Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 11 May 2017

Robot Tractors!

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Guest Post by Dave Ward

Many readers of this blog will be familiar with the Eastern Daily Press, one of the Archant publishing group’s longest serving titles. It proudly claims to be the country’s largest circulation regional daily newspaper. However, I was told many years ago that it also happens to be the country’s ONLY regional daily newspaper – but never let a good selling point get in the way! Produced and printed in the city of Norwich, home to the UEA, it regularly features press releases from that famous institution, and also from the burgeoning “renewable” industry in the region. However they rarely question any such information provided – that is left to a handful of readers (like me) who take the time to write in. Even when we do, it’s almost a given that submissions will be edited (ostensibly to fit the limited space available), but also in subtle ways which alter the meaning. Despite numerous complaints about poor reporting standards they continue to trot out stuff like this:

Imagine a farm where driverless electric tractors roam the fields, day and night, before silently connecting themselves to solar-powered charging points ready for their next autonomous shift.”

Who on earth penned that! I’m not a farmer, but I’ve spent much of my time around small farms and do some work for one of them, so it’s immediately obvious that the writer hasn’t the faintest idea of the realities involved.

How do they “roam” day AND night, if relying on Solar Power? Certainly not with the capability of the John Deere SESAM prototype – 4 hours (max) use, followed by 3 hours charging. Look at any graph of solar output versus the time of day and the pronounced peak around midday is obvious. This would give the fastest charge times, but by late afternoon the battery would be flat, and solar output rapidly falling. It would (probably) be fully charged by mid-morning the next day, but then you would miss the peak charge opportunity whilst using it. Do they expect farmers to have several (very expensive) machines sitting around, charging when they can, just to get a semblance of normal diesel fuelled usage? And where are these solar panels going to be installed – not the fields being worked in, that’s for sure. The power requirements will be huge, and for Mr Fairman to compare them with robot vacuum cleaners or lawn mowers (both of which are considerably less powerful than their mains operated cousins) is disingenuous, to say the least.

With the demands of modern “just in time” harvesting & production, farmers have to be prepared to work from dawn to dusk (or even longer) during busy periods. To keep a conventional tractor (or combine) running all that’s needed is a fuel bowser, which can usually be towed to the site behind the 4×4 which the operator often travels in anyway. With the present state of battery technology the idea that fleets of tractors will be charging from solar panels is absurd. We are not talking about a 30 mile daily commute to work in a car. If, however, they make use of mains power it becomes (slightly) more sensible, but the “Eco” credentials go out the window. This approach would still require considerable investment – whilst 11kV power lines are never far from rural fields, voltage reduction transformers and charging equipment would be needed at frequent intervals. I’m willing to bet that large scale deployment of electrically powered farm machinery would put a strain on those local networks, as well. And surely they won’t be expected to supplement the grid, as is being talked about with cars? Can you imagine a farmer having to phone Birds Eye and explain that he can’t harvest their peas because the sun didn’t shine and/or the wind didn’t blow meaning his electric tractor battery is flat…

Electric tractors are not “silent” either – watch this promotional video and listen to it moving off at time 2:14. Now consider how happy you would be with several of them working nearby at 3:00am! There seems to be some discrepancy over the power output and range. The quote says “130kW of continuous power” – which would agree with “174hp” in this picture from the National Farmers Union (NFU):

Unfortunately, in the video an on-board information display shows two bar graphs of only 50kW each:

My basic maths makes that a total of 100kW, NOT 130 – which equates to 134hp. I’m unsure why each bar has a negative scale, but as there is a “Cooling” light below, it may indicate when battery power is being used for cooling? Furthermore, 100kW divided by 150kWhrs (if this is what the RHD display really means) equates to just 1½ hours at full power (or just over an hour for 130kW).

4 hours worth of operation means just 37.5kW / 50hp, and it won’t be pulling a 6 furrow plough on that. I appreciate full power is not always needed, but a conventional diesel fuelled machine can deliver it for as long as the tank will allow (and can then be re-fuelled in a matter of minutes). There may be limited opportunity for regenerative braking if towing on the road, but certainly not when working in fields. I can’t find fuel consumption figures in the publications for John Deere’s conventional range – rather odd considering it must be an important factor for the farmer. So without comparing similar engines fitted in other vehicles it is difficult to work out relative hourly operating costs – maybe that’s intentional?

