I was just going through BR Research write-up with title: "The Wind Power quagmire" (The Referenced Write-up) published in Daily Business Recorder, dated December 31st, 2019. It's good to see that Renewable Energy is catching the eye of writers and analyst in our country, however I thought it appropriate to clarify some points so as to differentiate between myth and fact about wind energy as a source and technology.
First, we need to understand the difference between installed capacity and the rated output of energy in a given period of time. Its ratio is defined as 'Capacity Factor (CF)' that varies from resource to resource and is subject to also the advancement of technology. For example, couple of years ago, the average CF of wind was staggering between 29 to 31 but now with new plants it is touching close to 38 and 39% and who knows if we see its higher values in near future. This must be kept in mind that the CF near 100% means that the unit is operating almost all the time at a rate close to its maximum possible output. This in fact is an ideal situation otherwise every plant has limited availability throughout the year, hence CF on most of the account is always less than 100% in the case of all power generation technologies.
Pragmatically, this is inappropriate to criticize the resource on the basis of CF otherwise there will be almost no justification to develop expensive hydropower projects with traditional CF of 55-60% (less than the fossil fuel based power generation) due to seasonal variations of water flow in contrast with nuclear and coal with higher CF. Thus, Wind Power does not deserve to be criticized on the basis of CF which otherwise has other positive characteristics as a catalyst in building indigenized energy economy and ensuring sustainable development.
In particular context of wind power tariff, it is true that the initial determination was at 14.5 cents (levelized), but this reference is obsolete in respect of future deployment of wind power in Pakistan; especially in the face of currently reduced tariff. While the lately determined tariff of wind projects by NEPRA stands about 4.5 cents (Levelized), which evidently appears as the cheapest tariff if compared with any conventional power generation resource in today's date. As the matter of fact, the wind power prices are mostly stable and predictable in the global market and the future course of competitive bidding in Pakistan is expected to further bring down the prices if not retained at the present stage. As far as the PKR-US$ parity of 160.5 is concerned, the wind power cannot be blamed for this as the parity will be equally applied in all other cases of IPPs. In the same wake, the T&D losses and the recovery hiccups at the end of DISCOs as mentioned in the write-up bears no relevance at all with any technological drawback or pricing limitation of wind power.
This is often quoted that wind power due to its resource variability is not fit for base load requirements. However, this is only true if you have only wind power as the only renewable resource at any specific location of the country. In contrast, Pakistan is gifted with diverse Renewable Energy (RE) resources e.g., solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower at different locations with varying resource availability; hence there is very possibility to create a sizeable RE based base load in Pakistan. The traditional concept of base-load is only suitable in an archaic setting of power management. Had there been any substance in the lopsided concept of base load that we often quote, how come its possible for the countries like Denmark which depends more on RE than other resources. Also in Germany, some of the states have created RE based base load and reduced their reliance on typical base load technologies. In particular context of RE based resource availability and intensity, this needs to be acknowledged that Pakistan is much ahead of these countries.
Renewable Energy development is actually a full scale paradigm shift which should be viewed through the kaleidoscope of Energy Security, sustainability, Pricing Predictability, economic sense, physical and economic quantifications of externalities, scope for technological advancement, ecological benefits, substitution of costly imports, gestation period advantage, global trends and the best applied paraphernalia of system integration. What we do here is to compare a patch of renewable energy deployed against a system inertia of fossil fuel based energy economy prevalent in the country, which is the actual quagmire.
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