A couple of days ago, a Substack called Doomberg had a piece titled “False Utopia.” The piece featured a discussion of a post of mine from February 2023 with the title “We Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid.” My post argued that we should demand a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all the key elements — generation mainly from solar and wind, plus sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of the evil fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.
The Doomberg guys called my post “brilliant,” which is very flattering. I would not say it was brilliant, but only that it says obvious things that for some reason few other people are saying. Among the people who will definitely not mention the need for an all-element fossil-fuel-free renewable grid demonstration project are government officials and green energy advocates. The reasons they won’t mention this need could be (1) they are not bright enough to understand the subject, or (2) their understanding is impaired because they are too blinded by religious fervor to “save the planet,” or (3) they are intentionally deceiving the public to make money or fame or career advancement for themselves. Or it could be all three!
Meanwhile though, the government “net zero” or “Green New Deal” (or whatever they are currently called) promotional sites are full of talk of things they call demonstration projects. So are they responding to my demand? The opposite. All of what they call demonstration projects follow a common approach, which is only to attempt to demonstrate various portions of the full system that would be needed to provide reliable 24/7/365 electricity from predominantly wind and solar generation.
Consider for instance the latest news on energy storage. A few days ago on October 13, the Department of Energy announced big new grants and subsidies for a series of what they call “hydrogen hubs.” Here is a report from E&E News Energy Wire. Excerpt:
The Department of Energy on Friday announced seven projects that will receive $7 billion to build landmark hydrogen hubs, delivering a major boost to a nascent U.S. industry. The long-awaited move is a key piece of the Biden administration’s climate agenda. On Friday, the White House said it expects the DOE funding to help cut 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, roughly equivalent to removing 5.5 million gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year. “With this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,” said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.
According to this further piece from Energy Wire on August 21, the Biden Administration has set a goal of having the U.S. produce 10 million metric tons of “green” hydrogen (by electrolysis from water) by 2030. The E&E piece states that the massive funding for “hydrogen hubs” is coming from a part of the Energy Department called the “Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations,” and also cites the Department as calling the hydrogen hubs “demonstrations.” So this must be the demonstration project we are calling for!
Not quite:
DOE envisions the hydrogen hubs as a demonstration of production, storage, transport and consumption.
I guess at least this is intended to be a demonstration of more than just production of the hydrogen. But still, they are clearly leaving out the critical piece of the puzzle, which is the demonstration of how much of this hydrogen, and capacity to make more of it, will be needed, and at what cost, to get the country — or even some small town — through a full year (or two or five) without need for fossil fuel backup. That completely obvious elephant is not part of this multi-billion dollar “demonstration.”
And DOE is not putting all of its energy storage eggs in the hydrogen basket. They separately have another big bucks effort called the “Long Duration Storage Shot” that is throwing bucketsful of cash at various research efforts into batteries. But the battery efforts are even farther removed from any relevant demonstration project. From DOE’s opening webpage describing that initiative (with a date of September 2021):
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. Achieving the Energy Earthshots will help America tackle the toughest remaining barriers to addressing the climate crisis, and more quickly reach the Biden-Harris Administration’s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 while creating good-paying union jobs and growing the clean energy economy. . . . The Long Duration Storage Shot establishes a target to reduce the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration within the decade.
On September 22, 2023 the Administration announced some $325 million for “15 projects across 17 states and one tribal nation” to “accelerate the development” of these “long duration” battery technologies. The $325 million may seem rather paltry compared to the $7 billion just thrown at the hydrogen hub thing last week; but don’t worry, they have many billions more to spread around on this over the coming months.
