Posted on 03/26/2024 4:54:01 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis — replacement of fossil fuels in the energy system with intermittent wind-and-sun-based electricity generation — is not going to work. This is obvious to anyone who considers the subject seriously for any amount of time. Yet any mention of this issue has been almost completely banished from the mainstream media, from academia, from government, and from social media. It remains to a few lonely voices (such as, here in New York, myself, Roger Caiazza, and Ken Girardin of the Empire Center) to keep the subject in the public consciousness.
As small and lonely as our voices may be, somehow we must be getting under their skin. We know that because increasingly officialdom feels a need to respond publicly to our criticisms. But how can they give a plausible response, given that we are absolutely right and a wind-and-sun-based electricity system is never going to work? Easy! — Just treat the public like morons. Give answers that don’t make any sense while appealing to apparent authority, and expect the public to accept the answers without asking probing questions.
On March 17, Ken Girardin of the Empire Center think tank picked up on a press release just issued from an agency called NYSERDA (New York State Energy Research and Development Agency — the people in charge of the transition to “renewable” energy in New York) requesting proposals for what are described as “Public Relations Services” to assist “in developing a narrative around New York State’s clean energy and climate priorities.” In the next breath, NYSERDA discloses that a focus of the public relations effort will be “being able to rapidly respond to negative viewpoints and perceptions about the State’s climate and clean energy goals under the Climate Act, the costs associated with the Climate Act, and challenges to particular policies and programs.” Funny how these negative “viewpoints and perceptions” keep popping up. NYSERDA indicates that it is initially putting up $500,000 of taxpayer money to fund this effort, although it “reserves the right to extend and/or add funding to the Solicitation should other program funding sources become available.” Responses are due April 8.
While we await the hiring of these pricey professionals, NYSERDA is doing some of its own in-house PR to respond to the pesky critics. Caiazza has a post on March 23 reporting on the issuance on March 21 of an email blast by NYSERDA announcing something they call their “Solar Quiz.” Here is the excited introduction:
You may already know that solar panels convert the sun’s free and abundant light into electricity. Pretty great, right? So, we thought we’d give you a quick quiz to test your solar smarts.
The Solar Quiz consists of six questions, of which only the first two go to substantive issues of whether this is a viable source of electricity to power the grid. Here is question number one, with the full answer:
Q: Do solar panels work on cloudy days? A: Yes! Because the panels collect light, they still function on cloudy days even though efficiency is somewhat reduced.
I like the exclamation point after the “Yes.” But is the reduction in electricity output from solar panels on a cloudy day a little or a lot? And does it make any difference to whether you can match supply to demand to make the grid function? Don’t expect answers to those kinds of questions here. This quiz is for dummies.
Caiazza helpfully supplies a photograph of a weather station in Buffalo on March 23 at 10:15 AM, plus a graph of weather data from the same site for the seven days leading up to noon on the same date. The weather station is situated in the midst of a large array of solar panels, so you can get an idea what the conditions were like for the generation of electricity on that day (the third day of spring!):
And here is Caiazza’s graph of data from the weather station:
The red and green lines are temperature and dew point, while the harder-to-see yellow line, showing “insolation,” is the one we are interested in. Although it is faint, it looks like the yellow line didn’t even make it up to 200 at noon on March 23, compared to maxing out at over 800 on the sunny days of the 17th, 20th and 21st. So the “somewhat reduced efficiency” alluded to by NYSERDA can easily be a reduction of 75% or more. And note that reduced “insolation” is not the only thing degrading the performance of these particular solar panels. How about the fact that they are covered in snow? From the photograph, it looks highly doubtful that these panels were producing any meaningful amount of electricity after that snowstorm.
Question number two in NYSERDA’s Solar Quiz is even more insulting to the intelligence of the reader:
Q: If I have solar panels, will my house still have energy at night? A: Yes. Solar-powered homes collect excess energy and pass it to the grid for future use, and if you don’t have excess energy stored you pull energy from the grid at any time, like when it’s dark. Another option for night-time energy use is on-site battery storage, which collects excess energy and saves it for when it’s needed.
This is George Kamburoff-level critical thinking. Caiazza comments:
This is egregious misinformation. . . . In my opinion the worst subsidy for residential solar is the unacknowledged cost to provide grid energy when the sun does not shine. Somebody else is paying for the infrastructure (storage or alternative sources) necessary so that solar-equipped residences can “pull energy from the grid at any time”. Inevitably the “net-metering” rules will have to be changed so this subsidy is reduced or eliminated. The mention of on-site battery storage is a start, but the reality is that the largest reliability cost is associated with extreme conditions and providing enough solar panels and energy storage to start to address that problem is uneconomic for an individual.
