Wednesday, January 03, 2024
Premature Coal Closures Pose a Serious Threat to Grid Stability
A recent article at Hot Air claims that climate-focused energy policies, including premature closures of coal power plants, threaten the reliability of the U.S. electrical grid. This is true. Multiple utility operators have issued warnings over recent months that shutting down reliable energy sources without suitable backups will result in rolling blackouts and grid instability.
The article, “Will the Sierra Club Apologize If the Lights Go Out in Baltimore?” written by Hot Air contributor Beege Welborn, describes the situation many states are facing, but especially the New England region, as green and net-zero emissions policies are taking their toll on electric power generation in the states. Welborn writes:
I’m no math major (although I play one here at HotAir), and even I can see – without a whiteboard presentation – that (the numbers of incoming people + conversions to all-electric household/businesses + some unreliable minimal generation renewable power sources) – shutting down functioning, reliable, megawatt fossil fuel plants ≠ enough power when you need it.
He lists several instances of utilities being forced to apologize for blackouts, including Duke Energy, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and PJM.
The Sierra Club, a large, well-funded environmental activist group, is apparently directly involved in some of these coal plant shutdowns. Welborn points out that a major Maryland coal plant even entered an agreement with Sierra Club to shut down in order to avoid lawsuits from the green group. That particular shutdown is forecast to potentially reduced the grid reliability for more than one million electricity customers, Welborn reports. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie warned that the shut down was “potentially catastrophic.”
Such warnings are being issued more and more often, and in more urgent language, as Climate Realism has reported in previous posts detailing the so-called energy transition, here and here.
In the first linked Climate Realism post, the same FERC Commissioner, Christie, described at a House Committee hearing the danger of a too-rapid shutdown of fossil fuel infrastructure, “we’re heading for potentially very dire consequences,” and that the reason is “a shortfall of power supply[.]”
The intermittent nature of wind and solar make them bad candidates for replacing fossil fuels, a fact confirmed by utility companies and grid operators like PJM Interconnection, which recently released a report explaining that you need multiple megawatts of wind or solar to replace just 1 MW of a fossil energy source, plus battery storage.
The catch is, the needed battery storage to replace all of the Northeastern United States’ electric power plants with renewables is physically and economically impossible. A recent study (Fekete, et al.) crunched the numbers and determined that three months of electricity storage are needed, at a minimum, to make a renewables-only grid work. Battery technology to hold several months of energy does not exist, but even it if did this project alone would cost trillions. To replicate it throughout the United States would likely cost four times more than the entire Gross National Product.
These facts don’t seem to bother activists, however, because additional coal plants are being shut down with regularity, with nothing reliable, and sometimes nothing at all, to replace them. Hot Air is correct to point out these problems with green policy and the looming threat to the electric power grid. Losing electricity regularly would not just be inconvenient, it would be dangerous, deadly, and citizens and utility customers have a right to know this fact.
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Climate facts restrain panic
Hannah Ritchie, 30, was born in Falkirk and studied environmental sciences at Edinburgh. She is now head of research at Our World in Data, whose mission, according to Ritchie, is “to present data that helps us understand the world’s largest problems and how to solve them – that’s everything from the environmental metrics that I tend to cover to poverty, health, democracy and war”. Ritchie, who lives in London, is also a senior researcher at Oxford University. Not the End of the World – described by Margaret Atwood as “an inspiring data-mine which gives us not only real guidance, but the most necessary ingredient of all: hope” – is her first book.
You write that “I used to be convinced that I didn’t have a future left to live for”. What changed?
I grew up with climate change. I don’t really remember a time when it wasn’t talked about, so I became obsessed with it – a big part of my life was worrying about it. Then I went to university and that was all I was studying. The environmental metrics were getting worse and worse. I was also assuming that extreme poverty and hunger must be getting worse. This fed into the notion that humans were incapable of solving problems. A key turning point was discovering the work of [Swedish physician and academic] Hans Rosling. He did these Ted Talks, mainly focusing on human metrics, where he would show how the world was changing, through data. And it turned out that most of the human wellbeing metrics that I’d assumed to be getting worse were actually getting better. Take child mortality: 200 years ago, almost half of children would die before reaching puberty, and that’s now less than 5%. Now, the world is still terrible, and we have a lot of progress to make. But the realisation I came to was that we have the opportunity to improve both of these things at the same time: we can continue human progress while addressing our environmental problems.
