Wind Farms Can Be Viable, They Just Need One Hard To Do Thing

Worldwide installations of solar and wind power has skyrocketed. Since 2009, the heyday of government subsidies, global solar photovoltaic installations have increased about 40 percent a year on average, and the installed capacity of wind turbines has doubled.

There's just one problem. It hasn't appeared to help much. No one wants wind turbines near their homes and the cost to create infrastruture in remote areas means the turbines wouldn't evenpay for themselves before they would need to be replaced. Solar panels have startling drops in efficiency after just a few weeks. Countries in Europe are pulling the plug on subsidies and another giant solar panel manufacturer in China has gone bankrupt.

Stanford researchers say that wind energy is not as bad as it seems. They created a metric which includes the "energetic cost" of manufacturing batteries and other storage technologies for the electrical grid to see whether renewable energy supplies, such as wind power and solar photovoltaics, produce enough energy to fuel both their own growth and the growth of the necessary energy storage industry.

"Whenever you build a new technology, you have to invest a large amount of energy up front," said Michael Dale, a research associate at Stanford. "Studies show that wind turbines and solar photovoltaic installations now produce more energy than they consume. The question is, how much additional grid-scale storage can the wind and solar industries afford and still remain net energy providers to the electrical grid?"

Writing in Energy&Environmental Science, Dale and colleagues say that, from an energetic perspective, while solar power can only afford about 24 hours of energy storage the wind sector can afford enough to provide more than three days of uninterrupted power. The reason is because it takes more energy to manufacture solar panels than wind turbines.

Any time you use virtual metrics, the numbers will look a little fuzzy, and energetic cost does not escape unscathed. Utilities will need to pay people and they need to deal with intense regulation that restricts their abilities to function as a business unless costs are subsidized.
Everyone would like to have cleaner energy but Californians, as an example, pay 50 percent more in utility bills to cover the high cost of alternative energy subsidy schemes. Right now, solar panels are subsidized and then utilities are forced to buy any excess at the same cost they sell it, which means rich people who can afford panels get rebates and have their bills further reduced while poor people have to incur the cost of utility employees and maintenance.