This Energy Transition Thing Really Is Not Happening

June 25, 2024 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

From reading the left-wing media, you know (or think you know) that there is an energy “transition” going on. This is something that must happen as a matter of urgent necessity. Vast government subsidies are being disbursed to assure its rapid success. Fossil fuels are rapidly on the way out, while wind and solar are quickly taking over.

For example, you may well have seen the big piece last August in the New York Times, headline “The Clean Energy Future Is Arriving Faster Than You Think.”

Across the country, a profound shift is taking place . . . . The nation that burned coal, oil and gas for more than a century to become the richest economy on the planet, as well as historically the most polluting, is rapidly shifting away from fossil fuels.

But if you read that piece, or any one of dozens of others from the Times or other “mainstream” sources, what you won’t find are meaningful statistics on the extent to which fossil fuel use is declining, if at all, or the extent to which renewables like wind and solar are actually replacing them.

That’s why the Manhattan Contrarian turns instead to dry statistical data to try to get the real story. Several years ago I discovered an annual book of energy data called the Statistical Review of World Energy. At the time, the Statistical Review was produced by the international oil company BP. I first covered one of these Reviews in this post from July 2019. A couple of years ago BP apparently decided to get out of this business, and turned the product over to something called the Energy Institute. EI then produced a Statistical Review in June 2023 (covering 2022), and now is just out on June 20, 2024 with a Statistical Review covering 2023.

Most of the Statistical Review consists of just spreadsheets of numbers. There are some charts, but relatively few. But the takeaways are too obvious to hide. The big one is this: there is no energy “transition” going on, at least not in the sense that “renewables” are actually supplanting fossil fuels. Yes there is some considerable amount of “renewable” wind and solar electricity generation getting built (with huge government subsidies). But it is not replacing fossil fuel generation. Rather, fossil fuel generation continues to increase, and its share of overall energy production has barely budged.

Here is EI’s June 20 Press Release, which summarizes the five “key stories” that it says emerge from the statistics. The first one is the big one — increasing energy consumption led by increased production and consumption of fossil fuels:

Record global energy consumption, with coal and oil pushing fossil fuels and their emissions to record levels. Global primary energy consumption overall was at a record absolute high, up 2% on the previous year to 620 Exajoules (EJ). Global fossil fuel consumption reached a record high, up 1.5% to 505 EJ (driven by coal up 1.6%, oil up 2% to above 100 million barrels for first time, while gas was flat). As a share of the overall mix they were at 81.5%, marginally down from 82% last year.

And of course, “emissions” continue to rise:

Emissions from energy increased by 2%, exceeding 40 gigatonnes of CO2 for the first time.

No matter how much the federal government or any state threatens to punish you for your sin of fossil fuel use, aggregate global emissions from such use are not going to go down within our lifetimes.

The second “key story” relates to the contribution, or lack thereof, of solar and wind. Here EI engages in some modest spinning to make things look less bad than they are for the solar and wind promoters; but there’s not much they can do:

Solar and wind push global renewable electricity generation to another record level. Renewable generation, excluding hydro, was up 13% to a record high of 4,748 TWh. This growth was driven almost entirely by wind and solar, and accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.

4,748 TWh of renewable generation — wow, that’s a lot! Or is it? Do you notice how they suddenly switched units from Exajoules to Terawatt hours when they changed from talking about fossil fuels to solar and wind. Does anybody around here know the conversion factor? Yes — it’s 277.778 TWh per EJ. That means that the 4,748 TWh of “almost entirely” solar and wind power generated in 2023 came to all of 17.1 EJ, which is just 2.7% of the 620 EJ of world primary energy consumption. Could you have imagined that it could be so little, after decades of over-the-top promotion and trillions of dollars of subsidies?

And pay attention to that line “wind and solar . . . accounted for 74% of all net additional electricity generated.” Does that somehow sound like a transition is happening? It’s the opposite. If wind and solar were actually taking over, they would have to account for 100% of additional generation, plus large further amounts to replace fossil fuel generators. As long as wind and solar account for less than all of additional generation, then fossil fuels are continuing to increase, and there is no “transition” going on at all.

