![wind-turbine[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/wind-turbine1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Australian Renewables industry has reacted with fury to a leaked suggestion that a new “wind commissioner” will be appointed, to handle complaints about turbine noise.
According to The Guardian;
The Abbott government’s proposed “wind commissioner” represents a “new low in its relentless anti-renewables campaign”, the wind industry says, suggesting the Coalition might do better to appoint a “coal commissioner”.
Guardian Australia revealed on Thursday the Abbott government has agreed to appoint a “windfarm commissioner” to handle complaints about turbine noise, and a new scientific committee to investigate, again, their alleged impacts on human health, in a deal with anti-wind senators to win amendments to renewable energy legislation.
…
“This is a blatant attempt by the Abbott government to use taxpayer cash to appoint a propaganda agent for the anti-wind brigade,” said Andrew Bray, coordinator of the Australian Wind Alliance.
My personal impression is the wind industry might be frightened of the possibility of close scrutiny. Up until now, in my opinion, they have had a free ride – their status as a “green” industry has to some extent allowed them to shrug off worrying reports of adverse health effects from the infrasonic industrial noise pollution produced by wind turbines, and an embarrassing rain of bird carcasses and bats killed by blade strikes.
It looks like, in Australia at least, that free ride is about to come to an end. If there is nothing to reports of adverse health effects and slaughtered birds and bats, the wind industry surely have nothing to fear from a little scrutiny. But if there is any truth to these accusations, it would be better for the wind industry to come clean, to admit the problems and welcome scrutiny, otherwise they may in the future face accusations of having used tobacco industry style dirty tricks, to conceal significant health and environmental problems associated with wind turbines.
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The tide has truly turned against unreliables.
You are clearly pissing in the wind!!!!
I have a lot of time for Barry Brook who is more convinced about the threat of CO2 induced warming than I am to date, but nevertheless he knows that fickle solar and wind won’t cut it and hence advocates nuclear energy to replace fossil fuel based energy because of the likely insurmountable energy storage problem-
http://www.theenergycollective.com/barrybrook/471651/catch-22-energy-storage
Game set and match for any reasonable intelligence, but unfortunately that’s in short supply with those who would accuse him of heresy with nuclear energy advocacy, in order to solve their perceived problem. They’re still in la la land dreaming of idyllic rural scenes with horse, windmill and millstream while the rest of we serfs are out of the frame, bending our backs with scything and stooking to keep them in the feudal manner to which they are energy accustomed. Exhorting us all to scythe harder so their daily bread will rise better no doubt.
Emotional words, but no evidence behind them. See the following reports if you wish to understand the real status of wind power.
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/2013%20Wind%20Technologies%20Market%20Report_1.pdf
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
More combined cycle gas turbine fast start information
https://www.ge-distributedpower.com/products/power-generation/65-120mw/lms100-pa
(10 minutes, 116 MW)
http://www.power-eng.com/articles/print/volume-117/issue-6/features/gas-turbine-combined-cycle-fast-start-the-physics-behind-the-con.html
(more detail on the physics behind fast start than anyone here could possibly want – including me)
Why shut down the CCGT plant to make room for the more expensive [?????] wind power?
You don’t shut down the CCGT plant (well not permanently, just when the wind is blowing).
On most power contracts the power consumer carries the price risk of fuel price variations. However, there are financial instruments available to hedge against future fuel prices. You do pay a premium for such hedging. The further out you want to hedge the higher the risk and the higher the premium.
So you would expect the fuel and variable costs included in the DOE LCOE document for CCGT gas generation to include the cost of some hedging – otherwise the upside price risk is high and the consumers are taking all this risk themselves.
Clearly wind power prices paid by a utility to the wind farm owners are fixed at the point of contract signature and will then be static for the next 20 or 25 years. The wind farm owners in turn can sign a back-to back contract with the the turbine makers for maintenance which is their major cost since these things operate unattended.
Here is some more information on wind costs
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/08/f18/2013%20Wind%20Technologies%20Market%20Report_1.pdf
Although the title says 2013, the report was published in August 2014 so is the most recent version. The DOE appear to publish annually so you would expect the 2014 report to appear in a couple of months.
