Wade Allison has done a short but devastating analysis for the GWPF. The take home message is that the energy contained in the wind is diabolically more erratic than most people realize. It’s just basic physics and almost no one in politics seems able to comprehend just how impossible these numbers are. If only they would “follow the science” eh?
Thanks to Paul Homewood at Notalotofpeopleknowthat.
The exponential death of affordable electricity
It’s just physics. The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed which produces a twin engineering nightmare. If the wind doubles in speed, the energy goes up by a factor of 8 (or 2 × 2 × 2, and we need to spell it out), and if it slows by half, the energy drops eight-fold. It’s bad both ways. At high speeds, the mechanical engineers have to turn off the turbines to protect them, and at low speeds the electrical engineers have to ramp up power stations that may not exist, or pray to Gaia for batteries that will never exist.
Allison has a graph showing the total output of all the wind turbines in the UK and Europe for a whole year compared to the total electricity needed. As he says “This is not the headline plot that the industry shows to its investors, the media and politicians, but it comes from their own published annual WindEurope Report”.
Just look at this graph from 2021 where wind power is achieving so little in some of the richest nations on Earth and say the words The UN Secretary General wants us all to say: “NetZero by 2040”.
GWPF | Click to Enlarge.
The installed theoretical generating capacity above was 236 gigawatts (shown in the brown dashed line), but the highest daily output in the year was 103 gigawatts which means the other 364 days were worse.
Then consider the entire output of the offshore windfarms of the UK. The wind is more reliable over the ocean, but it’s still an electrical disaster.
In March 2021 there was an eight day period when the wind speed presumably halved and the output plummeted. For eight whole days 8.8GW of wind power was not available (green box). The total energy lost was around 1,600 gigawatt-hours, which is also 1,000 times more than what the biggest battery on Earth could provide.
Figure 2 shows the wind power generated by all UK offshore windfarms in March 2022, as presented online on the Crown Estate website.4 Over some periods, it rose to the nominal installed capacity of 10GW. However, for 8 days at the end of the month it averaged no more than 1.2GW.| Click to Enlarge.
Allison explains the devastating maths of filling in those gaps:
That much energy, 1600GWh, is 1000 times the capacity of the world’s largest grid storage battery (1.6GWh at Moss Landings, California). Batteries 20 million times larger are never going to be available and storage batteries will never make good the failure of offshore wind farms, even for a week. And the wind can drop for longer periods than that.
For those who want the physics, he sums it up so well:
The energy of the wind is that of the moving air, and, as every student knows, such energy is ½Mv2, where M is the mass of air and v the speed. The mass of air reaching each square metre of the area swept by the turbine blade in a second is M=ρv, where ρ is the density of air: about 1.2kg per cubic metre. So, the maximum power that the turbine can deliver is ½ρv3 watts per square metre.
If the wind speed is 10 metres per second (about 20 mph) the power is 600 watts per square metre at 100% efficiency.2 That means to deliver the same power as Hinkley Point C (3200 million watts) by wind would require 5.5 million square metres of turbine swept area – that should be quite unacceptable to those who care about birds and to other environmentalists.
But the performance of wind is much worse than that, as a look at the simple formula shows. Because the power carried by the wind depends on the third power of the wind speed, if the wind drops to half speed, the power available drops by a factor of 8. Almost worse, if the wind speed doubles, the power delivered goes up 8 times, and as a result the turbine has to be turned off for its own protection. This is not related to the technology of the turbine, which can harvest no more than the power that reaches the area swept by its blades.
REFERENCES
Wade Allison (2023) The Inadequacy of Wind Power, Global Warming Policy Foundation.
3 WindEurope Statistics.
4 Crown Estate publishes the running output over the previous 30 days.
As the world seems to be entering a cooling phase, I expect there’ll be much less wind so this problem will get much worse.
401
No need to worry about wind. Thats old gashioned.
Our local council here in the UK who declared a climate emergency several years ago has issued a leaflet declaring that recycling 6 used tea bags will create enough renewable energy to boil a kettle.
I know it’s nonsense but where on earth would the council have got such a calculation from? What with fantasies of wind in this article and the delusions of solar where do our elite derive their information?
560
Tonyb, I don’t have time to work through any calculations but a teabag weighs, 1.5-2g. Let’s be generous and say 6 bags gives you 12g of biomass.
Let’s assume very roughly, since the sample calculation has been done at the link below, that the tea leaves (assume they’ve been dried) have about the same calorific value as wood.
The calculation at the link shows that 90g of wood is needed to boil 1kg = 1 litre of water. But an average tea kettle is about 1.5-1.7 litres. So lets say 1.5 litres. 135g of wood would be required.
Of course, that assumes perfect efficiency which is not going to happen by a long margin. It would be much worse than that.
Your Loony Left local council is out by over an order of magnitude, probably much more, taking into account energy drying the bags to make them combustible and combustion efficiency.
Never believe a Leftist. They nearly always lie.
https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/biofuel-energy-content-d_1356.html
571
Perhaps they were thinking about boiling water on top of Mt Everest where they only need to get the water to about 68 degrees celsius.
