C8 wrote:I
I will embrace wind and solar when I see them fully powering the factories that make them.
I will fear climate change and rising oceans when I see powerful rich liberals, like Obama, not buying gigantic seaside homes.
Yes and Hell yes.
C8 wrote:I
I will embrace wind and solar when I see them fully powering the factories that make them.
I will fear climate change and rising oceans when I see powerful rich liberals, like Obama, not buying gigantic seaside homes.
The Green War on Clean Energy
The Green War on Clean Energy
Radical environmentalists fight against the very technologies that would cut carbon emissions.
Summer 2022
Infrastructure and energy
In 2018, a radical new environmental group emerged in the United Kingdom. The loose-knit organization called itself Extinction Rebellion, or “XR,” and aimed to raise awareness of climate change through disruptive protests. XR activists staged dramatic “die-ins” and shut down London bridges and metro stations. The group’s leaders warned that climate change could “kill six billion people this century” and called for Britain to halt the use of fossil fuels virtually overnight. Like the Occupy Wall Street movement that inspired it, XR disdains detailed policy prescriptions. But its members generally scorn our modern, energy-intensive lifestyles, while also rejecting nuclear power and other high-tech approaches to reducing emissions. To save the planet, many believe, capitalism itself needs to be overthrown.
One of the group’s most charismatic spokespeople was Zion Lights. The daughter of Indian immigrants and a mother of two, Lights was a longtime environmental advocate. (The Telegraph once dubbed her “Britain’s greenest mum.”) But she found herself hard-pressed to defend XR’s more extreme claims. Hoping to understand the issues better, Lights returned to college, where she studied the debates surrounding nuclear power and related themes. “I started to realize that almost everything I had believed was wrong,” she told me, when I interviewed her recently for a podcast. When Lights tried to discuss her new perspective with her XR colleagues, she said, “I found there was this immense, immense resistance.”
Ultimately, Lights had to ask herself a painful question: “What if you’d dedicated most of your life to trying to save the planet,” she wrote in Quillette last year, “but then you realized that you may have actually—potentially—made things worse?” It’s a question that more environmentalists should grapple with today. Over the past half-century, their movement has scored world-changing victories in reducing air and water pollution, preserving wilderness, and protecting wildlife. But when it comes to fighting global warming, the issue that most environmentalists now see as the planet’s paramount threat, the green-policy elite has arguably done more harm than good.
That claim certainly sounds counterintuitive, but evidence shows that some of the activists’ favored policies—especially the single-minded focus on wind and solar facilities for making electricity—have been marginally effective, at best. Other policies, such as replacing gasoline and diesel fuel with biofuels made from plants, actually increase emissions. One of the environmental movement’s biggest self-described victories has been its long-running war against nuclear power, the only technology that demonstrates the capability to reduce dramatically a nation’s carbon footprint. Today, some green activists are fighting against the next generation of climate-friendly technologies, including advanced nuclear reactors and systems to capture and store the carbon in fossil fuels, or even scrub it from the atmosphere. Call it the green war on clean energy.
Extremists like Extinction Rebellion aren’t the only ones with misguided ideas about how best to reduce emissions. Last November, heads of state and representatives from global NGOs, financial firms, and energy companies gathered in Glasgow for COP26, the United Nations climate summit. Speakers unleashed their most impassioned language. “We are digging our own graves,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres. British prime minister Boris Johnson compared the planet to James Bond, “strapped to a doomsday device” that threatens to “end human life as we know it.” Despite the catastrophism, conference attendees mostly stuck to a well-worn playbook. Governments promised to boost spending on renewable energy and restrict use of oil and gas. Financial organizations agreed to international guidelines that penalize fossil-fuel investments and favor green-energy projects.
While some countries promised to set even stricter targets for future emissions, China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, resisted demands to curtail its heavy coal consumption and pledged only to start reducing emissions sometime in the indefinite future. As the Associated Press noted, “the high aspirations and apocalyptic imagery at the start of the summit were soon met with a cold dose of reality.”
