The World Still Turns

Fanatics think that when they perceive an on-coming "doomsday" that they should have the right to pass laws to make everybody march to their beat. The "global warming" crowd feels they should dictate who gets to burn fossil fuel, by how much, and where. But the real world views that as fanatics imposing their wild-eyed craziness on the rest of the world. So the push by the fanatics to legislate morality (pass IPCC restrictions and quotas) has failed.

So how are we doing in the real world? Surprise! The real world is quickly moving toward renewable energy without the use of the Spanish Inquisition or the Iron Maiden of quotas and restrictions. Here is a bit from an article in the Los Angeles Times:

Renewable energy is surpassing fossil fuels for the first time in new power-plant investments, shaking off setbacks from the financial crisis and an impasse at the United Nations global warming talks.

Electricity from the wind, sun, waves and biomass drew $187 billion last year compared with $157 billion for natural gas, oil and coal, according to calculations by Bloomberg New Energy Finance using the latest data. Accelerating installations of solar- and wind-power plants led to lower equipment prices, making clean energy more competitive with coal.

"The progress of renewables has been nothing short of remarkable," United Nations Environment Program Executive Secretary Achim Steiner said in an interview. "You have record investment in the midst of an economic and financial crisis."

The findings indicate the world is shifting toward consuming more renewable energy even without a global agreement on limiting greenhouse gases.

...

As well as renewables spending exceeding that on new fossil plants, last year also was the first time expenditure in developing countries, mainly China, exceeded that in the industrialized world, Sawyer said, predicting both trends will continue.

The New Energy Finance figures exclude investment that merely replaces existing plants, and its renewables tally excludes money spent on building large hydropower projects.

Wind operators are likely to install 43 gigawatts of generating capacity this year and 48 gigawatts next year, up from 36 gigawatts in 2010, GWEC estimates.

I know this disappoints the doomsters selling the snake oil of catastrophic "global warming". But in the real world, technology improves and people make choices that make their world a better place. You don't have to beat them with whips or force them into chains. The ideologues prefer to reduce people to mindless soulless automata who simply follow orders from the politically correct. But in the real world, people like the idea that they get to choose their future and that they get credit for making intelligent choices.

The US's Energy "Policy" is to Cut Off Its Oil Supply

Here is a bit from an article on the blog Watts Up With That? which points out the idiocy of the US energy "policy", i.e. cutting off its supply in order to "save the Earth"...

We told you ... how pointless and futile the McKibben driven 350.org protests about the XL pipeline were, because they did nothing to alter the fact that the oil would still be used, somewhere. See The Only Choice Is Where It Gets Burned

I mentioned in an essay Friday that:

Dr. Christy ended his essay with the title of this post saying “Don’t demonize energy, because without energy, life is brutal and short”….I thought those were good words to consider, especially since we have activist maniacs like weepy Bill McKibben out to demonize energy on a daily basis. McKibben and his followers, not possessing the intelligence to fully understand what they are doing, think “they won“.

Bottom line: that tar sands oil is going to be burned somewhere, in other countries willing to buy it. Stopping a pipeline has no effect on Canada’s export of the oil, only on American jobs, but McKibben and his 350.org is cluelessly ecstatic over this.

Looks like we were right, only one day later, Canada looks to sell the tar sands oil to China. From Energy Daily:

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Sunday that he was looking at exporting more oil to China after the United States delayed a decision on a controversial pipeline.

The conservative Canadian leader, taking part in a summit in Hawaii hosted by Obama said the pipeline decision had produced “extremely negative reactions” and that he discussed oil exports with Chinese President Hu Jintao.

“This does underscore the necessity of Canada making sure that we are able to access Asian markets for our energy products,” Harper told reporters. “I indicated that yesterday (Saturday) to President Hu of China.”

Full story at Energy Daily.

I'm a conservationist, but a sensible one. These fanatics who cut their own throat are ridiculous. (I should qualify: these Pied Pipers sell "enviro" to the poor suckers who will live with the consequences while the "leaders" are rich and can buy their way out of the disaster they create.)

In the real world, the US needs oil. If it doesn't get it from Canada, then Canada will sell it where its is wanted and then the US will be locked out and have to get the oil from less secure areas which means that 1970s long line-ups for gasoline will return. That isn't a policy. That is political suicide brought on by following idiots who don't understand real "environmentalism". A serious environmentalist realizes that energy is essential for a sound economy and would be working to conserve and develop new technology, not cut supply. Conserve is like cutting down on carbs to get in trim shape. Cutting supply is like being stranded on a very small desert island with no food. You starve.

