Dear Bishop Hill: read your links. Also, take a look at this graph.
Bishop Hill thinks they've caught Nicholas Stern in a contradiction, saying one thing in 2009 and another in 2015. So let's take a look, using BH's own links.
Stern 2009:
Lord Stern said that although robust expansion could be achieved until 2030 while avoiding dangerous levels of greenhouse gas emissions, rich nations may then have to consider reining in growth...."At some point we would have to think about whether we want future growth. We don't have to do that now."
(Emphasis added.) That would be the second sentence of the article BH linked to.
And Stern 2015:
...Professor Stern, the chair of the Grantham research institute on climate change and the environment, said that it was a false dichotomy to posit growth against climate action. “To portray them as in conflict is to misunderstand economic development and the opportunities that we now have to move to the low-carbon economy,” he said. “To pretend otherwise is diversionary and indeed creates an ‘artificial horse race’ which can cause real damage to the prospects for agreement.” Green parties in Europe have often argued that decarbonisation requires an end to the model of economic growth “at all costs”. But Stern said that there was now “much greater understanding of how economic growth and climate responsibility can come together and, indeed, how their complementarity can help drive both forward”.
(Emphasis added.) In both cases Stern appears to be focusing on the short to medium term, and in both cases saying there's not a conflict between economic growth and addressing climate change.
In BH's telling, Stern said in 2009 they had to stop growing (BH gave no time frame so one would assume it was immediate) but that Stern in 2015 is saying grow away. Alarmist hypocrisy!!!
As for whether there's a difference over what to do in 2030, who knows - Stern wasn't being asked recently about policies 15 years from now, but I don't see a necessary difference in his statements. Even if there was a difference, BH somehow finds it unforgivable that someone could change their mind on a peripheral issue (what policies should be in place in 2030, as opposed to policies today).
Finally, BH might want to take a look at a graph at renewable power prices. Any graph really, but here's one:
This is new information available to Stern in 2015 and not in 2009, and I could see it having an effect on someone thinking about long-term compatibility of growth with limiting carbon emissions. I remember the debate 5 years ago over whether the long-term decline in solar costs would continue. Now we have the result.
Inability of denialists to adjust opinions to new facts is matched only by their inability to accept long-established ones.
Posts
760 comments:
1 – 200 of 760 Newer› Newest»I went to your reference link, tried to go to the link to the Lazard study and got a 404. The Cleantechnica site shows a Lazard chart with a caution, they exclude intermittency and transmission costs.
When it comes to solar and wind the costs and benefits are very site dependent. For example, as I've mentioned in the past, countries like Congo have a very poor wind and solar potential. This means the Lazard cost per kWh is highly dependent on location. I wouldn't trust anything claiming to be good enough for worldwide use. If I were you I would get familiar with a small group of countries and make sure what you dream up passes the smell test for them. I like to use Jamaica, Congo and Pakistan.
When it comes to coal or nuclear power (or hydro, or oil, or gas), the costs and benefits are very site dependent. And in the case of those that destroy the resource they require to provide power, the cost and future locked-in requirement to pay increased costs of the resource. Unlike wind or sun, which aren't extracted and delivered to the power station at a cost of business.
If I were you, I'd get in touch with people NOT blinded by outdated stone-age mythology and technology and look at what people who actually use their intelligence have to say on the subject.
This will likely cause you some emotional anguish as your cherished ideology will not be given special status over reality.
...they exclude intermittency and transmission costs. And of course the external costs of conventional plant, which also have intermittency and transmission costs as well as the health and environmental ones.
The quetest thing I saw this summer was a stalled windmill sitting next to a solar panel in the fog.
...the fog also obscured the battery.
I've not always succeeded, but I've tried hard not to accuse individuals of being dishonest. Andrew Montford, however, is someone I'm more than willing to publicly state is either dishonest, or remarkably stupid. I really can't see a third alternative. It really ticks me off that he is taken seriously by some (and pandered to by others) in the UK.
Eli,
It's a pity you didn't describe Lord Stern as the UK's leading climate economist . Doing something like that is normally guaranteed to lead to a visit from another UK-based climate economist who will either ask you to back up your claim about Lord Stern, or will tell you where he is on a list of highly cited ecomomists.
Yeah, even broken the nuclear power station producing no energy makes a lot of noise and pollution.
Mind you, something the senile and stupid don't understand is that there's still light underneath fog, so solar panels work quite well indeed, producing plenty of power.
Because they've never grown out of that infant's idea that if you can't see something, it can't see you. So if they can't see the sun, there can't be ANY sunlight! The fact that they can still see around in the fog so that there must still be light has never occurred to them because, as said before, they're senile and stupid.
"I've not always succeeded, but I've tried hard not to accuse individuals of being dishonest."
Why? They'll never return the favour. And if they weren't dishonest, they're stupid, so I'd suspect they'd prefer to be wrong *by their own choice* rather than incapable of thought.
Or they could change tack and, you know, provide evidence to show they're not dishonest.
It could happen one day.
FL: countries like Congo have a very poor wind and solar potential.
Wiki: The Democratic Republic of the Congo lies on the Equator, with one-third of the country to the north and two-thirds to the south. The climate is hot and humid in the river basin and cool and dry in the southern highlands, with a cold, alpine climate in the Rwenzori Mountains.
South of the Equator, the rainy season lasts from October to May and north of the Equator, from April to November. Along the Equator, rainfall is fairly regular throughout the year. During the wet season, thunderstorms often are violent but seldom last more than a few hours. The average rainfall for the entire country is about 1,070 mm (42 in).
RS: The quetest thing I saw this summer was a stalled windmill sitting next to a solar panel in the fog.
BPL: How quet was it?
BPL, remember, there's no "I" in Idiot...
Susan Socs:
The second quietest thing I heard was the owner weeping over the lowest bid for a battery big enough to run the AC long enough to keep is July tenants from bailing.
Will someone please ask the innumerate anonymous coward what part of 'optical depth ' it does not understand?
Gramps, will someone there get you your medicine? Your brain is dribbling out your nose and getting on the keyboard.
Your failures at maths here have negated any possibility of a whine from you about "innumerate" being thought of valid and reasoned critique of others.
Hey, Gramps, tell us more of your imaginary events! We are all agog! No, really! Tell us more things that you have made up out of thin air! Like all your other claims have been!
Or get nursey to help you to bed where you can calm down and not overexert yourself. This excitement isn't good for your incontipants.
Hey, gramps what part of "It isn't pitch black in a fog" did you not understand?
And here's a thing that no engineer on a crusade against ecology EVER understood.
The sun moves overhead and without that scattering cloud an early day sun's light will not excite the solar panel because so little of its light falls on the front. Yet when that scattering makes the light come from all directions, there is a large catchment area affected.
But you neither know nor care about reality, you only want to know the bits that prove your idiotic and destructive ego is right.
That cleantechnia graph is, to an extent, picking their own cherries, though, as the solar chart small print says it's somewhere in southewestern US, i.e ideal solar town. The fraunhofer institute did LCOE numbers for various locations ( http://go100re.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/2014_10_24_Statement_LCOE_PV_Fraunhofer_ISE.pdf ) and the costs are up to triple that of the graph posted. Furthermore these costs don't include storage or curtailment costs, which are going to be issues with higher penetration of solar. There may indeed be places where solar power is sometimes cheaper than from conventional sources, but until it can provide round the clock juice it will be inherently less valuable. Here in the UK solar panels are next to useless when electricity demand peaks at 6pm in December. And enough with the facile arguments about clouds and fog, clouds can easily knock off 80-90% of your solar output, as cofirmed by various solar sites ( http://www.solarpowerrocks.com/solar-basics/how-do-solar-panels-work-in-cloudy-weather/ ).
As for Stern, plenty of reputable people have taken issue with his claims (eg Kevin Anderson in the UK: http://kevinanderson.info/blog/avoiding-dangerous-climate-change-demands-de-growth-strategies-from-wealthier-nations/ ). Furthermore, I think that there's a lot wrong with the assumptions within which economists like Stern are operating. For starters, it's arguable that he;s using the wrong functional form of discount rate, even if discount rates are an appropriate tool to begin with (http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/%7Ejdf/papers/Hyperbolic.pdf ), and his work ignores the conclusions of ecological economics, which argues that energy is a much more significant contributor to economic growth than is thought ( http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2328101 ). Besides which, most of these analyses look at economies as open control systems, ignoring things like feedback loops, so they're basically just linearising a small part of a complex system. It's a recipie for drawing false conclusions and making dangerous decisions.
Besides which, there's a real danger of suffering climate myopia here. If one looks at the ecological boundaries work ( http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6223/1259855.abstract ) then you see that we're well into danger zones which have nothing to do with climate change (which we're still in the foothills of). Swapping in solar as a plug-n-play replacement for fossil fuels won't make us any more sustainable in areas like biodiversity loss, human appropriation of primary productivity ( http://www.pnas.org/content/112/31/9511.abstract?sid=bc01115e-62f2-4643-9a84-e60059e07b79 ), extraction of nonrenewable resources ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937801400065X ) and all the other lovely ways were making the planet less habitable for ourselves long term. I mean, the drought in Brazil, for example, is being blamed on deforestation as much as climate change.
Trying to argue that solar is good because it allows us to continue economic growth without harming the environment is utterly ridiculous.
"Furthermore these costs don't include storage or curtailment costs"
CSP.
Fail.
But then again, your comparison cost doesn't include backup or failures or cleanup or curtailment costs that, if the subsidies and tax breaks are any indication, are still not completely paid off a century and more later.
"which argues that energy is a much more significant contributor to economic growth than is thought"
Yeah, you're batshit insane, though. Ever noticed that your "energy" doesn't claim it has to be fossil fuel produced. Energy from wind or sun is still energy. And not having to waste resources to bring it to the power station saves a lot of money. Hard to be held to ransom by Russia turning off the tap to the pipeline that sends wind to the UK...
"And enough with the facile arguments about clouds and fog, clouds can easily knock off 80-90% of your solar output, as cofirmed by various solar sites"
And nuclear mishaps can easily knock off 100% plus put you in a trillion dollar hole. Literally as well as economically.
But you DO know that the actual output of a nuclear power station is around 60% of nameplate, half of which is due to unplanned outages (IOW accidents and failures), right? I mean, with all your "investigation", you didn't just investigate one side, did you? Because that would be moronic.
"extraction of nonrenewable resources ( http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S095937801400065X )"
Like coal, gas, oil and uranium, right? And tell me, did you even bother to read that paper? If so, tell us what it means and why it is relevant to your dribbling idiocy here.
"As for Stern, plenty of reputable people have taken issue with his claims"
As for Stern, HE IS a reputable person. And many more people agree with him of equal eminence.
"Here in the UK solar panels are next to useless when electricity demand peaks at 6pm in December."
Oooh, what a MASSIVE fail there! DOMESTIC load is highest.
But here's a thought: use wind power. It peaks near dawn and dusk and bad weather with clouds are usually very windy in the UK. And when the wind is still, it's usually because the sky is clear and the sun easily visible.
And given that most domestic power is heating, rather than produce more load, we insulate more and reduce the power requirements.
You know, sensible things.
"I mean, the drought in Brazil, for example, is being blamed on deforestation as much as climate change."
Therefore climate change will need to be addressed. What about addressing it, then?
'Blogger Profile'
Calm down, and try to think. The graph shown was for solar photovoltaics, not CSP, therefore it's valid and is not a "fail". Furthermore, the Fraunhofer link shows the IPCC graph with CSP cost estimates, which are around $200-400/MWh. And, frankly, good luck getting a CSP plant to do anything in any high latitude areas.
