It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.
So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.
From euronews.green we have a piece from November 12 with the headline “Powered by wind and water: The Canary Island proving it is possible to run on renewables.” The byline is Lauren Crosby Mendicott. Ms. Mendicott announces the exciting news that one of Spain’s Canary Islands, El Hierro, has recently reported that it ran its electricity system entirely on wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. Excerpt:
The smallest of the Canary Islands has achieved a record of only using wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. . . . [T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources. Its 10,000 inhabitants and local government are equally committed to the sustainability of the island.
Wow, that’s great! But OK Lauren, tell us more. If the system ran on just wind and water power for 28 days, what happened on days 29, 30, 31 and thereafter? Can we expect that with just a few tweaks the system can get to running 365 days a year on its wind/water system without fossil fuel backup? Or is it in fact nowhere close to that goal? Unfortunately you will not find any information on those subjects in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
As readers here know, I have been somewhat focused on the El Hierro project for several years, because it is the closest thing in the world to an attempt to build a demonstration project to show that wind power combined with energy storage can create a fully-functioning electricity grid without fossil fuel backup. I have had numerous pieces over the years dealing with the results of the El Hierro project, most recently this one on September 30, 2023. My conclusion from the data available at that time:
The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year.
The El Hierro system has wind turbines and energy storage from a pumped hydro system with nameplate capacity seemingly well in excess of peak electricity usage on the island. So theoretically they should have no problem getting all of their electricity from the wind/storage system — right? And yet, when you look at their annual data, somehow they only seem to average about 50% of annual electricity from the wind/storage system. Sometimes it gets to 70% or so for a few months, but then at other times it drops back to as little as around 30%. When I visited the Gorona del Viento website back in September, I found data for what it claimed as hours of operation on “100% renewable” generation for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — and nothing thereafter. For some reason, they had stopped reporting these data after 2020. The numbers were 2300 hours in 2018, 1905 in 2019, and 1293 in 2020 — a rather precipitous ongoing decline. Given that there are 8760 hours in a non-leap year (24 x 365 — likely beyond Ms. Mendicott’s math skills) these numbers represent shockingly small percentages of the annual operation of the system, declining from 26.3% in 2018 to only 14.7% in 2020 (a leap year with 8784 hours).
Going back to the Gorona del Viento web site today, I find the same figure of 1293 hours of “100% renewable” generation for 2020, and no subsequent data. Maybe those data are lurking somewhere in the Spanish-language portions of the site where I can’t find them. But somehow I think that if they had some great news to report on that subject, it would be front and center.
El Hierro is blessed with a rare near-perfect site for a pumped-storage hydro facility, with a volcano rising nearly straight up from the sea and a big crater on the top to store the water. Here is a picture of the shoreline, with the mountain rising nearly perpendicular out of the water:
And yet, despite having such a rare near-perfect site for a large pumped hydro storage facility, the El Hierro system does not have nearly the energy storage needed to provide full-time electricity from the wind/storage system. It would need to multiply its storage capacity by at least an order of magnitude to come close to 100% electricity from this system. Meanwhile, most of its electricity comes from a backup diesel generator — a fact nowhere mentioned in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
So, is the piece mere incompetence, or intentional fraud? Several factors would seem to give strong support to the inference of intentional fraud — failure to mention the diesel backup at all; failure to mention the number of hours in each recent year where the diesel backup had to be called into activity to keep the lights on, and whether that number of hours was trending up or down; failure even to consider how much energy storage would be needed to enable the system to operate full time without the diesel backup, and whether there are any plans to provide that amount of storage or at what cost. Is it possible that someone could write a piece on this subject without even being aware of these issues? You be the judge!
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
It’s always been fraud from 1992 onward …people that achieve degrees in science cannot be ignorant enough to believe what they claim , although they do seem to be dumb enough to believe they can get away with pseudoscience.
“Incompetence or fraud?”
Several decades ago I came to what seemed a true realization: hypocrisy is a temporary condition.
I still believe it to be true. By and large, the human mind is extremely reluctant to continuously communicate lies. There are exceptions, of course, but generally speaking we have an innate aversion to knowingly be wrong all the time, even when everyone around you believes we’re being right.
