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.
“Peak Oil” refers to the hypothetical point at which global crude oil production will hit its maximum rate, after which production will start to decline. At the forthcoming COP 28 conference in Dubai, a major agenda item will concern whether all parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change will commit to curtail financing of new hydrocarbons development, thus aiding to advance the arrival of “peak oil”.
“Peak Oil” refers to the hypothetical point at which global crude oil production will hit its maximum rate, after which production will start to decline. At the forthcoming COP 28 conference in Dubai, a major agenda item will concern whether all parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change will commit to curtail financing of new hydrocarbons development, thus aiding to advance the arrival of “peak oil”.
The International Energy Agency June 2023 Oil Report projected global oil demand to peak “before the end of the decade”.
The exact size of the global oil resource is not definitely known. Experience over many years has shown that initial resource estimates have been continually revised upwards as new discoveries are made, fields are better delineated and new technologies applied. It is important to understand the terminology. Oil reserves are the amount of crude oil a country or region has that can be economically produced with current technology. Oil resources include oil reserves plus the quantities of oil in the ground that are considered either “conventional” (susceptible to development through well bores using minimal stimulation) and “unconventional” (resources whose development also require multistage hydraulic fracturing or other advanced extraction techniques).
Current estimates are that global oil reserves are between 1.4 trillion barrels and 1.73 trillion barrels. The world has a reserve to production (R/P) ratio of somewhere between 38 and 46 (i.e. 38 to 46 years of production at current rates left).
There is a widespread international effort to find and develop more oil. According to a June 2023 report by Energy Monitor, there are now 47 countries with planned new oil and gas fields.
In 2012, the United States Geological Survey assessed undiscovered oil and gas resources. For undiscovered, technically recoverable oil resources, the mean total for the world was 565.3 billion barrels of crude oil. There remains a large potential for increasing oil production from existing fields by improving the recovery factor, or RF (the percentage of initial oil in place that is recovered through better technologies). The average RF from mature fields around the world is somewhere between 20% and 40%. The means to do this now are a combination of enhanced oil recovery (EOR) and improved oil recovery (IOR). Using combinations of EOR and IOR technologies it has been possible to achieve RF’s of 50% and 70% for some fields. In other words, in many cases it is possible to almost double the recovery factor, thus potentially doubling the existing conventional oil reserves.
Estimates of the size of the unconventional oil resource base are more difficult. Using the statistics of the US Geological Survey and the US Department of Energy, the global unconventional oil resource base was 450 billion tonnes (3.3 trillion barrels).
The potential ultimately recoverable oil resources are thus a combination of currently discovered conventional reserves (1.4 trillion-1.73 trillion barrels), plus undiscovered conventional reserves (565 billion barrels) plus unconventional resources (3.3 trillion barrels). The total, which must be regarded as speculative, is in the range of 5.1 trillion to 5.4 trillion barrels. At current rates of consumption, that could supply the world’s needs for close to 150 years. From this it is reasonable to conclude that the potential consumption of oil in the world will not soon be resource-constrained.
Development of additional oil reserves relies upon a favourable investment climate for oil companies, high enough prices to supply the necessary cashflow, and supportive government policies. The International Energy Agency 2023 report indicated that upstream oil and gas investment rose by 11% in 2022 to over US $450 billion and is expected to rise by 7% to US $500 billion in 2023. However, in 2015, new capital expenditures constituted over 90% of cash flow, but that share steadily declined to less than 50% in 2022. Among the reasons cited by the IEA was “uncertainty about future oil demand”, but global oil demand continues to rise at over one million barrels per day per year. A more accurate reason may be companies’ concern about the adverse impact of western countries’ anti-hydrocarbons climate policies.
Absent intrusive climate policies, the world would inevitably go through a long transition in which increasingly more expensive oil was supplanted by natural gas and a range of other competitively-priced energy sources.
Climate policy, however, seeks through taxation, regulation and central planning to control the pace of transition.
It also seeks to remove natural gas from the equation as a transitional fuel.
In so doing, climate policy risks creating a situation of both dire scarcity and extremely high energy prices that may persist for a long time. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the public in democratically-governed countries will tolerate such a transition.
In particular, the article singled out rice, sugar, and tomato production as particularly ravaged by climate change. The objective facts, however, show just the opposite.
This morning, the MSN news feed that displays for millions of people when they open a new Internet tab prominently displayed an article titled, “The climate crisis is here, the ecosystem is starting to collapse.” Embedded in the usual debunked claims of worsening extreme weather were claims that climate change is devastating crop production around the world. In particular, the article singled out rice, sugar, and tomato production as particularly ravaged by climate change. The objective facts, however, show just the opposite.
Fake claims of tomato shortages. According to the article, “India’s Burger King has taken tomatoes off their burgers after this year’s crop failed and the cost of tomatoes has become prohibitively expensive.”
An anecdotal claim that Burger King is taking tomatoes off its hamburgers in some locations does not prove that climate change is destroying tomato crops. Instead, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (UNFAO), global tomato production is faring quite well. In fact, the UNFAO reports that global tomato production has set new records an amazing 10 years in a row.
Sugar data is record sweet, not sour. The article continued, “The world’s largest sugar trader expects the coming season to see a deficit for the sixth consecutive year as unfavourable crop forecasts in India will reduce global stocks of the sweetener. ‘The world will be as close to running out of sugar as it can be,’ said Mauro Virgino, trading intelligence lead at Alvean, a trading house controlled by Brazilian producer Copersucar SA, in a recent interview.”
Claims by a trading professional who has a financial stake in leading people to expect higher sugar prices are neither evidence of declining sugar production nor evidence of any climate change impact. Fortunately, the UNFAO keeps meticulous data for world sugar production, also. According to the UNFAO, 2019 saw the largest global sugar crop in history. All 10 of the largest sugar crops in history occurred during the past 10 years. During the past 15 years, global sugar production has increased by more than 33 percent.
