Misleading are the public relations efforts intending to make people feel good about weather dependent electricity from wind and solar “taking root” and “replacing” traditional continuous uninterruptable means of making electricity.
By Ronald Stein Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure, Irvine, California
Tom Stacy Electricity System Analyst / Consultant, Ohio
Comparing nameplate ratings of various electrical generating powers sources is comparable to using IQ as the only or most appropriate measure of the value of an employee to the company he or she works for… If everyone had the same health level, skillset, and work ethic, it might suffice. But we don’t. And neither do different kinds of power plants.
For those of us who focus on the costs and benefits of various kinds of power plants within a grid system, it appears there has been an orchestrated effort through media, advertising, and public relations – even government agencies – to mislead the public about the value proposition of wind and solar.
One of the most glaring examples is the persistent use of “nameplate rating” (generating capacity) of breezes and sunshine as a benchmark of value and comparison. Nameplate rating itself is not a reflection of the contribution of energy or reliability to a grid system.
In the 20th century “nameplate rating” was a reasonable proxy for contribution to meeting peak demand whenever that peak may occur. Put another way, all prevalent power plant types could be turned on and run – up to their “nameplate rating” – whenever they were needed (aside from scheduled time for major maintenance or upon some small chance of unexpected breakdown) because they were able to manage their fuels.
For these tried-and-true technologies whose fuel availability is determined by human ingenuity and learning/adapting, it is common to de-rate nameplate rating by only about 10 to 15% to arrive at a “capacity value” or “system adequacy contribution” value (in reliable, on demand watts). This value for each power plant is added together across a system and the sum expected to meet maximum system demand (called peak load) with about ten to fifteen percent more as a “reserve margin” to avoid potential blackouts caused by unexpected generator outages or unexpected high demand.
The amount of reserve margin is a trade-off between the risk of black-outs (and other system reliability issues) and costs. So “right sizing” system “adequacy” is important to keeping electricity rates low because power plants cost far more to build and maintain than all the fuel they will ever consume over their lifespans. Accordingly, too many power plants are indeed too many because they are expensive to build, and therefore they rely on adequate revenue from their productivity to pay for themselves and produce a return on investment over several decades.
A 90 percent System Adequacy Contribution per watt of Nameplate Rating is fair and common across conventional types from coal to gas to nuclear. But wind and solar are different compared to technologies that have ‘Firm’ capacity. Their “fuels,” solar radiation and breezes, cannot be managed – i.e., consistently delivered and converted to electricity – and will never be. This is especially critical at the times demand is greatest. Therefore, they do not significantly replace the most expensive component of the cost of electricity: dispatchable power plants. Instead, they sap market share, gross margin percentages and revenue from the dependable fleet they can only pretend they can replace.
Just as problematic as renewables’ fundamental inability to generate at highest demand times is that these “intermittent fueled generators” often generate most when less power is needed by society, creating an undervalued market price for all electricity producers – sometimes lower than it costs them to generate (known as marginal cost), and far lower than the all-in cost to maintain system adequacy considering loan payments, payroll and other monthly expenses which must be met by all power plants.
For wind and solar “nameplate rating” is neither a measure of expected electricity generation over time nor their contribution to system reliability. Yet time and time again we see government entities, grid operators and especially news media spouting GENERATING CAPACITY (nameplate rating) in comparisons with conventional generating technologies.
Using nameplate capacity to compare technologies is misleading people into believing that weather dependent electricity can “replace” technologies that can manage their fuels when they cannot. This kind of reporting and public relations is, intentionally or not, biased toward intermittent generation. It’s sad when done by the media and public relations, and worse when done by a government agency.
However, with respect to cost comparison, US Department of Energy EIA states it clearly in their annual levelized cost of electricity reports, imploring:
“The duty cycle for intermittent renewable resources, wind and solar, is not operator controlled, but dependent on the weather or solar cycle (that is, sunrise/sunset)..(and so) their levelized costs are not directly comparable to those for other technologies..” ……………………………..
