Guest essay by Eric Worrall
For once Bill McKibben is right – if all the towns and cities in the world went 100% renewable, big oil would be crushed, and Washington’s bipartisan infatuation with Fossil Fuels would be defeated. The only problem with this plan: renewables are expensive, and they are not a viable replacement for fossil fuels.
We can battle climate change without Washington DC. Here’s how
Bill McKibben
Global warming is an immediate battle with enormous consequences. We dare not wait for Washington to return to sanity – nor do we have to
The most telling item in Donald Trump’s State of the Union address may have been what wasn’t there: any mention of climate change, the greatest problem the world faces. And just as telling was the fact that official Washington seemed barely to notice.
…
Even if Democrats manage to take back the House and Senate in the midterm elections, they wouldn’t be able to get meaningful legislation past Trump – and there’s nothing much to suggest they’d try very hard.
…
New York City is not as big as the federal government, but it’s big enough: it’s got lawyers aplenty, and the resources to do real damage. And it won’t be alone. We’ve just launched a huge Fossil Free US campaign, designed to make sure there are a thousand New Yorks working on a thousand fronts.
It has three main components.
The first – joining in work pioneered by groups like the Sierra Club – is to persuade towns, cities, counties, and states to pledge to make the transition to 100% renewable energy. This is now easy and affordable enough that it doesn’t scare politicians – cities from San Diego to Atlanta have joined in, and they will help maintain the momentum towards clean energy that the Trump administration is trying so hard to blunt.
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/01/climate-change-action-trump
Activists like Bill McKibben genuinely believe that renewables are an inexpensive replacement for fossil fuels. They believe the reason fossil fuels haven’t been replaced by renewables is that fossil fuel interests are fighting to prevent the rise of renewables, to protect their own interests.
This view is a fantasy.
I’m sure fossil fuel interests do a lot of lobbying, but the truth is there is nothing, not a single thing that fossil fuel companies could do to prevent the rise of a better energy solution.
The problem with renewables is that they are not a better energy solution.
History is littered with rapid shifts to new energy technology. Kerosene replaced whale oil in just a few decades. Natural gas replaced kerosene lighting on a similar timescale. Electric lighting rapidly replaced natural gas.
Famous inventor and business tycoon Thomas Edison once tried really hard to prevent the rise of a superior energy technology. Edison failed. George Westinghouse’s AC electricity grid displaced Thomas Edison’s DC electricity, because at the time AC was easier to transport over long distances.
Nobody has to make pledges or campaign for the adoption of better energy solutions. The evidence from history is that people embrace better energy solutions of their own free will, without any need for government intervention or noisy activist campaigns.
If renewables were any good, the renewable revolution would be rapid and uncontroversial. The strongest evidence that renewables are inferior is the fact that the renewable revolution has been, is and for the foreseeable future will continue to be an utter failure.
Correction (EW): h/t rogercaiazza The gas used for lighting was not natural gas, at least not initially.
Be interesting to see what happens to these “100% renewable” towns when they figure out that China no longer accepts many forms of renewables – including plastics and paper – and these WILL go into the land fill or burned because no one else will take them either. ref: GCaptain article on not shipping waste to China
That stuff will be processed in the US like it was before being shipped to China. The reason it went to China in the first place is because it was cheaper to ship it there than some place like Chicago. The trade deficit made it more profitable for Chinese shipping companies to offer really low shipping rates on the return trip to China than to send a ship back empty. 10% of something is better than 100% of nothing.
Most of it cannot be processed in the US. The labor costs alone would make it very unprofitable. Add in the environmental and safety regulations that are absent in China, and the incinerator or landfill become the only options. The Loadstar article (in gCaptain) mentioned above has a link to Dominique Mosbergen’s HuffPo article on the mess recycling has become. Yes, many shipping containers previously returned to Asia with a large chunk of the first world’s waste, but most of those will now just back-haul empty.
https://theloadstar.co.uk/container-lines-will-feel-pinch-china-restricts-import-waste-recycling/
Windsong, – Not just the U.S. All of the Western countries who were exporting their “renewable waste” to China are feeling the pain. Some city councils in my country have told their resident rate payers to stop using the renewables wheelie bins. Taxes and rates are going to rise to enable this waste to be either incinerated in the same country or stored.
My city has had a fire in a “renewable waste” storage facility – the fire burned for two weeks – it’s still smouldering months later.
Articles are being published even now condemning the “Throw away society”. Surely we will soon see legislation banning throw away consumerism. i.e. cheap products from China.
Things stored in landfills are merely waiting for a time when it becomes profitable to extract them again.
Landfills can be thought of as being the mines of tomorrow.
10-15 years ago we would ship container loads of plastic to China. Some of the plastic grades (#4 maybe) the U.S. recyclers did not have the machines to grind it and would have gone into the landfill if not sent to China.
Waste Management recently took away the recycle containers and told customers to put recyclables in the waste container. It became too costly to sort and recycle.
The most sensible thing to do with waste is to burn it and use the heat to generate power. Waste in landfill will decompose and give rise to large quantities of CO2 and Methane as well as other gases. Leaving it there to rot will not diminish the need for power and with present technology it means that coal, oil or gas will have to be burned instead. Sending waste to landfill means that we still get the greenhouse gases while not getting the power.
Of course non-combustibles have to be sorted out and noxious combustion products need to be removed by high-temperature combustion. However the technology is available and has been used for this purpose.
Perhaps the ideal combination is the burning of waste for power in conjunction with a cement kiln.
Even better would be the use of a plasma torch to avoid most combustion by-products and handle unsorted waste. Its slag can be used for various piurposes. It’s described in the book, “Prescription for the Planet”.
