Bishop Hill What on earth is Ewing doing?
Nov 9, 2015 Energy: grid Cornwall Energy is reporting that Scottish energy minister Fergus Ewing is worried about the lights going out. Indeed, so concerned is he, that he has written a letter to DECC. I kid you not.
In the letter, issued on Sunday 8 November, Ewing suggested that capacity margins were "worryingly low" and that the problem was being exacerbated by the government's energy policies.
Helpfully, Mr Ewing has made some suggestions about what DECC should do to ameliorate the situation:
He said policy needed to focus on ensuring faster build of new power capacity...
Seems sensible. And what types of generation do you think Mr Ewing flags up for DECC's attention?
...renewables in combination with increased storage capacity as well as carbon capture and storage for thermal generation.
Face, meet palm
Reader Comments (104)
My belief has never been so beggered
To be fair, Ineos did make an effort to do this recently, by having a sponsored page in the Daily Record, which was until Murdoch's Sun got a toe hold, the most read newspaper in Scotland:
Daily Record, Fracking, what's involved, 23rd June 2015
Also a follow up Q and A the next day.
To his credit, Jim Sillars has also been pointing out the idiocy of the current SNP policy on climate, energy and fracking, ironically in the only pro SNP newspaper, the National:
http://www.thenational.scot/comment/letters-to-the-national-october-23-current-energy-policy-is-a-grave-handicap-to-ailing-steel-industry.9083.
I still blame the Civil Servants and Scientific Advisors in Holyrood and Whitehall for the mess we are in, north and south of the border. The politicians are clearly not qualified to manage the grid nor energy policy, but the Civil servants have a duty to give impartial advice and when they do not know themselves, to seek expert advice and then explain the implication of an energy policy which favours unreliables rather than baseload and load-following stations. This has not happened, and instead they have taken advice from people like Bryony Worthington and Richard Dixon in WWF and FoE. Peak idiots indeed.
At 12:10, Bloke down the pub wrote "… pumped storage sites …" with reference to this, I think:
...renewables in combination with increased storage capacity as well as carbon capture and storage for thermal generation.
While pumped storage may be included in this, the statement is not clear – suggesting Mr. Ewing's thinking is likewise unclear.
"storage capacity" – might mean batteries, as well as a reservoir;
"carbon capture" – here seems not to be attached to the word storage; rather there is …
"storage for thermal" – that I took to mean Fergus knows wood chips and straw - when repeatedly rained on - do not burn well.
Thus, he could be asking for a super-sized building to keep imported wood chips dry. Big piles of wet "biomass" can also combust spontaneously, and maybe he knows that too.
As the Bish writes: "Face, meet palm"
Totally agree James, it took a while, but it is clear that the SNP leadership now fully understand the seriousness of the capacity margin situation (and maybe even that grid stability will be a real concern once Longannet closes). The problem lies with Cameron and the idiots in DECC. Or maybe they know too and are playing a game of bluff with the SNP over their refusal to consider a new nuclear plant. It is a game of Russian roulette though, and they don't seem to understand this.
Robert Christopher 4:09, Heathrow airport and electric cars. If they could build a wind turbine, with the blades rotating horizontally, they could generate electricity for the battery cars from the rising thermal updrafts, coming from the hot tarmac and jet engines.
The Met Office keep telling us how hot Heathrow is, but no Green has thought to harness the unique meteorological conditions created by man.
Pointman
Anyone called "Ewing" is the closest that the SNP comes to an aristocracy.
Winnie Ewing (sometimes referred to as Madame Ecosse, which is not a reference to Dickens' Madame Defarge in Tale of Two Cities burt don't tempt me!) is the grande dame of Scottish Nationalist politics.
Now 86, she won a by-election in 1967 and though she was booted out three years later she returned as MP for Moray and Nairn in 1974 and was in one parliament or another for the next 29 years.
Fergus is her son.
Bish: Ewing shouldn't be criticized for telling the truth. A shortage of generation capacity can be addressed by "renewables in combination with increased STORAGE CAPACITY as well as carbon capture and storage for thermal generation."
Now the right questions are: How much does it cost? Is it technically feasible? Can it be built in time? What are the other alternatives?
