Reposted with permission from the BOE REPORT
September 21, 20216:25 AM Terry Etam
I’m not sure about you, but the last thing I want to talk about is elections. When I think of how much of my precious time has been wasted hearing about politics in the last year, I want to puke. No more from pollsters, talking heads, or statisticians.
Well, maybe I’d like to talk about statisticians, as in the old joke about the one that drowned because he forded a river that was only three feet deep, on average. See, isn’t that better than politics already? However, as funny as a drowned statistician may be, there is a serious side to the problem with relying on averages. You really can die, for starters.
Before getting back to death and/or politics again (redundancy, I know), let’s think about the use of averages. A car may be designed for the average – one doesn’t find the tallest person on earth and design an interior to accommodate them. The exceptions get to either bang their shins or dangle their feet, but that’s the way it has to be.
In other areas, it can’t work that way. Do you insulate your house for average conditions? No, of course not. Do you install an air conditioner for average conditions? Same. And on it goes. When the risk of harm goes up, we design for the extremes, not the averages. Or we should.
A whole world of trouble will come your way if your plans are built on averages but you cannot live with the extremes. Or even with substantial variations. Europe, and other progressive energy parts of the world, are finding this out the hard way.
In the race to decarbonize the energy system, wind and solar have taken a dominant lead. Nuclear is widely despised. Hydrogen has potential, but is a long way out, as a major player. On the assumption that Hydrocarbons Must Go At Any Cost, wind and solar are the winners. Bring on the trillions. Throw up wind turbines everywhere. Blanket the countryside in solar panels.
The media loves the wattage count as fodder for headlines; big numbers dazzle people. “The United States is on pace to install record amounts of wind and solar this year, underscoring America’s capacity to build renewables at a level once considered impossible…The U.S. Energy Information Administration expects the U.S. will install 37 gigawatts of new wind and solar capacity this year, obliterating the previous record of almost 17 GW in 2016,” bleated the ironically named Scientific American website. Wow, gigawatts. No idea what those are but they sound huge.
What is the problem with all that capacity? Well, how good is it? Let’s see…at a 33 per cent capacity factor (used by the US government as apparently reasonable), that 37 GW is just over 12 GW of power contributed to the grid, on average. The assumption seems to be then that 12 GW of dirty old hydrocarbons have been rendered obsolete, and, for the energy rube, the number is an even more righteous 37 GW, because, you know, some days it is really windy all over.
But, what happens when that load factor is…zero? Because it happens.
The current poster child for the issue is Great Britain. The UK has 24 GW of wind power installed. The media loves to talk about total renewable GW installed as proof of progress, and the blindingly rapid pace of the energy transition.
However over the past few weeks wind dropped almost to zero, and output from that 24 GW of installed capacity fell to about 1 or 2 GW.
Ordinarily, that would be no problem – just fire up the gas fired power plants, or import power from elsewhere.
But what happens when that isn’t available?
More pertinently, what happens when the likelihood of near-zero output happens to coincide with the times when that power is needed most – in heat waves, or cold spells? That brings us to the current grave situation facing Europe as it heads towards winter. Gas storage is supposed to be filling rapidly at this time of year, but it’s not, for a number of reasons.
Natural gas isn’t supposed to be on anyone’s roadmap, though. The culturally hip website Wired talked (in early September) about the imperative to limit global warming: “To make the switch we need to switch to renewable energy, such as solar, wind and geothermal, right now. We’re making good progress on this; solar and wind energy are now cheaper than fossil fuels, and renewable energy was responsible for around a third of global electricity production in 2020.” The first glimmer into the damage of relying on averages starts to show.
A few weeks later, Wired shows that a few light bulbs may be going on: “There’s a tendency for the government to say the power sector is done, the sector has been decarbonised, the renewables transition is going at pace and all of that good stuff,” the article quotes the head of Energy UK.
The article’s author, after musing that seven UK energy supply firms have gone out of business so far this year (a result of having to pay more to generate/acquire power than their locked in sales values), makes one of those profound British understatements of the my-arms-are-cut-off-and-I-appear-to-be-in-a-spot-of-trouble-old-chap variety: “And we’re reliant on gas more generally than we thought.” No, foul dullard, we are more reliant than you thought. Anyone in the business of providing energy could have told you that, but the simpleton army wouldn’t listen. And now you pay.