Isn’t the issue with ‘plasma torch’ tech (thermal depolymerization – like CWT’s ‘turkey guts to oil plant in Missouri) that it costs more to employ the technology than you can sell the end product for?
slight negative there,
landfill gas (methane) is captured and stored in sufficient quantities and used for power generation across UK, check out BMI reports, it even makes it visible in the UK energy mix graph,
CO2, very little if any given off from landfill.
the best sensible solution is find a universal solvent for `plastics` and recycle all plastics back to H/C chain at a local level (just like EPS can be)
The option of sorting and burning waste was looked at in the 1970’s and early 1980’s. It was adopted in only a few locations because the cost was too high. Today, the cost would likely be even higher due to more restrictive air emission standards. Landfills today are largely sealed to contain methane produced. Also, some of that methane is captured for power production.
Many landfills are capturing the methane and burning it for power.
PS: If you burn the stuff that goes into landfills, it still generates CO2, just over a much shorter period of time.
PS: Most plastics, if you don’t burn them at a really high temperature, you get lots of nasty combustion byproducts.
“Perhaps the ideal combination is the burning of waste for power in conjunction with a cement kiln.”
This has been tried and the problem was that the waste accumulated faster than the kilns could burn it. The result was that drums of toxic liquids (at the bottom of the waste pile) burst and the contents ended up in the groundwater.
Dick Kahle is right. I recall Baltimore opening such a plant to much hooting, hollering, back-slapping, and all sorts of general all around self congratulating. Turns out that lots of people discard combustibles – some quite energetic. Turns out burning the waste wasn’t nearly as good an idea as everyone had supposed.
“Waste in landfill will decompose and give rise to large quantities of CO2 and Methane as well as other gases.” Even worst the metals and chemicals that are buried end up in the water table. Landfill are the worst way to get rid garbage. We take metals out of the earth to the most part they are oxides, metal oxides are most stable difficult for plants and animals to take up. We refine the metals so we can use them in that state plants and animals can easily take them up, in that state a great many are toxic. When we bury them they remain as metal and are denied oxygen so the remain unstable. On the surface they would oxidize and become stable. The same is true for oil base produces buried they are free to leach into the water table, on the surface bacteria will consume most if not all after oil is carbon and a very free carbon. Separating out the metals for recycling and burning the rest would make more sense and cause far less problem in the future, it may be more costly that burying them just cover up the problem it does not get rid of it, in a lot of ways it makes the problem worst.
Land fills have been sealed so that leachate can’t reach the water table for almost 100 years now.
BTW, if water can reach the metals, than so can oxygen.
Plasma Waste Recycling is a proven technology and can be rampted up to dispose of municipal waste in PWR plants that produce electricity from Syngas and have minimal residue. ZERO waste to landfill should be vision.
Big expense to get rid of something that isn’t a problem.
“100% renewable” towns will freeze their butts off and have very little electricity.
Yep. Going ‘green’ is affordable as long as you’re rich. When the next crisis hits nobody can pay just the maintenance of this infrastructure. America can’t even maintain its bridges.
I just watched a feature film on the 100% renewable, solar powered airplane that flew around the world. It had a passenger carrying capacity of zero and looked like it was moving at around 40 miles per hours as the seagulls flew past it. Quaint. Then I had a vision of an airbus flying by at 500 MPH with a payload of 500 passengers. You sort of get the picture of the problem with renewables from this contrast. It’s called energy density.
They won’t freeze … they just do a little creative work on the ledger and maybe change some key definitions.
They’ll just officially record it as death by heat stroke – – – –
MikeP
February 2, 2018 at 11:41 am
They’ll just officially record it as death by heat stroke – – – –
Well it is, just with a minus sign and what’s an omitted minus among statistics?
As in a refrigerator being called a negative heat exchanger
Change of outlook…
A mine is a place where useful and precious materials exist in concentrations that make it economical to extract them. A mine is place that feeds smeltering or purification processes.
A mine is also accessible so as to transport the materials to those processes economically.
Siberia is full of precious materials, but not full of mines.
What is the concentration of precious metals, plastics, organic materials etc. in a landfill? … much much more concentrated than any hardrock mine other than coal mines.
Landfills are storage lockers and nines.
Landfills are mines.
Here’s a bit from the UK Telegraph a gold source.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/11997874/Gold-worth-millions-is-flushed-into-British-sewers-every-year.html
Back in Victorian London there were people who went into the sewers to find anything of value that might have been dropped down a drain or flushed.
To find out more about London’s water supply and drains this is an excellent place to start.
https://www.waterandsteam.org.uk/
James Bull
Shouldn’t the title to this article be something more like “Cities and Towns Who try to rely on 100% renewables will be putting themselves even deeper into the dark?”
Like the 1,000 MW “extension” cord from Quebec to New York City to furnish base-load power?
Cities and towns expect to get their electricity via “extension” cords from elsewhere?
‘The New York Energy Highway’
Report: May 30, 2012
Plan for cable from Quebec to NYC information.
This project began 2008-2010 and there are many FERC documents about this project which now has a Presidential Permit.
http://www.nyenergyhighway.com/Content/documents/1.pdf
Champlain Hudson Power Express, Inc. / CHPE, project.
Presidential Permits – Canada
PP-362, Issued 10/06/14
Click on for more project information.
https://energy.gov/oe/services/electricity-policy-coordination-and-implementation/international-electricity-regulatio-3
Wikipedia: Champlain Hudson Power Express (CHPE)
According to Wikipedia:
Being developed by Transmission Developers Inc.(TDI) a Blackstone Group, LP portfolio group.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Champlain_Hudson_Power_Express
More information on this project on the Internet.
Transmission Developers Inc. (TDI), Albany, N.Y.
Board of Directors
http://www.transmissiondevelopers.com/about/board-of-directors.php
Hon. David Peterson (Ontario), Chair.
I think you confused the word ‘renewable’ with the word ‘recyclable’. China is in full support of renewable energy and we should be too. We also need to recycle and create less plastic.
(this is a repetition of an earlier comment that I made on 31 January:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/31/trump-gave-the-first-sotu-in-8-years-to-not-mention-global-warming/#comment-2731678 )
________________
I just had the misfortune of wasting an hour of my life watching C-Span’s broadcast of “The Climate State of The Union” conducted by Bill McKibben and Bernie Sanders.
I subjected myself to this torture because I had never previously seen McKibben speak and I wished to form an opinion of him. Now I know; the man is a genuine nutcase.