So are these battery technologies, or any one of them, even a potential solution to the problem of making a mostly wind/solar electricity grid work without fossil fuel backup? Again, you will not find any mention at those links, or at other government or advocate sites discussing the issue of how many of these batteries would be necessary and at what cost to actually fully back up a predominantly wind/solar grid and make it into a functional 24/7/365 electricity system. Indeed, you will not find any mention at any such sites of the fundamental problem with all batteries as the means to back up an intermittently-supplied grid, as identified in the big (and otherwise badly flawed) Royal Society energy storage report that came out in September. That problem is that stored energy as the backup mechanism entails engineering requirements that no battery can ever meet. Those include: holding at least several months of average usage, being capable of keeping that energy in storage for years in anticipation of worst-case once every multiple decades wind “droughts,” and being capable of discharging over the course of months if not a full year. The “10+ hours of duration” mentioned as the goal of the Energy Department’s battery program is almost trivial against the real engineering requirements.
Hydrogen, by contrast, has the theoretical capability of meeting all of those engineering requirement. However, there are many elements that don’t currently exist that would be needed to make a fully-functioning wind/solar/hydrogen storage 24/7/365 electricity grid. These include not just the electrolyzers, but also storage for huge amounts of hydrogen (underground caverns?), a full collection of thermal power plants capable of meeting peak demand burning pure hydrogen, and a transport system (pipelines?) to take the hydrogen from the electrolyzers to the storage caverns and then on to the power plants.
I could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this to get a rough idea as to cost, which would come to a multiple (not necessarily a huge one, but nonetheless a multiple) of what our current electricity system costs. But I’m not going to do it. The reason I’m not going to do it is that there as an obvious fact that tells you all you need to know, which is that no one in the country is spending their own private money to build out this system. They are all waiting for the government handouts. If this system could be built profitably at a cost competitive with what we have, there would be investors falling all over themselves to build it. When Thomas Edison built his first electricity plant, he did not go to the government for handouts to build it.
Because this is all a fantasy kept alive by government handouts, as soon as the handouts go away or even slow down, the whole thing will dry up and fade away.
Leftists…they never think things thru well, if our future is fossil fuel free, then how will we make all the solar panels and bird choppers and heat pumps for the millions of people? they all need to be replaced over time. It will never work.
Or things like scale or costs – to replace all coal & natural gas with wind & solar would require land mass twice the size of California and new transmission lines costing trillions that we don’t have
Ahhh … there’s two sides to that equation, supply and demand. They’re working hard on solving the demand side, reducing it through demand management, ie., population control!
El Hiero in the Canaries was an attempt at a all renewable system, with pumped storage, and a failure. Even given small scale, and favorable geology, it did not work.
Hydrogen is even less efficient than pumped storage, so hydrogen would be more of an issue.
I took a look at El Hierro and boy are they good at putting a positive spin on what’s going on; “El Hierro, 100% renewable” was one heading but when I read further it was 2015 and for four hours. But that figure is improving! But that’s where it starts to get into the wishful thinking territory, they are now installing a photovoltaic plant. Nowhere is there any mention of cost.
https://www.endesa.com/en/projects/all-projects/energy-transition/renewable-energies/el-hierro-renewable-sustainability
Green hydrogen is simply a bad idea that sounds good. Meaning, the gullible buy into it. Like our idiots in government. First, the electricity coming from wind/solar has an efficiency of 30% at best. So, we would need to build 3x the renewable capacity for the hydrogen target (in this case 10 million metric tons of hydrogen by 2030). But, green hydrogen requires distillation (20kg H2O to 1kg of H2), electrolysis and compression, prior to transport and eventual use in a power station or fuel cell. By the time it is converted into electricity the efficiency is again less than 30%. Overall, the say 1 GW of renewable capacity installed to produce green hydrogen results in approximately 10% of nameplate capacity used for actually work. It is chasing your tail and will never work.
20 kg H2O would produce ~2 kg of H2.
Set up your apparatus wrong (or right, depending on your POV) and you will produce just 1 kg of hydrogen. Plus 1/4 kg of helium. (Yes, I get rather strange late at night…)
Don’t knock it, we’ve been experiencing a helium shortage – it’s necessary to cool MRI scanners. If you can produce that as well, it’s still an option.
