Of the thousands of posts I’ve written for BMG, one of my personal favorites is this one, entitled “Quixotry,” in which I used the news that a Lexington man had set a new world record in competitive Scrabble by playing “quixotry” for 365 points as a lead-in to talk about Bill Weld’s hilarious endorsement of Mitt Romney for president.
Well, it turns out that Bill Weld may not be the most quixotic local politician after all. Tim Cahill is giving Weld a run for his money, since Weld’s quixotry was metaphorical, whereas Cahill is actually tilting at windmills.
“We all think of the Netherlands, and we think of all these windmills,” the independent gubernatorial candidate told a downtown meeting of business executives yesterday. “It’s really quaint.”
Well, Cahill is here to set the record straight. You see, Tim Cahill, like Don Quixote himself, believes that windmills are a threat.
“I understand the attraction to wind, because it seems so benign,” he continued. “It’s not as benign as people make it out to be.”
Oh, no indeed, Mr. Treasurer. The dark side of windmills has as yet gone largely unappreciated (despite nine years of exhaustive study of the Cape Wind project). Thank goodness you are around to alert us to this important issue.
It would be easy to laugh about a truly absurd stance like that adopted by the Treasurer, were it not for the fact that, at this very moment, there is an oil slick of historic proportions headed straight for the Louisiana coastline. The oil slick, which is the result of an explosion aboard an offshore oil rig that appears to have killed 11 people, threatens nearly unimaginable damage to the fragile ecosystems along the Gulf coast, putting both animal life and the human industries that depend on it (such as the oyster fisheries) in grave peril.
Oil and coal are catastrophes, for lots of reasons. We simply have to find alternatives. So let’s assume that some of what the naysayers like Cahill and Charlie Baker are saying is true: that the energy produced by Cape Wind won’t save oodles of money. We should do it anyway. The first time you try something, it’s always more expensive. But if we don’t start somewhere, we will never get anywhere. We have to do better than The Party (or, in Cahill’s case, Non-Party) of No.
so therefore build more offshore rigs that threaten the ecosystem? There are alternatives that don’t involve using up tons of resources just to build and threatening the ecosystem, mainly using much less oil. Eliminating half of the jobs in the insurance, health care, biotech, and legal industries would reduce the number of drivers and reduce the energy use by those industries, as well as cut their cost to the consumer. To do that, we would have to support policies that increased the number of two-income families and encouraged people to consume less global consumer products and create more locally sustainable goods.
But if you are seriously comparing the potential environmental hazard of a bunch of windmills in Nantucket Sound to the tragedy that is now unfolding in the Gulf of Mexico, you are not in touch with reality.
So….. what? This is simply and utterly incoherent.
Well played.
Sorry to break it to you, David, but the Democrats are fully in the pocket of big coal, big oil, big nuclear (though at least they pronounce it correctly!), big agriculture, big insurance, big finance, big you name it (though I’d say the Republicans corner most of the market on just plain big-otry). With choices like these, who needs elections?
Do you agree with Cahill and Baker?
Seems like a reasonably significant divergence in the instant case, even if what you say is, or is not, true in general.
Agree entirely. Well said, David.
wind brings down electricity costs for consumers. http://www.ryanstake.net/2010/…
When you make more of something, prices go up!
It’s Teaconomics 101.
Energy prices in Spain have gone down because of huge subsidizes. The cost of Cape wind hasn’t been publicly announced – but a project in RI rate was .50/KWH. I think cape wind is a great idea – it just shouldn’t cost much more than other sources or it will result in job loses in our state. Wonder where all of the manufacturing jobs have gone – raise their electrical rates will make them leave.
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p>BTW wind power has to be paired with in-efficient gas turbines (fast startup)- to provide backup when the wind stops.
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Gas peaking plants (cheap and cleaner than most capacity online today btw) already play that role on the grid today. They are needed for all power plants, not one in particular.
