Tag: more expensive

The intermittency of wind and solar power could be worse than originally thought, experts say

“Wind Droughts”: A 15-state region produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total.

From Just The News

By Kevin Killough

“Wind Droughts”: A 15-state region produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total.

Last month, multiple news outlets reported on the record-smashing year the wind industry had in 2023. The Global Wind Energy Council released its latest report showing the world installed 117 gigawatts of capacity. The Associated Press called 2023 a “record year for wind installations,” and Reuters noted that the U.S. was among the top five markets for wind installations.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration released a report this week showing that installing more wind farms doesn’t necessarily mean generating more electricity. The U.S. tripled its wind energy capacity, according to the report, from 47 gigawatts in 2010 to 147.5 gigawatts at the end of 2023. While that may sound impressive, generation from all those wind farms dropped 2.1% over 2022.

Much of that drop was during the first six months of 2023, when wind generation fell by 14% compared to the same period in 2022.

The capacity factor for the nation’s wind energy fleet, the EIA explained in its report, dropped to an eight-year low of 33.5%. This is the ratio of the amount of power produced compared to the total it could have produced if it were running continuously.

Fairly common

Renewable energy has an intermittency problem, which is why even though it’s cheap while it’s producing electricity, it’s more expensive than any other form of energy due to all the costs associated with making it reliable. These extra costs include the costs of battery facilities, baseload backup generators, transmission lines and over building of capacity.

However, as the drop in wind generation in 2023 shows, even with wind farms spread out across the U.S., it’s still possible that the wind won’t be there to turn the turbines. These wind lulls are called wind droughts.

“Wind droughts can happen at any time and are fairly common. As regions of the country become more reliant upon wind turbines producing electricity during periods of high demand, they become more prone to electricity shortages during these wind droughts,” energy experts Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, write in an article on their “Energy Bad Boys” Substack.

Orr and Rolling, who are policy fellows for the Center of the American Experiment, produced a report in 2022 showing how a 15-state region experienced a “wind drought” lasting more than three days. Science Magazine describes wind droughts as “prolonged periods of low wind speeds,” which “pose challenges for electricity systems largely reliant on wind generation.” 

The Midcontinent Independent System Operator, an organization tasked with managing the flow of high-voltage electricity across that region, produced less than 10% of its potential 22 gigawatt wind output over an 82-hour period. For 42 hours straight within that period, the wind output was only 1.5% of the total. Fortunately, coal and natural gas were available to meet demand.

Energy droughts

A new study by researchers at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) found that some parts of the country experience energy droughts lasting a week. Energy droughts are when both wind and solar energy fail as a result of windless, cloudy days.

The researchers found that energy droughts can occur in any season across the lower 48 states, and they vary widely in frequency and duration. California, for example, experienced energy droughts lasting several days, whereas Texas experienced frequent energy droughts lasting a few hours. The study also discovered that these energy droughts happen at the worst times.

“We found that the severity of the droughts that happened during those periods of high load is higher than the severity on average during periods that are not during high load,” Dr. Cameron Bracken, lead author of the study and Earth scientist at PNNL, told Just The News.

The study standardized its findings so that other researchers could use the same tools to and make accurate comparisons across different studies. The PNNL researchers hope their study will provide insight into designing and managing energy storage.

The study wasn’t able to look at what was happening with other energy sources — hydroelectric, coal, gas and nuclear facilities — during these drought events, Bracken said.

“That information is really difficult to come by. It’s usually proprietary,” Bracken said. That means, they can’t really determine during any particular drought event they identified what the exact shortfall that occurred on the grid was.

Orr and Rollin, in their analysis of the 2022 MISO drought event, were looking at the impact to grid reliability in Minnesota as a result of decreasing dispatchable generation from coal.

“The problem isn’t that the wind stops blowing sometimes; the issue is that state carbon-free electricity mandates and federal regulations are pushing reliable, dispatchable power plants into retirement,” the duo wrote.

That rate of retirement is likely to increase as a result of the EPA’s new power plant rules released late last month, which require expensive carbon-capture technologies in new gas plants and existing coal plants. The added costs, experts say, may make retirement a more attractive option for the plant owners.

Should that happen, the best hope for maintaining stability as the grid relies more and more on intermittent wind and solar will be battery facilities.

Dr. Ariel Cohen, senior fellow at The Atlantic Council, in testimony he submitted for a Senate Budget Committee hearing Wednesday, explained that storage costs of lithium-ion batteries amount to $338 per kilowatt hour for a battery with a 10-hour storage duration. For comparison, the average retail price of electricity in the U.S. is 12.36 cents per kilowatt hour. A single day of storage in the U.S., according to Cohen, would cost approximately $3.7 trillion per day.

If energy droughts hit American consumers when they need power the most while the grid depends on increasing amounts of batteries to satisfy demand, electricity is going to get a lot more expensive.

Govt. Green Rules Make Appliances Cost More and Do Less

“Everyday things that people actually want are going to get more expensive
or disappear, and the products that will be available will be more expensive
but not better. People are going to wonder why life is worse.”