JWP,
Not to be overly pedantic, but while your ultimate point is directionally right, your presentation is littered with errors that detract from the impact of the message.
It’s a capacity factor of 30-40%, not an efficiency. The wind only blows in a useful range so often, and often at a low speed compared to the optimum. The output of the bird shredders on average is 30-40% of what it would be if the wind always blew at an optimal rate 24/7. The separate question of efficiency would be what percentage of all the kinetic energy in the wind can be extracted by the windmill.
You say “green hydrogen requires distillation (20kg H2O to 1kg of H2)”…
While it’s probably true that effective electrolysis depends on starting with relatively pure water, it doesn’t necessarily require distillation. More importantly, distillation has nothing to do with the yield or output of hydrogen fuel per quantity of input water. Distillation is the process of separating volatile components in a solution from each other through evaporation and condensation. You can’t distill hydrogen out of water. The process that breaks the chemical bond between hydrogen and oxygen atoms is electrolysis.
The weight ratio of hydrogen to oxygen in water is 2:16 based on the molecular weight. Fully electrolyzing 18 grams of water into oxygen and hydrogen would yield 2 grams of hydrogen and 16 grams of oxygen. I’m not sure why you selected 20 kg as the basis, but for every 20 kg of water, you theoretically have 2.2 kg of hydrogen, not 1 kg.
My goal here isn’t to nitpick or ridicule. It is to help you refine your message to be more effective.
Good to get that clarity- which we never get with energy issues in the MSM. I never learn anything there but a lot here.
Its more complicated than just doing weight calcs. You need high temps
Solid oxide electrolyzers must operate at temperatures high enough for the solid oxide membranes to function properly (about 700°–800°C, compared to PEM electrolyzers, which operate at 70°–90°C, and commercial alkaline electrolyzers, which typically operate at less than 100°C). Advanced lab-scale solid oxide electrolyzers based on proton-conducting ceramic electrolytes are showing promise for lowering the operating temperature to 500°–600°C. The solid oxide electrolyzers can effectively use heat available at these elevated temperatures (from various sources, including nuclear energy) to decrease the amount of electrical energy needed to produce hydrogen from water.
So another heat source is required to provide ‘free heat’….
You’re quite right that there’s more to it than sticking a couple of electrodes into the water. You could try to estimate the overall (round-trip) efficiency but I didn’t attempt that. I just pointed out a few problems with what JWP originally posted.
What matters in the end is how much it costs per KW-hr you get from the hydrogen-powered backup generator. That takes into account all the losses, capital and operating costs, useful life of equipment, etc. in the overall process. It seems like it would have to be many multiples of the cost of power from a combined cycle gas turbine running on natural gas.
How was Uruguay able to create an electricity grid almost exclusively powered by renewable energy?
Where did they get electricity on windless nights, and dark windless days?
How did people’s electric bills compare to using coal?
And what subsidies are involved and can they continue.
NPR has the answer:
Uruguay’s power grid runs on 98% green energy. Here’s how it got there : Planet Money : NPR
It’s mostly generated via hydro but also still uses coal and natural gas and even some diesel in a pinch.
Sounds very much like Norway, small population, enough Hydro for most years.
Or Tasmania. small population… very little manufacturing..
Big hydro dams.
Yet now, the greens hate hydro and want to take down dams.
They love to include hydro as “renewable” to pad the dismal solar and wind output yet hate the idea of building the dams that produce it.
They even want to remove dams already in place.
I have no idea where the 98% number comes from, though its widely asserted. The generation mix is a mixture of wind and hydro, which makes sense because it does not seem to be pumped hydro. The combination of great hydro capacity, a lot of fairly constant rain, and wind, is one of the few scenarios in which wind makes sense. When there is a calm you just turn on the hydro, which is pretty much instant start, and you don’t worry about running out because you are constantly refilling it with rain.
