If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.
Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. This Scoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.
But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”
Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.
On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.
But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.
But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:
Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.
Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In additional to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.
Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:
The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):
Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.
As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.
Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.
I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:
This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.
But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?
- How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?
- How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.
- They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.
- And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?
The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.
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From the article, “The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades”. There are options like coal and methane that come to mind, or uranium or thorium if you are concerned about CO2 emissions.
Or, just use gas as a transition source to a completely nuclear future
Doesn’t Burning Hydrogen for energy produce H2O vapor?
Isn’t Water Vapor a potent GHG?
In fact, at just 2% atmospheric concentration H2O is responsible for 50% of the Atmospheric warming.
While concentrations of water vapor can’t top 4% without precipitating adding more to the mix can only serve to further warm the biosphere before causing increases in deluge flooding events.
Don’t you understand? Once Exxon is killed off, the rest is just piddling details.
Flights of climate fairies will scoop it up and store it deep, deep, deep underground.
Or to a completely coal future – it is the lowest cost, most reliable.
“””The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project….”””
The best you’ll get is some modelled output….
Modelled by AI, programmed by idiots
“The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades.”
hmmm…. something like …. oil? or natural gas? 🙂
Aluminium burns
also Iron, Magnesium, Sodium, Potassium, Calcium etc etc.
All these things can be made from electrickery in similar process to how Hydrogen is and they store perfectly easily for just about ever. Unlike Hydrogen = the original Houdini Gas
Or whatabout the Soda Engine?
All you need is Sodium Hydroxide and water – mix them together to get heat and steam.
When you’re done, dry the resultant solution to get your original NaOH back, store for as long as you like and, when you want Energy: Simply add water.
Calcium Oxide would also work….
Why are modern minds so clam-tight closed?
“mix them together “
I’d be sure to add the NaOH gradually to water. Wouldn’t you?
‘Or whatabout the Soda Engine?’
Nobody wants a basement full of Drano.
Because sodium hydroxide, ammonia and calcium hydroxide will turn your eyeballs to soap
Correct, they are getting there slowly as reality bites
So… if Ukraine had arrived at net zero paradise when the Russians invaded- I’m sure the Russians would have knocked out most of the industrial wind and solar energy- that would have been easy- and any huge battery installations would be a target – the resulting firestorm from striking them is unimaginable. How long would it take to recover from such a loss? Probably many years.
But, the Russians last winter knocked out most of Ukraine’s power – many of their ff power plants and much of their grid. Yet, Ukraine recovered quickly.
I should think there’s a lesson there.
Ukraine a Net-Zero paradise?
Pretty soon, Ukraine will run out of people.
At present, the Kiev regime claims 33.5 million people, but 7.5 million of those are in Crimea and four annexed areas, which leaves 26 million, of which 10.7 million are elderly retirees, who decided to stay, but woman and children and some men left, a total of 18.76 million in the West and Russia. See URL
Where will Ukraine get the bodies to keep on fighting, if it loses 15,000 per month dead and wounded?
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/about-half-of-ukraine-population-left-their-country
There’s a “perils of socialism” lesson in Ukraine demographics.
Liquidator checks.
Russia’s Goal is Restoring the Entire Empire.
You, apparently, wish them on- on to a more glorious Russian Empire!
This time, they will make it work.
They couldn’t make it work even after potatoes were imported from the new world. Russia, 500 years later, still searching for that warm water port.
Here is some history
Russia, under Katherine the Great, a German Princess, battled the Ottoman Empire and won several wars.
As a result, it ceded all northern lands of the Black Sea to Russia, including Crimea, a warm water port, in 1783.
Russia is no longer looking for THAT warm water port
Russia had two consecutive years with record wheat harvests, which have resulted in world prices decreasing.
Under Soviet times, Russia used to import tens of millions of metric tons of grains from the US, Canada, Australia, etc.
Now, it has become the biggest wheat exporter in the world, so, regarding wheat, they are “making it work”
It’s a joke, socialists are always telling us that this time socialism will work.
Russia’s economy is growing at least 2.5%/y, per word Bank.
Europe’s is stagnant due to blowback of sanctions, and “welcoming” destitute refugees from Africa, and about 6.1 million refugees from Ukraine, most of them are a net drain on government budgets.
Here are some facts with URLs
If the Media were doing their job, instead of shilling, they could have found the same facts
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/about-half-of-ukraine-population-left-their-country
Aren’t they claiming Alaska now, as well?
Ah, A Russian trollbot on WUWT!
Welcome Ivan!.
Clever!
/sarc
30% repaired, about to be hit right now, again.
General Winter is right on cue after General Rasputitsa (General mud).
Greta to the rescue. Abrams next endangered species.