"Yeah, you're batshit insane,"
And you appear to be foaming at the mouth and ignorant of quite a lot of energy data. Most environmental economics studies massively underestimate the role of energy in growth. As such, they're likely coming up with unrealistic estimates for how quickly we can decarbonise without impacting on our economies. Like it or not, 86% of the primary energy the world consumed last year was fossil based. This puts us in a sticky situation. There's a large literature about energy and it's relation to growth in ecological economics which you could do with reading (ayers and warr are a good place to start) in order to educate yourself further before you start spouting off. The following paper by Sorrell also covers some of the issues ( https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/2/6/1784/pdf )
"But you DO know that the actual output of a nuclear power station is around 60%"
Again, you're showing your ignorance of energy data. In the US nuclear capacity factor has averaged about 90% over the last decade. Around 70% in the UK, probably mostly due to Hartlepool and Heysham starting to show their age and experiencing repeated outages.
Your arguments about heating in the UK are, again, quite ignorant. Read the following report ( https://www.theccc.org.uk/archive/aws/IA&S/Element%20Energy%20-%20Decarbonising%20heat%20to%202050%20-%20Annex.pdf ). Electrifying heating in the UK would produce a crazy load shape, with a winter peak of 65GW and average demand of around 12GW, giving us an annual capacity factor of around 20%. Meeting this load with low carbon sources (including nuclear) would be extremely difficult.
I thought I'd just point out your major errors to help educate you. I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, because your tone is so offensive and frankly I've better things to do. Ignorance doesn't bother me, but when twinned with belligerence it does.
Sam, I am sorry that your idiotic screed, unsupported by reality other than were you selectively apply it solely to that end, has caused you to lash out in anger and pain against me for being the bearer of the inconvenient truth.
I hope and pray that you will find it possible to see reality without lashing out at those who do not tell you comforting lies in a vain attempt to pretend that reality is conformant to your wishes and therefore no need to conform your opinion to reality.
Moreover I hope that in your crusade to "find the truth" you will one day search for truth whether or not it provides evidence for the conclusion that you are looking to confirm and instead have the strength of character to search out truth no matter what it means and face the facts bravely rather than cower behind your offended sensibilities.
I hope too that one day you will look back on the charlatans that you worshiped with blind adoration and endless credulity merely for their ego-stroking assertions with shame and pity for the effort spend and wasted so earnestly.
"The graph shown was for solar photovoltaics, not CSP"
It also doesn't show how expensive fossil fuels are, however, you still drew from that in your rant against ecology and environmental issues. There is no need for storage BECAUSE we have CSP. And Wind. And Tidal. And...
However, you feel that this is far too modern and technical a solution and that we should stick with burning things like stone-age cavemen. Why? Because you're batshit insane.
Sorry you're insane, by the way.
"In the US nuclear capacity factor has averaged about 90% over the last decade."
Sorry you're demonstrating your complete lack of knowledge of power production. 90% of the power WHEN OPERATING. Solar has very nearly 100% capacity factor by the same metric. And the only reason why it isn't 100% is that it is possible somewhere that the power that was captured had to be dumped because of oversupply and no market to export. I don't know it has every happened, but it is possible.
Nuclear gets 60% of the rated power because about 20% of the time it is unavailable for scheduled maintenance, and about 20% of the time it is shut down for preventative measures or outright failure.
"Electrifying heating in the UK would produce a crazy load shape"
No, it wouldn't. Do you know why? Because you don't have to heat a well insulated home. And the tea break in the middle of Corrie causes far worse a crazy load shape.
Indeed the entire reason for the Dinworig hydro storage power station is because of the introduction of nuclear power. *100% of the cost of that station is due to nuclear power*.
A cost never noted in any pro-denier shill site or biased "study".
"Meeting this load with low carbon sources (including nuclear) would be extremely difficult."
Meeting this load with high carbon sources including coal and gas) would be extremely difficult. Therefore we shouldn't be using them??? Your "argument", if it can be called that, would indicate that we cannot have power generation at all.
"I thought I'd just point out your major errors to help educate you. I can't be bothered to respond to the rest of your post, because your tone is so offensive"
In other words: you have nothing, but you're going to pretend that it is my fault, therefore you do not have to prove your claim. Because magic. Or something.
I pointed out your major errors to help educate you, but you do not wish to be educated, only indoctrinated in comforting lies.
I am sorry you feel such rage at not being lied to. Maybe one day you'll wake up.
Please, don't ever change, BP.
"Like it or not, 86% of the primary energy the world consumed last year was fossil based"
Like it or not, that is not an argument that we must continue to use fossil fuels.
Yes, Tom Fullerthanadunnywagon, we are well appraised of your Metathesiophobia.
What is your point of continually banging on about it?
Blogger profile.
I'll just do some quick numbers to show why you're wrong. The eia shows that these days the USA has around 100GW of installed nuclear capacity. 100x365x24 = 876 billion kwh.
The eia also shows that in 2012, the nuclear fleet of the USA generated 769 billion kwh. 769/876 gives us a capcity factor of around 88%. Not only are you completely misunderstanding the general thrust of my argument, but you can't even be bothered to fact check or do basic maths. So what use are your contributions?
I'm not a climate change denier, I simply don't think we can avoid dangerous climate change without sacrificing economic growth. I'd rather we understood this and acquired it than bought into all the green growth hogwash that's sloshing around the internet, and are suddenly surprised when it backfires on us.
Sam, you're still hurt that your feelings are not being allowed to override reality. I am sorry that you are too sensitive to face reality and sorry that truth offends you. I will do my best to tell reality to stop being so mean to you.
"The eia shows that these days the USA has around 100GW of installed nuclear capacity"
It also shows a peak of 28GW:
http://www.eia.gov/beta/outages/
Appears from that figure then to be around 30% installed capacity maximum.
A long term study DAWES shows that nuclear is unavailable for use 60% of the time. It was done in the UK, where most of your cherry picking (except where it didn't accord to your preconception of "reality") was done.
"I'm not a climate change denier, I simply don't think we can avoid dangerous climate change without sacrificing economic growth."
And many thousands think you're utterly wrong.
Including Stern and many scores of similarly eminent economists.
Your "feeling" is no more relevant than someone "feeling god move in them" is for proving god exists.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/05/10/us-usa-nuclearplant-incident-idUSKBN0NU0RN20150510
What do you do when you can't run the nuclear power station, huh? The wind doesn't break, nor does the sun.
http://www.powerengineeringint.com/articles/2015/08/eskom-clashes-with-glencore-over-failure-so-supply-coal-fired-power-plant.html
What do you do if nobody will deliver coal to your power station? Nobody can block out the sun until you pay the danegeld!
http://www.civilbeat.com/2015/07/power-outages-across-oahu-after-coal-fired-plant-goes-down/
Coal power just isn't reliable...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/11148193/Hinkley-Point-nuclear-plant-to-cost-34bn-EU-says.html
Nuclear power just too damn expensive, even their producers know this.
http://londonminingnetwork.org/2015/01/the-real-cost-of-coal-providing-the-uk-with-energy-security-is-469-million-and-the-cost-is-rising/
And coal is no better.
But renewables get cheaper as time goes by...
Yet somehow it's renewables that are spelling doom for our future according to Sam and his "thinking".
Oh, and remember that LCOE assumes that you won't be producing any energy until it is 100% complete and operational with "fuel" available.
Solar and Wind can start as soon as you get the first item up if you wire up a link to the grid. That cuts the cost of production massively, which is the vast majority of the cost of those two renewables.
Add that a nuclear power plant especially, but any fossil fuel generators in general, are a bad investment since it may not be possible to run them for the projected lifetime because of environmental change (see France's outages because the rivers were too warm to use to cool the station, so they had to be shut down) and the introduction of renewables that cause demand to drop at peak times when the two renewables are outputting most, thereby ruining nuclear's efficiency and severely damaging coal and oil. And for all those, because they cost to run by use of fuel, a loss of productivity available that is a central part of the LCOE calculations.
Despite all the doom and gloom of how more than 20% renewables would destabilise the grid, the only things it has destabilised is the assumed future profitability of fossil fuel power generation.
Haha, that eia chart you linked to shows the unavailable capacity, you've got it totally wrong! It's completely congruent with the 90% capacity factor I calculated, and is taken from the same dataset. Are you really this stupid or just trolling?
Oh dear, Sam. You still don't understand, do you? That 88% is how much they got when they were online.
Which is why you morons keep going for the "capacity factor" because solar power is touted by you as "online" at night.
Makes for good copy for your frauds, though, doesn't it!
PS: Nope, incorrect on that, read up on it again. And do it without your ideological blinkers on, dearie.
Nuclear: far too expensive, about twice as expensive as solar for the same output. Making the ~30-40% capacity factor equivalent to around 70%. For the same price as what you'd get 50% of the power from with nukes.
Coal: Barely breaks even with Wind. And will go up in price.
Solar: dropping in price.
Wind: dropping in price.
Damn, your fantasy world is falling apart on you, isn't it!
I think you're a denier. This, according to you, is proof enough of the claim.
Remember that your "oh it's soooo inefficient" is already taken care of in LCOE, too, Sam.
You may want to read up on how power stations work, by the way.
http://www.nei.org/Why-Nuclear-Energy/Reliable-Affordable-Energy/Unmatched-Reliability/How-Power-Plants-Prep
NOTE: Coal power stations aren't much different.
Note that there are unplanned outages too, like here:
http://www.elia.be/en/grid-data/power-generation/unplanned-outages
And you can lose your power when your demands are highest:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2006/jul/30/energy.weather
Damn.
Seems like no power production is suitable...
Absolute prices are less interesting IMHO than the trend line, esp. when discussing the long term. Note the same trend is happening for battery power, concentrated solar, and of course wind which is somewhat resistant to intermittent problems if you've got a large transmission system or offshore wind.
Re the Congo, solar is obvious. And I know biomass is problematic but that has got to be one of the places that it's least problematic. Visiting Uganda, I was stunned at how fast things could grow.
I continue to hold out hope for biomass-plus CCS as a way to get us out of the hole we're digging in the post-2050 period, despite the pretty dismal record of CCS so far. Maybe Congo will be a powerhouse for that.
There's still plenty of sunlight under a cloudy sky.
And it is BETTER for generation than a clear sky in the morning and evening because the scattering of the sunlight means the effective area of the solar panel is fully used.
So much cheaper too. And no hidden costs in hydro backup or huge HVDC links in case gigawatts goes offline in five minutes either. And no problems throttling: you're not paying for the fuel, so you lose nothing running at full rate, and nuclear is much less efficient when run at less than full power (and even less when run in what is its best attempt at load following...), making nuclear really quite pants at base generation.
See France, for example. Net exporter of energy but exports their massive overgeneration at night when the spot price is through the floor, but it would cost more to throttle back. So sent at dumping prices to, for example, Germany.
Meanwhile, because of the lack of other sources of generation, there's no headroom to ramp up and they have to buy from others, such as Germany, whose daytime solar and wind power are overgenerating and available for export. At peak spot prices.
Germany is a net importer of money via energy trading.
Partly due to France being dumb and trying to be a nuclear powered nation. Partly due to choosing the right tech. Which has only gotten cheaper since.
Amazing. I thought climate change deniers were odd, yet here we have someone who apparently denies perfectly transparent eia data. Haha!
Here's 3 easy steps'
1). Sum the total nameplate capacity figures given in your eia link.
2). Multiply that amount by 365x24 to get what you'd expect if the plants were operative the entire year.
3). Divide eia or bp data for annual nuclear electricity generated into this figure, to get your capacity factor.
4). Be amazed when it's near 90%.
This is quite ridiculous, as I'm not even particularly pro nuclear. Just pro facts.
@ Brian
- Sorry, I managed to post this on the wrong thread. Let's try again:
Note the same trend is happening for battery power
Not AFAIK at utility scale, because that technology doesn't really exist yet. Yes, I know there are various R&D projects but no proven, established product to which economies of scale might then apply.
