@Curmudgeon: The rest of your link broadly confirms that wind does little for base power (they use the term 'capacity credit' - read it)

I did. From cover to cover as it were. You clearly don't understand the term capacity, nor capacity credit. Do yourself a favour and read the Wikipedia article on the subject http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Capacity_factor before you embarrass yourself further.

@Curmudgeon: agit-prop.

You think the IEEE Power and Energy Society is an agitation and propaganda machine? Ye gods. Here is another well known agit-prop mob, the US governments National Renewable Energy Laboratories. To quote them http://www.nrel.gov/wind/systemsintegration/wwsis.html :

"did not find any technical barriers to reaching 20% wind energy in the continental United States"

I notice my central point to you went unanswered, presumably because there is no answer. You get to have a say in the price you pay for electricity, both direct and externalised prices. That's it. If you aren't planning to actually generate some, it would be helpful if you had the good grace to get out of the way of those that are, and let them go about their business to the best of their ability. Seriously. You remind me of the anti-GM food mob saying we can't let farmers have access to GM crops because they might be ripped off, and of course implying the farmers are utterly incapable of making the commercial decision themselves.

And no doubt you have to temerity to call yourself a supporter of capitalism and free markets.

And since I've managed to get myself worked up about this, I am sick and tired of seeing the crap from the CEPOS report repeated over and over again here on OLO.

The CEPOS report http://www.cepos.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/Arkiv/PDF/Wind_energy_-_the_case_of_Denmark.pdf was funded by Denmark's fossil fuel industries (Muir report this article quotes is funded by a similar conservative think tank). It, surprise, surprise found that wind power in Denmark was a failure. It was analysed by a group of Universities and Energy companies, and a rebuttal report was written. http://www.energyplanning.aau.dk/Publications/DanishWindPower.pdf Here are the some of the points from that report:

- Only about 1% of Danish wind power is exported and wind power meets about 20% of Danish electricity consumption.

- No taxes are recycled to support established wind turbines; but R&D funding does come from taxes.

- The price of Danish residential electricity, excluding taxes and VAT, is 10th highest of the 27 EU countries. That is mostly the result of high taxes and VAT which are not used to support existing wind power. The price of Danish industrial electricity, excluding taxes and VAT, is the 7th lowest of the 27 EU countries.

- The net effect of Denmark getting 20% of it energy from wind is around 1%..2% rise in household electricity prices.

And that my friends is what a wind power disaster of the like Mark is presumably trying to save us from looks like.

One final note. Mark's article says Denmark isn't adding more wind power. They're now getting over 20% of their electricity from the wind. Going much above 20% does indeed mean you start having to make major changes to the grid in order to accommodate wind. Australia is at around 1.5% now.

Windfarms cannot supply baseload or load-following capacity no matter what technological improvement is made.
Turbines need a windspeed of 5 m/s to produce any power, give maximum power at 15 m/s (near gale-force) and shut down when the speed reaches 25 m/s. There's a cubic function between wind speed and power output, such that if the wind speed halves the power drops to one eighth. Experience in Europe shows that windfarms can go hours/days without producing much power because they tend to autocorrelate over a very wide area.
A 25% load factor is an average over a year; there will be periods when this fluctuates wildly between nothing and name-plate capacity. Unless you can live with blackouts, you need a level of thermal backup approaching the level of electric power you need. EON in the UK and Germany, who run windfarms and are also electricty suppliers to consumers, say that the capacity credit of windfarms is about 4% or 8% - therefore for each 100MW of supply from wind you'll need 90+MW of thermal plant backup. In Germany this comes from coal & gas plants; as they have increased their wind energy capacity they have had to build more coal and gas (mainly CCGT) power stations. They run as 'spinning reserve', burning coal/gas at reduced efficiency, producing no electricity when the wind blows, and producing CO2 gases which are subject to a Carbon Tax of course. An extensive German survey I have seen suggests that Germany would reduce CO2 emissions if it switched off all its wind turbines!
Consider then what happens if the windspeed is high enough to produce peak output; e.g. 4000x2MW turbines needed for 2GW average power will produce upto 8GW! The windfarm owners would still want their kWh money in order to meet their averages, so the grid would have to pay them for power the grid could not use!
It's clear that the grid company and electricty suppliers upstream of the windfarm would ordinarily refuse to take any electricity from windfarms even if it was free! Ah, but MRET forces them to take it.

I have never understood why the Greens or any environmentalists would ever want these twitching, thumping crucifixions of the landscape. Visual and aural blight on the better countryscapes, habitat destruction of 1000's of km, stomping armies of pylons across the landscape to join them to the grid, killer of bats and birds, they can and do catch fire, they can and do have bits fly off them, and they do produce increased cancer rates and birth defects in China to extract rare earths needed for their magnets. On death, the blades seem to be disposed of in landfill.

it doesn't matter which side you come in from, the other side is evidently "crap"

"I am sick and tired of seeing the crap from the "IPCC" repeated over and over again here on OLO."

I know exactly how you feel rstuart

It's like reading about reports commissioned by Greenpeace or Aust Conservation society, or the greens or whomever, they always seem to support the angle of the organization who funds the study .. who would have thought it eh?

organizations who conduct studies will get the results their clients want, or they are out of business .. we're not stupid, we know this to be true

the problem is, all of climate science is now corrupted due to the requirement of the funding sources wanting a particular spin or angle

no wonder people have lost faith in climate science and "studies and reports"

it's not me saying this, look at what is happening, Australians reject the climate spin, not the science, but the misuse of science.

So wind energy has no back up on windless days, an solar electricity has no back up at night or in heavy cloud during the day.

Is energy storage too nascent and too expensive for wide scale deployment? Some power suppliers don’t think so but add that if the technology can be included in state and federal incentives, developers could more rapidly ramp up.

the economists at Australia’s Productivity Commission got that right!  The law-driven subsidies make base load power generation even more inefficient and polluting, and thus would be better off paid as tax breaks for engineering constructors and operators of long-life electricity storages.  That is, storage technologies such as thermochemical, pumpable hydro-electric dams, and flywheel dynamo-generators and very large scale ultra-capacitors if these become technically feasible.

Energy storage systems not only harness power but also inject that energy into the grid so that providers can more efficiently meet their demands. With a focus on reducing harmful air emissions and on increasing the use of greener energy that is sometimes unavailable, such systems are getting the attention they deserve. And while some suppliers are now using the technology, they readily acknowledge that prices must come down if the tools are to proliferate. Energy storage costs now relative to what it may cost 20 years from now is not a fair metric

Today, storage adds value to power systems because it can create capacity. And that has the potential to allow utilities to defer investment in expensive infrastructure.

According to the Electric Power Research Institute, the total U.S. energy storage market could grow as big as 14 gigawatts of capacity. To get there, the price of such systems installed must fall to about $700-$750 kilowatts per hour. Depending on the required duration of storage, the costs can be three times that amount today. To reach the size and scale that is needed to cut prices, the US Electricity Storage Association is advocating for tax and financial incentives like the investment or production tax credits given to wind and solar