Electricity Generation and Green Technologies

[marchesarosa]

6 Jan 2010

In a recent 24 hour period these were the percentages of GB electricity generated from various energy sources.

Gas 47.8%
Coal 28.9%
Nuclear 19.6%
Wind 0.4%


Wind produced a mere 163 megawatts at around midnight last night, against an installed capacity of just over 4 gigawatts. That represents a load factor of four percent.

Last June The Guardian was in all seriousness retailing us the government’s claims offshore wind farms could generate one quarter of the UK’s electricity needs. Do you believe either The Guardian or the Government? Answers in one word on the back of a postage stamp.



eureferendum.blogspot.com/2010/01/monument-to-folly.html

[marchesarosa]

8th jan 2010

An interesting discussion just now on radio4 PM between Eddie Mair and ?? about the government's announcement of the granting of licences for more off-shore wind farms. (Nothing can even start until at least four years hence.)

The spin is, as stated in the OP above, that 25% of UK electricity requirement can supposedly be provided from this source.

The interlocutor was permitted to defuse the spin somewhat by informing us that the claimed 30 GW (gigawatts) of production translates into 10 GW at the most (because the wind does not always blow - duh!)

Another bit of spin was also defused. The government claims this new offshore electricity generation will provide ALL the UK's household needs. Sadly, domestic electricity consumption only amounts to 4% of total usage in the UK.

You learn something new every day!

And another thing!

The cost per extra watt of electricity produced by wind turbines is incredibly dear, even more than by nuclear generation, apparently, because of the back-up required from conventional power stations on windless days.

Can we actually afford a vastly inflated cost of our essential fuel especially when 300 years of coal reserves lies underground?

[marchesarosa]

White House Needs New Look At Energy

By MICHAEL J. ECONOMIDES
21 Jan 2010

www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=518743





The U.S. government under Barack Obama has yet to acknowledge once, in spite of widely held estimates, that oil will continue to account for 40% of world energy demand 25 years from now while total world energy demand will increase by 50%, at least.

Nor has the US administration, mired in Kyoto and Copenhagen global climate rhetoric, acknowledged that fossil fuels, oil, gas and coal will still account by then for over 85% of world energy demand, a largely unchanged contribution from what it is today.

Instead there is constant rhetoric about solar (the president’s favorite during the campaign), wind and “advanced biofuels” which, when combined, are not likely to account for more than 1% or 2% of the world energy demand over the next several decades.


Who's kidding who?

[marchesarosa]

In the 2008 Climate Change Act is a target to require the UK to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 by at least 80%. This Act was passed with the support of all political parties.

Are they utterly barmy?

Oh, but never mind, the "reduction" can be purchased via Carbon Credits. So that's all right, then. Phew! I though they SERIOUSLY intended to de-industrialise (de-carbonise) the UK economy. But no the carbon reduction illusion can be financed by the enhanced fuel bills we will all be paying, are ALREADY PAYING, in fact.

Did you know that?

Are you OK with that?

[marchesarosa]

Just found this interesting article about the challenge of introducing Green technologies.



The End of Magical Climate Thinking

BY TED NORDHAUS, MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER | JANUARY 13, 2010

the long-term failure of Kyoto and all other efforts to establish binding emissions caps is virtually assured and is a function of a basic technological problem. We simply do not have low-carbon technologies today that can at large scale replace fossil fuels at a cost that any political economy in the world is willing to impose upon itself. There will be no political solution to climate change, no binding international agreement to substantially reduce emissions, and no effective domestic carbon cap until low-carbon technologies are much cheaper than they are today...

The technologies we need will not materialize in response to carbon prices or emissions caps. Nor will they arrive, as many conservatives would have it, by getting the government out of the way and simply allowing a new generation of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to tinker away in their garages.

Rather, we need to create a new clean energy economy in the same way we created our information economy: by identifying a set of well-defined technical problems and mobilizing the human resources of our technologically advanced civilization -- our scientists, laboratories, universities, and engineers -- to solve them...

These technical questions are not difficult to grasp and in fact have already largely been laid out by Chu in his remarks to the New York Times. How do we convert sunlight into energy much more efficiently than solar panels do today? What combination of chemicals can store more energy in batteries that are smaller and lighter? How can we manufacture a next generation of self-contained nuclear reactors that are safer, smaller, and cheaper than the large ones of the 1950s and 1960s? And how can we engineer new biological organisms to serve as a cheap fuel alternative to oil?

