Reposted from the MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN
Earlier this month, I had a post discussing New York’s so-called Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act of 2019, and the various steps taken so far to implement the Act’s stated goals. The main goals are 40% reduction in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in New York by 2030, and 85% by 2050. These goals apply not just to the electricity sector (which only accounts for about 25% of energy usage in the U.S.), but to the entire energy economy. My post relied substantially on the work of Roger Caiazza, who has written extensively at his website Practical Environmentalist of New York about the implementation plans for the Act currently under formulation by various state bodies.
The current status is that a series of Advisory Panels have been convened, each covering a particular sector of the energy economy, and tasked to provide advice and guidance as to how to “decarbonize” that particular sector. My prior post covered some of Mr. Caiazza’s comments on the work of Advisory Panels for sectors including Transportation, Industry, Agriculture and Residential. However, at the time of that post (June 3) Mr. Caiazza had not yet commented on the work of the most important Advisory Panel, which is the one dealing with the sector of Power Generation.
There are two reasons that the Power Generation sector must be considered the most important in the overall decarbonization plan. First, it is thought to be the easiest to decarbonize. And second, the decarbonization plans for the other sectors basically come down to requiring those sectors to be converted from using fossil fuels to using electricity. Decarbonize transportation? Require electric cars! Decarbonize residential buildings? Require replacement of natural gas heating and cooking with electric! And so forth. And the advisory panels also have recognized the pre-eminent importance of the Power Generation sector by assigning that sector necessarily more ambitious decarbonization goals than for the other sectors: for the Power Generation sector it is 70% by 2030 and 100% by 2040.
The Power Generation Advisory Panel made its recommendations in a meeting presentation, which took place on May 10. Mr. Caiazza commented on his blog on June 6.
The so-called recommendations evidence a truly astounding level of amateurism and cluelessness on the part of this Panel. It is completely obvious that these people have no idea how to go about “decarbonizing” the electrical grid, or whether that can be done at all. Indeed, the apparent attitude of the members is that the only thing lacking is political will, and therefore if the appropriate orders are issued by government bureaucrats, then the goals will be accomplished. It appears that not one moment’s thought has been given to the potential engineering difficulties or costs of completely revamping an electrical grid that has taken over 100 years of incremental engineering improvements to develop to its current state.
Start with the membership of the Panel. You would think that intimate knowledge of how the electrical grid works would be the most important pre-requisite for membership. But in fact the Panel was stacked with environmental activists with no knowledge at all of how the grid works. On a sixteen member Panel, there were representatives of New Yorkers for Clean Power, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Vote Solar, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Public Utility Law Project, and the New York Battery and Energy Storage Coalition, among others. In the face of this crowd of activists, the New York ISO got exactly one representative. Caiazza comments:
In order to make power generation recommendations it is necessary to understand how the power system works and how planning affects reliability and affordability. Many of the members [of this Advisory Panel] did not want to understand and did not try to understand the technological challenges. Unfortunately, they were the loudest voices and their naïve insistence on speculative technologies has resulted in some risky enabling initiatives.
What Caiazza calls “some risky enabling initiatives,” I would call complete fantasy.
The big three problems with decarbonizing an electrical grid would be reliability, cost and storage. Each of those three is barely addressed at all in the Panel’s May 10 presentation, Rather than trying to deconstruct everything, let me focus on the issue of storage.
It is obvious to anyone who thinks about the subject for even a couple of minutes that an electrical grid powered almost entirely by wind and solar generating resources is going to need enormous amounts of storage to meet demand at times when the sun is not shining and the wind not blowing. The storage must be sufficient to cover many days of usage — indeed multiple weeks — and must also remain safely stored for many months between when the power is generated and when it is used. Consider for a moment a system powered mostly by solar resources. Generation from solar panels in New York could easily be triple in June as in December. In June, the day is longer; the sun is higher in the sky and therefore stronger; and there is less cloudiness. Therefore, a solar-powered system with no fossil fuel backup is going to need batteries that can store power in June — enough power to, say, run all of New York City for weeks on end — and save all that power all the way to December for usage.
Currently, no such massive-scale long-term storage technology exists.
