When do windfarms work?

Updated on Mar 14, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Readers here are familiar with the idea that wind turbines do not generate electricity when the wind doesn't blow and it is also now widely understood that they have to be switched off when the wind blows too hard as well, either because the grid can't take the surges or because it's dangerous to have the turbine spin too fast.

The latest news from the USA is that some windfarms may now have to be switched off at night.

Night operation of the windmills in the North Allegheny Windpower Project has been halted following discovery of a dead Indiana bat under one of the turbines, an official with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Monday.

Click to read more ...

Uncertain uncertainty

Richard Rood's article about uncertainty in climate projections is a few weeks old now, but I came across it only today after someone tweeted a link to it. Rood is trying to make the case that:

the uncertainty in climate projections associated with the physical climate model is smaller than the uncertainty associated with the models of emission scenarios that are used to project carbon dioxide emissions.

His argument seems to rest partly on the fact that climate models include well-understood physical laws at their heart, while economic models are much more empirical. This argument seems to me to be somewhat spurious. The fact that an aeroplane includes a number of transistors, whose behaviour is well-understood, does not make it necessarily more likely to fly than one that doesn't.

He argues that the spread in the models would be much less if it were not for the different economic scenarios that feed them. This seems flawed to me. Rood argues that the spread in the models represents "simple estimate of uncertainty". I'm not sure this is right. To the extent that the models make the same erroneous assumptions and have the same unknown unknowns, surely the climate model uncertainty is much larger?

Quote of the day

"It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on humanoid height."

[Extract from coversation of Joe Ordinary in Local Puborama]

"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
they can fit twice as many in the same building site.
(they say it's alright),
Beginning with the tenants of the town of Harlow,
in the interest of humanity, they've been told they must go,
told they must go-go-go-go."

Get 'em out by Friday

Genesis, in their Peter Gabriel era, foresee Professor Liao's suggestion that the human race should engineer itself to be smaller. (H/T PMT in the comments)

Eco-eugenics

The latest piece of insanity to emerge from the global warming movement is a paper by S. Matthew Liao, a professor at New York University. His idea is that we should be engineering the human race to be less resource intensive:

In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

There is a long interview with Liao in the Atlantic, in which he argues that his ideas are liberty-enhancing, since the alternative is a compulsory limit to family sizes.

Update on Mar 13, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Klimazwiebel picks up on the story here.

Fighting funding

Over the weekend, the Express reported that the wind industry is hiring eco-activists to help them in their efforts to destroy the British countryside.

While thousands of residents in Mid Wales have vowed to fight plans that would see up to 600 turbines carpeting the countryside, Action for Renewables, lobby arm of trade association Renewables UK, is seeking campaigners to champion its wind farms. The job description includes building a “network of local campaigning groups across the region” and identifying “campaign leaders in local areas close to existing and proposed renewables sites”.

The group, which was unavailable for comment yesterday, is part-funded by Centrica, parent group of British Gas

Click to read more ...

All change

Further evidence of the decline influence of green extremism in the UK, with two news stories today. The Mail on Sunday reports that a go-ahead appears likely for Cuadrilla to resume shale gas exploration in Lancashire. Work was suspended after some minor earth tremors were reported.

Meanwhile, hot off the presses is the news that the UK will oppose the idea of the EU producing a new renewables target for 2030 - the existing one runs out in 2020. Given the damage that greens - including those in the Conservative, Labour and Liberal Democrat parties -  have done to the UK economy already, this is probably wise, or at least not quite so extraordinarily foolish as previously.

Wind Energy: to the nearest whole number - Josh 156

I thought a handy illustration of a few facts about Wind Turbines and Wind Energy might be helpful.
(Higher res version for printing here)

Especially as there has been a bit of a Twitter storm over Matt Ridley's superb piece in The Spectator on Wind Energy, see at his blog here.  

Mark Lynas claimed that the article had no facts in it. Mark then asked for references, which Matt duly provided (all in the blog article). Mark either didn't like the references or is still busy reading them. We are still waiting for an apology from Mark for his completely unfounded Tweet.

Could be any time soon...

Cartoons by Josh

Flood and drought

Charlie Flindt is a farmer, who has written a rather funny piece at Farmer's Weekly wondering about the antics of DEFRA and the climatologists. Flindt doesn't like conferences but, he says:

...there was one meeting the other day that I would have given anything to attend, even at breakfast time: the DEFRA drought summit.