290
6 tea bags a day… for a whole year… might get you close to being able to boil a small kettle… once.
141
With a small amount of diesel applied, 6 tea bags will make fire starters for a couple of days in my wood heater….
120
Does that work well, if so I might give that a try in my stove. I put my teabags in the landfill – sorry, land reclamation – bin these days.
00
How much energy is produced if you split a Tasmanian beer atom with a hammer and sharp chisel?
70
Are you Serious? 🙂
10
Yahoo!!
10
They might have been using E=mc^2 but not realise that the technology (Mr Fusion) doesn’t exist.
20
E= 1/2 M c^2
Simples.
60
Where did that “1/2” come from? Blasted autocerrect 🙂
70
Half cut?
40
I wasn’t.
I didn’t.
Wasn’t me, was dolly.
10
Oh! Are we back to the old format, with some simple amendments?
And – Hooray – we have an edit function
70
I hope sincerely that tea bags don’t contain radioactive isotopes !
Did they use tea bags in “Back to the Future” to power the DeLorean ? 🙂
60
Perhaps they meant that if everybody in the UK recycled 6 tea bags each… then they could boil ONE pot of water ?
Or maybe they meant everybody within a 15 minute village ?
190
Simple. Its the energy to make those 6 tea bags is equal to boiling a kettle. But now you don’t have to tea bags to make the tea so why boil the kettle?
30
If you hang your used tea bags on the blades of wind turbines they will dry faster. How many times do the blades have to turn before the council considers the tea bags to be fully recycled?
51
And if you recycle the leaflet?
10
I reckon all the warmistas can relocate to Antartica, where they can harness power using Kid’s Ferris wheels from the 300 KmH katabatic winds. Winning!
61
‘ … a cooling phase, I expect there’ll be much less wind …’
Interesting point, worth further investigation.
‘Scientists measure wind in meters per second. In modern day Georgia and South Carolina, winds average between 1.3-2.2 meters per second, but during the Last Glacial Maximum winds averaged 4-6 m/s–more than double those of today.’
61
So you are indicating that a cooling planet will produce stronger winds and therefore wind generation will be much greater. But to achieve those greater wind speeds we have to freeze rather than FRY thus we can assume that CO2 is not the cause of warming so we can dump the whole ridiculous AGW/CC rubbish and go back to burning coal.
Meanwhile in the real world NSW is about to elect a socialist government which is only slightly more socialist than the current “conservative” government. The main aim of conservative voters this time around is to get rid of Matt Kean the “conservative” energy minister who loves wind turbines in the countryside so he does not have to see them.
41
More confirmation that the erratic nature of wind and the generators that derive their power from it is woeful. Unfortunately the politics of this is in, and they will compensate by building more so that we will not go without. So says Chris Bowen.
270
Jo,
I remember the Manhattan Contrarian did a couple of reports last year where they calculated an estimate of the number of days of storage power required to back up a unreliable system and the estimate was 6 to 7 DAYS to cover most feasible scenarios. That was for USA but I do not think it would be that much different here and we can see above for the UK!
This all needs to be put in front of the CSIRO and they need to be forced to do comprehensive calculations to prove the all these BS unreliables are not just fantasy fairy tarts!!
60
There is a very good reason mankind abandoned wind power as soon as a practical steam engine was developed as part of the Industrial Revolution.
Reverting to wind is just a reversion to the time before the Industrial Revolution.
561
Of course, I hope everyone realises that that’s “part of the plan” of the Left toward technological, social and economic regression to pre-Enlightenment and pre-Industrial Revolution times.
The standard of living and personal freedoms attained by Western Civilisation due to The Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution was and is too much for the Elites and their slave army of useful idiots of the Left hence their desire to “destroy it all“.
461
The further a ship lists, the more stable it becomes.
(to a 3rd power point of capsize).
Same logic as windmills feeding batteries to a starving population.
120
David,
The luddites will persist (until their tech stops working…)
20
There were 2 programmes on our Yesterday channel…er yesterday. One showed just how much the Soviet Union only survived during the war thanks to the US and UK supplying them with raw materials, tanks, planes, food, boots etc that there own industry could not produce. And far from being the workers paradise we are still told it was by the Guardian, BBC et al, the workers were being starved to death and should you comment that all was not well, you and members of your family would be shot by the NKVD. The numbers shot were nearly as much as some countries lost in action during the war!!!
The second was on the Baku oilfields that were taken over in 1917 by the communists. Whereupon the output plummeted and Lenin’s government was losing out on income from selling the oil. And so Lenin had to bring in the hated capitalist oil companies to run the oilfields.
30
While the climate science fictionists claim we are in the anthropocene it does seem more like the Retardocene and the human race goes backwards for the first time in centuries.
40
That’s not a bug-it’s a feature, as they say.
BTW, I like this format better.
Oh, an edit feature. Something I need for sure. Wonderful.
201
I tend to agree. We have the basic formatting functions of bold, italics and block quote, plus the much-requested edit feature but we are missing images, but as Jo has said, these could be problematic for various reasons.
