Well, despite zip77077’s grousing, he is not the last local blogger to weigh in on the subject of Mayor White’s new energy plan. It’s probably me. Y’see, everyone else has already had plenty to say about the political background of this plan (hat tip to Kevin over at BlogHouston) —

Zilkha’s close friend and weekly bicycling companion, Bill White, CEO of energy investment firm Wedge Management, is quick to point out that Zilkha and his management team are “not running a charity.” Indeed, the Zilkhas, he says, were “making more money than anyone else” with their technology-oriented oil and gas business in the 1990s.

White, a former deputy secretary of energy at the U.S. Department of Energy, met Zilkha a decade ago through common interests in the environment and the energy business. Zilkha now serves on the campaign finance committee for White, who is running for mayor of Houston.

White, who was responsible for oversight of federal research and development of wind energy in the 1990s, says he has long known that “wind energy can be a very competitive form of electricity” and that Texas “has some of the best wind in the country.”

— but my inner geek wanted to look at the actual feasibility of the whole idea. Would it work? The problem is, I’m no engineer, and I just don’t have the knowledge.

Fortunately, I know of someone who is, and does. Steven DenBeste wrote two years ago about wind:

. . . electric power has unique properties, and one of the most important is that at any given instant the amount of electric power being generated will always exactly match the amount of power being consumed. If you don’t deliberately balance the system, the laws of physics will do the balancing for you in ways you won’t like.

Electric power has to be generated at the time it is needed, and the electric power grid overall has to have the ability to add generation capacity as demand rises, and to reduce generation when demand falls again. Demand actually rises and falls by as much as 30% every day.

The biggest drawback of wind/solar is that they generate power when conditions permit them to do so, not when demand requires them to do so. And there’s no practical way to store electric energy in adequate quantities to deal with this without unacceptable losses or unreasonable capital and/or operating expense. (This is a major flaw of most of the fad alternate electrical energy sources we hear so much about.)

And two years before that, he was far more blunt about the shortcomings of wind energy:

It isn’t where we need it, and it isn’t when we need it, and there ain’t enough of it. The power grid has to adjust its energy generation to match consumption, and we can’t turn the wind on when we need more energy. The source is diffuse and it requires a massive investment to make and install all the windmills. There are not all that many appropriate sites where the wind is regularly strong and a lot of the places where that’s true (e.g. the Columbia River Gorge) are protected areas. Windmill farms are an eyesore, and they kill a lot of birds. (A lot of birds.) The equipment is large, complicated and will require a lot of repair to keep working; the resulting energy will be inadequate and unreasonably expensive per unit energy yield. And I’m still not convinced that it won’t take years before any given windmill finally yields as much total energy as it took to make it, transport it and install it. Ireland is making a massive investment in wind power, but when they’re finished and have fully deployed all sites it’s only going to generate 520 megawatts, when the wind is blowing. That’s one eighth of the power generated by The Dalles Dam.

The issue of scale is a major problem that he points out repeatedly. Granted, we are talking about energy for a city, not for an entire country, but if it’s not a good idea overall, then what makes it a good idea at this scale? What grand difference are we making with 17 windmills, that this is a good investment of city funding & credit at a time we’re borrowing money just to meet pension obligations?

You’ve got to start thinking really, really big.

Anything which, when fully deployed, generates less than ten gigawatts average (1010 joules per second) is useless for our purposes in terms of actually making a meaningful contribution to the total amount of energy we consume. For scale purposes:

Hoover Dam = 1.5 gigawatts.
Grand Coulee Dam = 6.5 gigawatts
Small coal or nuclear plant = 300 megawatts
Large coal or nuclear plant = 1 gigawatt

Average US electrical power consumption = 400 gigawatts

Peak US electrical power consumption is probably above 1 terawatt

If any proposed energy source can’t be scaled up to generate 10 gigawatts average (1% of that), it won’t be large enough to make any significant difference in the grand scheme of things even if it works and is really, really cool and clever and innovative and nifty.

And we’re going to make a difference to the City of Houston with a few dinky windmills located 250 miles away? (Hey, at least it’s not near Senator Kennedy’s place!) While the original report by Ch. 13 is a bit light on technical details like how much electricity the plan is supposed to produce, once you realize that the electricity generated actually has no relation to how much the city uses (because of that pesky generate-when-the-wind-blows-not-when-you-need-it-problem), it becomes obvious that the city isn’t generating it’s own electricity; it’s just underwriting Mayor White’s good buddy. The city will still be buying electricity at the going rate from the grid; it’s just that it gets to make and sell some too. If the wind is blowing, that is.

Update: As can be seen from the last link, Kennedy County is in a Class 3 zone. Far from having “some of the best wind, ” Texas is largely Class 3 or less, with less than 1% of it’s area zoned Class 5 or 6, and none zoned Class 7. Class 3 zones are considered economically marginal, even by wind power proponents.

The 2005-2009 Agency Strategic Plan from the Texas Public Utility Counsul details (on p. 21) the expected future economic conditions for power generation in Texas. Wind power is not listed as a viable alternative. A listing of all plants built since 1995 (or planned through 2010) is available here. The Kennedy County wind farm is not listed, though a number of others are.

Update 2: By the way, if you disagree with Steven, don’t pick an argument with him over this; while he maintains his archives out of courtesy to the public, he’s no longer (heh, never was) into dealing with nitpicks (that aren’t feasible anyway) that he’s already shot down time and again. That was what drove him out of writing about such things to start with. Find someone else to argue with.

Update 3: More of a snark really. The viability of the plan and product is obvious from the need to secure taxpayer funding; if it were such a great idea, financing would make itself available. That’s the way a free market works. Meanwhile, what is the opportunity cost to the City of Houston? In other words, what could we have accomplished with the money & credit otherwise blown helping out Mayor White’s good buddy? And what’s Zilkha making out of this? After all “Zilkha and his management team are ‘not running a charity.'”