I mentioned that there were relatively few charts in the Review, but some of them are striking. Here is one of my favorites, showing global coal consumption from 1965 to 2023:

lOver that period, North America and Europe have cut their consumption almost by half, from almost 40 EJ per year to around 20. But over the same period the consumption in the rest of the world has gone from about 20 EJ to around 140, multiplying by a factor of 7. And don’t be fooled by the apparent leveling off of increases in total consumption in the last several years. That reflects continuing decreases in North America and Europe, which are more than offset by larger increases in the Asia Pacific region.

Robert Bryce at his Substack has many more details from the EI Statistical Review, plus several charts that he has created from the EI data. He is much better at creating charts than I am. The title of Bryce’s article is “Numbers Don’t Lie.” Bryce also has a figure for the amount of government subsidies that have gone to wind and solar generation since 2004: $4.7 trillion. That much money to fund a supposed “transition” that isn’t occurring at all.

The story is going to be effectively the same every year until finally the promoters give up on the wind/solar scam.

Offshore wind project touted as ‘Bidenomics in action’ immediately shuttered due to ‘high inflation’ and ‘rising interest rates’

November 2, 2023  By Olivia Murray

Yesterday Fox News reported that Orsted, a global energy company based in Denmark, had recently announced the immediate end to the development of not one but two planned wind depots off the coast of New Jersey. (As you can imagine I was thrilled—two less multi-billion dollar corporate projects, ones in which I would never willingly invest, for me to sponsor? This is a net positive.)

Now according to the article, these two projects, named Ocean Wind 1 and Ocean Wind 2, had long been in the making; the lease for OW1 had been granted by Barack Obama’s bureaucrats back in 2009, and finally received the construction go-ahead from Joe Biden’s troupe just a few months back in July, at which point a climate staffer made this announcement:...........To Read More....

30-year veteran of CA fish and wildlife sounds the alarm on the obliteration of bird species

September 3, 2023 By Olivia Murray 

As with every policy of the left, there’s always an altar, drenched with the blood of an innocent and unwitting sacrifice. From an article out today by David Lindfield at Slay News:

As Democrat-led states across America push to meet the goals of the Biden administration’s green agenda, several wildlife species are being ‘sacrificed,’ experts are warning.…However, several experts, including a former official of the California Fish and Wildlife Department, are expressing major concerns about potential consequences such may entail for the state.

Per Lindfield, John Baker, a 30-year veteran of the California Fish and Wildlife Department who retired from the position of assistant chief, is sounding the alarm about impending ecological disasters, thanks to California politicians ramrodding “green” policies through the legislature and the bureaucracies—the state government has set an aggressive goal for “carbon neutrality” by 2045, cost be darned. Largely, this comes into play with the state phasing out “dirty” energy supplies like coal and petroleum, and transitioning to “renewable” energy, particularly wind; modern wind turbines are some of the biggest environmental offenders of “clean” energy technologies we have. Against all reason and logic, and without the science to back it up, Democrats are waging a war against the climate, and there is a lot of collateral damage.............To Read More....

 

 

The whale killing study the Feds are afraid to do

By David Wojick  July 11th, 2023 32 Comments @ CFACT

The Feds have admitted that offshore wind development can cause the death of whales and other marine mammals, but they refuse actually to assess that threat for any wind facilities. So I here outline what such a study should look like. This sort of study is what they are afraid to do because it would give numbers to the deaths that are likely to occur, species by species.

First off, here is the Feds’ own description of some of the known deadly threats. In this case, the offshore wind activity is driving the monster piles that support the turbine towers, but there are others. The Feds say this in the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the proposed Empire Wind project off of New York and New Jersey:

“It is possible that pile driving could displace animals into areas with lower habitat quality or higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction. Multiple construction activities within the same calendar year could potentially affect migration, foraging, calving, and individual fitness. The magnitude of impacts would depend upon the locations, duration, and timing of concurrent construction. Such impacts could be long term, of high intensity, and of high exposure level. Generally, the more frequently an individual’s normal behaviors are disrupted or the longer the duration of the disruption, the greater the potential for biologically significant consequences to individual fitness. The potential for biologically significant effects is expected to increase with the number of pile-driving events to which an individual is exposed.” Empire Wind DEIS v.1, Page 3.15-14, PDF page 372

The federal agencies, in this case, are the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) and NOAA Fisheries (NFMS), who jointly prepare the DEIS. Other agencies also have responsibilities for marine mammals.

