Posted on 06/22/2021 4:30:30 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The promoters of the climate scam have a variety of deceptions to get the gullible to accede to their socialist plans. Those deceptions range from the quite sophisticated to the completely preposterous. At the sophisticated end of the scale we have what I have called The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time — the deception by which 50 and 100 year old temperature records are altered (reduced) by impenetrable computer algorithms to make it seem like global warming has been much greater than the reality. At the preposterous end of the scale we have the claim that the fashionable “renewable” sources of electric power, wind and solar, are actually cheaper than fossil fuels to generate electricity.
I call this claim preposterous because the fundamental deception is so obvious that you would think that no one of any intelligence could possibly fall for it. And yet you have undoubtedly read numerous articles in the past few years asserting that wind and solar-generated electricity is now as cheap or cheaper than electricity from natural gas or coal. To make the claim, the promoters of wind and solar simply omit from their calculations the single biggest part of the cost of those sources. That would the cost of intermittency, otherwise known as the cost of providing sufficient backup or storage to run a stable electrical grid while generation from the wind and sun fluctuates wildly. (As wind and solar become a bigger and bigger part of power generation on the grid, the cost of necessary backup and/or storage could easily multiply the cost of electricity by a factor of five or more. For instance, see my post here.).
To divert your attention from this elephant in the room, somebody has come up with the concept of “levelized cost of energy,” or LCOE, supposedly to make fair apples-to-apples comparisons of the total costs of one energy sources versus another. There are seemingly sophisticated and technical discussions of life cycles and discount rates. But then, when putting a cost on wind and solar, they just completely omit the costs of intermittency. I suppose they hope that you won’t notice.
If you don’t believe me, check out this Wikipedia piece on “Cost of electricity by source.” The piece cites some five studies of comparative costs of different generation sources. The five studies come from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Lazard, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the IPCC and OECD. Representative of the conclusions reached is this from BNEF:
In March 2021, Bloomberg New Energy Finance found that "renewables are the cheapest power option for 71% of global GDP and 85% of global power generation. It is now cheaper to build a new solar or wind farm to meet rising electricity demand or replace a retiring generator, than it is to build a new fossil fuel-fired power plant. ...
Feel free to click through to verify my assertion that they simply omit all costs of intermittency when calculating the costs of generation from wind and solar.
The state of Texas, with its own power grid separate from the rest of the country, has been a leader in developing generation capacity from the intermittent renewables, particularly wind. While production from these facilities can vary greatly from month to month (depending on wind conditions), in typical months Texas has been getting about 20-25% of its electricity from wind and solar. (It was 23% in October 2020.). Then came February 2021, when Texas had a record cold spell, and the wind and sun died for several days running. Some natural gas and nuclear facilities were also out during that period. The result was a tremendous spike in spot market prices and rolling blackouts imposed by the grid operator (known as ERCOT).
Apparently the February event has caused some people in Texas finally to wake up to the issue of the true costs of the renewables. In March a bill called SB 1278 was introduced in the Texas state senate by Senator Kelly Hancock of Fort Worth to require the renewable generation sources to bear the extra costs imposed by their intermittency. Here is the relevant language of the proposed statute:
“[ERCOT] shall ensure that ancillary services necessary to facilitate the transmission of electric energy are available at reasonable prices … [and] ancillary services costs incurred by the ERCOT … to address reliability issues arising from the operation of intermittent wind and solar resources must be directly assigned by the ERCOT … to those resources. . . .”
The bill passed the Texas State Senate on April 14 by a bipartisan vote of 18-13. However, the bill got held up in the Texas House of Representatives, and apparently the legislature has now adjourned without further action on the bill. Nevertheless, it appears that the legislature has a good deal of unfinished business, and will be called back into special session at some point later in the year.
The delay has given renewables advocates a chance to regroup. A piece on May 17 at something called Utility Dive gives many of these advocates a chance to present their arguments. Most of them are BS. But I think there is a significant flaw in the language of the bill as drafted, which is that it puts the burden on the regulator, ERCOT, to figure out what particular costs are attributable to intermittency issues. That task is not necessarily so easy to do with precision in a mixed system of fossil fuel and renewable sources. A guy named Michael Jewell of something called Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation makes the point when he says this:
“[C]ost causation here is unclear because reliability needs vary with customer demand and, like wind and solar, traditional generators can [also] go offline."
A far better structure would be for the grid operator to set up a bidding system where bidders offering power from wind and solar sources must combine their bids with sufficient backup and/or storage to provide some fixed amount of firm power over some reasonable period of time, say 24 hours. In a post back in July 2018 I phrased it this way:
[T]he grid operator should seek only offers of power that are firm and reliable for some reasonable period, say 24 hours at a time. If you want to sell wind power to the grid operator, it's then on you to also provide the mix of backup sources (could be fossil fuel power plants, could be batteries, could be whatever else you come up with) to make your offer reliable for the requisite period.
