From 26th February to 5th March 2018, the UK and indeed most of Northern Europe was gripped by severe cold weather blowing in from Siberia. The event was Christened the Beast From the East by UK press. The conditions were harsh, not just sub-zero temperatures and snow but high winds that created life-threatening conditions. In this post I present the electricity generating statistics for the month 13 February to 12 March. The key point I want to make is that during the week of The Beast the UK’s remaining 10.6 GW of coal ran flat out day and night for 8 days. I think the time has come for the UK Government and National Grid to explain how they plan to keep the lights on when they close down this coal capacity by 2022-2025.
Sudden Stratospheric Warming
Before looking at the electricity data I want to dwell on the cause of The Beast which comes down to a process called Sudden Stratospheric Warming. This UK Met Office link has this to say (note there is also a good vid).
The term SSW refers to what we observe – rapid warming (up to about 50 °C in just a couple of days) in the stratosphere, between 10 km and 50 km up.
Jet streams high up in our atmosphere, in both the northern and southern hemisphere, circumnavigate the Earth from west to east. One of these, the Polar Night Jet, circles the Arctic.
Sometimes the usual westerly flow can be disrupted by natural weather patterns or disturbances in the lower part of the atmosphere, such as a large area of high pressure in the northern hemisphere. This causes the Polar Jet to wobble and these wobbles, or waves, break just like waves on the beach. When they break they can be strong enough to weaken or even reverse the westerly winds and swing them to easterlies. As this happens, air in the stratosphere starts to collapse in to the polar cap and compress. As it compresses it warms, hence the stratospheric warming.
This is the official view that needs to be contrasted with the man-made climate change drivel emanating from factions of the climate change community.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
To support a 100% renewable electricity sector Australia will need approximately 10 terawatt-hours of long-term energy storage. The multi-billion-dollar Snowy 2.0 pumped hydro project will supply only 0.35 terawatt-hours, a small fraction of this, and conventional pumped hydro potential elsewhere in Australia, including Tasmania, will not fill the gap. This post addresses the question of whether Australia might not do better to pursue sea water pumped hydro instead of Snowy 2.0-type projects. Sea water pumped hydro potential in Australia is limited by the lack of suitable coastal topography, but there are sites capable of storing very large amounts of sea water at distances of more than 20km from the coast. The question is whether these sites can be developed and operated at acceptable cost.
In his 
European energy security is a subject I return to time and again normally prompted by some kind of event. This time it is severe cold weather and snow that has spread from Siberia over the whole of North and Western Europe, rather late in the season, at a time when gas storage is depleted. There are some compounding factors like the Groningen gas field in the Netherlands is substantially reduced and the UKs biggest gas storage facility – Rough – has been closed. Will the lights stay on? Probably yes, but only because governments may ask large industrial consumers to scale back or shut down their operations. At a time when social services are being cut to the bone, is this really the time for government energy policies to be eroding national GDP?
Proponents of a global transition to 100% renewable energy point to a number of studies which claim to show that such a transition is feasible, and arguably the most influential of these is the study of Jacobson et al. 2017, an updated 2018 version of which is now available. Jacobson’s methodology is far too complex to be reviewed here, and besides Clack et al. 2017 have already reviewed it. This post therefore summarizes what the Jacobson study says will be needed in the way of new generation, energy storage etc. to convert the world’s energy sector – electricity, transportation, industry, agriculture, the lot – to 100% wind, water and sunlight power (WWS) by 2050. Among other things it calls for a thirty-fold expansion in total world WWS capacity, including a seventy-fold increase in wind + solar capacity, and up to 16,000 terawatt-hours of energy storage. And the cost? Well, a few trillion here, a few trillion there, and pretty soon we‘re talking real money.
In 2009, in the comments to 
The energy world is fixated on the “huge” amounts of battery storage presently being installed to back up slowly-increasing levels of intermittent renewables generation. The feeling seems to be that as soon as enough batteries are installed to take care of daily supply/demand imbalances we will no longer need conventional dispatchable energy – solar + wind + storage will be able to do it all. Here I take another look at the realities of the situation using what I hope are some telling visual examples of what battery storage will actually do for us. As discussed in previous posts it will get us no closer to the vision of a 100% renewables-powered world than we are now.
A global energy demand forecast is presented to 2100 based on historic growth of per capita energy consumption, 1965-2015 and on UN low and medium population growth forecasts. The low forecast sees energy demand growing from 13.15 billion tonnes oil equivalent (toe) per annum in 2015 to 19.16 billion toe in 2100. The medium population forecast sees 29.5 billion toe in 2100, that is a rise of 124% over 2015. This is an interactive post where commenters are invited to suggest where all this additional energy may come from.
The potential energy contained in the waters of the Great Lakes amounts to approximately six thousand terawatt hours, enough to supply the US and Canada with electricity for an entire year were the lakes to be drained to sea level. This of course will never happen, but there may be potential for partial utilization of the resource. A pumped hydro system that uses Lakes Huron and Michigan as the upper reservoir and Lake Ontario as the lower could theoretically generate 10 terawatt-hours, or more, of seasonal energy storage without changing lake levels significantly. The most likely show-stopper is the increased likelihood of flooding in the lower St. Lawrence River during pumped hydro discharge cycles. (Inset: Niagara falls runs dry in 1969).
This week’s lead story highlights the perils of basing policy decisions on speculative computer models. It seems that the ozone layer isn’t healing as predicted after all, so the dangers of man-made CFC radiation are still with us. And if radiation doesn’t do the job other computer models now tell us that melting permafrost threatens us with death from mercury poisoning. And if neither happens the forthcoming magnetic pole reversal spells the demise of civilization as we know it. Lots more energy and climate-related stories in this bumper Blowout, too numerous to synthesize, but read on and enjoy anyway. They’re not all bad.
While rummaging around the internet to see if I could find any information on the performance of wind farms in Queensland (and especially in Far North Queensland – Andrew Blakers’ supposed panacea for the rather more correlated wind farm outputs in the NEM area), I came across Thursday Island, which installed a small two turbine wind farm 20 years ago. Thursday Island is about as FNQ as you can get – about 25 miles into the Torres Strait that separates Australia and Papua New Guinea. The bonanza came when I encountered a 
The oil price has begun 2018 strongly with Brent breaking through $70 / bbl for the first time since December 2014. OPEC+Russia+others’ discipline on production constraint remains high with ~ 1.7 Mbd production withheld from the market. The IEA reports an ~1 Mbpd stock draw in the OECD + China in 4Q 2017. IEA revisions transform the picture in the USA from one of static production to one of strong growth over the last 3 months (this undoes one of the assumptions used in my 
My friend Alex is in Chamonix in the shadow of Mont Blanc in the French Alps. He sent some very snowy pics and mentioned that it was fair dinging down. The most snow since 2010. Knowing that sunspot cycle 24 was well-advanced I did some checking and came across a web site called 
In my recent post on 
The defining division between “climate sceptics” and “greenhouse gas warmists” is the role of the Sun in causing Earth’s climate to oscillate. The anecdotal evidence for a significant solar role comes from the observation that during the Little Ice Age (LIA) sunspots were virtually absent from the Sun for a few decades – and in Europe at least it was periodically very cold. The HARD scientific evidence that backs this up comes from cosmogenic isotope variations that provide a record of solar geomagentic activity. It is surprising therefore that The Geological Society of London’s (GSL) 2010 position statement on climate change does not mention the incredible cosmogenic isotope record at all.