Solving global warming's technology challenges will require not a single Apollo program or Manhattan Project, but many. We need to solve technical problems across a range of technologies and at a variety of stages along the road from technological development to demonstration to commercialization to mass deployment...

green lifestyles and energy conservation will not reduce the average American's energy consumption 80 percent over 40 years...

The hard work of mobilizing the resources and institutions necessary to engineer our way to a low-carbon economy will look profoundly different from both the histrionics at Copenhagen and the slick sales pitch offered by carbon traders in Washington...

Transforming the global energy economy from fossil fuels to low-carbon alternatives over the next 50 to 100 years is such a monumental technological undertaking that it is quite understandable that many would either declare it impossible or retreat into magical thinking. We must resist these temptations...

After two decades of domestic and international failure to take real action on climate change, it is time for the purveyors of magical thinking to take their exit so that the main act can begin.


Full article here
www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/01/13/the_end_of_magical_climate_thinking?page=0,1

[marchesarosa]

Wind power is a complete disaster

Posted: April 08, 2009,
Michael J. Trebilcock

By Michael J. Trebilcock
Financial Post
network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/04/08/wind-power-is-a-complete-disaster.aspx#ixzz0gZq6MFtR

There is no evidence that industrial wind power is likely to have a significant impact on carbon emissions. The European experience is instructive. Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity, has yet to close a single fossil-fuel plant. It requires 50% more coal-generated electricity to cover wind power’s unpredictability, and pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone).

Flemming Nissen, the head of development at West Danish generating company ELSAM (one of Denmark’s largest energy utilities) tells us that “wind turbines do not reduce carbon dioxide emissions.” The German experience is no different. Der Spiegel reports that “Germany’s CO2 emissions haven’t been reduced by even a single gram,” and additional coal- and gas-fired plants have been constructed to ensure reliable delivery.

Indeed, recent academic research shows that wind power may actually increase greenhouse gas emissions in some cases, depending on the carbon-intensity of back-up generation required because of its intermittent character. ....

Industrial wind power is not a viable economic alternative to other energy conservation options. Again, the Danish experience is instructive. Its electricity generation costs are the highest in Europe (15¢/kwh compared to Ontario’s current rate of about 6¢). Niels Gram of the Danish Federation of Industries says, “windmills are a mistake and economically make no sense.” Aase Madsen , the Chair of Energy Policy in the Danish Parliament, calls it “a terribly expensive disaster.”

The U.S. Energy Information Administration reported in 2008, on a dollar per MWh basis, the U.S. government subsidizes wind at $23.34 — compared to reliable energy sources: natural gas at 25¢; coal at 44¢; hydro at 67¢; and nuclear at $1.59, leading to what some U.S. commentators call “a huge corporate welfare feeding frenzy.” The Wall Street Journal advises that “wind generation is the prime example of what can go wrong when the government decides to pick winners.”

[marchesarosa]

Summary:

"Lessons Learned: E.ON Netz GmbH, the largest grid operator in Germany, reports in its Wind Report 2005, that "Wind energy cannot replace conventional power stations to any significant extent...The more wind power capacity [on] the grid, the lower the percentage of traditional generation it can replace."

EON Netz Wind Power Report 2005, Germany

www.windaction.org/documents/461

FIGURE 5 shows the annual curve of wind power feed-in in the EON control area for 2004, from which it is possible to derive the wind power feed-in during the past year:

1. The HIGHEST wind power feed-in in the EON grid was just above 6,000MW for a brief period, or put another way the feed-in was around 85% of the installed wind power capacity at the time.

2. The AVERAGE feed-in over the year was 1,295MW, around one fifth of the average installed wind power capacity over the year.

3. Over half of the year, the wind power feed-in was less than 14% of the average installed wind power capacity over the year.

The feed-in capacity can change frequently within a few hours. This is shown in FIGURE 6, which reproduces the course of wind power feedin during the Christmas week from 20 to 26 December 2004.

Whilst wind power feed-in at 9.15am on Christmas Eve reached its maximum for the year at 6,024MW, it fell to below 2,000MW within only 10 hours, a difference of over 4,000MW. This corresponds to the capacity of 8 x 500MW coal fired power station blocks. On Boxing Day, wind power feed-in in the EON grid fell to below 40MW.

