Tag Archives: wind power

Chu’s solar power regrets

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Michael Giberson

From The Onion:

WASHINGTON—Sources have reported that following a long night of carousing at a series of D.C. watering holes, Energy Secretary Steven Chu awoke Thursday morning to find himself sleeping next to a giant solar panel he had met the previous evening. “Oh, Christ, what the hell did I do last night?” Chu is said to have muttered to himself while clutching his aching head and grimacing at the partially blanketed 18-square-foot photovoltaic solar module whose manufacturer he was reportedly unable to recall… According to sources, Chu’s encounter with the crystalline-silicon solar receptor was his most regrettable dalliance since 2009, when an extended fling with a 90-foot wind turbine nearly ended his marriage.

What, no Solyndra jokes?

Secretary Chu responded on Facebook:

I just want everyone to know that my decision not to serve a second term as Energy Secretary has absolutely nothing to do with the allegations made in this week’s edition of the Onion. While I’m not going to confirm or deny the charges specifically, I will say that clean, renewable solar power is a growing source of U.S. jobs and is becoming more and more affordable, so it’s no surprise that lots of Americans are falling in love with solar.

Reading between the lines here, in particular, the claim “renewable solar power is a growing source of U.S. jobs,” I think we can conclude that the solar panel’s manufacturer has even more damning photos in a vault somewhere.

The Onion:

The Onion: “Hungover Energy Secretary Wakes Up Next To Solar Panel”

“Please, sirs, may I have some more … subsidies for wind power?”

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Michael Giberson

From The Hill’s Energy & Environment Blog:

A group of military veterans pressed congressional Republicans on Thursday to renew a tax credit for the wind industry that their party’s standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, has vowed to end.

The veterans, who are all employed by the wind industry, secured meetings with staff for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.), House Ways and Means Committee Chairman…

The two elements of half-hearted policy substance mentioned in the article are both suspect: “jobs for veterans,” and “reduces dependence on foreign energy.”

Over the last decade the domestic oil and gas production industry added twice as many jobs as the 37,000 jobs the wind industry claims expiration of the PTC will threaten. The only “foreign energy” we import in any quantity is petroleum, excepting some power and natural gas from Canada, and the wind power subsidy has approximately nothing to do with how much petroleum we import.

On the other hand, increasing domestic oil and gas production actually is reducing “dependence on foreign energy,” including imports from OPEC members and other sources, and even including power and natural gas from Canada.

Using military vets to lobby for wind power tax breaks? I guess some K Street lobbying genius imagined using vets would help the industry get a bit of face time with Republican lawmakers who would otherwise rather meet with representatives of some other special interest group. Don’t our military veterans deserve better than to be made into poorly-informed lobbyists for wind energy?

What’s next, retired firefighters, grizzled ex-cops, harried emergency room nurses?

Why not just round up some starving orphans and have them come plead Congress, “Please, sirs, may I have some more … subsidies for wind power?”

Dolan on the WPTC and energy policy

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Lynne Kiesling

Economist Ed Dolan makes a thorough argument for using the upcoming expiration of the wind production tax credit as an opportunity to rethink energy policy seriously. In particular, his combined focus on energy policy and tax policy, and whether such tax credits are good examples of either (guess what? No), makes for an informative discussion. He also argues that such policy falls short because it fails to focus on the policy objective, which he defines as reducing negative externalities. For that reason, he makes the Pigouvian tax argument.

While he is more confident than I am that we can devise such a tax effectively, identify the magnitudes of such external effects as are Pareto-relevant, and implement them in a politics-and-lobbying-light way, I think it’s worth considering the extent to which such a proposal would be an improvement on the subsidies for commercialization that are the current renewables policy, which are an abomination of rent-seeking and inefficiency.

Any reason to be worried about wind power industry layoffs?

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Michael Giberson

In an article titled “4 Reasons All Americans Should Be Worried About Wind Layoffs,” you’d think there would be at least one reason that people should be worried about wind industry layoffs.

Sadly, no.

Instead the author tells the reader: (1) wind power installations are largely in GOP-held congressional districts, (2) the U.S. is losing the “race” with China to build the most wind power, (3) fossil fuels receive tax breaks too, and (4)  natural gas prices are low.