Forget cost. The input/output energy math doesn’t work.
Electrolysis of water is about 70% efficient. Burning hydrogen in CCGT is about 60% efficient. So the net I/O is about 40%. That says you need about 2.5x what the grid would otherwise need to use hydrogen as ‘storage’. There is literally not enough room in the UK including offshore for those facilities in a net zero grid scenario. And remember, the grid must itself be vastly expanded to support EVs.
UK cannot physically get there from here at any cost. Using the right storage units does not (IMO) make this report semi competent.
And how much “warming” would this titanic waste prevent?
Correct Rud – Physics and Economics are not strong subjects in the modern day politicians, or any so called specialists armoury
A totally renewable grid would need to be, well, totally renewed – no nation, irrespective of GDP could ever afford it, but then again, it’s not about climate, or environment, or citizen welfare, it’s all about stealth tax and globalist personal fortunes, otherwise the green blobs backers would show some concern for the amount of wildlife being killed by renewable sources
How much hydrogen will be lost to leakage if it has to be stored for several years?
All of it.
But where do you get the hydrogen from? For any battery solution generation of electricity needs to be greater than 100% of actual demand. Is that ever likely?
It has to be hundreds of percent.
Once they are drained, they need to be recharged while keeping the power on.
But once we are net zero, there will be no new batteries or turbines.
Let’s see someone make a single panel or turbine, from digging out everything from the ground, to transport and manufacturing and installation.
But what they are calling for is doing this all at once, everywhere, while also preventing any new mining or power lines or factories or anything.
The enormity of what would be required is stupefying, and we are barely touching on the edges of it all.
So that’s why the Matrix was powered by deplorables!
Good synopsis. The real problem, however, is that net zero is not intended to work, but to collapse the economy in advance of bringing the Left to power.
Other weapons at the Left’s disposal include gender, ethnic, religious and generational strife, leading ultimately to the destruction of the family.
How glibly they talk of storing hydrogen.
BATTERY SYSTEM CAPITAL COSTS, OPERATING COSTS, ENERGY LOSSES, AND AGING
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
See PART 8
Here is an example of the cost of controlling the midday solar bulge and discharging 81% of it during the peak hours of late afternoon/early evening, each day.
The cost of any electricity traveling through the batteries will be a MINIMUM of about 37.6 c/kWh
NOTE: the table looks better in the article
GO WOKE, GO BROKE, AT THE SPEED OF LIGHT
Grid-scale Battery System Owning and Operating Cost for Solar Bulge Control
Battery systems perform various functions during a day, including absorbing the heavily subsidized, midday solar output bulge, and discharging about 81% of it during the peak hours of late-afternoon/early-evening; the other 19% are system losses. See Part 4
Owners want a return on their investment of at least 10%/y, when bank loans and long-term CDs are 6.5%/y. The 3.5% is about a minimum for all the years of hassles of designing, building, erecting, and paperwork of a project
Assumptions for Analysis
Assume, in the morning, the batteries are charged at about 20% full, so they can absorb the bulge to about 80% full. On days, with little or no bulge, the batteries are charged with low-cost, night-time electricity
– Bank loan 50%
– State governments want Owners to have at least a 50% investment, i.e., “have skin in the game”
– Megapack li-ion systems at $575/kWh for 2023. See Part 1
– Capacity factor of 0.6
– Owner return, 10%/y for 15 years
– Amortize bank loan, 6.5%/y for 15 years
– Cost of government subsidies at 50% of total costs
– System loss at 19%, HV AC to HV AC basis. See Parts 2 and 3
– System loss at 10 c/kWh
– System aging at 1.5%/y is ignored. See Part 7
The 0.376 c/kWh of throughput is significantly understated, because it is based on a very high CF = 0.6, and excludes the cost of system aging
All project costs are paid by ratepayers, taxpayers, and added to government debts.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/cost-shifting-is-the-name-of-the-game-regarding-wind-and-solar
NOTE: Utilities of grid-scale battery systems have the real owning/operating numbers, which they do not make public, because they are “proprietary”
Capacity, 1.0 MW/4 MWh
2023 pricing
Megapack li-ion, $/kWh
575
Capital cost, excludes aging, $
2300000
Subsidies
50%
Owner return, 10%/y for 15 y
50%
Amortize bank loan, 6.5%/y for 15 y 50%
Owner return, $/y
148296
Payment to bank, $/y
120213
Total payments, $/y
268509
System loss, kWh/y
205481
Other costs, O&M, insurance, etc., $/y
40000
Total cost, $/y
329057
System loss at 10 c/kWh, $/y
20548
Total costs, $/y
329057
Cost, c/kWh of throughput
0.376
Paid to Owner by:
Government, as subsidies, $/y
164529
Utility ratepayers, etc., $/y
164529
Total, $/y
329057
0.376C/kwh? 3.76C/kwh? 37.6C/kwh?
