{"id":284405,"date":"2023-10-21T21:04:18","date_gmt":"2023-10-21T19:04:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=284405"},"modified":"2023-10-21T21:04:22","modified_gmt":"2023-10-21T19:04:22","slug":"what-passes-for-a-demonstration-project-among-our-government-geniuses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=284405","title":{"rendered":"What Passes For A “Demonstration Project” Among Our Government Geniuses"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It doesn\u2019t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode.\u00a0\u00a0They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels,\u00a0but they can\u2019t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

From The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Francis Menton<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

A couple of days ago, a Substack called Doomberg had a piece titled \u201cFalse Utopia.\u201d<\/a> The piece featured a discussion of a post of mine from February 2023 with the title \u201cWe Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid.\u201d<\/a> My post argued that we should demand a demonstration project of a mainly renewables-based electrical grid that would include all<\/em> the key elements \u2014 generation mainly from solar and wind, plus<\/em> sufficient back-up or storage to make the whole thing work for the long term without involvement of the evil fossil fuels, plus any other necessary elements to make the whole thing work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Doomberg guys called my post \u201cbrilliant,\u201d which is very flattering. I would not say it was brilliant, but only that it says obvious things that for some reason few other people are saying. Among the people who will definitely not mention the need for an all-element fossil-fuel-free renewable grid demonstration project are government officials and green energy advocates. The reasons they won\u2019t mention this need could be (1) they are not bright enough to understand the subject, or (2) their understanding is impaired because they are too blinded by religious fervor to \u201csave the planet,\u201d or (3) they are intentionally deceiving the public to make money or fame or career advancement for themselves. Or it could be all three!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Meanwhile though, the government \u201cnet zero\u201d or \u201cGreen New Deal\u201d (or whatever they are currently called) promotional sites are full of talk of things they call demonstration projects. So are they responding to my demand? The opposite. All of what they call demonstration projects follow a common approach, which is only to attempt to demonstrate various portions of the full system that would be needed to provide reliable 24\/7\/365 electricity from predominantly wind and solar generation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Consider for instance the latest news on energy storage. A few days ago on October 13, the Department of Energy announced big new grants and subsidies for a series of what they call \u201chydrogen hubs.\u201d Here is a report from E&E News Energy Wire.<\/a> Excerpt:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Department of Energy on Friday announced seven projects that will receive $7 billion to build landmark hydrogen hubs, delivering a major boost to a nascent U.S. industry. The long-awaited move is a key piece of the Biden administration\u2019s climate agenda. On Friday, the White House said it expects the DOE funding to help cut 25 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, roughly equivalent to removing 5.5 million gasoline-powered vehicles from the road each year. \u201cWith this historic investment, the Biden-Harris administration is laying the foundation for a new, American-led industry that will propel the global clean energy transition,\u201d said Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to this further piece from Energy Wire on August 21<\/a>, the Biden Administration has set a goal of having the U.S. produce 10 million metric tons of \u201cgreen\u201d hydrogen (by electrolysis from water) by 2030. The E&E piece states that the massive funding for \u201chydrogen hubs\u201d is coming from a part of the Energy Department called the \u201cOffice of Clean Energy Demonstrations,\u201d and also cites the Department as calling the hydrogen hubs \u201cdemonstrations.\u201d So this must be the demonstration project we are calling for!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not quite:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

DOE envisions the hydrogen hubs as a demonstration of production, storage, transport and consumption.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I guess at least this is intended to be a demonstration of more than just production of the hydrogen. But still, they are clearly leaving out the critical piece of the puzzle, which is the demonstration of how much of this hydrogen, and capacity to make more of it, will be needed, and at what cost, to get the country \u2014 or even some small town \u2014 through a full year (or two or five) without need for fossil fuel backup. That completely obvious elephant is not part of this multi-billion dollar \u201cdemonstration.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And DOE is not putting all of its energy storage eggs in the hydrogen basket. They separately have another big bucks effort called the \u201cLong Duration Storage Shot<\/a>\u201d that is throwing bucketsful of cash at various research efforts into batteries. But the battery efforts are even farther removed from any relevant demonstration project. From DOE\u2019s opening webpage describing that initiative (with a date of September 2021):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The U.S. Department of Energy\u2019s (DOE) Energy Earthshots Initiative aims to accelerate breakthroughs of more abundant, affordable, and reliable clean energy solutions within the decade. Achieving the Energy Earthshots will help America tackle the toughest remaining barriers to addressing the climate crisis, and more quickly reach the Biden-Harris Administration\u2019s goal of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 while creating good-paying union jobs and growing the clean energy economy. . . . The Long Duration Storage Shot establishes a target to reduce the cost of grid-scale energy storage by 90% for systems that deliver 10+ hours of duration within the decade.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