At least he was honest enough to admit that the sum total of his background and education qualifying him to be an expert on energy, physics, chemistry, computer modeling, mathematics, economics and climate is that he is a writer.
Perhaps WUWT should organize a fundraiser to purchase a custom-fitted strait-jacket for the delusional buffoon.
Thanks for taking that bullet, John. I could tell that McKibben is missing a few screws by the picture above. No need to spend time listening to him.
TDI-New England
New England Clean Power Link project.
Quebec to Vermont, 1,000 MW power line link.
Presidential Permits – Canada
Presidential Permit: PP-400 issued 12/05/16
Click on for more project information.
https://energy.gov/oe/services/electricity-policy-coordination-and-implementation/international/electricity-regulatio-3
Base-load hydro-power from Quebec to Vermont.
Typo: TDI New England, PP-400
https://energy.gov/oe/services/electricity-policy-coordination-and-implementation/international-electricity-regulatio-3
Absolutely, big mouth, brain not so much. Human prosperity parasite, global leader.
He would come on here occasionally, and I did have the opportunity to point out to him directly that 350 ppm being the perfect CO2 level and ~400 ppm (at the time) was an environmental disaster was the thinking of a genuine f-wit.
F-wittery is as f-wittery does (for money).
They have brains, but they are visceral thinkers.
Yes indeed icisil, there was an old and very popular saying once, and whether or not you are an atheist or a religious person it’s understandable “There but for the grace of God go I”. I pity the man and his genetic background and upbringing. There but for the grace of God go I.
phil: Use of the brain God gave you keeps you from going there. It is a choice.
I say let these states and cities do what they decide.
No need to involve federal government.
When they run out of money and resources, so long as the Federal Government does not bail them out, they will learn fairly quickly.
Go for it McKibben, just hope you learn the lesson before you starve.
Of course in the case of New York, they should wait until such time the UN find the need to move out of their building. 🙂
https://thedemiseofchristchurch.com/2016/05/06/un-headquarters-and-usd1-2-billion-upgrade-and-rising/
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
The problem with this is that so long as there is a nanny state to bail these lunatics out at the end of the day they will never stop. They must be cut off and allowed to die.
I’m tempted to say that Mckibben is a Canute. But Canutes are useful, do Mckibben is not a Canute.
Isn’t it just bizarre how many really strange seemingly human beings this CAGW claptrap has brought and continues to being out of the woods and weeds to expose them unprepared to beacons of truth and reality? And to no avail?
McKibben’s group 350 is nothing but a cult. Lots of them around here (Missoula, MT).
Being a writer is not the same as being a science writer in that one must research and learn the science. I see your article is clearly of the science fiction variety. Never mind, you will still benefit when the government stops subsidizing fossil fuels and the consumers all opt in for renewable energy. Don’t hold gear shift too tightly, change is coming.
Ha! Ha! Ha! A fossil fuel free USA – what a joke! The most important, cheapest, highest energy-density resources on the planet demonized by somebody who has clearly lost the plot! What is it with these people who enjoy all the benefits of modern society while simultaneously trying to tear the whole edifice down? Or does this guy just like the sounds of his own voice too much?
He lives in the echo box that is created by such scientific luminaries as politicians and journalists.
And THEIR shining city on a hill is powered with 100% Renewable Energy. At least Science Fictions writers acknowledge that we are doomed without nuclear energy or some magical as yet unknown power source for transportation and flight. Flux Capacitor anyone?
I agree that the problem with renewables is that they are not a better energy solution.
One little quibble is when you say “Natural gas replaced kerosene lighting on a similar timescale. Electric lighting rapidly replaced natural gas.” I don’t think it was natural gas that was used for lighting. Instead it was coal gas or manufactured gas that was used.
They usually called it town gas. But, you are correct. Natural gas is a twentieth century innovation that displaced coal and fuel oil in home heating and cooking.
Yes, often called “town gas”, it was a mixture of H2 and CO.
A few more in there as well
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_gas
candles, whale oil, kerosene, coal gas or manufactured gas, natural gas, then electricity, according to
http://www.petroleumhistory.org/OilHistory/pages/Whale/whale.html
“1846: The Year We Hit Peak Sperm Whale Oil”
https://io9.gizmodo.com/5930414/1846-the-year-we-hit-peak-sperm-whale-oil
Side note: The infamous Gowanus Canal still contains the waste material left over from all the coal gas produced up to the early fifties. This waste material is a formidable challenge for anyone wishing to clean up the canal.
http://www.nyc.gov/html/dep/html/harborwater/gowanus_canal_history.shtml
Thanks, corrected.
IIRC one of the by-products of coal gas was coke – which has a few uses
Hey!
Coke is used commercially for smelting iron and it is great in a good potbelly stove and burns hot with minimal particulates.
These are two very excellent uses!
Cheers
Roger
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
rogercaiazza February 1, 2018 at 6:22 pm
Right on Roger!
It was John D. Rockefeller who ‘Saved the Whales’, killing the whaling industry with his kerosene lamp oil product ‘Standard Oil’. Thomas Edison et al. almost put ESSO (Standard Oil NJ) out of business when lamps went electric… but was saved by Henry Ford and the OTTO cycle gasoline/petrol engine.
No doubt something sooner or later will replace (kill) fossil fuels but not McKibben et. al. Besides, without fossil fuel feedstock where will all the plastics (poly-this-that-n-the-other) come from?
..and we’d have to go back to renewables like whale oil to keep those Airbuses in flying…
Cheers
Yes, the claims are abundant of “100 mpg carburetors” and “free energy generation” being quashed by fossil fuel interests in collusion with the government. Bill is ‘way out there’ with all those claims on this one. All he needs is some local public money and a lot of luck convincing the constituents to cough it up.
Yet there are millions of people who actually emote along the directions of government conspiracy, fossil fuel conspiracy, etc. I read them everyday in comment sections and conspiracy blogs. The “free energy” and so forth sell quite well. People are drawn to the insanity of “someone big and powerful made this happen or kept this from happening” because then they don’t have to look at their own miserable failure.