I tried to give some numbers and sources in another post in this thread. Its not all that easy to make sense of them, they are not consistent, but they seem to add up to a very unusual situation with regard to the combination of hydro facilities and wind. And they seem to show that getting your power generation to pretty low fossil fuel levels doesn’t get you anywhere close to Net Zero as a country.
Yes, it makes absolute sense that regions whose geography and climate provide them with predictable wind, rain, rivers & lakes to harness wind and hydro.
But these situations are relatively scarce around the world, and by no means should be used as a “one size fits all” application of wind & solar, as governments are attempting to inflict on most of the rest of the world.
and all through that story they confuse ‘energy‘ with ‘electricity‘
Always ‘watch the pea‘
Question: How are Uruguayans powering their cars & trucks, or using to cooking, heating their homes with and not least ploughing, fertilising and harvesting all that ‘uninhabited farmland‘ the windmills are planted upon?
and in the photo here of “Ramón Méndez Galain in his living room in Montevideo“, that living room does not seem to have been made out of mud & bamboo
Doesn’t look like many EVs being sold in Uruguay. 😉
Uruguay – Best Selling Cars Blog
Or the UK.
Uruquay’s per capita usage is about 1/4 of the USA..
A long way to catch up.
I think they may have intended to talk about Paraguay (!) The ignorance of modern journalists knows no bounds.
“By 2022, Paraguay became the only country in the world with 100% renewable energy electricity generation”
https://www.gem.wiki/Energy_profile:_Paraguay
IIRC Paraguay has one huge hydro plant on the Parana River, which it shares with Brazil, and a small population, and a climate where home heating is seldom required.
Costa Rica also scores well.
Vwch60,
it has something few countries have and that is large hydro electrcical generation, it is not wind and solar that make sit work.
https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides/uruguay-renewable-energy-equipment
In 2021, electricity matrix distribution consisted of 37 percent of hydropower generation, 35 percent wind, 18 percent fossil, 7 percent biomass and 3 percent from solar.
Wind generation is also a significant source of electricity in Uruguay. […] Uruguay has more than 1,525 MW of installed wind capacity representing about 30 percent of the country’s total electricity generation.[…] Wind energy development exceeded initial projections and the country currently has a surplus of wind generation capacity. The Government does not expect to increase wind infrastructure in the short term, although the government identified offshore wind as a key generation component for future green hydrogen production.
There are lots of claims of around of 98% of Uruguay electricity generation coming from renewables, but I don’t know what they are based on. It looks like 25% is coming from conventional. I would not count the biomass as renewable in the carbon sense, since it takes decades to replace it by growing more if it ever happens.
You can see how Uruguay is doing in its overall quest to get to Net Zero here:
https://www.iea.org/countries/uruguay
Look down at the bottom. This is not Net Zero or anything like it.
I guess the 1.5GW in the above quote is faceplate? From another source we find:
Installed capacityAs of 2020, Uruguay had 4.9 GW of installed electrical generating capacity, with hydro (31.2%) and wind power (30.7%) accounting for the largest shares.[1]
ProductionIn 2020, Uruguay produced 13.5 TWh of electricity, with 40% coming from wind energy, 30% from hydro, 20% from biomass, 6% from fossil fuels, and 4% from solar.[1]
https://www.gem.wiki/Energy_profile:_Uruguay
As Hume remarked, miracles always happen in far away countries a long time ago…
“I would not count the biomass as renewable in the carbon sense, since it takes decades to replace it by growing more if it ever happens.”
Not so- though I keep seeing it here- as a forester for 50 years, I can assure you, as you cut one tree, others are growing. If the total amount of wood in the forest stays more or less the same or increases, then forestry in that nation or location can be described as renewable. Renewable forestry is a big deal in the Scandinavian nations.
