Guest essay by Eric Worrall
What power system is most likely to survive a category six superstorm?
Climate change may scuttle Caribbean’s post-hurricane plans for a renewable energy boom
MASAŌ ASHTINE, UNIVERSITY OF THE WEST INDIES, MONA CAMPUS
April 20, 2018 Updated: April 20, 2018 11:02am
(The Conversation is an independent and nonprofit source of news, analysis and commentary from academic experts.)
Masaō Ashtine, University of the West Indies, Mona Campus
(THE CONVERSATION) Puerto Rico lost electricity again on April 18, seven months after Hurricane Maria first knocked out the island’s power grid. For people in some remote rural areas, the blackout was more of the same. Their power had yet to be restored.
The dangerous fragility of Puerto Rico’s energy systems has put other Caribbean countries on high alert. Across the region, electric grids are dated, ailing and overburdened – making it easy work for a powerful passing storm.
Caribbean nations also rely heavily on oil and diesel imports to fuel their power plants – a dirty and expensive way to produce energy. So even before the 2017 hurricane season, Caribbean governments were trying to integrate renewable energy sources like wind and solar into their existing grids.
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Unfortunately, I believe that climate change will also complicate the region’s transition toward renewable energy. The Caribbean is comprised of island nations, which are the world’s most vulnerable places when it comes to rising seas, changing weather patterns and other effects of global warming.
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Installing more wind, solar and hydropower – the world’s most reliable and common renewable energy options – would seem to be a more obvious step in the right direction. Between 2015 and 2016, the global capacity of these green power sources rose 9 percent – nearly half of which comes from the widespread adoption of solar panels.
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But, in a Caribbean of increasing weather extremes, these green energy systems are themselves vulnerable.
Modern wind turbines, for example, were first engineered in Europe – a region that rarely experiences Category 5 hurricanes. Wind speeds above 165 mph would tear the turbines apart.
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Read more: https://www.sfchronicle.com/news/article/Climate-change-may-scuttle-Caribbean-s-12850346.php
Coal, gas, zero emission nuclear – all these systems can be armoured. Properly constructed nuclear power plants are already heavily armoured.
Wind turbines, solar panels – not so much.
Granted Fukushima suffered a meltdown when the cooling systems were destroyed by a Tsunami, but Fukishima was old technology; modern passive safe designs like pebble bed reactors cannot melt down, even if all their cooling infrastructure is physically destroyed.
Burying the power lines should also be a no brainer. Well constructed buried power lines are not damaged by storm winds, and are more resistant to floods.
Contrast this to the blindingly obvious risk that even normal storms will smash fragile solar and wind power installations, let alone the worsening superstorms climate change is supposed to deliver, and it should be obvious to everyone except greens that renewables are a complete fail for delivering reliable electricity in storm prone regions.
That windmill photos gets a laugh out of me every time.
Sorry … wind turbine.
Prayer wheel?
Hope wheel.
Propeller
Comic relief:
http://www.windaction.org/posts?p=8&topic=Structural+Failure&type=Picture
Wheel of Misfortune.
Whirligig
Subsidy farm marker.
After all the subsidies have been farmed they are left as monuments to green stupidity and political virtue signalling.
Though I guess it mills OPM quite well.
“Installing more wind, solar and hydropower – the world’s most reliable and common renewable energy options ”
First , hydropower is very limited in its application, so that’s done.
But, wind and solar are NOT, NOT, NOT the most reliable and common renewable energy option. They might be called “common” because politicians are forcing them one people and nations, but they are not reliable at all, cost more than annoy other energy, and are not sustainable.
YOU CANNOT BUILD A RELIABLE ENERGY SUPPLY FROM UNRELIABLE ENERGY SOURCES.
“Sustainable” does not include equipment that requires rare elements, which are expensive. They are expensive because they are not sustainable, being rare. How do so few people understand this?
Turbine blades in jet engines work quite nicely at very high speeds. It ought to be possible to build relatively small wind turbines that could handle hurricane-force winds. The problem might be making a device that could handle not only high winds, but also debris blown by the storm. Jet engines are notoriously susceptible to “FOD” or “foreign object damage”.
Alternatively, larger wind turbines could be designed to “fold down” in preparation for high winds, and stowed.
I’m not going to attempt to calculate whether it would be economical to build wind turbines that would be able to withstand the storms.
Well, since it is not economical to build wind turbines that can’t handle storms … the analysis for a more expensive turbine should be fairly straight forward.
