Will corporate and government green-washing save Earth from inflated or phony eco scares?
Paul Driessen
I’d just passed the local Starbucks in Chicago, when my cell phone buzzed to say the Washington, DC City Council had unanimously agreed “in a preliminary vote” to require that 100% of the District’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2032. How can they put hundreds of wind turbines and solar arrays in DC, or get only renewable electrons from the wind-solar-fossil-nuclear grid? I wondered.
Then, just a few hours later, I received an email from a marketing and public relations firm. “Starbucks IL Stores Going 100 Percent Renewable,” it announced. The email and a related news release explained that Starbucks has entered into an agreement to power some 340 company-operated Illinois neighborhood coffee shops (plus the future Chicago coffee bean Roastery) entirely with renewable wind energy.
The electricity will be generated by the soon-to-be-completed HillTopper wind project in Logan County, about 150 miles southwest of Chicago. HillTopper is operated by Enel Green Power North America, but the Starbucks deal also involves a separate agreement with Exelon Corporation subsidiary Constellation.
The project’s nameplate capacity totals 185 megawatts; once fully operational, HillTopper will be able to generate 570 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually … under optimal wind conditions. The Starbucks-Enel-Constellation arrangement will involve 48,000 megawatt-hours of wind power annually – “enough to brew nearly 100 million cups of coffee” in the Illinois shops – the memos state.
All these numbers certainly get confusing – an unavoidable problem with wind (and solar) energy, largely due to its notoriously intermittent, unreliable, weather-dependent nature. The problem is also irrelevant to issues that are central to all “renewable” energy and their conjoined “Save the Earth” campaigns.
The fundamental, though diligently ignored reality is that nothing about wind (or solar) energy is renewable or sustainable. Breezes and sunlight are certainly renewable, if inconstant, and free. But their energy is highly diffused and dispersed – the very opposite of densely packed coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear fuels. And the complex systems needed to harness “free” wind power are anything but free.
Major wind projects like HillTopper require scores base that can reach 100 feet below the surface, a 400-foot-tall tower, a monstrous nacelle and generator, and 215-foot-long blades. They kill raptors, other birds and bats by the thousands. And every “wind farm” requires 100% backup by coal or gas-fired power plants that run 24/7/365 on “spinning reserve,” ready to power up every time the wind dies down.
During a nasty heat wave in 2012, northern Illinois electricity demand averaged 22,000 megawatts, but turbines generated a miserly 4 MW. Try brewing coffee in 340 Starbucks shops on 4 megawatts, especially while operating the lights, refrigerators, AC and computer hookups on that piddling electricity.
The backup units require only a few hundred acres, but they also require extra costs, materials and fuels – which means you need expensive duplicate energy systems. That is not renewable or sustainable, either.
Briefly analyzing the life-cycle, cradle-to-grave, global aspects of a wind project and its fossil fuel backup power plants – to assess their “climate friendliness,” renewability and sustainability – requires reviewing the fuels and raw materials needed to manufacture, install and maintain both systems.
Coal and gas power plants require enormous amounts of concrete, steel, copper and other materials, reflecting their energy output. Wind turbine towers and bases require thousands of tons of concrete and steel; rotor blades are made from fiberglass, carbon fibers and petroleum resins; nacelles from petroleum composites; generators and magnets from steel, copper, rare earth metals and multiple other materials. Transmission lines need steel, concrete, copper and plastic. Not one of these materials is renewable.
Extracting ores for these metals, limestone for concrete, petroleum for resins and composites, requires removing billions of tons of rock, processing and smelting ores into usable metals, refining crude oil, and manufacturing everything into finished products. Every step in those processes requires fossil fuels. You cannot make even one wind turbine with wind energy – or transport a turbine … or coffee beans … with wind (or solar) energy.
A single HillTopper-sized wind turbine contains about 800 pounds of neodymium, 130 pounds of dysprosium, other rare earth elements, and tons of other metals. If you want to use rechargeable batteries, instead of coal or gas backup units, you need lanthanum, specialized rare earth alloys, lithium, nickel, cadmium and assorted other metals – in massive quantities.
Many of those metals come primarily from China, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other places where child labor is common, adults earn a few dollars a day, and health, safety and environmental rules are all but nonexistent. They’re the renewable energy equivalent of “blood diamonds” and slave labor.
All this raises some awkward but vital questions that customers, journalists, regulators and politicians might want to ask Starbucks CEO Kevin Johnson, former CEO and now executive chairman Howard Schultz, board chairman Myron Ullman, vice chair Mellody Hobson, and local franchise owners.