Rice crops continue to set records. Also, claimed the article, “Most seriously of all, rice yields across southeast Asia have fallen sending prices up across the board. A rapidly escalating rice crisis is unfolding in Asia that has put hundreds of millions of people at food security risk. … The poor rice yields are going to get worse in the coming months as due to the record high sea waters, this year’s El Niño effect is expected to be especially strong that will cause rice yields to fall further. The food issue and soaring prices in Yangon in Myanmar has already become so bad that residents are turning to charity run food banks for help as they are unable to feed themselves.”
The UNFAO, however, reports an entirely different story. According to the UNFAO, global rice production set a new record in 2021, the latest year for which data is available. All three of the three largest crop years occurred during the past three years. All five of the five largest crop years occurred during the past five years. All 10 of the 10 largest crop years occurred during the past 10 years.
The article focuses special attention on rice yields in India, China, and Myanmar. However, the growth in India’s rice production is even more impressive than the growth in global rice production. India has absolutely smashed its rice production records six years in a row. In China, 2021 was the second-highest rice crop in history. All six of China’s highest-ever rice crops were produced in the past six years. Myanmar rice production is declining – an aberration compared to the global trend – but that is because of Myanmar’s horrible domestic political situation, not climate change. As reported by Human Rights Watch, “Since staging a coup on February 1, 2021, the Myanmar military has carried out a brutal nationwide crackdown on millions of people opposed to its rule. The junta security forces have carried out mass killings, arbitrary arrests, torture, sexual violence, and other abuses that amount to crimes against humanity.” Blaming climate change for Myanmar’s declining crop production is giving a pass to political brutality and human rights abuses.
The overall global crop picture is amazing. It is not surprising that MSN, when cherry-picking its worst-possible scenarios to claim a global crop crisis created by climate change, cannot even find one or two outliers to support its misinformation. The objective fact, as shown definitively by United Nations crop data, is that crop production of nearly all kinds throughout virtually the entire world is setting is setting impressive and live-providing new records nearly every year. This is happening in concurrence with more atmospheric carbon dioxide and modestly warming temperatures.
James Taylor is the President of the Heartland Institute. Taylor is also director of Heartland’s Arthur B. Robinson Center for Climate and Environmental Policy.
Taylor is the former managing editor (2001-2014) of Environment & Climate News, a national monthly publication devoted to sound science and free-market environmentalism.
Mysteriously, warming is happening across the solar system. The one common factor is at the center of it all: the sun.
The solar system’s powerful sun. Artist’s image of a solar storm hitting Mars, stripping ions from the planet’s upper atmosphere. Image: NASA, public domain.
Because man is burning fossil fuels, our planet is allegedly becoming increasingly covered by a blanket of “heat-trapping” greenhouse gases, scientists like to make people believe. The recent global warming simply couldn’t have anything to do with the sun, they insist.
They’re likely way off the mark.
Today German prof. Stefan Homburg tweeted a summary of warming that’s happening at other places within our solar system, suggesting the sun is behind it.
“Global warming isn’t only happening on earth,” he tweets.
Triton has warmed 3°K
For example, warming is happening on Triton, Neptune’s moon. According to Germany’s wissenschaft.de: “Neptune’s giant moon Triton is the first body in the solar system where global warming could be detected.”
According to measurements, the atmospheric pressure doubled and the temperature rose 3 degrees Kelvin. “The cause is probably higher solar irradiation of the nitrogen ice cap at Triton’s south pole.”
Mars warmed 0.65°K since 1970s
German online news weekly Stern also reported in 2007: “The average temperature on Mars has risen by about 0.65 degrees Celsius since the 1970s,” citing American astronomers. Blamed here, though, are Martian dust storms. Why would dust storms on Mars be getting stronger? It’s likely linked to increased solar activity.
The Moon 3°C warmer, due to man!
Newly analyzed temperature data show the surface temperature of the moon raised by about three degrees Celsius, reported Germany’s Business Insider here in 2018. But NASA blames the astronauts! “By walking around and poking at the lunar surface.”
“Climate change” on Pluto
According to www.wissenschaft.de here, Pluto’s atmosphere has warmed to being 40°K warmer than the temperature at the surface (-220°C). The reason for this temperature gradient is the “absorption of sunlight [by methane] reflected from Pluto’s surface into the atmosphere.”
Methane makes up only half a percent of Pluto’s atmosphere. This small fraction heats the atmosphere in sunlight.
But not only Triton, Pluto and Mars are warming in our solar system, as Prof. Homburg suggests, other planets are warming as well. And there’s only one common denominator: The Sun. Global warming scientists do all they can to ignore this rampaging elephant in the room.
Jupiter’s “planetary heat wave”
Scientists last year found “an unexpected ‘heat wave’ of 700 degrees Celsius, extending 130,000 kilometers in Jupiter’s atmosphere.”
What’s behind it? Jupiter experiences variable intensity auroras around its poles as an effect of the solar wind.
Saturn heating
The surface of Saturn has been “slowly heating up” as well, reports Popular Science here. But NASA blames Saturn’s rings for the recent phenomenon.
“According to the paper, the most feasible explanation is that icy ring particles raining down onto Saturn’s atmosphere cause this heating. writes Popular Science. “A few things could be driving this shower of particles, including the impact of micrometeorites, bombardments with particles from solar wind, solar ultraviolet radiation, or electromagnetic forces picking up electrically charged dust. Additionally, Saturn’s gravitational field is pulling particles into the planet while this is all occurring.
Note how it’s never the sun’s solar activity and variability. It’s always some mysterious explanation.
