By Rud Istvan,
WUWT readers emailed Charles the Moderator concerning two flurries of renewable Fake News PR in the past week:
1. The breathlessly reported planned FPL addition of the world’s largest storage battery for Florida’s Manatee County solar farm.
2. The less reported Bloomberg New Energy report that batteries were now becoming competitive in some grid applications/locations thanks to steeply declining costs.
ctm asked me to take a crack at an article covering this Fake News. This guest post tackles these items in sequence (and they are related). The research was somewhat complex, so rather than provide numerous links, sufficient pointers are provided that will take any interested readers to the relevant underlying documents via simple Google searches. Else, just enjoy the deceptive saga.
FPL PR
Many news outlets (Ars Technica, Forbes, every MSM paper in Florida) reported on the Florida Power and Light (FPL) announcement last week about “the world’s largest solar powered battery system—4x the next largest” (at Hornsdale, South Australia). Paraphrasing for brevity, it will be built on the 40 acre site of soon to be demolished almost 50 year old twin oil/natural gas-steam generating units in Parish, Florida. It will have 409MW and be able to produce 900MWh of energy from FPL’s adjacent Manatee solar farm and another (of equal size) to be built nearby. It will provide clean, cost effective electricity.
NOTHING about this FPL summary is correct except the location.
Battery capacity is not specified in MW, rather in MWh. Cost is ~ MW. Hornsdale is 100MW and only 129MWh. So the Manatee battery is actually (900/129) seven times more capacity. Oops, an ignorant PR under brag.
It does not replace the old oil converted to gas fired steam generating units, unlike what FPL implied. As old and decrepit as they are, their current August peak capacity (all that matters in Florida) is still 1618MW. (This and following data are from FPL’s “10 Year Power Plant Site Plan 2018-2027”, submitted to FloridaPSC.com and running about 270 pages of (1) capacity, (2) demand, and (3) capacity addition rate planning. Parish’ present 1618MW is in Part 1.) Parish baseload generating capacity is being replaced concurrently by 1778MW of new CCGT at Lake Okeechobee.
It is not powered by solar. The nameplate capacity of the Manatee solar farm and the nearby one now under construction is 74.5MW each. Per Part 1 of the FPL 2018 Plan, the August peak solar capacity factor is 52%. Both solar farms can provide (unless/until a hurricane) (974.5*2*0.52) 77.5MW, just 19% (less in winter) of what the battery needs. The rest will come from FPL grid CCGT additions.
It is NOT cheap. FPL refuses to say what it will cost. (Hey, I really tried to find out.) BUT, there is a small pilot plant equivalent (10 MW) that was installed at FPL’s Babcock Ranch solar farm (also 74.5MW nameplate) in 2018. From the FPL supplied pictures (Babcock Ranch actual, Parish FPL conceptual), the batteries are the present utility industry grid standard, high temperature (350C) Sodium Sulfur, with individual 1 MW modules looking like 20 foot shipping containers stood on end. That 10 MW/40MWh cost $15 million (digging through FPL and local press at the time)–and like Parish will be–is used for peak load. (Note: this is about industry standard capacity cost for that type battery. I covered two PG&E sodium/sulfur grid installations from 2010 and 2014, with illustrations, in essay California Dreaming in ebook Blowing Smoke.) So the Parish battery will cost ([409/10]*15) about $615 million capital dollars. By comparison, according to EIA Nov 2016, equivalent gas peaker turbine capacity would cost $450 million. (Remember this battery is 80% energized by grid generation burning natural gas, just like peaker turbines.) A bad economic deal for Floridians, if good for FPL green PR.
And finally, from the 2018 Plan part 3 rate considerations, we learn that this battery is being financed under SoBRA rate rules. Florida PSC says SoBRA guarantees FPL the full required revenue/cost recovery (plus return) via increased utility rates for ‘green’ solar, battery, and related activities. FPL’s claim that this is ‘clean and cost effective’ is only half correct. Maybe.
Bloomberg New Energy Forum
This ‘research’ unit of Bloomberg has been churning out rosy renewable projections for years. Following is their April Fools 2019 gem.
