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via Real Climate Science
July 12, 2025 at 09:40PM
By Vijay Jayaraj
You wake up to an alarm, flick on the light, brew coffee, and drive to work. Every step requires energy – the stuff that shares the coin of physical reality with matter, the E in E = MC2. It keeps homes warm, food fresh and economies running.
Supplying 80% of the world’s primary energy, coal, oil and natural gas make up the lifeblood of modern civilization. Yet, there continue to be calls for the abandonment of these fuels without any feasible, scalable replacement in sight.
It is dishonest for “green” lobbyists to claim that electricity from wind and solar can replace fossil fuels, when currently most of the energy used in the world is not even in the form of electricity.
Electricity represents only about 20% of global final energy consumption. That means four-fifths of the world’s energy use comes from fuels that power ships, planes, trucks and industrial furnaces. Oil fuels vehicles, natural gas provides heat for homes and industry, and coal is critically important for the manufacture of steel from iron.
Demand for hydrocarbons is expected to exceed that of electricity for many decades.
You’ve probably heard it before: “Solar and wind are now cheaper than fossil fuels.” This is a falsehood supported by a misleading metric – the levelized cost of electricity (LCOE). When Mark Twain spoke of “lies, damn lies and statistics,” he had LCOE in mind.
LCOE purports to present an apples-to-apples comparison between various energy sources. However, the measure is meaningless because it ignores key costs such as those of providing backup power to compensate for the intermittency of solar and wind. Something must be available to step up when the wind and sun are not available for power generation.
While it may be true that sunshine and wind are “free,” converting them to a form of energy that works with modern power grids and integrating them into the 24-hour operation of electrical systems supplying millions of customers is difficult and expensive.
A 2022 study by Robert Idel exposes LCOE’s flaws.
First, LCOE assumes constant output, but solar and wind produce only 20%-30% of their designed capacity, compared to 80%-90% for plants running on coal, natural gas or nuclear fuel.
This commentary was first published by RealClearMarkets on July 7, 2025.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO₂ Coalition, Fairfax, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
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via Watts Up With That?
July 12, 2025 at 08:01PM
By David Wojick
I keep reading how big batteries are all it takes to make wind and solar reliable as the sole grid electricity source. The reality is that making wind and solar work at all requires a fantastic amount of battery backup, far more than is possible.
Below is an example using the PJM grid. PJM is America’s biggest grid operator, with a territory covering the Mid-Atlantic and points west. Their territory includes the Washington, DC metro area, where all the federal bigwigs live, making it a good place to start. I also live there.
We are quantifying a fantasy, so let’s keep it very simple. In fact, the basic question is why hasn’t PJM done this simple analysis? They do a lot of sophisticated grid modeling. Or maybe they have done this crucial assessment, but it is a secret, which is even worse.
Consider a single day in a typical peak demand summer heatwave. The heatwave is due to a stagnant high-pressure system called a Bermuda high, so there is not enough wind to generate usable wind power, no matter how much generating capacity is available.
It is sunny during the day, so let’s assume that for 8 hours we get enough solar to meet demand (or, as I prefer to call it, to meet need). For the other 16 hours, we meet demand using batteries. We import nothing because our neighbors are in the same needy boat.
Finally, for simplicity, I assume the demand is at the peak level for the entire 24 hour day. This overestimates things a bit, but we will find that does not matter. A fancier analysis would use a typical demand curve. PJM can handle that.
My example year is 2030, as that is a standard near-term transition target year for which we have reasonable estimates of peak demand. Here then are the very simple numbers.
PJM’s estimate peak demand for 2030 is about 180,000 MW.
Meeting that for 16 hours with batteries requires 2,880,000 MWh of usable storage.
Usable storage is between 20% and 80% of nameplate battery capacity, hence 60%.
Thus we need 4,800,000 MWh of nameplate battery capacity.
Storage facility capital costs vary, but $500,000 per MWh is a reasonable estimate.
This gives a total cost of $2.4 trillion, or $2,400,000,000,000, for the batteries to make wind and solar reliable in this case. This fantastic cost is clearly not feasible.
There are things that could make this number go down a bit, such as reduced cost per MWh. But given last year saw just 130,000 MWh installed worldwide, the production capacity does not exist, so we are talking about new mines and factories. It actually cannot be done by 2030, not even close.
But the realistic numbers would be much higher if this fantasy played out because low wind, near-peak heatwaves often last for several days, even a week. Ten trillion dollars is easily possible. We are, after all, talking about hundreds of thousands of tractor-trailer sized batteries, basically containers full of expensive chemicals. Moreover, this is just for PJM.
Batteries simply cannot make a transition to wind and solar power feasible. The amount, and hence the cost, of storage is far too great.
Given the simplicity of this analysis, using readily available data, the big question is why are these impossible numbers not already widely known? PJM and their big utilities all do detailed modeling and supposed reliability assessments. So does NERC, whose sole mission is reliability. Many utilities file annual Integrated Resource Plans with their state regulators, typically looking out 20 years or more.
That battery backup cannot make wind and solar powered grids possible is obvious given these incredible numbers. The electric power industry must know this, but their silence is deafening.
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via Watts Up With That?
