This is coming to your neighborhood if you are depending on renewables! Renewables will NEVER replace COAL for reliability! While CHINA gets more wealthy due to wind turbines and solar panels we underlings will pay for it dearly! Thank you to the elite politicians pushing this agenda! NOT!!
Renewable Energy
All posts tagged Renewable Energy
Now that Sleepy Joe the Renewable salesman is in office the fun begins!
‘New York City will soon be home to the world’s biggest industrial-scale battery system. It’s designed to back up the city’s growing reliance on intermittent “renewable” electricity. At 400 megawatt-hours (MWh), this cluster of batteries will be more than triple the 129 MWh world leader in Australia.
Mark Chambers, NYC’s Director of Sustainability (I am not making this title up), is ecstatic. “Expanding battery storage is a critical part of how we advance momentum to confront the climate emergency,” he brags,” while meeting the energy needs of all New Yorkers. Today’s announcement demonstrates how we can deliver this need at significant scale.”[Emphasis added]
In the same nonsensical way, Tim Cawley, president of Con Edison, New York state’s power utility, gushes thus: “Utility-scale battery storage will play a vital role in New York’s clean energy future, especially in New York City, where it will help to maximize the benefit of the wind power being developed offshore.”
In reality, the scale here is vanishingly insignificant. The official enthusiasm puts the Con in Con Edison. (And few New Yorkers and other East Coast residents are going to tolerate thousands of 850-foot-tall wind turbines off their shores. People don’t want them in their onshore backyards either.)
When it comes to the scale needed to reliably back up unreliable pretend-renewable electricity generation– and keep business, industry, social media and civilization functioning – New York’s and America’s policy makers need to start living in the Real World. Otherwise blackouts will become common.
For simplicity, let’s suppose New York City is 100% wind powered. (Including solar in the generating mix makes it more complicated but does not change the unhappy outcome very much.)
NYC currently peaks at around 13,000 MW – just to keep the city running. If Mr. Biden makes all the cars and trucks electric, total demand could eventually hit 20,000 MW. But let’s stick to present day reality.
This peak occurs because of enormous air conditioning demand during summer heat waves, which is bad enough. But to make matters even worse, those heat waves are caused by stagnant high pressure systems called Bermuda highs. These highs often last for a week and because they involve stagnant air masses – and an absence of breezes – there is no wind power generation.
Wind turbines require something like sustained winds of 10 mph to move the blades and more like a whistling 30 mph to generate full power. During a Bermuda high, folks are happy to get the occasional 5 mph breeze. These huge highs cover many states, so it is not like we can get the juice from next door.
So for reliability we need, say, seven days of backup: 168 hours. Here’s the math:
13,000 MW x 168 hours = 2,184,000 MWh of stored juice needed to just make it. Mind you, for normal reliability we usually add 20% or so as a safety measure. Did I mention electric cars? Replacing natural gas with electricity for cooking, water heating and other needs? Charging all those batteries? Maybe they need to add 40% to account for emergency circumstances. But let’s ignore that for now.
It is easy to see that 400 MWh is not “significant scale.” It is trivial, infinitesimal scale. Virtually nothing.
Nada. It might as well not exist. It might be enough to power Gracie Mansion and City government offices during a summer heat wave, but that’s about it.
More specifically, 2,184,000 divided by 400 = 5,460. That means New York City just needs another 5,459 additional battery clusters to meet those peak needs.
On the other hand, this measly 400 MWh battery array may well cost half a billion dollars, which is significant, especially to the New Yorkers who will pay for it. No cost figures were given, because the system is privately owned.
However, the Energy Information Administration says the average utility scale battery system runs around $1.5 million per MWh of storage capacity. That works out to $600 million for this insignificant climate-obsessing toy.
So what would it cost to reliably back up wind power, at this MWh cost and NYC scale? Just over $3,000,000,000,000. THREE TRILLION DOLLARS! I have not seen this stupendous sum reported in the media. Perhaps Con Ed has not mentioned it. They certainly know about it.
