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 wood), and a very large part of that is ‘traditional biomass’; sticks and logs and dung burned by the poor in their homes to cook with. Those people need that energy, but they pay a big price in health problems caused by smoke inhalation.
…world energy demand has been growing at about 2 per cent a year for nearly 40 years.
If wind turbines were to supply all of that growth but no more, how many would need to be built each year? The answer is nearly 350,000, since a two-megawatt turbine can produce about 0.005 terawatt-hours per annum.
So we’d have to build 350,000 wind turbines every year just to keep up with the growth in electricity demand each year.
To be fair, apparently wind power generates nearly 5% of Australia’s total energy, which is at the same time, pretty remarkable, and also maybe why manufacturing here is dying.
Here’s a meaningless small number:
Portugal ran for four days straight once on renewable energy alone. Four whole days!
Read the whole article Wind Turbines are neither clean nor green.
UPDATE:
With millions worldwide taken in,
By the Greens through renewable spin,
While the wind-turbine yield,
Is on pie-charts revealed,
As a slice unbelievably thin.
–Ruairi
REFERENCE:
IEA Key Renewable Trends, 2016
Except no, Portugal didn’t run only on renewables. A significant amount of energy usage is for transport, and I am sure the vast majority of that was from petrol.
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… and or diesel.
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It’s seldom I butt in at the top of the Comments list like this, But I wanted to wait and see if anybody picked up on something very important here.
Note that pie chart graph there, and notice the title of it: (my bolding here)
Note it says energy here, and does not say ….. electricity generation.
Now, I understand that most of you did indeed pick up on that, but there is a point to be made here.
Whenever those green acolytes like to pump up their percentage of renewables, they always refer to ….. electrical power generation, because in that way, the slice of the pie chart that does reflect wind and solar will be a lot larger and more visible. Wind and solar might even be as high as 7 to 10%, depending on who has the agenda to pursue.
This ….. ENERGY chart shows all the energy being consumed, and note how oil has a pretty large slice. That’s planes and boats and trains and cars and trucks etecetera and also includes all that oil consumption from every source and then note Natural Gas consumption, as that is all consumption in every sector, not just power generation, and just with those two, you have more than half the World’s energy consumption, and even coal consumption is also from every source and that includes steel making as well, in other words Met coal, as well as steaming coal, probably half and half if truth be told. These three alone make up 81% of the World’s energy consumption.
What all of that does is dramatically reduce the wind and solar slice of the pie, almost to utter insignificance.
And trust me on this, that wind and solar slice will be not that much larger by 2030/40/50.
THAT is why the renewable urgers always show you the electrical power generation pie chart, because even the smallest slice there actually looks like a slice and not just the thinnest of lines on that pie chart.
Stop oil, gas, and coal consumption. You must be joking.
See now how closing down just some coal fired power plants is all but utterly insignificant ans that 81% of the World’s energy, well, all of it is CO2 emitting.
Tony.
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It’s because politicians don’t understand the difference between energy and electricity that in the UK, under the crazy EU Renewable Energy Directive, we are supposed to produce 15% of our total energy from renewable sources by 2020. Tony Blair (who doesn’t understand anything technical) signed up for 15% of our energy when he was supposed to sign up for 15% of our electricity. That simple act of stupidity by a stupid politician, is costing the UK £billions/year and will eventually total £100s of billions.
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I wonder if anyone noticed that there are places where wind makes up 100% of the energy used. Anyone ???
20
They’re called Washington DC, Canberra, and other names of capitol cities around the world where the politicians are now in such turmoil over the actions of one man that they spend as much wind as possible contradicting themselves. It’s quite amazing how much runs on wind power.
It’s all renewable too… …endlessly by an amazing process called elections. 😉
I wonder if it all gets counted for carbon trading purposes.
I wish we could make practical use of it.
30
Practical use? In America voting for a small party packs 6 to 36 times the law-changing clout as wasting a vote on the entrenched kleptocracy. I vote libertarian, but I notice that in Australia you have a Liberal party that’s fascist and another that is Libertarian. Vote for the smaller of the two evils and you will profit enormously from their venal treachery and facile backstabbing. Small party spoiler votes are like the dogs that herd sheep. It doesn’t take many of them to change the direction of the entire herd.
10
The real issue, that I worry about, is the degree of functional innumeracy in the general population.
I go to a grower’s market most Sunday mornings.
The older growers/sellers can keep a running total in their heads, and can ask for that amount as soon as you say you are finished. This requires them to be able to multiply the unit cost by the quantity, and add that subtotal to the running total of the overall purchase. They do this, whilst also exchanging banter.
The younger sellers (who have probably not grown their own produce), need to reach for a calculator. If you point out that there is a discount on something if you buy more than at certain number, they become totally flummoxed, and have to start again.
I would bet they can’t walk and chew gum at the same time, either.
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And I would think that those older growers wouldn’t believe in AGW either. In the small town where I live the ex-farmers express quite pungent views about ‘climate change’.
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Older people also have the benefit of having seen news delievered slowly and have time to thnk about stuff.
Most people under 50 these days get constantly hammered by “news” 24×7 but its all surface stuff – what the Devils’ Propagandists ( i.e. most of the MSM, who have thoroughly earnt this title… ) do really well, is slam people with 24 x 7 nonsense masquerading as news, but also critically never give people time to stop and think before its on to the next pile of horse manure….what this also does is train peole to accept, absorb and move on, missing the THINKING bit in between as they have been CONDITIONED not to think deeply. Its not that everyone s dumb, its just that they have been trained not to think deeply, and if they cant absorb it in 30 seconds, they move on.
This is why the emotional angle of news is importnat – under a technique called Trauma based Mind Control, during the period of time trauma is inflicted, logic is suspended, the dis-information is inserted, the mind returns to logical state, sealing the disinfo inside. Think about how easy it is ina traumatised state to get people to do almost anything….
The Bali Bomb was a perfect example – australias population was resisting going to iraq war, bali bomb “occurred”, mass national hysteria, people couldnt sign up fast enough……job done.
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Good analysis Steve, it is the quality of the information that defines the value of the opinion.
For most people the quality of information is miserably poor and as such is reflected in their opinion.
GeoffW
80
Quality? So many lies have been pushed out there that many people do not know who to believe. So they run after the bloke they think is in front.
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Rereke Whakaaro
May 12, 2017 at 5:03 am
The older growers/sellers can keep a running total in their heads, and can ask for that amount as soon as you say you are finished.
Interestingly, the cash registers at ALDI stores (at least the one near me) do not calculate the change to be given to a customer. The staff member has to calculate that themselves.
50
At least making change is a simple counting trick and even the arithmetically challenged like me can do it.
30
My husband had a Saturday job in a greengrocery shop as a young lad. He was used to working with £sd in his head; only got it wrong once and the woman concerned was very upset…about a halfpenny or something of that order! I wonder how many youngsters now would be capable of not only long addition of £sd in their heads but also using measurements in miles, furlongs, yards, feet and inches?! Every day stuff for us.
80
I am amazed at how well young people still handle my mixed measures. But nobody remembers pounds, shillings and pence.
20
I get your point, RW. But I would probably fail your functional test because that kind of mental trick has escaped me my entire life. It’s so bad that I envy those who can do any degree of mental arithmetic beyond 1 + 1 = 2.
Without a calculator I would be lost at sea without a paddle.
Not kidding you at all.
20
You’re not alone, Roy. I could grasp mathematical theorem in my school classes, but they would evaporate as son as the class was over. I can, however, work out change faster than the people at checkouts can read it off the screen. Go, as they say, figure.
00
Irrespective of the general numeracy of the population, the numbers don’t matter. What is important is the environment. It doesn’t matter how much Loy Yang produced it was seen as a dirty stinking place and should be closed to improve the environment. A drive past there chokes your nose and makes the air hazy. A large portion of our population has been there and consequently supports the closure.
20
Hydro is NOT renewable. The water passes the turbine just once.
145
You can never spin in the same Penstock twice.
51
What about the hydrological cycle? I think water can to some degree flow through a Penstock twice. If we think about it, hydropower is an indirect form of solar power, as the sun drives the precipitation from the oceans. It does however work a hell of a lot better than solar panels provided you not get a drought.
60
Stephen Richards
What a truly fascinating comment.
And I suppose that wind is renewable because the air passes the turbine blades more than once?
Your comment goes to the heart of the problem of energy production. You can release the energy from any given energy source only once. By the same token food is not a renewable source of energy because the meal can be digested only once and the wood in the cooking stove can be burnt only once, so wood too is not a renewable source of energy.
Hydro-electric power is clearly a replenishable energy source, the rain falls in the mountains, the rivers flow into the reservoir and the water level rises behind the dam. The source of the energy has been replenished. Food and wood production are also clearly replenishable, the plants have been successfully operating for literally hundreds of millions of years converting carbon dioxide into sugar and releasing oxygen from water that allows all the higher animals to feed and to breathe.
The problem with all energy sources for industrial use is that the energy source must be controllable. If there is water in the reservoir then the turbines can generate power. But who controls the wind? Not us, we cannot predict the strength or even the pattern of the wind far enough in advance and we certainly cannot command the wind to blow when we need power. Low density, uncontrollable sources of energy, such as wind, cannot be used to guarantee the continuous energy needs of an industrial society.
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And that is what the tree-huggers want – a non-industrial society. Not in the absolute, of course, but in a conceptual, feel-good, self-satisfied, sort of way.
We had a commune at the end of our rural road. People would turn up in spring, and sing songs of light, and dance for nature, and that sort of thing. They grew their own food too. “Good on them”, I said. But they went somewhere else when the weather got colder.
And then, an astute neighbour pointed out the number of diesel deliveries there were each month, to run their tractor and other farm equipment. They were also connected to the electricity grid; but by underground cable, so that their inner peace was not disturbed by overhead lines. They needed the electricity to run the computers, and the other social amenities, such as a spa pool. I could go on …
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Water for turbines tend to come from rain falling on the hills above. No rain no energy. Sucking the water back up the hill needs energy. Drought kills hydro. Therefore not renewable of if you are into pedant, not sustainable.
64
Stephen,
Energy which comes from the non renewable 4.5 billion year old sun.
70
Possible for multiple use food? See movie “The Human Centipede”. (or don’t, I couldn’t stomach it)
20
Don’t.
20
Has anybody yet considered a hot air wind turbine to be mounted in the roof of parliament houses?
100
Even the most advanced turbine designs couldn’t handle that amount of spin.
190
Won’t work – think of all the holidays!
30
I said none of those words. No energy is actually truly renewable because all involve the conversion of one form of energy to another. The transforming mechanism is the part that is not renewable. Windturbines, solar panel, gas turbines, water turbines etc.
41
But it passes down the river, evaporates and falls again as rain into the upper dam, yes?
50
Water Cycle and Carbon Cycle come to mind.
70
Unfortunately, not always in the place from whence it came. See what I mean?
31
Right Stephen, there is no renewable energy.
It all has to be worked for to be accessed.
It can be stored but it is not ‘renewable’
One cannot spend the same money twice.
Someone correct me if I’m wrong.
GeoffW
40
That isn’t even even remotely true energy can’t be created our destroyed just changed in form, so yes energy can be used over and over, energy use (work) is not conserved.
Consider an airconditioner we can remove heat from one room and add to the other we get work done cooling one room and heating the other using the same energy that heat difference could then be exploited to drive a Stirling engine. But unlike what the climateers think, the energy can only be in one place at a time, you can heat one room but the work in the other room MUST be cooling. The climateers seem to think that the same unit of energy can evaporate water, melt ice, make storms , blah blah all from the same energy at the same time
41
Tell that to Scott Morrison.
00
So does the wind.
10
Actually, with the Snowy River Scheme, water is pumped back up to save surplus generation from other sources for future use.
How much of of the Snowy Scheme’s output is recycled output?
