Elsewhere on the intertubes an engineer named Henk Tennekes chimes in with his opinion about wind as an energy source. That opinion is pretty well summarized by his first sentence, “[w]ind energy is an engineer’s nightmare.” His basic point is that designing and maintaining windmills is a challenge; a difficult one at that, and that therefore they’re a bad idea.
It’s completely laughable and appreciably sad that an engineer would dismiss an entire technology because there is difficulty involved. Certainly nuclear power plants, for which he advocates, represent only the simplest and easiest of engineering tasks. Nuke vs Windmill? Oh yeah, the windmills are the difficult ones. I’m also certain that all those engineers who currently design and build wind mills agree that they’re living a nightmare.
There is a bit more worth quoting.
Since the power generated by modern wind turbines is so unpredictable, conventional power plants have to serve as back-ups. Therefore, these run at far less than half power most of the time. That is terribly uneconomical – only at full power they have good thermal efficiency and minimal CO2 emissions per kWh delivered.
This is another contradiction to Courtney who argued that conventional thermal plants can’t really operate at all below their peak, especially not at “far less than half power.” Tennekes here also tries to pull an engineering sleight of hand. Rather than mention total emissions, he talks about emissions rates only at the thermal plant.
Why don’t politicians listen to engineers?
Well, Henk, I can think of a few reasons…
