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The National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) was launched by then-chancellor George Osborne in October 2015 to “think dispassionately and independently about Britain’s long-term infrastructure needs in areas like transport, energy, communication, flood defence and the like.” Well, the NIC has now thought dispassionately and independently about energy and has concluded that the UK can meet its 2050 decarbonization goals with either a mostly nuclear or mostly renewable generation mix, but that “wind and solar could deliver the same generating capacity as nuclear for the same price, and would be a better choice because there was less risk”. Here we take a brief look at this renewables-beats-nuclear option to see whether it might work.

The NIC study was brought to my attention in a comment by correspondent Ed T in Blowout Week 236, so a hat tip to Ed T. The data available to me consisted of the NIC report, NIC’s Power Point presentation, the source of most of the data I use, and a summary article from the Guardian. The power sector modeling work was performed by Aurora Energy Research (Aurora).

The NIC “aims to be the UK’s most credible, forward-thinking and influential voice on infrastructure policy and strategy, producing reports and analysis of the highest quality, written in plain English, independent of government and all vested interests, and making clear recommendations based on rigorous evidence; and developing an evidence base which sets a gold standard in its quality and breadth.” Its conclusions are summarized in the Guardian article:

Government advisers have told ministers to back only a single new nuclear power station after Hinkley Point C in the next few years, because renewable energy sources could prove a safer investment. Sir John Armitt, the NIC’s chairman, said: He argued that wind and solar could deliver the same generating capacity as nuclear for the same price, and would be a better choice because there was less risk.

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

Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World

July 7, 2018

Anton Balazh/Shutterstock

Why The Coming Oil Crunch Will Shock The World

And why we need a new energy strategy — fast.

My years working in corporate strategy taught me that every strategic framework, no matter how complex (some I worked on were hundreds of pages long), boils down to just two things:

Where do you want to go? (Vision)
How are you going to get there? (Resources)

Vision is the easier one by far. You just dream up a grand idea about where you want the company to be at some target future date, Yes, there’s work in assuring that everybody on the management team truly shares and believes in the vision, but that’s a pretty stratightforward sales job for the CEO.

By the way, this same process applies at the individual level, too, for anyone who wants to achieve a major goal by some point in the future. The easy part of the strategy is deciding you want to be thinner, healthier, richer, or more famous.

But the much harder part, for companies and individuals alike, is figuring out ‘How to get there’. There are always fewer resources than one would prefer.

Corporate strategists always wish for more employees to implement the vision, with better training with better skills. Budgets and useful data are always scarcer than desired, as well.

Similar constraints apply to us individuals. Who couldn’t use more motivation, time and money to pursue their goals?

Put together, the right Vision coupled to a reasonably mapped set of Resources can deliver amazing results. Think of the Apollo Moon missions. You have to know where you’re going and how you’re going to get there to succeed. That’s pretty straightforward, right?

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

The Aberdeen Bay Offshore Wind Farm

June 11, 2018

The Aberdeen Bay Offshore Wind Farm

After about 15 years in planning, the long awaited and largely hated Aberdeen Bay wind farm has taken shape in recent weeks. I seem to recall early reports saying that the turbines, located on the horizon, would be barely visible from shore. Well that was a lie. The huge towers completely dominate the once unspoiled and beautiful scenery of Balmedie Beach. Those who see this as environmental protection have sick minds. And President Trump, who owns a golf course not far away, and who fought this project in the courts, is going to be mighty angry.

Vital Statistics

The wind farm comprises 11 * 8.4 MW Vestas 164 turbines giving a total installed capacity of 93.2 MW. Here is how Vattenfall, the operator, describe the scheme using the all too familiar venacular of renewables ideology:

Annually produce 312 GWh.
Have an installed capacity of 93.2MW
Annually displace 134,128 tonnes of CO2
Remove the equivalent of 736,817 cars from UK roads throughout its lifetime
Produce enough electricity every year to meet the equivalent annual demand of 79,209 homes
Generate more than the equivalent of 70% of Aberdeen’s domestic electricity demand and 23% of Aberdeen’s total demand
Annually invest £150,000 to a Community Benefit Scheme

312 GWh per annum translates to a capacity factor of ~38%. Even although England, Denmark and Germany have vastly bigger offshore wind industries, owing to their favourably shallower water, this facility offshore Aberdeen has been christened the European Offshore Wind Deployment Centre (EOWDC). €3 million has been allocated to fund research into the environmental impact. There seems to be hope among local politicians and the press that this windfarm is somehow going to transform Aberdeen’s ailing economy that is still reeling from the 2014 oil price crash. Allow me to pour some cold water on this hope.