Sheri
I’ve lately been in a discussion where there was sarcastic mention of the “100 mpg carburettor”. One reply was to the effect that he had one but so far it was “only 30 % efficient”. Upgrades were promised real soon now.
Which lead to the joke here that was current back when there were bodaceous ads for miracle fuel efficiency improvers involving magic pills and magets etc.
Which was about the bloke who fitted them all and got pulled over by a policeman because his fuel tank was overflowing on to the road.
Another Ian
magic – no screen this time, though!
Plus lots
Auto
Another Ian – that is genius! I never thought of it that way!
I have to share your genius with some friends. I’ll give you credit.
How about 3,587 mpg! link
How about a lightly modified Honda CRX that gets 118 mpg on public roads! link
How about a practical vehicle that gets 84 mpg on the highway, coming real soon! link
Lightly modified is a stretch.
Practical is in the eye of the beholder.
Here’s the problem, a combination of EPA rules and safety standards kill fuel mileage. Then there’s the whole “I wont drive that!” which kills a lot of prototypes.
-The contest vehicle will never be manufactured as it’s just an expensive proof of concept testing how far one can get on a gallon of fuel.
-The Honda CRX, built in the 80’s, would not pass current safety and EPA standards if it was introduced as a new vehicle today. This car is actually my favorite example to use when explaining to people how current regulations kill MPG. A car that got 50 mpg back in the 80’s when today they consider a car that gets 35 mpg an “econo box”. We regressed 15 mpg in efficiency over 30 years…Another favorite example is they sell 80 mpg diesel vehicles in Europe that can’t be imported to the US, they don’t pass our safety and EPA standards…
-The Elio, first heard of them at least 5 years ago and they still are not in production. Anyway these are bypassing our safety and EPA standards (for now). Why you ask? Because they are considered a motorcycle and motorcycles don’t have to meet the same standards. As soon as motor cycle “cars” become popular enough that will change as regulators will start getting more involved.
Darrin, how much motorcycle driving have you done? Any in all nasty weather or heavy traffic?
Motorcycles’, while very fuel efficient, lack of mass (and that is what makes the difference) places the vehicles at a huge disadvantage to other vehicles on the road when it comes to collisions and safety. When large semi-trailers and SUVs are out and about being operated by less than vigilant drivers, safety rules are prudent to protect the passengers of such vehicles.
As you probably would agree passenger safety belts are a good idea, but where do you draw the line at other safety features? Are side impact structural members (door beams) too much? How about impact bumpers and crumple zones? Too much as well? As you can imagine all these safety features add mass to the vehicle and also permit it to absorb much of the inertia imparted by more massive vehicles.
Have you every seen the aftermath of a motorcycle collision with a tree? The tree doesn’t lose.
Back in 1974-75 I owned a Honda Civic CVCC. It would get 50+ mpg when I kept my foot out of the gas and drove the 55 mph speed limit. I tried a couple of times to see just how good a mpg I could get and made it to 58 mpg. That car could not be built new today in the USA because of safety and ironically pollution control regulations making that car a thousand pounds heavier. CVCC met all the pollution standards at the time without the heavy equipment being used by other manufacturers. I would imagine with a modern designed more efficient engine in the same car one could easily get 100 mpg.
Lack of mass makes a difference for motorcycles, however lack of aerodynamics makes a bigger difference.
The trunk space is designed to be 27 × 14 × 10 inches, enough for an airline carry-on bag or a golf bag with the rear seat down (47+ inches).[6]
Oh! Spiffing.
All the residence of those cities can simply move not to South Australia or Venezuela.
In the modern definition, economic victory means massive debt and high unemployment.
That’s more accurately the post-modern definition as touted by the progressive movement.
Every step backward for humanity is a step forward toward preserving Mother Gaia’s virginity
“To save the country we had to destroy it” comes to mind
I’ll meet you halfway…
“To save the planet we had to destroy civilization, and most of Humanity with it.”
I think McKibben would have better luck pushing trash-to-power projects when it comes to civil investments in power generation. He just can’t get over his CO2 paranoia.
Bill McKibben thinks that so-called ‘renewables’ are an inexpensive replacement for fossil fuels. They are in fact a prohibitively expensive, impractical and anti-environmental answer to a non-problem. CO2 is a benefit, not a problem and the more we have of it the better. Fossil fuels haven’t been replaced by so-called ‘renewables’ as fossil fuel is cheap, safe, popular, environmentally friendly, runs 24/7, is low-tech and people can afford it all over the World.
Bill McKibben is just pushing his own market-barrow.
The energy sources you used as examples didn’t have the Deep State bureaucracy to contend with. Look at what’s happened with nuclear.
The problem with poor sods like this bloke is that they fixate on “Big Oil” = “Fossil Fuels”. Even if collectively we were able to generate some significant percentage of energy from “renewables”, Big Oil will always be there providing the petrochemical feedstocks, lubricants, plastics, etc upon which modern civilisation depends. There is no chance that petrochemical resources will ever be “stranded” assets.
The “Greens” have been fanticizing on becoming as big and important as Big Oil , ever since they can remember. The only problem is that they cannot deliver the density and scale of energy that fossil fuel and nuclear can. Hydro runs into it’s own Enviro problems with fish and the like.
It has become a Political match for control of Energy for the Planet. HE who controls EVERYONE’S Power , controls the future of the Planet. That is why they take these issues to every Despot, and 3rd world country, who have voices in the UN, with promises of more Internal Power and riches from countries like ourselves. Every failure of Renewable power, is met with never ending taxes and more money, to “make it right”, arguments. By the end of it, we will be burning actual currency in the furnaces. Also, the MSM only reproduces articles like the above, and rarely any rebuttals . It was estimated that Hillary received over $ 1 billion free advertising dollars from mentions in the MSM, prior and into the Elections. I would like to see an approximation of how much money the MSM gives, in Free Advertising, to the Greens. You know they are trying to hitch their horses in front of the Winning wagons, and Hillary’s defeat cost them dearly. They are now doubling down , on what was suppose to be a cakewalk… The Steyers, Musks, WWF, GreenPeace, and the major Enviro NGOs have formed a de Facto World Government, based on draining World Governments of Treasury monies, to support their causes, and to fund elections of THEIR Representatives.(Think California, Brown, et al.) Agenda 21, now 31 , and the UN directives are only one faction of this..Encourage people to read up, or be an effect, not cause, of the future..
