Climate Initiatives

Power Density Physics Trump Energy Politics

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A plethora of insane energy policy proposals are touted by clueless politicians, including the apparent Democrat candidate for US President.  So all talking heads need reminding of some basics of immutable energy physics.  This post is in service of restoring understanding of fundamentals that cannot be waved away.

The Key to Energy IQ

This brief video provides a key concept in order to think rationally about calls to change society’s energy platform.  Below is a transcript from the closed captions along with some of the video images and others added.

We know what the future of American energy will look like. Solar panels, drawing limitless energy from the sun. Wind turbines harnessing the bounty of nature to power our homes and businesses.  A nation effortlessly meeting all of its energy needs with minimal impact on the environment. We have the motivation, we have the technology. There’s only one problem: the physics.

The history of America is, in many ways, the history of energy. The steam power that revolutionized travel and the shipping of goods. The coal that fueled the railroads and the industrial revolution. The petroleum that helped birth the age of the automobile. And now, if we only have the will, a new era of renewable energy.

Except … it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s not really a matter of will, at least not primarily. There are powerful scientific and economic constraints on where we get our power from. An energy source has to be reliable; you have to know that the lights will go on when you flip the switch. An energy source needs to be affordable–because when energy is expensive…everything else gets more expensive too. And, if you want something to be society’s dominant energy source, it needs to be scalable, able to provide enough power for a whole nation.

Those are all incredibly important considerations, which is one of the reasons it’s so weird that one of the most important concepts we have for judging them … is a thing that most people have never heard of. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the exciting world of…power density.

Look, no one said scientists were gonna be great at branding. Put simply, power density is just how much stuff it takes to get your energy; how much land or other physical resources. And we measure it by how many watts you can get per square meter, or liter, or kilogram – which, if you’re like us…probably means nothing to you.

So let’s put this in tangible terms. Just about the worst energy source America has by the standards of power density are biofuels, things like corn-based ethanol. Biofuels only provide less than 3% of America’s energy needs–and yet, because of the amount of corn that has to be grown to produce it … they require more land than every other energy source in the country combined. Lots of resources going in, not much energy coming out–which means they’re never going to be able to be a serious fuel source.

Now, that’s an extreme example, but once you start to see the world in these terms, you start to realize why our choice of energy sources isn’t arbitrary. Coal, for example, is still America’s second largest source of electricity, despite the fact that it’s the dirtiest and most carbon-intensive way to produce it. Why do we still use so much of it? Well, because it’s significantly more affordable…in part because it’s way less resource-intensive.

An energy source like offshore wind, for example, is so dependent on materials like copper and zinc that it would require six times as many mineral resources to produce the same amount of power as coal. And by the way, getting all those minerals out of the ground…itself requires lots and lots of energy.

Now, the good news is that America has actually been cutting way down on its use of coal in recent years, thanks largely to technological breakthroughs that brought us cheap natural gas as a replacement. And because natural gas emits way less carbon than coal, that reduced our carbon emissions from electricity generation by more than 30%.

In fact, the government reports that switching over to natural gas did more than twice as much to cut carbon emissions as renewables did in recent years. Why did natural gas progress so much faster than renewables? It wasn’t an accident.

Energy is a little like money: You’ve gotta spend it to make it. To get usable natural gas, for example, you’ve first gotta drill a well, process and transport the gas, build a power plant, and generate the electricity. But the question is how much energy are you getting back for your investment? With natural gas, you get about 30 times as much power out of the system as you put into creating it.  By contrast, with something like solar power, you only get about 3 1/2 times as much power back.

Replacing the now closed Indian Point nuclear power plant would require covering all of Albany County NY with wind mills.

Hard to fuel an entire country that way. And everywhere you look, you see similarly eye-popping numbers. To replace the energy produced by just one oil well in the Permian Basin of Texas–and there are thousands of those–you’d need to build 10 windmills, each about 330 feet high. To meet just 10% of the country’s electricity needs, you’d have to build a wind farm the size of the state of New Hampshire. To get the same amount of power produced by one typical nuclear reactor, you’d need over three million solar panels, none of which means, by the way, that we shouldn’t be using renewables as a part of our energy future.

But it does mean that the dream of using only renewables is going to remain a dream,
at least given the constraints of current technology. We simply don’t know how
to do it while still providing the amount of energy that everyday life requires.

No energy source is ever going to painlessly solve all our problems. It’s always a compromise – which is why it’s so important for us to focus on the best outcomes that are achievable, because otherwise, New Hampshire’s gonna look like this.

Addendum from Michael J. Kelly

Energy return on investment (EROI)

The debate over decarbonization has focussed on technical feasibility and economics. There is one emerging measure that comes closely back to the engineering and the thermodynamics of energy production. The energy return on (energy) investment is a measure of the useful energy produced by a particular power plant divided by the energy needed to build, operate, maintain, and decommission the plant. This is a concept that owes its origin to animal ecology: a cheetah must get more energy from consuming his prey than expended on catching it, otherwise it will die. If the animal is to breed and nurture the next generation then the ratio of energy obtained from energy expended has to be higher, depending on the details of energy expenditure on these other activities. Weißbach et al. have analysed the EROI for a number of forms of energy production and their principal conclusion is that nuclear, hydro-, and gas- and coal-fired power stations have an EROI that is much greater than wind, solar photovoltaic (PV), concentrated solar power in a desert or cultivated biomass: see Fig. 2.

In human terms, with an EROI of 1, we can mine fuel and look at it—we have no energy left over. To get a society that can feed itself and provide a basic educational system we need an EROI of our base-load fuel to be in excess of 5, and for a society with international travel and high culture we need EROI greater than 10. The new renewable energies do not reach this last level when the extra energy costs of overcoming intermittency are added in. In energy terms the current generation of renewable energy technologies alone will not enable a civilized modern society to continue!

On Energy Transitions

Postscript

Fantasies of Clever Climate Policies

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Chris Kenny writes at The Australian Facts at a premium in blustery climate debate. Excerpts in italics from text provided by John Ray at his blog, Greenie Watch.  My bolds and added images.

Collective Idiocy From Intellectual Vanity

We think we are so clever. The conceit of contemporary humankind is often unbearable.  Yet this modern self-regard has generated a collective idiocy, an inane confusion between feelings and facts, and an inability to distinguish between noble aims and hard reality.

This preference for virtue signalling over practical action can be explained only by intellectual vanity, a smugness that over-estimates humankind’s ability to shape the world it inhabits.

As a result we have a tendency to believe we are masters of the universe, that we can control the climate and regulate natural disasters. Too lazy or spoiled to weigh facts and think things through, we are more susceptible than ever to mass delusion.

We have seen this tendency play out in deeply worrying ways, such as the irrational belief in the communal benefits of Covid vaccination despite the distinct lack of scientific evidence. Too many people just wanted to believe the vaccine had this thing beaten.

Still, there is no area of public debate where rational thought is more readily cast aside than in the climate and energy debate. This is where alarmists demand that people “follow the science” while they deploy rhetoric, scare campaigns and policies that turn reality and science on their heads.

This nonsense is so widespread and amplified by so many authoritative figures that we have become inured to it. Teachers and children break from school to draw attention to what the UN calls a “climate emergency” as the world lives through its most populous and prosperous period in history, when people are shielded from the ill-effects of weather events better than they ever have been previously.

