Most every day there are media reports saying solar and wind power plants are now cheaper than coal. Recently UCS expressed outrage that some coal plants remain viable because industrial customers are able to commit purchasing of the reliable coal-fired supply.

Joe Daniel writes at Forbes The Billion-Dollar Coal Bailout Nobody Is Talking About: Self-Committing In Power Markets. A typical companion piece at Forbes claims The Coal Cost Crossover: 74% Of US Coal Plants Now More Expensive Than New Renewables, 86% By 2025.

Having acquired some knowledge of this issue, I wondered how these cost comparisons dealt with the intermittency problem of wind and solar, and the requirement for backup dispatchable power to balance the grid.

EIA has developed a dual assessment of power plants using both Levelized Cost and Levelized Avoided Costs of Electricity power provision. The first metric estimates output costs from building and operating power plants, and the second estimates the value of the electricity to the grid. Source: EIA uses two simplified metrics to show future power plants’ relative economics Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

EIA calculates two measures that, when used together, largely explain the economic competitiveness of electricity generating technologies.

The levelized cost of electricity (LCOE) represents the installed capital costs and ongoing operating costs of a power plant, converted to a level stream of payments over the plant’s assumed financial lifetime. Installed capital costs include construction costs, financing costs, tax credits, and other plant-related subsidies or taxes. Ongoing costs include the cost of the generating fuel (for power plants that consume fuel), expected maintenance costs, and other related taxes or subsidies based on the operation of the plant.

The levelized avoided cost of electricity (LACE) represents that power plant’s value to the grid. A generator’s avoided cost reflects the costs that would be incurred to provide the electricity displaced by a new generation project as an estimate of the revenue available to the plant. As with LCOE, these revenues are converted to a level stream of payments over the plant’s assumed financial lifetime.

Power plants are considered economically attractive when their projected LACE (value) exceeds their projected LCOE (cost). Both LCOE and LACE are levelized over the expected electricity generation during the lifetime of the plant, resulting in values presented in dollars per megawatthour. These values range across geography, as resource availability, fuel costs, and other factors often differ by market. LCOE and LACE values also change over time as technology improves, tax credits and other taxes or subsidies expire, and fuel costs change.

The relative difference between LCOE and LACE is a better indicator of economic competitiveness than either metric alone. A comparison of only LCOE across technology types fails to capture the differences in value provided by different types of generators to the grid.

Some power plants can be dispatched, while some—such as those powered by the wind or solar—operate only when resources are available. Some power plants provide electricity during parts of the day or year when power prices are higher, while others may produce electricity during times of relatively low power prices.

Solar PV’s economic competitiveness is relatively high through 2022 as federal tax credits reduce PV’s LCOE. As those tax credits are phased out, technology costs are expected to have declined to the point where solar PV remains economically competitive in most parts of the country. Because solar PV provides electricity during the middle of the day, when electricity prices are relatively high, solar PV’s value to the grid (i.e., LACE) tends to be higher than other technologies.

Onshore wind also sees higher economic competiveness in the earlier part of the projection, prior to the expiration of federal tax credits in 2020. Over time, wind remains competitive in the Plains states, where wind resources are highest. Wind’s LACE is relatively low in most areas, as wind output tends to be highest at times when power prices are low.

[Note: The video Can We Rely on Wind and Solar?  was banned by Youtube after 2 miilion views some years ago.  It can still be viewed on Facebook

To get the coal comparison to renewables, there is a study Benchmark Levelized Cost of Electricity Estimates from National Academies Press. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

The EIA Annual Energy Outlook supporting information identifies the methodology and assumptions that affect the reported estimates of LCOE for utility-scale generation technologies. The reported estimates are for the years 2022 and 2040. The focus here is on the 2022 estimates as the benchmark for the “current” costs. The assumptions include choices regarding the effects of learning, capital costs, transmission investment, operating characteristics, and externalities. These choices are both important and appropriate for the benchmark comparison (e.g., learning rates), are important and require some adjustment (e.g., capital costs), or are supplemental to the EIA assumptions (e.g., externality costs).

Note:  For the externality of CO2 emissions, the chart below shows a $15/ton “Social Cost of Carbon.”

