Guest post by the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Consider the Oldbury wind turbine, which WattsUpWithThat.com reveals was installed a couple of years ago at a primary school in the Midlands at a cost of £5000 sterling plus Vicious Additional Taxation at 17.5% (US $9694 in all).
In the first full year of the Oldbury White Elephant’s 20-year life it generated a gratifying 209 kilowatt-hours of electricity – enough to power a single 100-Watt reading-lamp for less than three months. The rest of the year you’ll have to find something else to do in bed.
Gross revenue for the year, at 11p (18 cents) a kilowatt-hour, was, um, almost £23 ($40). Assuming that there are no costs of finance, insurance or maintenance, and after subtracting 20 years’ revenue at last year’s rate, the net unamortized capital cost is £5,415.20 ($8,900).
Even this figure understates the true cost. The UK has hidden much of the cost of its climate measures behind a calculatedly complex web of levies, taxes, charges, and subsidies, and – above all – behind a furtive near-doubling of the true cost of electricity to pay vast subsidies (“yacht money”, as we landowners call it) to anyone connected with windmills. The website of the King Canute Department amusingly calls this obscurantist mish-mash “transparency”.
How much “global warming” will Jumbo the Albino forestall? While it is in operation, it will generate 209,000/365/24 or almost 24 Watt-hours per hour on average: just about enough to drive an electric toothbrush.
Mean UK electricity consumption, according to the Ministry of Transparency, is 43.2 GW. Electricity contributes one-third of UK carbon emissions, and the UK contributes 1.5% of world emissions. So the proportion p of global carbon dioxide emissions that the Worthless Windmill will forestall is 24 / 43,200,000,000 / 3 x 0.015, or 2.76 x 10–12, or, as Admiral Hill-Norton used to call it, “two-thirds of three-fifths of b*gger all”. Skip the next few paragraphs if mathematics makes your head hurt.
Today’s CO2 concentration is 390 parts per million by volume (less than 0.04%, though most people think it’s more like 20-30%). Instead of the 438 ppmv CO2 concentration that the IPCC predicts for 2030 on its A2 scenario, thanks to the Wonder Whirligig it will be 438 – p(438 – 390), or seven-eighths of a Hill-Norton below 438 ppmv.
IPeCaC, the UN’s climate panel says 8 Watts (no relation) per square meter of radiative forcing from CO2 and other bad things (p. 803 of its 2007 climate assessment) will cause 3.4 Celsius of “global warming” (p. 13, table SPM.3) from 2000-2100 (progress from 2000-2010: 0.0 Celsius).
That gives the “centennial-scale transient climate-sensitivity parameter”, which is 3.4/8 or 0.425 C/W/m2. Multiply this by 5.35, the coefficient in the CO2 forcing equation, to give the “centennial-scale transient global-warming coefficient” n = 2.274 C°. We don’t need to worry about warming beyond 2100 because, according to Solomon et al. (2009) it will take 1000-3000 years to come through, far too slow to cause unavoidable harm.
Multiply the logarithm of any proportionate change in CO2 concentration by the global-warming coefficient n and you get a central estimate of the warming that will occur (or be prevented) between now and 2100.
The Sandwell Sparrow-Slicer will only run for 20 years, not 100, so our value for n is going to be too big, overstating the warming the thing will actually forestall. But it’s Be-Nice-To-Bedwetters Week, so we’ll use the centennial-scale value for n anyway.
Let’s do it: 2.274 ln[438/(smidgen x tad <438)] is – well, put it this way, even my 12-digit-readout scientific calculator couldn’t do it, so I turned to Microsoft Excess. According to Bill Gates, the warming the Birmingham Bat-Batterer will forestall over the next 20 years will be rather less than 0.0000000000007 Celsius.
As the shopping channels say, “But wait! There’s more!!!” Well, there could hardly be less. How much would it cost, I wondered, to forestall 1 Celsius degree of warming, if all measures to make “global warming” go away were as hilariously cost-ineffective as this silly windmill?
You get the “mitigation cost-effectiveness” by dividing the total warming forestalled by the total lifetime cost of the project. And the answer? Well, it’s a very affordable £8 quadrillion ($13 quadrillion) per Celsius degree of warming forestalled. Remember, this is an underestimate, because our method tends to overstate the warming forestalled.
And that’s before we politicians ask any questions about whether IPeCaC’s estimates of climate sensitivity are wanton, flagrant exaggerations [cries of “No!” “Shame!” “Resign!” “I beg to move that the Noble Lord be no longer heard!” “What did I do with my expenses claim form?”].
