Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar, speaking in Atlantic City in April, added more hot air to the discussion about offshore wind when he stated that windmills off the East Coast could generate enough electricity to replace most, if not all, of the coal-fired power plants in the U.S.

Yet such would require offshore wind turbines stacked almost a hundred miles deep from Maine to Florida. I’m disappointed Salazar didn’t take a few minutes for fact-checking and back-of-the-envelope ciphering before his speech or he would have discovered that his estimates are pure bluster.

I am reminded of all this as I read of Germany’s plan to get offshore wind in the mix, forcing power-grid operators to build sea cables at their expense and requiring buyers to pay $0.21/kWh for the power.…

“The current rush for large scale onshore wind developments, connected by a hugely centralized grid system, shows a poverty of imagination and thinking rooted in the early 20th Century. If attention continues to be focused on increasing renewable energy targets, without any requirement to demonstrate what each development will achieve in greenhouse gas emissions reductions (including all aspects of the generation and transmission), we face a possible worst case scenario, where we achieve renewable energy targets through inappropriate developments and at great cost to important environments — only to discover that our greenhouse gas emissions are up, along with our energy consumption, and our energy supply is not secure.”

– The John Muir Trust, at http://www.jmt.org/what-we-think.asp

As a physicist and environmental advocate, I have been asked to elaborate a bit on my position regarding the Global Warming Theory (GWT), and how it relates to wind energy.…

The steady winds of New Zealand have allowed the country’s wind turbines to have the highest capacity factors for the wind in the world (around 37–40 percent). However, wind still has a cost premium to alternatives and is intermittent. In addition, output is about 10 percent below average in the autumn and early winter when it is most needed in New Zealand. The country’s abundant hydro resources (and pumped storage) cannot rescue wind from its intermittency and seasonality problems.

Prospectively, greater reliance on wind from government edicts is throwing good money after bad. Non-intermittent sources are far cheaper, not just reliable. A let-the-market-decide policy is needed in New Zealand as for the rest of the world.

Background 

The enthusiasm for renewable energy in the form of windpower, marine power, and the like, is driven by a belief that man-made greenhouse gases will cause dangerous global warming and that large-scale adoption of these technologies will “fight climate change.”…

[Editor note: Ross McCracken is editor of Platts Energy Economist]

Where support mechanisms are sufficiently generous, wind power is racing ahead. In the European Union, where supported by feed-in tariffs in countries like Germany and Spain, wind power targets are very likely to be met, if not exceeded. Last year, more wind capacity was installed in the EU than any other energy source, for the first time outstripping even natural gas.

Wind has become the “market choice” because the technology is mature, bank lending is assured where prices are guaranteed, and the supply-side has been steadily ramping up production capacity. And wind is the only viable renewable that can deliver large amounts of installed capacity in the short term.

But just because you can doesn’t mean you should. As wind penetration increases, the pricing effects become more extreme, impacting the profitability of existing baseload and peaking power plant, albeit in different ways.…