First, let me say I’m a fan of solar power when done correctly and without financial carrots hung out for electricity generation that entice abuse of the system. I put solar on my own home.
Bishop Hill points out that some solar power installations in Spain were producing power at night.
He writes of what was thought to be a joke:
…The prices paid for green energy were so high that it appeared to be profitable to generate that energy by shining conventionally fuelled arclights on the solar panels.
But finds truth to be stranger than fiction:
Although the exact details are slightly different there is now an intriguing report of the scam in practice. The text is based on a machine translation of the original German text:
After press reports, it was established during inspections that several solar power plants were generating current and feeding it into the net at night. To simulate a larger installation capacity, the operators connected diesel generators.
“This is just the tip of the iceberg,” said one industry expert to the newspaper “El Mundo”, which brought the scandal to light. If solar systems apparently produce current in the dark, will be noticed sooner or later. However, if electricity generators were connected during daytime, the swindle would hardly be noticed.
As I said last time around, this is the insanity of greenery.
Here is the Google Translation of the article.
You too can generate energy with your solar system at night, all you need is an 850 million candlepower WWII era searchlight, now available for rent.
Hey, it’s not crazy. There are so many fees, taxes, add ons, etc to power bills here in California now it is actually cheaper to generate your own electricity running a diesel generator than it is to buy it from PG&E. Anyone have a used diesel-electric locomotive I can buy?
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The UK is embarking on a massive crop of expensive offshore windmills. Apart from the capital investment, the cost and inefficiency of moving electrical current over or under the sea into the grid is prohibitive.
I’m baffled why they don’t use the power generated to manufacture hydrogen for fuel cells on site. There’s plenty of H2O to crack right there, and plenty of current or soon-to-be redundant platforms to host the process. There are even pipelines laying around which could be adapted (mild steel is eroded by hydrogen) to shift product on-shore. Transient gusts and calm periods would matter less for manufacturing than they do when trying to manage them live on the grid.
Regardless of AGW mysticism we shall need to diversify from carbon fuels. Forget batteries, hydrogen is the obvious fuel replacement for gasoline. Offshore wind farm development can then be grown to meet the developing hydrogen infrastructure.
Just my 2c
I memory serves me right those locomotive engines are 2 cycle diesels. Not real efficient but lots of power. You might think that somebody in the neighborhood would notice the diesel smoke and complain.
Also I was wondering a while back about the compressed air idea except using pipelines instead of abandoned mines. I realize there is a huge energy difference between nat gas and compressed air…but…we store lots of nat gas in pipelines and pull off what ever we need during times of peak demand. Couldn’t you do the same thing with compressed air? Here in MN we are having a huge debate about a new power line program called Capx2020. This is going to be a series of high voltage lines running all the way from North and South Dakota, thru Wisconsin and on to Chicago. What if you used pipelines instead? Could you generate enough air pressure and volume to run a generator hundreds of miles away instead of using high voltage lines. At least pipelines are out of sight for the most part. Not to mention that hot air balloning would be alot safer..
Can anybody here do that math?
Ron Pittenger (19:01:55) :
Is this the column you meant to run on April 1st?
You should laugh, April 1st was when this insanity (FIT) was launched in the UK.
The scheme here gives you 4x the going (grid) rate for your ‘solar’ power. There don’t seem to be any checks and balances in place. Just register your solar array and collect the cash. With incoming at electricity at 12p and outgoing at 41p What could go wrong?
The current ‘opposition’ party, far from rushing to scrap the scheme, has promised to expand it about ten fold! Can’t imagine why though.
More laughably all this comes at a time when our thieving politicians are talking about inevitable cuts in public spending after the election. Presumably 10’s of billions in subsidies (for this scheme alone) isn’t real money and so won’t be exempt.
The UK will likely become the worlds first economy where the entire population is employed and rewarded from a complex web of green scams.
As a sceptic I will probably be sent to a re-education camp and retrained as paperwork falsifier.
I despair, April 1st just isn’t funny any more.
I am currently designing a home for an electrical engineer – and – he has expressly requested No PV panels and No LED lighting.
According to my client – the manufacture, life expectancy and disposal costs of PV panels and required accessories – results in a NET Negative in terms of environmental costs and actual money. (Scamsudies notwithstanding)
They may be fun to play with, but they are not realistic yet.
LED’s are similarly overpriced and unstable per my client.
My client is intrigued with VU1Corp bulbs.
___________________________________________
However, I do see the irony in scamming the system using Diesel, Coal or what the heck, lets build a really big fake solar system and power it up with Nukes.