But hey, maybe the cost will come down a trillion – though not if we create a seller’s market by rushing into intermittent renewables, which is certainly where we are headed. After all, this is just New York City. Imagine what backing up America with batteries might cost. Don’t bother because it is impossible.
I should also add that we have no idea how to make 2 million MWh of batteries work together. The tiny 400 will be a challenge. Millions of megawatt hours on demand may not be possible.
Then too, New York State has the same problem. Only much bigger if New York City is included, which it often is. New York State peaks at about 32,000 MW, which works out to 5,376,000 MWh of stored juice at a cost of EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS for enough batteries to make 100% wind reliable. And again, this is without phasing in electric cars and trucks, phasing out gas heat, a 20% reserve, etc.
Note that New York State has a law saying they will build at least 3,000 MWh of batteries over the next decade. Like NYC’s grand 400 MWh battery system, this is as nothing compared to what is needed to keep the lights on. Nor does the New York Power Authority mention the many trillions of dollars needed to make renewables reliable.
All of this battery backup hype is a scam, and not just in New York. The papers are full of this con, from coast to coast. Solar plus batteries or wind plus batteries, as though the batteries mattered, when they do not. The utilities know perfectly well that these loudly touted battery buys are a hoax, but they are getting rich building the mandated and subsidized wind and solar systems the politicians are calling for. Adding a trivial battery makes it sound like renewables work. Which they don’t.
On a larger scale, consider PJM. This is the electric power coordinating group of utilities that oversees the central part of the Eastern USA (not including New York State). Its primary mission is system reliability, so it should be very interested in this impossible battery-cost problem. This includes big cities like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Washington DC
PJM peaks at around 150,000 MW, so a week of backup battery juice is 25,200,000 MWh. At $1,500,000 per MWh, that is just under a mere THIRTY-EIGHT TRILLION DOLLARS! This too is without electrifying all our fossil fueled cars, trucks, buildings, appliances and whatever else the climate emergency central planners can think of. Yet PJM says not a mumbling word about the impossibility of delivering reliability using all renewables and batteries.
Note that PJM plus New York is $46 billion and this is just a small part of America. The voters are oblivious to these impossible numbers, since they are repeatedly told that intermittent wind and solar are cheaper than reliable coal, gas and nuclear. Only when the sun shines bright and the wind blows hard, which is not all that often.
Maybe fracked geothermal, the reliable renewable, is the answer. Or how about reliable coal, oil, gas and nuclear power? Too bad they are all out of fashion.
Reality is just sitting there, waiting. 100% renewables cannot work, so it will not work. At this point it is just a question of how and when we find out the hard way. The key then is for voters and electricity users to learn this stuff, ask hard questions, demand honest answers, and not be Conned any longer.’https://stopthesethings.com/2021/01/21/new-york-con-job-trillion-dollar-batteries-not-included-in-all-renewables-hoax/
Free speech gone but supposedly free energy through renewables is here to stay. What a scam!
As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
That adage, however, doesn’t appear to trouble Britain’s current PM, Boris Johnson, whose plan to squander a further £50,000,000,000 on subsidies and over-the-market contracts for intermittent offshore wind power beggars belief.
But that colossal crony-capitalist boondoggle, is a mere snip by comparison with the £3 trillion that he’s planning to squander on an effort to completely remove carbon dioxide gas from the British atmosphere – well, at least the kind generated by all human activity, that is.’ Lots more of this article at https://stopthesethings.com/2021/01/16/command-control-subsidised-wind-power-central-to-britains-great-socialist-reset/
‘You know the wind and solar industries are in trouble when they’re reduced to muttering about humongous batteries saving their bacon.
Around the world, renewable energy rent-seekers have been furiously peddling the myth that mega-batteries are a free and easy solution to the hopeless intermittency of weather-dependent wind and solar.