The Levelised PPA chart on page 58 shows that the 2013 subsidised contract price of wind power in the US interior is around the 2 US cents/kWh ($20/MWh). These are for PPA contracts signed in 2013, not price projections. Most of the wind farms have been built and are in production, though some were still under construction at the date of the report. By my reckoning you should add 2.3 US cents/kWh for the federal PTC subsidy (production tax credit) subsidy, which places the LCOE price for US interior wind power electricity at well under $50/MWh. Certain interior states may have other subsidies available, of which I know little. You would expect the Lazards V8 documents below to include the effect of local subsidies when calculating wind price. Page 2 of Lazards V8 confirms minimum unsubsidized wind prices below $50/MWh – actually $37/MWh.
http://www.lazard.com/PDF/Levelized%20Cost%20of%20Energy%20-%20Version%208.0.pdf
From this chart, there are no grounds to say that wind power is more expensive than gas CCGT generation. Clearly electricity from new US interior wind is much cheaper than new CCGT plant. New US interior wind is also going to be cheaper than CCGT variable costs which include hedging for natural gas fuel prices. See chart below
http://w3.windfair.net/uploads/notice/preview/16753/awea_33.jpg
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the way this is going, with or without wind power subsidies. And the grey band is just the natural gas fuel costs, not the total LCOE of new CCGT generation.
As to shutting the CCGT plant, this is not what you should do. You get cheaper power overall by installing wind power to match the plant output, taking the zero-fuel wind power when available, then running the CCGT plant when it is not. By 2030 you should be installing solar PV too, by which time the CCGT plant will be running only 30% of the time – maybe less when some wind capacity factors start to approach 60% with the next but one generation of wind turbines.
So keep the same CCGT capacity as before, but watch the utilisation go down from 80-90% to 30% as renewables provide fuel cost savings overall.
How to save the world as an engineer – wind turbine ball bearings and rotors
There has been a continuing problem with ball bearing wear on wind turbines, which often results in failure around the 18 to 20 year mark, whereas the life of most of the wind turbine is expected to be at least 25 years. Replacement of bearings is expensive as you have to dismantle the nacelle (hub).
Before the problem was properly understood it was not priced into the manufacturer maintenance contracts, and the manufacturers lost money on this over a few years.
However, nowadays the problem is well understood and the frequency of bearing failure (and all other types of wind turbine failure) is priced into the maintenance contract prices. From the chart on page 54 of the Lazard’s report, the average total O&M costs are under $10/MWh. From other charts it looks like $5-6 MWh for maintenance contracts on new installations is typical. All these costs are included in the LCOE figures.
Some modern turbines are “direct drive” having eliminated the gear box and all the ball bearings in it.
But there is scope for innovation here which makes a real difference. If someone can improve bearing wear characteristics so that they last for the lifetime of the wind turbine, then that would knock a fraction of a cents off maintenance costs and wind power LCOE.
Another challenge is to make rotors in excess of 100m length – say 120m. This is going to knock a bigger fraction of a cent off the already-low wind power prices.
UK government is providing diesel generators for rapid start-up of back-up for wind farms.
Why do you think the diesel generators are being installed instead of the cheaper and more efficient CCGT plants (available ‘off the shelf’ for construction in 18 months) if the CCGT can start-up adequately fast?
It sounds like this is nothing to do with wind variability, but more to do with re-booting the power network when there has been a complete failure, or maybe a local region has failed and been cut off and cannot be reconnected quickly so it has to be rebooted as a stand-alone network. This needs a stand-alone generator which does not need a grid frequency reference to provide stable 50Hz or 60Hz power.
Network reboot isn’t an area I know much about, but here are some thoughts. If anyone does know more please would they post more information.
Although 30 minutes from a CCGT generator is fast in terms of supplementing variable wind output, in the case of a local or widespread network failure needing a reboot you need to get the network back up immediately, not in 30 minutes.
My understanding of diesel generation costs is that capital costs are very low, but fuel costs are extremely high. However, if you are only using such equipment for network reboot, rather than supplying power over long periods of time, then this is absolutely fine.
I would have thought CCGT and coal-fired stations would need similar local reboot immediate-start generators too.