The Power Generation Advisory Panel was made well aware of this issue at the outset. At its first meeting in September 2020 it was presented with the following chart by a consultant:
The chart shows how historical patters of wind and solar intermittency in winter months could lead to a period as long as a full week when those resources would provide next to nothing to meet electricity demand. (Indeed, there could be several such week-long periods in the course of a full winter.). The consultant specifically pointed to “the need for dispatchable resources . . . during winter periods of high demand for electrified heating and transportation and lower wind and solar output.”
So how did the Advisory Panel deal with this issue in its May 10 recommendations? It does not specifically address the subject of the winter lull at all. The closest it comes in its presentation is a slide with the heading “Advances Needed for the Future”. The following text appears:
Long Duration Storage Technology
- Focus State programs and funding on research and demonstration projects for the development of large scale and longer duration storage
- Develop and expand a Storage Center of Excellence to mature and deploy new technologies on the grid for large scale testing
- Attract and engage relevant parties in collaborative efforts to address the challenges unique to long-duration storage
In other words, they have no idea how it can be done, or whether it can be done, and nobody has even started working on the problem yet. But don’t worry, the electric grid will be 70% decarbonized by 2030, even with hugely increased demand from the likes of (mandatory) electric cars and (mandatory) electric heat in homes. Caiazza’s comment:
Long-duration storage is necessary so depending upon a technology that does not even exist in a pilot project is an incredible risk.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Speaking of NY power. Any word on how they are coming building the several thousand wind turbines they need to replace the power from the recently closed Indian Point nuclear power plant?
New Yorkers should mount or replace their buildings with wind turbines, construct a “Twin Windmills” in Manhattan to visibly celebrate their pride.
“Twin Windmills” in Manhattan to visibly celebrate their Green pride, which is ironically a green pride.
Is there any word yet on people noticing that the same people desperate to break the US energy production and grid,
( they KNOW it will make no difference to GAT) are the same people who brutally suppressed the true effectiveness of Ivermectin, HCQ, and Sunshine?
I have a brother living in NYC who tells me that he looks at the whole decarbonization of the grid problem like JFK’s call to send a man to the moon – in that the technology to accomplish said goal didn’t exist yet at the time either.
My answer to that is 1, Kennedy created a problem in need of a solution, and if that problem were to ultimately be deemed insurmountable then so what? Nobody gets hurt.
2, Decarbonization of New York’s energy grid by a set date is a “solution” to a non-problem (or, more to the point, a non-solution in search of a real problem) who’s very process has massive potential to inflict needless harm, suffering, financial decimation, and throwing the whole state (and surrounding region) into total unrecoverable chaos.
He just looked at me with a blank stare….
“JFK’s call to send a man to the moon – in that the technology to accomplish said goal didn’t exist yet at the time either.”
This is exactly the problem I described above when I listed various energy technologies and the physical science they are based on.
It is true that in 1960 we did not have the technology to go to the moon. But the science was all laid out. The math and physics of orbital mechanics were well known. Theoretical trips to the moon were calculated in a hundred different ways. Some of those ways turned out to be possible. At the same time, rockets were flying. With the German V2, rockets went to war in 1944. By 1960 in the US, rocketry was advancing at an astonishing pace.
In short, going to the moon did not require some new science.
Back to Earth:
There is absolutely no science which supports grid scale energy storage. Period.
If you want to “decarbonize” the grid, you have exactly one option. You must replace all fossil fueled generation with nuclear energy generation. That is it. That is the option.
That this Advisory Panel did not consider nuclear at all means they are not serious, or they do not care about the havoc and destruction their edicts will cause.
There is one other choice for the Advisory Panel’s failure to consider nuclear. They are too stupid. The other choices may also be true as well.
During the “it says we gotta do this so we will go through the motions” public hearings the generation panel was shocked when many commenters argued that shutting down the Indian Point nuclear station was the worst possible action if they in fact wanted to reduce emissions. There is a mention for considering nuclear buried somewhere but it is never going to be included as viable option.
The technology to send a man to the moon did exist when Kennedy made his speech. It just had to be supersized.
Importantly, they are getting a paycheck for all they don’t know and are brainstorming.
A lot of damage can be done by clueless know it all’s with an axe to grind.
anything is possible if you don’t know what you’re talking about
Western countries seem intent on putting all their eggs into one basket (electricity).