Absolute prices are less interesting IMHO than the trend line, esp. when discussing the long term.
The cost of integrating wind and solar increases as their share of the energy mix increases. At low levels (say below 20%) they can be free riders, relying on existing reserve capacity for backup against intermittency and slew.
Go beyond that and you have to build new backup capacity which is hugely expensive and *never* costed in the 'analyses' I have seen of large-scale W&S deployment.
Instead, the same (fallacious) reasoning is always used: the cost of the turbines and SPV (mainly SPV, really) exhibits a long term downward trend so big W&S will be really cheap. That's nonsense. The cost of the actual SPV panels is essentially irrelevant at scale. It's the absolutely vast amount of new build backup capacity that is the problem.
Nobody seems to grasp this, which is frustrating.
"Amazing. I thought climate change deniers were odd"
You are, Sam.
Sorry for upsetting you again.
And leap all around the place to pretend that nuclear is somehow a viable option. Sorry, 30 years ago it may have been workable, but too late by decades. Not to mention that we won't let most of the planet use it, so it's hardly a solution to global problems. Whereas the problems of ISIS or Boku Haram or the Teaparty getting their hands on a solar panel is quite benign.
Oh, I did make a mistake, though, it's DUKES not DAWES. The latter was another study done at a university I went to for a few years.
60% of the power production.
Losses:
a) dumping
b) throttled
c) maintenance
d) accident
And, yes, that means solar is all of 66% as available as nuclear.
But the price doesn't go up as the fuel runs out.
Odd how that happens, eh?
BBD: Instead, the same (fallacious) reasoning is always used: the cost of the turbines and SPV (mainly SPV, really) exhibits a long term downward trend so big W&S will be really cheap. That's nonsense. The cost of the actual SPV panels is essentially irrelevant at scale. It's the absolutely vast amount of new build backup capacity that is the problem. . . . Nobody seems to grasp this, which is frustrating.
BPL: If solar and wind become cheap enough, you don't even need backup--just massive overcapacity, and/or wide-area smart grids.
"Not AFAIK at utility scale, because that technology doesn't really exist yet. "
Then you don't know is the problem, not the technology.
"At low levels (say below 20%) they can be free riders, relying on existing reserve capacity for backup against intermittency and slew."
Never happened in this reality. But your cowboy built system may be problematic with it. But I would suggest that this is a problem with your system, not solar power. Try to do a better job of energy transport and stop blaming others for your failures.
"Go beyond that and you have to build new backup capacity "
Which you have to do with any power generation. Back it up in case of failure. And therefore this is no more a problem than if we were to build up coal or nuclear to replace aged and unusable closed power stations.
A problem shared by all means of production is not a case against one of the options.
Oh, and you can reduce your power needs. Quite a lot, in fact. See the Nordic countries use of power per capita, despite being colder and having less light in winter daytimes.
A cowboy builder's cutting corner may cause problems but the problem there is your shoddy engineering and lack of craftsmanship. Not energy production methods.
"It's the absolutely vast amount of new build backup capacity that is the problem."
Only if you haven't done any backup for your power production you have so far.
Otherwise you already have an absolutely vast amount of old build backup capacity and no need for new build.
"Nobody seems to grasp this, which is frustrating. "
I guess that Scientologists have the same frustration with those who don't grasp the fact that they are the only true humans.
Or that guy with the hat on has when people don't believe he's the son of god. I bet that's VERY frustrating.
BPL, a massive backup system will be there as well (even though almost entirely unneeded) - Electric cars and their batteries.
Or, you know, not using so much wasted energy for pointless things that can be done smarter and cheaper if you're willing to change your ways.
Haha, so you can't do a simple calculation because you know it'll contradict you. Go on, run the eia numbers like I showed, I dare you.
I don't think I've seen anyone write so much and contribute so little for quite a while.
Sam, so you believe what you like as long as it means you can laugh at others?
Tell me, are you 12 yet?
Nukes get about 60% utility. Not 90% or even close.
Go read up outside your comfort zone.
Here's a hint: why do there appear to be no unplanned outages in that graph, yet you can find them listed quite easily as having happened and NOT at an 18-month regular schedule?
BPL
BPL: If solar and wind become cheap enough, you don't even need backup--just massive overcapacity, and/or wide-area smart grids.
We are - yet again - in cloud-cuckoo land where hard problems (lack of available capacity) are waved away with soft 'answers' involving unfeasibly vast plant footprints and undefined 'smart grid' infrastructure that somehow magics energy out of nothing. This is extremely dangerous (a view also held by eg. James Hansen).
Instead of pretending that W&S don't require very considerable new-build backup, just accept it as a fact, like grid engineers do.
* * *
Decarbonisation will take every viable low-carbon technology we have, including nuclear deployed as geopolitically appropriate. The fantasy - and it *is* a fantasy - that we can essentially displace FFs by mid-century with W&S alone is a recipe for more, not less CO2.
It is the converse folly to arguing that we can do it all with nuclear alone.
"waved away with soft 'answers' involving unfeasibly vast plant footprints"
And "unfeasibly vast plant footprints" is NOT a soft "answer"?!?!?!?!
Sorry, BBD, you're freaking nuts. Completely Zoolander.
I bet you're taking this rubbish as gospel from "Without Hot Air", aren't you? That's a hack job done to preclude everything other than nuclear so that the moron writing it can claim they're not "for" nuclear, it's just "the only option".
"Decarbonisation will take every viable low-carbon technology we have"
But not, apparently, solar or wind.
"including nuclear deployed as geopolitically appropriate."
Aaand here we have the money shot. Yes, you get to choose who gets power and who doesn't. Based on who you like politically.
Hey, buddy, here's a tip for you: WE ALREADY HAVE NUKES.
And out of 39 "being built" and supposedly taking 7 years to build, most of which haven't even started or so early it cannot be said whether they are on track, the average time so far is 12 years and rising. And four of them have been "being built" for 20 years.
And, no, it isn't your scary monster NIMBY because wind and solar have even worse problems with NIMBYism and it still achieves earlier completion dates and higher production than planned for.
No, the reason is that the builders are found time and time again to have cut corners and have to put in the safety measures that they said they were doing earlier but didn't.
"The fantasy - and it *is* a fantasy "
Is that nuclear can be used. It can't.
"displace FFs by mid-century with W&S alone is a recipe for more, not less CO2."
That's a fantasy too.
"and undefined 'smart grid' infrastructure that somehow magics energy out of nothing"
Buddy, your problem here is your cluelessness.
Smart meters don't "somehow magic[s] energy out of nothing".
Read up on what smart meters actually DO.
BP
1/ Despite my spelling it out, you still unilaterally mischaracterise me as anti-renewables and I am tired of correcting you on this point.
2/ Your anti-nuclear activism is tedious and redundant. I think we all appreciate your position.
3/ Your general topic knowledge on energy is poor. Please just give it a rest and let others contribute.
Thanks.
My anti nuclear activism is solely due to two factors:
1) Ignorant nuke fluffers like yourself
2) It's far too late to make any useful inroads into CO2 reductions by rolling out nuclear.
My activism is a counter to your propaganda campaign. Stop making shit up and I won't HVE to be "an activist" (though quite why you believe this to be a bad thing is anyone's guess: you're just flailing for terms you've learned on the political pundit circuit as being empty yet vaguely ominous terms you can slap on someone to avoid having to explain what your problem is).
"Despite my spelling it out, you still unilaterally mischaracterise me as anti-renewables and I am tired of correcting you on this point."
That would be because you're continually anti-renewables. It isn't my fault if you are deluded enough to think you're not anti-renewable yet "have to" make up all this arrogantly vapid and incorrect BS.
Try coherent for a change. If, that is, you actually aren't anti-renewables.
"3/ Your general topic knowledge on energy is poor"
Says someone who thinks smart energy meters generate power...?!?!?!?
"Please just give it a rest and let others contribute."
IOW "Waaaaaah!!!! Stop telling people what the facts are and let someone else (me) talk BS! YOU MEANIE!!!!!"
And here I was thinking that your idiotic screed on free speech was that bad ideas should be countered by better ideas, when in actual fact it is that "bad ideas" should be countered by rationing speech.
One reason why nuclear is untenable is that if they meltdown we have vast areas of the planet that can no longer be used to live in and the fallout will devastate millions or even billions.
And if you want to whine about how unlikely that is, I refer you to the equally likely scenario that all solar and wind in the UK can be removed in a winter anticyclone. If you feel you HAVE to counter this calumny, then you need to look back at your "anti-nuke activism" and "let someone else talk" rant.
1) Ignorant nuke fluffers like yourself
*sigh*
BBD:
1/ Despite my spelling it out, you still unilaterally mischaracterise me as anti-renewables and I am tired of correcting you on this point.
Read the words. And stop the lies. I dislike being misrepresented, eg:
That would be because you're continually anti-renewables.
And:
Says someone who thinks smart energy meters generate power...?!?!?!?
WTF? Stop it.
"*sigh*"
I am sorry that your inability to spout unsupported rubbish without me correcting your mistakes makes you sad, buddy.
"1/ Despite my spelling it out, you still unilaterally mischaracterise me as anti-renewables and I am tired of correcting you on this point.
Read the words. And stop the lies."
I did read the words. They were lies like you say, and I'm doing my best to stop them. However, all you can do is sigh. Try not peddling rubbish. Easier for both of us.
"Says someone who thinks smart energy meters generate power...?!?!?!?
WTF? Stop it. "
Hmmm. Insanity pepper got your eyeballs, buddy? Who said this?
"and undefined 'smart grid' infrastructure that somehow magics energy out of nothing"
Do you have ANY CLUE what a smart grid infrastructure means? Smart meters seeing what needs power where and cutting demand when the price (demand vs supply) is high.
YOU appear to believe that these smart meters somehow generate magic energy.
"WTF? Stop it." indeed.
"Read the words."
Words like:
"displace FFs by mid-century with W&S alone is a recipe for more, not less CO2."
or
"involving unfeasibly vast plant footprints"
or
"This is extremely dangerous"
or
"The cost of integrating wind and solar increases as their share of the energy mix increases."
or
"At low levels (say below 20%) they can be free riders"
or
"Go beyond that and you have to build new backup capacity which is hugely expensive and *never* costed in the 'analyses' I have seen"
or
"The cost of the actual SPV panels is essentially irrelevant at scale."
and
"It's the absolutely vast amount of new build backup capacity that is the problem."
?
Any wonder why you're being identified as anti-renewable? Everything is saying we can't build any more renewables, and it was all a huge white elephant, but nuclear (which requires backup for when it goes offline, and backup for when it can't produce, and backup for the security systems that they're having to retrofit a lot more of on current power stations, which is never costed or even mentioned) is fine. No backup problems mentioned there. Nothing about security (except by telling some countries they're not going to be allowed to play).
Yes, I read the words.
Did you?
http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21587782-europes-electricity-providers-face-existential-threat-how-lose-half-trillion-euros
The trouble is that power plants using nuclear fuel or brown coal are designed to run full blast and cannot easily reduce production, whereas the extra energy from solar and wind power is free. So the burden of adjustment fell on gas-fired and hard-coal power plants, whose output plummeted to only about 10% of capacity.
...
Power down
The decline of Europe’s utilities has certainly been startling. At their peak in 2008, the top 20 energy utilities were worth roughly €1 trillion ($1.3 trillion). Now they are worth less than half that (see chart 1). Since September 2008, utilities have been the worst-performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of global share prices. In 2008 the top ten European utilities all had credit ratings of A or better. Now only five do.
...