They could easily have asked experts, like providers of hydrocarbons. But those people are today’s lepers. No one is interested in their opinion for fear of the appearance of collaboration. (Trudeau set up a “Net Zero Advisory Body” with the mandate to identify net-zero pathways; NZAB has posted the records of meetings to date (24); only once – once – has ‘oil and gas’ been mentioned in the records, and the context is dumbfounding: “Members received a foundational briefing on the oil & gas sector from federal officials.” FROM FEDERAL OFFICIALS. Meanwhile, the NZAB also heard a presentation directly from the David Suzuki Foundation. This should end well.)
Let’s drive this energy conundrum home a little better for all these people who are, as Principal Skinner put it on the Simpsons, “furrowing their brows in a vain attempt to comprehend the situation.”
The world has been sold a faulty bill of goods, based on a pathetically simplistic vision of how renewable energy works. A US government website highlights the problem with this example: “The mean turbine capacity in the U.S. Wind Turbine Database is 1.67 megawatts (MW), At a 33% capacity factor, that average turbine would generate over 402,000 kWh per month – enough for over 460 average U.S. homes.”
Thus armed, bureaucrats and morons head straight to the promised land by multiplying the number of wind turbines by 460 and shocking-and-awing themselves with the results. Holy crap, we don’t need natural gas anymore (as they tell me in exactly those words).
So they all start dismantling the natural gas system – not directly by ripping up pipelines, but indirectly by blocking new ones, by championing ‘fossil-fuel divestment campaigns’, by taking energy policy advice from Swedish teenagers – and then stand there shivering in dim-witted stupor when the wind stops blowing, and the world’s energy producers are not in any position to bring forth more natural gas.
It’s not just Britain that is squirming. A Bloomberg article (which I cannot link to as I will never willingly send Bloomberg a cent) notes the following unsettling news: “China is staring down another winter of power shortages that threaten to upend its economic recovery as a global energy supply crunch sends the price of fuels skyrocketing. The world’s second biggest economy is at risk of not having enough coal and natural gas – used to heat households and power factories – despite efforts over the past year to stockpile fuel as rivals in North Asia and Europe compete for a finite supply.”
It is profoundly important to recognize that these comments come from Bloomberg – a ‘news’ institution that is going far, far out of its way to demonize, deprecate, and decapitate the hydrocarbon industry. That hydrocarbon industry, by the way, is making major inroads in ways these demonizers deem impossible – developing carbon capture/storage, reducing methane emissions, working on hydrogen solutions, and even succeeding at First Nations inclusion such as demonstrated by groups like Project Reconciliation (trying to buy TransMountain) and the recent purchase of an oil sands pipeline by 8 local First Nations and Suncor. That same hydrocarbon industry is working overdrive to solve emissions problems and engage First Nations.
A lot of the global energy-transition-now madness stems from such a basic inability to grasp certain fundamentals, which are not at all hard to understand if one wants to, but are impossible for those who require an energy villain to add righteousness to their campaign. You can install all the wind and solar you want, but if their output can go to zero, and more importantly if their output is more likely to go to zero when most needed (extreme heat (low wind, inefficient solar panels) or extreme cold (low wind, obvious solar shortcomings)), then you don’t have an energy system at all. And don’t put up your hand to say batteries are coming someday soon. The math on that as a NG replacement is even more laughable.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Yeah, yeah, I can hear it already, how terrible, coming down so hard on a bunch of hapless bandwagon-jumping commentators. Yeah, about that. That bandwagon is cutting off the world’s fuel supply at its knees. There will be consequences. Serious ones.
Hundreds of millions of people without adequate heating fuel in the dead of winter is not particularly funny. If a cold winter strikes, all the yappiest energy-transition-now dogs will fade into the woodwork, distancing themselves from the disinformation they’ve propagated and the disaster they’ve engineered. People in position of responsibility will have no choice but to speak out loud the words they’ve dared not utter for a decade: you need hydrocarbons, today, tomorrow, and for a very long time yet. So start acting like it.
Buy it while it’s still legal! Before the book burnin’ starts…pick up “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
It has occurred to me that the UK crisis is being manufactured to spike the green loony brigade.
Possibly. If that is plausibly deniable
shhhh! griff might be listening 😉
Net current, for any length of time can destroy the grid.
US natural gas storage isn’t exactly in great shape either:
https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/75144/#75275
The National Electricity Market in Australia illustrates this problem. In the middle of the day, solar often provides 40-50% of electricity demand, and wind a further 5-15%. This results in 30 minute spot prices sometimes dropping to zero and even going negative. Not a problem for these “renewables” because they also receive subsidies (paid for by consumers) of $30-60/MWhr. But when the sun goes down and the wind doesn’t blow, reliable dispatchable generators must ramp up to meet the evening peak demand. That evening generator mix is typically coal 65%, hydro 14%, gas 10%, with wind 11% sometimes, batteries 0.2%.
