Doing the numbers on renewable energy

Wind and solar are still currently small in global terms. Which is why advocates never mention absolute size or even relative size, but focus on growth rates. They also never talk about the wildlife impacts.

In Australia, there is little research on such matters, but some figures are coming in from the US. The Gibson paper cites estimates that wind farms are killing 600,000 to 880,000 bats a year, which now makes them the second biggest risk to bats behind White Nose Syndrome. Birds are also getting killed in large numbers, but not large enough to rate next to motor vehicles and transmission lines; unless you are a bird.

But intermittent renewables like wind and solar need a much bigger transmission network than traditional grids, so they will also increase the avian transmission line death and injury toll. How much bigger does the transmission network need to be for wind and solar? 5-10 times. And those 600,000+ bats killed annually in the US are being killed for a power source that generates just 6.3 percent of US electricity.

The Jacobson plan (see Part I or critique here) calls to expand the 82 GW of wind turbine capacity in the US to 2449 GW; so we can expect this to also cost 18 to 26 million dead bats a year. We can also expect the current wind farm toll of half a million birds annually, including 83,000 raptors, to rise by perhaps a factor of 32.

But all these animal and environmental problems wouldn’t be so bad if the technology could both provide a reliable grid while also solving our climate problem… but it can’t.

In Germany, solar power is still only about 6 percent of electricity, but is already stuck.

The following figure shows that solar power growth is levelling off in all the key European countries who spent big on subsidising solar growth. The German data for solar output in 2017 is available and is much the same as for 2016.

Some of this is due to simply running out of money. But the much bigger problem is structural. It doesn’t matter how cheap it is if you can’t sell it. Solar power output in Germany will certainly rise a little more, but it’s unlikely to pass its predicted maximum of about 11 percent of German electricity.

Prediction? What prediction? I don’t know who spotted it first, but this article contains a description of why intermittent renewables will tend to level of at around what’s called the capacity factor… 11 percent for solar power in Germany, and 16 percent for solar power in sunny Australia.

Why? Put briefly, and using wind power, as an example, when you have enough wind turbines to meet 100 percent of the electricity demand on windy days, then the incentive to build more turbines starts to decline. Why? Think about what will happen on windy days after you double the amount of wind power? You’ll simply have to throw half of your electricity out; you can’t sell it.

How much electricity will you get from wind over a year if you satisfy 100 percent of the demand on windy days? This number is called the capacity factor. It’s just the annual average output divided by the theoretical maximum if every day was maximally windy at all turbine locations. It’s about 33 percent, give or take a bit.

So without large amounts of storage, profitability ceases and growth gradually stops, rather like what you can see in the graph.

The largest battery in the world was recently installed with great fanfare in South Australia, but can it store large amounts of energy? No. That was never the intention; as an energy storage device, it’s tiny.

SA typically uses 1,500 megawatt-hours of energy each hour, and the battery could store about 4 minutes worth of this. The battery was never intended to store energy; that’s just a side effect. Its purpose is to reduce frequency fluctuations during generator outages. Not that it will do that particularly well either. ACOLA reckoned it would need to be 6 times bigger to have prevented the September 2016 blackout.

So it won’t store much energy and won’t be much use to stop blackouts; so what’s it for? As a means of securing votes from renewable energy junkies, it’s priceless.

The only available technology which can store significant amounts of electricity to allow renewables to expand beyond their capacity factor is… can you guess? … flooded valleys; otherwise known as pumped-hydro.

So while renewable advocates cheered early exponential growth of solar and wind power, the rates were always destined to be logistic… meaning that they grow exponentially until hit by limiting factors which cause an equally fast levelling off.

If I had included China in the graph, you’d see a massive solar increase during the past few years, because she’s still on the exponential growth segment of the curve. But the limiting factors will eventually kick in, exactly as they have done in the EU countries. In fact, at a local level throwing out excess wind power in China is already a problem.