(Geothermal? – anyone)
rbateman (20:58:26) :
James Sexton (20:29:02) :
A 90 year old man who spent most of his life studying told me that he had the solution: Pump water up hill using solar or other non-fossil fuels in the day, release it during the night to regenerate the power and release it to the grid.
The Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric scheme discharges water during the day to generate electricity and returns some of the water at night using gas fired pumps. Apparently the economics of this arrangement are OK. Power is produced by water at peak times and water is returned off-peak.
At (20:54:53) you mention It is possible (though the outlay would be costly) to recapture wasted street light. The closer you get to the light, the smaller the outlay and higher the capture.
Now if that capture involved capturing wasted light escaping to space, now that would be interesting! A PV hood over the top of each street light ,but the efficiencies here are getting very low.
I once started writing a story which starts: “And the pigs turned to all the animals and said: ‘we have made mistakes, from now on animal farm will be a democracy and you can all vote for whichever pig you like to run the farm'”.
And central to my animal farm was a wind turbine (to replace the old windmill) which the animals work so hard to build and which eventually stands there turning day and night, night and day, through wind rain, snow and calm.
@James Baldwin Sexton (20:29:02)
The UK has a couple of pumped storage schemes which still produce useful amounts of “peak” electricity. Built (at huge cost) to ensure a reasonable degree of reliability in the National (electricity) Grid. Those were the days.
http://www.fhc.co.uk/ffestiniog.htm
http://www.fhc.co.uk/dinorwig.htm
There have been studies looking at using old coal mine workings (of which we have a good supply in the UK) together with a surface reservoir, hydraulic turbines to generate electricity from dropping water into the mine and bird choppers to pump it back out again (when the wind’s blowing).
The potential energy of thousands of cubic meters of water and a hole a thousand meters deep is highly significant!
Biggest problem is stopping the energy NOT captured by the hydraulic turbine from destroying the bottom of the shaft and the old workings.
feed in tariffs in italy will pay around 45 eurocents per kwh, versus an average cost of grid electricity of +/- 16 eurocents kwh.
i have calculated that a household of 2 people will consume around 800 euro of electricity a year, however, if a PV system large enough to produce the full amount of electricity the household uses is installed, the family will RECEIVE 800 euro/year. talk about miracles. it was just a matter of time before people would realize that there is a very good business case for frauds.
Sinking turbines blow ill wind across offshore energy sector
Hundreds of offshore wind turbines could be suffering from a design flaw that makes them sink into the sea.
Energy company engineers are urgently investigating the extent to which their offshore wind farms are affected, after flaws were discovered on a Dutch wind farm last autumn.
The problem could cost £50 million, said Renewables UK,
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/natural_resources/article7096654.ece
James Sexton:
“It’s not like we’ve a giant battery that we can stick in the ground. No such mechanism exists!!!”
Well, there’s the gravel pit concept, where you use “excess” power to run a heat pump to suck heat from one pit of gravel and pump it into another pit of gravel. When you need the stored power, the concept is reversed and the pump becomes a generator working on the difference in temperatures between the pits. Both pits live underground, are heavily insulated, have few moving parts and need no high investment of energy to make them in the first place (unlike solar panels, for example).
Basically, a big battery you can stick in the ground.
Apparently, in some regions the output of solar farms were up to 65% of all energy put into the net during night hours (pretty efficient solar panels there!)
Google translation of the original paper from Spain: http://tinyurl.com/y4rsmtx
From the tone of the comments it appears most here are already convinced of the folly of the alternative energy program. If you have yet to be convinced of that folly I recommend reviewing this table from EIA
http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epm/table1_1.html
It shows net generation by source from 1995 to 2009. The Other Renewables column is most pertinent to this discussion. It includes ” [4] Wood, black liquor, other wood waste, biogenic municipal solid waste, landfill gas, sludge waste, agriculture byproducts, other biomass, geothermal, solar thermal, photovoltaic energy, and wind.” Hydro has its own separate column.
Despite the billions ratholed to inflate this sector, it has managed to grow from 2.2% in 1995 to 3.5% in 2009, a number that was only achieved because total generation declined by 200 million MWhrs from the peak in 2007 presumably due to the big downturn in the economy.
Those who have suggested pumped storage as being of possible value may want to note that the contribution from that sector has been negative for every year of the record.
The growth that did occur in the OR sector has been mostly from wind turbines, but given the way these blights on the landscape have proliferated in the last decade, imagine what the country would look like with 20 times more of them, which would be the minimum necessary to achieve the least ambitious of the politician’s goals i. e. 20% of generation fro renewables by year xxxx. And that is without allowing for a big spike in demand if they succeed in bribing a sufficient number of people into electric cars.