Handling such significant differences in feed-in levels poses a major challenge to grid operators.

__________

In order to also guarantee reliable electricity supplies when wind farms produce little or no power, e.g. during periods of calm or storm-related shutdowns, traditional power station capacities must be available as a reserve. This means that wind farms can only replace traditional power station capacities to a limited degree.

An objective measure of the extent to which wind farms are able to replace traditional power stations, is the contribution towards guaranteed capacity which they make within an existing power station portfolio. Approximately this capacity may be dispensed within a traditional power station portfolio, without thereby prejudicing the level of supply reliability.

In 2004 two major German studies investigated the size of contribution that wind farms make towards guaranteed capacity. Both studies separately came to virtually identical conclusions, that wind energy currently contributes to the secure production capacity of the system, by providing 8% of its installed capacity. As wind power capacity rises, the lower availability of the wind farms determines the reliability of the system as a whole to an ever increasing extent. Consequently the greater reliability of traditional power stations becomes increasingly eclipsed.

As a result, the relative contribution of wind power to the guaranteed capacity of our supply system up to the year 2020 will fall continuously

to around 4% (FIGURE 7).

In concrete terms, this means that in 2020, with a forecast wind power capacity of over 48,000MW (Source: dena grid study), 2,000MW of traditional power production can be replaced by these wind farms.

[marchesarosa]

Apr 12 2009
7:08 PM
Just a couple of nitty gritty comments from Denmark:

1. re: "Denmark, the world’s most wind-intensive nation, with more than 6,000 turbines generating 19% of its electricity" - it should be noted that ~ 45 percent of the annual production cannot be put to use in the Danish grid (due to 'balancing problems' i.e. supply/demand mismatch), so it must be exported, mainly to Norway and Germany - often at very low spot prices! The wind turbine operators, on their side, are guranteed a fixed price per kWh produced, with the balance being paid by the Danish electricity consumers. The total annual 'surcharge' thus placed on their shoulders is in the order of US$ 8.000.000.

2. re: "pollution and carbon dioxide emissions have risen (by 36% in 2006 alone)" - I don't understand how that percentage was calculated: The 'actual' emission in 2005 was 49.4 Gt, in 2006 it was 57.3 Gt, corresponding to a 16% increase - the 'corrected' emission in 2005 was 51.0 Gt, in 2006 it was 52.4 Gt, corresponding to a 2.7% increase; it should furthermore be noted, at the 2005 'actual' emission (49,4 Gt) was clearly an 'outlier', with alle preceding years in the 50+ Gt bracket.

The crux of the matter is that the highly diversified Danish electricity production - based on the triad of
1) Wind turbines,
2) (conventional) coal plants and
3) 'decentralized' gas-fired plants for production of hot water (for heating purposes) AND electricity

- gives rise to huge 'balancing problems', problems that will become aggravated if/when MORE wind turbines are introduced!

Germany is reaping the benefits of wind energy, it is building coal burning plants to replace nuclear, by extension windmills, because green energy doesn't work. Shell dropped their interest in green (biofuel being the antithesis of green) like a hot potato, sheiks are losing or have lost interest in financing farms. They listen to their advisers (and I would think they are the world's best). It is everything you said in the article and more.

[marchesarosa]

MARCH 3, 2010

“Wind power Is No Solution To Anything” By Henk Tennekes

Wind energy is an engineer’s nightmare. To begin with, the energy density of flowing air is miserably low. Therefore, you need a massive contraption to catch one Megawatt at best, and a thousand of these to equal a single gas- or coal-fired power plant. If you design them for a wind speed of 15 m/s, they are useless at wind speeds below10 m/s and extremely dangerous at 20 m/s, unless feathered in time. Remember, power is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed.

Old-fashioned Dutch windmills needed a two-man crew on 12-hour watch, seven days a week, because a runaway windmill first burns its bearings, then its hardwood gears, then the entire superstructure. This was the nightmare of millers everywhere in the ‘good’ old days. And what did these beautiful antiques deliver? Fifteen horsepower at best, in favorable winds, about what a power lawn mower does these days. No wonder the Dutch switched to steam-powered pumping stations as soon as they could, in the late nineteenth century.

