Guest essay by Eric Worrall
Our old friend Tim Flannery, whose advice helped convince the Australian Government to squander billions of dollars on useless desalination plants, claims that renewables are a “huge economic opportunity”.
IT IS being hailed as the next big boom that has the potential to revolutionise our economy.
But unless Australia ramps up its commitment, experts warn it could pass us by.
A week before world leaders are set to meet in Paris to discuss setting agreed targets on reducing carbon emissions, the Climate Council of Australia has released a report which it says shows the world is in the midst of a dramatic energy revolution.
According to the research, clean energy investment grew 43 per cent globally, while the number of renewable energy jobs
nearly doubled to 7.7 million worldwide.
Climate Council chief councillor Tim Flannery said plummeting costs of renewables and the creation of jobs meant there was a strong economic case for scaling renewable energy that wasn’t clear in 2009.
“While in the past tackling climate change has been considered a moral imperative, it is now also a huge economic opportunity as countries make very significant commitments to growing renewable energy at the same time that the costs plummet,” Professor Flannery said.
Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/environment/climate-change/climate-council-report-finds-clean-energy-investment-grew-by-43-per-cent-over-six-years/news-story/2c6cef52c5de1b4527d3d0cf29342ba1
If costs are “plummeting”, why do renewables need such generous government support to prosper? Could it be that renewables are still ridiculously expensive, despite any alleged price drops?
Britain recently “reset” their energy policy, de-prioritising renewables. Many other European countries have forced renewable subsidy cuts, some of which well and truly left investors stranded.
In my opinion, recent history in the renewables sector more than demonstrates that it is pretty risky investing in a business, whose profitability is wholly dependent on the fickle whims of politicians.
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That is it. I can’t recall the movie, but it was a Superman movie, where Richard Prior devises a way to “extract” a half a cent or less, missed by most, from millions of transactions. Making BILLIONS. This is the climate scam.
I suspect that people claiming that renewables are getting cheaper probably haven’t been reaching the price charts of fossil fuels. Oil and gas are trading at the lowest levels for years. So any comment about costs must be seen in terms of the cost of the alternatives. Why Flannery still has any credability is an indictment on Australia’s leftist media.
There was a programme on BBC4 very recently http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06q9c93/power-to-the-people-2-its-not-easy-being-green
and they were, at one point, following the maintenance guys looking after onshore turbines.
They were on turbines about 40M tall, (so about 500kW rated ??) and said it costs annually between £20,000 and £30,000 per year to look after each one.
I get that to be, given a 25% availability and £30K cost, to be nearly 3 pence per kWh generated.
I know from actual experience, ground rent is paid at 1 pence per kWh (a pair of randoms from London arrived one day and volunteered to plant a turbine in one my fields) and then of course, you need to buy the thing and pay back whatever loan you need. Would that 500kW ‘mill have cost one 1mil GBP??
And that’s before they are an engineering disaster – who in their right mind is going to build a machine with an unsupported rotating shaft?
You put bearings at each end of a shaft (and also along its length) if you expect it to have any longevity. And even worse on a windmill, where the force on the shaft as it sticks single-endedly out of the gearbox, varies with each rotation, typically 20 revs per minute. Wind shear means the top of the shaft is in compression and the bottom of the shaft is under tension – and thats before the wind changes direction and yanks the thing sideways. No matter how fat that shaft is, its still just a piece of wire and we all know what happens when you repeatedly bend a length of wire.it gets hot, goes hard and snaps.
They are doomed to fail even before they leave the drawing board.
Then the maintenance guys peered into the gearbox. When it had been parked, it was left sitting on its gears, so the wind buffeting the non-moving blades was hammering the teeth to bits inside the box.
The muddle headed stupidity is thus multiplied, why the F did they put the ‘handbrake’ after the gearbox and not in front of it?
were doomed.
It would be even more interesting to see how they deal with off-shire maintenance.
Anyone involved in shipping knows the rigours placed upon machinery by the harsh environmental conditions in which it is being operated, and the difficulty that can arise in carrying out maintenance.
