Oh, this is precious. In Madison, Wisconsin, demonstrators gathered outside the Public Service Commission to protest against a requested rate structure change by the local utility company, Madison Gas and Electric (MG&E). During the protest, they decried the use of “dirty coal” and called for more renewable energy. To make their point, they had a blow-up coal power plant that was running on a fan powered by wind and solar charged batteries. Before the protest was over, however, the batteries died and their solar panel could not produce enough energy to keep the power plant standing upright.
h/t to Paul Westhaver
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A hairdryer is 1,200-1,500 Watts, this was only 1,000 Watts.
I did a quick back the of napkin calculation to see what equipment they would need to keep this running on solar using the same equipment they have.
The panel was 135W rated output; the fan was 1000W, so you would need 8 panels in full sunlight to keep it running. Of course if a cloud comes by or over cast day the power goes down a lot. If you assume 30% of name plate capacity typical output of the panel you will need 25 panels. But this is only to keep it running during the day time. But maybe you have a full 24 hour occupy Madison going protest going on and want to run it for 24 hours. Well then you need 32 car batteries (two lasted 45 Minutes) to get you through the 12 hour night plus an addition 25 panels to charge the batteries during the day.
So a total of 50 solar panels like the one shown and 32 batteries plus the space to set them up. This is best case by scenario the way, I think you need to double the numbers to make it work in real life.
No, you would not be using that much power unless you were stupid enough to not turn the heat off on the hairdryer…
True, your correct, but my point was 1,000 watts is just not very much power in a household. Probably 25-35 watts just for the hairdryer fan.
I liked the comment why not just have balloon that is more sealed and just keeps the air in, then it only needs to be topped up once in awhile. Then there silly solar panel would work.
I also want to point out the number of panels and batteries need just to supply a contentious 1,000 watts. I lot more than most greens think.
I saw this video, and thought it was hilarious. Further demonstration of the futility of mere solar or wind power as a baseload solution to the energy problem. It will ONLY be useful as a supplemental load under certain circumstances. But these guys from my old stomping grounds, the People’s Republic of Madison, Wisconsin, are nothing but fools (Madison, Wisconsin, is a place where most of the fools in Wisconsin congregate, like a sewer drain congregates sludge).
Maybe a nice Antarctic expedition would suit them.
The clown that set up the bouncy castle still doesn’t understand despite setting up a very public demonstration of the impracticality of renewable energy.
Fox News program “The Five” ran this story as well with some commentary.
http://insider.foxnews.com/2014/10/16/awkward-protesters-fail-inflate-coal-plant-balloon-renewable-energy
Mods may consider adding this video below the Maciver Institute video.
Another interesting tidbit is MG&E had converted their coal plant in Madison to natural gas.
Actually this is sad… It only shows how uneducated people are about these subjects and how lacking our general education system is. And the worst, on this Europe with its normally common sense approach is no better.
The education system is lacking by design. The uneducated are easier to manipulate.
Let’s actually build a national solar powered coal plant. It would be the perfect expression of bureaucratic government insanity in action.
I can’t think of a more perfect pork project simultaneously displaying incompetence and hypocrisy. I mean the solar offsetting the coal as rationalization would be wonderful.
The sad thing about Anthony Watts is his inconsistency.
Here he takes an easy shot at protesters instead of examining real issues – how to maintain the grid as it gets more renewable load, and how some groups are promoting punitive rate increases on those who use less energy.
Yet he uses solar and promotes solar, so he’s one of the very group he’s taking a cheap shot at.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/about2/
“While I have a skeptical view of certain climate issues, I consider myself “green” in many ways, and I promote the idea of energy savings and alternate energy generation. Unlike many who just talk about it, I’ve put a 10KW solar array on my home, a second one on my new home this past summer of 2012.
Plus I championed a 125 KW solar array on one of our local schools when I was a local school board trustee.
…
I encourage others to do the same when it comes to efficient use of energy and energy conservation. ”
I understand an easy jibe at the protesters lack of power backup was irresistible, but what’s your thought if your utility comes after “greens” like you? What is your take on how to pay for improvements to the grid to accommodate the growing use of renewable sources?
Don’t try to put the onus on me.
How’s that for a start ?
The reliability of the grid will be significantly improved and the cost of energy lowered if expensive, unreliable and constantly fluctuating power sources are refused access to the power grid. Being forced to subsidize these expensive, unreliable and constantly fluctuating power sources and then having to pay even higher end user energy costs because of all the problems they cause is an act of government forced collective insanity.
Restoring scientific sanity to the EPA regulations will significantly improve the reliability of the grid and lower the cost of energy. Forcing low cost, reliable power plants to cease operation based on politically driven faux science ‘findings’ that CO2 is pollution is another act of government forced collective insanity. CO2 is not pollution. It is the Staff Of Life to all flora on the planet Earth. Every breath you inhale has 400ppm CO2. Every breath you exhale has 20,000ppm CO2 and that is similar for all mammals on the planet. CO2 is not pollution. It is as natural and ‘clean’ as the air you breath in and out.