* Will Starbucks Illinois stores actually get electricity from HillTopper? Will transmission lines run directly from the Enel wind turbines to each Starbucks store? If not, how will Enel separate wind-generated electrons from the renewable-fossil-hydro-nuclear mixture on the regional grid?
* Since neither of those options is viable, will stores just get fancy certificates, attesting that equivalent amounts of electricity were transmitted from HillTopper to some customers somewhere in the state?
* What will power the shops when the wind isn’t blowing? If the HillTopper electricity is used to brew 100,000,000 cups of coffee a year, what’s left for lights, heat, AC, the Chicago Roastery and so on?
* How is it possibly “renewable” or “climate friendly” energy, if the turbines, transmission lines, backup batteries and backup fossil fuel power plants all require numerous non-renewable raw materials and fuels? How does your 100% renewable pledge factor in the fossil fuels needed to build all those components?
* How will your shops function without fossil fuels for plastic cups, tables, chairs, display cases and counter tops; paints and cleaners; ships and trucks to haul coffee beans; and factories to make all this stuff?
* How is it ethical, moral or “social justice” to get your electricity from slave and child laborers, who risk their health and lives in filthy, toxic pits, under few or no health or safety standards? Will you demand better, safer, more environmentally sound practices in those countries? If so, how might autocratic rulers in those countries react to those campaigns – and impact your business and profits there?
* Will Starbucks require that Enel Green Power allow independent biologists on its HillTopper sites, to determine precisely and honestly how many birds and bats are butchered by turbine blades every year – and prevent company or hired personnel from burying carcasses or letting scavengers haul them off?
* How is it ethical for highly profitable companies like Starbucks, Enel and Constellation to profit from a wind energy system that exists only because of government mandates and taxpayer and ratepayer subsidies? How is it ethical to launch slick PR campaigns to get glowing press coverage for doing so?
* Even with subsidies, wind-based electricity (with its essential battery or fossil fuel backup systems) is more expensive than conventional power. Will the higher electricity costs be passed on to Starbucks customers – or will Illinois ratepayers in general be saddled with higher prices?
* What climate benefits will come from this? Asian and African countries have more than 1,500 new coal-fired power plants under construction or in planning. Assuming for the moment that carbon dioxide actually is the primary force in climate change – how many thousandths of one degree less global warming will the Starbucks Illinois wind energy program result in? Who made that calculation for you?
It’s hard not to view this “100% renewable electricity” campaign as little more than a very clever public relations and virtue-signaling exercise, presented to friendly media to garner accolades the companies really don’t deserve. It will be interesting to see how company officials answer questions like these.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of books, studies and articles on energy, climate change, the environment and human rights.
Hydrocarbon fuels contain energy stored during photosynthesis.
Q: What drives photosynthesis?
A: Light from the sun.
Starbucks can use hydrocarbon fuels, and truthfully say they are using stored solar energy.
Starbucks will probably die soon…….had one cup of coffee there once, was average and not any better than instant at home.
But that is a HUGE part of climate change, an opportunity to virtue signal, nice proud empty hypocritical narcissistic arrogant egotistical virtue signalling, in 101 different flavors.
In the Climate ampitheater, Virtue Signaling is the name of the game. As long as you genuflect properly and sincerely at the Greenie Altar, and promise to do pennance, you are good to go. Appearances are everything. It’s how they keep the CAGW juggernaut trundling along, even as the wheels fall off and it self-destructs.
Think of this: the very fact that we are ABLE to build such big wind mills means we do NOT need them, because of the huge amount of fossil fueled energy needed to build them.
Gee, I don’t EVER recall hearing all the rightwingers bloviating so eloquently and endlessly about the evils of intermittent HYDRO power like do they about wind and solar power.
All power supplies are “intermittent” – no power generator has a 100% power capacity factor. And all power demands are intermittent. Matching demands to supplies is the trick of centralized power generation and distribution. It’s not that hard most of the time.
And where wind power is generated, the scientists have extremely good data on how often and how hard the wind blows, and places that can produce much less than 40% capacity factors are avoided for new wind farms, and other places with higher wind stability are preferred. Ditto on solar power generation. Today, the average capacity factor for wind farms is about 40+ percent, and the newer plants are routinely hitting 50% – which is equal to the best of the hydro power sites that we’ve been depending upon since the 19th century.
“All power supplies are “intermittent” FALSE
HYDRO isn’t intermittent by the minute, hour or day like solar or wind is. You can still deliver base load electricity with Hydro until you make a decision based upon storage levels to start winding down in an orderly fashion. You can generate Firm power for as long as you have sufficient water/head. Even Run of River Hydro is fairly stable since it is the seasonality of the watershed that governs flow, and anyway, the head pond has head level control so it is very gradual up and down, not on and off. Not like wind, where a gust has your wind farm going 4 Mw to flat out 600 Mw in 15 seconds, and then back to 4 Mw 2 minutes later. Same for solar with a cloud going over the solar farm.