A few years back AEMO did a study on how to meet Australia’s electricity demand with 100 percent renewable sources. They put forward two plans, both involved putting a baseload sub-system underneath wind and solar; one plan was based on burning forests and the other on geonuclear.

Geonuclear is where you drill a hole in the earth’s crust deep enough to tap into the heat generated by radioactive decay in the earth’s mantle and crust. You might know it as geothermal, but it’s a power source based on radioactive decay so why not call a spade a spade? And did I mention the radioactive material being bought to the surface and spread over the landscape by this industry?

Is it a problem? Absolutely not. Meaning that it is a well understood micro-problem which people solve in many similar industries. But could I construct a true but totally misleading scare story about it?

For some people, I probably just did. Not everybody appreciates the irony of opposition to digging big holes to drop radioactive material down (nuclear waste repositories) while supporting digging big holes down to where extraordinary quantities of radioactive material is generating heat.

And what if you don’t want burning forests or geonuclear? A recent study of the US showed what happens when you try and power the US with just wind, solar and storage. It quantifies the lack of end game with these technologies. It’s like trying to build a 10-story building with inadequate materials and design. Things may go brilliantly until level 9 and then you suddenly realise you are screwed.

The US electricity grid is currently about 99.97 reliable, ours is generally even better. The study found that that you can get an 80 per cent reliable grid with wind and solar without too much trouble. And then it starts getting hard; really quickly. By without too much trouble, I mean lots of overbuilding and extra transmission lines.

Look at the bottom graph, which assumes 75 per cent wind and 25 per cent solar. The black line shows how big an overbuild you need if you want a grid of specified reliability. The reliability is given along the X axis and the overbuild factor on the right.

Draw a horizontal line with your eyes from the overbuild factor of 10 and see where it hits the black line. Somewhere about 99.8 percent reliability. So if you want a 99.8 percent reliable supply of 1 gigawatt, then you need to build 7.5 gigawatts of wind and 2.5 gigawatts of solar.

This is very much an optimistic estimate. There are plenty of unrealistic assumptions here, like a perfect transmission system and all your turbines in the best spots. It’s the best you can do; it’s just that the best isn’t really very good.

Now draw a horizontal line with your eyes from the overbuild factor of 5 to the 12 hour storage line. This shows that you can get a 96 per cent reliable supply of 1 gigawatt by building 3.75 GW of wind and 1.25 GW of solar if you have 12 gigwatt-hours of storage.

You’d have to repeat the study with Australian data to see what happens here, but it’s worth thinking about what 12 hours of storage looks like. In Australia, our average power use is about 28 gigawatts, so to store 12 hours worth of energy would require about 3,100 of those ‘biggest battery in the world’ devices in South Australia. There are plenty of other tiny storage systems that it’s fun to pretend might one day scale to the sizes required, but only flooded valleys have a proven track record.

As it happens, someone has done a very similar study using Australian data. The recently released ACF report A Plan to Repowe Australia lists the study (by Manfred Lenzen of UNSW and others) among its evidence base. It finds pretty much what the US study found; namely that you could power Australia, meaning supply our 28 gigawatts worth of demand) with wind, sun and storage and all you’d need to do is build 160 gigawatts worth of wind and solar farms, including 19 gigawatts worth of biomass burning backup.

A one gigawatt power plant is a large structure, whether it’s burning wood, coal or gas. The 19 biomass burners would be doing nothing for 90 percent of the time, but we’d need them just to plug the holes when there are low wind and sunshine periods. Oh, and they also postulate 15 hours of storage for the 61 gigawatts of solar farms.

How would this be provided? The main paper didn’t say, and I didn’t buy the Supplementary material. But you could do it with about 8,000 “biggest battery in the world” Li-ion batteries. Alternatively you could use fertiliser; otherwise known as molten salt. This is a mix of sodium and potassium nitrate. All you’d need would be about 26 million tonnes, which is over 8 years worth of the entire planet’s annual global production (see here and here); all of which is currently ear marked to grow food.

