Posted on 12/15/2023 5:29:42 AM PST by MtnClimber
It’s the question that must always be front and center in your mind when you read anything generated by advocates of energy transition as a supposed solution to “climate change”: Is this just rank incompetence, or is it intentional fraud? (The third possibility — reasonable, good faith advocacy — can generally be ruled out in the first few nanoseconds.). As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, I suppose it would be better to be merely incompetent. However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying.
So let’s apply this inquiry to a piece that has come to my attention in the past few days.
From euronews.green we have a piece from November 12 with the headline “Powered by wind and water: The Canary Island proving it is possible to run on renewables.” The byline is Lauren Crosby Mendicott. Ms. Mendicott announces the exciting news that one of Spain’s Canary Islands, El Hierro, has recently reported that it ran its electricity system entirely on wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. Excerpt:
The smallest of the Canary Islands has achieved a record of only using wind and water power for 28 consecutive days. . . . [T]he 1.1 million-year-old volcanic island is on route to being 100 per cent energy self-sufficient through clean, renewable sources. Its 10,000 inhabitants and local government are equally committed to the sustainability of the island.
Wow, that’s great! But OK Lauren, tell us more. If the system ran on just wind and water power for 28 days, what happened on days 29, 30, 31 and thereafter? Can we expect that with just a few tweaks the system can get to running 365 days a year on its wind/water system without fossil fuel backup? Or is it in fact nowhere close to that goal? Unfortunately you will not find any information on those subjects in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
As readers here know, I have been somewhat focused on the El Hierro project for several years, because it is the closest thing in the world to an attempt to build a demonstration project to show that wind power combined with energy storage can create a fully-functioning electricity grid without fossil fuel backup. I have had numerous pieces over the years dealing with the results of the El Hierro project, most recently this one on September 30, 2023. My conclusion from the data available at that time:
The Gorona del Viento project (wind turbines and a pumped storage reservoir) on El Hierro Island off Spain fails worse and worse every year.
The El Hierro system has wind turbines and energy storage from a pumped hydro system with nameplate capacity seemingly well in excess of peak electricity usage on the island. So theoretically they should have no problem getting all of their electricity from the wind/storage system — right? And yet, when you look at their annual data, somehow they only seem to average about 50% of annual electricity from the wind/storage system. Sometimes it gets to 70% or so for a few months, but then at other times it drops back to as little as around 30%. When I visited the Gorona del Viento website back in September, I found data for what it claimed as hours of operation on “100% renewable” generation for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020 — and nothing thereafter. For some reason, they had stopped reporting these data after 2020. The numbers were 2300 hours in 2018, 1905 in 2019, and 1293 in 2020 — a rather precipitous ongoing decline. Given that there are 8760 hours in a non-leap year (24 x 365 — likely beyond Ms. Mendicott’s math skills) these numbers represent shockingly small percentages of the annual operation of the system, declining from 26.3% in 2018 to only 14.7% in 2020 (a leap year with 8784 hours).
Going back to the Gorona del Viento web site today, I find the same figure of 1293 hours of “100% renewable” generation for 2020, and no subsequent data. Maybe those data are lurking somewhere in the Spanish-language portions of the site where I can’t find them. But somehow I think that if they had some great news to report on that subject, it would be front and center.
El Hierro is blessed with a rare near-perfect site for a pumped-storage hydro facility, with a volcano rising nearly straight up from the sea and a big crater on the top to store the water. Here is a picture of the shoreline, with the mountain rising nearly perpendicular out of the water:
And yet, despite having such a rare near-perfect site for a large pumped hydro storage facility, the El Hierro system does not have nearly the energy storage needed to provide full-time electricity from the wind/storage system. It would need to multiply its storage capacity by at least an order of magnitude to come close to 100% electricity from this system. Meanwhile, most of its electricity comes from a backup diesel generator — a fact nowhere mentioned in Ms. Mendicott’s piece.
So, is the piece mere incompetence, or intentional fraud? Several factors would seem to give strong support to the inference of intentional fraud — failure to mention the diesel backup at all; failure to mention the number of hours in each recent year where the diesel backup had to be called into activity to keep the lights on, and whether that number of hours was trending up or down; failure even to consider how much energy storage would be needed to enable the system to operate full time without the diesel backup, and whether there are any plans to provide that amount of storage or at what cost. Is it possible that someone could write a piece on this subject without even being aware of these issues? You be the judge!
I found a solar package with batteries on Amazon for $9,000 but it says it is window air, not anything about whole house air conditioning.
I’ve got a small 1600 sq foot house.
I’ve searched a few times through the years on how to calculate how much water I need for water turbines.
Today I learned that it’s all in terminology.
It’s called Closed Loop Hydropower and there are tutorials galore.
As a side note, I was sitting at my drafting table as a tool and die designer when an old man walked in.
This was about 1973.
He gives me a solar cell about 4 inches in diameter and tells me his plan on interconnecting them into an array.
I designed his die and gave him the parts it stamped.
