Category Archives: Windpower

The Paris Agreement Road Map To Zero GHG Emissions–Next Post The Skeptics Response.

Posted on April 2, 2017 | Leave a comment

I do not think that the developed nations of the world are ready to endorse the actions they have signed onto when they authorized the Paris Agreement (PA). They liked the applause they were receiving from the media and the environmentalists. But they have not responded in-kind to their commitments for reducing CO2 emissions or contributions to the fund that helps the underdeveloped nations. See here and here. Vox posting on 4 October 2016 said “No country on Earth is taking the 2ºC climate target seriously”. The Climateactiontracker.org posted this quote: “Right now, with the policies governments have in place, we are heading to a warming of 3.6C said Prof Kornelis Blok of Ecofys.”The developed nations realize that it is time for them to “put up or shut up”. The “put up” part is bedeviled by the fact that most of them are finding that their renewable energy installations, eg solar and wind, are raising the cost of energy to a point where many can no longer afford it. Further, they are learning that the renewables make their power systems unstable and thus vulnerable to loss of power to supply the customers and industries.

Maybe, just maybe they are becoming aware of the actions they need to undertake to keep the Global temperature rise at no more than the target of 1.5C. The 24 March 2017 Science magazine published a study titled: “A roadmap for rapid decarbonization”.

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Posted in AGW, Climate Alarmism, Climate Models, CO2, Environment, fossil fuels, Global Temperatures, IPCC, Nuclear Energy, Oil and Gas Exploration, Renewable Energy, solar cells, Windpower

Planning CO2 Reductions Has Been Haphazard At Best–And Is It Really Needed?

Posted on March 29, 2017 | Leave a comment

My first venture into the study of global warming was as a researcher for a State Senator at a time when his State was considering a set of new laws to combat man made global warming. The laws were to be based upon a just published study that had been led by a Professor at the University. The study was how the State should control emissions, improve energy efficiency and develop schemes to reduce energy consumption. In many respects, energy efficiency, for example, had good programs. But its ideas for regulating and controlling energy in the name of global warming, was a reach too far in my thinking.

In my reports to the Senator, I always requested that he try to make the study authors provide an end point and how they were going to get there. I know he tried to do this, but with no success. They would only say that it was necessary to prevent or stop man-made global warming. It was obvious to me this would be an enormous task that might not be possible to accomplish.

I believed that the legislators should know what was needed to be done, how long it would take, and what would be the costs of these actions. In my years in the business world, that information was a requirement if I expected to get the money needed to achieve some results at the end point.

The Study was adopted and the over the years, coal plants have been shut down, subsidies paid to renewable energy producers, and the State eventually joined a cap and trade organization.

The public has been made to pay for some crony capitalism in the form of fuel cell production. More crony capitalism was in play when the State offered incentives in the form of loans to have in-state manufacturing of a hybrid plugin automobile named the Fisker Karma. The project fell through because of battery fires and an incident of flooding followed by fires of Karmas when tropical storm Sandy hit a New Jersey Port. The State got some of their money back. The big loser were the Feds who had loaned Fisker $529 million. I believe that the Feds only got back $25 million when it auctioned off Fisker to a Chinese company.

The State has installed a small number of wind turbines and solar cells. Fortunately, their plan to set up the first East Coast Off Shore Wind Farm was aborted.

All of this has had no perceptible impact on the global climate nor will it ever. It has made the State’s residential electric rates to the 14^th highest in the contiguous US. No long-term plan; no real vision of where the State was being led.

This story is a microcosm of what has happened globally. The Paris Accord, that Obama signed and provided $500 million in his last days in office, is clearly unworkable. As the dimensions of the required cuts in CO2 are at last becoming clear, the task is so enormous that it is almost beyond comprehension. It will not be implemented as the task is so far from anything the human population will accept either financially or from the suffering it will cause. And is it really necessary to cut CO2? The next blog will look at what has been proposed as the action plan to prevent a global temperature rise of 2°C.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, cap and trade, Climate Alarmism, CO2, Environment, Global Temperatures, Government Regulations, solar cells, Windpower

Renewable Energy Uses 100X Manpower Compared to Fossil Fuels

Posted on January 31, 2017 | 1 comment

The International Renewable Energy Agency of the US Bureau of Statistics provided employment data for three categories–Solar; Oil and Gas Extraction; and Coal Mining. Bloomberg drew a chart of employment over the period of 2012 to 2015. That chart is shown below:

Stanislav Jakuba looked at the employment in each of these three endeavours to compare electricity production versus manpower in his posting “Renewable Energy: High Jobs, Little Power (inefficiency personified”. He offered this analysis:

Ever wondered why has our standard of living not been improving?

