You don’t have to be any kind of a genius to figure out that wind and solar generation are never going to supplant fossil fuels in powering the world economy. The main reason is that the wind and sun only work part time, indeed well less than half of the time at best. With wind, you never know when it might work, and over a year a given facility might on average produce about 30-35% of rated capacity, with long and random periods of nothing. With the sun, you know from the get-go that you will get nothing fully half the time (i.e., night); and cloudy days wipe out half and more of the remaining half, again at random times. Averaged over the year, you’ll be lucky to get 20% of rated capacity from a solar facility.
With the world economy finally bouncing back (hopefully) from the year-and-a-half of pandemic, this is the moment for wind and solar to step up and show what they can do. All the advanced economies (Europe, UK, U.S., Canada, Australia) have been pushing wind and solar for a couple of decades, with tens of billions of dollars of various subsidies and tax breaks. There are now wind turbines and solar panels all over the place. Simultaneously the same countries have shuttered coal plants, reduced nuclear, banned fracking in many places (Europe, the UK, and much of the U.S.), and discouraged fossil fuels of every sort in a hundred different ways. Now there is a surge in demand for manufactured goods of every sort. That will take some energy. Let’s see what the wind and the sun can do!
The answer is that when they are needed they are useless.
Which brings me to two front page articles in the Wall Street Journal the past two days. Yesterday it was “Coal Shortages Weigh on global Economies.” Excerpt:
Coal supply shortages are pushing prices for the fuel to record highs and laying bare the challenges to weaning the global economy off one of its most important—and polluting—energy sources. The crunch has many causes—from the post-pandemic boom to supply-chain strains and ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions. And it is expected to last at least through the winter, raising fears in many countries of fuel shortfalls in the months ahead.
How much have prices increased?
Australia’s Newcastle thermal coal, a global benchmark, is trading at $202 a metric ton, three times higher than at the end of 2019.
And then from today we have “Natural Gas Shortage Sets Off a Scramble.” It’s basically the same story as for coal:
Buyers in Europe, Asia and Latin America are competing for limited supplies of gas, racing to fill tanks and caverns with the fuel before winter hits the Northern Hemisphere. Natural gas stocks are alarmingly low around the world, and prices in most places have never been higher after surging to new records in Europe and Asia this week. Demand has jumped as economies have bounced back from pandemic shutdowns, and the squeeze has caught traders, shipowners and energy executives off guard.
How about a few details on the price? They helpfully give us this chart:
Thankfully the U.S., home of fracking, has mostly been spared the huge natural gas price spikes that have befallen Europe and Asia. If the dopes occupying the White House and leading the Congress had their way, we would be suffering the fate of those places and worse.
And oil? It’s suddenly trading at $80 and more per barrel, the highest prices since 2014. Expect that fact to show up in gas prices at the pump over the course of the next few weeks or days.
But what are we missing? Shouldn’t wind and solar just step up to fill in the gaps? After all, they are clean, and they are green, we have lots of brand new facilities, and the fuel is abundant and free. The question is of course facetious. Wind and solar are completely useless to step in when supplies of fossil fuels are tight. You can cover the landscape with them, but on a calm night you will have nothing. Absolutely nothing. Essentially you need the same fossil fuel capacity as if you had never built any wind or solar facilities at all.
While we’re at this, we might as well look over to the big energy story on the front page of today’s New York Times. That would be “World Wants Action as China Gushes Emissions.” It’s a big three-column extravaganza, continued to all of page A-12 in the interior. The bottom line: China is producing a huge percentage of the world’s manufactured goods, and it currently has a shortage of electricity to do the job, and it’s going to build more fossil fuel power plants whether the pooh-bahs of the rest of the world like it or not. Some excerpts:
On the northern edge of a vast Chinese factory city, welding torches gleam as workers finish construction on a gas-fired power plant to replace one that burned coal and blanketed the surrounding neighborhood in a sooty pall. It’s one of several huge gas-fired plants being built to pump more electricity throughout this sprawling industrial city of about 10 million, where rising demand for power has led to rationing and blackouts that are now rippling across eastern China and threaten international supply chains. This archipelago of power plants underlines an unsettling reality in the global fight to slow climate change. China burns more fossil fuels than any other nation, making it the planet’s top source of the greenhouse gases that are warming the Earth. And its voracious appetite for electricity is only growing.
But hasn’t China built all kinds of wind and solar facilities, and for that matter hydropower? The Times calls them the “world leader” in all three categories:
China is the world leader in hydroelectric power, in solar power and in wind power. While China has mostly run out of rivers to dam for hydroelectric power, it has been building solar power and wind power faster than any other country in recent years.