So more intermittent solar and wind will eat the reliable generator’s lunch, weakening their economics. The latest proposal is to pay subsidies to coal and gas generators to keep them viable. Utter madness.
“Nuclear is widely despised”
Those that despise nuclear deserve to die of stupidity
Please form a line to collect your Darwin prize here
Nuclear is not despised in China, Russia and South Korea
Eventually, the rest of the world will come to its senses.
The earlier the deranged UN hucksters and others stop listening to Swedish children, the better for all of us.
Nuclear is still UK govt policy, with 17GW of new capacity part of the plan.
alas, nobody seems able to build it…
Says a member of the group who has dedicated themselves to making it impossible to build nuclear.
“America’s capacity to build renewables at a level once considered impossible…”
Pretty sure that it was just considered stupid. The sort of mobilisation seen in WWII could have been used to pepper the country side with less efficient but effective enough windmills to provide an average sufficient for the needs of the US. Enough lead acid batteries could have been built at the expense of all other development.
“On February 4, 1923, British biologist J.B.S. Haldane delivered a lecture on the future of science to the Cambridge Heretics Society, whose guest speakers over the years included Bertrand Russell, Virginia Woolf, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Haldane (1892–1964), a pioneering professor of biochemistry at Cambridge University, would later crack the genetic code of hemophilia and colorblindness and coin the term “clone.” His lecture’s main subject that day was the possible benefits of selective human breeding. In an aside, however, Haldane made an off-the-cuff prediction about Britain’s future energy system. He started by pointing out that the domestic supply of coal and oil must necessarily be exhausted within a few centuries. Hydroelectricity would be insufficient to replace fossil fuels in Britain, Haldane believed, although he conceded its viability in places like British Columbia (where today it does indeed provide 95% of electricity).
The answer, he said, lies in “intermittent but inexhaustible sources of power, the wind and the sunlight” and a “cheap, foolproof, and durable storage battery” that will transform the wind’s intermittent energy “into continuous electric power.” In short, Haldane predicted the inevitability of the renewables transition, named the two key technologies (wind and solar), identified their primary drawback (intermittency), and proposed a solution for it (efficient batteries).”
A website laughably called Debate Energy.
And of course, it’s not happening because we need it or the technology has arrived, but because this crowd marched through our institutions.
Well, yes. If such a thing existed, it would be the answer.
Now look at a few additional things:
1. You need to increase capacity to cover the times when unreliables are not providing power. If that is 75% of the time, and fairly evenly spread, that’s 4x the existing reliable capacity you need to install, and 16 hours of that as storage for the times that they are not providing power.
2. For every consecutive day that there MIGHT be no power from unreliables, eg cloudy winter days with little wind, you need to add 24 hours storage capacity, and an additional 4x generating capacity. That’d add up fast.
3. Double it if you want EVs to replace ICE.
4. Add probably another half existing capacity if you want to replace gas heating and cooking.
That’s about 10x existing reliable capacity multiplied by the maximum number of consecutive days that you might get no unreliable power, and make sure you can store it all.
It’s easy to make idiotic declarations, but “math is hard” as Barbie stated.
Those four points are exactly why no one living today will ever see 100% renewable energy in their lifetime. Achieving 100% Renewable energy is a thousand times harder, and more expensive, than the WWII “Manhattan Project,” The probability is ten times greater they will finally see “Fusion Power” rather than “Unreliable power.” Think of the costs for the entire world to be “100% Renewable.”
As far as “Averaging out the lack of wind/sun” through a massive DC distribution system, that just doubles the cost again!
During the recent Texas Wind Turbine blackout, we in Nebraska suffered through weeks of rolling outages and brownouts in providing them with needed power. That is a transfer of over ~600 miles ~1,000 KM. There is no dedicated transmission, line thus, every utility between Omaha, and Dallas was involved with moving the electricity in the right direction.
The claim that intermittents (solar and wind) are lower cost is a complete lie. They are ONLY lower cost (possibly) when running. But as a system? They are always a cost adder – as we’re finding out.
You MUST have enough coal/gas/nuclear/hydro/thermal to provide 100% of your power needs – or you’re willing to accept that the lights won’t always work. If you want reliability, then those intermittents CANNOT stand on their own. They REQUIRE the other sources to exist.
