Bishop Hill Failure to deny
Oct 16, 2014 Deben Energy: grid Lord Deben and his team have issued a response to Owen Paterson's speech last night. There's plenty to take issue with. For example, readers will recall my amusement over their scientific travails over future rainfall, so it's fun to see that they are having similar problems with the temperature trends: they are touting a 0.05 degrees per decade rise as showing that surface temperatures have not stopped. Given that the error in the record appears to be considerably larger than 0.05 degrees in a single year, I think it's fair to say that the trend is indistinguishable from zero.
But perhaps of greater interest is the CCC's response to Paterson's central point, namely that we face a risk that the lights will go out. Here's what Lord D has come up with:
Claim 3: The lights will go out because of decarbonisation
There is no fundamental conflict between decarbonising and keeping the lights on. Keeping the lights on depends on having enough capacity available to meet demand at all times; decarbonisation depends on the bulk of generation coming from low-carbon sources. There are challenges relating to increased penetration of intermittent technologies on the grid, but these can be met given an appropriate response.
CCC, DECC, academia and many others have published many scenarios that decarbonise while maintaining system security. DECC have also introduced a capacity market to ensure sufficient capacity at all times – the first phase of that scheme qualified far more capacity than needed to keep the lights on (over 60GW compared to a 51GW requirement).
STATUS: Rejected. Building low-carbon capacity can help to keep the lights on, supported by capacity incentivised through the capacity market.
It's fair to say that if you flooded every valley in the country and carpeted the oceans and the remaining land with wind turbines, you might be able to generate enough renewable energy to meet demand.
But what the CCC doesn't seem to dispute is that we face a real risk of the lights going out.
Reader Comments (103)
That response is right up there with Peter Sellers' famous 'political speech' record - where he is standing on an imaginary soap-box and is able to waffle for several minutes without making a point or commitment on ANYTHING...
Just to say that sufficient capacity can be created from renewables is pointless, unless the following question is answered, precisely:
'HOW..?'
Increasingly, I think it's not Mammon which drives Debden, but madness.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M4L-fKOZ9Zs
Pointman
What if it is worse than we thought? A volcano erupts and blots out the sun. Then the wind dies out.
Showing all the talent of a six year old, pity he was nor educated to a somewhat higher level, say 11. He could then fail the 11+ examination.
As sherlock1 said "HOW", how indeed, but then he probably believes in perpetual motion despite the :Laws of Physics.
Paterson was granted an audience with 5 Live earlier. He was calm and credible, which is good as a rant-style pitch would have destroyed his credibility. He raised the Pause and simultaneous conflict between now clearly incorrect models and pricey policies based on those same flawed models.
Richard Black responded by batting for the status quo. He side-swerved the 18 year pause by claiming 'other signals' should also be considered for signs of warming.
Paterson has at least set the conversation running, which he would not have been able to do had he gone a bit extremist. Progress of a sort.
Would that they could manage to actually think about things before replying. The 0.04K/decade is not supported by the link they give and neither (if it were true) is it significant compared to the natural trend of 0.06K/decade over the last 130 years. So yes overall it was warming over the piece if you use a linear fit over a patently nonlinear process but academia were assuredly not expecting any plateau from natural effects. In fact academia en masse outright denied any pause/hiatus/plateau for at least 10 years. They must hope we all have really short memories to continue to reproduce that PR lie that is contradicted even by their own rank and file. What the plateau means is that natural variation cannot be both in decline (as used to support the dominant CO2 assertion) and simultaneously an explanation for the current slowdown: They can't have it both ways! Nor did they need more than 20 years of natural PDO warming from 1979 (after 30 years of cooling) to 1998 in order to declare catastrophe in 2000.
But the main obstacle to progress is this quasi-religious belief, echoed by Adair Turner this morning, that just making it illegal to produce CO2 will somehow magically give us a power supply based on renewables rather than just close down the entire country as seems most likely. If Deben and Decc think windmills will achieve it then are listening only to unqualified greenpeace activists than engineers. If they don't get a plan B sorted out it will be an walkover for Ukip I hope: I'm not a natural Ukip supporter by any means but I'd still vote for them because this is the biggest issue in the UK and either demonstrates the utter contempt that Lib-Lab-Con have for the little people or their complete lack of common sense: They couldn't run a toffee shop!
The interesting thing about Gumdrop's response (and increasingly, others as well) is why does Paterson's hypothesis need rebutting at all?
In essence he is saying that "renewables" are needlessly expensive and unreliable (which is not really open to much doubt except by those with axes to grind and pockets to line) and that they do little or nothing to reduce CO2 emissions which is either the case or not (and it would be helpful if some neutral researchers could finally put that dispute to bed once and for all!).