Climate Pete:
One sided propoganda that misleads is not valid “evidence”. Even you admitted in this thread here that wind power is more costly than electricity from installed power stations.
Anyway, you have not addressed the fact that a grid operator would avoid using intermittent windpower in the absence of mandates that force him to accept it onto the grid.
Give up. Your campaigning on behalf of Big Wind is fooling nobody except perhaps yourself.
Richard
Richard,
However you wish to twist my words, I have presented two set of evidence (Lazards V8 and the Doe 2013 Wind Technologies report) that the cheapest wind power is now cheaper than the fuel and other variable costs of CCGT gas generation.
It really shouldn’t matter what I say, because . You should be looking at the evidence behind it. And this is clear.
The DoE 2013 WT report, which hopefully you have now scanned, says
And this is true even if you take into account the 2.3 cents PTC federal subsidy.
So what evidence are you basing your opinions on? Let’s see it please.
How can the German grid be so reliable despite using huge quantities of variable wind and solar power
richardscourtney said “you have not addressed the fact that a grid operator would avoid using intermittent windpower in the absence of mandates that force him to accept it onto the grid.”
Sure, grid operators want a quiet life, just like the rest of us. That is hardly the point.
To properly manage a grid with high levels of connected wind and solar takes more effort than to manage a grid with just fossil fuel generation. And you need Smart Grid technologies.
That doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done. If that means giving grid operators different targets so be it.
The best experience of high levels of renewables generation is from Germany, which is now at about 34% renewables. UK is currently around 20%, although around 1/3 of that is biomass and biofuels which does not count in my eyes.
German grid reliability is second to none – around 15 minutes per consumer outage per year through 2013. And it certainly hasn’t degraded as penetration of renewables has soared. It has remained the same.
http://energytransition.de/files/2014/08/70gridstabilitygermany.png
Contrast that with US grid reliability.
http://c1cleantechnicacom.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/files/2014/08/Screenshot-2014-08-07-15.47.48-570×428.png
Why should this be?
Most people don’t understand that fossil fuel generation is actually quite unreliable. Turbines and generators are mechanical devices, and if you lose a large generating set in a fossil fuel station the grid could lose 500MW of power in a fraction of a second.
By contrast renewables generation, being lower power density, comes in much smaller chunks. Current maximum wind turbine size are 6MW, though doubtless going up by the day. You can lose two or three of these without even noticing. Solar I don’t know, but large solar farms probably have multiple invertors.
Further, wind and solar are predictable to within a few percent one hour ahead – enough time to switch on fast-start CCGT, as we discussed. And modern wind turbines can be modulated so they are not necessarily all working at full available power at all times, allowing them to be used to provide or absorb changes in other types of generation.
So the loss of one large fossil fuel generator is disastrous, whereas with appropriate attention (more work for grid operators) the short-term predictability of renewables is actually much better, and the mechanical breakdown implicatation inconsequential.
The consequence of this is that you should be able to run a grid with high levels of renewables generation with a smaller level of spinning reserve. Clearly you need to be able to call on fast-start gas generation on an hour-by-hour basis, but this is outside the spinning reserve requirement.
Higher levels of renewables take more grid management, but it is well worth it, because should enable you to deliver cost savings and provide higher levels of reliability. You do need more sophisticated tools, computers and weather forecasts to provide the information required to manage such a grid. The costs of these are peanuts compared with any saving you can make in actual generation or hot standby requirements
So make the grid operators do the extra work necessary to manage a grid with high levels of renewables, but give them the Smart Grid tools they need to do their job. Why should they have a cushy job when the rest of us do not?
Climate Pete:
I do NOT “want to twist {your} words”. Your assertions are wrong so I – and others – refute them. Indeed, your persistent misrepresentations of my words are objectionable and I have already objected to them.
Also, you have NOT answered any of my requests for you to justify any of your outrageously untrue assertions. For example, I here asked you
and
As for your latest nonsense, I refer you to the simple truth stated by Allan MacRae here.
Richard
My extensive reply has been posted but awaits moderation. Why some things need moderation and some don’t I do not understand.
Now available as “Climate Pete June 23, 2015 at 2:39 am.”
