Home » Posts tagged 'renewable energy' (Page 17)

Tag Archives: renewable energy

I’ve been reflecting on the idea that the current energy system is starting to be swept along by a technological revolution somewhat akin to the “revolution” over the last 30 years in computers and telecommunications that has brought personal computers, mobile phones and the internet. Read some of the literature of techno-optimists and it is very common to suggest that Moore’s Law – the doubling of processing power on computers every year – provides an analogue for the sort of change that will apply in renewable energy systems – if only the politicians and carbon vested interest do not get in the way. In support of this idea people commonly point to the rapidity with which renewable systems like solar and wind have developed so far. The main thing is that the political support should be there…

I 60% agree but have severe reservations with carrying the analogy too far. There are some real differences that make the two “revolutions” largely non-comparable:

(1) The digital revolution has brought us many new products that do things we couldn’t do before – computers, mobile phones, the internet. That makes it attractive to people and companies and has sped adoption. The energy revolution does not bring new final end products – the end products are electricity (and heat and motion) which we already had. What it brings are many new ways of generating electricity (and heating and moving things).

(2) To pay for the energy revolution people must pay once for the new technology that generates the energy source (mostly as electricity) and once for products that are adapted to this new energy source (eg a petrol or diesel car to an electric car) – and perhaps a third time for the back up or storage to cope with intermittency in the renewable power source.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Apple, Google, and how not to go 100% renewable

September 29, 2017

Apple, Google, and how not to go 100% renewable

Earlier this year I described how the Dutch Railwayswere using “alternative logic” to claim that their trains were running on 100% wind power while in reality they were running about 90% on coal and gas-fired electricity from the Dutch grid. But Nederlandse Spoorwegen aren’t the only ones doing it. Other companies use the same alternative logic to show how they too are now 100% renewable even though they aren’t. In this post we review the claims of two of the most prominent ones – Apple and Google, who are making points with the public and the media by declaring themselves to be 96% and 100% renewables-powered even though Apple still obtains well over half of its electricity from non-renewable sources and Google probably over 80%. (Inset: solar array at Apple’s Maiden, North Carolina data center).

Introduction:

First on my use of the term “alternative logic”. The term “alternative facts” has recently come into vogue to describe facts that aren’t factual, and I use “alternative logic” to describe logic that isn’t logical (although there are other less polite terms I could have used). We will see how illogical shortly.

The path a company has to follow to go 100% renewable is now well-established. What it doesn’t do, except in rare instances, is build renewables plants itself. Instead it negotiates long-term purchase contracts with renewable energy providers and/or purchases Renewable Energy Certificates (in the US) or Guarantees of Origin (in Europe) that transfer ownership of the renewable energy generated by a third party to the company. And as soon as the company has purchased enough generation to cover its in-house consumption it can a) declare itself to be 100% renewable and b) claim zero CO2 emissions.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

We’ll always have the Sun: solar energy and the future of humankind

September 24, 2017

We’ll always have the Sun: solar energy and the future of humankind

Above, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) speaks to Ilsa (Ingrid Bergman) in the movie “Casablanca” (1942). Here, the sentence has been a little changed. In the film, the phrase refers to “Paris”, not “The Sun”. But in the debate on the future of civilization, there is only one certainty: we’ll always have the sun.

This post was originally published on Aug 15, 2017 by INSURGE INTELLIGENCE, a crowdfunded investigative journalism project for people and planet. Support us to keep digging where others fear to tread.

As it becomes clear that we must get rid of fossil fuels before they get rid of us, a question is being asked over and over:

“Can renewables replace fossil fuels?”

Some people have been sufficiently impressed by the rapid decline of the price of renewable energy that their answer is not only, “yes,” but that switching to renewables will be fast and painless. It will come simply as the result of the free market mechanisms, at most aided by a little magic called “carbon tax”. Then, economic growth will continue unabashed in the best of worlds.

Others take the opposite position. Noting that renewables require large investments in the energy infrastructure, that they don’t easily produce liquid fuels, that they can’t support energy “on demand,” and more, they conclude that renewables are useless; an illusion, if not an outright scam.