Yet, there’s a reason why it’s called the “solar” system. It’s because the sun is at its center, and so its solar storms and variability impact all the bodies in it.
As the planet Earth has slowly warmed, in fits and spurts over the last 3 or 4 hundred years since the end of the Little Ice Age, the worries about global average surface temperatures have ramped up. The much-denied Global Cooling Panic of the 1970s morphed into the Global Warming Panic when short-lived cooling stopped and the most current ongoing warming spurt started.
As the planet Earth has slowly warmed, in fits and spurts over the last 3 or 4 hundred years since the end of the Little Ice Age, the worries about global average surface temperatures have ramped up. The much-denied Global Cooling Panic of the 1970s morphed into the Global Warming Panic when short-lived cooling stopped and the most current ongoing warming spurt started.
This new panic, the history of which I will not recount, resulted in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and subsequent The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the current crop of international bureaucrats screaming about the Climate Emergency and Global Boiling. The slight and mostly beneficial general warming is propagandistically portrayed as heating and hotness.
Heat and Hotness are thus portrayed, always, as Too Much Heat and Too Hot; then to Dangerously Hot and Deadly Heat –in the time-honored 1984-ish propaganda slippery slope.
Now, the Climate Emergency agenda demands blood – bodies in the morgue, dead and dying grandparents and dead children, to back up its storyline of Deadly Heat.
Thus we have the mainstream mass media repeating endlessly that the warming we are experiencing and the summers we have in the Northern Hemisphere are killing us.
There is a bug in that ointment: Cold and low temperatures have always resulted in the deaths of far many more humans than warmth and high temperatures.
The facts have not stopped dedicated scientists, whole teams of them, from trying to prove the opposite of the truth.
In the United States, climate harm enthusiasts haul out the following chart from NOAA’s weather.gov site page:
This particular graph gives an entirely false idea because it is simplistic. It comes from the Storm Events Database and does not even pretend to represent total U.S. deaths from extreme temperatures, hot or cold, only those from “storms” in the database. There is also the Cause of Death problem, which you can read about here.
To discover the truth about Heat v. Cold Deaths, it is necessary to look to the scientific literature on the topic. A quick survey can be accomplished with a Google Scholar search like this. It returns the first ten out of very many papers on the topic. Typical findings are:
“Results: In UK regions, cold-related mortality currently accounts for more than one order of magnitude more deaths than heat-related mortality (around 61 and 3 deaths per 100,000 population per year, respectively). In Australian cities, approximately 33 and 2 deaths per 100,000 population are associated every year with cold and heat, respectively” [ source ]
“Results Between 2000 and 2010, 3.9% [CI 95% 3.2:4.6] of the total mortality was attributed to cold, and 1.2% [1.1:1.2] to heat.” [ source ]
Results: ….” Cold effects on mortality appeared higher than heat effects in this subtropical city with moderate climatic conditions.” (São Paulo, Brazil) [source ]
The title told it all. This chart from Gasparini gives the details:
Compare these hot v. cold deaths bars to those of NOAA’s Weather.gov far above.
Interestingly, as the title declares, moderate cold kills far more than extreme cold or moderate or extreme heat in this multi-country, multi-continent study.
When all the data was run through the computers and the models, the bottom line was:
“….9.43% (95% CI 7.58–11.07) of all deaths (8.52% [6.19–10·47] were cold-related and 0.91% [0.56–1.36] were heat-related. There were 74 temperature-related excess deaths per 100,000 residents (95% CI 60–87). The mortality burden varied geographically.”
That is: non-optimal cold ambient temperatures cause ten times the number of deaths worldwide than non-optimal warm temperatures.
Bottom Line:
The question of which causes more human deaths worldwide, higher or lower temperatures, heat or cold, is not controversial. It is well understood and the findings of many studies are quite clear.
Cold, low ambient temperature, leads to the death of far more human beings than Heat, higher ambient temperature, by an order of magnitude, ten times more deaths from low temperatures.
Any report to the contrary, claiming that heat kills more people than cold, is either made from total ignorance of the facts, or is intentional disinformation.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment:
It is one of the sillier aspects of the Climate Wars that this issue is bandied about, with major journals, such as the Scientific American publishing such nonsense as “These heat waves pose a major risk to public health. “In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” says Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.”
This type of misinformation is dangerous – the Gasparini chart in the essay shows that even in the U.S. extreme cold kills more people than extreme heat, but the real killer (well, leading cause of illness leading to death) is Moderate Cold.
I won’t say that the science is settled…but the evidence is in regarding Heat vs. Cold. Cold is the killer.
Dominion Energy, Virginia’s big electric utility, is telling the State it does not foresee complying with the 2045 net zero power target in the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). The preferred option in Dominion’s latest Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) retires no fossil-fueled power generators, other than the few old ones that are already in the process of retirement. In fact, it adds a lot more fossil juice.
Bright full moon over darkened New York City skyline during massive East Coast blackout affecting 80,000 square miles.
Dominion Energy, Virginia’s big electric utility, is telling the State it does not foresee complying with the 2045 net zero power target in the Virginia Clean Economy Act (VCEA). The preferred option in Dominion’s latest Integrated Resources Plan (IRP) retires no fossil-fueled power generators, other than the few old ones that are already in the process of retirement. In fact, it adds a lot more fossil juice.
Up front in the IRP, Dominion puts it this way: “Due to an increasing load forecast, and the need for dispatchable generation, the Alternative Plans show additional natural gas-fired resources and preserve existing carbon-emitting units beyond statutory retirement deadlines established in the VCEA. The law explicitly authorizes the Company to petition the SCC for relief from these requirements on the basis that the unit retirements would threaten the reliability or security of electric service to customers.”
