Let me welcome to the small and elite club of critical thinkers on the supposed energy transition a guy named Balázs Fekete. Fekete, with several co-authors, has recently (September 18) succeeded in getting an article published in a journal called Frontiers of Environmental Science, with the title “Storage requirements to mitigate intermittent renewable energy sources: analysis for the US Northeast.” Fekete then followed up by publishing on November 14 at Judith Curry’s Climate, Etc. blog a lengthy post summarizing the article, titled “Net-Zero Targets: Sustainable Future or CO2 Obsession Driven Dead-end?”
As with the previous competent analyses of energy storage requirements needed to back up intermittent renewable generation that have been featured on this blog and in my energy storage Report, there is nothing complicated about the Fekete, et al., analysis. The authors call it “a modified surplus/deficit calculation [as] taught to water engineers to size reservoirs for meeting water demand when the water resources vary.” When there is surplus production you add it to storage, and when there is a deficit you subtract; and then you sum over a year (or two, or ten) to calculate how much storage you need. It’s all basic arithmetic. What could be simpler?
You will not be surprised that the conclusion is “CO2 obsession driven dead-end.”
This subject would seem almost too obvious and trivial to cover on this blog. There is nothing complicated here. Everybody who is involved in any way in the energy transition game, and who has even the lowest level of professional competence, simply must be aware of this subject and of these calculations. And yet I just attended the big New York “Climate Summit,” (aka the Krazy Klimate Konference), featuring all of the powerful politicians and bureaucrats and industry leaders who are in charge of our state’s energy transition, and to a person they have no idea about any of this. And by no idea, I mean none, zero, zilch. One guy even came up to me and accused me of being “rude” for laughing out loud at his astounding ignorance. (The only other possibility was that it was intentional comedy.)
Unsurprisingly, the authors of Fekete, et al., make no claim to being “climate scientists.” Climate scientists as a class are way too smart to stoop to doing basic arithmetic. In the intro to the paper, Fekete identifies himself as a professor at the City University of New York — of Civil Engineering. Second author Mihály Bacskó is a former executive of the Hungarian Power Company. The other two co-authors are meteorologists working at the University of Oklahoma. In other words, the focus here is not on scaring the public with frightening scenarios from the occult voodoo of climate “science,” but rather only on whether the proposed solutions will or will not work.
The particular calculations in Fekete, et al., look at data from twelve states of the northeastern U.S. — New England, plus New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and West Virginia. Rather than using production data from existing wind and solar facilities, the authors obtained daily wind speed and solar irradiation data for the region. For consumption data, the blog post states that the authors applied an assumption of “constant energy consumption,” after determining that “seasonal variations of energy consumption are relatively small (deviate by only 10-15% of the annual average).” (Perhaps this decision could be criticized, but I doubt that it makes any material difference to the conclusion.)
And the bottom line is:
The storage capacity needed to align power generation from solar or wind is around 25% of the annual energy consumption.
In other words, you need three months worth of storage to try to make this work. Previous studies that I highlighted in my energy storage Report — for example, those of Roger Andrews and Ken Gregory — had calculated storage needs in the range of one to two months. However, those studies only used one year’s worth of data for each calculation, and allowed running the storage balance right down to zero. If you think that it’s too risky to run the storage right down to zero before the balance starts to refill, then three months of storage is a much more reasonable figure. Indeed, it’s still rather conservative.
Fekete, et al., don’t get into the specifics of cost of any possible storage solution. But then, they don’t need to. The potential costs are so enormous as to completely rule out any attempt even to start down this road. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, total U.S. electricity consumption in 2022 was just over 4 trillion kWh. So one-quarter of that would be just over 1 trillion kWh. Just to get an idea of the cost of that much energy storage, this site (Tesla fans) gives a (highly optimistic) cost for Tesla batteries of just over $100 per kWh. So a trillion of those will run you about $100 trillion. That’s four times the entire U.S. economy. Meanwhile, a Tesla-style battery is not remotely up to the job of the energy storage needed to back up wind/solar electricity generation, which would necessarily include the ability to save up power over a year or more and discharge over a year. But then, the economics are so wildly out of line that it’s hardly worth worrying about such technicalities.
Fekete, et al., in a very understated manner, put it this way:
In the absence of energy storage technology that can store several months worth of energy, one has to conclude that all studies suggesting that solar or wind are price competitive with other forms of energy should be retracted.
The Fekete blog post at Climate, Etc. contains two other subjects of interest. One relates to the peer review process. It appears that one of the peer reviewers made a run at getting the paper blocked, without stating the nature of any substantive criticisms:
One of the reviewers stated that “The manuscript contains fundamental errors that cannot be rectified through author revisions” without venturing into any details.
Fekete calls this effort “unscientific, unjust, and unethical,” which is again quite an understatement. Sadly, such conduct is the norm in what goes by the name “climate science” today. Fortunately, in this case, another reviewer was supportive, as was the staff of the journal.
The second subject of further interest in the blog post is that another reviewer criticized the draft paper for alleged “lack of references to the “plethora of work” related to integrating renewables to the current energy systems and transitioning to a sustainable energy future.” The criticism caused the authors to “roll up their sleeves” and go out and review some 360 papers recommended by the critic. Here is a list of what they found:
- The inter-annual and seasonal variations were rarely studied.
- The vast majority of the studies were limited to diurnal and minute-by-minute variations.
- The publications only investigated the use of few hourly storage capacities.
- The primary sustainability metric was reducing CO2 emissions.
- Most of the publications were limited to low renewable penetration.
- No publication attempted to address complete decarbonization.
- Even the most ambitious “deep decarbonization” scenarios stopped at 25-50% renewable contributions that was considered “high renewable penetration”.
And in summary:
Most of the reviewed papers assumed that solar and wind will be always supplemented by some form of “firm generation capacity”, which is the obfuscated name of using fossil fuels complemented with “carbon capture and sequestration”.
In other words, the orthodox “peer reviewed” scientific literature is almost completely lacking in consideration of the most important, fundamental problem of transitioning to an energy system based on electricity generated by the wind and sun. Well, now there is one competent paper in the mix. They will do their best to ignore it, at least until the whole wind/solar thing has conclusively shown that it can’t work.
Hmmmm . . . a reality check. Imagine that!
Two in just a few days, I may have to lie down for a few minutes.
Bottom line is they need to examine and design for Worst Case possibilities. If worst case lull for wind in Winter is 2 weeks and solar is only providing 1/4 – 1/2 normal capacity of 22% (so 6-12% from Solar 4 hours a day and near zero if not zero wind). Sufficient MWh storage capacity needs to be in place to allow for 2 weeks continuous back-up supply.
Further if those wind lulls happen back to back with only a week of normal generation between lull events, additional generation capacity will be necessary to recharge the GWhs back-up supply during the short time the weather is favorable.
Any utility scale mega battery back-up system would need to have a dedicated Wind/Solar generation system to recharge storage so as not to affect available supplies for normal daily demand.
Preaching to the choir, Bryan, preaching to the choir.
In other words, nuclear is the only answer.
Nuclear for base load + natural gas for variability.
In 1982-83 we had 80 days with no sunlight or wind to speak of here in Salt Lake City and the rest of the Wasatch Front. Temperatures ranged between 24 and 28 degrees.
Now THAT’S gonna be a big battery
Nuclear bomb size.
The recent UK Royal Society report on storage used a model based on 37 years of weather data which
“found variations in wind supply on a multi decadal timescale as well as sporadic periods of days and weeks of very low generation potential. For this reason some tens of TWhs of very long duration storage will be needed. For comparison the TWhs needed are 1000 times more than is currently provided by pumped hydro, and far more than could be provided cost effectively by batteries”
They concluded batteries would only provide short term grid balancing services.
For a large variety of reasons their estimates are on the low side. They used a single year of demand – 2018, which was not particularly challenging, and therefore did not consider that bad renewables years and extended Dunkelflaute are often matched by harsh, cold winters with extra demand. The demand estimate was kludged by the consultancy AFRY for the CCC, and already incorporates big assumptions about being able to shift or cancel demand through”flexibility”: these are not transparent, but it is quite evident that they suppress seasonal extremes. Then the assumptions about the cost and efficiency of renewables and electrolysers and generators using hydrogen, and of the storage itself, along with the failure to add grid costs properly also undermine their calculations.
It was however a start, and introduced the topic to green society: they can’t now ignore it.
Considering all the kludging in the estimates, all renewables brought online should be forced to provide their own backup, with a suitable fine many times more expensive than their tariff. At least in these early stages a loss of renewable power won’t be so disastrous (ignoring Texas…) considering how small a fraction it represents and that reliable power is still available and hasn’t been banned yet by the suicidal climate cult yet. The renewables should have to provide at least a month’s worth of backup – and future projects might have to provide more if further experience warrants it. It would be funny if renewable grifters bought ccgts as backup because batteries and unicorns were too expensive.
They need to look at a century’s worth of data and figure out how much storage is needed to guarantee the same level of reliability as the fossil fuel/nuke/hydro grid, which is basically the reliability of the wires themselves, as there’s more chance of your power going out due to a local problem with the wires and transformers, than it going out b/c of generation.
