Day: May 16, 2023

The Left thinks offshore wind costs are benefits

The climate Left is touting all the jobs that will be created by offshore wind development. They never mention that those fine jobs will all be paid for by those who use electricity, including the low income ratepayers.

From CFACT

By David Wojick 

The climate Left is touting all the jobs that will be created by offshore wind development. They never mention that those fine jobs will all be paid for by those who use electricity, including the low income ratepayers.

They think the huge offshore wind costs are benefits because somebody gets the money. In fact jacking up electric rates is a highly regressive tax. Electricity is a big cost in low income household budgets. The poor will get hit the hardest, paying for other people’s good jobs, for no good reason.

Plus most of those good jobs will be in other countries, especially Europe and Asia. We do not have a domestic offshore wind production industry so almost all of the equipment, which is most of the cost, will come from someplace else. Even the boats are foreign.

New Jersey is arguably the leader in stupidity here, although there are several serious contenders, so let’s take them as a quick example. Keep in mind that NJ already has all the power generating capacity it needs. More on this later.

Their stated offshore wind development goal is a huge 11,000 MW. Dominion Energy has decided to own Virginia’s offshore wind facility, instead of buying the juice from developers, so we have some public information on what this stuff costs. Their present estimate is around $4 billion per thousand MW for construction.

Thus NJ ratepayers are looking at something like $44 billion just to build their target. Dominion says finance charges are a bit more than construction so let’s say NJ’s green dream will cost $88 billion to build and pay for.

Then their is operation, maintenance and repair. It was recently reported that the new giant turbines that are planned to be used are having high failure rates, so this could be a big number.

Another big number that I have seen nothing on is the grid upgrades required to handle all this new juice. The New England ISO estimates that around 4,500 miles of transmission lines will have to be rebuilt and newly built to handle their proposed offshore wind, which is much smaller than New Jersey’s.

All things considered, a round $100 billion is a good working number for New Jersey’s proposed offshore wind. Electric bills will be going way up to pay it. Most of that money will be leaving the State and the Country.

Here’s a hoot. The majority owner of the biggest offshore developer (Ørsted) is the Government of Denmark. So the people of New Jersey will be sending big bucks to Queen Margrethe for the use of her juice. She probably has a better job than they do.

The stated reason for hammering the people of New Jersey this much is to reduce CO2 emissions. Here it is also nutty.

To begin with NJ already retired its roughly 2,000 MW of reliable coal fired power plants (in just the last six years) so that emission reduction is out. What is truly funny is that the State now gets about half its juice from nuclear power plants, which already have zero emissions.

Pretty much the rest of the electricity comes from gas fired plants, but here things get tricky. A significant fraction comes from peaking plants that only run when a lot of energy is needed, typically during very hot or very cold weather. Both cases usually have low to no wind, so all those offshore turbines will not reduce the peaker emissions.

The regular gas fired plants will also run frequently because low wind happens off and on year round. Moreover they typically have to run on standby when the wind is blowing. They have huge boilers that take days to start up, so cannot be shut down if they are backing up the wind generators. This “spinning reserve” as it is called is yet another big cost of offshore wind. New Jersey does not need more generating capacity

The real kicker is that building all this wind capacity creates enormous emissions.

Here is a simple example, among many. Each turbine tower stands on a giant monopile driven into the seabed. Each is a steel tube, say 300 feet long and 30 across, weighing around 2,500 tons. Assuming each turbine is 14 to 15 MW, which most plans call for, that is around 750 monopiles, weighing in at just under 2 million tons.

That is a lot of iron that has to be mined somewhere, processed, turned into steel, fabricated into monopiles and shipped to New Jersey, probably from Europe. I suspect the combined emissions dwarf the tiny reduction in gas fired NJ electricity.

And this is just the monopiles. There are also the emissions stemming from creating the towers, turbines, blades, offshore substations, undersea power cables, etc., plus all the onshore grid upgrades.

In fact the enormous steel substations might well be made in Singapore or Indonesia, with tremendous shipping emissions. The Empire Wind project off New York just ordered substations from both places. New York is a strong contender in the offshore stupidity contest.

Bottom line is the offshore wind stampede will cost the people of New Jersey a fortune with no real benefits. Local jobs are nice but they are a cost not a benefit.

Author

World’s Greatest Environmental Frauds: There’s Nothing ‘Clean’ or ‘Green’ About Wind & Solar

The hackneyed claim that wind and solar power are ‘clean’ and ‘green’ doesn’t stand first contact with reality. Both chew up monumental volumes of minerals, chemicals, rare earths and energy just to create the panels and turbines. Both leave monumental volumes of waste when turbines and panels are spent – after a decade or so – much of it incapable of being recycled and plenty of it monumentally toxic.