The only substantive content in the short piece was a casual invoking of “the externalities of fossil fuel.” I’d encourage the writer to hold on to this sentence, toss the rest, and start again.

Negative power prices due to wind power’s subsidy

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Michael Giberson

On the NYTimes.com Green blog, Matthew Wald reports on “An argument over wind.” The issue is the scheduled-to-expire Production Tax Credit for wind power. As previously mentioned here, former PTC-supporter Exelon Corp. has come out against the PTC extension. It parted ways from the American Wind Energy Association, of which it had long been a member, over the issue.

Wald reports on an Exelon-funded study done by The NorthBridge Group, “Negative Electricity Prices and the Production Tax Credit.” According to Wald:

The study sponsored by Exelon, prepared by the NorthBridge Group, which does extensive consulting for utilities around the country, found pockets where the number of negative hours reached 12 percent or more. While various types of electricity generation have received subsidies over the decades, said Frank Huntowski, one of the authors, “I don’t think we’ve seen something as dramatic as this.’’ …

Negative pricing occurs mostly on spring and fall nights when the wind is blowing strongly but offices, stores and factories are mostly closed and temperatures are so mild that there is virtually no demand for home heating or air-conditioning. The phenomenon existed before the surge in construction of wind machines, but the new industry is making it worse, some industry participants say, especially for companies with baseload plants that were built to run at a steady rate around the clock.

That is a special problem for Exelon, which runs many nuclear plants in the Midwest; nuclear plants cannot change their output quickly.

Long-time readers may recall that we’ve discussed negative power prices many times before here on Knowledge Problem. This link will execute a search of the KP archives: negative+prices.

Related:

Financial regulations add burden to wind power projects

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Michael Giberson

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab’s recently published 2011 Wind Technologies Market Report (pdf) provides a fairly focused look at wind power industry developments. Among the insights:

At the same time [as the European debt crisis began creating trouble for some lenders], new banking regulations took hold, driving considerably shorter bank loan tenors (institutional lenders, meanwhile, continued to offer significantly longer products). In contrast to the weakened debt market, the market for tax equity improved somewhat in 2011 … As the number of grandfathered Section 1603 grant deals begins to taper off in 2012, however, attrition in tax equity investors is possible, as some have indicated no interest in PTC deals.

I’m sure banking regulators didn’t intend to lead banks to offer shorter loan terms to wind power developers, but the rain falls on the just and the unjust and similarly the consequences of bank regulations are no respecter of conflicting government policies. (I’m wondering how banking regulators would score the net costs and benefits of slightly discouraging subsidized energy projects?)

The fraying of support for wind power’s PTC subsidy

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Michael Giberson

The coalition in support of  wind power’s Production Tax Credit has always had a bit of a “Baptists and Bootleggers” flavor: environmentalists making a clean and green argument in favor of wind power and the multinational wind power development corporations funding the political muscle needed to get things done. The coalition has proven durable even as wind power took a few environmental hits, but now the business side of the coalition is beginning to fray. The Production Tax Credit will expire at the end of 2012 unless Congress acts to extend it.

One example: The Chicago Tribune reports that Exelon Corp., a large electric power company that owns a significant amount of wind power and a member of the American Wind Energy Association, is opposing efforts to renew the tax credit (reg. required).

“The (production tax credit) has been in place since 1992, I believe,” Exelon Chief Executive Christopher Crane said in a conference call with investors and analysts Wednesday. “And I think that’s enough time to jump-start an industry, 20 years.”

The economic logic behind Exelon’s position is clear: ”with nearly half of its profits coming from its nuclear fleet and low-cost wind power cutting into its margins, Exelon is in Washington leading a fight to kill a tax credit the wind industry says is crucial to its survival.” Note that “low cost wind power” is referring to the low marginal cost of production, not the total cost per MWh of energy produced. Most of Exelon’s generating assets are in markets with energy prices driven toward the marginal cost of production, and additional wind power in these markets tends to push average prices down.

It isn’t just the nuclear fleet that sees its profitability pushed down, either. Wind on wind competition is also becoming an issue. If additional wind power comes online near existing wind power, it naturally produces more output at the same time that existing wind power plants produce more output. The profit-suppressing effect of new wind is thereby intensified for existing wind assets.