The idea that biomass energy (speaking here of wood, not grains)- is not renewable is pitched by forestry and fossil fuel haters. I’ve been battling those idiots for many years. Lots of them here in Wokeachusetts- including an idiot who fantasized “proforestation” who wants to lock up all the forests to do nothing but sequester carbon- in order to BRING DOWN current CO2 levels- not just net zero but better than net zero. Having biomass energy as a supplement to forestry practices allows superior forestry because much of the wood in well managed forests has no other market and is nothing but weeds that we struggle to remove to grow those superior trees for high value wood products. Farmers need to weed their farms and foresters need to weed the forests. The objective isn’t to replace fossil fuels- it’s to weed the forests. Forestry people LOVE fossil fuels. We use them in all logging machines and trucks and mills. However, unfortunately, there are some traitors in the foresty world- big forest owners right here in Wokeachusetts who are busy deforesting their forests to install solar farms- because of HUGE subsidies- then they pretend it’s to help save the planet- though they know better- but they have to have excuses so they sing the “save the planet” song. People now whine about high costs for wood- yet they don’t allow us to produce high quality wood products in large quantity- to save the owls, to save some bug species (yes, it’s true), to save the planet.
I’m ‘almost’ 200 years old. (More than a quarter of the way there)
It’s easy to see how the Uruguayan model would work in Arizona or Algeria or the Australian Outback, right vwch60? So much hydropower potential in those places, am I right?
Hydro. Provides the flexibility to handle wind and solar intermittency.
The more you add to the “tail” of the wind/solar/storage energy “solution”, in the form of batteries or electrolysed hydrogen to make the system resilient, the more impossible it becomes. The system quickly becomes net energy negative, which renders it less than useless as either a substitute for fossil fuels, or being net CO2 negative. Better to not build these systems in the first place.
Here’s what the Tasmanian Government calls a success story.
King Island (hydro.com.au)
As I’ve said before all you need are enough windmills, solar panels, batteries and a barge capable of landing enough diesel fuel to keep the whole thing running.
The wind has been doing poorly on King Island. It’s been around 65-80% diesel over the past 12 months. I suspect they have a broken turbine or two. Plus the new mine is running its own diesel generation.
The whole sorry exercise is completely unnecessary and a waste of time, money and resources. What these people are doing is criminal, I think it is time to start talking about prosecution. They are lying and cheating on a scale never seen before. Worse than that they are doing it on our dime.
List of items to be included in the proof of concept renewable energy grid site…
City of 200,000 to 500,000
Residential
Commercial
Industrial
On the coast or river (optional for EV shipping)
EVs only Personal and Public transport (busses, taxis, cars, trucks, delivery vans)
All Electric heating, cooking, water heating
All generation Wind, Solar, Battery Back-up within test zone
… (Rooftop Solar with Powerwall Back-up on every house??)
No Intertie to external grid sources
Requirement for ??% of residents to commute 30+ miles one way to work daily
Zero Gas
Zero Propane
Zero Gasoline
Zero Coal
(Plastics allowed??) Or eliminate ALL FF sourced goods (rubber tires, asphalt roads, ink, make-up, plastics, etc. (would need to include Solar Panels and Wind Turbines as both Steel and Silicon need Coal and Turbine Blades need Petrochemicals)
Do you go all the way to construction materials and methods being FF free as well??
There was already a proven global demonstration project four centuries ago. Biomass, animal power, all organic, thirty year life expectancy. We had a sustainable population of 300 to 500 million people, almost all in poverty.
Ok, so they even used some coal in the 1600s and perhaps all the way back to prehistoric times, but that was less than net zero.
So just get rid of 7.5 billion people and return to 1600s living standards. Easy peasy.
Ballpark cost estimate for battery storage is $325 billion to $500 billion per TWh of storage.
This storage would also require at least 50 km2 or 20 sq.miles per TWh.
Competition for limited resources suggests any potential savings due to technology development would be very likely to be consumed by higher raw material and other resource prices.
The amount of storage required varies depending on the extent of over-build of renewable capacity relative to average demand. At break-even over-build (Renewable nameplate installed capacity * minimum actual (not average) capacity factor * hours per year = Annual demand) storage requirement is enormous, but average storage level very low because variability causes the storage to be drained as fast as it is filled. For Ireland, the break-even over-build ration is 4.44. (2010 actual capacity factor was 22.5%, 1/0.225 = 4.44).