The line goes that giant banks of lithium ion cells can store ‘free and abundant’ wind and solar power, whenever the sun is up and the wind is blowing (just right). Then, at absolutely zero cost to power consumers, these monster grid-scale batteries can lovingly release groovy ‘green’ power at any time that businesses and households need it.
Back in 2017, South Australia, Australia’s wind power capital, squandered $150 million on one of Elon Musk’s creations, that would power the state for all of 4 minutes when the wind stops blowing and/or the sun goes down.
Giant lithium ion batteries are touted as the antidote to the inherent chaos that comes with attempting to rely on sunshine and breezes; bringing stability and security to a grid on the brink of collapse.
However, as Rafe Champion details below, claims by wind and solar worshippers that ‘big batteries will save us’ is just another humongous lie perpetuated by those with serious skin in the game.’https://stopthesethings.com/2021/01/15/no-renewables-recharge-busting-the-big-batteries-will-save-wind-solar-myth/
What would make a politician want to destroy their own nation? I suppose there are numerous reasons why but one way those in the USA and Australia are seeking to do it is through so-called renewable energy such as wind and solar. In Australia electricity prices were once the lowest in the world due to the abundance of cheap coal BUT no longer is that the case as coal is a dirty word. Now in the good ole USA ‘Joe Biden’s plan to carpet America wall-to-wall with 60,000 wind turbines and millions of solar panels comes with a staggering cost, and it’s America’s poor that will pay the heaviest price for the Democrat’s delusional energy policy.
The only thing guaranteed about subsidising wind and solar is rocketing power prices and unreliable electricity. Ask a German, Dane or South Australian.
In a country still reeling from the economic havoc caused by political responses to the coronavirus, the last thing Americans need is to increase the cost of living and doing business.
But that’s precisely what’s coming, as Brian Leyland and Tom Harris contend below.
Bryan Leyland MSc, DistFEngNZ, FIMechE, FIEE (rtd), MRSNZ, is a Power Systems engineer with more than 60 years’ experience in New Zealand and overseas. Tom Harris, M. Eng, is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition.
Biden’s Energy Plans Are Expensive—and Dangerous
PJ Media – Brian Leyland and Tom Harris
19 December 2020
Joe Biden wants the electric grid of the United States to be powered solely by energy sources that do not emit carbon dioxide by 2035. In the Unity Task Force plan that the former vice-president released with Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the commitment is made that:
Within five years, we will install 500 million solar panels, including eight million solar roofs and community solar energy systems, and 60,000 made-in-America wind turbines.
Overhauling the entire electric grid, which some call the world’s largest machine, and converting much of it to wind and solar power, is not just a momentous task. It is both dangerous and unbelievably expensive. The only reason Biden has been able to get away with such a preposterous plan is that many people actually believe that wind and solar power are cheaper than fossil fuel-powered generation. They conclude that a transition to a system supplied by wind and solar power will reduce consumer costs. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Instead of blindly accepting the Biden/Sanders energy fantasy, the public should ask the obvious question: “If wind and solar are so cheap, then why do they still need direct and indirect subsidies?”
The fact is that they are not cheap at all once all the costs that they impose on the power system are taken into account. Let’s examine this more closely.
Wind and solar power are intermittent and unpredictable and must be backed up by existing or new power stations or storage facilities that can rapidly change output to compensate for the fluctuating supplies from wind and solar power. That usually means natural gas back-up stations. Even environmental activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told the 2010 annual conference of the Colorado Oil and Gas Association:
For all of these big utility scale power plants, whether it’s wind or solar, everybody is looking at gas as the supplementary fuel. The plants that we’re building, the wind plants and the solar plants are [supported by] gas plants.
Other problems are the need for inertia (flywheel effect) that is required to stabilize the system frequency and for voltage support to stop the lights going dim. Both of these are provided by conventional generators but not by wind and solar power.
