The Required EPRs to Replace Denmark's 6,296 Wind Turbines w/Reliable Generation for 80 years. [View all]

[NNadir]

The Danish Energy Agency stopped updating the Master Data Register of Wind Turbines in March of 2022, possibly because the data therein demonstrates the unreliability and short lifetimes of the wind turbines that the Danes market.

Note that the link to the data is on the same page to links celebrating Denmark's off shore oil and gas drilling operations.

This is not a coincidence. The wind industry and the fossil fuel industry are intertwined. The fossil fuel industry doesn't really need the wind industry, except for marketing purposes since the wind industry is far more competent at generating complacency and wishful thinking, thus keeping the fossil fuel business in business. The wind industry, by contrast, cannot function without access to dangerous fossil fuels.

I showed, in this space, a little less than a year ago that the average lifetime of decommissioned wind turbines was less than 18 years:

A Commentary on Failure, Delusion and Faith: Danish Data on Big Wind Turbines and Their Lifetimes.

It is obvious that the trillions of dollars squandered on the wind industry on this planet has been ineffective at addressing climate change. At the time I wrote that post the concentration of the dangerous 419.73 ppm.

Here's where we are as of this writing:

June 01: 424.43 ppm
May 31: 424.65 ppm
May 30: 424.66 ppm
May 29: 424.76 ppm
May 28: 424.71 ppm
Last Updated: June 2, 2023

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2

Elsewhere I noted, using average continuous power figures from the spreadsheet that the Danes have stopped updating (probably for business reasons) that during the 17 year period it took to construct the now operable Olkiluoto 3 Nuclear Reactor, which has a reliable continuous uninterrupted power output of 1600 MW, the entire nation of Denmark was able to add just 979.9 MW of average unreliable wind power.

The Growth Rate of the Danish Wind Industry As Compared to the New Finnish EPR Nuclear Reactor.

The data page at the Danish Energy Agencies Website shows that the entire wind industry in the entire country produced, in 2021, the last full year for which the data was released, 16,100,589,038 kWh of electricity. A kWh is a unit of energy - one seldom used in the dishonest marketing of so called "renewable energy." Multiplying it by 3,600,000 J/kWh one finds that this is equivalent to 57.93 Petajoules. Dividing this figure with the number of seconds in a year, one finds that the average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark is the equivalent, sort of, of a single 1836 MW power plant.

The "sort of" reflects that the power produced by wind turbines is unreliable, sometimes there's a fair amount of it, albeit when it's not really in high demand, and sometimes it's not available for months at a time. People who are unfamiliar with the contents of science and engineering books sometimes wish to represent that this problem can be solved with batteries and/or (worse) hydrogen, and obscenely stupid affectation, since mountains of batteries the size of the Alps would not be able to power Denmark, never mind that coal burning hellhole Germany for a month long episode of Dunkelflaute.

The "answer" such as it is, is the coal, oil and gas industry, the latter two being very important to the Danish economy.

Since the EPR has a reliable output of 1600 MWe - nuclear reactors typically operate near or at 100% capacity utilization, something the wind industry never does - and the average continuous power output of all the wind turbines in 2021 was 1836 MWe, slightly lower than the figure for 2020 (1849 MWe average continuous power), Denmark could restore all of the land now turned into industrial parks for wind turbines, and all of the seabed similarly ravaged, with just two buildings, exporting clean energy to dirty Germany. They could build three such, and be a reliable supplier of clean energy for the better part of a century.

If they build reactors better than the EPR, with very high thermal efficiency, given that Denmark juts into the North Sea that it is now so happily trashing with drilling rigs and wind turbines, reactors capable of operating in the supercritical water range, it would be in a position to use seawater to generate carbon free motor fuels.

None of this will happen of course. A lack of sense is now very, very, very, very popular on this planet, hence the readings above 424 ppm. Denmark is just one hole of popular ignorance.

Have a nice weekend.