My focus here is displacement leading to a higher risk of vessel collision or fisheries interaction, as mentioned in the first DEIS sentence above. This is the obvious case where a whale or other critter is driven by excessive noise into a high-traffic ship lane and killed or into a net, tangled, and drowned. Many proposed wind facilities are located where this is a reasonably likely occurrence.

It is important that the first step in my study design is already being done in great detail. What I describe is a straightforward extension of the present method. For every wind project activity that produces excessive underwater noise, NMFS estimates the number of critters, by species, that will experience unsafe noise levels.

They call this experience of unsafe noise a harassment. For some projects, the number of predicted harassments is hundreds for whales and thousands for smaller protected mammals like dolphins and seals.

How the number of harassments is estimated is pretty technical, but the basic idea is simple enough. First, figure how the excessive noise will be distributed in the ocean. Then given the estimated population density of critters within that noise distribution, calculate the number of animals hit with excessive noise.

As the quote above makes clear, harassment can cause deadly behavior. The Feds do not address this issue, which is simply the likely death rate of harassment. So here is an outline of how it could be done.

Step 1: Harassment

Get or estimate data on critter densities and unsafe noise distributions, both over time. Estimate the number and distribution of likely harassment. This a already being done.

Step 2: Avoidance due to harassment

Given critter density and noise distribution, both over time, derive critter density changes due to noise. The animals will likely flee the unsafe noises and move to adjacent areas, increasing the population density of these.

Step 3: Threat densities

Get or estimate threat densities and distributions over time. Threat densities include things like ship traffic numbers, perhaps by vessel type and speed, net locations, etc. Detailed ship traffic data is available for some sites.

Step 4: Death increases

Derive increases in deadly threat exposure due to avoidance. An increased critter density in a high-threat area implies an increased likelihood of mortality.

Step 5: Refinement

Factor in adverse effects accompanying avoidance, such as deafness, panic, etc.

That is the study outline. If they can estimate harassment numbers by species, they can readily go on to estimate the deadly consequences of harassment using the same density-based methods. This can also be done for migration, foraging, and the other obvious impacts listed in the DEIS quote above.

The research question is simple: What is the mortality rate of harassment for a given offshore wind project?

The Feds must answer that mortality rate question before a project’s environmental impact assessment is complete. They should also assess multiple projects, as discussed in the DEIS quote above.

Author

David Wojick

David Wojick, Ph.D. is an independent analyst working at the intersection of science, technology and policy. For origins see http://www.stemed.info/engineer_tackles_confusion.html For over 100 prior articles for CFACT see http://www.cfact.org/author/david-wojick-ph-d/ Available for confidential research and consulting.

On To The Great Future Of Offshore Wind Power

December 19, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian

Today was a big day on the way to New York’s energy future: Our “Climate Action Council” voted to approve the final “Scoping Plan,” telling us all how we are going to achieve, among other goals, 70% of statewide electricity from renewable energy sources by 2030 and a zero-emission electricity system by 2040. The press release has the headline “New York State Climate Action Council Finalizes Scoping Plan to Advance Nation-Leading Climate Law.” Here also is a link to the Scoping Plan itself.

Taking a look at the Scoping Plan and its Executive Summary, I find that the two biggest elements in getting to this zero-emissions electricity system are supposedly going to be offshore wind turbines and energy storage. I’ve covered the energy storage issues extensively in other posts. But how about this offshore wind thing? Surely, to commit New York to transitioning to using offshore wind as the primary source of electricity only seven years from now, they must have a very solid game plan for how it is going to happen.

