Kevin Kilty
Last week an editorial in our small town newspaper was brought to my attention. It was entitled “Energy opportunities ignored, rate payer will pay more” and is most likely behind a paywall. It was, simply put, an awful editorial. It promoted all manner of unsupportable notions about energy generation and delivery. Just to give you a flavor of the editorial, I will quote one short section.
“Most cities could get a majority of their power from solar and battery storage at a price similar to new gas plants. The costs of solar and batteries are coming down fast.”
No data backs up any of these or similar claims. I mentioned in response that the authors missed that our utility bills have risen 46% in two years already, much of which is rising gas usage and cost related to balancing wind/solar, and also to market purchases of power.
The piece focusses most of its energy, though, attacking the most recent Integrated Resource Plan (IRP) of our local utility for backtracking on promises made years ago to abandon fossil fuels. It urges people to write to our Public Service Commission (PSC) and ask it to emphasize ratepayer cost and public health in its decisions about energy generation. Somehow this will help them abandon fossil fuels or force the utility to do so.
This opinion piece is unremarkably similar to an uncountable number of opinions expressed in the media each day. But my attention was not drawn to the piece itself, but to the writers’ affiliations. Both are members of the Citizen’s Climate Lobby and one additionally to an entity named republicEN.org, which one of the writers of the opinion piece suggests is a “community of conservatives dedicated to free enterprise actions on climate change.”
Free enterprise I am generally all in favor of. However, what has conservative or progressive, or any other political orientation, have to do with energy generation and delivery? As Margaret Thatcher said long ago, “the facts of life are conservative”, and the fact of life that most supports this statement is the very nature of energy. It is determined not at all by human affairs.
Thus, I was drawn into a closer examination of both Citizen’s Climate Lobby and republicEN.
Citizen’s Climate Lobby
This group’s website advertises two main initiatives: 1) Permitting reform, and 2) Nonpartisan Climate Advocacy.
Permitting reform is the idea that besides receiving hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer subsidies, clean energy (wind, solar, batteries) really could use the permitting rails greased for them as well. We can’t do enough for clean energy.
Nonpartisan Climate Advocacy looks like vanilla flavored lobbying – better to label it advocacy of course. The “nonpartisan” label here is false as a person can see by the advisory board members. A few of these, like Dr. Silvia Earle, are minor environmental celebrities. I recall her being a spokesperson for Rolex, but she has founded or is connected to many other environmental advocacy groups as well. Dr. Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize winner. Michael Gerrard is a Director of Climate Change Law and Chair of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Climate Change Law, of course, provides advisory support for climate litigation and the writing of climate related regulation.
Follow the path to the Earth Institute and what one finds is a long list of members who are, themselves, directors of other institutes, including NASA Goddard. What one learns quickly is how higher education can spend billions of dollars not educating anyone, but providing good paying jobs.
It is a very large web of connections. Pretty powerful ones.
RepublicEN
This group’s webpages devote a lot of space to promoting their “right wing” advocacy – thus the play on the word “Republican” in the group’s URL. Anonymous testimonials speak of the members being Christian or Right-wing, but deeply concerned about climate change, and not science deniers, by the way. One might interpret the pitch crudely as “please join us in advancing progressive goals on climate change, and we will put you in an environment where we promise not to mock or harass you for your other beliefs.”
It turns out that republicEN is not an isolated group or a grass roots organization. It is a project of the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University (CCCC). Following the path to this group reveals another of their initiatives is something called Climate Matters. A headline project here is helping TV weathercasters and journalists report local climate change stories. Apparently surveys done by CCCC have…
“revealed that TV weathercasters are highly trusted sources of information about global warming. They also have unparalleled access to the public, and superior science communication skills.”
Your local weather personality is the Marcus Welby of climate change.
Following a link on this Climate Matters page, takes a person further into one of CCCCs other partners, Climate Central. Here stories are produced for dissemination to local news organizations. There are only two things of particular note.
First, they promise
“…We defer to our partners on most final editorial decisions, but insist upon scientific accuracy and context. If we can’t reach agreement on the science in a story, we agree in advance that we will halt the project.”
If the opinion piece that started this effort is any indication, then accuracy falls short of this stated goal. The opinion piece was full of the usual flapdoodle about clean energy, prices, energy rates, and fossil fuels being horribly out of date as energy sources. OK; the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) says otherwise, though.