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p>Even if (and I’m not sure) Cape Wind alone would create the need for more peaking power, multiple wind projects provide their own backup since the wind blows differently in different locations.
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p>Reliability is a grid-wide service and wind actually provides it once there is enough of it.
my biggest argument is it cost effective – or should we just be using high efficiency gas turbines ?
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p>Massachusetts has built a lot of high efficiency gas plants – which when the cost of natural gas goes low get turned on.
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p>I also understand that offshore wind has much less problem with peak loading
neither of you are quite right.
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p>roark: Spanish electricity is in the process of being deregulated, so using “price” is problematic all the way around. The current feed-in tariff is wind systems is up to 73.02 euros/MWh for the first 20 years. In the USA, the federal production tax credit (PTC) is $19/MWh generated for the first ten years, and in addition to RPS requirements in more than half of US states, some states (and cities) are creating their own feed-in tariffs.
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p>But focusing on wind subsidies whilst ignoring the subsidies the Feds hand out to oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear means you’re only getting half the story. The fact is that nuclear is by far the most heavily subsidized electricity generation per MWh generated.
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p>Will Cape Wind bring down electricity prices as an independent project, in a vacuum? Yes. It has to. When supply goes up, price goes down in a competitive or semi-competitive marketplace. Now, is Cape Wind the project which would supply the nominally cheapest electricity possible? Nope. That’d be coal — which would be even cheaper if we didn’t have those damned safety laws on the books, and cheaper still if we didn’t have those damned air and water pollution laws on the books.
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p>Now, here’s the other part: in MA, the RPS law requires that the percent of electricity generated by renewable means goes up by 1% per year. Each utility must comply, and failure means substantial fines, which mean consumer prices go up. If Cape Wind doesn’t get built, other projects must get built to take CW’s place, and those projects would be far more expensive than the CW project per MWh produced. Because of the RPS requirement, not building Cape Wind would lead to far higher electricity prices than building Cape Wind. Keep in mind that while each state has their own RPS law, the market is quite regional — MA utilities can purchase renewable energy supply from NY or ME or Quebec (just as they can purchase brown energy from those places). Likewise, the RPS requirements in NY and ME and RI and CT etc allow for the purchase of green electricity from MA suppliers to be counted toward compliance. This system actually benefits Massachusetts substantially, as our demand is highest in New England and our renewable supply potential not nearly as high as our neighbors to the north.
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p>Bottom line: Cape Wind will absolutely lower electricity prices relative to what would have to happen had Cape Wind not gotten built. Furthermore, because Cape Wind will supply about 3% of the electricity for the Commonwealth, even if the prices were twice what coal charges (instead of nearly identical once federal credits are considered), your electric bill would go up 3% as a result of Cape Wind.
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p>You’ve trotted out these numbers before, and we went back and forth on the study, which was done by some economic researchers who had minimal experience with the industry, and didn’t consider what RPS compliance without Cape Wind would cost as a comparison. Their study was incomplete and naive, and it’s not what you ought be hanging your hat on.
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p>Trickle up:
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p>That’s sorta-kinda true. No power plant has 100% uptime. The ISO tries to manage scheduled maintenance so that there is always enough capacity by scheduling maintenance for spring and fall, and not allowing too many major suppliers to go down at the same time. Of course, not all downtime is scheduled.
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p>The question for the ISO in terms of long term planning is: what is the probability that we can get 1 MW out of a power plant on demand on a peak period (late afternoon summer typically) on a date over a year from now? For nuclear, that probability is extremely high. For coal and gas and oil, it’s quite high. For wind? Not quite so high. For solar? Extremely high — the peak demand is highly correlated with bright sunshine.
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p>It’s true that you can build an array of wind turbines to help reduce the risk that they’re all idle at the same time. Ideally, you find negatively correlated sites, but that’s hard to do so instead you just look for positively correlated sites with low values of positive correlation — it’s not as effective, but it’s the best they can do.