It has always bugged me that these phony "enviro" nuts want to cut GDP. Their fanatical policy wouldn't hurt them because they are rich and can buy what they need, and even if the society crashed because of the idiot policy, they would simply use their money to move to an unaffected part of the world. These people are selling the same kind of "Kool-Aid" that 1960s "back to the land" people sold. The rich kids, when they got tired, went back to their rich parents, got money, got back into school, or had their parents line them up with a job in the family business. Meanwhile those fools in the bottom 90% that followed the Pied Pipers of the 1960s into "back to the land" ended up living hard lives in urban inner cities or were marooned in desperately poor rural areas. Their lives were ruined by the lies of the "back to the land" sirens.

Looking at Day 1 of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster

Here is an excellent account of the Fukushima nuclear disaster. It is one article in a whole issue of IEEE's November 2011 Spectrum issue. Spectrum is the journal of electrical engineers:

24 Hours at Fukushima

A blow-by-blow account of the worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl

By Eliza Strickland / November 2011

Sometimes it takes a disaster before we humans really figure out how to design something. In fact, sometimes it takes more than one.

Millions of people had to die on highways, for example, before governments forced auto companies to get serious about safety in the 1980s. But with nuclear power, learning by disaster has never really been an option. Or so it seemed, until officials found themselves grappling with the world's third major accident at a nuclear plant. On 11 March, a tidal wave set in motion a sequence of events that led to meltdowns in three reactors at the Fukushima Dai-ichi power station, 250 kilometers northeast of Tokyo.

Unlike the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 and Chernobyl in 1986, the chain of failures that led to disaster at Fukushima was caused by an extreme event. It was precisely the kind of occurrence that nuclear-plant designers strive to anticipate in their blueprints and emergency-response officials try to envision in their plans. The struggle to control the stricken plant, with its remarkable heroism, improvisational genius, and heartbreaking failure, will keep the experts busy for years to come. And in the end the calamity will undoubtedly improve nuclear plant design.

True, the antinuclear forces will find plenty in the Fukushima saga to bolster their arguments. The interlocked and cascading chain of mishaps seems to be a textbook validation of the "normal accidents" hypothesis developed by Charles Perrow after Three Mile Island. Perrow, a Yale University sociologist, identified the nuclear power plant as the canonical tightly coupled system, in which the occasional catastrophic failure is inevitable.

On the other hand, close study of the disaster's first 24 hours, before the cascade of failures carried reactor 1 beyond any hope of salvation, reveals clear inflection points where minor differences would have prevented events from spiraling out of control. Some of these are astonishingly simple: If the emergency generators had been installed on upper floors rather than in basements, for example, the disaster would have stopped before it began. And if workers had been able to vent gases in reactor 1 sooner, the rest of the plant's destruction might well have been averted.

The world's three major nuclear accidents had very different causes, but they have one important thing in common: In each case, the company or government agency in charge withheld critical information from the public. And in the absence of information, the panicked public began to associate all nuclear power with horror and radiation nightmares.

Go read the whole article. It is well worth your time. The rest of the article goes through the 24 hour timeline detailing the complications and mis-steps that led to the disaster.

We've learned a great deal about the Fukushima accident in the past seven months. But the nuclear industry's trial-and-error learning process is a dreadful thing: The rare catastrophes advance the science of nuclear power but also destroy lives and render entire towns uninhabitable. Three Mile Island left the public terrified of nuclear power; Chernobyl scattered fallout across vast swaths of Eastern Europe and is estimated to have caused thousands of cancer deaths. So far, the cost of Fukushima is a dozen dead towns ringing the broken power station, more than 80 000 refugees, and a traumatized Japan. We will learn even more as TEPCO releases more details of what went wrong in the first days of the accident. But as we go forward, we will also live with the knowledge that some future catastrophe will have yet more lessons to teach us.

The foot-dragging and refusal to share information or access outside experts by TEPCO is criminal. Every engineer I know was always willing to share information. It is a tough career and you want to learn through others experiences. But management puts up walls to protect "intellectual property" or, in the case of TEPCO, to hide facts from the prying eyes of the wider world.

One of the hats I wore was "software safety engineer" and my experience was that it was difficult to get management to pay more than lip service to safety. Worse, the analysis to uncover failure modes was not a popular activity for engineers who got paid for producing designs. I also worked as a performance engineer and I ran into similar problems getting engineers to take the analysis for performance seriously. But I found they were more amenable to performance because it was more concrete. I built models and that was something that was tangible. Safety analysis produced paper but it didn't come across as "real". I'm not saying that engineers were hostile to the analysis. Some were interested, but most were indifferent. They just saw it as another hoop they had to jump through to get their job done. There are excellent books on safety but, just like human-centred design, these books aren't on the bookshelves of most engineers.

