How much fuel is being saved by use of wind farms?
The Maui News, www.mauinews.com 30 April 2012
The wind farms on Maui (The Maui News, April 26) may be a blessing to the people supplying and assembling them, but they are probably a curse to those of us paying for them.
I am still waiting for the answer to a question I posed to Maui Electric Co. last year: How much, if any, fuel oil is saved by the use of these wind farms?
Since diesel generators cannot be shut down and started up quickly, they are run at two-thirds to three-fourths of full speed whether they are needed or not. And since the wind does not blow all the time, I wanted to know how much oil we were saving and at what cost.
In spite of considerable help from Rep. George Fontaine and Doug McLeod of the Mayor’s Office, all I got was a number in a report without any explanation of how it was derived. One would think that if any significant amount of oil was being saved MECO would be more forthcoming with the answer to what I think is the most important question of all.
Didn’t the politicians who mandated this multimillion-dollar project bother to ask?
Mal Johnson
Kihei
URL to article: https://www.wind-watch.org/news/2012/04/30/how-much-fuel-is-being-saved-by-use-of-wind-farms/