If by “renewables” he includes hydro-electric and nuclear generated electricity, it might be a possibility. But that would mean that all transportation and HVAC will have to use this electricity as well, so Elon and his ilk will be fabulously wealthy. Oops, the Green Blob hates hydro and nukes, so… never mind.
Dang,
I bet property prices would go up if all available land was to be covered with windmills and solar panels.
I guess they could use spit to lubricate all of the moving parts on all of those windmills, and make those ginormous propellors out of the redwood trees they cut down to make room for the windmills.
Que cosa tan seria!
John
Spit? No way!
There was a reference on a machinery blog of ONE windfarm in SE Colorado that got a semi load of Mobil 1 every fortnight.
Maybe that’s why it costs so much at the farm and home supply?
I have a good friend who is an Engineer for our regional power company. Here’s 2 points he makes that many may not be aware of….
Renewable energy cannot be relied on as a generation source in many parts of the US. (The sun is useless regionally in the dark, when it is highly cloudy, and when the panels are snow-covered in regions that have snow. Wind power is not in play on calm days.) Hydro is better, but sources are fully tapped already.
Therefore, power companies must have capacity to provide full power when all sun and wind renewables are not producing. Purchasing and maintaining generation equipment and the ancillary things that go with it when usage is only intermittent is very expensive. All users pay for this redundancy. This redundancy (and its cost) will increase as localities move toward 100% renewable. Therefore, not only are renewables expensive to start with, their cost must include the cost of sustaining 100% reserve conventional power generation.
The producers don’t seem to care. They get very, very, very generous tax breaks that make the installation of useless pinwheels and panels great for them. My power company BRAGS how smart and good they are for killing eagles, ripping up prairies and making billions for Buffet. Virtue signalling, great tax breaks—who cares about customers and having the lights on? It’s about government handouts, entirely.
Here’s a third point for your friend.
It takes time to fire up those back up sources, so you need to buy massive batteries in order to power the grid while that happens.
So you end up paying three times.
1) Enough fossil capacity to power your town.
2) Enough renewable capacity to power your town (given the vagaries of wind and sunlight, you need faceplate ratings at least 2 to 3 times greater than your town’s needs)
3) Enough batteries to tide you over from 2 to 1.
Wind farms actually consume electricity when the wind isn’t blowing.
They have motors that keep the blades turning (albeit slowly) in order to prevent flat spots from forming on the bearings.
Idle question
Wind farms shut down when the winds get too strong.
Given this need to keep the blades turning to avoid damaging the bearings, how do they do this during high winds?
Do the feather to blades completely and use the same system they would use for no wind?
Do the not quite completely feather the blades, and use the power of the wind to keep the blades turning, but keep the rotation rate at 10 to 15 revolutions per hour?
“This does not mean that SJWs do not appear empathetic. Quite the opposite. Most narcissists and sociopaths are highly adept at hiding their aberrant character flaws behind causes, platitudes and virtue signaling. They have to believe that the things they do and the ideals they seek to enforce are grounded in moral soil, even though the consequences of these ideals are usually destructive. When confronted with reality, that they are the villains rather than the heroes they imagine themselves to be, they can become erratic and violent.
SJWs have effectively turned sociopathy and narcissism into a civil rights movement.”
http://www.alt-market.com/articles/3362-a-post-mortem-on-the-corpse-of-social-justice
A very insightful comment EH, that adequately describes the most notorious killers of the 20th Century.
As I wrote recently:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/12/25/al-gore-bilks-people-at-christmas-asking-for-climate-crisis-money/comment-page-1/#comment-2701695
[excerpt]
Marxism made simple!
The Groucho Marxists are the leaders – they want power for its own sake at any cost, and typically are sociopaths or psychopaths. The great killers of recent history, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot. etc. were of this odious ilk – first they get power, then they implement their crazy schemes that do not work and too often kill everyone who opposes them.
The Harpo Marxists are the followers – the “sheeple” – these are people of less-than-average intelligence who are easily duped and follow the Groucho’s until it is too late, their rights are lost and their society destroyed. They are attracted to simplistic concepts that “feel good” but rarely “do good”.
George Carlin said: “You know how stupid the average person is, right? Well, half of them are stupider than that!”
One can easily identify many members of these two groups in the global warming debate – and none of them are ”climate skeptics”.
People can certainly come to be true believers of their own BS. I seen this as an observer in a nasty divorce dispute. One of the parties lied so much and so often that it became a truth to part of them. The remaining part of them that still knew it was all lies was completely suppressed.
From the article: “New York City is not as big as the federal government, but it’s big enough: it’s got lawyers aplenty, and the resources to do real damage.”
Who is McKibben proposing to damage?
Hmm… Lawyers do more fiscal damage than anything else so I guess he wants the local residents to pay that too. It’s always easier to solve things when others pay the price.
They are in for a shock.
Sticker shock
Not when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
Touche!
Bill McKibben is a textbook case of Winston Churchill’s definition of a fanatic: “Someone who can’t change his mind, and won’t change the subject.”
Harping on the notions that “global warming is an immediate battle with enormous consequences,” and that a “huge, Fossil Free U.S. campaign,” can do avert it, overlooks several key facts, besides the ones mentioned in the article and previous posts.
1. China passed the U.S. in CO2 emissions 20 years ago, and has added more coal-burning capacity in the last 15 years than the U.S. has in total. If the U.S. ceased to exist, all its industries vanished, and all 320 million people committed suicide, it would not return the world to the CO2 status quo ante of the year 2000. Nothing’s going to happen until China does it. The U.S. is not the big kid on the block anymore, and hasn’t been for almost a generation. Two weirdos from Vermont are fly specks compared to the U.S. as a whole. Luddites have been around since before the word was coined in 1805, and persist only as destructive curiosities. If the U.S. commits suicide either bodily or economically, the territory would be colonized by people less weird and blinkered.