PJM, the largest wholesale electricity market operator in the world seems to agree in this statement describing the priorities in their most recent renewables transition study: “Correctly calculating the capacity contribution of generators is essential: A system with increased variable resources will require new approaches to adequately assess the reliability value of each resource and the system overall.”
This speaks directly to the importance of accurate system adequacy contribution comparisons between different generating technologies as the headline metric of value – instead of nameplate rating.
The correct two metrics of comparison between intermittent and dispatchable power plants that should supersede the use of nameplate rating are:
1) system adequacy contribution (in MWs) and
2) annualized electric energy generation (in MWhs)
Unfortunately, as PJM indicates, the methods of estimating system adequacy contribution are also controversial. The most widely used metric is “the old approach”, or ELCC (effective load carrying capability). That metric would be helpful if all generating technologies were symbiotic and not parasitic. In other words, ELCC fails to consider that wind and solar readily depress the financial viability of the existing dispatchable fleet that renewables require to remain, and that ELCC uses as a basis for the calculation of the system adequacy contribution of the “parasitic” renewables! In essence the metric isn’t well suited for an energy mix where competitive technologies aren’t direct substitutes for each other. ELCC is subtly circular in its reasoning since renewables have become politically favored into deployment and undermine the financial solvency of dependable power plant investments.
A better way of estimating system adequacy contribution looks at recent historical generating patterns of renewables in the context of the load patterns and amplitudes they might serve, independent of the existing generation mix. We favor one called “Mean of Lowest Quartile generation across peak load hours (MLQ) suggested by the market Monitor in its 2012 SOM report on MISO.
Realistically, by this metric, the following shows both nameplate capacity (outlined, not color-shaded) and system adequacy contribution (color-shaded) of the US electricity mix as of the end of 2018.
In using the wrong bases of comparison between power plant types, governments, market operators and image-obsessed companies are ignoring prudent economics and physics, placing the importance of the notion of a cleaner, self-sustaining world dependent on the weather for power ahead of real priorities like an affordable, abundant, and reliable electricity grid system, in accordance with FERC’s mission, to support human flourishing.
Renewables only “take root” because governments, market operators, utility regulators and misguided Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) factors – misguided only in that they do not account for how the Grid actually works, as discussed above – seek an unrealistic pace and impetus of “energy transition.” These push modern civilization toward reaching an economy like we had in the 1800’s and prior – the last time the world was “decarbonized”.
| Ronald Stein, P.E. Tom Stacy |
| Ambassador for Energy & Infrastructure Electricity System Economist |
http://www.energyliteracy.net/
The fundamental falsehood is that these energy sources are renewable. the second greatest lie is that they are carbon-free. Once one is taken in by either or both of those, power-ratings salesmanship goes down easy.
There is no “renewable” energy source that is not utterly dependent on cheap fossil fuel for raw material, manufacture, operations, maintenance, and waste disposition.
Voltage, current, and power ratings for PV and wind are needed for safety margins in system designs, they give very little information about possible performance in real applications.
I wish the authors had run this piece thru a high school study group before publishing it. The language is ok for most college engineering graduates, but not for the general public.
Most readers eyes will glaze over after the first 2 paragraphs…
Follow the KISS principle, “ Keep it simple, stupid”.
Wind and the sun can provide free energy some of the time ,
but the cost of collecting and distributing that electricity into the grid and homes does not come cheap . Reality will bite the voters eventually when trying to pay their power bills during a black or brown out .
Sorry people but our ‘Ambassador’ needs a crash course in Self Awareness.
Has he ANY IDEA of what he reveals about himself with the first paragraph – raving on about IQ and Intelligence?
In this Modern Age, you don’t talk to people like that. You don’t start conversations by implying/telling/asserting how clever you are, relative to your listener, thus implying how dumb they are.