How to Destroy a Country

Simple, follow blind ideology and ignore reality.

Here is a bit from an article in the UK's Telegraph newspaper pointing out that the UK is well on its way to transforming itself from a post-industrial country to a de-industrialized impoverished country:

What is the maddest thing going on in Britain today? There may be many competitors for that title, but a front-runner must be what the Government has made the centrepiece of its energy policy, to ensure that our lights stay on and that our now largely computer-dependent economy remains functioning. Last week, the BBC ran a series of reports by its science correspondent, David Shukman, on the Government’s plan to ring our coasts with vast offshore wind farms.

The nearest thing allowed to criticism of this policy came in an interview with the Oxford academic Dieter Helm, who we were told had “done the sums”. What, Shukman asked, had he come up with? The only figures Helm gave were that the Government’s offshore wind farm plans would, by 2020, cost £100 billion – scarcely a state secret, since the Government itself announced this three years ago – plus £40 billion more to connect these windmills to the grid, a figure given us by the National Grid last year.

Helm did not tell us that this £140 billion equates to £5,600 for every household in the country. But he did admit that the plan was “staggeringly expensive”, and that, given the current extent of “fuel poverty” and the state of our economy, he doubted “if it can in fact be afforded”.

...

Compare this with the figures for Britain’s newest gas-fired power station, recently opened in Plymouth. This is capable of generating 882MW at a capital cost of £400 million – just £500,000 for each megawatt. Thus the wind farm is 22 times more expensive, and could only be built because its owners will receive a 200 per cent subsidy: £40 million a year, on top of the £20 million they will get for the electricity itself. This we will all have to pay for through our electricity bills, whereas the unsubsidised cost of power from the gas plant, even including the price of the gas, will be a third as much.

You can't compete economically if you spend far more on energy than your neighbors. You can't compete if you layer huge debts on the population in order to meet a "green" ideology.

The children and grandchildren of this generation will be working to pay off debts of this ideological "splurge". And the cruelest joke will be that those generations will realize that the "global warming" craze was built on an exaggerated threat. People have been stampeded by ideologues and their children and grandchildren will be left picking up the pieces. Sad.

This insanity might be bearable if the cost actually bought the proposed "benefit", but it doesn't:

The insanity does not end here. The Government talks of building 10,000 windmills capable of generating up to 25,000MW of the electricity we need. But when it does so, it – like the BBC – invariably uses that same trick of referring to “capacity”, without explaining that their actual output would be well below 30 per cent. (Last year, onshore turbines generated just 21 per cent of their capacity.) In other words, for all that colossal expenditure – and even if there was the remotest chance that two new giant turbines could be built every day between now and 2020 – we could only hope to generate some 6,000MW. This is not only way below our EU target, it is only a tenth of our peak demand during those cold, windless weeks last winter, when wind power was often providing barely 1 per cent of the power we needed.

To keep the lights on during such times, for every new megawatt of wind capacity we build it will be necessary for to build a megawatt of capacity from gas-fired stations, kept wastefully running 24/7, chucking out carbon dioxide. This will add further billions to the bill we shall all have to pay, while ensuring that wind power does nothing whatever to reduce our overall emission of CO2. But this, again, is another thing that the Government and the BBC are careful never to tell us. Madness is far too polite a word.

Only an ideologue would celebrate buildling a megawatt of wind power and then having to back it up with a megawatt of gas-fired turbine to handle the fact that the wind power isn't sufficiently reliable to be left alone to provide the power. Rather than just building the gas-fired turbine and using it, the green fanatics end up building both and running the gas-fired turbine as "back up"!

Crazy Politically-Driven Energy Decisions

I'm all for conservation. But I get bugged when "Greens" preach conservation. Why?

• First, not that many practice what they preach (witness the multiple gigantic homes of "end-of-the-world global warming" Al Gore including expensive outdoor lighting run to show off his mansions).


• Second, I especially get bothered when others mandate that I practice their private morality. This is especially annoying. I have nothing against environmental nuts practicing "being green" but when they mandate by law that I dance to their tune, I get very angry.


• Third, a lot of the "save the world" stuff is run by rich bored offspring of billionaires and centi-millionaires who won't suffer one whit if the GDP is slowed down or even shrunk by their idiocies. But I feel for the world's really poor living on $1/day. Every penny counts for them.
  

