Month: April 2017

Uncategorized 26 Apr 2017

Why Renewables Cost More (some basics for short attention spans)

via Master Resource
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“Power plants, usually natural gas, must be kept in spinning reserve, ready to come online when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. There is the cost of natural gas to keep these units operating off-line, as well as maintenance costs from the added wear and tear on these units.”

“The strongest winds, which are the best for generating electricity, are found hundreds, if not a thousand or more miles away from where the electricity is used. Fossil-fuel] power plants are located closer to where the electricity is used.”

“Coal-fired and NGCC power plants were built to operate as baseload plants operating continuously. Cycling results in an increase in the number of cold-starts and shutdowns.”

The renewable-energy lobby has the advantage of many citizens having short attention spans and not being experts in the field. Thus the notion of a free energy input (wind) seems appealing–clean and green and cheap.

But this impression is opposite from the truth in many ways. Cost-wise, it is fallacious.

Aside from the fact that the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) is higher for wind and solar, there are many other operating costs that result in wind and solar being far more expensive than coal or natural gas for generating electricity.

Back-up

This is a well-documented cost, where power plants, usually natural gas, must be kept in spinning reserve, ready to come online when the wind stops blowing or the sun stops shining. Wind and solar are unreliable, and must have back-up power ready to go on-line at a moment’s notice. First, there is the cost of natural gas to keep these units operating off-line, but secondly, there are the additional maintenance costs from the added wear and tear on these units.

Storage

Storage is required to minimize the effect of rapid ramping up of fossil fuel power plants when the sun sets, or as an alternative to keeping natural gas power plants in spinning reserve. The CAISO Duck curve illustrates what happens when the sun sets, and fossil fuel power plants must be rapidly brought on-line to meet demand. Storage could theoretically provide some of the power needed when the sun sets.

The cost of storage varies, but at a minimum is around $2,000 per KW, about the same as the cost of a new natural gas combined cycle power plant. A recent trial by Pacific Gas & Electric resulted in storage costs that were more than twice as large.

The CAISO Duck Curve illustrates the sudden ramping as renewables increase.

Transmission lines

The strongest winds, which are the best for generating electricity, are found hundreds, if not a thousand or more miles away from where the electricity is used. This requires building expensive transmission lines. While it’s true, new coal-fired or natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) power plants may also need new transmission lines, these power plants are located closer to where the electricity is used.

The Joint Coordinated System Plan determined it would cost an additional $200 billion to build the transmission lines needed if only half the nation used wind energy, where wind supplied only 20% of the power.

More recent is the Pathfinder wind energy project that requires a $3 billion investment in transmission lines (see, Absurd Cost of California Wind).

Cycling

Coal-fired and NGCC power plants were built to operate as baseload plants operating continuously.

Because wind and solar operate intermittently, it’s necessary for these baseload plants to cycle up and down, following the constantly changing output from wind and solar plants. Cycling also results in an increase in the number of cold-starts and shutdowns.

Cycling puts an added strain on boilers, turbines and many other components of the transmission and distribution system. Thermal expansion and contraction is the main culprit. Different materials have different coefficients of expansion, so boiler tubing may expand more rapidly than the firewalls and other materials surrounding the tubing.

Ramping up when the sun sets, as described above, also causes this type of damage.

This damage increases maintenance costs. Utilities, such as Duke Power, are installing new monitoring equipment and attempting to develop new operating methods in an effort to minimize the damaging effects of transient temperatures.

Industry trade publications, such as Power Magazine and Turbomachinery International, are recognizing the damaging and costly effects of cycling.

Summary

All of these are operating costs that are borne by the utility and eventually paid for by customers.

They don’t include the social costs when there is a blackout, such as occurred in South Australia due to the unreliability of wind and solar. And not included is the environmental problem of energy sprawl from dilute in place of dense energy, explained elsewhere.

The post Why Renewables Cost More (some basics for short attention spans) appeared first on Master Resource.

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April 25, 2017 at 06:03PM

Uncategorized 26 Apr 2017

We’re All Victims Of The Great Green Swindle

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
http://www.thegwpf.com

A generation who thought they were doing the right thing by buying diesel and clean energy have been taken for a ride.

When I was three my parents moved next to one of the busiest roundabouts in Europe. Hogarth roundabout in west London leads to the M3 and M4 and the smell of car fumes was only overpowered by the aroma of hops from the brewery on the corner. It was the perfect place to grow up. We had a huge green in front where we could stand on the railings and count the number of cars whizzing past. No one in the 1970s worried about the lead pollution, only about being run over. Nor did we care about where our electricity came from unless the lights went out. Green issues were not high on our agenda nor was our health. Our neighbours happily smoked away and we ate tinned spaghetti hoops and Angel Delight without a care for the sugar content.