In South Australia, our wind energy supplies us with a little over the capacity factor percentage of energy; which means we are starting to throw away electricity when it’s windy, while relying on gas or coal power from Victoria when it isn’t.

Which is why the new Liberal Government wants to build another inter-connector. That’s fine as a short-term fix, but eventually the whole NEM will saturate with wind and solar. And then where do you build an inter-connector to?

The statewide blackout of 2016 was also a wakeup call that the automatic frequency control delivered by synchronous energy sources but not by wind and solar actually mattered; big time. Without it you are in trouble when events of any kind take out some of your generation capacity.

But ignoring the problems and assuming the US results apply, then we could surely plough on and build another 6.5 times more wind power plus considerably more solar and also buy another 180 of those Elon Musk special batteries and we could have a working, but sub-standard, grid.

This assumes we added all the rest of the required transmission infrastructure to connect all those wind and solar farms. That’s the thing with solar and wind. It may seem attractive when you kick the problems down the road and rave about the short-term successes. But the devil is in the detail and the total lack of end-game.

SOURCE  (See the original for links, graphics etc.)






Global warming could produce MORE farming land, scientists admit

CLIMATE change could increase the overall amount of boreal land ready for farming by up to 44 percent, a study has claimed

The threat of global warming and rising sea levels is increasingly likely, scientists have warned.

But a team of international scientists may have now found a potential upside to rising global temperatures. A study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, claims the impacts of global warming could unlock boreal regions for farming by 2099.

Currently, only 32 percent of the world’s boreal areas in the northern hemisphere are arable.

Study co-author Professor Joseph Holden, University of Leeds, explained: “Climate change will have a profound impact on our agricultural regions.

“A projected consequence is the loss of farmland and crops from areas that are currently productive, which is cause for concern regarding long-term global food security.

“Therefore we need to know whether in northern high latitudes new areas will become suitable for crops."

The world’s boreal regions are found in great swathes of the United States, Russia, Canada, Norway, Sweden and Finland.

But the study also warned increasing the world’s arable land could have a negative impact on agriculture in other parts of the globe by upsetting climatic water balance. [Rubbish!  A warmer world would evaporate more moisture off the oceans, meaning that overall rain and snowfall would INCREASE]

Study lead author Dr Adrian Unc, from Memorial University Canada, said: "We must not forget that any changes in land use has extensive impacts on the entire natural ecosystem, impacts that must be understood and included in any planning effort."

SOURCE 




EPA’s Pruitt is far cleaner than critics claim

His security, DC bedroom and policies are legitimate and defensible, under any fair standard

Deroy Murdock

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt has been hounded lately by allegations of rich spending and poor judgment. While he could have detonated himself during recent congressional-oversight hearings, the former Oklahoma prosecutor seems to have survived those tests. Nonetheless, EPA’s inspector general, the Government Accountability Office, and various congressional panels continue to probe Pruitt’s official conduct. While Pruitt has plenty for which to answer, on at least three key counts, he seems to be cleaner than his critics claim.

Pruitt’s foes have attacked him for allocating too much on bodyguards. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) slammed Pruitt for “taking 30 EPA enforcement officers away from investigating polluters to serve as his round-the-clock personal security detail.” The Associate Press counts 20, not 30, in Pruitt’s full-time protective detail. Its cost, AP reports, “approached $3 million when pay is added in travel expenses.”

But an August 16 EPA report suggests that Pruitt’s personal-defense outlays are fueled by genuine safety concerns rather than self-aggrandizement. This document cites 14 threats against Pruitt and his family in Fiscal Year 2017. Among them:

* Pruitt’s daughter has been menaced via Facebook. e.g., “I hope your father dies soon, suffering as your mother watches in horror for hours on end.”