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p>It turns out that wind in Horseshoe Shoal behaves differently than wind on land — it’s more reliable. In terms of ISO’s management of supply to meet demand, CW is a better wind projected than the same average production on land.
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p>Maintaining a sufficiently large maximum supply is important, and wind doesn’t contribute as much per MW capacity as nuclear and fossil fuel or PV does. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t contribute any (as many folks incorrectly assert).
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p>The reason we need to have a large maximum supply capacity is to meet large maximum demand. However, we need not only focus on supply. It turns out that demand for electricity is quite flexible, as companies like EnerNOC have figured out. Because the marginal cost of building a power plant that will only be used for 10s or 100s of hours per year (peaking) is quite high, the utilities and the ISOs have figured out that it’s cheaper to pay a company to reduce demand than it is to increase supply. That’s where EnerNOC comes in. They find large consumers (hospitals, universities, skyscrapers, manufacturing plants, even big-box retailers) and strike a deal. If you let EnerNOC install their equipment, then they will occasionally adjust your HVAC settings for 15 minute intervals or so. This means that if the peak is coming, they may crank up your AC just before the peak, then turn it off so that in aggregate the peak is a plateau that’s wider but shorter — thereby reducing maximum demand. For this privilege, EnerNOC pays the customer, and EnerNOC is paid by the utilities/ISO. Ratepayers pay less because we don’t have to pay for the extremely expensive power that comes from peaking plants.
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p>That’s the up side. What’s the down side? Lots of these large facilities have backup generators which run on diesel fuel. These generators would exist regardless of the existence of EnerNOC, so their capital costs don’t have to be factored in the economics of peak load management. When the spot price of electricity gets high because we’re nearing peak load, EnerNOC also pays folks to turn on their diesel powered generators, because the electricity generated from the diesel generator is cheaper per kWh than the spot price, since the capital cost of the generator isn’t factored into the customer’s generator but is factored into the cost of the gas peaking plant. Why is this a downside? The pollution from backup diesel generators is much higher per MWh than is emitted from a natural gas peaking station, and these generators tend to be located in urban areas where the particulate matter has a negative health impact on far more people.
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p>In perhaps 10 years from now, this will start to no longer matter because enough plug in electric vehicles (PEVs) will exist to balance load using the vehicles. Wind blowing? Charge those cars. No wind, large demand? Sell some of that charge back to the grid for more than you paid for it. PEVs will dramatically change the electricity supply landscape because just-in-time production will no longer be important — making intermittent power producers like wind just as valuable on a MWh for MWh basis as coal or nuclear.
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p>Given that new autos stay with their owners for an average of seven years, once PEVs hit the market they’ll saturate reasonably quickly. It takes much longer to build substantial wind power, which is why we’ve got to start now to get ahead of the PEV demand curve.
not even “strormv”, who is a globalist.
If you’re going to quote Stomv’s name, as if it’s some kind of disease, maybe you should actually spell it correctly?
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p>And, what exactly is a “globalist” and why do you write that as if it’s a bad thing?
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p>And if Stomv isn’t right, what is he wrong about? And if you admit “none” of us is “quite right,” how do you know if Stomv, Trickle Up or Roark are wrong or what they’re wrong about?
I’m not sure what you thought I got wrong, but I’ll just add that in terms of reliability, small is beautiful, because smaller units require smaller amounts of backup.
Once they’re built, they return a reliable profit. That is the essence of “cost effective.” The only reason why fossil fuels are cheaper to construct initially is because fossil plants have never been asked to fully offset all their costs, environmental and otherwise. Society ends up paying for them. Additionally, don’t for a second think that fossil-fuel plants aren’t subsidized, either.