2. “Renewables” aren’t fossil fuel free. It takes fuel to manufacture the components, ship them here from China or Europe, and require motorized commuters to go to the sites for operation and maintenance. Windmill technicians aren’t going to drive to work in ox carts. Plus, renewables wear out (like everything else) and must be replaced. Solar panels in particular are nearly impossible to recycle. That’s a lot of junk to pile up somewhere.
3. Fat chance New York, or any other major municipality are going to go 100% cold turkey on fossil fuels any time soon. What are they going to do? Ban trucks? Steel? Concrete? Food? Hospitals and all the sophisticated instruments they require? They need fossil fuels to manufacture and transport. Any city that bans those things will turn into a ghost town, and prove nothing, except that McKibben is nuts.
4. The last time the world was “fossil free,” was about 1700 (except China, which has been burning coal for a thousand years.) The pre-industrial world supported 1/15th the current population, at a much lower standard of living, with life expectancies around 40 among rich and poor alike. Anyone who wants to return to that benighted state is free to do so. No one’s buying. There are still regions in sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and remote islands like New Guinea that live that way, more-or-less. They attract few immigrants, and provide even fewer technological models.
This is just for starters. I’m sure other posters can elaborate.
Tom wrote:
“This is just for starters. I’m sure other posters can elaborate.”
No need to elaborate further, Tom. You’ve pretty much nailed it.
Best, Allan
Post script:
I was talking with my friend Dr. Dave last night on this topic, and I said
“Renewables like wind and solar power will not likely improve any time soon, because there is no practical ‘super-battery’ to store power and solve their intermittency problem”.
Dr. Dave said
“Sure there is, it works like this: Plants and small animals store solar energy, then they decay, compress, metamorphose into coal and oil over millions of years, then we recover them from the Earth, and then we burn them, Voila! There’s your super-battery!”
Surprising logic, coming from a medical specialist. Usually, it’s earth scientists like me who speak in terms of geologic time – the rest of the population rarely has that much patience. 🙂
Allan,
This is exactly how I’ve been “brainwashing” my kids for years. Even had my son do a science project on true “solar” power describing exactly this. Why in the world wouldn’t we use the energy that our planet and the sun have so conveniently placed for us just beneath the surface? Especially when doing so returns the raw materials (carbon) back in to circulation for use later. Seriously, this is basic stuff! And all the fears about it being “unprecedented” or, as our own Nick Stokes likes to point out, an unnatural forcing (my paraphrasing of his typical position), is just fluff and nonsense.
All this carbon, whether in the form of CO2 or just C, was at one time already in circulation. All we’re doing is harvesting the (essentially) free energy out of it before returning it for additional circulation.
rip
I think you’ve covered the bases fairly well!
I had dinner during the Obama administration with my friend, a senior US government energy official and one of his advisors. On the subject of intermittency, the advisor waved off the intermittency problem with the statement “we’ll solve that with storage”. I did not bother to reply – I was confident that my friend, who is quite competent, knew as I did that “storage” was impractical at this time (and will probably remain so for a long time).
But this is how halfwits like Bill McKibben think – they just throw out some nonsense and then are prepared to defend it to the death. We have known about the intermittency problem of wind and solar power since forever – I even suggested a possible solution circa 2012 or earlier, but it probably won’t work very well – see below.
Regards, Allan
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/02/16/wind-power-plug-pulled-in-illinois/
Sabastian says: February 18, 2012 at 7:14 am
RE: Allan MacRae: If we ever develop a “super-battery”
The “Super battery” like fusion is a fanciful illusion. Batteries have been around for 150 years. Plot watts per pound and watts per dollar, and you will discover that the rate of technical progress is very slow. Because of huge demand for mobile devices (not including autos), the rate of progress has moved up recently. But extrapolation of the plot shows it will be many decades before an electric car has the range and price point of a gas vehicle.
___________
Sebastian, your comment seems inappropriate in tone and context, as if I were a big fan of wind power (I’m not) and had great hopes for a “super-battery” (I don’t).
Furthermore, you say: “But extrapolation of the plot shows it will be many decades before an electric car has the range and price point of a gas vehicle.”
Electric cars are now appearing in the marketplace, and they may succeed or fail, but there is no need for them to have the same range as a gas vehicle – most people seldom use the full range of their gasoline vehicles, instead using their cars almost exclusively for short daily commutes to and from work.
The key to using all these electric cars in a collective ‘super-battery” is that this application is essentially free (secondary use of the resource), which means that your economic argument about the high cost of batteries does not have much traction.
I still see great practical obstacles for the “super-battery” concept, and I use the term broadly, to include batteries, capacitors, recycled hydroelectric power, or whatever, and I doubt that a super-battery will become a practical reality in the next twenty years.
In conclusion:
Wind power is still an energy dog. I wrote this conclusion, with confidence, in newspaper articles in 2002 and 2003. A decade later, this energy dog still has fleas. Even if we overcome the fatal flaws of wind power’s highly intermittent power generation profile through the use of a “super-battery”, there is still the serious problem of bird and bat kill.
Grid-connected wind power is uneconomic and anti-environmental.
Let me repeat yet again, for those who missed it:
“Wind power – it doesn’t just blow – it sucks!”
You forgot the other minor little problem, the cost of Renewables + Batteries, even super batterires make it uneconomic.
Not that it would stop Governments wasting Tax Payers money on them.
ALLAN MACRAE:
“The key to using all these electric cars in a collective ‘super-battery” is that this application is essentially free (secondary use of the resource), which means that your economic argument about the high cost of batteries does not have much traction.”
1. So I drive to work on a cloudy day, plug in my vehicle to charge, and lo and behold your “super-battery” begins to discharge my battery. Then when I come out to drive home, crap, I can’t leave because my battery is dead.
2. My partner works second shift and expects a charged battery when she leaves. But guess what? Your “super battery” has drained the battery and she can’t get to work.