It might be cheaper and more reliable to link the whole continent together – but then again, that’s just “beggar thy neighbour” and there’s no guarantee that a lull in winds, or major cloudy conditions won’t affect a hug part of the continent, and even in the best of conditions, solar power only gains a few hours of use, most to benefit BC/California in the morning and the Eastern provinces and states in the early evening, at the cost of transmission losses and the cost of setting up the extra capacity.
Meanwhile the democratic West is being increasingly challenged by authoritarian regimes who can see that we are committing suicide.
Without cheap fossil fuel energy sources we cannot invigorate our industrial base in order to produce the conventional weapons needed to oppose their imperialist ambitions.
They know that we will not use nuclear weapons first so they can freely indulge in conventional warfare against us.
The days of a fear of mutually assured destruction are over.
Have you checked the situation in Gaza recently?
Regarding what? Mutually assured destruction?
Gaza has nothing to do with MAD. Look no further than Ukraine at the machinations of that large hemorrhoid Putin and his dreams of a reunited CCCP to see where MAD is still in play
Hamas is certainly assuring the destruction of everything they are near.
The imperialist ambitions are a function of the US State Department and it’s masters.
Yep, the US took over Kuwait after they drove Iraq out and kept all the oil.
Yep, the US took over Iraq and are still pumping all their oil and taking it to the US.
Yep, the US is still importing all the opium and heroin from Afghanistan, oops, that is still somewhat true, but most of the US drug problem, fentanyl, is being manufactured in Mexico and China. BUT if you want heroin, it is from Afghanistan.
NOW, when TRUMP! started to attempt to return US troops from ALL OVER the world, he ran into massive resistance from the Pentagon and State Department.
When he tried to get NATO nations to meet their agreed upon 2% of GDP spending, massive pushback from the State Department.
The real “military” ambitions are from the defense industry. (military industrial complex) Massive money being made with troops and equipment all over the world. Billions left behind just for the profit of it. Over 100 billion of aid to Ukraine.
P.s.
The US needs to get the hell out of the Red Sea and that area COMPLETELY. Let Europe and the Gulf states defend those waters for safe transits. WE DON”T NEED THEIR OIL!
The Arab states are already moving toward Russia, let them use their navy for that purpose.
Spend the money from reducing the size of the terrestrial US military to build the Moon Base, withdraw from the Moon Neutrality Pact, claim the Moon as US property, do not allow any other nation to land on the Moon. AND follow Heinlein’s use of the Moon to be able to throw dirt clods at ANY point on Earth. (Solar powered linear accelerator, and particle weapons which should be highly functional for defense with little atmosphere to interfere.) The Moon, at the current technological level, IS THE HIGH GROUND. Use it. Now THAT is what you can call imperialism, but WHO are the “first peoples? No one to claim abuse or genocide?
More goes through the Red Sea and the Suez Canal than just oil.
The US has always patrolled the seas and ensured safe passage for merchant vessels, all the way back to the beginning of the Republic.
And militarizing the moon and using the moon base to bomb unfriendly nations? Always a ridiculous and impractical idea and hardly worth debating.
Isolationism and it’s twin brother of non-interventionism are bad ideas that should have been laid to rest after Pearl Harbor. Obama tried pivoting to Asia and the power vacuum he left behind led to the rise of ISIS and the reinvigoration of Iran. Biden has likewise left a power vacuum in Afghanistan and left strategic bases for our enemies to use.
While I agree with your assessment of the Suez Canal, and ensuring safe passage on the seas, I disagree on whether we need to have permanent bases in countries that routinely demonstrate and riot against the US. Nothing galls me more than seeing South Koreans and similar nations riot against the US. First, I lived in South Korea, and second, if it weren’t for us, they would be kowtowing to Premier Kim, while starving. I am ready to let them carry their own water, which they are more than capable of doing. I have no problem with selling them equipment and arms.
BS on the US being THE global power on the high seas “from the beginning of the republic.
The British dominated the worlds oceans until WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naval_history_of_World_War_II
Yes, Jefferson did put the barbary pirates in their place, but that was just that.
As to “bombing unfriendly nations”, the intent is deterrence, not destruction. I know that only works with rational “states, but then actual damage is justified when dealing with the irrational, you know, people who will put a baby in an oven to kill it!
Whatever other than oil through Suez is almost exclusively going to Europe or North Africa, or conversely, to East Africa, the middle East of Asia. Time for India to step up? Indonesia? All the BRICS countries? Or how about the Persian Gulf States themselves?
Finally as to the US footing the bill in treasure and LIVES for maintaining the sea lanes OF THE WHOLE WORLD since WWII, it is long past time for the Europeans to step up. As well as Japan and Korea, who are finally talking about working together to protect passage through the South China Sea. It has been 80 years!! and they are just NOW putting WWII behind them.
Funny thing is I don’t think the US corporations own ANY major sea freight companies.
That Moon thing is truly ridiculous. It’s a 4 day trip from there to here, plenty of time to execute a more localized postemptive strike before Moon Base Misses even arrive
“Rods from God” would be better than Lunar Base Missiles though they would need to be placed in geostationary orbits and would still take twice as long to reach their target than an ICBM would
We can’t disturb the pristine Lunar regolith. It would destroy the native species!!
/sarc
Drake, you need to get a grip on reality and learn recent history.
I have been to Kuwait on business AFTER the Iraqi attack when Red Adair spent 6 months capping all its blown oil wells. I can assure you that Kuwait’s Emir controls its oil production, not the US.
The US kept overwatch on a small NE Syrian field to insure its production benefitted the Kurds who owned it before Assad and then ISIS tried to control it. The Kurds produce and sell that oil from their traditional lands. NOT the US.
As for the Red Sea and the Straits of Hormuz, those are the transit chokes for the Suez Canal passage—along with the Panama Canal, one of two crucial important transits for global commerce. It isn’t about oil at all. It is about the US insuring regional bad actors (Iran) do not disrupt global general trade that is in its own best interest.
I guess you missed the clearly implied SARC.
My post was in response to the general spouting out about US imperialism.
implied SARC
See Poe’s Law.
Now if ole Biden would put some heat on the Mad Mullahs of Iran, the situation might calm down.
I hear leftwing appeasers wringing their hands lately about the war in the Middle East expanding to Iran.
They have it backwards: The Mad Mullahs ought to be the ones wringing their hands over any expansion of the war that includes Iran. The Iranian people are just waiting for a chance to depose the Mad Mullahs. An American attack might be just the time to do it.
But, the Mad Mullahs think they can count on Biden appeasing them and not bringing them into the fight, and if he does not, then the Mad Mullah’s proxy terrorists will keep taking pot shots at Americans, until the U.S. hits them, the Mad Mullahs, hard enough to make them stop.
If it was me in charge, I would take the next attack on American troops as the opportunity to knock out the Mad Mullahs nuclear weapons infrastructure, and their drone infrastructure and their missile infrastructure and other military facilities, and I would blockage their ports.
That ought to give the Iranian people enough room to rid themselves of the Mad Mullahs for good. As president, I would encourage them to revolt and would back them up.
We need to ensure Ukraine has whatever it needs to defeat our enemies. Better a proxy war with Russia now then a shooting war with Russian after they consolidate their victory.
If you think support Ukraine is expensive, wait until Russia wins, then see what it costs to prepare for direct engagement.
None of this means money isn’t wasted and that there shouldn’t be strict auditing on how it is spent. We also need a victory strategy. Trying to bleed Russia won’t win the war. Biden has screwed up aid by dithering instead of getting Ukraine what it needs to win.
And keep in mind when discussing Ukraine defense funding that a lot of that money is going to be spent in the United States for ramping up the production of armaments required for not only Ukraine’s defense but for the U.S. defense, and its allies, like Israel.
The U.S. needs to get geared up on a war footing. A smart enemy seeing the U.S. gearing up for action would refrain from putting itself at odds with the U.S.
The problem is the U.S. has a totally incompetent, appeaser, president. Our enemies do not fear him, and everyone can see why now.
Appeasers invite aggression from Bad Actors. And that’s what we are getting in Ukraine and the Middle East.
Joe Biden is a disaster.
Before 1900 when aspirin was invented everyone used opiates for pain. The average number of deaths from opiates in the 1920s to 1930s was only 35 deaths per year. The government made opiates illegal and that caused very high prices and forced people to use syringes causing the 100,000 deaths per year that we are seeing.
Syringes are not the main cause of death. Just a small amount of Fentanyl will kill a person, no syringe needed, and that is what is killing most people who are taking these drugs.
Many times, the victim did not know they were taking Fentanly as it is mixed with numerous types of other drugs.
If you don’t get it from a drug store, don’t take it, because you have no idea what you are taking into your body. You may end up dead.
Fentanyl is part of the Chicom ongoing attack on the United States.
Climate imperialism?
“I am ashamed of my country”, Joska Fischer shocks Germany: Europe must get nuclear weapons
“I am ashamed of my country… No more war, no more Auschwitz”, is the title on the front page of the German newspaper “Die Zeit”, where the veteran of the Greens, Joska Fischer, gave an interview.
Fischer’s statements in the German newspaper have caused waves in the Eurozone locomotive.
After criticizing the coalition government’s policy (which includes his own party) on the war in Ukraine, Fischer said he not only felt ashamed of his country’s stance on Russia’s war against Ukraine, but also said things that shocked Germans.
One of the oldest Greens !