EIA separates electricity generation technologies into categories of dispatchable and nondispatchable (EIA, 2015f, p. 6). The former include conventional fossil fuel plants that have a fairly consistent available capacity and can follow dispatch instructions to increase or decrease production. The latter consist of intermittent plants such as wind and solar, which depend on the availability of the wind and sunlight and typically cannot follow dispatch instructions easily or at all. It is generally recognized that the different operating profiles create different values for the technologies (Borenstein, 2012; Joskow, 2011). Empirical estimates for existing technologies show that the value of wind, which blows more at night when prices are low, can be 12 percent below the unweighted average price of electricity; and the value of solar, with the sun tending to shine when prices are higher, can be 16 percent greater than the unweighted average (Schmalensee, 2013).

One procedure utilized for putting nondispatchable technologies on an equivalent basis is to pair them with appropriately scaled dispatchable peaking technologies to produce an output that is like that of a conventional fossil fuel plant (Greenstone and Looney, 2012). Another approach, used by Schmalensee (2013), is to calculate the value of nondispatchable technologies based on spot prices. EIA provides a similar estimate based on its projected simulations, which is known as the levelized avoided cost estimate (LACE).

For purposes of equivalent comparison of the LCOE, the approach here combines these adjustments to provide an estimate of the net difference between the LACEs for the technology and for a conventional combined-cycle natural gas plant. The net differences are added to (e.g., for wind) or subtracted from (e.g., for solar) the other components of the LCOE.

With the above assumptions and adjustments to obtain an approximation of equivalent LCOE, the results appear in Figure B-1 and Table B-1.

FIGURE B-1 Levelized cost of electricity for plants entering service in 2022 (2015 $/MWh).
SOURCE: EIA, 2015f, 2016g. Because Annual Energy Outlook 2016 does not assess conventional coal and IGCC technologies, their values (in 2013 dollars) were sourced from Annual Energy Outlook 2015 and then converted to 2015 dollars using the Bureau of Economic Analysis’ gross domestic product (GDP) implicit price deflator.

It is clear from Figure B-1 that new natural gas plants are the dominant technology. And without accounting for the costs of externalities, new IGCC coal plants are more competitive than even the best of the wind and solar. Onshore wind is the closest to being competitive. But the relative cost estimates shown here are similar to those in Greenstone and Looney (2012). The primary renewable technologies are not cost-competitive, and the differences are significant. This is for entry year 2022. Looking ahead to 2040, with some additional cost reductions for renewables and more substantial increased fuel costs for natural gas, the situation changes for wind but not for solar.

CONCLUSION

Equivalent estimates of the LCOE are available from the supporting analyses of AEO2016. The data without the effect of selective policies indicate that existing technologies for clean energy are not competitive with new natural gas. And without accounting for the costs of externalities, the principal renewable technologies of wind and solar are not cost-competitive with new coal plants.

FIGURE B-2 Electric power generation by fuel (billions of kilowatt hours [kWh]) assuming No Clean Power Plan, 2000-2040. SOURCE: EIA, 2016f, Figure IF3-6.

[Note:  Again Youtube banned the video “Bill Gates Slams Unreliable Wind and Solar Power Energy.” It can still be viewed on Facebook:

Footnote: The above analyses do not adequately consider the effect of cheap subsidized solar and wind power driving dispatchable power plants into bankruptcy.  For more on electricity economics see Climateers Tilting at Windmills

This post is dedicated to Silicon Valley nouveau rich and their Cyber-Space Cadets now in the streets demanding that adults fix the climate, and fix it now!  Their thinking is fatally flawed by the simplistic transfer of tactics from cyber world to the real physical world.

Mark P. Mills writes at City Journal Want an Energy Revolution?  It won’t come from renewables—which can never supply all the power we need—but from foundational scientific discoveries. Excerpts in italics with my bolds.

Throughout history, some 60 percent to 90 percent of every nation’s economy has been consumed by food and fuel costs. Hydrocarbons changed the way that humans organize their productive capacity. The coal age, followed by the oil age, and now by the ascendant age of natural gas, has (at least for developed nations) driven the share of GDP devoted to acquiring food and fuel down to around 10 percent. That transformation constitutes one of the great pivots for civilization.

Many analysts claim that yet another such consequential energy revolution is upon us: “clean energy,” in the form of wind turbines, solar arrays, and batteries, they say, is about to become incredibly cheap, making it possible to create a “new energy economy.” Polls show that nearly 80 percent of voters believe that America is “capable of creating a new electricity system.”