3. Now it’s night and where does the power come from to charge all these dead batteries for the next day?
Jim Gorman, Allan McCrae:
Notice that “I” am forced by taxpayer subsidy to pay for Jim’s expensive daily-commute-to-a-government building parking lot electric car recharge stations, and the electricity that is dispensed to the government-subsidized electric cars for the government workers who are “allowed” to recharge their government-tax creditted electric cars …
“Electric cars are now appearing in the marketplace, and they may succeed or fail, but there is no need for them to have the same range as a gas vehicle – most people seldom use the full range of their gasoline vehicles, instead using their cars almost exclusively for short daily commutes to and from work.”
No need to have the same range? “Most” does not equal “all”. “Seldom” does not equal never.” “Almost” does not equal all. We do not make major purchases that merely meet our minimum requirements, but to meet all of our needs. I can get a range of 500-600 miles in a fossil-fueled vehicle, and refill the gas tank in less than fifteen minutes. That gives me some confidence that I can get to a sick relative nine hundred miles away reasonably quickly, out of the way of a hurricane or wildfire, or continue driving for several weeks in the event of a power failure or fuel shortage. It also means I won’t be spending a large fraction of my driving vacation through the mid-west waiting for a battery to charge.
The present ev’s are fine for as a second (third, fourth, fifth) car for the wealthy, or for a single SJW who never leaves his city, but for a significant number of us, with places to go and families to carry, they are non-starters.
How many people can afford one vehicle for commuting to work, and another vehicle for everything else?
Thank you all for your comments, with which I have already agreed, when I wrote above:
“I still see great practical obstacles for the “super-battery” concept, and I use the term broadly, to include batteries, capacitors, recycled hydroelectric power, or whatever, and I doubt that a super-battery will become a practical reality in the next twenty years.”
Reminiscent of Willis’s standard request:
Please do read what I have written before you agree (or disagree) with me, especially when you do so in the “first person accusatory” tense. 🙂
Jim – If that is your situation, you would not plug it into the super-battery. Alternatively, you would program your car to be fully charged for your afternoon departure time.
It is obvious that the grid needs a large proportion of 24/7 dispatchable power, which relegates wind and solar power to minority status, even in the presence of a (hypothetical) practical and economic super-battery.
Tom
The world was nothing like fossil free in 1700. The ports of Newcastle and Sunderland were shipping about 650,000 tons of coal per year at that time.
http://www.dmm.org.uk/history/htdd01.htm
By comparison, that is roughly a quarter of the total UK coal production today, though a tiny amount compared to the peak production of 287 million tons per year in 1913.
Thanks for the corrections.
EV have a 1% market share. Why aren’t climate change believers buying them? Reportedly 30% of the population are true believers. What am I missing?
Good question.
I always wonder why socialists don’t just make a society of socialists, where they would live according to their standard (as Amish do, for instance) without forcefully including non-believers (as Communists states did and still do), but the fact is, they don’t. Actually some did : Phalanstère, Kibbutz, … but despite the will and faith of participants, it always fails more than it spawns new replacement, so the scheme must have more flaws than virtues.
Never got an answer, just a big fat silence and let’s talk about something else
I think they just believe in “just talk about it” more than in “just do it”
A lot of the ones I’ve talked to proclaim that their schemes can’t work unless everyone is participating.
There is no excuse not to deploy Socialism on a university level, an essentially ‘closed’ society. Students do their work and get paid with grades. Let everyone do the work they wish to do, a share the average grade that work produces. Let’s see what happens.
But wait, jtom, there will be those in each class who are political or financial legacies at the institution. They will require full credit and lauriate status, despite the homogenization of the bourgeois’ academic performance.
” their schemes can’t work unless everyone is participating” is just another way to say it can’t work if people are allowed to escape. Which is just the point.
There are already many towns in the US that use virtually no fossil fuel energy. Any towns or cities that eliminate fossil fuel energy are likely to join them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ghost_towns_in_the_United_States
LOL!!
Tyhyv got the grid for backup, though, don’t they?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/10/22/weekly-climate-and-energy-news-roundup-288/comment-page-1/#comment-2643835
[excerpt]
WHAT IS GRID-CONNECTED WIND POWER REALLY WORTH?
Wind power is intermittent and non-dispatchable and therefore should be valued much lower than the reliable, dispatchable power typically available from conventional electric power sources such as fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
In practice, one should assume the need for almost 100% conventional backup for wind power (in the absence of a hypothetical grid-scale “super-battery”, which does not exist in practical reality). When wind dies, typically on very hot or very cold days, the amount of wind power generated approaches zero.
Capacity Factor equals {total actual power output)/(total rated capacity assuming 100% utilization). The Capacity Factor of wind power in Germany equals about 28%*. However, Capacity Factor is not a true measure of actual usefulness of grid-connected wind power. The following paragraph explains why:
Current government regulations typically force wind power into the grid ahead of conventional power, and pay the wind power producer equal of greater sums for wind power versus conventional power, which artificially makes wind power appear more economic. This practice typically requires spinning backup of conventional power to be instantly available, since wind power fluctuates wildly, reportedly at the cube of the wind speed. The cost of this spinning backup is typically not deducted from the price paid to the wind power producer.
The true factor that reflects the intermittency of wind power Is the Substitution Capacity*, which is about 5% in Germany (and declining) – a large grid with a large wind power component. Substitution Capacity is the amount of dispatchable (conventional) power you can permanently retire when you add more wind power to the grid. In Germany they have to add ~20 units of wind power to replace 1 unit of dispatchable power. This is extremely uneconomic.
I SUGGEST THAT THE SUBSTITUTION CAPACITY OF ~5% IS A REASONABLE FIRST APPROXIMATION FOR WHAT WIND POWER IS REALLY WORTH – that is 1/20th of the value of reliable, dispatchable power from conventional sources. Anything above that 5% requires spinning conventional backup, which makes the remaining wind power redundant and essentially worthless.
This is a before-coffee first-approximation of the subject. Improvements are welcomed, provided they are well-researched and logical.