Thank you.
It should read 37.6 c/kWh.
Another person showed a rational way to calculate the cost of the battery losses.
What is being absorbed by the batteries, is the heavily subsidized, midday solar bulge.
The utility paid at least 10 c/kWh to the Owner, but that was reduced by about 50%, due to various financial tax shelter gimmicks, including the upfront 30% ITC
About 19% of that expensive electricity is lost going through the batteries.
The remainder is fed into the HV grid during peak hours when prices are about 8 c/kWh
You can see it is very costly to use batteries to deal with solar bulges
I revised my Battery article to show the correct numbers
To properly account for the economic cost, the direct subsidies should be left out of the cost calculations. That there may be a 50% subsidy does not change the actual cost, it only moves it from the ratepayer to the taxpayer. The rate payer and tax payer in aggregate are one and the same.
I realize that you added back the government (taxpayer) subsidy at the end this example. However, the inclusion of subsidies is often used to hide the fact that economic renewable energy costs are 3x to 5x the cost from ff or nuclear.
Bill,
Battery systems perform various functions during a day, including absorbing the heavily subsidized, expensive, midday solar bulge, and discharging about 81% of it during the peak hours of late-afternoon/early-evening; the other 19% are system losses.
The utility paid at least 10 c/kWh to the Owner, but that was reduced by about 50%, due to various financial tax shelter gimmicks, including the upfront 30% ITC. See Part 4
I am using the 20 c/kWh cost to reflect the full cost of solar electricity.
If batteries are used to “tame” the bulge, the cost of passing the electricity through the batteries is $0.519/kWh of throughput.
The $0.519/kWh of throughput is significantly understated, because it is based on a very high CF = 0.6, and excludes the cost of system aging
All project costs, including subsidies, are paid by ratepayers, taxpayers, and added to government debts.
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/cost-shifting-is-the-name-of-the-game-regarding-wind-and-solar
NOTE: Owners of grid-scale battery systems have the real owning/operating numbers, which they do not make public, because they are “proprietary”
See PART 8 of my article
What was the source of the wind and solar data and where did it come from?
The Delabole wind farm was the first commercial onshore wind farm built in the United Kingdom, in November 1991. The first large solar farm in the United Kingdom, a 32 MW solar farm, began construction in November 2012 in Leicestershire. So the data must come from weather records as for the first seven years there were no commercial wind farms and there were no commercial solar sources until 2012.
That raises several questions in my mind
Did they average wind across the country, or apply it regionally, in 2022 the UK average wind speed was about 10mph. Today the wind speed is between 2mph (Bala Wales) and 19mph (Isle of Lewis). Current generation of windturbines need 6mph before they actually output anything. So the 3.5GW that wind is providing is coming from specific parts of the UK rather than all the country. So although wind droughts can afflict the whole country and much of Northern Europe there can be localised shortages. So if you put your windfarms in the wrong place you could have problems. North to south the UK covers about 700miles.
It’s the same for Solar PV extreme variations regionally and annually.
To do an assessment remotely reflecting reality you have to either study individual source location production against theoretical maximum. Or do the same for wind data against location and specification of a “standard” turbine or panel.
Here is the LIFETIME performance of the first Offshore wind system, now being dismantled
– Lifetime Performance of World’s First Offshore Wind Farm
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/lifetime-performance-of-world-s-first-offshore-wind-farm
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/biden-30-000-mw-of-offshore-wind-systems-by-2030-a-total-fantasy
You would expect better from a once, world renowned Society, yet in these modern days of dystopian globalist elitism, it has sadly joined the many cohorts of climate alarmist, nut zero peddlers
Being a Royal Society does align it neatly with King Charles own love of the renewable pantomime – the Crown Estate makes a nice little earner from renting out the UKs seabeds to off shore wind farm developers, to the tune of around £100Mn for 2022 alone – those Royal helicopters, private jets and gas guzzling 4×4’s are not cheap to run after all
Renewables were never a realistic option to power a nation without sufficient storage, unfortunately the cost and natural resources to provide that sufficient storage, are beyond reach of a nut zero chasing, economically regressed, increasingly impoverished nation, just look at Germany, the poster child of nut zero chaos
“And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.”
Difficult argument for someone who’s spent a lifetime watching techno-gadget price deflation – like large flat screen TVs going from unadjusted $10k to $500 while quality grew much better.
(Not advocating NZ)
That’s because fools equate the difference between transferring, processing and storing information (mass = 0) with anything else.