20
There is probably a foggy island or cloud-wrapped mountain village where some expensive and high maintenance wind turbines would be better than nothing. It’s just a matter how our Green Betters can move us all there. (They have some rather drastic population-reduction measures in mind, so it’s not as impractical as it sounds.)
Of course, the turbines are only renewable till someone has to renew them.
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I think this is the crux of the matter. The Green Blob thinks wind and solar are renewable, but once the windmills and solar panels need replacing, they have to be created from non-renewable materials (well, they have to be created from non-renewable products in the first place). If those non-renewable materials run out, so do their dreams of renewable energy. And none of the Green Blob thinks of where and how the materials for all of this are sourced and manufactured. That’s too ugly a thought.
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Yes, and then they talk about ‘clean’ energy.
I wonder just how clean neodymium is, not just in itself, but in its mining, extraction, isolation and refining.
And since 95% of neodymium comes from China, there goes the ‘energy security’ argument as well.
80
Baotou is China’s largest rare earth mine. The area has been reduced to a toxic radioactive wasteland.
30
Bemused, I refuse to use the term “renewable” because it is a misnomer, and like “climate change” is the use of language to create the image desired. The correct term should be “unreliable intermittent” energy, as that is exactly what it is and that would create a completely different image in the non-scientific public’s mind. We should all use that term when commenting on blogs. I do.
90
With millions worldwide taken in,
By the Greens through renewable spin,
While the wind-turbine yield,
Is on pie-charts revealed,
As a slice unbelievably thin.
390
Morning Jo,
This is gold.
Going to take this down to my local federal member’s (& State) offices this morning.
(Jim Chalmers…formerly “World’s Greatest Treasurer’s” no. 2; & Cameron Dick…possibly Anastacia’s Julia Gillard if her no’s. don’t miraculously improve!!)
But it will probably be a bit of a biblical waste of time (like Jesus’ parable with the farmer sowing so much seed and only part of it growing) – but at least I’ll be able to sleep at night over the coming months/years knowing I did my part to try and avert the possible coming de-industrialization of Australia.
Unlike this current crop of “treasonous malfeasants we have cancer-ising” our parliaments (labor and green politicians).
I truly hope in the coming few days/weeks we see a lot more information like this that will make our side of the debate finally totally impossible to ignore.
With the warmest of regards,
Reformed warmist of Logan.
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A curiosity of sorts. Does anyone have any idea why the only people that can run for public office always seem to be so far out of touch with the real world? Seriously. The number of political leaders that seem to have any idea of how the real world functions seems to be able to be counted on the fingers of one hand – not counting the thumb as a finger. So why is that common people, that actually are forced to experience the real world instead of Nirvana, can’t “band together” in small groups and come up with their own political candidates that can then run for office? You know, each local group could hold a local caucus, if you will, discuss the various candidates proposed by the local groups, and then choose the best choices to run? Can’t you create a party called “The people Party,” and instead of staying home on election day, go out to vote in the people’s candidates, and put government back in the hands of the people of the real world? It only takes groups of people willing to become active citizens, again, instead of passively sitting around complaining about the politicians that are elected, and I am willing to bet that it doesn’t have to be expensive as long as you say “screw” to TV and radio ads, and go talk to the people.
70
“Does anyone have any idea why the only people that can run for public office always seem to be so far out of touch with the real world?”
There is a profound misunderstanding as to what politics is all about in that statement.
Politicians are not leaders, they are followers – by definition. Their job is to convince enough people that they will do whatever a good proportion of the voting populace wants. If the populace believes in fairy-tales, it is the job of politicians to reflect that.
The only way to solve this problem is to have a suitably educated populace and direct democracy – where people vote for policies not for middlemen.
The fact that we need websites like this one suggests that most Australians know very little about energy and are too trusting of the media.
90
I thnk anyone who actually *wants* to enter politics shouldbe automataically barred from doing so….
180
Thank you Alfred, very god question. There are as many reasons as there are politicians. But the reasons tend to cluster around a few of the main ones.
1) Inadequate education and real life experience.
Too many get a useless degree, e.g. Marxist Sociology. This trains then for nothing but evil thoughts and evil deeds.
Similarly with political science when the teachers are almost all of a single socialist mode and believe the ends justify the means, i.e. no morals or fair play–just win.
All degrees which do not require mastery of simple mathematics, algebra, trigonometry, calculus, etc. lead to incompetence dealing with complex issues involving the need to calculate and understand what you have calculated. In other words, those without grasp of mathematics cannot be scientists.
2) Far to many lawyers.
3) Political correctness hurts our politicians more than it hurts the public. They are simply unfit to understand the need for morals, excellence, honesty and the other attributes that enable one to serve rather than lie, cheat, and steal.
4) When we vote and support politicians from 1, 2, and 3 above we are part of the uninformed electorate that always choose wrong.
Perhaps if we searched for honesty and good character first, then knowledge of basic mathematics and science second, and real world experience actually producing things and helping people.
Anyway, that’s a partial answer.
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I have to agree, when I vote I evaluate the candidates, not the party, so for example I voted for Malcolm Roberts and not Pauline Hanson since Pauline’s beliefs are less congruent to mine. In the house I voted for family first candidate for the same reason. If Tony Abbott was standing in my seat I would have voted for him, but I don’t vote for my electorates candidate based on who I want the PM to be. The PM is not representing ME. If every one did that politics would be much different.
40
My take on the matter, for what it’s worth. Politicians have no useful skill at construction, management, invention, humanities, health, money, medicine, or anything else that makes money. But they are good at manipulating people, or using “bait-and-switch” on them to get people to agree with them. Therefore politics is the only job they have.
Oh, and a massive ego. Mustn’t forget that.
40
“Treason” is a word I am hearing more of….much deserved so…similar to “Collaborator” with all its weighty historical meaning attached….
The problem is that the Establishment is stuffed full of many truly evil people, who will burn a country and its citizens for its own perverted pleasure, and think nothing of kickingoff a war to remove threats to ther own power – think “clash of civilsations” which I am very sure will come upon uss oon, most notably like a Gulf of Tonkin incident ( false flag ).
The other thing is the Establishment ( who in the UK also seem to have many nonces within ) will happily hold power to further thier own earth-based religion, namely protectiung “Gaia”. They also hate Christianity, which is why we have seen so many new attacks via “equality” etc etc to surround and try and remove a moral bulwark from society so the Establishment can then create a country lead by evil nhilists to so thier un-Godly bidding.
The shutting down of power stations is a doubling down of power to push our society into break-down mode. In a crisis the moral-free population in desperation will clamour for any “leadership ” they can find, and in true Stockholm Syndrome style will reach, a la 3rd Reich style, for a strong leader….history is repeating, our reichstag is burning now….
70
Renewable is a great marketing word, nothing more. It conveys the idea of infinite, eternal and free. Like the energy from gravity in the tides. Harvesting is the great cost and we have not found a way to harvest wind energy which is itself infinite, eternal and free.
So after 250,000 windmills there is no impact on the world power supply. The full replacement lifespan of this wonder system is less than a generation. The expense is horrific. Replaceables is a better word. Words fail with how bad this non solution to the energy crisis is. Worse, it has created the very energy crisis we were trying to avoid!
There are many other ways of harvesting energy which are not explored. My favorite since the OPEC oil crisis was the construction of offshore ammonia driven generators which harvested solar energy from vast areas using the differential between surface temperature and deep ocean temperature. My second favorite was using aluminum which is 95% electricity in cost as a way of safely storing, transporting energy and totally recyclable. Dollar per kilo it is comparable to oil, gas and coal, which are irreplaceable.
The third is of course the plentiful Thorium. No atom bombs. No breeder reactors and plutonium. As it is 100% usable against Uranium’s 2%, there is 50x as much of it and far less waste by volume.
There are more, but we are saddled with shamanistic wind and sun religions run by opportunists and politicians and the Green industrial complex. All under the banner of renewables when the only thing eternal is the cost for almost nothing at all.
So no effect on CO2 after maybe 20 trillion dollars, the stated and legislated objective, even if Carbon is not mentioned. What a shame. Let’s build millions more windmills. Clear the forests, denude the mountaintops. Birdlife, vistas and quality of life are simply collateral damage. All for the greater good, but of whom?
Its time to wind up wind power. Repeal the RET, four times the cost of Turnbull’s outrageous grab for cash from our banks.
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Sorry, “the stated and legislated objective, even if Carbon is not mentioned.” is not true. It is only implied thanks to the usual semantics.
Climate Change is a code phrase to mean Global Warming. Global Warming is a code phrase to mean Industrial pollution.
Industrial Pollution is a code word for Green House Gases. Green House gases is a code phrase to mean Carbon Dioxide as everyone knows Carbon Dioxide is a Greenhouse Gas. So it continues.
Renewables are not only ‘free and eternal, they are also complete replacement for Carbon Dioxide production. So the convoluted deceit continues hidden in a chain of semantics.
No, the war costing trillions is on CO2 and only CO2.
No one seriously believes windmills are a long term solution to replace coal or gas or oil.
Renewables are a joke solution.
By how much has CO2 growth been changed by all the windmills and solar. 0.0%
So what has been the impact on Climate Change/Global Warming/Pollution/Green house gases. 0.0%
That is why Obama now says we should now eat smaller steaks. Or insects. Perhaps cover our bodies in sackcloth and wail and hit our heads on lumps of wood. Or just rip off the public with massive hidden energy costs and send billions overseas and destroy manufacturing totally, as in South Australia.
The big question is whether South Australia now has the lowest CO2 on the planet? It certainly has the highest proportion of utterly inadequate unreliables.
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In this morning’s Australian, a mention that estimates of the cost of the RET include the Climate Council estimate of $40-$60 per tonne. Of course. I would prefer Dr Tom Quirk’s calculations of $100-$200. If you want to know who is telling the truth, just work out who earns their living from Climate Change.
Remember we were aghast at Julia Gillard’s $23 a tonne.
Also the estimate in the same article of the impact of the RET by the Energy authority is 5.8% of the household budget. Of course that is the literal cost of certificates at wholesale. So we can estimate at the cost at retail at around 11.6% of the household budget. Forget Shorten’ 49% tax on the ‘rich’. The RET is a massive tax on the poor.
Then the article suggests that we have to ‘subsidize’ windmills because they have to compete with coal power which was built with public taxes? So we give billions to strangers so they can force the closure of our power stations? For what benefit exactly and to whom?
170
I think those ammonia plants (OTEC) you mention are just windmills of the ocean as they are expensive although they can theoretically produce constant power, not random amounts like windmills.
According to a pro OTEC article here https://climatecolab.org/contests/2015/harnessing-the-power-of-mit-alumni/c/proposal/1325332 one cost given is US$75 million for 50MW which is $1500 per kW. It is much cheaper than wind, $15,000 per kW according to figures I posted yesterday but more expensive than ultrasupercritical HELE coal, $478 per kW for the Chinese example I cited yesterday. Admittedly, the OTEC plant would have no ongoing fuel costs.
62
I have to disagree. The two problem with solar and wind is not only intermittency but also the very limited collection area. A windmill or solar panel can only convert incident energy into electricity. The bigger the windmills, the bigger the area of solar, the more energy. Windmills are also very inefficient as is solar. Maybe 12% and what you miss is gone forever.
Not so with this idea on two counts. The ocean is a giant and closed convection system. In utilizing heat at the top surface of the ocean, you cool it. Heat then migrates from surrounding areas. The harvest area of a single system can be very much larger than the immediate area. Besides, who has really investigated this? The last time I saw a write up, it was a relatively simple device and we could have hundreds along the warm coast of Australia, which is all temperate to tropical. Of course it works at night too.