Suppose it was just as cost-ineffective to make “global warming” from other causes go away as it is to make “global warming” from CO2 go away. In that event, assuming – as the World Bank does – that global annual GDP is £36.5 trillion ($60 trillion), what percentage of this century’s global output of all that we make and do and sell would be gobbled up in climate mitigation? The answer is an entirely reasonable 736%, or, to put it another way, 736 years’-worth of worldwide income.
This is an inhumanly large sum. So how much would each of the seven billion people on the planet have to cough up over the next century to forestall the 3.4 C global warming that IPeCaC hopes will happen by 2100? It will cost each of us more than £3.8 million ($6.3 milllion), and that’s probably a large underestimate. I’m going to have to sell the Lear ad go commercial. No – wait – what did I do with that glossy brochure about how many tens of millions I could make from the 30 250ft windmills I could put on the South Beat? Ah, here it is, under my expenses claim form.
“The Noble Lord,” the Canutists might say, “is deliberately taking a small, absurd and untypical example. Shame! Resign! Expenses!” etc. So here are the equivalent figures for the £60m ($100 million) annual 20-year subsidy to the world’s largest wind-farm, the Thanet Wind Array off the Kent Coast – that’s £1.2 billion ($2 billion) for just one wind-farm. KaChing! I think I’ll have another Lear. And a yacht, and a Lambo, and a bimbo.
The “global warming” that the Thanet wind-farm will forestall in its 20-year lifetime is 0.000002 Celsius, or two millionths of a degree, or 1/25,000 of the minimum global temperature change that modern methods can detect. The mitigation cost-effectiveness, per Celsius degree of warming forestalled, is £578 trillion ($954 trillion), or almost 6000 times the entire 296 years’-worth of UK peacetime and wartime national debt as it stood when Margaret Thatcher took office. That’s more than 1.7 million years’ British national debt, just to prevent 1 degree of warming.
Making IPeCaC’s predicted 3.4 C° of 21st-century warming go away, if all measures were as cost-ineffective as Thanet, would take more than half of the world’s gross domestic product this century, at a cost of more than £280,000 ($463,000) from every man, woman and child on the planet.
“The Noble Lord is still cherry-picking. Resign! Moat! Duck-island!” etc. So look at it this way. All of Scotland’s wind farms, which can in theory generate 10% of Britain’s electricity (actual output in that cold December when we needed them most: 0.0%), will forestall just 0.00002 degrees of warming in their 20-year lifetime – about the same as all of China’s windmills.
So there you have it. After the biggest and most expensive propaganda campaign in human history, leading to the biggest tax increase in human history, trying to stop “global warming” that isn’t happening anyway and won’t happen at anything like the predicted rate is the least cost-effective use of taxpayers’ money in human history, bar none – and that’s saying something.
The thing about gesture politics is that the politicians (that’s us) get to make the gestures and the proles (that’ll be you) get to get the bill. I think I’ll have another moat. Torquil, don’t you dare put that expenses claim form on the fire. Think of the carbon footprint!
HenryP says:
May 1, 2011 at 9:28 am
I am also pretty sure that we have not yet seen the end of Fukushima. Apparently they have the same problem as Chernobyl.
Encapsulation isn’t the best long term answer. Concrete isn’t a terribly good thermal conductor and will crack over time. At Fukushima the primary containment vessels are for the most part still intact. The reactor and containment vessels will in all likelihood continue to be cooled by water until such time as the fuel can be safely moved to dry cask storage. A water filtration plant will be set up where the cesium will be filtered out and then vitrified.
At the moment at Fukushima they are pumping minimum flow rate in order to minimize water storage…once they have the filtration plant in place they will increase the flow rate and go into ‘cold shutdown’ on units #1 and #3. Unit #2 has some leaks that need to be repaired.
My stoopid question of the day: If we compare land-based windfarms with woodlots that take up the same acreage, which of the two land-use options would produce the most usable energy per year in the long haul? Given climate and soil conditions that are suitable for silviculture, is there any place on the planet where sustainable forestry would not trump windfarms?
I’m asking this, because Sweden, with its relatively small population and large forests, is looking to the latter as an energy-security resource, and is encouraging the use of pellet stoves for home heating.
From Mike Borgelt on April 30, 2011 at 11:10 pm:
Actually I researched different fusion methods months ago, which included Polywell. By the public releases of the research, the work had hit the stage where “All these problems will go away in a full size machine! And it’ll only take about $200 million to build it!” That was in 2007.
