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)
Steve Richards 8:08 that is a much shorter and simpler response than the one I tried to write last night. And all the better for it.
There is still the presumption that the rise in CO2 levels is a bad thing.
Communities with the technology to turn lights on and off at the flick of a switch, have lower birth rates, lower infant mortality rates etc.
Frank
I linked to CCS not to windmills which are a different subject. The numbers for Wind are either hugely pessimistic or hugely optimistic and I don't yet know who is lying the most. One thing I do know about windmills is that if they work at all then they will work much better in Scotland. As for all the rest I have zero faith in your qualities as an expert since you clearly miss out important things such as the low-cost storage alternatives I mentioned that you never acknowledged. Why don't you talk to some real experts rather than just pretending to be one? Maybe you'll find out that some of your assumptions are more fallacy than fact.
As for the SNP, or rather the Scottish government with 56 out of a possible 59 MP's, their reports are always clear even if the admittedly barmy public rhetoric confuses. I already pointed out that costing is an ongoing process subject to continual scrutiny. Those who pretend to know the future can surely tell us whether they predicted the oil price drop or the financial crisis. There is no commitment to 100% renewables. It is renewables 'equivalent' which in reality means mainly gas with CCS. Admittedly a sneaky way of saying it but the first 30% target was actually achieved: Something else you failed to notice.
As far as I can see only UKIP has a relatively sensible energy policy but they still make big blunders - like assuming coal plants were closed due to CO2 when in fact they were closed for SO2 and Nox emissions. So to criticise SNP you must be a kipper yourself because Labour , Libs, Greens and Tories have collectively lost the plot. But then UKIP don't much bother with asking a variety of experts and producing reports either - a 2 page pamphlet of policy on the hoof seems to be good enough.
Steve Richards asked: "How come conventional physics did not predict the pause?
After a discussion of unforced variability in chaotic systems, Frank concluded: "Therefore physics doesn't have to provide an explanation for the pause [because it might be due to unforced variability]."
Steve replied: "Have we not destroyed all arguments here with your above quote?"
Possibly. In 1991, Lorenz published a short, prophetic paper called "Chaos, Spontaneous Climatic Variations and Detection of the [Enhanced] Greenhouse Effect." The paper explains how difficult it is to draw reliable conclusions from observations of systems displaying chaotic behavior.
http://eaps4.mit.edu/research/Lorenz/Chaos_spontaneous_greenhouse_1991.pdf
Lorenz wrote: "How do we know when a stronger greenhouse effect is finally making its presence felt?
Suppose that for the first ten days in an unfamiliar location, the maximum temperature varies between 5 and 15 degC. Suddenly on two successive days, it exceeds 25 degC. Do we on the second warm day, or perhaps the first, conclude that somebody or something is tapering with the weather? [No] ... "
"Now consider a second scenario where a succession of ten or more decades without extreme global average temperature is followed by two decades with decidedly higher averages; possibly we shall face such a situation before the 20th century ends. Does this scenario really differ from the previous one? [2 decades instead of 2 days] We may feel that it does; for example, we may believe that if the atmosphere is subjected to similar external influences over separate long intervals, say decades, the average conditions should be similar, with short-period fluctuations tending to cancel. If so, our conclusions have been reached through THEORY [not observations] ... Certainly no observations have told us that decadal-mean temperatures are nearly constant under constant external influences. If we discard all theoretical considerations, we cannot distinguish between the two scenarios."
Then, Lorenz asks if statistical analysis could help, but notes that daily temperature fluctuations are highly persistent and decadal fluctuations could be equally persistent. So Lorenz concludes that a careful scientist should draw no conclusions from the two decades of rapid warming that followed ten decades with relatively little change. So just as the pause was about to begin, Lorenz would have concluded that greenhouse warming had not yet been detected solely from the temperature record. Nor would Lorenz have been surprised by the pause or drawn any conclusions from it.
Lorenz goes on to discuss using a combination of observations and climate models to detect the enhanced greenhouse effect. This is the IPCC's "detection and attribution" process. Lorenz comments:
"This somewhat unorthodox procedure would be quite unacceptable .... if the models had been tuned to fit the observed course of the climate."
Without some knowledge of how big unforced variability might be, it is difficult to interpret the pause or the warming that preceded it. The IPCC concluded from climate models that unforced variability is likely less than 0.1 degC. IMO, the pause invalidates these models: They either overestimate forced warming or underestimate unforced variability.
Without climate models, one can look at the historical record and guess which fluctuations represent unforced variability. We can see a number of warm and cool periods like the MWP and LIA that are 1 degC in magnitude that might be unforced. In the 20th century, no cause for the warming around 1940 has been identified. So unforced variability can be at least 0.25 degC. Therefore the pause can be explained by unforced variability.
SteveG wrote: "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?"
And SteveG later continued: "As for all the rest I have zero faith in your qualities as an expert since you clearly miss out important things such as the low-cost storage alternatives I mentioned that you never acknowledged. Why don't you talk to some real experts rather than just pretending to be one? Maybe you'll find out that some of your assumptions are more fallacy than fact."
Frank replies: I am not an expert on energy storage and knew little about some newer technologies like compressed air energy storage (CAES). However, even David MacKay (former Chief Scientist for the UK Dept of Energy) doesn't include CAES in his book on renewable energy. This is probably because that technology has never been demonstrated on a scale that could make a significant contribution to storage, like the facility at Dinorwig did for pumped hydro. MacKay believes that extensive use of wind in Britain could require a storage capacity equal to 40 Dinorwigs. Thanks to your comments, I discovered that Storelectric hopes to build a CAES facility half the capacity of Dinorwig by 2020, but even the pilot version is still under construction. IF that project is a success (many others have been postponed or never scaled up), then Scotland may be able to count on using this storage technology.
http://storelectric.com/timeline.html
When looking at other storage technologies at the greenage website, how can one tell whether any of these are ready to contribute to meeting the CURRENT need for reliable renewable energy? With the forced retirement of dispatchable generation facilities, we need to know what facilities can be built TODAY, not what might be feasible a decade from now. I think we need to look for scale and price: output power (GW), storage capacity (GWh), and the fixed and variable costs for each ($/GWh and $/GW). Any technology which hasn't be scaled up to roughly one percent of demand and whose costs at that scale aren't public knowledge probably won't be ready for at least a decade.
My comments were based on Budischak et al, a landmark study (with flaws) that designed a cost-optimized combination of renewable generation and energy storage capable of meeting the demand on the PJM grid in the Mid-Atlantic 99.9% of the time, given the weather and demand experienced HOURLY over a four-year period. This is the only realistic study that I know of defining what it actually takes to deliver RELIABLE renewable energy. The authors of this study, who should have been experts, didn't choose to include CAES or pumped hydro as one of their three storage options. Perhaps they didn't think these technologies could be implemented on the needed scale in the Mid-Atlantic region. Since two of Budischak's storage options were priced unrealistically optimistically (IMO), any lowest-cost system capable of producing reliable renewable energy mostly from wind will probably require building nameplate capacity roughly 10-fold average demand plus storage equal to about 0.5 to 5 days demand (depending on the length of calm periods and the cost of storage.) If Britain is going to allow available dispatchable generation capacity to drop below peak demand, then renewable generation plus storage MUST provide the remaining demand with high reliability. 99.9% reliability means power shortages for 9 hours per year, even when all systems are working properly.