The next time I saw his old station wagon it said ARCO Solar on the door.
It wasn’t long before I saw an ARCO Solar manufacturing plant being built.
Thanks for the help Tell It Right.
About the $9K solar package and air conditioning, it comes down to what you want from solar (i.e. just lower your power bills, or also be able to run your whole house if the power is out) and what's called "surge power" for starting appliances. Many appliances with a motor have two specs for power consumption: one for starting it up (surge power) and one for keeping it running (sometimes called constant power).
For example, in Phase I of my solar project (installed May 2021) I had an inverter that can provide 9kW continuous power (converting DC power to AC power), 16kW surge power for 10 seconds, and 25kW surge power for only 100ms. Because my old central A/C unit needed more than 16kW to start up, I couldn't run my A/C when the grid was down (thus my AC circuit wasn't on the critical load electrical panel that my inverter could power at all times, even when the grid was down). So I couldn't start my A/C the few times the grid was down (here in Alabama we're talking about only for a few minutes unless there's a tornado in my area, which hasn't happened in 12 years as far as taking out the power goes). However, solar was still able to save me tons of power running the A/C.
After owning solar for about 4 months and seeing my solar input track as expected regarding average daily peak solar hours as it changes per month in my area (as per the tool https://tsi.tyconsystems.com/html/nrel_lookup.htm, which was spot on for me), I converted my two natural gas appliances to high-efficiency electric ones to prepare for the winter. As part of replacing my natural gas furnace, I also replaced my old A/C unit with a variable speed heat pump, so that I now cool and heat my house with the heat pump unless it gets too cold for the heat pump, in which case the system uses heat strips.
With the variable speed heat pump, I need very little surge power to start it, so I was able to move the heat pump circuit to the critical load electrical panel and be able to cool or heat my home even if the grid was down (as long as it wasn't bitter cold, because the heat strips need a constant power of about 10kW). This Phase I system for a year provided 58% of all the power I needed in my all-electric home (which back then didn't include charging an EV). Of course, after upgrading my system in August last year to what I call Phase II (doubling the inverter capacity and solar input, tripling the battery storage), I can now run everything, including the heat strips, as long as I have solar and/or stored battery power. Mind you, I can't run all appliances at high speed simultaneously (i.e. charging the EV at 9.6kW instead of 5.6kW, plus running the clothes dryer on high at 6kW, plus running the water heater in "normal mode" which is normal heat strips at 4kW because I have company staying over instead of the usual efficiency mode at 300W, plus running the central air heat strips at 10kW because it's below freezing outside, while I'm in the hot tub with the jets on high drawing 3 or 4 kW, the sum of which would greatly exceed the 18kW continuous AC power my inverters can provide).
My recommendation before going solar is to make the home more energy efficient first. Even if you don't convert your natural gas appliances to electric like I did, a variable speed heat pump would probably do wonders. And don't forget simple insulation, sealing cracks, and door gaskets.
Another thing to consider is a hybrid water heater. Obviously if you have a nat gas water heater, then switching to a hybrid one would add to your power demand -- possibly. I use the cold air output from my hybrid water heater to help cool the home. My water heater is in a closet within my laundry room, which is in the living quarters of my house (off the small hallway near the living room and master bedroom). In the floor next to the water heater is a new air receiver for my central air. Thus, when the water heater runs, the cold air it produces is drawn in by my variable speed air handler and distributed throughout the house, which means my variable speed heat pump can run at lower speed for about 2 to 3 hours per day (how long the water heater runs on average in the warm half of the year). When winter comes, I flip a couple of levers for duct dampeners near the water heater, so that the cold air output from the water heater is ducted up into the attic (so that the cold air won't be drawn into the HVAC while I'm trying to warm the house). I also make the water heater run more efficiently by ducting the air input from the attic (where most of the year the air is very warm, sometimes hot) so that my water heater's heat pump doesn't have to work as hard to find heat from the air it draws in.
Before getting a hybrid water heater, though, look up the specs. There's a max length on the duct work coming in and out, so there's only so long you can run the duct work to get warm air from the attic and/or run duct work to direct the cold air output to somewhere useful for you to utilize.
Intentional fraud by evil incompetent people.
Your house sounds very efficient.
My house is over 100 years old.
Built with lath and plaster and no insulation in the walls.
The AC is new and I just put in an on-demand water heater.
I checked with my wife who pays the bills and we pay about $160 a month during the hottest months for electricity.
I charge $300 a month to board horses for friends.
The going rate at nearby stables ranges from $600 to $1,000.
A national park starts in my backyard and people trailer their horses here for the trails.
Boarding more horses sounds like my best option.
Like I said earlier, I love my neighborhood and the people are all so friendly.
This conversation is kind of like me thinking out loud on what to do when my wife retires.
My wife retired a few years ago at 55 and I’ll retire a few years from now in my late 50’s. My #1 purpose for the energy project is protecting our finances for decades of retirement from inflation, particularly energy cost inflation, since the Dims are hell bent on doing that.
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