Thus, intermittents are simply cost ADDERS, that allow for a lower cost of generation some times but also REQUIRE you to completely deploy 100% capacity in non-intermittents. You HAVE to apply the capital costs of the coal/gas/nuclear/etc to the intermittents as well because it is required to make a reliable grid.
Once you do that – they are NEVER lower cost – always more.
Two systems to do one job
The traditional one can do the WHOLE job very well without the wind/solar newcomers, but the reverse is not possible, EVER.
U.K. leads the world into fuel and soon food rationing caused by suicidal climate alarmist policies.
https://www.itv.com/news/2021-09-23/hgv-driver-shortage-bp-poised-to-ration-fuel-deliveries-amid-supply-problems
The Catholics call it attrition.
(This was the theme of the movie “Seven”)
Suffering for your stupidity without yet any intent to turn around. It doesn’t end well.
The driver shortage is due to political policy, not renewables.
The natural gas crisis is down to the price of gas, not renewables.
So the fact that demand for natural gas increased because wind and solar totally failed doesn’t matter in your world?
That’s not why demand increased, is it?
Killing off as many people as possible is a feature, not a bug, to these people. The green elites can afford to pay outrageous prices to eat, stay warm, and virtue signal, so like BoJo they shrug and say not to worry about it. The poor greens are dim enough to believe freezing to death in the dark won’t happen to them —until it does. Further, I’m wondering if UK excess winter deaths this year will be classed as “covid deaths” to hide the problem?
The word ‘average’ is probably the most misused word in climate science (much like the word ‘free’ in advertisements). Whether it’s temperature, rainfall, solar/wind output, or energy usage, it will mislead and deceive.
This is a tremendous lesson in average, and a reminder that at one time, the US military was more interested in results than optics. It is well worth the read.
https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-force-discovered-the-flaw-of-averages.html
The son of a friend of mine is a pilot, originally in the RAAF, now the Australian army. His helmet was created just for him, as all jet pilots in the RAAF,I believe. It cost about AU$300,000.
Journalists that write about energy are very naive to say the least. See this highly misleading article from CNN (very recent one) and the solutions that are presented. Outstanding ingenuity example!!! https://edition.cnn.com/2021/09/22/business/europe-energy-gas-renewables-climate-cmd-intl/index.html
Joel O’Brian hit on it….”This is being aided and abetted by the the Big Tech social media giants also working in collusion with the Democrats for common agendas.”
everyone realise…the media is owned by these mega-billionaires and they want all the power (wealth and contol) which cannot be achieved with a Capitalist Government…so any way to distroy it is the GOAL.
Does anyone remember the 1975 movie Rollerball….described as…”In a futuristic society where corporations have replaced countries, the violent game of Rollerball is used to control the populace by demonstrating the futility of individuality.”
think about it….that is what we are witnessing being developed.
my apology for the misspelled name…Joel O’Bryan
very sorry about that
On average, no one will freeze to death.
Hydrocarbons only work if you spend the time to replace what has been used
Currently no exploration is taking place and Governments are forcing handing back of permits
the US president Biden is shouting at the Saudi for not supplying oil to the US to keep gasoline prices low
the Europeans are accusing Russia of Price manipulation despite them needing to recharge there depleted storage because Norway Netherlands and the UK have not done there share
Fertilizer plants all over Europe are shutting down because of No NG at affordable prices – that means no Food next year
UK food processors can not supply meat because they need CO2 for processing animals
that means no Food next week and no food next year because farmers have to many animals to feed now and will not fill the hopper with new animals
Buy the way a 1GW interconnector has failed from France to the UK current estimates is its is down for the upcoming UK winter but probably much longer
and now Boris like Biden has insulted the French to get a new submarine contract with Australia
You know France will be able to redirect all there spare power to Europe so why shouldnt he the UK is not part of the EU
Hey Boris thanks for been an idiot you sit very nicely along side your US counterpart Biden
What is the expected number of people that will die from cold in the UK
Well they voted for you they get what they deserve
China has abundant 40w light bulbs left over from their home improvements. You can get Europe and the Americas to adopt this wattage to their abodes and solve the energy requirement problem that way.
While the whole article makes sense there does seem to be a misunderstanding of why we have gas or coal generation and how they operate. (not unusual in people who write about a subject they have little real knowledge of.
Quote from the article:- Ordinarily, that would be no problem – just fire up the gas fired power plants, or import power from elsewhere.