Nothing complicated there. But NYSERDA either is treating the public like morons, or alternatively they are morons themselves and don’t understand why what they are proposing can’t work. (Of course, it could be both.)
While we wait to see how our new professional spin-meisters are going to up the game of the New York energy propaganda machine, let’s check in with similar efforts from the other side of the globe. In Australia, the state-run Australian Broadcasting Corporation has an official “fact-checking” service called CheckMate. From the information on their web page, they seem to have two mottos: “Your inoculation against misinformation,” and “Fearlessly follow the facts no matter where they lead.”
In their fact check of March 22, CheckMate addresses the question “Can a country run entirely on renewable energy?” It seems that an Australian businessman named Dick Smith appeared on a Sydney radio station called 2GB earlier this week, and was quoted as saying "Look, I can tell you, this claim by the CSIRO that you can run a whole country on solar and wind is simply a lie. . . . It is not true. They are telling lies. No country has ever been able to run entirely on renewables — that's impossible." (CSIRO is the official government-supported scientific groupthink agency. The acronym stands for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization.). So, ABC, is there anything to Mr. Smith’s assertion?
Here’s their answer:
[E]xperts consulted by RMIT ABC Fact Check suggested Mr Smith's statement doesn't hold up.
Oh, really? What experts, exactly? And how do they back that up?
Mark Diesendorf, an expert on sustainable energy and energy policy from the University of New South Wales, labelled Mr Smith's assertions as "incorrect". "Several countries (and Tasmania) already run their electricity systems on 100 per cent renewables," he said in an email, noting that such places relied heavily on hydro power.
Sure, a handful of tiny-population countries, like Albania, Bhutan and Iceland, that happen to have lots of hydro or geothermal power can run on that. But Smith said the thing that was impossible was running on “solar and wind.” What’s the response to that? ABC goes to its next “expert”:
Andrew Blakers, a professor of engineering at the Australian National University's Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster solutions, told Fact Check: "Several detailed studies show that [getting to] 100 per cent renewables based mostly on solar and wind is quite straightforward, provided that enough transmission and storage is built."
“Detailed studies” show that it can work. So you say. But what is the country that has been able to run 100% on solar and wind, thus refuting Smith? He can’t name it. It doesn’t exist.
And then ABC resorts to the ultimate charlatan, Professor Mark Jacobson of Stanford:
When it came to regions with a comparable or greater population size to that of Australia, Professor Jacobson pointed to the US state of California, which has a population of around 39 million. As of Tuesday this week, he said, the state, which is aiming for 100 per cent carbon-free electricity by 2045, had "been running on more than 100 per cent WWS for 10 out of the last 11 days for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day".
Aha! So it counts as “running a whole country on wind and solar” if you can accomplish the feat for between 0.25 and 6 hours per day on 10 of 11 cherry-picked days? This is how they refute Mr. Smith.
I know that neither the American nor Australian public pays much close attention to the details of how the electricity grid works. But I also don’t think the respective publics are at nearly the level of idiocy that officialdom would place them. It is truly shocking that they have no better answers than these, even as they press forward to transform the energy systems without any indication that the transformation will work. Show us the working demonstration project!
Just pass a law that makes 100% wind and solar mandatory.
Manhattan Contrarian ping
...But the accumulation of dust on solar panels or mirrors is already a significant issue — it can reduce the output of photovoltaic panels by as much as 30 percent in just one month — so regular cleaning is essential for such installations....
There's a shocker, eh?
Question: Has anyone EVER seen anyone cleaning any of these things? Anywhere?!
Bueller? Bueller??
For those interested in the whole climate crisis issue, this is a must watch video.
https://youtu.be/A24fWmNA6lM?si=BkPijcg2mEi6reFC
They sort of have with the EPA setting impossible to achieve levels of “tailpipe emissions” as if these were somehow different than power plant emissions.
“The single biggest problem with the Left’s “climate” agenda is that the proposed response to the alleged crisis” is that it is all based on a hoax (lie).
I intend to design, procure and install an off-grid PV system for our home and garden. It will provide power for the outbuildings and critical systems in the house. And, it will have battery storage and an automatic generator backup.