* An e-mail sent to the Washington, D.C. office of Senator James Lankford (R - Oklahoma) threatened to assassinate Pruitt, President Trump, and Vice President Pence.

* One message to EPA said, “I hope your head administrator (Scott Pruitt), dies a very painful and horrible death through poisoning. Please explain the scientific method to this freaking neanderthal [sic].”

* Another spooky character stated via Twitter, “Pruitt, I am gonna find you and put a bullet between your eyes. Don’t even think I’m joking. I’m planning this.”

* A postcard sent to Pruitt read, “Get out while you still can, Scott, you are evil incarnate you ignorant fuck.”

* “Dear Mr. Pruitt,” another postcard began. “CLIMATE CHANGE IS REAL!! We are watching you. For the sake of our planet, our children & our grandchildren, will you be a reasonable man? I repeat, we are watching you! Myrna, Michele, Chris, Signe, Lucy, Olivia and Isabel.”

* A trespasser entered EPA headquarters on March 6, CBS News reported. He claimed to be a student attending a “Microsoft event,” said EPA Assistant Inspector General Patrick Sullivan. “The person asked about Scott Pruitt and wanted to know where Pruitt’s office was and if Pruitt ever walked in the hallway outside the room.” Although the intruder was escorted off the premises, he later phoned an employee’s office number and left voicemails in which he said, as Sullivan explained, “he can gain entry into EPA space anytime he wants.”

* Not content simply to write, one critic showed up in person. An EPA sentry stopped him. “During the confrontation, the subject was able to acquire the security officer’s duty weapon and discharge a round into a nearby chair.” The guard disarmed the visitor, who later was indicted for assaulting a federal officer/employee.

These and other concrete provocations justify Pruitt’s focus on security. The Left’s hatred of President Donald J. Trump and his supporters, including Pruitt, is incandescent. One cannot fault Pruitt’s caution, especially after James T. Hodgkinson, a Bernie Sanders campaign volunteer, shot and nearly killed Rep. Steve Scalise (R - Louisiana) and four others at the GOP congressional baseball team’s practice last June in Alexandria, Virginia.

Just a few days ago, Miami-Dade Police arrested Jonathan Oddi. Officers say they nabbed Oddi after he fired gunshots in the lobby of the Trump National Doral, one of the chief executive’s golf resorts. Miami-Dade Police Director Juan Perez said Oddi shouted “anti-Trump, President Trump rhetoric.”

A similar attack that maimed or killed Pruitt – and perhaps EPA personnel and innocent bystanders – is hardly fanciful. Such a scenario is worth devoting resources to prevent.

Also under review: Pruitt’s 2017 housing arrangements in Washington, DC. Pruitt’s accusers claim he got a special, below-cost deal in some sort of bed-for-bribe swap. Had Pruitt been billeted for pennies in a Georgetown townhouse or an Embassy Row mansion, these worries would be legitimate. However, Pruitt rented a room in a Capitol Hill condominium and paid only for the evenings when he actually slept there. He shelled out $50 per night, equal to $1,500 per month. According to Pruitt’s lease, “Enjoyment is limited to one bedroom that cannot be locked. All other space is controlled by the landlord.”

In an April 4 EPA memorandum, Designated Agency Ethics Official Kevin S. Minoli stated that “within a six-block radius” of Pruitt’s crash pad, there were “seven (7) private bedrooms that could be rented for $55 or less/day.” Minoli, who also is EPA’s principal deputy general counsel, also found 38 such rooms “across a broader section of Capitol Hill.” As a result of its research, Minoli explained, “the ethics office estimated $50/day to be a reasonable market value of the use authorized by the terms of the lease. As such, the use of the property according to the terms of the lease would not constitute a gift under the Federal ethics regulations.”

No gift, no graft.