Dr. Bussard took in a long stream of Defense-related funding, which went down to dribbles, then went dry in 2006. The publishing embargo ended, Bussard went public to solicit funding, formed the EMC2 Fusion Development Corporation as a non-profit to gather funds, touting how great Polywell was, how close to success, and it was publicly noted how stupid the government was to stop funding it!
By August 2007 they had Defense money again. October, Bussard died. Dr. Richard Nebel and Dr. Jaeyoung Park went on leave from Los Alamos National Laboratory in 2007 to lead the team that would continue Bussard’s work. Between late 2008 and early 2009, Nebel was saying some promising things, that there could be a commercial plant as early as 2020. By the latest Recovery Act info, 1st Quarter 2011, Nebel is no longer listed as a company officer.
In April 2009, the Department of Defense published a plan to get EMC2 $2 million of Recovery Act money, suggesting it was for domestic energy. September 2009, they got $7.8 million, contracted from the Naval Air Warfare Center Weapons Division, China Lake, California. The lab was moved to San Diego. Information about the ongoing research is at the minimum required, and that little bit is only due to Recovery Act funds being used.
When the Defense money ran out in 2006 and the research went public, they were ready to try a full size plant. After the Defense money resumed and Bussard died, the Defense cloak of secrecy descended once more, Polywell became a concept that still had to be proven, with a possible commercial plant by 2020, then came silence.
Wake up and smell the napalm. Polywell was a Defense Department baby. They tried cutting it, were basically shamed into funding it again. Current funding comes from the Naval Air Warfare Center. The specs call for proton-Boron 11 (PB11), an aneutronic fusion reaction with low shielding requirements (thus less weight). Whatever the DoD is planning on doing with Polywell, commercial power doesn’t seem to be on the list.
There are also doubts about Bussard, when it comes to obtaining funding. He spent decades promoting Tokamaks, first with the Department of Energy (Atomic Energy Commission) then later founded a private company researching a variant called a Riggatron. After that failed he moved on to the Polywell. Then in 1995 he announced in a letter to key members of Congress his support of Tokamaks was basically a sham, done for political reasons to maintain interest in fusion. This includes the admission of while he was at the AEC the budgets were inflated so they could skim off 20% for other work.
Oh, he also asked for appropriate Congressional help “…so that we can achieve clean, safe and economical fusion power sometime in the next 5-10 years.” That was in 1995.
I have very little confidence that Polywell will provide the economical nigh-limitless commercial power you dream of, ever. And that comes from just following the funding trail, before including the challenging technical and engineering aspects which had soured me on the concept when I studied it before.
about the DC high tension lines.
it seems to me that Westinghouse and General Electric fought out the battle over ac vs dc transmission wayyyyyy back when ~1900.
as a result the united states is pretty much universaly 60 cycle ac at this time.
the hype merchants have been beating the drum for DC transmission since the 50’s but don’t seem to be making much headway. probably has to do with the universal connections in the present system and an “oddball” not being able to connect to other sources/recievers in emergency or business change situations without additional equipment.
might be one of those deals like aluminum house wiring. ok except for the connections. they corrode and tend to set the adjacent stuff on fire. that system got decidedly unpopular after burning a few houses down and is now banned in many cities. of course thats one of those “dumb little details” that the academics gloss over when advocating to the masses.
C
And then, a few days later, there is this BBC news story about the stunning sums of money paid to owners of wind installations in Scotland to turn them off!! Just a few days of ‘not running’ is way more profitable than actually bothering to generate a voltage.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-13253876
Admittedly, this article is from an advocacy point of view, but a lot of their stuff IS verifiable.
AWEA figures show that the average wind PPAs are now being priced at about 6 cents per kilowatt-hour, the same price for energy procurements from a combined cycle natural gas plant. The group says wind is actually about 2 cents cheaper than coal-fired electricity, and more projects were financed through debt arrangements than tax equity structures last year, a possible sign that wind deals are winning more mainstream acceptance from Wall Street’s banks….
[AWEA chief economist Elizabeth] Salerno credits the breakthrough in cost to improved turbine design and performance, higher towers and longer blades, which have boosted the reliability and performance of wind power generation. Equipment makers can also deliver products in the same year that they are ordered instead of waiting up to three years as was the case in previous cycles, she said, calling it a sign of a mature supply chain.
http://cleantechnica.com/2011/05/01/cost-of-wind-power-kicks-coals-butt-better-than-natural-gas-could-power-your-ev-for-0-70gallon/
Kum Dollinson:
Wind power is expensive and unreliable. This is because the world is the way it is and the Laws of physics are what they are. No amount of sales promotion can change that.
