Bishop Hill Green costs you more
Dec 28, 2011 Energy: costs Energy: gas The Guardian is highlighting DECC's energy costs calculator, a system developed by its chief scientific adviser, Prof David Mackay. The outlook, it appears is bleak.
Every person in Britain will need to pay about £5,000 a year between now and 2050 on rebuilding and using the nation's entire energy system, according to government figures. But the cost of developing clean and sustainable electricity, heating and transport will be very similar to replacing today's ageing and polluting power stations, the analysis finds.
The calculator itself is here. I'm not sure I'm reading it correctly, but it looks to me as if you have to have carbon capture and storage if you want to have gas-fired energy generation. If that's correct then I think it's fair to say that the calculator is a waste of time.
Bishop Hill
The No Hot Air site, which I believe is much better informed on these matters than I, has more on MacKay's handling of the shale gas question.
(H/T J Heath in the comments)
Reader Comments (249)
HMG,
I presume you mean the Ardrossan turbine that caught fire when it failed to shut down correctly during 'Hurricane Bawbag'. Several articulated lorries were blown over during the storm. Perhaps we should ban them as well.
Scots Renewables
You have evaded questions from me at Dec 28, 2011 at 10:58 PM, Dec 29, 2011 at 2:00 AM and Dec 29, 2011 at 2:05 AM.
You have a great deal to say to others. Why the disconnect?
SR
And here's another one for you to dodge:
Despite its embarrassment of advantageous geology for hydro, exactly how much power does it generate?
Hmm..
More bluster laced with insults.
For someone who quivers like at maiden aunt at strong language from others - you seem quite happy to sling invective around when it suits.
The pertinent facts are -
You are paid to run an environmental website called ALIenergy for an organisation funded by around 10 different bodies - about eight of which are publicly funded.
You run a site of your own called Greenphase which sells books, describes itself as "The UK's leading environmental web directory", and solicits advertising "from just £50 per year".
You run two other websites called "Carbon Carbon" and "Tidestream" which promote companies offering commercial environmental services and renewable energy products.
http://www.webcraft.co.uk/environment.html
I will leave it to others with less "shallow standards" than myself to judge whether you were telling the truth when you said "I do not have any personal financial interest in renewable energy".
It is my understanding that a lot of existing hydro schemes were downrated to get the enhanced subsidies paid for capacity below 50MW. So much for renewables generating electricity. The owners are only interested in generating income from subsidies. People who support renewables are either gullible or are in on the money-making scam.
BBD
Not much. Read all about Scotland's state of the art generation capacity here. This includes his two magnificent pump storage plants that are rated at a total of 700 MW.
Also, perhaps you noticed that SR claims that the reason electric prices went up was because of the "cost of gas". Perhaps you and the others can explain to him why the prices are up while they have crashed in the USA.
Dec 29, 2011 at 1:40 PM | mydogsgotnonose
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You are right. Taking into account CO2 involved in production, installation including the concrete base and cabling to the grid, heating in cold conditions and CO2 produced by standby generators, I have little doubt that windfarms actually increase CO2 not reduce it.
The drive to wind was sheer madness and should never have been adopted as a policy. Two winters ago, it was clearly demonstrated the real problems that would be encountered if we were to become reliant on wind energy for 30% of our power needs and any sane person reviewing the experience of energy production that winter would immediately have put the brakes on further deployment of windfarms. In 20 years time we will be left with desolate and decaying monuments to this madness that no one will wish to remove because of lack of money.
The idea of off-shore windfarms is even worse. Anyone who knows anything about maintenance of ship's equipment would tell you that this will be a real nightmare. Maintenance costs will be exorbitant and so will down time since it will quickly be apparent how dangerous maintenance is in anything other than benign calm conditons (which will be rarely encountered at the sites chosen), Health & Safety will have a field day with this. These expenses are very much under-estimated and one should not disregard the loss of life on maintenance men that will surely follow.
The Labour party and Chris Huhne have a lot to answer for.
