How efficient is wind power? Does it cost more than burning coal?
Thursday, October 1st, 2009 at
7:06 pm
Is it economically efficient to have wind power as your source of electricity?
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Tagged with: source of electricity • Wind Power
Filed under: Wind Power
They are as efficient as the average generators however, air being the sorce of energy, besides maintenance, it’s free and environmentally friendly. Calculate your maintenance and compare it to your electricity bills.
can’t see it cost more then coal for the simple fact that wind is free!
the technology is expensive however but once it’s paid for it would be nothing but profit
Yes it is extremely efficient if you know the right place to put a wind farm. But there is a lot of resistance because greedy energy suppliers get all their money from coal. Wind power is cheaper because you do not have to constantly ship the stuff from place to place and it it does not pollute the atmosphere!
You have to be very careful in looking at the economics of wind power. In many cases the best wind fields are not always where the users are. In other cases they are not close to the power grid and that cost much be wrapped into the equation.
In general, coal based power plants are still more economical because they can be built in very large sizes and the coal is relatively cheap as energy sources go. Wind is free but all the other costs on a KW basis are relatively high.
You might find this site interesting:
http://www.awea.org/faq/wwt_costs.html
This is a very complex issue.
At the simplest level, wind energy is free because the fuel (wind) is free. In the case of coal, the fuel must be mined, processed, and in many cases, transported great distanced to the point where it is converted to electricity. And with coal, there is a major cost penalty of cleaning the effluent from the coal plant – sulfur, mercury, nitrogen oxides, CO and CO2, have to be removed. Also, the efficiency of the conversion of latent energy in coal to electricity is less than the conversion of wind energy to electricity.
Wind has some inherent economic penalties. The most significant is that the source of energy (wind) is intermittent, and since there is no way to store electric energy, it is necessary that there be an alternative source to meet demand when the wind isn’t blowing. Those alternative sources are usually fossil fuel sources, most often natural gas. And that also means that there necessarily must be greater spare capacity on the system when there is significant reliance on wind.
Also, the capital cost of a wind plant is greater per kilowatt of capacity than the capital cost of a coal-fired power plant. And there are some maintenance costs with wind that don’t exist with coal-fired plants – the fact that individual units are smaller in size means that maintenance tends to be more of a full-time activity with wind plants, whereas it is a periodic activity with coal-fired plants. The fact that workers have to climb several hundred feet into the air to get to those units adds to the cost. And finally, there are some ‘wear-out’ phenomena with wind that don’t exist with coal and for which technical solutions are slow in coming – many wind machines involve gear boxes where there are some significant torque problems, and there are known issues with intermittent torque fatigue failures of wind turbine blades.
Finally, there is the issue of getting the energy to the consumer. With wind, electricity must be produced where the wind is blowing, but that’s rarely where the load is. So power must be transported, often hundreds of miles. And the reality is that most of the most attractive areas for wind production are nowhere near existing power transmission facilities.
Coal also tends to be found at great distances from population (load) centers. But coal has an economy of scale advantage – coal plants are typically much larger in capacity than wind plants, so the cost of building, maintaining, and operating the transportation facilities to move either the coal itself or the electricity produced by that coal will be less than the cost of transporting the electricity produced by a wind plant.
Today, from the consumer’s perspective, electrical energy produced from wind is early equal in cost to electrical energy produced from coal. But the reason for that (in the US) is that the wind energy receives tax credits that offset some of the inherent costs. The theory in offering these tax credits is that they are encouraging development of technology, and as that technology evolves, some of those inherent costs will be addressed in a way that eventually will make wind competitive with fossil fuels.
That theory is true – I worked on one of the first commercial wind generation systems (in the late 1970’s), and at that time the cost was astronomical. There have been great advances in technology that have reduced costs significantly, and there are developments on the horizon that will result in even further savings.