ScienceofDoom has reviewed a recent paper discussing how much it would cost to provide 99.9% reliable electricity from renewable generation (wind and solar) in the Mid-Atlantic region of the US. The authors started with weather history for several years found (by trying thousands of combinations by trial and error) the lowest cost combination of generation sources and storage that would meet the actual hourly demand during the same years. The Mid-Atlantic region, like Scotland, is a poor region for solar, with a levelized cost for solar generation 3X larger than wind. To reliably meet demand, they projected a need for wind farms with a nameplate capacity 10X bigger than average demand and plus battery storage to get through several days of calm. The wind farms would cover 10% of the land. The battery storage would be similar to that required to provide everyone with electric vehicles. In Scotland, you may be able to use pumped storage of water for hydroelectric generation instead of batteries. That's right: To RELIABLY deal with intermittency, one will be wasting about 90% of the electricity being generated when winds are strong and expensive electricity storage is full!
http://scienceofdoom.com/2015/10/20/renewables-xiv-minimized-cost-of-99-9-renewable-study/
The goal of this study was 99.9% of electricity from renewables, mostly wind in this case. Suppose your short-term target was 50% conventional and 50% renewable. If the nameplate capacity of your conventional sources is 55% of average demand, your renewables must provide the other 45-50% with 99.7% reliability. This study provides an estimate of what is required to achieve this goal reliably: Massive overbuilding in terms of nameplate capacity plus expensive storage.
With Ewing, you have a minister who realizes that reliable electricity from wind requires storage of power for calm periods. Now he simply needs to admit just how much this costs - in money and environmental degradation: ?-fold increase in wind farms and numerous valleys flooded for pumped hydroelectric storage.
Frank
I've said before, if the wind isn't blowing then an infinity of windmills still won't meet demand! The end result is that the commitment to provide back-up is such that the there is no point in having the windmills UNLESS somebody very soon comes up with realistic storage at realistic cost!
It looks as if scienceofdoom might be making sense and since he seems to be some sort of hero to the warmistas maybe something will come of this.
Frank, expert opinion on renewables, is unreliable. People who have tried and failed to depend on renewables, are more reliable in their advice.
The SNP want Scotland to be the first country to shift from reliables, to unreliable non-renewables, even as the rest of the UK is starting to learn lessons, and stop renewing past mistakes.
Unless SNP manifesto pledges turn out to be unreliable, and are not renewed, and Ewing was just being political about renewables.
@Gareth. If you invoke with XML format you get a long list starting:
<PAGES>
<TITLE TEXT="Historic NONBM STOR Instructed Volumes for 2015-11-04 "/>
<TYPES>
<TYPE ID="DATE" TITLE="DATE" PLOT_YN="N"/>
<TYPE ID="SP" TITLE="S/P" PLOT_YN="N"/>
<TYPE ID="NONBM" TITLE="Non-BM STOR Instructed Volume (MWh)" UNITS="MWh" COLOR="#008B8B" PLOT_YN="Y" CSV_TYPE="NONBM"/>
</TYPES>
<SD SD="2015-11-04">
<SP SP="1">
<SERIES ID="NONBM" ZONE="N" TIME="2015-11-04 00:30:00" VAL=" 0.000"/>
</SP>
<SP SP="2">
<SERIES ID="NONBM" ZONE="N" TIME="2015-11-04 01:00:00" VAL=" 0.000"/>
</SP>
So you are right the time interval is 30min and the unit MWh. The colour is a deep sea green - you cannot get away from it
-- Peter
Frank and what happens when we are becalmed for more than a few days? A period of almost no wind for a fortnight is not impossible, especially in the coldest parts of the year. If 10% of the land is used for wind turbines, how much road infrastructure would that involve? How many individual windmills would there be? How long would they take to build? Given that they have a lifetime of 15-30 years, how many windmills would have to be replaced every day and at what cost? How much energy would it take? How much cement?
Frank
The UK is currently consuming 43GW, on a very mild November evening, and demand averages about 800GWh per day. Have you the foggiest idea how many batteries you would need to store even a tenth of that?
(Clue, it's about a million of the bigger Tesla EV batteries).
It should also be pointed out that if every western country put up such a huge quantity of wind turbines this would be likely to have an effect on the climate.
Mike Jackson: "The end result is that the commitment to provide back-up is such that the there is no point in having the windmills UNLESS somebody very soon comes up with realistic storage at realistic cost!"
Exactly. Given that power appears to be becoming critically short now, whatever is built NOW must be reliable - otherwise you will have outages. The only way you build reliable renewable power now is to take into account the actual hour-to-hour intermittency of current wind farm output, the history of customer demand, and the cost of today's expensive storage options. Then you need to recognize that the cheapest option probably involves massive overbuilding of nameplate wind capacity. Every GW of nameplate wind capacity provides an average of 0.3 GW of power, but only 0.1 GW or less of output reasonably often. It is too expensive to get the additional 0.2 GW from storage, so you need to building nameplate capacity about 10X average (in the Mid-Atlantic at least).
Until carbon dioxide storage has been tested in Scotland and shown to be safe, large-scale coal with carbon capture isn't an option.
Current wind power has been relying on the normal reserve the grid maintains to handle unexpected demand and outages, so its intermittency hasn't had a big impact in the past. Now that dispatchable generation capacity is becoming critically low, intermittency must be confronted. Anyone discussing renewable power and storage capacity has begun to recognize this reality. The next step is recognizing monetary and environmental costs. Renewable power is possible, but few Scots will want to pay the price.