All the great and the good were there: Mrs Spelman, the Environment Agency, Natural England, British Waterways, the Met Office, and representatives from the agricultural sector and environmental NGOs.

Reports suggest that there was much earnest discussion of this year's drought, the problems it brings, and measures that can be taken. These measures ranged from the bleeding obvious, like stopping leaks, to the fairly major, like suggesting that farmers consider on-farm storage of water.

Click to read more ...

Worstall on rare metals

With Gaia Vince's take on indium futures having proven mistaken, it's interesting to see Tim Worstall's look last year at availability of another rare metal: tellurium, which finds a major application in solar panels. Tim has crunched the numbers and worked out just how much of it we have at current usage rates:

So, even for [tellurium] one of the rarest metals on the planet we seem to have a million year supply of it. We could, at this point, say that the environmentalists are obviously correct, there is a risk of running out and we’d better do something about it. But worrying about what happens in a million years time is really a very slightly silly thing to be worrying about: the odds that our species will still be here at that time are pretty low, let alone the idea that we’ll be reliant upon Cd/Te solar panels.

Click to read more ...

Models, data and the Arctic

Updated on Mar 12, 2012 by Bishop Hill

While I was at the Met Office the other day, I had a very interesting presentation from Jeff Knight, who IIRC runs the season-to-decadal forecasting unit there. Jeff's talk included discussion of a paper that Lucia had looked here. Lucia's comments are, as always, very interesting and address a range of concerns that I'm not going to touch on here. The paper itself is here.

The headline image of Jeff's talk was what the Met Office refers to as "the Celery Stick" graph, which assesses the range of model predictions against data:

Click to read more ...

Policy questions

Peter Lilley is one of the few MPs who will be able to hold his head up high when the lights go out, having refused to back the absurdities of the Climate Change Act. Here he is in more recent action, asking ministers about the IPCC and the Interacademies Council Report:

House of Commons, 8 March 2012: Mr Peter Lilley (Hitchin and Harpenden) (Con): What assessment he has made of the procedures adopted by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for its fifth assessment report.

The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Gregory Barker): The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently revised its procedures in response to an independent review by the InterAcademy Council. The revisions address the key recommendations of the review and put the IPCC in a stronger position to prepare its fifth assessment report, but there is absolutely no room for complacency.

Mr Lilley: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for his answer, which none the less remains complacent. When the InterAcademy Council reported, it proposed radical reforms that would

“fundamentally reform IPCC’s management structure while enhancing its ability to conduct an authoritative assessment”,

and criticised IPCC authors for reporting

“high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence.”

Most of the InterAcademy Council’s recommendations have been rejected, however. Why are the Government not pressing for them to be implemented?

Gregory Barker: My right hon. Friend will know that, as a result of the reform procedures, an executive committee has been formed and a new conflict of interest policy has been created. The communications strategy has also been elaborated on much more strongly. I accept that this is by no means perfect, but we now have much greater faith in the IPCC and we look forward to seeing its fifth report.

What a comfort Mr Barker must get from the creation of a new conflict of interest policy. I wonder if he knows that it hasn't been implemented?

Via GWPF.

Update on Mar 10, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Richard Betts in the comments says that the COI policy has in fact been put into action.

Running out of natural resources

Gaia Vince, a environment writer with the BBC, has an interesting article about the world's lack of indium, a a rare element used in high-definition screens for iPads and the like. (The link is to a proxy view on the article, since people in the UK aren't allowed to see this part of the BBC's output).

In response, climatologist Michel Crucifix asks

Industrial adaptation to exhaustion of a natural resource. Did it happen before (excl. agriculture) ?

I've suggested coal as a reaction to deforestation, or fibre optics as a reaction to high copper prices, but there must be loads of other examples.

Update on Mar 9, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, a graph of indium prices (source) suggests that the markets don't see exhaustion of indium as being quite the problem that Gaia Vince does.

Wikipedia has this to say on the subject:

Based on content of indium in zinc ore stocks, there is a worldwide reserve base of approximately 6,000 tonnes of economically viable indium.^[16] This figure has led to estimates suggesting that, at current consumption rates, there is only 13 years' supply of indium left.^[17] However, the Indium Corporation, the largest processor of indium, claims that, on the basis of increasing recovery yields during extraction, recovery from a wider range of base metals (including tin, copper and other polymetallic deposits) and new mining investments, the long-term supply of indium is sustainable, reliable and sufficient to meet increasing future demands.