Since the power generated by modern wind turbines is so unpredictable, conventional power plants have to serve as back-ups. Therefore, these run at far less than half power most of the time. That is terribly uneconomical – only at full power they have good thermal efficiency and minimal CO2 emissions per kWh delivered. Think also a moment of the cable networks needed: not only a fine-maze distribution network at the consumer end, but also one at the generator end. And what about servicing? How do you get a repair crew to a lonely hillside? Especially when you decided to put the wind park at sea? Use helicopters – now THAT is green …!

For that matter, would you care to imagine what happens to rotor blades in freezing rain? Or how the efficiency of laminar-flow rotor blades decreases as bugs and dust accumulate on their leading edges? Or what did happen in Germany more than once? German legislation gives wind power absolute priority, so all other forms of generating electricity have to back off when the wind starts blowing. This creates dangerous, almost uncontrollable instabilities in the high-voltage network. At those moments, power plant operators all over Europe sweat blood, almost literally. The synchronization of the system is also a scary job : alternating currents at 100,000 volts or more cannot be out of phase more than one degree or so, else circuit breakers pop everywhere and a brownout all over Europe starts.

One application might be attractive, though. Suppose you fill a water basin in the hills nearby using wind power when it blows, and turn the water turbines on when emergency power is needed for one reason or another (a power plant failure, a cold winter night).

Wind power is a green mirage of the worst kind. It looks green to simple souls, but it is a technical nightmare. Nowhere I have been, be it Holland, Denmark, Germany, France, or California, have I seen wind parks where all turbines were operating properly. Typically, 20% stand idle, out of commission, broken down. Use Google Videos to find examples of wind turbine crashes, start meditating, and reach your own conclusions.

Only a few years ago, I changed my opinion on nuclear power. Now I think it is the only sensible alternative for the next twenty or thirty years. France was smart enough many years ago : unlike the rest of Europe, it can supply its citizens and industries with electricity even if Putin pulls another of his mean tricks.

Why don’t politicians listen to engineers? Why do engineers cave in to politically inspired financing? Merely to join the green daydreaming? I am an engineer; I want to be proud of my profession.


pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/wind-power-is-no-solution-to-anything-a-guest-weblog-by-henk-tennekes/

[marchesarosa]

What about this then? Apparently a means of making conventional fuel go further without emissions and without the necessity for an expensive and wasteful national electricity grid.


Will Bloom box replace power grid?
February 23, 2010 by Lisa Zyga

www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=6228923n&tag=api

The hot energy news for this week comes in the form of a small box called the Bloom box, whose inventor hopes that it will be in almost every US home in the next five to 10 years. K.R. Sridhar, founder of the Silicon Valley start-up called Bloom Energy, unveiled the device on “60 Minutes” to CBS reporter Leslie Stahl on Sunday evening. Although Sridhar made some impressive claims on the show, he left many of the details a secret. This Wednesday, the company will hold a “special event” in eBay’s town hall, with a countdown clock on its website suggesting it will be a momentous occasion - or at least generating hype.
Ads by Google
Heat Pump Central Heating - Thinking about renewable energy? Find out more here - www.MyGreenHeat.co.uk

As Sridhar explained to Stahl, the Bloom box is a new kind of fuel cell that produces electricity by combining oxygen in the air with any fuel source, such as natural gas, bio-gas, and solar energy. Sridhar said the chemical reaction is efficient and clean, creating energy without burning or combustion. He said that two Bloom boxes - each the size of a grapefruit - could wirelessly power a US home, fully replacing the power grid; one box could power a European home, and two or three Asian homes could share a single box. Although currently a commercial unit costs $700,000-$800,000 each, Sridhar hopes to manufacture home units that cost less than $3,000 in five to 10 years. He said he got the idea after designing a device for NASA that would generate oxygen on Mars, for a mission that was later canceled. The Bloom box works in the opposite way as the Mars box: instead of generating oxygen, it uses oxygen as one of the inputs.


