1) the balancing is rather easy technically as there is a lot of hydro in the Nordpool. Denmark selling power at low prices and buying it a higher prices from Norway or Sweden does not negate the benefits of wind, it's just a question of who gets that benefit. Thereality is that wind brings down prices, on average (via the merit order effect), with an overall benefit to consumers (ans a loss to traditional power generators) which is larger than the cost of the feed-in tariff for wind.

So, irrespective of the cost to Danish generators (and you should be happy about coal-plants oweners losing money, right?); it's a positive to Danish consumers and taxpayers.

3) that's an argument not to do anything.

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes

The decisions not to expand wind further in denmark have a hell of a lot to do with the costs of loadbalancing it.

The decision not to continue expanding wind in Denmark has nothing to do with engineering and everything to do with the fact that Fogh and that useful idiot he installed as minister for the environment hated Sven Auken's guts. Therefore, any project that Sven Auken liked was bad simply by virtue of the fact that Sven Auken liked it. Sven Auken liked wind. Therefore, wind was bad.

(Yes, for more than half a decade, Denmark based our policy in a vital strategic sector like energy supply on "not invented here" and personal animosity towards the outgoing administration. Yes, Danish right-wing politicians really are that petty and stupid.)

efficiency is shiny, but it tends to induce jevrons paradox effects

Only under laissez-faire. In a properly managed industrial production economy, there is nothing which prevents you from adjusting product taxes to compensate for lower cost.

And as far as heat and electricity goes, Jevron's effects are minor to negligible, because heat and electricity are infrastructure, not consumer goods.

If mankind is still about in a thousand years, noone is going to be dying from cancer

And by 2010, we'll have nuclear-powered airplanes. Oh, wait...

- Jake

If you only spend 20 minutes of the rest of your life on economics, go spend them here.

Thomas, thanks for letting me know something about you.  Me, pioneer in windpower from the 70's on (that's 1970's), developed first utility-scale wind park in the world, and have been influential in energy policy at both Federal and State policy levels.  One of my teachers is a father of windpower in DK, and former head of RISO Labs.  Once found an entire set of blueprints and binders for an Oregon nuke plant in someone's garbage. and read them.

Are you open to changing your views when confronted with evidence, i am.

1.  Annual costs are the marker for evaluating electricity prices, not short-term spot prices high or low or negative.  Your marginal cost of adding DK wind is not calculated upon spot prices, nor does it include what most other people believe are benefits.  But i'll let the Danes here contest this point.

2.  Point conceded.  Wind IS a catastrophe for the environment, you are correct, especially as you have evaluated the "actual consequences" of the two technologies so well, and so far into the future.

3.  Perhaps you don't trust energy efficiency, but then you wouldn't trust a half century of science, engineering and financial analysis which says otherwise either.

4.  Correct again, gas has to go.  But if it's the cleanest of all the fossils, when should it go?  Tonight?  After we C4 all the coal plants tomorrow morning?  Perhaps you should care, then you might be helpful in enabling a reasonable transition.

5.  Now you wrapped the knot around your neck.  Who's advocating wind in Tokyo, or Christiania for that matter, and how does that relate to your previous statement regarding wind/capita and watts/m2?  Which part controversial?  The parts that make no sense.

6.  Well, they are certainly good activists, if they raised nuclear costs all by their lonesomes.  You should hire those guys to your side, no?  Or perhaps the utility lawyers were drunk, and didn't give it their best shot?

7.  Have i read ExternE?  I was one of the leading players working years to get externalities mentioned, much less accurately accounted, including testimony before the California Public Utilities Commission and Congress.  You could say that ExternE came out of the work I and many others performed to set the stage.  So yes, i've read that and others, as well as those who investigate its shortcomings.

Your future cancer discussion is pretty absurd, so i'll let it stand on it's own.

8.  No one said ground water was used for cooling.  Cooling discussion was about your myopia on what a sea or air ecosystem is, and ground water contamination is a very real and separate issue.

9.  again, thanks for answering, now we know a bit more about you.  But i'm betting you have some better goal in life, and that tech support is not it, it's just a job for now.  What do you want to be doing in ten years?

"Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." - Anaïs Nin

3. efficiency is shiny, but it tends to induce jevrons paradox effects, so I dont trust it as a solution to AGW. Better energy efficiency will make mankind richer, it will only reduce actual energy use if future generations behave in ways no past generation of mankind ever has, and use machines less while they get cheaper to use.

The Jevons paradox goes beyond a normal division of the gains of efficiency between demand and supply to an increase in quantity demanded of the final product exceeding the efficiency gain.

However, where Jevon first observed it, it was in a market for a product where large numbers of low income consumers faced a tight budget constraint, and reduction of the price of coal-fired heat allowed switching to coal burning furnaces from, eg, wood.

Its a common abuse of the Jevon's paradox itself, as well as the far more common cases where Jevon's effect does not apply but the reduction in consumption of the input is less than the efficiency gain, to take it from arguing against sole reliance on efficiency gains - the techno-cornucopian position - to arguing against the benefit of pursuing efficiency gains at all.

We already know that efficiency gains alone are not going to be enough, because as we mine the easiest to reach inefficiencies, the result is a more efficient system with less inefficiency to be mined.

But that is no argument against replacing policies that support and encourage inefficient energy use with policies that support and encourage more efficient use. Its just an argument that efficiency on its own is not sufficient.

I've been accused of being a Marxist, yet while Harpo's my favourite, it's Groucho I'm always quoting. Odd, that.

The decisions not to expand wind further in denmark have a hell of a lot to do with the costs of loadbalancing it.

Demonstrably, utterly false. Why do you keep pushing this fantasy? The policy decisions of the Fogh cabinet (which I listed in a previous comment, and which you didn't deny but switched to criticise the present policy of parties) and their justifications are well known, as are their effects. And it is also well known that the Danish public utilities themselves prepared studies already back then showing that wind with 50% grid penetration can be easily be integrated in the current grid.

Gas has to go.

Yes, and before it, coal. While gas plants are less CO2 intensive and cheaper for load balancing than coal or oil, on the long run we need CO2-free peaker plants/energy storage, whatever will provide baseload. Now: are you advocating inaction on baseload until 100% replacement of peaker plants is possible?...

wind is a less appropriate technology in tokyo than it is in Texas

This is not an argument but flashy rhetoric. Europe is not one single megapolis like Tokyo, and suburban sprawl USA (including large swathes of Texas) is not a wilderness area like you imagine Texas.

_{*Lunatic*, n.
One whose delusions are out of fashion.}