Because it does not produce at demand. The production is random. This means that something else has to make up for:
Turn this into economics, and you will see that to do this is very expensive. It’s expensive because lots of energy is wasted in the process. It’s not about how much energy a wind turbine can theoretically produce through it’s lifetime. That’s just academic nonsense. The only thing that counts is how much useful net energy it produces, and at what cost. This cost has to include all the costs associated with building, running and maintaining everything else that is needed and that wouldn’t otherwise be needed.
What happens is that electricity prices will soar (this is where we are today). This will in effect make wind turbines more profitable, and you can make better and better nonsense EROEI or whatever other similar measure you use. We will eventually reach the true cost of wind power, but we are not there yet. But already today it is profitable to start building nuclear plants. Nuclear and wind does not go well together, unless the purpose is to push up the prices of course 
Wind needs batteries to be a proper producer of energy. You have to store the random energy, so you can use it on demand. With a proper battery it will work just fine. The problem is such a battery cost perhaps 100 or 1000 times more than the wind turbine. In other words, a suitable technology does not exist. There simply is no known energy storage technology today that will make wind turbines work properly.
On small/local scale, you can use hydro. But even if you do, you will end up in the situation that each new MW of wind power requires one new MW of hydro power. You will also have to decide for how long that extra MW of hydro power shall last in a worst case scenario before users have to shut down. The total energy production of hydro power does not increase, but the total installed power will. Wind together with hydro is by orders of magnitude the most economic way of utilizing wind. The cost of wind energy here is the cost of the wind turbines + the cost of expansions and new grid + the cost of more installed hydro power MW + the cost of wasted hydro power due to all the fluctuations and increased power. There is nowhere enough hydro power in the world.
What’s good with hydro is that the amount wasted energy is relatively low, no matter how much MWs are produced, and that from a technical point of view, hydro power can change output very fast. Still the added cost when including wind is huge. Wind together with any other energy production, and the cost of wasted energy becomes the killer. A much better combination is hydro + nuclear. It’s the best of all worlds in a way, and it doesn’t ruin the landscape and kill all the birds.
The EROEI is the useful net energy it produces over its lifetime, and wind isn’t “random”.
Wind turbines kill very few birds, the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) has said as much. Fossil fuel exploitation kills a lot more birds and ruins a lot more landscapes.
The problem with nuclear is that by the time we’ve finally approved and built a station, wind could have been decarbonising the grid for 20 years in the meantime.
alioth wrote:
So even if all the building and servicing used fossil fuels, its CO2e (CO2 equivalent) is very low.
AFAIK most of the processes outlined above still use fossil fuels, and probably will for a long time… and as far as the EROEI and so forth go, I only believe what I see, period.
Or, as somebody put it so nicely: “I only believe in statistics that I doctored myself”.
alioth wrote:
EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) for a wind turbine is on the order of 18:1
How anyone could come with such a statement beats me. Just quoting a fixed ratio for all the wind turbines demonstrates the futility of most arguments on the subject.
Dan wrote:
How anyone could come with such a statement beats me. Just quoting a fixed ratio for all the wind turbines demonstrates the futility of most arguments on the subject.
Average patient body temp across all hospitals in the country…
Dan wrote:
Just quoting a fixed ratio
“on the order of” is not very fixed, is it?
Yes, it is fixed in its context.
A quick search exposes the absurdity as in Wind power has a high EROI value, with the mean perhaps as high as 18:1 (as derived in an existing meta-analysis by Kubiszewski et al., 2010)
Meta-analysis? Perhaps as high? 18:1 or even higher?
Com’on, gimme a break… what about the ecological balance, not the commercial one?
alioth wrote:
The EROEI is the useful net energy it produces over its lifetime
Njet!
EROEI = Energy delivered / Energy required to deliver that energy (according to wikipedia). It’s a ratio of how much energy can theoretically be delivered divided by how much energy it takes to build and maintain that unit. A useless number when a wind turbine cannot produce energy on demand, because that is the only energy that is useful. The raw energy from a wind turbine needs to be refined, and that is what costs money.
Dan wrote:
Meta-analysis?
“Meta-analysis” is an established term in science meaning that you don’t do an analysis yourself but combine other published analyses. Simply put.
Reading between the lines of various reports on this topic, there is a lack of transparency when it comes to wind turbine operating costs. That’s another way of saying that they need more maintenance than is being disclosed. A year or two ago I went to a presentation by an engineering consultancy (Ricardos) where the guy told a story about the big bearings wearing out quickly and costing a lot of money to fix; they developed a device which rotates them slowly and evens out the wear. And if you go to a country where hiding costs is not so easy due to a general lack of money once the original stream from Brussels has dried up – Greece – you see loads of duff wind turbines all over the place.
Peter wrote:
Reading between the lines of various reports on this topic, there is a lack of transparency when it comes to wind turbine operating costs.
The public discussion is a pure politics one and you seriously talk transparency? ‘Climate Change’ became a religion and is no longer backed by experimental science, but fuelled by computer simulations (which results are not seldom just the backfired fear of the programmer). I wonder what happens when the US and its company rules are into the game for a couple of years – IFRS will tell us the costs in a few years and my guess, we will be surprised how little changed. And I am not talking the huge change costs and damages done on top, which may be the real reason for the US and big companies joining the club – there is profit, huge profit. Just imagine what marketing cost you save by using ‘Climate’ as a teaser …