The upward-aiming line in the above chart indicates one reason: growing employment in the renewable-energy sector. That employment contributes a miniscule amount to power production, and it does so at a dreadfully high operating cost.

Here are the numbers.

As illustrated, 200,000 people work in the solar industry (Photo-voltaic and Concentrated Solar Power combined), and they enabled the generation of 3.0 GW in 2015, which comes to 15 kW per employee. The down-sloping lines, combined, represent the 400,000 employees in the fossil fuel industry.

Assuming that about a half of those are needed just to supply fuel to generate the 310 GW electricity reported for that year, then the remaining 200,000 employees were responsible for 1550 kW per employee.

In other words, one employee in the fossil fuel industry produces 1550 kW, while it takes 100 employees in the solar business to produce roughly that amount.

Solar is thus the most expensive source of electricity. Plus, its output varies daily, sometime randomly (because of clouds and storms) and always intermittently (because of nights). Its inexhaustibility parallels the abundance of nuclear fuel, but the latter provides cheap and steady electricity, as well as heat, and is no less “clean” than solar.

The true cost of renewable energy is presently covered by subsidies drawn from our taxes, from Government borrowing abroad, and from various fees attached to our monthly utility bills.”

Jakuba has some addition thoughts on this topic in his posting which can be read by clicking here.

I keep reading that solar and wind are now competitive with natural gas and coal. Show me the cost number when they remove all the subsidies and when they include operating cost and investment for the backup fossil fuel generated power–because these renewables not reliable supplies.

I am not sure that I completely agree with the comparison technique, but they do have one heck of a lot of manpower for such a puny output of electrical power.

The politicians said these renewable projects would create jobs. They sure were right about that. Although, it looks like they carried it too far.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, Electricity, Electricity from Coal, Energy Development, fossil fuels, Green Jobs, solar cells, Windpower

John Kasich (modern day Don Quixote) Tilting At Windmills

Posted on December 28, 2016 | Leave a comment

The Ohio legislature passed a bill which allowed communities to make Ohio renewable energy standards optional.

The present standard calls on Ohio utilities to secure 12.5 percent of their power from renewable sources and increase their efficiency by 22.5 percent by 2025.

However, Governor John Kasich vetoed the bill saying he liked the idea of many fuel sources.

Renewables are still not competitive with natural gas and coal based electrical power.

Wow, and some people actually wanted to replace Donald Trump with John Kasich. I believe the person that wanted that the most was Kasich.

The source of this posting is E&E News.

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, CO2, Coal, Electricity from Coal, Energy Development, fossil fuels, Fracking/Shale Gas, solar cells, Windpower

Pew Research Report Data Not Supported By The Interviews. Human Caused CO2 Claimed To Be 48% But In Reality Is 31%

Posted on October 6, 2016 | 1 comment

Pew Research Center has just released a survey of American’s opinions about global warming. They interviewed about 1500 people over a period from 10 May to 6 June this year. There are many findings but the one I want to take issue with is their claim that about half of the American’s interviewed say Earth is warming due to human activity. From the Pew Research Center survey the chart displayed says that 48% believe Earth is warming because of human activity, 31% because of natural patterns and 20% say there is no solid evidence that Earth is getting warmer.

The Pew document presents the results of the interviews. The above conclusion was made from the following interviews:

Above is the first interview results. Only 26% said global warming is caused by human activity. Wow that would not do. I guess they were saying “how can we fix this. We can’t publish this.” So they came up with a plan.

Some of the interviewed said they were not sure or had no answer. So they decided to re-interview these people to see which of the three statements would be their second choice. Now there were 1534 interviewees in the beginning. Thus the “not sures” and the “no answers” would be 0.15X1534=230 people. In the next chart it appears that they only re-interviewed only 156 of the 230. Below are the results of the re-interview.

The results of the re-interview is that 29% said their second choice would be human caused warming, 20% said the warming was natural and 41% there was no evidence that the world is getting warmer.