For various reasons, 1,000 kilowatts (kW) of wind or solar power seldom produces more than 800 kW. On average, wind produces about one-third of its theoretical energy output (measured in kilowatt-hours – kWh) and solar power less than one-sixth. As a result, much more installed capacity plus energy storage facilities are needed to match the output of a conventional 1,000 kW station. It is the cost of this extra capacity and energy storage that kills the economics of wind and solar power.
One way of establishing the real cost of wind and solar power is to compare the cost of supplying all the electricity needed by a system with no connections to other power systems. Let’s consider the cost of supplying all the electricity needed by a power system with a peak demand of 4,000 megawatts (MW) and an energy demand of 19,000 gigawatt-hours (GWh), which is typical of most power systems.
We start by assuming that five days of storage would be needed to cover a series of cloudy days in winter or five days of little wind. So, we need to calculate the costs associated with storage by batteries or by hydro-pumped storage (in which excess power is used to pump water into a reservoir which then drains through hydraulic turbines producing electricity when the primary system lacks sufficient power to supply the grid). One then discovers that the solar power option would need 16,000 MW of solar capacity + 9,000 MW of battery capacity and the all-in cost would be 38 US¢/kWh. The wind power option would need 7,000 MW of wind and 2,250 MW of storage capacity to give a final cost of 34¢/kWh.
For comparison, the typical North American cost for combined-cycle natural gas generation is 5¢/kWh.
The solar option would occupy about 650 square miles of land and the wind option would occupy over 1,600 square miles. The environmental effects cannot be ignored. In many countries, the pumped storage option is likely to be opposed by environmentalists and it may not be feasible anyway because of the lack of sites that can accommodate two large storage lakes a short distance apart with one several hundred meters above the other.
The reality is that Biden’s ambitions for large-scale, low-cost solar or wind power cannot possibly be achieved by 2035, or even 2050, because of the huge numbers of wind turbines and solar farms and new transmission capacity that would be needed, and the very high cost and the associated technical and environmental problems. At the moment, and after the expenditure of billions of dollars in subsidies, solar and wind power provide only 8% of U.S. electricity.
If governments persist, the inevitable result will be skyrocketing prices and regular blackouts. Hospitals, industry, and commerce would need to install hundreds of diesel generators to maintain operations.
The assumptions made to derive the real cost of supplying 4,000 MW of demand from wind or solar power are as follows:
- A 1,000 watt ‘W’ solar cell has an average output of about 150 W, so 16,000 MW of solar power is needed to supply all the energy required by the 4,000 MW load and to compensate for the 25% losses in the energy storage system.
- As a 1,000 W solar cell seldom produces more than 800 W, the effective maximum output of 16,000 MW of solar is 13,000 MW.
- As the load on the power system can only absorb 4,000 MW, the storage system must be able to absorb the remaining 9,000 MW.
The storage capacity has to be able to provide 264 GWh needed in wintertime when there are likely to be five days of cloudy weather and the solar output is negligible. At the current $US200/kWh this amounts to over $US 50 billion. By way of comparison, the largest battery in the world at Hornsdale in Australia can store 130 MWh. Two thousand of them would be needed to store the 264,000 MWh needed for a reliable supply to the 4,000 MW load. This battery capacity is equivalent to all the batteries in all the electric cars in the world.
The conclusion is that about 25,000 MW of solar plus storage capacity is needed to supply the 4,000 MW demand! If batteries are used to provide five days of storage, the total cost is in the region of $70 billion, which explains the very high cost of providing a reliable supply from solar power.
Wind power that has an average output of 35% of its installed capacity is better but does not lead to a large reduction in price because the battery cost dominates.
Solar power with hydro-pumped storage is less expensive—an overall cost of 23¢/kWh, but still almost five-times the cost in the U.S. for combined-cycle natural gas generation. But hydro-pumped storage is impractical in most areas for the reason cited above.
From a greenhouse gas point of view, wind and solar power are horribly expensive. Carbon dioxide emissions are currently valued at about $30/tonne while calculations show that the carbon dioxide avoided by policy focused on wind and solar power would cost more than $1,400 per tonne.