Now that the target dates being touted by our dear leaders are getting too close to ignore, the truth that they’ve been trying to hide is beginning to appear. The mask is starting to slip.
The decarbonized future will be a future where everything is always in short supply, starting with energy. That is how they will keep the population under their control. When everyone (except the dear leaders and their inner circle, and their billionaire cronies) is cold and hungry, they will be too busy staying alive to rock the boat.
And when you’re living in fear that you may say the wrong thing about climate, or ethnicity, or gender, or Ivεrmecτin, and you know that you will disappear if someone rats you out or if you forgot to switch your phone off, you will keep your mouth shut and your head down. And you will join spontaneous demonstrations of support for the dear leaders when they increase your electricity ration from 10 kWh to 12 kWh a week. While tying yourself in knots trying to remember – wasn’t the ration 15 kWh a week, only last month?
I really would like to think that I’m wrong, but I’m not exactly hopeful.
“…advisory panels also have recognized the pre-eminent importance of the Power Generation sector by assigning that sector necessarily more ambitious decarbonization goals..”
Huge poker tell. You can safely go all-in on this one. The neophyte advisory brd. do indeed know something, as do top politicians, top activist heads and political climate scientists. They are really telling you that the transportation and shipping sector is the immovable elephant in the room.
This fossil fuel use sector is simply not going to be decarbonized even noticeably in this century.
Here is what is going to happen. We will continue research and development on nuclear/atomic energy processes and possibly new despatchable technologies for efficient, cheap electricity may pop up. Ultimately we will be going to electric vehicles for cars and trucks and most likely nuclear ships, maybe even mini thorium reactors in car for continuous electrification, or in garage for all electricity needs).
Dev of electric car has been all wrong. Should have started with cheap simple units without electric windows and the dozens of electric gizmos. Use the Henry Ford approach. Also look into electrified highways from which the car draws its power – then you have a 4000mi range! Etc.
Electrified highways are as dumb an idea as trying to use batteries to store months worth of electric power.
“On a sixteen member Panel, there were representatives of New Yorkers for Clean Power, the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign, the New York City Environmental Justice Alliance, the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, Vote Solar, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the Public Utility Law Project, and the New York Battery and Energy Storage Coalition, among others. In the face of this crowd of activists, the New York ISO got exactly one representative.
Caiazza comments:In order to make power generation recommendations it is necessary to understand how the power system works and how planning affects reliability and affordability. Many of the members [of this Advisory Panel] did not want to understand and did not try to understand the technological challenges.”
******
I find it both amazing and frustrating that being an environmental activist today (somehow) qualifies you as a substitute replacement for physicists and engineers when it come to addressing issues involving the electrical grid and the generation of energy. This indicate to me that politicians (particularly on the left) have embraced the idea of treating energy and the grid as eco-religious matters rather than matters for properly qualified people in science and engineering.
This seems to reflect that environmental groups have the kind of clout in government that they should not have. If these groups reject nuclear as a replacement energy source for fossil fuels, they are at a dead end with their activist agenda. Historically, old technologies have been phased out only after superior qualifying technologies come into existence to replace them.
Thus, the brilliant light bulbs on this Advisory Panel are doing things bass ackwards, and they probably are too arrogant and egotistical to realize it.
They don’t know what they don’t know
That is the entirety of the problem here
Industry representatives in NY universally ask the question: what about physics. No answer yet because this is all political theater
This is how the Soviet Union worked. The party set impossible targets, no-oine dared to question them, and when the targets were not met the engineers were jailed or executed (often the same thing at different speeds) for ‘wrecking’.
Which is why, of course, the Soviet Union didn’t work, and why “de-carbonizing” can never work without nuclear power.
Reduce demand (e.g. planned parent/hood). Lower expectations. Share responsibility. Purchase carbon indulgences. Wish upon a Rainbow.
“In other words, they have no idea how it can be done, or whether it can be done, and nobody has even started working on the problem yet.”
Yeah, but the donors will get to feel good about themselves and get virtue points to keep them cool in summer and warm in winter after all the conventional energy sources go dark. Meanwhile, the sponsors will find some new grift to keep up their lifestyles.
