Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
An excoriating report from the Civitas think tank has raised the official estimated cost of Net Zero from the U.K. Government’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) by a factor of at least three to £4.5 trillion. The author of the report, the economist Ewen Stewart of Walbrook Economics, puts the figure into context by noting that the resulting £6,000 annual charge per family would enable every family in the U.K. to have free food and £2,800 spending money every year until 2050. It can be additionally noted that removing such a large sum from family budgets might dent the incomes of well-paid liberal elites, but millions of people on or below average wages will find themselves pushed into grinding poverty.
The author charges that the Government has “grossly underestimated” the economic costs of Net Zero. At the same time it has adopted one of the most stringent and legally binding Net Zero frameworks in the world. The U.K. is one of only six countries to have made legally binding Net Zero targets, although it contributes less than 1% of global emissions of carbon dioxide. Despite a modest shifting of some deadlines last week, “the U.K.’s approach remains one of the most legalistic and prescriptive, globally risking both economic prosperity and the U.K.’s competitive position”. Last week’s announcement by the Prime Minister “does not amount to any material change in policy or economic cost”.
The U.K. may wish to maintain an aspiration of Net Zero, states Civitas, “but to drive a potentially four and a half trillion pound project, based on technology that in many cases is unproven, risks the very fabric of the U.K. economy and genuine societal hardship”.
Civitas explains that it has compiled its report “on the most conservative basis possible”. There is evidence to back this up. A programme to insulate Britain’s drafty housing stock produces a figure per house of £5,000, but this compares with Technology Professor Michael Kelly’s recent calculation that installing a heat pump with appropriate insulation would realistically cost £65,000. It would not be unreasonable to note that when Governments, public employees and private profit-seeking operations start with a ‘conservative’ figure, costs tend to double and even treble. Looking at you, HS2.
The Civitas report blows numerous holes in the fantasy economics practised, seemingly without any significant debate and scrutiny, by the green activists running the CCC. The CCC budget was prepared when interest rates were 0.1%, but recent increases to 5.25% have left a £1.6 trillion black hole in official calculations. Among the problems identified, it is said that the CCC largely ignores the capital costs of obsolescence and replacement, underestimates or ignores technological and supply chain challenges, along with the inflationary cost to consumers, ignores the risk of global price inflation as the world crowds into certain commodities such as lithium, does not address the issue of ‘crowding out’ from capital spend on other areas of the economy, takes no account of systemic risks to employment in areas such as the car industry, and alienates historic allies such as Saudi Arabia, risking energy security.
Despite politicians claiming that Britain is somehow leading the world in Net Zero, the effect on employment is very small. It is noted that according to the Office for National Statistics, the low carbon economy employs only 247,000 people, somewhat short of the two million green jobs the Government forecasts for 2030. Nor does the country appear to be a world leader in green technology innovation. The number of patents in the U.K. is low in comparison to those of China, U.S. and Germany.
The small number of jobs created by green technologies is starting to be noticed. Interviewed recently by Kate Andrews in the Spectator, Gary Smith, the leader of the GMB union, said the green household levies might be tolerated if there was any sign of the green jobs promised by every Government since Tony Blair. “Communities up and down the east coast can see wind farms,” continued Smith, “but they can’t point to the jobs.” Much of the green work seems to be either London-based lobbying or clearing away the animal casualties of wind farm blades. “It’s usually a man in a rowing boat, sweeping up the dead birds,” he observed.
One of the more obvious people who should be held to account for a decade of misleading statements about of the true cost of Net Zero is Lord Deben, formerly the Conservative MP John Selwyn Gummer and chair of the CCC for 11 years. Despite recently retiring, he advanced the opinion that Rishi Sunak’s minor can-kicking Net Zero exercise was “unconservative”. The investigative climate journalist Paul Homewood has followed Deben’s green career for many years and was disinclined to be charitable. It is not conservative to ban things, wreck the car industry and endanger the electricity grid, he noted, adding: “Above all it is not conservative to bypass the public and effectively hand control of public policy to a tiny, unelected clique of extreme climate activists and the renewable lobby.”
Any attempt to undo the untold economic and societal damage that will be caused by removing fossil fuels from the energy mix in less than 30 years will require changes in U.K. law. Led by two weak Prime Ministers, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and backed by large numbers of uninformed, virtue-signalling members of the House of Commons, the U.K. is tied into a tight legalistic path that demands net zero emissions by 2050. Civitas describes the U.K. predicament as “extraordinary granular”. It takes its authority from the Climate Change Acts of 2008 and 2020, but delegates the framework to the CCC, which then produces legally binding carbon budgets. Activists from pressure groups such as Friends of the Earth have the legal right to challenge any decision if they believe any policy is ignoring or endangering Net Zero targets. It might be noted that this carte blanche going forward could lead to a blizzard of lawsuits for almost any building project other than, of course, wind and solar farms.
Civitas observes that the overarching legal requirement to reach Net Zero in a series of legal carbon budgets was set up without any reference to the evolving scientific understanding, nor the economic, financial or societal implications of Net Zero. “The legal obligation is thus ideological, and neither holistic, pragmatic, nor dynamic,” it notes.