Actually, as with everything else here, they have no idea. As of today, there isn’t a single functioning offshore wind turbine in New York State, nor is there a single offshore wind turbine under construction. The climate cultists on the Climate Action Council think that they can just order this up, and then it will happen.

From the Executive Summary, here is what the CAC says will be necessary to achieve its emissions goals:

[The Scoping Plan] requires that the State install:
6,000 megawatts (MW) of distributed solar by 2025

3,000 MW of energy storage by 2030

9,000 MW of offshore wind by 2035.

That 9,000 MW of offshore wind might initially sound like a lot. At 10 MW per turbine (huge), that would be 900 of these behemoths.

The EIA gives the total annual amount of electricity consumed in New York State for 2021 as 141,423,778 MWh. Divide by 8760 (hours in the year) and you get average demand of 16,144 MW. 9,000 MW starts off sounding like more than half of that. Not bad!

But of course wind turbines only generate at about 35% of capacity averaged over the year. So this 9,000 MW of offshore wind turbines will at best give us an average of about 3,000 MW, so well under 20% of our electricity demand for the year. Oh, and they’re planning to double electricity demand by electrifying cars and home heat, so make that 10%. And peak demand is as much as about 25,000 MW, 50,000 MW after doubling. When the peak hits you can’t count on the 9,000 MW of offshore wind for anything,. So why are we doing this again?

Undoubtedly, if this were being done competently, there must be a working demonstration project to show how the offshore wind will be built and then integrated into the existing system? Wrong. Rather, the plan appears to be to let some gigantic subsidized contracts and then hope that something gets built some day.

Here is a link to the website of the New York Energy Research and Development Agency (NYSERDA). They claim to have 4300 MW of offshore wind projects “under active development” in the state, which is less than half of the 9,000 MW supposedly coming. Of the 4,300 MW, almost all is in the Atlantic Ocean off New York City and Long Island. Here is the key piece of their map:

But go to the Empire Wind website, for example, and you find a timeline indicating that they are just about up to the point of submitting applications for permits to federal and state authorities. Construction — if it ever actually occurs — is multiple years in the future. Nothing different over at the Beacon Wind website.

And what if well-funded environmental opposition emerges to these projects? That is almost inevitable. As an example, there have already been lawsuits by wealthy homeowners seeking to prevent cables from these windfarms from making landfall in their areas. Here is an example of one such brought in 2021 in the Town of East Hampton.

Is there any offshore wind project farther along than these from which we can get an idea how things might develop? Yes, there is the Commonwealth Wind project in Massachusetts, off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard. That one was approaching the start of construction, when in September the contractor told the state that it would need to “rewrite the contracts” because of a sharp increase in costs. On Friday (December 16) the contractor gave up on renegotiation efforts, and said it wants out of the contracts altogether. James Freeman of the Wall Street Journal has the story in his Best of the Web column today, relying on reporting from Jon Chest of the Boston Globe:

The state’s nascent offshore wind industry suffered a big setback on Friday when Avangrid told state regulators it wants to end its contracts with three major utilities to build a massive wind farm south of Martha’s Vineyard... In September, chief executive Pedro Azagra said Avangrid would postpone construction of Commonwealth Wind, which could eventually provide enough power for up to 750,000 homes, by pushing its completion date out to 2028, and would need to rewrite the contracts because of a sharp increase in commodity costs. With Friday’s move, Avangrid has given up on those renegotiation efforts.

Meanwhile, again from Freeman, over in Rhode Island, regulators are considering suspending a permit already granted for a cable to bring ashore power from another project called Mayflower Wind. The issue there is not the environmental impact of the cable, but rather the financial viability of the whole project:

Rhode Island utilities regulators are considering suspending Mayflower Wind’s application for transmission cables that would run up the Sakonnet River to the former site of the Brayton Point Power Station in Somerset after the developer raised questions about the financial viability of the first phases of the $5 billion offshore wind project it has proposed off Massachusetts.

Is there any chance that New York will fare any better? Unlikely. Expect long delays and demands for lots more money before anything gets built.

