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
What happened to a good idea:
” Summary
The use of wood for electricity generation and heat in modern (non-traditional) technologies has grown rapidly in recent years, and has the potential to continue to do so.
The EU has been, and remains, the main global source of demand, as a result of its targets for renewable energy. This demand is largely met by its own forest resources and supplemented by imports from the US, Canada and Russia.
Countries outside the EU, including the US, China, Japan and South Korea, have the potential to increase the use of biomass (including agricultural residues as well as wood), but so far this has not taken place at scale, partly because of the falling costs of competing renewables such as solar PV and wind. However, the role of biomass as a system balancer, and its supposed ability, in combination with carbon capture and storage technology, to generate negative emissions, seem likely to keep it in contention in the future.”
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A colleague came to work every Friday with his father’s tractor. On the the trailer the tank with manure collected from the farm.
After work he drove some 100 km to the biogas plant to deliver the cargo – and to cash the money.
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Great idea – till someone of the green counterstrike got gready and made big business out of REALLY nothing to no more saving the planet.
Hmmmm….cut live trees to burn for energy or burn very old dead trees for energy.
Both release that mystery molecule, CO2, when burned.
The live trees “breath” CO2 and make more trees.
The very old dead trees don’t breath anything.
Which should be burned if the goal is to reduce CO2?
Decisions, decisions….
“do more harm to the climate”
I despair. There are probably millions of people who think this has some meaning in reality. Maybe tens of millions of people. Maybe hundreds. It’s well beyond sad.
In Ontario Canada the provincial government converted a coal plant to wood chips made in the area at a cost of three or four hundred million dollars. After they converted it, they found out it wouldn’t burn wood chips from the local area, and had to import them from somewhere in Europe. It then produced electricity at 25 times more the cost of coal.
OMG you have to read twice
“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.”
to understand the centuries are not needed to ‘stop climate change’ but to stop climate change with the means of production and burning wood pellets.
So to stop climate change, all we need to do is get our energy sources from the carbon sink and make CO2 with it instead. How long will it take for the world to look like Haiti
http://www.haitian-truth.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/deforestation-fact-illegal-deforestation-and-land.jpg
Someone upthread mention importing chips to Canada from Scandinavia.
https://www.voiceonline.com/19th-annual-teddy-government-waste-award-winners/
Yeah, that sounds like the one. I heard them talking about it the other day on a Calgary morning radio talk show.
$37 billion – isn’t that north of $2700 per head of population or $7k plus per household?
Actually at 7.4b people worldwide, $37b equates to about $5.00 each
Enforcing a local content rule on solar also raises the cost by showing the sector leaders the door. The combinations of policy choice show that prices are the last consideration in their minds.
The Chris Hulne angle on this is interesting. How many key players in the climate change/green energy scam have we seen busted for basic dishonesty. John Beale at the EPA comes right to mind but there are others. Surely a good sign that a scam is running would be the court records. Wonder how Nobel winner Pachuri is doing these days.
With regard to lunacy #1, the burning of wood as biomass. There is a second problem. The alkali metals and alkaline-earth sulfates in wood ash deactivate the SCR catalyst – at a unpredictable and frequently rapid rate. This results in an increased cost to replace the catalysts and MAY increase NOx emissions because of poor catalyst activity.
Normally catalyst activity is monitored and the impacted catalyst is replaced when deactivation is observed in the 1st stage of a two stage SCR. However, with wood chips, rapid deactivation can occur in the 2nd stage shortly after deactivation is detection in the 1st stage and before the next scheduled outage.
In the United States, the cost of paying for extra NOx emission allowances is typically lower than the cost of bringing the unit down for unscheduled maintence. So an SCR may be operated at a less than optimum efficiency until the unit reaches a scheduled outage. No violation of law occurs, because the utility has to have the necessary NOx emission allowances to continue operations. However more emission allowances are used than is absolutely necessary.
If your entire generating fleet was based on wood chips, this would be a significant problem, because a utility is only issued so many emission allowances. If the utility runs out emission allowances it has to shut-down all of its generating units. Bottom line… you end up producing far less electricity for the same amount of emissions.
Coal degrades the SCR catalyst more predictably and at a much lower rate, so it much easier to anticipate catalyst degradation and you generally get higher NOx reduction.