Additional over-build, to 5.5 to 6 times is necessary to reduce storage requirements. At 5.5 times over-build (20GW installed, compared to 4.5GW actual), the estimated storage requirement for Ireland at current demand level (average 3.6 GW) is 3.1TWh, or about 36-38 days of demand.
This would require land area of about 150 km2, a land area greater than Dublin.
This would cost more than a trillion dollars, for Ireland alone.
As for hydrogen, the mantra is that surplus renewable energy can be used to make it. Those who make this claim fail to consider the priority of demand energy storage would have over H2 production. After periods of low wind, priority would be given to recharging the Energy Storage system. In these periods, there would be zero surplus electricity for H2 production, possibly for many months. The availability of surplus electricity for H2 production would be very highly variable and unpredictable, leading to a very low utilisation factor which would virtually certainly render the predicted H2 cost/kg unattainable.
UK electricity annual demand (319TWh per Ourworldindata) is about 10 times Irish demand. Similar climate, so simply factoring the Irish estimate to the UK (without considering necessary adjustments which would likely increase the estimate) gives a ballpark figure of 32 -33 TWh storage which would require over 1,600 km2 of land (approximately equal to the land areas of Greater London or Hertfordshire) and cost $10 Trillion or more.
A comparable level of storage in the US would require about 450TWh of storage and 22,500 kms or 8,700 sq. miles (this is approximately equal to the land area of the State of New Jersey) and would cost(if it were even remotely feasible) $146 trillion.
These fantastical numbers are estimates based on current demand. Coerced conversion of homes to electric heating and the adoption of EV will increase demand with commensurate increases in energy storage land area requirements and costs.
The Royal Society briefing referred to in the post concluded for the UK
“some tens of TWhs of very long duration storage will be needed…….1000 times more than is currently provided by pumped hydro, and far more than can be provided cost effectively by batteries”
The only role they saw for batteries was “short term grid balancing services”
Yup!!!
When the scale of energy storage required to enable zero carbon is accurately quantified, it is blindingly obvious that there is no known technology that can economically provide it.
Since the is no technological fix, we will need to wait for the druids if the Green Party to conjure up some magical solution.
“”any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.…””
Like fear
“”Children at ‘existential risk’ from climate crisis, UK’s top paediatrician says
Dr Camilla Kingdon, the president of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH), said every adolescent was at grave risk from the physical and mental effects of the climate crisis. Healthcare professionals were already seeing its impact first-hand””
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/oct/21/children-at-existential-risk-from-climate-crisis-uks-top-paediatrician-says
The good doctor needs help.
In your second paragraph there is a fourth reason Francis. At first they swallowed the CAGW scam. Now they realise that it is indeed a scam but they are afraid to say so because they think that they will look stupid for swallowing it in the first place.
They don’t just look stupid , they are stupid.
“The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions…”
If it’s abundant and affordable it shouldn’t need any acceleration – costing several billion dollars.
On using hydrogen to power trains:
Over the past few years, train builders across the world have been falling over each other to offer self-powered alternatives to diesel traction.
Hydrogen fuel cells are hugely hyped but have yet to prove themselves in the real world beyond a few limited trials or small fleets on the European mainland. Fuel cells have a shorter lifetime than batteries and their overall efficiency of a hydrogen train is much less – recent figures from Stadler show that just 25% of the energy reaches the wheels for a hydrogen train, compared with 80% for conventional electric traction or around 68% for a battery-electric train.
RAIL magazine
https://www.railmagazine.com/news/network/2023/08/23/a-fast-charge-to-dmus-demise
A study by Network Rail, which runs the rail network in England, Scotland and Wales, a
couple of years back concluded that achieving rail traction decarbonisation would require electrification of 13,000kms of currently unelectrified track.