Meanwhile, what is the total number of offshore wind turbines currently operating the the U.S.? According to Wikipedia here, the number is 7 — 5 for Block Island (part of Rhode Island) and 2 off Virginia. The same article says the Biden Administration plans to increase the capacity of offshore wind by around a factor of over 1000 by 2030. Sure.

Oh, and meanwhile, the 3,000 MW of energy storage mentioned in the Scoping Plan is well less than 1% of what would be needed to back up a predominantly wind/solar electricity system without fossil fuel generators. The whole thing is a fantasy.

Surprise, Surprise, Fossil Fuels Gets Equal Support with Wind and Solar

By Dr. Jay Lehr | Sep 4, 2022 | Climate Change, Energy, Global, Politics @ America Out Loud

 

In writing for the Associated Press, Mathew Brown and Michael Phillis uncovered a previously well-kept secret from the wind and solar energy lobbies. They had been had by the cleverness of Senator Joe Manchin. The man who is alternately hated by both parties. It came months after the current administration had canceled $192 million of leases in the Gulf of Mexico. But the industries set back were short-lived.

In order to get more money to support failed renewable energy on public lands, oil and gas industry lobbyists, with Senator Manchin’s help, were able to push through a deal that no climate change alarmist could love. Just the opposite, in fact.

While the Inflation Reduction Act concentrates on so-called clean energy incentives that might reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, it simultaneously buoys oil and gas interests by mandating the leasing of vast areas of public lands and off the nation’s coasts. And it locks renewables and fossil fuels together.

If the Biden administration wants wind and solar on public lands, it must first offer new oil and gas leases.

As a result, US oil and gas production, along with carbon dioxide emissions, will keep growing. Andrew Gillick of Enverus, an energy analytic company said this ends the idea that fossil fuels will become obsolete. The folks that think oil and gas will be gone in 10 years are not thinking through what this means.

Both supply and demand will increase over the next decade, and all these plans for Net Zero and decarbonization will begin to look like what they are, stupid, silly, impossible; take your pick.

The law reinstates within 30 days the 2700 square miles of Gulf leases that had been withheld. It ensures companies like Chevron will have a chance to expand and override concerns of previous judicial rulings. The fossil fuel industry’s ambitions are now directly linked to wind and solar development.

The bill prohibits leasing of federal lands and waters for renewable energy unless the government has offered at least two million acres of public lands and 60 million acres in federal waters for oil and gas leasing during the prior year. The law does not require the leases to be sold, only to be offered for sale.

The leasing provisions happily mark a failure in the efforts of environmental zealots to impose a nationwide leasing ban. It scuttles Biden’s promise to stop all oil and gas development on his first day in office.

A stream of potential drilling sites is crucial for companies to maintain future production because wells can take years to develop, and some yield nothing, said Jim Noe, an industry lobbyist. He worked with the Senate staff on the climate bill leasing provisions.

The demand for oil and gas will not decline. These new leases will bring many high-paying jobs, unlike the mythical jobs of the renewable energy industry.

Intelligent people understand that the country cannot run on the wind and sun, yet they tell us this story daily. At last, we have sensible legislation that understands this.

Dr. Jay Lehr

Dr. Jay Lehr is a Senior Policy Analyst with the International Climate Science Coalition and former Science Director of The Heartland Institute. He is an internationally renowned scientist, author, and speaker who has testified before Congress on dozens of occasions on environmental issues and consulted with nearly every agency of the national government and many foreign countries. After graduating from Princeton University at the age of 20 with a degree in Geological Engineering, he received the nation’s first Ph.D. in Groundwater Hydrology from the University of Arizona. He later became executive director of the National Association of Groundwater Scientists and Engineers.

Report On Yesterday's Soho Forum Climate Change Debate

August 16, 2022 Francis Menton @ Manhattan Contrarian 

The Soho Forum “climate change” debate yesterday went off without a hitch at the Sheen Center on Bleecker Street in Lower Manhattan. The proposition debated was “Climate Science compels us to make large and rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.” Andrew Dessler of Texas A&M University took the affirmative; Steven Koonin of NYU took the negative. Mrs. MC and I were among the sponsors of this debate. Daughter (and MC contributor) Jane Menton, who is Chief of Operations for the Soho Forum, was responsible for lining up the speakers and taking care of all the event details.