Strange stuff indeed.
These sort of shenanigans were cunningly envisaged up by Lord Turnbull speaking in the UK House or Lords in an older WUWT post.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/10/climategate-reaches-the-british-house-of-lords/
Paragraph 14 or there abouts.
“My electricity costs me 11p per kilowatt hour. If I erected a wind turbine, I could sell the power I produced to the grid for a whopping 23p. I think I would go out and buy a gizmo which linked my inward meter to my outward meter.”
Surprise surprise! The industry games the system when green energy subsidies are too high. In order to protect taxpayers, European governments will need to add a whole new layer of bureaucracy to police wind farms and solar facilities. And each green energy company will need to hire an under-qualified and over-paid Vice President in Charge of Going to Jail.
I agree that this is the tip of the ‘green iceburg’
As an electrical engineer I can suggest that the biggest scam is probably much simpler. You could connect a suitable DC switch-mode rectifier to your mains and pump the DC output directly back into your Grid-Connected inverter. The inverters usually have a few spare input feeds available so it would be a very simple exercise. Down here in Australia we pay around 6 cents per kw/h at night but receive 60 cents per kw/h for power we return to the grid, so this could be very profitable.
To me, the biggest issue with solar is that it provides little CO2 benefit for countries using coal fired power stations. This is because the peak demand period extends to 8pm at night, at which time there is no real solar benefit, and since the coal stations take up to 24 hours to reach full capacity they will still need to burn at full power for the solar shortened peak period. Gas power stations are apparantly better in this regard but the best of all is Nuclear, which can be turned up and down in almost real time to adjust for variation in green energy outputs such as wind or solar.
fyi – I have installed a 3kw system on my roof, but only to reduce my bill as it will do little to reduce the CO2 output of our coal powered energy supply.
So far nobody has come up with a device to harness the “backradiation” illustrated as having a value of 324W/m2 as against a puny 168 W/m2 for solar radiation in IPCC documents.
Enthusiasts for back radiation tell me that there are very high readings at night as well Some sceptics however think that it is all just to good to be true!
George Monbiot about UK solar panel rip-off
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/mar/01/solar-panel-feed-in-tariff
I once had a tutor who was a world expert on solar power, he confided to me that “The only profitable thing to do with solar power is to write books about it”. It seems he may have been wrong.
BTW, when they close or upgrade a telephone exchange, BT often give away well maintained, lightly used diesel generator sets. I don’t understand why they have no second hand value, but they have nowhere to store them for future re-use and its cheaper than paying someone to take them for scrap. I understand that many of the diesels end up driving boats in the developing world.
Can I get a government grant for the searchlight?
The sums don’t add up for using artificial light – the product of the efficiencies for Elec to light to elec is less than the ratio of £/kWh bought to £/kWh sold. Marginal using generators on the UK rate. A direct shunt from one supply line to another could work but I guess this is not that different to bypassing the meter which goes on anyway. Battery storage buying at night selling in the day could work and could be argued as a desirable outcome to provide peak load smoothing and capacity management on the grid. Don’t know how the figures work out on batteries. I’d guess a bit of intelligence in the invertors/meters and the panels should be able to prevent all but the most determined scammers.
Further to the comments of 3×2 at 23.10.40 there is even more to the scam than that.
Those who sign up are paid 41p for electricity that they put back into the grid, or are paid!! 36p for the electricity generated and used by themselves. These prices are indexed linked and guaranteed for twenty five years and they are offered a grant and I believe, very favourable interest rates. The main reason that they have to offer such a high tariff is that solar power from PVs offers such a low return, especially in the UK. They will likewise do absolutely nothing to solve the energy deficit. In mid winter, peak demand is going to occur when these things are producing next to nothing, i.e. when it is dark or typically cold, wet and overcast. What absolute nonsense from our politicians.
I am sickened that the Government can offer these incentives. They are prepared to pay a rate which is about 15 times the generation costs of gas turbine power plants and all because they have failed to take action to bring new capacity on line in time before the EU forces us to shut down ageing and “dirty” plants. These politicians have not got the sense to tell the EU where to get off, or to pay the penalty for retaining old plants, or to quickly build a few more gas plants, which would be needed under their plans anyway to provide back up for the ridiculous numbers of windmills that they intend to install.
I am equally sickened by all these people who are taking advantage of the scheme, such as the typical left wing liberal elitist Guardian reader (The Guardian have already promoted the scheme) and even a rich friend of mine, who are quite prepared to screw those less fortunate than themselves. All this has to be paid for with increased fuel bills, so these people are stealing from the poor and the pensioners already in fuel poverty. With a twenty five year life of the scheme, they are even stealing from people who have not yet even been born.
stevengoddard (19:10:57) :
(…)
For those people who don’t have the luxury of bright sunshine to illuminate their flashlight, they can purchase a mechanical flashlight which recharges by winding or shaking. Then they don’t have to wait for the sun to come out before they can have light.