Nonetheless, global emissions do appear to be peaking. The more apocalyptic scenarios that some activists forecasted are unlikely to happen. In fact, most developed nations are slowly reducing their carbon footprints, though not at the aggressive rates they’ve promised. Ironically, these reductions in emissions often occur not because of the policies advocated at climate conferences but despite them.
Ted Nordhaus, founder of the eco-modernist Breakthrough Institute, is skeptical of the “global climate-industrial complex” on display at COP26. “A climate movement less in thrall to fever dreams of apocalypse would focus more on balancing long-term emissions reductions with growth, development, and adaptation in the here and now,” he writes. The extremists of Extinction Rebellion and similar groups demand “system change,” by which they mean dismantling free markets, creating alternatives to existing democratic institutions, and deliberately reducing living standards through a process they call “degrowth.” The COP26 technocrats don’t advocate anything that radical, but they, too, envision a more centralized, less growth-oriented model for society. Under the COP26 paradigm, entire sectors of the economy—energy, transportation, manufacturing, housing—would undergo wrenching transformations.
According to this vision, markets are not adequate to manage the necessary transitions. Instead, change must be driven through government regulation, supranational agreements between industry and NGOs, financial controls, and other top-down measures. Certain technologies—electric vehicles, say, or rooftop solar panels—must be heavily subsidized, while others—internal combustion engines, gas stoves—should be penalized or even banned. The use of fossil fuels should be curtailed by any means necessary, including pushing up prices by restricting drilling and pipeline construction. All policies must be geared to achieve “net-zero emissions” by 2050.
“Some greens are fighting against the next generation of clean technologies, including carbon capture.”
This is a staggeringly difficult goal, which would touch every aspect of modern life. Yet net-zero advocates too often reject or neglect the very policies most likely to help the world achieve it. As Nordhaus recently wrote in The Economist, the activist community “insists upon re-engineering the global economy without many of the technologies that most technical analyses conclude would be necessary, including nuclear energy, carbon capture and carbon removal.” In other words, green elites want to upend the lives of billions but show surprisingly little interest in whether their programs work. In some parts of the world, the climate lobby has already managed to enact policies that raise prices, hinder growth, and promote political instability—all while achieving only marginal reductions in emissions.
The problem starts with the movement’s blanket opposition to fossil fuels. For example, most environmentalists viscerally oppose fracking and natural-gas pipelines. The Biden administration moved to curtail U.S. gas drilling within days of taking office (one reason U.S. gas prices have roughly tripled since Biden became president). But in fact, since natural gas emits nearly 50 percent less carbon dioxide than coal, it is one of our best tools to bring down emissions in the short term, while also benefiting the economy. Alex Trembath, deputy director of the Breakthrough Institute, writes: “The U.S. fracking boom of 2008 onward tempered inflation, created hundreds of thousands of jobs during the worst recession in a century, and, yes, reduced carbon emissions by displacing much dirtier coal-fired power.”
Eco-pragmatists like Trembath see natural gas as a “bridge fuel” that can ease the transition to lower-carbon energy sources. (Soon, carbon capture and storage [CCS] technology could make it feasible to harness the energy in gas while putting much less carbon into the atmosphere.) But most environmental activists argue that we must phase out natural gas as rapidly as possible, replacing it almost exclusively with wind and solar power. Wind and solar power can help reduce carbon emissions, as long as they are part of a mix of energy sources. But renewable-energy champions tend to gloss over the huge challenges of trying to power the grid primarily with such on-again, off-again energy sources.
People understand, of course, that wind and solar facilities make power only when the wind blows or the sun shines. But even experts sometimes underestimate what a complex challenge this “intermittency” presents to grid operators. Since most wind and solar facilities sit idle most of the time, renewable-power producers have to overbuild production capacity massively. Renewable power also requires a whole new network of transmission lines in order to shuttle power from, say, sunny areas to cloudy ones. Renewable backers promise that imminent breakthroughs in battery technology will make intermittency a minor problem. In reality, while batteries can help grid operators manage short peaks in demand, they remain far too expensive to serve as a long-term backup. All these challenges mean that, while the “all-renewable” power-grid activists’ demand isn’t technically impossible, it would cost far more—and take far longer to build—than more balanced approaches.