Individual post links don’t work, as far as I can see. Only thread links.
Search in this thread for just “June 23, 2015 at 2:39 am”. That works.
Note to windy BS-er Climate Pete:
No Subsidies = No Windfarms. It IS that simple!
“Wind power – its doesn’t just blow, IT SUCKS!”
UK Government Scraps 250 Wind Farms As Subsidies Are Axed
Daily Express, 23 June 2015
http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/586219/Windfarms-cuts-taxpayer-subsidies-axed
by John Ingham
Large swathes of the British countryside are to be spared the blight of windfarms by the axing of taxpayer subsidies, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has revealed. She said about 2,500 proposed turbines in 250 projects are now “unlikely to be built”.
Allan,
You have to look at the political picture here. Onshore wind is often unpopular locally because of the NIMBY effect (Not in My Back Yard).
However, the UK government is not banning onshore wind, merely reducing subsidies. It has also handed over planning consent for wind farms to the local level. My guess is that some onshore wind will still get installed. Let’s wait and see.
There has been no change to the policy for offshore wind, however, which is actually more expensive, but more politically acceptable – no-one lives in the North Sea.
UK has announced its intention of developing Dogger Bank offshore wind area – 7.2GW in total which is more than 10% of UK’s load (and probably more than 5% of total electricity supplied per year). The first phase is the 2.4GW Creyke Beck which has just received planning permission – quite a way to go yet. Most likely the contract price for this will be lower than the 400MW Danish Horns rev 3 project for which the contract price was 10.3 Eurocents / kWh. That’s the total that the wind farm owner gets paid and includes the subsidy element.
Other offshore wind farms are progressing.
So the under-the-covers political decision from the new government is to continue with wind power expansion, but preferring the uncontentious and expensive offshore wind to locally unpopular andcheaper onshore wind. This is fair enough. That is what politicians are paid to do – take the easy option mostly!!!
One consequence of UK’s recent emphasis on large-scale offshore wind is that it is going to advance the offshore technology, which will bring cheaper prices for all, including to later UK installations. Germany did this for solar PV. UK is now doing it for offshore wind – and we are the windiest country in the world, so why not?
So do not assume the change of heart on onshore wind reflects any backing off of the UK commitment to address climate change. It doesn’t. The appointment of Amber Rudd as the minister for the Department of Energy and Climate Change demonstrates that. Cameron could have appointed a climate contrarian. He didn’t.
Hello Pete,
Offshore wind power is twice as costly as onshore wind.
Grid-connected offshore and onshore wind farms are both uneconomic and require life-of-project subsidies.
This is also true of grid-connected solar power.
No energy system makes any sense if it requires life-of-project subsidies.
Wind power is mature technology – it is unlikely to get much less expensive.
Solar power is much more expensive than wind power but there still may be an opportunity for major cost reductions.
The simple test that should be applied to all such technologies is this: If they require life-of-project subsidies, they should not be built.
If these technologies improve to the point where subsides are not necessary, then build them.
Years ago I proposed a “super-battery” that would make intermittent power systems like wind and solar more economic. It requires the widespread adoption of electric cars – perhaps in a decade or three it will work.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/16/wind-power-plug-pulled-in-illinois/
Regards, Allan
richardscourtenay said “If wind power were economic and viable then oil tankers would be sailing ships”
http://www.enercon.de/en-en/2224.htm
http://www.thiiink.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/E-SHIP1-ENERCON.png
The really strange thing is why you guys can’t step back and take the simple view – an energy technology which uses no fuel is highly likely to end up cheaper than one which requires fuel.
This photo was stolen from my album. Watermark Enercon E-ship 1 was superimposed over mine. If some people are able to supply me with continuous use by Enercon or its suppliers please advise me. Enercon and their clients are abusive in very many ways. Do not in any way take their say for cash!
I was to back-up my saying for years an economic development specialist for for offshore industry, shipbuilding, and metallic fabrication industry including hydro-electrical machines. And I follow what is going on in my local province with that wind generator industry a clear and blatant economic looser venture for my government and the real hook-up to the hydroelectric grid cost are in my opinion largely under evaluated I would say several times more than in USA where its is 3 times under-evaluated for the smaller grids.