There’s an awful lot of negativity in the responses here. It’s true that the intermittency problem is a major hurdle and that battery storage is not likely to be sufficient on a large scale, unless there is are major scientific breakthroughs in battery technology which doesn’t depend so much on the limited supply of certain metals, and which is more durable and/or cheaper.
However, there is a solution which the current state of technology can provide, and that is, a combination of battery storage and long-distance Ultra-High Voltage Direct Current power lines (U-HVDC), preferably underground.
It’s obvious that in any single location the sun doesn’t shine continuously, and the wind doesn’t blow continuously, and there are occasionally a number of days without any sunshine or wind at all. However, on a world-wide scale, at any given moment, day or night, there are many locations throughout the world when both the wind is blowing and the sun is shining.
Adding all these locations together, one gets the equivalent of a huge area of land, much larger than the entire USA, where the sun shines and the wind blows for 24 hours every day.
We have the technology to connect these areas with U-HVDC cables, but the expense of course would be astronomical. That’s the major hurdle; the economic cost of constructing hundreds of thousands of miles of U-HVDC cables, under ground and under sea.
Multiple problems, the first is that even with UHVDC, you still get line loss. The longer the distance, the greater the losses. The second is that when wind dies, it often dies for areas that are hundreds to even thousands of miles wide.
You might be able to make your batteries a few percent smaller with this scheme, but at the price of adding a very expensive UHVDC distribution to a system that is already unaffordable.
The electricity loss from UHVDC lines over long distances are much less than the loss from AC lines. Typical for HVDC (as opposed to the latest UHVDC) is a 3.5% loss for every 1,000 km. I’ve seen figures as low as 1.5% loss per 1,000 km for the latest UHVDC lines.
There is an additional cost of converting the Direct Current to AC before it is used, but the main obstacle to the construction of long-distance, underground power lines, is the difficulty of getting permits for the use the land. That can sometimes take years of legal hassles.
An interesting project in its initial stages of development, is the proposal for Australia to export electricity to Singapore from a huge solar farm to be constructed in an arid region in Northern Australia. The electricity will be transmitted over land to Darwin, and then along a 4,500 km, submarine HVDC cable, to Singapore.
The details are at the following site:
“Situated in a Newcastle Waters cattle station halfway between Alice Springs and Darwin, the $20 billion plant will span over 12,000 hectares and generate 10 gigawatts of electrical power. Investors for the project, which is being run by Singaporean company Sun Cable, include billionaires Andrew Forrest and Mike Cannon-Brookes.
But it won’t be only Australians benefitting from this giant solar farm. Most of the energy will be transported all the way to Singapore.
Alongside the development of the solar farm, the world’s largest battery and longest submarine power cable will be constructed to export the electricity from Australian soil to Singapore.
The battery will be developed and stationed near Darwin, approximately 750km north of the solar farm. While a proportion of the power will be siphoned off into Darwin’s electricity grid, as much as two-thirds will be transported to Singapore via a 4,500-kilometer-long underwater cable known as a high-voltage direct current (HVDC) network.
Sun Cable is waiting on various approvals before the project can commence, which includes environmental assessments by the Northern Territory’s Environmental Protection Authority.
If it goes as planned, development will begin in 2023, the first energy will be produced by 2026, and the first export to Singapore will be by 2027.”
https://www.thomasnet.com/insights/australia-plans-to-export-solar-power-to-singapore/
In a reply above I noted that one big need is an assessment of how much wind and solar energy is available for the worst case situation which I think will be the winter multi-day lull. The problem is that those conditions are associated with a very large high pressure system. How far out do you have to run your transmission lines and how often will that infrastructure be used? I bet very far and not very often.
Less than AC, but still greater than zero.
You fail to address the issue of additional cost, nor have you done anything to indicate how far out you have to go in order to find someplace where the wind is still blowing.
Additionally, where ever the wind is blowing, the output of those wind mills is going to be needed to provide power for those who live in that region. Your belief that they are going to have excess power to sell is little more than wishful thinking.
Actually, you could exclude windmills entirely. Covering just a small portion of the deserts and arid regions throughout the world, with solar panels, including all the rooftops of all buildings in the suburbs and cities, could provide more energy than the entire world uses, converting all forms of energy use into kWh equivalent.