“One massive wood plant in Vyborg, north-west Russia produces 800,000 tonnes of wood pellets each year from felled trees in forests around Leningrad and Pakov oblasts. Its wood products are sold to companies including RWE, Vattenfall, Fortum and Dong Energy to meet demand in Denmark, Italy, Finland and Sweden.”
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For Vyborg, we did the upgrade engineering for the pulp paper machine / factory.
Because of the name Vyborg we thought the company located in Norway.
If memory serves me well it was an old Westinghouse.
Times ago and worlds apart.
Wonder where the money for NOx allowances goes. Discussed our local utilities net metering program with an officer of the utility once. He stated that the sweetheart solar prices were not coming from local rate payers as TVA reimbursed the money. I pointed out that all TVA funds came from power sales thus local ratepayers. He flushed a little and replied “well yes” I guess doing even a little homework throws these folks off message.
The vast majority of TVA’s SO2 and NOx emission allowances were obtained, at no cost, via direct issuance from States where TVA has, or had, fossil generating units (I.e. Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Kentucky). Some of TVA’s CAIR NOx allowances were obtained by trading surplus SO2 allowances for annual and ozone season NOx allowances.
Because TVA was an early adopter of both FGD SO2 removal and SCR & SNCR NOx removal technologies, TVA a had a surplus of both NOx and SO2 allowances in it’s “allowance bank” under the EPA’s CAIR regulations. When Obam’s EPA switched from the CAIR regulations to the CSAPR regulations it eliminated all of the surplus CAIR allowances… this deprived TVA residences of the advantages of having saved emission allowances over the previous years.
I can’t say precisely how renewables are paid for in the TVA system at present. However, my understanding was that the extra cost are paid via TVA’s “Green Power Switch” program. This program allows TVA customer to purchase renewable energy – only if they want it and are willing to pay the additional costs associated with it.
The wood pellet idea for draX was soundly thrashed BY commenters here at WUWT as soon as it was reported.
I recall in a listing of world Universities a few years ago Oxfords stood at the top. This may have been true some generations ago, but as with Harvard, today these institutions are are being judged by designer brain products of post normal educations. In this neomarxbrothers’ world, bright kids must hide their lights under a bushel. Every pupil gets a trophy in a lowest common denominator dumbdown. After Steve McIntyre deconstructed nonsense statistical analyses by the leading climateers that led to papers having to be retracted, he remarked that from their work, climate scientists on the team would have been lucky to have had jobs as high school science teachers in earlier generations. Certainly a high school student a few generations ago might have concluded the wood chip idea was a stupid one.
Time to buy long, KON ETF and URA ETF!
Cheers
KOL
The only reasonable way to feed renewable energy power stations seems to be biomass generated from bulls*it, i.e.animal manure, and is not necessarily BS. But the species producing most BS on earth obviously excludes itself from that circulus.
Why do we keep saying that the consequences are “unintended?”
I am not sure how it is with carbon saving, if the woodlands are managed in a sustainable way.
Here in Bavaria they say you could take out twice as much and still being sustainable. In a natural woodlot, some of the old trees die and moulder – which needs a long time compared to burning. So there is a time lag between burning and mouldering, having more CO2 released at first.
Also old trees are hindering new trees to grow quickly, thus hindering to take up CO2 in large amout.
The best solution woudl be: Cutting selectively the mature tree for making quality timber with portable saw mills, leaving the small waste there, and using low quality wood for heating purposes.
This would also avoid large transport machines, which are destroying the ground.
Using quality timber for houses and long-live furniture would capture CO2 for a long time.
(If there is any need to capture it…) But the rest of that action would make sense economically and ecologically.
So you gotta few boat-loads of shredded trees plying the seas on bunker oil? Raise you some mothballed desal plants and some diesel backup gennys-
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/warming-fail-dud-desal-plant-needs-diesel/news-story/4b1ab7cbfe635800731910a1c9e174bb
You’re not bluffing us in this sheep stations game of peak stupid.
Hey folks – the BBC reported this scandal on their website today! Perhaps they are turning the corner but way to go yet!
Here is the link:
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39053678
The trouble with turning their corners is there’s always something scarier around them for these people-
http://www.msn.com/en-au/news/world/biologists-say-half-of-all-species-could-be-extinct-by-end-of-century/ar-AAnpmkD
Seems tree hugging is all a bit passe’ this season.