.
richard verney
The HSE and RenewableUK have a lot to say about the safety of offshore (but little about the fact that nobody can afford to buy the electricity produced), i.e. they acknowledge there are serious problems. I foresee massive loss of life offshore. They already do things in the wind industry that wouldn't be allowed by H&S in any other industrial activity. The Labour Government gave them a licence to print money (or strictly a licence to take our money) and ensured that they wouldn't have to worry about noise issues or H&S issues. Just like the AGW scam, there will soon be a big backlash against the renewables scam in the near future, and there will be lots of rats trying to learn to swim.
Sign up to support us at http://www.slaythearray.com/ (my little bit of advertising).
Foxgoose,
I am not sure who funds Alienergy, but I am sure it gets some public money. So what? I merely host and maintain the website. I also host and support a website for an oil service company - does that mean I am in the pocket of the oil industry? If so, it is surely a strange collection of pockets I inhabit.
And what do you do for a living?
Phillip Bratby,
'I forsee massive loss of life offshore'
You make me laugh, but also you make me a little bit angry. There has already been massive loss of life offshore in the oil industry. Piper Alpha, Brent Spar, the Sumburgh Chinook - need I say more?
I worked offshore for over eight years and I know many whose lives were touched by these tragedies. There is no way that offshore wind has the potential to create another Piper Alpha, and for you even to suggest that there is shows a naivete that is frankly beyond belief.
Scots Renewables
Just in case you haven't figured it out, which you apparently have too much hubris to do, BH is not your average-run-of-the-mill website. There are enough Ph.Ds regularly contributing to these discussions to staff a good size university. And there are many times that of people with other advanced degrees in science and engineering -- certainly enough to start a fairly large high-tech company in California.
Please stop trying to play us for fools. I am growing tired of the bluster. There are many who contribute to BH whom I disagree with, but they are stating their opinions openly and honestly. That is their right and the Bishop goes out of his way to welcome them. And honestly, I find their views valuable as they often make me think about things in a new way.
However, I think Foxgoose does raise some very interesting points with regard to some of your claims.
ScotsR
I never mentioned Piper Alpha, so I resent you putting words in my mouth. In fact you should apologise.
I know all about previous losses of life in offshore oil ( a colleague of mine, an expert in risk assessment, wrote a report about Piper Alpha). The risks now being taken with the nascent offshore wind industry may not result in massive loss of life in a single tragedy, just an ongoing accumulation of accidents because of the unnecessary risks that are taken. These will be unnecessary tragedies, because there are far safer and cheaper means of generating electricity.
From the horses mouth (Statoil):
As with all nascent technologies one has the feeling that the passage of time will improve them and bring down the cost concomitantly, I don't have that feel for wind turbines. They have been round for a long time, and yet they remain stubbornly at around 28% efficient. I remember I used to go to Palm Springs every January where there a a huge number of wind turbines in the valley, I expect DPDLS will have seen them. If they had, in the period they have been there, which I believe is overs ten years, shown any signs of being commercially viable I'm. Sure they would have spread far and wide in the US and that there efficiency would be up at 40/50% by now.
SR, you are batting ( maybe curling) on a sticky wicket here, there are to many engineers and scientists on this site who can tell you in a sentence that if you want renewables that are efficient and cheap then the only game in town is nuclear power. Unfortunately, our friends in the eco- religion don't want that either.
SR
You know full well who funds Alienergy - you list all their logos on your website under the heading "how we are funded".
http://www.alienergy.org.uk/
Why do you have such a difficult relationship with the truth?
In any case, I don't personally think that the fact that you earn part of your living from promoting the green religion should invalidate your contributions here. I just think you should be honest about it - so that people know where you're coming from.
I also find it a bit rich that you harp on about all the "big oil funded right wing conspiracy" stuff while concealing your own interest.
Since you asked, I'm just a boring old retired businessman with a time expired second class BSc Elec Engg and a disappointing absence of big oil funding - but if Exxon Black Ops HQ are reading this they can pm me any time ;-)
Geronimo
Anthony Watts published some remarkable photos a while back of a valley in CA with broken and abandoned wind turbines as far as the eye could see.
I think it's inevitable, with any subsidy based industry, that installing new subsidy-yielding, state-of-the-art plant will take precedence over expensive maintenance of the older stuff.
I'm sure we can look forward here to decades (or more) of ugly, rusting memorials to the age of Green Folly.
Scots Renewables
Brent Spar?
