Weekend Australian
29/09/2007 Page: 38
On windy nights, western Denmark's wind farms produce so much electricity they can export it
IN the early hours of Saturday morning two weeks ago, Denmark achieved something that makes John Howard's goals for lifting the use of renewable energy in Australia look pretty modest. At 12.17am, as steady winds swept in from the North Sea and most Danes were in their beds, the nation's wind farms churned out 70 per cent of the electricity being consumed across the country. In fact, on windy nights the grid that serves the western half of the country occasionally receives from wind turbines more than its total power demand, leaving excess electricity to be sent by cable to east Denmark or neighbouring countries such as Germany and Sweden.
Denmark is not as windy as southern Australia or places such as Argentina, Morocco and Scotland, but it produces a world-leading 20 per cent of its electricity from wind energy and aims to increase that to 50 per cent by 2025. That is a huge advance on the Australian Prime Minister's goal for 2020 of drawing 15 per cent of the nation's electricity from all low-emission or no-emission sources, including hydro, solar and perhaps clean-coal technology as well as wind. Wind power will be the most important way to meet Howard's goal, so Australian policy-makers and investors will be hoping to learn from Denmark and other parts of Europe, such as the northern German state of Schleswig- Holstein and the mountainous Spanish province of Navarra, which use turbines to generate annual averages of 36 per cent and 44 per cent of their electricity respectively.
Driven by far more ambitious clean energy goals than Australia's, the major European nations have supported wind energy with mechanisms such as tax breaks and guaranteed above-market prices that have been passed on to consumers, allowing the industry and technology to develop to the point where 65 per cent of world wind generation is now in Europe. But even before the Australian engineers and money men arrive in Europe to look for tips, one shining lesson from Europe's experience with wind over the past three decades has been the need to work carefully on public attitudes to clear the way for an expansion of wind energy.
Denmark and the two other pioneers of Europe's wind energy industry Spain, which has the second highest dependence on wind energy at 9 per cent, and Germany, on 7 per cent stand out for their early and successful attempts to win over public opinion. Denmark, which went heavily into wind energy after the oil shocks of the 1970s, has encouraged 200,000 people to invest in turbines in order to give them a stake in the industry. "You have to get people directly involved and show them the benefits for their own communities, either by letting them be shareholders or perhaps insisting that a percentage of a turbine's revenue goes into local community activities," says Anders Dalegaard, a project manager at the Danish Wind Industry Association.
Navarra invested in public education programs and deliberately built its first wind farm in sight of its capital, Pamplona, so people would quickly get used to the industry. In contrast, the public relations performance of the Australian industry has been patchy. Tasmania has run strong community programs promoting wind but the Victorian industry has made things hard for itself with some unattractive early project applications. European industry analysts warn that Howard's late conversion to wind is now likely to unleash attacks from two sources.
"You will find that resistance and criticism will come from two groups," says Isabelle Valentiny, communications director of the European Wind Energy Association in Brussels. "There will be the people who don't like the effect on the landscape and think turbines are ugly, and there will be very serious, well-resourced campaigns run by competing power industries like coal and nuclear power." The first type of resistance has already been voiced by Tourism Minister Fran Bailey, who said this week that turbines were an ugly and loud "blot on the landscape".
Bailey said she believed that "wind technology as an alternate technology is far more suited to the northern hemisphere than the southern hemisphere", a view that is dismissed out of hand by European wind energy officials. "Australia has many of the absolutely best wind turbine sites in the world," said Stefan Gsaenger, secretary general of the World Wind Energy Association. "Tasmania has almost the perfect combination of wind and hydro power which work together very well and your other states have excellent conditions as well." The second type of resistance, driven by support for competing power industries, received an early airing this week when Melbourne-based business columnist Terry McCrann, in a report in the Herald Sun, quoted extensively from an annual report by Germany's largest power grid operator, E.On Netz.
Arguing against government promotion of the wind industry in Australia, McCrann noted that the wind turbines feeding into the German company's grid only produced an 18 per cent capacity factor the proportion of the electricity that they would have if they had operated at full capacity for the whole year. However, Gsaenger says: "The capacity factor on E.On Netz's grid is unusually low because many of those turbines are not located in particularly good areas and the company does its best to make it hard for turbine owners to connect to its grid." In any case, the relevant capacity figure for Australia is about twice the 18 per cent quoted by McCrann.
The Howard Government said in May last year that the average capacity factor in Australian conditions was 30-35 per cent, although industry spokesman Peter Rae says it is closer to 40 per cent. In the US, the average is 31 per cent for the whole industry or 33 per cent for newer turbines. Denmark claims an average of 30 per cent for its land-based turbines and 45 per cent for the large turbines that stand at sea a few kilometres off its coast.
Oil-fired plants typically have capacity factors of about 30 per cent, while coal plants operate at 70 per cent and nuclear plants 90 per cent. "But even at 18 per cent, the capacity factor is not that important in terms of economic viability or the stability of the grid," Gsaenger says. "You can just build more capacity to get the output you need. And you certainly don't have to have excess coal plants standing by in case the wind fails that is ridiculous. It is all about integrating the wind output into an overall system which combines other sources like hydro and gas, which can be quite flexible." The German Government now predicts that, by 2015 at the latest, wind energy will be cheaper on the power exchange than conventionally produced electricity.
The industry is investing heavily to try to develop ways to store power produced at peak periods. The possibilities include batteries, compressing air into underground storage areas to be released later, using electrolysis to make hydrogen, or pumping water back uphill into hydro systems. "Until then (when power can be efficiently stored) one of the most important things is to be connected to the power grids of other countries, so power can be imported when you need it and exported when you have an excess," said Dalegaard of the Danish Wind Association. "Having a large grid is important because the wind will always be blowing somewhere." All of Australia's grids are connected except for those of Western Australia and the Northern Territory, leaving the industry confident that fluctuations caused by wind variations can easily be smoothed out. "We have proven here in Denmark that you can integrate a large amount of wind energy into an electricity system, especially if you have a large grid," said Dalegaard. "You have to manage your grid system properly but we now know that it is possible."
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