The companies would have been in trouble anyway, whatever happened to renewables. During the 2000s, European utilities overinvested in generating capacity from fossil fuels, boosting it by 16% in Europe as a whole and by more in some countries (up 91% in Spain, for example). The market for electricity did not grow by nearly that amount, even in good times; then the financial crisis hit demand.
...
So far, it is true, they have managed to provide backup capacity and the grid has not failed, even in solar- and wind-mad Germany. In fact, the German grid is more reliable than most (countries run reliability indices: Germany has one of the highest scores in Europe).
And here:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/mar/27/renewable-energy-cost-nuclear-reactors
The row over subsidies for the UK's new nuclear power stations has deepened after it emerged that the £160m-a-year cost of accommodating the giant reactors on the national electricity grid will be borne by all generators, including renewable energy providers.
The new reactors planned by EDF for Hinkley Point are significantly larger than any existing power stations, meaning the national grid has to pay for extra standby electricity to stop the grid crashing if one of the reactors unexpectedly goes offline.
...
However, an industry source with decades of senior experience in the sector said offshore windfarms would not be connected to the grid by a single cable and therefore not pose the same risk. "All renewable generators are paying the additional costs here, but not causing the need. The cost should lie where it falls," he said. "National Grid obviously had its arm twisted at some point. Its justification is unconvincing."
...
Currently, the grid's back-up system plans for a major loss of up to 1,320MW a few times a year. But the two new reactors planned by EDF will have 1,600GW of capacity each, meaning the grid will have to increase its back-up to 1,800MW. Nuclear power stations can shut down at short notice owing to engineering problems or even a swarm of jellyfish blocking cooling water pipes, as happened in June 2011 at EDF's reactor at Torness in Scotland.
...
Mitchell said the nuclear industry was set to enjoy other benefits as well. "Renewables will be supported with 20-year contracts rather than nuclear's expected 40 years and the unknown costs of nuclear waste and accidents will also be placed on customers via government."
*sigh*
Everything is saying we can't build any more renewables
No, that is a misrepresentation.
Everything is saying that the energy fantasists who claim that W&S can displace FFs by mid-century are almost certainly wrong - with specifics as to why they are almost certainly wrong.
I also address the fallacious argument that renewables at scale become cheaper when in fact they become more expensive.
Read the words.
You are verballing me instead of listening to what I am actually trying to say.
Yelling and stamping around while grotesquely mischaracterising the other correspondent isn't an argument. Belligerent shoutiness coupled with a flat refusal to acknowledge serious errors isn't an argument.
God knows, you are your own worst enemy.
Well, you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.
One last try, because I do find you kind of amusing in a bizarre way.
The eia lists installed nuclear capacity in the USA in 2012 as around 100GW. Do you dispute this?
The eia lists nuclear electricity generated in 2012 as 769TWh. Do you dispute this?
769,000/(100*365*24)=0.88. Do you dispute this?
I'd like to thank you for all the time you've invested to give me a laugh though. All those words you've written! To think!
Indeed I don't seem to be able to manage that, Sam.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power
Go look at the world gap between nuclear power installed capacity and the amount actually produced. How come
a) The USA doesn't have outages from failures
b) Gets better than the world average by a lot
c) Is better than the UK's 60%
d) Is better than France's 58%
e) Appears to never have a failure.
Yet you think that 88% is valid???
You have also been given many other places to read up on this.
Yet you have refused to bother.
Sam,
60% is not 88%, do you agree to this?
BBD: We are - yet again - in cloud-cuckoo land where hard problems (lack of available capacity) are waved away with soft 'answers' involving unfeasibly vast plant footprints and undefined 'smart grid' infrastructure that somehow magics energy out of nothing.
BPL: I don't think you understand what a smart grid is supposed to do. It doesn't produce energy, it moves it from areas where it's oversupplied to areas where it's short. And you don't need much footprint for, say, solar to produce several times what the world needs in energy. Want the math?
BPL
You think geopolitics in a warming world is going to allow something like DESERTEC to get built? You think tens of thousands of km of unprotected HVDC links to Europe's interconnected smart grids won't be an unacceptable energy security risk?
Have you considered any of this? Because it is going to matter very much to future policy makers.
The obstacles to W&S *alone* displacing FFs are real, enormous and barely ever addressed or even acknowledged in these types of discussion and that is frustrating.
* * *
Perhaps I have not been sufficiently clear. I understand very well what a smart grid does. I also understand that the assumption that there will always be a surplus of supply available from 'somewhere else' by interconnector is - at best - extremely speculative. Handwaving smart grids will not magic away hard problems like these.
So you must think that either the eia are lying about installed capacity or the electricity which was produced. Which is it, and what is your basis?
BPL, re the solar footprint, it's not as simple as you think. I'd recommend Vaclav smil's recent book on power density for a thorough discussion.
Sam and BBD, I don't think there's any reason not to replace fossil fuels with renewables as soon as possible. For backup generation, there's always biomass.
Do I expect large-scale solutions to be put in place? No, of course not. In fact, I don't expect ANY solutions to be put in place in time. I merely object to the idea that there are technological reasons why it can't be done with renewables. The main reason it won't be done is that humans, en masse, are incredibly stupid and will never prevent a crisis, only wait until the crisis occurs and then react.
BPL
Sam and BBD, I don't think there's any reason not to replace fossil fuels with renewables as soon as possible. For backup generation, there's always biomass.
There are lots of reasons why renewables *alone* aren't going to be enough. We've touched on a few. Another one is that biomass isn't going to yield enough energy. This is another example of a hard problem vs wishful thinking.
I merely object to the idea that there are technological reasons why it can't be done with renewables.
Object away, but the problems are real and ignoring them is dangerous.
Let me repeat once again that I am not arguing for nuclear vs renewables or against renewables per se. That's just another commenter's misrepresentation. I *am* arguing for a pragmatic, inclusive energy policy where no viable low-carbon technology is pushed off the table because of ideology. Holistic energy policy provides the best chance we have of fast-enough decarbonisation. I repeat - ideological bias is just dangerous at this point.
BPL: I merely object to the idea that there are technological reasons why it can't be done with renewables.
Hell the only technological problems EXIST FOR ALL power generation.
Needs backup? So do the others.
Destabilises the grid? So do the others.
Uses a lot of space? So do the others.
Expensive? So are the others.
"You think geopolitics in a warming world is going to allow something like DESERTEC to get built?"
Uh, yes.
Is this a trick question or something?
Middle eastern oil nations in a world cutting back on oil consumption around the world have plenty of solar availability and can sell it.
Where is the problem?
The only problem I can see is the USA invading them to stop those commie environmentalists from taking the oil away from them.
"You think tens of thousands of km of unprotected HVDC links to Europe's interconnected smart grids won't be an unacceptable energy security risk? "
No. HVDC doesn't invade countries or wage terrorist attacks. They are quite harmless. Duh.
"The obstacles to W&S *alone* displacing FFs are real, enormous and barely ever addressed or even acknowledged in these types of discussion and that is frustrating. "
The obstacles to nuclear displacing FFs are real, enormous and NEVER addressed or even acknowledged. See your refusal to acknowledge them here right now.
And who cares if you're frustrated that nobody is buying your BS? Keep complaining bout it only makes you appear like a whiny little kid bleating about how nobody is listening to them do "On the Good Ship Lollipop".
Worse, nuclear won't manage to make ANY inroads for 50 years even if we went all out. And cost 5 times as much just to build as if we built out W&S.
"Perhaps I have not been sufficiently clear. "
You have. It's clear you're deliberately clueless and wish to remain a nuclear fluffer and anti-renewables.
"So you must think that either the eia are lying about installed capacity or the electricity which was produced. Which is it, and what is your basis?"
No, they're lying about what they're not producing. By counting "forced offline" as not online if it's out for six months of the year, therefore not lost capacity.
That is one definition of capacity factor. Japan do it slightly differently. Which is why they've had 0% capacity factor ever since Fukishima.
And I gave you the evidence. Did you not see it? Go back and look again.
US organization lied? Unheard of! Nuclear watchdog covering up? Unheard of!
Not.
And it's not even "blatant lying" where there's no known reason for it to be considered true (a la Chemical Ali).
BPL: And you don't need much footprint for, say, solar to produce several times what the world needs in energy. Want the math?
Obviously not. BBD KNOWS WITHOUT QUESTION that the footprint is massive. No maths could prove otherwise unless the maths was WRONG!
Denier M.O. is easily engaged in by people who aren't climate deniers. All that's needed is the fixed and unwavering belief in an ideological stance. Such as "Renewables are no good".
BBD KNOWS WITHOUT QUESTION that the footprint is massive.
Because physics. Not that you would understand that.
And it will still be useless at night and during the winter. There are problems, BP. The only denialism going on round here is coming from you.
Stuff BP KNOWS WITHOUT QUESTION:
Worse, nuclear won't manage to make ANY inroads for 50 years even if we went all out.
Reference this crap, please.
Well, I'll just review it so the figures are out there. The solar input at the ground is about 187 watts per square meter (161 with 14% reflection from the surface, but we'll ignore that for now). This is a global average, including latitude and the dark hemisphere. Earth's surface area is 5.10066 x 10^14 square meters, so total solar input is 9.54 x 10^16 watts. Land area is 29.2%, so 2.79 x 10^16 watts (though Japan is putting some solar capacity offshore).
All human energy use is about 1.8 x 10^13 watts. We therefore need 0.000645 of the land surface to generate all human energy use. About 0.0645%. Urban land (excluding highways) is about 1%, so if 6.45% of rooftop, road, parking lot, etc. area were covered with 100% efficiency solar PV, that would be adequate. Solar cell efficiency only averages 20% or so these days, however, so really it would need more like 32%. Clearly, it would be easier to build much of it outside the cities.
This, of course, assumes 100% of our energy is coming from solar power. With the addition of wind, biomass, tidal, wave, hydroelectric, and ocean thermal power, this could be considerably reduced. Plus, of course, we need to revamp and connect electrical grids over a wide area, and for that matter, reduce consumption through techniques such as cogeneration, improved efficiency, insulation, etc.
BPL
Meaningless devoid of regional or national context. A point I have raised above, eg. 2/9 5:17am and 2/9 10:51am (please see link).
Also, averaging for diurnal cycle, latitude etc does not mean that night, latitude and winter are actually dealt with in terms of their impact on regional deployments. Same goes for local planning opposition, geopolitical instability, energy security risk of HVDC, uncosted storage etc.
Everything is saying that the energy fantasists
You display a shockingly common ignorance of modern results in quantum physics.
Please be specific. What are you accusing me of being ignorant about?
Then tell me how far away the magic is from a proven, scalable, deployment-ready low carbon technology.
"Because physics. Not that you would understand that. "
What? The? Heck?
No, "physics" doesn't proclaim that solar would have a massive footprint.
Just your insane ranting.
"And it will still be useless at night and during the winter. "
At night, we're asleep. And it still works in winter, dumdum.
"Reference this crap, please. "
Yeah, already done, dumdum. Out of the 39 currently going ahead, 4 are running 20 years instead of 7 and STILL NOT COMPLETE.
It's up there, where you read but then expunged it because it was not to your liking.
"Meaningless devoid of regional or national context. "
Told you BPL, dumdum here doesn't want the maths. ANY MATHS MUST BE WRONG unless it conforms to what he "KNOWS TO BE FACT!"
A level of ignorance you'd find in, say, Monckton, or Watts.
"What are you accusing me of being ignorant about?"
Reality.
Like all the times you've been told you've got it hellishly wrong and then ignored it and shouted and stamped your feet and went "THAT'S UNSUPPORTED RUBBISH!!!!!"
"Because physics. "
Yeah, nailed it. Without Hot Air acolyte here.
The book is a pile of crap. It definitely isn't physics. You want a PHYSICS textbook for it. Not a hack job by someone who loves nuclear but is smart enough to pretend he's not.
