Climate Initiatives

Energy Revolution Not In The Cards

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Kite & Key explains in above video Why the Odds Are Stacked Against Net Zero.  For those preferring to read I provide a text from the captions, though the video is entertaining along with great images, some of which are included with the text in italics with my bolds.

Overview

Are we at the beginning of the end of fossil fuels? That’s the theory advanced by an international coalition of politicians who aim to get us to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050. Just one problem: Research from the experts in their own governments suggests it’s a nearly impossible task. Enthusiasts for net zero often say we’re on the cusp of an “energy revolution.”

And that theory has a big problem: Energy revolutions don’t happen — at least not in the way that politicians often describe. While it’s true that technological and economic factors sometimes change the energy mix — countries that get wealthier become less dependent on wood, for example — the broader trend in the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined by three words: more, more, more.

In a power-hungry world, we keep adding new energy sources. But there’s rarely any subtraction. And, with global energy demand expected to increase by about 35% by 2050, it’s nearly impossible that we can get all the power we need from carbon-free sources. For instance, meeting the net zero goals would require the construction of over 9,000 nuclear plants by 2050. The number currently being built around the world? 59.

So, what will the future of energy really look like? Our video explores.

Transcription

It doesn’t happen that often. But every once in a while, a single generation witnesses a technological breakthrough that will change the world forever.
The printing press.
The beginning of human flight.
And, for our generation, an inevitable full scale revolution in clean energy…
…that’s running a little behind schedule…
…Ok, way behind schedule.

“The beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” That’s how the United Nations referred to the outcome of a 2023 climate change summit held in…the United Arab Emirates. Which is sort of like having the Prohibition Conference in Vegas. Nevertheless, delegates from throughout the world left the gathering having pledged that the world would transition away from fossil fuels and get the world to net zero carbon emissions by the year 2050.

Now, the rationale for this is clear enough. Leaders from around the globe are worried that without a shift over to carbon-free energy sources like wind, solar, hydro, and nuclear the world will face significant problems as a result of climate change.

But, regardless of why they’re doing this, the more important question is whether they can do it. Because here’s the thing about energy revolutions: they don’t happen. At least not in the way that the UN is imagining. To understand why, it’s worth looking at the history of the world’s energy consumption – which looks like this.

Go back a couple of centuries and the world basically ran on “traditional biomass”– -which is a fancy way of saying … wood. We burned a lot of wood and also … dung. Then in the mid 19th century, coal came into the picture in a big way. By the 20th century, we’re using tons of oil. And natural gas is a big factor too, especially as we cross into the 21st century, and fracking makes it both abundant and more affordable. As the years went by, we added low-carbon sources of energy as well, like nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar–though overall, they’re still a pretty small part of the picture.

Now, there are two important things to note about this chart. First, the history of the world’s energy consumption can be defined in three words: more, more, more. Which kind of makes sense. After all, pretty much everything that defines modern life involves a lot of energy. Between 1950 and 2022, for example, the population of the U.S. a little more than doubled. But in that same time period, our electricity use got 14 times larger.

And second, because of that “more and more, more” trend, the only things we’ve ever had that look like energy “revolutions” have been about adding new sources into the mix, not getting rid of existing ones as net zero goals propose.

Now, to be clear, that doesn’t mean that nothing ever changes. In wealthier nations, the rise of cheaper natural gas has led to less coal usage, especially in the U.S. And poorer countries usually abandoned traditional biomass as they get wealthier, because no advanced nation powers itself by burning wood. We use it for much more sophisticated purposes…like doing psychedelics in the Nevada desert.

But using a little less coal or wood or relatively modest changes–and importantly are driven by cold, hard economic facts. By contrast, what the net zero goals entail is replacing all of this … with this … in just about 25 years. Based on little more than the fact that politicians just want it to happen.

To understand just how tall a task this is, it’s worth looking at what it would require to make it a reality. It’s estimated that meeting net zero goals would require deploying 2000 new wind turbines…
…every day … for the next 25 years. To give you some context for that, the U.S. builds about 3000 new wind turbines…
…a year.

Alternately, you could open one new nuclear plant every day for the next 25 years. For the record, that’s over 9,000 of them. And, also for the record, as of 2023, the number that were actually being built across the entire world was … 59.  And here in the U.S. anyway, it generally takes over a decade to build them.

And those are some of the reasons why what politicians promise about net zero and what the experts in their own governments say…don’t exactly match up. The government’s U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA, projects that by the year 2050, far from seeing a revolution in energy, America will be a little less reliant on coal, a little more so on renewables…and the rest of the picture looks pretty much the same as today.

And in fact, this is true for the entire world. The EIA ran seven different scenarios for what the world’s energy consumption could look like in 2050, and while all of them showed a significant increase in renewables … they also all showed a world that continued to get most of its energy from things like coal, oil, and natural gas. Not exactly “the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.”

The reason for all of this: We simply can’t take enormous quantities of energy offline in a world where it’s predicted that we’re going to need almost 35% more of it by the year 2050. For one thing, there are a lot of poor countries around the world who are going to need dramatically more energy to bring themselves up to even a fraction of our standards of living.

And for another, the technologies of the future require vast amounts of power. By the year 2030, it’s estimated the computer usage around the world will take up as much as five times more of the world’s electricity production as it did even in 2020. The digital cloud we all use to store data already uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan. And with new energy-hungry technologies like AI on the way, things are only gonna move further in that direction.

Which means the real future of energy is probably: everything. Nuclear, natural gas, wind, and solar, oil, hydropower, coal. We’re going to need all of it. Probably not much wood though.
Except for these guys.

Green Deal Cuts EU Emissions, Doubles Them Elsewhere

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The news and analysis from University of Groningen is reported at Science Daily European Green Deal: A double-edged sword for global emissions.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Greenhouse gas emissions will fall in the EU, but rise even more elsewhere

Summary:  The European Green Deal will bring down the emission of greenhouse gases in the European Union, but at the same time causes a more than a twofold increase in emissions outside its borders.

The European Union aims to be carbon-neutral by 2050 as part of the comprehensive Green Deal that was agreed upon four years ago. However, an analysis of the policy documents outlining the practical measures of the Green Deal shows that it will decrease carbon emissions in Europe, but also increase carbon emissions outside of the EU. This increase is more than double the amount of carbon emissions saved by the Green Deal. This analysis was published in Nature Sustainability on by an international team of scientists led by Klaus Hubacek, Professor of Science, Technology and Society at the University of Groningen.

The European Green Deal is a set of policies intended to fully decarbonize Europe by 2050, but it also includes measures for clean energy production and ecological restoration. Hubacek and colleagues from the United States and China carried out full supply chain analyses of the policy documents underlying the Green Deal. Their conclusion is that the Green Deal in its current form will lead to an increase in emissions in countries outside the EU by 244.8 percent compared to the Green Deal’s carbon reduction goal in the land, land use change, and forestry sector within EU borders.