We can thank Silicon Valley for popularizing “exponential change” and “disruptive innovations.” The computing and communications revolutions that have transformed many industries have also shaped both expectations and rhetoric about how other technologies evolve. We hear claims, as one Stanford professor put it, that clean tech will follow digital technology in a “10x exponential process which will wipe fossil fuels off the market in about a decade.” Or, as the International Monetary Fund recently summarized, “smartphone substitution seemed no more imminent in the early 2000s than large-scale energy substitution seems today.” The mavens at Singularity University tell us that with clean tech, we’re “on the verge of a new, radically different point in history.” Solar, wind, and batteries are “on a path to disrupt” the old order dominated by fossil fuels.

Never mind that wind and solar—the focus of all “new energy economy” aspirations, including its latest incarnation in the Green New Deal—supply just 2 percent of global energy, despite hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies. After all, it wasn’t long ago that only 2 percent of the world owned a pocket-sized computer. “New energy economy” visionaries believe that a digital-like energy disruption is not just possible, but imminent. One professor predicts that we will see an “Apple of clean energy.”

A similar transformation in how energy is produced or stored isn’t just unlikely: it’s impossible. Drawing an analogy between information production and energy production is a fundamental category error. They entail different laws of physics. Logic engines don’t produce physical action or energy; they manipulate the idea of the numbers one and zero. Silicon logic is rooted in simply knowing and storing the position of a binary switch—on or off.

But the energy needed to move a ton of people, heat a ton of steel or silicon, or grow a ton of food is determined by properties of nature, whose boundaries are set by laws of gravity, inertia, friction, and thermodynamics—not clever software or marketing. Indeed, the differences between the physical and virtual are best illustrated by the fact that, using mathematical magic, one can do things like “compress” information to reduce the energy needed to transport that information. But in the world of humans and objects with mass, comparable “compression” options exist only in Star Trek.

Spending $1 million on wind or solar hardware in order to capture nature’s diffuse wind and sunlight will yield about 50 million kilowatt-hours of electricity over a 30-year period. Meantime, the same money spent on a shale well yields enough natural gas over 30 years to produce 300 million kilowatt-hours. That difference is anchored in the far higher, physics-based energy density of hydrocarbons. Subsidies can’t change that fact.

And then batteries are needed, and widely promoted, as the way to convert wind or solar into useable on-demand power. While the physical chemistry of batteries is indeed nearly magical in storing tiny quantities of energy, it doesn’t scale up efficiently. When it comes to storing energy at country scales, or for cargo ships, cars and aircraft, engineers start with a simple fact: the maximum potential energy contained in hydrocarbon molecules is about 1,500 percent greater, pound for pound, than the maximum theoretical lithium chemistries. That’s why the cost to store a unit of energy in a battery is 200 times more than storing the same amount of energy as natural gas. And why, today, it would take $60 million worth of Tesla batteries—weighing five times as much as the entire aircraft—to hold the same energy as is held in a transatlantic plane’s onboard fuel tanks.

For a practical example of the physics-anchored gap between aspiration and reality, consider Florida Power & Light’s (FPL) recently announced plan to replace an old gas-fired power station with the world’s biggest battery project—promised to be four times bigger than the current number one, a system Tesla installed, to much fanfare, last year in South Australia. The monster FPL battery “farm” will be able to store just two minutes of Florida’s electricity needs. That’s not going to change the world, or even Florida.

Moreover, it takes the energy equivalent of about 100 barrels of oil to manufacture a battery that can store the energy equal to one oil barrel. That means that batteries fabricated in China (most already are) by its predominantly coal-powered grid result in more carbon-dioxide emissions than those batteries, coupled with wind/solar, can eliminate. It’s true that wind turbines, solar cells, and batteries will get better, but so, too, will drilling rigs and combustion engines. The idea that “old” hydrocarbon technologies are about to be displaced wholesale by a digital-like, clean-tech energy revolution is a fantasy.