Although Sunday was the first time Bloom Energy came public with the Bloom box (there’s not even a sign on the company’s building), several devices are already being used by about 20 well-known companies. Google, FedEx, Walmart, eBay, Staples, and others have taken advantage of tax credits to purchase the Bloom boxes, and they’re seeing cost savings in their energy bills. For example, four refrigerator-sized units have been powering a Google datacenter for the past 18 months, using about half as much natural gas as would be required to generate the same amount of energy at a traditional power plant. And at eBay, five units running on bio-gas made from landfill waste that were installed nine months ago have saved the company more than $100,000 in electricity costs, said eBay CEO John Donahoe on “60 Minutes.” Donahoe added that, on a weekly basis, the Bloom boxes generate five times as much power than the 3,000 solar cells that are installed on the roofs of the company’s buildings.
Ads by Google

Sridhar explained that the fuel cells inside the Bloom boxes are made from sand turned into thin ceramic squares, each side coated with a green or black “ink.” A single cell can power about one light bulb, but a stack of 64 of the cells could be “big enough to power a Starbucks,” Sridhar said. In between each disk there's a metal plate, but the Bloom box supposedly uses a cheap metal alloy instead of expensive platinum.
One of Bloom Energy’s early critics, Michael Kanellos of Green Tech Media, noted that researchers have been working with fuel cells since the 1830s. On “60 Minutes,” he told Stahl that, if Sridhar succeeds in making the technology affordable and efficient, there will likely be others that can, too.

“The problem is then G.E. and Siemens and other conglomerates probably can do the same thing,” he said. “They have fuel cell patents; they have research teams that have looked at this," Kanellos said.
"What do you think the chances are that in ten-plus years you and I will each have a Bloom box in our basements?" Stahl asked Kanellos.
"Twenty percent," he said. "But it’s going to say 'G.E.'"

Further details on the Bloom box - its efficiency; the materials it’s made of; how much carbon dioxide, water, heat, and other emissions it produces - are still secret. In a blog post Monday afternoon, Kanellos said that he had found a US patent filed by Bloom in 2006 and granted in 2009 that mentions the material “yttria stabilized zirconia” as well as electrodes made of metals in the platinum family - although this doesn’t necessarily mean anything. More information may be revealed at Wednesday’s event, which will feature John Doerr, partner in the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, which has provided financial assistance to the company. (Sridhar told Stahl that an estimate of $400 million raised by Bloom so far is “in the ballpark.”) Former Secretary of State Colin Powell, a member of Bloom Energy’s board, is also scheduled to be in attendance.

www.physorg.com/news186123245.html

[marchesarosa]

Freeing Energy Policy From The Climate Change Debate
29 Mar 2010

Environmentalists have long sought to use the threat of catastrophic global warming to persuade the public to embrace a low-carbon economy. But recent events, including the tainting of some climate research, have shown the risks of trying to link energy policy to climate science.

by ted nordhaus and michael shellenberger

The 20-year effort by environmentalists to establish climate science as the primary basis for far-reaching action to decarbonize the global energy economy today lies in ruins. Backlash in reaction to “Climategate” and recent controversies involving the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s 2007 assessment report are but the latest evidence that such efforts have evidently failed.

While the urge to blame fossil-fuel-funded skeptics for this recent bad turn of events has proven irresistible for most environmental leaders and pundits, forward-looking greens wishing to ascertain what might be salvaged from the wreckage would be well advised to look closer to home. Climate science, even at its most uncontroversial, could never motivate the remaking of the entire global energy economy. Efforts to use climate science to threaten an apocalyptic future should we fail to embrace green proposals, and to characterize present-day natural disasters as terrifying previews of an impending day of reckoning, have only served to undermine the credibility of both climate science and progressive energy policy.

The Endless Weather Wars

The habit of overstating the current state of climate science knowledge, and in particular our understanding of the relationship between global warming and present-day weather events, has been difficult for environmentalists to give up because, on one level, it has worked so well for them.

Global warming first exploded into mass public consciousness in the summer of 1988, when droughts, fires in the Amazon, and heat waves in The reality is that both sides abuse the science in the service of their political agendas. the United States were widely attributed as warning signs of an eco-apocalypse to come. Former U.S. Senator Tim Wirth held the first widely covered congressional hearing on the subject that summer and admits having targeted the hearing for the hottest day of the year and turned off the air conditioning in the room to ensure that the conditions would be sweltering for the assembled media.

Such tactics have only intensified over the past two decades. In the run-up to U.N. climate talks in Kyoto in 1997, the Clinton Administration recruited Al Roker and other weathermen to explain global warming to the public. In 2006, Al Gore used his “Inconvenient Truth” slide show to link Hurricane Katrina, droughts, and floods to warming. And some environmental groups have routinely implied that present-day extreme weather and natural disasters are evidence of anthropogenic warming.

