Joe Romm of Think Progress reports
A New Wind Turbine Generates Back The Energy It Takes To Build It In Just 6 Months, based on a study just published by The European Photovoltaic Industry Association which says, “(d)epending on the type of PV system and the location of the installation, the EPBT at present is between 0.5 and 1.4 years.”
After doing a comprehensive study of the full life-cycle of 2 megawatt wind turbines researchers at Oregon State found their energy payback time comparable to solar photovoltaic systems which have fallen from 40 year to half a year to a year and half from 1970 to 2010.
A new study finds that wind turbines have an energy payback of 6 months, which is comparable to the best solar photovoltaic systems. In other words, in their first six months of operation, large wind turbines produce the same total amount of energy that was needed to produce and install them. ...
The myth that wind and solar power are bad investments from an energy-payback perspective has been around for years. It even turned up in the error-riddled 2009 book “Superfreakonomics,” repeated by Nathan Myhrvold, former CTO of Microsoft.
It’s difficult to compare this to the energy payback time for fossil fuel plants, because not only do they require a great deal of energy to construct and fuel, they also cause climate change and mooch off of millions of years and heat and pressure provided by the earth.
Of course, decades ago, when manufacturers had not yet applied mass-production techniques to those then-nascent technologies, the energy payback time (EPBT) of renewables was considerably worse. That’s clear from this chart in “PE Magazine,” the lead publication of the National Society of Professional Engineers.
In general, the more sunlight at a solar installation the faster the energy payback. In the future, we can expect a continued improvement in energy payback. Year after year, renewable energy becomes a better and better investment.
Karl R. Haapala, and Preedanood Prempreeda published Comparative life cycle assessment of 2.0 MW wind turbines, in The Journal International Journal of Sustainable Manufacturing, (subcription required.)
Abstract
Wind turbines produce energy with virtually no emissions, however, there are environmental impacts associated with their manufacture, installation, and end of life. The work presented examines life cycle environmental impacts of two 2.0 MW wind turbines. Manufacturing, transport, installation, maintenance, and end of life have been considered for both models and are compared using the ReCiPe 2008 impact assessment method. In addition, energy payback analysis was conducted based on the cumulative energy demand and the energy produced by the wind turbines over 20 years. Life cycle assessment revealed that environmental impacts are concentrated in the manufacturing stage, which accounts for 78% of impacts. The energy payback period for the two turbine models are found to be 5.2 and 6.4 months, respectively.
It's great to finally lay to rest this spurious myth that on still occasionally runs into in that solar and wind power take more energy to make than they can produce.
We've had to put up with these kinds of attacks at the start of both the solar and wind industries because the first time you produce the very first unit of any new product, if you count all the research overhead, the cost of the entire buildings, all the labor that went into getting that far, the per unit costs of that very first unit are astronomical. When you make your second unit, you can then divide by two so the per unit costs of all the over head and upfront costs falls by half.
As one then finally gets an assembly line, improvements accumulate quickly, dramatically and predictably. Unless of course, one is a hostile critic of these new industries. Then you can find some early piece of data based on a prototype, to suggest these technologies would never work, or would be so expensive as to never be economic for any purpose.
As competitors industry and the industry matures, this same effect which includes all sorts of additional learning and economies of scale and scope an industry develops what is called a "learning curve" - relationship where for every doubling of the world-wide installed base the total unit manufacturing cost tends to drop by a standard percentage.
In the solar photovoltaic industry this is called Swanson's Law, and is 20%. This relationship has held up for 20 years. The Chinese have used it to buy their way down the learning curve as part of their national strategy to capture and dominate the global solar photovoltaic industry and "force solar to become a less expensive to produce electricity than coal.
I have two articles I intend to review soon that seem to predict the Chinese will succeed at this goal by 2016 to 2017 in China, and probably here as well, shortly thereafter, depending on tariffs, even without considering any RPS, or tax incentives.
This is one reason so many can predict so optimistically so much good news in the solar and wind industries' units costs coming down dramatically at the same the cost of coal is increasing as many of its terrible "external costs" such as pollution and global warming, that have thus far been kept out of the market price, are now being forced into the market price by regulation. Once this happens, it is not an economic way to produce electricity and will be replaced.
11:07 PM PT: 