Are you equating building batteries with building computers?
Batteries have been around for centuries, there is no massive improvement to be had in them.
What has happened to the cost of an oil storage tank? Still, I suppose you could count a nuclear fuel rod as being a massive reduction in storage cost. Until you look at the cost of the nuclear power station to house it.
Kevin, you have absolutely no idea what you are talking about.
What a wonderfully pathetic straw man! Idiots out in real force today.
O/T. but interesting
Despite all the hoo ha about the elites’ and their private jets…
“”Announcing the new route, Adam Golder, the company’s co-founder, told AeroTime Hub: “K9 Jets believes pet family members deserve to travel in comfort and style alongside their owners.
“We couldn’t be more excited to kick off this new route, just in time for the holidays, so guests can celebrate with their loved ones (including pets) in style.”
K9 celebrated the launch of the service on Instagram with a picture of a passenger sitting at a walnut table with a glass of champagne, her face wearing a delighted smile as she is nuzzled by her golden retriever.””
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/sep/30/private-jet-service-for-rich-dog-owners-condemned-by-climate-campaigners
There’s obviously a market to be had…
Hence the climate agenda transfer of money from the masses to the globalist elites – those private jets aren’t cheap
World leaders continue experiencing a “dangerous delusion” of a global transition to “just electricity” that that they believe will eliminate the use of the crude oil that made society achieve so much in a few centuries.
Crude oil is the basis of our materialistic society as discussed in an education and entertaining 27-minute podcast interview between Ronald Stein and Armando Cavanha in Brazil.
· All the components and equipment for the generation of electricity by wind, solar, coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro are all made from the oil derivatives manufactured from crude oil !
Well you have implicitly declared the end of civilization when cheap oil ends.
Concrete and steel are of course currently ‘made’ with coal and natural gas.
In terms of plastics, oil just happens to be the cheapest feedstock, but any organic material will do,and 60 years ago we were using wood and coal.
No, that is not the problem,. the problem is EROEI. In the end renewables are simply too pathetic in terms of energy out versus energy in.
Nuclear power is not.
If the governments of the world would stop interfering and let the markets dictate the direction of future technology, the optimal technologies would emerge. If there aare none, well it was fun while it lasted.
AGW is devoid of facts and its’ supporters either have an abundance of belief in unproven technology that will save them from the no wind and no sun apocalypse or they don’t really care as long as fossil fuels are gone. I believe it’s the second choice. These same people will be the first to complain when the realize they’ve committed energy suicide and their lifestyle will deteriorate to 19th century standards. Who will they blame then?
“Who will they blame then?”
As with ALL Marxist true believers, they will blame greedy capitalists or counter-revolutionaries! Perhaps the Climatista mind set will have to be added to the list of serious personality disorders along side narcissism, Machiavellianism and sadism! They appear to be common throughout GangGreen!
It will be a whole lot worse than the 19th century.
For a whole bunch of separate reasons.
First, the number of people was balanced by the means to provide for them, or they for themselves.
Back then, the ratio of food producers to food consumers was far higher, at least one and possibly several orders of magnitude so.
People were not largely fat, lazy, unskilled, weak, and 100% incapable of making a single of the things they needed to survive.
The list goes on and on.
Farmers used animal power, and there were lots of animals and the equipment to use them to farm. Most food was locally grown, and preserved using means that almost no one knows a thing about nowadays.
If this is not reversed, what comes after the fuel is gone and the power fails, is a mass dying on a scale so enormous, that no one wants to even make a horror movie that honestly depicts it.
Not a fast and quiet sort of laying down to die, either. Oh, no. But the bad kind.
None of the infrastructure we currently all use to live and survive, can continue to function when even a percentage of people randomly die.
It is obvious to me that almost no one here wants to even begin to contemplate what this road is actually leading us all to.
I doubt even a tenth of one percent of us would survive a single year without fuel and power.
IOW, when the pumps are shut off and the grid shuts down, it is not coming back if it is everywhere all at once.
We have a months worth of food on hand at any given time. Cities, a few days.
Much of it is in the form of unprocessed grain.
Hundreds of millions live where surviving a single very cold winter night is unlikely with no fuel or source of heat.
No one in any city has any ability whatsoever to feed themself when there is nothing to buy.
What is on hand and animals that can be killed and eaten, and then people will be eyeballing each other and wondering what they will do to avoid starving to death. All that inside of a week in Winter.
I do not think very many people are really considering what happens if these fools get their way.
I predict angry mobs will glue those deemed responsible to the roads as the scope of the catastrophe sinks in.