20
Thanks for the reference. I had not read anything for decades and a long time ago it seemed like a good idea. My disagreement was that to compare with windmills was not just the cost per kw of capacity but the collection area. Windmills and solar require huge area and even then are grossly inefficient, so you need much more area. Half of Victoria would be needed to power Melbourne with Solar and that figure was inadvertant from Will Steffen, Climate Commissioner.
My vision for this is a lot of individual offshore units at $75Million each each generating 50MW. (your figures) but to position them around the coast and stop the massive loss in transmitting electricity, often over 50%. On so many grounds counting cost per kw of capacity does not address the real needs. 2x50MW parked off Portland would give free energy for Alcoa’s smelter which currently uses say 200MW of capacity but loses 100MW in the wires.
30
As so many of Australia’s cities are placed around the coast in stable temperate to tropical climates despite the CO2, it would be ideal. Huge catchment areas, eternal steady 24/7 power, no energy is lost, eco friendly, eternal and from what I remember and you confirm, relatively cheap to build. Like lighthouses they would have to weather storms but you can park them in sheltered locations, not highly visible on top of ridges like windmills. You also need a lot fewer of them.
The concern I also remember was that they were so eco friendly that the intakes could jam up with molluscs, coral etc. Home to seals and other creatures who would love the intakes. Unlike windmills, no creatures would be harmed but the biggest cost was cleaning, a cost for all vessels.
Also once these were being produced in volume the costs would plummet as for all manufacturing. Then they are not 300 metres in the air or physically huge or dangerous or fall down. It would be an ideal product to revitalize heavy Australian manufacturing, but we are building submarines and and windmills and little else.
My idea was not to promote this particular solution but to point out that no one is looking for any alternatives. There was Flannery’s hot rock scheme which utterly wasted $93million of taxpayer money. Then a few wave generators which were destroyed by waves. The usual set of silly ideas which in hindsight appeared more a way to milk the government than to succeed. It is not the clever country. More an open cut mine.
20
A new idea. I wonder if such an offshore self powered device could actually dive say 20 metres and miss the bulk of any storm? Unattended, and full of water anyway, you could design it to automatically dive during cyclones when required.
10
Re definitions and use of language – see my comment 4.1.2 above.
10
Here is an interesting document that lauds the benefits of wind, yet shows its inherent flaws in graphic (literally) detail: https://www.thecrownestate.co.uk/media/5419/ei-km-in-om-om-062013-guide-to-uk-offshore-wind-operations-and-maintenance.pdf
The third page shows you all you will need to know, really.
50
Seems likely to apply to (particularly red thumb) responses to this thread IMO
“Larry Ledwick says:
11 May 2017 at 4:52 pm
I love the absolute certainty expressed about the cause of global warming, and condescension about possible errors in the beginning of this article and total lack of any recognition that the exact same sort of issues about validity/adjustments apply to terrestrial measurements.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/may/11/more-errors-identified-in-contrarian-climate-scientists-temperature-estimates
The uninformed will see this as a “case closed” analysis, and those who understand the issues, will recognize how biased this coverage is, and could tick off a laundry list of similar factors for the land based measurements data.’
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2017/05/02/tips-may-2017/#comment-83168
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Please, Another Ian:
Human emissions (a phrase that sounds rather sordid) continue to grow, yet temperatures do not – an immediate disconnect, so why bother reading further?
I wondered what other readers might think, so slid down to the comments. I am now going to bleach my eyes. BTW, before I go… who is the Other Ian?
20
Thank you, Matt Ridley, for reminding us of the basic disagreement: Reality vs government propaganda.
60
A simple logical error in 1935:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Nuclear_Energy_Error7.pdf
Still hides Nature’s abundant benevolence:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/HIGHER-POWERZ.pdf
20
Th primary purpose of government science today is to keep the public living in fear by creating new lies each year about the natural dangers of living, . . .
here on planet Earth, the only known place in the universe where life started, evolved and thrived!
Does anyone really believe Al Gore and the UN’s IPCC could have designed a better home for humanity?
40
Here is an interesting site which gives some insight into the safety of
windsubsidy-farms: http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/AccidentStatistics.htmIt is only for the UK, but you only have to consider how many deaths have there been in other electricity-generating industries; how many in atomic power, for example? To the best of my knowledge, there have been NONE, world-wide, for decades, but please correct me if I am wrong.
70
Renewables Policy A Scandal
SID MAHER, ANDREW BURRELL
John Howard says the looming energy crisis is a ‘scandalous policy failure of the first order’.
The Australian newspaper today
70
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/climate/renewables-policy-a-scandal-says-john-howard/news-story/0e7dee41c5dd5ebc86b80899c5659844
11
Unbelievable nonsense preached by a Green’s zealot. Here’s the Bolter’s summary and link.
http://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/green-zealot-clive-hamilton-freedom-our-enemy/news-story/af7c75a446225b33755f640bf3c83995
GREEN ZEALOT CLIVE HAMILTON: FREEDOM OUR ENEMY
Andrew Bolt, Herald Sun
May 11, 2017 11:06am
Abusive Clive Hamilton -former Greens candidate, Gaian and Climate Change Authority member -once suggested the “suspension of democratic processes” to push global warming schemes.
Now Hamilton – who seems to me a proto-totalitarian – claims freedom is our enemy:
…the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilised place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth paving the way to its destruction. The powers we most trusted have betrayed us; that which we believed would save us now threatens to devour us.
Hamilton’s apocalyptic view – and seeming contempt for human freedom – seems driven by his Gaian faith, which demotes humans and makes them subservient to a kind of Earth god whose interests and wishes Hamilton claims to know:
The “humans-only” orientation of the social sciences and humanities is reinforced by our total absorption in representations of reality derived from media, encouraging us to view the ecological crisis as a spectacle that takes place outside the bubble of our existence.
It is true that grasping the scale of what is happening requires not only breaking the bubble but also making the cognitive leap to “Earth system thinking” – that is, conceiving of the Earth as a single, complex, dynamic system. It is one thing to accept that human influence has spread across the landscape, the oceans and the atmosphere, but quite another to make the jump to understanding that human activities are disrupting the functioning of the Earth as a complex, dynamic, ever-evolving totality comprised of myriad interlocking processes.
If you think I read too much into that last passage, here is Hamilton a few years ago explaining his new religion – one that seems to have little time or love for humans:
So I think where we’re going is to begin to see a Gaian earth in its ecological, cybernetic way, infused with some notion of mind or soul or chi, which will transform our attitudes to it away from an instrumentalist one, towards an attitude of greater reverence. I mean, the truth is, unless we do that, I mean we seriously are in trouble, because we know that Gaia is revolting against the impact of human beings on it.
You may laugh off his musing as just the rants of some random zealot.
But realise that Hamilton is considered serious enough to be a Professor of Public Ethics at Charles Sturt University in Canberra. He taught at Yale University, Cambridge and Oxford. Most notoriously, the Gillard Government appointed him to the Climate Change Authority to advise on global warming policies, even though he is a professional ethicist with little obvious expertise (at least to me) in climate science or economics.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
But The Age preaches his dangerous politics with an unseemly reverence.
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Very scary.
22
You must wonder whether he is serious. This is religious extremism.
40
I don’t doubt that he’s serious…
22
It’s a bit like the film Avatar by James Cameron. A science fiction fantasy. L. Ron Hubbard did the same thing in Scientology with General Xenu and the Thetans and convinced millions he was the head of a religion. It was all made up of course and it is a huge money making machine. Does he believe it? Did Hubbard really believe it? No.
30
It’s crazy, but Hubbard himself said he wanted to be rich, and the best way to do that was to make a religion. So he did.
What’s really bizarre is that the religion he invented is so far fetched nobody should believe it. Yet they do. This just stuns me.
Not only that, but Hubbard himself said it was made up, but they still believe it?
10
I have in the past said that CAGW and its implementation is a religous war.
Most of the West was built on Christianity. Christianity believs humans are above animals, and has morals etc.
The greenies are earth worshippers who consider humans below animals, and seem to embrace a form of marxism….( which is Godless )
30
They make a two-way bet. They say humans are equal with animals; except when there are too many humans, or where an animal’s life is in danger, then the human must give way (sharks/crocodiles for example).
They have to say humans are equal in order that their own life has value. But yours is not because you don’t believe as they do. Their value system is flexible. Which means their justice is flexible.
20
In yesterday’s Age “newspaper” Nicky Ison said “…..renewables has already won the cost race – wind and solar are now the most affordable new-build electricity generation technology.”.
How can people get away with saying nonsense like this?
And how do they even come to such a conclusion when it’s obviously not true, not even close to it?
And if it WERE true, there would be no need for the world’s largest carbon tax as we have in Australia.
82
Quite right Dave, Nicky Ison and the Age sould be held accountable for such misinformation.
GeoffW
70
I believe that most people have been conditioned to not question MSM statements where anything Green is concerned as its one of many socialist or social taboo subjects that has a danger label to submit or suffer the consequences, so far these punishments have been mostly through social or MSM outlets but now we’re seeing more job losses, personal wealth reduction, governmental intervention or court appearances that will gradually escalate if the erosion of personal liberties and governing growth goes unchecked.
70
Deceptive advertising, written as news.
40
The mistake of switching to renewables follows relentless indoctrination of the false perception that CO2 has a significant effect on climate. CO2 has no significant effect on climate. Thermalization and Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution of molecule energy explain why. At low altitudes there are about 35 times as many water vapor molecules as CO2 molecules. Each WV molecule has more than 170 absorb/emit bands in the range of significant OLR (outgoing long wave radiation) compared to only one band for CO2. EMR (electromagnetic radiation) energy absorbed by CO2 is effectively shifted by the M-B distribution to the many lower energy absorb/emit bands of water vapor molecules. The ‘notches’ in top-of-atmosphere EMR measurements above temperate zones demonstrate this.
The only thing countering the temperature decline that would otherwise be occurring is the increasing trend in water vapor. (‘Otherwise’ results from declining net effect of ocean cycles since 2005 and declining solar activity which has been declining since 2014 and dropped below ‘breakeven’ in early 2016.) Average global atmospheric water vapor has been measured and reported by NASA/RSS since 1988 and shows an uptrend of 1.5% per decade. WV has increased about 8% since the more rapid increase began in about 1960.
Links to source data and graphs showing this are at http://globalclimatedrivers2.blogspot.com
The warmer temperature is welcome but the added WV increases the risk of flooding. IMO all rainwater retaining systems (dams, dykes, etc.) should be upgraded from design for 100 yr floods to 10,000 yr floods.
90
No, you have it wrong. It takes energy to evaporate water and for that to increase floods the hydrological cycle ie. The water flux must increase, AGW can only cause 0.8% increase in flux before the energy is depleted.
20
Bob – The increasing trend in atmospheric water vapor is measured. I see no reason for NASA/RSS to lie about this. If you had bothered to look at my analysis you would have discovered how to get to their data. It is fairly easy to calculate how much the water vapor should increase based on average global temperature increase. The water vapor is increasing more than 2.5 times what it should based on temperature increase alone (feedback). I wonder if you can figure out what has happened starting in about 1960 to cause the more rapid increase.
10
There has not been any particular trend in the amount of precipitation over the last 40 years – on average 2.7mm/day globally with no anomalous trend. Rain results from radiative heat loss from the atmosphere so that indicates the heat loss from atmospheric water has remained constant.
The increased water in the atmosphere means that the heat loss is occurring at slightly higher altitudes for a given latitude and that is consistent with the oceans increasing in temperature over the past 40 years. Ultimately Earth’s climate system self regulates because more water in the atmosphere means more water available to form clouds and they reflect more high energy solar radiation. The level of cloud cover is also affected by cosmic particles. Cloud cover has been increasing slightly since 2000 consistent with reduced solar activity.
Without the self regulating properties of water distributed across the globe, in its various phases and forms, the Earth would be very hot or very cold depending on your latitude and the time of day. Water is the fundamental component of Earth’s thermostat.