“The secret of politics? Make a good treaty with Russia.” ― Otto von Bismarck
When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
Otto von Bismarck
Does that mean Zylensky can purchase more yachts?
that’s been debunked
Not according to the references to him in the Pandora papers. The information may have been supressed because Zelensky is opposing Russia but it hasn’t actually been debunked.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVTO6VqcSqY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyR3qS6amJg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egeLT4kb4Ao
debunked
Joseph, I didn’t think you were being literal about some silly yacht thing – I was talking about the millions he’s got stashed in offshore accounts, embezzled from his time in office as found in the Pandora paper scandal. I know there have been stories of yachts and florida mansions but I pay them little heed.
Probably true- everybody in the former Soviet Union was/is corrupt- the difference is that Ukraine admits it and is trying to fix it so it can enter the EU and NATO.
My opinion of Commander Zero is fairly low given that he sat on his hands while our delightful Left dragged DJT through the Ukraine phone call impeachment mud.
“I don’t want a ride- I want ammunition”. Any other leader- probably in any other country- would have called for the ride. He gets 5 stars from me. Nobody is perfect including us. 🙂
He did say that, didn’t he.
Joe Biden was already defeated and wanted to give Zelensky safe passage out of Ukraine.
But, Zelensky turned Biden down.
Biden is so pathetic, and so delusional. He is completely unsuited to dealing with international affairs. He doesn’t have a clue. Nor do the members of his administration. They are all a bunch of damn fools.
One more year of this insanity. If we are lucky. If we are not lucky, then this insanity will go on for a long, painful time.
A Ship of Fools comes to mind
I don’t believe “Joe Biden” has anything at all to do with the US foreign policy or much of anything else for that matter.
Isn’t it obvious that someone else is pulling the strings in this administration?
Valerie Jarret even has an office in the White House while many of of the senior staff are former Obama administrators.
All they’ve managed to do is to f* up everything they touch… Everything.
“I don’t believe “Joe Biden” has anything at all to do with the US foreign policy”
Well, I do believe Biden was instrumental in forcing the debacle in Afghanistan.
He did the same thing to South Vietnam and to Iraq, abandoning them to their fates, so Afghanistan is just par for the course for this appeaser of dictators.
Even most in Biden’s administration were against the way he pulled out of Afghanistan, but Biden forced the move even though it was obvious that a disaster was going to ensue.
Biden is now mentally limited, but he still has input into the policy. And he is still the President of the United States, the most powerful man on the planet.
And one of the stupidest, delusionally dangerous men on the planet.
Z thought he had more time to amass wealth here and there, but Gaza happened, and all of a sudden the corruption gig is up.
No more money, no more weapons
If need be, he can be a comedian again
Sounds like a conspiracy theory to me.
Regardless, the story isn’t about Z- it’s about Ukraine remaining free of Russia. Z will be gone soon enough. It’s fine to complain about him as long as one doesn’t really want Russia to defeat Ukraine. Any American who thinks that ought to move to Russia.
It is about US/EU-backed extremist nationalists, installed in Kiev, after a coup d’etat in 2014 (Nuland was handing out cookies), who, festooned in tattoos, use Nazi emblems and salutes, and vowed to eliminate everything Russian, just like Hitler vowed to eliminate everything Jewish.
Their revered ancestors co-operated with the German army to eliminate Polish and Ukrainian Jews, during WWII
But 60% of the people in Ukraine speak Russian, already for at least 500 years, go to the Russian Orthodox Church, now outlawed, look at TV programs in Russian, now outlawed, read books in Russian, now outlawed, etc.
Forty percent of Ukraine people have relatives in Russia.
The US/EU/NATO trained Ukraine to be an attack dock to weaken/break apart Russia, which is part of a US containment project, since 1945.
They want to take control of Russia’s resources, as happened during the drunkard Yeltsin era,
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/how-american-neocons-wrecked-the-middle-east-and-ukraine-1
No, here’s the real reason for the war in Ukraine: Putin’s greed and delusions of Empire:
https://thehill.com/policy/defense/4064431-wagner-chief-says-russias-war-in-ukraine-intended-to-benefit-elites-accuses-moscow-of-lying/
His Wagner Chief doesn’t say anthing about US/EU-backed extremist nationalists being at fault.
And the Wagner Chief was Putin’s right hand man, so he knows what is really going on in the Kremlin. Well, he knew. Now he’s dead, because Putin didn’t like what he was saying. The truth hurts.
Tom,
You may want to read David Stockman’s article
David Stockman’s article on The Middle East and Ukraine.
The Ukraine part is quite good.
It agrees with my article I wrote some years ago.
UKRAINE A GEO-POLITICAL PAWN OF US/UK/NATO TO WEAKEN RUSSIA
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-plot-is-thickening-with-germany-and-france-no-longer-in
How American Neocons Wrecked the Middle East and Ukraine
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/how-american-neocons-wrecked-the-middle-east-and-ukraine-1
Authored by David Stockman via AntiWar.com,
This is part 2 of “Why There Is Still No Peace on Earth: Washington’s Folly From The Persian Gulf to Ukraine.” Read part 1.
he will be even more ashamed when Germans start freezing to death because the country doesn’t have enough natural gas to supply heat
I believe that doesn’t touch him in what way ever. He was foreign minister, not minister for social questions 😀
And Green 😀
Germany can’t heat itself because Merkel foolishly aligned Germany with Moscow.
“Europe must get nuclear weapons.” Europe has nuclear weapons – ask France.
….and the UK.
The UK doesn’t really have nuclear weapons. USA allowed us to buy the missiles but if we ever want the warheads then we have to ask nicely.
Known Countries with Nuclear Weapons
Israel +/-100 (but they won’t confirm or deny)
Pakistan 170
India 160
North Korea 20-30 (with enough material for 55)
France 290
UK 40 of 120 deployed
China 410-500
Russia 1584 of 6000 deployed
US 1744 of 5400 deployed
Apologies, I got it the wrong way round. We do own the warheads but only lease the delivery system (trident) from the US, who we have to ask nicely for maintenance, upgrades, etc.
Europe doesn’t need nuclear weapons as long as NATO and our ballistic submarines exist.
Russia can not be trusted to follow any treaty.
And if you’re talking about Ukraine negotiating a peace treaty with Russia, I have a nuclear treaty with Iran to sell you. Includes a free bridge and some swamp land near Florida. We could call it the Chamberlain Treaty, after the historic peace agreement between the UK and Hitler.
Russia agreed to future peace with Ukraine when we foolishly coerced Ukraine to giving up it’s nuclear weapons 30 years ago. Putin would observe peace long enough to rebuild his military for the next war against Ukraine.
There is quite a strong case to be made that Chamberlain was buying time for Britain’s rearmament.
Indeed. There is a story – told privately in later years by one of his Downing Street aides – that, on return from Munich with the famous “piece of paper” and the “Peace in our time” speech at Heston Aerodrome, his first words after the door of 10 Downing Street closed behind him were, “Gentlemen, let us prepare for war.”
Why on Earth would somebody downvote you for such an interesting snippet of information?
“They know that we will not use nuclear weapons first so they can freely indulge in conventional warfare against us.” I fear you may be over 10 years too late for that comment. The MAD strategy went out with the Reagan and Bush Sr. era, the new strategy, developed by the Defense Department, involves an overwhelming first strike that wipes out command and control centres and missile silos so that any return fire is ineffectual. Of course it is insane but their thinking is that they can actually ‘win’ a nuclear war – so much for Reagan and Gorbachev’s statement that “a nuclear war is unwinnable and should never be fought.”
Don’t worry, Dr. Strangelove goes to Washington for his feminizing hormone therapy.
Are you sure of that? I read a lot of military stuff and never heard of this. They may like it as one of many options. You never know what options you may need so you develop many. They have no need of such a strategy regarding Russia but might need it regarding China which is now “on the march”. It’s got the Aussies freaked out- and Japan. And everyone else in that region.
‘…the new strategy, developed by the Defense Department, involves an overwhelming first strike that wipes out command and control centres and missile silos so that any return fire is ineffectual. ‘
Is this Plan R, for Robert?
I don’t know. I found out about it some years ago before Hillary Clinton ran for president – apparently she had been briefed on this idea and was very enthusiastic. I’ve never seen a codename associated with it but it does seem to be a legitimate plan that the Defense Dept. came up with.
He is not getting the reference. I like it though😊
Oh that one went right over my head! I think I’ve only ever seen it once and that was a very long time ago, too long to get any niche references like that.
How sure are you of that?
Those who deliberately leave a massive military base full of weaponry for their “enemies” to help themselves to, obviously don’t think like you and me. They are nameless and faceless, but they run things in W-town.
What about “first” using them on so-called subhumans, like the Japanese?
Just to clarify
The US engaged in “first use” in 1945 two times.
During WWII, the Japanese were called al sorts of degrading names, so, in the eyes of Truman, etc., it was ok to “first-use” them.
To-day, the Japanese are trading partners, with Japan having a big trade surplus with the US.
Such surpluses are used to buy “friends”
Mostly wrong. The alternative to using nuclear weapons in 1945 was Operation Downfall and the death of millions by conventional warfare. The US casualties alone were expected to be over 100,000. This had nothing to do with your trivia of “degrading names” and everything to do with ending a montrous war as swiftly and painlessly as possible.
