Green Lunacy #1: £450 Million Lost Over Failed Green Power That Is Worse Than Coal
Ben Webster
Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidising power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found.
Green subsidies for wood pellets were championed by Chris Huhne when he was energy and climate change secretary. Mr Huhne, 62, was jailed in 2013 for perverting the course of justice/ LEON NEAL/ AFP/ GETTY IMAGES
Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report. It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral.
Green subsidies for wood pellets and other biomass were championed by Chris Huhne when he was Liberal Democrat energy and climate change secretary in the coalition government. Mr Huhne, 62, who was jailed in 2013 for perverting the course of justice, is now European chairman of Zilkha Biomass, a US supplier of wood pellets.
The report was written by Duncan Brack, a former special adviser to Mr Huhne, for Chatham House, the respected international affairs think tank. Britain is by far the biggest importer of wood pellets for heat and power in the EU, shipping in 7.5 million tonnes last year, mostly from the US and Canada.
Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets. The report says that the government’s assessment of the impact on the climate of switching from coal to wood pellets is flawed because it ignores emissions from burning pellets in power stations. The assessment counts only emissions from harvesting, processing and transporting wood pellets.
Wood pellets are claimed to be carbon-neutral partly because the forests from which they come are replanted. New trees would eventually absorb as much carbon as was emitted when mature trees were harvested and burnt. However, the report says that this process could take centuries — too late to contribute to preventing climate change over coming decades.
Mr Brack said: “It is ridiculous for the same kind of subsidies that go to genuine zero-carbon technologies, like solar and wind, to go to biomass use that might be increasing carbon emissions. It’s not a good use of money.
“For any biomass facility that is burning wood for energy, unless they are only burning stuff like saw-mill residues or post-consumer waste, their activities will be increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere for decades or centuries. We shouldn’t be subsidising that.”
Green Lunacy 2: Household Solar Storage Increases Co2 Emissions, Study Concludes
Energy & Technology, 31 January 2017
Tereza Pultarova,
Contrary to popular belief, household storage for solar power doesn’t reduce cost or CO2 emissions, an American study suggests.
As charging and discharging a home battery itself consumes energy, feeding surplus solar power into the storage device instead of into the grid results in higher overall electricity consumption for the household, as well as higher emissions because the increased consumption needs to be covered by fossil fuel-based energy. This increase is quite substantial – up to 591KWh annually.
“I expected that storage would lead to an increase in energy consumption,” said Robert Fares from the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, “but I was surprised that the increase could be so significant – about an eight to 14 per cent increase on average over the year.”
Fares, together with Professor Michael Webber, analysed the impact of home energy storage using electricity data from almost 100 Texas households that are part of a smart grid test bed managed by Austin-based renewable energy and smart technology company Pecan Street Inc.
The results are relevant for Texas, where the majority of grid electricity comes from fossil fuels. As a result, the increased consumption due to storage technology leads to higher carbon, sulphur and nitrogen dioxide emissions.
The situation, however, is different for utility companies, which could reduce their peak grid demand by up to 32 per cent thanks to solar energy storage and cut down the magnitude of solar power injections to the grid by up to 42 per cent.
“These findings challenge the myth that storage is inherently clean, but that, in turn, offers useful insights for utility companies,” Webber said.
“If we use the storage as the means to foster the adoption of significantly more renewables that offset the dirtiest sources, then storage – done the right way and installed at large-scale – can have beneficial impacts on the grid’s emissions overall.”
The study was published in the journal Nature Energy.
3) Green Lunacy 3: Protected Forests In Europe Felled To Meet EU Renewable Targets
Adam Neslen
Europe’s bioenergy plants are burning trees felled from protected conservation areas rather than using forest waste, new report shows
Protected forests are being indiscriminately felled across Europe to meet the EU’s renewable energy targets, according to an investigation by the conservation group Birdlife.
Up to 65% of Europe’s renewable output currently comes from bioenergy, involving fuels such as wood pellets and chips, rather than wind and solar power.
Bioenergy fuel is supposed to be harvested from residue such as forest waste but, under current legislation, European bioenergy plants do not have to produce evidence that their wood products have been sustainably sourced.
Birdlife found logging taking place in conservation zones such as Poloniny national park in eastern Slovakia and in Italian riverside forests around Emilia-Romagna, where it said it had been falsely presented as flood-risk mitigation.
h/t to THE GWPF
If only someone had told Chris Huhne this at the time he made his decision. Oh wait….