00
Ric – After wading through a lot of local data and faulty model nonsense it appears from https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-precipitation that precipitation has been increasing at about 0.2 mm/yr since 1901. I would like to see a valid assessment based on actual world wide measurements beginning about 1960. IMO the trend about doubled starting in 1960. There is a lot of spacial and temporal variation but most reports on local areas show increase.
I agree with your “self regulating” assertion and for pretty much the same reasons and also that “water is the fundamental component of earth’s thermostat. However, we appear to differ on the WV increase. Links to the NASA/RSS global average TPW data set and graphs using it are in my analysis (click my name). Because WV increase trend is continuing, at least thru March, 2017, it appears change to a new regulated level is incomplete.
My calculation showing that WV is increasing at more than 2.5 times expected from temperature increase alone goes like this: Global temperature increase in a decade from HadCRUT4, discounting el Nino, about 0.08 K. Percent increase in WV due to T increase = 0.08 * 0.0625 = 0.005 = 0.5%. Measured % increase from TPW in 28 yr = (29.5-28.5)/28.25 = 0.044 = 4.4%. In 10 yr = 10/28*4.4 = 1.57%. Thus measured increase in WV is about 1.57/.5 = 3+ times that for temperature increase alone. The ‘more than 2.5 times’ assertion appears credible.
00
I used global satellite data for the precipitation. This shows the anomaly since 1979:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ps2pdf.cgi?file=data/igpcp_23_0-360E_-90-90N_n_a.eps.gz
You could replot knocking out the Jan 1996 missing data to see if there is an underlying trend but it appears flat, which is consistent with no increased insolation, at least over water during that period:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/igpcp_23_0-360E_-90-90N_n_a.txt
The linked chart here shows ocean heat content in the climate controlling 0-700m of the oceans:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ps2pdf.cgi?file=data/inodc_heat700_0-360E_-90-90N_n.eps.gz
This one shows temperature anomaly in the top 100m of oceans:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ps2pdf.cgi?file=data/inodc_temp100_0-360E_-90-90N_n.eps.gz
I expect this to correlate with the precipitable water. As an example the saturated vapour pressure for water at 295K is 1856Pa. Increasing the ocean temperature to 295.7 takes the saturated vapour pressure to 1930Pa; a 4% increase. That is very close to the increase in precipitable water. A slight change in ocean temperature causes a significant increase in water vapour, which increases the potential for cloud formation, which reflect more solar radiation.
High cloud cover has been increasing since 1998 so I expect ocean temperatures to be in a cooling phase:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ps2pdf.cgi?file=data/ihiclouds_0-360E_-90-90N_n_a.eps.gz
This is Earth’s thermostat in operation with long lags due to the small changes in heat stored and the huge thermal inertia of the oceans.
10
By the way the partial pressures given above were both at 70% humidity. If I take 100% then the partial pressure is 4.3% higher at 295.7K compared with 295K. I used the 70% because it is closer to the average humidity over oceans.
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/styles/node_lightbox_display/public/key_figures_436?itok=x3jszHeR
Also I have taken a rough average of ocean surface temperature. Averages do not work particularly well when relationships are not linear. Irrespective I would am confident that the precipitable water bears the expected relationship with the ocean surface temperature, which has climbed steadily in the past 50 years but I expect to see come lower in the next decade.
10
Ric – Thanks for the response. Apparently you have also done some rational assessment of this stuff.
I perceive things to be about as you do, self-regulation and all. A few things remain a bother:
Although I get the same number for WV increase per K, the NASA/RSS data TPW extrapolates to an 8% increase since 1960 and the average global temperature increase since then is about 0.6 K. The increase is less than I have asserted but about double what you (and I) are finding for increased temperature alone.
‘Your’ worldwide precipitation chart shows flat trend until 2016 (I changed the 1996 outlier to zero), then a sharp uptrend and ending in March, 2016. The 2016 data looks suspiciously like instrument failure. ‘your’ chart differs substantially from the one put out by EPA at https://www.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-precipitation Here is a narrative article in Nature that asserts rainfall is increasing. http://www.nature.com/news/global-warming-already-driving-increases-in-rainfall-extremes-1.19508 IMO the issue of rainfall change needs more digging. If it is indeed increasing and not attended to with enhanced infrastructure it could be a problem.
‘Your’ high altitude cloud chart ended in 2007. It shows the increase 2000-2007 but none for the longer period 1985-2007. This data http://www.climate4you.com/ClimateAndClouds.htm#Cloud runs a couple years longer and doesn’t show much change. I will try to find more recent data.
I made an assessment of clouds a few years ago and made it public at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com . I found that average global temperature is very sensitive to average cloud altitude. This study implicitly assumed total cloud cover did not change. If high altitude cloud increase adds to total cloud cover then yes, increased albedo and cooling. If total cloud cover does not change, then higher average cloud altitude (cooler average cloud temperature), same albedo, planet warming. ‘
I finally got your last link to open (in Paint) so I see where you got the 70% relative humidity from.
00
Precipitation is a consequence of the OLR emitted from the atmosphere. That is what prevents the atmosphere from becoming very hot and getting lost to space. OLR is emitted from the atmosphere causing the water vapour to solidify to ice and then seed to clouds. 2.7mm/d precipitation corresponds to 80W/sq.m of surface heat lost through cloud top OLR globally. There are dry locations where a higher proportion of the OLR can find a path direct to space from the surface. The data shows a slight upward trend in precipitation in the last 40 years indicating a slight increase in surface heat loss through OLR from the atmosphere. That is expected since the surface has warmed and there is more water in the atmosphere. If you get reliable data on both TPW and ocean surface temperature over the same period I expect you will find there is good correlation between TPW and temperature:
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ps2pdf.cgi?file=data/ihadcruh_q_0-360E_-90-90N_n.eps.gz
http://climexp.knmi.nl/ps2pdf.cgi?file=data/isstoi_v2_0-360E_-90-90N_n.eps.gz
Say 0.6C increase and 0.15g/kg; 5% since 1980. Just a tad higher than expected for the temperature.
If currently dry land becomes water logged then there could be more precipitation as there would be more heat carried out from the surface by evaporation and that has to eventually go out as OLR from the atmosphere, which results in more rain. However the amount of rain is not directly related to the amount of precipitable water. In fact as the TPW goes up the cloud cover increases, depending on seeding, and that increases the reflected SWR so the OLR drops off and there is less rain. It is a self-regulating energy balance.
The link to the Nature article is Climate Disruption Humpty Dumpty science where any weather event can be whatever the climate scientists want it to be. In that way any weather event supports the Climate Disruption theory. Carefully note the wording. It talks about increases in extremes NOT increases in rainfall. How long does it take to determine if there is an increase in extremes!. It is not too difficult to determine if there is more or less rain. Much harder to determine what is extreme unless you are from the school of Humpty Dumpty science. Then it is whatever you want it to be.
With regard to dam design they are already designed for very long average return intervals when consequence of failure could involve loss of lives or significant property damage. I am familiar with the Australian ANCOLD requirements and they are comprehensive as well as conservative:
https://www.ancold.org.au
These requirements cover operating protocol, inspection regimes and maintenance regimes. We had a near disaster in Australia following a drought where the dam level was allowed to fill beyond its recommended safe level as a matter of storing as much water in the expectation of continuing dry as forecast by climate activists. Then there was flooding rain and the dam had to release water much faster than it otherwise would; causing extensive flooding.
If you look at frequency of rain events and flooding I doubt you will find any long term trends that would be outside the expected range. I once sat across the table from an Australian State dam inspector who said he sees 3 to 5 small dam failures each year that were designed to 100 year ARI events (suggesting the designs were not meeting the 100 year ARI)). When I looked at the number of dams he had in the state designed to that criteria it could be argued that the dams were over designed . Tying the design criteria to the consequence is a key feature of good design. Sometimes it can be very expensive to increase immunity to events but sometimes it costs very little. Some dam failures are due to neglect in terms of operating and maintenance procedures rather than events exceeding design.
00
Ric – Did you notice that the specific humidity graph stops before 2005? Extending the slope to now results in 7.4% humidity increase since 1980. I printed the graph and eye balled the slope of all the graph and calculated 9.9%.
Note that the specific humidity graph has the same shape as the TPW graph over the time interval they share. They appear to corroborate each other.
As to “dry land becoming waterlogged”, there has been a steady increase in irrigation, a lot of it spray irrigation which puts a lot of WV in the air. Use Google Earth to view the land west of Wichita Kansas. Those round dots are from circle irrigation. There is a deep well and pump in the middle with a long boom with spray heads extending out from it. The boom rotates slowly around the pump making the circle. There is a lot of spray irrigation of rectangular fields as well as regular irrigation. Add to this all of the yard sprinklers and there is a whole lot of water being put into the atmosphere.
00
No – I thought the data sets were on the same time base. Rather than extrapolate I looked for a more current data set. This link from NOAA. It shows flattening after 2005.
https://www.climate.gov/sites/default/files/specifichumidy_ocean_1985-2011.gif
This chart shows the same flattening or even falling after 2005:
https://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/fig4c_tpw.jpg
It covers the oceans not land but the vast majority of the precipitable water is above oceans.
Then this one that shows no trend in RH over a longer period:
https://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/FOS%20Essay/RH_near_surface.jpg
You would need to check for yourself the quality of the data behind the charts but they show what I expect; the TPW follows the ocean surface temperature.
There could be some increase in rain due to greening of the globe and higher humidity over land but that is a long term trend. There could be changes to local climate due to farming practices but there is no evidence that it is having global impact.
00
Ric – The TPW data measured by satellite by NASA/RSS that I mentioned earlier is monthly with the latest being April, 2017. I graph the data at Figure 3 in my blog (click my name). Although the least squares regression through the entire set shows the up slope of 8% since 1960, the trend looks pretty flat if you just look at 2002-2014 which is consistent with the graphs you linked (note the end dates). It seems to me that flooding is increasing: Sydney, Houston, etc. A list of U.S. flooding is here https://water.usgs.gov/floods/. I don’t know if this is not unusual or random variation or ‘thumb on the scale’ of WV increase. The rest of 2017 might be revealing.
I think I understand, and agree with, that amount of rain depends on OLR. I hadn’t thought of that until you pointed it out (thanks for that). Then rain would increase only to the extent that temperature and thus OLR increases. But the temperature increases as the WV increases with its ghg effect. End result would be a lot less rain increase than I had feared. That is a good thing . . .
00
350,000 windmills at a cost of about $5 million apiece, that’s only $1.75 billion – small change for the rent seekers like Goldman Sachs.
41
Oops, that should read $1.75 trillion. Goldman Sachs received a $10 billion bailout from the US government after the GFC crash.
100
350,000 turbines per year,say 1000 per day!!
Can’t be done, and won’t be done.
Simple.
GeoffW
80
The green blob gets to promise and don’t have to get their hands dirty actually making it happen. You are the one who has to deliver and make it work. If you don’t, it is your fault if it doesn’t work out. They did the really hard part. Your part is the easy stuff that is beneath level of existence.
As Arther C. Clark said: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Making something that actually works as promised looks like magic to them. It is beyond their mental capacity to conceive doing it otherwise. Hence, when you say you can’t do it, they see you as being uncooperative.
If you think I over state the case, I once had a sales manger with an MBA degree demand that I use my “magic” to deliver the impossibility he had already sold. He held that he had done the hard part: he made the sale. “All” I had to do was make it so for his promised price and date of delivery. My response was: “I promise it, I deliver it. You promise it, you deliver it. Be very careful with what you promise.” He went away mumbling and not very happy. Fortunately, I had a manager over me who backed me up.
This happened almost 50 years ago. If it were to happen to me today, I am not sure the manager would be able to walk away let alone mumble. At the very least, he would not get the gentle treatment I gave to that sales manager so long ago. I was young, naive and expected much more from my fellow man. I don’t expect so much anymore nor do I tolerate willful stupidity as gently.