For starters, BloombergNEF believes the nonsense put out by the EIA concerning the levelized cost of renewable energy (LCOE, an annuitized version of net present value). In a guest post over at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc, Planning Engineer (very senior exec at one of the US’ largest electrical utilities) and I wrote a deconstruction of EIA’s 2015 onshore US wind LCOE titled ‘True Cost of Wind’. Easily found using the search tool on her site. We corrected all the EIA ‘cheats’, and used the Texas ERCOT grid (~10% wind penetration) for cost of backup and incremental transmission. Unlike the BloombergNEF figure of ~$95/MWh for 2015, the true cost of onshore wind is about $144/MWh. So you already know this new table is a renewable April Fools joke.
There are three recent reference points for grid battery storage compared to the chart’s purplish/pink battery line.
First is Tesla’s LiIon installation at Hornsdale, South Australia. That came on line November 2017 after the infamous renewables induced SA blackout of 2016. 129MWh cost about $50 million (Australian, as reported in Australia). The current exchange rate is $1Aus = $0.71US. So Hornsdale cost about $35.5 million US, or about (35500k/129) $275k per MWh. The LCOE would be higher, because the capital is up front and the ‘fuel savings’ are annuitized. Bloomberg is ‘only’ two plus orders of magnitude off. But Hornsdale was a rushed Elon Musk PR one off, so maybe not a fair comparison.
Second is the Tesla PowerWall v2. Excluding the power electronics (which do scale some), it presently costs $6700 for 13.5 KWh and benefits from mass production in the GigaFactory. That math works out to $496/MWh, again higher when annuitized into LCOE. BloombergNEF is ONLY off by 1.65x.
Finally we have a direct grid comparison using FPL’s 2018 Babcock Ranch, which was 10MW for 40 MWh, exactly the BloombergNEF 4 hour standard. $15 million is (15000k/40MWh) $375k/MWh—ONLY off by ONE order of magnitude. Order of magnitude errors are not forgivable. They are Fake News.
Thus demonstrating that renewable Fake News remains alive and ‘well’.
H/t to WUWT commenter RK and ctm for the inspiration to get going again.
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Every country going “sustainable” is in deep trouble.
97% of Climate Scientists Love Gen IV Nuclear.
https://youtu.be/nkGLLHsnmyM
Worth watching. Why solar plus nuclear should be on Trump’s list.
Or you could stop wasting money and just go nuclear.
And sitting shivering in the dark when winter comes
Does this have anything to do with this installation?
https://www.stockgumshoe.com/reviews/international-speculator/are-liquid-electricity-cubes-really-going-to-be-a-mega-industry-you-can-cash-in-on/
… Energon?
○¿●
“Every country going sustainable is in deep trouble”
Unless that sustainable is backed by or supplementary to hydro.
It isn’t.
Germany 38% renewable electricity, UK 33% renewable electricity, Spain 42%… and so on. No grid failures.
https://www.thegwpf.com/increasing-electricity-system-fragility-in-the-uk/
They only are saved because they have strong grid links to other countries *spreading the trouble) and the grid operator has to do major interventions. That is why their power is so expensive.
There’s no way in hell Spain gets 42% of its electricity from renewables.. Obviously griff doesn’t know the difference between nameplate capacity and working output, but that’s a typical misconception given all the propaganda.
And even if it were true it would be an environmental disaster. Solar panels are the most polluting of all energy sources; next, windpower. Solar panels produce 300 times as much toxic waste per KWH as nuclear energy. Everything griff believes is a fairy tale. –AGF
I would be interested to see where that came from. Do you have a solid reference?
https://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/toxic-waste-from-solar-panels-300-times-that-of-nuclear-power/
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23/if-solar-panels-are-so-clean-why-do-they-produce-so-much-toxic-waste/#4bd03381121c
There was even a time when WaPo would report on the problelm:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/08/AR2008030802595.html
All ya gotta do is google. –AGF
griff April 6, 2019 at 12:32 am
It isn’t.
Germany 38% renewable electricity, UK 33% renewable electricity, Spain 42%… and so on. No grid failures.
______________________________________________
Griff, there are no grid failures from north sea wind parks to ~1,000 distant Stuttgart where the energy is needed
because there exists no efficient power grid from north sea wind parks to ~1,000 distant Stuttgart where the energy is needed for industrial production.
