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Posted on 05/03/2025 3:25:52 AM PDT by george76
The Spanish blackout made us all aware of how unstable the grid can get when renewables are in the driver’s seat, but one should also not forget that they don’t come cheaply. The idea of getting free energy from wind and solar is inaccurate. Man must build machines to extract energy from nature and those machines, windmills and solar panels, are expensive.
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renewables are unreliable and expensive
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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They work small-scale, in your back yard
For Solar Reliant Systems every afternoon is a race against Darkness
They’re attempting to dim the sun, ya know.
Wind and solar are extremely reliable for producing government waste and fraud. Obama proved that. We really don’t need to look any farther to know “renewable” just doesn’t work when there is access to the grid. Has everyone forgotten the Texas winter just a few years ago?
Ivanpah, a solar power facility in the Mojave Desert. Fifteen years ago they got a $1.6 billion loan from the Department of Energy. Now 11 years later, the facility is closing.
Most educated folks should know by now that the so-called “renewables” are just completely unsatisfactory for large scale uses. They may be very good for small scale uses, however, that don’t have to be 100% reliable in day to day usage. I’m wondering though if they can be financially feasible for such uses.
I don’t know if Bill Ponton’s numbers are correct but I’ll give him credit for at least attempting to work through the various operating scenarios for a mix of generation sources.
In working through costs for backup (when there is no wind and solar), the biggest issue that most folks don’t realize is that the cost (and efficiency) of gas generation isn’t just one number. Combined cycle gas generation is quite efficient (let’s use 60% as the max value and state of the art combined cycle is slightly more efficient than that). On the other hand, open loop gas turbines are typically less than 40% efficient. The problem is that combined cycle can’t respond fast enough to changing load requirements so it’s quite likely that if gas turbines are needed to make up a grid shortfall caused by the loss of wind and solar generation, it becomes necessary to use gas turbines that can go from zero to 100% in a very short period.... that excludes the more efficient combined cycle which simply can’t react fast enough. What this means is that a tremendous amount of natural gas is inherently wasted using less efficient gas turbines.... almost to the extent that the wind and solar contribution is zero when compared to what they could have got out of X amount of natural gas if only combined cycle was used. Just to be clear, this isn’t meant in an absolute sense.... lots of number crunching for all kinds of demand scenarios would need to be worked through to put a proper definition to that.
I didn’t take the time to track through all of Ponton’s calculations but it seems that this is what he is referring to on his lines A98 and A99.....
A98 60% Thermal efficiency (without wind and solar power)
A99 50% Thermal efficiency (with wind and solar power)
I would argue that the thermal efficiency with wind and solar power should be closer to 40% and even that is likely optimistic... but perhaps there are other considerations built into that number which weren’t identified.
One other issue that is never ever addressed is what all this up and down cyclical load business does to the longterm maintenance and reliability of the equipment... just think of an automobile that travels 100 miles unimpeded on a highway versus traveling 100 miles in stop and go traffic. There have been numerous technical papers written on the impact on power plants and the existing electrical infrastructure to accommodate wind and solar... none of is good. Where does the cost of significantly reduced life of existing facilities get factored into the calculations? Oh right... that’s down the road and therefore easy to ignore.
While they are dimming the sun, I hope someone gets to work removing salt from the oceans. If the sun can be dimmed, the salt can be removed. No? s/
Most of those “clean” projects are so expensive, they cannot even pay the interest on their loans!
In engineering economy terms, you will never invest for something which can’t even pay for its own interest!
Solar is good small scale on houses, flat roofs and parking areas. Wind is not a solution and ugly.
Small nuclear is the way to go. They’re like small unattended batteries with decades of life and no long distance powerline losses.
Save the gas for my outdoor grill; high test for my jaguar.
Of course the CO2 thing driving all this is a sham. If we were to find a reachhable planet with the worst case climate predictions and all other earth charactristics, we’d flock there to colonize it. Who needs polar ice anyway?
Elon wants to get to Mars with zero water and 93% CO2 in the atmosphere.
In my view, wind could be a good passive source for charging an electric generator.
“Renewables” are nothing more that virtue signaling until someone comes up with a storage tech that can scale. The energy must be stored overnight. Batteries are a pipe dream.
I worked at PG&E for ten years. We had one storage tech up and running — for a while. Excess power from our nukes was used to pump water uphill to a dam - which released the water when leccy was needed.
The pipe ruptured. Flooded a town nearby. Had to pay for damages — which wiped out all savings and doomed the project.
Paying off those damages also wiped out a $16,000 bonus I was supposed to get that year. So, I still hurt about that.
Renewable, sustainable, clean, green, organic, ... all propaganda buzzwords used by the evangelists for the New Green Religion.
The purpose of so-called renewables isn’t energy.
Their purpose is to enrich, with taxpayer dollars, democrat politicians and their NGO camp following prostitutes.
“Has everyone forgotten the Texas winter just a few years ago?”
You mean the winter where 38,000 megawatts of thermal power dropped off line that winter. Where the oil and gas industry flat out ignored the scientists and engineers who said you must winterize the wellheads, the surface running gathering lines , the not insulated oil,water,gas separators and also didn’t winterize any of the cooling systems for coal,nuclear and gas turbine combined cycle plants you mean that winter. I can assure you the cause as detailed in the 101 page certified report we sent to the Texas legislature points out correctly it was massive thermal power dropped off that killed the Texas grid full stop. The loss of 10,000 megawatts of wind was a rounding error in that case. Look in my post history I link the certified report as my consulting group had input in the report. It will show you and everyone else how the grid went down and no it was not frozen wind turbines. The grid crashed at night solar actually HELPED the grid the next few days. It was the systematic crash of the gas grid that brought down ERCOT this has been confirmed by no less than three independent groups doing after action reports.
I have a wind turbine that feeds the same inverters the solar panels feed. It tends to be windy when the sun is not out like when a storm from moves through and at night when the different cooling rates of fields vs urban areas cause advection. My 50kw turbine on a 30 meter mono pole kicks in at 3 meter per second it makes 5KW that’s just under 7mph winds. It’s oversized by design so when it cuts in at 3mps and 5000 watts by 4mps it’s making 10KW while it takes a full 10mps (22mph) to reach full power. Most winds in the North Texas Plains are in the 3-8mps range most of the time so oversized turbines make power more often when the blades are pitched to kick in at slower wind fields you sacrifice the top 1% of wind times for much more lowwe wind time. With variable pitch blades you get the best of both but VP turbines cost twice what a fixed pitch set up does the stall angle determines the kick out speed and thus the top wind field that can be used. The grid the can take 300 amps so well above what the turbine can put out. I either dump power for sale to ERCOT,use it on site immediately or charge the power banks and use it or sell it later. Having solar and wind on site means when it’s cloudy and windy or sunny and calm you have electrons flowing. Not having either is called a compound energy drought and for Texas it’s only a few times per year. My power banks hold more than a couple days worth ,plus I still have the grid if I wanted to buy power and not sell it.
This group used 40 years of weather data and found this.
“Overall, researchers found that the longest potential compound energy drought on an hourly timescale was 37 hours (in Texas)”
https://www.pnnl.gov/news-media/energy-droughts-wind-and-solar-can-last-nearly-week-research-shows
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