‘…..Jet engines are notoriously susceptible to “FOD” or “foreign object damage”.’
Yep. I served in the U.S. Navy in my younger days. During air operations at sea, aircraft carrier flight crews will do what’s called a “FOD walkdown” on the flight deck. They form a line and walk across the flight deck looking for anything on the deck which could get into the turbines of the jet engines and cause damage.
I can only begin to imagine what would happen to a wind turbine on land when a hurricane blows an object into it. That is one of the reasons why I would guess wind turbines are a bad idea in hurricane prone areas.
Hurricanes are dangerous.
Few things can survive them undamaged.
The answer for renewables is to be so cheap that they can be rebuilt immediately.
There needs to be a step change in technology for solar and wind. Each panel needs to cost less than a single US dollar. And each turbine less than 10.
Until then it’s not economic in the Caribbean.
Is it economical anywhere?
Snicker… Wind turbines only generate electricity within a narrow range of wind speed, depending on the design. Armored modular nuclear reactors would probably be the optimum trade-off.
We’re even prevented by CC from mitigating CC by utilizing wind and solar energy. We’re doomed I tell you. We’re doomed.
‘The Caribbean is comprised of island nations, which are’…………. mostly mountainous………. ‘the world’s most vulnerable places when it comes to rising seas’,… if it’s 100’s of feet
“Burying the power lines”….would cost way too much money they don’t have…..unless the drug trade picks up
Burying the power lines is up to 10X the cost of overhead and up to 4X the life-cycle cost for the cable itself. High water tables complicate things, and ground movement can be an issue (Christchurch).
ElonMusk is trying to convince the Puerto Ricons that his batteries and solar panels will allow folks to not need a grid, but even if folks could afford his solar roofs ,the sun can disappear for a lot longer period of time than batteries can provide power – they are only able to shift power a matter of hours, not days.
The Problem isn’t mythical climate change. It is money deficiency up front. The situation is like the ancient movie clip: W.C.Fields is in his long chauffeured sedan and encounters a little girl running madly next to her bicycle. He hails, ‘Little Girl, why don’t you just ride your bicycle?’ … she replies, “I can’t, I’m running too hard”.
This is the Caribbean.
Spending millions of VERY short-supply money on fuel oil, diesel, gasoline.
Some to make power.
Some to power motorcycles.
Some to power cars, busses and trucks.
Some even to bottle up and sell as cooking fuel.
It is running too fast against its petroleum-fueled energy deficit than to invest the nonexistent surplus money on anything as forward thinking as nuclear power.
In many ways, the Caribbean countries are poster children demonstrating that one can really keep a whole people enslaved to something, so long as they must buy small portions of the something all the time, every day. Like the countless people in East Oakland who buy single bars of soap, baggies of laundry detergent, pints of milk, half-pints of booze. Small quantities because as they “stretch their money”, they end up spending quite a premium to NOT buy anything in bulk.
Just saying.
Poverty is real.
But the crutch of impoverished planning is a yoke around the poor’s neck.
GoatGuy
Good analogy, I am on fixed income. Thank goodness for Amazon which gives me the ability to stretch my dollars. I buy a case of toilet paper once a year. I do similar for roll towels, etc. That makes a big difference in allowing me to stretch my thin dollars. When I shop with my food stamps I also buy bulk products. Then break that down for storage, and I get by very well doing that. With a nice garden and the know how to process foods from my years of restaurant experience I eat very well, and always have many months of food stocked up. At the peak of my garden I give stuff away to neighbors.
Extremely odd statement GoatGuy.
You describe their funds deficiency and infer blame on fossil fuels.
Yet, fossil fuels are the simplest and most efficient method for Puerto Rico to solve their money deficiency problems.
That is, to build or assemble product for sale internationally.
Not demonize fossil fuels.
Puerto Rico certainly does not have the income to support the most expensive energy forms; allegedly renewable wind or solar.
Nuclear energy would be the and is the best energy sources that support the entire GDP (Gross Domestic Product) development, build and sale process.
Only, nuclear energy requires the highest levels of up front expenditure and longest running rigorous meticulous maintenance expenditures.
Nuclear energy production has the greatest sensitivity to corruption caused weaknesses.
Which leaves fossil fuels as Puerto Rico’s best solution and a viable long term goal.