It also found that hydrogen powered trains would only be usable on 1300 kms of track and were not suitable for long range or freight services. Battery powered trains were only suitable on 800 kms of track.
They put the plan to the UK Treasury which said at a cost of £30bn it was too expensive
I wonder what the US with its less than 1% electrified track will go for.
So, have they solved the hydrogen embrittlement problem yet?
It looks to me like they are putting the cart before the horse.
Though well thought out and noteworthy, I would say that Menton’s proposal is far too costly and ambitious. I would suggest a much less extensive proposal. How about a demonstration project making a single house net zero. I would choose a randomly selected for sale house in metropolitan Jefferson City MO. This city was chosen because it is very near the population center of the US. All of the green energy production and storage would be required to be located on the property of the house. Any that was not located on-property would be required to be on purchased for-sale land, and transmission lines from the purchased property would be required to be permitted and newly installed for any energy that is sent to the house. Hydrogen transportation would require a permitted underground pipeline.
The house must be electrically heated or converted to electric heat. It would contain a 2-car family with only EVs, and the family could use only these EVs for vacations within the US. Only electrically powered equipment would be allowed on the property. A study would be done to determine the average annual electrical outages in the Jefferson City area, and any outage longer than this value in the demonstration house would mean total project failure. No further government spending would be allowed on Green Energy, until this outage would be demonstrated to be cured.
Much too small to be a useful demonstration project. It doesn’t cover nearly enough ground to allow scaling of its conclusions. Here is a more ambitious proposal which is large enough to deliver useful information but which is also containable in its adverse consequences if it fails.
Tom there’s no reason to pile on uneconomic constraints lacking economies of scale to force the demonstration to fail.
You could install a taxpayer-funded hydrogen distribution system and amortize the total cost by the number of users and the useful lifetime, providing the lowest-end per-customer cost. You can build massive underground caverns co-located with a windmill farm, electrolyzers, and gas turbines for backup generation, minimizing distribution costs.
After doing all that, it will still be ridiculously expensive and most likely still be unable to keep the lights on. You’d most likely also discover that the useful lifetime is significantly shorter than planned and that tripling the number of bird shredders leads to diminishing returns with many windmills having to be installed in poor wind sites.
Trillions to solve a problem that isn’t a problem in the first place
Francis Menton wants to see a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all the key elements — generation mainly from solar and wind, plus sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.
David Middleton writes a WUWT article about how copper has become the new oil. In response to David’s article, WUWT readers MyUsername and Joseph Zorzin link to this promotional article about Caterpillar’s new battery-powered mining truck:
Caterpillar Successfully Demonstrates First Battery Electric Large Mining Truck and Invests in Sustainable Proving Ground
Caterpillar’s promotional article contains this write-up:
The Caterpillar test site is located directly adjacent to the Sierrita Mine, a large open pit copper mine which is owned and operated by Freeport-McMoRan. Two other large copper mines are located in the same general area as the Sierrita Mine. All three of these mines are surrounded by the empty desert south of Tucson.
Large mining operations like ones south of Tucson consume a lot of electricity and diesel fuel for surface mining digging and for onsite mineral processing. The large mining trucks of the kind Caterpillar wants to electrify are the primary consumers of the diesel fuel used at any large mining operation.
Here is a proposal:
The now empty desert surrounding these three copper mines can become the host for a series of large solar farms, wind farms, and battery backup facilities which can supply 100% renewable electricity 24/7/365 for the three mines, while eliminating possibly 95% of their current fossil fuel consumption. Only a few pieces of smaller diesel powered mobile equipment such as road graders, front end loaders, and bulldozers would remain.
Presto, we now have a demonstration project of the kind Francis Menton advocates. This RE experiment has the benefit that it fully exercises renewable technologies while doing so on an industrial scale; the costs of the experiment are both discrete and measurable from a cost accounting perspective; and the experiment is bounded in a way which minimizes its adverse consequences should it fail.
How can this proposal be made to happen?