Ho hum.

A letter from the Conservative leader

This is a letter from Scottish Conservative Party leader Ruth Davidson to a windfarm campaigner. It was posted on the Facebook page of the Stop St Andrews University Windfarm group.

Thank you for contacting me about the issue of windfarms.

There is no doubt that renewable energy is a potentially highly beneficial  energy source. However it should not be pushed upon the people of Scotland  at any cost. Although attaining clean, renewable energy sources should  always remain a priority for Scotland, current strategies excessively burden communities, outweighing any possible benefits. In particular, many  people feel that their communities are coming under attack as wind farm  developers submit increasing numbers of speculative applications for  industrial wind farms. The current Government’s obsession with wind energy  over all other energy sources and the lack of any coherent strategy to  ensure that wind farms are put in appropriate locations, is unacceptable.

The continuing lack of any proper guidance to local authorities from  Government on the siting of wind farms is the root cause of much of the  anger and frustration felt in communities across Scotland. The cumulative  impact of more and more wind farms is becoming almost unbearable for an  increasing number of people. It is for this reason that we have called on  the Scottish Government to consider a moratorium on further development  until the public’s concerns have been addressed.

We should not forget that nuclear power currently provides a large  proportion of our electricity needs, yet Alex Salmond has, thus far,  failed to include nuclear power in its energy strategy. Nuclear power  provides thousands of jobs, which guarantees Scotland’s retention of  engineering talent. Despite what the SNP Government might say about the  safety of nuclear power, the fact remains that Scotland is one of the  world’s safest nuclear power providers. While the wind may not blow,  nuclear provides a reliable and secure energy supply.

The Scottish Government has set an ambitious target of sourcing 100% of  our electricity needs from renewable sources by 2020, and while that  target is questionable in itself, it is even more unlikely to be achieved  when the SNP government places greater emphasis on wind power at the  expense of other sources of renewable energy. By focusing on wind energy, which is highly unreliable, the Scottish Government is failing to plan to  provide Scotland with a secure energy supply.

Thank you for taking the time to contact me and for making me aware of  your position.

Yours sincerely,

Ruth Davidson MSP

The suggestion that renewables are good but windfarms are bad seems rather odd in the Scottish context, since there are few other forms of renewables on the table at the moment. I don't know whether this represents the beginning of the Tories backing away from greenery or just standard political two-facedness.

Delingpole on the state of the debate

James Delingpole has an article in the Commentator, looking at the changed landscape in which we find ourselves:

Something extraordinary is happening in the great Climate Wars. I had a taste of it just the other day on an LBC talk show. The producer had only booked me in for a ten-minute slot, in case the listeners weren't interested in my boring new book about that tediously hackneyed subject Man Made Global Warming. But the switchboards were jammed and the station ended up keeping me in for a full hour to reply to all the calls.

There was one big problem though: "We can hardly find ANYONE who disagrees with you," whispered the show's host, Julia Hartley-Brewer. This was true. By the end, things had got so desperate that I found myself accidentally picking fights with callers who were on my side. An easy mistake to make for someone on my (sceptical) side of the debate: we card-carrying Satanic "deniers" are so used to being vilified at every turn it really feels kind of weird suddenly to be in tune with the popular mood.

Questioning the scientists

Keith Kloor has an article at the Yale Climate Forum, looking at media reporting of science and climate change. In it, he quotes science journalist Ed Yong

Freelance science writer Ed Yong echoes this sentiment at his Discover magazine blog: “If we write something, and we put our names to it, the buck stops with us. If there is a mistake, it is our fault.” Yong sets the bar high for science journalists: “If the paper was rubbish, if the peer reviewers missed something, if the scientist lied, if the press release is distorted, it’s still our fault for producing something that is inaccurate or that fails to root out these problems.”

The idea that journalists should not be responsible for what they write is extraordinary, so Yong's comments are welcome. Unfortunately many science and almost all environment journalists do not see this as being part of their job. They see themselves as part of a movement and their job is not to question anything said by "the scientists".

Among all the reviews of Michael Mann's book published in recent weeks, can anyone recall one that challenged anything he said?