Yeah, already done, dumdum. Out of the 39 currently going ahead [blah blah blah]
More horseshit from you.
Your claim was this:
Worse, nuclear won't manage to make ANY inroads for 50 years even if we went all out.
Which we have not by any means been doing so yet more rubbish from you that you cannot back up.
The book is a pile of crap. It definitely isn't physics.
As for your nuttery about MacKay, well WTF can I say except that you prove my point. You don't recognise physics even when it is biting you in the arse.
Wrong, insane and tedious.
Goodnight.
"Your claim was this:
Worse, nuclear won't manage to make ANY inroads for 50 years even if we went all out."
Yes, dumdum, and you demanded this:
"Reference this crap, please. "
The answer to which is what you quoted then whined about.
The reference to my claim would not be the claim itself, dumdum.
Although you would totally accept it for yourself, I doubt you'd accept it from me, and anyway I prefer to do a reference rather than a repeat when some whiny little dumdum demands a reference.
"As for your nuttery about MacKay, well WTF can I say except that you prove my point. "
Yes, deniers like Monckton say that the IPCC claims are ridiculous and then thinks this proves the claims are ridiculous too.
You have no better grasp of proof than the mad monckfish does, dumdum.
BPL,
Smil calculated that, best case, power density of commercial scale solar PV plants is something like 10W/m^2, best case. To meet all human energy needs you'd basically need to build a machine the size of France. This strikes me as a somewhat ludicrous endeavour. Building materials are generally cheap and are easily found in the earth (my slate roof for example). High grade silicon wafers are somewhat more difficult to come by.
The cliff notes of a huge gaping wound in Without Hot Air is that the idiot
a) Picks an outdated turbine generator, which is less efficient
b) Pretends that the area of the windfarm is not available for any other use
c) Therefore picks out that we would not use more than a small % of the land for it
d) Then plugs in the numbers and gets enough power to manage our electrical power needs easily.
e) Then halves it to "prove" that it would not manage to do it.
He also makes a complete hash of our power use and pretends that petrol used for transport would be 100% efficient and then demands that our power use cover this mythical power generator rather than cover the needs of transport with electric engines.
It's a complete cakestand of idiocy.
And BBD loved it.
Because he's a credulous moron and wanted to believe it all along. Just like he believed that Mackay was not anti-renewables, despite him pulling every trick in the book to preclude them but doing the opposite for nuclear.
"Smil calculated that, best case, power density of commercial scale solar PV plants is something like 10W/m^2, best case."
Then he was either wrong, nuts, incompetent or lying.
"To meet all human energy needs you'd basically need to build a machine the size of France"
Only if you pretended you could only get 10W/m^2.
Smil could also have been talking about something totally irrelevant to BPL's calculation (which, by the way dumdum DID include regional context).
IOW you're the one who is wrong, ignorant or whatever, rather than Smil.
That's it, BP! Don't ever change. Huzzah! Onward to glory!
Then he was either wrong, nuts, incompetent or lying.
More unreferenced loudmouthing.
Show why.
* * *
a) Picks an outdated turbine generator, which is less efficient
b) Pretends that the area of the windfarm is not available for any other use
c) Therefore picks out that we would not use more than a small % of the land for it
d) Then plugs in the numbers and gets enough power to manage our electrical power needs easily.
e) Then halves it to "prove" that it would not manage to do it.
He also makes a complete hash of our power use and pretends that petrol used for transport would be 100% efficient and then demands that our power use cover this mythical power generator rather than cover the needs of transport with electric engines.
With the exception of (a), which is a misrepresentation as the choice was accurate at the time of writing all utterly wrong. Furthermore, in the case of (a) larger turbines need to be spaced further apart, so the area / output calculations pan out much the same.
All MacKay does is quantify which is why he is so often met with such hysterical denialism by ideologically-motivated but fact-free ranters.
You need to RTFR matey, instead of spewing out so much bullshit. Mind you, this couldn't get any worse, so I don't suppose anything you do really matters anymore.
Just a quick referenced example of the bullshit:
a) Picks an outdated turbine generator, which is less efficient
MacKay p34:
Wind turbines are getting bigger all the time. Do bigger wind turbines change this chapter’s answer?
Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies
of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. A wind farm that’s twice as tall will deliver roughly 30% more power.
And:
b) Pretends that the area of the windfarm is not available for any other use
MacKay p41:
Could this flood of solar panels co-exist with the army of windmills we imagined in Chapter 4? Yes, no problem: windmills cast little shadow, and ground-level solar panels have negligible effect on the wind.
It's all complete and utter bollocks spouted by someone who has very clearly never even looked at the text.
That plays badly here, IIRC.
"Tom said..."
Yes, yes, yes, we KNOW you hate change and have a phobia for it and will never let change be observed or admitted by anyone or anything.
What psychopathy or tourrete like symptom makes you plop that piece of crap out every time, though?
More unreferenced loudmouthing.
From BBD.
More unreferenced loudmouthing.
From BBD.
You are insane.
"All MacKay does is quantify"
Which isn't physics you credulous buffoon.
And what he quantifies is bullcrap, just like Monckton "quantifies" the level of ice melt in the galciers of the Himalayas.
He's wrong.
So is Mac.
"You are insane. "
Yet more unreferenced crap from BBD.
"Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies
of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. "
But occupy less of it.
He's a moron, and you;re a gullible moron for just swallowing it whole
Oh hes wrong about the bigger turbines too: they're more efficient. Of course, BBD doesn't know what that means, because With Hot Air doesn't say anything about it. Therefore it doesn't exist.
"All MacKay does is quantify which is why he is so often met with such hysterical denialism by ideologically-motivated but fact-free ranters."
All he does is quantify from garbage in and then his acolytes and gullible moron followers then pretend that the garbage out is perfect perfume and call anyone pointing out that it's garbage as hysterical idealogue fact free ranters.
After all, if you can make believe they're hysterical idealogue fact free ranters, you don't have to put any more thought into their calculations ("unreferenced garbage" or "no regional factors") and can happily sit in the echo chamber because only voices that agree with your own are valid, all else can be excluded.
Pop along to Bishop Hill or WTFUWT, they love that sort of thing. You'll be right at home.
"b) Pretends that the area of the windfarm is not available for any other use"
such as here:
"Chapter B explains. Bigger wind turbines deliver financial economies
of scale, but they don’t greatly increase the total power per unit land area, because bigger windmills have to be spaced further apart. "
Buddy, another idiot plan of yours is to claim "W&S replacing fossil fuels is not going to work" and then to prove it, make claims on USING WIND ALONE being ineffective, then making claims on USING SOLAR ALONE being ineffective and ignoring that it's WIND AND SOLAR you're supposed to be showing won't work.
Saying that you'll let the current level of wind and solar doesn't make you pro or even neutral renewables.
And insisting that ANY INCREASE in the fraction of power produced is going to be far more expensive or even worse is anti renewables.
Just part of your gullibility for something you "feel" is "fair and balanced" but ALSO panders do your parochality, ego, preconceptions and bigotries.
Renewables destabilise the profit of electrical companies who have investments in monolothic power generation who can only get "cheap" power from their huge investment (whose cost is now just upkeep) for as long as they can sell it all.
THIS is why power companies do not want wind and solar, despite the apparent opportunity to make out like bandits and not have their lunch eaten by an upstart.
Because they have a huge investment and their share holders (and price) demands they extract as much high profit margin time from these as possible, and renewables make that proposition hazzardous.
And scrapping that capital means a huge drawdown on financial capital and this too will see "investors" (they no longer are: they just gamble on share prices rising and selling on to a sucker before they drop, profit isn't paying enough) riled up and leaving in droves at this huge drop in profit (in capital loss).
"With the exception of (a), which is a misrepresentation as the choice was accurate at the time of writing "
No it wasn't retard.
Currently available generators much larger were there in real life and no reason to forbid their calculation, and known designs much larger than that were on the cards and a known engineering solution to their design.
Moreover, this indicates the two-faced hypocrisy of the blowhards of Hot Air in that they ALSO proclaim "IT DOESN'T MATTER!!!" see Chap B cutout from retard boy here in his other post.
They'll believe that you will swallow "It was the only size known for the time it was done" and "Bigger designs were available but would not help" and never themselves wonder why these bigger designs were not used in the calculation all along, if they don't make it work out any better. And anyone who does is a hysterical idealogue ranting fact free, so can be ignored without any proof.
As to "never read the text", I did. However, I did not read the same text as dumdum buddy here because I was not blind to huge swathes of incongruencies in the text, whereas dumdum here just accepted it and then made up a coherency based on his preconception.
Stalin read Marx and saw communism as the valid future of humanity. Marxists read the same text and saw that it was merely another form of broken society before utopia.
Of course Stalin saw the disagreement and thought them all hysterical idealogues fact free ranting and KNEW that they had never read Marx, because HIS was the only conclusion that could be right.
He was as nuts as dumdum here.
Interested readers are invited to compare the bilge above with the actual reference: MacKay 2009 p.263 ff and specifically the discussion of power per unit area (p. 265 - 266).
Interested readers will note the use of physics throughout.
Yeah, read it.
But work it out yourself rather than just obey its every word, or you end up like dumdum here.
And remember, as far as dumdum's logic goes, it's all also littered with entirely unreferenced garbage.
Remember: science is skepticism. Question the assertions and assumptions. Check whether they are correct.
Don't do what dumdum does.
Oh, read it all. Don't just read the selected quotes. They will be entirely unreferenced. After all, if the evidence were in just those few selected pages, it wouldn't have needed all the other ones.
"This number is worth remembering: a wind farm with a wind speed of
6 m/s produces a power of 2 W per m2 of land area."
This would indicate that the wind turbine is SITTING DOWN FLAT.
Also the assertion that you cannot put them more than 5 times their diameter. Yeah, right. Westerlies don't cause a shadow to the north or south. Oopsie. And what experts? Experts say that double your diameter is all that's needed. This is why your dew shield on a telescope is twice the diameter deep. And not all the speed is taken out. Indeed it would be impossible, so not even then. AND if the speed of air near the surface drops, that means upper air is drawn down into the partial vacuum.
Of course the biggest difference between small and large turbines is the slowest windspeed you can extract power efficiently from, with larger blades able to extract from slower moving air.
The other difference is that you need fewer per hectare and the ground used up is much much less per generated watt. Of course, to hot air blowhards, that land cannot be used for anything else.
This would indicate that the wind turbine is SITTING DOWN FLAT.
No, it wouldn't you clown. Now go back and RTFR properly instead of spraying yet more crap all over the comments page.
* * *
To end this nonsense, here is incontrovertible evidence that (a) MacKay has been extremely generous in his estimates of UK renewables' potential and that (b) BP has never read the text. From MacKay 2009 p106 ff:
People often say that Britain has plenty of renewables. Have I been mean to green? Are my numbers a load of rubbish? Have I underestimated sustainable production? Let’s compare my green numbers first with several estimates found in the Sustainable Development Commission’s publication The role of nuclear power in a low carbon economy. Reducing CO2 emissions – nuclear and the alternatives. Remarkably, even though the Sustainable Development Commission’s take on sustainable resources is very positive (“We have huge tidal, wave, biomass and solar resources”), all the estimates in the Sustainable Development Commission’s document are smaller than mine! (To be precise, all the estimates of the renewables total are smaller than my total.) The Sustainable Development Commission’s publication gives estimates from four sources detailed below (IEE, Tyndall, IAG, and PIU). Figure 18.6 shows my estimates alongside numbers from these four sources and numbers from the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT). Here’s a description of each source.
Be sure to click the link and read the rest!
The table on p. 107 comparing MacKay's estimates with those of the Institute of Electrical Engineers, the Tyndall Centre, the IAG etc is worth (at least) a thousand insane blog comments... Do look at the figures for wind (on and offshore) and SPV ;-)
"Be sure to click the link and read the rest!"