Yes. I wonder if Huhne knew/planned to be a Director of a wood chip company when he became CC Minister, or after he came out of prison. Whatever, it sucks. I wish we had a law that prevented ex-politicians taking up high-paid posts with companies they were close to in their Ministry. Oh yes. We do, don’t we?
The fact that Chris Huhne is chairman of a biopellet outfit is the clearest possible evidence that the whole thing is a scam.
But at least London got it right on diesel. Oh, wait. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/17/world/europe/london-smog-air-pollution.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-3&action=click&contentCollection=Europe®ion=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article&_r=0
O/T
Antarctic sea ice minimum looks like its about to happen over the next few days.
In the satellite recorded era, it appears to be the lowest area yet.
There has been a noticable change in wind this season being the main driver.
Thanks, any idea of the variation
If only there was a town in northern England that was famous for its supply of coal…
There’s a power station in Northern England famous for being built on a bed of coal. It’s called Drax.
The solution for Great Britain is to grow forests offshore, on giant barges located in the Forth of Firth and the Thames estuary. This will be a nice complement to offshore wind farms. My analysis shows a thermal plant burning trees harvested from offshore farms will deliver electricity at a net £32 per megawatt, if we include the economic benefit derived from bargeyards and hundreds of workers turned into offshore lumberjacks.
Oh, I’m a lumberjack and I’m okay, to keep the lights on I have to work all day!
The solution for Great Britain is going to come on line sooner than Greenies expect, i.e., natural gas. Old plants can be converted from coal and probably wood pellets. Fracking is about to begin. It will make Britain energy independent with the stupid ones there fighting tooth and nail.
What a great concept! You could tow the barges down to the tropics to take advantage of the higher temperatures and better sunlight, at least in the winter. Or better yet, have a huge fleet of barges constantly cycling from the Thames to the Caribbean and back, riding the Gulf Stream, driven by large sails, with the harvest occurring as the barge nears Merry England. Giant reverse osmosis water plants would be needed to convert sea water into fresh. Crews could be impressed from low-income neighborhoods throughout the Kingdom. Properly accounted for, my analysis shows this would reduce the cost to £29 per megawatt. And as Nancy Pelosi reminded us only too often, every dollar spent by the government on welfare benefits returns two dollars in economic growth. This just gets better and better!
#2 is not necessarily correct. Today, I have produced 29 KWH from my solar system to the infrastructure. That infrastructure includes the loads on that part of my house this is grid tied. No grid power has been purchased for charging my battery bank since the system has been turned on. Because of this, I do not necessarily see how my solar system has increased the output of CO2. Personally, I am of the solar effects school of climate, so I do not think it matters, but still. I am sure you can screw anything up, especially if you are the government, Drax is a vivid example.
With some major exceptions, people generally get the energy prices they deserve (before subsidy).
https://www.electricchoice.com/electricity-prices-by-state/
https://www.ovoenergy.com/guides/energy-guides/average-electricity-prices-kwh.html
Note Germany is an outlier among OECD countries.
blast from the past:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Conversion_Devices
All this wasted time, money and brainpower. For a fraction we could have retrofitted all the coal plants with scrubbers that didn’t have and done a pile of research into burning coal cleanly in an oxyfuel type plant.
There is a lot of coal in a lot of countries so count on it getting used. No amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth by the enviro/political groups are going to stop it so let’s do it as clean as possible.
Ran into a guy selling biomass boilers to schools in Vermont. Pleasent chat until I kept asking more details about emmisions and cost savings. From my experience he was only prepared to sell to believers and his cost savings only worked with generous tax subsidies.
many of the estates owned by the great and the good in the uk are having biomass plants installed at the taxpayers expense as we speak. i assume the owners are well informed of how long the subsidies last considering their connections.
Madness madness
Meanwhile China keeps building coal plants to generate electricity to refine aluminum to dump on the world market.
Because the English speaking world must pay for the British East India Company and the opium problem it caused…then two opium wars..stunting China for over two centuries and making it easy pickings for fascist Japan.
…and imports more coal from NK than the toothless UN allows.