So, in effect, this is a notice to Virginia’s utility regulator, the State Corporation Commission (SCC), that Dominion is prepared to petition for permission to not comply with the net zero power generation mandate in the VCEA.
In fact, this IRP may constitute such a petition. The anti-fossil forces apparently think so because they have petitioned the SCC to reject the IRP because it includes more gas-fired generation. In response, the SCC has initiated a formal legal proceeding to consider this request. A number of green groups have joined the proceeding; there has been a hearing, public comments have been taken, etc. The whole rulemaking deal.
The impetus for this unexpected bout of rationality from Dominion is, as the quote says, an increased load forecast. Specifically, the SCC requires Dominion to use the load forecast from the regional grid operator, which is PJM. They issued a whopping new forecast that is roughly double their earlier ones going back years.
So Dominion is saying they don’t think we can service this enormous new load and comply with the VCEA net zero mandate. They specifically propose not to retire most of their fossil fleet, plus adding almost 3,000 MW of gas-fired generation over the next 15 years. No wonder the anti-fossils are apoplectic.
Unfortunately, they also add a ridiculous amount of renewables. This is about 11,000 Megawatts (MW) of solar and 3,000 MW of mostly offshore wind, on top of the 2,600 MW of offshore already in process. With their usual smoke and mirrors, there is virtually no storage to make this intermittent junk reliable despite costing tens of billions of dollars. If the gas-fired power does that, why not just use it instead of the renewables? Plus, offshore wind is hell on whales. But I digress.
Dominion has 7 million customers in 16 States, so its Virginia no net zero action has much wider implications. Beyond that, it could be a national precedent, so other utilities, States, and interest groups should be watching closely.
What the SCC decides could be very important. Ironically, in a ridiculous sense, the SCC does not exist at this time. Due to a political stalemate, there is only one Commissioner, out of the called-for three, and it takes a quorum of two to issue a formal order. It looks like the most that can happen is that an administrative law judge can render an opinion on the anti-fossil petition.
The SCC legal mess is beyond my knowledge or understanding. Rejecting an IRP seems odd to begin with. Then, too, the VCEA seems to allow what Dominion is describing specifically. Nor is it at all clear that an IRP is a petition when the matter is just presented as an option. Perhaps it is a petition to be allowed to suggest it. The whole fight strikes me as an absurd confusion, but alarmism is like that. Maybe that is the message. Anti-fossil alarmism is an absurd confusion.
This confused action should be fun to watch. Stay tuned to CFACT as the no net zero drama unfolds.
The value of subsidies to wind power is falling, while the cost of erecting and operating these things has skyrocketed. The result is a complete collapse in wind power capacity investment in Britain, and elsewhere. The usual suspects are running a mile from projects that were (on paper) worth billions.
The value of subsidies to wind power is falling, while the cost of erecting and operating these things has skyrocketed. The result is a complete collapse in wind power capacity investment in Britain, and elsewhere. The usual suspects are running a mile from projects that were (on paper) worth billions.
While the wind industry pretends not to worry about pedestrian matters such as profit margins, the bottom line is starting to bite back. To date – whenever the money looked like running out – the rent-seekers have simply dropped the begging bowl in front of the government concerned, scooped up another round of taxpayer-funded subsidies, and carried on.
The Brits under Boris Johnson went all in with wind power, at the expense of the reliable and affordable stuff. Now the chickens are coming home to roost, as Jeremy Warner explains below.
The real costs of wind power prove the sums don’t add up The Telegraph Jeremy Warner 30 August 2023
Someone get a grip. UK energy policy is once again coming apart at the seams, with growing doubts over whether net zero or even energy security goals can be met.
Only now are the true economic costs and practical difficulties of going carbon-free becoming fully evident, and it’s not a pretty sight. Yet still policymakers don’t seem to get it; either that or they are being deliberately misleading on the ease with which it can be delivered.
All pretence at “leading the world” in the application of renewables is meanwhile going up in smoke, as one-time champions pare back their ambitions for the UK market in the face of rising costs, more sensible planning laws, and better opportunities elsewhere. Rival jurisdictions, particularly the US and EU, are beginning to offer far superior incentives.
If you cannot beat them, do the opposite. Slowly, but surely, the Government is watering down its environmental agenda, which sadly but inevitably frequently clashes with the parallel goal of enhanced economic growth – the latest example being so-called “nutrient neutrality” water pollution rules which act as a barrier to more housebuilding.
Yet on paper at least, and indeed legally, the overarching environmental goal of net zero by 2050 – together with the staged targets set for getting there – remains sacrosanct, even though most practically minded people have long thought there is not a snowball’s chance in Hades of actually meeting it. A giant leap of faith in the transforming powers of technology is demanded to think it can be.
As if to confirm the gaping chasm between ambition and reality, the latest round of auctions for UK renewable energy licences, the outcome of which is due to be announced late next week, has plainly hit the rocks.
Similarly with the UK energy group SSE, which has said it will not be entering its Seagreen offshore development into the auction, citing a low, officially set, strike price, and dramatically rising costs.
Under pressure from the renewables industry, the Government has announced a slight increase in the promised subsidy below strike prices, but it’s unlikely to make a difference.
Presumably there are at least some bidders still in the running; even so, officials will struggle to get the capacity hoped for, putting in jeopardy the target of 50GW of offshore wind by 2030. Current capacity stands at just 14GW, so there is a way to go.
This in turn raises doubts about the Government’s separate target of complete decarbonisation of the electricity network by 2035. This, too, looks unrealistic. British energy policy is once more in a chaotic mess. It was ever thus.
As it is, policymakers have set strike prices so low that investors are struggling to see how they might make a return. No surprise that prices should be forced down like this, for the green energy transition is not just about saving the planet. It is also meant to deliver much lower energy costs.