Reasons to be Skeptical of Policies

One example is the measure to increase biodiversity in Europe by planting three billion trees. ‘However, trees require a lot of land that cannot be used to produce food. That means that food must be produced elsewhere, and to do this, land must be converted into cropland. This increases the carbon dioxide emission and reduces biodiversity,‘ says Hubacek. In this way, the EU would reduce carbon emissions within its borders, but ‘export‘ them to the countries that would produce our food, for example Africa or South America.

Of course, the Green Deal does contain a paragraph forbidding the import of products (such as meat or animal feed) for which woodland is converted to farmland. Hubacek is sceptical: ‘Nothing stops these other countries from growing products for Europe on existing farmland and felling forests to produce for the local market. There are simply too many uncertainties in these types of regulations.’ The Green Deal also calls for an increase in organic farming, but this requires more farmland in Europe. Hubacek: ‘Again, there is very little information available on the impact on land use.’

No free lunch

However, the scientists did not just reveal the negative impacts of the Green Deal on the rest of the world. They also looked at different scenarios to see if overall carbon reductions could be enhanced. ‘We found one very effective way to do this.’ says Hubacek, ‘By adopting the more plant-based “planetary health diet,” it is possible to save an enormous amount of carbon emissions.’ Another measure is to phase out food-based biofuels within the EU, which would reduce the amount of farmland needed and thus save carbon emissions and prevent biodiversity loss. Also, the EU could assist developing regions to increase their agricultural efficiency, which would also reduce land use.

Although the Nature Sustainability article shows that the European Green Deal in its present form could result in a net loss for the global environment, the scientists conclude that it can be remedied. ‘By adopting the planetary health diet, which is relatively simple’, says Hubacek. However, there is one more thing that needs to change, he stresses: ‘The programme is driven by techno-optimism, but our analysis underlines that there is no free lunch. I very much doubt that “Green Growth” is possible, as everything you produce requires an input of resources. So we really need to consume less.’ There is a strong sense of urgency now that global warming seems set to surpass the 1.5 degrees from the 1995 Paris Agreement, and many other planetary boundaries are also being overstepped. Hubacek: ‘It is time to implement measures that work.’

Comment:

The authors share the IPCC notion of climate emergency caused by GHGs, but are practical enough to realize the proposed policies are counter productive.  I am among those who agree with Dr. Happer that the only climate crisis is coming from the torrent of ill-advised governmental policies that are not likely to reduce GHG emissions or temperatures, but will achieve great economic and social destruction.

See the series of four posts World of Hurt from Climate Policies

World of Hurt from Climate Policies-Part 1

See Also

Climate Policies Fail in Fact and in Theory

 

California Browning from Electricity Policies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Ronald Stein explains the devastation in his Heartland article The Golden State of California Is Turning Brown Without Continuous Electricity.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

As a resident of California for more than six decades, I am aware that the availability of continuously generated electricity in California is deteriorating and will get worse!

The “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California that are supported by Governor Newsom and the Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris have led to the state’s most expensive electricity and fuel prices in America and increasingly high cost of living, housing, and transportation, coupled with an increase in crime, smash-and-grab robberies, homelessness, pollution, and congestion that has caused many tax-paying residents and companies to exodus California to more affordable cities and states.

California’s net move-out number of residents in 2022 alone was more than 343,000 people that left California — the highest exodus of any state in the U.S.

The California Policy Institute counted more than 237 businesses that have left the state since 2005. Among these businesses were eleven Fortune 1000 companies, including AT&T, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Exxon Mobil, and Chevron.

The U.S. Department of Energy recently made a startling admission: U.S. electricity demand will double by 2050, and meeting that soaring demand will require the equivalent of building 300 Hoover Dams.

The last California Nuclear Power Plant at Diablo Canyon, a 2.2 GW plant generating continuous uninterruptable electricity, is projected to close soon. In nameplate only, it would take 1,000 2.2MW wind turbines to generate 2.2 GW, but then, it’s only intermittent electricity vs. the continuous uninterruptable electricity from Diablo demanded by the California economy!

As a result of the “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies and renewables of wind and solar stations built at the expense of taxpayer dollars, California now imports more electric power than any other US state, more than twice the amount in Virginia, the USA’s second-largest importer of electric power. California typically receives between one-fifth and one-third of its electricity supply from outside of the state.

Power prices are rocketing into the stratosphere and, even before winter drives up demand, are being deprived of continuous electricity in a way that was unthinkable barely a decade ago. But such is life when you attempt to run the economy on sunshine and breezes.

Projected electricity costs for California Businesses

Further, these so-called “green” electricity sources of wind and solar are not clean, green, renewable or sustainable. They also endanger wildlife.

California’s economy depends on affordable, reliable, and ever-cleaner electricity and fuels. Unfortunately, policymakers are driving up California’s electric and gas prices, and California now has the highest electricity and fuel prices in the nation. Those high energy prices are contributing to the pessimistic business sentiment. California’s emission mandates have done an excellent job of increasing the cost of electricity, products, and fuels to its citizens.

It’s becoming increasingly obvious that these supposed “green” alternative methods of generating electricity won’t work — especially as electricity demand is projected to double by 2050 due to AI, charging of EVs and data centers, government-mandated electric heating and cooking, and charging grid-backup batteries. Intermittent electricity from wind and solar cannot power modern nations.

These “green” wind and solar projects primarily exist because they are financed with taxpayer money, i.e., disguised by taxpayers as “Government Subsidies.”

“GREEN” policymakers are oblivious to humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels from fossil fuels, as they are to these two basic facts:

(1)  No one uses crude oil in its raw form. “Big Oil” only exists because of humanity’s addiction to the products and fuels made from oil!

(2)  “Renewables” like wind and solar only exist to generate intermittent electricity; they CANNOT make products or fuels!

To rid the world of crude oil usage, there is no need to over-regulate or over-tax the oil industry; just STOP using the products and fuels made from crude oil!

Simplistically:

STOP making cars, trucks, aircraft, boats, ships, farming equipment, medical equipment and supplies, communications equipment, military equipment, etc., that demand crude oil for their supply chain of products.

STOPPING the demands of society for the products and fuels made from oil will eliminate the need for crude oil.

The primary growth in electric power usage is coming from new data centers housing AI technologies. It is expected that over the next few decades, 50% of additional electric power will be needed just for AI, but data centers CANNOT run on occasional electricity from wind and solar.

Cal matters raises concerns about state policy to phase out ICE vehicles in favor of EVs.

How will the occasionally generated electricity from wind and solar support the following:

  • America’s military fleet of vehicles, ships, and aircraft?
  • America’s commercial and private aircraft?
  • America’s hospitals?
  • America’s space exploration?

Despite Governor Newsom’s and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris’s support for the “Green New Deal” and “Net Zero” policies in California, it’s time to stimulate conversations about the generation of continuously generated electricity to meet the demands of America’s end users.

 

Good News: SEC’s ESG Plans Thwarted with Biden Term Ending

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The news comes from Bloomberg Law article SEC’s Gensler Sees ESG Plans Thwarted as Biden’s Term Nears End. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

SEC Chair Gary Gensler started out with big plans on ESG.