Yes, incinerating Japanese teen-age girls on their way to school insured that none of their male offspring would ever become kamikaze pilots. Why would Japan need to have been invaded? MacArthur could have stood on the bridge of the USS Missouri and used a really big loudspeaker to tell the Nips to stay home from now on or die, their navy was on the bottom of the ocean. US ships could have patrolled the area around the Japanese islands for a few years, starving them of resources, until they were in no shape to fight anyone ever again. Instead the US has made it into a giant aircraft carrier that can be used to intimidate China and anybody else in the western Pacific. The Chinese don’t have bases in Jamaica or Barbados.
Remember some of the words of the US Marine Corps hymn:
“We fight our country’s battles in the air, on land and sea,
From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”
There’s no mention of Nebraska or Idaho.
My recollection of my studies on WWII is that in the taking of every island on the chain through Titian, Saipan and Iwo Jima, the Japanese fought fanatically to the death, taking many US lives with them. The expectation at the time was that an invasion of the Japanese homeland would be exceptionally bloody and deadly. My father in law was slated to head for Japan after V-E day, after he survived the Battle of Bulge. He and his fellow GIs were happy to not have to fight that battle.
In every battle during WWII, even when they had run out of ammo and the battle was completely lost, the Japanese still fought to practically the last man.
Why are you so convinced that they would have meekly surrendered just because their navy and air force were no more. The government was training women and children how to fight using sharpened sticks.
The US has turned Japan into a giant aircraft carrier? Are you totally delusional?
BTW, where do you get the idea that starving millions of civilians to death is so much more humane than killing a few 10’s of thousands in a nuclear fireball?
BTW, fighting wars on other people’s territory is generally considered a good idea.
Wow, great point by point rebuttal, saved me the time.
And remember, it took 2 bombs to induce Japan to surrender. Once was not enough. Funny thing is the US didn’t have a third ready.
A second and third plutonium bomb would have been ready in August had Truman not put them on hold shortly after the August 9 bombing, which was the first “fat man” plutonium bomb. The first atomic bomb dropped on Aug. 6th was a U-235 device. Early on it was realized that it took way too long to obtain enough U-235 to make more than a couple of bombs per year. PU-239, on the other hand, could be generated much more quickly, but required lens focused explosions to compress it to criticality. The U-235 design, “Little Boy”, was so simple it didn’t need testing, so the first nuclear test was of the Plutonium design. Hanford could produce enough plutonium for three bombs a month.
Drake,
Exactly correct.
In the 60s, my physics professor, who had worked with Zinn and Fermi on the Chicago pile, which led to controlled fission, etc., told me there was enough bomb-grade uranium for only two bombs, both of which were used on Japan.
That was top secret at the time.
That same quantity would be sufficient for many more bombs, each having about 1 million TNT, because we optimized the design over the years, as did the Russians, etc.
Ten such units fit on a Polaris rocket in a nuclear sub.
They can be individually targeted on ten cities.
We have come a long way!
I see you have given up claiming that McArthur was quoted a saying that he could end the war with just a few months of blockading Japan.
Mr. custer: You learned nothing from your military operation at the Little Big Horn??!! Maybe you should keep your analysis to yourself after that. Why didn’t you just hang back, patrol the edges and starve his enemies to death, like a great humanitarian. You would have starved many more than those incinerated, and you think that’s a strategy?
You have no idea what you are talking about.
As the US progressively got closer to Japan, casualties soared. 50% of US casualties since Dec. 7, 1941 occurred in the last 5 months before the bombs were dropped. The Japanese were in no way less deadly, nor were going to surrender. Planning for the invasion foresaw up to a million US casualties, and several millions of Japanese.
Hiroshima was not only the home of the Japanese 5th Army, but one of Japan’s industrial bases, and specifically Mitsubishi Heavy Industries where the specially adapted torpedoes necessary for the attack on Pearl Harbor were made (Japanese aerial-dropped torpedoes sunk to below 40 ft before coming up to attack depth, too deep for the shallow waters of Pearl. Mitsubishi developed and tested crucial modifications in secret, knowing their target well in advance, and delivered them in time for the Japanese fleet to set sail on Nov. 26th). Most of those killed in Hiroshima were, by far, industrial workers, not teen-age girls.
Only the bombs caused Hirohito to overrule the military and decide to surrender, saving untold lives, probably millions, on both sides.
Two uncles were in the Pacific, one in a submarine and the other as a Marine medic, in a theater where medics were specifically targeted, unlike in Europe. A third, who had fought with Patton, was on his way to the Pacific when the war ended. All wanted to get home as soon as Japan surrendered, and obviously having no idea of the bombs, were, frankly, delighted, especially the Marine, who said he never bought a Japanese-made product in his entire life.
Is Venezuela close enough?
Untold millions of Japanese lives were saved by using the A-bombs.
The US was prepared to use the bombs on German if needed. So much for the racism angle.
The a-bomb wasn’t ready until after Germany surrendered.
Had it been available earlier, it would have been used earlier. Lots of lives could have been saved had the a-bomb been available a few months earlier.
‘Such surpluses are used to buy “friends”’
If true, we ought to be planning a June wedding with the PRC.
Using the atomic bombs against Japan saved millions of Japanese and American lives. I’m fine with it. It was the right thing to do.
By forcing Japan to surrender earlier, Russia was prevented from ceasing even more of the Kurils.
The islands Russia took from Japan were part of a reward for entering in the war against Japan, as agreed by Stalin and Roosevelt
‘…so they can freely indulge in conventional warfare against us.’
Maybe against our forward bases, which we seem to have liberally sprinkled around the globe to serve as trip wires, but against ‘us’ literally, I don’t think so.
Probably not, the US military have far more first strike nuclear armed subs, ships and planes than the rest of the world combined, I think. Operational that is; Russia’s first strike capability is mostly rusting into place in various sub bases – Sergey Gorshkov would be spinning in his grave.
No, we don’t. Our Air Force has a high percentage of grounded planes due to lack of maintenance. We have too few subs that need maintenance. We do not properly maintain our nuclear weapons, either.
Why would they think that the US won’t use nuclear weapons first, if nuclear weapons are the only real military capability left to a nation devoted to foreign adventures?
And that the US is literally the only nation EVER to use nuclear weapons?
You forget to mention that the West is run by authoritarian regimes who increasing impose their suicidal whims on their voters who thought they were in control.
Please can someone send a copy of this to King Charles? It might be sufficiently simple for him to understand! The Pope too – although he would presumably have the good Lord to assist him in understanding it!
Can somebody from the UK answer this — Most people in the US who think of Charles consider him a boob. Is it the same in the UK? How about in Western Europe or the EU? Boob or respected statesman?
I refer to him as Chucklehead Charlie, others use different names, but he’s certainly not a respected statesman unless you’re a woke left-wing climate activist and most of them are republicans.
Ah, for the benefit of American sensibilities, please note that I said republicans, not Republicans.
No offense taken. I wish our Republicans were actually republicans – most of them have no problem with Federal overreach.
I know a fair bit about electrochemistry (batteries and supercaps), as hold basic patents on the topic. It is safe say that grid scale electricity storage for such durations does not exist. It is also safe to say it likely never will. No new storage technology is on the horizon, and LiIon doesn’t do grid scale despite Musk’s efforts.
With favorable solar capacity factors around 20%, and onshore wind around 30% (both already in most favorable locations in the US), the reality is that ff (preferably CCGT) will be supplying the grid about 75% of the time under the best circumstances. Phasing them out as COP28 wants is literally impossible—the Pope and Kerry not withstanding—as modern society and cities cannot do without continuously supplied electricity.
Fascinating analysis of the Royal Society’s model of hydrogen storage as a back-up power source. While already expensive the analysis by David Turver at Eigen Values on substack is thorough and enlightening.
Realistic Costs of Renewables plus Hydrogen Storage (substack.com)
See my ebook Blowing Smoke essay ‘Hydrogen Hype’. You don’t need ‘realistic costs’. You just need basic chemistry+energy. Doesn’t work out at any cost.
Biden’s handlers are going to spend $7 billion to get to your level of understanding, about the uselessness of hydrogen.
If we could just get the Media to shut up about boosting the hydrogen boondoggle
The key point here is that “to back up wind/solar electricity generation, which would necessarily include the ability to save up power over a year or more and discharge over a year“. The realization that the intermittency (or “resource limited”, as the alarmist prefer) can not necessarily be balanced out throughout a day or even weeks or possibly months is lost on those who want to believe in the nirvana of renewable energy. I’m not sure the storage requirements would be over a year (Fekete’s paper doesn’t document that…maybe his references do), but the point is well made regarding the need for a high level and duration of storage.
Don’t expect those most vocal on the subject (politicians, celebrities, children, tv talking heads and journalist) to even attempt to understand it.
So expect that alternatives will necessarily receive more attention. Perhaps the most promising will be storing the excess energy via the electrolysis of water to produce hydrogen. Be prepared.
An interesting aspect of the leap to renewables is the perpetual promise of thousands of new jobs in bringing the new paradigm about. Since the existing, reliable system will continue to require manning, the renewable construction and maintenance will need new blue collar participants. More employment means more jobs but it also means increased labor expenses, anathema to business. And where will these new employees come from? In a society where everyone is supposed to be a college grad only the most proletarian individuals will settle for the dull,dangerous, uncomfortable and zero-prestige life of a blue collar employee that usually receives less than $70,000 for a 2000 hour annual work schedule. Raising wages enough to be competitive with less strenuous callings will make the transition even more expensive.
