The Alliance for Wise Energy Decisions (AWED) is an informal coalition of individuals and organizations interested in improving national, state, and local energy and environmental policies. Our premise is that technical matters like these should be addressed by using Real Science (please consult WiseEnergy.org for more information).

A key element of AWED’s efforts is public education. Towards that end, every three weeks we put together a newsletter to balance what is found in the mainstream media about energy and the environment. We appreciate MasterResource for their assistance in publishing this information.

Some of the more important articles in this issue are:

Wind Executive Interview: Wind Energy is Just a Subsidized Experiment

Levelized Cost of Electricity from Existing Generation Resources

Australia Finds Out that Wind Energy Doesn’t Really Work

LTE: Wind Project opposed for Many Good Reasons

Bats Save Billions in Pest Control

The Right to Know: Releasing Wind Turbine Bird & Bat Death Data

Are We Considering All the Costs For Wind Projects?…

“Perhaps the most distressing characteristic displayed by the pushers of soft energy was the intellectual poverty of their grand designs, their impatient dismissal of all criticism, their arrogant insistence on the infallible orthodoxy of their normative visions.”

“There is little doubt about the origins and the real message of soft energy dogma: the roots are in the muddled revolts of young Americans in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the goal is a social transformation rather than simply a provision of energy. The latter fact explains the widespread appeal of soft energy sources among zealous would-be reformers of Western ways.” 

Vaclav Smil is one of the leading energy scholars of our day. He has, time and again, tried to inject energy reality into energy fantasy. Some of his previous posts at MasterResource (see here) include ‘The Limits of Energy Innovation’: Timeless Insight from Vaclav Smil and the five-part Power Density Primer.…

“The best approach to understanding wind’s impact appears to be that properly structured ‘bench’ tests should be performed, and results made publically available, on actual fossil fuel plants under the full range of conditions experienced in balancing the effect of the presence of wind’s generation behavior.”

Part I on Tuesday and Part II yesterday focussed on the greater range of variations and the increased ramping levels caused by wind in short time intervals of a few minutes or less, and introduced some of the complexities involved in analysis of the impact of wind in an electricity system.

This post looks at the analysis of published fossil fuel consumption and emissions information and addresses two major issues:

(1) the questionable nature of the published information, and

(2) the questionable attempts by external analysts (those outside the information publisher organizations) using this information to determine the cause and effect relationship between wind production and fossil fuel consumption and emissions leading to the determination of savings with wind.…

“Understanding the impact of wind requires very detailed analysis of ramping events on a short term basis. The analysis provided here raises even more questions, so there is still much to be learned to properly quantify any impact from the presence of wind on fossil fuel or emissions savings. Arguably the complexity involved defies analysis.”

“Wind increases the magnitude of the balancing activity by increasing the ramping over load alone with a notable number of large ‘outliers’. The dynamic impact of this can substantially increase the rate of fossil fuel consumption and emissions in fossil fuel plants in the net load balancing role over that claimed by any less rigorous analysis.”

Part I yesterday in this three-part series examined wind intermittency/integration basics. Part II today focuses on the ramping impacts of the combination of load and wind (net load).…