Climate Pete:
I looked at your nonsense to which you referred me.
It says
10 minutes to start up a combined cycle plant? RIDICULOUS!
It takes days to start-up a combined cycle plant.
10 minutes is how long it takes a plant on spinning stand-by to operate generation.
In spinning standby the plant uses as much fuel as when generating electricity.
And of course “You don’t shut down the CCGT plant (well not permanently, just when the wind is blowing)”. My question was
“Why shut down the CCGT plant to make room for the more costly wind power? ”
Clearly, you don’t have an answer to my question that you are willing to admit.
And you don’t mention my question that was
“Secondly, the UK government is providing diesel generators for rapid start-up of back-up for wind farms.
Why do you think the diesel generators are being installed instead of the cheaper and more efficient CCGT plants (available ‘off the shelf’ for construction in 18 months) if the CCGT can start-up adequately fast?”
Climate Pete, your responses have become so ridiculous that the only reason I can see for you posting them is to waste time.
Richard
Richard,
As far as the fast-start capabilities of CCGT are concerned you are clearly living in the 20th century, when there was no need for CCGT fast start and the extra costs did not justify providing it.
Now the situation is different. With increasing penetration of renewables in a number of power markets, no utility in their right minds would install a CCGT plant which did not incorporate fast start.
The requirement has been understood by the whole industry for some time.
There is nothing in the laws of physics to say you have to spend days heating various bits before generation can start, and nowadays ramp and decline speed of changing generation is a key parameter.
You have two choices. You can completely lgnore the evidence I put forward the capabilities of modern plant (which seems to be your current strategy), or you can research the internet to discover the state of the art for yourself. What I am saying is hardly anything new.
Climate Pete:
OK you have now reached the ulitimate in ignorant idiocy when you write
In reality the really strange thing is that you – or anyone – would post that ignorant nonsense especially after I had already refuted it above in this thread here where I wrote
And one ship used as an advertisement by ‘Big Wind’ does not refute the truth of my statement that said
“If wind power were economic and viable then oil tankers would be sailing ships”.
Richard
Richard,
Repeating the same BS twice does not make it any more true.
Ignoring the historical stuff no longer relevant at the beginning.
RS said :
There is no possibility that an industrialised civilisation can operate if it abandons the sources of high energy density collected by nature and returns to using the energy that humans collect themselves by e.g. using wind turbines and solar panels.
The logical fallacy here is false dichotomy. It is not diffuse production or concentrated consumption. It can be both. Diffuse production and concentrated consumption can be matched by a very simple invention – wires!!! Together with transformers and other grid equipment wires they allow diffuse production to co-exist with concentrated consumption.
RS said
real power stations must operate all the time to ensure there is power when e.g. there is no wind at night and it is unavoidable that wind power and solar power are not needed and are expensive additional costs for power generation.
Work the costs out using 100% CCGT. Then believe the Lazards and the DoE report when the figures say that wind total LCOE is less than the variable costs of CCGT (mostly fuel). Surely you can see installing the same capacity of wind alongside saves money.
A second way of looking at it is this. CCGT has low capital costs and high fuel costs. So to have CCGT operating at only 50% utilisation is cheap. Specifically, if you go with the DoE figures the LCOE of CCGT is $72 / MWh, with capital costs of $16 and fixed O&M of $2. Say offshore wind blows only 50% of the time. Then you need to operate the CCGT 50% of the time. Therefore you need to double the capital and O&M costs for each unit, giving an LCOE of $72 + $16 + $2 = $90 per MWh.
For this 50:50 split, the overall power cost is cheaper provided wind LCOE is no more than $72 – $16 – $2 = $52 / MWh. Since I am saying the best windy areas allow a wind LCOE under $50 / MWh then in those areas wind + CCGT has average LCOE of $70/MWh and is slightly cheaper than CCGT alone which has an average LCOE of $72/MWh.
And the LCOE of onshore wind is still coming down, as hub heights rise and rotors get longer.
Solar is not quite there yet, but may well be within five years. It’s had an 80% panel price reduction in the last 5 years and no-one in their right minds thinks this will stop dead in 2015.