Now my family is as green and healthy as possible. We recycle our apple cores, the children play sport every day under the Westway flyover, we bought a second-hand diesel car and then a hybrid and take the train to Devon for holidays. But the children are probably less healthy than I was 40 years ago. When the youngest started to wheeze I took him to the doctor who said he had doubled the number of inhalers he hands out in the past three years, so many children are becoming asthmatic.

“It’s the diesel, all that nitrogen dioxide and those toxic pollutants,” he explained. “He’ll inhale the particles in the car even with the windows shut, when he’s playing football by a busy road and even from the trains at the station.”

Our obsession with cutting carbon emissions has had terrible consequences. Air pollution contributes to an estimated 40,000 premature deaths a year in Britain, mainly among the young, the frail and the elderly, according to the Royal Colleges of Physicians and of Paediatrics and Child Health. It can also hinder brain development, raise the risk of heart attacks, strokes and cancer, and contribute to the onset of Alzheimer’s.

Our attempts to be altruistic have harmed rather than helped the most vulnerable. Almost as bad, those 11 million people who now own a diesel car are about to be penalised for following government advice a decade ago that the vehicles would help the country cut CO2 emissions. […]

Gordon Brown’s budget of 1998 may have said in the small print that the government “recognises the adverse effect that the use of diesel has on local air quality” but first as chancellor and then as prime minister he shifted incentives towards diesel, until more than 35 per cent of cars were running on it, while manufacturers fiddled their engine management systems to cheat the testers. Japan, meanwhile, steered consumers away from polluting diesel, America stuck to petrol and India began switching buses to compressed natural gas (CNG).

The same mistake is now being made subsidising power stations to burn American wood pellets that are doing more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, according to a recent Chatham House report. Drax in Yorkshire, once the largest, cleanest, most efficient coal-fired power station in Europe, has been converted to burn wood pellets with an annual £500 million public subsidy but it now pumps out more CO2. Wind farms are little better because we’ve had to build diesel power plants across the country to help on days when the wind doesn’t blow at the right speed.

One Scottish stately home owner boasted to me that he keeps his heating on in the summer as well as the winter because he is paid more in subsidies to use “green” wood chips for fuel than he pays out in heating costs. All this while the rest of us worry about our escalating energy bills.

Anaerobic digesters, which were sold to the public as a means to convert food waste into power, are now turning huge quantities of crops into small quantities of methane for the national gas grid thanks to yet more subsidies costing £200 million a year.

But it is car manufacturers who are still making the most money out of this great green swindle — consumers certainly aren’t. Diesel owners now face having to buy another car at vast expense. Scrappage payments of between £1,000 and £2,000 for the oldest diesel cars would help those hardest hit. However, if we subsidise new electric cars we will have to accept that much of the electricity used to charge their batteries comes from power stations using fossil fuels — or wood chips.

This week Andrea Leadsom, the environment secretary, shelved a new plan for air quality. But Downing Street policy advisers hint that Theresa May is on the side of the consumer, and sceptical of the latest money-spinning environmental fad. Last year, the prime minister’s joint chief of staff Nick Timothy described the Climate Change Act, which has been at the root of many of these misguided policies, as “a monstrous act of national self-harm”. He was right. As soon as the election is over Britain needs a coordinated energy strategy and a new Clean Air Act, to protect the environment and restore faith in government policy.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

April 25, 2017 at 05:53PM

Uncategorized 26 Apr 2017

Stunned – By Stupidity And Dishonesty

via The Deplorable Climate Science Blog
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Last April, the fake news Washington Post said scientists were stunned by a warm day in Greenland.

Scientists are stunned by what just happened in Greenland – The Washington Post

They were stunned by a warm day in April, 2016, but apparently were not stunned by the below normal melt for the rest of the melt season.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

The scientists also were not stunned by the record Greenland ice growth since September, 2016.

Greenland Ice Sheet Surface Mass Budget: DMI

One of the favorite techniques of climate fraudsters, is to cherry-pick one outlier and then fail to report the much larger picture when it doesn’t fit their narrative.

via The Deplorable Climate Science Blog http://ift.tt/2i1JH7O

April 25, 2017 at 05:07PM

Uncategorized 25 Apr 2017

My Nobel Prize Proposal

via The Deplorable Climate Science Blog
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The genetics Nobel Prize for 2017 should be given to whoever can figure out how to trade Miley Cyrus and Ashley Judd, for Freddy Mercury and David Bowie.