  • Gensler seeks board diversity, workforce, ESG fund disclosures
  • Agency unlikely to finalize ESG regulations before January

The Democrat arrived at the Securities and Exchange Commission in 2021, after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and President Joe Biden’s election that year fueled interest in environmental, social and governance investing. Gensler wanted public companies to report details about their climate change risks, workforce management and board members’ diversity.

He also sought new rules to fight greenwashing and other misleading ESG claims by investment funds.

Almost four years later, most of those major ESG regulations are unfinished, and they’ll likely remain so in the less than five months Gensler may have left as chair. A conservative-led backlash against ESG and federal agency authority has fueled challenges in and out of court to corporate greenhouse gas emissions reporting rules and other SEC actions, helping blunt the commission’s power.

The climate rules—Gensler’s marquee ESG initiative—were watered down following intense industry pushback, then paused altogether after business groups, Republican attorneys general and others sued.

“It’s clear the commission leadership is exhausted and feeling buffeted by the courts, Congress and industry complaints,” said Tyler Gellasch, who was a counsel to former Democratic SEC Commissioner Kara Stein and is president and CEO of investor advocacy group Healthy Markets Association.

The SEC has finalized more than 40 rules since 2021, “making our capital markets more efficient, transparent, and resilient,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement to Bloomberg Law.

The spokesperson declined to comment on the status of the agency’s pending ESG rules, beyond pointing to the commission’s most recent regulatory agenda.

Long-standing plans to require human capital and board diversity disclosures from companies have yet to yield formal proposals. Final rules concerning ESG-focused funds still are pending, and even if the SEC adopts them before January as the agenda suggests, a Republican-controlled Congress and White House may have the power to quickly scrap them under the Congressional Review Act.

Unlike the workforce and board diversity rules that have yet to be proposed, investment fund regulations concerning ESG have already been drafted and are targeted for completion in October, according to the SEC’s latest agenda. ESG funds would have to disclose their portfolio companies’ emissions and report on their ESG strategies.

The SEC proposed the regulations in May 2022, along with rules intended to ensure ESG funds’ names align with their investments. The commission issued final fund name rules in September 2023.

The SEC’s investment fund proposal has raised objections from both funds and environmental and investor advocates.

The proposal would require environmentally-focused funds to disclose their carbon footprints, if emissions are part of their investment strategies. But it wouldn’t require funds that look at emissions to disclose other metrics that play a significant role in how they invest and the methodology they use to calculate those measures. The Natural Resources Defense Council, Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, and other environmental and investor groups pushed for those requirements in an April letter to the SEC.

The Investment Company Institute, which represents funds, has raised concerns its members would have to report on their carbon footprints before public companies must disclose their emissions under SEC rules. The group in April called on the SEC to keep fund emissions reporting requirements on ice until the litigation challenging the agency’s public company climate rules is resolved. That litigation is at the US Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, which is unlikely to rule this year.

The fund rules have received no Republican support at the SEC, with only Gensler and his fellow Democratic commissioners voting in favor of proposing them.

“If it’s a Republican Congress and Trump administration, you could imagine they would be willing to disapprove those,” said Susan Dudley, a George Washington University professor who oversaw the White House regulatory policy office under President George W. Bush.

 

Methane Madness Strikes Again

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The latest comes from Australia by way of John Ray at his blog Methane cuts on track for 2030 emissions goal.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Australia’s methane emissions have decreased over the past two decades, according to a new report by a leading global carbon research group.

While the world’s methane emissions grew by 20 per cent, meaning two thirds of methane in the atmosphere is from human activity, Australasia and Europe emitted lower levels of the gas.

It puts Australia in relatively good stead, compared to 150 other signatories, to meet its non-binding commitments to the Global Methane Pledge, which aims to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by the end of the decade.

The findings were revealed in the fourth global methane budget, published by the Global Carbon Project, with contributions from 66 research institutions around the world, including the CSIRO.

According to the report, agriculture contributed 40 per cent of global methane emissions from human activities, followed by the fossil fuel sector (34 per cent), solid waste and waste­water (19 per cent), and biomass and biofuel burning (7 per cent).

Pep Canadell, CSIRO executive director for the Global Carbon Project, said government policies and a smaller national sheep flock were the primary reasons for the lower methane emissions in Australasia.

“We have seen higher growth rates for methane over the past three years, from 2020 to 2022, with a record high in 2021. This increase means methane concentrations in the atmosphere are 2.6 times higher than pre-­industrial (1750) levels,” Dr Canadell said.

The primary source of methane emissions in the agriculture sector is from the breakdown of plant matter in the stomachs of sheep and cattle.

It has led to controversial calls from some circles for less red meat consumption, outraging the livestock industry, which has lowered its net greenhouse gas emissions by 78 per cent since 2005 and is funding research into methane reduction.

Last week, the government agency advising Anthony Albanese on climate change suggested Australians could eat less red meat to help reduce emissions. And the government’s official dietary guidelines will be amended to incorporate the impact of certain foods on climate change.

There is ongoing disagreement among scientists and policymakers about whether there should be a distinction between biogenic methane emitted by livestock, which already exists in a balanced cycle in plants and soil and the atmosphere, and methane emitted from sources stored deep underground for millennia.

“The frustration is that methane, despite its source, gets lumped into one bag,” Cattle Australia vice-president Adam Coffey said. “Enteric methane from livestock is categorically different to methane from coal-seam gas or mining-related fossil fuels that has been dug up from where it’s been stored for millennia and is new to the atmosphere.

“Why are we ignoring what modern climate science is telling us, which is these emissions are inherently different?”  Mr Coffey said the methane budget report showed the intense focus on the domestic industry’s environmental credent­ials was overhyped.

“I think it’s based mainly on ideology and activism,” Mr Coffey said.

This concern about methane is nonsense.
Water vapour blocks all the frequencies that methane does
so the presence of methane adds nothing

Technical Background

Methane alarm is one of the moles continually popping up in the media Climate Whack-A-Mole game. An antidote to methane madness is now available to those inquiring minds who want to know reality without the hype.

Methane and Climate is a paper by W. A. van Wijngaarden (Department of Physics and Astronomy, York University, Canada) and W. Happer (Department of Physics, Princeton University, USA) published at CO2 Coalition November 22, 2019. Below is a summary of the more detailed publication. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Overview

Atmospheric methane (CH4) contributes to the radiative forcing of Earth’s atmosphere. Radiative forcing is the difference in the net upward thermal radiation from the Earth through a transparent atmosphere and radiation through an otherwise identical atmosphere with greenhouse gases. Radiative forcing, normally specified in units of W m−2 , depends on latitude, longitude and altitude, but it is often quoted for a representative temperate latitude, and for the altitude of the tropopause, or for the top of the atmosphere.

For current concentrations of greenhouse gases, the radiative forcing at the tropopause, per added CH4 molecule, is about 30 times larger than the forcing per added carbon-dioxide (CO2) molecule. This is due to the heavy saturation of the absorption band of the abundant greenhouse gas, CO2. But the rate of increase of CO2 molecules, about 2.3 ppm/year (ppm = part per million by mole), is about 300 times larger than the rate of increase of CH4 molecules, which has been around 0.0076 ppm/year since the year 2008.