Congratulations to the Soho Forum for succeeding in having Dessler actually show up and participate in this debate. Generally, the official position of the climate alarm movement is that no adherent should ever debate a skeptic who expresses doubt about any aspect of the orthodoxy. After the debate, I made a point of approaching Dessler, and thanking him personally for his willingness to participate. In our short conversation, he said that several of his colleagues had told him that he should not debate a “denier” like Koonin, but that he had decided that it was important to engage with the public. This willingness to engage publicly is much to Dessler’s credit.

I was very much looking forward to hearing one of the marquee names of the climate movement give his best statement of the basis for the position that “greenhouse gas” emissions must be reduced. At the end, I was left thinking, “Could this really be all they’ve got?”

Both Dessler and Koonin used large numbers of charts and slides, which unfortunately we audience members did not get copies of to take home with us. So forgive me for describing a few of them from memory.

Dessler’s presentation basically broke down into two parts: (1) the consequences of global warming are likely to be bad, and (2) reducing the greenhouse gas emissions is going to be easy and cheap. His emphasis was much more on (2) than (1), and I’ll follow that emphasis. But first, as to part (1), the consequences of warming, Dessler largely relied on a schematic graph that he returned to several times. The graph had an x axis that went (from left to right) from “very bad” to “bad” to “good” to “very good,” and a y axis that showed no units but presumably showed probabilities. The line of likely results was in the form of a bell curve with its tails at “very bad” and “bad,” and a peak about half way in between. No part of the line of likely results, even the slightest tail, got as far as “good.” Dessler represented that this chart was drawn from the peer reviewed literature, and represented the considered judgment of essentially everyone in the field. Make of that what you will. How everyone in the field just knows that the consequences of a few degrees of warming will be at least “bad,” if not “very bad,” was not disclosed.

But far the more important part of Dessler’s presentation dealt with the ease and low cost of transitioning to a low emissions future. This began with the assertion — repeated multiple times during the debate — that wind turbines and solar panels are now the cheapest ways to produce electricity. A chart showed comparisons of relative costs of wind and solar generation versus various forms of fossil fuels and nuclear. Wind and solar were clearly the cheapest, cheaper than even the latest natural gas generators. At the bottom of the chart, the basis for the comparison was given. The letters LCOE were legible. That’s “Levelized Cost of Energy.”

Ah, the Levelized Cost of Energy. This is the latest up-to-date metric adopted by promoters of wind and solar generators to mislead the gullible about the costs of making an electricity system that works. If you try to study descriptions of LCOE calculations, you will find that they are chock full of technical terms like “capital” and “operating” costs and “life cycles” and “discount rates,” and other such things that all sound so terribly sophisticated. In fact it is all a smokescreen to hide the fact that an LCOE calculation completely omits the dominant costs of generating reliable electricity using mostly or entirely wind and solar generators. These dominant costs are the costs of energy storage and/or backup, the costs of overbuilding, and the costs of additional transmission. For prior Manhattan Contrarian discussion of LCOE, try going here or here. The second of those posts, from January 22, 2022, with the title “What Solution Do Renewable Energy Advocates Offer For The Problem Of Storage?”, has the following quote:

Since the cost of storage is the dominant cost of the all-renewable system, LCOE is the opposite of a “neat quantification” of comparative electricity generation costs, and rapidly becomes completely misleading as the percentage generated from renewables increases beyond 50%.

In his responsive presentation, Koonin called the prospect for an entirely wind and solar generation system “fantastical.” That caused Dessler to double down in rebuttal by claiming that the details of a functioning wind/solar system had all been worked out, and it’s not all that complicated. He said that just by building more wind and solar generators, you can get to about 76% of electricity generation, and for the small (doesn’t seem so small to me) remaining piece, you just need “something dispatchable,” which could be nuclear (and therefore zero emissions).