This viewpoint is further split in two views. One seems to welcome the collapse of an energy-starved economic system and the associated return to the Middle Ages, or even to extinction. The other simply sees fossil fuels as a good thing to be kept and subsidised. After all, CO2 is food for plants, isn’t it?

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Race For The “Holy Grail” Of Renewables

September 22, 2017

The Race For The “Holy Grail” Of Renewables

In February, AES Energy’s Escondido battery storage facility in California was hailed as the largest one to date, with a capacity of 30 MW/120 MWh. Now, Tesla is building a bigger one—100 MW/129 MWh—in Australia. On the face of it, it’s a race for the bigger battery storage system. But there’s much more to it than that.

The race is on for increasingly reliable, grid-scale, quick-to-install energy storage solutions that will make the shift to all-renewable power much more realistic. In this, factors such as renewable-friendly regulation and integration of storage systems with renewable power generation capacity can tip the energy transformation scales.

California is one of the places to be if you’re a renewables fan. Its authorities have ambitious plans in this regard, eventually hoping to replace all fossil-fuel generation capacity with renewables. Wholly reliable grid-scale storage systems are crucial for this strategy, and they are becoming increasingly popular in the state.

Unfortunately, the initiative to make the 100-percent renewable plan a law fell through. Unions, worried about possible job losses, pulled their support. Legislators themselves tweaked the bill, so its goal is now to produce 100-percent greenhouse-gas-free energy. The debate about the feasibility of the plan and how fast it could become a reality continues. California is a cautionary tale for other ambitious clean energy proponents. Related: Can Russia Develop Its Shale Reserves?

Meanwhile, the leaders of the battery pack are expanding. AES recently teamed up with Siemens on a joint venture, Fluence, focusing specifically on energy storage system development. Fluence will deal in AES’ Advancion and Siemens’ Siestorage platforms, the companies said, adding it will target the development of new energy storage capacity across 160 countries worldwide.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The real strike price of offshore wind

September 20, 2017

The real strike price of offshore wind

Hinkley still scores on reliability and low carbon ….. but the extent to which its costs are obscene is now plainer than ever. In Monday’s capacity auction, two big offshore wind farms came in at £57.50 per megawatt hour and a third at £74.75. These “strike prices” ….. are expressed in 2012 figures, as is Hinkley’s £92.50 so the comparison is fair. As for the argument that we must pay up for reliable baseload supplies, there ought to be limits to how far it can be pushed. A nuclear premium of some level might be justified, but Hinkley lives in a financial world of its own, even before battery technology (possibly) shifts the economics further in favour of renewables …..

Thus spake the Guardian in a recent article entitled Hinkley nuclear power is being priced out by renewables.

What the Guardian says is, of course, nonsense. Comparing non-dispatchable wind directly with dispatchable baseload nuclear is not in the least “fair”. Barring Acts of God baseload nuclear is there all the time; wind is there only when the wind blows. We can level the playing field only by comparing baseload nuclear generation with baseload wind generation, and the only way of converting wind into baseload is to store the surpluses generated when the wind is blowing for re-use when it isn’t. To compare offshore wind strike prices directly with nuclear strike prices we therefore have to factor in the storage costs necessary to convert the wind into baseload, and this post shows what happens to wind strike prices when we do this using the “battery technology” favored by the Guardian. It finds that battery technology does not “(shift) the economics further in favor of renewables”. It prices wind totally out of the market instead.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Renewable Fuels Con

May 7, 2017

The Renewable Fuels Con

You can’t just sell gas anymore.

Most people don’t realize it, but what they’re pumping into their car’s tank isn’t actually gasoline, properly speaking. It’s gasoline mixed with ethanol alcohol – the ratio currently set at 10 percent ethanol and 90 percent gas (E10).

“Diesel” often isn’t exactly diesel, either.

The real stuff – the petroleum-based stuff – is mixed with bio-diesel, which is derived (like ethanol) from non-petroleum sources, usually vegetable matter.

