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via JoNova
November 5, 2024 at 08:55AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Well, the report into the feasibility of 2030 net zero targets from the electricity system operator, NESO, requested by Ed Miliband, has landed on his desk:
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Millions more households could be asked to regularly switch off light and appliances under Ed Miliband’s plan for a clean power grid by 2030, an official review has found.
The Energy Secretary has been told that the Government’s pledge to rely on wind and solar farms for most of Britain’s power needs is technically achievable but will entail a “Herculean effort” on every front.
Advice published by the National Energy System Operator (Neso) said a quadrupling of so-called flexibility is needed in order to ensure the grid can operate without the use of fossil fuels.
The Telegraph, however, seems to have largely missed the point! (Not for the first time!)
In reality, Fintan Slye’s report is a bit of a damp squib, little more than a rehash of the Future Energy Scenarios. The plan can be downloaded here.
Let’s first deal with the issue of “switching off the lights”.
According to NESO, most of this demand flexibility will revolve around smart charging of EVs and use of thermal storage. The idea of making us charge our EVs at night is hardly new; nor are electric storage heaters. But these only switch demand from one time of day to another, so are not really relevant in overall terms.
Meanwhile, “turning the lights off” is planned to save only 3 GW – again a bit of a side issue. Residential electricity demand, by the way, peaks at around 15 GW in winter, so they would be looking at 1-in-5 households switching off. Good luck with that!
The real importance of this energy rationing, however, is that a decarbonised power grid cannot simply turn up the gas plants to match demand as it goes up and down during the day. What happens when we refuse to cooperate is another matter!
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None of that addresses the problem though of what we will do when we get a week like this with virtually no wind power.
So what does the report actually say?
It reiterates existing Labour plans to double onshore wind power by 2030, triple offshore to 50 GW and triple solar as well.
Battery storage will quadruple to 22 GW, but as the report admits this is a drop in the ocean in terms of GWh. Same story with pumped storage. Their role will remain the same as now – maintaining grid frequency and topping up supply at peak periods.
So what will they do when the wind does not blow?
They have an answer – fire up the gas plants!
Indeed it would appear they need more than we currently have, around 35 GW they reckon:
So all of the bluster about 100% clean energy was a lie, as we have been saying all along. It is simply impossible to run a grid largely on intermittent renewables. Miliband’s plans were fantasy all along.
Sure, eventually they might replace all of this gas capacity with new gas plants fitted with carbon capture, or hydrogen burning plant using gas as a feed stock. But we will still be dependent on fossil fuels either way.
And keeping all of our gas capacity going for many more years to come brings with it its own problems:
You have to keep the plants fully manned all year, and you have to keep them well maintained. This all costs money. When owners of CCGT plants find they are only operational for a few days a year, what incentive will they have to keep them open. They will need billions of subsidies via the Capacity Market Mechanism to persuade, and probably a long term guarantee as well.
Which brings us to their assessment of costs.
They claim that all of this renewable generation will reduce generating costs by £15/MWh. But this is an outright lie, because they have included Carbon Costs in the cost of CCGT:
They justify this by claiming that we would have to buy emissions permits if we used gas:
This is plainly absurd, a choice of being burnt or scalded. They have included £60/MWh in the cost of gas generation for carbon costs, meaning that instead of being £15/MWh cheaper, their plan would increase the cost of generation by about £10/MWh. (Allowing for the fact that not all dispatchable power comes from gas). But carbon costs are not real costs, and we would not need to buy permits if the government changed the way the Scheme works.
Add that to the indirect extra costs they mention, and we are looking at an extra cost of £35/MWh over the grid as a whole. That equates to a total annual cost of around £14 billion, on top of the £12 billion or so which we are already paying for renewables.
These costs do not include standby payments to gas generators, as mentioned above. These alone will run into several billions a year.
To cope with the huge rise in renewable capacity and increased demand for electricity, they say we will need to spend £14 billion a year on upgrading the grid till 2030. On top of that will come an extra £34 billion for building renewable capacity:
And all of this expenditure will merely end up duplicating what we already have. Where on Earth is the sense in that?
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
November 5, 2024 at 08:36AM
By Anthony Watts and H. Sterling Burnett
The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article, titled “Scientists sure warming world made Spain’s storm more intense,” ties recent flash flooding in Spain to climate change. This is false. Data refutes claims that flooding has gotten worse in Europe amid modestly warming temperatures. In addition, the story ignores Spain’s long history of sometimes catastrophic floods due to many of its cities being situated in narrow mountain valleys.