It’s possible that the Democrat’s open border will assure a steady supply of turbine mechanics, equipment operators, and photo-voltaic experts but will business bet on that? There’s a steady level of retirement in the building trades and contractors are having problems filling spots with qualified workers now, yet their unions enthusiastically support Democrat renewable energy policies that can only realistically promise temporary positions. Laid off turbine erectors will have trouble paying their electric bills and making the monthly gouge on the EV pickup.
If the US government stopped “loaning” trillions of dollars to the liberal full employment factories, more young people will get into trades right out of high school. Wasting 4 years on a useless indoctrination not only sets millions back on the wage earning curve, it also saddles them with debt.
Obama’s Justice Department and Department of Education went after for profit training schools because students that came out of them didn’t get jobs in the trades they trained for. How many millions come out of the indoctrination mills get jobs that ate suitable to pay off their debt? AND if the Republicans actually eliminate 30% of the US budget, millions more leftist products of the “student loan” mining industry would be out of their jobs, you know, those created by the government to employ Democrat voters.
“the perpetual promise of thousands of new jobs in bringing the new paradigm about. “
This has always been a completely false argument. The whole point of modern energy systems has been to eliminate jobs in providing heat and light so that people can do on to other more useful and productive occupations.
If you want to maximize the number of energy system related jobs, simply hand everyone an axe and point them to the nearest woodlot.
The other obvious problem is that the windmills and solar panels are built using the energy from and the products of fossil fuels.
Possible story tip:
No doubt climate doomsters will blame these copper mining deaths on altered weather, rather than the insatiable NetZero demand for copper and the consequential encouragement of dangerous irregular and illegal mining.
https://www.voanews.com/a/zambia-landslides-kill-7-miners-illegally-digging-tunnels-more-than-20-missing/7381602.html
Imagine. I graduated in the lower third of my engineering class (UMich, ’59e) and I’ve known this for over 25 years. Back in those days the UM didn’t turn us into climate or social equity ‘experts.’ I do admit to some bias, since I spent 33 years in/around fossil and nuclear power plants.
The fall of Academia: half of US companies are reducing requirements for Bachelors degrees
University degrees aren’t what they used to beAfter years of universities turning out smug self-obsessed graduates of Woke ideology, Big Business has realized they might be better off hiring people with experience in the real world instead. They are also doing their own testing — with 2 out of 3 setting their own test assignments for candidates.
This year more than half of the 800 employers surveyed had already dropped bachelor degree requirements for at least some of their roles. It must have worked out, because next year almost all of those same companies plan on dropping the requirement for even more roles. That looks like a trend…
h/t JoNova
True story about San Jose CA. I bought a small company there with big future opportunities for Motorola, then ran it for a year.
One of my first decisions as GM was to bring final assembly back from the Philippines to a new automated assembly line we could easily build. About 8 people needed per shift, two shifts, so needed to hire 16 people for the factory floor. Goal was reduced costs and increased quality. MOT had a hard rule that you had to be able to read and write at an 8th grade level to be hired as a factory worker. Reason was 6 Sigma quality implementation. HR had to go through over 400 high school and community college grads to find 16 that met the R/W test requirement. And that was in the 1990’s—probably gotten worse since.
Truly shocking indictment of US public education.
Another anecdote: I asked a fellow teacher, an American college graduate, to add up the bill from a lunch for two at a Beijing restaurant. She was completely unable to do so.
I have dozens of anecdotes of similar failures of our educational system, and know others with as many.
At what point do a plethora of anecdotes become data?
In the early 90’s, someone I grew up with was a union rep that was involved with testing academic capabilities of potential employees. He told me at the time the union had determined that our high school diploma from the 70’s was the equivalent of a new associates degree because the education system had degraded.
I can agree with your assessment that it probably has gotten worse since.
Maybe, just maybe the tide is turning on this horrific slogan and absurd fantasy called net zero or more descriptively – nut zero.
We can but hope.
Very nice Francis, you are doing important work. This is how we win.
The other Francis?
Francis Menton.
and it would be the simplest thing in the whole wide world to ‘disappear the CO₂‘
Simply acknowledge where the rising atmospheric levels are really coming from = a lack of, and increasing lack, of natural absorptions.
i.e. The relentless destruction of perennial plants in favour of annuals.
esp that all the remedies presently proposed, especially ‘Biomass’ and the destruction of livestock farming, would cause the existing absorptions to vanish entirely and emissions would appear to skyrocket
i.e. The remedies so far proposed would make the (imaginary) problem even worse.
The “biomass” theory is particularly full of holes.
Coal is biomass. It is old trees that nature has heated and compressed for easy storage underground.
Drax group has been a major player in cutting trees down and shipping at high cost for wood pellet burning. They like to claim it’s sawdust, but I think not.
I’m guessing that in your world, dead perennials don’t rot.
but “it won’t work” or “it costs too much” doesn’t sway the faithful – but they do tend to scratch their heads when it is pointed out that since the vast majority of CO2 in the atmosphere (I’ve seen that it may be as much as 95%), which for starters doesn’t amount to even a rounding error (4 one hundredths of 1%) as far as the composition of the atmosphere is concerned, is naturally occurring which we can’t do much about even the faithful start wo wonder if spending trillions to remove that insignificant portion of the atmosphere (something like 1 one hundredth of 1%) would really impact the weather or the climate in any meaningful way
When world CO2 emissions dropped 6% during the start of the pandemic in 2020 the CO2 rate of increase didn’t change a bit
‘They will do their best to ignore it, at least until the whole wind/solar thing has conclusively shown that it can’t work.’ No. Until the whole thing has collapsed.
To be a proper Green, just imagine a Unicorn. Grid scale storage with the performance of Robert Heinlein’s Shipstones. If they can be imagined, someone can surely build them. A sufficiently extensive genetic engineering program, and pigs can fly!
They can 😀
“If they can be imagined, someone can surely build them.” As has been said before, it’ll just take a bit of engineering. Damn, we’re good.
According to the t-shirt, with enough thrust, pigs can indeed fly.
…..like half of a pair of pliers.
Just about every grid operator has made hour-by-hour “what if” calculations regarding more and more wind and solar on the grid.
Up to about 10% W/S, most grids can handle the variable, intermittent output, because they have enough reserve capacity of steady electricity sources, including imports from other grids, plus there is demand management, curtailment, etc.
When you get to 20%, things are very dicey. You need more and more storage, but that is unaffordable, even by the folks in Dubai
Only a few countries, such as Germany, Ireland, UK are over 20%, but all of them have connections to grid with hydro plants with huge reservoirs, such as French, Spain, Norway, Sweden.
More and more interconnection with HV DC lines has been the name of the game in Europe
If all these countries go to 25 to 30%, and not have more storage, they will hit the flexibility wall. The gig is up!
All that has been known for some years.
Finally, Brussels/EU has realized, and is admitting, you can’t get “there”, whatever “there” is, without nuclear
So, Kerry calls for a tripling of nuclear by 2050, which is physically undoable, plus the expanded nuclear would be only 5% of the world total electricity production in 2050, which is grossly inadequate to stay away from the flexibility wall
When will such know-nothing screwballs finally shut up?
BATTERIES IN NEW ENGLAND?
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/batteries-in-new-england
.
Excerpt
A Wind/Solar Lull Lasting One Day in Winter in New England
If such a W/S lull occurs, batteries will make up the electricity shortfall
We assume, at some future date, NE has installed:
60000 MW of solar, which produce an annual average of 8700 MWh/h, at capacity factor = 0.145
60000 MW of onshore and offshore wind, which produce an annual average of 21000 MWh/h, at CF = 0.35
During a W/S lull, we assume the production will be only 10% of these values during winter, which frequently has days with very little wind, and snow on most panels
We assume the average electricity fed to the grid is 21000 MW on a January day, and during that entire day the average W/S output fed to the grid is 0.1 x (21000 + 8700) = 2970 MW.
W/S electricity shortfall is 24 x (21000 – 2970) = 432720 MWh
Batteries are rated as providing a level of power for a period of time, or MW/MWh
Our required battery capacity is (18030 MW)/(432720 MWh/0.45)
There are some system design factors that reduce rated capacity, but we will ignore them, for simplicity
Tesla recommends not charging to more than 80% full, and not discharging to less than 20% full
That means the recommended maximum delivered electricity is 0.6 of capacity.
We assume the battery is 75% full, at start of lull, and is drawn down to 25% full, in 24 hours, i.e., 0.5 of capacity is drawn out of the battery, if we are lucky.
But that 0.5 “in battery” must be reduced by 10%, due to system losses, i.e., 0.45 is fed to HV grid
NOTE: Tesla’s recommendation was not heeded by the owners of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, in Australia. They had to add Megapacks to offset rapid aging of the original system, and decided to add more Megapacks to increase the rating of the system. In the article, the Hornsdale graph of operating conditions confirms:
1) The about 20% round-trip loss, explained below
2) The output reduction, due to rapid aging
http://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/the-hornsdale-power-reserve-largest-battery-system-in-australia
Battery System Loss: There is about a 20% round-trip loss, from HV grid to 1) step-down transformer, 2) front-end power electronics, 3) into battery, 4) out of battery, 5) back-end power electronics, 6) step-up transformer, to HV grid
That means, of the electricity taken from the HV grid, about 10% is lost to recharge the battery to desired levels, then, upon discharge, another 10% is lost, before feeding to the HV grid.