FWIW, in my personal opinion, SOD isn't a hero to warmistas. You might check out these early posts. The second provides a link to Wegman report and to ClimateAudit - as well as RealClimate.
http://scienceofdoom.com/2009/12/13/understanding-the-flaw/
http://scienceofdoom.com/2009/11/22/temperature-history/
The problem is that conventional physics does predict a no-feedbacks climate sensitivity of about 1 K for a doubling of CO2 and indicates that some feedbacks will increase this by an unknown amount. This creates problems for Dragon Slayers and others who reject or don't understand conventional physics.
TinyCO2 Nov 9, 2015 at 1:01 PM
Very true. I'm in Scotland in a mid-eighties built semi-detached with original double glazing, interior wall insulation and loft insulation as required by Scottish building regs when constructed.
When the wind is strong it is much colder in the house, as you say the wind literally sucks the heat out. My theory is that stored heat in the bricks (both solar and from interior) is wind-chilled away resulting in a larger temperature gradient and same with the exterior pane of glass in windows. This is based on the unscientific method of temperatures of walls inside - placing palm of hands on wall(s). On a normal day the temperature of the party wall is the same as the exterior wall, on windy days like today the exterior wall is noticeably much colder.
'Or, "Two out of three ain't bad" :)' --JamesG
That's batting 666, number of the Beast.
Our local sustainability group has arranged for this to come to our village, one evening, later this month, with a local attendee of the Paris summit to lead the discussion afterwards:
http://extremeicesurvey.org
Let's hope there is enough electricity to power the village hall lights :)
"Why are we not out on the streets campaigning on this stuff? A BH march would be good." --John
When the lights go out, believe me, the blob will be out on the streets, blaming 'deniers' for not spending enough on wind and solar. Maybe now is the time to start marching...
Peak idiot!
Just like peak oil, you think you have see the most, but then they go and find some more!
With peak idiots, we successfully get them out of parliament but they end up in the HoL.....
Fergus Ewing should made to copy longhand Peter Styles piece hosted on Ineos' web site 100 times
- presently on the "seen elsewhere" link list top right at BH...
OMG, Face palm gun to head bang. What a class A nutjob. OMG are the scots in trouble. Give them independence now before its too late.
Frank, how come conventional physics did not predict the pause?
How come conventional physics failed to point out the flaws in Mann's Hockey Stick?
People who rely on the consensus of conventional or basic physics, need to tamper with their data, to make it fit. That was not what I was taught when I did basic physics about 40 years ago, but maybe that is my fault for not staying up to date with modern methods.
Pcar, the greens dream of super insulated buildings but it's not like we're about to flatten and rebuild when we can't even build new what we need to make up population growth. That leaves us with buildings that gave little thought to CO2 and often the ventillation is key to stopping the building rot and/or asphixiate the owners.
If you put an infinite number of Greens, in front of an infinite number of flat batteries it would:
a) give them something useful to do
b) still be a waste of effort/energy
c) create full employment in Green industry
d) all the above
Golf Charlie wrote: "Expert opinion on renewables is unreliable."
Expert opinion is often unreliable. However, there are facts. The paper discussed at SOD has facts - although many are not discussed candidly.
Ewing statement suggests that she knows the the most important fact that most politician ignore: Reliable power from additional wind will require storage of power, probably pumped hydroelectric in Scotland. Britain already has 9.1 GWh of pumped hydroelectric storage at Dinorwig that can generate 1.8 GW of dispatchable power (and lesser amounts at three other sites in 2005). The cost of that facility is known. The cost of wind turbines is known (although there usable lifetime is somewhat uncertain). The record of wind output and demand needed to design a reliably increase capacity with new wind farms is known. When those facts are laid out in front of the public - the public presumably will reject the cost.
The problem arises with leaders incapable of recognizing that additional wind power requires storage of power to be used in calm periods. The limited wind power developed so far has been backed up by dispatchable fossil fuel plants, some of which have been and are being driven into retirement. Now that there is insufficient dispatchable reserve, new wind power will need to be accompanied by storage capacity and deliberate overbuilding of nameplate capacity.
Technology for carbon capture and storage exists and its rough cost is known. However, that technology can't be extensively used without at least a decade of experience at several sites showing that storage is safe - that people in low-lying areas aren't going to be killed in the event of a seepage.
Lapogus
Thanks for the links it cheered me up. Maybe the fightback is on. Only depressing thing was the poll was still 65% against. Good old Jim Sillars. He was always good to listen to. I still remember the '90 minute patriots' jibe. Spot-on analysis at the time!
Frank
You're forgetting about compressed air storage, either below or above ground in pressure vessels. This tech is already being done. Some costs here:
http://www.thegreenage.co.uk/tech/compressed-air-energy-storage/
In fact we need to store gas underground too - for exactly the same reason of smoothing demand.