Be sure to check that your gullibility is not at full power like dumdum!
"People often say that Britain has plenty of renewables."
What does this have to do with the rest of the following statements?
"Have I been mean to green?"
What does he mean? He's talking rubbish about it and pretending to have solid numbers when they're numbers selected to arrive at a desired outcome. No need to "be mean to green", just not be accurate.
"Are my numbers a load of rubbish?"
Yes, yes they are. Remember, 3 is not the number of pi, but it IS still an accurate number! So to know whether 3 is a rubbish number, you need to know its context.
"Have I underestimated sustainable production?"
Yup. By making up a land value and justify it with the hidden assertion that it can't be used for anything else, then when that doesn't work, halve it again.
Remember, Mad Monckton claims his numbers are from the IPCC claims itself, or respected scientific authorities, and exhorts you time and time again to go look, knowing that those who wish to believe it won't bother, because it's "Obviously" true. And thinks that anyone claiming he's wrong are alarmist hysterics run by rabid ideology and not science at all, and exhorts you again "Nullus in verba!" as if this proves he's on the up and up.
Which for the gullible liking his conclusion, is sufficient proof that he IS on the up and up.
" This would indicate that the wind turbine is SITTING DOWN FLAT.
No, it wouldn't you clown."
Yes it would you moron. Otherwise the occupancy of the rotor disk would not use up the land
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/energy/windpower/3309258/Britains-massive-offshore-wind-power-potential.html
The Torygraph is not known to be particularly wedded to renewable puffery.
When it is making positive statements for it like "he British Wind Energy Association (BWEA), believes that our offshore wind resources amounts to three times the UK's annual electricity consumption" and accept it, there's more than a smidgeon to it.
For the cost comparison to customers, look here:
http://www.ascrenewables.com/content/wind-power-facts.aspx
And can anyone find out a plan that lets us be on nuclear power alone by 2050?
http://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/britain-renewable-energy-2050-target
Just about every first world country has a definitely plausible plan to be 100% renewable by 2050.
BP says, "What psychopathy or tourrete like symptom makes you plop that piece of crap out every time, though?"
Please refer to this thread.
"Please refer to this thread."
Please answer the question rather than pretend to do so, Fullerthanadunnywagon.
TL:DR
Dukes electricity shows nuclear load factor in the UK to be between 60-75% https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/447632/DUKES_2015_Chapter_5.pdf
Total primary energy is not the target to aim for: efficiency in conventional power stations is less than 50%, coal is only 35%. For transport, useful energy from fossil fuels is around 30-35% of primary energy. So just moving to renewables will reduce "primary" energy demand by 50% or more.
Today it was announced than the Flamenville French nuclear plant that was supposed to go online in 2012 will not be finished before 2018 and the cost is more around 10 billion Euros for 1,650 MW capacity. The original estimate was 3 billion Euros. And this is a country with perhaps the largest nuclear fleet...
Germany has a large wind and pv contribution to the grid. It is relatively predictable and lowered the wholesale price of electricity as you can see here:https://www.energy-charts.de/price.htm
Sam: Smil calculated that, best case, power density of commercial scale solar PV plants is something like 10W/m^2, best case.
BPL: I would like to see the alleged calculations. I can't imagine how he got a figure that small, unless he's calculating it for Solar power on Ceres.
Nigel, first a criticism, why did you feel the need to tell us you didn't read anything?
Secondly, your comment will be ignored by buddy dumdum and "refuted" by Sam telling you that it's 88% because two numbers he got have a ratio of 0.88.
And finally a thank you. I couldn't get a decent link to the DUKES study with that information, only bits of production and use of energy. Thanks for supplying the link
BPL, I believe he's "calculating" a "suitable" dead area around each panel such that no shadow impinges. (see Mackay's hack job for it done for wind), and paths for maintennance, access, conduits, cleaning paraphanalia and probably a kiddie playground or four...
" Germany has a large wind and pv contribution to the grid. It is relatively predictable and lowered the wholesale price of electricity "
If you'd decided not to DR, you would have seen that already posted.
It didn't work at all for me, so it's not going to work for you either. Buddy dumdum KNOWS that it can't work and that it MUST destabilise the grid, so anything other than that is hysterical idealogue fact free ranting. So can be safely ignored.
Let's go over the Trenberth et al. (2009) figure for Solar power absorbed at the ground, 161.2 W/m^2, which would be 187.4 without the 14% reflected by mean global surface albedo. Start at space.
The Solar constant is around 1,360 watts per square meter at Earth's orbital distance, pace Kopp and Lean 2011. Trenberth et al. probably used earlier figures which averaged 1366 or so. The Earth is a sphere, so between Lambert's cosine law and the dark hemisphere, we have to cut the S figure by a factor of 4 (an easier way to derive it is simply dividing the cross-sectional area of a sphere, π r^2, by its surface area, 4 π r^2). This gives 340 W/m^2.
Earth's albedo, mostly from clouds and ice but also from other surfaces, is around 30%. The flux density absorbed by the climate system, then, is 238 W/m^2, corresponding to Earth's radiative equilibrium temperature of 255 K. The visual optical depth of Earth's atmosphere averages about 0.24, which by the Beer-Lambert-Bouguer law (I know, it's not always strictly applicable) gives a transmissivity of 0.79. Thus 187 W/m^2 at the ground, on mean global annual average.
Not 10.
Allow 20% efficiency of conversion. We get 37.4 W/m^2.
Not 10.
Make it the 10% efficiency available around 1980. We get 18.7 W/m^2.
Not 10.
10 is right out.
Don't you realise, BPL, that Buddy dumdum here has told you THAT IS NOT SCIENCE!
What IS science is Mackay's quantifying of how renewables just cannot possibly manage it.
Your post was just unsubstantiated rubbish with nothing included about regional and national contingencies and not physics at all! Physics is where you prove renewables can't manage it and have NUMBERS to prove it! Whereas you just had numbers that have no bearing on how renewables can't do it, therefore are wrong.
Now you are repeating lies:
Yup. By making up a land value and justify it with the hidden assertion that it can't be used for anything else
Last time you lied about this I posted a link to the reference demonstrating that you were lying. It is here.
This sort of serial dishonesty is unacceptable, particularly as you never acknowledge that you have repeatedly been shown to be bullshitting.
All you are doing is burying the thread in a deluge of ranting nonsense to cover up the fact that you have been exposed as ignorant, biased and wrong over and over again.
BPL
10 is right out.
Not only is 10W/m2 correct, I'm not aware of any NH mid-latitude solar farm currently doing better.
WRT calculations, I've already linked to this twice now, but I appreciate that the ranting by BP makes the thread extremely difficult to follow.
@ BPL
I'm sure you will also find this section of MacKay 2009 interesting.
And please NB.
Yup. By making up a land value and justify it with the hidden assertion that it can't be used for anything else.
Otherwise we wouldn't be limited to the small percent of land that Mackay claims. We would be able to put one in every available place in the country because the occupation of the land is a miniscule fraction of the space you ascribe to it.
" Now you are repeating lies:"
Nope.
I'm repeating the same statement. YOU complain it is a lie.
"I'm sure you will also find this section of MacKay 2009 interesting. "
Just like you found his post interesting, right?
So interesting that it doesn't even get mentioned. Ignored even.
PS referencing itself to support itself is called "idotic".
" BPL
10 is right out.
Not only is 10W/m2 correct"
More bullshit lies, with zero refential support other than "I think". From a moron like buddy dumdum here, this is hardly a ringing endorsement...
Oh do shut up FFS.
Let other people have a conversation.
Why? Tell you what, stop spouting BS and I'll stop posting to point out how it's all a fabrication of deliberate malfeasance.
This isn't some redneck school district where you can demand to teach "both sides of the controversy" nor corporate MSM rag that insists that "equal times for all ideas, no matter how insane they are" is the same as "fair and balanced".
Demanding that the people pointing out your rubbish should shut up doesn't prove your rhetoric is right. Rather the opposite.
I'll stop posting to point out how it's all a fabrication of deliberate malfeasance.
This is just insane. It is also libelous. Looking into this vicious lunacy, I see that it's been going on since the book was published. MacKay responded at the time. Those interested in the facts can read what he had to say here.
" I'll stop posting to point out how it's all a fabrication of deliberate malfeasance.
This is just insane."
OK, so I'll have to point out AGAIN that this is all a fabrication of deliberate malfeasance.
"I see that it's been going on since the book was published."
Yeah, odd that.
And M&M's paper has been lambasted for being a piece of crud masquerading as science but actually a load of old tosh ever since their craptastical paper was published.
Does that somehow prove that M&M were right?
No. Buddy dumdum here would not accept that as proof there.
But HERE, where buddy has an ideology invested in this idyllic meme, it is totally acceptable insinuation.
Because ... reasons?
"Those interested in the facts can read what he had to say here."
And those who think Mad Monckton was wrong in his claims and are interested in the facts can read what he had to say here:
http://www.climatedepot.com/2015/01/25/monckton-fires-back-point-by-point-rebuttal-at-warmist-critics-of-new-peer-reviewed-study-shoddy-rent-a-quote-scientists/
(sorry about linking to this, peeps)
So I guess that since he had something to say about those who claimed he was BSing everyone, buddy dumdum here will accept that he's part of a cabal of climate scam artists intent on building a new world order to destroy western democracy and capitalism, right?
I mean I said "those interested in the facts" in relation to the link, so that proves the link is factually correct, right?
Of course, to the sane proportion of humanity, or merely those who don't want proof by assertion of fact, would not be convinced the potty not-at-all-a-peer is correct in his wild-ass claims and would also be as unconvinced by buddy's use of the same insistence as "proof" of his master's voice too.
RTFL
I did.
It said SFA only a reiteration that he protests he's not anti-renewable, which is as reliable as Monckton's claims his facts are backed up and can be verified.
Or, to be topical, Lomborg's insistence he's not a denier.
Did you read the climatedepot link?
It said SFA
No it didn't. Go back and try again.
Start with the title: "Is David MacKay "trying to make wind sound useless"? Let's look at more data"
==> Let's look at MORE DATA
You are as dishonest as the worst of the other lot.
" It said SFA
No it didn't. Go back and try again."
Yes it did. It is nothing more than a repeat of a statement belied by the facts written. The title of the climatedepot link says: rebuttal-at-warmist-critics-of-new-peer-reviewed-study-shoddy-rent-a-quote-scientists. Does this mean that the critics are warmists and shoddy rent-a-quote scientists. He insists that this is the case.
Did you read the climatedepot link?
This is an *explanation*. It is easy to understand but I've added emphasis for BP:
To indicate the rough scale of windfarms required to deliver large amounts of power, I assumed in the book a power per unit area of 2 watts per square metre. So yes, there are windfarms that have powers bigger than 2 watts per square metre. Was I deliberately "making wind power seem worse than it is"? No. I chose 2 watts per sq metre as an estimate of what we could get if we put up lots of wind farms (with the area of Wales), which is obviously going to be less than the power per unit area of the very best spots. Yes, I willingly agree that if we want wind to make only a small contribution (for example, less than 1 kWh per day per person), then it would be appropriate to assume a higher power per unit area - perhaps 3 or 3.5 W/m2 instead of 2 W/m2, if we keep building in the best spots.
Very simple. Lots of wind in the energy mix means building on a very large area of the UK, much of which has relatively low average annual wind speeds compared to eg. Scottish hilltops. But the larger the amount of wind in the energy mix the lower the average power per unit area..
That was an *explanation*. By contrast, this is *libelous bullshit*:
this is all a fabrication of deliberate malfeasance
"Very simple. Lots of wind in the energy mix means building on a very large area of the UK"
No it doesn't.
Some.
