Bishop Hill Maybe, maybe not
Nov 13, 2013 Climate: Parliament Energy: gas ;)
Yesterday, the House of Lords took further evidence in its inquiry into shale gas, this time from a somewhat motley selection of people from industry majors and thinktanks.
I've skimmed the video, and most of it seems very uninformative, with platitudinous answers from the participants and some not very probing questions from the peers. But Lord May's intervention was interesting (from 16:42). It had a whiff of grandstanding about it, which is always entertaining, and suggests someone who is playing to an audience rather than engaging in truth-seeking behaviour. But it was the pop he took at Cuadrilla's Francis Egan that intrigued me:
I did find the discussion we had with the head of Cuadrillo [sic], Francis Egan...the general tone of it was "there is no problem, it's an uphill public relations battle, we have to win the public over rather than address the substance of the worries".
Having watched last week's hearing, and couldn't recall anything like this, although I could remember the reference to an uphill public relations battle. Here is the excerpt from the transcript:
Lord Rowe-Beddoe: If I were in your position, I would be taking my public relations exercise very seriously and letting the world know what I was doing, why I was doing it and what the implications are both for and against. It would appear from this correspondence that this has not been gone through.
Andrew Austin: I think it is fair to say that all of us are aware that we have an uphill public relations challenge. It is an information challenge. Maybe I can say this in a way in which Cuadrilla cannot, but an open letter was written to a number of newspapers post the activities at Balcombe once Cuadrilla had gone off-site, which actually expressed support from a number of villagers and from the parish council. I cannot remember the percentage —
Francis Egan: Sixty people signed it.
So Lord May has got the name of the company wrong, the name of the person who mentioned "uphill public relations" wrong and he has completely misrepresented the circumstances of what was said.
Whoops.
Reader Comments (35)
I have yet to make my own mind up about UK shale gas. Its absolutely true that we must do everything to boost indigenous primary energy production. But few folks are aware of the scale of drilling involved. It would mean tens of thousands of wells - i'm not sure what mark that makes on rural England. And its not cheap! How can it be? Great long horizontal well and fracking to produce a wee f*art of gas. Rex Tillerson is still losing his shirt. Half a dozen nukes may provide same electricity.
Meanwhile Clive and I have posted the physical models and interpretation of UK temperature records which may be of interest to some. Also links to pdfs of papers and a ppt.
Best Euan
Coincidentally, I listened recently to a podcast from 'The Life Scientific', which featured Lord May. It was this one - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jgll3 .
I quite warmed to him - clearly a bright bloke and obviously quite egotistical, but in the way of tea-total rather than Ocker Australians. In some ways, belligerent drunks are easier to deal with, but he might well respond to facts & data. Not a stupid man at all, but once he's made his mind up he's probably difficult to shift. He doesn't seem to do ambivalence.
A man of whom his wife said; "When he plays with the dog, he plays to win".
DevonshireDozer
And when he plays with the facts, he plays too loose!
A man of whom his wife said; "When he plays with the dog, he plays to win".
Nov 13, 2013 at 11:10 AM | Unregistered CommenterDevonshireDo
--------------------
Looking at the photograph, I can believe that.
Euan Mearns,
I don't know about you but I'd rather have a few drill sites than TENS OF THOUSANDS OF WINDMILLS any day!
I guarantee you not one single endangered bird will ever be killed by a fracking well.
Mailman
Why is he nursing a Thylacine?
Mailman - you have experienced windmills and have decided you don't like em - so that's OK. But you have probably not experienced the drilling of a shale well (I haven't) and so you don't know what sort of problems that may present. Shale wells need to be tied by pipelines to gas process plants etc. I'm saying my mind is not yet made up, I'll be doing a post on this shortly.
One thing I will say is that new energy infrastructure should be judged on a rounded environmental impact and not just on short-term CO2 intensity.
And pray tell Mr. Mearns just when were windmill judged on "rounded environmental impact"? As to CO2 intensity, they failed on that!
Windmills are the cute little things you find on Dutch postcards -- and they represent a bygone era.
Industrial Wind turbines (IWT) are 350 -- 550 feet tall. They are noisy! They are intermittent suppliers of electricity at best.
IWTs are not capable of supplying baseload power due to their intermittent nature and any attempt to portray them as such is a technical fantasy.
IWTs are not capable of supplying baseload power due to their intermittent nature and any attempt to portray them as such is a technical fantasy.