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/research/energy/undergroundGasStorage.html
Charlie Golf asked: How come conventional physics did not predict the pause?
Conventional physics recognizes that our weather and climate behaves chaotically. Some chaotic systems are known to demonstrate a long-term average behavior, but it is difficult to demonstrate how it takes for the long-term average to be observed. (SOD speculated that the standard 30-year period used to define climate may be too short to produce a true average.) So the pause poses absolutely no problems to conventional physics.
The pause and other fluctuations in warming in the 20th century appear to be examples of unforced or internal variability. SInce the deep ocean is much colder than the surface, chaotic fluctuations in the amount of upwelling and downwelling can easily change the surface temperature of the ocean for long periods of time. ENSO is an example of such unforced variability: Among other phenomena, upwelling of cold water off the coast of Peru and downwelling of warm water in the Western Pacific both slow during an El Nino. The PDO appears to represent a tendency for more or less frequent El Ninos. The AMO may be produced by chaotic or regular fluctuations in the meridional overturning current in the Atlantic involving deepwater.
The pause poses problems for the climate scientists who chose to ignore the important role that chaos and unforced variability play in our climate. The potential unforced variability in climate makes it difficult to interpret the meaning of any modest trend or change in temperature. Since we don't know if cold periods like the LIA, and warm periods like the MWP were "unforced variability or "naturally forced" (by volcanos, cosmic rays, changes in the sun, etc.), it is possible that climate sensitivity is very low and that most 20th century warming could be attributed to unforced variability. Conventional physics tells us that about 0.5 K of warming would be produced by the 20th century rising in CO2 (without feedbacks, aerosols and solar fluctuations - which are poorly understood).
Frank, renewables remain unreliable.
Carbon capture and storage remains an uneconomic white elephant.
Battery technology is improving, but you still need a reliable method of charging them.
When people are cold and hungry, worrying about their carbon footprint to rectify cold and hunger, for them and their nearest and dearest, is not high on their list of priorities. They actually get quite angry, for a long time, with those responsible for making them cold and hungry. As underinvestment and subsequent closure of reliable power generators, has been one of the intended consequences of the Climate Change Act, and other 'Green' policies, you are going to have to do better than relying on the 97% consensus and basic physics to explaing two decades of no warming, contrary to all predictions.
ps, I was fooled once by Michael Mann's Hockey Stick, so why should I trust climate scientists now? Even the IPCC seem to have lost trust in the Hockey Stick
For those not acquainted with Mr Ewing (oor Fergie) there is a very sound reason why he makes comments such as this - he is an idiot. In a party totally bereft of any technical savvy Fergie is the stand out buffoon.
jamesp,
Each line of data represents half an hour of grid operation. In an entire day there are 48 of these periods and the figure at the end of each line is what I assume to be the amount of energy the grid operator told the STOR suppliers to provide.
The data I quoted begins at half past three in the afternoon (the line contains 153000. The following line contains 160000, etc) In the early evening on 4th November the grid operators instructed the STOR suppliers to begin supplying the grid for a couple of hours to cover for an unexpected shortage of power. Before and after that STOR was providing no power. I've gone back a couple of weeks and there have been several other times when STOR appears to have been supporting the grid.
There can be days when nothing was needed - 2015-10-29, and days when possibly quite a lot was needed - 2015-10-24 and 2015-10-31.
If it is working as intended you'd think they would be shouting about it.
Frank: As you say, some views of conventional physics indicate a slight warming, which in general is very beneficial. Why would you want to consider carbon capture and storage?
If any warming at all is slight, and we have no indications of any for nearly 20 years, why do you want to manufacture a solution for a problem that does not exist?
Your manufactured solution is expensive, inefficient, will generate more CO2 to power the system, why why why?
You admit that climate is considered chaotic, why move any further forwards?
IF climate is TRULY chaotic it is not predictable therefore cease spending money on research into climate and lets live with what we have and adapt to any change IF AND WHEN that change happens.
Frank, as a follow up, would it be better to think more about the causes of the MWP and LIA? Conventional climate science pretends the LIA was not significant, and the MWP did not exist.
If you can explain previous anomalies, the late 20th century anomaly might turn out to be normal after all, and we would not need abnormal physics to explain what is so different.
My opponent in the recent election was the Minister for Energy -- we met at the Remembrance Sunday parade on Sunday when, to give him his due he came to shake hands. 'I thought of you last week' he said. 'When you read about the electricity crisis?' I asked. 'No, the Vulcan and the barrel roll.' But I digress.*
I've told people this before. When he was MfE he informed me that solar was going to solve our supply problems and looked nonplussed when I pointed out that we'd need to store the energy. Let me be cross about this. THE MINISTER FOR ENERGY DID NOT KNOW WE NEED TO STORE RENEWABLE ENERGY IF WE WANT TO KEEP THE LIGHTS ON. !. Bloody !!