This, too, is turning out to be a pretence. It’s true that in the past seven or eight years, the notional cost of renewable energy has plummeted. The price of offshore wind output has, for instance, fallen by around two thirds, from £100 per megawatt hour to less than £40. There you go, say ministers in response to net zero sceptics; it’s cheaper than coal.
Would that it was, but the claim is in fact a statistical illusion. The manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs alone have been surging since long before the war in Ukraine. To these we must also add the costs of upgrading the National Grid to bring the new sources of electricity from where they are generated to where they are used.
Littering the countryside with pylons is understandably running into local opposition. Billions may have to be forked out to compensate affected communities, or in finding alternative, more expensive, transmission routes. It could make HS2 look cheap by comparison.
But to gain a proper understanding of the real costs of wind, and to a lesser extent, solar, we need to factor in another of their characteristics – that they are intermittent.
In order to function effectively, the grid needs a constant balance between supply and demand; if the wind isn’t blowing, or even if it is blowing too strongly, thereby overloading the grid, there is a problem.
Lots of conventional backup capacity is required to deal with the shortfalls that result from intermittency – capacity that can be brought online quickly at the flick of a switch when needs arise.
The upshot is likely to be a high degree of duplication in generating capacity. This will obviously very considerably add to the costs of the renewable element. It’s disingenuous to say wind is cheaper than fossil fuels.
Potentially, storage could provide a solution to the intermittency problem, yet for the moment it doesn’t exist at the scale needed to do the trick. If Britain cannot guarantee to keep the lights on, nobody is going to want to set up shop here.
What about batteries? This may seem unduly pessimistic, but it stretches credulity to believe that they can ever really be the solution. Is there even enough lithium in the world to provide the level of battery power needed to supply the National Grid when the wind stops blowing?
There are alternatives, nuclear being the most obvious, but many environmentalists are as opposed to it as they are to coal, gas and oil, and here in the UK, policy on new nuclear capacity, as on much else, falls woefully short.
It is as much as we can do even to get the money-eating leviathan of Hinkley Point C up and running. Next comes Sizewell C, which scarcely promises to be much better. As Britain’s ageing fleet of existing nuclear power stations reaches the end of its life, merely replacing what’s closing down seems to be beyond us.
And to phase out the 80pc of UK energy demand currently satisfied by fossil fuels, we would need far, far more. Yet the Government continues to procrastinate. Shamefully, it is still faffing around with an international competition to decide who gets to build Small Modular Reactors, never mind how to finance them.
The last two auction rounds lulled the Government into a false sense of security on the economics of renewables. Both were hugely successful in attracting bidders at apparently highly competitive prices.
But things have changed. Having been ahead, Britain is slipping behind. Next week’s announcement on the outcome of the fifth round auction threatens to be a rude awakening. The Telegraph
It’s certainly been exceptionally hot for the last few days, but even with thermometers next to airport runways, main roads and in the middle of London, the highest temperature the Met Office could come up with was 33.2C (91.8F) at Kew.
But it was in fact much hotter in September 1906
It’s certainly been exceptionally hot for the last few days, but even with thermometers next to airport runways, main roads and in the middle of London, the highest temperature the Met Office could come up with was 33.2C (91.8F) at Kew.
The reading of 96F at Bawtry, S Yorks is still officially the highest September temperature in Britain.
The widespread extent of the intense heat was in itself remarkable, stretching from the Scottish Highlands, through Yorkshire and the Midlands, and down to the South East. In contrast, temperatures last week did not appear to get above the mid 80s at most for much of the country. This was certainly the case in Rutland, where I was cycling.
Probably even more remarkable still were the three September heatwaves in 1911, the culmination of an exceptionally hot summer.
Mean temperatures in July/August were a full 2C higher in 1911 than this year. And as the chart below shows, daily maximums were consistently higher then , other than that short spell in June.
I have absolutely no doubt that in due course the Met Office will highlight this year’s heatwaves in June and this month, and say they are evidence of climate change.
I somewhat doubt they will even mention the summer of 1911, much less explain how it could happen in the absence of climate change!
Five cars have been destroyed at Sydney Airport after a battery from a luxury electric car burst into flames.
About 8.30pm on Monday, firefighters were called to a parking lot on Airport Drive in Mascot after flames engulfed a luxury electric car before spreading to another four vehicles.
…
Research officers from Fire and Rescue’s Safety of Alternative and Renewable Energy Technologies team have also been at the scene.
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Fire and Rescue NSW Superintendent Adam Dewberry said … “There had been some problem with the car and the battery had been removed, we believe that the car has suffered some mechanical damage which can contribute to a battery breaking down and catching fire without notice.
“We don’t have a concern about this broadly, it’s not often that electric cars catch fire.”
Firefighters were called to Sydney Airport where flames had engulfed five cars.CREDIT:FIRE AND RESCUE NSW
The fire chief Adam Dewberry claims they don’t have a concern about this broadly, but in that case, why do they need a special fire department renewable energy technologies team?
Even if an EV needs minor accident damage to turn it into a ticking time bomb, airports are notorious for minor bumps and scrapes, lots of people arrive late and have to rush to catch their flight. If a minor bump can turn an EV into a ticking time bomb, at the very least EVs should be isolated in their own fire hazard area, especially if they show any signs of damage.
As for passenger ferries, I mean we’ve all seen what an EV can do to a vehicle transport ship – ferocious white hot flames which can’t be quenched, even by experienced maritime fire control officers.
Even if the risk is small, it’s still only a matter of time until a group of EV’s parked next to each other on board a passenger ferry catch fire and torch the entire ship, leading to massive loss of life, and lifelong injuries to survivors who inhaled toxic lithium smoke.