So the contribution of methane to the annual increase in forcing is one tenth (30/300) that of carbon dioxide. The net forcing increase from CH4 and CO2 increases is about 0.05 W m−2 year−1 . Other things being equal, this will cause a temperature increase of about 0.012 C year−1 . Proposals to place harsh restrictions on methane emissions because of warming fears are not justified by facts.

The paper is focused on the greenhouse effects of atmospheric methane, since there have recently been proposals to put harsh restrictions on any human activities that release methane. The basic radiation-transfer physics outlined in this paper gives no support to the idea that greenhouse gases like methane, CH4, carbon dioxide, CO2 or nitrous oxide, N2O are contributing to a climate crisis. Given the huge benefits of more CO2 to agriculture, to forestry, and to primary photosynthetic productivity in general, more CO2 is almost certainly benefitting the world. And radiative effects of CH4 and N2O, another greenhouse gas produced by human activities, are so small that they are irrelevant to climate.

Transmission of shortwave solar irradiation and long wavelength radiation from the Earth’s surface through atmosphere, as permitted by Rohde [2]. Note absorption wavelengths of CH4 and N2O are already covered by H2O and CO2.

Radiative Properties of Earth Atmosphere

On the left of Fig. 2 we have indicated the three most important atmospheric layers for radiative heat transfer. The lowest atmospheric layer is the troposphere, where parcels of air, warmed by contact with the solar-heated surface, float upward, much like hot-air balloons. As they expand into the surrounding air, the parcels do work at the expense of internal thermal energy. This causes the parcels to cool with increasing altitude, since heat flow in or out of parcels is usually slow compared to the velocities of ascent of descent.

Figure 2: Left. A standard atmospheric temperature profile[9], T = T (z). The surface temperature is T (0) = 288.7 K . Right. Standard concentrations[10], C {i} = N {i}/N for greenhouse molecules versus altitude z. The total number density of atmospheric molecules is N . At sea level the concentrations are 7750 ppm of H2O, 1.8 ppm of CH4 and 0.32 ppm of N2O. The O3 concentration peaks at 7.8 ppm at an altitude of 35 km, and the CO2 concentration was approximated by 400 ppm at all altitudes. The data is based on experimental observations.

If the parcels consisted of dry air, the cooling rate would be 9.8 C km−1 the dry adiabatic lapse rate[12]. But rising air has usually picked up water vapor from the land or ocean. The condensation of water vapor to droplets of liquid or to ice crystallites in clouds, releases so much latent heat that the lapse rates are less than 9.8 C km−1 in the lower troposphere. A representative lapse rate for mid latitudes is dT/dz = 6.5 K km−1 as shown in Fig. 2.

The tropospheric lapse rate is familiar to vacationers who leave hot areas near sea level for cool vacation homes at higher altitudesin the mountains. On average, the temperature lapse rates are small enough to keep the troposphere buoyantly stable[13]. Tropospheric air parcels that are displaced in altitude will oscillate up and down around their original position with periods of a few minutes. However, at any given time, large regions of the troposphere (particularly in the tropics) are unstable to moist convection because of exceptionally large temperature lapse rates.

The vertical radiation flux Z, which is discussed below, can change rapidly in the troposphere and stratosphere. There can be a further small change of Z in the mesosphere. Changes in Z above the mesopause are small enough to be neglected, so we will often refer to the mesopause as “the top of the atmosphere” (TOA), with respect to radiation transfer. As shown in Fig. 2, the most abundant greenhouse gas at the surface is water vapor, H2O. However, the concentration of water vapor drops by a factor of a thousand or more between the surface and the tropopause. This is because of condensation of water vapor into clouds and eventual removal by precipitation. Carbon dioxide, CO2, the most abundant greenhouse gas after water vapor, is also the most uniformly mixed because of its chemical stability. Methane, the main topic of this discussion is much less abundant than CO2 and it has somewhat higher concentrations in the troposphere than in the stratosphere where it is oxidized by OH radicals and ozone, O3. The oxidation of methane[8] is the main source of the stratospheric water vapor shown in Fig. 2.

Future Forcings of CH4 and CO2

Methane levels in Earth’s atmosphere are slowly increasing.  If the current rate of increase, about 0.007 ppm/year for the past decade or so, were to continue unchanged it would take about 270 years to double the current concentration of C {i} = 1.8 ppm. But, as one can see from Fig.7, methane levels have stopped increasing for years at a time, so it is hard to be confident about future concentrations. Methane concentrations may never double, but if they do, WH[1] show that this would only increase the forcing by 0.8 W m−2. This is a tiny fraction of representative total forcings at midlatitudes of about 140 W m−2 at the tropopause and 120 W m−2 at the top of the atmosphere.

Figure 9: Projected mid-latitude forcing increments at the tropopause from continued increases of CO2 and CH4 at the rates of Fig. 7 and Fig. 8 for the next 50 years. The projected forcings are very small, especially for methane, compared to the current tropospheric forcing of 137 W m−2.

The per-molecule forcings P {i} of (13) and (14) have been used with the column density Nˆ of (12) and the concentration increase rates dC¯{i}/dt, noted in Fig. 7 and Fig. 8, to evaluate the future forcing (15), which is plotted in Fig. 9. Even after 50 years, the forcing increments from increased concentrations of methane (∆F = 0.23 W m−2), or the roughly ten times larger forcing from increased carbon dioxide (∆F = 2.2 W m−2) are very small compared to the total forcing, ∆F = 137 W m−2, shown in Fig. 3. The reason that the per-molecule forcing of methane is some 30 times larger than that of carbon dioxide for current concentrations is “saturation” of the absorption bands. The current density of CO2 molecules is some 200 times greater than that of CH4 molecules, so the absorption bands of CO2 are much more saturated than those of CH4. In the dilute“optically thin” limit, WH[1] show that the tropospheric forcing power per molecule is P {i} = 0.15 × 10−22 W for CH4, and P {i} = 2.73 × 10−22 W for CO2. Each CO2 molecule in the dilute limit causes about 5 times more forcing increase than an additional molecule of CH4, which is only a ”super greenhouse gas” because there is so little in the atmosphere, compared to CO2.

Methane Summary

Natural gas is 75% Methane (CH4) which burns cleanly to carbon dioxide and water. Methane is eagerly sought after as fuel for electric power plants because of its ease of transport and because it produces the least carbon dioxide for the most power. Also cars can be powered with compressed natural gas (CNG) for short distances.

In many countries CNG has been widely distributed as the main home heating fuel. As a consequence, in the past methane has leaked to the atmosphere in large quantities, now firmly controlled. Grazing animals also produce methane in their complicated stomachs and methane escapes from rice paddies and peat bogs like the Siberian permafrost.

It is thought that methane is a very potent greenhouse gas because it absorbs some infrared wavelengths 7 times more effectively than CO2, molecule for molecule, and by weight even 20 times. As we have seen previously, this also means that within a distance of metres, its effect has saturated, and further transmission of heat occurs by convection and conduction rather than by radiation.

