Elites’ Energy Fantasies Abound
Stephen Barrett reports on ruminations from technically challenged overlords in his Spectator Australia article by way of John Ray’s blog The chattering climate class and their war on coal. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
The Climate Chattering Class is now telling each other:
No Such Thing as Baseload Electrical Power.
Electricity is slippery stuff, in that it can be difficult to properly grasp what it is or how to quantify it. We can blame the school system. Teachers who were taught social politics at University must somehow teach mathematics and physics.
There is a reason for everything in the world and that reason usually comes down to physics until politics gets mixed in. This is a problem. In politics, the same big lie can be repeated many times, as loudly as possible, until people accept it as truth or give up trying to argue the toss.
Readers will be familiar with the nameplate rating on wind farms and solar plants. It lists the rated output under ideal circumstances, measured in watts. If a heater has 1,000W we all understand it is telling us the output at one instant in time. Consumption is a different thing and is measured in watts/hour. Reversing this, we can understand we are seeing a generator’s nameplate watts as the size of the generator and watt hours as how much it provides.
An interesting idea making its way around the energy conversation
at present is that there is no such thing as baseload energy.
The lie is perpetrated by the political system which is, at present, intending to destroy the concept (and existence) of baseload energy. Baseload is created by heavy generators that operate all day, every day, and are typically cheap. The disadvantage of this structure is that baseload plants usually take time to reach full production. Then, they need to run for extended periods of time to be economically viable. Coal and nuclear are the only two types feasible for most of the Australian market.
Gas and diesel plants can provide electricity but they are expensive when operated in this way. Peaking power is where gas comes to the fore. It can be fired up quickly and make electricity rapidly. This is ideal for peaks when people come home from their day and want heating or cooling and to cook. Gas can cover this surge very happily. Diesel is lovely stuff and great in remote locations where there is no access to the grid or if the grid fails. It might not be pretty, but it delivers when needed.
In the whole clean grid argument, those words should be enshrined…
‘When it is needed.’
Coal, nuclear, gas, and diesel will deliver when needed. Reliability has been ignored by the chattering classes who have created the current disaster of high prices and brownouts that continue to destroy various industries.
Perhaps that is the whole point of ‘renewable’ energy. I put that in quotes because the best figures I can find are that they only return seven-tenths of the power used to build them.
Every wind tower is a hallmark to coal-fired power being able to carry inefficient freeloaders. Freeloaders because renewable technologies can never produce energy when it is needed, only when it wishes.
Solar and wind dump themselves on the energy market, making it impossible for reliable supplies to remain economic. If they had to obey the same bidding rules, they would never survive.
Let’s compare the costs of wind, solar, and nuclear. To do this we can look at the Shepherds Flat Wind Farm, Topaz Solar Farm, and Barakah Nuclear Power Plant.
We can skittle the first anti-nuclear claim about taking too long to build. Barakah was completed within eight years. The global average for modern nuclear plant construction (globally) is between seven and eight years. Sadly in Australia we have a less than helpful public service that thrives on inefficiency that might drag out this timeline.
The nameplate ratings on these plants were 845MW for Shepherds Flat, 550MW for Topaz and 5,600MW for Barakah. Nuclear can appear expensive if you compare build cost against the nameplate rating but not markedly. Shepherds Flat cost $2 billion, Topaz $2.5 billion, and Barakah $24.4 billion. Comparing build cost to nameplate rating, Shepherds Flat Wind cost 42 cents/MW, Topaz Solar 22 cents/MW, and Barakah Nuclear 23 cents/MW.
Looking at the size per dollar, nuclear is almost as good as solar and better than wind. The issue already demonstrated is not size as much as provision. That nameplate value is giving you one second of use. One second later, you are going to need that much again. This means the Watt/Hrs is crucial.
This is where wind and solar fail massively. The watts produced are not as important as the Watt Hours provided to the market. Assuming a generous 25-year life span for Shepherds Flat, 30 years for Topaz, and a mean-spirited 60 years for Barakah (when it is likely to still be running 100 years after it started), I calculated the GWh per annum compared to the Build Price over the life of the project. That is Build Price divided by annual GWh times lifespan.
Shepherds Flat was $40,000, Topaz $75,000 and Barakah $9,300.
On this measure, nuclear is significantly cheaper, but the price of firming wind and solar is not added to their totals. So that you can have power on those hot still days of summer when the wind doesn’t blow or the cold nights of winter when the sun is not shining you will need either nuclear or coal to provide you with the electricity you need.
We can discuss batteries some other time, but the new super battery has been coming about as long as perpetual motion and flying cars. Lithium ion batteries are old tech that has been developed to a point of maturity where there is little left to squeeze out of them and without mountains we are not going to get enough pumped hydro no matter how economically bad that model is.
If I magically had the power I would build more coal-fired stations, only because nuclear will need time to be made legal and that cannot be predicted. Nuclear however beats wind and solar to bits as far as costs and output and reliability are concerned.
Steve Goreham explains in his Heartland article
Emmett Hare reports in City Journal 
By way of John Ray comes this Spectator Australia article
“If there’s anything that I argue, it’s that we need to be resilient. We should stop pretending that if we changed or lowered our emissions the climate would stop changing. That’s the true denial of climate right there,” Wielicki says. “What we need to accept is that regardless of the CO2 in the atmosphere, we are going to have climate change and those shifts could occur over timescales of decades or centuries, and we should be prepared.
Today we have a coordinated release globally of a study claiming to disprove the Covid 19 virus came from the Wuhan Institute of Viology (WIV). An example is the article from the UK so-called Independent 
Science Matters 
Two seemingly mutually excluding theories of SARS-CoV2 origin are now a matter of a heated debate.
On one hand, scientists siding with the lab-leak idea are bringing up a lot of reasonable but circumstantial evidence in favor it. There is no real way to prove the leak until an unbiased commission of researchers inspects the potential sites and lab records. That is unlikely to happen, and the problem may be never solved, unless another leak, next time a leak of critical information happens.
On the other hand, a seemingly large group of scientists supports the natural origin of the COVID19 pandemics. The key point here is that they also do not have a direct evidence of SARS-CoV2 being transmitted to humans through an intermediate host in a manner similar to what was found before for SARS and MERS viruses.
The debate becomes more and more heated, not at the least being motivated by non-scientific reasons. Major journals publish unbalanced editorials favoring ‘natural origin’ theory that so far has not produced the fatal blow to the opposite view. It is argued that it is hard to find a needle in the haystack (an animal that is an intermediate host for SARS-CoV2), but this is the real source of uncertainty.
For an unbiased critical mind, it is impossible to take sides in this debate simply because both previous lab leaks (including of SARS virus) and a natural transmission through intermediate hosts of human SARS and MERS coronaviruses have been documented. If one wants to convince that unbiased critical mind of the natural origin of human SARS-CoV2 – show us the money!
Find the intermediate host, find the virus, explain in molecular terms
how it got the furin cleavage site, or better continue working hard.
The article by Michael Worobey is an example of delivering arguments that can hardly make a dent in the leak theory for the following reasons:
Calm, however, is an unlikely outcome of this debate. My argument is that scientific thinking and integrity should come first. It is really tiring to read the numerous editorials and letters that are unilateral with no substance. I rest my case totally prepared to be convinced one way or another by solid direct evidence.