Wasn't that the storage buoy that Greenpeace lied about as a publicity stunt, claiming that dumping it at sea would result in all sorts of nasty things happening to the environment when they knew otherwise?
The same Greenpeace who happily disposed of Rainbow Warrior that way?
Or maybe I'm thinking of a different Greenpeace. Either way the only casualty in that incident was truth.
As for deaths ... you'll get deaths in any industry. Society believes that on a cost/benefit basis the actual casualty rate in oil exploration and coal mining is acceptable.
I'm not sure that the same will apply to offshore wind farms.
SR
Still no responses to my earlier questions I see.
Okay, let's try again.
Nuclear will deliver 90% load factor, reliably. Nuclear is a low-carbon technology. Nuclear is a proven technology. Nuclear is ideally suited to baseload generation. Nuclear is what is required to meet the twin objectives of decarbonisation and reliably meeting increasing baseload demand over the coming decades.
Renewables are profoundly unsuitable for baseload, largely untried at scale (or at all, in the case of tidal), require non-existent, emitting, or prohibitively expensive backup technologies, and in the case of wind, do not reduce emissions but in fact will increase them where new build OCGT is used as spinning reserve (this will occur when wind approaches 10% of the UK energy mix).
We do not have the time or the money to indulge the fantasies of renewables advocates. The problems we face are too serious to permit nonsense like this from hijacking energy policy - yet this is what has happened.
In my view, renewables advocacy is as dangerous and as reprehensible as climate change denial. It delays decarbonisation and prevents rapid displacement of coal from the energy mix.
A failed attempt to fast-track the growth of renewables in the UK energy mix will lead to serious economic damage by reducing the reliable energy supply below demand and causing energy prices to rise. This need not happen if we go down the nuclear path instead.
If you can fault the logic here, please do so.
Good post BBD. Wind energy is a proxy for continued dependence on fossil fuels and at high penetration, increased CO2 emissions.
The real purpose is to rape the British public by high energy costs to make the carbon traders and renewables' people rich.
We need rope and lamp posts to string 'em up......:o)
mydogsgotnonose
And the greens have been completely taken in by the scam. It just shows how gullible people with no technical knowledge can be. Every green I have come across thinks that wind turbines reduce CO2 emissions.
The facts are that 26% capacity factor reduces to 16% when you lose 40% because the windmills will be turned off for 11% of the time in high winds. it could be more - Denmark dumps 50% of the wind energy to hydro because it can't use it.
Then you reduce the efficiency of the CCGTs from 50% to ~35% because you have to keep the steam boilers warm with gas burners to avoid thermal fatigue.
Finally, you have lots more transmission losses with the LV lines from the wind farms.
No wonder the texans and the dutch are finding they generate more CO2 with the windmills than without.
mydogsgotnonose
Did you factor in the need to use power to run the beasts when there is no wind to prevent them seizing up? Ot have I got that one wrong?
[snip] the Texas and Dutch experience is showing that at high wind penetration, you produce more CO2 with the windmills than without, e.g.: http://www.clepair.net/windSchiphol.html
It's a big con to benefit the carbon traders, the Mafia, the rent seekers, the reinsurance companies and the bent politicians.
[snip- DNFTT]
- the current wind fleet is backed up by existing spare conventional capacity (no emissions impact).
- BUT as wind approaches 10% of the UK energy mix, new OCGT spinning reserve will have to be constructed to manage wind intermittence and slew. This will increase emissions.
- the spinning reserve needs to be near-equivalent in capacity to the wind fleet or it will not be able to compensate during widespread low-wind conditions, eg winter anti-cyclones
- this means you have to pay for two parallel generation systems (wind and gas)
- emissions increase is directly proportionate to the fraction of wind in the UK energy mix once it exceeds 10%
mydogsgotnonose
Let's not get carried away. I do not argue for hanging anyone. And while the subsidy system is undoubtedly being systematically abused (as in Spain and Germany), the intention was honourable, if misguided.
This is the backwash from decades of green anti-science fearmongering over nuclear.
"wind power" for human electricity usage requires massive permanent public subsidy. There is no reason to expect it will be cost effective or economically plausible within the lifetimes of anyone now on the planet.