For example, if the entire Sahara Desert were covered with modern solar panels, the electricity generated would be around 20 times the current world-wide use of energy. Of course, covering the entire Sahara Desert is not sensible or practical. However, a proposal to build a number of very large solar farms around the world, in the various deserts or arid regions where the sun shines on most days, could provide more than enough electricity for everyone, provided we had a world-wide, international, UHVDC grid.
However, the initial cost of constructing such an international grid system would be huge and would require a lot of energy from fossil fuels, which is why such a plan would take many decades of gradual advances.
It will be interesting to see if the Singapore/Australian plan goes ahead.
The joke is on you because they are experts at sending the bill to the feds with names like Superstorm Schumer or Sheldon Smuck.
There’s probably another factor at play besides abysmal ignorance. People who work in the government, or for the government as many of the green groups do under contracts and grants, have grown used to assuming that their internal processes, such as time spent emailing, phone calling, holding conferences and meetings, doing online research, writing reports, issuing decrees, etc, is the same as work like engineering, construction, manufacturing that builds actual physical objects. Of course it’s not at all the same, but they have spent their entire working lives in front of a computer, absorbed in tail-chasing bureaucratic process, and are unable to tell the difference.
Add in the NGO’s who have a vested interest in selling catastrophe who are pushing the agenda and the crony capitalists who stand to make a killing off this scam and you have a large, loud group with vested interests.
The energy storage required does exist. It’s called coal.
The other possibility is that they do have an idea to reduce emissions by forcing society to adjust to living with intermittent electricity. By the time people realise they have been duped it will be too late.
“If you don’t know where you are going, any road will get you there”- Lewis Carroll.
Yes, quite so, its obviously impossible as soon as you think about what measures would be needed to deliver it.
And even if it were possible and were done, it would have so small an effect on national, let alone global, emissions that it couldn’t be measured.
So we have the usual combination. Activists are demanding that the local authorities do things that are both ineffective, technically and politically impossible.
They also refuse to have anything to do with planning implementation, I guess because they know that its impossible, but equally importantly because they want the current authorities to carry the can for the disaster that would result from any serious effort to do what they are demanding.
You see the same thing in the UK, with the notorious Climate Change Act.
The fact is that if a country or region wants to get to zero carbon, it can. But what it will require is huge social and economic change. The abolition of cars and highways, suburbs and malls. Walk, bike or take mass transit to work. Move the entire population into high density highly insulated housing with local shops, entertainment and workplaces. Think any US or UK city in about 1890, with Internet. Close down cities like Phoenix or Las Vegas. Also think the countryside in 1890 or earlier. Its got to be made petroleum free – no chemical agriculture, but rotating crops, mixed farming with livestock and cropping.
The fundamental dishonesty of the current Green movement is that it is unwilling to specify the means which are required to reach its supposed goals. Its unwilling to specify what must be done locally to meet the supposed local goals. And its unwilling to specify what must be done globally to meet the supposed global goals – mainly, for China and India and Indonesia to reduce their emissions by 90%.
Look at activist demands on race and gender for similar patterns of thinking and behavior. When it gets general, its called a cultural crisis.
Whenever Fascists try to explain how an electrical wind/solar grid can “easily replace” the current natural gas/coal/hydro/nuclear grid, I’m reminded of that hilarious cartoon with the punch line, “I think you need to be more explicit in step 2”……
First of all, so glad I got the hell out of NY almost 20 years ago.
2nd, what many fail to understand is that those thinking about ‘decarbonizing’ NY (or most other states) actually have little comprehension of atmospheric science or geological history. Beyond that, they actually believe there will soon be warm, snowless winters so solar on a mass scale is not only workable but necessary. What they don’t understand is that except for a few extremely localized events (such as the NW is experiencing this week with record heat), most of the warming in recent decades has been at the poles (the north pole in particular) & not in habited areas.
Go nuclear.
Interestingly, this whole issue will morph into a crisis, dominated by 1) the extreme effects of a periodic weather event (heat wave, cold snap, hurricane or blizzard). 2 finger pointing as who to blame which will likely fall first on the utilities, Extensive calls for government funding to take care of the all the victims of a failed policy followed by the morphing of the original cause into another red herring cause that the trust fund babies that start this shit need to feel their lives matter.