When all the options are examined, the conclusion is that the best way to eliminate emissions of carbon dioxide from power generation is safe and reliable nuclear power supplemented by a relatively small amount of pumped storage. So, at least Biden’s support for nuclear and hydropower makes sense. But don’t expect ant-nuclear activists in the extreme left of the Democratic Party to allow this to happen.
The power disaster unfolding in California gives a good preview of what is in store for America as a whole if Biden succeeds in his goal of sweeping away fossil fuel-generated power and replacing it with wind and solar. Power outages are now commonplace in the Golden State, which suffered its first rolling blackouts in nearly 20 years last summer. Indeed, with 4,297 power outages between 2008 and 2017, California led the nation in this category (Texas was a distant second with 1,603).
Governor Newsom admitted that there was not enough wind power to compensate for the drop in solar power due to cloud cover and nightfall. The Los Angeles Times reported:
… gas-burning power plants that can fire up when the sun isn’t shining or the wind isn’t blowing have been shutting down in recent years, and California has largely failed to replace them …
The result is that California has fallen thousands of megawatts behind its needs.
Joe Biden said in his climate change plan:
Getting to a 100% clean energy economy is not only an obligation, it’s an opportunity. We should fully adopt a clean energy future, not just for all of us today, but for our children and grandchildren, so their tomorrow is healthier, safer, and more just.
If Biden actually does what he tells us he plans to do, life will be dismal indeed for our children and grandchildren. It will be a highly unjust future in which all those except the wealthy will lack the energy to be healthy and safe and will simply be left freezing in the dark.
The technical report and data to support our computations are available on the website of the senior author of this article at http://www.bryanleyland.co.nz/cost-of-wind-and-solar-power.html‘https://stopthesethings.com/2021/01/11/bidens-bonanza-poor-will-suffer-most-from-democrats-wind-solar-obsession/
Are we in the West so ignorant or blind that we cannot see that the CCP is manipulating almost every facet of our future?!
‘The chief beneficiary of the incoming Biden administration’s climate agenda will be none other than the People’s Republic of China, the same outfit that brought the world COVID-19.
Purveyors of renewable energy are eager to take advantage of Biden’s pledge to move the U.S. from fossil fuels to renewable energy and are already taking legal action to smooth the transition. On December 29, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA) and solar-power developers, including NextEra Energy Inc. and Invenergy Renewables LLC, asked the U.S. Court of International Trade to issue an injunction prohibiting an October proclamation by President Trump that raised tariffs on imported solar equipment.
The Trump proclamation removed a tariff exemption on two-sided, or bifacial, solar panels, almost all of which are manufactured in China. As reported by Bloomberg (Dec. 29), the lawsuit contends the Trump administration “failed to follow the required procedures” before acting.
SEIA’s legal challenge – Solar Energy Industries Association v. U.S., 20-3941, U.S. Court of International Trade (New York) – comes more than a month after a trade-court judge ruled that Trump’s proclamation to eliminate the bifacial solar panel loophole did not violate an earlier court order. But the judge in his order said that the proclamation could be challenged under a separate action. This is what SEIA and its allies are now doing.
Dependence on China
The action by the Washington lobbying group speaks volumes about renewable energy’s dependence on Chinese suppliers. Solar panels have a life expectancy of about ten years, after which they must be replaced. And because solar energy, like wind energy, is intermittent, it requires a backup source of fuel at night and on cloudy days. Domestically produced natural gas has been the backup source of choice for under- or nonperforming wind and solar facilities. But the Biden administration’s move away from fossil fuels means that increasingly batteries will fill that need. Batteries, however, along with solar panels, wind turbines, and drive trains for electric vehicles depend on critical materials sourced or processed from overseas, primarily from China. SEIA’s lawsuit all but acknowledges this.