There already was a boom in windfarms heavily subsidized by tax dollars, in the '80s and '90s in the USA (see link below). Of course contemporary advocates will say the turbines have improved since the debacles described below, but the basic economic issue is that without the public subsidies the turbines will not long be kept operational. Yet the subsidies make no economic or scientific sense at all!
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"California's wind farms -- then comprising about 80% of the world's wind generation capacity -- ceased to generate much more quickly than Kamaoa. In the best wind spots on earth, over 14,000 turbines were simply abandoned. Spinning, post-industrial junk which generates nothing but bird kills."
Wind Energy's Ghosts
By Andrew Walden
http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/02/wind_energys_ghosts_1.html
[snip]
From a recent essay by James Hansen (article at Brave New Climate):
Sorry - that should have been:
Please see the article at Brave New Climate for the numerous live links in Hansen's text.
BBD
As ever I admire your arguments, but nuclear is currently very difficult to finance and expensive. 4th generation nuclear is always 20 years away, and never gets closer (frustratingly).
Given the significant levels of uncertainty regarding the correlation between temperature and CO2, the uncertainties of the economic impacts (surely noone now believes Stern!) and even the uncertainties of measuring temperature and impact, a sensible low cost approach is to exploit the newly viable reserves of shale gas, and use that alongside (limited) hydro and some limited continuation of nuclear. As yet renewables other than hydro are not remotey economic, and wind never will be. Moving to gas from coal reduces emissions while we wait to see if the temperature-CO2 correlation begns to make sense again. If it does not we have lost nothing.
To several of you: new build OCGT built as spinning reserve to back up increased wind penetration will not increase CO2 emissions. In fact open cycle gas turbine plant can accelerate from a cold start to a full load without a warmup period. This is alarmist bullshit, and the worrying thing is that you all know it!
Bratby - your idea that offshore wind is going to kill more people than Piper Alpha is nonsense and your bluster about me putting words into your mouth does not stand up to review. As usual when you lose one point you pick something irrelevant out of a random hat and jump to a totally different non-argument. Fossil fuels are killing thousands of people on a daily basis, a fact you conveniently overlook.
Mike Jackson - Brent Spar was a helicopter crash where six men died - the rules were changed after that.
Foxgoose - you obviously have no idea what the word 'funding' means or what a web design company does. If this is the level of debate you are capable of then frankly you are a waste of electrons.
There may be lots of PhDs and all sorts of degrees on here, but any real knowledge is utterly overwhelmed by the arrogance and the paranoia, the belief in a global conspiracy and the complete and utter contempt for any pov other than your own.
BBD, take it to another place if you want to talk to me. You make some valid points, but there is a limit to how much of this utter crap I can stand at a time. This place is really quite sickening.
Happy New Year when it comes people. It is going to be the year climate deniers are finally exposed.
The IPCC CO2-AGW science is pretty pathetic because although it started out as plausible, it has been since 1997 when the data showed CO2 followed T at the end of ice ages, a descent into ever more daring fraud as those in charge get reckless, the arrogance of not being found out taking over.
There is no experimental proof of any CO2-AGW. The science predicting it is wrong. There may be some but no more than ~15% of the IPCC's median claim. However, you can explain all climate change by other effects, including recent Arctic warming now turning into cooling.
The scam is nearly over.
Hmmm.............
I think he's gone the way of that wind turbine in the recent gales.
Overspeed & burnout.
To Scots renewables: the thermodynamic efficiency of a RR Trent 700 is 39% at steady rotational speed, but when cycling it'll be much less because of the inertial losses. Assume 30% at the generator output terminals.
SR
Thermal stress. Plant lifecycle implications.
Have you got a reference for your claim btw? To be very clear, I am asking about commercial, grid-linked plant, not CHP systems.
jheath
Necessity is the mother of finance ;-)
Things change.
SR,
"It is going to be the year climate deniers are finally exposed."
Please, please, please promise to come back here in 12 months to discuss that.
Hi guys enjoyed your discussions but think the coming financial breakdown will see the end of subsidies and therefore the end of non viable renewable energy. Shale gas will be the saviour of our way of life and a killer of wind farms.
Happy new year.
Here's a comprehensive study of wind turbine accidents.