The U.K. needs to unpick the legally binding nature of its Net Zero commitments, argues the think tank, and abandon the centralised direction of the economy. Unless it wishes to export employment and undermine an already weak competitive position further, “the U.K. needs to move from the centralised CCC carbon budget approach to a much more organic, bottom-up, market-driven model”.
Chris Morrison isthe Daily Sceptic’sEnvironment Editor. This article was produced from a pre-publication copy of ‘Net Zero: an analysis of the economic impact’. It is published today and further details can be obtained from Civitas.
I traveled to Oregon last week at the invitation of a CO2 Coalition supporter. Besides being completely off the grid at a lodge on the scenic Rogue River, I gave a presentation to about 50 people from southern Oregon after returning from the wilderness.
As you can imagine, the climate zealots are in full-on crisis mode in the Beaver State. For my talk, I examined Oregon-specific temperature data. The top image shows the annual mean temperature that reveals about a 1-degree Fahrenheit (F) increase since 1895, which is hardly a crisis.
Interestingly, maximum temperatures were basically flat going back 125 years, while the low-temperature readings had increased by 2.0 degrees F. Increasing night-time low temperatures benefit agriculture by extending growing seasons.
Sleep well, Oregonians. There is no climate crisis.
So, what will the citizens of Oregon get for going to net zero? Analysis using the MAGICC simulator indicates that had the state attained zero emissions in 2010, the warming averted in 2050 and 2100 would be 0.0007 and 0.0018 degrees Fahrenheit, respectively. These are theoretical effects that could not be measured and would make no difference.
A recent New York Times (NYT) article titled “The Beekeepers Who Don’t Want You to Buy More Bees,” explains that contrary to popular media narratives, honey bee populations are healthy and numerous. This is true. Colony collapse disorder, the main threat to bees, is largely a commercial bee problem and not necessarily a wild honey bee problem.
In the article, professional bee-keeper Gorazd Trusnovec explains to NYT writer David Segal that the well-intentioned growing popularity of beekeeping is actually misguided, because there are now actually too many honey bees in areas all around the world.
“If you overcrowd any space with honey bees, there is a competition for natural resources, and since bees have the largest numbers, they push out other pollinators, which actually harms biodiversity,” he said, after a recent visit to the B&B bees. “I would say that the best thing you could do for honey bees right now is not take up beekeeping.”
Segal goes on to describe colony collapse disorder, which is a phenomena seen in commercial beekeeping in which a large portion of a bee hive or colony dies or is wiped out. Segal writes that “experts tend to blame pesticides, an invasive parasite, a reduction in forageable habitat and climate change,” and this tracks with what Climate Realism has seen and combatted previously. However, climate change is not among the best explanations for the problem, as explained in “Tell the Truth, UPI News, Parasites and Pesticides, NOT Climate Change, Are Killing Honey Bee Colonies,” or in the June Climate Fact Check.
Extreme weather like heat waves and precipitation aren’t occurring more frequently as measured by any metric, so climate change can’t be implicated in increasing numbers of commercial bee hives being damaged across large geographic regions.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency lists the factors it believes are the most likely causes of the decline in bees and other pollinators:
Honey bee killing, invasive varroa mites;
New and emerging insect viruses;
Pesticide poisoning;
Habitat changes and lack of food sources;
Combinations of the above factors.
The alarm around colony collapse disorder (CCD) caused a huge spike in interest in beekeeping in order to “save the bees,” however as a another professional conservationist interviewed by Segal explained, CCD is “an agriculture story, not a conservation story[.]” In fact, there are “more honey bees on the planet than there have ever been in human history.” Segal writes that the number of hives in the world has risen 26 percent in just the last 10 years.
Beekeeping has become so popular in places like Slovenia, for example, that the NYT reports honey yields are dropping locally despite a huge increase in hives because there is not enough plant nectar for all the bees.
Honey bees are also not the only pollinators around, and an overabundance of them could negatively impact the populations of other bee species, like bumblebees, as well as non-bee pollinators. This is particularly true in places like North America, where honey bees are an introduced species brought over by European settlers as livestock for honey production. They are not native here, and are considered by conservationists to be invasive competitors to native species.
Honey bees are doing more than fine, regardless of climate change. According to this NYT investigation, they are almost doing too well, due to an increase in the number of beekeepers. Commercial beehives experiencing CCD are not indicative of the health of the entire species, and certainly climate change is not to blame for their problems. Thanks, NYT, for looking beyond the narrative that “climate change causes everything,” to get to the true root cause of the struggles of honey bees and other pollinators, at least in this one story.
Linnea Lueken is a Research Fellow with the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy.
While she was an intern with The Heartland Institute in 2018, she co-authored a Heartland Institute Policy Brief “Debunking Four Persistent Myths About Hydraulic Fracturing.”
New Zealand (NZ) offers a good example of operating an electricity grid with relatively high penetration of renewables, almost exclusively wind.
This is a companion post to the ones previously done on the Australian (AUS) grid: Australian Renewables Integration: Part 1, Part 2,Part 3. and the recent update. The New Zealand gird has is a very similar market structure but with significantly different generation base. However, the same type of issues from moving away from fossil fuels to renewables are occurring.
Overview
The NZ grid runs on a market model, similar to but simpler than that of AUS. The Market regulator is the Electricity Authority (EA) — the NZ equivalent of Australian Energy Regulator. The grid owner is Transpower and the day-to-day wholesale market is under the control of an arm’s length subsidiary, System Operator.