Cut them all down!
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/24/business/energy-environment/deforestation-brazil-bolivia-south-america.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
……says Saruman
Looking at how the CO2 levels over millions of years are falling, mother nature is sequestrating CO2 for free. Using a low quality energy source like wood for generating electricity is stupid. For homes, log fires I get it, for energy it is dumb. As all the wood does not rot a percentage of the wood will eventually become coal. Sequestration for free, we burn coal which produces more CO2, tress grow faster more CO2 will therefore be sequestrated. Burning wood actually stops mother natures natural sequestration process. These people really are stupid.
Maybe I’m asking an obvious question, because trees, obviously, are nothing but big stalks of carbon. But I do have to ask: are these people completely insane?
The other question is also obvious: since Russia has the largest shale oil reserves in the world and a wealth of methane sequestered in the tundra of Siberia, why is this not being marketed? Putin last week (2/14/17) sold 50% percent of the drilling right for his Rosneft platform to Qatar and Swiss-based Glencore.
What am I missing in all of this?
After they have burned down the biosphere, blaming human kind for ravaging the planet, the depopulation agenda of these sociopaths is on track again.
We have to stop this madness at any price.
The UK, just like Norway, has vast coal resources that together could power the entire world for at least 5000 years.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/10518072/UKs-next-offshore-energy-fortune-lies-in-coal.html
We will never be out of hydrocarbons and coal. Burning our forrests is a crime and it will completely destroy the environMENTAL movement.
Quote from the article,
“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.”
This is simply wrong. Within the US it takes less than 40 years for a forest to recover. And maybe less than 30 years since to make wood pellets we are probably talking small trees, not large, because small trees are easier to work with.
If the tiny, temporary increased emissions of CO2 from wood pellets are enough to change the climate then obviously we are all doomed anyway.
In the longer run wood pellets are carbon neutral if we ignore emissions due to harvesting and transport. But that last has been taken into account and compared to other current plausible energy sources it still means a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.
Basically the article is just wrong.
If I were to write an essay criticizing wood pellet burning, I would focus on costs. If wood pellets are more expensive than other energy sources, and for electricity generation it probably is, then this is increasing the cost of electricity and probably moving economic activity that depends on the cost of electricity to other countries that are less concerned about CO2 emissions.
On the other hand wood pellets make a lot of sense for heating as here they are both cheap compared to the alternatives and close to CO2 neutral. In fact I suspect that if an individual were trying to lower their carbon footprint then converting to wood pellet heating would be probably the single act that would have the biggest impact.
Just finished up an article that links to this one:
Climate “Science” on Trial; Clear-Cutting Forests to Save the Trees
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/02/25/climate-science-on-trial-clear-cutting-forests-to-save-the-trees/
Sometimes the Greenies eat their own children.
Soylent Green is people!
Hug a wood pellet today!
“Hunger and mifery was prophefied unto them, that they fhoud eat and not be fatisfied; that men and women fhould eat their own children; and every man eat the flefh of his friend: fathers fhould eat their fons, and fons their fathers, when all things fhould lack […]”
~Henry Ainsworth (1571–1622), Two Treatises
It has occurred to me from the comments that we don’t put two and two together until we’ve been 60 years on the Earth and realize that we were duped because of our youth. Meanwhile capitalism steams full throttle ahead, amassing a higher and every higher GDP solely because we are adding more bureaucracy each billing their own charge.
I read that now that the economy is improving the divorce rate is increasing. How strange, since the agencies involved in divorce, family court, social workers, police, the jails all get paid one way or another and that actually increases GDP. So its actually the other way around.
Have you heard the one about the biggest way to increase the GDP is from an elderly rich man dying of cancer in the hospital being divorced by his third wife? And the pool of sharks that are going to be employed by the inheritors?
In America the GDP is not from actual production which is why we now build factories in other countries where everything associated is cheaper, but continue to build a mountain of costs under which one finds a single individual.
katesisco, okay, it seems that you have “found” a whole bunch of problems … for which I am confident we can all sit down — or, remain standing, for that matter — and find a whole bunch more.
I am just curious: do you care to provide some solutions to these problems? [Note: for me, even some general arm-wavy solutions are as good as any a starting point.]