“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).…

“Analyses of wind impact on emissions do not take the impact of the highly variable and unreliable wind generation fully into account, especially in short term intervals, and can be discounted as not providing conclusive results.”

This three part series will illustrate the problems in properly evaluating the impact of unstable generation sources (wind and solar) in electricity systems. It will be seen that the complexity involved makes it virtually impossible to analyze all the necessary factors, and the use of sophisticated mathematics, especially statistical approaches, cannot compensate for this. Further complicating this, any analysis relying on published fuel consumption or emissions is made even more inconclusive because of the questionable nature of this information.

A basic problem is the erratic behaviour of wind in the short term (a few minutes or less) and unreliable in the longer term (hours and days).…

 “The Master Resource people are whores of the fossil fuel industry. (Yes, that certainly includes you.)”

– David Appell (@davidappell) | March 5, 2014 at 10:33 pm |

Judith Curry at Climate, Etc. posted about a new analysis by Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok, “A sensitive matter:  How the IPCC buried evidence showing good news about global warming” (Global Warming Policy Foundation: press release here; short version here), for which she wrote an introduction (see Appendix B below).

Several hundred comments followed. A critical, emotive thread of comments toward Lewis/Crok, and by implication Curry, was coming from David Appell, a highly credentialed journalist with a widely read blog, Quark Soup, that focuses on climate issues from an alarmist perspective.

I noticed this comment from Dr. Appell in response to pokerguy (aka al neipris) | March 5, 2014 at 7:16 pm who argued that at lower climate sensitivity, the external effects would “more likely … be overwhelmingly positive in its effect.”…

This post completes the determination of wind costs, and Part IV covers subsidization and emissions. Part I, Introduction and Summary, contains links to all the posts in this series.

Just about any analysis you see understates wind’s cost. In fact there can be no comparison between the costs for wind and reliable, dispatchable generation plants such as coal, nuclear and gas plants. Reliability is so important in electricity systems, and wind’s persistent erratic behavior is so problematic that any electricity it produces is not usable and is a threat to electricity system reliability.

Add capacity from reliable generation plants flexible enough to balance wind’s erratic output and a steady, reliable electrical energy flow can be provided. However there is a substantial cost associated with this. As shown in Part II, for wind to produce the same amount of useful, reliable electricity over 40 years, wind and associated balancing overnight plant capital costs are almost 3 times that for nuclear, the most expensive conventional generation plants reviewed.…