RS said
If wind power were economic and viable then oil tankers would be sailing ships
This is both a red herring and a misrepresentation. It is a red herring because the economics of sea transport has very little to do with the economics of power generation. And it is a misrepresentation because lack of wind power on most ships does not prove wind power would be uneconomic on them.
And you have jumped to conclusions that the one ship I featured was the only one using wind power. Congratulations on being flexible enough to combine three logical fallacies in one statement.
Climate Pete
If you believe the nonsense you promote you are delusional, and if you don’t believe it then your twaddle is malign.
You ignore all reality whenever it is explained to you, and you complain when it is pointed out that you have ignored it!.
The use of fossil fuels has done more to benefit human-kind than anything else since the invention of agriculture. Industrial civilisation happened when – and because – the great energy intensity in fossil fuels became available by use of the steam engine so the diffuse energy supplies of wind and solar power were displaced. Hence, human population and life expectancy increased and living standards were improved beyond previous imagining.
There is no possibility that an industrialised civilisation can operate if it abandons the sources of high energy density collected by nature and returns to using the energy that humans collect themselves by e.g. using wind turbines and solar panels.
You are calling for a return to ways of life that are short and brutal. And if your desires were fulfilled then the immediately resulting deaths would pale into insignificance the combined activities of Pol Pot, Stal1n and H1tler.
I shall ignore any more of the twaddle that you post.
Richard
Richard,
By the main corollary of Godwin’s law you lose the argument – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law. (first mention of Hitler, nazis or the holocaust in a threaded discussion loses, unless that is the subject under discussion).
It is agreed that fossil fuels has done more to benefit human-kind than anything since the invention of agriculture. However, you can have too much of a good thing, which is what we have now with fossil-fuel caused CO2 emissions at unacceptably high levels.
Most of the 350-500,000 or 1.2m deaths from air pollution in China each year (depending on whether you believe the Chinese health minister or the WHO) are caused by coal-fired generation, so if China did nothing over the next century it would single handedly beat the total deaths from all those activities you mention.
And Sheik Yamani, the old Saudi oil minister once said
However, virtually none of the arguments I have put forward above have relied on climate change or air pollution deaths. Mostly they explore what is going to happen when wind and solar MWh prices fall below the fuel prices alone for firstly CCGT generation, then later on for coal generation (though there will be no coal generation left by that time in USA or Europer).
And solar prices dropping through the floor are coming much much faster than you think.
Time to get real, Richard.
How about including some pictures of exploding oil refineries on this site once in a while? C’mon, at least give the impression that you are unbiased.
Or leaking coal ash ponds?
..
http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/local/oqxv4x/picture13140947/ALTERNATES/FREE_960/ash-riverbend.JPG
Joel D. Jackson:
Leaking coal ash ponds cause little contamination of very small areas.
As JB Goode explained in this thread here and emphasised in a post he addressed to you in this thread here, windfarms despoil immense areas.
Coal provides most electricity for the world. Wind and solar provide trivial amounts and never will provide much.
Richard
Max Sargent:
How about including some pictures of agriculture and modern medicine which rely on the use of fossil fuels and without which life would return to being short, hard and brutal.
Richard
Tell that to the inhabitants of El Hierro, who are the first island community to use 100% renewable power (wind + pumped hydro storage into volcanic craters with 700m height difference). They retain their diesel generators but haven’t had to use them at all since the last wind turbine was installed.
Pete – you are such a BS-er that, in the absence of a credible reference, I reject as improbable your comments about El Hierro.
But even if your comments are true, pumped storage requires a unique and rare topography so is not a solution for wind power intermittency in the great majority of real-world cases.
Allan,
Does that mean you are not capable of Googling El Hierro for yourself to see whether it is true or not?
No Pete – it means that he who alleges must prove – that is the standard, but it has not been upheld.
Global warming alarmist have routinely misled the public with falsehoods for which there is NO credible evidence.
The BIG LIE is tat is the warmists’ false claim that climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 is high, when in fact the evidence shows that sensitivity to increased CO2 is low-to-miniscule.
ALL the trillions spent on the alleged global warming crisis has been wasted on a false alarm.
Most of those trillions have been spent on worthless “green energy” schemes that are not green and provide little useful energy.