Regards, Allan
* Reference:
“E.On Netz excellent Wind Report 2005” at
http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/wp-content/uploads/eonwindreport2005.pdf
Allan, please stop referencing and 10 year old report and ignoring all the evidence since then.
Kit – you are a know-nothing or just a bullsh!tter.
Nothing has changed in this report – it is basic physics.
Retired,
Does this mean I should quit referencing Einstein’s 1905 papers on physics because those papers are now over a century old?
The last time I looked, Newton’s Laws had not changed.
Kit, since you are so knowledgeable, perhaps you can detail what has changed since then.
Here is a graph of German wind production 2015, 2016 calculated at 5% nameplate intervals..
As you can see, in 2015, 2016 it was below 16% of nameplate 50% of the time.
And rarely got to 40%
Andy,
That is a very informative graph. Do you have a link to the source data?
Cheers
https://www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html
U.K. National Grid Status
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
France National Grid Status
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/france/
Performance of Photovoltaics (PV) in Germany
https://www.sma.de/en/company/pv-electricity-produced-in-germany.html
Agreed, Allen – “renewables” need to fetch a price reflective of their actual (minuscule) worth – AND should receive no “preference” or subsidy of any kind. That would end the needless construction of windmills and solar panels faster than anything.
Wait until the “100% Renewable City” gets a power failure during a cold snap, when the wind dies and the Sun sets.
We have experienced several of these in Canada during severe ice storms. It’s not much fun. Everything stops, Some people die. Just how delusional do you have to be to willingly put yourself in this situation?
Bill? I’m talking to you.
“Bill McKibben genuinely believe that renewables are an inexpensive replacement for fossil fuels.”
And on that point alone he is wrong, and either is ignorant of the reality that renewables are a huge economic cost, and that by themselves renewables can not be sustained. Or is he just willfully trying to make a name for himself by this political campaigning (on this single issue), pulling the wool over the eyes of the innocent bystander who’s ignorant of the technical issues, and are unaware of Bill McKibben’s probable underlying motive is to destroy America’s economic base.
I wonder what financial benefit does Bill McKibben get for this and from who?
It probably doesn’t matter one way or another to him. He’s a socialist, probably communist, and his only goal is to make everyone poor and miserable, except himself, of course, and Bernie and the other gods of global warming. If selling oil and gas could lead to socialism and dicatatorships in the US, Bill would out there pushing oil and gas and how sharing is caring and whatever else his brain could turn into a slogan for destroying freedom and lifestyles. The end is all that matter—the means are irrelevant.
Sheri
A poor reader of history then. He’d likely be in the first consignment of useful idiots to go.
Bill McKibben is a true believer. He believes that God has given us a stewardship over the earth. He truly believes he is preventing the earth from being destroyed by doing this.
Rhys – No he doesn’t. Note what I posted at 6:50 PM.
Tom
Can you put a number on ‘huge’ relative to society?
I only ask because I am in Lost Wages, Nevada. The cost of Casinos and new football stadium is huge.
Retired Kit P,
Much expensive than many, many, many, many,many,many,many…
(get the message?) than society should pay when COAL, Gas, Oil, and Nuclear are the cheaper options that operate 24/7 for many decades..
Between the actual cost of manufacture, installation, and maintenance of those unreliables, then the required grid re-engineering to allow the unreliable to operate on the grid.
Huge as in it’s cost in productive agricultural turned into industrial blight, cost in making the grid less reliable, cost as in $ubsidies to keep the boondoggle going. Huge as it never being able to show a return on investment over their lifetime without all that tax-payer funds as $ubsidies. While the $ubsidies continue the true cost is incalculable, just a bottomless pit of expense. (get the message?)
“huge” means just that.
The cost of Casinos and football stadium ARE huge, indeed, but people are willing to pay for them. People also pay bigly for an endless list of stuff they do them no good, and even harms. As long as this is their choice, well, fair enough.
The same applies to renewable energy: just fine as long as you are willing to pay the price (and by price, understand not just money, but also the fact that you won’t have energy when you will, but when wind and sun allows),
If people are willing to pay for football stadiums, why do we usually have to get government to do it?
End the oil industry and the world will come to a grinding halt. Literally. Why? Because there will be no lubricants for machines, including bird munchers. Plant based lubricants only go so far.
You have to wonder how much thought they put in to their Fabian Utopia/ post energy era world.
I suspect Bill McKibben’s closest living relative is a dung beetle. ONLY dung beetles and some humans have a limitless appetite for swallowing bullshit.
H T, I made this point earlier. There is A LOT of things the Oil Industry will/must continue to provide regardless how much energy renewables do or do not provide…
I absolutely refuse to fly on an airliner with windmills on its wings, rather than jet fuel engines , or a cruise ship with 300K solar panels over hanging the deck, and that is only for powering the lights.
I would surmise that either Davos or the Paris Accord Conferences would have ANY attendees without fossil fuel transportation. I have yet to see an Amphibious Prious …
Bill quotes the Sierra Club, so we are talking about Agenda 21 and everything after it.
So I don’t think he believes any of it it for 1 minute.
What he believes in is the “New World Order”, as he thinks he qould be one of them.
They could bring back sailing ships and give the whales another tuneup
The morally superior tell us that the stone age didn’t end because they ran out of rock and the oil age won’t end when we run out of oil.
But the whale oil industry was about to run out of whales. We only have them to save today because mineral oil made them redundant. That sounds like a green tick to me. 🙂
Windmills are full of copper windings which are coated in plastics to prevent shorting. Ending the fossil fuel industry by default will end windmills.
It is simply about money and who writes their paychecks. Just like it is for the climate pseudoscientists.
Bill McKibben and his 350.org theirs funds and paychecks from the likes of Soros and Steyer. They continue to keep their hands in those pockets doing their bidding while carniaval barking, as agood laps dogs.
Socialism. Pure and simple, activist socialism.
Not quite, it is a new world order they want, they are trying to destroy capatalism, which they made their money from and they want to shut off the spigot so no one else can do the same to challenge them.