If windpower were sensible then oil tankers would be sailing ships.
And sailing ships use direct windpower with no mechanical losses from gear boxes, electricity generation, etc.
The energy intensity in fossil fuels is so much higher than is available in normal winds that windpower will never be able to compete; not now, not ever. And that is why windpower was abandoned when the greater energy intensity in fossil fuels becamer available bu use of the steam engine.
Face reality and cope with it.
Richard
Great! That should mean there’s no longer a need for renewable mandates and special tax subsidies!
Let the good times roll!!!
Richard, fossil fuels are getting more expensive, and Wind isn’t.
Reality . . .
Live with . . .
Etc .. . . .
Kum Dollison says:
“Richard, fossil fuels are getting more expensive, and Wind isn’t.”
Great! Then we can eliminate the subsidies for windmills. Heck, let’s eliminate all energy subsidies, and let the cards fall where they may.
Are you game?
’tain’t up to me, Smokey. I don’t even get a “vote.”
come on, nobody likes coal but who’s gonna believe an article that says “cost of wind power kicks coal’s butt…” they living in fantasyland….
kbray response to:
HenryP says: May 1, 2011 at 9:16 am
HenryP says: May 1, 2011 at 9:28 am
To Henry Pool in South Africa,
I never said, “there is nothing wrong with nuclear energy”. Yes, there can be great danger with nuclear and as we all know both events you mention were/are very disruptive and tragic. Slowly most of the damage will be cleaned up and isolated. We learn as we go and will rebuild even better.
However, like you, I also think that CO2 is actually “good for the planet” and the plants. Using fossil fuels is perfectly fine by me.
But countering our free use of fossil fuels is a “draconian mind set” wandering the worldwide halls of legislation that consider CO2 as a poison to our planet, flora, fauna, and future climate, supported by idiot “researchers”… ie: “CO2 must be eliminated”.
To appease the above mentioned clowns, a modern nuclear power plant design with multiple fail-safe enhancements could work out well and be magnitudes safer than a Chernobyl or Fukushima obsolete design. Windmills will just not do the job.
Again, nuclear is not my first choice, fossil fuels are, as you also propose.
To help influence the situation, I see that as a minister, you are in a powerful position to pray for a major mindset change and a return to sanity by our “leaders”. We could all benefit by a major worldwide pray for that. I’m on your side. kbray.
Kum Dollison said on May 1, 2011 at 6:52 pm:
Vote with your wallet.
BTW, China pays price for world’s rare earths addiction.
Enjoy your wind turbines with are getting more efficient using rare earth magnets, and high voltage DC transmission lines using pricey semiconductors.
Kum Dollinson:
Your response to me displays a complete ignorance of “energy intensity”.
Wind power is several times more expensive than fossil fuel power and it always will be. So what if wind power is getting “cheaper” and fossil fuels are getting more expensive? Windpower is – and always will be – much, much more expensive than energy from fossil fuels.
Please explain why you think oil tankers are not sailing ships.
Richard
“The SB700 is available in the UK for around £800 offering up to 700 Watts of power. Much larger applications could be served with an SB3000 or SB6000 inverter for powers of up to 3000 (£1500) and 6000 Watts (£2500) respectively.”
Were the above Grid Tie Inverters or Battery Banks included in the costings? They often seem to be “omitted”!
Steamboat Jack says:
May 1, 2011 at 8:23 am
The good Lord Monckton’s discourse is in keeping with British politics. It is typical of the exchanges in the House of Parliament.
My favorite example was an exchange between William Gladstone and Benjamin Disraeli. I believe (and would welcome correction if wrong) that it took place during a debate in a regular session of the House of Parliament:
Upon being told by William Gladstone: “I predict, Sir, that you will die either by hanging or of some vile disease” Benjamin Disraeli replied: “That all depends, sir, upon whether I embrace your principles or your mistress.” As the other members would have said: “Hear! Hear!”
Ah! My favourite. I’ve always considered that to be the greatest putdown ever! Good to see it again. I always forget who said it, but after looking it up ten times over the years, the name John Wilkes left a faint imprint in my memory. FYI, Googling for
loathsome disease principles mistress Wilkes
serves up the goods: It was John Wilkes and John Montague.
