Undoubtedly, the question right now at the top of everyone’s mind is, When is the Manhattan Contrarian’s Energy Storage Report coming out? After all, he previously promised it for September, and then October, and here we are almost in December and we still haven’t seen it.
It’s a fair question. Being a blogger, I don’t have much appreciation for the formalities of the publication process. In blogging, you finish the post, do a quick proofread, press “Publish,” and there it is. With this, it has been rounds of peer review, editing, typesetting, proofreading, and so forth. However, I’m now told that the official issue date will be Thursday, December 1.
After the publication, I’ll have several posts expounding on parts of the Report, particularly those portions that cover topics I have not already beaten to death here on the blog. But for now I want to focus on the most important aspect of this, which is: Don’t get discouraged in thinking that the climate extremists have “won.” They have not.
It does not really matter that the climate extremists at the moment control all of the commanding heights of our culture — the media, academia, most big corporations, and the Executive Branch of the government. What matters is that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work and cannot work. It’s only a question of when and how it fails — and of how big the political blowback will be when that happens. The main Achilles heel of the proposals is the problem of energy storage.
As an example of a discouraged voice out there, I refer you to an interview of environmentalist-turned-climate-skeptic Michael Schellenberger, that appeared today on the website Spiked. After a long career in environmentalism, Schellenberger more recently came to realize that the climate alarm movement is a scam. In 2020 he published the book “Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All.” But despite getting his own views out there in a book, in the Spiked interview he remarks that essentially all voices of reason on the subject of climate, including his own, are getting completely drowned out in the public square:
[T]he climate movement is bizarre. . . . [I]t’s taken control of all these elite institutions. The movement’s ideology is the official religion of the British government, including the British Conservative Party. It’s the official religion of the United Nations. It’s the official religion of the World Economic Forum. Climate activists have made the great reset, which is fundamentally about a transition to renewables for climate change, the dominant ideology of the global elites. . . . [T]he whole mainstream news media and the global elites are basically part of this cult. The idea that the world is coming to an end is mainstream among journalists.
As the voices of climate extremism have become more dominant in the public square, Schellenberger notes that their demands have become ever more and more unhinged:
We’re seeing much more extremist rhetoric and a lot of people engaging in extremely disruptive civil disobedience. That’s what’s new about Just Stop Oil. Its accusation is, why are people upset about attacking works of art, rather than being upset about the planet? . . . There’s definitely a cult aspect. You see it in everything they’re demanding.
Schellenberger’s conclusion: the climate extremists “have won”:
[T]he climate extremists have won. Their demands and their discourse are so mainstream. . . .
My response to Schellenberger is, don’t be so sure. The extremists may seem to have the upper hand at the moment, but the missing piece is that they have no idea how our energy system works, and they are demanding a replacement that has zero chance of success. It’s only a question of when and how it will fail, and how damaging the consequences of the failure will be.
Consider as a counterpoint to Schellenberger a post today from a British guy named Paul Homewood at his website Not A Lot Of People Know That, with the title “Why Solar Power Is Useless In Winter.” Homewood has gone and gotten the hourly data on UK electricity generation from its solar panels from this website. For context, the typical electricity usage in the UK at this time of year is given by Homewood as 840 GWh, which would be 35 GWh for each hour of the day. The capacity of the solar generation facilities in the UK is given as 14 GW. That would mean, if the solar facilities produced at full capacity for the 24 hours, they would have produced some 336 GWh, or a full 40% of the UK’s usage for the day. But hey, it’s late November. The days are short, and the UK has lots of clouds. So how much did the solar facilities actually produce today? Here is the chart:
At around noon, the solar panels reached their peak of generation for the day at 1.33 GW — less than 4% of average usage. For the whole day, production from the solar panels was all of 5.46 GWh, or 0.65% of usage. The times of peak electricity demand are the early morning and evening. At those times the UK’s solar panels produced absolutely nothing. In fact, they produced nothing from midnight to 8 AM, and then from 4 PM on.
So how is the UK (or anywhere else) ever going to obtain a meaningful amount of its electricity in winter from solar panels? Well, considering just today, they could have built some 154 times as many solar panels as they currently have. With that, they could have obtained the exact amount of electricity that they actually consumed today. However, it still would have come mostly at mid-day when it was not needed, and nothing during the peak 6-8 AM and 5-8 PM windows. To cover those, you would need some kind of energy storage. Hundreds of gigawatt hours worth, just for today. Or you could try saving the energy up from the summer time when there is more sun. But for that, to cover the whole winter, you would need, for just the UK, some tens of thousands of gigawatt hours of storage, of a form that could store the energy for six or more months and then discharge over the course of months. Such a thing has not yet been invented, and it is not clear that it can ever be invented.
“What matters is that the cultists are proposing a new utopian energy system that will not work and cannot work.”
It’s only people like Menton who fantasise a system that will not work. Meanwhile actual engineers continue building a system that does work.
Where is this mythical place where wind and solar work?
Would you care to actually counter the arguments given?
Or do you just expect us to take your word for it again.
The “argument” says that solar does not work well in UK in winter. We knew that. So use what does work, as they do.
I’ve shown many graphs and stats of wind and solar working well in South Australia and Texas.
Current renewable technology only works most of the time at great cost. The current technology does not work now for the last 10% and it may never work for the worst-case renewable resource drought as I argued in a recent post
We are not down to the last 10%.
If you keep replacing power supplies that work with power supplies that don’t, you will get there quickly.
Fossil fuels and nuclear currently 80% of UK supply.
Thank goodness for fossil fuels, hey Nick.
They are the ones that WORK, when needed. !
Solar and wind are just a parasite on the grid… sucking the life out of its host.
The winter before last parts of Texas froze their fannies because wind and solar weren’t working so when they had problems with conventional power sources, there was no backup. On a good day, everything works as advertised however reliably requires everything works when everything goes wrong.
Here is a plot of electricity generation leading up to and during the freeze. Wind was down a bit; so were gas and coal. The main shortfall was gas.
“Main shortfall was Gas..” ???
What a totally GORMLESS statement !
Your are reading from a different graph than the one you posted, obviously.
Wind and solar contributing SFA !
Coal steady until Monday.
GAS carrying basically all the load
The gas shortfall was about 15 GW. Wind and coal about 5 GW each. That is what caused the problem.
Nick, so the plan is to stick with natural gas and coal is it?
Sounds great to me. Swap out the moronic electric compressors on the gas pipelines with gas powered ones and ramp up the coal mines stat!
When the bird choppers stop working over the next 15 years, the endangered raptors can be saved (except for all those eagles k!lled by housecats, I know), and the natural landscape can be restored to its former grandeur.
Within 20 years the slaver panels will no longer be putting out their pointless 1% and either the Uighurs will all be dead or freed from their slave labor concentration camps, so replacements would need a new source of slave labor.
Or did I misunderstand your point?
According to your graph, for over a week Gas was essentially supplying almost all Texas’ energy requirements, with Solar and Wind contributing practically nothing. Any shortfall in Gas was caused by the replacement of gas-powered compressors by electric ones, which failed. Are you sure this supports your argument?
It doesn’t need to support his argument. All it needs to do is change the subject.
And on the day that fossil fuel is turned off, say in 2050, what will this graph look like?
Not even you can make solar work at night.
I also don’t think you an appreciation for the Great Plains of Noth America where there is nothing to block the wind from central Canada all down through the Dakota’s, Kansas, Oklahoma, and on to west Texas. When blizzards blow with 40 – 50 mph winds, the windmills will be useless along with solar.
We’ll be wishing for coal and gas!
So you have just posted the proportion of power generated by fossil fuel in Texas .
You are trying to tell us or sell us the story that wind and solar are good .then you post this graph .
Wind and solar were useless .Wind around 5 gigawatts and solar was so intermittent never even reaching 5gigawatts any day and averaging under 2 gigawatts for the ten day period .
You have just proved how useless the renewables are and how they need fossil fuel backup.
Now be reasonable, Graham! Nick is pointing out that people would only freeze to death every couple of years.