OTOH: When passengers at Frankfurt Airport for 3 days sit in the dark because of power outage
or passengers on german railways in winter sit for 7 hours without heating in their stranded railway cabins
or passengers on german railways in summer faint away after 5 hours without working air condition in their stranded railway cabins:
Then where is Griff to tell the world.
nice analysis. If you guarantee against loss plus padding you will get an ice plant built in the Artic. Although that has probably been run up the funding flag pole. The best way to beat this junk down is by analyzing it as you are doing. Educate people who can’t do what you do. We pass it along.
troe: Thanks for a good laugh, “ice plant in the arctic.” If they ran it up the flagpole as an arctic solar powered ice plant, they might have got the grant!
However, on at least one point, the article is ‘unclear on the concept.’ For example, ” …just 19% (less in winter) of what the battery needs.”
A battery doesn’t need anything. It just sits there as you add electricity up to its capacity. So, if the battery gets only 19% of what it needs – I’m guessing he means that it gets 19% of its capacity in an hour – then it will take a little over 5 hours to get to max capacity. 5 hours of electricity won’t get utility users through the night, but that’s a separate question.
The Road to Hell used to be paved with good intentions, now it is paved with green energy intentions. This whole green energy phony deal is about lies and liberals. When the next Little Ice Age starts move close to a nuclear power generating unit.
“… green BS”.
Green BS is particularly slippery, thus putting all of civilization as we know it at risk of falling on its ass, if allowed to pass as feasible guidance.
So fueled by castor oil or epsom salts?
And in 10 years after the battery capacity is significantly less, it will be even worse.
We all deal with batteries of various kinds in our modern life, and none of them live up to the hype for life or life-time output. I know I’m biased because I spent 33 years in and around power plants (mostly nuclear) and transmission systems, but it amazes me how “scientists,” governments, power companies, the UN, and GND advocates can make the claims they do about how RE competes with or beats fossil and nuclear generating costs. Considering that RE is useless without dispatchable backup, the backup has to be included in the cost of RE systems, so they can’t be less expensive than an equal amount of fossil/nuclear generating capacity.
And then there’s the claim about new wind/solar (with or without batteries) installations being able to supply power to X-number of homes. Horse pucky!
I hate batteries. My car battery, the battery in the car key, the battery in my phone, my wristwatch, my remote controls, my garage door system, my flashlights, my camera, flashguns, remotes, my GPS devices, my computer, laptop, mice… and one and on.
Bottom line: they all suck and are a PITA to maintain in good working order. I can’t imagine how much hassle and danger must be involved with a battery the size of a house.
Yes batteries suck, especially when you have a large number of them. As an example a project I worked on to build a Windows 10 SOE for a health provider here in Sydney hard a nice platform, an “All-in-one” PC. It was very nice! The project sponsor specified wireless bluetooth keyboards and mice. The keyboard used two AAA batteries, the mouse used just one AA. After a very short time in use, maybe 6 – 8 weeks IIRC, both needed new batteries. That’s for 2500 units. Eventually, the vendor paid to have all keyboards and mice replaced with wired options.
Batteries suck!
Batteries are like anything. Used appropriatley they are a great convenience, used stupidly they are a pain. I feel for the bluetooth people. My company went the same way, so I just bought my own damn USB keyboad and mouse
My Logitech mouse needs a new battery about every 2 months.
I do not use the keyboard as much as would be done in an office.
Those 2 batteries have been replaced, but I don’t remember when.
With those 2500 units, many batteries would have to be on hand.
How many went home with the staff? How many went in the trash?
“John F. Hultquist April 5, 2019 at 10:06 pm
With those 2500 units, many batteries would have to be on hand.
How many went home with the staff? How many went in the trash?”
Responsibility of battery supplies were left to the staff and Dr’s in each medical centre. Some centres were large, maybe 30 units (Meaning Doctors) or more. Imagine you are a patient seeing a Dr. and they are trying to type up a prescription which requires the use of a keyboard and mouse. The power is low and all sorts of strange things happen, like keys not responding, the Dr. keeps tapping away at the key, then the keyboard sends all those keystrokes to the system, via bluetooth, where they all of a sudden, appear on the screen. The Dr. then had to press backspace to remove the extra letters. Clearly whoever chose this hardware hadn’t done their homework on what the needs of the Dr. were. In fact, I attended a medical centre that was part of the project and hard to show the Dr. where the CD/DVD drive was and how to open it.