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

Energy Externalities Day 5: Wind Power

March 27, 2018

Energy Externalities Day 5: Wind Power

It’s now day 5 of the Energy Externality Game and time to move onto the first of the new renewables, namely wind power. Loved by Green groups who see only reduced CO2 emissions, wind farms are hated by many others who see a blot on the landscape. Here at Energy Matters we normally just see high cost noise being added to a grid that needs to be balanced from second to second with some precision. This high cost noise needs to be mitigated and the cost of that mitigation is normally borne by others, not the wind farm operators.

The Externalities of Energy Production Systems (Day 1 Coal)
Energy Externalities Day 2: Gas-fired-CCGT
Energy Externalities Day 3: Biomass-Fired-Electricity
Energy Externalities Day 4: Nuclear Power

I am proposing to use 12 metrics to measure costs and benefits:

Fatalities / year / unit of energy produced
Chronic illness years / year / unit of energy produced
Environmental costs not covered directly by the system operators
Foot print of energy system per unit of energy produced
Energy system costs where energy source transfers costs to the transmission system
Energy system benefits where energy source provides a service to the transmission system
Environmental benefits derived from energy system operation
Taxes raised / year / for total energy produced
Subsidies paid / year / for total energy produced
Tax free cost of energy
EroEI
Resource availability

For the following 12 electricity generating systems

Coal-fired (Monday 19 March)
Gas-fired (Tuesday 20 March)
Biomass-fired
Diesel
Nuclear
Hydro electric
Wind
Solar PV
Solar thermal
Wave
Tidal
- barrage
- lagoon
- stream
Geothermal

I then go on to provide qualitative assessments of each measure for each electricity system. I have then developed a game whereby we assign a score against each measure on a scale of 1 to 10 where.

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

Wind farm blades damaged after just a few years at sea — hundreds need repair

February 23, 2018

Wind farm blades damaged after just a few years at sea — hundreds need repair

Image of offshore wind farms. Baltic Sea Wikimedia | Mariusz Paździora

We are trying to collect dilute erratic energy, spread over hundreds of square kilometers in windy, salty, and wet conditions with machines that spin at 330km/hour. What could possibly go wrong?

Ørsted must repair up to 2,000 wind turbine blades because the leading edge of the blades have become worn down after just a few years at sea.

The wind turbine owner will not disclose the bill, but says that the financial significance is “small”.

h/t “Offshore wind fiasco” at GWPF –The original story in Danish.

The cost of repair is so small they need to keep it a secret.

But it can’t be cheap. For the most part the blades need to be brought down, shipped and repaired on land. Repairing them at sea is a rare feat.

This must be the infamous leading edge erosion.

The Offwhore Wind Industry website discussed this type of damage in 2015:

Large rotors lead to large yields, but also to lots of annoyance – at least as far as the coating is concerned. After only a few years, the protective layer that is supposed to prevent erosion is already worn out. Materials that really last for 20 years are still being worked on.

The ever larger rotor blades have led to increasing rotation speeds of the blade tips. Offshore, speeds of up to 90 m/s are now reached. This is around 330 km/h. At these speeds, raindrops and hailstones hit the coating like bullets and remove the erosion protection like a pressure washer. After that, the rain washes away the rest of the coating layers and in the worst case exposes the blade structure. The tips and the leading edges of the blades are most affected.

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

Wind and solar on Thursday Island

February 8, 2018

Wind and solar on Thursday Island

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 pamphlet from Harwell complete with charts showing monthly performance of the wind farm and its contribution to local power demand.