Most of the gas tripped because of the grid collapse, which would not have happened without the sudden loss of wind power
“happened without the sudden loss of wind power”
Seems to be the narrative here. Wind wasn’t doing anything, and then when it stopped doing that, everything fell apart. Of course, wind does come and go, but the grid manages.
There was a gradual tapering of wind over about 24 hours, on Feb 15. At some time during that, gas suddenly dropped. The latter is what actually caused the blackout.
If you look at the previous Tuesday 9th, wind dropped by about the same amount over twelve hours. The grid handled that.
So without reliable backup, wind and solar are less than marginal. Got it.
Gas tripled it’s output, but because it wasn’t able to increase by 4, it’s at fault.
Hope for the best, plan for the worst.
‘I’ve shown many graphs and stats of wind and solar working well in South Australia and Texas.’
Parasites obviously exist in this world, but that’s not to say that their hosts are better off for it. Wind and solar are parasitical to the ‘grid’, and the proof for that lies in the fact that they cannot and do not exist beyond the aegis of government intervention.
Wind doesn’t work any better than solar.
Wind and solar do produce power, trivially true. However the problem is that they don’t produce enough power, nor do they produce that power when it’s needed.
If they aren’t fit for function, then it they don’t work.
Oh I get it. So then we print the graphs of South Oz and Texas out, ship them to the UK and then the British burn them to stay warm.
In your own words, Nick, solar does not work in the UK and hence we need to use what does work.
So, again in your own words, we need to use something ‘non renewable’ in the UK.
That is exactly what you are saying, Nick.
If that is not your intention you need to withdraw your previous claims, because at the moment you are literally saying that something that isn’t solar needs to be
rolled out in the UK.
Literally.
Under the literal meaning of that word.
Solar does not produce much in winter in the UK. Wind is pretty good.
Today December 1st 2022 the first metrological day of winter in the Northern Hemisphere wind in UK is producing 2.5 GW of energy, yesterday was the same and the day before that was less.
That is how ineffective wind power is in the UK at any given time.
Like solar, wind does not work consistently or economically or even environmentally. When prime agricultural farmland in Devon UK is covered in solar panels, you know something other than energy generation is funding the decision to industrialise our prime food growing lands.
But the windmills are producing power, which by Nick’s standard means they work.
On the other hand when gas generators in Texas are able to triple their output, but fail to quadruple it, that proves they don’t work.
Wind is producing only 8% of the supply at the moment
GAS and Nuclear 80%
I bet they wish they still had the solid reliability of coal to supply base load. !
UK wind “pretty good” in Winter?
Well, wind here has produced next to nothing since Sunday.
Even the remaining 3 coal power stations that our Beloved Leaders have not yet blown up have produced more (though they have lately had to double coal imports to do so. At great cost).
It would be far cheaper, simpler and less disruptive to the grid, if they glued all the Just Stop Oil nincompoops to bicycles with dynamos. Especially if I was behind them with a cat o’ninetails.
Pontius Pilate had some pretty good whips for scourging. I’d suggest using those.
I suspect the leather on those whips has gotten a bit stiff by now.
It was the little metal tips that I had in mind. By all means refresh the leather!
Wind is not pretty good in the UK, Nick, especially during still winter days when we would need it most if we were to make the transition to unreliable wind and solar power.
We currently have an installed capacity of 25 GW.
At 7:30 am today, 01/12/22 we are producing less than 3 GW using wind turbines.
To produce the current demand of 38 GW using wind turbines, the UK would need to install 500 GW, and still have gas and nuclear backup for the days when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun is weak.
How on earth is that pretty good?
And for what? To save 0.0001 GT of live-giving CO2?
Minimum since Monday 28/11 has been 249MW, and for around 26 hours it was less than 1GW. For those 26 hours we’d have needed about 2TW of wind or a 1TWh battery.
The BBC was making a song and dance of this battery in Hull with a massive 196 MWh, just another 10,000 needed for those 26 hours
Wind is also often of little use at other times of the year.
In the Summer and early Autumn of 2021 Europe experienced a long period of dry conditions and low wind speeds that badly affected wind generation. In the UK SSE said it’s unreliables produced 32% less power than expected.
The IPCC also suggest that wind speeds over Europe will decrease by up to 10% because of climate change.
With your intellect Nick how did you work out solar was useless in the UK in their winter ?
Have we not been telling you that ?
Have I ever said otherwise?
DOHH!!!
On the day that graph was produced, all of our lovely wind power produced just 1% of total electricity, Nick
CLUE—- This is a British winter, when cold, windless days are common
Nick Stokes,
The wind in the UK turns off for days at a time, often extending to weeks. Since 00:00:45 Monday 28/11/2022 the maximum from UK’s 25GW of wind was 7.8GW, but since Monday 09:10:40 we’ve had a maximum of 3.26GW and a minimum of 0.25GW (249MW).
Contrary to what you and many people think the wind isn’t always blowing somewhere in the UK. According to my weather forecast app we should start getting decent amounts from wind on Sunday when winds get up to 8-12m/s although at the lower end of that only about 25% of 25GW or back to 7GW.
Have you any idea what you are talking about?
Wind is terribly intermittent in the UK. We are currently (the last week) in a very calm spell. Just a couple of days ago, at 20.00, wind was supplying just 1.6% of need. The following day 4%.
The UK was importing 17% of its needs from Europe, a very dangerous position, seeing as Russia could cut those cables anytime it chooses.
The wind has picked up a little and at this very moment (15.00) is supplying 7.3% of need and solar less than 1% (soon to be zero).
Tell us exactly what supply system would you have had in place to have kept the UK’s society going over the last few days. Give the approximate numbers and don’t forget, it needs to be able to deal with the hugely increased demand coming down the line as EV cars are enforced and houses are forced to switch from gas heating to electricity.
Now don’t hide away, man up and be specific.
“Tell us exactly what supply system would you have had in place”
I don’t get to decide the UK supply system. But I can tell you what is happening. The fraction of wind is increasing, and will continue to do so. This will reduce fuel cost and emissions. The grid will continue to function 24/7.
Only if “pretty good” means that it’s output is some what above zero.
In other words it is not a baseload capable generation scheme! Where does the baseload come from in winter, only windmills?
They only “work” because they have baseload powerplants that can generate electricity all day every day to back them up, fueled by coal, natural gas, and uranium. If they didn’t have reliable fossil-fueled power to carry the load, the mob would show up quickly with pitchforks and hunt down the people who foisted this disaster on them. “Renewable” energy as a primary source of power is a fantasy, unless you’re talking about uranium as the fuel. There’s enough in the oceans to power all the world’s energy needs for a billlion years, which makes it effectively “renewable”. And economical extraction from sea water has already been proven.
Wind and Solar work OK only so long as the sun shines and the wind blows.
(Which it doesn’t do 24/7/365)
They work OK in Texas until it gets too cold like it did in Feb 2021
Or until the Wind blew too hard like in South Australia like it did in …
Sept 2016 (Wind)
Oct 2018 (Damaging Wind and Thunder Storms)
Nov 2022 (thunder, lightning, rain and wind)
What does work well is non weather dependent generation like…
Nuclear
Gas
Coal
Which can produce electricity 24/7/365 regardless of solar radiance or Wind speed or ambient temperature
But what about the costs for backing up those sources with wind and solar? What do you mean they don’t need that?
If nukes are only online 99% of the time, wind ought to cover about 0.3% of the shortfall.
Ok let’s call it even. If we’re not counting the cost of backing up conventional sources 0.3% of the time, it’s only fair that we don’t count the cost of backing up the bird choppers 70% of the time. Now I see where Nick is coming from.
Beyond Back-up generation costs is Storage. Solar basically only produces usable power from 10 am til 2 pm (with a ramp up from 8-10 and a drop off from 2-4). From 4 pm til 8 am Solar produces NADA, ZIP, ZILCH and so expensive and potentially explosive and Massive Storage Batteries are also needed along with additional expensive and basically redundant “Solar Free Energy” generation to charge them up from 10 am til 2 pm (when Solar actually produces usable energy).