Politicians tell us in the same breath that producing clean energy is the most urgent and important task for the planet and reject nuclear energy, the only reliable form of emissions-free energy. The activists argue that reducing emissions is so imperative it is worth lowering living standards, alienating farmland, scarring forests and destroying industries, but it is not worth the challenge of boiling water to create energy-generating steam by using the tried and tested technology of nuclear fission.

Our acceptance of idiocy, unchecked and unchallenged, struck me in one interview this week given by teal MP Zali Steggall. In many ways it was an unexceptional interview; there are politicians and activists saying this sort of thing every day somewhere, usually unchallenged.

Steggall was preoccupied with Australia’s emissions reduction targets. “If we are going to be aligned to a science-based target and keep temperatures as close to 1.5 degrees as we can, we must have a minimum reduction of 75 per cent by 2035 as an interim target,” she said.

Steggall then patronised her audience by comparing meeting emissions targets to paying down a mortgage. The claim about controlling global temperatures is hard to take seriously, but to be fair it is merely aping the lines of the UN, which argues the increase in global average temperatures can be held to 1.5 degrees with emissions reductions of that size – globally.

We could talk all day about the imprecise nature of these calculations, the contested scientific debate about the role of other natural variabilities in climate, and the presumption that humankind, through policy imposed by a supranational authority, can control global climate as if with a thermostat. The simplistic relaying of this agenda as central to Australian policy decisions was not the worst aspect of Steggall’s presentation.

“The Coalition has no policy, so let’s be really clear, they are taking Australia out of the Paris Agreement if they fail to nominate an improvement with a 2035 target,” Steggall lectured, disingenuously.

This was Steggall promulgating the central lie of the national climate debate – that Australia’s emissions reduction policies can alter the climate. It is a fallacy embraced and advocated by Labor, the Greens and the teals, and which the Coalition is loath to challenge for fear of being tagged into a “climate denialism” argument.

It is arrant nonsense to suggest our policies can have any discernible effect on the climate or “climate risk”. Any politician suggesting so, directly or by implication, is part of a contemporary, fake-news-driven dumbing down of the public square, and injecting an urgency into our policy considerations that is hurting citizens already with high electricity prices, diminished reliability and a damaged economy.

Steggall went on to claim we were feeling the consequences of global warming already. “And for people wondering ‘How does that affect me?’, just look at your insurance premiums, our insurance premiums around Australia are going through the roof,” she extrapolated, claiming insurance costs were keeping people out of home ownership. “This is not a problem for the future,” Steggall stressed, “it is problem for now.”

It is a problem all right – it is unmitigated garbage masquerading as a policy debate. Taking it to its logical conclusion, Steggall claims if Australia reduced its emissions further we would lower the risk of natural disasters, leading to lower insurance premiums and improved housing affordability – it is surprising that world peace did not get a mention.

Mind you, these activists do like to talk about global warming as a security issue. They will say anything that heightens fears, escalates the problem and supports their push for more radical deindustrialisation.

Our national contribution to global emissions
is now just over 1 per cent and shrinking.

Australia’s annual emissions total less than 400 megatonnes while China’s are rising by more than that total each year and are now at 10,700Mt or about 30 times Australia’s. While our emissions reduce, global emissions are increasing. We could shut down our country, eliminating our emissions completely, and China’s increase would replace ours in less than a year.

So, whatever we are doing, it is not changing and cannot change the global climate. Our national chief scientist, Alan Finkel, clearly admitted this point in 2018, even though he was embarrassed by its implications in the political debate. Yet the pretence continues.

And before critics suggest I am arguing for inaction, I am not. But clearly, the logical and sensible baseline for our policy consideration should be a recognition that our national actions cannot change the weather. Therefore we should carefully consider adaptation to measured and verified climate change, while we involve ourselves as a responsible nation in global negotiations and action.

Obviously, we should not be leading that action but acting cautiously to protect our own interests and prosperity.

It is madness for us to undermine our cheap energy advantage to embark on a renewables-plus-storage experiment that no other country has dared to even try, when we know it cannot shift the global climate one iota. It is all pain for no gain.

Yet that is what this nation has done. So my question today is what has happened to our media, academia, political class and wider population so that it allows this debate and policy response to occur in a manner that is so divorced from reality?

Are we so complacent and overindulged that we accept post-rational debate to address our post-material concerns? Even when it is delivering material hardship to so many Australians and jeopardising our long-term economic security?

Should public debate accept absurd baseline propositions such as the idea that our energy transition sacrifice will improve the weather and reduce natural disasters, simply because they are being argued by major political groupings or the UN? Or should we not try to impose a dose of reality and stick to the facts?

This feebleness of our public debate has telling ramifications – there is no way this country could have embarked on the risky, expensive and doomed renewables-plus-storage experiment if policies and prognostications had been subject to proper scrutiny and debate.

Our media is now so polarised that the climate activists of Labor, the Greens and the teals are able to ensure their nonsensical advocacy is never challenged, and the green-left media, led by the publicly funded ABC, leads the charge in spreading misinformation.

Clearly, we are not as clever as we think. Our children need us to wise up.

Nine July Days Break Wind Power Bubble

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Parker Gallant reports at his blog  Nine July Days Clearly Demonstrate Industrial Wind Turbines Intermittent Uselessness.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added image. H/T John Ray

The chart below uses IESO data for nine (9) July days and clearly demonstrates the vagaries of those IWT (Industrial Wind Turbines) which on their highest generation day operated at 39.7% of their capacity and on their lowest at 2.3%!  As the chart also notes, our natural gas plants were available to ramp up or down to ensure we had a stable supply of energy but rest assured IESO would have been busy either selling or buying power from our neighbours to ensure the system didn’t crash. [Independent Electricity System Operator for Ontario, Canada]

The only good news coming out of the review was that IESO did not curtail any wind generation as demand was atypical of Ontario’s summer days with much higher demand then those winter ones.

Days Gone By:         

Back and shortly after the McGuinty led Ontario Liberal Party had directed IESO to contract IWT as a generation source; their “Annual Planning Outlook” would suggest/guess those IWT would generate an average of 15% of their capacity during our warmer months (summer) and 45% of their capacity during our colder months (winter). For the full year they would be projecting an average generation of 30% of their capacity and presumably that assumption was based on average annual Ontario winds!

The contracts for those IWT offered the owners $135/MWh so over the nine days contained in the chart below those 125,275 MWh generated revenue for the owners of $16,912,125 even though they only generated an average of 11.8% of their capacity.  They are paid despite missing the suggested target IESO used because they rank ahead of most of Ontario’s other generation capacity with the exception of nuclear power due to the “first-to-the-grid” rights contained in their contracts at the expense of us ratepayers/taxpayers!

Should one bother to do the math as to the annual costs based on the 15% summer and 45% winter IESO previously used it would mean annual generation from those IWT in the summer would be about 3.9 TWh and 11.7 TWh in the winter with an annual cost of just over $2.1 billion for serving up frequently unneeded generation which is either sold off at a loss or curtailed!