Sorry about that, but what is there to do but shout? He's off to a new job, a Cabinet post, he walks away and the people who depend on us to represent their interests are left to suffer the consequences. Were his civil servants as ignorant as he? I wouldn't bet against that explanation.
Don't blame me, I stood for UKIP.
JF
* I raised a glass to 558 and her last reach for the sky this week, and remembered out-turning a Lightning at 53,000ft over the Med. To stop himself falling out of the sky the pilot had to go supersonic and dropped a boom on Limassol. I grow old, I grow old....
Tiny CO2 asked: "what happens when we are becalmed for more than a few days? A period of almost no wind for a fortnight is not impossible, especially in the coldest parts of the year."
Answer: You must spend a lot to money to have reliable renewable power. The lowest cost solution advocated for the US Mid-Atlantic advocated building wind farms with a nameplate capacity roughly 10X average demand, so that even modest winds will usually meet demand. More than half of the wind power will be wasted. The scenario also includes storage capacity capable of meeting 9-72 hours of average demand. (Off-shore wind has fewer totally calm periods than on-shore.) Based on weather records for 4 years, this combination would have provided all of the power needed to meet actual demand on all but parts of 5 days during those 4 years (99.9% of the hours).
My point is that you have an energy minister who apparently actually recognizes that wind power requires storage capacity to get through calm periods. You need to demand that the advocates of renewable power to show how their plans for new capacity will meet 99.9% of the demand no longer capable of being supplied by dispatchable generators using historical weather and demand data - as was done in this paper. If Scotland has longer calm periods than the Mid-Atlantic region of the US, then you will need more storage and more wind farms. The technology for getting by on renewable power exists - but even the best solutions are likely to be found to be too expensive and too intrusive to be adopted.
In other words, don't say renewable power can't replace the fossil fuel plants scheduled for retirement. Ask how much it COSTS (money and land) to replace these plants with a 99.9% RELIABLE source of renewable power.
A link for the paper is provided below, but the post and comments at ScienceofDoom expose some of the deceptions in the paper. For example, the cost of fossil fuel power includes the cost of negative externalities which double the cost. So when they cite costs comparable to today's, it means double today's cost. Their cost of storage as hydrogen appears to be off by a factor of 10, so that option should be ignored. They unrealistically assume that everyone will be driving an electricity vehicle whose battery power can be confiscated when needed for 10% of the cost of the battery. So the central battery storage option is the only valid one. Despite these limitations, they show what it actually takes to provide reliable renewable power to a large area: massive overbuilding of wind farms (wasting more than 50% of their output) and very expensive storage capacity.
http://www.udel.edu/V2G/resources/BudischakEtAl-2013-CostMinimizedWindSolarPJM.pdf
http://scienceofdoom.com/2015/10/20/renewables-xiv-minimized-cost-of-99-9-renewable-study/
Julian Flood @10:53 AM
thanks for the insight into Matthew Hancock's grasp (or rather pitiful lack thereof) of his ministerial brief - his civil servants must have loved him dearly - while the rest of us paid dearly....
That such a talented Oxford PPE is now Minister for The Cabinet Office must please
Sir Humphrey ApplebySir Jeremy Heywood immenslyGolf Charlie: Two periods of low solar activity occurred during the LIA: the Maunder and Dalton minimums. The largest estimates of reduced solar output are about 5 W/m2, which when spread over the surface of the planet comprise a -1 W/m2 forcing. That is not enough to account for the cold during the LIA. So, as best I can tell, we can't rule out the possibility that unforced variability can cause a 1 degC temperature change lasting centuries. That doesn't mean unforced variability DID CAUSE most of the LIA or MWP. The 20th century provides some evidence that the amplitude of unforced variability might be about 0.3 degC and last for two decades.
When Mann's hockey stick first appeared, climate scientists chose to ignore the strong evidence for a significant LIA and allowed it to be highly publicized. All of the authors of the paleoclimatology section of AR3 except Mann had to know something was wrong with the hockey stick and their summary for policymakers claimed that it way merely "likely" that it was now warmer than the MWP (greater than 66% likelihood). The hockey stick papers claimed 95% confidence. No reconstructions published since Mann's early work show a straight "handle" and the absence of an LIA. Everyone (even Mann) now believes in a LIA; they simply don't want to say Mann was wrong.
Steve Richards: I think you misunderstand my position: Given the large range of climate sensitivity compatible with conventional physics, the high cost of reliable renewable power probably doesn't make sense today. Nuclear makes far more sense. Those opposed to nuclear power probably should include a lot coal with carbon capture, because it is dispatchable and therefore reduces the need for expensive storage. However, it is also expensive and not properly tested for safe storage.