Nov 13, 2013 at 1:49 PM | WillR
This straw man must be getting rather ragged.
The purpose of wind power is to decrease CO2 emissions. This is done by by producing electricity without burning fuel. This decreases the amount of electricity which has to be generated using fossil fuels, reducing the amount of fuel burned and the amount of CO2 emitted.
Used in this way intermittency is irrelevant. The maximum contribution of wind power so far recorded was 17% of the total generated. Intermittency will only become a problem when fossil fuel power stations can no longer be used.
Euan - have a look at the two images which compare gas wells and wind turbines. There are 11 gas drilling sites in the first photo - can you spot them? The second image shows just how little land is required for shale gas extraction compared with biomass, solar and wind, shale wins by far in terms of energy density and minimal environmental impact.
I think things are getting critical and we need as much shale as we can get until new (ideally thorium) nuclear is up and running.
Great that you and Clive are working together on the UK temperature / sunshine data. Will have a look at the new post later.
Euan,
You clearly haven't got a clue about windmills have you? How do you think they get what little electricity they generate to your beer fridge? Little Fairies with cute little flowered covered buckets?
It's funny how our clueless drama greens are all aghast at the infrastructure required to get gas to your doorstep yet don't bat an eyelid at the quite considerable land gobbling infrastructure required to hey windmills, mirrors and ground unicorn horn power generation to your Eco habitat in your rather expensive lefty mansion.
Mailman
I like Entropic Man's reasoning "Used in this way intermittency is irrelevant. The maximum contribution of wind power so far recorded was 17% of the total generated. Intermittency will only become a problem when fossil fuel power stations can no longer be used."
It is rather windy in the UK and at present wind contributes 8.67% (3.87GW). The rest to provide 44.65GW is made up mostly of fossil fuel and Nuclear. Nuclear will be phased out (apart from the odd new station built by the French/Chinese). Intermittency will be a problem shortly when enough coal fired stations have been shut down (thanks to EU) and the energy firms refuse to provide gas powered plants because they are not paid when the wind is blowing (or not paid enough). So CO2 will be emitted to build the wind turbines and the extra connectors, and when wind is blowing, to provide stand-by cover for systems energy maintenance when the wind suddenly drops. I trust Entropic Man has done his calculations and has concluded that there is still a miniscule of CO2 saved. I wonder how much this saving will reduce Global Warming made by Man? 0.001C???
And do you just use your electricity intermittently, when the wind blows, EM? Or just when you need it? Perhaps you also think electric trains should only move when the wind blows.
Chaps, I'm afraid you've lost me totally here. Personally I believe that wind farms should be subject to more rigorous environmental impact studies and that the true cost of dealing with intermittency should be much more transparent and done on an energy cost (ERoEI) and economic cost basis and not based on CO2 abatement policies - I'm surprised you don't seem to agree with this.
And as for shale whilst you all seem to have made up your minds that it's a good thing I'm saying my mind is not made up yet since I don't feel I know enough about the facts . Its also quite likely that you find out I know a lot more about "shale" (and wind) that you may want to believe.
You should check this out:
Oil Watch: Drill Baby Drill
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/9795
You may want to check this out as well:
The changing face of UK electricity supply
http://euanmearns.com/?p=544
John Peter
Ask the government. It's their policy.
Of course, there is a boom in cheap shale gas coming. With 40 years gas supply on our doorstep any reliance on renewables is unnecessary :-) .
michael hart
I think you missed my point. Used as part of the current energy mix, intermittency is not a problem. There's no need for you to care how I use electricity.
People like Lord May would rather PAY OUT the subsidies wind / solar need
- rather that accept the tax that fracking will PAY IN
..we all agree that subsidy dependent industries are unsustainable
- energy prices will keep going up until we reach Peak Subsidy
(and Ed Davey yesterday told us yesterday he wants Peak Subsidy to be no earlier than 17 years time)
Ah, that would be the Lord May referred to here by Roger Harrabin, I presume:
I remember Lord May leaning over and assuring me: "I am the President of
the Royal Society, and I am telling you the debate on climate change is
over."
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10178454
Not quite a full shilling...
I think that many are unaware of the UKs' power-planning for the future.
It's called "demand side planning".
In other words, you fit consumption to what is available.
In that way "intermittency" ceases to be a problem: For the generators.