This article is a good source of information
https://www.windtaskforce.org/profiles/blogs/battery-system-capital-costs-losses-and-aging
Capital Cost: All-in, turnkey capital cost of Tesla, Megapack-based system = 432720/0.45 x 1000 kWh/MWh x $575/delivered kWh as AC, 2023 pricing = $553 billion
Double that amount, if the W/S lull lasts two days.
W/S lulls of 5 to 7 days are not uncommon in New England, throughout the year
Dealing with such multi-day lulls will require batteries costing about $2.8 to $3.9 trillion, just for New England!
Those capital costs can be reduced by extreme “demand management”, including rolling blackouts and complete blackouts, often practiced in Third World countries.
Imports from nearby states is not an option, as those states face similar wind/solar/battery challenges.
Here’s the monthly record of performance of the Big South Australian Battery since it started up until earlier this year, confirming what you say.
Bloomberg estimates $200 trillion to stop warming by 2050.
Correction: The above 5% should be 11%
“So, Kerry calls for a tripling of nuclear by 2050, which is physically undoable,”
Of course it’s doable. The United States could build out of its own resources over 100 power reactors in a space of less than 15 years. Over the next 30 years it could achieve that if it did no better than the rate of construction of the 1970s.
So, what’s your evidence for claiming that it is physically undoable?
Think about it. They need to go where the energy users are. Nobody wants wind turbines in their backyard, how do you think they’re going to feel about a nuclear plant just down the block?
Siting is going to be held up for years, then there’s the regulatory minefield to navigate and most companies that can won’t if they have to get over those hurdles – they’ll go somewhere with less red tape and more profit. Even if you get rid of a lot of the regulations and ease the siting problems, encouraging enough companies to build will have problems in itself.
Cleveland Ohio has had a nuclear power plant in the next county for decades without a problem other than big bribes of politicians from the company that owned it.
I would agree that it is politically undoable, but physically possible. I think planners and Kerry underestimate the fear that people still have over nuclear plants.
Physically impossible, because of complexity, not obvious to lay people, and regulatory delays, legal challenges
I was involved in the engineering and construction of some of those plants.
They were quickly built, with little government regulation, and with low inflation and low financing cost, but they were grossly under designed
Major necessary changes were made to existing plants in the 1970s and 1980s
That was true in France as well.
One of the units of Three Mile Island was started in late 1978. The core melted in early 1979, due to a lack of cooling water. The other unit, with upgrades, operated 40 years.
To-day, that would not be possible, because of redundancy and fail-safe interlocks. That plant was designed in the early 1970s, was still partially under designed in 1979
The new plants are much more complicated, and take a lot longer to build, because getting government approvals is very slow, and they are much more expensive, but they are much safer, just like cars.
The tripling Kerry proposed is doable in China and Russia and South Korea, which can build plants in 5 to 6 years, but not in the US and EU, which take 10 or more years
Texas generates about 30% of its electricity from wind and solar now.
Spain and Portugal are generating around 50% now.
Clearly your statements above are wrong.
Both setups above manage this by making enormous use of dispatchable natural gas, and have negligible storage.
Both Spain and Portugal have substantial amounts of hydro electric power which is included in their renewables percentage.
Spain and Portugal have huge hydro plants with storage, and pumped storage hydro plants. Just google
Texas uses gas plants for counteracting the W/S-up/down output, on a less than minute by minute basis, 24/7/365
Texas has had numerous rolling brown-outs, during heat waves with no wind, and during cold periods with freeze ups
I agree with this but find the paper lacking on fundamentals.
There is a very important ifference between wind and solar. Nothing being done on Earth will alter the available solar resource at the top of the atmosphere. By contrast, wind is a limited resources.
Average windspeed globally is 3.3m/s. If that is applied to the total atmospheric mass, then the kinetic energy is 92E18J. But that wind energy did not build in a day. The convective towers in the Hadley cells that drive the global air circulations have a potential energy to mechanical energy conversion rate of 57W/m^2 of land surface. An estimate of the surface area of these towers in the ITCZ circling near the equator is 10E12m^2 to give total power of 5.7E14W globally powering the circulations. Just over 1W/m^2 of total global surface area.
Anthropogenic annual energy consumption is 160PWh; equating to average power of 66E15W. So of the order of 100 times the available wind power. .
Most wind energy is created by the convective engines operating over the tropics. Their conversion efficiency from thermalised solar to wind power is less than 20%. The conversion of that wind energy to electrical energy cannot be higher than 59% in a single pass and probably closer to 50%. So only 10% of the solar energy available for driving wind turbines can be extracted as electricity.
Wind energy can be ruled at as a viable resource on its very limited availability in terms of anthropogenic requirements.
At high latitudes, the best performance from panels will come from vertical mounting. You want the energy in winter not summer. However south facing walls with a clear view of the horizon are in limited supply. So that becomes the constraint.
The woke west can dabble with this fantasy as long as China continues to accelerate their coal consumption.
It is worth noting that most wind energy is over oceans. There is much less over land. And I believe time will show just how limited the resource is.
Large offshore wind farms will have a significant impact on local climate through air stilling and reduced ocean advection to land. Once a location dries out, it can quickly become a desert.
Unfortunately you can’t just average the wind speed, since energy in the wind depends on the cube of velocity, and turbines have reduced efficiency below their sweet spot and are limited by generator capacity and cut out speed above it. See an example here
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/GqyyC/1/
Speeds also vary with (hub) altitude and the roughness of the terrain. Most of the wind energy is in storms over the oceans too far from land to be harvested. Here’s the current global wind pattern at a nominal 100m hub height (click for a bigger, better image): really only winds between 10 and 25 m/sec (green to yellow) produce somewhere close to turbine capacity.
For high latitude solar, see this:
https://euanmearns.com/a-brief-review-of-the-buckland-alaska-solar-project/
Surprisingly high average capacity factors, but then there is ~24 hour sun in summer (subject to clouds), which you need to follow to capture when the sky is clear. Nevertheless, costs do not look too good.
Rud Istvan said: “With favorable solar capacity factors around 20%, and onshore wind around 30% (both already in most favorable locations in the US), the reality is that ff (preferably CCGT) will be supplying the grid about 75% of the time under the best circumstances. Phasing them out as COP28 wants is literally impossible — the Pope and Kerry not withstanding — as modern society and cities cannot do without continuously supplied electricity.”
Sure. No doubt about it. But it doesn’t mean that places like New York state and California won’t be spending many billions of dollars on wind, solar, and battey projects in an attempt to achieve nearly complete decarbonization.
IMHO, these two states will not step back from this insanity regardless of how much damage their decarbonization schemes eventually cause.
New York State and its 2019 Climate Act represent perhaps the most prominent example in the US of what might happen to a power grid if decarbonization is pushed forward with nothing in the way of any kind of rationally imposed restraint.
Referring to Roger Caiazza’s WUWT article, ‘Ellenbogen: New York State’s Energy Transition’:
Let’s note that the NYS Climate Act is implemented primarily through legislation and regulation, including NYS-funded wind and solar development projects.
The fact is that it is impossible for any combination of NYS-funded projects plus privately-funded projects to fully replace the state’s gas-fired power generation resources with wind & solar. Not even close.
Replacement of gas-fired capacity can’t be done on the Climate Act’s legislated schedule, and it can’t even be done within the next fifty years regardless of how much money is spent trying to do it.
The Climate Act’s emission reduction targets can only be achieved through a massive commitment to energy conservation — up to and including rationing of fossil-based energy.
How will energy rationing be accomplished in New York State?
Rolling blackouts as well as unintended catastrophic blackouts will become the defacto means of rationing electricity in New York State. Rising prices for all forms of energy and a steady loss of both industry and population will become a defacto, if indirect, means of promoting energy conservation.
The next big question in the NYS Climate Act saga is how the NYS Public Service Commission, the NYS Independent System Operator, and the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation will be handling air emission permit renewals for the state’s gas-fired power plants.
Intense pressure will be brought against the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation to deny renewal of air emission permits for New York state’s existing gas-fired power plants whenever these come up for periodic review.
Periodic renewal of air emission permits for New York City’s load pocket peaker plants will come in for special near-term attention when the larger fight over periodic renewal of environmental permits becomes acute.
The argument will be made that (1) the NYS Climate Act all but directs the NY-DEC to place the alleged adverse impacts of carbon emissions above all other considerations in making its regulatory decisions; and that (2) the US-EPA’s new carbon emission rules will force the closure of the state’s gas-fired power plants regardless of what the NY-DEC decides.
As noted by Roger Caiazza, recently added rules dictate that the impacts of gas-fired generation on disadvantaged communities in New York State must also be taken into consideration, adding more pressure on the NY-DEC to deny renewals for air emission permits.
Similarly intense pressure will be brought against the NYS Public Service Commission and the NYS Independent System Operator to support any NY-DEC decisions which deny renewal of air emission permits.
Here is the big question.
Will these two agencies, the NY-PSC and the NY-ISO, stand their ground in defending the true public interest and oppose early closure of the state’s gas-fired power plants?
Or will these two agencies cave in to the intense pressures being brought against them and concur with an NY-DEC decision to deny gas-fired power plants regulatory permission to continue operating?