I hear you, either you back up the Ruinables with fossil fuels (cost-effective chemical energy storage) or with deathtrap battery bombs that cost more than your entire net worth.
Bird choppers are like a car that you know will fail to start 13 out of 20 times when you most need it. On the days when it works in the morning to get you to work, you’re more likely than not going to be stranded trying to get home. But it gets phenomenal fuel efficiency when it works. And it costs about as much as this other car that starts right up at -30C or +40C, day or night. You know, the one your spouse drives to come pick you up most days and to drop you off some days. Of course your car is the cheapest transportation evah! You can’t understand why your spouse doesn’t want to switch.
Texas, February 2021.
“So use what does work,”
Yes they use GAS and NUCLEAR..
The wind and solar are just a disruption to supply grids.
And because they no longer use COAL, which has worked and done so cheaply and reliably for decades, their electricity is now extraordinarily expensive.
Its also close to major disruption way too often.
Industries are closing in UK and Germany because of the price and the erratic supply.
Stop taking whatever you are taking, it isn’t helping your cognitive function.. !
Bull Shi! Nick .
South Australia had black outs and has had to import fossil fuel power from NSW and Victoria when the wind and solar failerd..
We are not that stupid to believe your cra9.
Nick Stokes
I used to challenge Griff to live his life with energy use matching UK renewable contributions to the UK grid.
I’ll modify the challenge for you. Live your life with electricity use matching the proportion of actual versus installed for renewables in the UK. You can use Gridwatch for almost instant data. Total installed renewables (wind+solar) in UK is around 40GW current output is 3.37GW so you should be cutting down to 8.5% of your normal hourly electrical consumption, which is higher than it’s been since midday Monday
Perhaps the good readers at WUWT could pony up some funds to purchase a device which thoughout the day randomly and unpredictably modulates Nick Stokes’ domestic electricity supply between 0 and 240 volts.
Yes! Smart meters should be available to climate alarmists that receive second by second updates about how much renewable energy is supplied to their residence. The power would be based on the amount of renewable energy being generated
Can you see what will happen at 4pm every day when solar goes away just as their getting home? And, if the wind isn’t blowing, no charging the EV either!
Price of power would be based on renewable costs only and since they are “cheaper” it should be a win/win situation!
This way, they can walk the talk!
Some time ago I suggested having two markets for energy in order to avoid system operators having to deal with the intermittency of wind and solar. In this framework, supply to ‘renewable energy only’ customers would be curtailed when renewable supply failed to materialize, while excess renewable energy, if available, could be offered into the real time market if desired by conventional suppliers to meet their obligations. As you said, it would be telling to see who would actually sign up to supply or consume unsubsidized wind and solar energy on such a level playing field.
This is the silliness of which I complained re Menton. People love creating straw men and doing silly calculations. No-one is proposing anything other than a continuous electricity supply. The question is what mix of sources should be chosen to deliver it. We currently have of order 10-20% renewables, and everything works, at a cost (mainly fuel). We can continue increasing renewables, diminishing fuel use. And that is what is actually happening. Not these strawman fantasies.
If fuel cost is the principal factor in the price of electricity, why does electricity cost so much in Germany and Denmark, which have the highest proportion of “Renewables” in their energy mix?
“We currently have of order 10-20% renewables, and everything works, at a cost (mainly fuel).”
“(mainly fuel)”. Yeah, right. So I guess the embedded costs associated with fossil fuel backup don’t count in this “everything works”, right?
Your business acumen is sorely lacking. Please come here and tell us what you invest in so we can do something different!
The problem is that the net-zero plan is increase the percentage of renewables so much that the intermittency and lack of ancillary services problems make renewables untenable. If we can see that it is a dead end why are we going down that path?
Cool. How do solar panels in Texas help the rest of the world? How well do they work at night?
All-in, Turnkey Capital Cost of 1000 GWh of Battery Systems
Batteries should not be discharged to less than 20% full and not be charged to more than 80% full, to achieve 15-y useful service life.
Battery system rated capacity would be
1000 GWh/0.6, available capacity factor = 1666 million kWh, delivered as AC at battery voltage
All-in, turnkey, capital cost of battery systems would be
1666 million x $400/kWh/1000000000 = $666 billion; most of it would need to be replaced every 15 years. See Note
NOTE: The rated capacity of the Moss Landing, California, battery system, owned by Pacific Gas and Electric Company, is 300 MW/1200 MWh.
The all-in, turnkey, capital cost was $370 million, or $370 million/1200000 kWh = $308/kWh, delivered as AC at battery voltage; 2018 pricing
The 2018 pricing has increased at least 30% to $400/kWh in 2022
NOTE:
Li-ion battery systems have a loss of about 18%, when new, and about 20%, when older, on an A-to-Z basis
Delivered by battery system is 1 GWh, as AC to high voltage grid
Charge in battery system is 1 GWh/0.9 = 1.111 GWh, as DC
Electricity to battery system is 1.111/0.9 = 1.235 GWh, as AC from high voltage grid
The 0.235 GWh loss has to be produced by additional solar panels, of other generators.
NOTE: Remember, all of this is highly subsidized with ratepayer and taxpayer money, to line the pockets of the world’s high rollers with private planes, and private yachts, and mega mansions.
Renewabkes systems can only “work” with Fossil Fuel or Nuke Back-up.
That back-up system must carry 100% of peak load for 3 weeks…(per “dead winds records”)
That system could carry that load 24/7/365…so the Wind and Solar systems would be a terribly expensive redundancy… needing replacement every ~20 years.
WE. CAN. NOT. AFFORD 2 Complete Energy Generation Systems. 1. Unreliable system and 2. A reliable back-up system that can do the whole job itself.
The large majority of generating cost is fuel. Wind/solar/hydro do not have fuel costs.
hydro is already pretty maxed out in most places. Wind and solar cost more per Kwh than fossil fuels and nuc despite the lack of fuel costs. So your point is?
Hydro has been used as base load, and for that is limited by stream flow. But if used as backup storage, it is limited by the capacity of generators that are built.
Here is the levelised cost per MWh of wind and solar in Australia, from the IEA calculator. Fuel costs dominate, and wind and solar come out way ahead:
How much power will wind and solar produce on a calm cloudy day? How much solar power is produced between 5:00PM and 8:00 AM? How much battery capacity is needed to supply 100% of the demand during periods of zero output from wind/solar sources? How will these batteries be charged?
No engineer has designed a system that can supply 100% of grid scale demand using only wind and solar and storage that is not prohibitively expensive or could even be constructed with currently available materials. As MC has frequently pointed out, there is not a single operational example of an RE Net-Zero energy system even on the scale of a small city anywhere on the planet. Why not?
Cost comparison of intermittent unpredictable wind and solar — without including the costs of storage — with all-day every-day thermal electricity generation is preposterous and usually intended to deceive.
The Snowy 2 pumped hydro scheme costs have increased five-fold and is still only around one-third complete.
Your Snowy 2.0 link is an opinion article by:
Ted Woodley is a former managing director of PowerNet, GasNet, EnergyAustralia, China Light & Power Systems (Hong Kong).
His background is in gas, not a renewables enthusiast.
So what? Do you dispute his facts?
Yes
Then do so. To date all you have done is declare that since he’s not a member of your camp, his numbers can’t be trusted.
You are obviously clueless how Snowy 2 will be operated, Nick
It will pump when demand and price is low.. (this will mean COAL fired power stations can keep producing to cover the pumping needs)
Then S2 will power up when electricity price is high.
It is a boon for the coal fired power stations because it means they don’t have to throttle up and down as much.
“they don’t have to throttle up and down as much”
In fact Snowy 1.0 did that. Snowy 2.0 does of course have pump capability (so did Snowy 1.0), and it would be driven when wind/solar power is in excess. But a major feature is just more generation capability, so that even the normal flow can be used more to cover bigger gaps. This makes best use of the huge storage capability that the dams represent.
“not a renewables enthusiast”
Oh, you mean a realist?
More like “not a snake oil salesman.”
So only acolytes need supply data.