There is a paper by the solar physicist, Valentina Zharkova, who discovered how two magnetic dynamos at different depths in the Sun give the 11-year sunspot cycle and another cycle of around 400 years. She says that the Sun is going to be cooling enough to lead to a mini-ice age for around 40 years with probable crop failures starting in a few years.
‘Modern Grand Solar Minimum will lead to terrestrial cooling’
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7575229/
NOAA also agrees that the sunspot number, currently around 100, will start dropping starting in 2025 going to single digits in 2031 and going to zero in 2040 when their forecast ends, and that will reflect a lower solar output leading to terrestrial cooling.
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/products/predicted-sunspot-number-and-radio-flux
“No one in any city has any ability whatsoever to feed themself when there is nothing to buy.”
That’s not true. Most people have a natural ability to store food in their body, in the form of excess fat and protein, so they can survive when food is not available, which is why most people in developed countries are either overweight or obese.
A typically overweight person, who is not yet obese, is carrying about 20 kg of food with every step they make. That’s equivalent to carrying around a 20 kg suitcase at the airport.
Imagine carrying a 20 kg suitcase in each hand, all day long. That’s a lot of surplus food. Imagine the amount of surplus food a significantly obese person is carrying around all day long. That’s probably equivalent to a 40 or 50 kg suitcase in each hand.
Of course, because the weight is spread fairly evenly over the whole body, that 80 kg of surplus food is easier to carry.
From the following article:
“Overweight and obesity in the US has risen from 47.1% to 71% in recent decades.”
https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/trends/adults-global
They wouldn’t last without potable water however, and without electricity the water supplies and the sewage pumps all stop, and cholera takes over.
No reason to do any calculations, just ask the Morlocks.
Indeed. In his ‘collapse of complex societies’ Joseph Tainter cites a chilling report from WWI in I think Turkey or Crimea, where a town was isolated . Within two weeks law and order broke down, and people were dying.
A modern city wouldn’t last 5 days.
This is what drives the zero’s to despair :
Fusion Experiments Shatter Previous Energy Records
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Fusion-Experiments-Shatter-Previous-Energy-Records.html
And right there :
In 2021, The Joint European Torus (JET) in Oxfordshire broke its 1997 fusion record by a more-than two-fold gain when it produced 59 megajoules of energy in a single fusion experiment.
Oxfordshire knows more about hydrogen than the London zero’s of Battery Power Station.
The lasers that they use to ignite the fusion are too inefficient to make fusion energy practical any time soon. They are only about 20% efficient, at best, so the total energy input is far greater than the fusion output.
Well the balanced view is that fusion isn’t here yet, but it is coming.
In the meantime there is 10,000 years of fissionable (fertile) material lying around the place.
No shortage of cheap energy. Just oil, gas and common sense.
Looks like Britain is going full colonial, again.
UK Fast-Tracks A Unique Renewable Energy Project
https://oilprice.com/Latest-Energy-News/World-News/UK-Fast-Tracks-A-Unique-Renewable-Energy-Project.html
Cable power from the Sahara – now where did we see that before? Desertec? 2010 estimate $400 billion killed the idea one thought.
Gibralter to be a huge power switch or batter charger?
It’s supposed to come via a near 4,000km subsea cable around the coasts of Spain, Portugal and France that Russian subs will have scoped out in no time. Odd that the Spaniards aren’t interested in it, as they could save the cost of all but 21 miles of subsea cable. Or perhaps not so odd. Xlinks is a real hostage to misfortune, aside from creating a grid nightmare. Huge batteries too to try to mitigate the swings in generation. An electric HS2.
‘Odd that the Spaniards aren’t interested in it…’
Probably still upset about how the whole Armada thing worked out.
Dunno why they would be upset. The year after the “Armada Thing” the Spaniards completly destroyed the English fleet.
Oh its the latest greenFraud. Millions will be piled in, some people will make fortunes and the whole thing will collapse in financial ruin
Doesn’t Burning Hydrogen for energy produce H2O vapor?
Isn’t Water Vapor a potent GHG?
In fact, at just 2% atmospheric concentration H2O is responsible for 50% of the Atmospheric warming.
While concentrations of water vapor can’t top 4% without precipitating adding more to the mix can only serve to further warm the biosphere before causing increases in deluge flooding events.
Generating hydrogen removes water vapour and adds oxygen. Its a closed cycle.
Hmm, let’s see. Store hydrogen in caves? By volume hydrogen has a pretty poor energy comparison to most other energy sources. It has to be stored under serious pressure to have any storage efficiency at all. How does one pressurize a cave? The hydrogen would leak out thru every fissure. And if not under pressure, the cave would need to be about as big as all of Britain, if not bigger.