July 12, 2025 at 04:08PM
I have already reviewed Astwood Bank (as well as Cardiff and Aboyne) however, following yesterday’s outrageous and frankly dishonest claims by the Met Office, I feel I should go into further depth to expose their deliberate disinformation agenda. No credible meteorologist could accept that Astwood Bank reading is in any way reliable but, of course, this has nothing to do with either meteorology or indeed even any science. Political ideologies must rule.
Firstly another site aerial image to help orientation. Google maps and aerial images run north to top, south to the bottom. The site address is a domestic house known as Alwynne, 48 The Ridgeway Astwood Bank Redditch. I do not wish to be the cause of any upset to the owner, however, the Met Office itself freely publishes all this information and the homeowner is fully aware of the details being in the public arena.
The north of this site is a spur off the main road (The Ridgeway) down which the Google Streetview camera partly went. This is what is shown of that northern boundary.
To give an idea of the scale the brick pillars are 22 brick courses high – the working height of a brick is 3 inches so those pillars are 5 feet 6 inches (1.67 metres) plus capping stones. I conservatively estimate the wind barrier to the north in the region of 12 feet (3.7 metres) high. Another image angle offers a different perspective.
Very obviously indeed the tree to the end of the hedgeline is much taller again. The front of the house is shown to be a large area of concrete driveway and parking. This elevation is particularly important given the wind conditions of the afternoon of 11th July in this region. There is no anemometer published data for Astwood bank but the wind direction is. What very light breeze there may have been was from the north.
To gain a very good indication of wind speed, the nearest official site with an anemometer is the fully equipped Pershore site (formerly RAF Throckmorton hence very sophisticated wind speed and direction recording equipment) just 8 miles to the south south west.
This confirms a northerly very light breeze measured at 10 metres above ground level ranging from 6 kph down to dead flat calm throughout the record period. This will be discussed in detail later, however, it is blatantly obvious that any wind there was at the Astwood Bank area would have been completely blocked by the significant perimeter hedging and trees to this site.
The general eastern side to the screen is firstly the wide ranging house with the extensive concrete driveway and parking area. The property is single storey but with an elevated roof section indicating loft conversion and a ridge height in excess of 5 metres. Further treess, shrubs and conservatory extension form a total wind block to this side.
Now consider the length of shadow by the house and relate that to the shadow cast by the predominantly south hedge perimeter.
It is again obvious that this southern hedging is very high probably higher than the ridge of the house at 5 metres. Again a total wind block.
The final west elevation is a similarly well manicured thick hedge that sits just 3.5 metres from the screen. A differently timed image indicates the level of visual shade this hedge creates.
All of the above is to confirm beyond any doubt that this site is completely sheltered from wind from any angle and that in layman’s terms this is a “suntrap” garden. The relevance of this is that it is perfectly well known that in low wind speeds (and in this case at Astwood Bank it was guaranteed dead flat calm) Stevenson’s screens will (not possibly, nor maybe) in strong sunny conditions, overheat. This defect was in fact ascertained in 1884 in the same year that the Met Office formally adopted this type of instrument screen. Scottish meteorologist John Aitken identified this overheating effect which later adopted his name “Aitken Effect”
The Met Office itself used to openly acknowledge this problem. Their “Factsheet 17” entitled “Observations over land” specifically states “Anomalies may arise when the wind is light and the temperature of the outer wall is markedly different from the air temperature.” Clearly the term “anomalies” is a euphemism for overheating.
Dr Eric Huxter elaborated on this well known overheating problem and cited research by internationally regarded meteorologists of the Royal Meteorological Society and Reading University such as Dr Steven Burt. This research unequivocally supports the fact that Stevenson screens in such low wind speeds and sunny conditions will not give accurate representations of the real world temperature.
Is there any more real world further evidence to substantiate this as an over-recorded reading?
One of the nearest weather stations to Astwood Bank is the Class 2 site at Wellesbourne. I have not reviewed Wellesbourne yet as I was actually saving the good quality sites until the latter part of this project. Whilst I have referred to the likes of Rothamsted (England), Thomastown (Northern Ireland), Trawsgoed (Wales) and even Craibstone (Scotland) as good quality sites, these reports were partly to relieve the monotony of reporting on so many junk sites. There are in fact several very good quality sites to review shortly and Wellesbourne is one of them. Without going into details now, simply contrast this site’s location with Astwood Bank.
There certainly is nothing breaking the wind in this open site. Even in low wind speed conditions Wellesbourne is much less likely to encounter any Aitken Effect.
Wellesbourne peaked at 32.6°C which is 2.1°C lower than recorded at Astwood Bank.The latter’s figure undoubtedly the result of the well noted likely effect of Aitken warming effect – and the Met Office must know that. If not they are incompetent.
How this Astwood Bank site even came into its adopted Met Office existence reads more like a tale of a cottage industry than latter day 20th century science. The official public record is here, with this from the local newspaper
Hold this thought……..a hobbyist’s “passion” is now proof of the anthropogenic global warming narrative according to the UK tax payer funded Met Office from a 100% Junk site giving known corrupted readings.
I challenge any meteorologist to defend using this Astwood Bank site readings in this way.
This is political disinformation and marks the death of Met Office credibility.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
July 12, 2025 at 01:20PM
Iowa Climate Science Education 