The transmission grid is effectively a spine running the length of each island with spurs out to large generators or load centres. There is a relatively high capacity DC link between the two islands. The grid is usually run as a single market entity, with generation and reserves shared between both islands. Figure 1 shows a simplified map.
Fig 1 A simplified version of the grid map – the largest dots are about 1300MW and the smallest 200MW
The NZ market, unlike AUS, does not have negative pricing. Instead, must-run bids are put in at 1c/MWh. Most of the time, there is little price separation between the two islands, but in general prices rise as one moves from south to north. This is the way power usually flows. Live generation and market data is shown here and here. The prices are shown in 14 regions, to reflect the role of line constraints in pricing. About two thirds of NZ’s load is in the North Island, and two thirds of that is in the upper half.
The big difference with AUS is that NZ generation is hydro dominated, with thermal plant typically making up only 10-20% of the supply. The total generation is about 44TWh a year (AUS is over 270TWh), of which hydro is about 60%. However, this varies year to year depending on rainfall. Geothermal provides 20%. Wind is less than 10% and solar insignificant. With the different climate to Australia, solar in NZ has a lot less potential. Average sunshine hours across the country are about half of outback Australia’s. One of the original settlers’ names for the country translates as “Land of the Long White Cloud”.
Because of the temperate climate, air conditioning and heat pumps (large daytime electricity loads) aren’t common. The gas fired stations typically provide about two thirds of the difference between renewables generation and load, with coal supplying the remaining third. Generation from diesel fuelled gas turbines (GTs) is only for the very high peaks and emergencies. Figure 2 shows the generation source – the major “Other” contributor is from wood waste boilers driving steam turbines.
Fig 2 Annual Generation by source. The hydro and wind contributions are more variable over shorter time periods, even just quarterly. There have been no significant hydro developments since the early 90s.
The 1GW of geothermal runs in the same niche that nukes occupy – baseload at very high load factors, typically >90%. The hydro is based on three main rivers and an underground station connecting a big lake directly to the sea. There is relatively little hydro storage (about six weeks supply when the head lakes are all full), but the country typically has year-round rain with snow-melt in spring. If it doesn’t rain for a month or so, more coal is burnt. The hydro and geothermal generating units are smaller than the usual thermal equivalents. Almost all hydro generator units are less than 110MW, with most in 30-50MW range. That makes it easier to match generation to available flow.
Unlike Australia, the NZ load is highest in winter. Daily electricity usage is about 100GWh in summer and 120GWh in winter, with the near nation-wide shut down during the end of December early January summer holidays, dropping it down to less than 90GWh. Typically, the annual peak load is about 7GW just after dusk in the middle of winter – a calm frosty night. When this occurs, there is typically an anticyclone over the whole country.
The daily load curve has a pronounced double peaked shape. This 40% change makes it quite different to many other grids including AUS, which often have large heavy industry demand as part of their load. Figure 3 shows the maximum and minimum over a recent two-year period. The evening peak is generally higher; but in winter, it can be the morning one. The only big industrial load is a 500MW smelter at the bottom of the South Island which both stabilises the grid and offers rapid short-term demand response if the hydro which mainly supplies it has a unit trip. There is another about 200MW of near continuous demand in big industries, mainly pulp and paper mills, but these often have embedded generation to deal with their waste products and lower their grid demand.
Fig 3 all the daily NZ grid load in 2017-18 was between the two lines. The orange Xmas Day was the minimum by some margin with the wrinkles at 5:30 and 20:30 being sunrise/ sunset. The shape of the curve throughout the year is markedly consistent with the big ramp- up 5am to 8am and the double peaks. That big 2500MW ramp-up is mainly done with hydros but almost always does need significant thermal input. Power stations that run mainly in the heavy load period 0600 to 2200 are said to be two-shifting.
With geothermal’s 1GW at the bottom of the generation merit order stack, the minimum load is made up by must-run thermal & hydro, plus what wind there is. Like AUS, the wind is unreliable – if anything, worse. Wind has a higher nameplate rating available than geothermal, but wind provides only 40% of the geothermal energy. The windfarms are located across length of the country north- south line (and the main wind comes from the west quadrant), but are concentrated in the lower North Island where the wind is strongest. Total wind farm output can vary from 900MW down to 6MW! Despite the distances, there is significant synchronicity in the windfarms’ generation. The swinging up and downs of total wind supply rarely match grid requirements. The variability has caused short-term operational problems in frequency and voltage management as well as ramp up problems. At the 3-4 am minimum load period, wind may make up a quarter of the supply.
Chains of hydro stations dam the steeper parts of rivers to use all the head available, with one station’s tailrace at the head of the next hydro lake. They start and stop multiple generators in synch at each station, rather than changing the individual machine’s outputs to match the load. Water needs to be staged during low demand periods to supply the lower dams and to avoid dewatering downstream riverbeds. Figure 4 shows both this loading and the value of dispatchable generation. Hydro spill is minimised as the EA can fine generation companies for not using water to generate, which could raise the market prices. Other than the big floods, or units being out of service on maintenance, the only spill happens just when there is too much generation available for the load and the hydro stations are dispatched off.