Note that when H20 is present in the lower troposphere, there are few photons left for CH4 to absorb:

Even if the IPCC radiative greenhouse theory were true, methane occurs only in minute quantities in air, 1.8ppm versus CO2 of 390ppm. By weight, CH4 is only 5.24Gt versus CO2 3140Gt (on this assumption). If it truly were twenty times more potent, it would amount to an equivalent of 105Gt CO2 or one thirtieth that of CO2. A doubling in methane would thus have no noticeable effect on world temperature.

However, the factor of 20 is entirely misleading because absorption is proportional to the number of molecules (=volume), so the factor of 7 (7.3) is correct and 20 is wrong. With this in mind, the perceived threat from methane becomes even less.

Further still, methane has been rising from 1.6ppm to 1.8ppm in 30 years (1980-2010), assuming that it has not stopped rising, this amounts to a doubling in 2-3 centuries. In other words, methane can never have any measurable effect on temperature, even if the IPCC radiative cooling theory were right.

Because only a small fraction in the rise of methane in air can be attributed to farm animals, it is ludicrous to worry about this aspect or to try to farm with smaller emissions of methane, or to tax it or to trade credits.

The fact that methane in air has been leveling off in the past two decades, even though we do not know why, implies that it plays absolutely no role as a greenhouse gas.  (From Sea Friends (here):

More information at The Methane Misconceptions by Dr. Wilson Flood (UK) here.

Climatists Aim Forks at Our Food Supply

Fishy Activists Destroying Hydro Dams

Posted on by Ron Clutz

AP Photo/Nicholas K. Geranios

John Stossel bring us up to date on the fishy case for removing hydroelectric dams on the Snake River in Washington state.  His Townhall article is A Dam Good Argument.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.and added images.

Instead of using fossil fuels, we’re told to use “clean” energy: wind, solar or hydropower.  Hydro is the most reliable. Unlike wind and sunlight, it flows steadily.

But now, environmental groups want to destroy dams that create hydro power.

The Klamath River flows by the remaining pieces of the Copco 2 Dam after deconstruction in June 2023. |Located on Oregon/California border.Juliet Grable / JPR

“Breach those dams,” an activist shouts in my new video. “Now is the time, our fish are on the line!“

The activists have targeted four dams on the Snake River in Washington State. They claim the dams are driving salmon to extinction.

Walla Walla District Dams on the Snake & Columbia Rivers

It’s true that dams once killed lots of salmon. Pregnant fish need to swim upriver to have babies, and their babies swim downriver to the ocean.  Suddenly, dams were in the way. Salmon population dropped sharply.

But that was in the 1970s.Today, most salmon
make it past the dam without trouble.

How?  Fish-protecting innovations like fish ladders and spillways guide most of the salmon away from the turbines that generate electricity.

Lower Granite fish count station & ladder (left, bottom right); Lower Monumental fish ladder (top right)  Source: Fish Passage Thru the Lower Snake & Columbia Rivers

“Between 96% and 98% of the salmon successfully pass each dam,” says Todd Myers, Environmental Director at the Washington Policy Center.  Even federal scientific agencies now say we can leave dams alone and fish will be fine.

But environmental groups don’t raise money by acknowledging good news. “Snake River Salmon Are in Crisis,” reads a headline from Earthjustice.  Gullible media fall for it. The Snake River is the “most endangered in the country!” claimed the evening news anchor.

“That’s simply not true,” Myers explains. “All you have to do is look at the actual population numbers to know that that’s absurd.”  Utterly absurd. In recent years, salmon populations are higher than they were in the 1980s and 90s.

The fish passage report for 2023 (here) has many results like this for various species. Conversion refers to completing the Snake River run from Ice Harbor through Lower Granite.

“They make these claims,” Myers says, “because they know people will believe them … they don’t want to believe that their favorite environmental group is dishonest.”

But many are. In 1999, environmental groups bought an ad in the New York Times saying “salmon … will be extinct by 2017.” “Did the environmentalists apologize?” I ask Meyers. “No,” he says. “They repeat almost the exact same arguments today, they just changed the dates.

I invited 10 activist groups that want to destroy dams to come to my studio and defend their claims about salmon extinction. Not one agreed. I understand why. They’ve already convinced the public and gullible politicians.  Idaho’s Republican Congressman Mike Simpson says, “There is no viable path that can allow us to keep the dams in place.”

“We keep doing dumb things,” says Myers. “We put money into places where it doesn’t have an environmental impact, and then we wonder 10, 20, 30 years (later) why we haven’t made any environmental progress.”

Politicians and activists want to tear down Snake River dams
even though they generate tons of electricity.

“Almost the same amount as all of the wind and solar turbines in Washington state,” says Myers, “Imagine if I told the environmental community we need to tear down every wind turbine and every solar panel. They would lose their minds. But that’s essentially what they’re advocating by tearing down Snake River dams.”

I push back: “They say, ‘Just build more wind turbines.’”  “The problem is, several times a year, there’s no wind,” he replies. “You could build 10 times as many wind turbines, but if there’s no wind, there’s no electricity.”

Hydro, on the other hand, “can turn on and off whenever it’s needed. Destroying hydro and replacing it with wind makes absolutely no sense. It will do serious damage to our electrical grid.”

“It’s not their money,” I point out.”Exactly,” he says. “If you want to spend $35 billion on salmon, there’s lots of things we can do that would have a real impact.”  Like what?

“Reduce the population of) seals and sea lions,” he says, “The Washington Academy of Sciences says that unless we reduce the populations, we will not recover salmon.” “People used to hunt sea lions,” I note. “Yeah, that’s why the populations are higher today.”

But environmentalists don’t want people to hunt sea lions or seals. Instead, they push for destruction of dams. “Because it’s sexy and dramatic, it sells,” says Myers. “It’s more about feeling good than environmental results.”

PostScript

Of course there is a political dimension to this movement.  Left coast woke progressives are targeting Lower Snake River dams located in Eastern Washington state.  Folks there and in Eastern Oregon would rather be governed by common sense leaders like those in Idaho.

The case against the dams is actually about climatism.  The fish are not at risk, as shown by many scientific reports. But climatists do not include hydro in their definition of “renewable.”  And they promote fear of methane, claiming dam reservoirs increase methane emissions.

So here’s the political solution.  Keep the dams open and the fish running to their spawning grounds.  And to appease climatists ban any transmission of electricity from those dams to Seattle and Western Washington state.  Deal?

Background Post

Left Coast Closes the Dam Lights

Signs of Sun Setting on Renewables

Posted on by Ron Clutz

News come from renewables trailblazing Australia including signs there and around the world that wind and solar power are losing their momentum. From the Australian by way of John Ray is the article The sun is setting the renewables ‘superpower’ fantasy of the Australian Left. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Renewable energy superpower status is supposedly in Australia’s grasp now the government has given Mike Cannon-Brookes the green light to export solar power to Singapore.

Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood says Australia’s largest solar farm to date has been given the “green light” by the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek.  Plibersek announced environmental approval for the tech billionaire’s eccentric proposal last week, taking a swipe at Peter Dutton’s “expensive nuclear fantasy that may never happen”.