100
Lionell I love the Arthur C Clarke quote – just so true.
Your workplace experience is something we can all relate to.
Regards GeoffW
20
I too have noticed that the older one gets, the less tolerant of managerial stupidity one gets. The threat of getting sacked for your rebuff just isn’t the threat it once was :).
But times have changed, and managers have a long memory. As soon as a restructure comes along, you’re suddenly not needed any more. I’ve seen this time and time again to the best workers, who’s sole crime was to tell the boss their ideas won’t work. Eventually the manager gets the upper hand; To his own hurt, but that doesn’t matter as much as revenge for his hurt pride.
30
Clearly, such managers are not in their position to be able to make a contribution to their company nor the economy. They are there only to have power over others. They are after only short term gain. They lust after the ability to exercise that power without regard to its consequences.
At most, they think only of the next quarterly report. All future quarters are to be and will be sacrificed to make themselves look good for this quarter. Their hope is that they will get promoted before the fall. If they don’t, they usually will blame all the uppity engineers who dared to hold their ground and refused to do the impossible with the inadequate, immediately for free.
I say, run don’t walk to the nearest exit. The only rational thing is to stop trying to support the gigantic inverted pyramid of incompetence and willful stupidity from collapsing. Let it fall. It will anyway and likely sooner than later. About all you can do is delay it a while at a huge personal cost. It is best not to be there when it happens. There is nothing significant to gain and much to lose if you try to hang on.
00
You are almost right lionell. The quarterly reports are required of the middle managers by the upper managers. For the upper managers, the quarterly reports are their
Godbread and butter as their Key Performance Indicators (KPI for short) are tied to the quarterly reports, i.e. their bonuses.So the middle managers focus exclusively on these quarterly or end of year reports to the upper managers. The upper manager oversees several departments but knows very little about any of them. Their soul purpose is to keep the middle managers writing reports (which their KPI’s are tied to).
The middle managers have to stand on the workers heads in order to meet the KPI’s of the upper managers, else they too will get shafted rather quickly.
The workers don’t give a crap about the KPI’s or arbitrary deadlines, created for the end of year budgets and managed by the accountants. The whole thing is just “pick a number, and lets say…. 4 weeks”. You have that much money and time to finish this project. Go!
00
Concerning the world’s biggest carbon tax we have in Australia, another way to look at it is that it establishes a minimum price for electricity, so as someone pointed out in a recent post (TdeF?) even if a thermal generator gave their electricity away for free, you would still be paying the 9c per kWh carbon tax and the price would be greater still once it got to the consumer.
62
Replacing light globes failed to halt or diminish any doomsday global warming.
I have seen no evidence a solar panel or a wind turbine will do that either, as claimed.
Except on the planet Itsacon, where the climate never changes.
50
Found this this morning…I had a giggle at running a desal plant on solar…ah the childish enthusiasm & cluelessness of the ABC….
Any thoughts on viability in terms of energy in /out and also could it be done on a large scale? Or is it just kite flying?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-11/hydrogen-breakthrough-could-fuel-renewable-energy-export-boom/8518916
“Australia’s next big export industry could be its sunlight and wind, as game-changing technology makes it easier to transport and deliver their energy as hydrogen.
Industry players are even talking up renewable hydrogen as the next liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, which could supply hydrogen to power cars, buses, trucks and trains in Japan, South Korea and even Europe.
Their plans have been given a boost by a CSIRO-developed metal membrane, which allows the high-purity hydrogen needed for hydrogen-powered cars to be separated from ammonia.
What is renewable hydrogen?
•Hydrogen is a carrier of energy
•Renewable hydrogen is produced by purifying seawater, then separating the hydrogen and oxygen via electrolysis
• The process of separation is powered by solar or wind energy
•The hydrogen becomes a vehicle for storing renewable energy such as solar or wind
•It is converted into transportable forms for export
CSIRO principal research scientist Michael Dolan said the technology, now being trialled on an industrial scale in Australia, was “the missing link” which allowed hydrogen to be transported and used as an energy source”
31
Enormous amounts of energy are required to electrolyse water into hydrogen and oxygen. They do it on nuclear subs to produce oxygen but that’s because they have to – and they have essentially unlimited power from the reactor.
Pathetic little windmills and solar panels are simply not up to the job.
It is not clear what the reference to ammonia is about. Are they planning to dissolve the wind and solar produced hydrogen in liquid ammonia? Well, that will be fun won’t it? Having transport vehicles carrying around loads of liquid ammonia….what could possibly go wrong?
72
Maybe use the ammonia, hydrogen and seawater in a renewable absorption refrigeration system… to cool the planet.
30
From memory electrolysis is only around 50% efficient, that is the calorific value of the hydrogen is half the electrical energy absorbed in the electrolysis. Then the combustion and conversion of the chemical energy to kinetic is only 30% efficient do the whole process is less than 15% efficient. IE it you used the hydrogen to drive an engine to produce electricity in a generator you would get less than 150 Watt hours for every kW used in the electrolysis. This is a dumb idea.
30
The underlying premise here is that wind and solar power are “free” and that therefore this hydrogen can be produced at little cost. Of course, that is nonsense. You’d be better off producing hydrogen using fossil, hydro or nuclear power but the true cost will be enormous.
We have plenty of oil left for the forseeable future and if we ever run out of that, we can turn coal into liquid transport fuels.
It’s disgraceful that CSIRO is wasting money on projects of this nature.
122
Hydrogen has been looked at for a long time and the same problems arise, as you mention above, and include the difficulty of actually containing H2 for longer periods as it permeates and embrittles nearly everything and escapes from the smallest imperfections. It requires expensive storage. Should the time come when such costs appear economic I’m pretty sure it will be more economic to hang the hydrogen on a carbon backbone to create volatile liquids as a do now. The added bonus is we already have the distribution system.
40
Hydrogen is really easy to store, you just bind it with carbon in a radio of 2:1 to produce CH4 you can liquify that and use it directly in ICEs – it’s variously called methane or natural gas. It’s renewable and unlimited and 90% of organisms make it naturally as a by product of digestion. It’s also made continuously abioticallly through the conversion of CO2 under pressure. There are glaciers/oceans of it on the outer planets.
50
I have always wondered why methane was so prevalent on moons and planets throughout the solar system. I learned something today, thanks 🙂
10
From memory the ingredients are a reducing catalyst say iron, water, CO2, pressure and heat, the iron oxidises breaking the oxygen from the hydrogen which then combines with the CO2 producing Methane and oxygen (more iron oxide).
I’m sure someone will correct me if I have it wrong.
10
Not if you have invested in enough solar and wind to supply electricity demand as it occurs. The installed energy collection capacity is about 7 times the actual energy demanded. That is the nature of intermittent supply meeting demand as it occurs. All the spare energy capacity can be put to good use producing hydrogen as “bottled sunshine”. Energy storage in hydrogen requires only 2.5% the capital cost of storing in batteries. The hydrogen has much higher specific energy than a battery and can be easily transported through existing NG pipelines.
11
Rick,
what efficiency factor did you use for hydrolysis? High pressure continuous electrical hydrolysis give nominally 80% efficiency, but that includes oxygen. So for hydrogen your efficiency drops to “roughly 67% efficient, hence if we put in 1 MWh of electricity at $120, we get out 0.67 MWh of H2 at a cost of $179 a MWh”.
Intermittent hydrolysis is theoretically 45% efficient but by the time you’ve finished (separation, drying, compression) you are looking at around 35% at best.
Also hydrogen isn’t great in internal combustion engines (Octane rating 67) and by burning in with air in external combustion units risks nitrogen oxides formation in the hot flame.
http://euanmearns.com/the-hydrogen-economy-more-green-mythology/
has further discussion.
50
My comparison is based on electrolysis efficiency of 80% and I am only considering the energy storage phase. Hydrogen is a much more flexible fuel than chemical energy locked up in a lithium battery.
If you take a 1kW hydrogen electrolysis plant over a 20 year life it will store 126MWh at 80% efficiency to hydrogen and with 90% utilisation. Taking capital cost at $1000/kW the cost of storage is $7.8/MWh:
http://www.h2fcsupergen.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Hybrid-Hydrogen-Energy-Storage-Michael-Penev-National-Energy-Research-Laboratory.pdf
I previously used a figure of EUR1000/kW for the hydrolysis plant but I did not find that reference. This reference offers a slightly lower capital cost.
Current grid scale lithium batteries cost $1000/kWh and worked at 50% DoD will give 5000 cycles or 2.5MWh over its life for each kWh installed. Hence the cost of storage is $400/MWh.
Relative cost of storage power is say 8/400 or 2%.
To go back to electrical energy from the hydrogen will entail additional losses of about 30% using fuel cell but even for my uses I would be happy to feed hydrogen I produced in summer into water heating in winter. On a sunny day in summer I use about 1 hour of sunlight out of a possible 6 or 7 with my off-grid system so a good deal of solar capacity wasted. I have used excess solar capacity to heat water during the summer rather than using gas.
There is a firm in Australia installing so called “bottled sunshine” that looks neat but I expect it would be too large and uneconomic for my uses.
http://www.sefca.com.au/backup-power/6-bottled-sunshine-fuel-cells
With this storage technology having such low cost relative to batteries and the energy is indeed free then it offers considerable opportunity. Not quite as convenient as a battery though.
It is possible to buy membrane electrolysers and fuel cells but the technology is improving rapidly and there are quite a few variants so hard to know what will prove most economic over its life. The costs are likely to come down as small scale are still embryonic. Units around the 100 to 200W size would dramatically increase the on-demand capacity of my 5kWh battery throughout the year.
10
We had this discussion last thread and you learned nothing. Hydrogen embrittles those pipes and induces premature failure, it has a huge diffusion rate in most storage containers, it’s explosive burnt in air, with it’s only saving grace being that it rises quickly and doesn’t pool. It has a low energy density and can’t be liquefied. It has a very low flash point making it very sensitive to static electricity ignition. Fuel cell feed stock is better supplied by a hydrogen source that is more concentrated and with a higher flash point, eg. A Carbon hydride or a nitrogen hydride IE: CH4 or NH3 or maybe say Ammonium nitrate (fertiliser) which is a convenient solid. Hydrogen is the dumbest fuel possible except where you need to exploit it’s fast burning characteristic, say as rocket propellent. Using hydrogen makes about as much sense as using nitroglycerin as a propellant.
60
Hydrogen is widely used in industry. Annual productions stands at 50Mt. Large generators have used hydrogen for almost a century. Hydrogen can be produced from sunshine and water as the only consumables. Hydrogen can produce electricity directly in combination with air. Hydrogen has high specific energy. Hydrogen is stored at very little cost in underground caverns.
All those pluses make it a good candidate to store energy where there is excess generating capacity from the intermittent generators that developed countries are destined to have.
10
Rick, you would be much better off using the solar energy to agitate and optimally heat a bio digester to make methane and/or ethanol. The process is far more efficient than the grossly inefficient electrolysis process you favour. The 50 Mt you mention is produced for very specific purposes and from steam reformation of natural gas. Hydrogen is a poor fuel candidate.
50
The linked literature may improve your understanding of hydrogen production and why it is the preferred option for energy storage where electricity is abundant and essentially free:
http://www.hydrogen.no/maritim-bergen-sept2014/NEL%20Hydrogen%20Efficient%20H2%20production%20with%20Norwegian%20electrolyser%20technology,%20Henning%20Langås.pdf
This photograph shows a bottled sunshine installation:
http://www.sefca.com.au/images/sliders/bottledsunshine/Actapower-HT4.jpg
Somewhat bigger than I have in mind but the basic elements are there.
Now provide a link to a photo of what you are proposing for a residential digester. I will then show both images to my wife to see what she would prefer at the back of the garage.