Replacing Natural Gas Plants with BESS:

Anyone who has followed the perceived solution of ridding the electricity grid of fossil fuels such as natural gas will recognize ENGO [Environmental Non-Governmental Organizations] have convinced politicians that battery energy storage systems are the solution!  Well is it, and how much would Ontario have needed over those nine charted July days? One good example is July 9th and 10th and combining the energy generated by natural gas from the chart over those two days is the place to start. To replace that generation of 221,989 MW with BESS units the math is simple as those BESS units are reputed to store four (4) times their rated capacity. Dividing the MWh generated by Ontario’s natural gas generators by four over those two days therefore would mean we would need approximately 55,500 MW of BESS to replace what those natural gas plants generated.  That 55,500 MW of BESS storage is over 27 times what IESO have already contracted for and add huge costs to electricity generation in the province driving up the costs for all ratepaying classes. The BESS 2034 MW IESO already contracted are estimated to cost ratepayers $341 million annually meaning 55,500 MW of BESS to the grid would add over $9 billion annually to our costs to hopefully avoid blackouts!

The other interesting question is how would those 55,500 MW be able to recharge to be ready for future high demand days perhaps driven by EV recharging or those heating and cooling pumps operating?  The wind would have to be blowing strong and the sun would need to be shining but, as we know, both are frequently missing so bring us blackouts seems to be the theme proposed by those ENGO and our out of touch politicians and bureaucrats!

Just one simple example as to where we seem to be headed
based on the insane push to reach that “net-zero” emissions target!

IESO Ontario Electrical Energy Output by Source in 2023

Extreme Examples of Missing IWT generation:

What the chart doesn’t contain, or highlight is how those 4,900 MW of IWT capacity are undoubtedly consuming more power than they are generating on many occasions and the IESO data for those nine days contained some clear examples but less than a dozen are highlighted here!

To wit:

  • July 5th at Hour 11 they managed to deliver only 47 MWh!
  • July 7th at Hours 8, 9, and 10 they respectively generated 17 MWh, 3 MWh and 18 MWh! 
  • July 9th at Hour 9 they delivered 52 MWh!
  • July 12th at Hours 8, 9, 10 and 11 they respectively generated 33 MWh, 13 MWh, 13 MWh and 35 MWh. 
  • July 13th at Hours 9 and 10 they managed to generate 19 MWh and 39 MWh respectively! 

Conclusion:

Why politicians and bureaucrats around the world have been gobsmacked by those peddling the reputed concept of IWT generating cheap, reliable electricity is mind-blowing as the Chart coupled with the facts, clearly shows for just nine days and only looking at Ontario!

Much like the first electric car invented in 1839, by a Scottish inventor named Robert Davidson, the first electricity generated by a wind turbine came from another Scottish inventor, Sir James Blyth who in 1887 did exactly that. Neither of those old “inventions” garnered much global acceptance until those ENGO like Michael Mann and Greta arrived on the scene pontificating about “global warming” being caused by mankind’s use of fossil fuels!

As recent events have demonstrated both EV and IWT are not the panacea to save the world from either “global warming” or “climate change” even though both have “risen from the dead” due to the “net-zero” push by ENGO.

The time has come for our politicians to wake up and recognize they are supporting more then century old technology focused to try and rid the world of CO 2 emissions.  They fail to see without CO 2 mankind will be setback to a time when we had trouble surviving!

Stop the push and stop using ratepayer and taxpayer dollars for the fiction created by those pushing the “net-zero” initiative. That initiative is actually generating more CO 2 such as the 250 tons of concrete used for just one 2 MW IWT installation!   Reality Bites!

Wind Energy Risky Business

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The short video above summarizes the multiple engineering challenges involved in relying on wind and/or solar power.  Real Engineering produced The Problem with Wind Energy with excellent graphics.  For those who prefer reading, I made a transcript from the closed captions along with some key exhibits.

The Problem with Wind Energy

This is a map of the world’s wind Resources. With it we can see why the middle Plains of America has by far the highest concentrations of wind turbines in the country. More wind means more power.

However one small island off the mainland of Europe maxes out the average wind speed chart. Ireland is a wind energy Paradise. During one powerful storm wind energy powered the entire country for 3 hours, and it is not uncommon for wind to provide the majority of the country’s power on any single day. This natural resource has the potential to transform Ireland’s future.

But increasing wind energy on an energy grid comes with a lot of logistical problems which are all the more difficult for a small isolated island power grid. Mismanaged wind turbines can easily destabilize a power grid. From Power storage to grid frequency stabilization, wind energy is a difficult resource to build a stable grid upon.

To understand why, we need to take these engineering
Marvels apart and see how they work.

Hidden within the turbine cell is a Wonder of engineering. We cannot generate useful electricity with the low- speed high torque rotation of these massive turbine rotors. They rotate about 10 to 20 times a minute. The generator needs a shaft spinning around 1,800 times per minute to work effectively. So a gearbox is needed between the rotor shaft and the generator shaft.

The gearboxes are designed in stages. Planetary gears are directly attached to the blades to convert the extremely high torque into faster rotations. This stage increases rotational speed by four times. Planetary gears are used for high torque conversion because they have more contact points allowing the load to be shared between more gear teeth.

Moving deeper into the gearbox, a second stage set of helical gears multiplies the rotational speed by six. And the third stage multiplies It again by four to achieve the 1,500 to 1,800 revolutions per minute needed for the generator.

These heavy 15 tonne gearboxes have been a major source of frustration for power companies. Although they’ve been designed to have a 20-year lifespan, most don’t last more than 7 years without extensive maintenance. This is not a problem exclusive to gearboxes in wind turbines, but changing a gearbox in your car is different from having a team climb up over 50 meters to replace a multi-million dollar gearbox. Extreme gusts of wind, salty conditions and difficult to access offshore turbines increases maintenance costs even more. The maintenance cost of wind turbines can reach almost 20% of the levelized cost of energy.

In the grand scheme of things wind is still incredibly cheap. However we don’t know the precise mechanisms causing these gearbox failures. We do know that the wear shows up as these small cracks that form on the bearings,which are called White Edge cracks from the pale material that surrounds the damaged areas. This problem only gets worse when turbines get bigger and more powerful, requiring even more gear stages to convert the incredibly high torque being developed by the large diameter rotors.

One way of avoiding all of these maintenance costs is to skip the gearbox and connect the blades directly to the generator. But a different kind of generator is needed. The output frequency of the generator needs to match the grid frequency. Slower Revolutions in the generator need to be compensated for with a very large diameter generator that has many more magnetic poles meaning a single revolution of the generator passes through more alternating magnetic fields which increases the output frequency.

The largest wind turbine ever made, the Haliade X, uses a direct drive system. You can see the large diameter generator positioned directly behind the blades here. This rotor disc is 10 m wide with 200 poles and weighs 250 tons. But this comes with its own set of issues. Permanent magnets require neodium and dysprosium and China controls 90% of the supply of these rare earth metals. Unfortunately trade negotiations and embargos lead to fluctuating material costs that add extra risk and complexity to direct drive wind turbines. Ireland is testing these new wind turbines here in the Galway Wind Park. The blades were so large that this road passing underneath the Lough Atalia rail Bridge, which I use to walk home from school every day, had to be lowered to facilitate the transport of the blades from the nearby docks. It takes years to assess the benefit of new Energy Technologies like this, but as wind turbines get bigger and more expensive, direct drive systems become more attractive.