On September 22, 2023 the Administration announced<\/a> some $325 million for \u201c15 projects across 17 states and one tribal nation\u201d<\/em> to \u201caccelerate the development\u201d<\/em> of these \u201clong duration\u201d<\/em> battery technologies. The $325 million may seem rather paltry compared to the $7 billion just thrown at the hydrogen hub thing last week; but don\u2019t worry, they have many billions more to spread around on this over the coming months.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So are these battery technologies, or any one of them, even a potential solution to the problem of making a mostly wind\/solar electricity grid work without fossil fuel backup? Again, you will not find any mention at those links, or at other government or advocate sites discussing the issue of how many of these batteries would be necessary and at what cost to actually fully back up a predominantly wind\/solar grid and make it into a functional 24\/7\/365 electricity system. Indeed, you will not find any mention at any such sites of the fundamental problem with all batteries as the means to back up an intermittently-supplied grid, as identified in the big (and otherwise badly flawed) Royal Society energy storage report<\/a> that came out in September. That problem is that stored energy as the backup mechanism entails engineering requirements that no battery can ever meet. Those include: holding at least several months of average usage, being capable of keeping that energy in storage for years in anticipation of worst-case once every multiple decades wind \u201cdroughts,\u201d and being capable of discharging over the course of months if not a full year. The \u201c10+ hours of duration\u201d mentioned as the goal of the Energy Department\u2019s battery program is almost trivial against the real engineering requirements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hydrogen, by contrast, has the theoretical capability of meeting all of those engineering requirement. However, there are many elements that don\u2019t currently exist that would be needed to make a fully-functioning wind\/solar\/hydrogen storage 24\/7\/365 electricity grid. These include not just the electrolyzers, but also storage for huge amounts of hydrogen (underground caverns?), a full collection of thermal power plants capable of meeting peak demand burning pure hydrogen, and a transport system (pipelines?) to take the hydrogen from the electrolyzers to the storage caverns and then on to the power plants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could do a back-of-the-envelope calculation on this to get a rough idea as to cost, which would come to a multiple (not necessarily a huge one, but nonetheless a multiple) of what our current electricity system costs. But I\u2019m not going to do it. The reason I\u2019m not going to do it is that there as an obvious fact that tells you all you need to know, which is that no one in the country is spending their own private money to build out this system. They are all waiting for the government handouts. If this system could be built profitably at a cost competitive with what we have, there would be investors falling all over themselves to build it. When Thomas Edison built his first electricity plant, he did not go to the government for handouts to build it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Because this is all a fantasy kept alive by government handouts, as soon as the handouts go away or even slow down, the whole thing will dry up and fade away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It doesn\u2019t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode.\u00a0\u00a0They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels,\u00a0but they can\u2019t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup. From The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN Francis Menton A couple of days ago, a Substack called Doomberg had […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":121246920,"featured_media":284411,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_coblocks_attr":"","_coblocks_dimensions":"","_coblocks_responsive_height":"","_coblocks_accordion_ie_support":"","_crdt_document":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"It doesn\u2019t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode.\u00a0\u00a0They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels,\u00a0but they can\u2019t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[691823861,691823860,691823859,691818849,691818154,691819094],"class_list":{"0":"post-284405","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","6":"hentry","7":"category-uncategorized","8":"tag-doomberg","9":"tag-electrical-grid","10":"tag-false-utopia","11":"tag-green-new-deal","12":"tag-net-zero","13":"tag-renewable-green-energy","15":"fallback-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/10\/00mfrack_green_energy_ba6a58ee-987c-4d1f-bda2-30738e5f040e-1170x656-1.jpeg?fit=1170%2C656&ssl=1","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paxLW1-1bZb","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":259353,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=259353","url_meta":{"origin":284405,"position":0},"title":"Neil Oliver: There\u2019s nothing green about the green agenda…just plain old greed!","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"27\/05\/2023","format":false,"excerpt":"There\u2019s nothing green about the green agenda","rel":"","context":"In \"Green Agenda\"","block_context":{"text":"Green Agenda","link":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?tag=green-agenda"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/00Screenshot-2023-05-27-144411.png?fit=898%2C508&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/00Screenshot-2023-05-27-144411.png?fit=898%2C508&ssl=1&resize=350%2C200 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/00Screenshot-2023-05-27-144411.png?fit=898%2C508&ssl=1&resize=525%2C300 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/climatescience.press\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/00Screenshot-2023-05-27-144411.png?fit=898%2C508&ssl=1&resize=700%2C400 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":209088,"url":"https:\/\/climatescience.press\/?p=209088","url_meta":{"origin":284405,"position":1},"title":"The Utopian Vision Driving Green Energy Enthusiasts","author":"uwe.roland.gross","date":"18\/07\/2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Essay by Eric Worrall A glorious vision of green steel, green cement, green fertiliser, green hydrogen and a green energy export business. 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