tim watkins – Page 4

Global warming may yet prove to be the one thing which saves us from our largely misguided attempts to respond to global warming. This is because, while the crisis is real enough, the solution that we have bought into is an absolute stinker. While a great deal of corporate profit has been made from the deployment of non-renewable renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs) whatever question they are an answer to, it is not “how do we operate a complex industrial society without fossil fuels?”

Up until now this has not been a problem, of course. For the best part of half a century, politicians have been mouthing warm words about protecting the environment and saving the planet. But in practice they have simply presided over more business as usual while hoping that clever people somewhere else will discover some new energy source or invent some new technology which will save the day. In the meantime, energy-expensive solar panels and wind turbines were deployed – with huge subsidies doled out to landowners – to lull a gullible public into believing something was being done.

The establishment media played their part by conflating electricity with energy, so that they could falsely claim that this city, region or country had run entirely on renewable energy yesterday – although “yesterday” often turned out to mean “a couple of hours yesterday.” But since electricity is only 20-25 percent of the energy we use, these media stories simply ignored the gas used for heating and cooking, the oil used to operate transport, plant and agricultural machinery, and the coal used to make steel and cement.

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

Who determines prices?

September 12, 2021

Who determines prices?

One of the consequences of the response to the pandemic and the disruption from Brexit is that labour shortages are appearing across the low-paid sectors of the economy. So much so that even the metropolitan liberal Guardian has begun to wonder whether the benefits of higher wages for the low-paid might outweigh the cost of having to pay more for a plumber or an au pair. As John Harris puts it:

“For decades, large swathes of the labour market have been run on the assumption that there will always be sufficient people prepared to work for precious little. But here and across the world, as parts of the economy have been shut down and furlough schemes have given people pause for thought, the idea that they need not stay in jobs that are exploitative and morale-sapping has evidently caught on.

“In the UK, meanwhile, Brexit remains a disastrous and chaotic project – but, among its endless and unpredictable consequences, leaving the EU has cut off employers’ access to a pool of people who were too often exploitable. Time has thereby been called on one of the ways that our dysfunctional labour market was prevented from imploding.”

Harris points to sectors of the economy – mostly low-paid – where employers have been obliged to increase wages in order to fill vacancies. And there is certainly some room for wage increases across the economy. But the emerging narrative is that this is a bad thing because it will create price increases. Much of the thinking around this issue though, is based on experiences and on economic models that last saw the light of day half a century ago. And with this in mind, we should take mainstream narratives with a pinch of salt.

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

A problem shared is a problem doubled

September 11, 2021

A problem shared is a problem doubled

At seven minutes to five on the afternoon of 9 August 2019, a lightening strike caused the loss of 150MW of distributed power (i.e., a large number of small wind, diesel and solar generators) from the National Grid. This sudden loss triggered the safety system on the giant Hornsea wind farm in the North Sea, taking another 799MW of power from the system. Fortunately, regulations at the time required that the Grid operator keep 1GW of back up capacity for precisely this kind of emergency. And so standby turbines at the Little Barford gas power station were started. However, the system failed, taking 244MW of Little Barford’s power offline too. This loss of power tripped a further 350MW of distributed generation bringing the total loss of power to 1,481MW. Within the next minute, 900MW of National Grid’s 1GW of backup capacity was brought online, stabilising the frequency at 49.2Hz. Seconds later, however, the gas turbine at Little Barford failed; bringing the loss of power to 1,691MW. At this point, National Grid had consumed all of its 1GW backup capacity and had no resource to cope with further power losses or frequency fluctuations. Then, half a minute later (16:53:50) the frequency fell to 48.8Hz; triggering the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme and automatically disconnecting 1.1 million business and household consumers. In response, and for yet to be discovered reasons, (16:53:58) a third turbine at Little Barford went offline bringing the total loss of power to 1,878MW – nearly double Ofgem’s stipulated backup capacity.

Network Rail was among the large industrial users in the Low Frequency Demand Disconnection scheme, so that at the peak of the Friday evening rush hour, a large part of the UK’s rail network was brought to a halt…

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

This isn’t going to work

September 8, 2021

This isn’t going to work

If an energy policy sounds too good to be true, that is usually because it is. Take, for example, just one of the jigsaw pieces in current policy for reaching net zero by 2050: electric car batteries. Jillian Ambrose – who should know better – at the Guardian reports this weekend that:

“Ofgem plans to make it easier for electric vehicle drivers to sell the energy stored in their car batteries back to power grid as part of a move to help make the switch away from fossil fuel cars more affordable.