So why don’t they just use these sources to provide the power they need and forget about the coal and the natural gas? The Times will never say it, but the fact is that all the wind and solar are completely for show. They produce some small amounts of power at random times, and then when you really need them they can’t be counted on. So China continues to build natural gas and coal plants, while mouthing empty promises about maybe someday slowing that process down. As to the reality on the ground:
China still plans to build 247 gigawatts of new coal power. That is nearly six times Germany’s entire coal power capacity. China’s plan “would actually undo the ability of the rest of the world” to restrain global warming to a relatively safe level, [John Kerry] said.
But Kerry and his ilk have no real idea of where actual useful energy can come from to make all this manufactured stuff. For example:
The biggest driver of China’s emissions, however, is its insatiable appetite for steel and cement, key ingredients for apartment towers, bullet train lines, subways and other large construction projects. Producing these two materials accounts for about a quarter of China’s carbon emissions.
Make vast amounts of steel and cement with solar power? Good luck with that.
Anyway, we’re little by little seeing the inevitable consequences of trying to replace real energy that works (fossil fuels) with fairy dust. This will continue until the low and middle income people of the world figure this out and throw the climate cultists out of power.
From the quote “Coal supply shortages are pushing prices for the fuel to record highs and laying bare the challenges to weaning the global economy off one of its most important—and polluting—energy sources. The crunch has many causes—from the post-pandemic boom to supply-chain strains and ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions. And it is expected to last at least through the winter, raising fears in many countries of fuel shortfalls in the months ahead.”
How can the short supply of coal be a function of ambitious targets for reducing carbon emissions? Burning less coal should lead to oversupply, not less. I guess CO2 can violate the law of supply and demand.
It is almost impossible to get finance and environmental approval to commence any fossil fuel project. Australian mines near rail lines and port infrastructure could be started in 3 years last century. Now it takes at least a decade with all sorts of legal challenges.
Even expanding existing mines faces legal challenges for generational pillaging – depriving Greta and cohort of a survivable future. The nub is that they will die of cold without fossil fuels.
Just make sure you have your own trees and a place to burn them when it gets really cold. Also keep a few tonne of dry wood handy for emergency use – preferably well hidden from would-be thieves. And don’t advertise your heating appliance.
Coal mines cannot really ramp up supply quickly to meet a sudden increase in demand.
New mines take decades to go through external and internal approvals processes. Equipment lead times can be three years. Infrastructure takes many years to be approved, let alone installed.
A lot of coal projects now face severe pressures to be approved, and the timeline to gain approval has ballooned.
Even operating mines are constrained by the existing machines, most are operated at as close to 100% of nominal capacity as they can so the ability to bump up production is very limited. Most mines will have the ability to stockpile only a few weeks of production – and are loath to do that because it costs a lot of money to have a stockpile just sitting there.
If demand is reduced, operating mines will simply move onto a lower operating cost method of operating, eg go to 5 days a week from a 7 day operation. The days of producing more when prices go down to lower fixed costs on a unit basis are long over. Producers have a bit more discipline.
“The main reason is that the wind and sun only work part time”.
There are 2 main reasons, each fatal. The other is the exceedingly low energy density of wind and solar, causing an ongoing need for huge expenditure of resources.
Imagine thinking a 1500 year old technology could replace fossil fuel to generate electricity.
If you recall, windmills were originally built to grind grain. The millers had no control over the wind or weather, but knew both of those well enough to know what their limits were, and how big the sails on the windmill arms had to be to do the miller’s job. There are still old windmills on farms next to water tanks, and they still pump water for livestock and household use, in this country.
But just because it worked for millers and farmers and what they did, producing flour, pumping water, etc., it does not mean it would work for producing a constant stream of electric power or anything else. Even a farmer who used a windmill to pump water for livestock in the Midwest knew that.
And if these geniuses who think they know everything about everything when they don’t even know what day it is without checking a phone to find out, knew even half of what millers and farmers know, they’d realize how abundantly dumb their brilliant ideas are and go back to watching TV, where they belong.
Is that a large bird’s nest in that photo? See??? Those obnoxious eyesores do have some post-wind-cranking usefulness, after all. 🙂
It’s just unfortunate that the people who don’t understand the real limits on solar and wind almost seem to follow that path intentionally. I think they need a dose of their own medicine. I certainly will not share my bean soup and cornbread with butter and cut-up veggies if they drop by. It’s about earning the privilege of being in my kitchen, and they haven’t.