Figure 1: Thursday Island wind generation and percentage contribution to power demand

Digitising the plot allowed monthly demand to be estimated by dividing wind generation by its percentage contribution, as well as showing the highly seasonal nature of generation with almost no wind during the “Doldrums” summer months. The twin turbines have a total capacity of 450kW, and produced 1,680MWh, for a very respectable average capacity factor of 42.6% – somewhat above the projections of 36% made on the basis of a 5 year study of wind speeds. This pattern is not untypical, as this chart of monthly average wind speeds from the study shows:

Demand shows a peak in the hot summer months – precisely when wind is in the Doldrums. It is therefore no surprise to find that the pair of wind turbines were sized to provide under 10% of the island’s annual demand of about 18.5GWh – aside from there not being a great deal of space on the island anyway, with much of the area already taken by housing. The rest of the generation is of course diesel powered.

Figure 3: Power demand, derived from Figure 1

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

In Maria’s Wake, Could Puerto Rico Go Totally Green?

October 2, 2017

In Maria’s Wake, Could Puerto Rico Go Totally Green?

The ecological and humanitarian destruction of Puerto Rico has left the world aghast. But there is a hopeful green-powered opportunity in this disaster that could vastly improve the island’s future while offering the world a critical showcase for a sane energy future.

By all accounts Hurricane Maria has leveled much of the island, and literally left it in the dark. Puerto Rico’s electrical grid has been extensively damaged, with no prospects for a return to conventionally generated and distributed power for months to come.

In response Donald Trump has scolded the island for it’s massive debt, and waited a full week after the storm hit to lift a shipping restriction requiring all incoming goods to be carried on US-flagged ships. (That restriction is largely responsible for the island’s economic problems in the first place.)

The Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority is a state-owned operation that hosts a number of solar and wind farms, as well as a network of hydroelectric dams. But the bulk of its energy supply has come from heavy industrial oil, diesel and gas burners. It also burns coal imported from Colombia at a plant in Guyama.

The fossil burners themselves apparently were left mostly undamaged by Maria. But the delivery system, a traditional network of above-ground poles and wires, has essentially been obliterated. Power authority officials say it could take at least 4-6 months to rebuild that network.

And of course, there is no guaranteeing such a pole-and-wire set-up would not then be obliterated by the next storm.

Among the most serious casualties have been the island’s hospitals. According to reports, 58 of Puerto Rico’s 69 medical facilities have been blacked out. At least two people died when intensive care units went dark.

…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…

How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone

September 14, 2017

How (Not) to Run a Modern Society on Solar and Wind Power Alone

Wind energy

While the potential of wind and solar energy is more than sufficient to supply the electricity demand of industrial societies, these resources are only available intermittently. To ensure that supply always meets demand, a renewable power grid needs an oversized power generation and transmission capacity of up to ten times the peak demand. It also requires a balancing capacity of fossil fuel power plants, or its equivalent in energy storage.

Consequently, matching supply to demand at all times makes renewable power production a complex, slow, expensive and unsustainable undertaking. Yet, if we would adjust energy demand to the variable supply of solar and wind energy, a renewable power grid could be much more advantageous. Using wind and solar energy only when they’re available is a traditional concept that modern technology can improve upon significantly.

100% Renewable Energy

It is widely believed that in the future, renewable energy production will allow modern societies to become independent from fossil fuels, with wind and solar energy having the largest potential. An oft-stated fact is that there’s enough wind and solar power available to meet the energy needs of modern civilisation many times over.

For instance, in Europe, the practical wind energy potential for electricity production on- and off-shore is estimated to be at least 30,000 TWh per year, or ten times the annual electricity demand. [1] In the USA, the technical solar power potential is estimated to be 400,000 TWh, or 100 times the annual electricity demand. [2]

Such statements, although theoretically correct, are highly problematic in practice. This is because they are based on annual averages of renewable energy production, and do not address the highly variable and uncertain character of wind and solar energy.

Annual averages of renewable energy production do not address the highly variable and uncertain character of wind and solar energy

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

The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion

February 19, 2017

The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” Delusion

The “Wind and Solar Will Save Us” story is based on a long list of misunderstandings and apples to oranges comparisons. Somehow, people seem to believe that our economy of 7.5 billion people can get along with a very short list of energy supplies. This short list will not include fossil fuels. Some would exclude nuclear, as well. Without these energy types, we find ourselves with a short list of types of energy — what BP calls Hydroelectric, Geobiomass (geothermal, wood, wood waste, and other miscellaneous types; also liquid fuels from plants), Wind, and Solar.