Nice to know just how tightly Nick has his eyes closed.
He supplied opinion, not data.
Nick:
Here in the US the EIA.gov calculation of LCOE for wind & solar
1) does not include costs of backup generation or transmission,
2) uses a too long depreciation schedule (30 yrs),
3) ignores Renewable Portfolio Standards & subsidies.
They even admit you can’t directly compare renewables to other energy forms using this metric. How does the IEA handle these?
According to Vaclav Smil the average EROEI [energy returned on energy invested; higher is better]:
Coal 40-60
Oil/gas 50-80
Wind < 10
Solar < 2
Biofuels < 1.5
[For FF it varies with quality of the fuel & ease of extraction; for W/S it’s wind speed / latitude,cloudiness]
Pretending their aren’t massive costs integrating solar and wind into the grid.
Very disingenuous, Nick. as always.
Thanks for posting that. The figures are from 2020, but there is still lots of useful info to be gleaned.
The table includes a $30/tonne carbon price, which dominates the lignite cost and is comparable to the fuel price for coal.
The capital costs dominate lignite, and capital and fuel costs are comparable for coal.
Solar PV and on-shore wind do come out well price-wise.
However, the expected lifetime of the various categories seem to be rather elusive. That can make quite a difference.
Fiddling around a bit more (setting the carbon price to 100/ton), it looks like the carbon (dioxide?) emissions per MWh are:
CCGT – 425 kg
OCGT – 659 kg
coal – 849 kg
lignite – 114 kg
That allows calculation of the CO2 emission crossover point for utilisation of CGT vs OCGT, which I’ve been chasing gor a while.
“The table includes a $30/tonne carbon price, which dominates the lignite cost and is comparable to the fuel price for coal.”
There is a column for that, but the amount isn’t included in the total on the right.
Yes it is. Just set the “Carbon price” slider to 0 and see the change.
I assume you’re using https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/data-tools/levelised-cost-of-electricity-calculator
The “Fuel (th)” column isn’t included in the total. The total is the sum of “Capital costs”, “O&M”, “Fuel (el)”, “Carbon” and “CHP heat revenue”.
I assume “Fuel (th)” is fuel costs per terrawatt hour and is included for reference
Sorry, I hadn’t looked at it for a while. I must have been thinking of the Fuel(th) column.
Those d’oh! moments are a bit of a hassle 🙁
I had one of those with the lignite carbon emissions (should be 1145 kg rather than 114), but I think I got away with it.
Now that we have figures for C/MWh (doesn’t matter if it’s C or CO2 for the purposes of the exercise), we can investigate the optimal technology mix to minimise CO2 emissions pr MWh.
Assume:
Solar is simple enough, because sun angles vary in a continuous function. That leads to solar + CCGT, with CCGT burning gas 14 hours/day, so around 60% of total output for approximately 255 kg/MWh
Wind is trickier, because the output varies on much shorter time scales. That essentially dictates the use of OCGT. For the 255 kg/MWH of solar, OCGT would be running 40% of the time, so wind needs to be carrying 60% of the load.
Over to the forum for somewhat less unsophisticated calculations.
Just tacking this on as a reference for using hydrogen-fueled turbines as an alternative to methane: https://gasturbineworld.com/gas-turbines-burning-green-hydrogen/
Roughly a 36% round-trip efficiency for electrolysis, so that’s a starting point for calculating the necessary overbuild of solar or wind.
So Nick, your saying that the cost of electricity for Australians has been dropping?
So Nick, your saying that the cost of electricity for any location relying on renewables has been dropping? Show us just ONE location. To be clear, don’t show estimates show actual prices.
Like most places, we have a national grid, and no source of generation is sold separately. Prices have been rising because of the cost of fuel.
You’ll never bend to reality until it plants it’s boot so far up your wahzoo that you can’t deny it Nick.
Using “the levelised cost per MWh of wind and solar” is like assessing an ambulance service by looking only at the times that it is operating. If the service only operates at occasional random times of day then the rest of the time patients just die, but that isn’t counted in a “levelised” assessment. There is a very good reason that ambulance services operate 24/7. Electricity production also needs to be 24/7.
Noite: Ambulances are dispatchable, ie, when an ambulance is called for, the next available ambulance can go. When wind and solar installations stop, they all stop together.
“Electricity production also needs to be 24/7.”
And it is.
Ambulance services need to be available 24/7. That doesn’t mean every driver needs to work 24/7.
“Electricity production also needs to be 24/7.”
So true. And Wind and Solar ARE NOT.
More like 24x7x365
Most places would have 4 9s (1 hour outage/year), but those outages tend to be local. Even areas affected by cyclones, flooding and bushfires would average better than 2 9s (3 1/2 days/year)
Wind and solar have to have storage and do not provide the ancillary services necessary to maintain the transmission system needed to get the diffuse renewable power to major urban centers. Hydro cannot be scaled up in many areas. The fuel cost advantage does not make providing energy when and where needed cheaper with wind and solar.
Umm no.
For a peaking plant, the large majority of the cost is the cost of building it. Wind has significant depreciation and maintenance costs. Solar has significant depreciation costs. This is WITHOUT taking energy storage costs or de-commissioning costs into account.
From what I’ve read, installed cost of wind generation is starting to increase due to increasing costs of raw materials. Installed cost of solar won’t be going down by much more as the price of PV cells is a fraction of the overall installed cost for a PV generating station.
After you have already taken the labor cost to zero by using Uyghur slaves, how much cheaper can you make a slaver panel, Nick?
Eric:
And IIRC, most contracts with solar (and probably wind?) plants do not include the cost of decommissioning & remediation of the land as it is for coal & nuclear. Most of both are now starting to end up in landfills since relatively little is recycled.
Maintenance is higher with wind and solar with far less output. I live 30 mile away from Paloverde Nuclear generating station. Push a few numbers around on paper and tell me what it would cost to replace it with another power source that provides 24/7 service. Hydro is good but you can’t use it for two reason. First, we have maxed our capacity out over 50 years ago and Second, there just isn’t that much falling water around here.
Additional help. The wind isn’t consistent here and solar at best provides about 8 hours of power a day.
You keep pushing that lie, it’s almost as if you actually believe it.
Fuel is actually one of the smallest costs for gas/coal/nuclear (GCN).
The distributed nature of wind and solar means that maintenance costs for them are much higher than GCN.
Due to the very diffuse nature of wind and solar, construction costs for equivalent generation is way, way higher than GCN.
GCN don’t need backup, wind and solar do. The cheapest source of backup power for wind and solar is GCN. The most expensive are batteries.
The real world has completely refuted the claims that wind and solar are cheap forms of power. They are in fact the most expensive, by far.
“Fuel is actually one of the smallest costs for gas/coal/nuclear (GCN).”
I’ve given the IEA numbers. How about you give some quantitative backup for your claim.
Yes, Nick, and once you add in the cost of backing up unrealibles, wind and solar are far more expensive than reliables
Connecting remote wind farms doesn’t come cheap either. Beauly-Denny cost £700 million, connecting Hornsea 2 a similar amount. Building gas fired power generation near the user isn’t difficult, and nuclear doesn’t get built in the middle of the North Sea
The numbers you have supplied do not show what you want them to show.
The many, many problems with that data has been shown many times.
To date you have never addressed any of the criticisms. The closest you have ever come is to complain that the criticisms are coming from people who aren’t renewable energy enthusiasts.
Yes, people like to dismiss the IEA numbers. But they never provide quantification showing anything different. Just assertions..
And Wind and Solar are unreliable ON DEMAND…
Wind and solar either are ON or OFF but are not dispatchable sources
You can’t ask your local solar farm to up production during the evening peak and you can’t ask Wind to up production during winter time blocking highs that kill wind speeds
The ONLY thing FREE about Wind and solar is the fuel source … the facilities are expensive to install and expensive to maintain and require replacement in less than Half the lifetime of conversation sources
But they do have MASSIVE COSTS to do with integration into the grid.
The cost of fuel in a nuclear generator is as close to zero as it gets. The great advantage of nuclear is it runs constantly, very reliably and is not weather dependent.
