The won'd be news to those who have visited J. Richard Wakefield's "Ontario Wind Performance", but it's nice to see the perspective from a professor of finance
E. Tylor Claggett: The dis-economies of wind power | The Daily Times | delmarvanow.com:
...wind power is intermittent, depending on whether the wind is blowing. Therefore, reliable back-up power generating facilities (plus the associated switch gear) must be on hand and ready to fill in when wind generation is absent.Read the entire article
These realities require duplicate capital investment and, to some extent, duplicate operating expenses. Consequently, it is an apples-to-oranges comparison when an installed megawatt of wind generation infrastructure is compared to an installed megawatt of conventional generation infrastructure. Another way to look at wind generation installations is as expensive, unreliable (intermittent) substitute fuel for conventional generation facilities.
In this writer’s opinion, the proper apples-to-apples comparison is the total cost of wind-generated electrical energy compared to the value of the primary fuel (oil, gas, coal or whatever) displaced by wind-generated electricity. And to accommodate the unwanted production of greenhouse gases associated with fossil fuels, the estimated costs of these undesirable externalities can be subtracted from the cost of wind-generated electricity.
If this is the accepted method for judging economic viability, wind power loses by multiples.
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