This is why intermittent renewables should only get wholesale rate, but yet they are subsidized to the point of shuffling off base load coal and gas to the spot market where it is worthless, because these renewables get priority access to the grid. You can only do this to a point, before you crash your grid and make the product so expensive, that it was never worth doing in the first place. So you are wrong about that aspect of your comment Duane. These renewables in high proportion to the rest of the generating assets are damaging to the power generation profile and planning. This is why everybody is so mad, especially the crazy high prices that get paid to these shiesters.
As soon as you said that we match demand to supply, I stopped reading. You obviously have no idea how the electric utility system works. Supply must be matched to demand, and no, that’s not just semantics. Electrical generation must always load follow demand, but I bet you can’t explain why. Not only can hydro load follow, but it can provide baseload as well. And because hydro uses huge spinning generators, they can supply frequency control. Wind and solar can do none of these things and are in fact grid destabilizers; conventional plants must be taken on and off line to account for their intermittency.
Looks like Duane is another leftwinger who couldn’t care less about reality.
First off, Hydro isn’t intermittent. To the degree that it’s output changes during the day, that’s do to changes in demand, not supply.
While it is true that everything requires back up, fossil fuel and nuclear are available 90%+ of the time, while wind is available less than 20% of the time and solar isn’t much better. Combine that with the fact that you know weeks and months ahead of time when fossil/nuclear will be shut down for maintenance, wind and solar can and do shut down randomly without any warning.
Just where are these mythical places where wind is available 40% of the time and why have none been developed yet?
PS: It really is fascinating how Duane is so convinced that it’s only right wingers who care about affordable and reliable power.
Solar in Oregon is also toxic.
“The project’s nameplate capacity totals 185 megawatts; once fully operational, HillTopper will be able to generate 570 gigawatt-hours of electricity annually … under optimal wind conditions”
This gives the project a 35% capacity factor “under optimal wind conditions” which is a nonsense and meaningless. You could just as easily say the projects capacity factor is 100% “under perfect wind conditions”.
“Under normal wind conditions” the capacity factor would be around 25% bringing the annual production down to 405 GigaWatthours.
Paul Driessen,
Great essay!
A question that you did not ask: How many of the green virtue signalling outfits will claim the same ‘renewable’ wind of solar generation. I would not be surprised if the same ‘renewable’ source was claimed by many different virtue signaling saviors but the power output coming up short. Hell, I could claim that all my power comes from solar or wind, but I’m not willing to pay the market price for it. It would take some ‘magical’ accounting if everyone made the same claim.
RENEWABLE energy kills. It’s is a program to eliminate the unwanted, the poorest citizens of our society, not unlike results of the Nazi Holocaust.
ONTARIO’S 2008-enacted Green Energy Act mandates converting to renewables and shutdown of coal-fired electric plants, with the wind energy costing upwards of 41 cents per kwhr, compared to previous coal-generated power at 3 cents/kwhr, that once comprised the most advanced fleet of coal generators on the continent. Ontario’s electricity costs are now the highest in North America.
References: WindWatch http://www.wind-watch.org/faq-output.php
Ontario’s high-cost wind-millstone, CCRE Commentary, June 2017 by Marc Brouillette Council for Clean and Reliable Energy http://www.thinkpower.ca
Quarterly stats show wind power blowing Ontario electricity costs higher https://parkergallantenergyperspectivesblog.wordpress.com/
Getting zapped: Ontario’s residential hydro prices increasing faster than anywhere in North America:
Brady Yauch, economist, Energy Probe, Consumer Policy Institute, http://cpiprobeinternational.org
SECOND, consider the more than 440,000 Ontarians that can either no longer afford electricity from wind turbines, have been disconnected, or their electric bills are in arrears, and disconnections threaten them.
References:Ontario’s Wind Power Obsession Punishing Thousands-390,000 Families Struggling
to Pay Power Bills and 58,000 Disconnected — https://stopthesethings.com/2018/01/17
/ontarios-wind-power-obsession-punishing-thousands-390000-families-struggling-
to-pay-power-bills-58000-disconnected
THIRD, consider the Ontarians now among the energy impoverished if their annual incomes fall below $47,700
Reference: Who suffers most from high energy prices in Canada?
— April 19, 2016 https://www.fraserinstitute.org/blogs/who-suffers-most-from-high-energy-prices-in-canada
The material above should be presented to any legislative committee considering renewables, along with graphics on easel-mounted flip charts and handouts. (It would be happening, if we were the well-organized, well-funded entity we are accused of being.)