If we want a disruption to the energy status quo, we will need new, foundational discoveries in the sciences. As Bill Gates has put it, the challenge calls for scientific “miracles.” Any hoped-for technological breakthroughs won’t emerge from subsidizing yesterday’s technologies, including wind and solar. The Internet didn’t emerge from subsidizing the dial-up phone, or the transistor from subsidizing vacuum tubes, or the automobile from subsidizing railroads. If policymakers were serious about the pursuit of the next energy revolution, they’d be talking a lot more about reinvigorating support for basic science.

It bears noting that over the past decade, U.S. production of oil and natural gas has increased by 2,000 percent more than the combined growth of (subsidized) wind and solar. Shale technology has utterly transformed the global energy landscape. After a half-century of hand-wringing about import dependencies, America is now a major exporter. Now that’s a revolution.

See also Energy Changes Society: Transition Stories

A wind turbine loomed over the Craggy Ridge neighborhood in West Falmouth.
JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

The story is by David Abel at Boston Globe January 24, 2019 ‘Green energy blues’ in a town that sought to do something about climate change.  Excerpts in italics with my bolds.   H/T Greenie Watch

FALMOUTH — For nearly a decade, the giant blades have loomed over this seaside town, stirring hope and fear in the salty air.

To proponents, the twin wind turbines proved that residents could act on their ideals, producing their own clean energy and relying less on fossil fuels. To critics, they were mechanical monstrosities, blinking eyesores whirring at such a frequency that some neighbors said they became ill.

Nine years after the first was built beside Falmouth’s waste treatment plant, both turbines now stand idle, no longer producing a kilowatt of electricity, totems of good intentions gone awry.

Facing fierce neighborhood opposition and multiple lawsuits, selectmen last week voted to remove the turbines, which had cost the town about $10 million to build, saddling residents with years of debt.

“All that’s left now is that we have an albatross to live with,” said Sam Peterson, the one dissenting vote on the five-person board.

Wind power offers communities a way to reduce their emissions, but the protracted resistance to the turbines offers lessons as communities throughout the region consider similarly controversial renewable energy projects.

It also reflects the challenges, often tacit, in the state’s promises to make substantial reductions in its emissions. Those plans rely on importing hydropower from Canada and major offshore wind farms, and both approaches are being contested by powerful, well-organized interest groups and could be subject to legal challenges.

For Dave Moriarty, who spent much of the past decade fighting the Falmouth turbines, news that the town was finally giving up its efforts to keep them running was a welcome relief. He considers the turbines “overbearing, antiquated dinosaurs” and said they left the town with the “green energy blues.”

The 56-year-old contractor, who lived close to the turbines after they were built, moved across town because they wrought too much stress, he said. He blames town officials for ignoring his and other neighbors’ concerns.

“The town was warned,” he said. “The damage can never be reversed for many of us wind turbine victims. Some of my friends have serious health issues now.”

Neighbors complained that the churning of the turbines and the resulting flickering light and vibrations produced dizziness, nausea, depression, or anxiety — a set of symptoms that critics call “wind turbine syndrome.”

In 2012, with both 1.65-megawatt turbines operating and the opposition becoming increasingly vocal, state environmental officials took the unprecedented action of recommending that one be shut down. They found that turbine, which was fewer than 1,500 feet from the nearest home, had repeatedly exceeded allowable noise levels.

But a panel of independent scientists and doctors convened by the state Department of Environmental Protection found little to no evidence the turbines posed a health risk to neighbors.

The town eventually stopped them from operating at night, and in 2015, a state appeals court judge ruled that the town lacked sufficient permits for one of the turbines and prohibited it from operating. Two years later, a Superior Court judge ruled that both turbines posed a nuisance to neighbors and ordered that they never operate again at their current location.

“The lessons others should learn from our experience is that residents should do their homework in advance of construction,” Moriarty said. “They should ask questions and know what they’re really getting into.”

For Peterson, the only selectman who declined to vote in favor of removing the turbines, the decision ultimately reflects the power of those concerned about any large industrial project close to their homes.

While he said he felt empathy for those whose homes are closest to the turbines, he thinks they exaggerated their complaints. He visited their homes and never heard more than a minor hissing of the moving blades.

“We had the best of intentions, and they bullied those of us who tried to reason with them,” said Peterson, a retired physics teacher who like many of his neighbors hoped to do his share in addressing climate change.

He also noted that the turbines were approved by repeated votes by more than 200 members of Falmouth’s Town Meeting. But he acknowledged that town officials made mistakes, particularly in failing to comply with zoning requirements.