But it turned out that both sides could play the weather game. Skeptics also started pointing to weather events like snowstorms as evidence of no warming. While environmental advocates frequently criticize opponents such as Sen. James Inhofe for conflating weather with climate, the reality is that both sides abuse the science in the service of their political agendas. Climate change models, created in an effort to understand the potential long-term effect of global warming on regional weather trends, can no more tell us anything useful about today’s extreme weather events than last month’s snow storms can inform us as to whether global warming is occurring.

Climate Science Disasters

For more than 20 years, advocates have simultaneously overestimated the certainty with which climate science could predict the future and underestimated the economic and technological challenges associated with rapidly decarbonizing the energy economy. The oft-heard mantra that “All we lack is political will” assumes that the solutions to global warming are close at hand and that the primary obstacle to implementing them is public ignorance fed by fossil-fuel-funded skeptics.

Environmental advocates — with help from pollsters, psychologists, and cognitive scientists — have long understood that global warming represented a particularly problematic threat around which to mobilize public opinion. The threat is distant, abstract, and difficult to visualize. Faced with a public that has seemed largely indifferent to the possibility of severe climactic disruptions resulting from global warming, some environmentalists have tried to characterize the threat as more immediate, mostly by suggesting that global warming was already adversely impacting human societies, primarily in the form of increasingly deadly natural disasters.

The result has been an ever-escalating set of demands on climate science, with greens and their allies often attempting to represent climate science as apocalyptic, imminent, and certain, in no small part so that they could characterize all resistance as corrupt, anti-scientific, short-sighted, or ignorant. Greens pushed climate scientists to become outspoken advocates of action to address global warming. Captivated by the notion that their voices and expertise were singularly necessary to save the world, some climate scientists attempted to oblige. The result is that the use, and misuse, of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself.

Little surprise then, that most of the recent controversies besetting climate science involve efforts to move the proximity of the global warming threat closer to the present. The most explosive revelations of Climategate involved disputed methodological The use and misuse of climate science by advocates began to wash back into the science itself. techniques in which some researchers merged data sets to reinforce certain contentions, such as temperatures rising sharply in recent decades, resembling the so-called “hockey stick” shape. Whatever one thinks of the quality of the data sets, the methods used to combine them, or the efforts by some to shield the underlying data from critics, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that those involved were trying to fit the data to a trend that they already expected to see – namely that the spike in global carbon emissions in recent decades tracked virtually in lockstep with a concomitant spike in present-day global temperatures.

Other faulty or sloppy claims in the IPCC’s voluminous reports — such as the contention that global warming could melt Himalayan glaciers by 2035 — followed the same pattern.

Perhaps most problematic of all, with some environmentalists convinced that connecting global warming to natural disasters was the key to climate policy progress, researchers felt enormous pressure to demonstrate a link. But multiple studies using different methodologies and data sets show no statistically significant relationship between the rising cost of natural disasters and global warming. And according to a review sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation and Munich Re, researchers are unlikely to be able to unequivocally link storm or flood losses to anthropogenic warming for several decades, if even then. This is not because there is no evidence of increasing extreme weather, but rather because the rising costs of natural disasters have been driven so overwhelmingly by social and economic factors — more people with more wealth living in harm’s way.

Yet prominent environmental advocates, including Al Gore, have continued to make claims linking global warming to natural disasters. And in its 2007 report, the IPCC — ignoring evidence to the contrary — misrepresented disaster-loss science when it published a graph linking global temperature increases with rising financial losses from natural disasters.

Action in the Face of Uncertainty

It was only a matter of time before such claims would begin to undermine public confidence in climate science. Weather is not climate and linguistic subterfuges, such as the oft-repeated assertion that extreme weather events and natural disasters are “consistent with” climate change, do not change the reality that advocates and scientists who make such assertions are conflating short-term weather events with long-term climactic trends in a way that simply cannot be supported by the science.

For 20 years, greens and many scientists have overstated the certainty of climate disaster out of the belief that governments could not be motivated to act if they viewed the science as highly uncertain. And yet governments routinely take strong action in the face of highly uncertainty events. California requires strict building codes and has invested billions to protect against earthquakes even as earthquake science has shifted its focus from prediction to preparedness. Recently, the federal government mobilized impressively and effectively to prevent an avian flu epidemic whose severity was unknown.