10
Graeme
On looking at your link I soon get to:
This shows a complete misunderstanding of what an intermittent generating system needs to look like to supply on-demand power. The installed capacity for the most economic solution using battery storage needs to have energy capacity roughly 7X the average demand. In my analysis to meet the NEM demand I established there would need to be solar capacity of 240GW to meet the annual electricity demand of 200TWh or 720PJ. That installed solar capacity could have an annual energy output of around 4320PJ, depending on its location, if it could be dumped into a large energy store. Australia’s total energy usage in 14/15 was 5919PJ. So the solar system required to meet just the on-demand electricity could be used to satisfy 73% of Australia’s total energy needs.
If the installed solar capacity can be used continuously and long term storage is low cost then there is the possibility for.solar to be economic with fossil fuels. We are probably about 30 years from the point of having those technologies proven but it is an economic possibility.
As far as I can ascertain none of the materials for a hydrogen based energy system is in short supply. Fuel cells and electrolyses can be made from relatively abundant materials. That contrasts with less abundant materials used in lithium batteries. Batteries may have their place for high power density component of supplies.
20
However 7 times overbuild emits at least 3 times the equivalent CO2 emission of an equivalent gas turbine. Given your solar is so inefficient and doesn’t save CO2 compared with even coal, exactly what is the point of it?
You need to learn some math and some basic life cycle cost assessment.
For example the retail solar industry itself consumes around 20-30% of all the solar energy made in Australia leaving only 70-80% for everyone else. You don’t account these systemic losses.
30
Sorry, Rick,
I do not see that the efficiency you quote is obtainable, nor that enough hydrogen can be generated nor stored to overcome the vagrancies of renewable generation. An annual average isn’t adequate planning for seasonal variations.
I point out that the vast majority of hydrogen is made these days by steam reaction with natural gas (i.e. steam plus methane gives hydrogen and CO2) because it is far cheaper than using electricity. Since the effort by the Greens is to push up the cost of electricity there is little chance of your scheme eventuating.
A better storage scheme is that being developed in the Shetlands. Rather than trying to integrate their (quite efficient, small) wind farm into the grid, they have opted for using the variable output to heat large, insulated tanks of water. The warm water is to be circulated through houses, shops etc. to keep them warm. Smaller tanks will supply various hamlets and buildings.
The advantages are that variations in supply are smoothed out (despite the over 50% Capacity Factor – Shetland is noted for wind) and that heating doesn’t draw on the grid. Given that Shetland has an average temperature lower than Hobart (and Copenhagen) this is a better way to add storage and avoid periods of no wind).
30
I am already using heated water as storage but in practical volumes in a residential property it holds its energy for about only 24 hours despite thick layers of insulation. The specific energy of hydrogen oxidation is almost 1000 times the specific energy of heated water over a usable temperature range from say 30 to 80C and a gas bottle at room temperature does not require any specific storage requirements.
You can already buy small electyrolysers that achieve 50% efficiency. The 80% figure is the current limit of technology but this will become commercially available.
To couple the storage with solar production it needs to not degrade over 6 to 9 months. That is possible with massive scale ponds but not practical for residential use.
Current commercial hydrogen plants have an overall hydrogen electrolyser efficiency of over 70%:
http://www.hydrogen.no/maritim-bergen-sept2014/NEL%20Hydrogen%20Efficient%20H2%20production%20with%20Norwegian%20electrolyser%20technology,%20Henning%20Langås.pdf
But there are new electrode technologies that are achieving 80% efficiency. This is an emerging technology with many opportunities for refinement.
The energy is literally free because any intermittent generator has to have a huge excess of capacity to meet the daily demand each day or maybe over a few days if the battery storage is large enough. Hydrogen gas storage extends the storage capacity with water as the only consumable, which most residences would have in ample supply.
Norway has excess of hydro capacity from year to year so electricity to hydrogen already makes sense.
10
Er, let me see if I get this one little bit, here –
” (i.e. steam plus methane gives hydrogen and CO2)” (my bolding there)
So to get hydrogen, a nice clean fuel/storage medium, you also make CO2.
I thought the entire point was to NOT make more CO2??
And one of my goals in life is to not be blown up by the tech or fuels I use to get through life – it sounds like would be a lot more difficult to accomplish this goal should hydrogen come into play. Yes? No?
00
Methane reforming is a common way of producing hydrogen for industry where natural gas is readily available.
The only consumables in a hydrogen electrolyser are water and electrical energy. Water is abundant and hydrogen producers in Europe can get electricity free or are actually paid to consume the electricity. Even now in SA the electricity price goes negative and the State is a long way from 100% renewable.
http://nelhydrogen.com/assets/uploads/2017/01/Nel_Electrolyser_brochure.pdf
Once installed capacity of intermittent generators reach the maximum grid demand at any time of the day or night, the power price can spike to large negative values because there is a cost attached to taking generators off line. A load that can respond to these price dips can get paid to take power. One of the common themes in the Finkel submissions was recommendations for NEM pricing to be settled every 5 minutes rather than the current 30 minutes. That would allow fast response loads to make money on the dips and fast response generators to make money on the peaks.
Hydrogen is a relatively safe fuel. It has high buoyancy in air so rapidly dissipates if leaked.
http://www.computerworld.com/article/2852323/heres-why-hydrogen-fueled-cars-arent-little-hindenburgs.html
Living has it risks. The risk of dying in your home from a fuel explosion or fire is relatively low. This puts that risk in perspective:
https://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/10/28/Factfile_deaths_large.png
Hydrogen fuel will lower that risk.
00
Rick Will,
“bottled sunshine”
For a long long time this phrase has meant wine.
Think: Penfolds Grange, Champagne, Beaujolais Nouveau, 2 Buck Chuck
Please, do not sully this fine phrase by using it associated with the CAGW scam.
Bottled Sunshine
20
The term “bottled sunshine” is not mine. It comes from SECFA:
http://www.sefca.com.au/backup-power/6-bottled-sunshine-fuel-cells
There is a no indication that they have attempted to copyright the term though. There is a registered business name Bottled Sunshine and a flower variety.
00
Very interesting.
With respect to wine, the phrase has been around for a long time. How long I have no idea.
The picture I linked to was used in a magazine ad at least 10 years ago — with the phrase.
Florida citrus growers produced a movie in 1968 titled “Bottled Sunshine – a Juicy story”
Because these are not related things, trademark laws probably do not apply.
I’ll have the wine, though.
00
……ummm…where does the ammonia come from?
00
Look, you all know how I continually harp on about the Maths when it comes to wind power, because, until people actually understand how useless wind power really is, then wind power will always gain traction, and the Maths helps me to show you how useless they really ARE.
Look at this.
See how right at the top of Joanne’s text, it’s mentioned that there are 341,000 wind towers. Keep that number in mind.
When you click on the link (341,000 wind turbines) the second number from the top is 55.6. That’s the amount of Nameplate added during 2016 to bring the Worldwide total for wind up to the figure shown there of 486.8GW. (and hey, note the misprint there, where the very last thing in that sentence is 2015. Read it again carefully, because that should read 2016.)
So here we have a total Nameplate for wind power of 486.8GW.
Note here that NOWHERE on that list is an actual total for the actual power generated by these wind turbines, nowhere.
So, 486.8GW, or 486,800MW total Nameplate for wind power
Okay then, let’s do some Maths then.
The overall Capacity Factor (CF) for wind on the Worldwide scale is 29%, so that means that the total power generated by these 341,000 wind turbines is 1238TWH of power.
Let’s then compare that with HELE (USC) coal fired power, and here, I’ll use generating units of 1000MW, and two units at one power plant, so, one Plant – 2000MW.
For the same Nameplate as wind power, (486,800MW) that’s 244 power plants, (rounded up to the next one) or 488 Generators.
These power plants are currently operating at a CF of around 85% after 10/12 years of operation in China.
So, for actual power generated from that Nameplate for HELE, we get 3630TWH, which is almost three times the power that all those wind turbines generate.
However, here we are only doing an equality with what is generated by wind power, 1238TWH so here, we only need 166,000 MW of HELE power to generate that, so at 1000MW per generator, that’s 166 generators, two at each plant, so 83 individual power plants.
341,000 wind turbines, or 166 generators, 83 Power plants.
The comparison is stark to say the least.
Tony.
141
We are the only significant nation on earth that’s actually not following the maths. All other nations of significance are building coal fired power stations as though their lives depended on them, and they do. We and only we are turning a blind eye to the maths and decommissioning our coal fired power stations and refusing to build new ones. We are doomed unless the people wake up and demand a complete turnaround. The ball is in their court, not the government. The next federal election will be critical to Australia’s future.
110
Huh! Ironic comment on no one knowing any Maths these days. An unemployed Sydney man won $50 Million in last night’s PowerBall. One of his first comments was , “I don’t even know how many zeroes there are in 50 million.”
I guess there’s no point my trying to tell people how useless wind power is if that’s the strength of their maths knowledge.
One of the first things we learned in our trade – pico, nano, micro milli, Unit, kilo mega, giga, tera
Maths was just so much fun. Really.
Tony.
91
Indeed. I was one the few who actually enjoyed doing 4 unit maths. Part of the enjoyment was due to finding it so easy.
30
Tony stated:
This is a gross oversimplification. The wind turbines are intermittent producers and cannot supply power on demand. The developed world expects power to be available when they want; not when the wind is blowing. The capacity factor no longer applies unless you have near infinite storage capacity available.
When you consider typical load profiles combined with intermittent generation and optimum levels of storage the generation capacity needs to be at least 7 times the average demand. That means the 341,000 turbines could be matched with about 30 off 1MW base load plants depending on the load profile.
If half of the current global inventory of wind turbines were installed in Australia and matched to suitably massive energy storage then Australia could get 100% of its current NEM demand supplied by wind. The total energy is around 200TWh. It is doable but one certainty is power prices MUST go up for investment of that scale.
40
No Rick , 7 times is for Solar (nameplate to peak demand) which is at least somewhat predictable, wind can be becalmed for months, there’s NO effective level of overbuild that can guarantee 99.5% reliable supply. Engineers do however usually apply a practical level which is just 1% of nameplate, but that is not based on the correct reliability level for the grid. What this means is that for every megawatt of wind installed you can retire just 10kW of fossil fuel energy. 100 GW of wind needs to be installed to retire just 1GW of coal, and even then you can’t expect the same reliability.
Wind reliability is statistical because the wind doesn’t rise in the east every morning as regular as clockwork. You might make reliability statistically but with a statistical distribution there is always the chance your generation will land somewhere far out in the tail of the distribution. Customers won’t be particularly forgiving….
20
The 7 times is based on solar. I have not done the sums on solar. Irrespective Tony grossly underestimates the require intermittent generation if he simply uses the capacity factor.
20
Yes, on this you are correct, the CF is an annual average that does not allow for reliability, grid level reliability is far less than that (around 3%) or as you put it about 1/7 th of the capacity factor adjusted output. Tony’s output figures are 7 times the amount of energy that can be reliably expected to be available on demand.
20
You do not need to use maths to explain the point.
It can readily be illustrated by some common examples which most people will readily understand.
Every kid knows how useless wind power is. There is little energy in the displacement of air and this is readily seen when playing with a water pistol.
Why do you refill a water pistol when it runs out of water? Answer, because there is all but no power in the displacement of air whereas there is power in the displacement of water?
How much does an empty 2 litre bottle of coke weigh? Compare that with a full 2 litre bottle of coke. Hold, at waist level, an empty 2 litre bottle in your left hand and a full 2 litre bottle in your right hand. Position these over your left and right foot and let go. The empty bottle does not hurt your fot, whereas the full bottle does.
It is easy to see that there is all but no energy in air and windturbines are simply harnessing next to nothing, especially as they have to be shut down when it gets really windy.
42
Seriously? That is how you’d explain wind power to the lay person? I agree that Maths can be avoided but weak unquantifiable examples that have no relationship to people’s lives is not the alternative.