So for example, an off-shire windfarm may plan to carry out routine maintenance in the 2nd and 3rd week in August. Supply vessels are chartered in (in advance), and when they arrive, the weather is not suitable to permit work on these highly exposed structures, to windy/gusty etc. Operations have to be cancelled and high standby charges paid etc.
Even a modest swell can cause difficulties in operating cranes, which difficulties are not experienced onshore.
And of course, salt air is very abrasive. It will quickly take the edge off the blade profiles and lead to ongoing inefficiency, as well as getting into the machinery.
A lot of fun and games lie ahead for those operating off-shore wind. I suspect that it will quickly prove to be uneconomic to maintain and repair these structures and their cost effective working life expectancy will be far shorter than onshore wind.
Not a problem whilst the subsidies are flowing and can be farmed, but will be as soon as the tap is turnwed off and they have to stand on their own.
. . Off Shire ?? The Hobbits have wind turbines ?????
You see that is where ‘Abdor industries’ ,register in Luxembourg, come in.
Towards the end of their life cycle , with a ton of cost to be faced ,’Abdor industries’ will suddenly be sold all these viable assists for say 1 dollar.
Sadly it turns out that ‘Abdor industries’ is nothing more than a name plate with zero actually worth other than these ‘assist’ now of course not much of an actual assist, however then do come with a very high requirement for investment.
Sadly this means the end of poor ‘Abdor industries’ and its name plate, as they go bankrupt being unable to meet these costs , only the good news no one will lose their actual job.
Then of course there is a need to find ‘someone’ to pay all the costs of taken this things down and recycling them because they cannot be left to rust and form a shipping or environmental hazard . Guess who that someone will be?
Although you may think I am joking , there is simply ‘NOTHING’ to stop this happening in real life once they stop being ,ironically, money spinners .
Generous government support. Environmentalists to sell niche solutions. JournoLists to hide “green” technologies’ environmental disruption throughout its life cycle from recovery to reclamation. Teachers to train children conflate technology and drivers. A “secular” cult to force adoption.
I would have expected more response from the mining and resource engineers out there by now. Check out the supply chains for supposedly sustainable solar. There are a Rare earth minerals that need to be refined to make them. IF solar panels were truly rolled out globally, the price would go through the roof. Plus the toxic waste from manufacturing.
No, but they do require a lot of greenhouse gases with very high global warming potentials.
Wind turbines mostly use rare-earth magnets as field magnets in their generators. Just so as not to be left out of the “Chinese-rare-earth-refining-environmental-disaster” story. Plus the “China holding rare earth users to ransom” story. Both with a big element of truth BTW.
“Wind turbines mostly use rare-earth magnets as field magnets in their generators”
At least one turbine maker says that it is going full electromagnets now, but I don’t know which one of “China holding rare earth users to ransom” story or the “Chinese-rare-earth-refining-environmental-disaster” story was the critical decision factor.
Silicon needs to be really really pure too…
Why would Flim-Flannery not just invest every dollar he has in this guaranteed winner and get rich? Is it because he invested in the ‘simple technology of geothermal electricity generation’ and lost his investment?
“…while the number of renewable energy jobs nearly doubled to 7.7 million worldwide.”
Don’t these idiots understand that “more jobs” to do the same task (provide energy) means less efficiency? If this were the path to bliss, then simply ban washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers etc., then the rich will start hiring servants again the way they did in the 19th century. Millions of jobs! Bliss!
Morons.
I heated with wood instead of oil in my house at the first commercial nuke that I worked at after getting out of the US Navy. It is a lot of work but good exercise. You also need at about 5 acres of hardwood for a sustainable source of firewood. I figure that I could supply about ten houses with wood but I could not afford a nice house. Since the nuke plant could supply a million homes, my share was about 1000 homes.
Whatever the arguments, renewable energy has one big failure no one can deny and that’s because the source the use is unreliable no matter how hard the greens dream.
Nuclear is the only emission free option and the path to our future.
This is really not a failure because the power industry plans for unreliability of different sources. Every source of power makes the system more reliable.
