We Must Demand A Demonstration Project Of A Mainly Renewables-Based Electrical Grid

Manhattan Contrarian ^ | 8 Feb, 2023 | Francis Menton

[MtnClimber]

Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels? It takes hardly any thought about the matter to realize that wind and solar don’t work when it is calm and dark, as it often is, and particularly so in the winter, when it is also generally cold. Thus a wind/solar electricity system needs full backup, or alternatively storage — things that add to and multiply costs. Surely, our political leaders and top energy gurus are fully aware of these things, and would not try to mislead the public about the cost of electricity from a predominantly wind/solar system.

If you think that, you must have missed the State of the Union Address yesterday. Nor is Presdident Biden alone in peddling the preposterous fantasy of cheap electricity from the wind and sun The internet is filled with seemingly authoritative voices asserting with complete confidence that wind and solar generators are the answer to providing consumers with cheaper electricity.

No amount of pointing to the failed experiments of places like Germany, the UK and California seems to get any traction. We need to demand a working demonstration project of a fully wind/solar system so that the full costs can be shown for all to see.

So there was President Biden last night talking about his great green energy plans.

Look, the Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis. Lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, and leading the world to a clean energy future.

It’s so spectacularly contrary to reality that it doesn’t nearly do it justice to call it just a “lie.” In Germany and the UK, energy transition fantasies have led to electricity bills three times and more the U.S. average, and continuing to increase, and millions of ratepayers thrown into energy poverty. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why the costs explode. They can build thousands of wind turbines and solar panels, but they can’t get rid of any of the dispatchable power plants because they are all needed for backup. So now they are paying for two duplicative systems. Then they must pay the dispatchable plants enough to cover their capital costs at half time usage. Then they must buy the fossil fuels for backup on spot markets where production has been suppressed by, for example, banning fracking.

But as I said, it’s not just President Biden who is too dumb to figure this out. Consider Mark Z. Jacobson, Professor at Stanford and tireless promoter of his WWS (water, wind and solar) system as the “low cost” way of the future. No amount of debunking of Jacobson’s models can keep him from endlessly repeating the same ridiculous claims. He got another shot just yesterday in the Guardian, headline “We don’t need ‘miracle’ technologies to fix the climate. We have the tools now”:

Wind, water and solar energy is cheap, effective and green. We don’t need experimental or risky energy sources to save our planet.

Jacobson goes on with endless mumbo jumbo about how his fantasy system can deliver electricity at low cost. Excerpt:

When combined with electricity storage, heat storage, cold storage and hydrogen storage; techniques to encourage people to shift the time of their electricity use (demand response); a well-interconnected electrical transmission system; and nifty and efficient electrical appliances, such as heat pumps, induction cooktops, electric vehicles and electric furnaces for industry, WWS can solve the ginormous problems associated with climate change at low cost worldwide.

Is there any such thing as a demonstration project on any scale — small, medium, or large — to vindicate these claims that such a future system would be “low cost”? Absolutely not. I would say that everybody with even half a brain knows that Jacobson is a charlatan. But then we have our President, not to mention the entire federal bureaucracy backed by trillions of dollars of annual taxpayer largesse, buying into his nonsense.

Nobody would be happier than me to see a demonstration project built that showed that wind and solar could provide reliable electricity at low cost. Unfortunately, I know too much about the subject to think that that is likely, or even remotely possible. But at least the rest of us need to demand a demonstration project from the promoters of these fantasies.

[EEGator]

PUC, NERC, FERC, PJM, etc?…

[Sequoyah101]

More like an MPA which is even less useful for the purposes than an MBA?

I can’t imagine much of the engineering world now. The one I left 7 years ago was getting pretty bad with substandard educations and spotty qualification. With much of the boomer generation and their experience disappeared all at once a lot of expensive relearning has to be taking place.

The last two years I have watched our local coop install fiber to the home in a rural area. That is going to be a lot of glass to replace when we finally get another one of our world class ice storms. I plan to stay on the line of sight commercial broadband system I now use as long as they can hold out.

Seems like a hub and spoke hybrid system expanding from substations where there is already at least T1 with vastly underutilized capacity would have been less costly and more reliable. Seems like anyone could have / should have seen this.

Instead, they strung fiber on the poles down every pig trail in the service area.

[deport]

Dats de big boys. But you have to deal with the
locals at county, city, etc level also. They
want their little slice of the pie also.

[Cincinnatus.45-70]

Represented DOD as an intervenor in rate cases. Got to attend the NARUC course at Michigan State.

[EEGator]

It’s brutal in a way. I have had to learn to not care, aside from what I personally turn in, about my industry.
In current companies, HR(which seems to only be fat assed black women) will only hire a person after the experienced person is gone from the company.
Zero transition of knowledge.
More and more personnel don’t have EE degrees.
More promotions for Boobs Patel and Jaquarious Jenkins.

The amount of work we have, and funds allocated, is staggering.
I essentially have all the OT I want until death, and I’m in my 40’s…
I will be fine, but the future?…

[EEGator]

That’s interesting. Some serious weight thrown around there.

[Tell It Right]

This is a great idea. In fact, the demonstration system could be extremely simple. For instance, giving nearly the best possible location and system: a single solar home in suburban Phoenix. The only caveat would be that the solar panels must all be located on the property, be used to provide all power, heating/AC, and EV charging, with no absolutely no fossil fuel usage by the homeowner, and absolutely no grid power could be used at any time. There would simply be not enough acreage to place the solar panels and Batteries on the property, not to mention their outlandish cost.

I'm 100% with the sentiment of the control-freak greenies should have to prove it. I'm not for them forcing it onto us even if it's proven. But as far as if it CAN be done, especially at the individual level instead of the utility level if you're like me and want to make your family less depending on things the Dims over-regulate like they do energy...