The next challenge is getting the electricity created inside these generators to match the grid frequency. When the speed of the wind constantly changes, the frequency of current created by permanent magnet generators matches the speed of the shaft. If we wanted the generator to Output the US Standard 60 HZ we could design a rotor to rotate 1,800 times per minute with four poles two North and two South. This will result in 60 cycles per second. This has to be exact; mismatched frequencies will lead to chaos on the grid, bringing the whole system down.

Managing grid frequency is a 24/7 job. In the UK, grid operators had to watch a popular TV show themselves so they could bring pumped Hydro stations online. Because a huge portion of the population went to turn on kettles to make tea during the ad breaks. This increased the load on the grid and without a matching increase in Supply, the frequency would have dropped. The grid is very sensitive to these shifts; a small 1 Herz change can bring a lot lot of Destruction.

During the 2021 freeze in Texas the grid fell Incredibly close to 59 Hertz. It was teetering on the edge of a full-scale blackout that would have lasted for months. Many people solely blamed wind turbines not running for causing this issue, but they were only partly to blame, as the natural gas stations also failed. Meanwhile the Texas grid also refuses to connect to the wider North American grid to avoid Federal Regulations. Rather oddly Texas is also an isolated power grid that has a large percentage of wind energy.

The problem with wind energy is that it is incapable of raising the grid frequency if it drops. Wind turbines are nonsynchronous and increasing the percentage of wind energy on the grid requires additional infrastructure to maintain a stable grid. To understand what nonsynchronous means, we need to dive into the engineering of wind turbines once again. The first electric wind turbines connected to the grid were designed to spin the generator shaft at exactly 1,800 RPM. The prevailing winds dictated the size and shape of the blades. The aim was to have the tips of the blades move at around seven times the speed of the prevailing wind. The tips of the blades were designed to stall if the wind speed picked up. This let them have a passive control and keep the blades rotating at a constant speed.

While this allowed the wind turbines to be connected straight to the grid, the constant rotational speed did induce large forces onto the blades. Gusts of wind would increase torque rapidly which was a recipe for fatigue failure in the drivetrain. So to extract more power, variable speed wind turbines were introduced. Instead of fixed blades that depended on a stall mechanism for control, the blades were attached to the hub with massive bearings that would allow the blades to change their angle of attack. This provided an active method of speed control, but now another problem emerged.

The rotor operated at different speeds and the frequency coming from the generator was variable. A wind turbine like this cannot be connected directly to the grid. Connecting a varying frequency generator to the grid means the power has to be passed through two inverters. The first converts the varying AC to DC using a rectifier; then the second converter takes the DC current and converts it back to AC at the correct frequency. This is done with electronic switches that rapidly turn on and off to create the oscillating wave.

We lose some power in this process but the larger issue for the grid as a whole is that this removes the benefit of the wind Turbine’s inerti. Slowing something heavy like a train is difficult because it has a lot of inertia. Power grids have inertia too. Huge rotating steam turbines connected directly to the grid are like these trains; they can’t be slowed down easily. So a grid with lots of large turbines like nuclear power and coal power turbines can handle a large load suddenly appearing and won’t experience a sudden drop in Grid frequency. This helps smooth out sudden increases in demand on the grid and gives grid operators more time to bring on new power sources.

Wind turbines of course have inertia, they are large rotating masses. But those inverters mean their masses aren’t connected directly to the grid, and so their inertia can’t help stabilize the grid. Solar panels suffer from the same problem, but they couldn’t add inertia anyway as they don’t move.

This is an issue for Renewables that can become a critical vulnerability when politicians push to increase the percentage of Renewables onto a grid without considering the impacts it can have on grid stability. Additional infrastructure is needed to manage this problem, especially as older energy sources, like coal power plants, that do provide inertia begin to shut down.

Ireland had a creative solution to this problem. In 2023 the world’s largest flywheel, a 120 ton steel shaft that rotates 3,000 times per minute, was installed in the location of a former coal power plant that already had all the infrastructure needed to connect to the grid. This flywheel takes about 20 minutes to get up to speed using grid power but it is kept rotating constantly inside a vacuum to minimize power lost to friction. When needed it can instantly provide power at the exact 50 HZ required by the grid. This flywheel provides the inertia needed to keep the grid stable, but it’s estimated that Ireland will need five more of these flywheels to reach its climate goals with increasing amounts of wind energy.

But they aren’t designed for long-term energy storage, they are purely designed for grid frequency regulation. Ireland’s next problem is more difficult to overcome. It’s an isolated island with few interconnections to other energy grids. Trading energy is one of the best ways to stabilize a grid. Larger grids are just inherently more stable. Ideally Ireland could sell wind energy to France when winds are high and buy nuclear energy when they are low. Instead right now Ireland needs to have redundancy in its grid with enough natural gas power available to ramp up when wind energy is forecasted to drop.

Currently Ireland has two interconnect connections with Great Britain but none to Mainland Europe. That is hopefully about to change with this 700 megawatt interconnection currently planned with France. With Ireland’s average demand at 4,000 megawatts, this interconnection can provide 17.5% of the country’s power needs when wind is low, or sell that wind to France when it is high. This would allow Ireland to remove some of that redundancy from its grid, while making it worthwhile to invest in more wind power as the excess then has somewhere to go.

The final piece of the puzzle is to develop long-term energy storage infrastructure. Ireland now has 1 gigawatt hour of energy storage, but this isn’t anywhere close to the amount needed. Ireland’s government has plans to develop a hydrogen fuel economy for longer term storage and energy export. In the National hydrogen plan they set up a pathway to become Europe’s main producer of green hydrogen, both for home use and for exports. With Ireland’s abundance of fresh water, thanks to our absolutely miserable weather, and our prime location along World shipping routes and being a hub for the third largest airline in the world, Ireland is very well positioned to develop a hydrogen economy.

These transport methods aren’t easily decarbonized and will need some form of renewably sourced synthetic fuel for which hydrogen will be needed, whether that’s hydrogen itself, ammonia or synthetic hydrocarbons. Synthetic hydrocarbons can be created using hydrogen and carbon dioxide captured from the air. Ireland’s winning combination of cheap renewable energy abundant fresh water and its strategically advantageous location positions it well for this future renewable energy economy. Ireland plans to begin the project by generating hydrogen with electrolysis with wind energy that has been shut off due to oversupply which is basically free energy.

As the market matures phase two of the plan is to finally begin tapping into Ireland’s vast offshore wind potential exclusively for hydrogen production with the lofty goal of 39 terrawatt hours of production by 2050 for use in energy storage fuel for transportation and for industrial heating. Ireland is legally Bound by EU law to achieve net zero emissions by 2050 but even without these lofty expectations it’s in Ireland’s best interest to develop these Technologies. Ireland has some of the most expensive electricity prices in Europe due to its Reliance on fossil fuel Imports which increased in price drastically due to the war in Ukraine. Making this transition won’t be easy and there are many challenges to overcome, but Ireland has the potential to not only become more energy secure but has the potential to develop its economy massively. Wind is a valuable resource by itself but in combination with its abundance of fresh water it could become one of the most energy rich countries in the world.

Comment

That’s a surprisingly upbeat finish boosting Irish prospects to be an energy powerhouse, considering all of the technical, logistical and economic issues highlighted along the way.  Engineers know more than anyone how complexity often results in fragility and unreliability in practice. Me thinks they are going to use up every last bit of Irish luck to pull this off. Of course the saddest part is that the whole transition is unnecessary, since more CO2 and warmth has been a boon for the planet and humankind.