Here's an example of "green idiocy" from Canada's Financial Post newspaper:

During the spring months in Ontario, the winds blow a lot. For companies in the wind-power business, that’s good news. For the province’s electricity consumers, though, it’s another financial disaster that, on an annual basis, drains up to $400-million out of consumers’ pockets. But that money doesn’t directly fund green electricity for Ontarians who pay for it. Instead, the bulk of wind power is essentially surplus power that is exported to the United States and out of province at rock-bottom prices. Ontarians are paying $135 for units of power that are dumped on the export market at prices as low as $20. Sometimes, Ontario has to pay other jurisdictions to take the surplus off its hands.

This past May, Ontario’s wind producers generated 284,000 megawatt hours (MWh) of electricity. For each MWh, the producers collected $135, for a total of $38-million. That money is paid out of the churning slush fund that is now the Ontario electric power system. The system, through its byzantine structures, sold that same power into the electricity market at market prices. The average market price for electricity in May was about $25 a MWh. Wind power, however, rarely gets even the average price.

This is complete economic insanity: mandate production at $135 and sell at $25. This is green eco policies designed to beggar the public. This should be a crime.

The Greening of Solar Power

Alternative energy sounds so appealing. Replace all that dirty old technology with new "green" technology and we have a wonderful, no muss no fuss future.

But I see a green nightmare:


The above is from a post on the blog NoTricksZone with the title "Weed-Covered, Neglected Solar Park: 20 Acres, $11 Million, Only One And Half Years Old!".

I'm no expert in solar power, but I would bet that you get a lot less power generation when your panels are shaded by weeds. Your fixed costs are fixed, but your income is variable depending on sun vs. cloud and this -- surprise! -- need to maintain a solar power plant by chopping down weeds and doing various maintenance tasks. I'm guessing that all those optimistic scenarios about "low cost solar power" ignore the problems with weeds and the costs of maintenance.

Going Green and the Hand Wringing Apologists

There is a lot of brow-beating of people in the developed world about their "guilt". Guilt for a "colonial" past. Guilt about outrageously self-indulgent lifestyles. Guilt about greedily seizing resources and living the underdeveloped world desperate and without.

Well... I was never a colonialist. I don't live an indulgent lifestyle. And I've never hogged resources. Sure, colonialism was rampant 300 years ago. But if you go back 2000 years you find Romans, Chinese, Persians, Indians, etc. as the great colonialists. Why don't be beat Iranians, Chinese, Indians, etc. about the ears for having "empires". My ancestors were running around half naked in the northern fringe woodlands 2000 years ago.

As for using an "unfair" share of resources:

Click to Enlarge
The above graph is from a post on energy by Ed Yardini in his blog Dr. Ed's Blog.

As the graph makes clear, the rising standard of living in China and India (and more generally in southeast Asia) means that resource consumption there has rapidly surpassed the "developed" world. Sure, the per-capita resource use is still low, but the graph shows the trend. In 30-50 years the overwhelming about of resource consumption will be with the billion+ populations of China and India.

Oil consumption is falling in the "developed" world while it is strongly rising in the "undeveloped" world. But all the anti-technology, "green", guilt-ridden propaganda used to make people in the developed world feel guilty is out-dated. It doesn't reflect the world we now live in. But it always takes time for people to throw off out-dated mental shackles.

Alternate Energy Source for Jet Fuel

I found this bit of a post by Geoffrey Styles at the Energy Outlook blog to be interesting:

The government of Ontario Province just awarded Rentech, Inc., a company with long expertise in gasification and fuel synthesis, a 1.3 million ton-per-year supply of forest waste and other biomass from Canada's Crown Forests, specifically for the production of renewable jet fuel. The proposed facility would produce around 22 million gallons per year of biojet, along with another 11 million gallons of non-jet products. That equates to roughly 1% of Canada's current jet fuel consumption. Canada might have enough forest biomass available to produce a sizable fraction of its jet fuel needs from such sources, but other countries don't, so it's fortunate that alternative jet fuel can be made through so many different pathways.

The doomsday crowd wants to mandate all kinds of crazy things to "fix" what they see as impending doom with "global warming". I don't expect the earth to burn to a crisp because (a) I think the danger is far over hyped and (b) I believe that man's innovative technology will "save" us far before we start to smoke and burst into flames from runaway global warming.

I do believe that we have exploited all the cheap oil reserves and as the price of oil rises inexorably over the next century, alternatives will keep heaving into view and I expect a lot of them will be "green". So I think any "global warming" will be like the doomsday scenario that England faced in the 17th century of a doomsday of "no more trees to support the building of the fleet". England discovered lots of trees in North America, then it decided to build it ships from steel. So the ever-feared "end of times" scenario of no trees left to build a ship passed quietly without the apprehended disaster raising its head.