There is no evidence from the Holocene that our chaotic climate has varied much more than about 1 degC. (There has been a steady slow cooling bigger than this associated with orbital changes). If climate sensitivity is high, unforced variability and natural variability aren't big enough to save us from what many suspect will be catastrophic change. And if we wait to reduce emissions until it is clear just how high or low climate sensitivity really is, mitigation will certainly be much more difficult. However, that doesn't mean we should spend ridiculous amounts of money today trying to make wind into a reliable source of power - even though that is technically feasible.
So Fergus Ewing knows much more than Mathew Hancock but Ewing is the idiot for basically telling the truth? Yeah right! FYI as long as there is a legal requirement to limit CO2 then there is an obligation for CCS with gas and storage of renewable energy and Ewing has to mention them. You can argue as hard as you like about options to whoever - and I have - but the answer always comes back that CO2 reduction is legally binding.
Also you can buy battery backup for your solar panels now and have been able to do so for 20 years at least. And prices are falling.
And any study of storage that does not consider compressing air underground or in tanks (a technology required to be constructed anyway for gas) hasn't really considered all options has it?
Frank, 11:37, thank you for your response. If more climate scientists had made a more honest assessment of Michael Mann, his Hockey Stick and it's consequences, a lot of the ridiculous claims about global warming would have been avoided.
Unfortunately, in the run up to Paris, some of the world leaders in global warming are still refortifying their trenches, to defend, pointlessly, the indefensible. The UK public are working it out for themselves, as the terrible consequences of global warming fail to materialise. Power cuts are more likely, due to unsubstantiated fears, and reliance on unreliable technology.
Charlie Golf wrote: "Carbon capture and storage remains an uneconomic white elephant."
That is partially accurate. Almost everyone is abandoning their carbon capture demonstration projects. However, I don't think cost is the problem. If I understand correctly, capture only doubles the cost of getting electricity from coal without capture. My guess is that projects are being abandoned because few are willing to run the risk of a leak after burying the captured CO2 under ground. Since CO2 is denser than air and undetectable without special equipment, anyone in a nearby low area could suffocate from a nearby leak. Furthermore, carbon capture removes only 80-90% of the CO2 and you use a lot of power recovering, compressing and disposing of the captured CO2. So burning coal with carbon capture might be only modestly better than burning natural gas in terms of CO2 emission per GW. Since our reserves of coal are far larger than other fossil fuels and since dispatchable power is far more useful than non-dispatchable power, the day could come when burning coal with carbon capture makes sense.
If you build wind farms with nameplate capacity about 10X average demand, there will be plenty of excess wind power to charge batteries or power "pumped storage" on average days. It is my understanding that the Swiss buy up cheap excess German electricity from solar during the summer and use it to pump water back up into their dams. Then they use that water to generate electricity for the Germans in the winter when the price is high. Supposedly pumped storage is being installed at every dam in the Alps.
Charlie Golf asked: "I was fooled once by Michael Mann's Hockey Stick, so why should I trust climate scientists now?
You should not trust them. Stephen Schneider has told his peers that it is acceptable for them to tell the public scary stores, to oversimplify, and to hide their doubts in order to make the world a better place. Anyone who isn't revolted by this doesn't deserve to be called a scientist and live in a democracy. On the other hand, many scientists do try to practice ethical science as Schneider defined it (the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, with all of the ifs, ands, buts, and caveats) when publishing their work in technical journals and even some portions of the IPCC's technical chapters. With care, you can pick and choose some parts of climate science that are trustworthy. For me, that doesn't include much paleoclimatology or output from climate models. On the other hand, you can't trust much of the science posted on skeptical blogs either. Fortunately, our host is fairly cautious commenting about the technical aspects of climate science. I listen to the few skeptics who actually manage to get something published.
Frank, the Sun's heat output per sq. metre doesn't have to change to explain the cooling of the LIA (or previous cold or warm periods). It is the surface insolation at the tropics and mid latitudes which matters. If Svensmark & Shaviv's cloud-seeding hypothesis is correct, then the Sun's electromagnetic output and moderation of ncoming cosmic rays can explain much of the climate's variability. Just look at how well the cloud cover data has correlated with global temperatures in the last 30 years:
Climate for You; cloud cover verses air temps, tropics graph
or: Global cloud anomaly (%), 1983-2012) and Hadcrut4, 1982-2013. (if you have an image editor, invert the Hadcrut4 graph and resize it by a ratio of about 1.13 to get the scales to match).
Interestingly the IPCC also recognised this, until they realised the implication was that the CO2 game would be up.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/12/01/ipcc-finds-the-important-natural-climate-driver-solar-surface-radiation-intensity-but-then-ignores-and-buries-it.
In case anyone is interested (which I doubt) the SNP don't just bloviate like some folk here; they consult recognised experts and publish actual reports. Nor do they irrevocably commit to high costs. Details here regarding CCS with links lengthy documents..
http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Business-Industry/Energy/Energy-sources/traditional-fuels/new-technologies/SGactionCCS
"In the UK only offshore storage areas are currently considered suitable by Government for CO2 storage"
"Rolling review of technical and economic viability of CCS will take place"
"..if CCS is not seen as technically and financially viable alternatives around the Emissions Trading Scheme and possibly an Emissions Performance Standard could be considered."