Labeling expensive, materials mining intensive, high manufacturing and maintenance cost, low energy density, unreliable, bird chopping and frying wind and solar energy as ‘renewable’ is the height of Orwellian cliche. Equally inverted and idiotic is labeling hydroelectric power ‘nonrenewable’, as they do in the state of Washington where I live. The cleanest, most reliable and sustainable power on the planet is labeled ‘nonrenewable’ to make destruction of hydroelectric dams more politically acceptable.
We should not accommodate unreliable energy sources that destabilize the electric grid and drive end user energy costs up.
We should not accommodate the false labeling of CO2 as pollution by the EPA ….or anyone else.
We should not accommodate the deceitful labeling of unsustainable and highly unreliable energy sources as ‘renewable energy’.
We should not accommodate the false labeling of highly reliable, low cost hydroelectric energy sources as ‘nonrenewable energy’.
We should not accommodate those who espouse these false arguments.
What you really want to know is when I stopped beating my wife, isn’t it ?
Bit of info about the installation relating to your “concern”
“The trick is to generate exactly enough power to result in a net-zero energy use, because PG&E does not pay you back for any excess power generated.”
Hi, “an engineer” (I don’t include “Just” there, because I respect all the math that goes into it.)
I didn’t read the details of the Milwaukee rate change, but I was wishing out loud that Mr. Watts – as a person with his own renewable generation capacity – would have taken at least a moment for thoughtful comment after the initial “This is funny”. (and it was funny).
Preventing any sale of someone’s excess power is as foolish as forcing the operators to foot the entire bill for updating the grid to allow two-way energy flow. Watts shouldn’t have to generate “exactly enough power”, but at the same time, people with excess capacity shouldn’t expect top dollar for it all the time. PG&E should have net metering so they could buy his power when needed and thus cut down on use of fossil for peak demand cycles.
My point is that the grid is going renewable anyway, and if you look at sources like http://www.fortnightly.com/article-categories/td-grid you see that the grid operators know it.
IEEE also has a lot to read at http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/
We’re at a really big transition point and have to figure out how to share the costs and benefits. Within a very few decades, renewables plus storage will be cheaper than fossil in the US. Any remote place depending on diesel should already be getting rid of it, and gas peaker plants are very expensive to run.
But at the same time, we’ve got to figure out how to make it financially worthwhile for the existing base load generators – including coal and nuclear – to keep their plants open until such time when we have storage and demand management integrated into the grid at a scale where we can start retiring the fossil plants, and shutting down the oldest nukes.
Coal was Mother Nature’s way of storing solar energy over millions of years, to be used by the first civilization with the necessary science and technology level to realize its energy potential. She stored so much of it that, even after +100 years of increasing use, the USA still has another 200 years of coal available to meet the power demands of the nation!
Unfortunately, Mother Nature nearly starved the plant life on ice ball Earth in the process, by tying up all of that carbon and reducing atmospheric CO2 to less than 250ppm.
These are the fundamentals the Madison solar erectile dysfunction twits can’t seem to grasp.
Good ol’ plastic. I imagine it would be difficult to make inflatable coal plants with leather.
Zeke,
How may inflated goat bladders and cow stomachs do you think a ‘good’ all natural, inflatable ‘coal plant’ would take? Maybe they should have found a ‘green’ bag piper to help keep it inflated? };>)
Hey, this could be the beginning of a great civilization for them! Chuckle.
Let’s see, your input energy is 130 watts, but the drain is 1,000 watts. One does not need a PhD in math to see how this will play out. The fact that they couldn’t figure this out shows how little they know and understand about energy.
Bob, they just needed 9 more panels. 😉
They could have just replicated the full scale system and put a STOR diesel generator on there as well.
The irony runs deeper. Try reading the “basic principles” in MG&E’s rate case.
http://www.mge.com/about-mge/who-we-are/rate-case.htm
They talk about future “system reliability” being critical; that “securing and sustaining the “grid”” will become more complex. This whilst trying to switch to renewables from local sources.
As readers will know, wind and solar are incompatible will reliable supplies of electricity. Given the choice between serving its customers and going local and green, MG&E has shifted towards the former. The protesters have provided a very practical demonstration to MG&E and its customers of why the new rate plan is a step the right direction.
Instead of protesting why don’t they donate money time and resources to trying to invent a solution which can compete in the marketplace? Protesting is easy, solving a problem (even one which is not a real problem, just a perceived problem like CO2) is hard.
The new all electric car Formula-1 style competition is a great example of actually trying to do something positive rather than just protesting and whinging.
The deflated display collapsed into an ugly hockey stick form. It’s a fitting end. They were better at knocking over tombstones of vets in Madison during the anti-Iraq war protests.