There are myriad more and varied examples he could have used – such as you wouldn’t buy or use a Formula One racing car to ‘do the school run‘ or to ‘pop down the shops for a carton of milk’
Maybe ‘Ambassadors’ do do that, e.g. whenever the chip on his shoulder needs replacing?
Maybe the word ‘ ambassador’ means something different in the US to what it does in the UK but, I’m sorry. no no no. Ditch this guy.
(He’s never come out with anything of real substance anyway)
Well you can easily look up % of annual demand met – above 40% for several European nations and rising.
Thus all soothed, in colder weather the more classic dirt-fuel power sources work much more efficiently
For the UK grid the solar MLQ is a firm ZERO. it will always be so no matter how much solar capacity you add to the UK grid. As the UK is an island grid solar is therefore pointless. But we knew this already.
The MLQ for wind will not be zero, but almost certainly be below 5 % of nameplate capacity.
This is an excellent article for people in the industry. For explaining to the public and swaying their opinions on the issue it fails. The average person is going simply see word salad and move on.
Sorry – this post totally misstates effective power generation. Only nuclear plants have actually approached 90% effective actual production. Coal plants average only around 60% effective production, which is not far from renewables. Coal plants are highly maintenance intensive, while gas plants are less so.
Also, just because someone theoretically can turn up the throttle does not mean the additional fuel will actually be there. See great Texas freeze where gas compressors they fill froze and failed for several days. Pipelines and coal trains are interruptible.
Also, steam plants operate at lower efficiency when operated significantly below max rated power.
Renewables require far less maintenance than complex mechanical-thermal power plants and suffer far less maintenance down time, and have flat efficiency over a very wide range of operating conditions (sunlight and wind).
Finally the author fails to mention that there is this little thing called “demand” which varies greatly on a predictable cycle which is actually favorable for use of solar and wind power. Electrical demand always peaks in daytime when people are awake and using peak lighting, heating and cooling, and when business, industry, and government facilities are open, operating, and generating peak demand.
Daytime also happens to be the peak generation time for supply of solar and wind.
Renewables clearly have an important contribution to make in supplying peak utility demands, and in fact are better at doing that than any thermal power plant. Solar and wind are not as useful for supplying base load demands since they require additional expensive infrastructure for energy storage.
An efficient grid system uses a combination of base load generation and peaking generation.
It’s capacity, MWs, and energy, MWh, that should not be confused.
“it is common to de-rate nameplate rating by only about 10 to 15% to arrive at a “capacity value” or “system adequacy contribution” value (in reliable, on demand watts).”
There is a reason that. There is a “10 – 15%” of de-rate of name plate output. Essentially every form of generation, other than solar, use “10 – 15%” of the generated power to make the things run that are needed to make electricity. Solar also has a problem if used only to charge a battery or pumped storage facility and then discharge that batter/facility when needed. Solar is even worse if only used for battery charging due to the very low capacity factor anywhere outside of the southeast US. Those facilities with the greatest number of environmental regulations are at the top end of the usage and even exceed 15%.
Wind also is at the high end as all of the equipment is running 24/7/365. Some wind turbine locations actually consume more electricity, annually, that they make annually. Look at the annual net generation from off-shore facilities in the North Atlantic. Further north the greater the loss.
Thanks to Ronald Stein and Tom Stacy
This is another strong and informative essay/presentation published here on WUWT. Easy to read and understand and gets directly to the point. Anyone who can’t grasp what they have presented should not run for office or have any influence on energy policy or for that matter even be allowed to vote. The latter with regards to voting makes logical sense as utter stupidity should not have an influence on the entire population and economy, especially if the stupid become a majority.
Great article – as an HV Electrical Engineer with 42 years industry experience, I find the whole renewables will run the grid 100%, 24/7, so laughable!
A 10MW wind turbine will only produce that when the wind is blowing just right, hence, availability and reliability are inherently low – same with solar when the Sun is dim or gone!