Wind power project owners contemplating PTC extension have to weigh the benefits from anticipated new projects against the price suppressing consequences for their existing wind power and other generation assets. It is a cost-benefit weighing that is increasingly turning against continued support for the PTC among owners of wind power assets. Of course, on the other hand, manufacturers of wind power turbines and towers, and those developers who build but don’t own wind power projects benefit only from the construction of new projects. Wind power coalition dynamics should see these players taking a bigger and bigger role over time.

The Chicago Tribune article contains more good stuff. They found someone willing to claim that wind power needs the subsidy because it is “on the cusp of seeing real price declines,” and “In three to five years wind energy will be cost competitive … without the subsidy.” The claimant doesn’t explain why we shouldn’t just wait three to five years and build wind power when it is actually competitive.

(Research efforts do seem to be making progress in improving wind power productivity. That progress justifies maybe a few million dollars for continued research, not a few billion dollars to build more not-quite-cost-competitive wind power projects now.)

Other Production Tax Credit news and commentary:

 

Danish wind power ♥s Norwegian hydropower

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Michael Giberson

From time to time a promoter of wind power will encourage the U.S. to follow Denmark’s lead and aim for a much higher levels of wind power on the grid. (Recently Denmark’s legislature established a goal of attaining 50 percent of its energy from wind power by 2020.)

A working paper by Johannes Mauritzen explains one of the key factors supporting Denmark’s current wind power capability: the flexibility inherent in Norway’s vast hydro-power capability. Mauritzen’s abstract:

It is well established within both the economics and power system engineering literature that hydro power can act as a complement to large amounts of intermittent energy. In particular hydro power can act as a “battery” where large amounts of wind power are installed. In this paper I use simple distributed lag models with data from Denmark and Norway. I find that increased wind power in Denmark causes increased marginal exports to Norway and that this effect is larger during periods of net exports when it is difficult to displace local production. Increased wind power can also be shown to slightly reduce prices in southern Norway in the short run. Finally, I estimate that as much as 40 percent of wind power produced in Denmark is stored in Norwegian hydro power magazines.

So, a first step for the United States renewable power policy might be to pick up and move the country a little closer to Norway.

Less facetiously, and projecting a little bit, we might casually infer that the New York power market won’t have too much trouble with a moderate amount of wind power since it also has access to a lot of hydro-power. (11 percent of generating capacity is hydro and another 4 percent is pumped hydro, plus it imports hydro-power from Quebec.) Similarly, we might be more puzzled about all of the difficulties that power system administrators in the Pacific Northwest are having integrating wind into the regional grid, given the extensive hydro-power resources available. (With hydro about 2/3rds of the electric capacity in the region.) Finally, we might be still more surprised by the relative growth of wind power in Texas, which has relatively little hydro-power capacity on its system. (About 0.6 percent of capacity.)

Admittedly, the thing that a mostly-uncontrollable, variable-output technology like wind needs isn’t hydro-power per se, but rather a certain amount of flexibility and control within the power system it is connected to. The necessary flexibility is one part technology and one part power system rules.

The Nordic power system has both the technical means and the supportive power market rules, same for New York, and same for the ERCOT market in Texas (only in Texas the “technical means” are not hydro-power, but rather fast-ramping gas generation along with other resources over which the market has some control).

The Pacific Northwest has tons of flexible capability on the technical side of things* and it has the federal Bonneville Power Administration on the power system rules side of things. Yet somehow the combination of lots of capability and federal agency management produces as much conflict as cooperation.

*About the only caveat in BPA’s defense is that, to some degree, many competing claims to that technical flexibility have already been granted to non-power system users of the water resources involved in the form of environmental constraints, irrigation demands, treaty obligations with Native American organizations, and so on. Maybe the residual flexibility is smaller than it appears.

The WSJ’s awful editorial against the wind power industry

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Michael Giberson

Like the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, I’d like to see the Production Tax Credit for wind and other renewable energy technologies expire at the end of this year as scheduled. So policy-wise, I’m with them. Still, their editorial against the wind power policy yesterday was awful and it deserves public criticism.