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p>The point of the matter — and why wind brings the cost of power down — is that once they’re built, there’s more electricity in the area. The choice isn’t usually wind or fossil fuels, it’s wind or (often the industry’s preference) nothing. It’s a very simple economic principal that when you increase supply, costs go down. That’s what adding wind will do. Mark my words, when Cape Wind is finished, it will actually force the price of electricity in the Cape and Islands down.
which it will do, according to Jevons Paradox. And demand will continue to rise unless we institute social constraints on lifestyle, which includes family and work choices. We need to reduce the footprint of family and work as well as leisure. Only when demand goes down, will price go down. Otherwise, new offshore rigs will continue to be drilled just as fast as they can drill them.
1) We don’t necessary need to “institute social constraints,” so much as we need to increase efficiency. Believe it or not, we could whack about 20% of our energy consumption through conservation without really impacting our lifestyles.
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p>3) The Jevons Paradox doesn’t detract from Cape Wind. The Parodox simply says that consumption would rise, not that prices would rise. In fact, it says that prices would fall — which is exactly what would spur increased consumption, but not to the order that the increased use would increase prices relative to where they were before. Maybe you should read things before you link to them?
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p>The “rebound effect,” the idea that increased supply and efficiencies would lead to increased consumption, is less than 100%. Therefore, it still makes sense to build more energy and efficiencies — because 1) there’d be enough extra energy to lower costs and/or slowly shift away from fossil-fuel consumption and 2) it would allow for more economic development, which is a pretty damn good thing.
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p>3) This is simply bizarre:
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p>You can’t go quoting a 19th century economic principal, then make up your own rule which flies against the cardinal rule of economics. Demand going down is one way to get price go down, not the “only” one. Increasing supply absolutely, positively is another way, a way which fits nicely inside your Paradox. I’d even go so far as to say it would be nearly impossible for that Paradox to work unless relative price went down, or at the very least stayed the same. If prices went up, there would be no rush to increase consumption, hence no Paradox.
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p>4) I really think you’re confusing the issue. The goal of wind projects (and the goal of combating climate change) is not to decrease demand, it’s to shift reliance on fossil fuels to renewable, clean sources. That increasing over-all energy supply would increase over-all consumption isn’t exactly a surprise. The shift will take some time, but eventually, if we build enough wind, solar, geothermal and other clean and renewable sources, we’ll be able to retire the bulk (or at least enough) of our fossil-fuel facilities. Few, if any, people who care deeply about climate change are advocating we all try to live like the Amish. We’re just trying to say that if we want modern, convenient lifestyles, we need to accompany that with modern and clean methods of creating the energy to power those lifestyles.
Bubbling around the left blogosphere is the suggestion that this might be Cheney’s fault.
Per that diarist, the requirement to have such a switch was scuttled as a result of Cheney’s efforts on behalf of the energy industry. This switches cost about $500,000.
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p>I’m not sure we should believe this yet.
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p>The Right, on the other hand, has the competing hypothesis advanced by Mr. Rush Limbaugh, that some left wing environmental saboteur deliberately brought about this accident to prevent future drilling for babies.
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p>You can’t make that kind of stuff up, but Mr. Limbaugh certainly can.
of blaming Bush for Hurricane Katrina (which no one was actually doing, of course – since we know it was the gay people triggering the wrath of God). From now on, any major event that seems to reflect badly on the Republicans or their policies will be blamed on liberal saboteurs. Also, popular thing Obama does will be politically motivated, because the only reason he does anything is to make the Republicans look bad.
I actually took the day off from school (used my union protected sick days), drove to Louisiana, climbed into a diving bell, went down 5000 feet, and sabotaged the well.
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p>I was also there with FDR when the decision was made to let the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor.
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p>I was responsible for ACORN voter fraud. I have Obama’s real birth certificate, and I’m not talking.
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p>I watched Taxi Driver with John Hinkley the first time he saw it.
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p>I killed Vince Foster for the Clintons!
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p>Do you hear me, Rush? I did it! I did it!
we know that you were the second gunman in Dallas.