Why would any developed sensible society want anything other than least cost, reliable and least damaging environmentally, power generating systems, Nick?
Who needs wind and solar with their inbuilt environmental issues when nuclear is well proven to be so superior and better?
Nick,
Can you reference a genuine economic analysis that compares real life costs of hydrocarbon fuels and a chosen form of renewables like wind or solar array at a national grid scale? Those that I have seen do not compare prices under operational conditions, such as fully accounting for intermittency, frequency stability and incremental transmission line costs. Some analyses include subsidies, but have unconventional definitions of such.
I am looking for a review of a standard that would pass muster in a law court, with truth, full truth and nothing but truth. The information is out there in scattered pieces, but there seems to be a determination not to assemble it and put it before an informed public. Even our AEMO predicate reports by not analysing scenarios contra to government policy like net zero by 2050. In my humble view, AEMO has a duty to analyse and to warn governments making policy on unsound assumptions.
I am getting tired of authorities lacking mature thinking, failing to produce acceptable accounting in favour of childish youngster games like hide the sausage.
If you cannot reference such a report, I suggest that you are unwise to discuss power economics. If you do not want to mention such a report, that is your business but it would smell like sausage. Geoff S
“I am looking for a review of a standard that would pass muster in a law court”
Then you’ll need to pay me barrister’s rates. The thing is, there is a huge amount of private investment going into renewables. People raising money provide a business case, which is carefully read by those putting in the money. It’s all happening, so there has to be something amiss with all the assertions here about how it can’t work. People are putting their money in, and it is working.
Nick,
So you are unable or unwilling to provide a decent reference. If you do not have one, why do you get involved in aconomics arguments?
As for the rest of your response, surely you know the differences between subsidy farming and production of goods in need. Sure people are investing, but as usual, more than half will lose. Geoff S
Stokes asserts: People are putting their money in, and it is working.
Really? Thousands of people in Spain lost their life savings “investing” in Solar.
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/focus/20220221-spain-s-solar-energy-crisis-62-000-people-bankrupt-after-investing-in-solar-panels
Keeping the lights on requires reliability
Nick claims: “Wind/solar/hydro do not have fuel costs.” Not true! They have fuel costs all the time, but more so when the idling thermal backups are ramped up to cover the demand Vs availability mismatches.
The ignorance does amaze!
Wind and solar do have fuel costs. You should be including the coal, gas, and nuclear fuels needed for backup when wind and solar aren’t generating nameplate power! You should also be including investment costs for coal and gas and nuclear during those same times. That my friend, will give you levelized cost of unreliable!
”Wind/solar/hydro do not have fuel costs.”
Hey Nick, what about the expense of decommissioning and disposing of old wind and solar farms and the cost of replacing them every 15 to 25 years?… Oh, but they still work.
“It’s only people like Menton who fantasise a system that will not work. Meanwhile actual engineers continue building a system that does work.”
Really? Show us how it is working in Europe and the US Nick! Sure there are certain specific areas where it can generally work. But they are trying to make it work everywhere. Show us how that is going to work! I’m sure that all those people in Europe that are going to suffer through a cold winter with rationed fossil fuels would like to know that there is a good reason for their unwilling sacrifices.
As usual, Nick is playing word games with us.
His point is that wind and solar are capable of generating power, therefore they “work”.
That they work by producing power that is at many times unusable, is completely ignored.
You nailed it, Mark!
The true believers like little Nicky are actually Climageddon Sophists! They twist and warp the facts and language to align with their deeply held religious beliefs, they never try and outline their plans because all they have are bits and pieces of an idea.
There is NO stand alone Unreliable Energy system that is capable of powering even a large city for more than brief periods of time; trying to power a First World nation with them is insanity on a scale never before witnessed in human history! Without a revolutionary new storage system, there never will be widespread use of intermittent wind and solar! The mass hysteria will end as the “Green” Gravy Train runs into the brick wall of facts and reality; the only question is how much damage will be done to human societies! But Little Nicky insists on pointing out that he found a dollar under his pillow, so there MUST be a Tooth Fairy
“That they work by producing power that is at many times unusable”
No, that is very rare, in any large grid. South Australia is a case in point. They do frequently produce more renewable energy than SA can use. But we have interconnectors, soon to be expanded. They sell the power to other states.
I believe that it has recent happened once or twice, that mainly solar power has overwhelmed even the export arrangements, and solar providers had to be switched off. But that is rare.
Nick, you’re making the cardinal mistake that a unit of energy produced on demand under any conditions is equivalent to one that is produced subject to the variability of nature. They’re not.
“continue building a system that does work.”
ROFLMAO
You really have drifted into La-La-Land Nick !!
Anywhere that has a largish INFECTION of wind and solar , has massively expensive electricity..
… and a supply system that regularly teeters on the very edge of collapse.
You are only FOOLING yourself with your ridiculously stupid statements.
The system works. Lights come on. Toasters toast. That isn’t a fantasy.
The system works. Lights come on. Toasters toast, when the wind is blowing and the Sun is shining.
No, it happens all the time. We have diversity in generation.
Why is diversity in generation a good thing, especially when “Renewables” increase the cost of electricity and decrease reliability?
Yes – thanks to coal, oil and gas. No wind or solar is needed, and the “contributions” of wind and solar are nothing more than skyrocketing electricity prices, reduced to the edge of collapse grid reliability, landscape blight, habitat and wildlife destruction, and wasted resources.
If you are describing Australia, then the big aluminium smelters have started to go to other countries, the big car makers have gone, the bulk of miscellaneous manufacturing is now in China. That has allowed the remaining workers to use less electricity per capita as windmills erode the electricity from hydrocarbons market. We now have more “workers” than before serving each other by being baristas in the mornings and coffee lounge lizards in the afternoons, but being conscious about the evils of plastic cups.
Nick, look at the destruction of productivity of materials that matter, even if you cannot face the increased national vulnerability should there be a sudden war. We can no longer make our own light infantry vehicles, looking to Sth Korea and Europe. We used to make aircraft. We used to make our own trains. Our military leaders are looking at solar powered tanks. All because we are told by incompetent scientists that we face an existential crisis because CO2, even though there is no proof to customary science standards.
Sheesh Nick, can you not see that your woke ideology is lethal? Geoff S
Geoff,
“All because we are told by incompetent scientists that we face an existential crisis because CO2″
That is absurd, and not just because of the slur on scientists. We stopped making aircraft, etc, long before anyone was worrying about CO2. We stopped because it was cheaper to buy them overseas.
And why? Because we very successfully exported minerals. The dollar rose, because if you export something of value, that entitles you to buy stuff. In fact, you have to buy stuff, else you just get pieces of paper in return. So we bought manufactured goods. Local manufacture could not compete.
Nick,
I am not slurring good, competent scientists. My concern is about incompetent science.
As you know, I worked a while in rather successful mineral exploration. We had no option other than to use good science, (Incompetence could lead to criminal charges).
The global warming scenario is a product of wishful thinking. (But you cannot wish away papers like van Wijngaarden & Happer). Imagine that our failure to find new mines was because we did not follow the hopes and beliefs of people. Where, in climate research, is the equivalent of a detailed proposal to mine?
Geoff S
Nick wrote “We stopped making aircraft, etc, long before anyone was worrying about CO2. We stopped because it was cheaper to buy them overseas.”
That is an observation. It was indeed cheaper to buy from overseas.
I am more concerned with the reason.
In my experience, a fair part of the propblem came from the same influential people who were solidly against nuclear electricity from its start. Maybe it was a consequence of some big wars in Germany, but there was a large core of anti-development people there by year 2000. We were feeling their anti-development influence by the mid 1970s. The same core, wealthy, influential people have made the CO2 topic into a ludicrous “existential crisis”.
By opposing manufacturing as an overall principle, they made Australia poor and dependent on overseas manufacture. They are still doing it.
Soon we will be unable to defend ourselves because we will have to by defence weapons from other countries who might ot might not be willing to sell.
Geoff S
The lights come on, etc, thanks to fossil fuel and nuclear power stations.