So here are quotes from the WSJ in italics, followed by my comments.

“The renewable energy tax credit—mostly for wind and solar power—started in 1992 as a ‘temporary’ benefit for an infant industry.”

Stick with “mostly for wind.” Other technologies qualify, too, including a variety of hydroelectric technologies and geothermal power, but not currently solar power.

Solar was briefly included in the PTC through the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004, but then was back out at the end of 2005. Solar power benefits from the Investment Tax Credit, and until December 2011 benefited from “Section 1603″ cash grants in lieu of the ITC.

If you’re tempted to argue they said “renewable energy tax credits”, not specifically the PTC, note that they clearly say the renewable energy tax credits that began back in 1992 (in that year’s Energy Policy Act) – they’re talking about the PTC and they get the solar reference wrong.

Details on the PTC, via DSIRE.

“The ’1603 grant program’ pays up to 30% of the construction costs for renewable energy plants …. Wind producers then get the 2.2% tax credit for every kilowatt of electricity generated.”

No. To get the 1603 cash grant a developer has to forgo the Production Tax Credit. One or the other, but not both.

And for crying out loud, it is a 2.2 cents/kwh tax credit, not a “2.2% tax credit.” The Heritage Foundation can get this right, you’d think the WSJ could do as well.

(Or, more precisely, that was last year’s subsidy but the PTC is adjusted annually for the effects of inflation so in 2012 it will be slightly higher.)

… and Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico has introduced a national renewable-energy mandate so consumers will be required to buy wind and solar power no matter how high the cost.

I didn’t notice this problem myself, not having dug through the details of the bill Sen. Bingaman introduced last week, but Richard Caperton and Stephen Lacey at Climate Progress point out that the bill caps the cost increase at 3 cents/kwh.

These sloppy errors don’t mean the WSJ is wrong, only that they’re willing to publish poorly researched opinion pieces.

The Caperton and Lacey post at the Climate Progress blog mentioned the above errors and raised some additional complaints. Most of their additional complaints concern the relative virtues of oil and gas production when compared to wind power, and who gets how much subsidy. On these points I mostly lean toward the WSJ‘s view. Suffice to say that wind power subsidies are orders of magnitude higher per unit of energy provided to consumers.

But this brings us to one key point they raise: “one justification for the tax credit is to makeup for the fact that taxpayers are bearing the harm from fossil fuels.”

There is, embedded in this idea somewhere, the foundation of an analytically sound justification for policy intervention. My problem with the Production Tax Credit for wind power is that it flows to wind investors for every qualifying kwh of power generated irrespective of any such benefit. The wind power investor gets the same subsidy whether the wind power produced displaces coal-fired electric power or efficient natural gas-fired power or hydropower. Wind would still qualify for a PTC even if its output was displacing solar power while wind turbines chopped up migrating birds.

While there may be an intellectually defensible case for a policy supporting renewable energy because it reduces a harm, the Production Tax Credit bears little resemblance to that policy.

So let’s let the Production Tax Credit die, and get on with the business of developing sound public policy on emissions. (And please, WSJ, stop embarrassing yourself with silly mistakes.)

 

The Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy

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Michael Giberson

The Spectator magazine in the U.K. announces the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy:

Matt Ridley has long deplored the wind farm delusion, and was appalled when a family trust was paid by a wind farm company in compensation for mineral rights on land on which it wanted to build a turbine. The trust would be paid £8,500 a year for it, and Matt couldn’t abide the idea of profiting — even in part — from this. So he is donating £8,500 in an annual prize to be given to the best essay exposing environmental fallacies. Entries open today.

The rules are simple. We invite pieces from 1,000 to 2,000 words in length, to gore one of the sacred cows of the environmentalist movement. Matt says more in his cover essay for the new Spectator (which you can also read on Facebook) : ‘There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest or that organic farming is good for the planet or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species.’ A shortlist of six will be put to a panel of judges and the winning entry will be published in the magazine in July.

Entries … close on 30 June 2012.

More details at the first link above. £8,500? That is more than US$13,000. Hmmm, which sacred cow do I want to gore?

Matt Ridley is the author of several books on science and society, including The Rational Optimist, The Red Queen, The Origins of Virtue, and Genome.