Just a side thought- I remember when Bunker C and better oil was competitive with coal and natural gas for electricity generation on our East Coast. Most people forget that after the US guaranteed again to protect Saudi Arabia after the 1973 oil crisis, the dropping oil prices reached around $7 a barrel at times. In 1997 the US terminated a major project to develop bio-oils from algae because it was uneconomical. Much of Puerto Rico’s generation capacity was developed during this era to run on imported oil.
I have been down to the islands in the immediate aftermath of major hurricane hits. Two things hit you hard.
1) The incredible storm damage. Palm trees blown down *everywhere*. Whole palm forests knocked flat. Roads blocked by hundreds of trees per mile. Bridges destroyed by torrents of flooded streams. Huge mudslides coming down the mountains, again destroying roads.
2) The other thing to see is the tremendous energy and industrious work of the locals getting things working again. Roads are cleared, temporary river crossings created (sometimes little more than fording areas), power restored. As soon as raw basic services are restored, businesses reopen and people get back to their day jobs.
Unfortunately, sometimes the island is completely devastated, with no area untouched. In this case the people are in a world of hurt. Rescue supplies of food, water, medicines and emergency shelters have to be the first priority. Then comes generators, fuel, chainsaws, heavy equipment, and building supplies. Rebuilding will be a long, slow, painful and expensive process.
Having a heavy reliance on renewables is decidedly *unhelpful*. It is already decided that they will be destroyed in a hurricane, and would have to be rebuilt from the start. Until then you have a big power generation deficit, hindering other recovery efforts. Not good. Bad planning.
Extended power outages in the Caribbean and Puerto Rico in particular were almost exclusively due to failures of electrical distribution systems, not generation. Those failures were attributable in large part to old, under-capitalized, poorly maintained systems. Anything that drives up cost of power (e.g. renewables) will be an (even greater) economic disaster for the region. The archipelagic nature of the grid provides little opportunity for load sharing and exacerbates the intermittency problem for renewables.
In the Caribbean having a bunch of medium size, modern coal plants with big-ass piles of coal on site to minimize supply disruptions is probably an optimal solution.
This country is broke, but they should really bury all their power lines where possible.
Sure, Elon, build these poor people more solar and battery capacity. Exactly what they don’t need.
Footage of damage on Puerto Rico due to Hurricane Maria, last fall.
At around the 2:00 min mark, a wind farm with large turbines shows catastrophic damage to every single machine, all with lost blades, and none capable of generating.
Around 3:40 mark, we see footage of downed power lines along a coast road.
At 4:30, we see damage to a solar field. A huge percentage of the panels are destroyed, with one end of the large field faring slightly better. This field will need to be completely rebuilt before anyone will get any useful electricity from this facility. Not only that, the existing panels will require work to clean up and recycle.
At 5:50, we see some sort of radar or communication tower. If there was a surrounding sphere, it’s completely gone.
At the 7:00 mark, there’s some sort of commercial greenhouse, it looks like, with glass panels blown out.
Of course, many houses, roads and bridges damaged, with roofs torn off boats on dry land, flash flood damage, hillside slumps, downed trees. Many homes and small villages are scattered and high on steep hills, with their roads damaged.
What I found amazing was that most of the houses with completely flat roofs appear to be undamaged, while houses with ridged roofs – even if only slightly ridged – seem far more likely to have part or all of the roof missing. I assume that the ridged roofs created sufficient lift that they were dislodged from their moorings, and hence were blown away.
Just to add some dimension to the condition (I hesitate to call it a problem since there are no affordable solutions), the link below connects to a list of hurricanes that have hit Puerto Rico.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Hurricanes_in_Puerto_Rico
As you can see from this Wikipedia article, hurricanes and tropical storms are just an ongoing feature of living in this little corner of paradise. Storm damage happens — and frequently…..and many time severe.
I was in San Juan a few months after Hugo paid a visit in 1989. The damage that Maria dealt looks much the same as the damage from Hugo except perhaps it’s a more severe same old same old.
Just change this line,
“The Caribbean is comprised of island nations, which are the world’s most vulnerable places when it comes to rising seas, changing weather patterns and other effects of global warming.”
to this,
“The Caribbean is comprised of tropical island nations, which are the world’s most vulnerable places when it comes to the expected damage to solar and wind energy production due to naturally occurring tropical storms.”
and it makes a lot more sense.
I was enjoying a beverage at a breezy open air cafe on one of the islands. You could not help but notice the roof supports. The roof ridge was supported by a huge wooden truss. The truss members were huge 8 in. X 14 in. timbers. All joints were made with heavy steel plates and generously through-bolted with equally massive bolts. The rest of the building frame was built to match, with massive timbers, lots of steel at every connection, and plenty of big bolts to hold it all together.