His alternative proposals which have been variously put forward by others — mini-nukes, CHP, shale gas are all pretty uncontroversial, demand management less so — would all have the effect of reducing energy costs, reducing CO2 output and increasing reliability and energy independence. That's before we look at balance of payments, job creation and any other benefits.
WTF is Deben complaining about?
So, their argument is that if we paid every single person in the UK to be a full-time carer, then everyone would be taken care of.
Spectacular levels of dimness, ideological stupidity or brazen lying*.
*Delete where applicable.
Will someone PLEASE take these people to court? Any halfway decent lawyer would ride a coach and horses through these arguments.
So the lights won't go out?
If they do then nobody will believe Lord Deben and his team again.
Sorry! If the lights do then nobody except Ed Davey and those beyond rational thought will believe Lord Deben and his team again. But they won't be heard in the outcry.
Sure you could manage to keep the lights on but at such expense that it becomes prohibitive.
It's worth looking carefully at what CCC said and comparing it with what Paterson said, to look for straw man arguments.
Look at Claim 1, where CCC say
Claim 1: There has been no temperature increase for 18 years
Now look at what Paterson said:
"the failure of the atmosphere to warm at all over the past 18 years - according to some sources."
Paterson is quite right - according to RSS satellite data there has been no atmospheric warming over the last 18 years.
As the CCC put it- STATUS: Rejected
Claim 5 says
Claim 5: The UK’s targets are unachievable – the scale of investment required is so great that the 2050 target cannot be achieved.
Here, Roger Pielke agrees with Paterson, see his blog post The Failure of the UK Climate Change Act.
the error bars in all that sceance have never been "communicated" :)
But there is much more deficiency in all that sceance:
one of the pillars in statistics besides precision is whether you actually have
enough data at all to say something useful. This has never been "communicated" to the community either.
Is it enough to have 1 thermometer in the northpole, say, for 50y, to say something about the global climate?
global means the whole world
climate means 100s 1000s and Ms of years.
terrabytes of data per day on a square/cube mm of the kitchen does not say anything/or not a lot about the kitchen.
In the case of climate they have been measuring for 10y on the surface, where the whole things is driven by the
oceans who have vastly more content/energy
https://twitter.com/lorddeben
You don't have to be on twitter to read someone's tweets.
Lord Deben, AKA John Deben, AKA John Selwyn Gummer tweets
"Owen Paterson says that the UK targets are unachievable. They have been carefully measured by the Climate Change Committee and are entirely sound". (you can google his other tweets)
To say that the "noble Lord" is running scared would be an understatement.
As we observed last night, Paterson achieved exactly what he set out to achieve.
Lift hatch, pull out pin, drop in hand grenade, close hatch,stand clear.
Presumably they asked offgem and the national grid what they thought and didn't get the answer they wanted:
Lord D says, "Building low-carbon capacity can help to keep the lights on". But this doesn't contradict Paterson's reported claim. (And I didn't notice a £ sign anywhere in the rebuttal.)
1) Unless we suddenly discover a commercially viable CCS, or build 50GW of nuclear, the only low carbon capacity we are left with is wind/solar.
Which brings us back to - what do we do when the wind does not blow and sun does not shine?
2) He talks of the capacity market mechanism, but this in reality can only be reliably supplied by fossil fuels, mainly gas.
Deben's tweet referred to 0.04% per decade over an unspecified period. Taking average temperature to be around 288K, that's about 0.115 K per decade.
https://twitter.com/lorddeben/status/522454050462531584
I'd also be interested to see how he can possibly claim that 66 countries are taking "major action" against climate change.
https://twitter.com/lorddeben/status/522454797354823680
His claim about capacity being unlinked to decarbonisation is of course utter nonsense - the amount of capacity has to increase to cover intermittency and losses through energy storage systems, as well as to replace energy consumption not currently fuelled by electricity, in particular for transport.
https://twitter.com/lorddeben/status/522502458996969472
As to the claim about soundness of the CCC's projections:
https://twitter.com/lorddeben/status/522505253674291200
I agree with Pointmen - the question is whether Deben is still of sound mind.
Worth saying as well that the lights can go out because the bills are too high to pay, as well as supply issues...
We need to de-link fear of Carbon Dioxide (which may well be a great plant food) and society's power generation policy. Or decide Carbon Dioxide reduction is more important than sustaining society.
I take it you have all listened to Owen Patterson on the Jeremy Vine show BBC Radio 2 in the last hour.