Wind and Solar can be part of the solution. But they are not the only solution. Oil and natural gas are the main part of the solution and will always be that way. Nuclear too.
Here are some quotes from my paper at
https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
” Abstract
This paper begins by reviewing the relationship between CO2 and Millennial temperature cycles. CO2 levels follow temperature changes. CO2 is the dependent variable and there is no calculable consistent relationship between the two. The uncertainties and wide range of out-comes of model calculations of climate radiative forcing arise from the improbable basic assumption that anthropogenic CO2 is the major controller of global temperatures. Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between the phases of cyclic processes of varying wavelengths and amplitudes. At all scales, including the scale of the solar planetary system, sub-sets of oscillating systems develop synchronous behaviors which then produce changing patterns of periodicities in time and space in the emergent data. Solar activity as represented by the Oulu cosmic ray count is here correlated with the Hadsst3 temperatures and is the main driver of global temperatures at Millennial scales. The Millennial pattern is projected forwards to 2037. Earth has just passed the peak of a Millennial cycle and will generally cool until 2680 – 2700. At the same time, and not merely coincidentally, the earth has now reached a new population peak which brought with it an associated covid pandemic, and global poverty and income disparity increases which threaten the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. During the last major influenza epidemic world population was 1.9 billion. It is now 7.8 billion+/. The establishment science “consensus” that a modelled future increase in CO2 levels and not this actual fourfold population increase is the main threat to human civilization is clearly untenable. The cost of the proposed rapid transition to non- fossil fuels would create an unnecessary, enormously expensive. obstacle in the way of the effort to attain a modern ecologically viable sustainable global economy. We must adapt to the most likely future changes and build back smarter when losses occur. ”
……………………………..
Most importantly the models make the fundamental error of ignoring the very probable long- term decline in solar activity and temperature following the Millennial Solar Activity Turning Point and activity peak which was reached in 1990/91 as shown in Figure 5. The correlative UAH 6.0 satellite TLT anomaly at the MTTP at 2003/12 was + 0.26C. The temperature anomaly at 2021/9 was + 0.25 C. (34) This satellite data set shows that there has been no net global warming for the last 17 years. As shown above, these Renewable Energy Targets in turn are based on model forecast outcomes which now appear highly improbable. Science, Vol 373,issue 6554 July2021 in “Climate panel confronts implausibly hot models” (35) says “Many of the world’s leading models are now projecting warming rates that most scientists, including the modelmakers themselves, believe are implausibly fast. In advance of the U.N. report, scientists have scrambled to understand what went wrong and how to turn the models…… into useful guidance for policymakers. “It’s become clear over the last year or so that we can’t avoid this,” says Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.”
The global temperature cooling trends from 2003/4 – 2704 are likely to be broadly similar to those seen from 996 – 1700+/- in Figure 2. From time to time the jet stream will swing more sharply North – South. Local weather in the Northern Hemisphere in particular will be generally more variable with, in summers occasional more northerly extreme heat waves droughts and floods and in winter more southerly unusually cold snaps and late spring frosts”
The whole Net Zero campaign is founded on the self delusions and confirmation bias of the academic establishment consensus model forecasts . The main stream Media notably the BBC ,Guardian, NBC ,ABC, CBS,PBS have been the greatest sources of false news. They have produced a generation of scared and psychologically disturbed teenagers and green fanatics who believe that the world has no future if fossil fuels continue to be used. The effect of C02 on temperature is immeasurably small. There is no CO2 caused climate crisis. It is left to sites like WUWT and the Blogosphere in general to question and discuss the basic science on which the disastrous Net Zero policies are based.”
“with tens of billions of dollars of various subsidies and tax breaks.”
Fie! They simply need several trillion $ (each) increases and things will really fly. Haven’t you heard what Joe said?
My take away from the editorials bashing China. The CCPP isn’t bribing enough people and that the these newspapers have no hope of selling their services in China.
The very fact that wind turbines are seriously considered as providers of scalable electric power is all the evidence you need that green energy is a pipe dream. Everything needed for functioning wind turbines had been invented by 1832, when Michael Faraday developed a practical means for generating alternating current. Airscrews (as in windmlls) had been invented in the Eighth Century. Wind turbines are roughly as modern a technology as steam engines.
Here in Canada, it would probably cost 100 million dollars to electrify a town of 2500 souls with wind turbines, which would still need fossil fuel back-up. It is only grotesque levels of popular ignorance that keeps the green energy chimera alive in the public imagination.
Articles like this are anti-Australian.
Australia’s resource based economy is benefitting hugely from this madness – please don’t try to bring sanity back into the discussion.