Update (EW): I’m a bit concerned about suggestions in comments that hydrogen isn’t dangerous. Pure H2 gas, by itself, cannot detonate or burn. But Hydrogen is very good at leaking from containers, tiny H2 molecules easily leaks through the smallest crack, and readily form a dangerously explosive mixture with air over a wide range of mixture ratios. There is no effective odourant for hydrogen, no smell which can warn you if there is a leak, because all gaseous odourant molecules are much larger than hydrogen molecules, the odourants can be trapped by the kinds of cracks tiny hydrogen molecules can freely pass.
I used to play with hydrogen as a kid, hydrogen balloons are much cheaper than helium balloons, when you make the hydrogen yourself using common household ingredients. About a third of the balloons detonated during filling – the slightest wisp of air contamination and the friction of the hydrogen gas rubbing against the balloon rubber were enough to cause an explosion. Some of the balloons detonated after sitting quietly for hours. And they were big explosions, given the tiny quantity of gas – like a large firecracker.
We never took the hydrogen balloons inside, a bunch of balloons blowing simultaneously could have damaged our house, likely blown out a few windows.
After my experience playing with hydrogen as a kid, I have zero doubt that parking 40-50Kg of compressed hydrogen next to anything you care about, or inside anything you care about, would be the definition of insanity.
Firefighters were called to Sydney Airport where flames had engulfed five cars.CREDIT:FIRE AND RESCUE NSW
The trouble with wind and solar became readily apparent as 7 o’clock and 8 o’clock come around. At the critical time of 7:25 p.m.—when ERCOT issued its Energy Emergency Alert 2, solar generation had plummeted to 11.6 percent of expected summer capacity—down from 86.9 percent just over two hours before. Wind also had dropped, as it usually does about that time of day.
Wind turbines in the Papalote Creek Wind Farm near Taft, TX. Monday, Oct. 28, 2013.
“The predictable but inevitable intermittency of renewable energy had created a grid emergency that would not exist on a grid that operated without renewables…. natural gas peaker plants would have handled the load at peak demand, the riskiest time for a normally functioning grid.”
“, Governor Greg Abbot should declare an energy emergency and call the Texas Legislature into special session and keep them there until they eliminate all Texas subsidies for renewable energy and force renewable generators to pay for the costs they have imposed on Texas consumers.”
As many renewable advocates like to point out, solar often provides good performance during periods of high temperature. Leaving aside for the moment the performance of solar compared to installed capacity, at 5 p.m. solar came close to its expected output of 12,636 MW. At 6 o’clock, solar dropped off to 77.6 percent of expected summer output. It also contributed 12.2 percent of generation at the time of peak load about 5:55. Wind was operating at 54 percent of expected summer capacity (10,427 MW) and contributing 7 percent at the same time. Batteries added only 0.3 percent.
The trouble with wind and solar became readily apparent as 7 o’clock and 8 o’clock come around. At the critical time of 7:25 p.m.—when ERCOT issued its Energy Emergency Alert 2, solar generation had plummeted to 11.6 percent of expected summer capacity—down from 86.9 percent just over two hours before. Wind also had dropped, as it usually does about that time of day. To make things worse, wind generation had already been operating far below expected summer capacity throughout most of the day. Thus, wind could not pick up the load for solar as the sun was going down.
In evaluating what happened on September 6 it is important to remember the load had dropped significantly by 7:25 when the grid emergency occurred. At that point, demand was 77,670 MW, down by almost 6 percent from the 82,350 MW demand at 5:55 and continuing its decline. Yet renewables could not keep up even with falling demand. The predictable but inevitable intermittency of renewable energy had created a grid emergency that would not exist on a grid that operated without renewables.
A Texas Grid Without Renewables
To fully understand the situation ERCOT is in today, we can contrast the events surrounding Energy Emergency Alert 2 to what the Texas grid would be like absent the takeover of the grid by renewables.
A grid operating without renewable energy would have handled peak load very differently than what occurred on September 6. As temperatures and demand soared, natural gas peaker plants would have come online to handle the increased load. These plants are built exactly for this type of situation. Often, peaker plants run less than 1,000 hours a year. Of course, in order to be profitable, they need to receive high prices for their electricity when they do run. That was the genius of Texas’ competitive electricity market. As demand increased faster than baseline generation could ramp up, prices would increase. That would be the signal for peaker plants to come online.
Such was the nature of the Texas power market from the late-1990s through 2015 or so. Investors flocked to Texas from all over the world seeking to earn profits by building new natural gas “peaker” plants. From 1996 when Texas began its move toward competitive markets, almost 35,000 MW of natural gas generation was built through 2009. This constituted about 45 percent of all generation in ERCOT in 2009 and was why Texas was able to make it through the summer of 2011, the warmest on record at the time, without any outages due to generation shortages.
The situation was beneficial for everyone. Peaker plants received high prices in the relatively few hours they operated when generation became scarce. Texans paid higher prices for a few hours a year, but the power they received kept the lights on.
Allowing this scenario to play out on September 6, it would have been the peaker plants—in response to higher prices, not solar, that would have come online to handle the peak load at 5:55 p.m. Then, as the load decreased as businesses shut down and temperatures dropped, some peakers would have gone offline or reduced output. But some of them still would have been online at 7:25 to handle the reduced load at that time. There would not have been the sudden drop off in generation that the grid experienced on September 6 due to changes in the weather or the setting of the sun.
In other words, natural gas would have handled the load at peak demand, the riskiest time for a normally functioning grid. Perhaps there might have been calls for conservation at that time, but more than likely there would not have been; such calls occurred much less often before renewables arrived. And unlike on September 6, there would have no discussion about how to handle the decreasing load between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m. For the straightforward reason that the necessary generation assets, peaker plants, would have already been online and committed to carrying the load. They would not have suddenly disappeared from the grid, unable to generate the needed electricity, like many wind and solar farms did that day.