150
Jo, you wrote “The energy of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles to the third power …” I think you mean not “energy” but “power” since you have the correct terminology lower down.
Regards,
John.
90
OK John, and fair point. I’ve changed it to “The power of the blowing wind increases by the speed of those particles cubed…”. Straddling the worlds of physics and popular science is difficult when power and energy both have so many different meanings — and the original sentence had the word power in two different definitions which is ugly.
I’m trying to find a way to explain this to bus drivers.
42
The Left have been trying to introduce wind power ever since the failed attempts of the National Socialists as documented by Rupert Darwall in “Green Tyranny – Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex”.
SEE LINK FOR REST
241
If energy can not be created or destroyed but can only be converted from one form to another, what happens to the energy in wind once it has been converted to electricity via a wind turbine. Surely the power of the wind would be diminished so less energy would be available to any turbines down wind and etc. Anyone able to help me here?
120
Energy is extracted from the wind making it slower and more turbulent, causing many downstream effects.
One notable, but little published effect is global warming (not a typo).
ALSO SEE
161
William, you may be subconscously thinking that the wind speed is hitting the blades at a uniform rate but it will be changing direction and speed continually as well as gusting to various levels and as the pressure systems or weather fronts move so to does the wind energy in the system
90
Thanks David and R.K. And R.K, as a golfer I know that the wind changes continually, it is always into me on every hole!!
120
Not wind but downstream effects –
I’ve just read Constance Babbington Smith’s “Air Spy” and learned that photo interpreters can work out the speed of ships from the wake wave pattern
30
Morning all,
I offer this in hope, and even some confidence. But if you’re using a phone or other small device the graphs I’d hope you can see may not be displayed. I’m using an iPad Pro so have a reasonable 10 inch display.
You need to scroll down a little to the first graph, labelled “Mudgee Hourly Forecast”, and below it is “Mudgee 7 Day Forecast”. (Mudgee is my nearest weather station.)
https://www.weatherzone.com.au/nsw/central-tablelands/mudgee
At the left hand end of each is a record of the previous 6 hours wind speed and temperature (check the box to select if not already displayed.) And then there’s the forecast. Note the nice smoothness in the forecast, but on the left the actual wind speed line is typically quite jagged. That is usual in my observation.
Note that the site is updated rapidly, so you will see something different in detail, but the generality should be persistent and obvious.
Cheers
Dave B
120
There’s an important point about energy output that follows from Wade Allison’s paper that really should be mentioned …
On the basis of the energy output being wind-speed raised to the power of 3, it takes only a 20% reduction in wind-speed to cut the energy output by near enough to 50%. (For the mathematically inclined, 0.8 x 0.8 x 0.8 = 0.512.)
150
Jo,
The UK needs no such thing, they will simply deny the people access to electricity.
And the people will accept it in order to save the planet.
110
A single turbine cannot extract 100% of the wind energy. The Betz limit of 9/16 is the theoretical maximum fraction of the wind power that a single turbine can extract. So the physics is worse than stated above.
A turbine does not completely stop the air flow like a wall. A wall cannot extract power because it is not moving. The turbine blades must move to generate power so they only slow the air flow. The 9/16 ratio is the point of maximum output. The physics is more complicated than set out above.
210
Yes, Matt Ridley wrote about the Betz Limit in the Spectator (May 2017) and also re-iterated that there is no more improvement in turbine efficiency possible – they’re at their limit. Making them bigger might produce more kW per turbine but doesn’t increase efficiency. Some say the effect of larger turbines is offset by the fact that stronger winds are then needed for blade propulsion (vs smaller turbines/ blade lengths). WindEurope is also a very good website and really honest. I don’t think we have the same resources here in Australia, which is a travesty.
110
9/16 is close, 0.5625. Betz limit is 0.593 . Real world wind turbines might get 75%-80% of that limit at best.
So, the practical efficiency limit of a wind turbine is 44% to 47% of the available wind energy. Less if the turbines are improperly placed and shield other turbines.
Methinks they’ll need twice as many batteries.
160
papundits.wordpress.com/2023/03/20/australian-weekly-wind-power-generation-data-13-march-2023-to-19-march-2023/
Tony from Oz shows that the long term wind capacity factor is around 30%
90
Tony showed that on the 5th of February out of 3450 wind turbines in the AEMO area only 165 were even turning.
20
It is an exact ratio that I pulled from memory without checking – it is 16/27 (4^2/3^3) rather than (3^2/4^2) as I had above.
20
I did a case study on the Wattle Point wind farm. The design wind speed was 47 km/hr. At this velocity the Betz limit is 778 W/m2. Wattle Point’s rated total power is 91 MW i.e. 313 W/m2 of disc area (40% of 778).
00
Yes, to Rickwill and others: the Betz fraction of .593 is the maximum possible energy extraction from any fluid flow. There is a good summary in Wikipedia.
00
Most of us in this quorum are on the same page. How do we start convincing others of the folly of mass implementation of renewable energy?