Fig 4 – Load following by the 3 main hydro rivers. Each river has a different company operating the stations on it. The two low sets of curves on the graph’s right-hand-side are the weekend. This operational pattern is often called two-shifting. The notchiness in the purple line is caused by the big size of the units – full load or off operation.
To help minimize the impacts of rapid load rises, the distribution companies have a system where customers can have short-term non-essential power like hot water and space heaters available to be switched off when required. They are on separate meters and get the power at a cheaper rate (for me, it is about 4c/ unit) The switching is done by injecting high frequencies into the 50Hz waveform which triggers relay switches. The common name for this is ripple control. Across NZ, a nominal 1GW is available, but the typical load on it at any one time is only 100-150MW.
The market price for power is typically around $120/MWh. However, lately as more windfarms come in, the distribution curve of market prices has become bimodal, <$30 when lakes are full and the wind is blowing, >$200 when it isn’t. The merit order stack can be very steep. One thing that needs to be stated clearly (as many don’t understand it) is the market is only for residuals – maybe 10% of the total generation. Most of the retailers have long-term pricing contracts or hedges to cover their customer’s electricity loads. In contrast to Australia, NZ’s domestic power prices have remained remarkably steady over last fifteen years; in fact, slightly dropping since 2015 as shown in Figure 5 NZ power is now cheaper than AUS and less likely to rise as fast.
Fig 5 Inflation adjusted domestic power prices.
For those that don’t understand how market dispatch works, the day is divided up into 48 ½h segments – Australia is now 5-minute segments. The generators put in their bids of MW and cost (in terms of $/MWh). These bids are arranged in ascending price order (bottom of stack are must run units at $0.01 cost). The lowest price ones up to the demand are the ones to be dispatched to generate. Spot market price is set by the unit cost of the last unit dispatched. Another name for this is merit order. If there are constraints, like transmission line outages, then these can reshuffle the merit order. If there is too much generation at even minimum price, the ones least needed for security are dispatched off. This means the grid tells the plant to stop generating or maybe just reduce output.
There are two main parts to what companies set as their bid packages (MW & price) to recover their costs – the fixed and variable components. The fixed charges are recovery of the cost of that power station, divided by number of hours it is expected to run. This would include staff & contractors, overhauls, and recovery of the capital costs of building and refurbishing the plant. For thermal plant, the variable costs would mainly be for fuel which includes the carbon charges. This might not be a fixed sum as efficiency varies with load and starting up requirements that don’t generate income can use a lot of fuel. Stop/ Start operation increases maintenance and capital costs. For a hydro plant, the variable charge is the value of that water, at least if they have storage capability. Use it now, or save it? Factors that influence the price is how full all the hydro lakes are, and the longer-range weather forecast. There is also the risk to be factored in of having to buy the power from thermal plants if there isn’t enough water to supply their customers’ load requirements. What this can mean is that some hydros split their bid. Some “must run”, some at a cheap price and some more expensive than coal.
Thermal makes up the difference between available renewables generation offered in on the merit order bids and the actual load. As hydro storage drops or the wind dies, thermal increases its contribution. It also acts as dry period reserve. The level of the lakes is a very important metric major consumers monitor. Most of the hydro is in the South Island and all the thermal in the North. It is not unusual for the DC to run lightly south at night and heavily north during the day. This may not be the situation for much longer. The major thermal plants are getting old and the government wants them to shut down. Replacement alternative dispatchable power supplies aren’t being built. For the foreseeable future, the grid won’t be secure for both the power and energy requirements without the reserve provided by maintaining the coal and gas fired plants so they can generate when needed.
Transpower does a good planning process, putting out an Asset Management Plan and a transmission planning report every two years. The latter document breaks the country down into regions, looking at the expected load change for every grid exit and injection point as well as switchyards. They then use these documents to prioritise their capital works programme. It then goes to the EA to get authority to increase charges to pay for it. The reports aren’t definitive as they were recently caught out by a major cyclone flooding incident which took out two big switchyards, needing major remedial work and capital expenditure. The major problem the process has is the grid company is wholly owned by the government, which prefers dividends to asset building.
As the grid is relatively small, frequency swings can be often and significant. Frequency control is done by a number of methods. It can be through very short dispatch period adjustments – 20MW up or down type instructions. Or it can be by running some units partially loaded on governor control. However, it can still be tricky to manage without the buffer of the resources of a larger grid. Frequency swings are larger because of this. In NZ, a 1Hz swing isn’t uncommon while AUS rarely goes worse than 0.2Hz. This is a problem of small grids, especially those without relatively large stable industrial loads like smelters.
Figure 6 shows the normal ramp up in the spring early morning. Figure 7 shows the effect of the final of the Rugby World Cup held in England the following weekend which many New Zealanders would have got up about 4:30am to watch. The rapid 400MW load increase at half-time caught the SO out. The frequency drop that went with the 10% rise needed major corrective action.
Fig 6 A typical Sunday morning load ramp-upFig 7 2015 Rugby World Cup and effect of half-time. Frequency dropped to about 48.5Hz until ripple control and reserves brought it back under control.
The grid inertia requirements are generally not seen as an issue because of all the hydro and geothermal units running. Most reserves (also part of the market) are managed by either partially loaded, or in-service as synchronous condensers, hydro units. The latter are connected to the grid, but have the inlets shut and use compressed air to depress the water in the tailrace. This allows the runner to spin in air with relatively little power consumption. Units in this mode can then be used to give voltage support. They can also open the inlet controls and be up to full load in 10-15 seconds – instantaneous reserve. GTs provide slower acting support.
