Global Warming Endangers Energy Production in the United States and Europe
The energy supplies for the United States and Europe are at risk, thanks to increasing complications attributed to climate change. In an ironic twist of fate, the rising water temperatures and reduced river flow caused by global warming is lowering the energy output of thermoelectric power plants, such as coal-fired power plants, that require constant supplies of water for cooling purposes. In other words, the problem that some of these power plants help create is now impacting their ability to perform.
Climate Change Causing Blackouts
Extreme drops in power generation, blackouts and full or partial shutdowns of thermoelectric power plants are expected to triple over the next 50 years, according to a report in Nature Climate Change.
Reduced flow in rivers and ever increasing water temperatures decrease the cooling capabilities that nuclear and coal-fired power plants have come to rely on. While this study shines a light on the needs for better water conservation methods, it also points out how significant of a weakness thermal cooling is for our existing power grid.
The co-author of the study, Dennis Lettenmaier, a University of Washington professor of civil and environmental engineering, said “this study suggests that our reliance on thermal cooling is something that we’re going to have to revisit.”
In the summer of 2011, the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama had to go offline on more than one occasion because the Tennessee River water was just too hot to provide any cooling capabilities. The study finds this was not an isolated event, in fact the findings predict that energy efficiency or power production in the U.S. will decrease 4 percent to 16 percent and even higher in Europe due to a reduction in cooling water between 2031 and 2060.
Source: Global Warming is Real (http://s.tt/1e5iY)
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Gosh, all this extrapolated to the US and Europe from just one power plant in Tennessee that had to shut down on a hot summer day when the river had lower than usual levels. WUWT previously covered this breathtaking report of the river water temperature “crisis” and shutdown last week.
With facts like that it MUST be real. I’m reminded of this hilarious cartoon circulating the net via waznmentobe.com
I think a bigger threat to power plant shutdowns is environmental excess by the EPA, note there’s more than one power plant being closed, with a nearly 10% energy capacity drop, but somehow, that’s not a crisis to the geniuses at GlobalWarmingIsReal.com.
When the next big heat wave comes, do you think they’ll blame the EPA, or global warming for the blackouts that will surely come when the grid is stretched to capacity?
Bill Sticker
June 14, 2012 at 6:46 pm
DesertYote says:
June 14, 2012 at 5:55 pm
I’m thinking of doing a study to demonstrate that Climate Change causes brain damage.
Sadly I fear that the brains you wish to study were already damaged.
###
Gosh, I think your right. I just did a phase-space plot of a small sample. It clearly shows that I have got my causality backwards.
Thanks!
Meanwhile in the real world “theres no business like COAL business” http://www.bp.com/sectionbodycopy.do?categoryId=7500&contentId=7068481
Demand for oil over the last year has grown by less than 1%, demand for coal has increased by 5.4% globally and 8.4% in the “developing” world. At least the lights will stay on in China.
Mods, here’s a Snopes link regarding satellite image at top:
http://www.snopes.com/photos/space/blackout.asp
I get it: We’re going to have to shut down those thermoelectric (?) power plants so they won’t cause any global warming that might negatively impact those . . . same . . . thermo . . . electric . . . oh, never mind.
KLF is gonna rock you!
That would mean “Kilowatts Lacking Functionality”.
That call that comes at 3am ,,,,,,,no?
How stupid do they think we are? Droughts occur naturally and river flows vary despite a tiny bit of warming. To claim that the water is just too hot to use for cooling is to ignore evaporative cooling and the very hot nature of the water to be cooled in the power plant. These people actually get paid for these lies?
“because the Tennessee River water was just too hot to provide any cooling capabilities.”
When they built the Limerick nuclear plant outside Philadelphia, they expected to shut down the plant for a week every other summer due to the river being too low. To date, I don’t think they have ever shutdown the plant due to the river being too low, in over 2 decades of operation.
Browns Ferry was running at reduced power last May, but not because of temperatures. It’s because we were hit hard by tornadoes in the valley on April 27th last year.
This is all by design. The Coal Gen. and Nuclear Gen. are to be scaled back in order to cause such black outs. The UN requires we be forced into a state of discomfort, moderate at first, then eventually a major discomfort or even a crisis. Then we will be willing to do what they require us to do so that we can be saved from our selves. Cap and Trade was all part of this, in fact there are several parts, including AGW. It’s a very complext plan requiring decades but it was all supposed to gel about 2 years ago however, some of the gears never fell into place, or in the case of AGW, popped out of place thanks to the efforts of a few key folks. So when you see stuff like this happen and the news stories which come off sounding silly, it’s because not all the gears are in place and working right, theres quite a bit of grinding going on and folks are starting to see that something is fishy. The whole plan is starting to unravel, that is what you are seeing. You will see even more of it to come in the near future. Enjoy.
River water temperature “crisis”: For instance, the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant in Alabama had to shut down more than once last summer because the Tennessee River’s water was too warm to use it for cooling.
River water temperature “crisis”: These plants pump water directly from rivers or lakes to cool the turbines before returning the water to its source, and require high flow volumes.