Well, I'm not at THAT point of being 100% reliable on solar. Nor do I live near Phoenix. My suburban home (so much of my property and the nearby properties are wooded it's borderline calling it "rural" instead of "suburban") in Alabama has lots of solar on the roof and battery storage in the garage with no use of land (thus no space needed for solar besides the building structures). And it produces 80% (admittedly not 100%) of all the power we consume in our all-electric home, including charging our EV.

For reference, we've put 17K miles on our EV since we bought it in late June. Not all of the charging for that was done at home (we take it on trips if the trip has fast chargers along the route). But 3,700 kWh of charging was done at home (compared to 1,700 kWh charged on the road). So count it as charging our EV for driving 11,500 miles in less than 8 months, along with powering the rest of the house.

To support your point about other forms of energy consumption needing to be considered, we do occasionally drive the ICE pickup for pickup chores and for if a long trip is through an area with few chargers. I can't imagine relying completely on EV's. The same with buying gas to for my lawn mower. (Though I'm considering a battery riding mower whenever the day comes that my existing riding mower gives up the ghost and has to be replaced anyway.)

To support your point about solar being too expensive to rely on it for 100% of our energy. The reason I didn't expand the solar and storage capacity to meet beyond 80% of our needs is because that's the point where I run into the law of diminishing returns. The system I have now will pay for itself on about the 11th year (assuming a 3% inflation rate of all energy costs I avoid, which of course the Dims keep promising to raise even faster than that). That includes paying the interest on the HELOC I took out to pay for most of this energy project (admittedly the Fed is raising interest rates so starting a project like this now might not be worth it like it is for me with my low fixed interest rate). If I had tried to make it produce 95% of our power the payoff point would be 20 years.

I'm just saying, it can be done most efficiently if you live in a good area for it and you do it on your own initiative to make sure it's done correctly to meet your needs (not regulated by some bureaucrat). Don't be surprised if soon a lot of southern homeowning FReepers do the same to wean ourselves off of the Dims' stupid energy policies.

[Vaduz]

Renewables-Based Electrical Grid

Solar generators are always good for a early 4th of July event.

[cpdiii]

Renewable power is good provided it is cost competitive with conventional power. Today it is not. An electrical grid must have sufficient backup conventional power for when the sun does not shine, and the wind does not blow. This does not exist today in Texas. Thus, the big freeze last year left millions without power when the wind did not blow, and the sun did not shine.

The best thing to do is end all subsidies for renewable power. When and if it is cost competitive the electric companies will build it themselves.

[JoJo354]

Now that is interesting. I am computer illiterate when it comes to EXCEL but my hubby does his own programming for financing in EXCEL and he also did a program for the Spamdemic cases and deaths that were being reported during the first 18 months of the “crises” and he showed that the reports were mostly lies and the numbers just didn’t add up. That’s how we treated everything the government was trying to push on us...we knew it was all a scam.

[norwaypinesavage]

It looks a little chilly and rainy in Alabama today. How are you heating your solar powered home?

[Chode]

“that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels”

that was never in their plans...

as long as it’s somehow made constant, they don’t care if it costs twice as much, their goal is to kill petroleum.

[Tell It Right]

It looks a little chilly and rainy in Alabama today. How are you heating your solar powered home?

I have not pulled from the grid since 8 AM Saturday morning (6 days) except for a 100W continuous pull as a kind of ping to the utility. It's my way of telling the utility not to automatically shut off my service for lack of pull. Thus, the small orange blocks in the screenshot below from Sunday to today is 2.4kWh of power pulled each day. For comparison, we actually consumed 73.2kWh on Feb 6 (the long pink bar above the 06).

For starters, it's not chilly here (mid 50's) near Birmingham, AL. But the cloudy overcast has been somewhat constant the past 6 days with some breaks of sunlight and also some rain. Right now when I look at the sun it's through a cloud, yet I'm getting 10.5kW in solar, while my house is consuming 0.9kW (900 watts) of power. Thus, even with the cloudy overcast I'm charging my batteries enough to probably last through the night again without pulling from the grid (except the constant 100W pull). Tomorrow it's supposed to rain all day. So I wouldn't be surprised if by mid-day tomorrow I'm pulling virtually of my power from the grid until about noon Sunday. So there are good days where the system saves me lots of money, and bad days (like Feb 1 and 2 in the screenshot) where the system saves me little or no money. But I'm trying to win it on the averages so that the system protects my long term financial planning from the Dims' stupid energy price inflation.

To understand it from a long view, look at the overall difference between the pink bars (the load, which is the power we consume) and the orange bars (the power imported from the grid). The greater the average difference between those two bars, the more money the system is saving us (by us not having to pull that much power from the grid to enjoy the lifestyle we want).

[joe fonebone]

EXCEL is an excellent spreadsheet program. You can do anything with it.

This is why, when the fed says they can’t clean up voter rolls, etc. I have to call BS.
Give me the raw information and a week and I will have a viable database, that can be filtered to find anything you want it to find.
And, you can import from non-compatable programs and convert.

I’ve been using EXCEL since the Lotus 123 and EXCEL wars of the late 80’s.

[JoJo354]

My husband is all self taught on EXCEL and I had to talk him into even getting a computer back in late 1999. I had one and I was playing with design programs for houses and I loved it so I thought he would like to try something similar. Well, he installed the whole package of EXCEL, Works and Word and he just started working with it and found he loved EXCEL and the things he does with it amazes me.

[norwaypinesavage]

It sure looks like you have a well thought out strategy and a forward-looking plan. I wish you success.

It’s too bad the global warming zealots aren’t so well informed.