By contrast, the Environment Minister would have us believe Cannon-Brookes’s plan to siliconise the NT Outback is a done deal. All that’s left to do is:

♦  raise $35bn in capital,
♦  install 120 square kilometres of solar panels,
♦  build a modest 788km transmission line to Darwin, and
♦  lay a 4200km high-voltage cable on the seabed, and we’re good to go.

The Sun Cable AAPowerLink project feels like it was stolen from a Heath Robinson cartoon: a convoluted, unnecessarily elaborate, and impractical contraption designed to accomplish a mundane task. It may mark the beginning of the end of the renewable romance, the point at which the transition to wind, solar and hydropower collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

There is increasing evidence the US has reached the point of peak renewables, as the pool of private investors shrinks and winning community approval becomes harder. Research by the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory showed roughly one-third of utility-scale wind and solar applications submitted over the past five years were cancelled, while about half of wind and solar projects experienced significant delays.

The US Department of Energy says the national electricity network needs to grow by 57 per cent by 2035, the equivalent of approximately 21,000 km a year. Last year’s total was around 200 km, downfrom just over 1000 in 2022.

Meanwhile, the challenges of grid synchronisation and storage remain unresolved, and the technical problems for offshore wind turbines, in particular, are mounting. Last week, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova announced an investigation into a blade failure in the 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea off the coast of the UK. It is the third blade failure this year.

In July, a newly installed blade crumbled at the Vineyard Wind offshore plant, creating debris that washed up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. At 107 metres long and weighing 55 tonnes, they are the most enormous blades deployed commercially. The failure of three in quick succession suggests the quest to increase output by installing ever-larger blades has reached its natural limits.

Yet the imperative of expanding generating capacity is hardening.

The principal driving force is not electric vehicles but the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. AI requires at least 10 times the power of conventional computing programs.

In the US, data centres account for about 2.5 per cent of power and demand could rise to 7.5 per cent by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. In Ireland, data processing and storage use 12 per cent of electricity produced, forcing the authorities to limit the number of connections to the grid.

Silicon Valley has long abandoned the notion it can be powered by silicon photovoltaic panels while burying stray emissions in the Amazon forests.

In April, the tech giant Amazon paid the best part of $1bn ($US650m) for a sizeable block of land next to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power station. It will be the site for a data centre powered by up to 480MW of carbon-free electricity delivered reliably around the clocky.

Shares in US nuclear power companies such as Consolidated Energy, Talem and Vistra have soared by between 80 per cent and 180 per cent in the past year. So-called green energy stocks, on the other hand, are static or falling, while coal is making an unexpected comeback.

In May, the Financial Times reported that the retirement dates for coal-fired power stations are being pushed back as operators become concerned about grid security. Allianz Energy has delayed the conversion of its Wisconsin plant from coal to gas for three years to 2028. Ohio-based FirstEnergy announced in February that it was scrapping its 2030 target to phase out coal, citing “resource adequacy concerns”.

The effect of AI on electricity demand was largely unanticipated at the beginning of the decade. AI chips will undoubtedly become more efficient, but there is no telling how much further the demand for AI will grow since the technology is in its infancy. Nor can we begin to guess what other power-hungry forms of technology might be developed by 2050.

What we do know, however, is that if Australia’s demand for electricity exceeds 313 TWH a year in a 2050, we’re in trouble. That’s the target the Australian Energy Market Operator has set in its updated blueprint for the great electricity transition.

As Chris Bowen points out, that’s going to take a lot solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Minister says we need 22,000 new solar panels a day and a new 7MW wind turbine every 18 hours just to meet our 2030 target of a mere 202 TWH. For the record, the speed of the rollout in the first two years of Labor government is less than a tenth of that.

One of the hallmarks of the anointed is an unwavering conviction
in the integrity of their analysis and
the effectiveness of their proposed solutions.

They feel no need to hedge their bets by factoring in contingency arrangements should their predictions turn out to be wrong. Nothing in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan indicates its experts have given any thought to scaling up electricity production in line with actual demand, which may well be considerably higher than they’ve anticipated.

If they had, they would have to acknowledge that there are limits to the renewable energy frontier determined by energy density, the demand for land and the requirement for firming. The silicification of northern Australia cannot continue forever, nor can we expect to rely on China for most of the hardware and pretend there are no geopolitical consequences.

As for our nuclear-phobic Prime Minister’s dream of turning Australia into the Saudi Arabia of green hydrogen, while simultaneously sitting at the cutting edge of quantum computing, forget it. In 2006, as the shadow minister for the environment, Anthony Albanese gave a speech at the Swansea RSL on avoiding dangerous climate change.

“Why on Earth would we want to take the big health and economic risk of nuclear energy when we have a ready-made power source hovering peacefully in the sky every day?” he asked.

If Albanese doesn’t know the answer to that question 18 years later, he probably never will.

Climate Policies Fail in Fact and in Theory

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A recent international analysis of 1500 climate policies around the world concluded that 63 or 4% of them were successful in reducing emissions.  The paper is Climate policies that achieved major emission reductions: Global evidence from two decades published at Science.org.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Abstract

Meeting the Paris Agreement’s climate targets necessitates better knowledge about which climate policies work in reducing emissions at the necessary scale. We provide a global, systematic ex post evaluation to identify policy combinations that have led to large emission reductions out of 1500 climate policies implemented between 1998 and 2022 across 41 countries from six continents. Our approachintegrates a comprehensive climate policy database with a machine learning–based extension ofthe common difference-in-differences approach. We identified 63 successful policy interventions with total emission reductions between 0.6 billion and 1.8 billion metric tonnes CO2 . Our insights on effective but rarely studied policy combinations highlight the important role of price-based instruments in well-designed policy mixes and the policy efforts necessary for closing the emissions gap.

Context

(1). Although the [Paris] agreement seeks to limit global average temperature increase to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C,” its success critically hinges on the implementation of effective climate policies at the national level.  However, scenarios from global integrated assessment models suggest that the aggregated mitigation efforts communicated through nationally determined contributions (NDCs) fall short of the required emission reductions.

(2)The United Nations (UN) estimates quantify a median emission gap of 23 billion metric tonnes(Gt) carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2-eq) by 2030

(3). The persistence of this emissions gap is not only caused by an ambition gap but also a gap in the outcomes that adopted policies achieve in terms of emission reductions.

(4). This raises the fundamental question as to which types of policy measures are successfully causing meaningful emission reductions. Despite more than two decades of experience with thousands of diverse climate policy measures gained around the world, there is consensus in neither science nor policy on this question.

The exhibit above shows the scope and complexity of the analysis.  But the bottom line is that 96% of the effort and trillions of $$$ were spent to no avail. It is estimated that on the order of 1.2 Billion tonnes of CO2 were prevented over the last 20 years, with an additional 23 Billion tonnes to be erased by 2030. 

Any enterprise with that performance would be liquidated. 
That is an epic failure in fact. 

And recommending mixing of policies including subsidies and regulations along with pricing goes against economic theory and fails in practice. Ross McKitrick explains the dangers of making climate policies willy-nilly in his Financial Post article Economists’ letter misses the point about the carbon tax revolt.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Yes, the carbon tax works great in a ‘first-best’ world where it’s the
only carbon policy. In the real world, carbon policies are piled high.