I fully expect most of the used batteries ended up in the trash.
One bright exception to that is the led flashlight as compared to older style flashlights. I gave up years ago on replacing C or D batteries for a Maglite flashlight. A friend gave me an led flshlight several years ago, and the difference between the old and new amazed me. Even after months of use when the power diminishes the led still gives as much light as an older style flashlight.
However that is due to the LED being much more efficient, not the battery.
@ur momisugly tty..that is correct. Maglite has a led replacement for their older style flashlights which makes them usable once again. LEDs really brought change to flashlights, along with the best of the new alkaline batteries, a great combination.
Batteries use electro-chemical reactions and they are probably close to their potential performance. Could there be a better electricity or energy storage technology at this scale? It looks to me like the best candidates are super-capacitors and carbon nano-tube flywheels.
Yes, I have a draw full of duff rechargeables. Not sure how to get rid of them.
Rud, nice job on short order. Any idea on depreciation cost of these batteries? And is everyone happy they are hardened enough for a CAT 5 hurricane? Floridans would be unhappy to learn that 80% of the charging will come from natural gas! The stinkers will report all this as a solar charging success. Isnt against the law to knowingly report such lies?
Gary, FPL provides no deprecition info. But the PG&E installation forced by CaliPUC was amortized over 15 years, with an average over lifetime round trip efficiency of 75%. (Remember these things operate at 350C so there are significant thermal losses.)
The containerized batteries are probably hurricane hardened, but I cannot imagine how the adjacent PV farms could possibly be, speaking as someone who experienced Katrina, Wilma, and Irma. Fort Lauderdale was ~110 miles from Irma’s eye, and we experienced ‘only’ a strong Cat 2 for about 10 hours. Yet our condo tower built to post Andrews standards (tempered laminated glass and supporting extruded aluminum frames can withstand 150 mph wind impact) sustained significant structural damage. Every ocean facing unit on our floor (12th) sustained major damage (heavy sliding balcony doors blown off 1/4 thick extruded aluminum tracks or completely in) except ours (tucked into an alcove of the curved building). Caused by mini tornadoes in the stronger wind bands.
Good article. I have been interested in glass since Harvey, partly because of all such damage in Corpus Christi from hurricane Celia (1970). Some “hurricane proof” had cracks and “bullet holes” from roof gravel, not exactly a good idea. Rockport still has 4 story motels (2 above tree line) closed. Some scattered tree tops twisted off. The recent FEMA report, some mention of solar panel damage, but not all covered. Short memories, little history understanding.
https://www.fema.gov/media-library-data/1551991528553-9bb91b4bfe36f3129836fedaf263ef64/995941_FEMA_P-2022_FINAL_508c.pdf?
“Wind-related building damage is primarily attributable to using improper materials in hurricane-prone regions; design deficiencies; poor installation or failure to follow installation guidelines for wall coverings, windows, and doors in high-wind zones; and inadequate attachment of roof coverings and roof-mounted equipment. ”
Wouldn’t a categotry-5 hurricane wind make more electricity, since it would spin the magical windmills at super-fast speeds? [/sarc, of course]
Rud
Boaught your ebook. Love your stuff. I live right down the road from Babcock Ranch.
You might instead of speculate on what could be, take a look at real world data of what was: https://www.winknews.com/2017/09/22/americas-first-solar-city-babcock-ranch-escapes-irmas-grip/
There is no real world data there at all, just BS, how in the hell do solar panel put out power at night? For that matter when it was raining. That town is on the grid, solar power my behind.
If you have ever been in a hurricane you know there is certainly no sunshine.
Have you seen the photo of the solar farm in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria? Solar panels strewn all over the place.
Thanks Rud. A good shot at the house of cards that is being built upon wind, solar and battery misinformation and hype.
Great article, Ristvan.
“Per Part 1 of the FPL 2018 Plan, the August peak solar capacity factor is 52%.”
