Senator Ron Boswell; wrong about wind power

Wind farm performance Graphic credit Wind Farm Performance

Heath reported Boswell saying that "The wind farms only work 30 per cent of the time". This is a very similar claim to that made by the anonymous writer of Stop These Things, another of the organisers of the failed rally; Mr STT said "the average windfarm only produces energy about 25% of the time".

That this is quite false is shown by the the average South Eastern Australian wind farm having a capacity factor of 35%. That is to say, a typical 3MW wind turbine will, on average, generate about 1MW. Quite obviously, since there is a significant amount of time when it is running at less than full power, it must produce power much more than 30% of the time to achieve an average of 35% of its installed capacity.

It could be that Senator Boswell was thinking of capacity factor when he wrote about the proportion of the time that wind farms generate power; but even if he was, he was still wrong.

The graph above, which was from the data of the most recent full day available at the time of the claim on the STT net site, shows that of the 27 wind farms logged by the Wind Farm Performance site, most were generating most of the day. This is a typical day of wind farm operation.

While this may be close to the fact, it ignores a fundamentally important point. Unlike gas or coal-fired generators, the great bulk of the cost of wind farms is up-front. Once the gas or coal generators are built the operators have to continually pay for fuel; in the case of a wind farm, there are no fuel costs at all. The wind is free.

Did Senator Boswell not realise that the wind is free while oil and gas must be paid for, or did he simply choose to ignore that fact, because his argument would otherwise fall down? Again, this shows either gross ignorance or a willingness to misrepresent the facts in order to achieve his aims.

The smaller part of this misrepresentation by Senator Boswell was his statement that the capacity factor of wind power is around 20% to 30%, while the fact for the average of all south-eastern Australian wind farms is a capacity factor of about 35% (from Australian Energy Market Operator figures).

The larger part of Senator Boswell's misrepresentation here was when he compared the wind power capacity factor to that of oil and coal, which he claimed to be "closer to 80%". As an example of actual figures, below are the capacity factors for various power generators from the US Energy Information Administration (via Wikipedia).

Type of generator	Capacity factor (%)
Natural Gas	11.4
Oil	7.8
Hydroelectric	39.8
Other renewables (Wind/Solar/Biomass)	33.9
Coal	63.8
Nuclear	90.3

Senator Boswell, the 11.4% of gas is not closer to 80% than is the 35% of Australian wind power!

"With a coal or gas fired plant, you turn it on and it works–it generates power. When you want power, you simply fire up your generators"

In the case of a coal-fired power station it's not that simple. They take a long time to fire-up and close down.

"With wind farms, you are at the mercy of the wind. You do not know when the wind is going to blow"

Not true; the wind can be reliably forecast, so the amount of electricity that will be generated by Australia's wind farms can similarly be forecast.

"This unreliability means that you have to have highly reliable, conventional fossil fuel fired generators, either spinning or ready to fire up at a moment's notice, to step in and take the place of wind farms."

There has always had to be back-up. All power stations are off-line some of the time. Fossil-fuelled power stations are typically available around 85% of the time; at other times they are undergoing maintenance or suffering breakdown, etcetera. For example, on the evening of 2013/05/31 600MW of generating capacity from AGL's Torrens Island power station was lost and at the same time 200MW was lost from Origin Energy's Osborne plant, both in South Australia. (This is equivalent to the maximum power output from about 400 wind turbines.) The system coped with this loss. There has always been backup in the system, the advent of wind power has not produced any need for greater backup.

Senator Boswell claimed that wind power will not lead to any significant abatement of greenhouse carbon dioxide.

Emissions intensity on the Australian NEM Graph credit – Professor Mike Sandiford, University of Melbourne; data from the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO)

Again; this is simply false, as the record shows.

The graph on the right shows emissions intensity (EI) from the four large states in the Australian National Electricity Market (NEM) and the average for the whole of the NEM, including Tasmania. Tasmania's EI is off-scale at the bottom of this graph.

Note the very large decline in South Australia's EI; due almost entirely to the introduction of wind power.

"We can dump roof-top solar, which is now totally discredited as a sensible way to reduce emissions."