“No doubt about it, these explosive downpours were intensified by climate change,” Friederike Otto, Ph.D., who is co-leader of World Weather Attribution (WWA), told the BBC. “With every fraction of a degree of fossil fuel warming, the atmosphere can hold more moisture, leading to heavier bursts of rainfall.”
The problem is, neither Otto nor the BBC cited any data to back up the claim that this storm’s moisture content was enhanced by warming, because none exists. Rather the attribution is based on the projections of flawed computer models and is typical of the type of “research” quickly published by WWA. As with all of WWA studies Climate Realism has discussed previously, they suffer from the logical fallacy of assuming what they are attempting to prove. WWA’s research assumes climate change causes or contributes to a particular weather event and then uses computer models to project how big the effect was. That is not how one conducts science. Climate Realism has refuted similar attribution claims on multiple occasions, here, here, and here for instance.
The recent terrible flooding across the Spanish province of Valencia has claimed more than 150 lives, but there is no evidence the flooding was historically unusual. Reviewing the historical context of the flooding area shows it has experienced recurring severe floods. The BBC article claims of “increased atmospheric moisture” and rising temperatures to explain the event, but other meteorologists, as mentioned by the BBC, said the event was driven by the common “gota fría” weather pattern, also known as a “cold drop” and recently named DANA in meteorology texts. It is a weather event that commonly brings cold air from northern latitudes over the warm Mediterranean, leading to sudden and intense rainfall.
The recent storm that hit Spain is consistent with its long history of severe autumnal storms. Gota Fria’s have not become more common or severe during the recent period of modest warming.
Valencia, which sits along and at the mouth of the Turia River on the Mediterranean Sea, suffered similar flooding, for example, in 1897, 1957, and 1996, 127, 67, and 28 years of warming ago, respectively, when temperatures were cooler than at present. Dozens of people died in each of those floods. The historical account of Valencia’s 1957 flooding, as documented by Caroline Angus, presents a well-known pattern of extreme rainfall events in the region, long before the age of alleged climate change. On October 14, 1957, an unprecedented flood struck Valencia, releasing nearly 6,000 cubic meters of water per second into the city. Towns around Valencia, including Pedralba and Vilamarxant, saw record rainfall, causing massive flooding that impacted thousands of lives and required years of recovery efforts.
This 1957 flood event was not an anomaly but part of a natural cycle that Spaniards have come to recognize as a seasonal threat from the Mediterranean’s temperature dynamics and terrain. That storm dumped about a foot of rain in 2 days, when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels (said to drive climate change) were just 314 parts per million (ppm), compared to the 422 ppm measured today.
As Caroline Angus’s account of the 1957 Valencia flood reveals, these conditions are neither new nor unprecedented. The BBC’s focus on “climate change” and a warmer atmosphere as the primary cause of the recent flooding ignores the atmospheric mechanics behind these storms and downplays the recurrent pattern of similar natural events. It also too easily dismisses the well-known gota fria phenomenon, despite the BBC itself writing, “[w]eather researchers say the likely main cause of the intense rainfall was a natural weather event [gota fria] that hits Spain in Autumn and Winter.” Any links to climate change are based solely on rapid, non-peer reviewed attribution claims, not data.
From a science perspective, BBC made a glaring omission by not referencing the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, which finds little evidence of increased precipitation. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) provides an assessment of confidence levels in precipitation trends.
According to Chapter 12, Table 12.12, (seen below) the IPCC expresses “low confidence” in a clear trend for increases in heavy precipitation in southern Europe, including the Mediterranean basin, even under flawed high-emission climate model scenarios like RCP8.5.
Unable to completely ignore the fact that natural weather systems dominate rainfall patterns, in Spain and elsewhere, the BBC suggested, the flooding was worsened because each degree of warming causes a 7% increase in rainfall. This does not align with the IPCC’s low confidence in any increase in rainfall, river flooding, or heavy precipitation, at present despite more than a degree of warming over the past century. The BBC are engaging in pure speculation, not backed by evidence or the IPCC’s own findings.
One thing that almost certainly contributed to the high death toll and massive damage of the recent flood is the huge increase of population in harm’s way of flooding – the expanding bullseye effect discussed at Climate Realism repeatedly, here and here, for example. Valencia’s population over the past century has grown from 213,550 inhabitants in 1900 to 1,582,387 residents within the urban area and 2,522,383 people in the metropolitan region.