And you're wrong about the 17% of power provided by wind. For a brief period, about a week ago, in the early hours, wind provided 25% of the UK electrical requirement.
Admittedly, an industrially-based country will have to have more strings to its bow....but the future planning for the UK does not involve heavy power users..
Used in this way intermittency is irrelevant. The maximum contribution of wind power so far recorded was 17% of the total generated. Intermittency will only become a problem when fossil fuel power stations can no longer be used.
Not even wrong.
Intermittent power supplies present some problems, EM, not the least being that any electric grid needs to maintain system inertia and spinning reserve to meet fluctuations in load (these would be measured at the milli-second to several second time scale). Adding intermittent power sources is (from the point of view of the grid) equivalent to increasing the fluctuations in load. The only practical way to meet this increasingly unstable load is either to provide storage hydro running in the part-load range (an expensive proposition) or thermal resources (also in part-load range). The problem is that the required flexible-response thermal systems are simple-cycle (open-cycle in UK terminology) turbines that are less efficient than baseload combined-cycle units, particularly when operated at part-load - the net impact is that total CO2 emissions increase, rather than decrease, and costs increase significantly.
At longer time scales, the problems remain: in order to provide backup power to 'firm up' intermittent resources, firm resources must be used inefficiently, or the resource allocations must be skewed away from the optimal mix, or both. The outcome again is increased costs, generally with no net impact (and often, depending on the study) a negative impact on CO2 intensity.
John M
On what timescale are you thinking? Over 40 years or so a nuclear/renewables mix and demand side planning are probably invitable as fossil fuels become depleted. Are you expecting demand side planning to come in earlier?
Dont tell the other sceptics that it is possible for wind to provide 25% of our power. They think it cant boil a kettle. :-)
decardno
You are describing short term changes, on a scale of minutes. Wind power is only intermittent on that scale locally when a wind farm is operating close to its maximum or minimum windspeed and individual turbines are switching in and out. On a regional or national scale output is predictable over hours and large scale backup from open-cycle gas turbines is not necessary.
It would be interesting to see quantitative information on this.
To an extent, demand-side planning already exists:
http://www.nationalgrid.com/uk/Electricity/AdditionalMeasures/
It will, of course, become much more evident as time flows..since the government/s are incapable/unable/don't-want-to of planning beyond the immediate need we are about to get the worst of all worlds...
Demand lowered by price/availability.
Production lowered by price/dogma.
Did I mention that I also think governments really don't want so many people?
Given all the fuss over one re-drill of a long-existing well at Balcombe, it's hard to see how they're going to get to "tens of thousands" in the UK, however, many wells can be drilled from each pad.
One company has drilled over 1,000 gas wells in Austria over the years for example, some of which I have worked on, and if you didn't know where they were,you would never find them. It's hard enough when you do know where they are. When you tell local people you are drilling in their area just a few km away, many simply don't believe you unless they know somebody working on the rig.
If you don't want drilling in densely-populated areas then you are simply voting for longer pipelines. A drilling rig in a populated area will never create as much disruption, for as long a period, as say, construction of a large building. We seem to be very emotionally selective about what we'll tolerate.
John M
....for a brief period...in the early hours...when hardly anyone was using it......and it couldn't be stored.
On a regional or national scale output is predictable over hours and large scale backup from open-cycle gas turbines is not necessary
Experience in North America does not support this assertion, EM. Bonneville Power Administration shows the average error in wind output forecasts is comparable to the actual wind energy supplied. I know this is true at a daily timescale (ie, when comparing the day-ahead forecasts), and I believe it is true at larger timescales, as well, although I haven't bothered to go back and check on it.
The fundamental problem is that wind is a really poor energy source; there is a reason why modern economies have largely abandoned it, other than for very specialized applications. This is ture irrespective of price - add the high cost, the environmental impact (both in operation and manufacture), operating impacts of noise or occasional failures, and the despoilation of the countryside, and you have a seriously misguided policy.
Over 40 years or so a nuclear/renewables mix and demand side planning are probably inevitable as fossil fuels become depleted. Are you expecting demand side planning to come in earlier?
Once the scales fall from your eyes and you realise that intermittent renewable generation is at best a bolt on adjunct to dispatchable fossil technology, the case for nuclear and intermittent renewables together can be seen to completely flawed.