All in all, it was reminiscent of the post and beam construction of a New England dairy barn of old. But the old dairy barns were built to store many, many tons of hay in the loft.
Here, the roof was just a roof. So why the massive overbuild?
Finally it dawned on me. That massive structure was not to hold the roof up, it was to hold the roof down.
Just to be pedantic, Fukushima melted down because the emergency generators intended to power the auxiliary cooling systems were destroyed by the tsunami. Had they been sufficiently elevated, even this old technology nuclear plant would have survived.
I noticed that as well, Paul. You are spot on.
While I agree that turbines and solar panels are not the answer, the answer is not burying power lines. Burying is prohibitively expensive (especially high power lines) and PR would never be able to recoup the cost.
Take a look at what rural residents in Ontario are being forced to deal with:
http://ontario-wind-resistance.org/2015/01/27/first-wind-turbines-then-power-lines-and-now-they-need-guard-rails/
Driving down roads that have monstrous turbines on either side and especially at night through clusters with piercing red lights flashing is dangerous.
“the world’s most reliable and common renewable energy options”
That thar is one mighty low bar to surpass.
If Fukushima’s diesel generator had been above ground instead of in the basement, or at least in a water tight room. There never would have been a meltdown.
Actually if they had put the emergency generators in the parking lot level at Fukushima there would have been no melt down.
I understand that even when emergency generator arrived on the plant, the electric connections where wet and couldn’t be used.
UNLESS the power lines are buried, there is NO WAY any high voltage main transmission lines can survive a CAT 6 storm. Too many towers will blow down. The only way to survive with power still available is to distribute small generators widely – to long high power transmission lines are not necessary – or bury the grid (and hope the earthquakes aren’t too bad!)
Where exactly, is the evidence that climate change is creating stronger storms?
“let alone the worsening superstorms climate change is supposed to deliver,”
ya the above sentence made me cringe
There is no evidence of worsening storms, but it is fun to point out green ideas make no sense even on their own terms.
Gads! We are supposed to pretend a typical Atlantic hurricane is now a ‘Climate Super Storm’??!!
These griffters will say anything to keep their long con game running!
Speaking of griffters, haven’t seen any mewling posts from Griff in a while???
Griff has been gracing Tony Heller’s site recently, spreading the, er, wealth.
Fertilizer.
Go easy on Ms. Griff! She provided a lot of humor. She was the epitome of the dumb blonde joke. I looked forward to reading her “thoughts” on climate science. I just had to be careful to swallow my coffee before I read beyond her name.
Expensive fossil fuel, 10 cents per KWHr, Cheap Renewable 40 Cents
per KWhr. Use geothermal and second hand turbines, problem solved cheaply
And then in order to have money with which to subsidize the “renewables”, you must have a ‘sustainable’ economy that is powered reliably by energy that is derived mostly from fossil fuels. Then you can have enough solar and wind generation that you can show it off and use it to do a bit of virtue signalling.
There is no such thing as a category six storm. The definition of category 5 has no upper limit.
Greens want a Category six so they can point and cluck…
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-22/new-category-six-cyclone-rating-needed-nz-climate-minister-says/9473574
Just turn it up to “12”.
Yet another sign of how “climate change” requires the true believer to be self deluded.
https://youtu.be/DzLP2Z7JVZA
Even though I’ve seen that a million times, I still laugh.
The power cut is really way beyond comprehension. These are small islands. Small cable trencher costs nothing. Getting some experts from Iceland costs nothing.
Please take time to look at a map of Puerto Rico.
It is a hilly, mountainous island from shore to shore. Trenching through the frequent solid rock extrusions is not so easy.
I’ve driven completely around PR, as well as bisected it through the mountains. While there are places as you described, mainly in the mountainous interior, most of the cities could be served by buried lines. In the other areas, just do the same as they do with their water and sewerage (you don’t think they’re handled by pole lines, do you?). Put the cables in steel pipes on the ground running alongside the roads.
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It’s fun to see energy storage at work to respond to emergency situations like this one, but it’s now clear that Puerto Rico needs a better long-term solution to their energy grid problems.
https://electrek.co/2018/04/18/tesla-powerwall-powerpack-puerto-rico-blackout-elon-musk/
Unquote
Not fun for the million without
Perhaps the grid went down because of people drawing additional power to charge their Tesla Powerwalls and Powerpacks.