Second, in terms of identifying for the public the origin of these stories they say…
“We share bylines with print partners and ask broadcast partners to mention our partnership in their coverage.”
This surely undermines trust between a media resource (print or TV) and its consuming public who have been conditioned to believe that news sources are independent. The general population are rapidly learning not to trust anything coming from the media. Climate Central’s effort in this case is probably hurrying this erosion along.
Conclusion
Two organizations, one espousing its nonpartisanship, and the other promoting itself a “right-wing” or Republican, are revealed as increasingly progressive leftist as one peels away layers of other affiliations and partnerships. We may be the world’s most viewed site about climate change, but we aren’t nearly so organized.
The bigger lesson learned, though? Nullius in Verba.
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Good points, Kevin.
From that editorial you linked, which was not paywalled, I find this paragraph of pure wishful thinking:
“Other technologies include: inexpensive long-duration batteries; high voltage direct current transmission lines; new geothermal technologies; photovoltaics with improving efficiencies and declining costs; vehicle batteries integrated with the grid; rewiring of existing transmissions lines with improved conductors; repowering thermal power plants with hot-rock storage and renewable hydrogen, increased transmission line capacity through improved sensors, modeling, and line monitoring; back-to-back converters and High-Voltage Direct Current lines to eliminate the seam between Eastern and Western Interconnections; and load management in residential and commercial buildings and in industrial plants.”
All fluff. No substance. This sort of laundry-list-persuasion fails to convince this old-school engineer that the authors have the slightest clue about setting a design basis and choosing among proven design options to meet the requirements at favorable cost.
I am glad it was not paywalled after all, but I was so sick of reading the piece in paper copy that I couldn’t stand to check the digital version. I would be willing to bet that if I asked to write an opinion piece in response, I’d get…no response.
“Inexpensive long-duration batteries” — a euphemism for big pile of Powder River Basin coal.
Kevin, very good work for uncovering this climate fraud.This is almost as bad as Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute trying to infiltrate Heartland Institute under a false identification back in 2012. If the science is so sound and indisputable, why do the Warmistas have to employ so much outright lying, deception and misrepresention of the facts, and who they really are?
As long as batteries are electro chemical, they will not be both inexpensive and long-duration. Can’t have both.
Good comment. As for the ‘inexpensive’ claims — we had a 105 mile high voltage DC transmission line built in our area recently. Cost $500 million, nearly $5 million per mile. It connects to a group of wind farms in a neighboring state so actual power transmission will be weather dependent. Of course us rate payers will be paying off this cost (plus guaranteed utility profit) through our electric bills for decades. And we still get 75% + of our juice from fossil fuel plants and < 7% from wind.
Batteries are a mature technology. The idea that there are big improvements to be had, is just wishful thinking.
Already exist, no potential improvement there.
Another mature technology.
More mature technologies. The available efficiencies are limited by the physics of the available atoms. Unless someone invents some new stable atoms, no improvement to be had here.
Not going to happen unless mandated by law. Who wants the extra wear and tear on batteries that already don’t last long enough. Plus risking not having enough power to get to work in the morning.
What improved conductors? Room temperature super conductors are still pipe dreams.
The rest of the list are either already in existence and not deployed for cost and practicality reasons, or already installed.
You’re going to get cost savings as production scale ramps. Better fixed cost coverage. How much? No real idea as I don’t know what proportion of costs is materials and variable and what is fixed. My guess is it’s heavy on materials yet automated equipment will offset to a degree with better fixed cost coverage.
Battery costs will add considerably to grid stability costs if you choose to shut down current grid stabilizing equipment (coal, NG). This is always missed in their calculations. US gets < 4% of its BTUs from the grid from intermittent sources. And this drops considerably in northern states during winter. If these replace traditional source’s batteries will have to be added. The economics don’t work with this added.
Good friend was COO of a central Ohio power company (now retired). He scoffs at the idea that wind and solar are cheaper sources. He’s seen the math.
Electro chemical cells (aka batteries) do not like the cold, so have to include power and cost for the heaters.
They don’t like heat either, so you also have to include power and cost for cooling.