JK: I see the prof slept through thermodynamics! The main us of cooling water in a power plant is to condense the steam back into water. That occurs at 100C and above. It is laughable that a rise in river temperature from say 5C to 5.8C would make a difference. Same for cooling anything around 100+C steam.
Its more likely that some crackpot enviro rule is the problem, not physics.
Thanks
JK
The GEOSTAT image is a fake.
REPLY: Yes, thanks, it came up in my search for info on the 2003 blackout, caption amended to reflect that – Anthony
The water was too hot? WTF????? What sort of imbecile wrote that sh….t? Oh my…… we’ve bred down so low that we are, truly, in the age of stupid.
Now, I know it isn’t nice to pick on or degrade mentally challenged people. But, this is beyond the pale. It is well past time for the mentally competent people to assert themselves over this …. this inanity. We need to quit mainstreaming them! They have people believing that an IQ of 70 is above average!!! Make it stop!!!!
The alarmists are getting desperate because they know they have been rumbled and that time is running out. The are caught in a trap of their own making. The public is tiring of alarmist claims, nature isn’t playing ball, so they know that to get any legislation passed, they must act quickly. To maintain the little momentum left, they have to make increasingly outrageous claims which, unfortunately, nature refuses to deliver. This makes the public even more weary hence the requirement to go back to the ‘quick, make up a scare story’ stage.
The general public is catching on to this, governments know this and the alarmists know this.
As promised skyrocket has delivered. He delivers monies to continue the perpetration of fraud on U.S. tax payers. Doubling down on AGW while doubling the debt.
EPA is the new Global Warming.
(And that allegation has gotta piss ’em off royally.)
My experience with cooling towers is that most of the heat transfer is due to evaporation, not conduction.
Whoopie says:
June 14, 2012 at 6:34 pm
” Praise be the prophet Gore.”
I think you meant the “Profit Gore”…
http://www.bp.com/liveassets/bp_internet/globalbp/globalbp_uk_english/reports_and_publications/statistical_energy_review_2011/STAGING/local_assets/pdf/statistical_review_of_world_energy_full_report_2012.pdf
A great series of graphs and statistics. The US has 11 years of proven oil reserves left (pg 6), 13 years of proven gas reserves left (pg 20), and 239 years of proven coal reserves.left (pg 30).
It is any wonder why the EPA is fighting so hard to ban coal as an energy source? Without coal as competition, oil and gas prices will skyrocket.
“this study suggests that our reliance on thermal cooling is something that we’re going to have to revisit.”
Clearly, more grants, tax breaks and bank guarantees are needed to successfully develop & market a novel non-thermal cooling solution.
By Matthew Speer
“The energy supplies for the United States and Europe are at risk, thanks to increasing complications attributed to climate change. In an ironic twist of fate……..”
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Is it just me, or is “ironic twist of fate” , just saying the same thing twice ?
It’s a typo – he meant to write …In an ironic twist of faith…the rising water temperatures and reduced river flow caused by global warming is…
There – now it’s fixed.
“From GlobalWarmingIsReal.com, a rather hilarious take on what that 0.8C of temperature increase in the last century is doing. Who knew the global electric grid was so fragile that it couldn’t handle such massive temperature increases? /sarc -Anthony”
This comment is inane and demonstrates such flawed thinking that, if anyone with even common sense read it, they would realize your agenda. how can anyone, let alone a “meteorologist” suggest that a mean global tempertatures rise measured over decades translates into a uniform rise of that magnitude locally and at shorter time scales?
You mislead your readers. And little wonder you had to get someone to do the stats for you in the paper you co-“authored” when you make primary school level mistakes like this.
REPLY: You mean mistakes like missing the /sarc tag? Hey chump (Or is it DeanL or Exp, or another fake name you’ve used here from IP Address 84.72.140.120), if you have something to say to me, at least have the courage to put your real name to it. Otherwise it’s just coward noise. – Anthony
Browns Ferry had to go offline because the river was “too hot”. What sort of temperature does he think a river gets to ? There is plenty of cooling from even a hot river like the Tennessee. You just increase the flow through the condensers. But this leads to the real reason the plant was restricted the environmental consents would restrict both the amount of cooling water taken and probably the max temp of the outlet flow. We are only talking a fairly low temperature here, maybe 24C . probably the river has occasionally allways been like this
A short piece in this morning’s Tribune, titled DWR to reduce reliance on coal:
The California Department of Water resources will stop buying electricity from a coal-burning power plant in Nevada next year as part of a plan to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions.
Electricity from the plant primarily serves DWR’s State Water Project, the nation’s largest water diversion system and the single largest energy consumer in California. Part of a climate action plan released by the department, DWR plans to buy more energy from the California Independent System Operator.
It simply can’t get any more strange. There must be something in city water that dissolves brain cells.
The journal Nature Climate Change.
Is this the least illustrious and most high profile junk science repository in the world?
As I am not a subscriber I cannot tell if any papers worth the ink have been published there. But so much utter tripe gets through their peer review process that I can’t see why any honest researcher would want to be associated with it.
Come to think of it, do they even have a peer review process?