“Under the plan put forward by Great Britain’s energy regulator, electric vehicle drivers could earn money by effectively transforming their cars into mobile power plants by releasing power back to the energy network when demand on the electricity grid reaches a peak.

“If enough drivers take up the chance to make money from their car batteries by using vehicle-to-grid technology, the UK could avoid investing in new power plants with the equivalent generation capacity of up to 10 large nuclear power stations.”

This is wishful thinking on steroids. While it is true that if all of the UK’s 37 million cars were replaced with battery electric cars, and assuming that all were fitted with a mid-range – 98KW -battery, they could provide 3,100GW of power to the grid – just shy of the 3,200GW from 10 nuclear plants – they could only do it for about an hour. A battery is not a source of power, it is merely a storage medium. For comparison, a recent report the Manhattan Institute finds that:

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

Exergy-driven crisis

September 1, 2021

Exergy-driven crisis

Media has little in the way of memory and the rest of us struggle to remember much of what happened more than a week ago. And so, the narratives we use in an attempt to make sense of the rapidly changing world we are living in, tend to revolve around short-term tribal talking points. Take, for example, the narrative about Britain having a shortage of lorry drivers. It tends to be a very short narrative: Britain left the European Union, European lorry drivers went home, Britain has a lorry driver shortage. Ergo “Brexit Bad!” Unfortunately, there are more holes than a Swiss cheese in this narrative. To begin with, driver shortages Across Europe were observable to anyone paying attention more than a decade ago:

“The study provides a concise overview of the road freight transport sector, in the light of the structural issue of qualified driver shortage. In particular, this study analyses the multiplicity of factors affecting labour supply and demand, by taking into due consideration also the impacts of the current EU legislation and the effects of the present economic downturn.”

Since 2009 was before the 2016 Brexit referendum, the 2009 lorry driver shortage could not logically have been the result of Brexit. Moreover, lorry driver shortages across Europe were sufficient that a Franco-German inspired change of regulation – the so-called “Macron Package” (which requires drivers to use hotels overnight and to return home every eight weeks) – was introduced to halt the impact of cheap and unregulated Eastern European drivers on the road haulage industry of Western Europe; this was not a solely British problem.

The driver shortage doesn’t end there though. According to the International Road Transport Union (IRU), driver shortages are a truly global problem which governments and media have turned a blind eye to for years…

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

A rising tide sinks all boats… eventually

August 25, 2021

A rising tide sinks all boats… eventually

Have you heard that ice cream causes murder or that global warming has led to an increase in piracy? Apparently in Maine, consuming more margarine leads to more divorces, while increased US spending on science, space and technology results in increases in suicides by hanging, strangulation and suffocation. Actually, these are examples of spurious or false correlations – entirely unrelated things whose data appear to suggest a causal relationship. And in these examples, the outcome is little more damaging than a few humorous media articles and a couple of books.

False correlations, however, run deep. And some can have a pernicious impact on large numbers of us. Consider for example, the well-worn neoliberal saying that “a rising tide raises all boats.” It is based on two mistaken premises. First, that employment is always a route from poverty to prosperity; and second, that an increase in overall employment must benefit everyone. And it is for these reasons that continued economic growth is the altar upon which all else must be sacrificed.

The evidence for the benefits of economic growth for all is far more nuanced. In pre-industrial economies where most people worked the land, there is little evidence that much growth occurred beyond that allowed by the ups and downs of the annual harvest. Indeed, it took the economies of the British Isles until the eighteenth century to re-reach the technological level of the Roman Empire; so what economic growth their had been amounted to a catching up following a major economic collapse. And even during that period of lethargic growth, various plagues and famines – including the catastrophic Black Death in the fourteenth century – rapidly threw economies into reverse.

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

The only thing worse than an energy collapse

August 18, 2021

The only thing worse than an energy collapse

We learned recently that one of the last coal power stations in the UK is bidding to become the first commercial nuclear fusion plant on Earth. The news should be taken with a large pinch of salt… nuclear fusion has been 25 years in the future since before I was born and it will likely still be 25 years in the future the day after I die. Nevertheless, nuclear fusion reactions have been generated; albeit for just a few seconds and at a massive energy cost. And the physicists and engineers working on the multinational (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) ITER project in the south of France have something of a spring in their step just now; claiming that:

“ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. ITER will be the first fusion device to maintain fusion for long periods of time. And ITER will be the first fusion device to test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity.”