The unreliability proves that wind and solar don’t work.
Proof please Nick Stokes.
You are the one that is fantasizing.
There is only one reliable solution for windless days and nights and sunless days if you don,t want to use fossil fuel .
That is nuclear power for base load and if you do not have hydro that can be stopped and started remotely the only other option is natural gas gas turbines that can be started and stopped as required.
Battery storage is not yet an option and it might never be a viable cost efficient system .
Even you Nick Stokes should be able to work that out even with your green glasses and failed logic that CO2 is the control switch for the climate .
The solution is nuclear power and also small scale hydro dams on many rivers that only produce power in the morning and evening peaks .
Pumped hydro uses far more power to pump the water up hill than you can ever generate and the same with green hydrogen .
Griff, is that you?
No, Nick, its not working. Look here:
http://www.gridwatch.co.uk
What percentage of demand is being met, and what by?
Its 60% gas! Its under 10% wind+solar.
Do you really think a system that requires gas to meet 60% of demand, and which can only supply under 10% of demand for long periods from wind and solar combined is really properly described as renewables working as a system?
Your an intelligent guy with a quantitative background in a rigorous discipline. Why can you not see it, its as plain as the nose on your face?
What is also plain is that if the UK really does drive for what Keir Starmer has announced as Labour’s objective – total wind and solar by 2030, which means no or minimal gas – the result will be pretty much a total freeze of economic activity, not to mention people freezing in their homes.
At the moment electricity demand in the UK is around 40GW, varies by time of day of course, and is a bit higher in winter and lower in summer.
But they are planning on moving everyone to EVs and heat pumps, which will raise demand to well north of 50GW.
Now look at the above chart and tell me you really think this is sensible and achievable! Its not, its a pathological failure of intellect to think it is.
The PPE degree as has a lot to answer for.
I personally prefer the “original and best” Gridwatch website :
https://gridwatch.org.uk/
To see just how unlucky the people jumping into this sub-thread yesterday and today shouting about just how “good” wind turbines are for UK electricity generation, check the screenshot of what the “Wind (GW)” output did during the 36 hours from midnight on Sunday to noon on Monday … and just how high the “peak” in wind generation has managed to reach in the 72 hours (and counting) since then …
Do show please.
Nick, please define “works” or “works well”, so that a meaningful discussion can be had re: your perception. That’s perception vs FACT.
Are Nick and Griff the same person?
Mr. Whitney: IMO, no. Griff is a mere fool. Mr. Stokes is not. Mr. Stokes is capable of obfuscating with words (this post has several classics “works well” “pretty good” hides the truth that he knows), griff was never that clever.
They are two separate people.
In the UK over the past week solar and wind have accounted for just 7% of the country’s electrical power; and that’s without all those cars and industries that currently use fossil fuels.
Where in God’s name is the storage capacity ever going to come from to cope with these numbers, Nick; and these weather conditions aren’t particularly unusual.
The idea that engineers “continue building a system that does work” for renewable energy storage to meet the needs of the UK is one of the most absurd that I’ve ever come across on WUWT.
This is the nub of the problem. You’re undoubtedly an intelligent guy, Nick, but that comment is just plain nonsense and reflects the head-in-the-sand approach to energy planning. It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious.
“Where in God’s name is the storage capacity ever going to come from to cope with these numbers”
As so often here, you keep jumping from the practical problem of what grid mix should we aim for in the near future, to the notional problem of a 100% renewable grid. That was my original complaint with Menton. Here and now, we can add more renewables; the system will keep working, and fuel costs (and emissions) will be saved. At some future stage, more serious innovations with storage will have to be made. Hydro will be a big component. People do battery calculations leading to absurdity, but that is just absurd.
You keep ignoring the costs of backup, be they battery or fossil fueled. Fuel for fossil fuel plants is significant but much less than labor, maintenance, taxes, interest on loans and bonds, stock dividends, etc. Yes many of these are DUPLICATED with unreliables, but that is the problem.
Duplicated costs are unnecessary costs and raise the price per unit of the product, i.e., electricity to the consumer. Why do you think the price of electricity has increased dramatically?
For every watt of baseline power generated by fossil fuels, you are only paying one set of non-fuel expenses,. For every watt of “baseline” from unreliables that must be backed up, you are paying at least double the non-fuel costs.
Ultimately, you pick the percent of renewables. Say 75%. For everyone of those watts you are going to be paying at least double over what fossil fuel alone would cost.
Back up type doesn’t really matter. With batteries you will be paying extra for unreliables that will be used to charge them. Sooner or later the government will cave and make the cost of recovery for battey power be absorbed into the cost of electricity and anyone is going to have a problem justifying that over pure nuclear.
HI Nick,
My co-authors and I published in 2002 that there was no real dangerous global warming crisis and green energy was not green and produced little useful energy. That was correct then and it is correct now. The evidence in Britain and Germany is incontrovertible.
In 2013 I predicted “European energy shortage plus extreme cold” to happen within a decade, and here it is. I also predicted a major cull of the elderly and the poor as a direct result of the energy shortages and increasing cold. Between the toxic Covid-19 jabs, unheated homes and extreme cold this winter, the elderly and poor of Britain and Germany are in great peril – in 2013 I predicted a multitude of Excess Winter Deaths in Europe.
CAGW is a fifty-year-old scam, now being superseded by the Covid-19 scam. Both were extremely costly and extremely destructive, wasting trillions of dollars and tens of millions of lives, and both scams were promoted by the same “usual suspects”.
When the carnage is clear to even the most obtuse politicians, there will be judgment – you would be well-advised to get off that sinking ship while you can. Maybe you can have a “Road to Damascus” conversion, like some others.
Actual engineer here, who does make solar and advanced-battery tech work … for portable and off-grid projects where the situation justifies the costs and living with the limitations.
Menton is absolutely right. The problem IS energy storage. Without that, the Climate Change Cult’s dream of REPLACING fossil energy with renewables at utility scale will not work and cannot work to maintain – much less grow – a civilization whose productivity and living standards depend upon RELIABLE, 24/7/365 on-demand energy availability,
And energy storage is not progressing at a Moore’s Law pace, because of the physical and chemical limits that impinge upon the state of the art. Were that not so my day job would be a LOT easier.
All renewables can practically do right now at utility scale is SUPPLEMENT fossil and nuke sources – at the cost of maintaining TWO power systems, with each watt of renewable capacity matched watt-for-watt with fossil and/or nuke sources, to assure that demand is met at all times.
Yet the Cult wants to FORCE this upon us, before the state of the art can support it. In the name of a “crisis” that has not been proven to be a crisis, and that they themselves do not treat as a crisis through changing their own lifestyle choices … from favoring nuclear power (though a few have come around on that) to insisting that “climate conferences” be teleconferences with no need for private jet travel.
I see a couple of motivations behind all this that are hiding behind the climate hysteria:
> The typical myopic idealism of the profit-phobic Left, who see changing to renewables not only as “saving the planet”, but as Sticking It to Old Greed and a first step in cleansing our civilization of the profit motive (fat chance of that – for even scientists, academics, and activists are susceptible to the profit motive in their own ways).
> The potential, by restricting fossil/nuke energy, to create an ARTIFICIAL demand for green energy tech that can be churned (exploiting the idealism above) by the Davos crowd into The Next Big Bubble, in a manner reminiscent of the 1990’s dot-com euphoria – that will allow them to cash out and leave us stuck with a less reliable energy infrastructure, that their cash buffers them from its negative effects upon the rest of us.
Consider those motivations, please.
It was really clear in the former Russian Empire that communism did not work by 1920. Meatheadedness and inertia are powerful.
For the 1920 Russians, as well as almost all modern communists, communism was never anything more than the vehicle that brought them to power.
Oh, some of the Old Bolsheviks (or Mensheviks, or other Communist factions) were True Believers at one point. Whether Lenin was ever sincere is a matter of debate, let alone Stalin.
It worked perfectly well for the leaders of the Communist Party.
Pump Up the Storage | Do the Math (ucsd.edu)
a good read
One will be weaned of oxygen before being weaned from oil.