A woman walked along Westmoreland Drive in Falmouth, in the shadow of one of the city’s wind turbines. JONATHAN WIGGS/GLOBE STAFF

In addition to the $10 million that the town’s 30,000 residents spent on building the turbines, they now have to pay as much as $2 million more to remove them.

“It’s a shame,” said Susan Moran, chair of the town’s board of selectmen, who initially supported the turbines but voted to take them down. “This is absolutely a financial blow to the town.”

Moran and other town officials acknowledge those losses will take a toll. They’re already considering cutting back on some services, such as curbside trash collection.

While the town received $5 million in state loans for the project — $1.5 million of which has been forgiven — residents are likely to have repay the rest. If the turbines had operated as planned, functioning 24 hours a day, they were projected to earn the town between an estimated $1 million and $2 million a year.

In an effort to recoup some of those costs, selectmen have instructed town officials to consider a variety of options for what to do with the turbines.

Those include possibly converting them into cellphone towers or selling them to another community that might operate them. If they were able to negotiate such a deal with another town, Falmouth might have the rest of their state loans forgiven, as the turbines would be generating renewable energy.

“We’re looking at our options, but either way, there’s certainly going to be a financial impact to Falmouth,” said Julian Suso, to town manager.

As noted here before, public opinion surveys are often “push polls”, raising issues like climate change as part of an effort to promote public concern.  Such surveys also inform activists how successful or not has been the media messaging in generating belief and support for climate policy proposals.

Sometimes the questionnaires are manipulated to show the greatest possible public awareness and support..  For example, see:  The Art of Rigging Climate Polls.

Other times, the survey is used to chide the public for failing to buy into claims and propaganda prominently advanced in the media.  For example, see: “Hottest Year” Misdirection, where mainstream media claims 17 of the last 18 years were the hottest on record, while the public in 37 countries guessed only 9.  After checking the data, the correct answer is more likely 5.

That same survey, Perils of Perceptions, reported that in most countries the public overestimates how much green energy they consume.  That finding is the subject of this post.  As we will see, energy from renewables is perceived to be much higher than numbers from the World Bank.  And since those numbers are themselves exaggerated, the gap between virtuous green behavior and performance is even greater than stated.

The renewable energy finding from Ipsos (here):

The majority of countries overestimate the amount of energy used that comes from renewable sources in their country. The average guess is 26% when it’s actually only 19%. Malaysia, Saudi Arabia, China and Singapore were the furthest out; some countries, though, actually underestimate how much progress they have made with renewables, such as Sweden and Montenegro.

Now, 19% of energy consumed coming from renewables looks high to me, so let’s explore two of the countries:  Canada and the Netherlands.

First, The Canadian Story on Green Energy Supply

Question is Framed to be Misleading

Note that wind and solar power are presented as examples of renewable energy sources, when in reality hydro and nuclear are much larger sources of power (electricity). Note also respondents are led to confuse power with total energy, which is a much larger amount.

What is the Reality of Canadian Energy Supply (Consumption)

World Bank shows 22% of Canada’s total energy consumption was from renewables in 1990 and 2015.

Let’s test that number against the Canadian Energy Fact Book 2016–2017 (which presents 2014 as the latest statistics).  The categories are defined nicely in this diagram:
Working from the top down, first is the mix of total primary energy supply by source:

In this fact book, energy supply is equivalent to energy consumed, since it is calculated after adjusting for energy imports and exports. Note that 17.7% is the amount of energy from renewables, and hydro is 11.6%.   Let’s see how much of renewable energy comes from wind and solar:
So Canadians actually consume 4.35% of their renewable energy from wind and solar. 92% of Canadian renewable energy comes from the traditional sources:  Hydro dams and burning wood.

Combining the two tables, we see that 80% of the Other Renewables is solid biomass (wood), which leaves at most 1% of Canadian total energy supply coming from wind and solar.

Second, the Netherlands Green Energy Story

According to the Ipsos Perils of Perception survey, respondents from the Netherlands said on average 22% of their energy is Green, while the World Bank says only 6% comes from Green sources.  Last year there was a provocative and entertaining analysis of Dutch perceptions versus green energy realities broadcast on a popular Sunday morning TV show.  The episode was called Green Electrical Shocks, and is provided below for your enjoyment and edification.