And so through some largely unconscious process (undoubtedly involving rationalization, information cherry-picking and the like), the mind begins to convince itself that what it is communicating is, in fact, true. When we know something to be true — really, truly know it to be true — then we know that anything which appears to contradict it must be false. And there is no reason not to play around with this falseness in order to make it conform to what we know to be really true.
Think of the cop who absolutely believes a certain thug is a drug dealer, but the raid on his house doesn’t turn up any evidence. Since the cop knows the thug is guilty, there is no harm in planting the bag of coke he conveniently brought along just in case of such a situation.
Incompetence or fraud? Yes. And neither.
But as noted already, there are exceptions. Those who have no mental problem with continuous lying, providing it serves their purpose. These people make excellent leaders.
Is that a form of cognitive dissonance?
BTW many of the Prosecutors and Judges in the current lawfare against former President Trump have naively openly expressed those very thoughts – “he’s guilty so he deserves whatever we can do to stop him”. Judicial circular reasoning.
There are also a great many group think individuals who subscribe to that rational.
These people have exceptional ability to get into positions of leadership. That is quite different from being even remotely “excellent’.
They are “excellent” for the purposes of whatever the agenda might be. It’s often been commented (at least by Heinlein, I believe) that the leaders of any religion are best when they don’t really believe in it, but can use its tenets for their own purposes. That way they can keep their eye on the true goal – control. The same is true for any secular “religion” from climate change activists to hardboiled Trump advocates.
Why should anyone imagine that incompetence and malice are mutually exclusive? Or that either dispenses with consideration of any or all of the other seven deadly sins?
Consider the behavior of politicians: incompetence or corruption or a combination of the two?
Cognitive dissonance.
Obviously this is deliberate deceit by purposeful omission.
This example is a very good microcosm for the entirety of AGW reporting. Among other nefarious methods for pitching the AGW message.
The width, depth and frequency of this public deception journalism is seemingly limitless.
In the USA it is distinguishing issue between Democrats, the champions of this deceit, and Republicans who do not.
On issue after issue there are equally stark distinctions.
There is not nearly enough mention of who it is perpetrating this intentional fraud.
Long exposure has revealed that consensus climatologists are incompetent. They lack the training to judge the physical reliability of their own data and models.
They are sincere in their AGW belief, because they don’t know that they don’t know. But they’re hostile toward finding out that they don’t know.
That attitude is a special form of incompetence — one directly analogous to the intransigence of a religious or political demagogue. It cements their position as not-scientists.
The whole AGW thingy can be summarized as the incompetent leading the opportunistic.
To diagnose Ms. Mendicott as a fraud requires that we know both her state of knowledge and her conscious internal intent. One difficult, the other impossible.
What we can say is that her essay is grotesquely misleading. And it is evidence that Ms. Mendicott, too, is incompetent.
She either did not do her research or she chose to suppress the truth. The first is incompetence in fact and the other incompetence by want of professional ethics.
Climate science appears to be populated by one semester statistics people and no training in making measurements that withstand legal and real physical science scrutiny.
What evidence for this conclusion? Read this site https://www.degreedays.net/calculation to see what HVAC folks are begining to use from ASOS stations. Integrating hourly, minute, or even second data to get accurate overall daily temperature distributions. Climate science has never even started to mention anywhere about moving to more accurate portrayals of temperature. That’s not science, it is cultish behavior of not questioning traditional, inaccurate Tavg determination.
We are fast approaching 30 years of stations that have been giving at least 5 minute data. It is time for climate science to start using more accurate depictions of temperature. If HVAC engineers can do it surely climate science can also.
Climate scientists are relying on programmers who have no clue. I have been dealing with two on Twitter that have no compunction about using simple averaging and ignoring the variance of the random variables they create on the way to a “global average ΔT”. Measurement uncertainty is foreign to them and they see no reason to deal with it.
Mendicott, as a free-lance writer makes a living writing articles people pay her to write. She is just following the easy money. Her article would not sell if she wrote about the problems with renewables. She is not incompetent and is not a fraudster. She is a paid propogandist.
Read InsideEvs or other such green sites and they are filled with paid promotions for green tech. I read them for the entertainment value, not for technical analysis.
Well, this calls for an independent unbiased judge….Mikey Mann sez he is available ….for a small fee.
I don’t believe you. Mikey would require a very LARGE fee. 😉
El Hierro is not a poster-child for living in a energy transitioned world.