Seems way too high for solar PV. PVwatts solar estimator tool from NREL gives 5.69 hrs/day equivalent full power generation in August in the Babcock ranch area of florida. That is more like 23.7% capacity factor.
The 52% capacity factor may be for a solar thermal plant.
“Second is the Tesla PowerWall v2. Excluding the power electronics (which do scale some), it presently costs $6700 for 13.5 KWh and benefits from mass production in the GigaFactory. That math works out to $496/MWh,…”
Should that be $496K/MWh, or $496/kWh?
Yup. My bad.
I was going to comment. At $496/MWh I would buy one or two of these …
Deep cycle car batteries cost about $100/kWhr
Cars don’t use deep cycle batteries. They use high current batteries. You don’t use high current batteries to power a state.
It is not capacity factor. 52% is the solar contribution during the peak load hour. This is how they determine the generation capacity value. 100 MW of solar avoids 52 MW of peak generation.
Using the suggested 23.7% capacity factor (expected 5.69 hours a day of PV generation) and 2 x 74.5 MW solar farms, that is 2 x 74.5 MW x 5.69 hours or 848 MWh…seems a lot closer to the 900 MWh battery.
Almost nobody understands the importance and value of the peak generation. If Rud was knowledgeable and genuine about his writings on this he’d focus almost exclusively on this because that is where the value of the batteries is.
Rudd, did anything surface during your research on battery life cycle replacement requirements?
I know those answers from other reseach. The Tesla LiIon Powerwall is supposed to last 10 years with a capacity decline to 80% (usual cutoff, because the SEI buildup is very rapid thereafter). That presumes daily cycling. Hornsdale would be longer lived since not daily cycled. Sodium sulfur, as noted in a subcomment above, is 15 years with an over lifetime rte of 75%.
That is interesting, considering just about all mobile device batteries are LiIon or LiPo and are lucky to last 2 years cycling daily. 600-800 cycle published life for most. How does Musk get around the history of chemistry on such? Sounds allot like name plate vs. capacity factor language used in selling solar and wind power. Maybe they left the word “shelf” out just before the word “life” in their claim.
Cheers!
Answer is found in the Nernst Equation. The Powerwalls and Teslas are liquid cooled, (radiator and fan) so the charging heat is removed. Mobile devices have no cooling, so heat on charging. As a NE rule of thumb each additional 10C cuts cycle life 50%.
Thank you Sir. Learned something new today that I had forgotten about!
Also now know why devices with addition protective cases on them seem to grow weaker than those without over time. Talk about a catch 22…….
10C cuts cycle life 50%.
======
Source? I didn’t find anything to confirm this. The NE appeared more to explain why cold batteries have lower voltage.
If 10C heating cuts battery life by 50% you should never put the phone in a plastic case, but everyone does.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.researchgate.net/figure/Battery-life-vs-temperature-at-different-charging-rate-of-lithium-ion-battery-154_fig7_316897945/amp
this article shows battery life is more complicated and is flat when charging temp between 20-40 C
It would appear that charging rate significantly cuts battery life even if constant temp is maintained.
ferd — I just performed a test with/without the case. Cellphone enclosed in case results in a .2 C temperature increase.
Maybe you should look at real world data from Elon Musks actual batteries.
https://interestingengineering.com/tesla-drivers-collect-data-to-show-battery-degradation-at-less-than-10-after-250000-km
Cheers!
I don’t understand the 250000km claim. Most of the users on that spreadsheet seem to report mileages typically of a few thousand to a several 10s of thousands km.
Can you explain?
It’s very clear look at the charts Mike. What don’t you understand?
“That math works out to $496/MWh”
I guess this should be: “That math works out to $496,000/MWh”
Wait for the hurricane! Not only will solar glass be flying, but if the “battery” goes underwater, watch the fireworks.
I guess it makes some sense to be able to store power from gas generators, if you can run them more efficiently. Being able to slow down and speed up power generation over more time will likely mean less wear and tear on the generators. I doubt it is cost justified, but it might serve an alternative purpose. I guess you can leave some running all day to charge the batteries for nighttime when there is less power available.