There is also some ambiguity over where, in the existing range, this prototype fits in. According to that picture it is based on a 6 series chassis, and with 100kW, is comparable to the 6135M, for instance. This model has a 265 litre / 58 gallon fuel tank, which should give rather more than 4 hours endurance, I suspect! And yet in another video it sports a “7830” label, which doesn’t appear in the current JD brochure, but the “7” series range covers 210 to 310hp. The German text in the second clip mentions “400PS” (1PS = 0.986 horsepower), but which ever way you look at it a 100kW machine is not in the same ballpark. Pure electric cars may have startling acceleration, compared to similar petrol or diesel models, but they don’t do the sort of work a large tractor is expected to. The high starting torque available from electric drive systems might be beneficial in getting a multi-furrow plough started in a clay field, but sustained power after that is needed to get to the other end, and to do it over and over all day…

The proponents of electric vehicles constantly bang on about “revolutionary” advances in battery technology being “just around the corner” but similar claims have been made about other things in the past. Until they can offer the same energy density as conventional fuels the idea that we can simply replace I/C engines is pie in the sky, even disregarding where the extra electricity is supposed to come from.

There was a further section in the EDP article:

I suppose smaller autonomous battery powered agricultural vehicles, such as crop sprayers, might have a reasonable chance of success, as they don’t have to drag ploughs and heavy trailers around. Being able to operate at night also gives a better chance of applying their payload accurately, when winds are often lighter. But the NFU suggestion that technology could help farmers post-Brexit is rather wide of the mark, if John Deere are anything to go by. The company have been getting a lot of negative publicity lately regarding their policy of denying owners of their machinery access to technical information and diagnostic equipment. At least a conventional machine can be worked on (with pirated software), but what chance would even the most enterprising farm mechanic have with a fully electric machine? And the sight of a 750 volt battery sitting there with the connectors apparently covered in little more than some plastic film ought to ring alarm bells…

On the other hand, there may be the possibility for someone to “hack” an electric tractor and give it a Tesla style “Ludicrous” mode. The mind boggles…

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May 11, 2017 at 06:09AM

Uncategorized 11 May 2017

Paris Agreement: Carbon Tax Elders Offer More Bad Advice

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Paris Agreement: Carbon Tax Elders Offer More Bad Advice | Watts Up With That?

Guest essay by Marlo Lewis Jr. of the Competitive Enterprise Institute

They’re back! The same GOP elders who have been pushing what American Enterprise Institute economist Ben Zycher charitably calls “The Deeply Flawed Case for a Carbon Tax” are now urging President Trump to stay in the Paris Agreement.

Yesterday in the New York Times, former Reagan Secretary of State George P. Shultz and his Climate Leadership Council colleague Ted Halstead, who heads the organization, argue that staying in the pact will “spur new investment, strengthen American competitiveness, create jobs, ensure American access to global markets and help reduce future business risks associated with the changing climate” whereas exiting will “yield the opposite.”

Shultz and Halstead ignore the chief perils of remaining in the Paris Agreement:

The Agreement is the legal framework for a permanent global campaign of political pressure and diplomatic blowback to “name and shame” leaders, like Trump, who dare to champion the American people’s freedom to develop the country’s vast energy resources.
Remaining in the Agreement ensures that U.S. leaders will continually have to negotiate domestic energy policy with foreign governments, multilateral bureaucrats, and anti-growth advocacy groups—elites who do not put America’s interests first.
If Trump is free to treat President Obama’s emission-reduction pledge—the U.S. “nationally determined contribution” (NDC)—as a retractable wish list rather than the official commitment it plainly is, the next progressive president will similarly be free to rescind Trump’s NDC and pick up where Obama left off. No revision of the U.S. NDC can secure the future of U.S. energy producers as well as exiting a pact designed to bankrupt them.
Failing to repudiate a treaty adopted unilaterally, with the stroke of a presidential pen, without benefit of the Senate’s advice and consent, will set a dangerous precedent undermining one of the Constitution’s important checks and balances.

Shultz and Halstead write that, “Our companies are best served by a stable and predictable international framework that commits all nations to climate-change mitigation.” No so. Our companies are best served by an international framework that allows them to capitalize on comparative advantages. One of U.S. industry’s key advantages, so vital to the manufacturing renaissance on which Trump campaigned, is an abundance of affordable energy.