An open letter is circulating online among my economist colleagues aiming to promote sound thinking on carbon taxes. It makes some valid points and will probably get waved around in the House of Commons before long. But it’s conspicuously selective in its focus, to the point of ignoring the main problems with Canadian climate policy as a whole.

EV charging sign Electric-vehicle mandates and subsidies are among the mountain of climate policies that have been piled on top of Canada’s carbon tax. PHOTO BY JOSHUA A. BICKEL/THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

There’s a massive pile of boulders blocking the road to efficient policy, including:

    • clean fuel regulations,
    • the oil-and-gas-sector emissions cap,
    • the electricity sector coal phase-out,
    • strict energy efficiency rules for new and existing buildings,
    • new performance mandates for natural gas-fired generation plants,
    • the regulatory blockade against liquified natural gas export facilities,
    • new motor vehicle fuel economy standards,
    • caps on fertilizer use on farms,
    • provincial ethanol production subsidies,
    • electric vehicle mandates and subsidies,
    • provincial renewable electricity mandates,
    • grid-scale battery storage experiments,
    • the Green Infrastructure Fund,
    • carbon capture and underground storage mandates, 
    • subsidies for electric buses and emergency vehicles in Canadian cities,
    • new aviation and rail sector emission limits,
      and many more.

Not one of these occasioned a letter of protest from Canadian economists.

Beside that mountain of boulders there’s a twig labelled “overstated objections to carbon pricing.” At the sight of it, hundreds of economists have rushed forward to sweep it off the road. What a help!

To my well-meaning colleagues I say: the pile of regulatory boulders
long ago made the economic case for carbon pricing irrelevant.

Layering a carbon tax on top of current and planned command-and-control regulations does not yield an efficient outcome, it just raises the overall cost to consumers. Which is why I can’t get excited about and certainly won’t sign the carbon-pricing letter. That’s not where the heavy lifting is needed.

My colleagues object to exaggerated claims about the cost of carbon taxes. Fair enough. But far worse are exaggerated claims about both the benefits of reducing carbon dioxide emissions and the economic opportunities associated with the so-called “energy transition.” Exaggeration about the benefits of emission reduction is traceable to poor-quality academic research, such as continued use of climate models known to have large, persistent warming biases and of the RCP8.5 emissions scenario, long since shown in the academic literature to be grossly exaggerated.

But a lot of it is simply groundless rhetoric. Climate activists, politicians and journalists have spent years blaming Canadians’ fossil fuel use for every bad weather event that comes along and shutting down rational debate with polemical cudgels such as “climate emergency” declarations. Again, none of this occasioned a cautionary letter from economists.

There’s another big issue on which the letter was silent. Suppose we did clear all the regulatory boulders along with the carbon-pricing-costs-too-much twig. How high should the carbon tax be? A few of the letter’s signatories are former students of mine so I expect they remember the formula for an optimal emissions tax in the presence of an existing tax system. If not, they can take their copy of Economic Analysis of Environmental Policy by Prof. McKitrick off the shelf, blow off the thick layer of dust and look it up. Or they can consult any of the half-dozen or so journal articles published since the 1970s that derive it. But I suspect most of the other signatories have never seen the formula and don’t even know it exists.

To be technical for a moment, the optimal carbon tax rate varies inversely with the marginal cost of the overall tax system. The higher the tax burden — and with our heavy reliance on income taxes our burden is high — the costlier it is at the margin to provide any public good, including emissions reductions. Economists call this a “second-best problem”: inefficiencies in one place, like the tax system, cause inefficiencies in other policy areas, yielding in this case a higher optimal level of emissions and a lower optimal carbon tax rate.

Based on reasonable estimates of the social cost of carbon and the marginal costs of our tax system, our carbon price is already high enough. In fact, it may well be too high. I say this as one of the only Canadian economists who has published on all aspects of the question. Believing in mainstream climate science and economics, as I do, does not oblige you to dismiss public complaints that the carbon tax is too costly.

Which raises my final point: the age of mass academic letter-writing has long since passed. Academia has become too politically one-sided. Universities don’t get to spend years filling their ranks with staff drawn from one side of the political spectrum and then expect to be viewed as neutral arbiters of public policy issues. The more signatories there are on a letter like this, the less impact it will have. People nowadays will make up their own minds, thank you very much, and a well-argued essay by an individual willing to stand alone may even carry more weight.

Online conversations today are about rising living costs, stagnant real wages and deindustrialization. Even if carbon pricing isn’t the main cause of all this, climate policy is playing a growing role and people can be excused for lumping it all together. The public would welcome insight from economists about how to deal with these challenges. A mass letter enthusing about carbon taxes doesn’t provide it.

Postscript:  All the Pain for No Gain is Unnecessary

 

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The Short Lives of Wind Turbines

Posted on by Ron Clutz

In a recent short video (below) John Burgess summarizes why wind farms become unviable long before promoters promised. He explains that after about 15 years wind farms are uneconomic to keep going. Also the far more reliable older smaller under 2 MW turbines have a longer life. All based on the work of one professor – Gordon Hughes.who did some brilliant work on wind farm costs some three years ago. For those preferring to read, I provide a transcript lightly edited from closed captions in italics with my bolds, key exhibits and added images.

Paul Burgess Basics 2 The Lifespan of Wind Turbines

This video is on the lifespan of wind turbines. In this video and quite a few others actually, I’m going to be relying on the work of Professor Gordon Hughes and a document you should all read is this one The link to Hughes’ study is in the title in red below. That video was produced three years ago but had very few views less than a thousand. My job is to bring these stories to the public and his work is extremely valuable, so this video is based on that.

Wind Power Economics – Rhetoric and Reality

Here we go the lifespan of turbines.  Shock Horror. Wind turbines gradually wear out and they do it faster than you think. As I have explained, the load factor for a wind farm is the percentage of the actual electricity you get out of it in the real world compared to a purely theoretical maximum, the maximum being every second of the Year it blows perfectly and everything you get 100%. What percentage of that do we actually get, that’s the load factor.

Typically for onshore wind farms in the UK Island Etc it’s 26 to 30%, in that sort of range. The bigger ones, the higher ones may get into the low30s. So that’s the load Factor but that doesn’t stay the same. It actually deteriorates. These things wear out as they go, and they actually deteriorate at quite a rate, around about 3% per year. And so what matters with load factors– no excuses. If it has to be stopped for maintenance that reduces a load Factor, because it’s a real world measurement of what you produce.

Now Denmark kept really good records of their turbines. And here is a diagram that explains a few things about them. The results are quite remarkable. This graph looks complicated, but it’s a graph to show basically the failure rate over time for wind turbines. And it’s constructed from a large number of wind turbines in Denmark. On this vertical axis is how much of the energy is lost, which affects the load factors. We start off with almost zero so nothing is lost. We’re getting the expected performance, and that seems to be the case here for almost two years. But as you go up that axis and you go to the very top, there’s nothing left at all, There’s no energy output.