See Also:

Replace Carbon Fuels with Hydrogen? Absurd, Exorbitant and Pointless

Another Fake Climate Case Bites the Dust

Posted on by Ron Clutz

The decisive ruling against climate lawfare is reported at Washington Free Beacon Dem-Appointed Judge Tosses Major Climate Case Against Oil and Gas Producers in Blow to Environmental Activists. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Baltimore judge deals blow to left-wing effort
to punish oil companies for global warming

A Baltimore judge tossed a landmark climate change lawsuit against more than two dozen oil and gas companies in a sizable defeat for environmental activists and Democrats that have touted the case.

Baltimore Circuit Court judge Videtta Brown—who was appointed to the bench by former Gov. Martin O’Malley (D., Md.)—ruled late Wednesday that the city cannot regulate global emissions and swatted down the city’s arguments that it merely sought climate-related damages from the defendants, not the abatement of their emissions. She further stated that the court does not accept the city’s contention that it does not seek to “directly penalize emitters.”

“Whether the complaint is characterized one way or another, the analysis and answer are the same—the Constitution’s federal structure does not allow the application of state law to claims like those presented by Baltimore,” Brown wrote in her opinion (July 11). “Global pollution-based complaints were never intended by Congress to be handled by individual states,” she added.

In a statement to the Washington Free Beacon, the Baltimore City Department of Law’s chief of affirmative litigation division Sara Gross said the city respectfully disagreed with the opinion and would seek review from a higher court.

The ruling represents the latest setback for a broader left-wing effort to penalize oil companies for allegedly spreading disinformation about the role their products play in causing climate change. Over the past several years, Democratic-led states, cities, and counties—which are home to more than 25 percent of all American citizens—have filed more than a dozen similar lawsuits.

Overall, if plaintiffs were to get their way, oil companies could be forced to pay billions of dollars in climate damages, a potentially catastrophic blow to their ability to stay in business.

Baltimore filed its original complaint in 2018, making it one of the first ever cases of its kind. After it was announced, former Democratic mayor Catherine Pugh said Baltimore was on the “front lines of climate change because melting ice caps, more frequent heat waves, extreme storms, and other climate consequences caused by fossil fuel companies are threatening our city and imposing real costs on our taxpayers.”

“These oil and gas companies knew for decades that their products would harm communities like ours, and we’re going to hold them accountable,” then-Baltimore city solicitor Andre Davis added at the time. “Baltimore’s residents, workers, and businesses shouldn’t have to pay for the damage knowingly caused by these companies.”

BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, CITGO, ConocoPhillips, Marathon Oil, and Hess
were among the 26 entities listed as defendants in the filing.

“The Court’s well-reasoned opinion recognizes that climate policy cannot be advanced by the unconstitutional application of state law to regulate global emissions,” Theodore Boutrous, who serves as counsel for Chevron, said in a written statement to the Free Beacon. “The meritless state tort cases now being orchestrated by a small group of plaintiffs’ lawyers only detract from legitimate progress toward a lower carbon global energy system.”

The majority of the cases filed by Democratic prosecutors against the fossil fuel industry remain pending and are working their way through local courts, even as the oil industry has pushed for them to be litigated in federal courts.

In a ruling similar to the Baltimore court decision issued Wednesday, a Delaware state court in January delivered a setback to the State of Delaware’s lawsuit against oil producers filed in 2020. That court found that alleged injuries stemming from out-of-state or global greenhouse gas emissions are preempted by the federal Clean Air Act.

Delaware, Baltimore, and most other jurisdictions pursuing the climate cases across the U.S. are being represented by the San Francisco-based law firm Sher Edling. The firm was founded to specifically spearhead these novel cases, but has received criticism for its dark money funding.

In 2022 alone, the most recent year with publicly available data, Sher Edling received grants worth a total of $2.5 million from the New Venture Fund, a pass-through fund managed by dark money behemoth Arabella Advisors, according to tax filings analyzed by the Free Beacon. That funding adds to the more than $8 million the firm received in prior years from dark money groups.

Although Sher Edling’s individual donors remain unknown, past funding for the firm has flowed from the Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

Sher Edling didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Big Batteries? Big Problems!

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Battery Mad-Hattery

Viv Forbes’ article on this subject is at Canadian Free Press under the title First Aid for Flicker Power.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Wind and solar energy have a fatal flaw – intermittency

Big batteries bring big problems

Solar generators won’t run on moon-beams – they fade out as the sun goes down and stop whenever clouds block the sun. This happens at least once every day. But then at mid-day on most days, millions of solar panels pour so much electricity into the grid that the price plummets and no one makes any money.

Can your solar project weather a hailstorm?

Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution
to green power failures – “Big Batteries”

Turbine generators are also intermittent – they stop whenever there is too little, or too much wind. In a wide flat land like Australia, wind droughts may affect huge areas for days at a time. This often happens when a mass of cold air moves over Australia, winds drop and power demand rises in the cold weather. All of this makes our power grid more variable, more fragile and more volatile. What do we do if we have a cloudy windless week?

More big batteries storing renewable energy to be built around Australia The batteries will come online by 2025 with sites in Queensland, Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia.

Our green energy bureaucrats have the solution to green power failures – “Big Batteries”.

But big batteries bring more big problems – they have to be re-charged by the same intermittent green generators needed to keep the lights on, the trains running and the batteries charged in all those electric cars, trucks and dozers. And if anyone has been silly enough to build some power-hungry green hydrogen generators, they too will need more generation capacity and more battery backups. How long do we allow them to keep throwing our dollars into this green whirlpool?

Collecting dilute intermittent wind and solar energy from all over a big continent like Australia and moving it to coastal cities and factories brings another “green” energy nightmare – an expensive and intrusive spider-web of power-lines that are detested by landowners, degrade the environment, cause bushfires and are susceptible to damage from lightning, cyclones and sabotage.

They call them solar “farms” and wind “parks” – they are neither farms nor parks – they are monstrous and messy wind and solar power plants   And these very expensive “green” assets are idle, generating nothing, for most of most days.

In late July 2021, a fire broke out at the Victorian Big Battery in Moorabool, which was undergoing testing when the incident began. Image: CFA

Big batteries sitting in cities have proved a big fire risk and no one wants them next door. So our green “engineers” have another solution to these problems caused by their earlier “solutions” – “Mobile Batteries” (this is a worry – no one knows where they are – maybe they will be disguised as Mr Whippy ice cream vans)?

Near elimination of air pollution from diesel-electric freight trains by 2025 is now possible by retrofitting them with battery tender cars. BeyondImages/iStock

Train entrepreneurs want to build “batteries on tracks” – a train loaded with batteries, which parks beside a wind/solar energy factory until the batteries are full. Then the battery train trundles off to the nearest city to unload its electricity, preferably at a profit. They can also play the arbitrage market – buy top-up power around midday and sell into peak prices at breakfast and dinner times when the unreliable twins usually produce nothing useful. This will have the added advantage of sending coal and gas generators broke sooner by depressing peak prices. Once coal and gas are decimated, then the battery trains can make a real killing.

