Wind power is unlikely to be economical within ten years

100% backup is required for wind energyBelow a wind speed of around seven miles per hour, wind turbines produce no electrical energy output. This is a consequence of the wind energy being proportional to the cube of the wind speed. At low wind speeds there is too little energy to yield a net output. Consequently, wind farms sometimes produce no energy output at all. Large regions, e.g. all of California or all of the Midwest, can drop off line.My opponent proposes that by 2021 half of California's electricity may be produced by wind energy. That means that when there is no wind, either half the state will go dark or there must be backup generators that provide the missing half of the power. The half powered conventionally is not backup, because it is on line providing power to the state already. Backup generators must be purchased, tied to the grid system, and kept running and on line. However much power is expected from the wind, an equal amount must be built and paid for.Inadequate backup led to serious power disruptions in Spain and Texas. In Spain, on March 1, 2005, at a time of high demand, at drop in the wind reduced the power output of 11,000 windmills by 700 MW. Large power users were forced off line to prevent consumer blackouts. Spain has since added large gas-fired backup generators. In Texas in 2008, wind power dropped from 1700 MW to 300 MW in ten minutes. The power companies forced major users off line. [1]Natural gas generators can be spun up quickly to compensate for the variations in the wind. All the costs of natural gas generators, siting them, and transmission lines for them must be paid for, and in addition, since wind power is unreliable, abut 60% of the natural gas fuel costs must be paid as well. Con may refer to my calculations in the previous round. The whole natural gas generator system needed to supply the power demand when the wind fails costs 90% of what it would cost if the wind system did not exist.Wind power is inefficientCon makes the gross error that the wind power systems run at peak capacity 40% of the time. That's not true. If a wind farm has a peak output of one gigawatt, over the course of year it will produce at most 40% of the rated output energy for the year. The most that can be achieved is 40% of the watt-hours implied by the peak rating. I showed data that in California the expectation is around 25%. not 40%. Con's reference says a wind turbine starts at $1.2 million per MW. However, the next sentence says that grows to $3.5 million when installed. Turbines have to be installed on towers and wired together, all on land for which the rights have been acquired. The 1 MW turbine in California will produce 0.25 MW of power over time. Con is therefore off by a factor of three too low (3.5 : 1.2) in cost and a factor of four too high (0.25 : 1) in power output. That makes the wind investment required about $273 billion. To this we must add the cost of a system capable of generating an equal amount of power using natural gas, which must be on line to pick up the load when the wind happens to drop below 7 mph. That investment might alternatively yield about $11 billion per year at the corporate utility bond rate of 4%. The wind power system has a life of bout 25 years, so another $11 billion must be figured for depreciation. 165,000 GWh are generated by wind at a cost of $22 billion per year. That is 7.5 cents per KWh for the generation, to which we must add 4 cents for transmission and control, and 10.1 cents for backup. The total cost of the wind system is therefore 21.6 cents per KWh, compared to the present price of 11 cents by conventional means. Con figures that the costs of conventional power will inflate, but not the costs of wind power. That's wrong because the price of wind turbines and maintenance will inflate like everything else, and the huge cost component of the backup system is conventional power.Con calculates the transmission line cost incorrectly. He assumes that the transmission line appears only when needed, and disappears when not needed. The line must be built and paid for, even though it will be way below capacity most of the time, because the wind is not at it's peak. Con proposes 11,000 square miles of wind farmsGood wind power sites in California are rare. The best available yield only about 25% efficiency. The Altamont Pass site produces 0.125 GW on 78 square miles. Con plans on adding 18.8 GW, requiring 11,731 square miles of high quality wind site. The area required is 7% of the state, and there is not that much good wind siting availableMost of the good wind energy sites in the US are in the region from Texas to North Dakota. http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov... That's where the 40% efficiency might be achieved. California has nothing as good. http://www.windpoweringamerica.gov... The brown areas on the map are on the threshold of viability, and the task is to cover 7% of the state with wind farms. The 25% efficiency will not be achieved, and power will have to sent of long transmission lines. Poor sites will increase the costs above what was figured, probably by more than a factor of two. Keep in mind that half the wind has only one-eighth the energy, so sites that might seem only slightly worse are actually much worse.Additional CostsSome environmentalist will try to sue to stop any new source of energy. However, the ability to use the Endangered Spec's Act to stop a project is unique. Projects can be stopped without any consideration of costs or benefits. Giant flood gates that would have saved New Orleans from Katrina were stopped to protect a fish that couldn't mate when the flood gates were closed -- or at least was suspected of losing the ambition. http://www.opednews.com... California has a large agricultural area devastated by lack of water in order to protect a minnow. http://online.wsj.com... There is no legal instrument of comparable power available to stop the construction of gas turbine generators.In California, the Altamont Pass site is closed n winter to prevent the deaths of several thousand migrating raptors each year. In Southern California, win sites conflict with the habitats of endangered California condors http://www.fws.gov... and with Golden Eagles.Wind turbines kill bats by overpressure, without contact. A wind farm project in West Virginia has been stopped due to the problem. http://green.blogs.nytimes.com... Bats eat insects and consequently important to agricultural production in California's Central Valley, including potential choice wind farm sites.Noise and other problems with conventional power plants are limited by the small area occupied by the plants. Objections on noise or unsightliness or other reasons are met by putting modest buffer zones around the plants. That approach doesn't work with 11,000 square miles of wind farms. SummaryMy opponent makes gross errors in computing the cost of wind power. He assumes that a backup system and transmission lines need only be paid for on an hourly basis when needed. That's dead wrong. Backup generators and transmission lines all must be paid for as permanent parts of the system. The whole costs are required even if they are only used part time. He also mistakes how much power a wind farm generates relative to it's peak capacity. In California, the total power is about a quarter of the rated peak. These are fundamental errors that make his cost estimates off by more than a factor of twelve. Con's errors are made almost universally by wind power advocates. I explained those errors in R2,and have gone over them again in this round.---------------[1] Etherington, John, The Wind Farm Scam: An Ecologist's Evaluationn, p. 68