It looks as though there are pressure limitations on hydrogen storage which imply a molar ratio of about 55% of the moles of methane you could store in the same salt cavern. Allow for the fact that hydrogen is only a third the energy density per mol and you are looking at about 5 times the volume of storage required to hold the same amount of energy.
The RS have finally introduced the idea that if you are concerned about climate change to the extent that you wish to rely on the climate for energy, you need to look at the extreme situations that can throw up over the course of decades. You might have thought it was the first thing that those who propose extreme climate scenarios would have thought of. But no.
What the RS have done is finally to latch onto the work of Staffell & Pfenniger available here https://www.renewables.ninja/downloads (including the papers describing their methodology), first released in 2017, and first used by me to look at precisely the issue they addressed not long after. It is a reanalysis of MERRA-2 weather data on a gridded basis to provide estimated wind speeds that are converted to estimated wind outputs using stylised turbine power curves and solar radiation converted to panel output on an hourly resolution going back to 1985 (solar) and 1980 (wind).
Because this is based on real weather data it is far superior to anything that relies on simulations or short periods such as a year, which always fail to capture the full spectrum (in a Fourier analysis sense, including geospatial/temporal correlations a.k.a weather systems). And at least for the data purporting to relate to the “current” fleet of wind farms it has the advantage of being calibrated against actual outputs, allegedly resulting in high correlations. Perhpas they could be improved marginally by fuller accounting of variations of air density due to pressure and water vapour content and temperature
However, when it comes to the data they actually used, you have to go digging here:
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/large-scale-electricity-storage/Large-scale-electricity-storage-report—Supplementary-Information.pdf?la=en-GB&hash=1CD5385B177E651041BBB70F050A1D28
Some important quotes:
At high levels of wind and solar, fluctuations in supply will be much bigger than in demand.
With, for example, solar plus wind supply (mixed 20/80) scaled to average 700 TWh/ 80
GW/year, it varied from 0.3 GW to 194 GW over the 37 years studied according to the Ninja
Renewables model. In contrast, in 2019 (the last pre-lock down year) demand varied from
19.5 to 49.1 GW. According to the AFRY model, which assumes that peak demand is flattened
by demand management measures, 2050 demand will vary from 43 to 98 GW. Fluctuations
in residual demand will grow as more space heating is electrified, since high heating demand
is correlated with low wind speeds during winter anticyclones, but this effect will be partly offset
by falling demand for heating as temperatures rise due to global warming and by further
improvements in insulation.
The AFRY future demand model, used in this paper, has a basic demand that relates to 2018
and hence its weather. It includes the effects of weather variation for that year, but beyond
this does not include any correlations with the weather for other years studies.
So although we have supply modelled on 37 years of weather data, demand is based just on 2018, which is hardly a challenging year compared with the cold weather in the Dunkelflaute 2010 and 2011. Moreover, it is assumed that demand management can flatten demand so that the maximum is only 98GW, even in the coldest weather, trying to rely on heat pumps and resistive heating top-up. Given that it is estimated that actual hourly gas demand can peak as high as 350GW (conveniently buffered by linepack), and gas demand as high as 5TWh for a day – an average of 208GW – has been recorded this seems highly implausible. This failure to consider correlation between demand and Dunkelflaute is a major failing.
For the ambitious, Staffell and Pfenniger have just published a new tool that tries to factor MERRA 2 weather data into demand with adjustable parameters. Their paper on it was published in Nature here
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41560-023-01341-5
and data and modelling can be found here:
https://demand.ninja/
I have yet to work out how to evaluate it and incorporate it: anyone who would like to help me give it a go please take a look and notify me in a comment.
More comment on other aspects follows.
‘At high levels of wind and solar, fluctuations in supply will be much bigger than in demand.’
A while ago, I compared the variance of W&S generation to that of load over 2022 using hourly data from PJM (a large US grid operator) in order to investigate the efficacy of using these renewables to ‘hedge’ load.
Turns out that wind is a negative hedge, meaning that if one was ‘short’ load, one would also need to be short wind to some extent in order to effect any reduction in hourly variance.
Solar, on the other hand, did provide some reduction in total variance, given the small quantities generated during 2022, but could also be shown to become counterproductive if substantially more capacity were to come online.
Absent price data, this was all done solely on the basis of variance reduction, so W&S might be reasonable hedges against load if they were truly inexpensive, but I don’t believe that’s the case.
My simple old brain struggles to grasp why all the focus is on “what to use” to provide clean, reliable, 24/7/52 dispatchable, affordable electricity.
The solution is and has been there for decades – nuclear fission reactors. Now modular even.
So rather than get into a lather about “what to use”, the focus should just be on “where to get the funding”.
And even that challenge is readily solvable with favorable regulatory treatment –
the stock markets.