Frank, do not forget that if you get your 10x number of wind turbines, you will need to massively build up the grid (overhead cables, pylons etc) to get that extra current from, perhaps one tenth of the country with wind, to all other parts of the country without wind. The next day conditions will be different, so overall a high density electricity distribution grid 'expensive'.........
JamesG wrote: "In case anyone is interested (which I doubt) the SNP don't just bloviate like some folk here; they consult recognised experts and publish actual reports. Nor do they irrevocably commit to high costs."
Total BS. The link you provide says this about renewable energy:
"What are we aiming for? Renewable sources to generate the equivalent of 100 per cent of Scotland's gross annual electricity consumption by 2020, with an interim milestone of 31 per cent by 2011."
No discussion about intermittency OR cost. Here the SNP is just pretending wind is practical because it has a relatively low levelized cost. In fact, reliable power from wind requires massive overbuilding of wind farms (in terms of nameplate capacity) to handle demand during periods of weak wind and expensive storage to handle periods with negligible wind (that are known to occur). Now that Britain's dispatchable power plants are incapable of meeting 100% of demand and outages are projected, reality is popping the bubble. Ewing's above comment recognizes a need for (expensive) storage.
Please ask your party to post a detailed plan with costs capable of meeting Scotland's demand from renewable sources for 99.9% of the hours in the past decade using the actual weather and demand data - without importing power from the continent (which may not be available). 99.9% reliability means 9 hours per year of expected outage due intermittency. (I doubt the public will accept much more.) Provide them this paper as a model for their experts to use with the real costs in Scotland. Remind them that if the remaining non-renewable generation capacity can only meet 70% or 50% of demand, wind and other renewables must meet the remaining 30% or 50% of demand with the same 99.9% reliability.
http://www.udel.edu/V2G/resources/BudischakEtAl-2013-CostMinimizedWindSolarPJM.pdf
As for CCS, can you point to one place where the SNP projects that the cost of CCS will be less than the RANGE of realistic estimates for the social cost of carbon?
JamesG wrote: "In case anyone is interested (which I doubt) the SNP don't just bloviate like some folk here; they consult recognised experts and publish actual reports. Nor do they irrevocably commit to high costs."
Total BS. The link you provide says this about renewable energy:
"What are we aiming for? Renewable sources to generate the equivalent of 100 per cent of Scotland's gross annual electricity consumption by 2020, with an interim milestone of 31 per cent by 2011."
No discussion about intermittency OR cost. Here the SNP is just pretending wind is practical because it has a relatively low levelized cost. In fact, reliable power from wind requires massive overbuilding of wind farms (in terms of nameplate capacity) to handle demand during periods of weak wind and expensive storage to handle periods with negligible wind (that are known to occur). Now that Britain's dispatchable power plants are incapable of meeting 100% of demand and outages are projected, reality is popping the bubble. Ewing's above comment recognizes a need for (expensive) storage.
Please ask your party to post a detailed plan with costs capable of meeting Scotland's demand from renewable sources for 99.9% of the hours in the past decade using the actual weather and demand data - without importing power from the continent (which may not be available). 99.9% reliability means 9 hours per year of expected outage due intermittency. (I doubt the public will accept much more.) Provide them this paper as a model for their experts to use with the real costs in Scotland. Remind them that if the remaining non-renewable generation capacity can only meet 70% or 50% of demand, wind and other renewables must meet the remaining 30% or 50% of demand with the same 99.9% reliability.
http://www.udel.edu/V2G/resources/BudischakEtAl-2013-CostMinimizedWindSolarPJM.pdf
As for CCS, can you point to one place where the SNP projects that the cost of CCS will be less than the RANGE of realistic estimates for the social cost of carbon?
Frank, what is the social cost of carbon?
Isn't it just another fictional creation of global warming in the absence of any real science?
lapogus wrote: "the Sun's heat output per sq. metre doesn't have to change to explain the cooling of the LIA".
I agree. However, AFAIK we don't have the ability to convert proxies for change in the solar magnetic field (B11, C14) into a change in cloud cover and then in W/m2 of absorbed solar radiation. And the altitude and type of clouds is as important as cloud cover. In the absence of conclusive quantitative evidence that the LIA was forced, the POSSIBILITY exists that the LIA represents mostly unforced variability. IMO, the LIA currently provides an uncomfortably high upper limit for unforced variability. The unforced warming around 1940 and the cooling around 1960 provide smaller examples (though some cling to the idea that cooling around 1960 was caused by aerosols). Any of these phenomena indicate that the pause can be explained by unforced variability. Therefore physics doesn't have to provide an explanation for the pause. On the other hand, a good chunk of 20th century warming could also be due to unforced variability. IMO, the lack of recognition of the importance of unforced variability makes us over-confident about the meaning of any temperature change.
