Matt Ridley: The Beginning Of The End Of Wind: "To the nearest whole number, the percentage of the world’s energy that comes from wind turbines today is: zero. Despite the regressive subsidy (pushing pensioners into fuel poverty while improving the wine cellars of grand estates), despite tearing rural communities apart, killing jobs, despoiling views, erecting pylons, felling forests, killing bats and eagles, causing industrial accidents, clogging motorways, polluting lakes in Inner Mongolia with the toxic and radioactive tailings from refining neodymium, a ton of which is in the average turbine — despite all this, the total energy generated each day by wind has yet to reach half a per cent worldwide."
'via Blog this'
11 comments:
I believe generators of all types use neodymium these days.
Also, wikipedia says:
"As of 2010 wind energy production was over 2.5% of worldwide power, growing at more than 25% per annum."
There's no citation in the Wiki article to support that number. I guess I'm inclined to trust the non-anonymous reporter assertion over the volunteer wiki editor's.
And also because I've read Matt Ridley's stuff before, and generally believe him to be credible. But everyone make mistakes.
Yeah, citing wikipedia was a bit of a joke.
It's hard to find some of these numbers, but the Department of Energy's website has this table (http://205.254.135.7/cfapps/ipdbproject/IEDIndex3.cfm?tid=2&pid=2&aid=12) where you can sort through some things. I made a little spreadsheet and it looks like the % of electricity generated by wind in the world was .9% in 2007, 1.1% in 2008, and 1.4% in 2009. Wind is increasing its output by over 25% per year. They didn't have all the data past that, but extrapolating the growth of wind and total production gives 1.7% in 2010, 2.1% in 2011, and 2.6% by the end of 2012.
Granted this is just electrical generation, so I'm guessing Ridley's number is accurate if you factor in other forms of energy (petroleum and natural gas). On the other hand, an industry that is still small but is growing by 25% annually hardly seems on its way out.
Oh, I did find the data for total energy and wind was at .53% in 2009 (no extrapolation needed). That, to the nearest whole number is 1%. So I take it back, Ridley is a dirty filthy liar.
Is that a measure of the world's energy production or the U.S.'s energy production? Because he says the world's energy, and I'm guessing the department of energy is mostly concerned with use energy production.
It was world production. US wind production is significantly higher.
You should email him, and see if he has an explanation.
Ok, so not all that significantly. The US was at 1.0% wind (of all energy) in 2009.
Email him? Maybe. There could just be another source of data that he's using.
Yeah, were only off by .4, right?
There could be some reason that number is not accurate--like maybe the percentage is based on rated capacities of the various energy producers, and we know that other sources of energy produce much closer to their rated capacities, making up the slight difference?
I'm just guessing.
Post a Comment