It’s The Weather, Stupid: When The Wind Won’t Blow, The Power Don’t Flow

The wind industry and its acolytes are none too happy with the weather, because when the wind don’t blow, the power just don’t flow. At a loss to brush away the inherent chaos involved with wind power delivery, these characters are left to curse what they call ‘wind droughts’, as if the weather was something new.

One myth, long busted, is that if you spread enough wind turbines out over a large enough geographical expanse, there will always be wind power available, because “the wind is always blowing somewhere”.

The graphic above shows the location of every wind farm connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid; 79 in all. Turbines – with a combined capacity of 10,277 MW – are located from Far North Queensland, along the Great Dividing Range in southern Queensland and all the way down through New South Wales (across to Broken Hill, in Western NSW), all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and vast tracts of the Mid-North and South- East of South Australia, as far west as Port Lincoln.

The Eastern Grid connects all of those States: QLD, NSW, VIC, TAS and SA. The Northern Territory and Western Australia are too remote to be connected to the Eastern Grid – the cost of running transmission lines from WA or the NT would never be repaid and will never happen, whatever claims are made.

The first graphic below shows the combined output in MWs of every one of those wind farms during May 2023, the second does so in terms of percentages of their combined notional capacity.

The data above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – depicts the typically chaotic performance of Australia’s wind farms.

Occasionally, and then only briefly, their combined output tops out at around 60% of their notional capacity. What the rent-seekers and zealots refuse to acknowledge are the routine and random 5-6,000 MW collapses in output that occur over the space of a few hours. Nor is there any acknowledgment given to the lengthy (and frequent) calm spells, when output struggles to top 5% across the entire Eastern Grid. And, likewise, there’s never any mention of those frequent occasions when their best performance amounts to 20-30% of their combined capacity – again, for only brief moments (see above).

Australia could – as its dimwitted Energy Minister, Chris Bowen says it should – crisscross itself with additional transmission lines and interconnectors between States and it would not make a shred of difference.

When a system capable of generating 10,277 MW – and spread over an enormous geographical expanse – only ever generates 60% of that capacity (at best) and routinely generates around 5% of that capacity – ie 510 MW – or less, no amount of connection can rectify that system’s inherent and obvious inability to generate power, on demand. With the entire system generating as little as 5% – and often no more than 10-20% – there is nothing, or next nothing, to distribute across the Grid, irrespective of how well connected those 79 wind farms and thousands of turbines might be.

As the data consistently shows, wind power is always and everywhere a weather-dependent proposition. It’s that simple, and that obvious, as Rafe Champion outlines in the first piece below.

Careless, expensive & barely relevant
New Catallaxy
Rafe Champion
1 July 2023

Looking at a preprint of a paper by Richardson et al on “compound solar and wind droughts” from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes at the University of NSW. The purpose of the study was to assess the risk to energy security in the NEM posed by periodical shortages of sun and wind.

We believe this is the first study that systematically assesses the role of weather systems and climate modes on the frequencies of compound solar and wind droughts.

That is if you don’t consider the work of Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly over a decade ago. They went straight to the point: are there low points of wind supply that are deep, wide and long enough to threaten the power supply if we replace coal power with wind power? We know there is no sun at night without elaborate research.

Paul’s paper was published in the academic literature in 2012, and this site has open access. Anton’s observations go even further back and can be found in thousands of blog posts covering many aspects of power generation from all sources.

Miskelly concluded that the findings suggest that the connection of such a wind farm fleet, even one that is widely dispersed, poses significant security and reliability concerns to the eastern Australian grid. These findings have similar implications for the impact of wind farms on the security of electricity grids worldwide.

As for Richardson et al contributing the first paper to assess the role of weather systems in relation to wind droughts, Paul Miskelly made the connection of low wind with high-pressure systems that move across the country and sometimes settle for days. Richardson et al know about “blocking highs” that are associated with calm conditions but they did not go directly to the AEMO records on wind power to look for the association, instead they used an elaborate analysis of numerous Renewable Energy Zones to see how often drought conditions might occur at the same time in different locations.

Clearly this is an example of the genre of literature that starts from the assumption that the green transition is going to happen and the studies are all about optimizing the location of RE resources. This is an example from the US, using a massive database and sophisticated models to generate additional data to throw into the mix.

Testing the basic assumption is avoided like the plague. This calls for analysis of worst-case scenarios like the “killer months” in the AEMO records -June 2017, June 2020 and August last year.

This note from the Australian Energy Realists shows the multiple low wind days in June 2020. It is also an early warning to beware the various icebergs in the path of the RE Titanic. There is an appendix on the sources to do your own wind-watching.

Richardson et al wrote “Whether, or how often, the AEMO grid is at risk from widespread, weather-induced reductions to production is not known.”