“
The movement’sGreta’s ideology is the official religion of the British government, including the British Conservative Party. It’s the official religion of the United Nations. It’s the official religion of the World Economic Forum.Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one. Charles Mackay, 1841.
This is where we are right now. Starvation in Sri Lanka due to policies that could not possibly work. Food production in Canada and Holland also on the chopping block, hey why not starve the whole world rather than just yourself? A bleak winter forecast for Europe who are scrambling for energy supplies to keep millions from freezing to death while Britain cuts itself off from its own energy supplies. The West is dieing from a thousand self inflicted wounds while Asia rises on the back of coal power that oblterates everything the West thinks it is saving with solutions that don’t work.
How much longer will the madness persist? I wish I knew, but the recovery will be slow.
David mh,
It continues to be disappointing that there is no periodic, systematic calculation of the cost of doing nothing.
Almost all effort goes into the costs of combatting the spectre of global warming, as if the threats are axiomatically so huge and terrifying that all that is needed is a reminder to the public now and then that it is an existential crisis without question.
I do not have the remotest idea of the cost to do nothing, to compare with the present path of wild spending because all the wise ones are agreed we must spend.
Richard Lindzen and Christopher Monckton are two eminent thinkers who have proposed the do nothing approach. It seems to have lost traction.
I cannot even imagine what major cost categories need to be included for future estimates, for whatever reasons. There must be more than talking points like the cost of elimination of fossil fuels or the costs of stopping production of nitrogenous fertilizers. Where is the full, complete set of books of items to pay for, to avoid the existential crisis? Without them, the do nothing option cannot be balanced against them.
The engineering world can be criticised for not opposing hydrocarbon fuel elimination, but it seems that the financial accounting world needs criticism as well for not objecting to incomplete accounting on a massive scale.
Where has professionalism gone? Geoff S
Isnt that essentially what Nordhaus won his Nobel Prize asserting?
They don’t even do the costs of what they say needs to happen. In April 2022 the UK House of Commons Public Accounts Committee published its report ‘Achieving Net Zero: Follow Up’ which said
“The Government has unveiled a plan without answers to big questions of how it will fund the transition to net zero, including how it will deliver policy and replace income from taxes such as fuel duty or even a general direction of travel on levies and taxation. The Government has no reliable estimate of what the process of implementing the net zero policy is actually likely to cost British consumers, households, business and government itself.”
“The Government has no clear plan for how the transition to net zero will be funded – vague performance measures, lack of overall budget, limited assessment of the cost impact on consumers”
Well said David .
When we have governments around the world passing regulations that are directly suppressing the food production the world is in trouble.
GOVERNMENTS SHOULD NOT BE TAKING ACTION TO RESTRICT EMISSIONS THAT AFFECTS FOOD SUPPLIES .
That is a directive from the UN but many countries are ignoring this directive and are demanding their farmers and growers to reduce their fertilizer use and cut back their herd numbers to reduce emissions of nitrous oxide and methane .
Nitrogenous fertilizer is essential to grow food to feed 4 billion of the worlds population so any major reduction will severely impact of crop yields and milk and meat production .
This is an indisputable fact .
You would think that facts like this would be at the for front of any decisions made .
Politicians seem to only change the course that they are on when disasters and large scale famines start affecting many regions around the world .
Lets hope that it does not come to that to change the stupidity that we are witnessing in many countries in the name of climate change .
‘It’s only a question of when and how it fails — and of how big the political blowback will be when that happens.’
That’s true of socialism in all its forms. The problem is how long, how much damage and whether or not the succeeding regime might be even worse, e.g. Weimar’s ‘socialism lite’ giving way to National Socialism.
That’s a rabbit not a hare. /pedant
In the long run, of course, climate extremists will lose. We are forever losing sight of the fact that there is a big world out there, away from our navel-observing Western civilisation, where climate extremists carry no weight. The world will blithely carry on – fearlessly continuing emitting the harmless, in fact beneficial, trace element CO2 into the atmosphere.
And we here will be left, with eggs on our face – with a ruined economy (which will benefit our competitors greatly!!).
Andy Espersen
“When is the Manhattan Contrarian’s Energy Storage Report coming out? After all, he previously promised it for September, and then October, and here we are almost in December and we still haven’t seen it.”
Larry: “You said you were going to blitzkrieg Great Mitten by the middle of August.”
Curly: “Then you said Septober, then Octember – now it’s the middle of Novonder, and we ain’t there yet!”
Moe: “Well Novonder! I didn’t say what year!”
The Three Stooges, I’ll Never Heil Again
Some, including Nick Stokes on this site, are still using LCOE (Levelised Cost of Electricity/Energy) as a parameter to assess the cost of wind and solar generation by comparison to conventional or nuclear.
The chart in the post shows how wrong this is.
LCOE takes the total costs of an installation over its life, and discounts it to allow for the time value of money to get a Net Present Value of the cash out.
It then takes the total amount of electricity generated across the same period and divides, giving a price per MWh.
One thing that is wrong in practice about the way this is done is that important costs are always left out – the costs of additional transmission or backup or constraint payments.
But the fundamental problem with it is that the procedure assumes that all the power generated is of the same value, no matter when or in what pattern it is generated.
So if you take the above chart, what LCOE says is that this amount of MWh produced in this pattern are identical in value to the same amount produced in a constant level through the 24 hours. Or, across seasons, it says that 10MW produced during the day in July is identical in value as the same total amount that yields produced continuously throughout the year.
In fact however what we are looking at in the above chart is, as Menton points out, a basically unusable product. This is why backup is always needed for wind and solar, its why there are constraint payments when they produce far more than can be used at a point where its not wanted or storable.
Now, Nick usually argues in reply to this that adding wind and/or solar to a mainly gas fired system is financially advantageous because of the alleged savings in fuel use they bring.
I have never seen, and Nick has never either produced or linked to, proper NPV analysis showing this. And it seems totally implausible when you consider the huge costs of the wind/solar installations, their limited lifespan, and the fact that using gas plant in instant-on makeup mode lowers fuel efficiency.
Using gas plants in an instant on makeup mode not only lowers fuel efficiency but also increases the cost of that fuel because the gas plant does not know when it will be required to back up the unreliables so it is unable to make long term contracts with the gas supplier.
Michel: “One thing that is wrong in practice about the way this is done [ the LCOE calculation ] is that important costs [for wind and solar] are always left out – the costs of additional transmission or backup or constraint payments. But the fundamental problem with it is that the procedure assumes that all the power generated is of the same value, no matter when or in what pattern it is generated.”
Using LCOE as a means of comparing power generation systems has a third major issue. The additional costs spawned by the presence of wind & solar on the grid are now being carried by the legacy fossil fuel, hydro, and nuclear power generation systems — thus placing these legacy systems at a competitive disadvantage through use of largely artificial market distortions.
You sound like a planning engineer calculating the usefulness of an investment. Congratulations!
And here, for Nick’s benefit, is Matt Ridley in the Spectator, on how well the UK system is working:
This week the prices offered to anybody – anybody! – who could guarantee to supply power on the chilly, windless evening of 29 November shot up briefly to about £1,100 per megawatt-hour (MWh), more than ten times the normal rate. Demand was forecast to peak at 41.2 gigawatts, supply at 40.7. In the words of Mr Micawber: result, misery. At such a price, enough supply did indeed come out of the woodwork, but not from the wind industry, which can’t just turn on the wind when it wants. Growing reliance on unreliable wind has left Britain paying sky-high prices on still, cold days. Remember when the secretary of state for business used to pose for the cameras while blowing up old coal power stations? They would be handy this winter.
So much for Nick’s idea that if you install more wind you will save on fuel costs! What happens is you pay astronomically for spot supply. And one day, as this mad project continues, there will be none at any price on the spot market. And what do you do then?
Blackouts is what you do!
And this is supposed to be reducing CO2 emissions and saving the planet?