Despite those obstacles, most green activists regard wind and solar power as something close to a climate panacea. So one would assume that environmental groups are lobbying hard to get these projects approved and built. Yet environmental activists often lead the way in opposing the construction of renewable-energy projects—especially when they’re slated to be built in their own backyards. In the U.S., environmental groups are currently fighting solar installations in Massachusetts, California, Nevada, Florida, and many other states. Wind-turbine farms face even more opposition: since 2015, more than 300 U.S. communities have rejected or restricted wind projects, according to a database maintained by energy author Robert Bryce.
It’s no wonder many environmentalists are conflicted: the zero-carbon energy sources they demand can take a terrible toll on the wildlife and open spaces they love. California’s iconic Altamont Pass wind farm, for example, kills thousands of birds yearly, including an estimated 75 to 110 golden eagles. Solar farms threaten endangered desert tortoises and other wildlife. Because of their low energy density, wind and solar developments require enormous tracts of land, compared with other energy sources. New York’s now-shuttered Indian Point nuclear power plant sits on just 240 acres. Replacing its power entirely with wind power would require more than 500 square miles of turbines. That’s a massive amount of land and habitat lost to energy production...
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
It’s dark, it’s still – it’s dunkelflaute
Whether you’ve heard of it or not, dunkelflaute (dunk-el-flout-eh) is a challenge our energy systems will need to manage. Dunkelflaute is a German word that literally means dark doldrums or dark lull. It describes events where there is minimal or no sunshine and wind for extended periods, usually occurring during winter. Dunkelflaute is a specific problem of low electricity output that occurs in highly-renewable electricity systems. The challenge it presents is obvious – how to guarantee electricity supply when the dark lull descends?
In Australia, this has been referred to as a renewable drought. A recent lull in wind generation in South Australia is a small-scale snapshot of what could become a much larger problem in future.
AEMO data (via Open NEM) shows that across 11 and 12 June, wind power (represented by green in Figure 1 below) generated fewer than 4,800 MWh of a total demanded 55,000 MWh, only 8.7 per cent of total generation. This is compared with 9 and 10 June when wind power generated 46,000 MWh out of a total demanded 73,000 MWh, contributing 63 per cent to generation.
Figure 1 – SA generation by resource type, 9th to 12th June 2021 (Source: Open NEM)
Germany is in a similar position as South Australia in terms of renewable penetration. Renewable electricity in Germany contributed 45.4 per cent of electricity consumption in 2020, more than coal, oil and gas combined. Germany also has significant transmission connection with the EU, possessing more interconnectors than any other country in Europe.
In Germany there is a growing fear of dunkelflaute as the share of renewable generation increases and displaces dispatchable generation. The type of event to cause dunkelflaute doesn’t have to be severe weather like we saw in Texas in February. It can be as benign as several still winter days in a row.
How do we manage dunkelflaute?
A recent Grattan Institute report Go for net zero referenced dunkelflaute as ‘the winter problem’. In the document, Grattan notes that an energy system with 90 per cent renewable electricity would reduce emissions by 105 million tonnes at a cost of less than $20 per tonne. The final 10 per cent, however, is much trickier to achieve because the electricity system must increasingly rely on firming options.
The immediately available electricity storage option that might come to mind is batteries – but batteries tend to be best suited to managing hourly fluctuations across the day, charging from the midday sun and then discharging to help with the evening peak. Today’s batteries are not well placed to manage longer durations, with most having less than four hours of storage. The Victorian 300MW Big Battery project in Geelong is slated to be able to provide electricity to 400,000 households for one hour at full charge. That may be big but managing dunkelflaute will require a much bigger battery.
Broadly, there appear to be three options that could assist the transition from 90 to 100 per cent renewables.
Lots of renewable generation and transmission
The first is building a diverse renewable generation fleet all across the country in hopes that the wind is blowing or sun is shining somewhere, while ensuring sufficient interconnection to transport large quantities of electricity all across the country. This option would result in a large amount of electricity being ‘wasted’, along with lowering the utilisation of interconnection, while still leaving room for dunkelflaute in severe cases.