Fossil fuels and nuclear are the only reliable, available and affordable energy sources – the only ‘reliable renewable’ source would be tidal, but again, without storage, it is unable to power the grid 100%, 24/7 – simple physics dictates this
Fossil fuel power generation will be with us until nuclear fusion becomes commercially available, then all fossil and renewable energy sources could be replaced by a reliable and available source – although I suppose safety and environmental risks of using nuclear will be the climate alarmists next holy grail!
I see quite a bit of complaint about this article being too technical or elitist in some way. I found it to be very good, from my perspective, and Figure 10 I am going to copy and keep close for reference in debates and hearings.
Here’s the transcript of Mark Mill’s factual S & W video and it takes about 5 minutes to watch. Please wake up to these TOXIC RUINABLES and their very short 20 year life. SO WHAT ABOUT YOUR ENVIRONMENT????
https://www.prageru.com/video/whats-wrong-with-wind-and-solar?playlist=fact-checkers
Have you ever heard of “unobtanium”?
It’s the magical energy mineral found on the planet Pandora in the movie, Avatar. It’s a fantasy in a science fiction script. But environmentalists think they’ve found it here on earth in the form of wind and solar power.
They think all the energy we need can be supplied by building enough wind and solar farms; and enough batteries.
The simple truth is that we can’t. Nor should we want to—not if our goal is to be good stewards of the planet.
To understand why, consider some simple physics realities that aren’t being talked about.
All sources of energy have limits that can’t be exceeded. The maximum rate at which the sun’s photons can be converted to electrons is about 33%. Our best solar technology is at 26% efficiency. For wind, the maximum capture is 60%. Our best machines are at 45%.
So, we’re pretty close to wind and solar limits. Despite PR claims about big gains coming, there just aren’t any possible. And wind and solar only work when the wind blows and the sun shines. But we need energy all the time. The solution we’re told is to use batteries. Again, physics and chemistry make this very hard to do.
Consider the world’s biggest battery factory, the one Tesla built in Nevada. It would take 500 years for that factory to make enough batteries to store just one day’s worth of America’s electricity needs. This helps explain why wind and solar currently still supply less than 3% of the world’s energy, after 20 years and billions of dollars in subsidies.
Putting aside the economics, if your motive is to protect the environment, you might want to rethink wind, solar, and batteries because, like all machines, they’re built from nonrenewable materials.
Consider some sobering numbers:
A single electric-car battery weighs about half a ton. Fabricating one requires digging up, moving, and processing more than 250 tons of earth somewhere on the planet.
Building a single 100 Megawatt wind farm, which can power 75,000 homes requires some 30,000 tons of iron ore and 50,000 tons of concrete, as well as 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics for the huge blades. To get the same power from solar, the amount of cement, steel, and glass needed is 150% greater.
Then there are the other minerals needed, including elements known as rare earth metals. With current plans, the world will need an incredible 200 to 2,000 percent increase in mining for elements such as cobalt, lithium, and dysprosium, to name just a few.
Where’s all this stuff going to come from? Massive new mining operations. Almost none of it in America, some imported from places hostile to America, and some in places we all want to protect.
Australia’s Institute for a Sustainable Future cautions that a global “gold” rush for energy materials will take miners into “…remote wilderness areas [that] have maintained high biodiversity because they haven’t yet been disturbed.”
And who is doing the mining? Let’s just say that they’re not all going to be union workers with union protections.
Amnesty International paints a disturbing picture: “The… marketing of state-of-the-art technologies are a stark contrast to the children carrying bags of rocks.”
And then the mining itself requires massive amounts of conventional energy, as do the energy-intensive industrial processes needed to refine the materials and then build the wind, solar, and battery hardware.
Then there’s the waste. Wind turbines, solar panels, and batteries have a relatively short life; about twenty years. Conventional energy machines, like gas turbines, last twice as long.