There are problems controlling transmission line voltages into NZ’s biggest city, Auckland, because there are no nearby synchronous generators. The nearest one is at Huntly, a large thermal station complex 60 miles to the south. Even with that, stations in the centre of the North Island have to provide significant voltage support. That shortcoming needs major switchyard investments to correct. The DC link and windfarms are also prone to cause sub-synchronous oscillations in the grid which will eventually need correction, but have not significantly manifested themselves yet.
There was some load shedding in an event two winters ago, when wind generation dropped in the afternoon, too late to bring on slow start thermals for cover. Then they had weed blocking the intake screens at a big hydro, limiting their output; but the main problem was the SO’s grid management model and processes were wrong. They could have just made it through on the generation they had. Much mea culpa about that incident with a lot of revision and validation work done. It is not supposed to happen again.
More big dams are politically unpalatable so there is little hydro development potential. Growth has been accompanied by a gradual move to build more geothermal and wind. However, there are few new sites for geothermal left to develop. Geothermals are also being installed for the two shift operation. To balance this, there is retirement or less operating for the big thermals. The major problem will come when there is not enough thermal to cover the shortfall when there’s little wind and not enough water for hydros. This will especially challenging for the daily ramp up, as well as when covering the unexpected cold day peaks with sufficient reserves. Even now, it is not unusual to have more than 1500MW of reliable thermal plant running to make up the difference between what renewables generate versus the load.
The income derived from thermal plants has to meet their fixed as well as operating costs, so with lowered participation they become uneconomic and will eventually be forced to close. Even a major breakdown could be uneconomic to fix. The government in another virtue signalling move severely restricted gas exploration and development. This will mean future fuel supply is uncertain. The one coal station is old, though not as old as many in AUS. Coal is imported from Indonesia though the station sits on a coalfield. Transmission line problems and lack of reserves can exacerbate the generation shortage situation. That shortfall leading to rolling blackouts may be only a calm dry, cold winter’s day away.
There is no overall co-ordination of power station development. It is left to each generation entity (four big power companies, two smaller ones, as well as overseas developers or community groups) to evaluate potential new plant on its own merits; looking at the market, their balance sheets and customer load profiles. They then apply for consents to build and operate it. Stations won’t be built unless the owners believe they can pay back their capital and operating costs. This has frustrated many who yearn for a return to the days of centralised planning largesse. Invariably, those decisions were driven by political, not grid management or financial reasons.
Because the current government wants to virtue signal, moving from the predicted 95% renewables by 2030 to 100% while also providing cover as dry year reserve, development of a massive pumped storage scheme at Onslow in the lower South Island has been promoted. Exact details aren’t forthcoming as it is still just a concept, but it is scoped as about 1200MW, 5000GWh. Pricing just for the station went from $4B to $16B in the space of two years of investigation, but the Minister of Energy still thinks it is a good deal. Industry speculation is that the real capital cost of all the infrastructure needed would maybe double that. There is no report or details as to how it will operate or integrate into the market trying to pay its way by arbitrage. It has been discussed as both dry year storage or day to day energy smoothing – it can’t do both. There will need to be massive transmission lines and switchyard infrastructure built to utilise the power if it goes ahead. As well, many windfarms will need to be built to fill the lake. None of these have been proposed, let alone costed. If the government changes at the forthcoming election, the current Opposition have stated they will kill the project. Consignment to the never-to-be-mentioned-again graveyard of politicians’ bad ideas then is inevitable.
There are a lot of plans to build more wind and grid solar farms, but many see them as just tyre-kicking exercises, with few consents applied for and even less construction starting. The windfarms get no direct subsidies from NZ consumers. Therefore, the economics just aren’t there for building additional plants of this sort. They do get an indirect subsidy, in that they don’t have to meet dispatch where other generators can get fined if they don’t keep their output within pre-notified tight limits. Domestic solar has various subsidies to help assist installation but these aren’t generous. There are no government feed-in-tariffs (FITs) for their output, though some distribution companies offer a nett power (single meter) option.
Almost all generation from existing windfarms is purchased by the large generation companies (if they don’t already own them), who then offset the output against their other generating assets. However, that margin for balancing is now near gone, especially with thermals closing down. The NZ market will need modifications to accommodate the variability. This is especially so with reserves management.
Though it was near thirty years ago, one paper’s cartoonist got it right about creating a complex market.
For the reasons outlined above, it is more likely that Australia will have operational problems maintaining its grid before New Zealand does. However, the latter is not immune from the same issues confronting other Western countries. It will be interesting to see which government will be the first to publicly say the heresy that net-zero power generation won’t work.
If you want to power our modern economy on intermittent renewables (wind and solar), and also banish the use of power from fossil fuels and nuclear, then the only option remaining to make the grid work reliably is energy storage on a massive scale. And then it turns out that energy storage on the scale needed is enormously costly — almost certainly so costly that it will in the end sink the entire “net zero” project.