A good friend of my mother sent her an inexpensive “shaker” flashlight. I looked it over, noticed the plunger was actually a crudely sheared-off steel slug… and the little circuit board wasn’t populated… and a clip on the other side of the board held two coin-sized lithium batteries… Works great! Lights right up whenever she needs it!
================
MattB (21:11:19) :
Using an arc light to power a solar array, and here I thought the discussions of the first law of thermodynamics was heated over the viability of hho generators for cars.
Back in the ancient days of muscle cars and the initial worries about better mileage in the late 1970’s – early 1980’s, they had water injection systems, a fine mist going into the engine intake that allegedly cooled the chamber and generated better performance and mileage by converting heat into expanding water vapor, plus some extra lubrication benefits. Major drawback was piston rings and valve seals are not absolute, high-pressure chamber gases escape and get into the oil thus excess water would accumulate in the oil.
Today’s engines are engineered to run hotter for better emissions and efficiency, anything that results in chamber cooling will irritate those sensitive electronic controls. So the HHO generators simply break down the water beforehand using alternator current, and the water is reformed in the chamber upon combustion. There may be something to it, you may get some better numbers, but you still end up with excess water in the oil and related maintenance problems.
Are ALL our governments trying to bankrupt themselves?
With subsitites in place, there is absolutely no reason to look at new development or even encourage any. Many manufacturers of these junk products, they love this.
The actual efficiency of any one of these devices is less than 2% at peek running due to being designed for BULK harvesting. Not efficient harvesting.
Our oceans carry a massive amount of stored energy through pressure. If you figure out how to break the water holding bond then cheap energy.
Atmospheric pressure, we have silos that can generate a good amount of wind.
Green would be a good concept if figured out properly and not greedily.
I have seen tinted windows on office buildings that the sun NEVER shines on.
Efficient? Ya….right.
Here’s another “Dark Side” story. The truth about Brazils sugarcane ethanol industry:
http://www.dtnprogressivefarmer.com/dtnag/common/link.do?symbolicName=/ag/blogs/template1&blogHandle=ethanol&blogEntryId=8a82c0bc268be2db0127f7c5788f11de&showCommentsOverride=false
The Dirty Underside of Brazil’s Clean Energy Revolution
While Brazilian sugarcane ethanol has a leg-up on corn ethanol in U.S. federal and state-level low-carbon fuel standards, Foreignpolicy.com in Washington, D.C. said the Brazilian industry has its share of environmental and other problems that have gone largely unnoticed.
Most notably, Foreignpolicy.com said sugarcane ethanol produced with crops grown in Brazil’s Atlantic rainforest have led to “deforestation and, paradoxically, more carbon emissions.”
Brazil has lost about 93 percent of the Atlantic rainforest there is just a small remnant of it remaining today.
Foreignpolicy.com said Brazil’s sugarcane ethanol industry the Atlantic rainforest, which is home to tens of thousands of plant and animal species.
“Despite the hellish conditions for the workers, ethanol has been able to sell itself to the public on its ability to reduce carbon emissions,” Foreignpolicy.com said.
Brazilian ethanol raises other greenhouse gas emissions issues.
The industry uses more than 240,000 tons of nitrogen fertilizer a year.
In addition when cane is cut by hand controlled fires are used in fields to smoke out razorsharp leaves, snakes and tarantulas.
The burnings pollute the air with soot release methane and nitrous oxide.
O’Success = O’Failure = Insanity.
O’s AGW-Nuke Deal = n’O Deal x 2.
1. n’O Nuke Deal:
“Both Obama and Harper described the summit as a success despite the fact that it concluded without a formal or binding deal requiring states to secure their nuclear materials.”
http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/Politics/2010/04/13/13567696-qmi.html
…-
2. n’O AGW Deal:
“UN climate chief: new deal ‘out of reach for 2010′
With a little over a year until the Kyoto Protocol expires, the United Nations’ climate chief has warned that a new deal is still a long way off. The first global climate talks since last year’s near-fiasco in Copenhagen were held at the weekend in Germany and afterwards, UN climate negotiator Yvo de Boer bluntly confirmed a new deal was out of reach for this year.”
http://www.radioaustralia.net.au/connectasia/stories/201004/s2871136.htm
http://www.smalldeadanimals.com/mt/mt-comments.cgi