It is a tiny place with a population only about 3X that of some large residential buildings in the large cities of the world, or 2X the newest large cruise ship Icon of the Seas. Buildings are limited to two floors.
The temperatures are neither dangerously low nor high.
The energy section of the Wikipedia page has numbers through early 2018.
Wind and hydro.
Greens push to build more windmills but not more dams. Some even want to remove existing dams.
Yet they’re more than happy to add hydro power numbers to “Green energy output totals” to make “Green energy” appear to be approaching viability.
What portion of El Hierro “Green energy” is from wind alone?
All of it that isn’t from diesel. Pumped hydro creates no energy, it just redistributes energy in the time domain.
It’s not complicated, W&S has limited value. I always wonder if the W&S aficionados really don’t understand that. Are they pretending that they believe wind and solar are “cheaper than fossil fuels” and that because “the wind is always blowing somewhere and the sunshine always shining somewhere” that with a proper grid all electricity can be provided by W&S cheaper than with “fossil fuels”?
If they know better, then they are lying, if they actually believe it, they are simply “less than wise”. I have a difficult time convincing myself that people with a PhD don’t know any better. I have to conclude that they have a career or investment portfolio basis for their stated position. They must be liars.
There are a lot of believers out there that have no understanding of what they believe. They just find it easy and comfortable to believe the “consensus”. Why else are there “scientists” if they are not trying to extend knowledge and possibilities?
The problem with their system is it is undersized by about a factor of five. The upper reservoir is a tiny pond (8-10 acres). Wind power is five 2.3MW wind turbines. Why is the installation so undersized? Was the actual power production from the turbines was wildly overstated to give an appearance of viability and affordability? It must have been disappointing to build this installation and find out electricity on Tuesdays and Fridays was the best it can do.
Oddly enough, the number of turbines is not the issue – they are in an ideal spot, on a large hill, where the trade winds provide excellent wind speeds that could be the poster child for renewable energy. Problems occurred with the siting, sizes required and a host of other factors that undermined the validity of the site. Valverde is smack bang in the worst position for the hydro system, limiting the size of the reservoirs and pipe runs. It was initially thought that they would use the volcano crater as the upper reservoir but, with the limits imposed by the lower one it was realised they’d then have to dump 2/3rds of the fresh water into the sea. El Hierro, far from being a great example of renewables, is a case study in how not to build a renewable system and a definitive case of ‘if you want to get there, you can’t start from here’.
I have looked at a number of net zero plans and while I do not agree with them none is technically incompetent. They all admit that new technology is needed but we have 25 or more years to go so one cannot say the plan is impossible.
For example Tesla uses hydrogen for storage. Others use a lot of carbon capture to retain fossil fuel use. IEA uses a lot of nuclear. The Brits use a lot of biofuel plus hydrogen.
So they are neither incompetent nor fraudulent, just wildly optimistic.
Wildly optimistic being heralded as 100% successful must, surely, come very close to fraudulent? The header article appears to show El Hierro as a success, as being all-renewable powered for months at a time when, in reality, an engineers assessment seems to be that it cannot be run for more than a few hours at a time without the generators. The company building the site had an ideal site then reality kicked them in the behind, resulting in an unworkable system – despite being lauded by the author, Ms. Mendicott, as a hugely successful renewable system.
Perhaps I should’ve changed that to wildly (over) optimistic.
>> Incompetence or Intentional Fraud
Well, there are for sure honest people and good doers among the climate community and I would even grant a few of them a justified cause by any standard.
But it is the other ones, the bad apples, which are clearly visible and the fact that this particular community cannot deal with them, which of course puts any climate alarmist in a bad light, they stand together (which seems somewhat natural), so they fall together.
One of the most obvious persons is Mann and his hockey stick publication. It has various flaws and misleading statements, but also a very clear and obvious omission, which really needs no expert to detect (yet, with McShane and Wyner we have two experts putting this critique in peer review):
“””
[..]Consequently, the application of ad hoc methods to screen and exclude data increases model uncertainty in ways that are ummeasurable and uncorrectable.[..]
“””
Why is this paper not corrected or withdrawn, a very simple question.
(and no the answer cannot be that other articles support it in any ways, it MUST stand on its own)
This is fraud for personal gain, plain and simple!
I suggest that you have look at the Spanish part of the website. It is completely up to date. There are excel files full of data. They may contain the information that you think is missing. It is a bit early to pass judgement.