They like heat, but only to a certain point. Military applications require 125C. We got an exception for 90C. Turns out the voltage is a bit higher, the amperage is a bit higher. Likewise the self-discharge is a bit higher (bad news) and there is a tad more AHr capacity. Please note this was a lithium primary cell.
Each chemistry is unique. Silver oxide cells, for example, output 20% nominal voltage at 0C.
I cannot discuss lithium secondary cells as that is current work.
The real point is, as Harold Hill said, “but you gotta know the territory.”
In some environments you will need heaters. In others coolers. Some places neither and others both.
Battery production is already large scale. There is very little “economies of scale” that haven’t already been captured. Ditto for things like solar panels.
Probably but I’d need to see the numbers before I put this to rest in my head. I’m an accountant; numbers guy. It’s a curse I live with.
How many laptops are out there? How many produced in a year? Each requires a Lithium secondary (ala Li-Ion) battery.
Answer is millions per year.
Answer: the technology is scalable and has been scaled.
He’s seen the real math.
One economy of scale that isn’t going to happen is wind itself. The best locations get built first, so there’s a declining return as more get built.
Your good friend is correct.
An excellent deep dive.
Still, no surprises.
It is as we all knew, just added more details.
It does take time to dig through these web pages to figure out who is doing what.
Believe me, I know.
Groups on a mission that has a misleading title are not unknown in the dishonest topic dishonestly labelled “Climate Change” and promoting dishonest labels like “renewables” being dishonestly “cheaper than fossil fuels”.
In Australia, we have the label “Australian Academy of Science” for an activist, green, left-leaning bunch of scientists with impressive paper credentials who have captured ownership of a once-neutral, fine Academy for the purpose of spreading dishonest propaganda while enjoying handsome incomes in comfortable premises.
Geoff S
Yes, false-flag and trojan horses appear all the time because they often work.
Trojan Rinos
There are exactly 2 things about renewables that are cheaper than FF. The cost of their energy source (free fuel) and the quality of their materials and manufacturing.
Other than that, they are very costly as conventional Gas/Coal generation lasts 3-4 times longer and Nuclear lasts up to 6 times longer.
Plus neither Gas/Coal nor Nuclear are affected by inclement weather or time of day in a 24 hour period. And all FF generation is available 24/7/365 without the need for expensive renewable back-up.
I remain unconvinced that SV and/or WTG are cheaper that coal and/or hydrocarbons in terms of the quality of the materials and manufacturing.
They’re far more expensive.
The average operational lifespan of a wind turbine is typically 20 to 30 years
The average lifespan for a coal power generation plant is about 40 to 50 years easily twice wind and likely three times that wind assets would need complete rebuild over the lifespan of coal generation, including concrete footings.
And wind only works in the goldilocks zone 9-55mph winds. Below 9mph and inertia cannot be overcome to spin the turbine, above 55mph and automatic breaking kicks in to protect the bearings. So on a very windy night or a still winter night generation vanishes.
And its even worse for solar
Solar can only last until the next high wind event or large hailstorm. Many panels degrade in 10-15 years and some have been known to cause rooftop fires.
At that rate Solar would be replaced a minimum of 4 times at ever increasing costs from inflation. Possibly more with annual passing hurricanes.
Solar also only produces power at anywhere near nameplate 22%of the time (just over 4 hours a day) and produces nothing at peak demand time.
Solar is also affected by Latitude and seasons because of an inherent lower angle of incidence.
Solar PV and Wind are nowhere near cheaper than Coal and definitely not Solar or Nuclear (which has a 98% capacity factor and a potential lifespan of 80 years).
Should have read
Solar PV and Wind are nowhere near cheaper than Coal and definitely not
SolarGas or Nuclear (which has a 98% capacity factor and a potential lifespan of 80 years).I agree. I was specifically responding to:
“There are exactly 2 things about renewables that are cheaper than FF. The cost of their energy source (free fuel) and the quality of their materials and manufacturing.”
I missed the play on words. 🙂
From the article:”Your local weather personality is the Marcus Welby of climate change.”
Years ago the head of the Weather Channel said any weather man/metrologist that doesn’t agree with CO2 causes climate change should have their credentials revoked.
Saving others the Googling: “Marcus Welby, M.D. is an American medical drama television series that aired on ABC from September 23, 1969, to May 4, 1976. It starred Robert Young as the title character, a family practitioner with a kind bedside manner, who made house calls and was on a first-name basis with many of his patients.”