The people behind all of this have an advantage over you and the rest of us here…they do not have brains capable of any struggle whatsoever.
They do not know what they do not know, and this is true to an extent it is hard for us that understand, to even grasp.
Yes. There are people in the markets now trying to set up funds and organizations to attract serious funds from e.g pension fund managers, for nuclear power development.
The problem is that post Fukushima, when German greens forced the closure of half of Germany’s nuclear fleet, and the owners took huge losses, and the government was taken to court, the political risk of nuclear became a real financial risk.
The ‘Just stop oil’ lunatics becoming ‘just stop Nuclear’ and sabotaging a power plant could easily whip up enough public panic to stop nuclear all over again.
In short potential investors see nuclear power as a hostage to political fortune. Unless governments are prepared to sign guarantees that future governments will not close down nuclear without full compensation of the share and bondholders, no self respecting fund manage dare touch it with a barge pole.
Technically nuclear power is the only way forward as oil reserves decline and oil prices scale the dizzy heights.
But oil companies are finding that investing in renewable activism and climate change is a very good return on investment. It multiplies the value of their assets marvellously if there is no viable competition.
” … as oil reserves decline …. ”
Plenty of coal left, though.
So we have established that the demand forcast used by the RS is approved by the Climate Change Committee and the Future Energy Scenarios team at National Grid. That is, it is carefully calibrated to ignore the real world and assume that we will be poor, cold and hungry, mostly without cars or jobs, or perhaps even homes (dormitories, anyone?) so as to cripple demand to the required level.
Next, we enter the realms of real fantasy:
BEIS’s projections of the cost of wind and solar generation in 2040 are reported in Table SI
2.3, together with the weighted averages for 2040 and 2035 with the mix discussed above.
The discussion of 2050 costs in this report uses weighted averages of i) £35/MWh (2020
prices) ii) £45/MWh and iii) of £30.2/MWh found using the 2040 projections in the 2020 World
Energy Outlook with the capacity factors the WEO assumes for Europe replaced by those
assumed by BEIS for the UK. £35/MWh (just above BEIS’s low 2040 projection) is taken as
the central value since BEIS’s projected costs still appear to be falling in 2040 (a simpleminded
extrapolation of BEIS’s low projections gives £30/MWh in 2050), their past projections
have tended to be pessimistic, and it is above the IEA projection.
This completely ignores the failed auction for AR5 offshore wind at a price of £58.85/MWh in 2023 money (£44/MWh in 2012 money), or what wind is costing for wind farms in production today which we can see in this chart is comfortably more than 3 times their assumptions, even before we consider that LCOE is under costing wind when added at scale to the grid:
Of course, a large part of this arises simply because of the capacity factors “assumed by BEIS for the UK” – some 63.3% for offshore wind according to the parameters for the AR5 auction. The Hopium seems to include a lot of climate change in a direction not forecast by the IPCC. Once again, they are using the government group think assumptions to inflate the projected performance of wind farms – which is going to reduce their estimates of capacities required and the degree and frequency of shortfalls against demand.
The science is settled. This fact has been known for some time. When are the banners going to be unfurled: Gore and Mann Knew!!
As always, the only options up for consideration are one’s that are impossible.
The cost is too high, the timetable far too short (enough “cavern space” carved out in a few years? Hah!), the tech does not exist yet, the required infrastructure is not even possible to emplace in time due to numerous independent factors…
And the kicker, the real nut-buster, is that none of it will matter even if the plans work perfectly, since the countries not taking part in this madness out-emit all of the rest of us put together.
Oh, yeah, plus warming is not dangerous, CO2 does not have much, if any, effect on temperature, and no one involved has a single clue about anything that is part of what the rest of quaintly refer to as “reality”.
Millions more people die from cold-related causes than from heat-related causes each year.
This article from 2015 says that cold weather kills 20 times as many people as hot weather and that moderately warm or cool weather kills far more people than extreme weather. Increased strokes and heart attacks from cool weather are the main cause of the deaths.
‘Mortality risk attributable to high and low ambient temperature: a multi-country observational study’ https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(14)62114-0/fulltext
This recent study shows that the cold weather we have every year causes about 4.6 million deaths a year globally mainly through increased strokes and heart attacks, compared with about 500,000 deaths a year from hot weather. We can’t easily protect our lungs from the cold air in the colder months and that causes our blood vessels to constrict causing blood pressure to increase leading to heart attacks and strokes.
‘Global, regional and national burden of mortality associated with nonoptimal ambient temperatures from 2000 to 2019: a three-stage modeling study’
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5196(21)00081-4/fulltext
Build new fossil fuel and nuclear generators and remove wind and solar from the grid. Remove all subsidies, tax preference and bailouts from renewable energy and EVs.