Unfortunately, a transition to such a short list of fuels can’t really work. These are a few of the problems we encounter:

[1] Wind and solar are making extremely slow progress in helping the world move away from fossil fuel dependence.

In 2015, fossil fuels accounted for 86% of the world’s energy consumption, and nuclear added another 4%, based on data from BP Statistical Review of World Energy. Thus, the world’s “preferred fuels” made up only 10% of the total. Wind and solar together accounted for a little less than 2% of world energy consumption.

Figure 1. World energy consumption based on data from BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.

Our progress in getting away from fossil fuels has not been very fast, either. Going back to 1985, fossil fuels made up 89% of the total, and wind and solar were both insignificant. As indicated above, fossil fuels today comprise 86% of total energy consumption. Thus, in 30 years, we have managed to reduce fossil fuel consumption by 3% (=89% – 86%). Growth in wind and solar contributed 2% of this 3% reduction. At the rate of a 3% reduction every 30 years (or 1% reduction every ten years), it will take 860 years, or until the year 2877 to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels. And the “improvement” made to date was made with huge subsidies for wind and solar.

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

As Drought Grips South Africa, A Conflict Over Water and Coal

May 16, 2016

As Drought Grips South Africa, A Conflict Over Water and Coal

Facing one of the worst droughts in memory, South Africa’s leaders have doubled down on their support of the water-intensive coal industry. But clean energy advocates say the smartest move would be to back the country’s burgeoning wind and solar power sectors.

Until a ferocious drought withered crops, turned rivers to trickles, and dried up municipal drinking water supplies, one of Limpopo province’s distinctions was the ample sun and good soil that made it South Africa’s premier producer of fruits and vegetables.

Another distinction was that the province’s farmers made an informal agreement to share scarce water with coal companies developing the Waterberg Coalfield that lies beneath dry central Limpopo.

Keith Schneider

Residents of KwaZulu-Natal wait in line daily to get water from a government-supplied tank.

The drought, the most extreme in South Africa since the start of the 20th century, shattered the fragile equilibrium between the agricultural and coal sectors. Pitched street clashes between farmers and police, who back the coal interests, have broken out south of Musina, where Coal Africa proposes to build a $406 million mine in an area where some of the country’s most productive vegetable farms operate. The mine would consume 1 million gallons of water a day, according to company disclosures. Both the mine and neighboring irrigated farms are dependent on the Nzhelele River, which has dwindled to a shallow stream.

Higher temperatures and diminished rainfall, which many scientists attribute to climate change are wreaking havoc in two of South Africa’s largest economic sectors — agriculture and energy. Yet in the face of this growing crisis, South Africa’s leaders continue to display unyielding allegiance to the nation’s water-guzzling coal sector, whose 50-plus billion tons of coal reserves fuel 90 percent of the country’s electrical generating capacity and provide a third of its liquid fuels.

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

Storing Energy by Gravity

October 1, 2015

Storing Energy by Gravity

– A simple and efficient way for large scale and long duration energy storage.

Renewable energy technologies have come a long way since the first solar panels and wind turbines were built to harness the energy from sun and wind to meet the ever increasing energy demands of mankind. Advancements in renewable technologies and mushrooming of bigger and larger wind and solar farms are slowly reducing the unit cost of power generated using renewable resources. Also, the contribution by renewable technologies in many countries energy pie chart is growing in size, and is slowly reducing the world’s dependency on fossil fuels for electricity.

Illustration showing the mechanism behind storing electricity using gravity. (Image source: Gravity Power)

And yet, renewable energy technologies are still incapable of standing on their own and have to lean on the fossil fuel to meet irregular demands. Wind doesn’t blow with sufficient strength all the time and there are days when the sunlight doesn’t reach the earth’s surface at a given geographic location with sufficient intensity. Matching the irregular demand with an equally fluctuating power generation is the biggest challenge faced by renewable technologies today. Grid scale renewable farms often rely on gas-powered “peaker” stations to meet irregularities in supply and demand and are fired-up quickly when needed.

The solution to this problem lies in storing the surplus energy on the grid until it is required.
Traditionally, energy has been stored in a number of ways through devices like batteries, flywheels and compressed air. But other than pumped hydro, none of them really amounts to much from a utility stand point with a potential to match supply with demand.

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

Renewable Energy Will Not Support Economic Growth

June 5, 2015

Renewable Energy Will Not Support Economic Growth

Container terminal image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission.