Woody Rickerson, the ERCOT official, discussed the difference that solar has made during times of peak demand. “What’s changed in the last three years has been this huge influx of solar. Solar has taken [most of] the risk out of 4 p.m. and 5 p.m,’ he said. But Rickerson gets this aspect of the risk shift wrong. Solar has not taken the risk out of the peak load situations. At least no more than peaker plants have done in the past. Investment in solar has shifted the burden of carrying load from peaker plants to solar.
But September 6 clearly demonstrates that solar has failed in this task. Solar did not take the risk out of the grid during peak demand, it simply shifted to a later time. Only non-intermittent, quick-start generation like peaker plants can actually reduce the reliability risk to the grid.
Renewables from Government Favor
Money, or, more specifically, money taken from taxpayers and paid to renewable generators by the government is the reason renewable energy has taken over the Texas grid. Originally, Texas’ competitive electricity market allowed investors that made wise decisions to earn money. A lot of money for many of them. Money flowed from investors to generators to build the plants. Then, as the generators sold their electricity into the market, money flowed from consumers to generators and back to investors to pay for the plants.
That was the case before subsidies for renewable energy helped destroy market pricing signals that allowed for these transactions to take place. This is why for the first fifteen to twenty or so years of Texas’ competitive electricity market the grid was able to handle very high peak loads as the Texas economy and population grew. Texas never suffered blackouts because of insufficient generation during peak loads on hot summer afternoons.
Since that time, however, investment in natural gas, coal, and nuclear generation has dropped to almost zero. Already in 2009 investment in wind generation had overtaken natural gas. New generation requests from wind in 2009 totaled 44,900 MW versus only 14,100 MW from natural gas. Today the problem is much worse. From 2018 to 2021, renewables made up 85 percent of all new generation. A study completed for the Public Utility Commission of Texas (PUCT) estimates that renewables will make up 98.7 percent of all new generation from 2022-2026. By that time, the installed capacity of renewables will make up 57.1 percent of all generation on the grid.
This rapid change in the generation mix on the Texas grid is not happening because of market forces. Investors did not shift from natural gas to renewables because generation from wind and solar farms is more efficient or profitable—at least in the market. The shift came because billions of dollars of federal, state and local subsidies guaranteed profits to investors who no longer had to deal with the uncertainty of prices. No matter what the price of electricity is on any given day, the subsidies guaranteed investors at least a marginal profit for every kilowatt of electricity sold. In 2018, for example, 28.8 percent of the income of renewable energy generators came from government subsidies and benefits.
NextEra Energy, for example, received $5.7 billion from the federal government’s Production Tax Credit (PTC) from 2007 to 2016. Over the same period, Texas’ NRG received $1.1 billion. During that time, the top 15 recipients of the PTC received $19.4 billion.
Money also flowed to renewable generators from Texas. A lot of it. From 2006 through 2023, about $29 billion of subsidies and benefits have flowed to renewable generators in Texas. $15.3 billion of that came from the federal government, $11.7 from the Texas government, and $2.1 billion from local Texas governments. All of the money, though, eventually came from the pockets of taxpayers.
Renewable Subsidies in Texas 2006-2023
Local
2,061,294,571
State
11,656,191,988
Federal
15,339,304,303
Total
29,056,790,862
Investment in reliable generation was also brought to a stop because renewable subsidies destroyed market prices in ERCOT. When the wind blows at night for instance when demand is very low, wind generators drop prices to force their electricity on the grid at the expense of thermal generators. Wind generators can do this because they have no fuel costs and because of the subsidies. This allows them to actually give away their electricity for free and still earn a profit. Thermal generators must either drop out of the market at this point or sell their electricity at a loss. In either case, thermal generators lose revenue making investment less attractive.
This problem is magnified in times of higher demand. When solar or wind generation increases output at these times, prices may be relatively high, but the subsidies ensure that renewable generators can price their energy to ensure they gain market share. This either pushes peaker plants offline or reduces the revenue they can earn while on the grid. More than anything else, this is the problem that is plaguing Texas today; renewable generation has brough investment in new peaker plants to a halt.
Without renewable subsidies, none of this would have happened because Texas would have almost no renewable energy on the grid. In the late 1800s, consumers rejected renewable energy—a four-thousand-year-old technology—as soon as fossil fuel became widely available. Oil and coal became the energy product of choice because it was more efficient, more reliable, and less expensive than wind and solar. That is still the case today, and always will be.
The intervention in energy markets through renewable energy subsidies has distorted market prices, thus distorting and reducing the information available to buyers and sellers. And reducing the quality of the decisions made by them.
An extension of this is that intervention, by design, changes or even prohibits the market outcomes that would have resulted through the voluntary actions of buyers and sellers in the market. The result is that intervention replaces preferences of market participants (to a greater or lesser extent) with those of the regulators and other parties, usually those seeking to profit through regulation. We can see this clearly today in the Texas electricity market, where renewables are making the Texas grid less affordable and less reliable.
The consequences of this were clearly seen on September 6. Solar has taken over the role of natural gas peaker plants only because subsidies for wind and solar energy have led to few or no new gas peaker plants. No longer, then, can Texas safely operate on reserve margins of 10 percent or below as it did less than a decade ago.
Conclusion
ERCOT said earlier this year that Texas has 146,719 MW of installed generating capacity. Yet only two-thirds (97,138 MW) was expected to be available during the summer, largely because wind and solar always operate far below their installed capacity.