Steven Finder on the MC Contrarian said: “The real question is when will intense pressure from the public be brought against all this regulatory efforts? Hopefully not after major damage has been done.”
My response:
There will be little or no proactive pressure from the public at large to keep gas-fired power plants online in the face of strong pressure to close them from environmental activist groups and from climate activists working as employees inside the NYS state government.
If the opinions and attitudes of my relatives living on Long Island, in Manhattan, and in upstate New York in blindly supporting the Green New Deal are any indication, major and possibly irreparable damage will be done to the NYS power grid before it’s all said and done.
The sad reality here is that even if hundreds or even thousands die in winter blackouts, no one either in the environmental activist groups or in the NYS state government will ever be held accountable for what happened. That’s the true nature of politics in New York State. And, I might add, in California as well.
Those states have interconnectors. I’m sure that, once the home state’s energy needs have been met, an entire industry will spring up building power stations to supply the hardcore woke states through those interconnectors. At a massive profit, of course.
Richard Page; “Those states have interconnectors. I’m sure that, once the home state’s energy needs have been met, an entire industry will spring up building power stations to supply the hardcore woke states through those interconnectors. At a massive profit, of course.”
In New York state, the 2019 Climate Act has provisions to deal with this possibility; i.e., that new fossil-fueled power plants located outside the state’s borders might be constructed to serve New York state’s internal power needs.
The 2019 Act states that any regulatory decisions concerning additions to energy infrastructure in New York state must take into account the impacts on upstream carbon emissions resulting from that decision.
Under provisions of the 2019 Act, any proposed increase in the state’s internal power transmission capacity designed to tap into external sources of fossil-fueled power must be denied by state regulatory agencies.
Several proposed upgrades to New York’s internal power transmission infrastructure designed to tap into external power resources from surrounding states and from Canada have already been successfully opposed on other grounds by the state’s environmental activist groups.
With provisions of the 2019 Climate Act clearly on their side, any proposals to tap into fossil-fueled power plants external to New York’s borders will be quickly and easily shot down.
Ok. I was not aware of that. I had no idea that the New York political class preferred mass murder of their citizens to losing their ideology – that’s disturbing to say the least.
Richard Page: “Ok. I was not aware of that. I had no idea that the New York political class preferred mass murder of their citizens to losing their ideology – that’s disturbing to say the least.”
The political class and the environmental groups can marshall thousands of people on short notice to oppose or support any regulatory decision.
Take for example the regulatory hearings conducted in 2016 concerning the proposed closure of the two Indian Point reactors which, prior to their 2021 shutdown, supplied one-quarter of New York City’s electricity.
Written comments favoring closure of the two reactors outnumbered those opposed to shutdown by a factor of roughly a hundred to one. In the live public hearings held in 2016, those who spoke in favor of shutdown outnumbered those opposed by a factor of roughly ten to one.
Energy policy makers in New York State government favored the Indian Point shutdowns and said so on the record.
A little less than decade after the 2016 Indian Point hearings, we can expect that NY-DEC hearings conducted for the periodic renewal of gas-fired power station enivironmental permits will see similar ratios.
Written comments opposed to renewal of the environmental permits will outnumber those in favor by a hundred to one. Comments opposed to renewal spoken in live public hearings will outnumber those in favor of renewal by ten to one.
Energy policy makers in New York State government will go on record as opposing renewal of the environmental permits. After all, the 2019 Climate Act is absolutely clear in directing what kinds of energy policy decisions must be adopted by state agencies.
Here is another factor which must be considered.
The regulatory decisons made in 2016 which resulted in the closure of the two Indian Point reactors were made under the assumption that new gas-fired generation could be quickly brought on line to cover the shortfall in generation capacity.
That is what actually happened. Two new-build gas-fired power plants, one inside the state’s borders and another in New Jersey, were quickly constructed and went into service before the two reactors went offline.
Had the provisions of the 2019 Climate Act been in force in 2016, no such assumption could have been made. The climate law would not have allowed construction of new gas-fired power plants which could replace the capacity lost with the closure of the two nuclear reactors.
Here is a question: Would the decision to close the two Indian Point reactors made in 2016 been different had the option of replacing them with gas-fired generation not been on the table?
I think the same shutdown decision would have been made.
The array of political forces allied against the two Indian Point reactors in 2016 was just too powerful to overcome. Strictly-enforced energy conservation measures would have been the near-term solution for dealing with capacity shortfalls.
Here in the year 2023 — soon to be 2024 — the only means of keeping New York state’s gas-fired capacity on line in the face of the powerful political forces opposed to keeping them in service is for the NY-PSC and the NY-ISO to stand their ground in defending the true public interest and to oppose early closure of the state’s gas-fired power plants.
If these two agencies cave in to the intense political pressures being brought against them and concur with an NY-DEC decision to deny gas-fired power plants regulatory permission to continue operating, then tens of thousands of New York’s citizens will be at risk of losing their lives in a series of winter weather power blackouts.
Presently, the US Pumped Water Storage capacity, which is the cheapest method of storage, is just over 2% of the total capacity, thus over 12 times that amount would need to be built to meet 25% number. However that ignores the fact PWS consumes power to pump the water back up hill to refill the reservoir. Why spend money on a solution that is not conducive for recreational use and is going to be met with NIMBY’s pushback, delays, lawsuits, DAM protesters, newly discovered rare species, etc., etc. when the equivalent amount of Nuclear power could perform the same function for about the same cost? Similar arguments can be made for any/all storage solutions.
PWS is a nice way to time shift grid loads about 8-12 hours. It NO WAY solves the renewable intermittency ~3 month storage problem. Plus, most of the viable PWS sites in the US have already been built out because so valuable for simple load shifting.
One of the problems that promoters of renewables have is that they don’t know the difference between the words “supplant” and “supplement”. They believe that the former is what wind and solar will/can do to fossil fuels when they should have realized the best those two renewables actually can do is the latter.
>> most ambitious “deep decarbonization” scenarios stopped at 25-50% renewable contributions
Long before the perceived urgency to decarbonize, there was a n effort by California, Germany and other regions to in-cooperate regenerative electricity for environmental reasons.
Most efforts stopped at the lower end of this 25-50% for economic reasons, ading more regeneratives has demising returns.
Also for solar based electricity, 3 months or storage capacity seems optimistic as in the North there is low production for 6 months and you will need to store for at least 6 months if you want to use electricity at the end of April, but may Fekete et all have it figured out already, I haven´t read the paper yet, I guess there is some likelihood of some wind within 3 months..
Apparently you measure the importance of skeptical articles these days on how hard they try to hide them, just like Alimonti´s article showing there is no climate signal in extreme weather patterns.
F.M. wrote:
“One guy even came up to me and accused me of being “rude” for laughing out loud …”
You could stand up and fart in his general direction!
There’s only one way to settle this dire threat to democracy with so much fake news and skepticism about-
The Nobel Prize-winning scientist suggested media organisations – in order to be given specific rights and protections – be required to accredit against a set of standards, in the same way universities self-accredit…..
Prof Schmidt said the solution lay in education.
“Education is the single easiest tool we have to help,” he said.
“It is the most powerful weapon to change and reshape the world.
“We know that trust in government increases markedly with education, as does essentially every other measure, from health to happiness.”
Australian democracy is in peril, warns university boss (msn.com)
You will trust the accredited university perfessors and media and be happy 🙂
PS: Like most useful idiots the perfessor means well-
The activist journalists who signed an open letter calling for ‘ethical reporting’ on ‘Israel’s devastating bombing campaign’ | Sky News Australia
Without reviewing the paper I infer from the fact that it arrived at three months as the storage requirement that it failed to consider the possibility of overbuilding and curtailment: of reducing the storage requirement by building so much capacity that some of the potential output can’t be used. And some trade-off between overbuilding and storage would be much cheaper than building only enough wind/solar to meet the average demand with enough storage. By using some admittedly optimistic assumptions a couple of years ago I used Texas wind data to conclude that only 69 hours of storage would be needed if there were enough wind capacity to average 2.2 times the average load.
Now, Texas is presumably much more favorable for wind than New England and the Middle Atlantic are. Also, I ignored charge/discharge losses and transmission limitations. And I based the conclusion on only one year’s worth of data. As a consequence, the storage requirement I found for no overbuilding, i.e., only 957 hours, was undoubtedly optimistic. But the fact that overbuilding by 120% reduced the storage requirement in my study from 957 hours to 69 hours suggests to me that Fekete wasn’t considering the cheapest (no-thermal-or-hydro) configuration.
I hasten to add that I still found the cost exorbitant.
Read the Royal Society paper and supplementary materials linked to below.
According to Tesla, all-in, turnkey capital cost for large, Megapack-based systems is about $575/delivered kWh as AC, 2023 pricing. See my above battery comment with references
Thank you. If you read my Naptown Numbers post you’ll see that I was decidedly optimistic about battery prices. My intention wa to show that backing unreliables up solely with batteries would be expensive even if battery prices came down considerably.
“…only 69 hours of storage would be needed if there were enough wind capacity to average 2.2 times the average load…”
OK, take the UK. We know from UK stats that you can expect several episodes a year of ten days in a row with less than 10% of faceplate from the wind.
You are going to have to supply 90% of demand for 10 consecutive days. That is
0.9 x 10 x 24 = 216 hours
How are you going to do that with 69 hours, less than three days, of storage?
