Winds! Winds!
The wind power industry is in trouble. For illustration, look no further than the UK. A few days ago, low winds brought the country’s output to less than 1% of total generation. Right now, the UK grid regulator is preparing to start throwing cash at wind turbine operators because the next named storm is coming and it will bring strong winds — likely much stronger than is healthy for grid balance.
Meanwhile, in Germany, total wind capacity additions for last year hit 14 GW or 2,400 turbines but at the same time the country is facing a future of coal for longer, to balance the grid. Reports are using the word “may” but we all know they actually mean “will” because you can’t have an unbalanced grid.
Wind turbine developers’ shares are down because of Trump’s anti-wind offensive and quite likely to stay down because there is no way in Heaven or Hell the EU can compensate for U.S. impairments — not when it’s scraping the barrel with the subsidy cash, which it is.
Electric utilities, on the other hand, are having the time of their lives. Because Trump has given them a free “Get out of the death spiral” ticket and is about to boost their overall profits by prioritising energy supply security. Because this security will come from baseload generation and electric utilities have a big presence in baseload generation.
Here’s a taste from Siemens Energy’s supervisory board chairman: “Think about the data centers, artificial intelligence, we have waiting times now on large gas turbines. Actually, customers are coming and saying, hey can I make a reservation and I’ll pay you for a reservation? Just think about that. It hasn’t happened for a long time,” Joe Kaeser told CNBC. Utilities are going to make billions from the AI rush and from Trump’s security quest. And they’ll slowly and quietly pull out of wind and try to forget they were ever there at all.
(Longer paywalled version of the story comes out at 1 pm GMT today.)
WHY HAS THIS COME AS A SURPRISE?
The issue from the very beginning of the push for large-scale wind power was whether wind would be reliable enough to provide continuous input, bearing in mind the ABC of intermittent energy.
A. Supply to the grid must continuously match demand.
B. The continuity of wind and solar input is disrupted by nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no grid-scale storage at present using pumped hydro or batteries or any other known technology.
Therefore intermittent inputs from the sun and wind have no place on the grid.
That might have been the end of the story if the meteorologists had ever spread the word about wind droughts, that is, prolonged periods with next to no wind across continental areas. And if the people who planned the wind transition using subsidies and mandates to drive out coal had bothered to consult with the meteorologists to assess the reliability of the wind supply.
https://quadrant.org.au/news-opinions/climate-change/no-gusts-no-glory/
There are plenty of references to problems with the wind supply going back to 2015 and 2016 when there were long spells with no wind across much of North America and the meteorologists explained these by reference to high pressure systems.
There was still plenty of conventional power and windless nights caused no problems.
It was different when Dunkelflautes turned up unannounced in Europe in 2021 and proceeded to wreck the power supply in Britain and Germany where the transition to wind was well advanced and coal was on the way out.
And so the spectre of power failure has haunted Britain and Germany ever since. Why the surprise?
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/The_endless_wind_drought_crippling_renewables___The_Spectator_Australia.pdf
Germany and Britain are in the grip of A WIND DROUGHT TRAP and it remains to be seen whether the United States can avoid the same fate because they were possibly only one Democrat administration away from the red zone where windless nights are very dangerous.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/escaping-the-wind-drought-trap
And along come the Chinese and the pesky question of how exactly AI makes money to further complicate things.