Now there are four colors of Curves, The higher two are for offshore, showing Old Generation and New Generation offshore. The lower two are for onshore, again Old Generation and New Generation. The new generation have higher turbine values and this comprises turbines up to 8 megawatts. They’re much worse than the older generation; they deteriorate much faster, and you can see that from the curves. Reading a curve is quite amazing. Let’s look at what point you’ve lost 60% of the energy coming out the wind farm. For Offshore New Generation the answer there is just 60 months or 5 years.

So 60% of those offshore modern turbines have failed within 5 years. Obviously they have to repair them all the time and therefore there’s a big rising cost to all this. But looking quickly at what we get from onshore modern ones which is the orange curve here. Let’s check when 20% of the turbines are failed, that’s one out of five turbines, and that is at about 68 months or about 5 to six years.

You can expect failures so these things they had to be repaired, which puts the costs up. So what are the running costs of these turbines? This graph of one axis shows how many thousands of pounds per megawatt of installed capacity you actually pay out per year. And the bottom scale is the length of time, how much those costs rise over time. And as you can see the lower line is the older generation and the Top Line the newer generation, such as they are putting into the Isle of Man

So let’s take Isle of Man as an example. They’re going to install 20 megawatts worth, so let’s look at the running cost and these are in 2018 prices, so the costs have risen since then. You can see taking the Isle of Man modern turbines we start off at £74,000 a year per megawatt, and we end at about £100,000 a year after 12 years per megawatt of installed capacity. So we start off with 74 times in this case for 20 megawatts for the Isle of Man which is 1.48 million a year and we end up at a neat 2 million a year in running costs. And that keeps rising.

This basically shows that after about 15 years
it’s no longer worth maintaining the wind Farm.

Offshore wind of course is much more expensive starting off at around about £200,000 a year and ending up at £400,000 a year per megawatt, three to four times the price of onshore.

I am aware that that raises lots of questions and they will be answered in following videos. Why is it if it’s about 15 years that you’ve had some forms carry on Beyond? And so on. The whole thing seems to me to be a Ponzi scheme, it really does. And that will be explained in following videos.

See Also

Wind Energy Risky Business

Put Climate Insanity Behind Us

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Conrad Black writes at National Post Time for the climate insanity to stop.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

We have been racing to destroy our standard of living
to avert a crisis that never materialized

We must by now be getting reasonably close the point where there is a consensus for re-examining the issue of climate change and related subjects. For decades, those of us who had our doubts were effectively shut down by the endless deafening repetition, as if from the massed choir of an operatic catechism school, of the alleged truism: “98 per cent of scientists agree …” (that the world is coming to an end in a few years if we don’t abolish the combustion engine). Decades have gone by in which the polar bears were supposed to become extinct because of the vanishing polar ice cap, the glaciers were supposed to have melted in the rising heat and the impact of melting ice would raise ocean levels to the point that Pacific islands, such as former U.S. vice-president Al Gore’s oratorical dreamworld, the Pacific island state of Tuvalu, would only be accessible to snorkelers. There has been no progress toward any of this. Ocean levels have not risen appreciably, nothing has been submerged and the polar bear population has risen substantially.

A large part of the problem has been the fanaticism of the alarmist forces. This has not been one of those issues where people may equably disagree. There was a spontaneous campaign to denigrate those of us who were opposed to taking drastic and extremely expensive economic steps to reduce carbon emissions on the basis of existing evidence: we could not be tolerated as potentially sensible doubters; we were labelled “deniers,” a reference to Holocaust-deniers who would sweep evidence of horrible atrocities under the rug. For our own corrupt or perverse motives, we were promoting the destruction of the world and unimaginable human misery. There has been climate hysteria like other panics in history, such as those recounted in Charles MacKay’s “Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,” particularly the 1630’s tulip mania, in which a single tulip bulb briefly sold for the current equivalent of $25,000.

In western Europe, and particularly in the United States, where the full panic of climate change prevailed, the agrarian and working echelons of society have rebelled against the onerous financial penalties of the war on carbon emissions. There have been movements in some countries to suppress the population of cows because of the impact of their flatulence on the composition of the atmosphere. This has created an alliance of convenience between the environmental extremists and the dietary authoritarians as they take dead aim at the joint targets of carbon emissions and obesity. Germany, which should be the most powerful and exemplary of Europe’s nations, has blundered headlong into the climate crisis by conceding political power to militant Greens. It has shut down its advanced and completely safe nuclear power program, the ultimate efficient fuel, and has flirted with abolishing leisure automobile drives on the weekends.

Claims that tropical storms have become more frequent are rebutted by meticulously recorded statistics. Claims that forest fires are more frequent and extensive have also been shown not to be true. My own analysis, which is based on observations and makes no pretense to scientific research, as I have had occasion to express here before, is that the honourable, if often tiresome, conservation movement, the zealots of Greenpeace and the Sierra Club, were suddenly displaced as organizers and leaders of the environmental movement by the international left, which was routed in the Cold War. Their western sympathizers demonstrated a genius for improvisation that none of us who knew them in the Cold War would have imagined that they possessed, and they took over the environmental bandwagon and converted it into a battering ram against capitalism in the name of saving the planet.

Everyone dislikes pollution and wants the cleanest air and water possible. All conscientious people want the cleanest environment that’s economically feasible. We should also aspire to the highest attainable level of accurate information before we embark on, or go any further with, drastic and hideously expensive methods of replacing fossil fuels. Large-scale disruptions to our ways of life at immense cost to consumers and taxpayers, mainly borne by those who can least easily afford it, are a mistake. We can all excuse zeal in a sincerely embraced cause, but it is time to de-escalate this discussion from its long intemperate nature of hurling thunderbolts back and forth, and instead focus on serious research that will furnish a genuine consensus. I think this was essentially what former prime minister Stephen Harper and former environment minister John Baird were advocating in what they called a ”Canadian solution” to the climate question. Since then, our policy has been fabricated by fanatics, including the prime minister, who do not wish to be confused by the facts. The inconvenient truth is now the truth that inconveniences them.

Western Europe has effectively abandoned its net-zero carbon emission goals; the world is not deteriorating remotely as quickly as Al Gore, King Charles, Tony Blair and the Liberal Party of Canada predicted. Some of the largest polluters — China, India and Russia — do not seem to care about any of this. Canada should lead the world toward a rational consensus with intensified research aiming at finding an appropriate response to the challenge. What we have had is faddishness and public frenzy. Historians will wonder why the West made war on its own standard of living in pursuit of a wild fantasy, and no immediate chance of accomplishing anything useful. We have been cheered on by the under-developed world because they seek reparations from the advanced countries, although some of them are among the worst climate offenders. It is insane. Canada should help lead the patient back to sanity.

Postscript:

So to be more constructive, let’s consider what should be proposed by political leaders regarding climate, energy and the environment.  IMO these should be the pillars:

♦  Climate change is real, but not an emergency.

♦  We must use our time to adapt to future climate extremes.

♦  We must transition to a diversified energy platform.

♦  We must safeguard our air and water from industrial pollutants.

A Rational Climate Policy

This is your brain on climate alarm. Just say N0!