In the end, there is no avoiding the enormous uncertainties inherent to our understanding of climate change. Whether 350 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere, or 450 or 550, is the right number in terms of atmospheric stabilization, any prudent strategy to Evidence of climate change was never going to drive Americans to demand painful limits on carbon. minimize future risks associated with catastrophic climate change involves decarbonizing our economy as rapidly as possible. Stronger evidence of climate change from scientists was never going to drive Americans to demand economically painful limits on carbon emissions or energy use. And uncertainty about climate science will not deter Americans from embracing energy and other policies that they perceive to be in the nation’s economic, national security, and environmental interest. This was the case in 1988 and is still largely the case today.

But the danger now is that having spent two decades demanding that the public and policy-makers obey climate science, and having established certainty and scientific consensus as the standard by which climate action should be judged, environmentalists risk undermining the case for building a clean-energy economy. Having allowed the demands of advocacy efforts to wash back into the production of climate science, the danger today is that the discrediting of the science will wash back into the larger effort to transform our energy policy.

Now is the time to free energy policy from climate science. In recent years, bipartisan agreement has grown on the need to decarbonize our energy supply through the expansion of renewables, nuclear power, and natural gas, as well as increased funding of research and development of new energy technologies. Carbon caps may remain as aspirational targets, but the primary role for carbon pricing, whether through auctioning pollution permits or a carbon tax, should be to fund low-carbon energy research, development, and deployment.

MORE FROM YALE e360

Climategate: Anatomy of
A Public Relations Disaster

The way that climate scientists have handled the fallout from the leaking of hacked e-mails is a case study in how not to respond to a crisis. But it also points to the need for climate researchers to operate with greater transparency and to provide more open access to data.
READ MORE No longer conscripted to justify and rationalize binding carbon caps or the modernization and decarbonization of our energy systems, climate science can get back to being primarily a scientific enterprise. The truth is that once climate science becomes detached from the expectation that it will establish a standard for allowable global carbon emissions that every nation on earth will heed, no one will much care about the hockey stick or the disaster-loss record, save those whose business, as scientists, is to attend to such matters.

Climate science can still usefully inform us about the possible trajectories of the global climate and help us prepare for extreme weather and natural disasters, whether climate change ultimately results in their intensification or not. And understood in its proper role, as one of many reasons why we should decarbonize the global economy, climate science can even help contribute to the case for taking such action. But so long as environmentalists continue to demand that climate science drive the transformation of the global energy economy, neither the science, nor efforts to address climate change, will be well served.

www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2257

[marchesarosa]

“Wind power Is No Solution To Anything” A Guest Weblog By Henk Tennekes
pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/03/03/wind-power-is-no-solution-to-anything-a-guest-weblog-by-henk-tennekes/


Wind energy is an engineer’s nightmare. To begin with, the energy density of flowing air is miserably low. Therefore, you need a massive contraption to catch one Megawatt at best, and a thousand of these to equal a single gas- or coal-fired power plant. If you design them for a wind speed of 15 m/s, they are useless at wind speeds below10 m/s and extremely dangerous at 20 m/s, unless feathered in time. Remember, power is proportional to the CUBE of the wind speed. Old-fashioned Dutch windmills needed a two-man crew on 12-hour watch, seven days a week, because a runaway windmill first burns its bearings, then its hardwood gears, then the entire superstructure. This was the nightmare of millers everywhere in the ‘good’ old days. And what did these beautiful antiques deliver? Fifteen horsepower at best, in favorable winds, about what a power lawn mower does these days. No wonder the Dutch switched to steam-powered pumping stations as soon as they could, in the late nineteenth century.

Since the power generated by modern wind turbines is so unpredictable, conventional power plants have to serve as back-ups. Therefore, these run at far less than half power most of the time. That is terribly uneconomical – only at full power they have good thermal efficiency and minimal CO2 emissions per kWh delivered. Think also a moment of the cable networks needed: not only a fine-maze distribution network at the consumer end, but also one at the generator end. And what about servicing? How do you get a repair crew to a lonely hillside? Especially when you decided to put the wind park at sea? Use helicopters – now THAT is green …!