It appeared never to occur to Dessler that in the system he was now talking about, the “Levelized Cost” calculations that he had used to claim wind and solar were cheapest were no longer applicable. Wind turbines in good locations can achieve generation at around 35-40% of nameplate capacity over the course of a year; solar panels about 20-25%. A combined wind/solar system might come in at around 30%. That means that if you build a wind/solar system with nameplate capacity equal to peak usage, you will get about 30% of your electricity in the year from these sources, and the rest must come from backup or storage. So how are you going to get to supplying 76% of usage with wind and solar? For starters, you could try building twice as many wind and solar generators, otherwise known as a 2x overbuild. This is the strategy that has been adopted by, for example, Germany. You can get more of your electricity from the wind and sun, but you won’t get double the 30%. That’s because when the wind and sun are at full strength together, you must throw away half or more of the generation; and when they both are at zero (a calm night) you will still get nothing. So with a 2x overbuild, you may get 45-50% of your electricity from the wind and sun. How about a 3x overbuild? With each round of overbuilding, the percentage of generation that is wasted goes up. You will be throwing away more and more at times of peak generation, and also at times of moderate generation and low usage (a windy morning?), and still get nothing on the calm night. Dessler never mentioned it, but the 76% figure he tossed out represents something in the neighborhood of a 4x overbuild of the wind/sun system. And you would still need full backup from something dispatchable.

If you need to build four times the amount of wind and solar generators to provide the same amount of electricity, your so-called “levelized cost” just got multiplied by four. It is no longer remotely competitive with the cost of generation from fossil fuels. And then, in Dessler’s system, you also need to pay for the “dispatchable” backup to generate that last 24%. It may only be called on to generate 24% of the energy over the course of a year, but it must be able to generate 100% of peak usage when needed, and it needs to cover 100% of its capital costs in the price it charges running only a small minority of the time.

In short, the system Dessler was proposing would have to cost a minimum of five times what a standard fossil-fuel generation system costs. Now, is he aware of this and therefore intentionally trying to deceive the audience? Or, alternatively, is he innumerate, and does not understand how this works quantitatively? I don’t know the answer to that. But I can’t think of a third alternative.

Koonin did a very professional job of responding to Dessler. Koonin in various ways made the same point I am making above, but in somewhat different words. He emphasized the necessity of near-absolute reliability in an electrical grid, and used the term “cost of reliability” to characterize the costs that Dessler was omitting — such as costs of backup, overbuilding, storage, and additional transmission capacity — in claiming that wind and solar are the cheapest sources of power. He also repeatedly made the important point that promoters of expensive wind/solar electricity systems are immoral to the degree that they would deprive people in developing countries of the energy-based prosperity that we in the developed countries benefit from. Overall, Koonin was far more in command of facts and figures than Dessler throughout the debate.

The video of the debate seems to be available already at Watts Up With That, although I can’t find it yet at the Soho Forum website. I’ll have to find out from Jane why that is.

Ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether an Andrew Dessler or anyone else claims that wind and solar electricity are cheap based on some flawed metric like LCOE. Big investors put professionals on the job of evaluating projects, and projects don’t get built unless the numbers add up. And thus there is no such thing as a wind or solar project that gets built without massive government subsidies, either in the form of direct cash or tax savings of some sort. The federal government just enacted a law putting up some $370 billion in subsidies, mostly tax benefits, for “renewable” energy. None of that would be needed at all if wind and solar were in fact the cheapest sources. And meanwhile, over in Europe, which is way ahead of us in building wind and solar facilities, the costs of reliability are in the midst of hitting home, and energy costs soaring. Sooner or later this will become obvious to all. 

 

More Evidence of the Pointlessness of Wind and Solar

July 24, 2022 by John Hinderaker in Energy Policy, Environment

This essay by David Stevenson of the Caesar Rodney Institute Center for Energy & Environment appeared in May, but I just ran across it today. It analyzes data from the PJM electrical grid, America’s largest, between 2019 and 2021.