Some also have fretted about the fact that this property is owned by energy lobbyist Steven Hart and his wife Vicki. Pruitt told the Washington Examiner that they were old friends from Oklahoma. “I’ve known him for years,” Pruitt said. “He’s the outside counsel for the National Rifle Association, has no clients that are before this agency, nor does his wife have any clients that have appeared before this agency.”

Pruitt reportedly requested and was given multiple extensions on his lease until last summer. Having overstayed his welcome, the Harts eventually asked Pruitt to make way for an incoming renter. The Harts changed the locks behind Pruitt. If this couple wanted to curry special favor with the EPA chief, this seems like a rather fruitless strategy.

It’s no surprise that these and other actions by Pruitt are under a microscope. For many on the Left, battling so-called “global warming” borders on religion. As they see it, the science is “settled,” this creed is beyond debate, and the heretics who question this faith should be jailed, as Bill Nye the Science Guy has suggested, or executed, as University of Graz, Austria Professor Richard Parncutt has proposed.

Someone like Pruitt, who rejects manmade-global-warmist alarmism and is powerful enough to implement his ideas (e.g. persuading President Trump to junk Obama’s Clean Power Plan and withdraw America from the Paris Climate Treaty) embodies the Left’s worst nightmares. To the warmists, Pruitt is a torch-bearing arsonist, scurrying maliciously through their Vatican. And he must be stopped.

Even if Pruitt winds up scot-free, his situation should serve as a cautionary tale for every member of Team Trump – from the president on down: Their margin of error is thinner than Saran Wrap. President Trump and all who work for him should act as if their every action and utterance were being broadcast live on MSNBC, with Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews and Joe Scarborough offering scathing, bitter and unforgiving commentary. No one on Team Trump ever will get the benefit of the doubt. When the First Lady gets slammed, even for unveiling an anti-cyberbullying initiative, it is safe to assume that everyone in this administration will be scrutinized with the deepest suspicions.

As much as these actions by Scott Pruitt can be defended, these days require an even higher level of purity. It may be as physically unobtainable as 250-proof alcohol. Regardless, and unfair as it may be, this must be the ideal to which every member of the Trump Administration, the Republican Congress, and pretty much each American conservative must aspire.

SOURCE 





Liberals Upset by superhero movie's Message: Environmentalism = Mass Murder

Progressives are worried about Marvel’s Avengers: Infinity War. They think its villain Thanos, whose solution to the overpopulation problem is to wipe out half the planet, gives the wrong impression that environmentalists are evil.

At Yale Climate Connections, Michael Svoboda complains: By ascribing selfless motives to Thanos, AIW tacitly delivers this toxic message: environmentalism = mass murder.

Solitaire Townsend, co-founder of the environmental PR agency Futerra, also finds the movie’s message too close for comfort. At Forbes, she writes: The Mad Titan sounds worryingly like some environmentalists. Over the years the need for ‘population control and reduction’ has been widely called for as the necessary solution to our resource and sustainability crisis. Thanos is the ultimate Malthusian. After he fulfills his purpose, crumbling half of life in the universe into dust, he retires to an idyll many environmentalists would enjoy – a simple rural hut set in sunlit dappled fields. He had promised “not suffering, but salvation,” and in the final shot a tiny smile is playing on his face after a job well done. Ouch.

For Svoboda, this is a horrible distortion of the essential goodness with which environmentalists are imbued. Not only is it “repugnant” but it fails to take into account all the many wonderful possibilities that greens are now considering as part of their plan to save the world.

In AIW, no one ever points to a country or world that has learned to live sustainably, even though at least two places in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Asgard and Wakanda, appear to have been moving in that direction.

Neither does anyone point out other ways to solve the problem of environmental degradation, or even other ways to pursue Thanos’s preferred solution. Empowering women, for example, is a peaceful way to constrain and then reverse population growth.

Except, as Maddie Stone argues here, Thanos’s attitude is actually a pretty accurate representation of how many environmentalists think.