Consider: to meet peak demand we have to have a sufficiency of dispatchable plant to meet it. There is not a single intermittent generator we dare rely on to actually provide any power or not. Even if we can predict what it will provide several days or weeks in advance, that does nothing to actually meet the demand and the renewable shortfall when they occur simultaneously.
So, if we eliminate all fossil from the grid, we must needs have enough available nuclear capacity to meet the entire national peak demand (less whatever we can scrape out of hydro and biomass etc).
Since we now have the capacity to meet all demand without burning an ounce of fossil fuel, what is the point of adding expensive unreliable and grid stressing intermittent renewables to it at all? No further reduction of emissions beyond 100% will be gained by this. All we gain in real terms is duplication of necessary nuclear, in itself already zero emissions, with unnecessary renewables.
I have written on these matters extensively*: To have 'nuclear and renewables' is not a technically sound solution, it is a political compromise to save face after tacitly admitting that, if you want to have any energy security at all in the absence of fossil generation, you have to have nuclear. The renewables industry has fought tooth and nail to keep nuclear off the agenda because they know, as I know, that once you actually consider the implications of having nuclear energy at all, the overridingly sensible thing to do is to have as much of it as possible, and to ditch all (intermittent) renewables as (in that scenario) a total waste of money that achieves nothing that the nuclear alone, does not.
Some years back the political line from the Tory party was 'I believe in renewable energy, just not in my constituency'. I spent many years proving, to my own and to others' satisfaction, that this was a deeply hypocritical and ultimately damaging position.
It was simply political expediency talking.
Now nuclear is accepted as necessary, but once again the statement is we will have nuclear and renewables.
This is equally a false and hypocritical position, born of political expediency. Politically the powers that be cannot yet quite bring themselves to admit that the emperor's new green renewable clothes leave the nation stark bollock naked and exposed in a climate which isn't getting any warmer, and indeed may well be getting colder.
Cost benefit analysis in terms of cash cost, security, and emissions gives us several possible mixes of generation technology on the grid.
By adjusting the weighting on the 'cost' of emissions and energy security, we can arrive at various mixtures of fossil and nuclear power.
Those are the choices.
But no matter what cost you ascribe to energy insecurity or emissions, in no scenario does the addition of intermittent renewables improve the benefit to cost ratio, unless you remove nuclear altogether.
In short if you go for a nuclear free mix, some renewable energy may marginally impact on emissions by displacing some fossil kit off the grid, although the fuel costs of doing so are actually nearly as high as the fuel saved.
Once you have a substantial nuclear baseload, the last thing you want to do is push it off the grid when the wind blows.
Wind solar etc. - as evinced by the CFD mechanism strike prices - are already more expensive than nuclear. And that is expensive enough. Without the addition of storage - which would increase the expense by at least 100% and only provide limited dispatch capability - renewables cannot displace conventional generation, only augment it.
Which leads to the inevitable conclusions that intermittent renewable technology without storage cannot displace any dispatchable plant at all - only slightly reduce its fuel burn and massively reduce its profitability. And it is already more expensive than nuclear, which can and does utterly displace fossil capacity.
In short there is no place whatsoever for intermittent renewables in any primary energy strategy that is not more expensive, uses more fossil fuel, than the nuclear option.
*http:///www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Renewable%20Energy%20Limitations.pdf
http://www.templar.co.uk/downloads/Beyond_Fossil_Fuels.pdf
@ WillR Nov 13, 2013 at 1:49 PM
Industrial wind turbines are not turbines. Steam turbines are, gas turbines are, but windmill vanes are not turbines. The name is just taken to make a serious impression.
Windmills generating electricity are not serious. They are very expensive, cannot be connected to the grid without causing havoc. When the contribution of wind energy to the grid is 20% as the EU wants, the total fuel savings including lifecycle costs are negative, as is already shown in Germany where for the second year the CO2 emissions related to energy use are increasing.
The only reasons electricity generating windmills exist are that they are subsidy cash cows for the operators running them and that they appear to give many people good feelings when they look at them.
Very expensive good feelings.
Leo Smith
" if we eliminate all fossil from the grid, we must needs have enough available nuclear capacity to meet the entire national peak demand (less whatever we can scrape out of hydro and biomass etc)."
I'm not a wind power fanatic. I'd be quite happy with an all nuclear system, since it meets the same CO2 reduction need as renewables.