It is interesting to note that Rentech, a supplier of wood pelets to Drax Energy, is taking a big hit in the market. There are also investigations into the company. “Goldberg Law PC Announces an Investigation of Rentech, Inc. and Advises Investors with Losses to Contact the Firm”. http://finance.yahoo.com/news/shareholder-alert-goldberg-law-pc-162600160.html
Rentech started as a Coal-to-Liquids firm developing Fischer-Tropsch technology. When the NGO’s came out strongly against coal, even with CCS, Rentech morphed into Biomass-to-Liquids. They were given a million hectares of land in Ontario, Canada if only they would harvest it. Free feedstock for the taking. But they couldn’t make that project work. But they hired a wood pellet advocate who became president of the company. They built wood pellet plants but had to recently shut them down for a number of reasons. So much for another Green Energy company. http://www.rentechinc.com/
A case of we had to destroy the environment in order to save the environment
… strikes again.
Easy to spend other peoples money.
I’m trying really hard to not get my dander up.
After all it is only Thursday.
Griff writes,
“The Texas report is just nonsense… a solar powered house with storage is drawing less from the grid”
I am not anti-solar, I anti-stupid.
Say I am required by a mandate to make electricity with solar PV. I am an engineer so it is not my job to question the political motivation but I establish some criteria for doing the work just like I would in nuclear power.
Safety comes first. I especially do not want to hurt children. PV have caused house fires. Batteries produce hydrogen and explode. Then I must think of the workers. Going up on ladders is one of the most frequent cause of occupational deaths.
Of course my goal is to make electricity. So I look at industry experience. A utility scale PV in Tucson has a capacity factor (CF) of 19% compared to the theoretical 20%. The range of capacity factor for less idea locations is 0 % to 14%.
So how about storage. That will reduce the amount of power produced by 20%. As I have discussed, there are safety issues. There are also environmental issues. Unless I can find a compelling reason for storage, no need to consider the environmental cost.
I have batteries in our motorhome and sailbareoat. Currently we are off grid at Lake Mead running out computers off the inverter since being grid would mean being in a crowded RV park.
What other criteria should I consider? Griff did mention places that people can not live. There are a few more utility scale PV sites that jsut a few years ago. No one can live there. For safety reasons, you can not like in a house with PV on the roof.
So if you listen to all the stupid people like Eric W and Griff, nothing gets done. However, tell me what you want done, I will get it done by minimizing risk and cost.
Just to make Griff happy, I will photo shop some PV panels in front of the 1600 MWe nuke plant. He will never know the difference.
This is the thing I have a problem with: “As charging and discharging a home battery itself consumes energy, feeding surplus solar power into the storage device instead of into the grid results in higher overall electricity consumption for the household, as well as higher emissions because the increased consumption needs to be covered by fossil fuel-based energy. This increase is quite substantial – up to 591KWh annually.”
If I am feeding power into the batteries from the solar panels, that is indeed less power that I have that could otherwise be sold into the grid or used within my house. Never the less, I am still providing power to my house or feeding power into the grid or both with my solar panels. The consumption of power to condition my large bank of batteries does not have to be covered by fossil fuel based energy. As far as the grid is concerned, I could just be one of the folks with a batch of panels, a grid tie inverter and NO batteries. Where the 591 KWH annual wag comes in is anybody’s guess. In my case I guess up to includes zero, but I do not regard zero as substantial.
Yes, a lead acid battery room has to be treated with respect and properly ventilated. Stuff capable of producing lots of current when you drop a wrench on the terminals has to be respected too. Still, if you do NEMA it is probably as safe as anything else in your house such as the ng line.
“Still, if you do NEMA it is probably as safe as anything else in your house such as the ng line.”
I agree unless you are and idiot. If you put solar PV on your roof for a tax credit, you qualify as an idiot.
ShrNfr: Assume your house uses 10,000 KWHr per year. Next assume you have solar PV that generates 5,000 KWHr per year. That means you buy 5,000 KWHr from the grid. Now, add batteries that run on some kind of duty cycle for some reason. Charging and discharging the batteries and running the inverter add about 10% because they are not perfect. If you use the batteries for half of your consumption, the added energy in your battery system uses .5 * 10% or 5% of your 10,000 KWHr per year, or another 500 KWHr per year to your total consumption. Since the solar PV still generates 5,000 KWHr per year, that means you will purchase that added 500 KWHr from the grid.
The only reason for a homeowner to buy battery storage is to use the energy if the grid goes down. You can run your fridge day and night on your solar PV. The reason why utilities are buying them is to level out the intermittent wind farms.