Clearly, presenting the physics and real-world observations is not getting us there. Do we actually need to have our energy infrastructure being run into the ground and suffer a decade (or more) of unreliable energy provision, high energy prices and industry (and talent) moving to areas that have made better choices?
200
Anything we say or do won’t get much traction but blackouts, now that’ll get their attention.
250
As I have said before, I thought so too.
But due to the high cost of electricity, much of industry has shut down and domestic consumers choose to go without heating and cooling.
This has liberated a lot of electricity.
All that’s needed is a few kWh per day to run some night time lighting, do basic cooking and watch TV or go on the Internet to receive government propaganda.
Sadly, I don’t think there’ll be blackouts and the Sheeple will not wake up.
172
I don’t agree, you are confusing consumer demand with our ability to generate electricity. We will get blackouts because we will very soon no longer be able to generate the stuff
80
There’ll still be a small amount of electricity flowing, perhaps from diesel generators or hydro but I expect there’ll be rationing for every household. It will be enforceable because smart meters will report power consumption and you’ll be cut off if you exceed permitted limits.
81
David,
The end game for power is still unclear . Economic collapse is being discussed as well and this may force a turn towards reality . If the war spreads we will have all of the four horsemen saddled and riding and all bets are off.
41
Gloomy in Australia with Bowen, for sure. However, take some heart from the EU and the UK. When the Russian supply of gas was cut off and the politicians feared for their own self preservation with winter coming, they told the environmentalists where to go and switched asap back to fossil fuels from anywhere to find enough energy to keep power running. I could be wrong but I believe even the most ardent of climate believers were very happy to shutup and have the chance to keep warm.
30
If Eraring closes in August 2025 as scheduled, AU will find out about blackouts in a meaningful way.
So, let’s see. Hmm. If the grid goes black, and AU doesn’t have enough synchronous generation to restart it, what happens then? No water, no lifts, no sewage treatment, no traffic lights, no internet, no refrigeration, no aircons, no traffic lights, nothing.
I’d rather not be in a city after 3 days. I’d really rather the pollies rethink what the outcome is.
Absent some actual thinking, things look rather bleak. If Eraring closes, you can’t unring the bell.
130
It’s O.K. Lance, Liddell will save us.
40
There is a large paper mill in Victoria that shuts down during grid shortages and gets a nice compensating payment for doing so. Hell of a way to run the economy of a country.
100
So we are paying for electricity plus shutdown compensation.
I hope it doesn’t go to the local aluminum smelter, that would cost us HUGE.
Go Tomago.
40
Blackouts will be blamed on the inability of fossil fuels to provide supply. Their ABC has already stated this once from recent memory.
111
“Blackouts will be blamed on the inability of fossil fuels to provide supply”
Because they closed all the fossil fuel power stations.
They can’t supply if they don’t exist any more!
80
Paul, we’ve already had the blackouts here in Australia. (not sure if you are in Australia or another country) South Australia (including capital city Adelaide) went black for days in 2016 and in later years Victoria during high heat in summer (rolling blackouts). It was all blamed on either storms or “unreliability” of coal. But, in truth, both blackouts could either have been prevented or fixed earlier if more baseload power from either coal or gas had been available. In other words from reliable sources, not intermittent. The government spin doctors had a field day trying to spread the blame. In the Victorian situation the blackouts were called “controlled outages”, which projects a perception the government were in control. They weren’t, it was a huge red flag they ignored.
150
There need to be a lot more blackouts and sadly people dying because of them for the truth to gain traction. And if you have seen a piece on WUWT, you will see that the growing use of unreliable generation that gets first call to supply the grid is increasing the unreliability of reliable generation due to lose of income leading to reduced maintenance.
20
Strong wind or should it abate,
Effects energy by a factor of eight,
Brings a gigawatt flop,
As the turbines must stop,
Says the data from Crown Estate.
170
Affects?? Pedant me! Sorry
10
Thanks Don A, fell asleep at the noun/verb wheel.
00
Climate change isn’t ‘particularly dangerous’: Richard Lindzen
Sky News Australia
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/03/23/climate-change-isnt-particularly-dangerous-richard-lindzen/
My favorite comment to the article is comment #1 from Steve Case quoting Carl David’s comment on the YouTube link in the article:
My favourite Richard Lindzen quote about CO2 being a pollutant. “What sort of pollutant is it that when you remove it, everything dies”.
200
We might say that politicians are ignorant, but of course it’s wilful ignorance. They know that in every matter and debate, there are experts on each side, often with wildly-differing opinions, so it’s clear that they are choosing which experts to believe. This exposes their own agendas and objectives. They just decide what they want to do then go shopping for cooperative experts to agree with it and bingo, they have a fig leaf of credibility – and that’s all a compliant media demands.
160
The left started well ahead. That march through the institutions as well as through the Liberal Party had every stick in place to take up the propaganda – starting with the youngest kids in kindergarten. We have a society of 40yos that have lived that experience without counter almost every day of their life. Then there’s the msm and social media, controlled, which magnifies the message. If its not the propaganda its the diminished learning in maths, chemistry and physics from the time exam scores became the criteria for university admission and the difficulty of the subjects from which those scores were amassed was incidental. That created the ignorance, or should that be innocence, whereby the ex students lacked the disciplines and logic required to challenge what they were being told. ‘The facts’ are presented in every subject they learn.