Thanks to fracking and horizontal drilling, the United States has become the world’s largest producer of oil and natural gas. In doing so, it has broken the back of the once-mighty OPEC oil cartel. Now, with the switch to renewable energy, the U.S. runs the risk of abandoning its hard-fought energy independence. After having been dependent on OPEC oil for decades, and then freed ourselves from that dependency, we are now – in the name of “clean energy” – heading down a path that will lead to mineral dependency on China.
From a geopolitical standpoint, that is a terrible exchange. What’s more, it will have no measurable effect on the climate and – as batteries, wind turbines, and solar panels rapidly deteriorate – the shift will create a host of environmental problems in the decades to come. And the rolling brownouts and blackouts that have become commonplace in “clean-energy” leader California will spread nationwide.’https://papundits.wordpress.com/2021/01/05/u-s-solar-industry-itching-to-import-chinese-panels/
Western leaders are either so stupid or so leftist they cannot think logically. In this climate scam argument there is no sane discussion. Facts show that renewables cannot now or in the near future provide the energy Western nations need. Nevertheless, ‘Boris Johnson reckons wind power’s the future for Britain. If so, it’s a future that will soon resemble England’s bitter Dark Ages.
The UK has already had its taste of mass blackouts thanks to sudden and unpredictable collapses in wind power output. Now, as Brits head into winter, it’s a case of much more of the same.
A bout of calm weather has Britain’s grid managers begging for reliable power from, you guessed it, those same fossil fuel-powered sources that Boris claims he’ll soon replace entirely by corralling the British Isles with thousands more of these things.’https://stopthesethings.com/2020/11/09/into-the-black-calm-weather-leaves-britains-power-grid-at-risk-of-total-collapse/
The Coronavirus is only one of many things bringing the West to its knees. For instance, the so-called experts that are pushing for more ‘renewable energy’ is a national disaster here in Australia. Solar and wind will NEVER bring the price of energy down, but who’s listening? For instance ‘Australia’s suicidal energy policies are the product of a squad of rent-seekers masquerading as energy ‘experts’. These sanctimonious windbags all carry PhD’s in spending other people’s money, and all graduated from the University of Endless Subsidies.
The Federal Government has to share its responsibility for the debacle; it started it, after all.
But, every time the Liberal/National Coalition attempts to bring energy policy back from the brink, in chime the ‘experts’ with their brand of self-serving wisdom. Hammering the government whenever it exhibits the temerity to support meaningful electricity generation. And filling the void with endless waffle and propaganda about how Australia is a heartbeat away from an all wind and sun powered future.’
But there is more! ‘There is a pattern of conservative governments setting up agencies to deliver policy outcomes but either locking in an inflexible process that cannot be subsequently modified or failing to establish the appropriate machinery from the outset. An example of the latter is the $1 billion Grid Reliability Fund, whereby Energy Minister Taylor sought to divert soft loan subsidy funding of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to reliable new (and hence lower emissions) coal generation. But, of the 12 projects recommended for further consideration by the panel he set up, only one was a coal project. And that will eventually be killed.
The fact is that the bureaucracy appoints its own gatekeepers while ministers pretend to be in charge with portentous speeches. The committee set up to guard public spending through the Emissions Reduction Fund is headed by an environmental activist, ANU’s Professor Andrew Mackintosh (who was recently congratulated by the Environment Department for also being appointed as a reviewer of the Commonwealth’s expansionist Environment Protection and Biodiversity Act). Its other members also comprise environmental activists from within academia and the bureaucracy and are supported by the architects of the infamous National Energy Guarantee, the Climate Change Policy Branch in the Department of the Environment and Energy.
Taylor is attempting to change the decision-making body as part of an additional funding package and has appointed a new “expert panel” for advice. The tentacles of the Deep Green State, however, run deep.
Even though the head of the panel is Grant King (previously Origin Energy and AGL), its other members are Susie Smith, CEO of the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network, the aforementioned Prof Andrew Macintosh, head of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, and David Parker, the Clean Energy Regulator.’ https://stopthesethings.com/2020/03/30/suicide-squad-green-energy-experts-destroyed-australias-reliable-affordable-power-supply/
