Wind Farms And Wind Energy Facts
Wind power is more expensive to produce than power from coal and natural gas. This is because electricity is only produced when the wind is blowing and it often isn’t, and because the number of kilowatts produced varies depending on wind speed and direction.
Nevertheless, commercial wind turbines are being manufactured and installed world-wide by the main industrialized countries as a part of an international drive to both reduce atmospheric pollution, which causes climate change, and in consideration of the depletion of oil & gas stocks and their increasing cost.
The UK government is providing fiscal support for renewable power and the current main support mechanism is the Renewables Obligation (RO). The RO requires electricity generators to source an increasing percentage of the UK’s total electricity supply from renewable energy sources or pay an equivalent value which is re-cycled to renewable providers. This is encouraging the energy companies to install their own renewable sources.
Wind power generation is the lowest per kilowatt at the turbine of any of the large renewable resource other than some hydro schemes. However, it will require a big infrastructure spend for all nations that extend their systems to become a major power source. Rarely will the windy places also coincide with centers of population – the power users, so extensive and hugely costly new transmission systems will be needed. So, overall costs will largely depend on available wind speed, required rate of return on investment (discount rate), world turbine prices (which may become inflated due to an impossibly high demand) and infrastructure. The present experience in costs is likely to continue were costs are highly variable between projects and location, size, etc.
The most transparent prices for onshore wind were provided in the information from the last years (1998/9) of the previous UK support mechanism (Non-Fossil Fuel Obligation, NFFO). It has been clear that areas of high electricity demand with lower wind speeds, e.g. south-east England, require higher prices for commercial viability.
Operating a wind farms in the ocean is more costly than operating one on land, most experts will admit, no matter how much the larger scale of offshore turbines will help. Factoring in the added difficulties and extra costs of transporting and installing on the sea floor several dozen 80-meter-tall wind turbines, the expense of running underwater electrical cables from the turbines back to shore, and the extra safeguards needed to protect the turbines from the force of ocean waves means that the cost can be 50 to 100 percent higher for offshore wind than onshore wind, one expert says.
In the US alternative wind energy can be a cost-effective addition to the main windy regions energy supplies. Production costs average 4 – 5 cents per kilowatt-hour. So also, as in Europe, wind power is starting to be backed by more and more respected industrialists. For example, Boone Pickens is creating a 4,000 Megawatt wind farm in west Texas, and states that he could continue creating farms like this all up the mid-west wind corridor all the way to Canada.
So, in Europe at least, wind power will have to be heavily subsidized by the taxpayer. As we all know you cannot store electricity big costs will be incurred keeping oil and gas power stations available for those days when there is no wind. Operation of units in a regional thermal power system have been investigated and quantified by means of modelling. Furthermore, the possibility to reduce the influence from wind power variations by means of introducing a variation moderator or demand side management will need to be evaluated in each region ans state.
Support for wind power needs to go hand in hand with a push for much greater energy efficiency in transport, households use, and the public sector.
However, wind power whether at large scale or small wind turbine is a clean energy source that can be relied on for the long-term future. A wind turbine creates reliable, cost-effective, pollution free energy and it is certainly here to stay.
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