Hydro is subject to droughts. Natural gas pipelines blow up. Coal pipes freeze or catch fire. Floods have a nasty habit of screwing up fossil fuel transportation. Earthquakes that are greater than the design basis of a counties nuke plants can take a whole fleet nuke plants in the case of Japan. Then any year would not be complete without a major fire in the main transformer of large power plants.
I dream of large reserve margins. As long as wind and solar is less that the reserve margin, failure will not happen because of wind or solar. Since greens do not produce power, there dreams of irevalent.
For me there is a lot of irony in the debate. The greens who claimed we should not build nukes in the 70s because they were not needed now insist that wind and solar that is not needed get built.
Capacity is just half of the story: enough dispatchable power is essential but not sufficient, the grid stability depends on having enough machines with inertia and the right behaviour.
Green energy investments are not profitable without large subsidies from tax and electricity rate payers. The trick of course has been to gather enough beneficiaries to successfully pressure the politicians who control the subsidies. In that sense the investments pay off for the initial investors. Utilities and their customers are left stranded.
Kitna for infidels.
I think that the majority of the posters here are uninformed regarding the actual cost of PV panels.
In the US you can buy PV panels between USD $0.40 and $1.00 per watt — for UL Listed 25 year panels.
These prices are WITHOUT SUBSIDY.
For those who argue — cloudy days etc — pvwatts at nrel.gov calculates KWh produced based on multi-decade records of solar insolation at cities all over the US.
Karl
Then there is no need to continue the subsidies. Nor is there a need for first in line or, even more importantly, is there a need for net metering.
There is no need to continue the subsidies. There is Government Interest in developing the solar and Renewable industries in the US — that is all that is necessary.
There is also no need for the subsidies still given to the Nuclear Power Industry, yet they continue.
Net metering is simply free-market, not allowing a producer access to the market is protectionist, and preventing net-metering is illegal in most states.
“There is also no need for the subsidies still given to the Nuclear Power Industry, yet they continue.”
The nuclear power industry isn’t subsidised, but restricted by severe “regulations”.
“and preventing net-metering is illegal in most states.”
source?
Karl, the PVWatts Calculator produces AVERAGE outputs. Clouds (and eclipses) produce variations that can vary by the second. Unless sufficient storage is available to cover the instantaneous variations (which can include oversupply as well as undersupply vs demand), the grid operators need to cover the variations with spinning reserves and or storage. There is no viable storage that exists to cover the amount of output variations that occur with PV arrays (and wind turbines) since hydro storage is severely limited (aside from a very few nordic countries) so either fossil fuel or nuclear generators need to be held as spinning reserve to cover pretty much the whole nameplate capacity of PV arrays (and wind turbines).
And any home PV arrays that are grid connected are basically using the grid as a battery which increases the problem – that “the sun is always shining somewhere” assertion is a total fallacy that renewable supporters can’t seem to accept (just like “the wind is always blowing somewhere” assertion is patently false).
Please learn something about grid stability management – it’s not simple else why is the UK installing masses of remote controllable diesel generators to maintain the stability of their grid in the face of increasing wind turbine generation along with traditional fossil fuel and nuclear capacity reduction (due to political mandates).
It actually uses a daily average based on decades of solar insolation data and then sums up monthly.
The grid is there regardless of Home PV so your spurious argument of using as a battery is disingenuous and MOOT. (even though it’s effective0
There is plenty of viable storage, most are not implemented — compressed air energy storage is one such capability — as are newer Li_Ion batteries (do you think Musk is Investing Billions in Battery Tech just for cars??)
CAES has decades of charge discharge cycles — is super cheap — can provide heat from the adiabatic heat of compression, can absorb heat from thermal solar to increase the pressure of the working fluid and therefore stored energy
And where have I said ONLY USE SOLAR PV?
Distributed Home Solar is ECONOMICALLY VIABLE without subsidy — it becomes ridiculously cheap with current US Federal and State subsidies.