“So much for Nick’s idea that if you install more wind you will save on fuel costs! “
No, that has nothing to do with fuel costs. It is the way that dispatchable sources, mainly gas, get compensated for the capability they provide. Of course most people are shielded from such vagaries by long term contracts, which is why the spot price is so volatile.
You say this should be included in the LCOE calculation. But no, LCOE is the cost of actually generating electricity. Where this shows up is in the average price received, which is likely higher for gas than for wind, because of its agility. But that disparity diminishes for a larger grid, with interconnectors, say.
Perhaps you could address the the points about the deficiencies of LCOE, as enumerated by Michel and Beta Blocker above.
No, Nick. Arguing like this to a management committee in a Fortune 500 company would get you fired, or at least re-assigned.
LCOE is indeed the cost of actually generating the electricity. But what you have done is not a defence of it as a parameter governing investment decisions. You actually show that LCOE is immaterial to an assessment of the investment merits of wind versus conventional.
What people usually do is say that the LCOE for wind is X. Then they do the same calculation for (eg) coal, and they arrive at an LCOE of Y.
They then argue that if X is less than Y it shows wind is cheaper and therefore it will be financially advantageous for the generating company to deploy it, rather than coal. Or financially advantageous for a given country to have it deployed.
This is how you are arguing. But this doesn’t follow and its an improper method of doing investment appraisal. Its a really basic error.
When doing investment appraisal betweeen two alternatives you must include all the cash flows, and only the cash flows that bear on the decision.
We leave out subsidies when doing our appraisal of wind and solar because they are irrelevant to the question, which is, what are the real costs of deployment? Which alternative has the lower costs of deployment? That’s the question.
The costs of deploying wind must include all the costs of running a system which is the usual mixture of wind and gas. So if you have to rely on spot gas some of the time, those costs must be estimated and included. If you have to build transmission to get the power to where its needed, those costs too. If you are going to incur constraint payments because some of your power is generated at 3am when its unusable, those costs also. If you are using battery or pumped hydro, those costs as well.
This is, if you think about it, another way of saying that to compare two generating systems, the product they supply must be the same. So another way of putting the same point is that you have to include all the costs needed to make wind supply available at the same point and with the same reliability as a coal fired supply. Or a gas fired supply, or whatever you are comparing with.
Or you could try and argue, which the die hards in some forums do, that intermittency doesn’t matter, and you don’t need storage or backup. A glance at either UK gridwatch site will put this to bed immediately, though.
It is perfectly true that the levelized cost of electricity for wind will include all the costs of delivering the gross amount of electricity which the system will deliver through its life. But that is pretty much irrelevant to the investment appraisal. The question you have to ask when doing investment appraisal is which of the two systems is cheaper to deploy and use, and to get all the costs you have to include storage, backup, transmission and constraint payments.
Put it yet another way. Intermittency and remoteness of supply in the case of wind and solar imposes costs. You have to take all of these costs into account when appraising whether its cost effective to deploy them, or more cost effective than using gas or coal or nuclear.
Subsidies just transfer these costs from the operator to the public or the tax payer. They are irrelevant to the real merits of the investment decision.
I am finding it hard to explain this any more clearly, because it is so basic. It amounts to saying, just do your investment appraisal by the book. Include all the costs, compare like with like…. The problem with LCOE is that it gives a parameter which is irrelevant to the investment appraisal, but which is then used as if it were the decisive one.
I’m afraid I must disagree with the Manhattan Contrarian. The affirmationists (those that believe in something without evidence) completely dominate the public scene while the negationists (those that refuse to believe in something without evidence) are censored, ignored, and canceled. Most of the greatest scientists of the past were negationists, like Galileo, who denied the Earth was the center of the Universe, and Darwin, who denied that humans had been created by God. And many of them had to face hardships from the affirmationists of the time for being negationists.
The goal of the affirmationists was to justify certain policies, and those policies are being implemented, to the point physical reality and the economy allow, without many protestations (until now).
Most people in the world, including most scientists, are now convinced that:
That looks like a victory to me, even if we refuse to surrender. In the end, affirmationists always lose because science cannot advance on false premises. But their goal is not to be right in the end but to control power and money now. When the CO2 hypothesis starts running aground they’ll invent something else.
“But their goal is not to be right in the end but to control power and money now.”
That’s correct.
Depressing, but…
“But for that, to cover the whole winter, you would need, for just the UK, some tens of thousands of gigawatt hours of storage, of a form that could store the energy for six or more months and then discharge over the course of months. Such a thing has not yet been invented, and it is not clear that it can ever be invented.”
Doesn’t that describe fossil fuels?
“The affirmationists (those that believe in something without evidence) completely dominate the public scene while the negationists (those that refuse to believe in something without evidence) are censored, ignored, and canceled.”
“In the end, affirmationists always lose because science cannot advance on false premises. But their goal is not to be right in the end but to control power and money now.”
Here we have the pot [TSI denier] calling the kettle [CO2 affirmationist alarmists] black.
Who has operated under the same false premises as the CO2 alarmists?
Who wrote multiple articles this year all based on the same assertion that underpins the affirmationists ‘science’, that ‘the sun’s TSI didn’t cause the climate to change’?
As a negationist I have always refused to believe in something without evidence, so instead of just believing the endless assertions presented everywhere, that were always made with scant evidence that ‘the sun’s TSI didn’t cause the climate to change’, I took a look for myself.
As a negationist I have researched, found and presented scientific evidence that the sun’s TSI is indeed the cause of climate change. Ironically, the affirmationist here in this scene is the who continues to believe TSI didn’t, continues to believe as before, just like the CO2 affirmationists.
………………………………………………………..
Skeptics and realists can and will win with winning science.
Don’t believe it? Back in 2018 I presented a poster in Washington, DC at the 100th AGU fall meeting, titled “Extreme Weather Events and Climate Extremes are Limited by the Duration of Solar Cycle Irradiance Extremes“, where I predicted a return to more ice and harder winters.
Has it? Here I quote Willis E. from his Sea Ice Mysteries article, then part of my response:
“First, in addition to not being able to explain the recent radical sea ice changes in retrospect, there wasn’t one climate scientist on the planet who predicted those large changes in sea ice.”
“True Willis, no climate scientist predicted more ice, but I did in my 2018 AGU poster, referring to the cooling effect of solar activity below my decadal sun-climate warming threshold.”
We can win when this cold, hard, icy winter is widely understood as a TSI cooling effect like global warming is a TSI warming effect.
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We won’t win, ie will continue to lose, with affirmationists, ie TSI deniers, leading the charge.
There is an old saying that if you mix honey with ordure you get ordure.
Thus, if you mix science with politics you get politics.
If you mix economics with politics you get politics.
If you mix business with politics you get politics.
Is CO2 driving the climate? We don’t know.
Is Methane from Dutch farmers driving the climate? We don’t know.
Can green energy replace fossil fuels? We don’t know.
But it would be a “tell” if various billionaires and trillionaires and activists and scientists and politicians risked their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to save the planet rather than forcing us peasants to risk our money and our 401(k)s on the project.
Reply to the three questions that you have asked .
Q1 CO2 is not driving the climate because the effect of CO2 on warming the atmosphere is logarithmic and the wave lengths are all but saturated .We will not see more than half of a degree Celsius if that ,of warming .
Q 2 The answer is NO The methane from animals is the second biggest scam ( after climate change ) and farmed animals do not add one additional atom of carbon to the atmosphere as all forage that the animals eat has absorbed CO2 from the atmosphere ,The process is a closed cycle .
Q3 Green energy is not really green and renewable is far to intermittent to run an industrial country as factories need reliable affordable electric ;power to make and produce all the things that modern civilization need .
If Nuclear was classified as green the the answer could be yes .
Wind and solar on their own are useless but some countries with plenty of hydro which is green (but the greens hate it ) can remotely turn their hydro stations on and off as the wind blows and the sun sets
The only way that green energy could work in most countries is battery storage on a very large scale which have nor yet been built and tested .
I don’t believe the cultists really have the world’s good in mind. They want to kill most of us and turn the rest into serfs, per The Great Reset. Thus it doesn’t matter to them if we’re comfortable so long as they, the elite, are.