From STOP THESE THINGS

The hackneyed claim that wind and solar power are ‘clean’ and ‘green’ doesn’t stand first contact with reality. Both chew up monumental volumes of minerals, chemicals, rare earths and energy just to create the panels and turbines. Both leave monumental volumes of waste when turbines and panels are spent – after a decade or so – much of it incapable of being recycled and plenty of it monumentally toxic.

So, call wind and solar whatever you like, but there’s simply no sensible basis to call them clean or green.

Mark P. Mills is a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mills has provided plenty of detailed analysis which supports STT’s view that wind and solar constitute the greatest economic and environmental fraud the world has ever known. Including his critical primer: The “Energy Transition” Delusion A Reality Reset.

A few weeks back, Mills appeared before US House Committee on Energy and Commerce to deliver the same message; namely, that there’s nothing ‘green’ about intermittent and unreliable wind and solar.

A summary of his testimony appears below. The full transcript is available here: Mills Testimony

Testimony to Subcommittee on Environment, Manufacturing, and Critical Materials U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on: “Exposing the Environmental, Human Rights, and National Security Risks of the Biden Administration’s Rush to Green Policies”
Manhattan Institute
Mark Mills
26 April 2023

Testimony Summary

Good afternoon. Thank you for the opportunity to testify. I’m a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute where I focus on science, technology, and energy issues. I am also a Faculty Fellow at the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University where my focus is on future manufacturing technologies. And, for the record, I’m a strategic partner in a venture fund focused on energy software, and I’m also a director of an oil-field services company.

Permit me to begin by observing two indisputable facts about our future. First, economic growth is the fundamental driver of energy demand. And second, while periods of slow growth and recessions are inevitable in all societies, those periods always end. But any subsequent growth can be stifled if energy supplies are either unavailable or too expensive.

Energy supply itself is not as much a matter of finding resources as it is one of building machines, regardless of the natural resource used, whether sun, wind, water, oil, gas, coal, or uranium. Thus realities around machine-building determine costs and all the associated environmental, social, and geopolitical impacts.

We know a lot about those impacts—both the good and the bad—associated with energy machines that use hydrocarbons because we’ve been using those technologies at scale for a long time, and because that’s how 85 percent of U.S. and global energy is supplied. We’ve learned a lot less about impacts from wind, solar, and battery technologies because they’re relatively new and, so far, supply only a few percent of society’s overall energy.

The Biden Administration has a stated policy goal to see America powered increasingly, eventually entirely by renewable energy. I should like to stipulate that the future will doubtless see far greater use of wind and solar technologies, and electric cars, if for no other reason than the sheer scale of future energy needs, and because developed countries are wealthy enough to pay higher costs.

However, there are many misconceptions about the realities of renewable energy technologies at scale, especially if the goal is to replace rather than supplement hydrocarbons. It begins with the core reality that renewables aren’t green. In fact, nor are renewable technologies inherently cheaper, nor more geopolitically secure.

That renewable energy isn’t green is a consequence of an unavoidable feature of wind and solar resources; they have very low energy density. That means, compared to using hydrocarbons, one must build machines that occupy roughly ten-times more of the earth’s surface to deliver the same amount of energy to society—whether it’s an hour of heat, or light, or computing time, or a mile of driving.

Essentially all life occupies the thin, surface interface of our planet, whether it’s land or water. One of humanity’s greatest achievements has been the radical reduction in the amount of that interface we use to deliver increasing quantities of food and fuel.

The inherent low-energy-density of renewables also means that far more machinery must be fabricated to deliver the same energy as now supplied by hydrocarbon machines. That in turn translates into a radical increase in global mining and minerals processing to supply all the critical materials needed to build renewable machinery.

Renewable plans proposed or underway will require from 400 percent to 8,000 percent more mining for dozens of minerals, from copper and nickel, to aluminum, graphite, and lithium. The IEA says the world will need hundreds of new mines, soon. Given regulatory realities, those won’t be here. Instead, most will be in emerging economies and most will be on or near the lands of indigenous people in areas that are culturally and ecologically valuable and fragile.

And given machine realities, the huge jump in mining required will increase energy use in that sector, thus offsetting a lot, in some cases all the CO2 emissions saved later by replacing hydrocarbons in powerplants and cars. Global mining today already accounts for 40 percent of worldwide industrial energy use, which is dominated by hydrocarbons, and will be for decades.

It bears noting that renewable-energy machines are like all machines; they wear out. This means the near future will see megatons of worn-out hardware, of trash, much at unprecedented scale because of the unprecedented quantities of energy machinery needed. Some of it cannot be recycled at all, some not easily, much of it expensively.

The huge land footprint and materials requirements of renewable machinery shows up in the economics too. Despite claims of cost parity, the fact is that in every state and nation, a rising share of wind and solar on grids has brought higher electricity costs. EVs, for similar reasons, are locked into inherently higher prices because of greater use of underlying resources.