To the contrary, long periods, up to three days, with next to no wind are clearly visible in the AEMO records. This demonstrates that the system will fail when more coal power is retired, unless gas picks up the slack at crippling expense. These records are available in a processed form at Aneroid Energy and the NemWatch widget, They have been ransacked by the Energy Realists, notably Mike O’Ceirin who has an interactive website to interrogate them, and by Paul McArdle of Global Roam.
New Catallaxy

Now, for those who might think all of this is unique to Australia (and probably a right-wing conspiracy to foil our glorious and purportedly ‘inevitable’ transition to an all-wind and sun-powered future), we’ll cross to John Hinderaker who provides a little insight on the fact that (conspiracy or not) the phenomenon (aka ‘the weather’) is alive and well in the USA.

The Folly of Wind
Powerline
John Hinderaker
6 July 2023

The U.S., like much of Europe, has supposedly committed itself to replacing fossil fuels with “green” energy, which mostly means wind. This will never happen, and the effort to make it happen will collapse in ignominy and economic and social chaos. The reason is simple: wind turbines, and even more so solar panels, fail to produce electricity a large majority of the time. Just as bad, their failures are unpredictable and often ill-timed.

Here in the Upper Midwest, we have experienced a couple of hot weeks, which means that air conditioners have been running. MISO, the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, has a nominal 28,572 megawatts of wind energy on its grid. Surely the wind turbines were able to keep the air conditioners running. Right?

Just kidding. Isaac Orr explains:

The graph below shows wind capacity factors in MISO during the same period in blue. A capacity factor is a percentage of how much electricity a power plant generates compared to its theoretical maximum output.

The graph also shows the capacity value that MISO gives to wind turbines, which is intended to measure the reliable capacity that the asset is supposed to contribute during peak electricity demand. In 2023, MISO expects wind turbines to operate at an 18.1 percent capacity factor during times of peak demand, shown in red in the chart.

So MISO knows wind turbines are mostly useless. It plans on getting only 18% of wind energy’s rated capacity. Sometimes, of course, it gets more because it happens to be windy. But under extreme hot or cold conditions, wind tends to die down. Over the last two weeks, there have been periods when wind turbines produced virtually nothing–down to only around 6% of their alleged capacity.

The idea that we can replace coal, natural gas and nuclear power plants that operate reliably, 24/7, with wind turbines and solar panels that produce electricity only occasionally, is absurd. And yet that is the policy that the Democratic Party has declared. All of us will soon pay a fearful price for that fantasy.
Powerline

Of course, as we hurtle towards this brave new weather-dependent world, when these so-called ‘wind droughts’ take hold, the best advice is to stock up on candles and secure your own form of power generation.

Rafe Champion picks up the thread below.

Approaching the tipping point
New Catallaxy
Rafe Champion
11 July 2023

This series of slides supports a talk “How wind droughts can destroy Western civilization.”

The first thing is to explain the danger of windless nights if we ever have to depend on wind and solar input to meet demand. This danger did not arise as long as we had a large reserve of conventional power capacity.

What is the problem with the wind supply? What are wind droughts? Most people have never heard of them.

Most people assume that the wind is always blowing somewhere and indeed we are assured of that by windpower zealots. Australia is supposed to have wonderful wind resources, and wonderful solar resources as well.

We can easily monitor the wind supply using the NemWatch widget provided by the great RE supporters at Global Roam. They think that we will be impressed by the amount of wind and solar power that you can see using their widget on sunny afternoons when the wind is brisk, especially in South Australia, the wind-leading state.

But often the widget tells a different story, showing that there is next to no wind across the whole of SE Australia.

Look at the widget at sunrise and sunset to see how the system performs when there is no sun at all, and often enough very little wind.

This is a good example, approaching dinnertime when the demand is rising towards the peak for the day and solar power is about to disappear for the night.

Sometimes there are several periods of severe wind drought in quick succession. June 2020 was the worst in recent times, before that June 2017 had a 74 hour period of drought with several shorter episodes.

The most serious episode in very recent memory was a spell of 40 hours in August 2022.

Below is a highly simplified picture of the way we are approaching a critical tipping point in the power supply as conventional power capacity (mostly coal) has run down since the turn of the century. Up to the closure of Hazelwood in 2017 there was enough spare capacity to buffer the effect of unplanned outages and the peaks of demand at dinnertime during very hot and very cold weather.

Meanwhile the penetration of wind and solar power rose from zero to reach 36% of demand last month. The expectation is that coal will continue to exit the system and RE will continue to rise.

Of course demand varies in a predictable way over 24 hours, with a small peak at breakfast time and a larger peak in the evening, just as the sun is fading away. Hence the first pinchpoint in supply comes at the evening peak but as coal continues to exit then the time will come when the supply of conventional power is short of the base load, the lowest level of power that is required day and night. Then if wind and solar don’t make up the shortfall, blackouts will happen.

Given the increasing penetration of RE, the usual suspects think that it will easily fill the gap and permit a seamless transition towards the green future. Look, the gap is nothing like 36% of demand.!

However on windless nights there is nothing to fill the gap.

New Catallaxy