As Stephen Eule of the U.S. Chamber’s Institute for 21^st Century Energy explains:

It is well understood that America’s abundance of affordable, reliable energy provides businesses a critical operating advantage in today’s intensely competitive global economy. IEA [International Energy Agency] data show a huge comparative energy advantage in natural gas, electricity, and coal prices for U.S. industry compared to its OECD competitors, with prices for these energy sources in the United States often two to four times less.

European Union environment minister Margot Wallström once said that the “Kyoto [Protocol] is about the economy, about leveling the playing field for big business around the world.” That goes in spades for the Paris Agreement. The only way to impose high European energy prices on U.S. firms is to pressure U.S. leaders to adopt European energy policies.

Humorless scolds never consider that candidate Trump might have been twisting their tails when he tweeted that “The concept of global warming was invented by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Eule notes that the marginal cost of carbon dioxide emission reductions under China’s mostly business-as-usual NDC is $0 per ton whereas the marginal cost under the U.S. NDC is $85 per ton. What I find in Trump’s funny tweet is a serious point: Global warming is the rationale for the Paris Agreement, which would handicap U.S. manufacturers much more than it would China’s.

Shultz and Halsteed warn there will be “repercussions” and damage to America’s “reputation and credibility” if “America fails to honor a global agreement that it helped forge.” However, the exact same can be said if America fails to implement the NDC on the basis of which the Obama administration negotiated the Agreement, and which he subsequently submitted as the official U.S. commitment. The Paris Agreement expressly provides two options for withdrawing, but provides no option to “adjust” an NDC to make it less stringent. By what logic is the former less kosher than the latter?

Shultz and Hallstead would have us believe that Article 4.11, which states that a party “may” adjust its NDC “with a view to enhancing the level of ambition” also implies the party may adjust the NDC to do just the reverse. Huh?

That theory can’t be right, because it conflicts with the plain meaning of words like promise, pledge, and commitment. Try applying it to more mundane circumstances. Dad promises to pick up the kids after school. He fails to do so and they wait for hours in the freezing rain. Mom demands to know why he broke his promise. Dad retorts: “I did not break my promise, because I am now retracting it!”

Shultz and Halstead note that “Global statecraft relies on trust, reputation and credibility, which can be all too easily squandered.” No quarrel there. But that’s actually a reason to withdraw. President Obama had no business putting the trust, reputation, and credibility of the United States on the line without first vetting the Paris Agreement with the U.S. Senate. Submitting the Agreement to the Senate for its review would have spared everyone the present controversy, because the pact had no chance of being approved.

Article II, Section 2, clause 2 of the Constitution states:

He [the President] shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur. . . .

The advice and consent process is a quality control filter. Especially as combined with the supermajority ratification requirement, Senate review ensures that no treaty will be adopted without broad-based political support. That discourages the executive from promising others more than the political composition of the country and statutory authorities actually allow him, or his successors, to deliver. The treaty process minimizes the risk that national interest concerns will impel one executive to upend international commitments made by his predecessor.

Shultz and Hallstead should be encouraging Trump to repudiate the dangerous precedent Obama set, not validate it. After all, how much confidence can other countries put in U.S. leaders if the latter cannot be trusted to follow their own Constitution’s rules of international engagement?

Shultz and Hallstead claim “the only risk Mr. Trump faces from altering or weakening domestic climate policy under Paris is in the court of public opinion, not in federal courts.” The court of public opinion, however, is what ultimately determines the direction of public policy. As long as we stay in, the Agreement will give “progressives” at home and abroad a high-profile global platform for lobbying U.S. policymakers and influencing public opinion.

It is naïve to suppose that legitimizing such an arrangement could not severely narrow the energy policy choices available to future administrations, Congresses, and voters. It is also naïve to assume the U.S. government can remain in a pact built on the narrative that governments must take urgent action to avert planetary disaster without inviting courts to step in when policymakers fail to deliver.

Shultz and Hallstead warn that “pulling out of the agreement could subject the United States to retaliatory trade measures, enabling other countries to leapfrog American industry.” But they just told us the only penalty for tearing up Obama’s NDC is bad PR. If pulling out exposes us to retaliatory carbon tariffs, why wouldn’t replacing Obama’s emission reduction pledge with a drill-baby-drill-style enthusiasm for new oil and gas exploration?

