photo credit: DarrelBirkett
I read a brilliant article in New Scientist a week or two back by Jerome Guileet and John Evans, all about Wind Energy. If you don’t read New Scientist, then I’d urge you to try it, it’s very interesting and although some articles are a bit deep, most are very readable and interesting.
Anyway, the article in question was discussing Wind Energy.
Wind Energy is derided at every opportunity it seems. Comments vary from “they make birds lungs burst” to assertions that every wind turbine is subsidised by the taxpayer to the tune of £100k +pa and then you’d hear that every property within miles of a wind turbine automatically has it’s value cut in half. “They” say all sorts of things about Wind Turbines.
So, are Wind Turbines subsidised? Well, the answer to that seems to be ‘No’. They do get the ‘favour’ of guaranteed access to ‘the grid’ and minimum prices for the electricity they produce. This does affect the price you pay for electricity, so I suppose you could argue that the tax payer is involved with the costs of wind power – the power generators are obliged to produce a certain amount of their power from renewables.
However, all is not as it seems and actually, you could end up paying less for your electricity when wind power is involved.
Here’s how, and as this could get complicated, I’m going to quote the writers…if I breach copyright rules I am sorry.
In Europe and North America electricity markets are Marginally Priced – the spot price of electricity is set by the highest price the transmission company must pay at any given time to meet demand. The example in New Scientist runs like this. Imagine you need 100 apples. One grower has 60 apples at £1 each, another has 30 at £2, a third has 20 for £3. You buy the entire stock from the 1st and second growers and 10 from the 3rd. But, you must pay £3 for each apple you buy.
The very highest spot prices of electricity are seen at moments of highest demand – an ad break during the X factor final, things like that. At these times, coal, nuclear, and hydro power can’t meet the need so extra ‘peaker’ plants need to be turned on. Generally oil or gas fired, peaker plants have high costs of production so peaker plants drive the spot price of electricity up.
This is where Wind Power comes in – Wind Turbines don’t burn fuel, so their costs of production are very low, in fact, they are the lowest. Being cheapest, like our 1st apple grower, all the electricity companies buy their electricity first. On windless days wind power companies don’t get paid, but on windy days their output ensures the more expensive ‘peaker’ plants don’t need to be turned on.
In other words, when there is little or no wind, electricity prices are normal, when there is alot of wind power available it moderates prices, so over time, electricity bills are lower than if wind power was not available. In Germany one study found that it saved German consumers 5 billion euros pa.
This is where things get curious – you’d think this was all good, but the there is a theory that it spurs opposition to renewables among energy companies and discourages investment in renewables.
Here’s why. Imagine you owned a nuclear or coal fired power plant – you are like the guy with the £2 apples, except wind power is preventing you from cashing in on £3 high spot prices at times of peak demand. You lose your opportunities to sell your electricity at higher prices.
And maybe if that was irking you, you’d make sure there was plenty of ‘anti wind energy’ information out there.
Maybe a new free thinking government would work out a way of solving this little quandary…hope so, the effort and money going into dissing renewable energy would be much more useful spent making it better!
