Each of these attacks has been roundly rebutted by government data and studies by independent grid operators conclusively showing that pollution and fossil fuel use decline significantly in lockstep as regions ramp up their use of wind energy.
In fact, much of the data indicates that the emissions savings of wind energy are even larger than expected because wind farm plants tends to disproportionately displace dirtier and less flexible coal plants relative to less dirty and more flexible natural gas plants. We’ve also pointed out numerous critical flaws in each of these fossil fuel industry-funded attacks on wind energy.
The latest incarnation of this misinformation campaign against wind turbines comes from a Web posting by a Dutch anti-wind farm activist, C. le Pair. While we wouldn’t ordinarily expect non-peer-reviewed attacks on wind energy on an obscure Dutch anti-wind farm website to receive much attention, in this case major publications like The Atlantic and The Guardian have covered his claims. Fortunately The Atlantic and The Guardian articles were duly skeptical of the anti-wind farm activist’s claims and included quotes from professors and other experts pointing out many reasons why the anti-wind turbines claims were false.
However, the quotes from those experts did not comprehensively address all of the flaws in le Pair’s work, so we will do so here:
Power Grid Operations
As others have pointed out, le Pair’s attack is based on a serious and fundamental misunderstanding of how the power grid operates. Le Pair assumes that changes in the output of each wind turbine must be compensated by corresponding changes in the output of a fossil-fired power plant.
First of all, le Pair fails to understand that the output of all wind turbines connected to the power grid is combined, which greatly reduces the variability of their aggregate output. Dozens of studies have found that when hundreds or thousands of wind turbines spread over hundreds of miles are aggregated, changes in output at one wind turbine are almost always canceled out by changes in the output of the other wind turbines. (http://www.vtt.fi/inf/pdf/tiedotteet/2009/T2493.pdf)
The short-term variability in wind farm output is the most greatly reduced, as it takes hours for a single weather event to affect a significant share of a wind fleet spread over hundreds of miles. This short-term variability is the most important as this is what grid operators must accommodate by using fast-acting, expensive, and inefficient reserve generation, and fortunately wind energy adds little to the need for these reserves. Longer-term (over an hour or more) variations are far more easily and efficiently accommodated by grid operators.
Second, le Pair fails to understand that changes in aggregate wind farm output are combined with all other sources of variability on the power system, which cancels out many of the changes in wind output. Since the dawn of electricity more than a century ago, power grid operators have been kept busy 24/7/365 continually changing the output of power plants to accommodate changes in electricity demand and supply.
Electricity demand changes drastically as people turn appliances on and off and as factories come on and offline. Small changes in the weather can drastically change the number of people running air conditioners or electric heaters. Many changes in electricity demand are unpredictable or imperfectly predictable, which make them harder for grid operators to accommodate. Because most of these changes in electricity use are random, much of the time electricity demand is decreasing when wind output is decreasing or vice versa, meaning that the changes in wind output are canceled out.
Similar to the unexpected changes in electric demand, all conventional power plants experience unexpected outages on a fairly frequent basis due to mechanical or electrical failures. These outages occur instantaneously and without warning, requiring grid operators to maintain enough fast-acting backup reserve generation 24/7/365 to replace the largest power plant