You can see the weakness since counter examples are just as easy to make up on the spot (like your examples). How about these? Australia was settled by Europe using wind power. Whole cities get destroyed in hours by wind power. Surfers surf huge wind derived waves and they are powerful (even been wiped out?).
41
“I agree that Maths can be avoided ”
Yes.. we know you do. !!
31
‘Australia was settled by Europe using wind power.’
That’s a good line, how about.
Wind power brought death and destruction to a pristine environment.
10
Using a transit time the best part of a year, me I prefer the 24 hours a kerosene powered turbine delivers.
20
https://museumvictoria.com.au/discoverycentre/websites-mini/journeys-australia/1850s70s/
For those who travelled to Australia in the nineteenth century, the journey was often long and dangerous. In calm weather a sailing ship might take as long as four months, while a well-run clipper ship with favourable winds could make the journey in a little over half this time. These ships represented the pinnacle of sailing ship technology. With their streamlined hulls and acres of sail designed to catch even the slightest breeze, clippers were built primarily for speed.
For some reason I remember my grandmother saying it took them nearly 6 months to get to Sydney when she was 11 years old. Which would probably put the date around 1920, or there-abouts. They probably called into ports along the way and did trade, I don’t know.
The modern methods are definitely a million times faster and safer.
30
In the 19th century they came by the Roaring Forties and dodged large icebergs, later with steam it would have been via the Suez Canal and stopping off in Colombo.
10
341,000 wind turbines vs. 166 generators.
From the figures in Matt Ridley’s article:
In steel and concrete – 85,250,000 tonnes vs. 426,250 tonnes
In coal burnt to produce said steel and concrete – 51,150,000 tonnes vs. 255,750 tonnes
It is very clear why China and India combined have around 1000 new technology HELE coal power stations under construction.
00
Going against the tide and in search of a political compromise, the people in remote or isolated environments in the great outback are getting reliable energy for the first time.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-05-11/horizon-power-has-success-with-solar-power-system-in-regional-wa/8518622
20
I don’t think marble bar is a good example.
10
Well, at least it seems like a practical application. Even though it was subsidised to the tune of $100 million.
20
This quote from Frank Tudor got me interested, where he suggests the population has grown enormously, so in this sense a startup cost of $100 might seems reasonable.
“We are refreshing the entire electricity infrastructure because large resource developments have quadrupled the size of the town,” Mr Tudor said.
10
That is …. $100 million might seem reasonable to large resource developers.
10
I wonder how much extra coal would need to be mined and burnt to produce all those wind turbines to go from virtually 0% to a suitable figure for the alarmists of say 20%? The sooner Australians wake up and demand a stop to the demonising of coal the better but they won’t because they are still asleep. It will take a rude shock to wake them up, and it’s coming.
80
11 May: Reuters: Christoph Steitz: SolarWorld collapses as Europe’s solar industry eclipsed by China
Shares in SolarWorld, which employs around 3,000 people and was once Europe’s largest solar panel maker, plunged about 80 percent on Thursday after the group said it would file for insolvency.
“This is a bitter step for SolarWorld, the management board and staff and also for the solar industry in Germany,” said Chief Executive Frank Asbeck, known as the “Sun King” in the German solar industry’s heyday…
Through lavish government subsidies, Europe – most notably Germany – was instrumental in building a global solar industry…
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sma-solar-results-idUSKBN1870ZV
10 May: Reuters:Christoph Steitz: German Sun King’s SolarWorld to file for insolvency
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-solarworld-bankruptcy-idUSKBN1862MN
71
Bye,bye Solar World and good riddance,
GeoffW
50
should have inluded this excerpt from the first Reuters link:
In a sign of pressure on the broader renewables industry, German wind turbine maker Nordex (NDXG.DE) also said on Thursday its order intake in the first quarter plunged by nearly 40 percent, due to growing competition in Europe.
The group’s shares fell about 6 percent to the bottom of Frankfurt’s technology index. TECDAX. SMA shares, which have nearly halved over the past 12 months, were down 2 percent, compared with a flat technology index .TECDAX.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-sma-solar-results-idUSKBN1870ZV
41
comment in moderation re: “In a sign of pressure on the broader renewables industry, German wind turbine maker Nordex (NDXG.DE) also said on Thursday its order intake in the first quarter plunged by nearly 40 percent”
31
10 May: Oregonian: SolarWorld says it’s insolvent; fate of Hillsboro factory unclear
By Ted Sickinger and Mike Rogoway
SolarWorld AG, the German parent of a major solar factory in Hillsboro, said Wednesday that it cannot cover its debts and will file for insolvency.
It’s unclear what will happen to the company’s Oregon operation, which taxpayers have supported with tax breaks worth tens of millions of dollars. SolarWorld Americas employs 800 on its 103-acre campus in Washington County, and is a big customer for a number of suppliers in the region.
Should the Hillsboro factory close, it would be the final blow to an economic development strategy hatched more than a decade ago by then-Gov. Ted Kulongoski to transform Oregon into a solar manufacturing powerhouse…
SolarWorld competitor Suniva, based in Norcross, Georgia, shuttered a Michigan solar manufacturing plant in late March, then filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection three weeks later to reorganize…
This is not SolarWorld’s first brush with financial difficulties. In 2013, it avoided insolvency through a reorganization in which much of its debt was swapped for equity, and it received an eleventh-hour injection of capital from Qatar Solar Technologies…
SolarWorld spent $440 million to overhaul the site, opening the 480,000-square-foot facility in 2008 with 250 employees. Oregon helped with energy tax credits and property tax credits that The Oregonian valued at $100 million in 2012…
http://www.oregonlive.com/business/index.ssf/2017/05/solarworld_says_its_insolvent.html
41
11 May: DailyCaller: Michael Bastasch: Largest US Solar Panel Maker Files For Bankruptcy After Receiving $206 Million In Subsidies
SolarWorld has gotten a whopping $115 million in federal and state grants and tax subsidies since 2012, according to the Union-backed group Good Jobs First. And that’s on top of the nearly $91 million in federal loan guarantees the company got during that time…
http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/11/largest-us-solar-panel-maker-files-for-bankruptcy-after-receiving-206-million-in-subsidies/
41
Globally, wind power capacity by the end of 2014 was
enough to meet at least 3.1% of total electricity consumption
http://www.ren21.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/REN12-GSR2015_Onlinebook_low1.pdf
(bottom of P73 on the LH side.)
[Warning: The referenced document is over 250 pages in length. Download times may vary.] Fly
21
capacity ????
but what about reality !!!
61
Indeed; capacity is what it CAN produce.
What DID it produce?
40
You entirely miss the point of Matt Ridley’s article.
In terms of global energy production, wind power only produced 0.46% and needed 250,000 wind turbines, 62,500,000 tonnes of steel and concrete, 500,000 tonnes of neodymium and the burning of 37,500,000 tonnes of coal just to produce 0% (rounded to the nearest whole number) of the world’s energy needs.
Big Wind subsidy farming is an economic and engineering dead end.
00
So the IEA counts the burning of twigs and dung in 3rd world countries as “renewable energy production”? Now I really know these statistics are bull sheet . Might as well count all the Boy Scout and Guy Fawkes bonfires as well.
50
Jo stated
How does 0.7% become 5%? The contribution of wind in 2014/15 was 41PJ in a total of 5919PJ in Australia.
https://industry.gov.au/Office-of-the-Chief-Economist/Publications/Documents/aes/2016-australian-energy-statistics.pdf
The actual data for Australia is much the same as the rest of the world and not that “remarkable”.
20
Also
That would require all trucks and cars with combustion engines to be off the road; no gas used in industry; no coal used in furnaces etc. I doubt that actually occurred.
50
Fair comments Rick. That Portugal ran for (4) days of course refers to electrical power generation. Of course this procludes energy for industry and transport which is a lot more and tends to be neglected in the debate.
Regards GeoffW
10
I think I read this same comment on WUWT last week. Someone in the know stated that it’s basically true, but they also imported 80% of their power from their neighbours.
So yea, they didn’t burn coal to produce it.
30
Rick -easy, they almost certainly used the “nameplate” capacity of the turbines, instead of the measured output. As I understand it, measured output is typically 15-20 percent of nameplate, so divide the nameplate mw by 5 or 6 to fix it.
20
Hey this is all a bit spooky. That Matt Ridley Spectator article is dated 9.00am 13th May 2017 – amazing what even talking about renewables can do
10
Oregonian first reported the SolarWorld insolvency story on May 10, 2017 at 5:06 PM, which would be 10.06pm 11 May EST Australia.
yet still no story can be found at NYT, CNN, ABC Australia, Guardian, Fairfax etc etc.
ABC America and WaPo only manage to carry a very dry, short piece by AP:
10 May: WaPo: AP: Germany’s SolarWorld files for insolvency as prices fall
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/germanys-solarworld-files-for-insolvency-as-prices-fall/2017/05/11/c7c0718e-365d-11e7-ab03-aa29f656f13e_story.html?utm_term=.6830d6c148d2
not a story to be told during the Bonn CLIMATE talks, it seems.
11
oops…I should have said 10.06AM EST:
Oregonian first reported the SolarWorld insolvency story on May 10, 2017 at 5:06 PM, which would be ***10.06AM 11 May EST Australia.
which means MSM has been avoiding this story even longer.
20
I for one am happy to spend 361 days a year huddled in a damp cave if it means that I can have four days of solar energy a year.
30
I speak to the pseudo Marxists over the barricades and they are developing a Medieval fantasy, small is beautiful.
They want to deindustrialise and setup villages across this barren land, with cottage industries, but I argue quite convincingly that they can’t have their continental bullet train network without base load power. Is this correct?
20
nothing on SolarWorld insolvency at BBC either, but Matt McGrath is a busy man:
10 May: BBC: Matt McGrath, Bonn: UN examines fossil fuel influence in climate talks process
Environmental groups allege that fossil fuel industries are funding a number of business and industry participants in these talks.
These groups should be restricted, say the campaigners, because they say their goal is to slow down or derail progress.
Business representatives say that the discussion is an attempt at censorship.
At this meeting in Bonn, the UN has convened a special workshop on the role of observer organisations that make up a significant proportion of the attendees at these events…
“There are over 270 business and industry NGOs accredited to the UNFCCC,” Jesse Bragg from Corporate Accountability International told BBC News.
“Many of these groups represent the interests of fossil fuel companies around the world.”
“What ***many parties are saying now is that ***we need to take a look at what voices we want to have heard in the climate policy making process.”…
When asked what the differences were between the industry and green groups that try and influence proceedings, Mr Bragg said:
???”Environmental groups represent the public interest – these business groups represent the financial interests of certain industries. Fundamentally we are talking about representing people or representing profits.”…
The National Mining Association (NMA) is a US body that represents the interests of more than 300 corporations and organisations involved in the extraction of coal and mineral resources.
“NMA is on record as withdrawing from these discussions and urging our government to do the same,” Luke Popovich, NMA vice president told BBC News via email.
“We are listed on a UNFCCC website as an ‘observer’ from a filing some 10 years ago that was never activated and was never removed from the site. NMA will have no role in these discussions, period.”
Mr Popovich also railed against the attempt of green groups and others to restrict organisations that promote the use of fossil fuels from having a role in the UN discussions.
“If they believe climate change is real why do they wish to prevent dialogue, to censor discussion, on what might be the rational policy responses to climate change?
“They are smitten by their own voice and no other.”…
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39863816
11 May: BBC: Matt McGrath, Bonn: SOS Ivanka! Can ‘first daughter’ save Paris climate deal?
Among the diplomats meeting here in Bonn, there’s a recognition that the person who’s really key to the future progress of climate talks is not in Germany but in the White House some 6,500km (4,000 miles) away.