Unfortunately a single nuclear power station like the new 3.2Gw Hinkley Point project costs £15billion, about the same as the combined profits of the big 6 energy companies for a year. To replace the UK generating capacity of 80Gw would need 25 of these at a total cost of £375billion spread over the next 20 years.
The Gemini consortium in the Netherlands will receive € 7.6 billon over 15 years for production of 660 MW electricity. The Dutch government, who are as silly as the UK's, envisage 7.5 of these projects by 2020, costing € 57 billion for 4.5 GW wind electricity.
After 15 years they will have to pay this again, since the windmills will then have to be replaced. All this money for zero fossil fuel savings; all existing fossil and nuclear power plants will have to continue to exist to compensate periods with no wind.
Give me your Hinckley power plant every day. Cheaper, lasting longer and reliable.
Bonneville Power Administration shows the average error in wind output forecasts is comparable to the actual wind energy supplied.
I overstated the case; I mis-remembered the data I was recalling. I had a look for current forecast-error data, and for wind the averge difference between forecast and actual average output for the whole BPA fleet is about 50% (I took 2012 as a sample year) - but that makes the error look much worse than it actually is, since the large (percentage) errors occur when the forecast and the actual output are both low: a 10 MW forecast and a 3 MW output isn't really comparable to a 875 MW forecast and 850 MW output. The average deviation is about 12% weighted by actual output level, but the data doesn't indicate the time range of the forecast - if that's a 12% deviation on a one-year forecast that's really impressive - if it's a 12% error on the hour-ahead forecast, that's pretty crummy (in fact, incredibly crummy, and it would make unit dispatch difficult).
BPA also publishes a 72 hour output forecast by hour - and updates it every hour. The coefficient of variation between the 72 forecasts for a given hour is about 60% unweighted, and 20% weighted by output. For a forecast over three days and with an average term of 1½ days (and a large installed base of wind generation - BPA has ~5,000 MW of wind) that strikes me as pretty poor forecasting. Our forecasting ability may improve, but the inherent variablity will doubless increase - one of the constraints on wind development is the reliability of the wind; as sites are developed, the locations with the steadiest wind are preferentially developed, and as we go further up the wind resource stack we should expect to see increasing variability at a site level. So far, we see little of the claimed geographic diversity benefit that evens out site variability.
dcardno
Thank you.That sounds more likely. Even 72 hours ahead is pushing weather forecasting technology quite hard. A 60% success rate for 3 day forecasts is actually quite respectable.
It would be interesting to get equivalent UK data. I found a couple of references relating to power output prediction. One is scientific, one is commercial.
Between them it would seem that accurate prediction is
a) possible.
b) becoming a requirement of the National Grid, who are expecting accurate predicted outputs 24 hoars ahead and penalising deviations.
http://www.lse.ac.uk/CATS/Publications/Publications%20PDFs/52_UsingMRweatherForecastsTo_2003.pdf
http://www.naturalpower.com/news/2011/december/more-twenty-uk-wind-farm-sites-adopt-natural-power%E2%80%99s-foresite%E2%84%A2-wind-forecasting-s
A 60% success rate for 3 day forecasts is actually quite respectable.
No. It's not.
We are not forecasting weather - we are forecasting power production. Vagaries of weather within the normal range are inconsequential - slightly warmer or colder, more or less rain or sun. Fluctuations outside the normal range - extreme storm events, primarily - have consequences, but can usually be predicted at least several days in advance. Small variations in power production have significantly larger consequences. If we are lucky, those consequences are confined to the grid operator and power companies - their costs go up and their equipent needs greater repair, both of which will be seen by society at large as an increase in the cost of energy . If we are unlucky, the consequences spill over in the form of brownouts and blackouts, as well as the increased costs of course.
@ dcardno:
"We are not forecasting weather - we are forecasting power production."
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Right to the nub of the issue. Well said, sir or madam.
I should clarify - the 72 hour prediction data was taken from a single month (August 2012, IIRC); I just couldn't be arsed to look at more than that, since the data layout is inconvenient for the analysis I wanted to do. I have no idea whether that is a representative month.
A 60% success rate for 3 day forecasts is actually quite respectable.
At the risk of banging on long after everyone has lost interest in the subject, I should also point out that this error rate is not for three-day forecasts; it is for the average of hourly forecasts over a three day period. Thus, the (presumably more uncertain) 72-hour ahead forecast is averaged in with the (presumably more certain) 1-hour ahead forecast - on average the forecast is for 36 hours ahead.