The market isn’t demanding this – but the government is.

There is a law called the Renewable Fuel Standard. It requires the “blending” of oceans of corn con ethanol and biodiesel boondoggle into the general fuel supply – ostensibly, to reduce America’s dependence on foreign (and non-renewable) oil.

Like so much that government does, it sounds good – but what it actually doesisn’t so good.

The RFS has raised refining and distribution costs as well as the cost to motorists, who not only pay more for the Uncle-adulterated fuel but also for the fuel systems in their vehicles, which have had to be modified to be compatible with the not-quite-gas (and sort-of diesel) fuels the government is pushing.

These adulterated fuels are also – ironically – less efficient. A gallon of pure gas will take you farther than a gallon of 90 percent gas and 10 percent ethanol because the gallon of gas contains more energy than a gallon of E10.

As is almost reflexively true of everything the government mandates, we get less – and pay more for it.

But that doesn’t mean someone’s not making a buck – as is also usually true when government intervenes in the market.

In addition to the Usual Suspects – the ethanol lobby, for instance – there is a another group of crony capitalists making hay off the RFS mandate. These are the large refiners and chain gas stations, who can leverage – in the lingo of the federal bureaucracy – Renewable Volume Obligation (RVO) credits to gain an unfair competitive advantage over smaller refiners and independent gas stations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The High Cost of Renewable Subsidies

April 17, 2017

The High Cost of Renewable Subsidies

I have for some time wanted to get to the bottom of renewable subsidies and their impact upon electricity prices. But the complexity and opacity of the system has always defeated me. And then last week a report titled “Status Review of Renewable Support Schemes in Europe” landed in my inbox and it seemed to contain much of the information I was seeking. The headline numbers: the weighted average subsidy paid to renewable generators in EU 26 in 2015 was €110 / MWh. The maximum was €184 / MWh in the Czech Republic and the minimum €16.2 / MWh in Norway and the UK came in at €75 / MWh.

Considering that the wholesale price of electricity in Europe is typically €40 to €60 / MWh we can see that renewables are costing on average about 3 times as much as conventional power (wholesale~50, subsidy~110, total~160). And politicians, who have mandated the use of renewable electricity, are wondering why electricity prices are rising.

The report was published by the Council of European Energy Regulators (CEER) on 11th April 2017. But since it summarises a vast amount of complex data that has taken considerable time to compile, the reference years reported are 2014 and 2015. The report can be downloaded here.

Figure 1 [Report Table 4] Total renewable electricity produced that received subsidy support in 2015 in MWh.

Figure 2 Sorting total subsidised generation from Figure 1 shows Germany way out in front with 162 TWh of subsidised renewable generation followed by the UK, Italy, Spain and France.

Figure 3 The 4 largest RE producers with categories of generation broken out and normalised to 100% shows different solutions for different countries. Germany relies mainly on bio energy, solar and onshore wind. The UK on bio energy onshore and offshore wind. Italy on bio energy solar and onshore wind, rather similar to Germany but with more solar and less wind. Spain on solar and onshore wind. It is notable how important bio energy has become. Only time will tell if this leads to deforestation. There seems to be a lot of woodland disappearing in Scotland right now.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The dream of 100% renewables assessed by Heard et al

April 14, 2017

The dream of 100% renewables assessed by Heard et al

Posted on April 12, 2017 by

Before the world can transition from fossil fuels to 100% renewables it must come up with a transition plan that has some realistic chance of working. So far Energy Matters has evaluated a few such plans, including ADEME and the Centre for Alternative Technology and most recently Lappenranta, and has concluded that none of them does. There are, however, a large number we haven’t looked at. Now a recent study evaluates 24 of these plans and reaches the same conclusions. It finds that none of them meets the criteria necessary to provide a reasonable guarantee of success, or even comes close, and questions whether a 100% renewable electricity system is in fact feasible.