The stupidity of a grid-tied PV system is massive. If the grid goes down, your PV system is disabled for the safety of the power company workers. This is not unreasonable, as a retired electrical engineer, power safety is paramount, but people have to know that effect to their system, unless they have a cutoff system to isolate their PV from the grid. Even then, if they do not have batteries, when the sun goes down, so does their electrical power.
We nearly got scammed by one of those PV companies, which triggered me to do the research. They wanted to sell us a grid-tied system with no batteries (Too expensive) for nearly $200k! When we cancelled, they came back with a price of $79k which we rejected, but it took nearly a year to get the “project” cancelled. Caveat Emptor!
…and efficient.
Subsidies show the inefficiency of wind and solar.
Base load can never be carried via either.
Side note- we had a work meeting discussing how we could improve efficiency.
My immediate thought was to say “not have meetings about efficiency”.
I only thought this.
Rain does most of the cleaning. I clean my panels twice per year with a squeegee and a water hose. I do it after pollen season is over, then again half a year later. IMHO, this is very minimal work and not a good argument against the left's mandating to solar/wind.
The fact that solar and wind are intermittent are what we should focus on. The left's claim that we can rely 100% on them is hogwash. My solar is successful for me because "success" as I define it isn't being 100% dependent on them. They greatly reduce my power bills (only 20% of my power has to be pulled from the grid).
Because the grid has to be 100% reliable, making the grid dependent on solar is a very bad idea. The only way I can support solar farms going to the grid is if there would be a way to make fossil fueled plants scalable -- able to cheaply turn those up or down depending on when solar isn't doing enough. To my knowledge, that capability doesn't exist.
“Because the grid has to be 100% reliable, making the grid dependent on solar is a very bad idea.”
When the alternative is the end of life on an incinerated Mother Earth, the assumption that the grid has to be 100% reliable is downright dangerous. There is no real reason for people to be doing anything at night, Just turn everything off, then the grid will be fine. //OFF SARC
These people have a swindle going. It will catch up to them. The electric vehicle part of it already seems to be catching up to them.
Natural gas generation is able to provide dispatchable energy on an as-needed basis to the grid. Since solar and wind generated energy are unreliable and also tend to destabilize the grid the more of it penetrates, this standby “spinning reserve,” is essential given current infrastructure. It doesn’t necessarily come cheap, however.
The reason Texas almost collapsed a couple years ago was that when the wind generation failed, ERCOT had to cut the feed to the gas fields, which meant compressors and pumps in the NG system failed. The media of course blamed NG instead of the real culprit, 7000 wind turbines freezing up or simply falling idle when the wind died.
Why did ERCOT have to cut the feed to the gas fields when the wind generation failed?
I have a relative who agreed to a rooftop solar panel system at his home, on a 25 year lease basis. Together with the montly lease cost and what energy from the grid he requires, he has had a modest reduction in his total electric power cost.
Then, during one hot year in California, he found - with no battery power backup system - when the grid operator is forced to shut the grid for any reason, he loses power because the solar panel system’s electric controls must shut off when the grid goes down because otherwise they’d be trying to send power to the grid.
A: Yes. Solar-powered homes collect excess energy and pass it to the grid for future use...
Bovine Scatology. What little excess power from household solar panels sent to the grid is not "stored" for future use. There are only two methods for "storing" electricity at the grid level, Battery and inverter pairs, which are ferociously expensive, require constant maintenance, have a relatively short lifetime and create toxic waste both during manufacture and disposal. Pumped storage using water reservoirs to hold water pumped in during low demand periods and released through generators during higher demand. Pumped storage sites are expensive to build, can only be done in certain locations and are operated on overall grid demand profile not necessarily for returning home generated solar at night.
The whole agenda is a hoax and was produced 100% for the political creation of businesses and industries beholden to socialist agendas and other political groups that would provide dictates, mandates and regulations to lift up those industries and make them beholden to the politicians that made them possible.
Cutting carbon emissions is insane when China doesn’t have to anything. This is meant to shut down. Imagine millions of people not being able to go to work, hospital,, store, bank, run errands, etc when grid goes down across America.
“Why did ERCOT have to cut the feed to the gas fields when the wind generation failed?”
I don’t think it was ERCOT, it was the EPA. In order to ‘save the planet’ they required the gas pumping stations to run on electricity, rather than their own natural gas, as had always been done.
As I say, people in a position to know better should stop bending over and taking it, and instead SPEAK UP with the government is doing stuff that is really stupid.
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