From Science Matters

By Ron Clutz

NYC going after pizza oven emissions. You’d have to burn a pizza stove 849 years to equal one year of John Kerry’s private jet

In his Master Resource article Energy Appliance Victory! (DC Circuit vs. DOE), Mark Krebs explains the DOE agency machinations targeting boilers as a case in point of government bureaucrats attacking everyone’s economic well-being in the name of saving the planet.  

First, a contextual piece describes the game plan behind all this.  Later on, a synopsis of Kreb’s analysis of the tactics on the ground.

Background:  Why This Judgment Matters 
Biden’s Green Rules Make Appliances Cost More and Do Less

Authored by Kevin Stocklin at The Epoch Times, published at Planet Today.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

The Biden administration announced in December 2022 its pledge to take “more than 100 actions” to impose significantly tighter environmental standards on consumer goods is now becoming reality.  And consumer groups are predicting a future in which Americans pay more for products that do less, while manufacturers warn of shortages and supply chain breakdowns.

“You’re seeing, just in the last few months, new rules from the Biden administration about clothes washers, dishwashers, and other kinds of kitchen appliances, and in every case, you’re talking about a tightening of already very, very tight standards,” O.H. Skinner, executive director of the Alliance for Consumers, told The Epoch Times. “That will make it so that nearly the majority of the current products on the market don’t meet the standards and have to be redesigned or removed from the market,” Skinner said.

“Everyday things that people actually want are going to get more expensive
or disappear, and the products that will be available will be more expensive
but not better. People are going to wonder why life is worse.”

The announcement touted 110 new regulations enacted by federal agencies on “everything from air conditioners and furnaces, to clothes washers and dryers, to kitchen appliances and water heaters—as well as commercial and industrial equipment.” 

According to the Biden administration: “Once finalized, these standards will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 2.4 billion metric tons, equivalent to the carbon emissions from 10 million homes, 17 million gas cars, or 21 coal-fired power plants over 30 years. The projected consumer savings from these standards would be $570 billion cumulatively, and for an average household this will mean at least $100 in annual savings.”

The stoves are just the thin end of the wedge.

These actions follow a familiar pattern: rumors of new directives, followed by official denials, followed by draconian diktats.   

For example, reports that the Consumer Product Safety Commission would ban gas stoves over alleged safety concerns sparked a public outcry in January, which was met with denials by the Commission, together with media ridicule, that any such thing was being contemplated. This was then followed by new environmental standards from the DOE that would ban the manufacturing of 50 percent of the gas stoves available on the market today.

Case in Point: DOE Rule on Boilers Vacated by DC Circuit Court

Mark Krebs explains the agency machinations in his Master Resource article Energy Appliance Victory! (DC Circuit vs. DOE).  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

“The ‘wheels of justice turn slowly,’ but they indeed turned, even within the District of Columbia’s ‘uni-party.’ As for holding on to this victory, it is far from a slam-dunk for preserving consumer choice and free markets. I expect the struggle to escalate in Biden’s all-of-government war against natural gas and other fossil fuels.”

Beleaguered energy consumers were just handed a far-reaching victory by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia (DC Circuit). The ruling vacated a Final Rule from the U.S, Department of Energy (DOE) that would have banned the manufacture and sale of non-condensing boilers for use in commercial applications. DOE’s rule was challenged several years ago by natural gas interests–and later joined with a separate but similar case brought by the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute (AHRI).

DOE’s failures were major and numerous. Previously, the Court had afforded DOE ample opportunities to rectify them, but they didn’t. Ultimately (reading in between the lines), it appears that the Court lost its patience with “the Agency” (DOE). One of the far-reaching results of this victory is that it undermines a veritable super-weapon of the administrative state: the Chevron Deference. This aspect will be discussed in more detail further down.

DC Circuit has set a precedent that illustrates how DOE routinely bends the rules to achieve its “administrative state” objectives. Consequently, DOE should exercise more care and transparency going forward with both present and future developments of appliance minimum efficiency standards.  However, it is probably more likely that DOE will find ways to get around it; perhaps drastically.

The end-result of this (amid many other analytical biases discussed in the Court ruling) is fatally skewed economic “determinations” that almost always favor stricter standards, regardless of the true economics.. As a result of this Court Order, such routine biases are now on public display to demonstrate the full intent of regulatory failures that occur within the intentionally opaque bureaucratic processes to ostensibly overcome so-called market failures.

Most important of all, fossil fuel industries should exploit this victory to illustrate just how fallible government agencies can be.  This decision goes far beyond the particulars of packaged commercial boilers. It goes to the heart of the question of government agency standing relative to actual stakeholders.

Ever since the “Chevron Deference” was put in place in 1984, federal courts have deferred to an agency’s ostensibly unique “subject matter expertise” for interpretating ambiguous statutes. Such is clearly the case when reviewing regulatory actions like promulgating rulemaking for mandating minimum energy efficiency standards for appliances. On May 1, 2023, the U.S. Supreme Court granted review in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, No. 22-451, on whether to overturn or limit Chevron Deference.

Subsequently, perhaps the most important victory in this case is that it becomes a “poster child” for why the administrative state’s abuse of the Chevron Deference should end. At least in this instance, the Courts found DOE to be not worthy of deference. Perhaps SCOTUS will follow their lead.