Chairman Mao taught the extreme left very well – and it wasn’t about science.
11
One only has to look at King and Flinders Island renewable power schemes, situated in the Roaring Forties as they are, they should be a shining beacon for unreliables, but alas, diesel power needs to come to the rescue most of the time.
At 08:45, diesel is supplying 91% of the generated power.
200
A devastating and simple synopsis! Thank you, Wade Allison and Jo!
60
The wind is no more reliable over the ocean than anywhere else as the pressure patterns are always moving across the earths surface. The article is very good. It does not however mention the huge problem that comes with size, in trying to spin big blades high on a tower when struck by high winds and storms. There are ever increasing failures of gear boxes and bearings because of the huge stress and change in loads on the whole structure. The latest turbines are now having blades up to 120 metres in length and weighing over 30 tonnes – there is no way to keep these blades and even smaller ones in balance, as over time, flying debri, hail, lightning and other damage will cause them to go out of balance.
The three major manufacturers all had big losses in the past year and warranty claims were high and the problem will get worse.
170
May their losses continue to grow.
10
I started collecting and detailing the daily data for wind generation more than four and a half years ago now. (233 weeks, so 1631 days of data)
The total Nameplate for wind has a little more than doubled in those intervening four and a half years.
However, the Capacity Factor (CF) has stayed almost rigidly stuck at 30%, both in the long term (233 weeks) and for the most recent 52 weeks yearly average.
The current total Nameplate for wind is 10,277MW.
The highest total there has ever been for wind generation was in fact prior to the most recent increase in that Nameplate, when the Nameplate was lower. (9254MW) That highest point EVER for wind generation was at 8.50PM on Thursday 4th August 2022. Now, why I detailed the EXACT time was because wind only reached that huge (for wind) total for one five minute recording period. That total was 7,304MW, and at that single point in time, wind was operating at 74.12% CF.
That high power delivery (record) has only changed (been exceeded) eight times in the last 23 Months.
The highest power delivery across a full day was on Saturday 17th September 2022, when wind generation delivered 148.94GWH of power (at an average of 6206MW) and that meant wind was operating at 62.98% CF, and again, that daily high power record has only changed ten times in that same two year period.
Okay, the data, the maths, and the facts are pretty dull and boring I know, but the point I’m trying to make is no matter how much wind you install, it will never even get remotely close to delivering that total, and even those high points are (very) few and far between, for five minutes every eight weeks or so.
I have been writing about how wind generation is a failure at what it is supposed to do ….. deliver power now for 15 years.
It was a flop when I started writing about it back then, and (evidently) the technology has improved so much in the interim, that it’s still as big a flop now as it was then.
Oh, and incidental to this, evidently, Capacity Factor is totally meaningless, and of zero importance, across at the RenewEconomy site, when I have mentioned it there a few times, well, before I was banned anyway.
Tony.
270
I think they should concentrate on a “Reliability Factor.”
That being how much a source can generate, say 90% of the time.
101
Tony,
Rather than CF, the renewable power producers and planners at U.S. utilities are beginning to use a measure called efficient load carrying capacity (ELCC). I would prefer to use “expected” rather than “efficient” because we are speaking probability here. Nevertheless, two months ago I gave some public testimony at a Public Services Commission hearing about a wind project locally and explained that the nameplate rating of this plant, 590MW, would in fact be between zero and perhaps 400MW on any given day, but would average around 200MW over a year. The 590MW is meaningless. This appeared to cause the Commission to quiz the utility more fully, and the utility finally admitted that for planning they rate that 590MW as only 60MW ELCC unless it has backup. The backup is nearly always coal, of course.
In short, when pressed on the point the utilities don’t value wind very much.
50
Clarification: “that the nameplate rating of this plant, 590MW, would in fact produce between zero and perhaps 400MW on any given day”
50
Thanks again, Tony. I, and I am sure most on this site, really appreciate the effort you put in to recording the data and in the way you present the results in a really understandable way.
80
Can you separate the outputs for SWIS and NEM with respect to wind generation? Yes capacity factor or effective capacity still applies, but then so does location, location, location
20
Once all the windiest sites have been covered with these “useless monstrosities” and their attendant battery farms, I would expect the average capacity factor to decline from its current 30%.
00
A bit OT, but it is related: I see that the Henry Hub gas price is down near $2, way below its prices over the last 2 1/2 years. It obviously isn’t because wind has supplied all the electricity needed, so why is the gas price down so far and what are the implications? Is it because (a) the US economy has now successfully been destroyed so no-one’s buying gas? Is it because (b) greens worldwide have stopped anyone using gas so now there’s no market? Is it because (c) other international suppliers have bumped up supply and now ‘everyone’ worldwide has enough gas? If it is anything except (a) then surely this is going to be very good for the US economy, because there is now a source of cheap plentiful energy. Not so good for everyone else. Any ideas anyone?