These truths have been evident for decades.
Until recently, our 2002 APEGA debate was published at
http://www.apega.ca/members/publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
We knew with confidence based on the evidence that global warming alarmism was technically false, extremist and wasteful.
We clearly stated in our 2002 debate:
On global warming:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
On green energy:
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
On real pollution:
“Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.”
On squandering resources:
“Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.”
I suggest that our four above statements are now demonstrably correct, within a high degree of confidence.
The warmists have succeeded in scamming the public and greatly increasing the cost of energy, which has resulted in more winter deaths, especially among the elderly and the poor.
When ignorant politicians fool with energy systems, real people suffer and die.
Cheap, abundant, reliable energy is the mainstay of modern society – it IS that simple.
Regards to all, Allan
European pumped storage potential sufficient for 80% renewables at least
Allan,
Assessment of the European potential for pumped hydropower energy storage
Current European daily electricity consumption – around 9TWh. Energy efficiency reduces that, additional load (EV charging, heat pumps) increases it – assume total consumption unchanged in 2050 because the two effects balance.
Assume 20% nuclear base load generation, 80% renewables generation.
Assume 15% of total load can be shed on demand (for a suitable remuneration) by industrial demand response for up to a couple of weeks e.g. aluminium production is not time critical.
Requirement for generation by energy storage when no wind or solar = 9 TWh x 0.8 x 0.85 = 6 TWh
See table 12 on page 29 of the document. This gives two measures of the realisable pumped storage capacity – either 28 TWh or 79 TWh depending on the criteria used.
So the European pumped storage hydro potential energy storage is capable of providing somewhere between 4.5 and 13 days of storage at reduced load.
The higher figure is enough to avoid having to keep any backup CCGT generation. At the lower figure you would want to keep enough CCGT to generate 4 TWh per day. This needn’t be equipped with CCS (carbon capture and sequestration), because it will only be used once in a blue moon.
Northern USA
There’s plenty of pumped hydro potential in Canada, reachable from the Northern USA.
You’ll have to work out other areas for yourself.
Climate Pete wrote
This ludicrous suggestion is so laughably wrong that of itself it would have been sufficient to discredit anything said by Climate Pete were it not for the fact that this BS-ing troll had already discredited itself in this thread.
Richard
RE Pete’s silly claims about long-distance pumped storage:
If long distances, huge costs and huge line losses were not real obstacles Pete, then your claims might be true.:
And if frogs had wings, they would not have to bump around on their asses.
Allan MacRae said
The BS-ing troll wrote
Any successor to the Kyoto Protocol was killed at Copenhagen in December 2009 so, yes, Kyoto is old news.
And politicians proclaim their intention to not do something when they assert it will be achieved long after they have died of old age.
Richard
If you want to know what the developed countries of the world will do between now and 2030 then look at the UNFCCC INDC web site
http://www4.unfccc.int/submissions/indc/Submission%20Pages/submissions.aspx
China does not count as a developed nation. It’s commitments can be found on the Chinese government web site – http://en.ccchina.gov.cn/
In summary they have committed to peak CO2 emissions by 2030 (which is too late) and to peak coal used by 2020 at no more than 16% more than 2013 levels. However, from the charts it looks as if Chinese coal use has already peaked, and therefore China will probably be peaking CO2 emissions at a lower level than anticipated by 2025. End 1Q 2015 Chinese coal use was already around 7-8% down on 2013 figures :
http://i.unu.edu/media/ourworld.unu.edu-en/article/16027/China-Coal.jpg
Sorry Pete – I’m done with you and your nonsense.
There has been NO global warming for 18 years and counting. There is no global warming crisis.
The trillions spent on ineffective green energy schemes/scams to “fight global warming”, now clearly a false alarm, have been completely wasted.
Industry has relocated to China where even the worst forms of air, water and soil pollution are not controlled.
Those wasted trillions could have been spent on providing clean water and sanitation systems for the third world, and about 50 million kids under the age of five could have been saved from horrible deaths.
Concerning Excess Winter Deaths, our paper is here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/05/24/winters-not-summers-increase-mortality-and-stress-the-economy/
I suggest, Pete, that your information is false and highly misleading – hysterical nonsense.