But battery trains may be the perfect answer to supplying those energy-hungry AI data centres. Let’s start a pilot project and park a battery train beside the National AI Centre near CSIRO in Canberra.

“Big Batteries on Boats”

Lithium-ion batteries ‘keeping the fire alive’ on burning cargo ship carrying luxury cars 2022

A more ambitious idea is the BBB Plan – “Big Batteries on Boats”.It would work like this:

The Australian government places an order with China to build a fleet of electric boats (sail-assisted of course) that are filled with batteries (and lots of fire extinguishers). The batteries are charged with cheap coal-fired electricity at ports in China. They then sail to ports in Australia where the electricity is un-loaded into the grid whenever prices are high or blackouts loom.

Australian mines can profit from the iron ore used to make the boats, the rare minerals used to build the batteries and any Australian coal used by the Chinese power plants to charge the batteries.

This solution allows Australian politicians to go to world conferences boasting that Australia’s electricity is “Net Zero”, and more tourists can be enticed to visit our endangered industrial relics – coal mining and steam generator museums.

Of course there is another danger in the BBB solution – some entrepreneurs may load their boats with nuclear generators plus enough fuel on board for several decades of operation. Or they may even site a small nuclear reactor beside a closed coal power station and make use of all the ready-to-go power lines already in place.

Concerns over how transmission lines are ‘impacting’ prime land. Sky News Australia

This sort of dangerous thinking could well demolish another Queensland green dream – “CopperString” – a $5 billion speculation to build 840 km of new transmission line from Townsville to Mt Isa. We are not sure which way the power is expected to flow. They will probably not get there before the great copper mine at Mt Isa closes.

Why not just send a small nuke-on-a-train to Mt Isa?

Viv Forbes, Chairman, The Carbon Sense Coalition, has spent his life working in exploration, mining, farming, infrastructure, financial analysis and political commentary. He has worked for government departments, private companies and now works as a private contractor and farmer.

Viv has also been a guest writer for the Asian Wall Street Journal, Business Queensland and mining newspapers. He was awarded the “Australian Adam Smith Award for Services to the Free Society” in 1988, and has written widely on political, technical and economic subjects.

Over the Top Guterres Claims Oil and Gas Ads Cause Global Warming

Posted on by Ron Clutz

A recent post below highlights the many colorful falsehoods perpetrated by UN Chief Guterres.  Now he takes his nonsensical word salads to a new level, referring to traditional energy companies as “Godfathers of Climate Chaos,”  a label better suited to himself.  After all, those companies are only filling the demand by billions of people who depend on affordable reliable energy.  What economic demand is Guterres filling?

His lecture was reported many places, including an article at Al Jazeera ‘Godfathers of climate chaos’: UN chief calls for ban on fossil fuel ads.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Antonio Guterres urges a 30 percent cut in global fossil fuel
production and use by 2030 amid record high temperatures.

“The godfathers of climate chaos – the fossil fuel industry – rake in record profits and feast off trillions in taxpayer-funded subsidies,” he said.

Drawing a comparison with many governments’ restrictions on advertising for harmful substances like tobacco, he said, “I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies, and I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”

Carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels – the main cause wrongly claimed to cause climate change – hit a record high last year despite global agreements designed to curb their release and a rapid expansion in renewable energy. [My edit: see 2024 Update: Fossil Fuels ≠ Global Warming. ]

Coal, oil and gas still provide more than three-quarters of the world’s energy, with global oil demand remaining strong.

Of course Guterres can urge all he wants, without any accountability for his words, since the UN has no authority to decide who agencies take on as advertising clients. It is all bluff and bluster, threatening as though a mafia boss lacking enforcers. Even so, the evidence does not support hydrocarbon fuel emissions as causing temperature changes.  Moreover, there’s no reason to believe banning advertising of such products will reduce the demand, which comes from real people purchasing with their own money in free markets.

Background Post UN Chief Wins Junk Science Award

At Financial Post’s Junk Science Week, Terence Corcoran highlights the hysterical alarmist statements by the UN chief promoting IPCC agenda, the article being The UN emperor has no science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.H/T John Ray.

Guterres Mangles Metaphors To Pitch Extreme Climate Alarmism

UN secretary General Antonio Guterres addresses the media during a visit to the UN office in Nairobi, Kenya, May 3, 2023. © Provided by Financial Post

History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres destined to be singled out for his personal contribution to the distorted UN climate alarmism.

Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science. It occurs when:

    • scientific facts are distorted,
    • risk is exaggerated (or underplayed), and
    • “the science” adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

That definition encompasses a wide range of activities among scientists, NGOs, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who manipulate science for political, environmental, economic and social purposes. It also nicely captures the entire United Nations’ climate crusade and the work of its institutional creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But no single official can top Guterres as a purveyor of IPCC hype and doom, a living embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s  fabled emperor who believes he is fully, stylishly dressed but in fact has no clothes.

Our Sinking Planet – Antonio Guterres is a photograph by Photograph by Christopher Gregory for TIME which was uploaded on July 21st, 2020.

Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and president of the Socialist International (1999-2005), was in typically ridiculous form on June 5th when he  delivered a speech  at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, at an event billed as “A Moment of Truth” and a “special address on climate action.” Guterres talked about a planet on a “highway to climate hell,”  rehashing a line he used in 2022 in Egypt at the COP27 climate conference: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

Guterres also has no qualms about mixing and mangling metaphors. He simultaneously told the Manhattan audience that humans are “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

The longer Guterres rambles on, the more confusing, contradictory and senseless the metaphors become:

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet.  We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the truth is … we have control of the wheel.”

Other Guterres’ climate spins include: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell” and “become a weapon of mass extinction.” And: “We must go into emergency mode and put out this five-alarm fire.”

Is Guterres describing reality — or the content of a new AI computer game in which some crazed teenaged human monster drives a flaming meteor through the ozone layer, knocking off dinosaurs before crashing onto a highway and plowing into a Russian Museum of Political Roulette just outside the Gates of Hell?

As UN Secretary-General, Guterres sits atop a hierarchy of agencies such as the IPCC climate science megaplex, which was created  in 1988 by two other UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). UNEP was cobbled together in 1972 as the  brainchild of Maurice Strong , the late Canadian global environmental schemer, who famously mused about a fictional environmental crisis that leads a group of global insiders to decide the only hope for the planet is “that the industrialized civilizations collapse.” The current “de-growth” movement is a version of deindustrialization that reflects Guterres’ off-ramp from the highway to hell. In fact, the word “de-growth”  appears  28 times in the IPCC’s sixth and latest Assessment Report .

With these UN agencies as his guide, Guterres’ verbal jumble of science statements is no better than his mixed metaphors. His abuse of climate and environmental facts has often been commented upon, including in a YouTube video titled “Who is Antonio Guterres?,” posted earlier this year by Ottawa journalist John Robson on his Climate Discussion Nexus site. Robson reviews and highlights  some of the garbled inaccuracies and misrepresentations Guterres routinely cranks out.

For instance: “Climate-related natural disasters are becoming more frequent, more deadly, more destructive with growing human and financial cost.”  Not true . And: “The number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years.”  Also not true .

When it comes to policies to deal with his fantastic vision of planetary destruction, Guterres aligns with Maurice Strong’s de-growth agenda. In his Manhattan speech, he repeated the UN call for a “fossil-fuel phase-out” since “economic logic makes the end of the fossil fuel age inevitable.” He urged financial institutions to “stop bankrolling” fossil fuel industries. “Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet,” he told bankers, “they’re toxic for your brand.”