FWIW, the pause tells me that that Nick Lewis's estimate of ECS are likely to be more accurate than AR4's central estimate. (AR5 didn't provide a central estimate.) The likelihood of observing a long pause from unforced variability increases dramatically if GHG forcing is "supposed" to be increasing GMST by 0.25 degC/decade rather than 0.15 degC/decade. Current climate models project that a 5-year "pause" in warming occurs about 25% of the time; a 10-year pause, 25%^2 of the time; a 15-year pause, 25%^3 of the time. Observations demonstrate that climate models are over-estimating the warming rate OR underestimating unforced variability
Charlie: The social cost of carbon is real, though it may be impossible to calculate with our present degree of understanding.
The simplest social cost to understand is rising sea level. Sea level rose 120 m after GMST rose about 5 degC as the last ice age ended. That's an awesome 24 m/degC. There is enough ice in Antarctica to continue at this rate, though I don't believe it likely. Sea level rise has been negligible for at least the past two millennia, so 20th century SLR was almost certainly caused by warming - from the end of the LIA, unforced variability and/or GHGs. In the long run, we will probably need to invest a lot of money to protect valuable assets located near the oceans. (The rate of SLR is likely to be relatively slow (IMO), reducing the net present value of those future costs.)
In much of the US, a 1 degC rise in temperature is equivalent to moving south 100 miles. So a projected warming of 4 degC will cause changes like moving the climate of the Iowa corn belt into southern Canada. Warmer temperatures increase evaporation and the demand for water for irrigation. (A warmer planet will have increased precipitation, but not enough where it is needed.) Every time plants open their stomata to let CO2 in for photosynthesis, water escapes. In the western US, all but a small "environmentally essential" fraction of river flow is already being used by people and agriculture. In Asia, the Yellow, Yangtze and Indus rivers have been fully exploited and frequently don't flow into the ocean. Owens Lake is long gone, the Aral Sea is nearly gone. The salty (and toxic?) dust bowls that remain are far less valuable than what existed before. In these regions, expensive measures or changes will be needed to provide needed water. San Diego is spending $1B (before operating costs) on a desalination plant to provide drinking water for 300,000 residents. $3,333/person plus high operating cost isn't peanuts.
Social costs of CO2 emission certainly exist, although they are estimated to have been net social benefits during the 20th century. Essentially all economists agree that at some point (perhaps today) these net benefits will become net costs. Every time someone says that adaptation will be cheaper than mitigation, they are discussing the social cost of carbon - the cost of adaptation. I have no idea whether this cost can be calculated with any reasonable degree of accuracy, but it certainly exists.
The simplest way to prove to JamesG that the SNP isn't realistically about CCS was to ask whether it is projected by the SNP to save or lose money given estimates (however bad) of the social cost of carbon. Unless you tell the public the cost per gigaton of CO2 not emitted, then you have no idea of whether a project makes sense. When we get actual numbers, we can debate their reliability. The most likely outcome is that the public will be outraged at even optimistic costs. Without numbers, most people instinctively want to help the environment.
I recognize that it is easy for skeptics to casually assert that the pause proves that ECS must be zero, that a social cost of carbon dioxide emission doesn't exist, or that wind power can't be made reliable. You can assert that it is impossible for a few hundred ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere do anything and then put one millionth as much PABA (sunscreen) per unit area on your skin to prevent sunburn. (There is a nasty name for this I won't use.) The important questions are not the qualitative absolutes of politics: CAGW exists or doesn't exist. They are QUANTITATIVE (with highly uncertain answers): How much will it warm? How much will mitigation and adaptation cost - after benefits are recognized? Zero is likely to be the wrong answer. For the most part, I am on your side of the debate from a quantitative perspective and deeply skeptical of any government's ability to deal with climate change even if it made sense financially. International agreements are more problematic.
Fergus Ewing seems to be a few planks short of a policy. He wants to correct the problem by applying more of what caused the problem in the first place. A three-year-old might be ahead of him on that idea.
Well at last he noticed there's a problem. He's ahead of many others world-wide!
Only harsh reality, angry voters and blackouts will force politicians generally to work out what is going wrong with prices, security & harmless CO2.
Frank: "Therefore physics doesn't have to provide an explanation for the pause."!
Have we not destroyed all arguments here with your above quote?
If there are major unknowns in the climate system, then ALL of the pontification from 'experts' in the field which lead to policy change are null and void.
It used to be okay to say that we did not understand something and more research is required.
Now they say "were very confident at 95% that X will happen because of Y, BUT there are SOME unknowns that require further study".
Sorry, you either know or you do not know.
We know they do not know it all!!!!!!!