Failure adequately to address the energy storage problem is the fatal defect of nearly all “net zero” plans that are out there. For an example of a thoroughly incompetent treatment of this problem, you might look at New York’s so-called “Scoping Plan” for its mandated “net zero” transition. ThisScoping Plan was issued quite recently in December 2022. As examples of its stunning incompetence, it almost entirely discusses the storage problem in the wrong units (watts versus watt-hours), and regularly posits the imminent emergence of magical “dispatchable emissions-free resources,” that have not yet been invented, to cover the gaps in wind and solar generation. The people who issued this Plan have no idea what they are doing, and are setting up New York for an energy catastrophe some time between now and 2030.
But now along comes a report from Royal Society addressing this energy storage problem in the context of Great Britain. The Report came out earlier this month, and has been brought to my attention by my colleagues at the Global Warming Policy Foundation. The title is “Large-scale energy storage.”
Having now put some time into studying this Report, I would characterize it as semi-competent. That is an enormous improvement over every other effort on this subject that I have seen from green energy advocates. But despite their promising start, the authors come nowhere near a sufficient showing that wind plus solar plus storage can make a viable and cost-effective electricity system. In the end, their quasi-religious commitment to a fossil-fuel-free future leads them to minimize and divert attention away from critical cost and feasibility issues. As a result, the Report, despite containing much valuable information, is actually useless for any public policy purpose.
On the plus side of the ledger for this Report, the authors use the correct units to calculate the amount of energy storage needed to back up intermittent wind and solar generation; and their arithmetic appears correctly done as far as I have checked. Also a plus is that it takes them almost no time to conclude that there is essentially no possibility that battery technology will ever be able to solve the energy storage problem for a nation’s grid powered by intermittent sources, no matter how much the technology may improve and no matter how much its costs may decrease.
But then there are the negatives. The authors share the conceit of all green energy advocates — and of all central planners everywhere — that their models and projections have anticipated all costs and problems of their massive schemes. And thus, they think, they know all the answers to how this will work, and can dispense with the tiresome need for any physical demonstration project to prove function and cost. And then there is the discussion, or lack thereof, of ultimate cost to the consumer of these grand plans. The treatment of this subject is inadequate, and characterized by what appears to be an effort to divert the reader’s attention from the subject before too many questions are asked.
But let’s start with some pluses. This is from the “Major conclusions” section of the Executive Summary, page 5:
Wind supply can vary over time scales of decades and tens of TWhs of very long- duration storage will be needed. The scale is over 1000 times that currently provided by pumped hydro in the UK, and far more than could conceivably be provided by conventional batteries.
Go to the body of the Report, and you find that the authors have collected data on generation from wind and solar sources Great Britain over a 37 year period, 1980-2016. Those data show that the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation are far worse than even I had thought. In additional to diurnal and even annual cycles, there prove to be periods of relatively low wind that can persist literally for years. To deal with such situations requires putting huge amounts of energy in storage and then keeping it there for years, maybe decades, in anticipation of these low wind years.
Here is one of my favorite charts from the Report. It depicts the storage balance in a hypothetical 123,000 GWh storage facility for Great Britain over the 37 year period 1980 to 2016. The storage balance never goes much below about 80,000 GWh during the 23 year period 1984 to 2006 — which might have led the incautious to conclude that about half as much storage would be sufficient. But then there was a big low-wind period from 2009-2011:
The authors describe the situation as follows (page 31):
Figure 13 exhibits two striking features. First, a study of the 23 years 1984 – 2006 would have found a storage volume very much smaller than found by studying 1980 – 2016. Second, there is a very large call on storage in the period 2009 – 2011 which reflects persistently low wind speeds that lead to the large deficits seen in figure 2 (some of the energy that fills these deficits would have been in the store since 1980). These features reinforce the conclusion that it would be prudent to add contingency against prolonged periods of very low supply and the possible greater clustering of 2009 to 2011-like years.
As a result of observations like this, the authors, I think correctly, conclude that batteries are completely out of the question to solve this problem. The only storage medium that could conceivably work would be a combustible chemical substance that can be put in massive underground facilities for decades. Only two possibilities are out there — hydrogen and ammonia. And ammonia is far more expensive and far more dangerous. So that leaves hydrogen.
Since hydrogen is the one and only possible solution to the storage problem, the authors proceed to a lengthy consideration of what the future wind/solar/hydrogen electricity system will look like. There will be massive electroayzers to get hydrogen from the sea. Salt deposits will be chemically dissolved to create vast underground caverns to store the hydrogen. Hydrogen will be transported to these vast caverns and stored there for years and decades, then transported to power plants to burn when needed. A fleet of power plants will burn the hydrogen when called upon to do so, although admittedly they may be idle most of the time, maybe even 90% of the time; but for a pinch, there must be sufficient thermal hydrogen-burning plants to supply the whole of peak demand when needed.
I find the treatment of the potential cost of all of this to be totally inadequate. There is never a mention of the most relevant subject, which is how much electricity prices to consumers might increase. The closest thing I find is this chart on page 32:
This is cost “to the grid,” thus wholesale cost. Will there be a huge multiplication of final price to the consumer? At first glance this doesn’t look too bad. About 50 pounds/MWh for the wind/solar input, and then 60-70 pounds/MWh for the storage makes about 110-120 pounds/MWh total. Add about 33% to convert to dollars, and you would have about $143-156/MWh, or 14.3 to 15.6 cents per kWh. It’s high, but not completely in the stratosphere.