Now comes the magic. You can see it in the bottom part of the above chart where it says the “combined responses” gave a new set of percentages for each of the three possible answers. However the answer for one of the three changed. It now includes both human caused and natural caused warming even though there still is a natural caused warming category.

I have gone through the math. The “human caused” in the first interview was 26% or 398 people. The “natural” was 45% or 690 people. “No evidence” was 14% or 215 people. As noted above the number re interviewed was 156 although the percentage would have called for 230. Note also that the percentage listed in the chart is only 90% or 140 people. The bottom line for people actually giving an opinion looks to be 1443 rather than the 1534 they began with. But the discrepancies in total number make little difference to the outcome. The human caused would be 398 original people plus 45 of the re interviewed for a total of 443 representing the share of the total 31%. Natural 690 plus 31 for a total of 721 and 50%. No evidence came in with 215 plus 64 for 279 and 19%. So only 31% said warming was human caused.

Obviously the surveyors could not let the initial result stand—–only 26% thought warming in human caused. So they came up with a way to obscure the results.

I have plowed through the rest of the interview material. It is obvious that most of the people have little concept of the issues surrounding renewable fuels/renewable energy.

Their level of the science knowledge is probably pretty well summed up by the interview question shown above where they were asked to name the major gas that makes up our atmosphere. Seventy-three per cent did not know the answer. I would hazard a guess that most of our politician would do no better on that question.

If you want to look in detail at the full report and the interviews click here and then click on “Complete Report PDf

cbdakota

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Posted in AGW, Climate Alarmism, Climate Models, CO2, Domestic Energy, Energy Development, Environment, fossil fuels, Fracking/Shale Gas, Renewable Energy, solar cells, Windpower

Small-Scale Renewables Program Failure.

Posted on April 17, 2016 | Leave a comment

Operation of a small-scale wind farm was undertaken at Lake Land College** about 4 years ago. Now the College is planing to tear down the two wind turbines because of high maintenance cost and the wind farm’s inability to provide the College’s power requirements.

According to a Daily Caller posting, the turbines returned a negative 99.6% return on investment. The posting tells us the College got $987,697.20 in taxpayer support for the wind power. The turbines were funded from a $2.5 million grant from the US Department of Labor.

The college has spent $240,000 in parts and labor attempting to keep the wind turbines in operation. But they are now inoperable with an estimated cost of $100,000 to get them back online.

From the Daily Callers posting:

“School officials’ original estimates found the turbine would save it $44,000 in electricity annually, far more than the $8,500 they actually generated. Under the original optimistic scenario, the turbines would have to last for 22.5 years just to recoup the costs, not accounting for inflation. If viewed as an investment, the turbines had a return of negative 99.14 percent.”

“Even though the college wants to tear down one of the turbines, they are federal assets and “there is a process that has to be followed” according to Allee. (Allee is the Director of Public Relations)

“The turbines became operational in 2012 after a 5-year long building campaign intended to reduce the college’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions to fight global warming. Even though the turbines cost almost $1 million, but the college repeatedly claimed they’d save money in the long run.”

But the College nor the US Government are not through with renewable power despite this lesson. According to the Daily Caller posting we learn that they are going solar:

“Lake Land plans to replace the two failed turbines with a solar power system paid for by a government grant. “[T]he photovoltaic panels are expected to save the college between $50,000 and $60,000 this year,”Allee told the DCNF.”

Because the wind farm was planned to be a teaching tool for the College students. It could be that some of maintenance was done be the students. However, maintenance must have been lead by professionals.

Third world countries have vast and legitimate needs for electricity for their people. But the greens tell the third world countries that they do not want to provide them with fossil fuel powered plants. And the World Bank says it will not provide them funding for fossil fuel plant. A study done in a remote part of India found that spreading solar cells around did not work because they needed many trained people distributed through out the area the solar cells were being placed and they just did not have that kind of talent. Enough talent can be concentrated in a power plant. Someday these countries, as they advance, will develop these people but they do not exist now. The people in this part of India, of course did not like loosing power every night, either.

You also wonder who in the Department of Labor determines the appropriateness of these awards. Already having put $2.2million in renewables, they are going for more.

I hope the College knows that they wont have power in the evening. (sarc)

cbdakota.