You write that doomsday messages are often no better than climate denial. Why?
It’s appropriate to say that climate change is a really serious problem that has a large impact. We need to get across a sense of urgency, because there is a lot at stake. But there’s often this message coming through that there’s nothing we can do about it: it’s too late, we’re doomed, so just enjoy life. That’s a very damaging message – because it’s not true, and there’s no way that it drives action. The other thing about doomsday predictions is that they’re a dream for climate deniers, who weaponise poor forecasts and say: “Look, you can’t trust the scientists, they’ve got this wrong before, why should we listen to them now?”
There are definitely flaws with capitalism. But we do not have time to dismantle it and build something else
Explain why you think we are in a “truly unique” position to build a sustainable world.
I break down sustainability into an equation of two halves. One half is environmental sustainability: we should have a lower impact so we don’t remove opportunities from future generations and other species. The other is caring about people who are alive today. You only really achieve sustainability if you’ve achieved both of these things. People have the notion that we’ve only become unsustainable very recently, when we discovered fossil fuels, and I don’t think that’s correct. Our ancestors in many ways had a lower environmental impact but they never really achieved the first half of the equation of providing high standards of living. Now we’ve tipped that the other way. We’ve achieved amazing human progress but at the cost of the environment. My proposition is that we can be the first generation that achieves both at the same time.
Capitalism has been a great accelerator of climate change and other environmental crises, but you don’t challenge it much in your book. Do you believe capitalism can right its wrongs? Or that it’s the best system to get us out of this mess?
I accept that there are definitely flaws with capitalism. What I would push back against is the notion that we can just dismantle capitalism and build something else. The core reason is time. We need to be acting on this problem urgently, on a large scale, in the next five to 10 years, and to me it does not seem feasible that we’re going to dismantle the system and build a new one in that time. I think capitalism does drive innovation, which is what we need to create affordable low-carbon technologies.
Would you describe yourself as a techno-optimist?
I would probably get put in that camp. I’d prefer to say I’m a techno-realist. But yes, I am optimistic about the power of technology to change the world, and in terms of our fight against climate change it’s the strongest lever that we have by far.
Are you concerned that growing chaos in global politics could thwart positive action and fuel yet more climate breakdown?
I think there are some risks of that on short timescales, where a political event slows things down or there’s a small rebound in fossil fuels for a year or two. With the Ukraine-Russia war, people were initially very concerned that Europe was going to burn lots more coal because they were putting restrictions on Russian gas. That was a very temporary effect. Coal use went up a small amount, but since then there’s been a significant decline in coal again, and also a decline in gas, so in some sense it actually pushed countries towards decarbonisation rather than away from it. So I’m sure there will be events that could set us back a little bit, but I think the overall trajectory is towards decarbonisation. And many of these events will fuel us to do more rather than less.
What did you make of Cop28 and the “landmark deal” to transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems by 2050?
I’m a bit meh. I don’t think it’s that historic to say: “OK, we’ve now decided that climate change is happening because of fossil fuels.” We knew this decades ago. What’s more important are some of the nearer-term targets that are in there, so tripling renewable capacity by 2030, or doubling energy efficiency by 2030. If you set targets for 2050, it’s easy for politicians to put it off until 2040, whereas if you have a quite ambitious target set for 2030, we need to act on this now.
How can you be sure that the stats you work with are trustworthy?
We are really strict on data quality issues in Our World in Data. We rely on international data providers that have a very high reputation. What’s important is that, if you then look at alternative data sources, they all tend to quite closely line up, so you can be pretty confident in the narrative and direction of travel. Also, we have a lot of eyes on our work and we have a very good feedback process, so if there were really large data flaws, they would be flagged.
How does your research affect your own lifestyle choices?
For me, it relieves a bit of the stress of trying to optimise absolutely everything. I still do the recycling and try not to be wasteful, but I don’t get really stressed about it. If I turn up at a supermarket and have to get a plastic bag, it’s not a big deal. In terms of the bigger lifestyle changes, I’m a vegan. I don’t have a car because I live in a city and I don’t need one. I rent a flat so I can’t install a heat pump and put a solar panel on it, but when I can afford a house I will optimise for these big decisions that reduce my carbon footprint.
You begin the book by talking about people of your generation being afraid to bring children into the world. Do you feel more optimistic about this now?