Green Electrical Shocks

On Sunday Feb.4, 2018, a weekly news program aired in the Netherlands on the titled subject. H/T Climate Scepticism. The video clip is below with English subtitles. For those who prefer reading, I provide the substantial excerpts from the program with my bolds.

How many of you have Green Electricity? I will estimate 69%
And how much nationally? Oh, 69%!
So we are very average, and in a good way, because the climate is very important.

Let me ask: Green electricity comes from . . .?
Yes, electricity produced from windmills and solar panels.
Nearly 2/3 of the Dutch are using it. That’s the image.

Well I have green news and bad news.
The green news: Well done!
The bad news: It is all one big lie.
Time for the Green Electrical Shocks.

Shock #1: The green electricity from your socket is not green.
When I switched to green electricity I was very proud.
I thought, Yes, well done! The climate is getting warmer, but not any more thanks to me.

Well, that turned out to be untrue.
All producers deliver to one communal grid. Green and grey electricity all mix.
The electricity you use is always a mix of various sources.
OK. It actually makes sense not to have separate green and grey cables for every house.
So it means that of all electricity, 69% is produced in a sustainable way. But then:

Shock #2: Green Electricity is mostly fake.
Most of the green electricity we think we use comes from abroad.
You may think: So what. Green is green.

But that electricity doesn’t come from abroad, it stays abroad.
If you have green electricity at home, it may mean nothing more than that your supplier has bought “green electricity certificates”.

In Europe green electricity gets an official certificate,
Instead of selling on the electricity, they sell on those certificates.
Norway, with its hydro power, has a surplus of certificates.
Dutch suppliers buy them on a massive scale, while the electricity stays in Norway.

The idea was: if countries can sell those certificates, they can make money by producing more green electricity.
But the Norwegians don’t produce more green electricity.
But they do sell certificates.

The Dutch suppliers wave with those certificates, and say Look! Our grey electricity is green.
Only one country has produced green electricity: Norway.
But two countries take the credit.
Norway, because they produce green electricity, and the Netherlands because, on paper, we have green electricity. Get it? That’s a nice deal.

More and more countries sell those certificates. Italy is now the top supplier.
We buy fake green electricity from Italy, like some kind of Karma ham.

Now, let’s look again at the green electricity we all think we use.
So the real picture isn’t 69%. If you cancel the certificates, only 21% of electricity is really green.
Nowadays you can even order it separately if you don’t want to be part of that Norway certificates scam.
You may think: 21% green is still quite a lot. But it is time for:

Shock #3: Not all energy is electricity.
If you talk about the climate, you shouldn’t just consider electricity but all energy.
When you look at all energy, like factories, cars, trains, gas fires, then the share of consumer electricity is virtually nothing.
If you include everything in your calculation, it turns out that only 6% of all the energy we use in the Netherlands is green. It is a comedy, but wait:

Trees converted into pellets by means of petroleum powered machinery.

Shock #4: Most green energy doesn’t come from sun or wind, like you might think.
Even the 6%, our last green hope, is fake. According to the CBS we are using more sun and wind energy, but most of the green energy is produced by the burning of biomass.
Ah, more than half of the 6% green energy is biomass.

Ridiculous. What is biomass really? It is organic materials that we encounter every day.
Like the content of a compost heap. How about maize leaves or hay?
The idea behind burning organic materials is that it will grow up again.
So CO2 is released when you burn it, but it will be absorbed again by new trees.

However, there is one problem. The forest grows very slowly and our power plants burn very fast.
This is the fatal flaw in the thinking about biomass. Power plants burn trees too fast, so my solution: slow fire. Disadvantage: it doesn’t exist. So this is our next shock.

Shock#5: Biomass isn’t all that sustainable.
It’s getting worse. There aren’t enough trees in the Netherlands for biomass.
We can’t do it on our own. We don’t have enough wood, so we get it from America.

In the USA forests are cut at a high rate, Trees are shredded and compressed into pellets.
These are shipped to the Netherlands and end up in the ovens of the coal plants.
It’s a disaster for the American forests, according to environmental groups.

So we transport American forests on diesel ships to Europe.
Then throw them in the oven because it officially counts as green energy.
Only because the CO2 released this way doesn’t count for our total emissions.