50
The wind industry goblins in fantasyland don’t care how much of other people’s money they spend to get this boondoggle of giant propellers foisted upon us. Nor are they concerned about how much collateral damage to the environment they cause in the short and long term. Overall, it amounts to yet another money laundering scheme where energy industry operatives make lots of dosh chasing after the wind whilst we subsidise their efforts through preposterously high power bills.
90
( yawn ) well as I’ve said manys a time before… and ( NORTHERN) Germany has MORE Wind gen capacity than UK even consumes, yet our so called leaders have this dream that they are fully clothed on parade: not hopelessly dressed inadequately with the Feathersof the Herons, which are dying somewhere since there ARE NO FISH in the popnd when the wind don’t blow: Not much point in getting MORE Herons, or even Pelicans to come fishing. Aye Pelicans: the fish they catch can be stored for future use: but if the fish aint there, the Belly/ Beak will rumble dry. ZILCH. That is how far BEHIND the UK is in terms of their ideals of wind gen. etc..
And then they want to fill the pelican’s belly with Water from Coire Glas https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-highlands-islands-65015217 I’d like to know where all that wate will be coming from and going to, if/ when this Loch Ness Monster gets going. Another Great Glen Ranch going wrong.
50
OT…. TdeF will like this one. 🙂
https://notrickszone.com/2023/03/23/new-study-atmospheric-co2-residence-time-is-only-5-years-too-short-to-affect-the-climate/
101
Yes, that is the essential fact. The velocity of the transfer of CO2 into water is incredibly high. It’s high enough for oxygen but CO2 is 30x as soluble. You use all this rapid exchange as you breathe, O2 in and CO2 out! It’s near instant. How someone can deny it and breathe is beyond my understanding.
The 5 years was understood in the 1950s. And it has not been scientifically contradicted. Rather it has been confirmed.
31
But there is more, another quick calculation we can make using this scientific fact.
Al Gore “We’re still putting 162 million tons .. every single day“.
So 3,140 billion metric tons of CO2 in the atmosphere and 50% into the ocean every 5 years. So (3,140/2)/(5*365) or 860 million tons per day, every day both in and out of the ocean.
The idea that fossil fuel CO2 hangs around for long is ridiculous.
Now another fact, that the equilibrium ratio of CO2 between ocean and air is 98:1. So that will be the distribution of the extra finy fossil fuel CO2 as well.
And it means 860+162 = 1022 million tons into the ocean each day. But only 860+0.02*162 or 863 million tons comes out!
Problem solved. They tiny 3.0% of fossil fuel in the air vanishes very rapidly, a balance between the inflow and rapid outflow.
We also know the extra radioactive C14 from the atom bomb blasts before 1971 is rapidly gone from the entire bisophere. And there is only one sink, the deep ocean. This breaks the IPCC assumption that the deep ocean is not involved.
So we have absolute confirmation that the whole atmosphere is extremely rapid in eliminating excess CO2. And the only reason there is more CO2 in the air is known ocean surface warming, following Henry’s Law.
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As I recall, the human body can’t handle CO2 rapidly at all. It requires an enzyme, carbonic anhydrase to accelerate the uptake and excrete it through the lungs. Speed is a relative term depending on the condition one is addressing.
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The world needs to move to nuclear power (Small Modular Reactors) asap. Renewables are a total disaster.
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I want coal back. Now. It was fantastic. Anyone who thinks carbon is bad for you is nuts. You are made from it and you are an internal combustion machine. If CO2 is pollution, every living thing is evil pollution. That’s nuts. And where on earth has there been any Climate Change. It’s all a lie. If you want dangerous emissions, try nuclear.
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The world needs to return to cheap, reliable, and increasingly clean, fossil fuels ASAP, while technologies such as nuclear matures. Also, the world needs to return to free market principles.
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We have plenty of gas, just build the pipelines. Industry can use the gas direct bypassing the power station.
Before you slam that red button I mean “as well as”.
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The world needs to transition from fossil fuels (coal and gas) to nuclear power for electricity generation — not to renewables.
Reference:
Lang, P.A. Nuclear Power Learning and Deployment Rates; Disruption and Global Benefits Forgone. Energies 2017, 10, 2169. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/en10122169
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Peter,
We need to build nuclear now . Save all the fossil fuels for the things that we cannot do without it for . The problem with fossil fuels is that they are limited/finite and will become scarce (and expensive) eventually . Renewables are NOT the answer.
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ITS THE WIND DROUGHTS, STUPID!
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/03/21/its-the-wind-droughts-stupid/
The met bureaus of the world failed to identify or signal wind droughts that are the fatal flaw in the RE system.
See the Iron Triangle of Power Supply.
There must be continuous input to the grid, wind droughts and especially windless nights wreck the continuity and there is no feasible storage to bridge the gaps.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/02/the-iron-triangle-of-energy-realism/
To coin a phrase, “Its about the wind droughts, stupid!”