Finally, the claim that renewables are geopolitically superior is exposed by one now well-known fact: China has a 40 to 80 percent market share in producing or refining energy minerals needed to build renewable machinery. That is a strategic dominance roughly double OPEC’s market share in oil. Building assembly plants in the U.S. for EVs and solar panels doesn’t change that fact.

There is, however, one common claim for renewables that’s true: they create more jobs. That emerges directly from the excess land, materials and machinery needed to deliver the same energy. The problem is that much of that work isn’t in America. And, to the extent it can be, any new jobs come at a time when our nation doesn’t necessarily need more jobs, as much as it needs more people willing and able to fill the jobs we have, especially in the skilled trades.

Full testimony here: Mills Testimony 
Manhattan Institiute

Testimony_House_Energy_Mills_4-26-2023Herunterladen

India’s Heatwave A Year On.

You will recall a heatwave in spring last year in India, with BBC claims of record temperatures in Delhi and Met Office claims that climate change is making such events 100 times more likely.

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/av/61483012

You will recall a heatwave in spring last year in India, with BBC claims of record temperatures in Delhi and Met Office claims that climate change is making such events 100 times more likely.

I debunked it at the time, here, here and here.

Now of course we have the full data for spring for last year, and this year too.

Below are the spring mean temperatures at Safdarjan Airport, in New Delhi, which has long running, high quality, is relatively unaffected by UHI, and is listed by the India Met Office as one of their Base Stations:

https://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/gistemp/STATIONS/tmp_IN022021900_14_0_1/station.txt

It was certainly how last spring, but not as hot as 1941 and 1943, and this year’s temperatures were actually below average. There is clearly no trend towards hotter springs there.

Monday Mirthiness: Wow So Much Climate Change in Five Years

Well I’m not out to prove that, when I am out the show is that using color you can make it look worse than it is. And that’s exactly what they did here in Germany. The temperatures are in centigrade, the colors are from hell.

From Watts Up With That?

This will bring out the fact checkers…. Saying “missing context”…. “Doesn’t prove climate change isn’t real.” etc.

Well I’m not out to prove that, when I am out the show is that using color you can make it look worse than it is. And that’s exactly what they did here in Germany. The temperatures are in centigrade, the colors are from hell.

Propaganda, pure propaganda

Mysterious “Aurora Blobs” Identified

Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming, so its impact was not a surprise. Photographers were already outside at sunset waiting for auroras. And, indeed, auroras appeared, but they were very strange.

From Spaceweather.com

By DR.TONY PHILLIPS

May 15, 2023: Europeans are still trying to wrap their minds around what happened on April 23, 2023. Everyone knew that a CME was coming, so its impact was not a surprise. Photographers were already outside at sunset waiting for auroras. And, indeed, auroras appeared, but they were very strange.

“I had never seen anything quite like it,” says longtime aurora watcher Heiko Ulbricht of Saxony, Germany. “The auroras began to tear themselves apart, forming individual spots and blobs which rose all the way to the zenith.” Here is a sample of what he saw:

“It literally took my breath away,” he says. “My pulse was still racing hours later!” The same blobs were sighted in France and Poland, and in Denmark they were caught flashing like a disco strobe light.

Ordinary auroras don’t act like this.

“These were not ordinary auroras,” confirms space physicist Toshi Nishimura of Boston University. “They are called ‘proton auroras,’ and they come from Earth’s ring current system.”

Most people don’t realize that Earth has rings. Unlike Saturn’s rings, which are vast disks of glittering ice, Earth’s rings are invisible to the naked eye. They are made of electricity–a donut-shaped circuit carrying millions of amps around our planet. The ring current skims the orbits of geosynchronous satellites and plays a huge role in determining the severity of geomagnetic storms. Earth is the only rocky planet in our Solar System that has one.

Sometimes, during strong geomagnetic storms, protons rain down from the ring system, causing a secondary shower of electrons, which strike the atmosphere and make auroras. Earth-orbiting satellites have actually seen these protons on their way down. Ordinary auroras, on the other hand, are caused by particles from more distant parts of Earth’s magnetosphere and have nothing to do with Earth’s ring current.

Mystery solved? Not entirely. “We still don’t know why proton auroras seem to tear themselves apart in such a dramatic way,” says Nishimura. “This is a question for future research.”

“It was very exciting to watch,” recalls Ulbricht. “I would definitely like to see these again.”

Good, because they are likely to return. Solar Cycle 25 ramping up to a potentially-strong Solar Maximum next year. Future storms will surely knock more protons loose from the ring current system.

Here’s what to look for: (1) Proton auroras tend to appear around sunset. Why? Electric fields in Earth’s magnetosphere tend to push the protons toward the dusk side of our planet. (2) Proton auroras love to pulse–a sign of plasma wave activity in Earth’s ring current. (3) Proton auroras are often accompanied by deep red arcs of light (SARs), which are caused by heat leaking from the ring current system. These arcs were also seen on April 23rd.

Let the proton rain begin!