Except fo stand by gas open cycle generators which can start and come on line fairly quickly, all other thermal plants have to be running and at opertating temperature before they can be put to work. (Closed cycle gas plants which also have steam turbines run from the waste exhaust heat cannot ‘just be switched on’ they have to be warmed up which is days not hours)
There is also the matter of a stable frequency which uncontrollable wind and solar do nothing for. There has to be a substancial amount of controlled generation to keep the frequency within limits and this is gas, coal Hydro etc all large plants with large inertia, a stabilising force for frequency trying to supply a varying load, sometimes significantly so.
The real point is that you cannot replace conventional generation with renewables they are not an equivelant or alternative source of electricity. All they can do is remove some of the conventional generators load to their detriment in efficiency and operating profit. The last point is important as who will invest in new conventional genertaing plant if it is not economic. It is however essential and it’s time the politicians were told this!
The basics of a grid and its need for reliability is not impossible to understand as a concept. That policy is constructed by ignoring these fundamentals is a triumph of ignorance, and most politicians today are just that, ignorant. Not because they lack the ability, but because most prefer fantasy to reality, in a nutshell that is the problem with the western world
It is hilariously funny in a dark sort of way to see how big a sacrifice in terms of financial loss and number of economic trash-people freezing or starving to death, Europe is willing to pay, in order to protect their sacred right to regard gas from Russia’s Nordstream 2 as racially impure. Quite a lot I would guess, if past form is anything to go by. How are stockpiles of coffins looking? If it’s so important for America that Europe continue treating Russians as untermenschen, maybe they can help out by shipping over a few million coffins of nice American wood?
Gas crisis leaves Europe searching for solutions – BBC News
Solar made a significant contribution to UK power this summer, as did cheap French nuclear power, exported when summer demand was low in France.
The UK is of course installing another 30 GW of offshore wind, most of it in high capacity wind areas well offshore and well distributed around the coastline, thanks in part to floating turbines. This is wind power actually building, approved and for which the plans are in the planning process, i.e. very likely to get built.
It also has another 7 HVDC links to Norway and continental Europe approved or building, plus any number of solar, small hydro, anaerobic digester, pumped storage and tidal schemes.
The UK has a concerted programme of improving internal links to avoid constraining wind and solar, it has a growing number of grid scale batteries for frequency response and peak hours supply.
In short it looks like the UK and Europe will be able to draw on available renewable energy and hydro from across the whole West of the continent, from a growing array of disparate sources sited for maximum supply.
And that gas storage grid in Europe: it will form a place to hold reserves in the form of natural gas/green hydrogen mix…
The UK saw the worst of wind availability this summer and Germany this winter and managed that extreme (for extreme and unusual it was)
griff just keeps pumping out the same old lies. It’s like he never bothers to read the responses to him.
And its like people read the facts I post and just reply with the same old stuff ‘it can’t work because it doesn’t fit our political viewpoint!’
Tell me why the UK and Europe can’t make it work with a large installed base of renewables, widely distributed, massively connected.
The same thing is happening in other fields. Switzerland has just prolonged their moratorium on gene technology in agriculture. The government at first had spent a 150 millions of taxpayer money for an expert report which concluded that after 30 years of observation, the risk is minimal. The report was then ignored, and the decision was then justified as a “political” and not a “scientific” one. This is the second time this moratorium has been prolongated, even though it was specified that with modern gene editing, one knows exactly what one is doing. Plans to forbid the use of pesticides and herbicides are also ongoing. No energy, no food: that’s called progress…
If people want to freeze to death and starve, there’s no stopping that. And they most definitely are begging for this fate.
Many years ago my parents had oil lamps and my grandmother had a paraffin heater. All just in case because the power grid was rubbish. If you think there is a chance the power might go out it might be an idea to get something similar. At least spent a few pounds on some candles and a camping stove. It is no good saying “I told you so” if you don’t plan to mitigate the risks you think will occur.
Beatifully put.
BUT please join the dots – when someone says solar and wind cost have been reduced to be competitive that does not allow for the costs of the generation required when the sun don’t shine and the wind don’t blow
“A lot of the global energy-transition-now madness stems from such a basic inability to grasp certain fundamentals..”
Refusing to grasp them as they’re in it for the money, and ready to cash in on the problems they create.
“solar and wind energy are now cheaper than fossil fuels” Why keep on repeating this lie?
Recycling costs have not been factored in, and they are going to be hefty.
But very obviously, if they were cheaper, our energy bills would be, and they arent!
Free market competition would ensure that the end user would get cheaper energy if 30% of our power was now cheaper than before.