The planet would be much better off if national governments stopped bankrolling Guterres and the United Nations and their constant poisoning of our science, economics and politics.

Declare Freedom from Climate Alarms

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Illustration on climate hysteria by Alexander Hunter/The Washington Times

The Washington Times Editorial Board published ‘Declaring independence from hoaxes’ – ‘Let’s put the climate change fantasy to rest’ – ‘What’s being sold as science isn’t science at all’. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.

Two hundred forty-eight years ago, America declared independence from the idea we needed to be governed by a king. Our Founding Fathers realized a freethinking people are perfectly capable of governing themselves. It was a revolutionary concept in every sense of the word.

Today, tyranny no longer emanates from the decrees of a faraway monarch suffering from a dash of mental illness. It has become a mental tyranny emanating from academics and politicians who employ doomsday tales to replace freethinking with blind acceptance of yarns that advance their agenda.

Mankind’s use of modern conveniences has, they insist, warmed the planet to an uncomfortable degree. Unless we do something to reverse this deadly trend, we will be subjected to extreme storms, rising seas and plagues on an apocalyptic scale. Scary stuff indeed.

We are told this is the conclusion of science, and one cannot
disagree with “the science.” But perhaps we should.

Earlier this year, The Heritage Foundation released a report comparing the predictions of 36 climate models against the actual temperature patterns recorded in the U.S. Corn Belt between the 1970s and the present.

The plot shows the 50-year area-averaged temperature trend during 1973-2022 for the 12-state corn belt as observed with the official NOAA homogenized surface temperature product (blue bar) versus the same metric from 36 CMIP6 climate models (red bars, SSP245 emissions scenario, output here).

Accurate models would be able to match real-life measurements. As the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explained in 1964: “If [a theory] disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.”

All 36 climate predictions disagreed with reality — that is, each forecast temperatures much higher than what Midwesterners actually experienced. The “warming” never lived up to expectations, which means the climate models are something other than science.

Yet President Biden on Tuesday said you’re “really dumb” if you deny the climate crisis the models predict. He demands you return him to the White House so he can heap more climate regulations on the businesses he disfavors.

It’s not likely that another layer of red tape will do anything to alter global weather patterns, because the sun, not mankind, is the primary driver of climate. Whenever humans try to overcome the sun’s influence, the results inevitably fail to live up to expectations.

For instance, a study published in Nature in May found changes in the formulation of fuel used in cargo vessels four years ago “abruptly reduced the emission of sulfur dioxide from international shipping by about 80% and created an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock with global impact.”

That’s a fancy way of saying cleaner skies allowed more sunshine to reach the ocean, warming the seas dramatically. It’s a puzzler for devotees of the climate change narrative to explain how pollution can combat global warming, so they just ignore it as they do all inconvenient truths.

If climate change were rooted in honest belief, liberals would rally around nuclear energy as the cleanest and most efficient means of supplying any nation’s electricity needs. According to the Energy Department, when counting manufacturing emissions, rooftop solar panels create 40 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour of electricity generated. Nuclear power plants generate one-third that much.

Freethinkers ought to question the animosity toward carbon dioxide, the substance that nourishes plants and makes for bountiful harvests. We ought to liberate our minds from the influence of mountebanks who enrich themselves through the telling of climate fairy tales.

What’s being sold as science isn’t science at all.

 

UN Chief Wins Junk Science Award

Posted on by Ron Clutz

At Financial Post’s Junk Science Week, Terence Corcoran highlights the hysterical alarmist statements by the UN chief promoting IPCC agenda, the article being The UN emperor has no science.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.H/T John Ray.

Guterres Mangles Metaphors To Pitch Extreme Climate Alarmism

UN secretary General Antonio Guterres addresses the media during a visit to the UN office in Nairobi, Kenya, May 3, 2023. © Khalil Senosi, AP

History will record that the United Nations has established itself as the greatest organizational perpetrator of junk science in modern times, if not of all time, with current UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres destined to be singled out for his personal contribution to the distorted UN climate alarmism.

Since his appointment in 2019, Guterres and the UN have lived up to our standard formal definition of junk science. It occurs when:

    • scientific facts are distorted,
    • risk is exaggerated (or underplayed), and
    • “the science” adapted and warped by politics and ideology to serve another agenda.

That definition encompasses a wide range of activities among scientists, NGOs, politicians, journalists, media outlets, cranks and quacks who manipulate science for political, environmental, economic and social purposes. It also nicely captures the entire United Nations’ climate crusade and the work of its institutional creation, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

But no single official can top Guterres as a purveyor of IPCC hype and doom, a living embodiment of Hans Christian Andersen’s  fabled emperor who believes he is fully, stylishly dressed but in fact has no clothes.

Our Sinking Planet – Antonio Guterres is a photograph by Photograph by Christopher Gregory for TIME which was uploaded on July 21st, 2020.

Guterres, a former Socialist Party prime minister of Portugal (1995-2002) and president of the Socialist International (1999-2005), was in typically ridiculous form on June 5th when he  delivered a speech  at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, at an event billed as “A Moment of Truth” and a “special address on climate action.” Guterres talked about a planet on a “highway to climate hell,”  rehashing a line he used in 2022 in Egypt at the COP27 climate conference: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator.”

Guterres also has no qualms about mixing and mangling metaphors. He simultaneously told the Manhattan audience that humans are “like the meteor that wiped out the dinosaurs, we’re having an outsized impact. In the case of climate, we are not the dinosaurs. We are the meteor. We are not only in danger. We are the danger.”

The longer Guterres rambles on, the more confusing, contradictory and senseless the metaphors become:

“We are playing Russian roulette with our planet.  We need an exit ramp off the highway to climate hell. And the truth is … we have control of the wheel.”

Other Guterres’ climate spins include: “Humanity has opened the gates of hell” and “become a weapon of mass extinction.” And: “We must go into emergency mode and put out this five-alarm fire.”

Is Guterres describing reality — or the content of a new AI computer game in which some crazed teenaged human monster drives a flaming meteor through the ozone layer, knocking off dinosaurs before crashing onto a highway and plowing into a Russian Museum of Political Roulette just outside the Gates of Hell?

As UN Secretary-General, Guterres sits atop a hierarchy of agencies such as the IPCC climate science megaplex, which was created  in 1988 by two other UN agencies, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). UNEP was cobbled together in 1972 as the  brainchild of Maurice Strong , the late Canadian global environmental schemer, who famously mused about a fictional environmental crisis that leads a group of global insiders to decide the only hope for the planet is “that the industrialized civilizations collapse.” The current “de-growth” movement is a version of deindustrialization that reflects Guterres’ off-ramp from the highway to hell. In fact, the word “de-growth”  appears  28 times in the IPCC’s sixth and latest Assessment Report .

With these UN agencies as his guide, Guterres’ verbal jumble of science statements is no better than his mixed metaphors. His abuse of climate and environmental facts has often been commented upon, including in a YouTube video titled “Who is Antonio Guterres?,” posted earlier this year by Ottawa journalist John Robson on his Climate Discussion Nexus site. Robson reviews and highlights  some of the garbled inaccuracies and misrepresentations Guterres routinely cranks out.