**Lake Land College, located in Mattoon, Illinois, is a two year community college.

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, CO2, Electricity, Energy Development, Environment, fossil fuels, Government Regulations, Renewable Energy, solar cells, Windpower

Mr President, You Owe American An Apology.

Posted on March 10, 2016 | Leave a comment

Rebloging a posting from Oilpro.com titled “Mr. President, you owe America an apology. We did drill our way to $2 gas.”

The President has done about everything imaginable to make the price we pay for energy skyrocket. He has prevented drilling for oil on Federal lands but he could not do anything about State and private land. It is disgraceful that the media lets him get away with his retrospective claims that the lower prices were his doing. He even claimed he had approved oil being pipelined from Canada.

Anyway, Marita Noon tells of the misinformation that the President feeds to low information crowd.

cbdakota

‘’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’’

MY PRESIDENT YOU OWE AMERICAN AN APOLOGY. WE DID DRILL OUR WAY TO $2.00 GAS.

“We can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices,” President Obama told an audience four years ago at the University of Miami. Like this year, it was an election year and Obama was running for re-election. Later in his speech, he added: “anybody who tells you that we can drill our way out of this problem doesn’t know what they’re talking about, or just isn’t telling you the truth.” He scoffed at the Republicans for believing that drilling would result in $2 gasoline—remember this was when prices at the pump, in many places, spiked to more than $4 a gallon: “You can bet that since it is an election year, they’re already dusting off their three-point plans for $2 gas. I’ll save you the suspense: Step one is drill, step two is drill, step three is drill.”

Well, Mr. President, you owe America, and the Republicans, an apology. Your snarky comments were wrong. The Republican’s supposed three-point plan, which you mocked, was correct.

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Posted in Alternative Energy, Coal, Domestic Energy, Electricity from Coal, Fracking/Shale Gas, Keystone pipeline (KXL), Nuclear Energy, Off Shore Resources, Oil and Gas Exploration, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy, Windpower

4 Major Warmers Change Their Mind And Now Back Building Nukes

Posted on February 15, 2016 | 1 comment

Back when there was temporary shortage of natural gas, that fossil fuel was the favorite of warmers. When it became abundant, they were against it. They just pretend to be even handed. Well what about nuclear energy? It doesn’t produce carbon dioxide (CO2) but they do not like it. My guess is that many of them are just following through on their objective of destroying capitalism.

However, a group of influential warmers now say they were wrong to oppose nuclear energy.

At the Paris COP21 in December 2015, a press conference was held where 4 noted warmers announced that they were going to back development of nuclear energy.

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, China, Climate Alarmism, CO2, Coal, Electricity from Coal, Environment, EPA, Government Regulations, IPCC, Nuclear Energy, Renewable Energy, Solar System, Windpower

Lomborg Says Wind And Solar Will Still Not Be Competitive By 2040

Posted on February 1, 2016 | Leave a comment

Bjorn Lomborg asks in his posting “Are wind and solar energy already competitive with fossil fuels?” He says no they are not and probably will not be competitive even by 2040.

“We constantly hear how solar and wind energy is already cheaper than fossil fuels. A few months ago, Bloomberg Business ”wind power is now the cheapest electricity to produce in both Germany and the U.K., even without government subsidies.” If renewable energy is cheaper than dirty fossil fuels, why isn’t everyone adopting them? Are we so irrationally addicted to polluting energy sources that we won’t even embrace cheaper and cleaner alternatives?

Well, as you might have guessed, it turns out that wind and solar energy isn’t cheaper than fossil fuels in the real world. A new report by the same Bloomberg now warns that if subsidies are phased out by 2020 in the U.K, the renewable industry will dry up and drop off a cliff. ”

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Posted in AGW, Alternative Energy, Energy Development, Renewable Energy, Renewable Fuel Standard, solar cells, Windpower

Germany’s Renewables Can Only Provide 11% Of Their Rated Capacity

Posted on January 20, 2016 | Leave a comment

Here is a look at the German renewable energy program. The NoTricksZone is a site that covers German media and reports it in English. The site is managed by Pierre Goselin and he recently posted “Two Great Destructive Lies German Leaders Refuse To Abandon”. The first of the two “lies” relates performance of wind and solar systems and it is that:

“German renewable energies sun and wind are a success!”