I know Georgia (the US state not the country recently dominating headlines) has produced pilot-scale off-shore wind farms, but has not yet found it cost-effective to expand. Off-shore wind farms present a two-fold advantage resulting from capitalization upon temperture differentials between land and sea (a source of wind), and the ability to avoid the Not In My Back Yard sentiment. However, some places the wind blows and some places it doesn’t.

Having said this, I am optimistic that with improvements in battery technology, efficiency of solar cells (the likely reason they don’t do 50% solar is that they would probably have to cover every square inch of the country with cells to achieve it) when combined with some type of pigouvian tax on carbon that captures the marginal cost to society, renewables will play a progressively larger role in energy production.

As for the profit issue, most people, if asked to put their 401K money in investments with companies that were unprofitable- thus getting less back when they retire (in real terms) than they put in, they would dismiss this is crazy talk. However, somehow profitability has gained an interesting stigma that I don’t quite understand. Without profit there is no incentive to invest one’s money; just like without salaries and wages there is no incentive for people to go to work.

But I just read an article on http://www.metaefficient.com (which they got from the Wall Street Journal) about the problems the Danish utility company is having with wind power. Because they have a lot of windy coastline, Denmark built enough windmills along it to generate 20 percent of their electricity.

But often, it gets really windy. When that happens, the percentage of electricity generated by the windmills can climb to 40 percent. If that happens, the price of electricity can drop to zero “leaving utilities scrambling to offload excess power or take a financial hit”.

So far, they have been selling the extra electricity cheap to Sweden and Norway. This is neither a desirable nor a long-term solution. So the Danish utility company is planning to build a country-wide system for charging electric cars with the excess power. (Israel is doing the same.)

So the problem in Denmark is that renewables are just so darn — well — renewable. The wind just keeps blowing. Blowing down the price of electricity. Thus the task of the utility company becomes finding ways to use excess electricity. In other words, to find ways to limit the supply of electricity enough to keep the price up. (Are you wondering why they need to keep the price up?)

And all this bother because they have built enough windmills to provide 20 percent of their electricity on ‘normal’ wind days. Kind of makes me wonder what would happen if they built enough for 50 percent wind power and 50 percent solar power — or 50 percent tidal power. Would electricity be virtually free except for small maintenance and labor costs? So abundant we couldn’t find ways to use it all?

Profit demands scarcity. Faced with abundance, our economy would be in ruins. It seems the name of the “man behind the curtain” in our energy woes is Profit.

MJ Olsen
http://butisitpc.wordpress.com