You’ve left out racking, inverters, charge controllers, cabling, fuses, conduit, ground rods, ground connectors, disconnects, automatic transfer switches, monitoring, lightning arrest devices, labour (if you don’t do it yourself), inspection, permitting, engineering, increased insurance costs. And, if you add batteries: batteries, large gauge cabling, shunts, ventilation, hydrometers… Let’s see what did I leave out. Want to try that math again?
Bill Webb (replying to Karl)
Hmmmn. Well, in today’s over-educated, under-capable, those who used to be able to “do something” with their hands are increasingly older and less physically capable; and those who (used to be) physically capable of maintaining and monitoring and servicing their homes are ever-less capable, less knowledgeable, and less willing to even change the oil in their cars and the lightbulbs in their ceiling fans and flashlights. So, in a society when people cannot fill their near-flat tires and change their sparkplugs, how many houses and apartments and building will burn down, scald and burn and hurt people with under-maintained, very-high-powered home solar power plants? How many thousands more will be killed trying to “save the planet” while en-riching the political donors of the democrat party and their minions?
Every car “fuel-savings” measure that reduces body weight, reduces redundancy and safety margins. As car fatality rates increase as strength goes down, who publicizes the extra deaths?
“compressed air energy storage is one such capability”
At what cost? Volume use? What losses?
Indeed RACookPE1978, another point Karl does not seem to understand, is, that, any subsidy has a “dead weight welfare loss” of actually contracting the overall economy. Wish I could draw a diagramatic representation of that here. That being said I support the development of economically viable renewable technologies.
Here in NC we are one month from losing the very generous State Personal Tax Credit of 35% for residential installation. That will basically end residential. Which in concession to Karl is economically viable at times, but, usually only if you do it yourself and have someone sign off on it for you.
But, commercial solar farm state tax credits will continue. Please note Duke Power is placing many of it’s commercial plants in areas in or around Dominion Power’s territory. Dominion has a footprint in VA — as in Washington DC. Overlay the links below. Methinks they display a very telling “power play” here, and, has nothing to do with green energy. Gov. McCory, a very good guy, was after all counsel for Duke Power before they took over the onerous Renewable Portfolio Standards the Democrats imposed off no scientific or economic analysis. The Democrats used their idealist emotion based promises to get elected. Some parties on the Republican side ( only some) are now using those same laws they opposed to economically conquer opponents. Both sides got rich off reducing the economy and fleecing tax payers over the global warming scare.
https://www.duke-energy.com/pdfs/RenewablesSolarPowerProjectsMap.pdf
http://outagemap.dom.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/external/default.html
Green energy here has been a boondoggle economically for the state creating a few thousand jobs in exchange for a tax loss of 124 million — all the while making a few people very rich and powerful — a very few.
Wind is variable, unpredictable (large uncertainty even just one day ahead) with possible erratic variations, as sailors know.
The cinetic energy of a volume of air is grows with the square of the speed, the volume of air intercepted by a given circle is proportional to the speed, so the energy content of the volume intercepted grows with the cube of the speed. So for a given uncertainty over wind speed, the uncertainty of wind energy varies much more at moderate wind speed (when the wind turbine might be useful) than as low wind speed.
At high wind speed the turbine is potentially dangerous and must be stopped. This means that the transition between high speed and too high creates a drop of output from max to zero. These sudden drops can be destabilizing if they occur for too many sources at once (this was never an issue when wind accounted to a trivial part of the power, but will become more and more an issue).
Wind turbine power output isn’t the same as energy content of air passing through over time, as there is a flat zone where the
The variability of wind is the dirty “secret” of the industry. It’s a kind of conspiracy to hide that, in official French documents of RTE, the company responsible for electric transport (owned mostly by EDF, owned mostly by the State). The kind of conspiracy where you pretend rain is dry and snow is hot, and repeat it very often.
The wind industry has one “get away” card: to pretend the variability of different wind farms “cancel out”. This is an even bigger lie: the variation usually go in the same direction and add up to large variations over a region, a country or Europe:
http://www.euanmearns.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/europe_wind_jan13.png
http://euanmearns.com/correlated-wind-and-incoherent-energy-policy/
The correlation between countries 1000 km apart still exists. Correlation between the north and south of Europe is lower but not neglectable.