It lists 1093 incidents with 83 fatalities.
Ooooops, forgot the reference:
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf
If another molecule emits an identical photon before there is a collision and energy transfer from the newly excited molecule, all that has happened is that there has been an increased optical path length.
Yes. Also known as insulation, in non-technical language. The photons take longer to escape the earth, which means it cools slower.
But in general what you wrote to reply to me is very different from what you wrote the first time round. If you state that you don't think the effect of photons being trapped and re-emitted in a system near saturation is sufficient to make any noticeable difference, then we are in agreement.
You wrote:
And to the idiots who persist in pushing these fake physical principles ['back radiation'
There is back radiation. It's not "fake". If you mean that it is trivial in the earth's atmosphere, then you need to say that.
Otherwise people will go round saying the sort of tripe you see on WUWT all the time, where the very mechanism of the IR photons being trapped is disputed.
Great post and discussion which if nothing else proves that the debate ain't over. In fact we have a raging debate over CO2 sensitivity, carbon savings from wind farms, shale gas as a game changer, back radiation and it's inability to do work, Uranium over Thorium and various other major issues. Add to that certain interlopers storming off un a huff because you bad lot dare to argue and we have a great read to accompany a nice glass of Jura in the downtime between Christmas and new year.
Merry Christmas one and all.
Eddie
Takes another sip and exits stage left
Scotts Renewable
No one doubts that the oil industry is dangerous or for that matter the mining industry. That is not the point especially since very little electriciy is generated by oil.
The point under discussion went to the maintenance of power plants. Maintenance of conventional power generating plants whether gas or coal is not a particularly hazzardess job. However, maintenance of land based wind farms is fangerous. These usually require maintenance to be performed at height in exposed locations. The working enviroment is dangerous and there have already been a number of deaths.
The problem is compounded off-shore since the elements will make maintenance a more frwquent event and the structures will be slippery (inevitable consequence of wind swept spray) and even more exposed. One can therefore expect that the number of deaths of maintenance staff will increase significantly compared to on shore wind farms.
Ot is likely that prevailing conditions will make maintenance so unsafe that there will be considerable downtime. I have been involved in the shipping industry for more than 25 years and I know the difficulties of maintenance and downtime consequences.
I suspect that this has been very much under-assessed when considering the cost effectiveness of off-shore wind farms.
The point is that windfarms neither reduce any significant quantities of CO2 emissions and are an inefficient and expensive form of energy production. There is no economic case for building windfarms. If they were economically sustainable there would be no need for any subsidy. What would happen is that the electrity producer would builg the farm. This would involve initial outlay which would be set off against tax. Perhaps the energy supplier would show a loss for the first 5 to 7 years even with the tax/capital write down. Years 8 to 10 would be break even and years 11 to 25 would be high profit because wind is free. However, we all know that this is not the case and windfarms are commercially viably only so longer as subsidies roll in. As soon as these stop, windfarms will be abandoned and we will be left with a country littered with decaying steel monstrocities.
The present world wide economic problems will mean that subsidies cannot go on as presently handed out and consumers will be too cash strapped to pay the ever increasing costs of green energy production.
The next 10 years will be a game changer in all of this.
Looking back, it is obvious that Scots Renewables just makes things up. He lives in a fantasy world of his own creation.
Me 5.18pm:
Scots Renewables, 5.26pm
Me, 5.39pm
Me, 5.54pm:
Scots Renewables, 5.26pm
mooloo: ‘Back Radiation’:Imagine two parallel plates at the same temperature. Put a radiometer in the gap and it measures ‘back radiation’ Turn it 180° and it measures the same in the opposite direction. So, ‘back radiation’ is cancelled out at equilibrium. A Dutch researcher showed over a height of 800 feet at night, up-down fell exponentially to zero, Beer’s law absorption of IR from the Earth’s surface with zero net IR from the atmosphere towards the Earth’s surface.
So, back radiation can do no thermodynamic work. It’s a measure of temperature and emissivity. It is the means by which the density of IR states in the emitter communicate with those in the absorber and vice versa, hence Kirchhoff’s law of Radiation. It is ‘Prevost Exchange Energy’.
