On September 14, the Institute for Energy Research (IER), a fossil-fuel industry funded group, began distributing a collection of misleading and outright false claims about wind power in Denmark. These claims were presented in a study commissioned by IER and accompanying fact sheets which presented the study’s conclusions in an even more misleading and false manner.
President Obama is correct that Denmark does produce 20% of its electricity from wind. One need look no further than page 9 of IER’s very own study to learn that “It is true that Denmark generates the equivalent of about 19% of its demand by wind turbines; the figure in West Denmark for 2007 was almost 26%.”
How does IER twist these numbers to claim that Denmark only produces 5% of its electricity from wind? By not counting any electricity that ever flows across the country’s borders, even if an equal amount of electricity is then transferred back to Denmark. By the same logic, if a person deposited five $20 bills at a bank one day and came back the next day and withdrew five different $20 bills, IER would claim that the money the person received was not actually his or hers. Such a claim makes even less sense on the power system, where electricity constantly flows across state and national boundaries. Given that Denmark is a small country integrated into the massive European power grid, the equivalent for the U.S. would be to claim that electricity produced at a power plant in Rhode Island wasn’t actually “produced” if it crossed the border into Massachusetts or Connecticut.
The laws of physics (as well as the principles of economics) dictate that electricity will flow from where it is produced to where it is needed. For example, in the U.S. during the winter, electricity flows from California to the Pacific Northwest to heat homes there, while power flows in the opposite direction to run California’s air conditioners during the summer. Similarly, states with nuclear plants export electricity when the plants are online and import it when they are offline. Arizona regularly exports power to California because it is difficult to reduce the output from its Palo Verde nuclear plant, but it imports power from California when the plant must shut for a month-long fueling outage or an unplanned outage. It should come as no surprise that wind power is exchanged on the grid in the same way that any other type of electricity, or for that matter any resource, would be exchanged in a market. It seems especially strange for a self-described “free-market” group like IER to be so dismissive of interstate trade.
Second, even if the claim made by the study were true, this example would have no bearing on the situation in the U.S. Given that the U.S.’s electric grid network is about 100 times larger than Denmark’s and is only weakly tied to the grids of our neighbors, almost all wind power electrons produced in the U.S. will be consumed in the U.S. before they have a chance to cross into Canada or Mexico. As explained in the study commissioned by IER, Denmark’s grid is very strongly tied to the rest of the European grid, with large transmission links to Scandinavia and Germany. Thus, even though wind power produced in Denmark does routinely cross an international border, this would not be the case in the U.S.
IER’s claim that wind power flowing from Denmark to Scandinavia does not reduce carbon emissions is false. Market forces dictate that wind power added to the electric grid will displace the most expensive sources of electricity first, which will be carbon-emitting gas, coal, and oil-fired power plants. In the relatively rare instance in which all available fossil fuel-fired power plants in Denmark and surrounding countries have been turned down or off and there is still too much electricity, grid operators will reduce the output at hydroelectric plants to store water to be used to offset fossil generation at a later point in time. Thus, even in this case, wind power offsets fossil fuel generation and the associated harmful emissions on a 1-for-1 basis, even if the offset occurs less directly.
Moreover, even if this were an issue in Denmark, it would not be a problem in the U.S. because of the size and nature of our electric grid. The U.S. gets the large majority of its electricity from coal and gas, so wind power in the U.S. will almost always directly offset fuel use and emissions at a fossil fuel power plant. In the rare instances when that would not be the case, the U.S. also has an abundance of hydroelectric dams where water can be stored to displace fossil generation at a later point in time. In addition, because the U.S.’s land area is 200 times larger than that of Denmark and our wind resources are more diverse, U.S. wind resources will demonstrate much less variability than those in Denmark, making them even easier to integrate into the electric grid.
IER’s claim that Denmark has better wind resources than the U.S. is even debunked by their own map. A quick glance at the map IER linked to in their very own fact sheet and a map of wind resources in Denmark is all that is needed to debunk this false claim. One can see that large regions of the U.S. have wind resources rated in excess of 500 Watts/sq-m, with many resource areas exceeding 1000 Watts/sq-m, while only very narrow strips of Denmark have resources that reach 500 Watts/sq-m. Moreover, the land area of the U.S. is about 200 times larger than that of Denmark. Thus, it is no surprise that a 2008 analysis by the U.S. Department of Energy found that there are over 13,000 GW of viable wind resources in the U.S., around 20 times more than the peak electrical demand of the U.S.
Denmark’s relatively high electricity costs were not caused by renewables; even IER’s own study says so. We learn on page 2 of the IER-commissioned report that “Taxes and charges on electricity for Danish household consumers make their electricity by far the most expensive in the European Union.” Also, a closer look at historical electricity prices in Denmark clearly shows that, adjusting for inflation, the price of electricity increased drastically in the early 1980's and has fairly consistently remained at that level ever since. Because wind energy did not become a significant part of Denmark's generation mix until the late 1990's, it would be difficult to blame wind energy for Denmark's high electricity prices.
--Guest Blogger Michael Goggin |