There is a positive correlation between solar energy across the National Energy Market (NEM) shown in Figure 2 below. When the sun is shining in one area, it is also likely to be shining in others, and visa versa. The absence of solar energy in one region may not be easily replaced by solar in another as different regions can be affected by similar weather systems.
Deep storage
The second option is building deep storage, like pumped hydro, that by its nature is well placed to provide storage capacity. Snowy 2.0 for example will be able to provide 2000 MW of generation capacity for 175 hours at full capacity. Grattan has modelled that across a 10-year period, up to 9GW of storage capacity might be required to bridge the largest gap between renewable generation and demand over 14 days. That’s about nine Snowy 2.0’s assuming they all start at full capacity.
This type of deep storage solution is likely to sit idle most of the time and could be challenging to finance, with Grattan rightly noting that many optimal sites for pumped hydro have already been developed. Additional interconnection would also be required to connect this deep storage, which may again be poorly utilised.
Developing this much deep storage is likely to be incredibly costly and unlikely to be in customer’s best interests.
Zero emissions dispatchable energy
The third and most promising option is building zero-emissions dispatchable energy, consisting of renewable gas usage in gas powered generation plants. Natural gas already provides a similar role in today’s generation mix and renewable gas will allow much of the current infrastructure to be utilised to support high levels of variable renewable electricity generation.
Frontier Economics examined the role of gas powered generation in South Australia during renewable droughts to support a highly-renewable system and found that using gas powered generation could reduce the overall system cost by between 28 to 35 per cent per year, depending on the extent of the renewable drought during winter.
The optimal level of gas generation was found to be seven per cent of total generation. If natural gas can be substituted by renewable gas into the future, it’s likely that full decarbonisation can be achieved by utilising existing infrastructure and lowering overall costs.
Managing the winter lull
Dunkelflaute is a challenging problem that requires detailed planning and mapping of the electricity system and usage throughout the year, rather than relying on averages that are more commonly talked about.
There are a range of technical options available to manage dunkelflaute. Batteries and pumped hydro can be good options for managing hourly and daily fluctuations in demand, but there are questions over longer durations. Shorter-term storage is likely to best be complemented by renewable gas electricity generation to manage longer periods of low variable renewable generation.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
vtsnowedin wrote:this is a war and you have to take the best available option.
mousepad wrote:vtsnowedin wrote:this is a war and you have to take the best available option.
The russians and ukrainians squabbling a bit in the east is not much of a war. It's about on the level of gang violence in Philadelphia. It's bad when caught in the middle, but otherwise it doesn't affect the world.
The eruopeans are just fine. They can wear a sweater and tone down the heat from 24C to 18C in winter. Drive a bit less, eat a bit less, travel a bit less, consume a bit less. No big deal. It's actually quite healthy for europeans to get a friendly reminder on reality.
vtsnowedin wrote:And no the Europeans can't just put on a sweater and carry on.
mousepad wrote:vtsnowedin wrote:And no the Europeans can't just put on a sweater and carry on.
I used to think the same as you. Then I said I go and see for myself. So I visited a few european cities. I could find neither issues nor hardship. Plenty of cheap gas, plenty of food, plenty of tourists, plenty (and a mean PLENTY) of 3rd world imports all being fed, housed and clothed. Europe is a land of plenty.
AdamB wrote:.they don't hand out guns to lunatics
they don't allow women control over their reproductive rights?
...MERIKA!!!!
vtsnowedin wrote:Back to the limits of renewable energy and diesel generators for back up this winter.
Germany the largest energy user in the Union has about 120 Megawatts of solar and wind generating capacity.
vtsnowedin wrote:diesel generators to take the load.
good working order which the Germans are famous for.
Did you flunk sixth grade math? 62.7 + 58.7=121.4 which is just 1.4GW off of the estimate I gave based on public sources and might vary by five percent or so based on the final year of the data base.yellowcanoe wrote:vtsnowedin wrote:Back to the limits of renewable energy and diesel generators for back up this winter.
Germany the largest energy user in the Union has about 120 Megawatts of solar and wind generating capacity.