Just accept that it has been a very bad mistake by climate science. The other is 33 K present GHG warming: take out the atmosphere and albedo falls from 0.3 to 0.07 [no clouds or ice] so equilibrium radiant temperature to space =~0°C meaning maximum GHG warming is 15 K. Do a proper calculation including the aerosols and it falls to ~9 K with 24 K lapse rate warming at the surface.
These two elementary mistakes are apparently corrected by false aerosol optical physics of clouds. The net AIE is not negative, it's slightly positive now but it explains warming at the end of ice ages by being high in polar regions. It explains present Arctic warming now ending.
Real CO2 climate sensitivity can be no more than 155 of the IPCC median.
15% nor 155
Scots Renewables
I stand corrected.
mydogsgotnonose
This seems to be central to your hypothesis:
Can you provide references? Specifically for the phytoplankton/cloud effect. I'm not having any luck finding them.
Also, how does the hypothesis you advance account for the cooling 50Ma - present?
CO2 correlates well with T over the Cenozoic (Hansen & Sato 2011), so a new hypothesis would need to provide an alternative explanation.
I asked about this earlier and it remains an open question:
How do we account for the cooling from 50Ma - present? The Cenozoic cooling is apparently inexplicable except in terms of a reduced atmospheric forcing. Solar evolution, solar variability and Earth orbital dynamics individually or collectively do no provide energetically sufficient alternatives. CO2 is an obvious and energetically sufficient atmospheric forcing. It cannot easily be dismissed at this stage.
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Hansen & Sato (2011) Paleoclimate implications for Human-Made Climate Change:
http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1105/1105.0968.pdf
Tripati et al. (2009) Coupling of CO2 and Ice Sheet Stability Over Major Climate Transitions of the Last 20 Million Years:
http://atripati.bol.ucla.edu/23.pdf
More on back radiation, key info from a contributor to another blog [ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/12/29/unified-theory-of-climate/#comment-847194 ].
It is blackbody radiation. With a clear sky there is some CO2/H2O absorption but under clouds it is pure blackbody for the temperature of the gas a few m above the detector.
So, 'back radiation' is essentially nothing to do with GHGs but a measure of temperature alone. That means the whole Trenberth model has to be redone.
This is great experimental confirmation of the elementary mistake made by climate science.in this key part of the theory. The models are broken. No doubt about it.
29 Dec: WSJ: RYAN TRACY And JIM CARLTON: California Low-Carbon Fuel Rules Halted
The decision puts on hold a major portion of California’s effort to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, at a time when the most-populous state’s stance has taken on extra importance nationwide because of a stalemate in Washington over greenhouse-gas legislation.
The judge’s move means that refiners and ethanol producers, which previously could have been faced with having to buy credits when importing oil and ethanol into California to comply with the rules, will now be freed of those obligations…
Judge O’Neill hasn’t issued a final decision on the case, but on Thursday he barred California from enforcing the rules while the lawsuit continues…
David Pettit, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council, which intervened in the case, said other states considering similar rules “would likely be scared off trying to do what California did if the decision is upheld.”…
“It is not surprising that the oil industry is attacking these programs, but like previous attacks in the courts and at the ballot box, we expect this one ultimately to fail,” said Trip Van Noppen, president of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm based in San Francisco.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577128972816077652.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
So, back radiation can do no thermodynamic work.
I'm not asking it to do any work. Insulation doesn't do work either, but has a very real effect.
So, ‘back radiation’ is cancelled out at equilibrium.
We are also not in an equilibrium situation or there would be no temperature gradient at all, so giving explanations in an equilibrium context is rather odd. Clearly there would be no back radiation effect in an equilibrium, but every night we have a hot earth and a cold space and the quicker the heat escapes, the cooler the earth gets.
It may well be that the effect of back-radiation from CO2 is tiny. I am happy to believe that experiments show this. I'm not even remotely a warmist. But that is different from the model being fundamentally flawed in concept.
You clearly understand the physics, and I apologise for the earlier slur with D-K effect, but you keep expressing it in a way that leads to great confusion. You've seen the wallies on WUWT claiming that Trenberth is asking for heat to flow from cold to hot, which he clearly is not doing. They think that because they hear that back radiation "can't do any work" and get tied up from there.