But wait a minute. Are these guys leaving anything out?
How about the new network of pipelines to transport the hydrogen all over the place?
How about the entire new fleet of thermal power plants, capable of burning 100% hydrogen, and sufficient to meet 100% of peak demand when it’s night and the wind isn’t blowing.
They use a 5% interest rate for capital costs. That’s too low by at least half — should be 10% or more.
And can they really build all the wind turbines and solar panels and electroayzers they are talking about at the prices they are projecting?
The whole thing just cries out for a demonstration project to prove feasibility and cost. I’m betting that that will never occur before the whole “net zero” thing falls apart from the disaster of skyrocketing electricity prices. Time will tell.
Now that they have done so, their reasons for obstruction have become a little bit clearer.
Some recent history: On 7 March 2022, the Ministry published a Review of the Continued Operation of Nuclear Power Plants Due to the Ukraine War, which made the case for completing Merkel’s nuclear phase-out and shutting down the plants despite the impending energy crisis. This review concludes with a brief “assessment” of the implications for “energy and climate policy.” If you read carefully, you’ll notice a strange thing: The two paragraphs which follow this heading abound with remarks on energy production, but say basically nothing about climate or emissions.
The documents Habeck’s Ministry have released since the court order reveal why. BILD has seen an earlier draft of this review, and notes that there was a originally a third paragraph at the very end, which Ministry officials deleted before publication.
It was here that they explained the emissions implications of phasing out nuclear power:
With regard to the reduction in CO2 emissions – sometimes used as an argument in this discussion – the approximately 30 TWh of additional nuclear electricity per year from 2024 onwards would result in about 25–30 million tonnes of CO2 reduction in the German electricity supply. Yet there would be no European-wide CO2 savings, as the energy industry is subject to EU emissions trading and the cap in the EU-ETS is set independently of a possible lifetime extension [for nuclear plants] in Germany.
Ralph Alexander: The truth about weather extremes. What the past tells us
This report refutes the popular but mistaken belief that today’s weather extremes are more common and more intense because of climate change, by examining the history of extreme weather events over the past century or so.
Drawing on newspaper archives, the report presents multiple examples of past extremes that matched or exceeded anything experienced in the present-day world.
That so many people are unaware of this shows that collective memories of extreme weather are short-lived.
Submitted comments and contributions will be subject to a moderation process and will be published, provided they are substantive and not abusive.
Review comments should be emailed to: benny.peiser@thegwpf.org
The deadline for review comments is 30 October 2023. = = = From the Executive Summary:
The perception that extreme weather events are increasing in frequency and severity is primarily a consequence of modern technology – the Internet and smart phones – which have revolutionised communication and made us much more aware of such disasters than we were 50 or 100 years ago. The misperception has only been amplified by the mainstream media, eager to promote the latest climate scare. And as psychologists know, constant repetition of a false belief can, over time, create the illusion of truth. But history tells a different story.
On September 27th, CFACT Senior Policy Analyst Gabriella Hoffman testified before the 2023 Kansas Interim Special Committee on Foreign Adversary Investments and Land Purchases. She was invited to speak at the behest of state Senator Mike Thompson (R-KS) and, along with Margaret Byfield of the American Stewards for Liberty, delivered a statement that focused on various threats posed to land ownership and private property rights.
Throughout her speech, Gabriella stressed the importance of property rights and how looming threats, both foreign and domestic, threaten to undermine these rights during her testimony. “Property rights are inalienable to us as citizens and are foundational to a market-based society like that historically found in the United States,” Hoffman said.
Her testimony primarily touched on three important points:
Concerns regarding foreign holdings of U.S. land – including adversarial nations like China that are purchasing large swaths of productive farmland.
How certain corporations are seeking to limit individual ownership of land.
How the Environmental, Social, and Government (ESG) movement – especially the E (environmental) prong – poses a threat to property rights.
Gabriella added, “While China’s holdings are paltry compared to the aforementioned nations, it’s confounding that our government would allow purchases by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to proceed—especially as the ruling party there is increasingly taking small and large stakes in private companies. Why would the CCP respect our laws regarding private property rights when it actively restricts access to financial markets and blatantly violates intellectual property rights at home?”
In addition to providing testimony, Ms. Hoffman also writes for CFACT, conducts media interviews, and hosts the Committee’s original video series “Conservation Nation” as well as her own District of Conservation podcast.
Across the USA, wind power outfits are being repeatedly busted for dumping their blades and simply cutting and running. Then there are scammers like Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc which makes claims about recycling dumped blades, notwithstanding there is no market for ground up toxic waste, funnily enough.
Principal among the toxic agents to be found in turbine blades is Bisphenol A – a compound banned in numerous countries.
Back in August 2021, Global Fiberglass Solutions Inc was busted for piling up over 1,300 blades at three makeshift dumps in Iowa – despite claiming it would ‘recycle’ them.
It’s a model it has chosen to repeat across the United States, including West Texas where locals are outraged. Stories about recycling blades keep being recycled, while thousands more blades pile up in dumps that resemble ‘green’ energy graveyards.
Russell Gold reports on the American wind industry’s dump and run tactics below.