A carrot and stick approach might be applied in which the federal government agrees to subsidize the experiment while at the same time making an offer the mining companies can’t refuse — these companies either accept the government’s generous offer of subsidies or else they see all their environmental permits revoked.
How is this experiment relatable to the general world?
Mr. “How is this experiment relatable to the general world?”
Large surface mines and their associated mineral processing operations like the three copper mines south of Tucson use a lot of energy in the form of both electricity and fossil fuel. In addition, their onsite mineral processing facilities need a reliable supply of electricity 24/7/365.
The three copper mines share those characteristics with the city of Tucson to the north. If the combination of wind and solar backed by batteries worked out for the three copper mines, then at some point the RE farms would be expanded to partialy cover the energy needs of the greater Tucson area to the north.
Another point to make here is that the large digging shovels used by these three mines are already powered by electricity. Suppose the battery-powered Caterpillar haul truck proves to be successful with the result that all digging operations in the mine can be largely electrified.
In that case, the argument could then be made that the three copper mines be hooked up to a centrally located nuclear SMR source for their electricity and all of the output from RE farms then be redirected into the portion of the grid serving Tucson.
.
Beta blocker,
My employer company found and saw production from a dozen new Australian mines in the 1960-2000 era.
One of our biggest time consuming problems was fighting against impositions that hindered the most efficient means of production. Mining runs best when the miners have full control and choice of activities.
In one case, we had no choice but to surrender numerous licences and leases, fully legally granted, because dome distant theorist agitators imagined this land of prime mineral potential would be better as a world heritage area with mining banned. That type of regulatory interference is in the same category as being forced to minimise fossil fuel use with unproven alternatives being much more expensive and unreliable. Such matters kill efficient mining, sometimes for reasons as fickle as ideology or Dreamtime thinking.
The world is in real trouble from power given to people unqualified to exert it. Geoff S
Geoff, the vast majority of the people now in political power in the industrialized west are unqualified to exert it. And from every perspective, not just from the scientific/technical perspective.
However, that said, in the west’s political chaos may lie profitable opportunity for those savvy enough to pursue it.
Mining companies in the 21st century are nearly always operating at the margins of profitability and are therefore conservative in how they spend their money.
My proposal for RE electrification of the mines would not be seriously considered unless a thorough engineering feasibility analysis had been performed which examined every detail as to how the project was to be accomplished, and to determine just how cost efficiently the RE systems could be operated once they went live.
More likely than not, the engineering study would reveal that a proposal for full RE electification of the three copper mines would require direct and substantial government subsidies if the participation of the mining companies was to be gained.
Suppose that the study of the RE electrification approach be balanced by yet another study focusing on placing a nuclear SMR facility in a central location near the three mines.
An honest look at the costs and the operational issues of an RE electrification solution versus an SMR electrification solution would probably reveal that a single centralized nuclear SMR would serve the electrification needs of these three copper mines at less cost than would a wind & solar RE solution.
The only way to know for sure is to perform these engineering studies and then take an honest unbiased look at the results.
BHP and Fortescue are both strong supporters of decarbonisation. Either or both of these companies may see such an approach as a good opportunity for some of their remote operations.
Fortescue is quite a supporter of green hydrogen, so it could be interesting to see this in operation at a moderate scale.
My post argued that we should demand a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all the key elements — generation mainly from solar and wind, plus sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of the evil fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.
Including 100% battery transport in little Utopia-
Disaster for EV drivers as their cars risk becoming ‘uninsurable’ | The Sun
It was about 70 years from when the Bolshevik Revolution set up the Soviet Union to its complete collapse
Imagine the suffering that could have been avoided if somehow the Bolsheviks had been required to set up a demonstration project of their planned government for say 20 years.
The whole world would have gone in a different direction. Just a thought experiment.
Yet here we go again. Europe and the Anglophone countries are committing eco-suicide while the rest of the world looks on either horrified or laughing.
Doomberg is a fantastic site.
Great analysis’ on a variety of subjects
Worth every penny