Wind turbines - going strong 20 years on

[madokie]

Anti-wind campaigners claim that wind turbine performance more than halves after 15 years. Chris Goodall analyses the figures and finds that even 20-year old wind turbines in the UK are still going strong ...

The evidence strongly suggests that Professor Hughes greatly exaggerates the rate of performance decline.

The Renewable Energy Foundation (REF) has made the surprising assertion from the assertion that the performance of wind farms declines rapidly with age.

A study carried out by Professor Gordon Hughes for the REF in 2012 suggested that: "The normalised load factor for UK onshore wind farms declines from a peak of about 24% at age 1 to 15% at age 10 and 11% at age 15."

To put this in everyday English, Professor Hughes is saying that a 15 year old onshore wind farm will typically produce less than half its initial output of electricity.

Few people in the industry would demur from a conclusion that wind farms very gradually lose output but none accepted Hughes's finding that electricity generation falls at anything like the rate he stated.

http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/2221532/wind_turbines_going_strong_20_years_on.html

[Altair_IV]

1. Yes - going "strong" for 20 years

The wind industry has been going strong for 20 years; but let's see what they've accomplished in the USA. The reference below is for 2007, so it is a few years out of date; so it only covers 13 years of the 20 years that the industry has been "going strong".

If we look at the 2007 chart for energy "flow" in the USA, courtesy of the scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory:

https://str.llnl.gov/Sep09/simon.html

we see from the graphic just above the heading "Capturing the Big Picture" that wind supplies 0.31 units of energy out of the total of 40.46 units of energy for the entire electric sector. Hence wind supplies 0.77% So the actual performance record for the wind industry is to get us *less* than 1% of our electric generation capacity in a time period that is greater than a decade.

Tell me again how wind is the quick way to electric energy independence....

Altair_IV

[madokie]

2. We're getting 11 percent of our electricity from wind right now

Here in flyover Oklahoma