But even renewables’ expected capacity has proven to be fickle. ERCOT’s projected reserve margin of 17 percent this year shrank to 1.6 percent at 7:25 p.m. on September 6 when renewables failed to show up. The only thing left for the operators of the Texas grid to do was declare an emergency.
Likewise, Governor Greg Abbot should declare an energy emergency and call the Texas Legislature into special session and keep them there until they eliminate all Texas subsidies for renewable energy and force renewable generators to pay for the costs they have imposed on Texas consumers.
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Part I was yesterday. This concludes the two-part series.
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Bill Peacock is director of the Energy Alliance of the Texas Business Coalition. TBC highlights the aspects of the energy market that matter most to consumers: Reliability, Affordability, and Efficiency. Our research can be found at www.theenergyalliance.com.
The recent and concerning collapse of the once revered scientific process in large parts of the climate change and medical community is detailed in a highly critical ‘open review’ paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Someday, charge the authors, there will need to be an inquiry into how so many scientific bodies abandoned core principles of scientific integrity, took strong positions on unsettled science, took people’s word for things uncritically, and silenced those who tried to continue the scientific endeavour.
The recent and concerning collapse of the once revered scientific process in large parts of the climate change and medical community is detailed in a highly critical ‘open review’ paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Someday, charge the authors, there will need to be an inquiry into how so many scientific bodies abandoned core principles of scientific integrity, took strong positions on unsettled science, took people’s word for things uncritically, and silenced those who tried to continue the scientific endeavour.
Universities have abandoned their historical role of open and disinterested enquiry on behalf of humanity, and “should be sanctioned for this by revoking their charitable status”. Group-think that maintains prevailing fads and supresses dissent on behalf of alleged ‘consensus’ is the opposite of the central purpose of universities. Mainstream media have long been uncritical receptacles for alarmist ‘clickbait’ political scare stories, and this, it might be added, encourages self-promotion among aggressive publicity-hungry scientists. There are many errors and deceptions and much censorship, state the authors, blighting the complete story being told in an unbiased manner. Singling out the behaviour of state broadcaster the BBC, they note: “Any reasonable observer will wonder whether Ofcom [the state regulator] is asleep at the wheel, not requiring the BBC to correct the errors it has been made aware of by experts, nor return to some form of neutrality.”
The report is mainly written by Professor Michael Kelly, the former Prince Philip Professor of Engineering, Trinity Hall, Cambridge University, and Clive Hambler, Science Lecturer at Hertford College, Oxford. There is also economic input from Professor Roger Koppl from Syracuse University. The full GWPF report is due to be published in December and the paper is currently open for review, comments and contributions from other academics. The GWPF notes habitual attacks on its work from activists, and its ‘open review’ policy is explained here.
The realisation that genuine free speech and scientific enquiry is being replaced by strict politicised requirements to adhere to orthodoxy and pre-set narratives grows with every appalling ‘climategate’-style scandal. Regular readers will need little reminding of the recent retraction of the Alimonti et al. paper by Springer Nature following a year-long campaign by a small group of activist scientists and journalists. The paper, whose lead author was Professor of Physics Gianluca Alimonti, reviewed past weather trends and found no data to support the politically-termed ‘climate emergency’. World headlines have also been devoted to the astonishing story of Dr. Patrick Brown of Johns Hopkins University, who blew the whistle on his recent paper published in Nature on California wildfires. He said he wrote it according to the approved script boosting the role of ‘climate change’ and downplaying any natural causes and the horrendous role played by arsonists.
The full publication of the GWPF paper will add to the growing concern and alarm about the science advice given to governments and the media for onward distribution to the public. The corruptions involved in this process are seemingly built into the current system. Trillions of dollars now back the Net Zero collectivisation project across the world, and most scientists, largely paid for by politicians and wealthy green elites, are fully onboard the gravy train.
The GWPF authors aim to push back by maximising the diversity of advice, challenging advice through opposing ‘red’ teams, ensuring a reasonable level of accountability for scientists to discourage hype, and protecting scientists from career damage if they rationally disagree with mainstream views. Institutions should not take official positions on scientific issues, “since this stifles diversity of thought, freedom of speech and the reliability of advice”. Scepticism must be recovered as a respectful term for scientific behaviour from its present position as an insult, “and reinstated as a core duty of universities and learned societies”, demand the authors.
The authors are particularly dismissive of the role of computer models in the recent Covid pandemic and the promotion of climate change alarm. In the U.K., the “gross misuse” of Covid computer models in the absence of robust data to measure them against is noted. Along with a “paucity of challenge” to scientific advice, this may have contributed to “death tolls, economic decline and societal ills”.
On the climate side, the models have produced temperature forecasts two to three times higher than the actual data eventually showed. What is worse is that the results are getting more inaccurate. If the models were actually modelling the evolving climate, the gap would be narrowing. The inaccuracy is a “major embarrassment” and would not be tolerated in any other field of science, and certainly not in engineering. Separation of human-induced warming from natural temperature variation is far more difficult than that portrayed by the UN-funded Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC), since experimentation and replication is “simply not possible”. The inability to model significant parts of the atmosphere are “fatal flaws” in any system that is supposed to be predicting future climate change.
Yet, as regular readers will again recall, computer models play a vital part in promoting the unhinged Thermogeddon fantasies of people like the UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘global boiling’ Guterres. The UN-backed IPCC seems addicted to using computer models incorporating a ‘pathway’ of 5°C global warming within less than 80 years. Over 40% of its impact predictions are based on this forecast, despite an admission it is of “low likelihood”. According to a recent Clintel report, over 50% of clickbait climate science papers incorporate this pathway in a seemingly desperate attempt to attract the attention of activists writing in the mainstream media.
Chris Morrison isthe Daily Sceptic‘sEnvironment Editor.
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