The article just isn’t making sense, When I see an article with a summary about a scientific paper, and there is no link to the original paper, ore even a link to an abstract of the original paper; my Hookey meter tends to peg over pretty hard. Seems to me that resistive and inductive losses in the grid would cancel out a larger portion of the charging/discharging inefficiencies.
The grid losses still exist whether or not you are using batteries.
So battery/charger losses are on top of the grid losses.
Think of it this way. Assume a battery pack w/o any solar cells. (Battery instead of backup generator?)
The battery/charger losses mean you need more grid power.
Now put the solar cells back in. Battery/charger losses mean that there is less usable power coming from the solar cells, so you need more grid power to make up for that fact.
Put your bogosity meter back on ice.
Here in Australia, the government started by privatising the electricity.
Then, a while later, they offered massive subsidies for people to place solar panels on their roofs. A cashback on the panels themselves, and fantastic prices for the electricity that was generated and sold back to the grid.
The effect was marked. Electricity consumption plummeted.
It has been declining every year since 2007, which is around the same time as all this started.
What was the effect of this though? Well, unsurprisingly, electricity generators and retailers still want to make profits for their shareholders even though demand is falling off a cliff. Electricity is an essential resource. There are only a handful of generators and retailers in Australia…
So they jack up the price accordingly, to force profits. Conventional supply and demand theory doesn’t work in an oligopoly, for an essential resource. Oops!
So as a result, profits for electricity generators and retailers soared. Electricity was, and still remains, one of the most profitable untertakings in Australia.
Only now, 10 years later, there are whispers that the market is broken and the privatised companies manipulate it regularly to gouge consumers to maximise prices and profits.
And why wouldn’t they?
Lets see. The government offers people tons of other peoples money to put a product that doesn’t work on their homes.
Because of this private operators become less efficient as they sell less power, plus the demand for their product becomes more unpredictable which forces them to operate their plants less efficiently.
In order to go out of business they are forced to increase their prices.
And from this you conclude that private power production is the villain?
In order to AVOID going out of business
Sorry
Freddy said
“Here in Australia, the government started by privatising the electricity.”
Fancy that; The government gets out because they know what is going to happen. In the process they destroy other peoples money and have a scape goat for what they have created. More proof to me that the whole purpose was to ruin western economies while shifting the blame. Freddy it worked for you. You bought the magic trick. Keep your eye on the pea.
same here in the uk.
Textbook example of supply and demand.
“…Mr Brack said: “It is ridiculous for the same kind of subsidies that go to genuine zero-carbon technologies, like solar and wind, to go to biomass use that might be increasing carbon emissions. It’s not a good use of money….”
All other subsidies are waste of money. Kettle calling pot brack.
As several folk have suggested, the second story about solar is slightly one-sided. It is certainly true that storing electric power before consuming it will involve losses. Duh. But at it’s best this kind of storage is either about moving towards energy independence at the household level, or about smart electronics using it for grid smoothing (calling on a zillion household batteries for five minutes after the start of half time when a million people are making a cup of tea).
Short term issues remain volume and cost. There are not enough lithium ion batteries made worldwide to keep a small US State or UK County going for a couple of days, let alone a month of snowfall.
And yes woodburning at Drax is an absolute blithering nonsense. In Britain we ran out of wood as an energy source in the 16th century and started using coal. Those who will not learn from history are doomed to repeat it
Lithium batteries will soon be run off the market by super capacitors. Don’t invest a penny in lithium.
As an aside, that is a seriously impressive power station. I remember the first time I saw it, from a distance, cutting over on the M62 in order to eventually work my way down along A roads and B roads to King’s Lynn and then onto Cambridge.
I’ve said it before, when this was first proposed:
The obvious solution is to establish pineapple farms in Greenland. After they have been collected using electric vehicles, recharged by solar panels, and dried in the Sun, they can be transported to the UK by sailing ship and burnt as biomass.
I’m astonished that nobody has thought of this economic, practical and ecologically sound solution to the UK’s energy gap.
(I hope not – many a true word is said in jest!)
They are also logging forests in Virginia and North Carolina. Shipping them to pellet plants then sending the pellets by boat to the UK.
Truly Insane!
What energy source do the ships use and the loaders and haulers and the private vehicles of the workers and the port equipment? Also, where are the mountains of ash going afterwards and what energy source moves it?
The ash should be shipped back to the areas that grow the trees so that it can be used as fertilizer.
(only partly snarky)
Devout followers of the faith will happily burn the village to save the village every time.
They know what’s best