You seem quite upset about my posts which contain valuable information aimed at trying to advance a real solution to our energy/climate change issue. You make unfounded accusations yet do not provide any useful information of your own.

I am an environmental & process engineer and I do work on all kinds of energy projects so I have no special allegiance to coal-fired energy. If you had read all my posts you would know this.

The basic problems with using wind energy to replace fossil fuels are the following:
- Low and erratic availability (22-26%)
- No practical means of storing the energy on the scale required if wind energy becomes more than the minute portion of our energy production it is now.
- Extremely expensive capital costs/kwh compared to other energy production methods (more than triple coal/gas generation). This makes wind projects non-profitable without massive government subsidies which means no private investments.
- Short equipment lifespan compared to conventional energy production equipment.
- Currently requires back-up through conventional fossil fuel generation, such as NG combustion turbines, making the net GHG emission reduction quite small.

If you want to contribute in a useful manner please tell me how you address the above concerns.

In regard to my comments on hydrogen production you completely misunderstood my position. I suggested that future large scale hydrogen production was one of the potential means by which we could store energy produced by non dispatch-able sources such as wind and solar and make them viable. If hydrogen could be produced and stored at the wind generation site and then used to power fuel cells to produce power when the wind dies down the erratic nature of the wind energy could be overcome, contrary to the current method which consists of firing up NG gas turbines to replace the missing wind power. If you want to say that this is not currently viable then I will agree and tell you that’s why there is no useful application of wind-energy on a large scale today.

Michael has a number of valid points about the technical limits of wind, but also he makes some important mistakes. His data regarding the percentage of wind power (0.5%) and coal (over 50%) in the US, is years out of date. Wind output has tripled and will pass 1.5% this year, with total renewable electricity growing to over 3%. The result for coal use is the opposite of what he claims: in the 1990s coal amounted to over 50%, but fell below this level years ago, and today is shrinking to near 46% (for 12 months rolling to july 2009) as natural gas and renewables displace it successfully. for up to date info see– http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html

In other words, Michael is missing a key turning point, and declares wind and renewables a failure just as they are actually beginning to have a real effect.

Michael is correct that wind does not reduce carbon as much as people think if the wind is backed up by fossil fuel, as is commonly the case. However, his value of 9% reduction is a gross underestimation. Simply replacing coal with relatively low efficiency, simple cycle natural gas plants will cut carbon emissions by 30% to 40%, even without further displacing some of that natural gas power with wind.

As for the intermittant character of wind, that is a technical challenge, but one that is currently not very significant. Except for a couple of local areas in the country, we are a long way from wind producing 20% of our power.

The argument that we need storage for wind is correct; however we don’t need to wait for hydrogen technology. We can use pumped water storage, which is well proven and relatively cheap, and the nation has over 20,000 megawatts of existing capacity. In addition, output of wind and solar can be balanced by conventional hydropower, which is not just operated as “baseload” as Michael claims. Much of 77,000 megawatts of conventional existing US hydropower can be used to follow variable load or to meet peak demand, and can respond much faster than natural gas.

If we include hydropower and biomass as renewable (which I know many enviros are reluctant to do), then renewable energy provides 7% of US total primary energy (as opposed to only the sources of electricity cited above), vs. 9% for nuclear and 23% for coal. In fact, renewable energy is worth more than the nuclear, due to the gross inefficiency of nuclear power–less than 30% of of heat from uranium fission gets delivered to customers as electricity. This is in addition to all the other serious problems of nuclear, such as outrageously high cost for new plants, radioactive hazards from mining, transport and waste disposal, not to mention the threat of accidents and international security issues. To illustrate: I suspect that the world’s major nations would not have the slightest concern if Iran and N. Korea were building solar or wind manufacturing plants.

So, I will go with renewables over nuclear or fossil fuel. Also, I strongly agree with comments saying we need to invest much more heavily conservation and energy efficiency as, in general, these are the most cost effective ways to reduce carbon emissions and avoid wasting resources.