But a hell of a lot less than if we'd built it from nuclear.
"But the larger the amount of wind in the energy mix the lower the average power per unit area.. "
From someone who "rebutted" BPL's calculation with "Not only is 10W/m2 correct, I'm not aware of any NH mid-latitude solar farm currently doing better." this is hardly a reliable claim.
There's absolutely no need for this to be the case, but it is bleated out there as "fact accompli" and anyone who doesn't agree is told "FFS STFU you hysterical ranter!!!!".
Short version: itsaloadabull.
I can quote monckton's claims too.
And I can even bold them for you, buddy dumdum.
This doesn't make them true.
BBD: Not only is 10W/m2 correct, I'm not aware of any NH mid-latitude solar farm currently doing better.
BPL: Then no doubt you can demonstrate where I made my mistake(s).
BBD, after insisting that 10 W/m^2 is a real maximum, you immediately directed me to a site that lists 15 W/m^2 as typical for concentrating solar power. I was, of course, talking about photovoltaics, but even concentrating on CSP, citing a source that lists a figure 50% above your maximum as "typical" seems counterproductive. Do you read these web pages before you cite them?
BBD, you do realize, don't you, that you and BP are peas from the same pod?
BBD - I believe you are quite ignorant of ALL fundamental physics, and your comments clearly indicate that to me. By insisting that it be deployable now, it already is. However, semiconductor donor acceptor technology using single crystal silicon is quite expensive, as are giant wind generators. However simple addition says that we could do it NOW using those technologies if we wanted to, since we really have to. By not doing it, you are condemning the planet and the human civilization that currently resides on it, to thermal failure.
What modern quantum physics and abstract mathermatics ALLOWS us to do is study things like entropy production and simple machines, and then design processes and devices that are able to function at substantial fractions of Carnot cycle efficiency, among other things, and then cascade those losses into cogeneration pathways with insulation barriers of our own clever design. With that, we can easily go carbon free in the near future, and even draw the atmospheric carbon down.
The problem is cultural and religious. We can do that with conventional alternative energy right now with the exception of a few industrial processes that quite frankly we won't need anymore. The real problem is religious and cultural zealots like yourself who make grandious claims with little or no understanding of the physics and math. Demonstrable lack of knowledge, that.
A 1kW system will take up 6-6.7 sq m and in the UK in Devon/Cornwall produce 1.05kW peak, averaged over the year at that latitude. Shetland about 750W peak.
Tracking means you get about 10 hours sunlight (reduction from 12 being due to extinction at low altitude angles) a day, so tracking you get about 1050*10/24 average watts from the Devon site per 6-6.7sq m panel.
65-73W per square meter. Call it 70W.
Not tracking but tilted: 70% of that, 49W.
Not tracking, flat on the ground, 70% of THAT. 35W
@ BPL
Do you read these web pages before you cite them?
Yes, and I even drew attention to the CSP vs SPV issue.
Perhaps you would do me the courtesy of re-reading the links properly and you will then see that the 10W/m2 figure is correct.
Why not go and find us some actual output figures for NH mid-latitude SPV farms?
Number string
BBD - I believe you are quite ignorant of ALL fundamental physics, and your comments clearly indicate that to me.
And:
The real problem is religious and cultural zealots like yourself who make grandious claims with little or no understanding of the physics and math. Demonstrable lack of knowledge, that.
Another mildly abusive but entirely specific-free comment. You go into the crank bin along with BP.
"Yes, and I even drew attention to the CSP vs SPV issue."
This may or may not be true. However, you neglect to show the issue where the CSP has half of its mirrors pointing the right way to reflect on to the CSP reception node, but half facing the wrong way.
So that 15 becomes 30 per usable mirror.
And how SPV don't have to face half of itself away from the sun.
And how can "I said some stuff" be showing BPL where he got his calculation from Trenberth2009 wrong?
"Why not go and find us some actual output figures for NH mid-latitude SPV farms? "
Why not demonstrate that his figures are wrong? You know, instead of asking he demonstrate his figures are wrong.
"Another mildly abusive but entirely specific-free comment."
LOL!
Denier worthy projection!
Amusing too in a thread that has ATL ending with:
Inability of denialists to adjust opinions to new facts is matched only by their inability to accept long-established ones.
It's not just for climate denial. Buddy Dumdum does it.
From Hot Air, Ch6, we have:
"Well, if we covered 5% of the UK with 10%-efficient panels, we’d have
10% × 100 W/m2 × 200 m2 per person"
Why 5%?
And why 100W/m^2? Solar constant is 1.4kW/m^2.
All because 100 makes his case. Loverley cherries! Get them while they're picked!
Then we have:
"The power density (the power per unit area) of such a solar farm would be
10% × 100 W/m2 = 10 W/m2."
OK, so he gets 10W/m^2 by taking 10% of 100W.
WHY is, well, not explained. Or supported.
Meanwhile Ch25 says:
"“All the world’s power could be provided by a square 100 km by 100 km
in the Sahara.” Is this true? Concentrating solar power in deserts delivers
an average power per unit land area of roughly 15 W/m2."
Why 15? Nobody says. Buddy dumdum certainly doesn't care. Because "It's PHYSICS!". Unlike Trenberth2009.
Lets look at the figures.
Solar constant 1.4kW.
Equatorial tracking parabolic CSP gets about 1/2 that sunlight averaged per day. 700W/m^2
Efficiency to electrical conversion for parablic CSP is about 32%.220W/m^2.
To drop to 15, there has to be some 93% loss in the system...
And why 100W/m^2? Solar constant is 1.4kW/m^2.
All because 100 makes his case. Loverley cherries! Get them while they're picked!
If you had the remotest clue or had read the text as you clearly have not, you would know that this is the average value for the UK.
But rather than bother to read you accuse MacKay of a "fabrication of deliberate malfeasance".
Which makes you an ignorant clown.
Equatorial tracking parabolic CSP gets about 1/2 that sunlight averaged per day. 700W/m^2
Efficiency to electrical conversion for parablic CSP is about 32%.220W/m^2.
To drop to 15, there has to be some 93% loss in the system...
Those of us who bothered to RTFR know that:
The power of raw sunshine at midday on a cloudless day is 1000W per square metre. That’s 1000 W per m2 of area oriented towards the sun, not per m2 of land area. To get the power per m2 of land area in Britain, we must make several corrections. We need to compensate for the tilt between the sun and the land, which reduces the intensity of midday sun to about 60% of its value at the equator (figure 6.1). We also lose out because it is not midday all the time. On a cloud-free day in March or September, the ratio of the average intensity to the midday intensity is about 32%. Finally, we lose power because of cloud cover. In a typical UK location the sun shines during just 34% of daylight hours.
The combined effect of these three factors and the additional complication of the wobble of the seasons is that the average raw power of sunshine per square metre of south-facing roof in Britain is roughly 110 W/m2, and the average raw power of sunshine per square metre of flat ground is roughly 100 W/m2.
"If you had the remotest clue or had read the text as you clearly have not, you would know that this is the average value for the UK."
If you had the remotest clue, then this is NOT the average value for the UK.
Moreover, the reduction of the solar constant affects the light intensity per square meter ON THE LEVEL GROUND.
Here's something neither you nor "dimwit david" ever got: they don't have to sit flat to the ground, we can *tip them*.
Now, given that the solar constant is the intensity of the sun at a given distance, the value drops off as the square of the distance from the sun, and therefore the drop in the solar constant here at the UK is the distance between the equator and the sun and 50N to the sun (both squared).
The difference is lost in rounding errors.
"But rather than bother to read you accuse MacKay of a "fabrication of deliberate malfeasance"."
I did read. This is how I got to the conclusion it was a fabrication of deliberate malfeasance. Unlike you I formed my own opinion based on evidence.
"We need to compensate for the tilt between the sun and the land, which reduces the intensity of midday sun to about 60% of its value at the equator (figure 6.1)."
If you bothered to read what you quoted off me, you would have seen:
Equatorial tracking parabolic CSP gets about 1/2 that sunlight averaged per day. 700W/m^2
If you need specifics I have my own blog and I already regurgitate astrophysical and quantum physical specifics here and elsewhere more than enough. Thermoelectricity will converge to superconductivity at somewhere near cryogenic temperatures which will make solar powered household cryogenics a reality very soon. You just don't get that.
And that is WITHOUT topological physics, which is just developing.
Cites : http://arxiv.org
"Finally, we lose power because of cloud cover."
However, for a non-tracking system, and again for one flat on the ground, early morning and late evening illuminates more of the active area because light that would otherwise go elsewhere WOULD BE SCATTERED INTO THE PANEL.
But you don't read anything outside your own little bubble, do you buddy dumdum.
Completely sealed thinking.
For data on power per unit area for SPV solar farms see MacKay (2013) DOI: 10.1098/rsta.2011.0431, section 3:
First, for almost all ground-based solar farms (shown by the filled circles and polygons), the ratio of the output power per unit land area to the incoming solar power per unit land area is between 0.02 and 0.06. Second, all four farms in the UK and both farms in Germany have power per unit area between 4.0 and 5.3 W m−2. Third, in Italy and Spain, where the average insolation is between 47 per cent and 86 per cent greater, the power per unit area of every ground-based solar farm is between 3.5 and 10 W m−2. Fourth, in all locations in the USA with insolation above 160 W m−2, the power per unit area of every ground-based farm is between 4.3 and 11.4 W m−2.
So an average of 10W/m2 is *generous*, especially for the UK.
Any further argument on this point needs to be backed up by actual data. Otherwise, the matter is closed. I've only got so much patience.
BBD: Why not go and find us some actual output figures for NH mid-latitude SPV farms?
BPL: Why not point out where I made my error?
But hell, let's assume we have to get 100% of all energy from photovoltaics, and we can only get 10 watts per square meter. 1.8 x 10^13 watts then requires 1.8 x 10^12 square meters, which is huge, but still only 0.35% of Earth's land surface. It's doable. After all, 1% of Earth's land surface is cities and 2% is highways.
But I still say the 10 W/m^2 figure is bogus.
"For data on power per unit area for SPV solar farms see MacKay (2013)"
For data on power per unit area for SPV see my post above.
It's not 10W/m^2. At Southern UK, it's 70W/m^2 for tracking solar.
"So an average of 10W/m2 is *generous*, especially for the UK."
No it isn't.
The solar constant ON THE GROUND is 892 at noon. That would make it at 16% (the actual figure) efficiency 142W at noon. To be "generous" we'd have to assume we only get 1.7 hours of full daylight average per day...
Oh, and who is the author of that link to DOI rtsa blah blah blah?
David J. C. MacKay
Yup, the proof of Mackay's figures is in a posting by the independent authority Mackay...
@ BPL
But I still say the 10 W/m^2 figure is bogus.
Please read the links provided. I doubt that The Royal Society publishes 'bogus' data in Phil Trans A. You are behaving like our resident clown and it is extremely disappointing.
Only real-world data are of relevance to this discussion, eg. see here for update to MacKay (2013):
Three spectacularly large solar power stations have recently been in the news: Ivanpah, located in California, but within spitting distance of Las Vegas, is a concentrating solar power station in which 300,000 flat mirrors focus sunshine onto three power-towers. Solana, located in Gila Bend, Arizona, has a collecting field of about 3200 parabolic-trough mirrors, each about 25 feet wide, 500 feet long and 10 feet high, and it can generate electricity at night thanks to its ability to store high-temperature heat in vast molten salt stores. Kagoshima, near the Southern tip of Japan, has 290,000 solar photovoltaic panels.
All three are enormous, and must be amazing to visit: Ivanpah occupies about 14 km2; Solana, 12.6 km2, and Kagoshima, 1 km2.