Electroverse.info just ran a piece that said more than 1,000 new fossil fuel plants are being planned or are under construction around the world, mostly in China and India. They are putting prosperity ahead of a 1-2 degree rise in temperature, in this ice age that the Earth is currently in.
“And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. ”
Now that is funny.
I am not working at a power plant that uses either for fuel. No one is.
I have done hazard analysis on both H2 and ammonia in the relatively small quantities in an industrial settings.
Coal piles, diesel fuel, or uranium is easy to store safely.
Pumped hydro can also be done safely.
Regulation require you make electricity without killing workers or the public,
The UK is turning into a great case history. It seems like people are finally waking up to the reality of what all political parties have, so far at least, committed to. Another excellent example is here from Civitas
STORY TIP
https://www.civitas.org.uk/publications/net-zero/
Which tries to assess how much Net Zero will cost the UK. Huge numbers.
In other news, John Lewis’ underwriters have stopped covering EVs, because of concerns about repair costs. Leading indicator of very high insurance costs to come.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/bills/insurance/john-lewis-stops-insuring-electric-cars/
Excellent piece by Francis Menton, as always. In the comments below, those from “It doesnot add up” are very informative. It seems like its even worse than Francis thought.
Incidentally, another recent story about EVs said that service station operators are now hiring staff to police the EV charging points, because the long waits and unavailability are leading to unruly behavior by the public. The legendary British patience in queuing appears to be coming to an end on this….
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/09/30/ev-power-point-shortage-driver-disputes-motorway-services/
Moto hires staff to manage queues and prevent conflicts over limited charging points.
Moto chief executive Ken McMeikan warned the UK’s motorway service stations are facing growing “public disorder” due to a lack of grid connections preventing him from installing enough car chargers to meet the surge in demand.
It means many motorists are facing long waits, with angry drivers confronting staff and each other over the lack of charging facilities.
Mr McMeikan said the delays made drivers “very angry and stressed” and warned of the growing risk of “charge rage” on Britain’s motorways.
He said: “People need to drive their EV cars around without range anxiety, without long queues and without public disorder but at peak seasonal times we are experiencing all this now.”
Moto, which runs 49 motorway services around the UK, has already introduced marshalls at Exeter, Rugby and Wetherby to manage EV queues and prevent conflicts during busy periods.
Back in 2022 a ‘Research Whitepaper’, under the auspices of several pan European Associations looked at the situation with EV charging stations in Europe.
https://www.acea.auto/publication/european-electric-vehicle-charging-infrastructure-masterplan/
.
Its tempting to conclude that the conversion simply won’t happen, governments will abandon it when they see the results, see they cannot provide enough charging points for the current ICE use pattern to continue.
The other possibility is that they do carry on and ban ICE without the charging points being built out, with car purchase costs remaining high, and the result is far lower car ownership – and use. That may be more likely, the thing has tremendous momentum now.
It is getting clearer and clearer that the one thing that is not going to happen is present ownership levels and usage patterns, just with EVs instead of ICE cars.
Agree with most of what you say. But remember there are over 30m ICEs in the UK and many are the families only car – so maybe 40m or more people dependent on their car to carry on their lives. Politicians cannot ignore that fact.
Doesn’t intermittency of supply also mean intermittency of recharge – whatever form the battery takes?
If wind/solar is supplying, it cannot be available for recharge, unless recharging has dedicated wind/solar installations, but even then it cannot be planed nor is it reliable.
If batteries are discharging what happens if wind/solar is insufficient to recharge?
There is an assumption that supply and recharging can somehow be synchronised.
The only way storage works – like pumped storage – is despatchable, continuous supply which can be used in periods of low demand.
And finally: hydrogen burnt in air gives water vapour, which is the gas that causes global warming. Supposedly it is a surfeit of this caused indirectly by C02 delaying outgoing radiation, that hastens us to doom.
The climatrons really should read their own notes.
Water vapour amounts will be tiny, not an issue. But the fundamental problem is indeed intermittency. The idea that intermittency can be solved by digging out, in the UK, 900 caverns and then generating hydrogen by wind, and then filling the caverns and burning the hydrogen during calms, while at the same time doubling or tripling electricity demand…
Its mad. But you see what a grip the madness has on the Establishment by the fact that the Royal Society doesn’t just point this out, they find some way to explain that this is a realistic approach. Just like Sunak doesn’t dare come out with it and say Net Zero is nonsense, but announces a program that is small tweaks to make it a bit more palatable, in effect trying to save it.
There seems to be, in the UK and the USA both, a sort of crippling fear of stating publicly what everyone knows. Not just climate and energy either, happens equally regarding race and gender.