I think the analogy means my local weather personality is “a friendly face for climate catastrophe advocacy groups” and also “the author is well over 50”.
“Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to DECEIVE”.
Is so apt for the climate cult.
Also Google AI.
“Free enterprise actions on climate change” is DOING NOTHING.
Since humans have no measurable impact on the Earth’s “climate” and any “actions” regarding what is natural and not under human control are futile.
Most of the “climate” is water, ice, snow, rocks and sand. Activities of humans are not going to effect the climate of the vast Pacific ocean or the Rocky Mountains.
“Sooty electricity, for example, would lose out to solar, wind, hydro and nuclear power”
President Trump wants to massively expand coal. Just because coal is used for electricity generation does not mean it is “sooty electricity.” With the latest technology it is possible to both have clean and cheap energy generated by coal and that is assuming that CO2 is not a pollutant but a beneficial gas. As long as Carbon is an essential component of all living things, both animal and plant, it is ludicrous to speak of getting rid of Carbon. CO2 is not only plant food but is also essential in nature to animals and humans and their respiratory system. If CO2 was a pollutant, why would we need it in our respiratory system? Of course climate alarmists do not want to discuss these matters because for them CO2 is evil.
CO2 isn’t necessary in our respiratory system but rather created there. We breath in air at 420ppm CO2 but breathe out between 40,000ppm and 70,000ppm. Though it is needed in the respiratory systems of all plants.
It is both. It also helps regulate blood pH and a few other metabolic processes.
Good to know, thanks for the further education.
Good to know, thanks for the further education.
There’s only one way to make that work.
The city in question would need sufficient solar to generate 150% of what it needs in a given day due simply to inherent losses in storage and conversion DC/AC.
The city would need a back-up battery the size of a 30-50 story building to supply GWh worth at night
The city would need sufficient Solar to provide ALL demand from 10 am until 2 pm plus the dedicated overcapacity to replenish the battery building also from 10 am until 2 pm. It will take one hellofalotta panels to gather and store those night time GWh in 4 hours a day.
For example NY,NY uses (per Google AI) between 120GWh and 150GWh daily with an average of around 139GWh. Allowing for losses in conversion and storage you would need 180GWh-225GWh of generation/storage capacity to provide night time usage including peak demand.
Then you better hope that the bottom level batteries don’t Flambé or the entire building is toast.
Not to mention the entire.array won’t last 20years without needing replacement at ever increasing costs.
It’s a fools errand to make oneself dependent upon solar/battery from simple longevity to potential self immolation
ANT there’s absolutely NO GUARANTEE you will have sufficient sun EVERY DAY 365 in fact you’re far more likely to need a full weeks battery backup available especially in winter with a lower solar angle in the sky
Then there’s that nagging miniscule factoid that those figures are only for current usage and demand peak. Now let’s add more (Solar AND Battery) to cover Transportation, Heating/Cooling, Cooking, … Total electrification of all sectors.
Funny how the only place where solar and battery prices are going down, are those areas where the subsidies are going up.
“A few of these, like Dr. Silvia Earle, are minor environmental celebrities. I recall her being a spokesperson for Rolex, but she has founded or is connected to many other environmental advocacy groups as well.”
I had not heard of Rolex, but us marine biologists need to have a considerable background in the physics, geology and chemistry of the ocean which could be tempting. A few may give the rest of us a bad name with their advocacy. She was at least a tiny part of the anti-commercial fisheries activist crowd that have been ignoring natural background effects like severe freezes.This makes determining the real human effects difficult.
An interesting aside is an August, 1994 letter appearing in my trash file that I got from the Princeton Educational Testing Service to help “set a standard” for their examination “entitled Environment and Humanity: The Race to Save the Planet. ” Their example questions were lousy as were their examples of biased references.I ignored their “Participation Form.” Save us from those who want to save us?
“ actions on climate change.””
As soon as you see those words, you KNOW it is totally bogus. !!
There is nothing humans can do to affect the naturally changing climate.
Very nice. I am never surprised to learn that the promoters of CAGW are less than honest. If they were forced to be honest they would have nothing to say.
Another fake ‘conservative’ organization on climate is R Street. Carbon taxers and the rest of it.