The naked truth (inconvenient) about wind power

From Canadian Energy Issues:

Wind power is gas power, and comes with pollution
According to Ontario�s long term energy plan, in 2030 the province will get 26.3 billion kilowatt-hours from wind, solar, and bio-energy. Most of that will be from wind, which according to historical statistics produces electricity 33 percent of the time. To get 26.3 billionn kWh, then, Ontario will need around 10,000 megawatts of installed wind capacity.

If you think this seems an odd way to plan a power system, you are right. Wind is not dispatchable; the electricity system operator cannot call the operator of a wind turbine and say �I�ll need 50 MW of power in five minutes, so start ramping up.� Well, he actually can call and request exactly that, but there is a 67 percent chance the wind operator will say �sorry, the wind conditions are such that I cannot fulfill your request.� i.e., the wind isn�t blowing.

This points up a central reality of power systems whose planners want to add a lot of wind capacity. In the words of Dr. Ulrich Decher, a nuclear engineer with Westinghouse, wind turbines �do not replace the need for any other generators. All the generators that are needed without windmills are needed with windmills.�

Comparisons are often made of how many windmills it would take to eliminate the need for a conventional power plant. These comparisons are totally meaningless because windmills do not add any megawatts to the grid when the wind is not blowing. Windmills must be paired with some other power plant or energy storage device (such as pumped hydro storage) to add capacity to the grid.�Dr. Ulrich Decher (source: ANS Nuclear Caf�)

This means that when the Ontario system operator is forced to turn to another power generator to meet the provincial demand�not if, but when�it is almost certain that that other generator will run on natural gas.

This is because the province plans to phase out coal-fired generation by 2014. Which raises a critical issue that is directly related to the reason for the coal phase-out. The coal plants are being phased out because of their heavy carbon and pollution emissions. That is why coal is being replaced by wind and gas: wind turbines ostensibly put no emissions into the air, and gas puts less emissions than coal.

But because of the reality that Dr. Decher describes, those 10,000 MW of wind must be matched with 10,000 MW of gas. Let�s also be clear that gas will actually be the main energy source in that pairing, producing those 10,000 MW of energy 67 percent of the time. Depending on the type of gas generator, each kWh of gas power can dump 330 to 550 grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In view of this, it is reasonable to consider what the emissions implications of the wind/gas pairing will be.

If I was king it would be nuclear all the way with Thorium / molten Fluorine salt reactor cores.