Imagine irrigation projects proceeding without attention to the record of droughts and the capacity of dams to make up the shortfall in dry seasons. What happened to the due diligence in Australia and everywhere else?
In Australia it seems that the authorities used average wind speed as the metric for wind resources, with hourly records aggregated for weeks, months and years. There should be a major inquiry into the reason why that information in raw form was not processed to issue wind drought warnings. It was left to others, notably Paul Miskelly and Anton Lang, to record wind droughts, long before the responsible or irresponsible authorities took any notice.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-voice-of-energy-realism/
Climate and energy realists around the world need to demand investigations in their own jurisdictions to find why no wind drought warnings were issued, or heeded.
The Dunkelflauts in Europe must have been common knowledge among sailors for hundreds of years, and windmills in Holland pumped water, while windmills everywhere milled grain. So how come the shock in recent years?
In Australia when the next coal power station closes, every wind drought will threaten the power supply and prolonged wind droughts will be potentially catastrophic.
https://spectator.com.au/2022/07/energy-policy-where-parallel-universes-are-set-to-collide/
That is the way things are going everywhere, it is just a matter of running down conventional power to the point where wind input starts to matter.
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As I posted on Thursday and windmills are just the tip of the world wide climate confidence scam.
Coal power generation is not being superseded by solar, simply made unprofitable. That was the explicit intention of the Renewable Energy(Electricity) Act 2001. It alone double electricity prices, made coal, oil, gas generation a second class citizen and provided direct cash from electricity invoices to double income to random energy providers. This crushes the profitability and competitiveness of steady providers of baseload, the concept of which is continually also under attack by shareholder activists.
Random energy is the Green preferred solution to manufacturing. Except it is unworkable. There is almost no energy use which is workable with random energy. Elevators, transport, lighting, smelting, traffic lights, manufacturing. Perhaps pumping water uphill or something equally useless.”
How would you drive a car which ran only when the sun shone? How would you like to be on a plane which stopped mid flight because of rain? Or in a smelter where a vat full of melted aluminum went cold? Whole industries can be destroyed by a single outage and in a factory everyone has to stop work and even the lights go out? It is not the exception but the rule that people want reliable, constant, predictable energy not random.
After a century of predictable constant energy, we are told that random energy will be good for us? That’s ridiculous, dangerous, irrational and wrong. Medieval windmills were abandoned two hundred years ago for good reason.
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As for reducing CO2 in the air, the inconvenient fact is that fossil CO2 in the air is only 3.0% of atmospheric CO2. This is fact. In 1958 it was 2.03%+/-0.15%. That radio carbon analysis has not been challenged. And without man made CO2, there is no argument for man made anything let alone global warming. Windmills are literally a blot on the landscape, now world wide with perhaps 500,000 of the steel monsters.
The near linear very slow 40% CO2 increase over 250 years is due to slow surface ocean warming, a 200 year solar cycle, nothing more. And CO2 and O2 move very rapidly across the air/water interface, which is what you prove with every breath you take. It is not pollution, it is the gas from which every living thing is made, the source of energy for your body, your brain, your muscles. The power of the sun converted to carbohydrates.
As Richard Lindzen says, “What sort of pollutant is it that when you remove it, everything dies”
And “Controlling carbon is a bureaucrat’s dream. If you control carbon you control life.”
“The influence of mankind on climate is trivially true and numerically insignificant”
and in his special area of atmospheric physics
“According to any textbook on dynamic meteorology, one may reasonably conclude that in a warmer world, extratropical storminess and weather variability will actually decrease“, which has proven to be the case.
and a critical observation on ‘The Science’
We have the new paradigm where simulation and programs have replaced theory and observation, where government largely determines the nature of scientific activity, and where the primary told of professional societies is the lobbying of the government for special advantage”.
The final comment applies in particular to the World Meteorological Society so that it could join the trough at the UN by creating the IPCC. But also NASA, NOAA, CSIRO, BOM, Royal Society etc. etc.
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I found so much professional commentary
Dr. Harold Lewis, a distinguished physics professor, bluntly described this reality:
“The global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it … has
corrupted so many scientists … It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific
fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.”
(October 6, 2010 resignation letter to the
American Physical Society).
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I am amazed that scientists are having to resign to make a point. Most commentators like Prof Ian Plimer have retired.
And senior scientists are having to denounce the official government position in every Western democracy but they have to retire or be fired and worse, as happened to Prof Peter Ridd. Who was proven completely right.
Meanwhile China is not only driving the anti Carbon agenda, they are exploiting it, even selling carbon credits as the world’s biggest ‘polluter’. And Canada’s Premier Trudeau is as compromised as is Daniel Andrews and so many democratic leaders. And organizations like the UN/EU/IPCC/WHO. China’s fingers are in everything.
Then your get the extraordinary Woke organizations like Science and Technology Australia!
“The nation’s peak body representing 115,000 Australian scientists and technologists strongly supports an Indigenous Voice to Parliament”
Why? Why is a scientific organization telling the world that Australian scientists support changes to the Australian Constitution solely as it relates to the aboriginal race, making the Constitution racist?