I believe that Germany actually has 62.7GW of wind generating capacity and at least 58.7GW of Solar generating capacity so the amount of diesel generation required to replace it would be far in excess of what you calculated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
vtsnowedin wrote:Did you flunk sixth grade math? 62.7 + 58.7=121.4 which is just 1.4GW off of the estimate I gave based on public sources and might vary by five percent or so based on the final year of the data base.yellowcanoe wrote:vtsnowedin wrote:Back to the limits of renewable energy and diesel generators for back up this winter.
Germany the largest energy user in the Union has about 120 Megawatts of solar and wind generating capacity.
I believe that Germany actually has 62.7GW of wind generating capacity and at least 58.7GW of Solar generating capacity so the amount of diesel generation required to replace it would be far in excess of what you calculated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power_in_Germany
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_in_Germany
So let us see your better then mine calculations with a bit of source documents.
vtsnowedin wrote:OK so maybe I am off by a factor of 1000. So you need 30,000 4MW generators to fill the gap not 30.
How many can they install? Every one they do install reduces their shortage by that much.
Got a better plan?
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
The Guardian wrote:Solar farm plans refused at highest rate for five years in Great Britain
Solar farms are being refused planning permission in Great Britain at the highest rate in five years, analysis has found, with projects which would have cut £100m off annual electricity bills turned down in the past 18 months.
Planning permission for 23 solar farms was refused across England, Wales and Scotland between January 2021 and July 2022, which could have produced enough renewable energy to power an estimated 147,000 homes annually, according to analysis of government figures by the planning and development consultancy Turley.
The refusals have jumped significantly since the start of 2021 – the research found only four projects were refused planning permission during 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020 combined.
Of the 27 declined solar farms between 2019 and 2022, 19 are in Conservative constituencies. Four were in Labour constituencies, three in Scottish National party constituencies, and one in a Liberal Democrat constituency.
There are fears such refusals could increase further as the Tory leadership contenders, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak, have made disparaging comments about solar farms.
South-west and eastern England had the highest number of refusals in the last 18 months, with four projects turned down in each region. Wales, the West Midlands and Scotland each had three refusals, while the east Midlands, north-east and south-east of England each had two planning applications turned down.
Analysts at the thinktank Green Alliance said the rejected projects were large solar farms at an average of about 30MW each, which may account for the planning refusals as it is easier to get smaller farms approved.
However, it added that this should not be a reason to refuse planning permission, as larger solar farms could cut bills further.
It said the refused solar farms could have cut about £100m off Great Britain’s electricity bills this year.
Dustin Benton, the policy director at Green Alliance, said: “We should be building as much cheap, clean energy as we can to reduce people’s energy bills and cut our reliance on Russian gas. This additional solar power generation, if it displaced gas, would have saved over £100m per year in wholesale energy costs.”
“By integrating solar panels into fields, even farmers on high-grade land can continue to grow crops at the same time as enjoying the steady income from solar panels.”
If Truss proceeds with her plans to crack down on solar farms she would be going against the government’s energy security strategy published this spring.
The strategy set out ambitions of generating 70GW of energy from solar technology by 2035. It also promises to consult on amending planning rules to strengthen policy in favour of development on non-protected land, as well as supporting solar that is co-located with other functions such as agriculture and established energy infrastructure.
Emma Kelly, an associate director at Turley, said: “Solar should be a key contributor to the energy market, especially as we look to diversify our renewable energy products to ensure maintenance of supply.
“The significant uplift in planning permission refusal for solar farms goes entirely against the proposals laid out in the government’s British energy security strategy. Solar power currently contributes 14GW of energy at present, so we have some way to go before reaching the 70GW target. If Liz Truss goes ahead with her plan, the British energy security strategy will need to be rewritten.
“Biodiversity is certainly a factor we need to consider with solar farms whilst the ongoing rise of the cost of energy has shown just how important renewable energy generation is for the future of the UK. A growing trend of refusing planning permission for renewable energy projects that are designed to support energy security is a huge step backwards on our road to net zero.”
After two years of wrangling, false starts and disappointments, it finally happened: America has passed its first-ever climate legislation, moving the country closer to its goal of a decarbonized future and taking a significant step toward helping the planet avert the worst scenarios of climate catastrophe.
Alfred Tennyson wrote:We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
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