They put up against him Prof. Richard Allan from Reading Uni. He was a revelation and well worth a listen on the listen again. The world is still warming and GCM have forecast the temperature rises of the last 40 years. The science is settled.
Re: Patterson's proposal (mentioned on Vine's show) to put "shut-off" controls on home refrigerators ... is this real? Is there a cost/benefit analysis available on this? feels like a red herring.
The CCC is as mad as a March hare, but more importantly, the CCC is a bigger danger to the future of this country than Hitler ever was.
Re, "decarbonisation depends on the bulk of generation coming from low-carbon sources".
So the CCC thinks decarbonisation means 50.01% of electricity coming from low-carbon sources.
Not zero-carbon sources. Not 100% of electricity. And only a tiny percentage of all *energy*.
I wonder what the Green Blob thinks of that?
Does anyone have any ideas how a 'fridge can be selectively switched off.
Surely, to do this there must either be :-
Direct connection to the electricity meter; or an electronic device in it 'fridge that responds to a mains wiring signal.
If the former, it will require all houses to be rewired. (The 13A ring main will not be able to be used) If the latter, then is anyone aware of this development?
I suspect that eating all those BSE burgers in the 80's in support of the beef industry, has fried Deben's synapses and turned what little brain he had to sponge. Having said that he definitely wasn't the brightest crayon in the box even before the BSE crisis.
I forget who said words to the effect of: 'when a substantial part of power generation is intermittent the whole grid becomes intermittent'
this is what will be engraved on Deben's tomb
Owen Paterson knows what he up against, with the Green Blob on the other side.
"I soon realised that the greens and their industrial and bureaucratic allies are used to getting things their own way. I received more death threats in a few months at [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] than I ever did as secretary of state for Northern Ireland."
http://online.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-the-green-blob-1407366963?KEYWORDS=owen+paterson+
Watching government on wind is like watching a man sawing the tree trunk on which he sits.
Once you've said that its a really daft thing to do and when you've been totally ignored, all that one can reasonably do is to stand back and laugh - ideally with a video camera so that every other daft chump can see how daft they are.
RetiredDave: "They put up against him Prof. Richard Allan from Reading Uni. He was a revelation and well worth a listen on the listen again. The world is still warming and GCM have forecast the temperature rises of the last 40 years. The science is settled."
The amazing thing is that academia has been talking this kind of nonsense for hundreds of years, but because academia wrote "history", we never heard about it.
Then along came the internet - and now we are the ones writing up the history - and they still think they can get away with this ridiculous clap trap?
"capacity incentivised through the capacity market" in other words, subsidised heavily
"Failure to deny: we face a real risk of the lights going out."
Why would anyone deny this? We have always faced a risk of the lights going out. We traditionally mitigate this risk by building, on average, twice as many power plants as we actually need (overall capacity factor for conventional plant is around 50%) in order to be able to cope with occasional peak use. And that plant has average efficiencies of around 50%, throwing away the other half. All quite uncontroversial.
"these can be met given an appropriate response" which is? The point made is that there is no way to fix the intermittency problem, no "appropriate response" short of everyone sitting in the dark if the wind does not blow. Wow.
I presume when they say capacity market, they actually mean the "stor" , us paying over the odds for diesel generators to be ready to take up the slack when the shit hits the windmill!
@John de Melle Oct 16, 2014 at 2:33 PM
"Does anyone have any ideas how a 'fridge can be selectively switched off"
Wifi with new Smart Meter and wifi configured fridge etc. I think 300 experimental/test ones are being shipped to UK via the EU fools fairly soon.
Similar to wifi wall plug-in units related to Routers.
Bothers me immensely that compressors are going to be short cycled. But they may have a bit of electronics installed to check gas pressure each side of a compressor...massive junk
Re: John de Melle Oct 16, 2014 at 2:33 PM
Switching off fridges is easy to do, but you must buy a new fridge. Such a new fridge then measures the mains frequency and, when the frequency is too low, the compressor can be switched off. When the frequency is sufficiently high, the fridge can start pumping heat again.
The mains frequency of 50Hz +/- 0.5 Hz is a measure of grid load. When the frequency approaches 49.5 Hz new electricity generation must be switched on. Of course, that is a difficult thing to do with windmills when the wind does not blow. It is quite easy and quick with CCGT generators, it takes a bit longer with coal. Nuclear is also not easily ramped up or down.
However, switching off fridges is a rather pointless thing to do. It will never save any energy, because for every outside temperature it takes a specified amount of energy to keep a fridge at the inside temperature set by its thermostat. As soon as the grid frequency has sufficently increased, all the fridges with mains frequency apps wil switch on again and start pumping. This sudden extra load could cause the grid frequency to become low again, so that all fridges would switch off again. And so on. That is an illustration of grid instability.