And who is the top scientist in the STA representing 115,000 Australians? CEO Misha Schubert? Formerly the National Political Editor/journalist for The Age! No science qualifications at all. A radical journalist telling you what scientists think.
Many organizations have been captured by the extreme left. And windmills are the new international windfall, the source of trillions in free money, climate gifts, climate taxes, not free energy. Random energy. And electricity prices are soaring with free energy.
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A bit of fact checking needed there.
This “peak body” seems to reside under the umbrella of The Statistical Society of Australia, which “…had about 800 members in 2019.” (Wiki)
Keep watching here. There is a boundary between Free Speech and Criminal Activity.
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AEMO grid at 6.0pm last night: Solar 240 MW, Wind 2,100 MW (from nameplate 10,200 MW), battery 85 MW.
What kept the light on, requiring a total of 25,550 MW? Hydro 3,900 MW, Coal 16,100 MW, Gas 3,100 MW.
Liddell, soon to close, delivered a reliable 960 MW.
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Hopefully Liddell closing will be the first of the dominoes to fall, which may or may not wake folk up.
Load shedding will concentrate their attention when inner city chaos ensues and highrise dwellers have to climb the stairs to the 25th level.
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Reality is a harsh teacher. All of this wind/solar idiocy is about to learn a hard lesson.
The sad part is that thinking people can see the train wreck coming, whilst the navel gazing idiots believe in Magic.
The tragic part is that all the pain, death, etc, could be avoided by “not being stupid”.
The comical part is that a seeming majority are unable to think critically, replacing what works with what sounds good and supports their emotional concept of reality.
Time to invest in true friends, self reliance, and heavy metals.
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The australian government has budgeted $25 BILLION FOR GREEN ENERGY.
This amount of money would build 4 new 2000MW power stations and make no difference to the climate and give us reliable elect supply.
further we would not be indebted to china for millions of non recyclable solar panels.
to generate 2000MW with solar panels would need 4 million panels 500watt each,and would only work when the sun shines approx 6-8 hrs per day ,what do we do for the other 16-18 hrs !
use battery storage the experts say , store 36000 MW for 16-18 hrs what rubbish.
the cost of solar energy is far more expensive than coal fired without subsidies.
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WIND LITERACY is a required to explain the significance of the iron triangle of power supply. First be sure that your friends and relations understand that the grid needs continuous input to meet demand at the time,
Then introduce them to the NemWatch widget and tell them to check at breakfast and dinnertime to see how often there is next to no green (wind) in the bars so they can see how much they depend on the black and brown in teh bars to have a hot breakfast and air-conditioning at dinnertime. Get your grandchildren interested in the widget and ask them to give their parents a dinnertime update on the state of play.
https://www.nem-watch.info/widgets/reneweconomy/
Circulate the information pack assembled by the Energy Realists of Australia to provide essential basic information, especially the two five-minute videos by Mark Mills.
https://www.flickerpower.com/images/INFORMATION_PACK.pdf
Then move on to the briefing notes circulated by the Energy Realists.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
Note 21.7 is helpful to explain why serious trouble starts when conventional power has run down to a critical point. Up to that time people can remain unaware of the looking disaster.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/21-7-intermittent-solar-and-wind-power-can-displace-coal-but-cannot-replace-it
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Back of the envelope calculation from that first graph
It looks like the low points run at about 25 GW and the demand at about 350 GW.
So, for wind to provide for those times would need (350/25) times the wind capacity –
about 14 times that presently available
But then there is also the problem of what to do with the output on a good day
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The left and eco-loonies can’t count. They have no concept of the magnitude of the numbers. You can only explain size to them in terms like ‘big’, ‘very big’, ‘obcenelybig big’. A hopeless task.
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How about the Snuffy Smith units –
“Tads”, “skoches” and “bodacious amounts”?
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Politicians of all varieties are notorious for their lack of education in science or maths. Very few come from a STEM background: parliaments are full of lawyers, businessmen, and increasingly of former party staff and activists who have never worked outside politics.
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[…] Wind fantasy land: to cover 8 days of half-speed wind, UK needs 1,000 times the “biggest batte… […]
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Hi Jo,
Great blog as always.
Just want to point out a small error in the equations above before someone does a gasket. The formula for energy, (half MxV squared) is correct. The formula for mass (density x V) is correct, BUT, in the first equation V is for VELOCITY and in the second equation V is for VOLUME. Therefor the energy of moving air is indeed the Square of the velocity. I hope that makes sense.
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True but Allison is calculating the power rather than just the energy, yes? So max theoretical power depends on the speed cubed. One edge of “volume” is created by velocity…
The equations are spelled out better in pages like this where you can see both “V” and “v” included:
https://home.uni-leipzig.de/energy/energy-fundamentals/15.htm
And this page agrees but doesn’t lay out the equations as well. I just found it interesting explaining the dynamics of different blade combinations.
https://thundersaidenergy.com/downloads/wind-power-impacts-of-larger-turbines/
But well spotted on the two different “v’s”. It would have been better to clear up that ambiguity. Thank you.
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