Now, I'm always interested in powers per unit area of energy-generating and energy-converting facilities, so I worked out the average power per unit area of all three of these, using the estimated outputs available on the internet. Interestingly, *all three* power stations are expected to generate about 8.7 W/m2, on average. This is at the low end of the range of powers per unit area of concentrating solar power stations that I discussed in Chapter 25 of Sustainable Energy - without the hot air; Andasol, the older cousin of Solana in Spain, is expected to produce about 10 W/m2, for example.
Now, I really don't care whether you have an emotional response to the actual data or not - they are what they are. However, I do have a finite and now exhausted amount of patience for ludicrous nonsense like this.
I have provided data and links supporting what I wrote. Nobody else has, so as far as I am concerned, this discussion is at an end.
"But I still say the 10 W/m^2 figure is bogus.
Please read the links provided."
He did.
His conclusion is it's bogus calculation.
Do you want to see the proof? Read his post above where he calculates the value you get and gets 35-ish watts per square meter.
Well I'm way late here, but:
1. Actually an interesting argument, even if I'm usually not willing to go check cites.
2. The insults are much less interesting.
3. As Eli's stated in the past, we encourage the stiletto rather than the bludgeon here at RR. And IMO both sides are making fact-based arguments, so I'm not sure even a stiletto's needed. Let the facts do the talking.
4. I wouldn't say the (pretty lax) commenting rules here at RR were violated, but still the insults are unnecessary.
5. TL:DR is fine for long threads like this IMO, and you're also free to ignore the comment of anyone who chimes in with that disclaimer.
Brian, when two different calculations lead to about 35W/m^2, and another supplied by the one disagreeing with those two provide another that indicate something like 30W/m^2, and the one disagreeing insists it's 10W/m^2, in what way do you think that both sides have facts?
It isn't both 10 and 35 watts per square meter.
"The combined effect of these three factors and the additional complication of the wobble of the seasons is that the average raw power of sunshine per square metre of south-facing roof in Britain is roughly 110 W/m2"
Well, the wobble makes naff all difference.
But this is the thing about south-facing roofs in the UK. They aren't at 50 degrees declination to the sun like our floors are, they slope at (usually) either 35 or 60 degrees. Which makes the effective latitude of those roofs 15N or 10S.
Neutering one of those "corrections" (for inconvenient power capacity).
Oh, and dessertec isn't being done in the UK.
"5. TL:DR is fine for long threads like this IMO"
But why proudly proclaim this to people who can't do a damn thing about it and can't care either?
Why not *think to yourself* "This is too long to read, I'll just post my point I wish to make" and NOT tell everyone "I didn't bother reading a damn thing, so here is my uninformed opinion!"? I mean, that's what "TL;DR" means, right.
It's just a way of blaming EVERYONE ELSE POSTING for your being uninformed.
Then again, by posting uninformed, you are making it too long. And if nobody read it, as you didn't, then pointless other than for self-gratification. And if you're going to post for self aggrandizement, what on earth does it matter what you think to anyone?
It's not like you have to tell people you didn't read a damn thing, is it?
But if you're trying to tell everyone else off, then you cannot decry someone telling you off for doing so.
"this discussion is at an end."
"the matter is closed."
In your feverish closed mind it is. First of all it makes no difference what the actual global surface average irradiance turns out to be, basic entropy considerations and current observations, events and theory rule out all other options. It's all you've got. Furthermore, the ramping up of 'conventional' wind and solar are just stop gap measures until quantum physics (thermoelectricity and superconductivity) produces sustained strong magnetic fields that opens up a plethora of exploitable quantum phenomena and pathways where topological physics will allow us to finish the job and put things back where they were so that civilization can be sustained in whatever post modern form it takes. What you further don't grasp is that this same topological quantum physics with make the colonization of space a near triviality, where abundant flux and materials await you. Your biggest glaring error is not assuming that this won't work that's bad enough and just plain wrong, in fact so wrong it's not even right. What you don't grasp is that you have NO OTHER CHOICE.
Your physics and math may be weak, but your critical thinking skills are much weaker.
"Those of us who bothered to RTFR know that:
The power of raw sunshine at midday on a cloudless day is 1000W per square metre."
Those who understood what it said know that the TSI is nearly 1400W per square meter. You know, PHYSICS. So even if all the rest were right, that 10W is now 14W.
Brian
And IMO both sides are making fact-based arguments
That is beyond disappointing.
BP: Go back to the beginning of this thread and try reading it in one go. The first bit had some interesting points that I wanted to add my halfpennyworth to.
Then it got boring with the hot air.
So the TL:DR was a disclaimer in case my points had already been covered.
BTW, just to throw some more petrol on the fire: average wind speed increases roughly by 4% for a doubling of height. Power is proportional to the cube of wind speed, so taller wind turbines produce significantly more output than shorter ones.
And let's not forget the offshore option...
BBD: Please read the links provided. I doubt that The Royal Society publishes 'bogus' data in Phil Trans A. You are behaving like our resident clown and it is extremely disappointing. . . . Only real-world data are of relevance to this discussion
BPL: I gave you real-world data, sir. You have yet to point out where I made my mistake. Get off your fat, lazy rear end, stop citing authorities, and DO THE MATH YOURSELF. I did. If I made a mistake, prove it. If you can't prove it, shut up.
I might add that using global average surface irradiance when discussing energy flux density is kind of like using globally averaged surface temperature when discussing instantaneous microclimate effects and weather. It's the wrong metric. In the future we will have very long high density superconducting transmission cables anyways, and a variety of ways to store energy realistically besides lithium batteries.
I might add that using global average surface irradiance when discussing local energy flux density is kind of like using globally averaged surface temperature when discussing instantaneous microclimate effects and weather. It's the wrong metric. In the future we will have very long high density superconducting transmission cables anyways, and a variety of ways to store energy realistically besides lithium batteries.
Oops, there I go again with the double post.
And Barton, demanding that someone shut up no matter how nutty their ideas might sound (and his ideas are not that nutty) is kinda like if I were to come into your church and demand that you shut up. Kinda rude.
Kinda ... religious. Religion. Now that's nutty.
"BP: Go back to the beginning of this thread and try reading it in one go. "
Why?
And why should I do so, then if I give up because it's too long, decide to tell everyone I am unable to muster the concentration and patience and am going to make an uninformed opinion anyway?
If I DO go through, have I proven it ISN'T too long? Will you decide to read it all and NOT complain it was long?
"So the TL:DR was a disclaimer in case my points had already been covered."
And if they had been covered, would telling everyone that you don't care if they have been covered been something to make it fine to have done so, whereas its lack would have made it a heinous offence?
If you had bothered to read it and found it covered, would you have not bothered to post anything at all? In which case, you could have gone
"TL;DR" in your head AND NOT POSTED A THING. Saving you even MORE time!
And if the point made had been new and novel, what would we supposed to have done with the knowledge your opinion had been uninformed with what else had been covered? Amazement that you can come up with such a new idea without having read the thread? Disgust that you told us you couldn't be bothered reading, but DO want us to read what you wrote? Confusion that you put in information that had no bearing on what you posted or the reason for it?
Here's a thought experiment.
EVERYONE, even the first poster, starts off with "TL;DR" and says so, and posts their opinion anyway, having never found out what anyone else is saying.
In what way does this help the discussion? Is the discussion BETTER because nobody is bothering to read what anyone else is saying, but at least telling them that the post is being made under the aegis of tabula rasa?
And if everyone knows nobody is reading their posts, is this still fine, because the only point is to write, not read.
Are blogs write-only fori? And better for it?
Or would it be better for nothing to be written unless some attempt had been made to read the opinion of others, even if the information was then discarded as incorrect, flawed or irrelevant?
And if it is better and correct to read posts, isn't it rude to demand others read posts that have made the thread even longer when you thought it fine to avoid that step?
Nigel, if you want a shorter version, not TL;DR-able, what is the point of saying TL;DR when it can confer nothing worth the effort of reading, never mind the writing?
Anyone interested in US capacity factors for nukes and renewables?http://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.cfm?t=epmt_6_07_b
Mind you, I haven't found the methodology for the calculations, apparently there's a footnote for the nukes somewhere but I can't find it on my tablet.
"And Barton, demanding that someone shut up no matter how nutty their ideas might sound"
But demanding that someone put up or shut up is the only way to get someone who doesn't want to prove their claim to do it.
It is entirely NOT about "how nutty their ideas might sound", which by the way entirely encompass your posts on this thread. It's about "Don't tell me to find where the errors I made lie, YOU tell me where the errors I made lie" and the "Or shut the hell up" is the most polite method of making this not a demand for THEIR time to be spent on YOUR demand.
Indeed your post was entirely the same "Shut up your ideas are nutty" you're complaining of BPL doing.
BPL
As I said, nothing is relevant here except real world data. I don't care where you went wrong and it doesn't matter. It's a rabbit hole. We are discussing actual power per unit area. Nothing else.
Please see tables 1 - 3 MacKay (2013).
Real world data. Note that the >10W/m2 powers per unit area are ususally achieved by roof-mounted SPV *not* large-scale solar installations which
generally range between 4W/m2 - 10W/m2.
Please also note insolation data is also presented in tables 1 - 3.
Everything relevant is there and my points above stand.
"Mind you, I haven't found the methodology for the calculations, apparently there's a footnote for the nukes somewhere but I can't find it on my tablet."
Yup, Monckton frequently makes claims of trends or values and nowhere can you find where the calculation or source of these numbers are. Yet those numbers TOTALLY prove him right.
Hence BPL and myself asking that BBD make his case WITHOUT telling us to go back to what he said as "proof" of what he said was right.
There are other problems with the sourcing and this is explained in several posts, repeatedly, above. However, I can't be bothered rewriting them for someone who can just scroll up and read the thread for them.
TL;CBB
"Please see tables 1 - 3 MacKay (2013)."
Since BPL doesn't reference Mackay, his error cannot be in his use of that information.
Please show the error in his calculation or SHUT THE HELL UP.
Nigel Franks
Power is proportional to the cube of wind speed, so taller wind turbines produce significantly more output than shorter ones.
And let's not forget the offshore option...
All been covered. Review the thread and *links*.
BP
First, you do not, ever, tell me what to do. So make that the last time.
Second, I have provided data - empirical evidence in support of what I have said.
You have fulminated more or less incoherently and at extraordinary length but you have said almost nothing and provided no empirical evidence to support what little you did string together.
OK, I think that I've found the reason for such high capacity factors for nukes. It's based on summer capacity... Not nameplate. And summer capacity is less than nameplate, because maximum production may be limited by cooling water issues.
tables 1 - 3 MacKay (2013).
It's almost as if you believe that MacKay invented the data rather than simply acquired it from the relevant sources.
Cheers, Nigel. There is still a hugely suspicious lack of evidence of the outage of nuclear power, despite it being generally about the same level as planned outage for the most modern designs in wide use.
Maybe they hide it in the same way summer hides.
And note: nothing there worried about tldr, did it. Which would never have been pointed out if tldr had never appeared.
Sorry Nigel - the previous was for BP
" tables 1 - 3 MacKay (2013)."
It's almost like you never read anything.
BPL didn't use Mackay, so his error in his calculation cannot be in there.
Here, try this for size: Mackay got it wrong, to see proof, see BPL's calculation above.
"First, you do not, ever, tell me what to do."
First, yes I do. You can't tell me never to tell you what to do. Unless you think that telling someone what to do is acceptable. In which case I can tell you what to do.
Secondly, put up or shut up you windbag.
"And let's not forget the offshore option...
All been covered. Review the thread and *links*."
Lets not forget those links have been shown to be bunkum.
Lets not forget about the contraction apostrophe.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc
"from the relevant sources."
Lets not forget the link that contains leads to Mackay's publication.
Proving Mackay by appealing to what Mackay said is not generally held to be a reliable method of proof.
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