This is not a typical Energy Matters post in that it does not provide any original data analysis. It simply synthesizes a study written by others. The study in question is the 2017 paper entitled Burden of proof: A comprehensive review of the feasibility of 100% renewable-electricity systems by Heard, Brook, Wigley and Bradshaw (hereafter Heard et al., link to the full paper kindly supplied by Ben Heard.) And the most remarkable thing about the study isn’t what it says but who wrote it. The authors are not, as one might expect, climate change skeptics, but firm believers in the threat that climate change allegedly poses and the need to do something constructive about it, as the following statement attests:

With the fate of modern society and global environments at stake, eﬀective action on climate change demands credible, evidence-based plans …..

The authors are also not nonentities. Barry Brook is a leading environmental scientist with hundreds of publications to his credit, Tom Wigley is “one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change and one of the most highly cited scientists in the discipline” and Corey Bradshaw has co-authored books with Paul Ehrlich.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Renewable Energy Advocates are Hurting the Climate Cause

March 5, 2017

How Renewable Energy Advocates are Hurting the Climate Cause

In the wake of the 2016 presidential election, the proliferation of misinformation on social media is finally getting the attention it deserves. Or so I thought.

Scrolling through my Facebook news feed recently, I stumbled upon an article shared by Climate Central, a nonprofit news organization focused on climate science. “The World’s Renewable Energy Capacity Now Beats Out Coal,” read the headline from Co.Exist. I clicked. “The tipping point marks a major milestone in the transition to cleaner power sources,” the subhead declared from atop an aerial photo of a wind farm.

And so went most of the coverage of a new report on renewable energy markets by the International Energy Agency, a well-respected source of global energy statistics. Outlets big and small, reputable and lesser-known, specialized and general, adopted similar headlines, subheads and ledes, accompanied by photos of wind turbines and solar panels.

The problem is twofold. First, capacity is a highly selective way to measure electricity, especially in the context of emissions and climate change. Capacity is defined as the maximum electric output a generator can produce under specific conditions at a moment in time — for example, how much a solar farm can generate during a sunny summer day or a wind farm when it’s really windy. But, of course, the sun doesn’t always shine or the wind always blow.

“Installed capacity is not really a useful metric for a lot of purposes,” Mark Jacobson, an engineering professor at Stanford University who studies renewable energy, told me. “When you’re asking, ‘how much is this supplying, how much is wind supplying versus coal?’ you want to look at the actual energy delivered.”

That’s commonly called generation, and is defined as the amount of electricity produced on average over a period of time, such as a year. Sure enough, if you look at generation numbers, coal still beat out renewables in 2015 by a significant margin, 39 percent to not quite 24 percent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Is The Renewable Transition Harming The U.S. Economy?

February 25, 2017

Is The Renewable Transition Harming The U.S. Economy?

Recent data from the 2017 Sustainable Energy in America Factbook suggests that sectors of America’s energy market are quickly shifting towards greener energy, while also dispelling the myth that such shifts will hurt the economy. Despite a GDP growth of 12 percent since 2007, America’s usage of energy has fallen by 3.6 percent. Analysts believe this to be indicative of a new stage of American history in which energy productivity is improving, while increasingly less energy is needed to sustain growth.

These movements are overlapped by dramatic decreases in greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, 2016 marked a 25-year low – emissions have dropped 12 percent since 2007. As part of the original Paris Agreement, the U.S. has pledged to reduce national greenhouse gasses by over 25 percent by 2025 – these new numbers mean we are nearly halfway there.

These numbers are supplemented by the fact that consumers spent less than 4 percent of their annual household income on energy. This is the smallest estimate ever collected in America. Further, retail rates for electricity have fallen nationally by 3 percent. But in some regions, Texas for example, retail prices have fallen by as much as 29 percent. Moreover, since its peak in 2014, demand for electricity has fallen 1.2 percent. During the same period of time, GDP has grown 4.2 percent.

These numbers seem to contradict the widely-held belief that if America shifts away from carbon-based energy, we will either face economic deceleration, or radical price increases.

