Wind turbines: the whole truth.
III1. The costs.
Why can these only be extremely high?
The price for building a wind turbine is naturally always related to their maximum power output. The term a "3MW wind turbine" seems to imply that has been built to produce the lion's share of 3MW wind. But that turbine, over a year, yields on average no more than the just mentioned 18% or in extremely rare cases 30% of that power. What this really means is that one pays for a machine meant to produce 3 MW but the electricity it yields amounts to only 18 to 30% of that, and it is made available by means of unpredictable fluctuations. Have another look at the graphics! This means that 70 to 82% of the money spent is wasted. (Imagine a steam turbine of 600 MW maximum power but which will not yield with more that and average 150 MW just because there happens to be so little steam). Wind turbines are very efficient Capital Liquidators.
It is obvious that kWh made available in a very unpredictable way are worth a lot less than kWh you can count on every minute of the year, with certainty. You will understand that one way or the other, huge subsidies are bound to play a role in the exploitation of Wind turbines. Subsidies which have to be paid for by all Dutch citizens for the very unreliable delivery of the product!
That is also why it is not fair to compare prices between the kWh reliably and conventionally produced in plants and the price of kWh produced by Wind turbines in a highly unreliable and precarious manner, not allowing a solid deal on their delivery to the energy market. "Normal kWh" and "wind turbine kWh" do not have the same monetary value. Insisting on this is like comparing a case with half rotten apples with a case of first quality ones.
On top of this, if wind energy is to be substantially introduced, all the very costly but necessary technical facilities for guaranteeing reliability of delivery to the grid push up the final price to many times the costs for building and operating the individual Wind turbines. Let us recall what has just been explained and demonstrated, namely the fact that Wind turbines cannot be counted on for more that 10%, or even less, as reliable generators of the electricity in a national grid. This is also one of the aspects about which the propagandists of wind energy keep silent. For the truth about these technical problems we can turn to the German E.ON Wind report 2005, where all those inevitable colateral costs for Germany are estimated at several billion euros.
It is therefore an extremely complicated technical task to compare, on a realistic basis, all the actual costs of electricity produced by Wind turbines with the costs of electricity produced conventionally, but the outcome of this comparison will be extremely dependent on "politics". "Politics", naively, pretend that one would only need to build Wind turbines which, so to say, could be simply plugged into the national high voltage grid. This is far from the truth.
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