The world needs to end its dependence on fossil fuels as quickly as possible. That’s the only sane response to climate change, and to the economic dilemma of declining oil, coal, and gas resource quality and increasing extraction costs. The nuclear industry is on life support in most countries, so the future appears to lie mostly with solar and wind power. But can we transition to these renewable energy sources and continue using energy the way we do today? And can we maintain our growth-based consumer economy?

The answer to both questions is, probably not. Let’s survey four important sectors of the energy economy and tally up the opportunities and challenges.

The electricity sector: Solar and wind produce electricity, and the fuel is free. Moreover, the cost of electricity from these sources is declining. These are encouraging trends. However, intermittency (the sun doesn’t always shine, the wind doesn’t always blow) still poses barriers to high levels of solar-wind electricity market share. Grid managers can easily integrate small variable inputs; but eventually storage, capacity redundancy, and major grid overhauls will be necessary to balance inputs with loads as higher proportions of electricity come from uncontrollable sources. All of this will be expensive—increasingly so as solar-wind market penetration levels exceed roughly 60 percent. Some of the problems associated with integrating variable renewables into the grid are being worked out over time. But even if all these problems are eventually resolved, only about one-fifth of all final energy is consumed in the form of electricity; how about other forms and ways in which we use energy—will they be easier or harder to transition?

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

The Suits Are Flocking to Renewables

May 18, 2015

The Suits Are Flocking to Renewables

Investors like the ‘predictability’ of clean energy.

If you’re looking for revolutionaries, radicals and upstart disrupters, you wouldn’t generally search among a crowd of municipal bureaucrats, policy wonks and businesspeople, all suited up for a conference at the Four Seasons Hotel in Vancouver.

But the 350-odd delegates to the first Renewable Cities Global Learning Forum made it clear last week that revolution is decidedly their goal. They intend, by every means possible, to consign fossil fuels to the dustbin of history. And much, much sooner than most people are prepared to expect.

This is not journalistic interpretation or a suggestion from the most optimistic and least powerful delegates, idling on the side of the room. Ross Beaty, founder and still chair of the second-largest silver mining company in the world (Pan American Silver Corp.), and one of the conference’s main sponsors, said it plainly halfway through the first day: “It’s a revolution.”

The “it” in question is the corporate swing from non-renewable fuel sources like coal and oil to the alternatives that Beaty now makes available through his most recent venture, Alterra Power, a mid-sized renewable energy company with solar, wind, hydro and geothermal operations in B.C., Ontario and Iceland.

In a panel discussion, in answer to a question about ethical divestment of fossil fuels, Beaty said, “It’s almost irrelevant. Coal, especially, is a dinosaur industry. It’s going out of busines …. It’s just a bad industry to invest in, whether you divest for ethical reasons or not.”

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

Are We Witnessing The Beginning Of The End For Fossil Fuels?

May 17, 2015

Are We Witnessing The Beginning Of The End For Fossil Fuels?

Bloomberg recently declared the era of fossil fuels irrevocably in decline: “The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there’s no going back.”

The sea change in how we power our economies officially occurred in 2013, Bloomberg’s Tom Randall writes in “Fossil Fuels Just Lost the Race Against Renewables.” That year, there were 143 gigawatts (GW) of renewable electricity capacity added globally, versus just 141 GW of new fossil-fueled capacity.

Despite low oil prices, the trend toward renewables is not going to slow down anytime soon, given that the cost of solar and wind power has steadily fallen to the point that it is now cheaper than grid electricity in some parts of the world, Randall argues. “The shift will continue to accelerate, and by 2030 more than four times as much renewable capacity will be added.”

That’s for electricity generation, of course, but before you can officially call the race in renewables’ favor, you have to consider transport. Our cars and trucks and planes mostly run on fossil fuels, after all. As Vox’s Brad Plumer points out, “Electricity and heat were only responsible for about 42 percent of global CO2 emissions from fuel combustion in 2012. For clean energy to truly win the race, it will have to make inroads in other sectors as well, particularly transportation.”

An analysis by the International Energy Agency found that the amount of energy used for transport has doubled over the past three decades, and that slightly more than half of all oil is used for transport.

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

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This must be the infamous leading edge erosion.

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