In reality biomass emits more CO2 than natural gas and coal.
These are laws of nature, no matter what European laws say.
At the bottom line, how much sustainable energy do we really have in the Netherlands?
Well, the only real green energy from windmills, solar panels etc. Is only 2.2%. of all the energy we use.

In Conclusion
So the fact that 2/3 of the audience and of all Dutch people use green electricity means absolutely nothing. It’s only 2.2%, and crazier still, the government says it should be at 14% by 2020.
They promised: to us, to Europe, to planet Earth: 14 instead of 2.2.

Instead of making a serious attempt to save the climate, they are only working on accounting tricks, like buying pieces of paper in Norway and burning American forests.
They are only saving the climate on paper.

Summary Comment

As the stool above shows, the climate change package sits on three premises. The first is the science bit, consisting of an unproven claim that observed warming is caused by humans burning fossil fuels. The second part rests on impact studies from billions of research dollars spent uncovering any and all possible negatives from warming. And the third leg is climate policies showing how governments can “fight climate change.”

It is refreshing to see more and more articles by people reasoning about climate change/global warming and expressing rational positions. Increasingly, analysts are unbundling the package and questioning not only the science, but also pointing out positives from CO2 and warming.  And as the Dutch telecast shows, ineffective government policies are also fair game.

More on flawed climate policies at Reasoning About Climate

Robert Bryce reports on the end of wind power hopes in City Journal.  Why Wind Power Isn’t the Answer  Excerpts in italics with my bolds

As a new study confirms, turbines would have to be stacked across state-sized swaths of the American landscape.

On October 8, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report warning that nations around the world must cut their greenhouse-gas emissions drastically to reduce the possibility of catastrophic climate change. The report emphasizes “fast deployment of renewables like solar and wind” and largely ignores the essential role nuclear energy must play in any decarbonization effort.

Four days earlier, to much less fanfare, two Harvard researchers published a paper showing that trying to fuel our energy-intensive society solely with renewables would require cartoonish amounts of land. How cartoonish? Consider: meeting America’s current demand for electricity alone—not including gasoline or jet fuel, or the natural gas required for things like space heating and fertilizer production—would require covering a territory twice the size of California with wind turbines.

The IPCC and climate-change activists love solar and wind energy, and far-left politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have called for a wartime-style national mobilization to convert to 100 percent renewable-energy usage. But this credo ignores a fundamental truth: energy policy and land-use policy are inextricable.

The renewables-only proponents have no trouble mobilizing against land use for the extraction of hydrocarbons. Consider the battle in Colorado over Proposition 112, which will prohibit oil- and gas-drilling activities within 2,500 feet of homes, hospitals, schools and “vulnerable areas.” Environmental groups including 350.org, the Sierra Club, and Greenpeace have endorsed the initiative, which will appear on the November 6 ballot. If it passes, Proposition 112 would effectively ban new oil and gas production in Colorado, the nation’s fifth-largest natural gas producer. Or consider the months-long demonstrations that ended last year in South Dakota over the Dakota Access pipeline. More than 700 climate-change activists and others were arrested during protests claiming that Dakota Access, by crossing the traditional lands of the Standing Rock Sioux, was violating the tribe’s cultural and spiritual rights. These energy- and land-use battles are waged by climate activists and environmental groups whose goal is to shutter the hydrocarbon industry. Most of these groups, including 350.org and Sierra Club, routinely claim that the American economy can run solely on renewables. Further, the Sierra Club has tallied 74 U.S. cities that have pledged to get all of their electricity from renewable energy.

Japan is going to remove this Fukushima turbine, one of the world’s largest with a rotor diameter of 167 meters. It was deemed unprofitable due to multiple malfunctions decreasing the utilization rate. Its utilization rate over the year through June 2018 was 3.7 percent, well below the 30 percent necessary for commercialization.

But the new study, published in Environmental Research Letters, shows yet again that wind energy’s Achilles heel is its paltry power density. “We found that the average power density—meaning the rate of energy generation divided by the encompassing area of the wind plant—was up to 100 times lower than estimates by some leading energy experts,” said lead author Lee Miller, a postdoctoral fellow who coauthored the report with Harvard physics professor David Keith. The problem is that most estimates of wind energy’s potential ignore “wind shadow,” an effect that occurs when turbines are placed too closely together: the upwind turbines rob wind speed from others placed downwind.