For instance: “Climate-related natural disasters are becoming more frequent, more deadly, more destructive with growing human and financial cost.”  Not true . And: “The number of weather, climate and water-related disasters has increased by a factor of five over the past 50 years.”  Also not true .

When it comes to policies to deal with his fantastic vision of planetary destruction, Guterres aligns with Maurice Strong’s de-growth agenda. In his Manhattan speech, he repeated the UN call for a “fossil-fuel phase-out” since “economic logic makes the end of the fossil fuel age inevitable.” He urged financial institutions to “stop bankrolling” fossil fuel industries. “Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet,” he told bankers, “they’re toxic for your brand.”

The planet would be much better off if national governments stopped bankrolling Guterres and the United Nations and their constant poisoning of our science, economics and politics.

Green Baloney, Hype and Fairy Tales in Australia

Posted on by Ron Clutz

Viv Forbes writes at Spectator Australia Battery baloney, hydrogen hype, and green fairy tales in Australia.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.  H/T John Ray at his blog Greenie Watch.

How low Australia has fallen… Our once-great BHP now has a ‘Vice President for Sustainability and Climate Change’, the number of Australian students choosing physics at high school is collapsing, and our government opposes nuclear energy while pretending we can build and operate nuclear submarines.

Our Green politicians want: ‘No Coal, No Gas, No Nuclear!’ while Our ABC, Our CSIRO, and Our Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) are telling us that wind and solar energy (plus a bit of standby gas, heaps of batteries, and new power lines) can power our homes, industries and the mass electrification of our vehicle fleet. This sounds like Australia’s very own great leap backwards.

There are two troublesome Green Energy Unions: the Solar Workers down tools every night and cloudy day, and the Turbine Crews stop work if winds are too weak or too strong. And wind droughts can last for days. The reliable Coal and Gas Crews spend sunny days playing cards, but are expected to keep their turbines revving up and down to keep stable power in the lines.

From Duck to Canyon Curve

Magical things are also expected from more rooftop solar. But panel-power has four huge problems:

♦  Zero solar energy is generated to meet peak demand at breakfast and dinner times.

♦  Piddling solar power is produced from many poorly oriented roof panels or from the weak sunshine anywhere south of Sydney.

♦  If too much solar energy pours into the network (say at noon on a quiet sunny Sunday), the grid becomes unstable. Our green engineers have the solution – be ready to charge people for unwanted power they export to the grid, or just use ‘smart meters’ to turn them off.

♦  More rooftop solar means less income and more instability for power utilities so they have to raise electricity charges. This cost falls heaviest on those with no solar panels, or no homes.

Magical things are also expected from batteries.

When I was a kid on a dairy farm in Queensland, I saw our kerosene lamps and beeswax candles replaced by electric lights. We had 16 X 2 volt batteries on the verandah and a big thumping diesel generator in the dairy.

It was a huge relief, years later, when power poles bringing reliable electricity marched up the lane to our house. All those batteries disappeared with the introduction of 24/7 coal power.

Batteries are never a net generator of power – they store energy generated elsewhere, incurring losses on charging and discharging.

There has to be sufficient generating capacity to meet current demand while also recharging those batteries. What provides electricity to power homes, lifts, hospitals, and trains and to recharge all those vehicle batteries after sundown on a still winter night? (Hint: Call the reliable coal/gas/nuclear crews.)

The same remorseless equations apply to all the pumped hydro schemes being dreamed up – everyone is a net consumer of power once losses are covered and the water is pumped back up the hill.

Yet AEMO hopes we will install 16 times our current capacity of batteries and pumped hydro by 2050 – sounds like the backyard steel plans of Chairman Mao or the Soviet Gosplan that constipated initiative in USSR for 70 years. Who needs several Snowy 2 fiascos running simultaneously?

Mother Nature has created the perfect solar battery which holds the energy of sunlight for millions of years. When it releases that energy for enterprising humans, it returns CO2 for plants to the atmosphere from whence it came. It is called ‘Coal’.

‘Hydrogen’ gets a lot of hype, but it is an elusive and dangerous gas that is rarely found naturally. To use solar energy to generate hydrogen and to then use that hydrogen as a power source is just another silly scheme to waste water and solar energy. It always takes more energy to produce hydrogen than it gives back. Let green billionaires, not taxpayers, spend their money on this merry-go-round.

Who is counting the energy and capital consumed, and the emissions generated, to manufacture, transport, and install a continent being covered by ugly solar panels, bird slicers, high voltage power lines, access roads, and hydro schemes? Now they want to invade our shallow seas. Who is going to clean up this mess in a few years’ time?

As Jo Nova says:

‘No one wants industrial plants in their backyard, but when we have to build 10,000 km of high voltage towers, 40 million solar panels, and 2,500 bird-killing turbines – it’s in everyone’s backyard.’

With all of this planned and managed by the same people who gave us Pink Batts, Snowy 2 hydro, and the NBN/NDIS fiascoes, what could possibly go wrong?

Another big problem is emerging – country people don’t want power lines across their paddocks, whining wind turbines on their hills, and glittering solar panels smothering their flats. And seaside dwellers don’t want to hear or see wind turbines off their beaches. Even whales are confused.

The solution is obvious – build all wind and solar facilities in electorates that vote Green, Teal, and Labor. Those good citizens can then listen to the turbines turning in the night breezes and look out their windows to see shiny solar panels on every roof. This will make them feel good that they are preventing man-made global warming. Those electorates who oppose this silly green agenda should get their electricity from local coal, gas or nuclear plants.

What about the Net Zero targets?

At the same time as Australia struggles to generate enough reliable power for today, governments keep welcoming more migrants, more tourists, more foreign students and planning yet more stadiums, games, and circuses. None of this is compatible with their demand for Net Zero emissions.

Unlike Europe, the Americas, and Asia, Australia has no extension cords to neighbours with reliable power from nuclear, hydro, coal, or gas – we are on our own.

Australia has abundant resources of coal and uranium – we mine and export these energy minerals but Mr Bowen, our Minister for Blackouts, says we may not use our own coal and uranium to generate future electricity here. Someone needs to tell him that no country in the world relies solely on wind, solar, and pumped hydro. Germany tried but soon found they needed French nuclear, Scandinavian hydro, imported gas, and at least 20 coal-fired German power plants are being resurrected or extended past their closing dates to ensure Germans have enough energy to get through the winter.

Australia is the only G20 country in which nuclear power is illegal (maybe no one has told green regulators that we have had a nuclear reactor at Lucas Heights in Sydney since 1958). Australia is prepared to lock navy personnel beside nuclear power plants in our new nuclear-powered submarines but our politicians forbid nuclear power stations in our wide open countryside.

More CO2 in the atmosphere brings great benefits to life on Earth. If man adds to it, the oceans dissolve a swag of it, and what stays in the atmosphere is gratefully welcomed by all plant life.

In 2023, Australia added just 0.025 ppm to the 420 ppm in today’s atmosphere. Most of this probably dissolved in the oceans. If we in Australia turned everything off tomorrow, the climate wouldn’t notice, but our plant life would, especially those growing near power stations burning coal or gas and spreading plant food.

Climate has always changed and a warm climate has never been a problem
on Earth.  It is cold that kills. Especially during blackouts.