None of Shultz and Hallstead’s arguments for staying in make much sense. Until we get to the penultimate paragraph. Then we learn what they’re really after—a carbon tax:

If the president wants to strengthen America’s competitive position, he should combine a price on carbon with border tariffs or rebates based on carbon content. United States exports to countries without comparable carbon pricing systems would receive rebates, while imports from such countries would face tariffs on the carbon content of their products.

Far from viewing the Paris Agreement as a voluntary pact with no penalties for non-compliance, Shultz and Hallstead actually expect the Agreement to be enforced through a global regime of “border tariffs or rebates based on carbon content.” They want the United States to lead the world into a new era of retaliatory trade measures. History, however, suggests protectionism is harmful to world peace and prosperity. Also, how do they know U.S. firms would always or usually prevail in trade disputes, rewarded with rebates rather than penalized with tariffs?

Zycher points out how difficult it would be for the border tariff/rebate assessors to equilibrate carbon taxes with “regulations, or subsidies for such alternative energy sources as wind and solar power, or other policies that are purported to reduce [greenhouse gas] emissions.” Even more difficult is factoring in “the international supply chain phenomenon: Goods imported from a given nation are likely to embody components and other inputs from other nations—perhaps many other nations—in vastly differing proportions, and those nations’ policies on GHG emissions almost certainly will vary considerably.”

Sorting it all out—especially in anything approaching real time—would likely require “a new bureaucracy, or perhaps an expanded one at the Internal Revenue Service,” making highly technical decisions with “important implications” for profits, shareholder value, and market share. Hardly a plan to make America great again.

Trump should be wary of taking advice about the Paris Agreement from carbon tax advocates, because their political judgment is terrible. The battle for hearts and minds in American politics is to no small extent a contest between a party that is pro-tax and anti-energy and a party that is anti-tax and pro-energy. That clear product differentiation is a political asset of enormous value to the GOP. Indeed, that sharp contrast was an important factor enabling Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 elections and the GOP to retain majorities in the House and Senate.

So now a group of GOP elders argues that Trump, despite promising to cut taxes and remove political impediments to domestic energy production, should impose a new tax on energy. Similarly, they argue that Trump, despite promising to “cancel” America’s participation in the Paris Agreement, should stay in. And all so that America can finally get the carbon tax the elders think is a brilliant idea.

Had Trump campaigned for the Paris Agreement and a carbon tax in 2016, would he still have defeated Hillary Clinton? Indeed, had he campaigned as Shultz and Hallstead now urge him to govern, would he even have won the GOP nomination?

Those are questions Trump and his advisors should consider carefully if he does not want to become a mere blip on the road to a carbon-constrained future rather the president who changed the direction of U.S. energy policy and made America great again.

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May 11, 2017 at 06:00AM

Uncategorized 11 May 2017

As the World Cuts Back on Coal, a Growing Appetite in Africa

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By Paul Homewood

Two contrasting news items today:

New coal plants in Africa are largely being paid for by China and developed countries that are turning away from the technology at home. Here’s why.

A coal mine in Zimbabwe is one of the signs of activity for the fossil fuel in a developing Africa.

Lamu, Kenya

Few places in the world exude a sense of timelessness as Lamu, an island off of Kenya’s northern coast home to the oldest and best preserved Swahili settlement in East Africa. Lamu’s old town, a UNESCO World Heritage site and an epicenter of Indian Ocean trade for centuries, is a maze of narrow winding streets that cut through neighborhoods of limestone and coral houses, past elaborately carved mahogany doors and several dozen mosques and churches. Only a handful of motor vehicles are allowed on the island; transportation is mainly the domain of donkeys or men pushing wooden carts thorough the tropical swelter.

Yet Lamu Island’s 24,000 residents are faced with what many here call an existential crisis. Some 15 miles north of town, on a sparsely populated seaside area of the mainland formerly used for growing maize, cashews, and sesame, a Kenyan company known as Amu Power is preparing to erect a $2 billion coal power plant, the first of its kind in East Africa.

Financed with Chinese, South African, and Kenyan capital, and built by the state-owned Power Construction Corporation of China, the plant is intended to add 1,050 megawatts of capacity to Kenya’s national grid and power operations of an adjacent 32 berth deep-water port. Both are part of an ambitious government plan to transform Kenya into a newly industrializing, middle-income country by 2030.

The project is controversial in part due to the risks it poses to Lamu’s delicate marine environment, which many fear will harm its two most vital industries: fishing and tourism. Yet it is also emblematic of Africa’s growing appetite for coal, the most polluting form of power generation, which until now has existed in significant quantities only in the continent’s most industrialized country, South Africa.