Thousands of Old Wind Turbine Blades Pile Up in West Texas Texas Monthly Russell Gold 24 August 2023
Every year since 1958, the West Texas town of Sweetwater has hosted the World’s Largest Rattlesnake Roundup, which is exactly what it sounds like. Thousands of the venomous ophidians are rooted out of their dens and brought to the Nolan County Coliseum to be gawked at, “milked,” and often beheaded and skinned. It started as a way for the region to rid itself of some of its least-welcome residents. Now community leaders wish they could do the same with several giant piles of scrap that have for too long been left to bake in the sun. But that’s proving to be much trickier than wrangling reptiles.
About forty miles west of Abilene on Interstate 20, Sweetwater has unwittingly become home to what is possibly the world’s largest collection of unwanted wind turbine blades. When forklifts deposited the first of these in a field behind the apartment complex where Pamala Meyer lives, on the west side of town, in 2017, she wasn’t initially bothered. But then the blades—between 150 and 200 feet in length and mostly made of composite materials such as fiberglass with a binding resin—kept coming. Each was cut into thirds, with each segment longer than a school bus. Thousands arrived over several years, eventually blanketing more than thirty acres, in stacks rising as high as basketball backboards. Every few dozen feet, a break among the stacks leads into an industrial hedge maze.
“It’s just a hazard all the way around,” Meyer said. She worries about neighborhood children exploring the unfenced piles and says that stagnant pools of water inside the blades breed swarms of mosquitos. Matt Jackson, who works in a nearby warehouse, has other concerns. The piles create shaded nooks and crannies, perfect for Sweetwater’s unofficial mascot. “It’s just a big rattlesnake farm,” he said.
The blades were brought here by Global Fiberglass Solutions, a company based in Washington State that announced in 2017 its intention to recycle blades from wind farms across the region. Instead of ending up in landfills, they would be ground up into a reusable material that could be turned into pallets, railroad ties, or flooring panels. Global Fiberglass is one of a few companies attempting to develop a viable business from the impossible task of recycling blades.
Besides the main boneyard—behind Meyer’s apartment—stacks of blades also occupy ten acres a couple miles south of town, and the company is storing blades in other locations in the county. “They have, in my view, abandoned them there,” said Samantha Morrow, the Nolan County attorney. “The county doesn’t have and cannot find millions of dollars to clean this up.”
The Sweetwater piles are also at least partly the indirect result of a rule clarification the Internal Revenue Service issued in 2016. Before then, a wind farm could collect valuable federal tax credits for only its first ten years of operation. But the IRS determined that it would restart the clock on the credits if a wind farm “repowered” its turbines—replacing most of their equipment with newer parts. So, despite the expected two-decade lifespan for turbine blades, wind farms across Texas and other states began replacing many that remained in good shape years early.
Some paid Global Fiberglass to remove the older blades and haul them away. The company set up shop in an empty industrial facility in Sweetwater that was once an aluminum recycling plant, but Don Lilly, the managing director of Global Fiberglass, told me that only a handful of blades have ever been ground up there. He said the company was close to ramping up and would soon mill the blades into pieces the size of coarse sand. “The blade material is sold,” he said, “but I can’t go into that part yet.”
Sweetwater has heard such pledges before. The county declared the stockpile a public nuisance a year ago. City attorney Jeff Allen said Sweetwater’s local ordinances are aimed at overgrown lots, not turbine blades, leaving the city with limited legal options. He said he believes Global Fiberglass “intended to be a viable business” but at some point “it just came off the rails.” (Lilly disputes this and says the delays have come from ensuring “all systems were engineered.”)
The wind industry claims Sweetwater benefits from the local wind farms nearby. Drivers arriving on I-20 from either direction are welcomed by a giant wind turbine blade painted with the town’s name. But even the community’s biggest boosters of renewable energy long ago ran out of patience with Global Fiberglass’s mess. “We’d like to see them gone,” said Karen Hunt, director of the local chamber of commerce. “The sooner the better.”
Sweetwater isn’t the only place Global Fiberglass has stockpiled blades. It has a total of 1,300 in Newton, Iowa, and two other cities in that state, according to the state’s Department of Natural Resources. After an investigation, the agency concluded in 2021 there was no recycling going on, nor was any likely to happen. It declared the company to be running an unpermitted dump.
Frank Liebl, executive director of the Newton Development Corporation, testified at a state hearing that the initial excitement in 2017 of recruiting a blade-recycling company soon soured. In the intervening years, he asked Global Fiberglass many times when it would begin its recycling. He always got “the same answer: ‘Soon,’ ” he said.
By July 2021, the company owed more than $1 million in unpaid rent in Newton, according to testimony at the Iowa hearing from its landlord’s attorney. In Texas, it failed to pay taxes to Nolan County in 2020 and is now three years in arrears, according to tax records. Last year, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality fined the company $10,255 for what it described as illegally stored solid waste. It allowed the company to pay the penalty in monthly installments for three years. In June, Global Fiberglass defaulted, according to the commission.
In Newton, pressure from the state of Iowa seems to have worked. Craig Armstrong, a city employee, said that General Electric recently acquired the blades. It’s unclear whether GE purchased them from Global Fiberglass or from the landlord who was owed the $1 million in rent, who may have taken possession of the blades. The city was promised that they would be sent to a recycling center by the end of the year, although none had been removed by mid-August, according to a Newton city official. Lilly declined to talk about the Iowa blades. Texas Monthly
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