“Diogenes, also known as Diogenes the Cynic or Diogenes of Sinope, was a Greek philosopher and one of the founders of Cynicism. “
“Diogenes the Cynic, who went around the sunlit streets of Athens, lantern in hand, looking for an honest man. This same Diogenes, when he heard Plato being praised for defining man as “an animal, biped and featherless,” threw a plucked chicken into the Academy, saying, “Here is Platonic man!”“
“[T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island“.
I have greater respect for those who think its a simulation.
There is some maximum amount of energy that can be extracted from the wind on that island. Even if established science (not consensus science) is grossly wrong about the maximum possible conversion from wind energy to electrical energy, there is some maximum amount of wind energy that sweeps across the island, on average.
The only alternative to that is new technology that allows useful wind extraction from the occasional heavy storm or hurricane when current technology requires the wind turbines to be shut down for their own good, but then, since such storms are not all that common, there is still some maximum amount of wind energy that visits the island.
This means that even with an order of magnitude more storage capacity, or 6 orders of magnitude of storage capacity, there is a significant limitation to acquiring the energy to fill that storage so it is quite probable that no number of wind turbines and storage capacity could ever fulfill all the island’s energy needs. Maybe it is possible for human life to still exist under primitive conditions, in poverty, but quite unlikely in any great comfort.
This is aside from the significant amount of published evidence, on which I have yet to see a single factual refutation, of the detrimental effects of regularly occurring industrial infrasound, produced in abundance by the currently popular type of wind turbines, that is likely inducing a high incident of various aliments and shortened life spans among the captive residents.
The Green advocates are always trying to pull such stunts. They’ll take some town with a small or tiny population and claim that because it has made some environmentally-friendly gimmick work for a limited period of time, there should be no problem adopting it 24/7/365 for an urban area of 10 million. Except none of this has been done yet, so we should dismiss news of these marvelous breakthroughs without wasting time reading about them.
We have the same nonsense from King Island, off the coast of Tasmania. They have wind and solar, with batteries and a flywheel for storage. They also have diesel generators.
They claim –
You’re seeing in real time the dashboard for our King Island renewable energy solution. It is based on contributions from wind and solar and the enabling technologies that improve system security and reliability, such as battery, dynamic resister, flywheel and demand side management.
No mention of diesel in that blurb (perhaps it’s part of demand side management) but at midday today wind was providing 16%, solar 1% (don’t know why) and diesel 60% with some also coming in from the flywheel. The batteries were taking some power.
In the years I have been watching King Island I have never seen a day when diesel is not suppling a major portion of demand.
Heres the link.
https://www.hydro.com.au/clean-energy/hybrid-energy-solutions/success-stories/king-island
Fraud, by omission. They know, that if they give the ‘full picture’, their narrative won’t stand up to scrutiny. In some cases, it is relatively minor, but in this instance, it is significant, and deliberately intending to misleading the readers.
I think it is incompetence first, because the “science” of the climate change is demonstrated to lack the fundamentals in physics and chemistry; it was done below standards of investigations, way below what the USA government asks like the industry to prove the industrial studies on safety and purity of products: validations, certifications, etc.
100+%. Statistical novices.
It’s more subtle than that. It is deliberately cultivated ignorance so that one can claim, like the famed Tony B. Liar over te Iraq war ‘I believed that what I was doing was right’
So that’s all right then Tone, having simply accepted a dossier that was faked, at face value and by deliberately not questioning its veracity you took our nation to a war against the wrong enemy for all the wrong reasons with no plan as to how to ever finish it.
On the basis that deliberately cultivated ignorance is not a crime.
“It’s not a lie if you believe it’s true”
George Costanza
Climate advocacy is rooted in public opinion generated by propaganda mills in both in the scientific press and popular media. Strictly speaking, much of the political rhetoric we consume is borderline fraudulent because it intentionally hovers over many truth boundaries strategically to impact opinion. Truth has been become elusive and untouchable in our internet world.
125 years ago, journalists regardless of their religious or political stance would eviscerate stupid babble and shadowy lies shrouded in false logic. This is because our top journalist were true intellectuals of the highest order. How can great intellectuals exist in a thought world were the metaphysical doesn’t exist, truth is subjective and authority is rooted in the deepest pockets and the loudest lies.