When more people move to flood zones, more damage results when flooding does, and more people are harmed. This is especially true if government authorities don’t revise flood planning as the population grows. Instead of asking how Spain might have planned better in the past for floods that aren’t unusual, or how the government and planners might prepare for an anticipated seasonal flood cycle going forward, the BBC shifts the dialogue to an assumed inadequacy of current infrastructure to withstand “new” extremes. Yet the 1957 floods show us that extreme floods have long tested Spain’s infrastructure. In response to the catastrophic 1957 event, Valencia took direct action with the Plan Sur, diverting the Turia River to protect the city center from future flooding.
Unfortunately, new development along that diversion channel allowed for new flood damage in areas different from that of the 1957 flood.
Let’s be clear: reducing meteorological complexity to a tired “climate change did it” line cheapens the discussion. Spain’s unique geography and centuries-old storm patterns deserve more than sensationalist fluff. But as is typical, the BBC offers an alarmist tale wrapped in a pretty climate-change bow, leaving out history, science, common sense, and accountability. That’s shoddy journalism, misinforming the public, thus making it harder for them to make rational decisions about elections and responses to weather.
via Watts Up With That?
November 5, 2024 at 08:05AM
By Jason Isaac
Expect Kamala Harris’ Justice Department to wage Green New Deal lawfare if she is elected president on Nov. 5.
As with every last issue pertaining to this election, Harris has not said much about the substance of her climate policy. But a review of her record suggests she’d be amenable to unleashing the Justice Department on energy providers, and her conspicuously quiet allies on the climate left are optimistic she’ll do just that.
Unleashing the Justice Department on American energy companies means hurtling this country deep into the last century. Traditional energy sources are essential for the world historic quality of life most Americans enjoy. Litigation will drive prices up. The lawsuits will also strongarm a transition to electric vehicles, stoves, and water heaters that will remain unpopular with most people because they aren’t affordable and don’t work as well as gas-powered alternatives. Green New Deal lawfare unfolding at the state and local levels all over the country means to force those appliances onto an unwilling public through settlement terms or public spending funded by big money verdicts.
Harris is already aligned with climate lawfare. Harris investigated whether Exxon “repeatedly lied to the public and its shareholders about the risk to its business from climate change” during her tenure as California attorney general, according to the Los Angeles Times. The probe did not result in a lawsuit, though she was supportive of legal claims targeting energy providers as a presidential candidate.
Harris parroted claims typical of climate lawsuits during her ill-fated 2020 bid. She accused energy providers of concealing inside information about emissions, much as tobacco companies were accused of misleading customers about the health consequences of smoking.
“You should be really prepared to look at a serious fine or be charged with a crime,” Harris said at a 2019 town hall in South Carolina. She made a similar remark in an interview she gave to Mother Jones.
Harris has of course renounced much of her 2020 platform, but climate cultists sense she remains willing to pursue energy providers in court. A coalition of alarmist groups is pushing Harris to direct the Justice Department to investigate the industry, calling such a probe “long overdue.” Democrat partisans like Sheldon Whitehouse and Jamie Raskin are similarly pressuring DOJ to take this step.
One step DOJ could take – and the climate left is already calling for it – is to open a probe under the anti-mafia statute, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. That means holding defendants liable not just for emissions, but also for political speech and actions that support a pro-gas energy policy. Democratic lawmakers favorably discussed this avenue in May as a former DOJ official testified to the Senate Budget Committee.
How would anti-energy lawfare cash out for the average American? The cost of settlements or big money verdicts will inevitably reach consumers across numerous points of service. Everything will cost more. You’ll notice this most when paying an energy bill, filling up your tank, or buying a plane ticket. But cheap and abundant energy is essential to all businesses, and there will be hidden penalties everywhere.
Moreover, the climate plaintiffs are already mapping their plans for spending money climate lawfare delivers. These plans include investments in EV-charging infrastructure, mandated electric appliances in new builds, and even repurposing neighborhoods to create 15-minute cities. This is social reengineering by lawsuit, a foisting of lifestyle choices on unwilling participants.
With preelection forecasts favoring a Republican takeover of the Senate, it’s quite likely a president Kamala Harris would not move landmark climate laws through Congress. That means she would have to think creatively about birddogging energy companies, and siccing the Justice Department on them is a likely step.
Jason Isaac, a former state representative in Texas, is founder and CEO of The American Energy Institute,
This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.
via Watts Up With That?
November 5, 2024 at 04:07AM