It is worth noting that ITER is an experiment rather than a working power plant. And just as well; because even its proponents point to an energy return on investment (EROI) of just 10:1 – about half of the return from a wind turbine. Even this may be a slight of hand, according to Steven Krivit at New Energy Times:

“Widespread false and exaggerated claims made by leaders in the fusion community have caused many people and institutions to convey the incorrect claims to a wide cross-section of the general public. Below, I’ve listed four of several hundred examples I’ve located. Each of these statements, through no fault of the authors, is fundamentally wrong:

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

Crisis hiding in plain sight

August 7, 2021

Crisis hiding in plain sight

Putting a positive gloss on the news is especially important as we attempt to recover from a pandemic. And if that positive gloss is green in colour, so much the better. And so yesterday we were treated to the news that:

“More electric vehicles were registered than diesel cars for the second month in a row in July, according to car industry figures. It is the third time battery electric vehicles have overtaken diesel in the past two years.”

That is surely great news. But as is usually the case in matters green, we are starting from a very low position. Much more will have to be done to raise the number of battery-only EVs from the current nine percent of registrations in 2021 to the planned 100 percent by 2035. Moreover, the current nine percent is a share of a dramatically depressed new car market… which is the real headline news in this story.

Nobody is actively covering this up; but they are playing it down. According to the BBC piece which celebrates the rise in EV sales:

“However, new car registrations fell by almost a third…”

Insofar as the wellbeing or otherwise of the car industry has been a measure of the health of the wider economy throughout the oil age, a 29.5 percent collapse in new car sales ought to have been given far more prominence. This is particularly true insofar as this year’s decline comes on the back of the massive lockdown-decline in 2020:

Instead we are treated to several implausible explanations for why this is nothing to worry about. First, we are told, the decline is the result of people no longer wanting to buy diesel cars. Certainly, there has been a collapse in demand for diesels in the wake of the Volkswagen scandal and government increases in tax on diesel vehicles…

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

The only thing worse than an energy collapse

August 5, 2021

The only thing worse than an energy collapse

We learned recently that one of the last coal power stations in the UK is bidding to become the first commercial nuclear fusion plant on Earth. The news should be taken with a large pinch of salt… nuclear fusion has been 25 years in the future since before I was born and it will likely still be 25 years in the future the day after I die. Nevertheless, nuclear fusion reactions have been generated; albeit for just a few seconds and at a massive energy cost. And the physicists and engineers working on the multinational (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) ITER project in the south of France have something of a spring in their step just now; claiming that:

“ITER will be the first fusion device to produce net energy. ITER will be the first fusion device to maintain fusion for long periods of time. And ITER will be the first fusion device to test the integrated technologies, materials, and physics regimes necessary for the commercial production of fusion-based electricity.”

It is worth noting that ITER is an experiment rather than a working power plant. And just as well; because even its proponents point to an energy return on investment (EROI) of just 10:1 – about half of the return from a wind turbine. Even this may be a slight of hand, according to Steven Krivit at New Energy Times:

“Widespread false and exaggerated claims made by leaders in the fusion community have caused many people and institutions to convey the incorrect claims to a wide cross-section of the general public. Below, I’ve listed four of several hundred examples I’ve located. Each of these statements, through no fault of the authors, is fundamentally wrong:

New York Times: “ITER will benefit from its larger size and will produce about 10 times more power than it consumes.”

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

The everything death spiral

June 20, 2021

The everything death spiral

Inflation is back in the establishment media headlines, as prices are rising across the economy. But rather like generals fighting the last war, business and economic journalists are dusting off models of inflation last used in the early 1980s. The idea, for example, that “inflation is always a monetary phenomenon” worked well as a description of the crises of the 1970s when the class structure was flatter and simpler and when planet Earth still contained massive volumes of untapped resources; including decent reserves of energy-cheap energy.

Throughout the post-war years – and largely as a consequence of energy-cheap energy – the workers’ share of the profits from manufacturing and trade had risen. Various national versions of America’s suburban dream became available to skilled and semi-skilled workers across the developed states. Where the wartime generation rented small terraced houses, the post-war generation bought roomy semi-detached homes. Where the wartime generation walked to work, the post-war generation drove a car or rode a motorbike. Where the wartime generation holidayed at a nearby seaside town, the post war generation took package holidays in Mediterranean resorts.

Insofar as it existed at all, unemployment was a choice or a “frictional” period of a few weeks as workers moved from one employer to another. Only those few with complex problems, such as disabled people, people with mental illness or people with drug or alcohol dependency tended to be long-term unemployed. And the lack of a pool of unemployed labour empowered trade unions by undermining management’s ability to threaten the sack. If workers were fired they could easily find work elsewhere. And firms that sacked workers often struggled to find replacements.

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

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