Further details concerning 2016 show that renewable energy sources have also spiked. Last year, the U.S. created 22 gigawatts of new renewable-energy-generating capacity. 12.5 of these gigawatts were generated from the solar industry. The wind industry contributed 8.5 gigawatts, and the remainder was comprised of additions from hydropower, biomass, biogas and waste-to-energy.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fumbling Towards Collapse

February 20, 2017

Fumbling Towards Collapse

In all the smoke and fog emitted by Trump and his adversaries, it must be hard to make out the actual issues dogging this society, and even when you can, to find a coherent position on them. This was nicely illustrated in Paul Krugman’s fatuous column in Monday’s New York Times, “On Economic Arrogance” — the title describes Krugman’s own attitude to a T.

In it, Krugman attempts to account for the no-growth economy by marshaling the stock-in-trade legerdemain of academic economics: productivity, demographics, and labor metrics. Krugman actually knows zip about what afflicts us in the present disposition of things, namely the falling energy-return-on-energy-investment in the oil industry, which is approaching the point where the immense activity of getting oil out of the ground won’t be worth the cost and trouble of doing it. And since most of the things we do and produce in this economy are based on cheap oil — with no reality-based prospect of replacing it with so-called “renewables” or as yet undiscovered energy rescue remedies — we can’t generate enough wealth to maintain anything close to our assumed standard of living. We can’t even generate enough wealth to pay the interest on the debt we’ve racked up in order to hide our growing energy predicament. And that, in a nutshell, is what will blow up the financial system. And when that department of the economy goes, the rest will follow.

So, the real issue hidden in plain sight is how America — indeed all the so-called “developed” nations — are going to navigate to a stepped-down mode of living, without slip-sliding all the way into a dark age, or something worse. By the way, the Ole Maestro, Alan Greenspan, also chimed in on the “productivity” question last week to equally specious effect in this Business Insider article.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Sower’s way: the path for the future

September 17, 2016

The Sower’s way: the path for the future

Our paper on “The Sower’s Way” has been published in the IOP Environmental Research Letters journal. It is an attempt to quantify the physical limits of the energy transition from fossils to renewables.

The title of the article takes inspiration from a strategy well known to ancient farmers, the fact that they had to save something from their current harvest for the next one; it is the origin of the common saying “don’t eat your seed corn!”

Starting from this ancient wisdom, we performed a quantitative calculation of how much “seed” we need in the form of fossil fuels in order to have enough energy to build a new “harvest” of renewable energy that can replace the old one. All that without emitting so much CO2 that we would go over the 2°C limit and without anyone being left out.

Of course, it is a calculation that depends on a lot of debatable parameters, but we did our best to remain within realistic consideration, without asking for technological miracles or drastic reductions in the human population. We just assumed current technologies and that the population curve would follow the UN projections. At the same time, we recognize that perpetual growth is a dream that only madmen or economists can think as possible. We assumed that humankind would gradually move toward a stabilization of the economy and of the population on a level of per capita energy sufficient to survive.

It is possible, here are the main results from the paper

You can see how we assume a rapid growth of renewable energy, built up in the beginning using fossil energy but, in the later stages of the transition relying on renewable energy to continue the process, while phasing out the fossil fuels which are completely abandoned by around 2060. In this scenario, emissions do not go over the COP21 limit.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Intermittent Renewables Can’t Favorably Transform Grid Electricity

September 10, 2016

Intermittent Renewables Can’t Favorably Transform Grid Electricity

Many people are hoping for wind and solar PV to transform grid electricity in a favorable way. Is this really possible? Is it really feasible for intermittent renewables to generate a large share of grid electricity? The answer increasingly looks as if it is, “No, the costs are too great, and the return on investment would be way too low.” We are already encountering major grid problems, even with low penetrations of intermittent renewable electricity: US, 5.4% of 2015 electricity consumption; China, 3.9%; Germany, 19.5%; Australia, 6.6%.