According to data compiled by CoalSwarm, an industry watchdog, more than 100 coal-generating units with a combined capacity of 42.5 gigawatts are in various stages of planning or development in 11 African countries outside of South Africa—more than eight times the region’s existing coal capacity. Nearly all are fueled by foreign investment, and roughly half are being financed by the world’s largest coal emitter: China.

The International Energy Agency projects the region’s electricity demand to triple by 2040, with roughly half of new capacity coming from renewables. Yet coal-fired plants, which generate 41 percent of the world’s electricity today, remain attractive because coal is relatively cheap and their operation isn’t subject to the whims of nature—unlike solar, wind, or hydro.

In Kenya, for example, the country’s 800 megawatts of hydropower, one third of its total capacity, has become increasingly unreliable due to recurrent drought and is virtually inoperable at present, according to Richard Muiru, an advisor to Kenya’s Ministry of Energy and Petroleum. Although the country has extensive wind and geothermal resources, which it has started to exploit, these projects aren’t coming online fast enough, Muiru says, to keep up with Kenya’s projected demand.

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To put the numbers into perspective, the figure quoted for new build, 42.5GW, is effectively double the coal plant capacity that we had in the UK in 2011, before it started to be run down.

Africa’s embrace of coal is in part the result of its acute shortage of power. Although the continent’s economy has doubled in size since 2000, more than two thirds of residents south of the Sahara still live without electricity and most states lack the grid capacity to drive the expansion of job-creating industries.

Being from National Geographic, the article warbles on about how renewables are really the answer to Africa’s problems.

But the Kenyan Government, and those of other African nations, clearly realise that this is nonsense, and that only the sort of cheap, reliable power, which coal brings, is capable of lifting their economies out of the dark age.

Meanwhile, as GWPF report, Europe’s biggest solar company has just gone bust:

Germany’s SolarWorld, once Europe’s biggest solar power equipment group, said on Wednesday it would file for insolvency, overwhelmed by Chinese rivals who had long been a thorn in the side of founder and CEO Frank Asbeck, once known as “the Sun King”.

source: Bloomberg Markets, 11 May 2017

SolarWorld was one of the few German solar power companies to survive a major crisis at the turn of the decade, caused by a glut in production of panels that led prices to fall and peers to collapse, including Q-Cells, Solon and Conergy.

SolarWorld was forced to restructure and avoided insolvency thanks to a debt-for-equity swap and the support of Qatar, which took a 29 percent stake in the group four years ago through Qatar Solar S.P.C.

A renewed wave of cheap Chinese exports, caused by reduced ambitions in China to expand solar power generation, was too much to bear for the group, which made its last net profit in 2014.

“Due to the ongoing price erosion and the development of the business, the company no longer has a positive going concern prognosis, is therefore over-indebted and thus obliged to file for insolvency proceedings,” SolarWorld said in a statement on Wednesday.

Frankfurt-listed shares in the group last traded down 77 percent at 0.81 euros.

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Advocates of solar power claim that the cost of the technology has been plummeting in recent years. But much of this has been brought about by dumping of solar panels by China, something that is ultimately unsustainable.

Observant readers may notice the China connection in the two stories! As Trump has pointed out, China is only interested in how it can benefit economically from Western obsession with climate change.

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May 11, 2017 at 05:09AM

Uncategorized 11 May 2017

Matt Ridley: Wind power makes 0% of world energy

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It’s all in how you spin it. Supra-zoogle-watts of new wind power capacity was added last year. Wind and solar grew faster than fossil fuels. There are now 341,000 wind turbines around the world! Thus do Meaningless Big-Numbers flow.

Instead Matt Ridley gets down to the small numbers that tell us what is going on: Wind Turbines are neither clean nor green.

The Spectator: Here’s a quiz; no conferring. To the nearest whole number, what percentage of the world’s energy consumption was supplied by wind power in 2014, the last year for which there are reliable figures? Was it 20 per cent, 10 per cent or 5 per cent? None of the above: it was 0 per cent. That is to say, to the nearest whole number, there is still no wind power on Earth.

Key Renewable Trends IEA 2016

The only renewables superstars are those you never hear about — wood and hydro:

Their trick is to hide behind the statement that close to 14 per cent of the world’s energy is renewable, with the implication that this is wind and solar. In fact the vast majority — three quarters — is biomass (mainly […]