This comparison of actual regional grid carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions between 2019 and 2021 shows increased use of wind and solar did not reduce emissions. Wind and solar electric generation are actually poor technologies no one would use without permanent government mandates and massive subsidies and taxes that are adding $1 billion a year in power cost. They are also unreliable, non-recyclable, have negative environmental impacts, have shorter productive life spans than alternative power sources, and take up a lot of ground. If it doesn’t reduce carbon dioxide emissions why are we using wind and solar?.................More Evidence of the Pointlessness of Wind and Solar

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Hurricane risk is real for offshore wind

David Wojick | June 24th, 2022 | Energy | 54 Comments @ CFACT My regular readers know that I have been fussing about the threat of hurricanes destroying proposed Atlantic coast offshore wind arrays. The issue arises because the offshore wind industry is based in Europe, which does not get hurricanes. My focus has been Dominion’s massive project off Virginia, but the whole East Coast is hurricane alley.

Now I have found some research that actually quantifies the threat and it is very real. It looks like wind generators will have to be redesigned specifically to withstand hurricanes. In fact that work is underway. In the meantime we should not be building conventional offshore wind towers.

The 2017 press release is succinctly titled “Offshore wind turbines vulnerable to Category 5 hurricane gusts.” The PR says this: “The study, which was conducted in collaboration with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, highlights the limitations of current turbine design and could provide guidance for manufacturers and engineers looking to build more hurricane-resilient turbines in the future.”

We certainly want hurricane-resilient turbines! Actually they also mean towers and blades, not just the turbines. It is the towers and blades that are most likely to collapse in extreme wind, although the turbines can be damaged as well.

The research report itself has a more specific but equally scary title: “Gusts and shear within hurricane eyewalls can exceed offshore wind turbine design standards.”

Mind you what they did is computer modeling. But what they found confirms prior observations that people were having trouble believing.

Simply put they found that hurricane wind gusts can hit an incredible 200 miles per hour (mph), while wind towers are only designed to withstand 160 mph. If those extreme gusts hit an offshore wind farm, catastrophe is pretty much guaranteed.

In addition to extremely damaging gusts, the press release says this: “Furthermore, current standards do not account for veer, a measure of the change in wind direction across a vertical span. In the simulation, wind direction changed by as much as 55 degrees between the tip of the rotor and its hub, creating a potentially dangerous strain on the blade.”

Here is how they make the fundamental point:

“The findings could be used to help wind farm developers improve design standards as well as to help stakeholders make informed decisions about the costs, benefits and risks of placing turbines in hurricane-prone areas.”

I have yet to see any sort of hurricane risk assessment from any of the proposed East Coast wind projects, most of which involve billions of dollars. In the Virginia case, the primary stakeholders are the ratepayers who are on the hook for an estimated ten billion dollars. In their case hurricanes have not even been mentioned by Dominion.

A more recent article comes to similar conclusions—”Hurricane eyewall winds and structural response of wind turbines“

The article is technical but here is their plain language summary:

“Offshore wind energy is a burgeoning area of renewable energy that is at an early stage of development in the United States. Exposure of offshore wind turbines to hurricanes must be assessed and mitigated to ensure the security of the renewable energy supply. This research assesses the impact of hurricane wind fields on the structural response of wind turbines. Such wind fields have characteristics that may pose heretofore unforeseen structural challenges to offshore wind turbines.”

I have not done a literature search but there may well be a large literature on this huge problem. If so then the wind developers are carefully ignoring it.

Before we build tens or hundreds of billions of dollars worth of massive offshore wind facilities off the East Coast we need to be sure that they will withstand strong hurricanes. (It may well be that even Category 4 hurricanes will exceed today’s design standards.) Otherwise both the ratepayers and the grid will be at great risk.

This hurricane design case may be something that NERC should Issue a Reliability Standard on. Such a Reliability Standard would lay out the kind of hurricane risk assessment that must be done as part of the facility design process. These risk assessments need to then be made part of the public decision process.

Offshore wind should not fly blindly into the teeth of the storm. Too much is at risk.