With current plans, the International Renewable Energy Agency calculates that by 2050, the disposal of worn-out solar panels will constitute over double the tonnage of all of today’s global plastic waste. Worn-out wind turbines and batteries will add millions of tons more waste. It will be a whole new environmental challenge.
Before we launch history’s biggest increase in mining, dig up millions of acres in pristine areas, encourage childhood labor, and create epic waste problems, we might want to reconsider our almost inexhaustible supply of hydrocarbons—the fuels that make our marvelous modern world possible.
And technology is making it easier to acquire and cleaner to use them every day.
The following comparisons are typical—and instructive:
It costs about the same to drill one oil well as it does to build one giant wind turbine. And while that turbine generates the energy equivalent of about one barrel of oil per hour, the oil rig produces 10 barrels per hour. It costs less than 50 cents to store a barrel of oil or its equivalent in natural gas. But you need $200 worth of batteries to hold the energy contained in one oil barrel.
Next time someone tells you that wind, solar and batteries are the magical solution for all our energy needs ask them if they have an idea of the cost… to the environment.
“Unobtanium” works fine in the movies. But we don’t live in movies. We live in the real world.
I’m Mark Mills, Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, for Prager University.
Solar works on sunny days. Not so much on overcast days. Not at all at night.
So what’s wrong with that?
Well, winter is more overcast, at a time when we need more energy. Snow lands on those panels, too, reducing their output. AT night is when the BIG EV guys figure we’ll all be charging our cars. Oops.
Wind? Those turbines have an ideal windspeed. Too little, and output falls off. Sure, they might turn, but you can’t put much load on them. Too much, and they have to shut them down or risk having them damaged
And the wind? At night we normally have what is called a nocturnal inversion, when the air near the surface of the earth cools and gets heavier and tends to disconnect from the air above it, and the surface winds decrease to pretty much nothing unless it’s stormy. So, at night, little or no power from them.
Weather systems affect the wind. High-pressure systems tend to have little wind once the system settles in, and what sort of weather do we get under a High pressure zone? Clear skies, which means cold winter nights as the small amount of accumulated surface heat radiates out into space, and hot summer days and the overhead sun really cooks us. Those are the two times we need more electricity, for airconditioning and heating. And it ain’t there.
Just imagine If the wind always blew within range. If the sun always shone at the optimal incidence. A handmade tale and fantasy merges with reality.
I believe that not well informed members of the public would be shocked to learn how much land area is needed for wind turbine and solar energy supply installation businesses, including the land for the feeder transmission lines to the main grid and for ancillary back up equipment.
As compared to power stations with an equivalent generating capacity, as compared to so called renewables unreliable intermittent supply, that generate reliable supply twenty four hours a day every day.
In addition to misleading the public by using nameplate ratings, both wind and solar facilities degrade over time, so they can’t deliver nameplate power over their lifetimes, even when conditions are optimal. With wind power, it’s mostly due to the blades getting rough surfaces.
Whereas, the nuke down the lake from me is still putting out the same 3.1 GW that it was in 1970.
And that’s not even addressing the life expectancy of wind and solar installations. Energy from the wind and sun may be free and infinitely renewable, but the cost of harnessing it is another thing entirely. For that matter, you could say that the energy in a kilo of uranium, or a ton of coal, is free; it just takes money to mine it, refine it and build the power plants to use it.
The post makes the point, which is seldom emphasised enough, that wind and solar installations can only deliver electricity at the low prices ceaselessly extolled by their proponents, because they have “must take” contracts that often force grid operators to sell excess power to neighbouring jurisdictions for less than the cost of production, when demand is low. Or sometimes even at negative prices (i.e. paying neighbours to take it). Because base load from thermal power stations can’t be ramped up and down at will to match variations in wind speed.
And that’s not even getting into direct subsidies, tax credits etc.
I prefer to categorize wind and solar power as “Unreliables”, calling them renewables puts them on par with hydroelectric power, biomass which they are not.