With that market structure, the wind and solar operators themselves would be required to recognize and calculate the costs of the intermittency of their assets. The structure would also give those operators the incentive to reduce the costs of intermittency (that is, of backup and/or storage) to the extent they can.
Someday, the world will come around to adopting my proposal. Meanwhile, I’m glad to report that Texas has at least woken up to the existence of this issue.
Anyone who thinks we can go 100% renewable is an idiot. I’m guessing 4-10% is closer to the truth and even that would be in a a high estimate at present levels of solar and wind capabilities!!!
What you say makes sense, but the main power source these days is natural gas. The thing is gas plants are pretty cheap to build and keep running, but fuel costs are high.
A plant that costs $500 million to build can burn a $1 billion in fuel per year.
It can make a lot of sense to spend $500 million on the gas plant and $500 million on wind turbines next door. The wind will be intermittent, but if it defers only half the fuel cost you’ve broken even in a year.
Seems like nobody ever calculates in the costs of manufacture, shipping, installation, and ultimately disposal of the devices at the end of their lives.
The total amount of energy needed for all that would, in all likelihood, exceed the amount of energy they actually produce in their lives, as opposed to the amount of energy they theoretically can produce.
Good análisis !
What all the world needs now and for centuries to come, is cheap and plentiful energy. “Fossil fuels” (and that is a misnomer) provide a bridge until such time as a much safer form of nuclear power is made available. The older form, uranium-fueled light water reactors, has a number of rather severe limitations, one of which is that the “spent” fuel which cannot any longer produce sufficient energy to supply the reactions necessary to maintain the nuclear chain reaction, and are contaminated with plutonium, a deadly and long-lived isotope which can be used to make dirty nuclear bombs.
But technology has gone far to update and replace the uranium-fueled plants, using a thorium-fueled molten salt reactor that is inherently much safer, and also cheaper to set up and run. The fuel, thorium, is both more plentiful and much safer to handle than uranium, and it is not capable of runaway “China syndrome” overheating and meltdown. And one of the more important advantages, it NEEDS a small amount of a “spent” uranium fuel rod to initiate and sustain a nuclear reaction in the molten salt solution, so eventually the stockpiles of “spent” uranium fuel rods will be used up. There is a small amount of atomic “ash” left over when thorium reactors are recharged, but its volume is both much smaller, and composed of relatively short-lived atomic isotopes, in contrast to the uranium fuel rods.
These thorium-fueled molten salt reactors generate an enormous amount of heat, which could be used not only for electric power generation, but the heat could be used to drive a number of other processes, including the distillation of brackish water to make fresh potable water, and to power any number of industrial level formulation applications, like the thermal depolymerization of organic wastes, to make a very good grade of kerogen, the feedstock from which “fossil fuels” are fractionated.
A new age is dawning upon the world, if only some long-standing superstitions and taboos can be put aside.
Before we experience such outages, we have to find a way never to allow such to have their hands on any buttons or switches of responsibility. To include food, energy, transportation, government, etc.
That may just be a pipe dream as we seem to have reached that point already.
What’s the “environmental” cost of building double the infrastructure to back up “intermittent” sources? We all know the answer.
It’s staggering how many people oppose this. They’d rather fill up landfills and then complain about how many landfills there are than do something that actually works and produces electricity at the same time.
Point being humans didn’t have any impact on that at all though did they :0)
What’s the “environmental” cost of building double the infrastructure to back up “intermittent” sources? We all know the answer.
Indeed we do, but there are some deaf ears not listening.
It can make a lot of sense to spend $500 million on the gas plant and $500 million on wind turbines next door. The wind will be intermittent, but if it defers only half the fuel cost you’ve broken even in a year.
If instead one built a coal or nuc plant, you wouldn’t have the problem of fluctuating gas prices to begin with.
Energy suppliers have been hamstrung for decades by environmental actions that have resulted in the destruction of the coal industry and coal fired power plants in the idiotic pursuit of man is harming the planet BS. The very reliability of the electric grid is now being compromised by such “thinking”.
We know what works, and if we refuse to stick with it, we will be the ones suffering in the cold. God provides and only man can screw it up with brainless “thinking”.
At this moment coal really doesn’t make sense. It a more expensive fuel that NG, and plants are more expensive to maintain.
Instead of a $500 million dollar NG plant burning a $1 billion in fuel per year, for coal you will need a $2 billion plant that burns $1.5 billion in fuel each year. Everything about it is more expensive than NG.
That may change, cheap gas can’t last forever, but right now the fuel costs are enough higher than NG that the costly conversion of a coal plant to NG will break even in only a few years.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.