If 20% of America’s electric generation were replaced by wind power as proposed by Al Gore, the reduction in oil imports would be 0.292% and reduction in CO2 emissions would be 0.00948%.
Wind power has an EROEI of 0.292 and is unsustainable.
Game, set, match.
Not according to the Wall St. Journal. Wind Power makes electricity cheaper in Texas.
But, you know what a Liberal, left-leaning rag that is. 🙂
It is not difficult to turn garden waste or any vegetative matter into the equivalent of sweet crude oil. There have been two pilot plants put into production, the cost about 1990 was about $15 to $20 per barrel. The only matter to be dealt with is arranging to obtain the feed stock for the vegetative matter.
CO2 is the trace gas that all green plants use, along with water, to construct themselves. Putting the green plants that are the basic source of all the food we and animals eat on shorter rations is about the stupidest concept I have ever seen proposed. Back circa 1945, a bumper crop of corn (maize) on a farm I lived on in NW Iowa was 90 bushels per acre. In recent years, crop yields of 145 bushels per acre are rather common, due to the mild increase of CO2 since 1945. Some trees have been measured for growth, and those trees measured are growing about 40% faster now as opposed to 1950 . . . due to the same minor increase of atmospheric (for above water green plants) and increase of CO2 dissolved in water (for underwater green plants).
“Go Green” policies would (except that we humans produce so little CO2) in fact be counterproductive for green biomass growth. Any reduction in concentrations of CO2 would mean less green plant growth, and less in the way of food production on farms.
The equation for photosynthesis is 6CO2 + 6H2O + Energy(sunlight) = C6H12O6 + 6O2. The basic source 0f both the food we eat and the oxygen we breath is carbon dioxide. More would be better, and all that much less would be a disaster for life on this planet.
Not wind, Kum, biofuels. There we go.
===========
From that Wall Street article, “wind power works best when it’s not much needed.” From the Texas ERCOT report for the year- wind power capacity factor is about 8%. Basically, put up 100 wind turbines and get the use of about 8 of them when you really need it. I believe the gist of the article is that wind may lower the price of natural gas. Question, how much did it cost in wind infrastructure to lower the cost of natural gas?
Actually, we’ll fill that gap with Solar (which is, also, getting much, much cheaper.)
Dan says:
April 30, 2011 at 8:10 pm
This is a real world example of a windgenerator working and saving money (a lot of money) http://www.antarctica.gov.au/living-and-working/stations/mawson/mawson-electrical-energy
Not every windmill can rely on the katabatic winds generated by an adjacent 14 million square-kilometer, 3,000 meter high chunk of very cold ice.
kadaka (KD Knoebel) says:
May 1, 2011 at 8:06 pm
…
Enjoy your wind turbines with are getting more efficient using rare earth magnets, and high voltage DC transmission lines using pricey semiconductors.
ENERCON news ENERCON WECs produce clean energy without neodymium
29.04. 2011
ENERCON wind energy converters (WECs) generate electricity in an environmentally friendly way without the use of the controversial element, neodymium. The gearless WEC design on which all WEC types – from the E-33/330 kW to the E-126/7.5 MW – are based includes a separately excited annular generator. The magnetic fields required by the generator to produce electricity are created electrically. By design, and unlike the majority of competing products, ENERCON WECs do without permanent magnets whose production requires neodymium.
Neodymium has made the headlines recently because its extraction partly involves significant environmental damage. China, where neodymium-containing rocks are quarried in mines, is the main supplier of this so-called rare earth element. According to investigations by Germany’s NDR TV station, separation of neodymium from mined rocks results in toxic waste products (Menschen und Schlagzeilen and Panorama television magazines aired on 27 and 28 April). In addition, radioactive uranium and thorium are released by the mining process. These substances find their way into the ground water, heavily contaminating plant and animal life. They are seen as harmful to humans. According to the reports, part of the locals at the neodymium production sites in Baotou in northern China are already seriously ill.
ENERCON feels that these environmental and health aspects support its choice of WEC design. “We are a high-tech company that sets great store by environmental protection,” says ENERCON Managing Director Hans-Dieter Kettwig. “Our choice to rely on separately excited generators was the right one, not only from a technological but also from an environmental point of view.” According to Kettwig, renewable energies need to be viewed in their entirety in order to offer a convincing alternative. Producing clean energy is one thing; however, sustainability in production is just as important.
Wind turbine life cycle:
All the stuff anyone could ask for:
http://www.vestas.com/en/about-vestas/sustainability/wind-turbines-and-the-environment/life-cycle-assessment-(lca).aspx