I don’t want to be anywhere near these battery farms. One is going to blow up one of these days, and spew hot toxic salts all over the place.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/battery-fires-risks-storing-lareg-amounts-energy/
RofT, good thought and correct for steam turbines, but not correct for the new CCGT designs. The newer GE CCGT operate at full load 61% efficient, at 80% load 60%, and at 40% load 58%. They cannot operate below 40% load. This flexibility is by design, so that older capital underultilized peakers needed with coal/steam can simply be retired.
For whatever it’s worth, I endorse your statistics, Rud. That is exactly what is happening at my local utility.
Virtue signalling is not cheap. Nor should it be.
Just curious: why do they tout solar but not wind?
You cannot engineer a Wind Turbine to survive Cat 4 or 5 Hurricane winds. Cat 3 is possible at the low end, but still will likely be damaged.
Earlier today my mind wandered into the world of nations that won’t give up on coal, and alleged 1st world powers that are jumping down the rabbit hole of renewable energy.
Here are my predictions for the year 2050
1) Poland will be the world’s wealthiest country, per capita, due to plentiful coal powered electricity
2) Ah the little children won’t know what sno-cones are, since they won’t be able to afford the electricity to run a refrigerator
3) Canada will still be cold
4) Most of California will be uninhabited desert
5) I will, due to the blessing of excellent genes, be smoking cigars and drinking good beer somewhere where the weather suits me
And America twiddles it’s thumbs and Green Tithes a quadrupled electric bill to save the planet. Time to re- read Gibbon…
Is ” Cost is ~ MW. ” supposed to be ” Cost is ~ MWh.”
The most important question, is it Chiquita Khrushchev (AOC) approved?
It can’t be nonsense. American energy companies are betting they will remain viable by buffering intermittent gray energy sources through non-renewable, environmentally disruptive battery piles.
Please let me know when batteries start generating electricity instead of being boat anchors which just store it.
Then maybe I’ll get excited.
Thanks, Rud.
Even your analysis understates the true cost of solar/wind. Because of things like sunset, and wintertime, every Watt of solar/wind must be backed up by a Watt of something that runs when the sun doesn’t shine or the wind doesn’t blow. Further some non solar, non wind capacity must be dedicated to grid stability.
Those Watts of capacity produce no revenue when the sun shines or the wind blows, but they still depreciate and amortize, Those costs must be included in the final analysis, and they will be paid for by consumers, whether they want to or not. Will Ye, Nill Ye.
More like, every kWh of solar must be backed up by 4-5 kWh of non-solar, since (as noted above) power-production levels of sunshine exist only 5.69 hrs/day (in that particular location, and then only when the sun is shining because anywhere around Florida a cloudy day is not unheard of). So you need enough panels to power the load, plus 4-5 more panels to charge the batteries, plus enough more panels for that 25% loss per cycle, and buy enough batteries for, oh let’s say 4 days of heavy overcast, and then enough more panels to keep them charged also because you know a rechargeable battery loses charge while it’s sitting waiting to be needed… And then comes that 5th day of overcast and now what do you do?You can sit in the unairconditioned dark surfing the internet by candlelight or you build a hydrocarbon or nuclear power station to turn on when you run out of pixie dust and unicorn farts. So why don’t we reduce that cost by about 80-90% by just building the reliable power plant (the hydrocarbon and/or nuclear power plants, just in case I’m being too subtle) to begin with and forget about all that other bull s***?
I may have misunderstood the meaning of that “5.69”. It might be the total annual hours of PV production divided by 365. In other words it already takes into account cloudy days, but it gives no clue of… arrangement…? IOW, how much backup do I have to have to get me to the next available block of significant PV production?
If you need a small amount of power, for a parking meter for instance, it is way cheaper to use solar than to pay the cost of hooking the equipment to the mains. Tiny solar panels are popping up all over the place.
If you insist on living a few miles from the nearest power line, it may well be cheaper to go full solar with batteries than to pay the horrendous cost of having the utility run wires. Solar and wind have their place. The problem is with technically illiterate, but fully arrogant, university professors who think you can extrapolate that situation to fit everybody.
