I see it all the time. The media tells you how much power a wind turbine can output and to put it in terms of how much power it is, they tell you how many homes it can supply. This clarification is no clarification at all. What a house consumes depends on so many things…like what time of year is it and what is the weather. In the summer, a home will consume more electric power to run air conditioners. Some homes are in areas that don’t need much air conditioning (like at the beach or further north) and some regions are more likely to use electric power to heat homes in the winter.
The real way to determine the power output of a wind turbine is to look at the name plate rating…and then multiply by 30%. A large windmill may produce as much as 1 megawatt in ideal conditions. Over time it is more likely to produce about 300 kilowatts. Compare that to a large steam turbine that can produce 750 megawatts all the time. It would take 2,500 1-megawatt windmills to replace one large generator driven by a steam turbine.
What is even worse is when a windmill is likely to be under rated. The wind slows in the summer, so wind turbines produce less power when demand is the greatest. This is a big problem. To replace a large steam turbine during the peak consumption (summer), you would need over 3,000 windmills. As you can imagine, the maintenance budget for 3,000 windmills is far greater than for one steam turbine.
The power companies don’t have big batteries somewhere storing electric power. When you turn a light on, generators around the region have a harder time turning. This extra effort starts to slow down the generator. In response, generating stations increase the input into their systems in order to keep the generators spinning at the same speed.
Electricity is generated on demand.
There are two types of generators; base load generators and peak generators. The base load generators are used all the time. They run at their peak efficiency points and are rarely adjusted. The peak generators are always on, but are brought up to speed and introduced to the electricity grid during peak electric usage.
Base load generators run near peak efficiency points. Peak generators run over a wide range and therefore usually are not running at peak efficiency.
Wind mills are operated when the wind is available…not when electricity is demanded by customers. Therefore, fewer traditional generators run as base load generators. Instead they run as the less efficient peak generators. This shifts the cost from the windmill to the traditional generators…but it is a cost that must be absorbed by customers regardless.
These are not arguments against building windmills. These are just basic facts that most advocates of windmills do not consider.
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[...] the power of the wind is undependable, expensive and can not be stored. Investing trillions of dollars in a dubious wind plan seems [...]