A gif is worth a thousand words:
Paul,
The problems of wind and solar were known in adequate detail when I first got involved about 1970. Fifty years ago just about every relevant engineer did the calculations that showed no significant part to play except for niche applications and in remote locations. The energy supply was too diffuse and too intermittent.
I continue to ask why engineers have avoided mention of common knowledge and proceeded to participate in design and construction of devices they knew were going to fail.
You engineers out there, why did you not decline to participate?
Why are you still silent?
Why are you being paid to advance failure?
Have you abandoned your principles and your professionalism?
Geoff
‘Will Starbucks Illinois stores actually get electricity from HillTopper?’
Of course not. This is like selling “stadium naming rights.” No reason why HillTopper couldn’t over subscribe like Jim and Tammy Faye.
‘The Washington, DC City Council had unanimously agreed “in a preliminary vote” to require that 100% of the District’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2032.’
The Washington, DC City Council has authority over 2018. Double ought zero over 2032. Anything they say about the future is fakey fake fake.
Starbucks and DC didn’t get this bright idea on their own. They were pushed by activists. They wouldn’t have made this move without that push.
Yet again I have to say it. “We have to wait for the lights to go out”.
Why ?, because the Warmer Greens appear to be winning the Properganda war. Now we have Attenborough saying that we mist all work hard to Save the Planet. A lot of people will say Ïf a man likes that tells us that if] “Climate change, is for real, then it must be true.
Australia is going to become the canerry in the mine. Sad because once upon a time we were known as the lucky country. Because by world standards we had high wages, we managed because our coal, both brown and black was mostly just below the surface, so open cut which is cheap, is the way we mine it.
Cheap coal meant cheap electricity.
Of course while we are now told that coal is very bad, we are happy to sell vast quantities to the likes of both India and China, where because of their fake Ünderdeveloped countries”status, they can ignore all of the restrictions that us Western countries are via Paris, subject to.
MJE
In other news: Starbucks to Start Offering “Bird Blend.”
No, but it makes corporations look sexy with it and eco conscious so they sell more product to gullible snowflakes.
So they have a Gizmo now that can sort “renewable” electrons from fossil fuel electrons and from nuclear power electrons?
No, but they can charge the saps in DC more for the same electricity though.
And then the Socialist-Democrats will expect the grid operators to appropriately pad their election campaign coffers.
It’s a form of pay-to-play.
“Transmission lines need steel, concrete, copper and plastic.”
Transmission lines today are aluminum. Insulators are glazed ceramics.
Socialist Democrats love spending OPM.
If Starbucks (or any other entity) wants the 100% renewable bragging rights, they should not receive power from any other source. The only way to guarantee this is by limiting certified consumers’ consumption from a grid to renewable input to that grid.
SR
Renewable power certification should work like water rights for farmers on an irrigation system.
As water input into an irrigation system reduces in a dry summer, each farmer’s supply is reduced according to his water rights standing.
Likewise, when electricity produced by a wind farm or solar power array drops off, each certified consumer should have their supplied power reduced according to their place in the “power certification queue”.
SR
“Starbucks IL Stores Going 100 Percent Renewable..”
Thinking there may be a market for a device you clip onto your supply cable that only allows green electrons through, and stops the polluting ones. Of course it will actually do nothing.
Well, apart from paying for my jet.
Climate Change is causing intermittent winds and unpredictable cloud cover, both of which impede the development of reliable, renewable, wind and solar power.
As a partial solution to provide full time solar power I am proposing a stationary array of plastic straws in space to act as light-pipes to direct sunlight to areas of the earth that would normally be without sunlight at night, providing energy for solar panels. An additional benefit would be the elimination of the need for streetlights, headlights on cars, a longer growth cycle for plants, and more consistent illumination for football games.
I’m sure Elon Musk will seize the opportunity…
BTW, am I the only person that finds Starbuck’s makes lousy coffee? High priced and in plastic dispensers. Oh yeah they make a super vanilla caramel latte for people who don’t really like coffee. It’s been a fad of “progressivchiks” to eat “healthy” foods that taste awful – thats how you know it’s good for you.
I’m with you Gary. Starbuck’s coffee is ** at best ** very ordinary, and certainly NOT worth the price they charge. There are so many lower cost alternatives that are as good or better than Starbucks, and also more convenient and allow you to do your own virtue signaling. For example, you can make a statement by purchasing your coffee at your local gas station. Not only do you support a business which is delivering essential energy products to consumers, they typically make a great cup of coffee too!