The study looks at 2016 energy-production data from 1,150 solar projects and 411 onshore wind projects. The combined capacity of the wind projects totaled 43,000 megawatts, or roughly half of all U.S. wind capacity that year. Miller and Keith concluded that solar panels produce about 10 times more energy per unit of land as wind turbines—a significant finding—but their work demands attention for two other reasons: first, it uses real-world data, not models, to reach its conclusions, and second, it shows that wind energy’s power density is far lower than the Department of Energy, the IPCC, and numerous academics have claimed.

Further: “While improved wind turbine design and siting have increased capacity factors (and greatly reduced costs), they have not altered power densities.” In other words, though Big Wind has increased the size and efficiency of turbines—the latest models stand more than 700 feet tall—it hasn’t been able to wring more energy out of the wind. Due to the wind-shadow effect, those taller turbines must be placed farther and farther apart, which means that the giant turbines cover more land. As turbines get taller and sprawl across the landscape, more people see them.

Rural residents are objecting to wind projects because they want to protect their property values and viewsheds. They don’t want to see the red-blinking lights atop those massive turbines, all night, every night, for the rest of their lives. Nor do they want to be subjected to the health-damaging noise—both audible and inaudible—that the turbines produce.

The backlash against Big Wind is coast to coast. In New York, which has mandated 50 percent renewable-energy usage by 2030, the towns of Yates and Somerset are fighting against Lighthouse Wind, a 200-megawatt wind project proposed for the shores of Lake Ontario. In Oklahoma, the tiny town of Hinton continues its battle against NextEra Energy, the world’s biggest wind-energy producer, over the siting of wind projects nearby. In California, which just boosted its renewable-electricity mandate to 60 percent by 2030, wind turbines are so unpopular that the industry has effectively given up trying to site new projects there. Meantime, in deep-blue Vermont, both gubernatorial candidates—incumbent Republican Phil Scott and Democratic challenger Christine Hallquist—favor renewable energy in principle but oppose further wind-energy development in the state.

Big Wind has attempted to intimidate some of its rural opponents by filing lawsuits against them. Last year, NextEra sued the town of Hinton in federal and state court after the town passed an ordinance restricting wind-energy development. The wind-energy giant also sued local governments in Michigan, Indiana, and Missouri, all of which had passed measures restricting wind-energy development.

Why the hardball tactics? Simple: rural residents stand between Big Wind and tens of billions of dollars in subsidies available through the Production Tax Credit. In September, Lisa Linowes, cofounder and executive director of the Industrial Wind Action Group, a New Hampshire-based nonprofit that tracks the wind industry, published an article on MasterResource.org. “The US Treasury estimates the PTC will cost taxpayers $40.12 billion in the period from 2018 to 2027,” Linowes wrote, “making it, by far, the most expensive energy subsidy under current tax law.”

The punchline here is obvious: wind energy has been sold as a great source of “clean” energy. The reality is that wind energy’s expansion has been driven by federal subsidies and state-level mandates. Wind energy, cannot, and will not, meet a significant portion of our future energy needs because it requires too much land.

Gray area required for wind farms, yellow area for solar farms, to power London UK.

Miller and Keith’s paper shows that the ongoing push for 100-percent renewables, and, in particular, the idea that wind energy is going to be a major contributor to that goal, is not just wrongheaded—it’s an energy dead end.

The paper is Observation-based solar and wind power capacity factors and power densities

Robert Bryce is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the producer of the forthcoming documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains the World, which will be released in 2019.

See also Kelly’s Climate Clarity

Footnote:  It bears repeating here that modern societies have benefited greatly by sourcing their energy from underground rather then above ground.   From post excerpting writing by Pierre Desrochers and Joanna Szurmak, Control Population, Control the Climate. Not.

“Pessimists are also oblivious to the benefits of unlocking wealth from underground materials such as coal, petroleum, natural gas and mineral resources. Using these spares vast quantities of land. It should go without saying that even a small population will have a much greater impact on its environment if it must rely on agriculture for food, energy and fibres, raise animals for food and locomotion, and harvest wild animals for everything from meat to whale oil. By replacing resources previously extracted from the biosphere with resources extracted from below the ground, people have reduced their overall environmental impact while increasing their standard of living.”