In fact, I have come to the rather astounding conclusion that even if wind turbines and solar PV could be built at zero cost, it would not make sense to continue to add them to the electric grid in the absence of very much better and cheaper electricity storage than we have today. There are too many costs outside building the devices themselves. It is these secondary costs that are problematic. Also, the presence of intermittent electricity disrupts competitive prices, leading to electricity prices that are far too low for other electricity providers, including those providing electricity using nuclear or natural gas. The tiny contribution of wind and solar to grid electricity cannot make up for the loss of more traditional electricity sources due to low prices.

Leaders around the world have demanded that their countries switch to renewable energy, without ever taking a very close look at what the costs and benefits were likely to be. A few simple calculations were made, such as “Life Cycle Assessment” and “Energy Returned on Energy Invested.” These calculations miss the fact that the intermittent energy being returned is of very much lower quality than is needed to operate the electric grid. They also miss the point that timing and the cost of capital are very important, as is the impact on the pricing of other energy products.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Germany About To Make Big Changes To Its Renewables Policy

May 8, 2016

Germany About To Make Big Changes To Its Renewables Policy

On Earth Day, some 171 nations formally signed the Paris climate agreement; it was a mostly symbolic, though meaningful next step. The document now awaits individual ratification and, more specifically, ratification by 55 countries representing 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. When and from where those approvals will come is difficult to say with certainty. How are the targets are then actually met is even less clear. For its part – and well aware of the fact that it has much to do – Germany is in the process of reshaping its transformative Energiewende policy.

To be sure, Germany is no slouch. Over the last two years the country has added roughly 11 and 4 gigawatts (GW) of wind and solar capacity respectively. Last year, nearly 33 percent of Germany’s electricity demand was satisfied by renewable sources – wind even out-producedcoal for the first time ever in December. Renewable energy penetration in the power supply is already greater than 100 percent in two German states. Moreover, renewables account for 15.3 percent of gross final energy consumption nationwide, up nearly 2 percent from 2014. Globally, Germany has a top-three wind fleet and the world’s largest solar PV capacity.

But – with high expectations and increasingly heavy realties – there’s still much left to do. As it stands, Germany will not meet its current climate obligations. By 2020, it is estimated that Germany will only have cut greenhouse gas emissions by 32 percent compared to 1990 levels, or well short of its 40 percent target. In fact, GHG emissions have seen year-on-year growth in six out of the last ten years. Persistent, and in some cases growing coal use, combined with backward progress in the transportation sector suggest the current, aggressive electricity transformation is having trouble maturing into a full blown energy shift.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The sustainable energy transition: a “back of the envelope” calculation

May 7, 2016

The sustainable energy transition: a “back of the envelope” calculation

Image source. “Back of the Envelope” calculations are a tradition in science and often turn out to be able to provide plenty of useful information, at the same time avoiding the common pitfall of complex models, that of being able to fit anything provided that one has enough adjustable parameters.

The world’s economy can be seen as a giant heat engine. It consumes energy, mainly in the form of fossil fuels, and uses it to produce services and goods. No matter how fine-tuned and efficient the engine is, it still needs energy to run. So, if we want to do the big switch that we call the “energy transition” from fossil fuels to renewables, we can’t rely just on efficiency and on energy saving. We need to feed the big beast with something it can run on, energy produced by renewable sources such as photovoltaics (PV) and wind in the form of electric power.

Here are a few notes on the kind of effort we need in order to move to a completely renewable energy infrastructure before it is too late to avoid the double threat of climate disruption and resource depletion. It is a tall order: we need to do it, basically, in some 50 years from now, possibly less, otherwise it will be too late to avoid a climate disaster. So, let’s try a “back of the envelope” calculation that should provide an order of magnitude estimate. For a complete treatment, see this article by Sgouridis et al.

Let’s start: first of all, the average power generation worldwide is estimated as around 18 TW in terms of primary energy. Of these, about 81% is the fraction generated by fossil fuels, that is 14.5 TW. This can be taken as the power that we need to replace using renewable sources, assuming to leave everything else as it is.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Tag Archives: renewable energy

Content

Post categories

Economic Links

Energy/Resource Links

Environmental Links

Geopolitical Links

Liberty Links

News Links

Other Links

Survival Skills

Post Archives by Category

Post navigation

Latest Posts