For that matter, would you care to imagine what happens to rotor blades in freezing rain? Or how the efficiency of laminar-flow rotor blades decreases as bugs and dust accumulate on their leading edges? Or what did happen in Germany more than once? German legislation gives wind power absolute priority, so all other forms of generating electricity have to back off when the wind starts blowing. This creates dangerous, almost uncontrollable instabilities in the high-voltage network. At those moments, power plant operators all over Europe sweat blood, almost literally. The synchronization of the system is also a scary job : alternating currents at 100,000 volts or more cannot be out of phase more than one degree or so, else circuit breakers pop everywhere and a brownout all over Europe starts.

One application might be attractive, though. Suppose you fill a water basin in the hills nearby using wind power when it blows, and turn the water turbines on when emergency power is needed for one reason or another (a power plant failure, a cold winter night).

Wind power is a green mirage of the worst kind. It looks green to simple souls, but it is a technical nightmare. Nowhere I have been, be it Holland, Denmark, Germany, France, or California, have I seen wind parks where all turbines were operating properly. Typically, 20% stand idle, out of commission, broken down. Use Google Videos to find examples of wind turbine crashes, start meditating, and reach your own conclusions.

Only a few years ago, I changed my opinion on nuclear power. Now I think it is the only sensible alternative for the next twenty or thirty years. France was smart enough many years ago : unlike the rest of Europe, it can supply its citizens and industries with electricity even if Putin pulls another of his mean tricks.

Why don’t politicians listen to engineers? Why do engineers cave in to politically inspired financing? Merely to join the green daydreaming? I am an engineer; I want to be proud of my profession.

[marchesarosa]

From Arno Arrak

The EU has declared that ten percent of its transport should use biofuels by 2020. I bet you did not know that this requires that seventy percent of its cropland should be devoted to producing nothing but biofuel. Grain prices are already sky high thanks to current projects and there have been food riots in poor countries as a result. For England this means using their entire present grain harvest for biofuel and requires her to import as much grain as she now grows. No one has any idea of where that grain will come from.

Or take the windmills. Denmark is ahead of everyone in windmill land. But in 2002 they declared a moratorium on new windmill projects. Why? Because the wind does not blow steadily. They found that when the wind was light they had to buy expensive electricity from Germany. And when it was strong they had an excess on their hands. You cannot store it so they ended up selling it to Norway below their own cost. It was a lose-lose proposition and the Danish people are now paying the highest electricity rates in Europe.

And if you think that windmills are carbon free think again. It turned out that because of the uncertainty of wind speeds the outputs of individual systems kept fluctuating and it was necessary to keep a conventional “spinning reserve” on hand to take up that unpredictable slack at a moment’s notice. They get approximately eight percent of their electricity from these windmills. The same amount of power could be supplied at far lower cost by just one conventional coal-fired power station.

If the Waxman-Markey ever becomes law we are in for a whole lot of such irrational actions, all to fight a non-existent warming.


wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/10/my-thanks-and-comments-for-dr-walt-meier/

[marchesarosa]

As someone who has studied the wind power industry for several years and acts as an expert witness at wind power station public inquiries (it is a mis-nomer to call them wind farms), it is patently obvious that they are expensive white elephants whose sole purpose is to enrich developers and land owners (and other vested interests). The BWEA (now RenewablesUK) is one of the biggest peddlars of lies that I am aware of and yet it has the government's ear. Everybody else apart from developers and landownerssuffers financial loss, loss of amenity and destruction of the countryside. Industry will die or leave the country to places where there are reliable suppplies of competitively priced electricity. Money is being diverted to wind that should be spent on proper electricity generating stations. It is likely that we will have electricity supply shortages in the next 5 years or so due to the dash for wind.

One of the reasons the government wants to install smart meters in every home is so that they can restrict our energy use and avoid brown or blackouts as the result of nulabour's energy policy (or lack thereof - about a dozen energy ministers in 13 years results in lack of coordinated policy; and putting energy with climate change in DECC under Ed Miliband was the final straw).

May 1, 2010 | Phillip Bratby, Bishop Hill
bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2010/5/1/something-rotten-in-the-state-of-denmark.html#comments

[rsmith77]

Hi Mary,
Still reading the BBC science stuff. You're doing well, keep it up. I can't post on the site but have taken the fight to the heart of the beast....I'm standing for parliament. With some notable success already.
Regards
Mr Smith