To me at least, it came across as a clear denouncement of a certain breed of solutions-oriented environmentalism that centers planetary “balance” over people.

The early history of environmentalism is festooned with warnings of a population apocalypse, beginning with 18th century scholar Thomas Malthus’ An Essay on the Principle of Population, which concluded that rising human numbers would inevitably lead to widespread poverty and famine. As Malthus’ pessimistic predictions failed to materialize, he was declared a false prophet.

But his ideas stuck around, re-emerging with force in the mid-20th century following the viral popularity of works like Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb(1968), which predicted “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death” in the 1970s, and The Limits to Growth (1972), an MIT research report that concluded “The basic behavior of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.”

So yeah, Thanos’ concern about galactic population control? Definitely something we’ve thought about here on Earth. And while the most dire doomsday predictions haven’t come true—thanks largely to industrialization and the green revolution in agriculture—this school of thinking has had real-world consequences, including racist campaigns to sterilize millions of women in the developing world, and China’s fraught one-child policy.

Avengers: Infinity War isn’t the first movie to buck Hollywood’s “environmentalism = fluffy and good” trend. One of the first to do so was Michael Crichton’s State of Fear (2004) in which eco-terrorists plot mass murder to raise awareness of global warming.

The evil mastermind in Kingsman: The Secret Service was also an environmentalist. Richmond Valentine (Samuel L Jackson) is a billionaire philanthropist who believes the only way to save humanity from overpopulation is to wipe out everybody except his favorite celebrities and politicians.

SOURCE 





Democrats Blame Trump for High Gas Prices

Meanwhile, Dems regularly call for more tax hikes on gasoline

Gas prices across the nation have been steadily rising and have now reached levels not seen since November 2014. The average price of gas this week is $2.92 per gallon, 55 cents higher than this time last year. And while summer gas price hikes are nothing unusual, the fact of the matter is it’s an election year and Democrats are looking for any political narrative to spin in their favor.

Lobbing baseless accusations from the political peanut gallery, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) bloviated, “President Trump’s reckless decision to pull out of the Iran deal has led to higher oil prices.” He continued, “These higher oil prices are translating directly to soaring gas prices, something we know disproportionately hurts middle and lower income people.” Ah, so “controlling” the inherently uncontrollable and regularly fluctuating price of gas is more important than pulling out of a terrible deal that did nothing but give cover to a villainous, terror-funding regime on its march toward nuclear weapons? Schumer’s simply trying to kill two birds with one stone. That’s because he’s worried that the widely anticipated “blue wave” may prove to be nothing more than a ripple.

So why do gas prices fluctuate so regularly, and why in particular do they rise during the summer months? First, the leading factor in the price of gas is OPEC. In November 2016, OPEC decided to limit oil production with the express purpose of increasing the price. Second, the EPA requires refiners to change their gas formulas in the spring to accommodate air-quality regulations, driving up production costs, which are then passed on to the consumer. And finally, economics 101 — America’s growing economy has increased the demand for gas, which in turn raises the price. None of these factors are directly controlled by this or any president.

In fact, the only real direct control politicians have over the price of gas is via taxation. Ironically, while Schumer and his fellow Democrats are running around blaming Trump and Republicans for higher gas prices, the fact is Democrats have for years advocated raising gas taxes. As Investor’s Business Daily notes, “As recently as 2015, Democrats were pushing to nearly double the federal gasoline tax. At the time, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi said that it was the perfect time to do so because ‘if there’s ever going to be an opportunity to raise the gas tax, the time when gas prices are so low — oil prices are so low — is the time to do it.’” Democrat-controlled states like California already have raised gas taxes.

So the next time you fill up and wince at the price, remember just how much of the price is already due to Democrat taxes, and how much higher they’d prefer those prices to be.

SOURCE 

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For more postings from me, see  DISSECTING LEFTISM, TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. Home Pages are   here or   here.  Email me (John Ray) here.  

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