Yes. For me personally, I would like to have children and I don’t think that climate change would stop me from doing that. If anything, it would make me more determined to build a better future for them. There are a lot of people working on climate change who know the impacts and the trajectory we’re on, and they are still making the decision to have children. That’s a bit of a signal.
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China Plans to Dominate the New Era of Green Shipbuilding
China wants to extend its lead in global shipbuilding to a new generation of vessels that burn cleaner fuels.
The nation is targeting building more than half of global vessels powered by lower-carbon fuels including liquefied natural gas and green methanol by 2025, according to a joint statement released by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and four other departments.
The goal is in line with Beijing’s plans to future-proof its massive industrial complex by focusing on sectors that will gain prominence as the world tries to reduce emissions over the next few decades. China already dominates global production of solar panels, batteries and electric vehicles.
China’s shipyards built more than 50% of the world’s ships over the first 11 months of 2023. But shipbuilding is on the cusp of a massive transformation, with fleet owners beginning to replace oil-powered vessels with ones that burn cleaner fuels as they try to reach an International Maritime Organization pledge of zeroing out emissions around 2050.
Last year, orders for ships powered by slightly cleaner LNG jumped to near 40% of the total, from about 15% in 2019, according to BloombergNEF. Green methanol, a fuel with little to no lifetime emissions, has seen orders more than double this year, BNEF said in an August report.
In addition to the target for building such vessels, China also plans to speed up research and design of new types of ships powered by liquefied ammonia, hydrogen and even carbon dioxide. A unit of China State Shipbuilding Co. has secured more than $1 billion in contracts to build methanol container ships for A.P. Moller-Maersk A/S, local media reported earlier this month.
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Australia: Broken power system still fuelled by calls for subsidy
A plea by energy retailers for higher prices to compensate for the rising use of household rooftop solar is an inevitable and predictable confirmation of the dysfunction that now characterises Australia’s electricity system. It represents another chapter in a tale of cascading subsidies that have become necessary as a system rooted in baseload generation from coal is forcibly switched over to one dependent on variable sources of renewable energy such as wind and solar.
If retailers get their way, energy users who have been forced to subsidise renewable energy projects, including rooftop solar, will be asked to pay more for the projects that these renewables were designed to force out of the market in the first place. The new cost would be included as part of the regulated price that retailers are allowed to charge. The power retailers also are largely the owners of the coal-fired power stations that still supply most of the nation’s electricity but are being rendered unprofitable by design and forced to close.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has upped the ante on the subsidy regime with a turbocharged Capacity Investment Scheme that will underwrite the profitability of 32 gigawatts of new renewable projects, up from 6GW previously. Like rooftop solar, the overbuild of large-scale renewables is needed to meet Labor’s target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 43 per cent from 2005 levels by 2030. This target also is being revised upwards.
A large amount of wind and solar is required to deal with the fact individual projects will produce for only some of the time. But when they are all working together it is likely there will be a glut, as is the case with rooftop solar on sunny days when there is low demand. Wholesale prices are now often negative in the middle of the day.
But regardless of how many wind and solar projects are built, it’s likely there still will be periods of shortage that must be plugged when intermittent power generation is not sufficient. The experience in Britain has been that baseload generators have demanded subsidies to be available still when needed under a capacity market. Renewable generators that are producing power that is not needed have demanded to be paid as well.
Projects designed to help, such as the Snowy 2.0 pumped-hydro and expanded transmission network, are proving to be slower and more expensive than promised. Under Mr Bowen’s latest scheme, taxpayers will be on the hook to ensure all of the projects approved as part of the 32GW target achieve a minimum rate of return. Ironically, the subsidies will make renewable energy, the so-called cheapest option, more expensive than it otherwise would be. But a price guarantee and overbuild ensure that other options such as nuclear will struggle to find space in the market to justify their cost.
If adopted, the latest call for assistance from electricity retailers will be felt directly by energy users. Retailers want a higher price because of fierce competition from rooftop solar as well as the looming impact of batteries and offshore wind that will depress prices in the evening, after the sun has stopped shining and when wholesale prices traditionally have spiked. Retailers are urging the Australian Energy Regulator to factor the rise of solar into its considerations when determining the default market offer from July.
After two years of big increases in the default market offer price, the political pressure will be for the AER not to approve another big increase. But the laws of physics dictate that power will have to come from somewhere and private sector economics suggests absorbing sustained losses is not an option for generators.
This leaves taxpayers and users on the hook to continue Band-Aiding a system that has been broken by ideology and a lack of proper planning.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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