Absolutely, there is a place for gray energy in low availability, low risk and niche (e.g shifted environmental disruption in high-density population centers) applications. The assortment of energy products and converter technologies should be selected to purpose and effectiveness. That said, save the eagle! Spare the environmentalist, and spoil the butterfly. Not one more lizard sacrificed for a photovoltaic blight… or we could return to a rational and practical state of existence without PC encroachments.
A very green uncle of mine had an off grid farmhouse with solar panels.. later a wind turbine was added but his loathing for little things like regular maintenance saw the nut loose it’s self and the props spun off into a paddock shortly thereafter. A battery failed and organizing another took him some time so I understand little things like lighting, clothes washing and TV time halted. The last time I was at his farm I heard the gentle puttering of a diesel generator and I realized that his green ideology had somehow made space for convenient on demand power. I also clicked his constant harping on about the viability of ‘free energy’ had toned down to zero. It made me smile quietly to myself.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Putin and China’s Xi are jointly laughing their assess off at the West’s suicidal Green plunge to energy poverty.
By any reasonable measure, it is the Progressive US Democrats with their Marxist Watermelon Religion that are colluding with Putin to destroy the West’s, and specifically the US’s, economic and military power.
I heard something interesting the other day.
We now know that Obama’s intelligence agencies were trying to infiltrate Trump’s campaign presumably to compromise it, and now it has been reported that the Bernie Sanders campaign also had some people trying to infiltrate his campaign, too.
It looks like Hillary and Barack were trying to cover all the bases when they weaponized the federal government for political/personal purposes..
The Bernie Sanders campaign won’t comment on this. Yet.
All this may become public knowledge before too long. The Democrats ought to be shaking in their boots.
Joel: I’m pretty sure the Russians who have run the green movement for 28 years or so from the Kremlin basement with great success are now giving a few tips to the comrades down the hall who failed to steer the 2016 election to the Kremlin’s candidate.
Thanks for the great summary. This is very much like the mania that swept state governments following the successful development of the Erie Canal. With the significant difference that the Erie Canal was actually profitable, and not just pipe dreams wrapped in progressive dogma.
I think there is a typo in this formula:
“(974.5*2*0.52) 77.5MW, just 19% (less in winter)”
If makes sense if you drop the “9”. That is:
“(74.5*2*0.52) 77.5MW, just 19% (less in winter)”
American corporations, businesses, organizations, and government entities are betting big on “progressive” political, economic, social, science, etc. dogma, for a sustainable, renewable source of green-backs and democratic leverage.
The great thing about green-backs is that you can print as many as you want. Better yet, the $100 denomination bills are becoming the preferred alternative to gold for transactions that require a certain amount of privacy. There are about 12 billion such bills in circulation worldwide. This is the preferred method of balancing our trade deficits as near as I can tell.
“Lies! Climate Deniers in the pay of big oil are spreading disinformation, a bunch of racist Nazi lairs!”
This from a retired government employee that believes in Sandy’s GND dream .
I followed up with NOAA’s “we are currently approaching a Maunder-type minimum in solar activity.”
and got:
“The sun has nothing to do with Global Warming, CO² from big oil is destroying the world”
I sent an email to his wife and ask her to check if he was taking him medications….
They are nice people or were until after DJT was elected President, they have slowly moved off the deep end.
Rudd, thank you for taking the time to put this together, one day I can only hope those that orchestrated this scam are tarred and feathered and then prosecuted.
The problem with solar in California is that it not available during the morning ramp or evening peak. When it is available, it is used to serve load. Only occasionally is there any surplus solar energy during the day. Thus there is not enough surplus energy available to charge any batteries.
We could build more solar and wind farms. However, environmentalists such as the Audubon Society do not like wind farms and thermal solar units, which kill birds, including endangered species. Solar units in the Mojave Desert wreak havoc with wildlife, such as the desert tortoise.
Rud
Correcting something you wrote
You can rate batteries by MW as the size of the cabling, transformers, components etc, sets the maximum current carrying capacity they can provide.
But yes, they aren’t cheap to install, they cost a lot to run, and they are net energy consumers. All of which has to be paid for by the end use customer.
What would we do without WUWT!
The Talent here can debunk them almost faster than they can write them!
Thanks for putting things in perspective, Rud.