The problem is that averages do not help. You do not meet average demand with average production. You have to produce to actual demand. In the case of the UK this means you have to deliver 45GW when its wanted, regardless of if the wind is only delivering 1 or 2GW. You will need several hundred GW of wind, and even then you’ll need well more than 69 hours of storage.
There is a reason why the Royal Society proposed excavating 900 caverns to be filled with hydrogen, in which it would be stored for years or decades until a wind drought season happens, as it does every couple of decades.
As I said, my numbers are optimistic, for the reasons I gave. And I would indeed expect things to be worse in the U. K. than in Texas.
Subject to the caveats I gave, though, the storage requirement I calculated should be correct for that year in the ERCOT area (most of Texas, so probably twice the area of the U. K.); I calculated it on an hour-by-hour basis. So I remain convinced that with so much overbuilding three months’ storage would be quite excessive.
Moreover, I’m not sure I 100% agree with your math. It’s true, of course, that the batteries would need to store at least 216 hours’ electricity if batteries had to supply at least 90% of nameplate capacity for ten days at a stretch. But I’m not convinced of your premise.
For the data I used, the wind-turbine capacity factor was 36.7%, so for the average available power to be 2.2 times the average load the nameplate capacity would be 6 times the average load. That means 10% of nameplate capacity would be 60% of the average load. Yes, the remaining 40% still implies at least 96 hours of storage in the U.K. instead of the 69 hours I found for Texas. Again, moreover, that 69 hours I arrived at is undoubtedly optimistic. But it’s quite a leap from at least 96 hours to the 2190 hours that three months translates to.
I’m sure you did the basic maths right, and it wouldn’t be too difficult to sophisticate it a little to incorporate other factors such as storage round trip efficiency, limit on capacity to capture surpluses to reflect costs of extra assets (transmission, battery inverters/electrolysers, pumping for hydro etc.) to explore the tradeoff with curtailment etc., and also to look at different cost environments. Long runs of data are really required to test the system out and find what you need to cover a 1 in 50 year: that was the big discovery that the Royal Society belatedly made. I had done very similar work about 6 years ago that showed the problem – but I don’t have their publication profile.
You are correct that overbuild is always going to be a cheaper option than only relying on storage, since the maximum storage you need will only be needed to meet very rare circumstances, yet overbuild always provides some help toward reducing the need for storage, and does so most at low overbuild volumes. The scales depend on relative cost and efficiency of the storage round trip and the tradeoff between curtailment and storage.
Turbine nominal capacity will of course be inflated by dividing average demand by average capacity factor.
I took a look at the impact of different storage technologies in this chart:
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/ZmrQw/1/
Francis,
This is the UK Royal Society report and the associated supplementary material. They came to exactly the same conclusion, that batteries are out of the question, and as a result ended up proposing to excavate and seal 900 caverns, and fill them with hydrogen, to cover calms. An idea so mad that its hard to believe anyone could advocate it with a straight face.
The unique thing about this work was that they went back many decades to get a firm handle on wind variability, and discovered the existence of season long wind calms in the historical record.
This of course greatly ups the requirement for energy storage. It also equally interestingly ups the requirement for how long you need to store the energy.
It cannot and will not be done. Its very interesting, in your piece, that people who have previously studied this seem to have confined themselves to short term smoothing of wind fluctuations, or to hybrid systems with no more than about one third renewable.
Its one of these weird social phenomena, when everyone knows something fundamental which makes nonsense of the whole thing, but there is a tacit agreement not to mention it.
You wonder whether there were some ironic smiles on the faces of the Royal Society authors as they moved to the idea that the most promising way to solve the problem was the cavern excavation. Carefully avoiding drawing the obvious conclusion.
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/large-scale-electricity-storage/V1_Large-scale-electricity-storage-report.pdf?la=en-GB&hash=90BC8F8BCBC2A34431B6CF9DD80A8C9D
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/large-scale-electricity-storage/Large-Scale-Electrricity-Storage-Report—Supplementary-Information.pdf?la=en-GB&hash=C921816B98140C785FE2B10312A96C8C
Even so, their report is full of Hopium assumptions that mean it underestimates the need. They have followed CCC orthodoxy in many of their other assumptions.
“The manuscript contains fundamental errors that cannot be rectified through author revisions” without venturing into any details.
Another disgrace to the profession. Does anyone know if, in such circumstances, a potential publisher would go back to him and ask what these fundamental errors are. And can I hope that if failed to provide them that he or she would be struck off a list of reviewers they use?
Government Dictated Energy Policy (GDEP) describes it well-
Eliminating fossil fuel use means ‘ruining billions of lives’ (msn.com)
The climate changers are getting desperate with Vampires-
Explainer-Energy efficiency could offer major climate wins. But what is it? (msn.com)
Several notes:
1) The entire EU has had 2 incidents in the lsat 5 years where wind performance across the entire region was down 30% or more for 3 months and 6 months, respectively.
2) What is the lifespan of a lithium battery? If it is 20 years, then the cost is $100 trillion every 20 years = 20% of GDP every year. Ouch.
3) Even disregarding cost – I am quite certain there is insufficient lithium, copper, etc to build $100 trillion of lithium battery storage every 20 years just for the US. People don’t seem to get the enormous scale of electricity generation. I saw an iron oxide based storage solution – the problem is that it stores something like 1 MWh per acre – meaning you would need 1 billion acres of land. But it also uses A LOT of iron – as in a majority fraction of world iron production. Using lead acid – better but still ridiculous numbers as opposed to actual world production.
The requirements for grid scale storage are simple: cheap, efficient, scalable.
Lithium is none of these three – it is not clear ANY battery storage can be any of these 3.
“ And after we get rid of the medieval warm period we’ll have to get rid of physics and economic principles…”
Copying comment from the article on Dr. Curry’s blog:
Saying solar is not going to be relevant just because currently it is not the biggest renewable energy contributor is not necessarily a convincing argument – (https://www.nrel.gov/news/program/2023/how-renewable-energy-is-transforming-the-global-electricity-supply.html). The recent massive growth in solar energy indicates its significant potential in the renewable energy landscape. People aren’t stupid and they like money. Long-term planning and economic viability drive the development of power plants, and the increasing investment in solar reflects its potential.
Solar’s integration into the grid involves both transmission and distribution. While building more transmission lines to connect regions with varying solar availability is a complex task (right now there is little to no interconnection between ERCOT, East, and West), it offers a clear path to achieving a higher (30%+) share of solar in the grid which helps offset regional intermittency (ie resiliency). Distributed solar, a key component of a “smart grid,” plays a crucial role in enhancing grid resiliency. Despite challenges like power quality issues and reverse energy flow in aging infrastructure, these challenges present opportunities for grid improvement. The current distribution infrastructure, nearly 50 years old, needs upgrading, and addressing issues like system outage detection can be vastly improved. How is it almost 2024 and the most common way a grid operator finds out there is a system outage is a customer physically calls them? There is so much room for improvement, and the infrastructure will need upgrading regardless. Why not include smarter data collection so operators can quickly and efficiently localize grid outages and restore power to the most critical areas like people’s homes who need constant medical care? Why not add distributed PV that can provide voltage support at the end of distribution lines where there are little to no voltage regulators. Why not provide smarter metering options for people to save money by reducing their own electricity load through demand response or distributed generation?
There is a very clear path to adding orders of magnitude of renewable generation onto the grid before we’d run into any large issue (issues which people have been studying for decades now: see above statement that “people aren’t stupid”). The article does a good job articulating the challenges with storage for extremely high renewable penetration, but my entire point is that the immediate next steps to a stronger grid and cheaper electricity are clear. Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress. It’s an incredibly complex and challenging undertaking and saying people will freeze to death or die because of renewables is too much alarmism for my taste. Notice how I didn’t use the term “climate change” once in this post, renewables offer more to the grid than CO2 reduction.
Goodnight.
that’s all hand waving until you first demonstrate that solar produces more electricity than was consumed producing and deploying an array. If it does, then .GOV wouldn’t need to subsidize it so heavily. (yes, people like money).
and the comparisons need to be legitimate. I am sick of NEVER being able to get more than 1.9 kW out of my 3.01 kW rated arrays. Also, practical experience needs to be included. As in Scottsbluff NE
As with every power plant there is an estimated energy payback period because you produce energy year over year, so every solar plant ever made will always produce more electricity than was consumed, the question is just when that time occurs. As with most energy questions the answer is the much-maligned “it depends”, with utility scale solar falling somewhere between 3-8 years depending on location (https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/energy-payback-time).
I do completely agree with you that the transparency and information about distributed PV is severely lacking, and the fact that the rated capacity that is advertised is for noon on a clear sunny day is misleading. But again, it depends. Someone with a 3 kW array on their house in Tucson, AZ will have much different emotions about their investment than someone in NE. The slope of your roof, direction of your roof, and any possible shading by trees or power lines all affect an array, so this information needs to be distributed to the consumer much better.
Also seen on the “people like money” front – https://www.imf.org/en/Blogs/Articles/2023/08/24/fossil-fuel-subsidies-surged-to-record-7-trillion
when they announced that the 2025 ramcharger would have a 130 kW on-board generator I was almost shocked (lol) at the overkill. but then i remembered that the generator needs to refill the batteries..as well as power the truck. and do it quickly.
Nice to know there are engineers who can still do the math.