The only boon of the mains frequency app is to defer fridge load to a later time, hoping the wind will blow soon. This could take a long time. When you investigate at Gridwatch you will see that during the first three weeks of September there was hardly any wind. If the fridges are off for more than a couple of hours, the food will certainly be damaged. When the fridges are off for a couple of weeks, of course, the food will have to be thrown away.
The mains frequency app for fridges is a harebrained green idea, just like using diesel generators as backup capacity. The best thing to do is to take all windmills off the grid and build new nuclear, coal and gas plants.
After all, the CO2 savings exercise is totally theoretical; it is calculated from the wind energy output delivered to the grid. Never is the mayhem caused by the windmill intermittency on the grid calculated in these sums, nor the lifecycle energy used for windmills (production, transport, installation, grid adaptation, maintenance and end-of-life removal). When these energy costs are taken into account it becomes clear that windmill CO2 savings are in the order of 1% of nameplate (full) power, for 10% total wind energy contribution to the grid. For higher contributions the savings become negative.
I remember when the mad cow disease was in its heyday and he fed himself and grandchild with beefburgers maybe he was foolhardy because his brainpower seems somewhat diminished.
Lord D whose snot is firmly jammed in many a renewable trough and in case you wondering yes he does have back diesel generators and no wind power at his place. .
Peter Whale
"his brainpower seems somewhat diminished."
I think you're being kind. In the Bish's phrase, it is indistinguishable from zero. :-)
Albert
"switching off fridges is a rather pointless thing to do"
Indeed. Mine uses about 100W, when running, or the same as an old (pre-EU regulation) light-bulb. My cooker, which I should be very annoyed to have switch off at random, can draw 100 times as much...
Can't we have something a little more dramatic than " the lights will go out" its just too tame. Bring back the three day week I say.
- will everyone who thinks who thinks tiny fridge power will magically smooth gigawatts of grid deficiency in the UK stop pretending unless they have some new evidence
(I repeat from the other thread..as I play wack-a-mole with this myth across today's posts)
The idea of turning appliances off for short periods is sensible. It is not to save energy but to move the demand peaks and save on the need to run up and down generators to cover peak load. There must be around million fridges sold each year in the UK, so if all new ones had built in frequency sensitivity and 10% of them dropped 1KW of load on detecting under-frequency, that would be a 100MW drop in load. That is a simplistic example but it illustrates that the amounts of demand management possible from this sort of technology are not small. And it is not limited to fridges. The costs would be trivial if mass produced. And the issue of them all turning back on at once is solved by a random standoff period.
@Raff - one steel furnace consumes 60 MW
home use of electricity is nothing compared to other sectors
Then why does the grid have to take special measures when home use peaks in TV breaks if, as you say, "home use of electricity is nothing compared to other sectors"?
Like I said after only 1 year with only 10% of the new fridges (in that year) responding to the frequency dip, there could be 100MW of demand management capacity available. Not much different from your steel furnace, except that it is distributed.
What Deben has said is what the IPCC say: the energy and energy economic models say the plan will work. What Paterson says is, like the IPCC climate models, the energy and energy economic models don't consider real world conditions and so their usefulness is nil, i.e. the models don't "work", so the plan won't work.
I have written on the different types of Certainty in WUWT. To recap, there are four kinds:
1. Computational certainty, which is that the numbers as crunched are consistent. The math is good.
2. Intellectual certainty, which is we have figured things out, how they work etc., and the results are consistent. We're really, really smart.
3. Ideological certainty, which is we are on the right path, the path is not necessarily straight, but it will get us to where we should be. Our intentions and goals are laudable.
4. Representational certainty, which is that our expectations demonstrate fidelity to experience and current observation, and have very small aspects that are not yet determined. We'll bet our first-born on this.
Deben and the others speak about the first three; Paterson, the fourth. Planes fall out of the sky if all you require of your engineers is adherence to the first three.
Martyn
I agree. Something along the lines of "not only will all computers crash including yours but the economy will probably be in dire straits" might be nearer the point.
Messenger
I think we could say "there will be civil unrest, rioting, looting and deaths".
100 MW of demand management is pathetic, on a total demand of 30 - 40 GW. It will have no influence whatsoever.
Thanks for the info about switching off fridges. It looks as if my soldering iron will be busy modifying it.
If they plan to use WIFI for anything then "hard cheese" as it is always switched of, except when I am downloading to my Kindle.
Could be an autumn/winter/spring of discontent on the way. Don't worry too much about powering the fridges, there won't be much in them.