It’s not you Mr Trump, it’s your official first daughter!…
In most of the conversations I’ve had here in Bonn, one name is mentioned with a nodding mixture of REVERENCE AND HOPE…
“It’s crazy times, and we’re trying to influence with all the tools and tactics at our disposal,” said Liz Gallagher from environmental think tank, E3G, and a long time participant in these talks…
Call the White House!
It’s not just the people on the ground here who are fervently trying to get a message to Ivanka,
Environmental campaigners around the US and the world are being urged to get in touch with the White House…
Some commentators believe that the President is now in an optimal position – everyone is waiting on him, no-one wants to upset him. He doesn’t really have to do anything.
However that situation is unlikely to last more than a few months. As one (ANONYMOUS) delegate said, it will soon be time for him to ***”poop or get off the pot.”
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-39883635
***KEEP IT CLEAN, BBC, OR AT LEAST NAME YOUR ALLEGED SOURCE.
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read all:
11 May: American Thinker: S. Fred Singer: A Global Warming Surprise
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2017/05/a_global_warming_surprise.html
meanwhile, how shameless is this? writer even contradicts his own figure for attendance within the article and still estimates on the high side!
10 May: Sun-Sentinel: Anthony Man: Experts see climate change peril for South Florida’s black and Hispanic communities
African-American, Caribbean-American and Hispanic communities are typically located ***miles from South Florida beaches where climate change is most visible — but people who live in those areas are profoundly vulnerable to the effects, political leaders and climate science experts said Wednesday.
And, panelists at a Fort Lauderdale conference said, there’s a growing awareness in minority communities of the implications of climate change…
About ***75 people turned out for Wednesday’s climate change conference at the Urban League of Broward County. U.S. Rep. Alcee Hastings, a Democrat who represents most of the African-American and Caribbean-American communities in Broward and Palm Beach counties, said he was amazed at the attendance.
The environmental movement was long seen as the province of “white tree huggers,” said Caroline Lewis, director of the CLEO Institute, a non-profit based in Miami-Dade County that stands for climate leadership engagement opportunities.
But that is changing, said Lewis, who is Caribbean-American. “Here in southeast Florida, it is almost flipping,” she said. “It’s bubbling up tremendously.”…
***•Panelists and audience members said degradation of coastal communities that are home to affluent people could end up hurting people who live in inland minority communities, who could get priced out of their homes by people with more money looking for places to live…
Braynon suggested that anyone who doubts that climate change is real should try to visit South Beach during a full moon, when there’s flooding even during dry weather…
TWEET Broward Politics (Anthony Man, author of the article): About 60 people at #climatechangesouthfl conference at Urban League headquarters in Fort Lauderdale. (LOOKS MORE LIKE 40)
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/politics/fl-reg-alcee-hastings-climate-change-20170510-story.html
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But, but , wind power is supposed to help climate right? Why don’t we see more studies on large scale wind farm impacts on climate like this from years ago? Is brown the new green in 341,000 locations now? Is this simlilar to the way a Dam changes the local climate and habitats, or worse?
http://news.mit.edu/2010/climate-wind-0312
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Forgot to link the embedded paper in the article. Sorry about that.
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/10/2053/2010/acp-10-2053-2010.html
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11 May: Reuters: Christoph Steitz: Nordex wind turbine order intake down as sector shifts to tender
Nordex posted first-quarter sales and core earnings that were below expectations, adding new orders for its wind turbines dwindled as the European industry is weaning off subsidies and moving towards a competitive bidding system.
Order intake in the first quarter stood at 333 million euros ($362 million), the group said on Thursday, down from 541 million in the year earlier period and also lower than the 527 million average analyst forecast in a Reuters poll.
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFASN00071W
10 May: Bloomberg: Wind Turbines May Get Reprieve in Sweden
by Jesper Starn
Halting Swedish wind turbines at still summer nights would save almost all of the tens of thousands of bats killed by the rotating blades every year.
Every turbine kills 10-15 bats annually on average as the creatures are struck when they hunt insects attracted by the spinning unit, according to a study (LINK) by Sweden’s Energy and Environmental Protection agencies…
As it would be evenings with already low wind speeds, less than 1 percent of total output would be cut, (co-author & bird researcher at the University of Lund Martin) Green said…
Five different species of bats have been found dead below turbines in southern Sweden by the researchers. What they all have in common is that they prefer to hunt at higher altitudes, making them more vulnerable to the rotating blades than peers. None of the species are at risk of extinction, but if nothing is done to limit the deaths, numerous populations are at risk of getting rare, Green said…
A similar study by the University of Exeter in England said hundreds of bat deaths at U.K. onshore windfarms could be avoided if producers turned off turbines at night. Operators that take preventive steps could be rewarded with higher tariffs for their power, the researchers said in the November report…
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-05-10/bats-massacred-by-wind-turbines-may-get-reprieve-in-sweden
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There was some talk about hydro above and if it is “renewable”.
The problem is that the warmists throw hydro into the “renewable” mix along with wind and solar.
Our problem is that hydro is a legitimate, engineered contnuous power, cost effective system at the few sites it is suitable for.
Because it is a legitimate system from an engineering point of view it gives legitimacy to other renewables it is classified with such as solar and wind.
We should not allow this improper categorisation to take place.
Its correct categorisation is that it should be considered a non-fossil fuel technology, the same as nuclear.
Our legimate power generation hierarchy is therefore fossil which includes coal and gas and non-fossil which includes nuclear and hydro.
The other category is diffuse (low energy density), intermittent, expensive methodolgies such as solar, wind, wave power and other thought bubbles the warmists may have from time to time.
The point is, don’t let them claim a legitimate engineered system such as hydro as their own, it predated their thought bubbles by about a century.
I hope this makes sense.
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Much hydro (almost all?) is via dams – and dams alter the ecosystem, preventing water from flowing downstream freely, disrupting natural seasonal rhythms and ecosystems. The disruption of natural ecosystems and seasonal rhythms occurs upstream as well with the flooding of large areas in order to have the water required for generation available all year. Greens should hate hydro and not include it in renewables because of this – but then, the greens have ceased to be about anything other than the disruption of CO2 in the ecosystems. They no longer seem to care about the other creatures on this planet – at least, not in ways other than as abstract concepts and marketing devices.
Wonder what they will do if (when) windmills and solar start killing polar bears and penguins?
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12 May: Yahoo: GoodMorningAmerica: Conor Finnegan: US signs international declaration on climate change despite Trump’s past statements
While President Trump has talked tough in the past about his skeptical views on climate change, his administration appears to be taking a more cautious approach to the issue on the world stage in the early days of his presidency.
U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson signed a document today calling climate change a “serious threat” to the Arctic and noting the need for action to reduce its potentially harmful effects.
The document, known as the Fairbanks Declaration, concluded Tillerson’s chairing of a meeting of the Arctic Council, a board made up of indigenous groups and the eight countries bordering the Arctic, in Fairbanks, Alaska.
While the council only has the power to issue advisories, the language in the statement signed by Tillerson comes in stark contrast to statements and promises made by President Trump about climate change…
While Tillerson endorsed the Arctic Council document, he cautioned that the U.S. would not be rushed into formulating its policy.
“We’re not going to rush to make a decision. We’re going to work to make the right decision for the United States,” he said…
The Fairbanks proclamation says that “the Arctic is warming at more than twice the rate of the global average, resulting in widespread social, environmental, and economic impacts,” and notes “the pressing and increasing need for mitigation and adaptation actions and to strengthen resilience.”
It calls for “the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change and its implementation, and reiterating the need for global action to reduce both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants.”
Later in the statement, the parties commit a whole section to addressing the impacts of climate change, laying out eleven steps forward…
The State Department defended Tillerson’s signing by saying the declaration is not an obligatory document.
“The Fairbanks Declaration notes what Paris claims to be,” a State Department official told ABC News. “It does not obligate the U.S. to enforce it.”
The Canadian foreign minister thanked the U.S. delegation for signing the document today…
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/us-signs-international-declaration-climate-change-despite-trumps-004206189–abc-news-topstories.html
no link to the Declaration in the above, so here it is:
11 May: US Dept of State: Fairbanks Declaration 2017: On the Occasion of the Tenth Ministerial Meeting of the Arctic Council
https://www.state.gov/e/oes/rls/other/2017/270802.htm
11
Repeating a comment is not always intentional particular if your internet connection is very slow and unreliable. In this case it was not intentional
12
But we live in the 21st century. We have flying cars and skateboards. Energy is supplied by miniaturised home nuclear plants, and nobody has to work as our robots do it all for us!
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Greg,
Change whatever you’re smoking. It’s doing you no good. 🙂
00
from the Fairbanks Declaration, note the Agenda30 SDGs follow the mention of the Paris Agreement. if only people understood the connection:
Noting the entry into force of the Paris Agreement on climate change and its implementation, and reiterating the need for global action to reduce both long-lived greenhouse gases and short-lived climate pollutants, and
Reaffirming the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the need for their realization by 2030…
https://www.state.gov/e/oes/rls/other/2017/270802.htm
10
So… how much do wind turbines cost us in birds per GWh?
40
Though no fan of wind power, or any other ‘in-vogue’ sources of electricity, I do not think that the demise of manufacturing in Australia can be blamed on the application of this technology. It is more like the final stroke, especially for my home state SA, putting nails in the coffin of a deceased manufacturing sector.
The key factors, in my option, were Australian labor laws, hobbling the ability of Australian manufacturing to compete with imports, ably assisted by over-regulation.
One only has to look at the thousands of permits that are now required to get any major project off the ground, to realize that the age of getting things done in Australia is pretty much over.
00
The thing I have never understood is why the greenies
promoting the earth has a fever are such blatant hypocrites . Flying around in private jets (OK maybe they jet pool ), driving bullet proof black monster trucks . owning waterfront mansions and eating like they wear nothing but stretches .
I mean if your going to pull a heist at least make the appearance credible . The little bow ties and white smocks are a nice touch though . Full marks to Mr.Dress Up.
00
Well its probably going to inch up a tad greater than zero because there’s a big offshore wind farm project trying to get approval for huge turbines off the beautiful central coast of Southern California. I just got notice of it from my representative on the board of supervisors.
There’s nothing they respect, not facts and certainly not beauty. Funny thing is, it may well be some of the same people who have been so opposed to the offshore drilling rigs that at least provided us something useful who will be supporting this. So I guess it’s a matter of what is spoiling the view rather than the mere fact that the view got degraded by all that hardware sticking out of the water.
00
let’s have a big hand for Coal-
Steam coal – also known as thermal coal – is mainly used in power generation.
Coking coal – also known as metallurgical coal – is mainly used in steel production.
Other important users of coal include alumina refineries, paper manufacturers, and the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. Several chemical products can be produced from the by-products of coal. Refined coal tar is used in the manufacture of chemicals, such as creosote oil, naphthalene, phenol, and benzene. Ammonia gas recovered from coke ovens is used to manufacture ammonia salts, nitric acid and agricultural fertilisers. Thousands of different products have coal or coal by-products as components: soap, aspirins, solvents, dyes, plastics and fibres, such as rayon and nylon.
Coal is also an essential ingredient in the production of specialist products:
Activated carbon – used in filters for water and air purification and in kidney dialysis machines.
Carbon fibre – an extremely strong but light weight reinforcement material used in construction, mountain bikes and tennis rackets.
Silicon metal – used to produce silicones and silanes, which are in turn used to make lubricants, water repellents, resins, cosmetics, hair shampoos and toothpastes.
10
Renewable Energy indeed? Wind Turbines made of non-renewable materials, base pads for turbines 60 metres x 60 metres x 12 metres of reinforced concrete, environmental sabotage. Developers paid almost 1 million Taxpayer dollars per turbine to build them and then half a million Taxpayer dollars per turbine per year for 25 years, in Renewable Energy Certificates. With all those dollars going off-shore.
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