Allan,
About the only indicators of twenty or so which shows no warming over 15 years are the UAH and RSS satellite data sets. The UAH 5.6 Lowere Tropospheric dataset showed healthy warming, so John Christie changed it so it measured temperatures higher up in the troposphere so surface temperatures have less of an impact on the readings. In this respect it is closer to RSS to which surface temperatures have always had a smaller contribution.
See http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/version-6-0-of-the-uah-temperature-dataset-released-new-lt-trend-0-11-cdecade/. In this Roy Spencer (his sidekick and underling) says :-
It is obviously surface temperatures which determine evaporation rates and thus have the biggest bearing on drought conditions, not temperatures a few hundred metres up into the atmosphere. To that extent the new UAH 6.0 data set has been more or less relegated to a scientific curiosity of the lower atmosphere rather than a mainstream player in the efforts to measure surface temperatures. Like it or not, the surface temperature data sets are now the only game in town – and you know full well what they have been showing over the past 18 years.
One source of data from which is it easy to calculate the net energy imbalance at the top of the ocean is the NOAA ocean heat content chart
It shows an 11 x 10^22 J increase in ocean heat content between the pentadal averages between mid points of 1998 and 2012 (smack on the “pause” period). Dividing by the earth’s surface area an the number of seconds in this period gives a contribution from ocean heat 0-200m to the over all top of the atmosphere net energy imbalance of around +0.5 W / square metre.
To be honest, who cares if the radiative forcing (net energy/power imbalance at the top of the atmosphere) is going partially into warming the surface or not, right now. It is the existence of the imbalance which defines the issue of global warming, and if the proportion of heat going into surface warming suddenly increases due to weather factors like El Ninos, then surface temperatures will soon catch up to where they were expected to be.
Allan MacRae: “I suggest, Pete, that your information is false and highly misleading – hysterical nonsense.”
You certainly got that right.
+100!
First solar CEO does not care about renewal of the 30% ITC – he thinks solar will thrive without it now
http://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/First-Solar-CEO-By-2017-Well-be-Under-1.00-Per-Watt-Fully-Installed?utm_source=Solar&utm_medium=Picture&utm_campaign=GTMDaily
Jim Hughes, CEO of First Solar says the prices bid for all-inclusive utility solar PV now commonly are typically in the range of 5 to 6 US cents/kWh, but that bids of 4 to 5 US cents are starting to creep in. He thinks within 10 years solar pricing will be in the low 3 cent/kWh range. That is lower than the hedged price of natural gas for CCGT generation, according to Lazards V8 report.
The tax credit goes down from 30% to 10% soon but Jim no longer believes the tax credit is needed for solar PV – he believes it is very competitive at 10% tax credit, and the additional tax credit of 20% will only take 18 months of cost reduction to absorb.
He says by 2017 a solar PV utility-scale tracker system installed in the western US will have a fully inclusive price of $1 per watt. That’s panels plus inverters plus everything else. Last time I looked as US rooftop solar the all-in cost was over $3 per watt.
He says a lot of businesses with large sites are interested in installing their own solar especially for things like data centres, because it locks in the power price at a fixed cost, making it more independent of market rates which can fluctuate and cause price uncertainty. Plus for data centres there’s an opportunity to do DC to DC direct feeds, rather than having to go into grid voltage AC, which makes the system more efficient and reduces costs of inverters etc with a 15% cost saving. He says companies are driven purely by the economics, not by climate change concerns.
The key thing is really that he is putting his money where his mouth is and telling congress not to bother fighting over extending 30% tax credits further – solar doesn’t need them any more.
Noise is only the tip of the iceberg and yes they get an extremely very generous free ride. I am positive that there should be serious inquiries in to those contracts. Looking from my angle I have a very strong doubt about “secret dealings” I wouldn’t say illegal but dubious for those orders for wind turbines and heavily subsidized wind farms. The governmental funds, not the public utility’s were unblocked only a few days before dissolving parliament. The ships were from my observation “extremely” fast to deliver the machines. There appears also to be an extensive use of third parties residing in fiscal paradises for a vast list of dealing and services.