Safety First!

Leave it to a bureaucrat to put public safety above all else. Here is a bit from an interesting article in the Chicago Tribune:

Making the Chicago River safe enough for swimming would waste taxpayer money and increase the risk of people drowning, officials who oversee the waterway said today.

Responding to an order from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to clean up high levels of disease-causing bacteria in the river, the president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District’s elected board said the urban waterway has been altered so dramatically that new efforts to improve water quality would not be worth the costs.

Go read the whole article to appreciate the "sophistication" of their bureaucrat's "reasoning".

In the same vein...

• Giving children immunization shots is a big waste. It just means more kids will survive childhood and become a burden on the social system when they retire and collect Social Security.


• Putting up road signs just means more people will avoid dying at intersections or not kill themselves when surprised by winding roads or a need to yield to on-coming traffic. Adding signs is a waste of taxpayer money and means that the will be more cars on the road slowing everybody's commute.

Ah... the possibilities of this kind of logic are unending!

Jolly Green Giant?

Here is a bit from a Washington Post article by Bjorn Lomborg that questions the myth that China is the leading actor in a "green future" for planet earth:

China was responsible for half of the world’s production of solar panels in 2010, but only 1 percent was installed there. Just as China produces everything from trinkets to supertankers, it is exporting green technology — which makes it a giant of manufacturing, not of environmental friendliness.

In wind power, China both produces and consumes. In 2009, it put up about a third of the world’s new wind turbines. But much of this has been for show. A 2008 Citigroup analysis found that about one-third of China’s wind power assets were not in use. Many turbines are not connected to the transmission grid. Chinese power companies built wind turbines that they didn’t use as the cheapest way of satisfying — on paper — government requirements to boost renewable energy capacity.

Consider the bigger picture: 87 percent of the energy produced in China comes from fossil fuels, the vast majority of it from coal, the International Energy Agency found in 2010.

Go read the whole article.

I liked Bjorn Lomborg's original stance on "global warming". He was a pragmatist calling for a rational trade off between the expenses of a "precautionary principle" and the very real benefits of money spent on more pressing issues for humanity. He questioned the real costs of warming. He didn't waste much time arguing about the "settled science" of global warming. He should have been the consensus winner, but he wasn't. Lately he has drifted more into the hysterial global warming camp. From Wikipedia:

In August 2010, Lomborg appeared to reverse his position on global warming in an interview with the Guardian. He revealed that he endorses the use of a carbon tax to fight climate change in his latest book.

I think he has lost his way and given into the seductions of being on the "winning" side. The science isn't settled and as I shiver through a La Niña year on the Pacific West Coast I can assure you things are colder here and no "global warming" is in evidence. I remember in the early 1980s when I bought my first house going out to the dykes wondering if they would hold as earth grew warmer and the rising sea level from global warming would overtop them. The extremist were telling me that by 2000 at the latest my house would be subject to flooding as high tides overtopped the dykes. Well, the dykes were never raised and global sea levels are up a couple of centimeters instead of the metre promised by the diehard crazies.

The above article by Lomborg is good because it underlines that you can't take things at face value. You have to nose around and look beyond the headlines, look past the screaming fanatics on left and right, you need to use your own intelligence to understand the world and come up with your own strategy. If everybody independently does this, then we will have the diversity of viewpoints and the undertaking of a multitude of different strategies which will give us the necessary depth of options and alternatives needed to deal with whatever the future throws at us.

Real danger comes when people get on a bandwagen. To use a tired example: look at Germany under Hitler, an advanced country with culture and education marched off a cliff under the guidance of a fanatic. Nobody has truth by the tail. Only if everybody finds their own bit of truth and contributes it to the collective whole do we have a real chance of having the tools to deal with what will be thrown at us. Strength in number, strength in diversity in depth, strength through democracy and individual choice.

Unintended Consequences of Renewable Energy

Those who rant for simplistic solutions often overlook "unintended consequences" of their choices. Here's a bit from a newspaper article from the Seattle Times noting a conflict between wind generated power and hydropower from large dams in the state of Washington. I'be bolded the key bit:

Pacific Northwest wind-power producers are battling a proposal that could force them to periodically shut down their plants in the months ahead, potentially costing them millions of dollars in lost revenue.

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) officials say that limiting wind production could be required to free up space in the regional transmission system to handle hydropower generated from the melt-off of a huge mountain snowpack this year.

...

The dispute reflects major strains on the regional power system, which has been reshaped by a dramatic expansion of wind power in Washington and Oregon. Most of that power is exported to California and other markets outside the Northwest.

Wind-power producers say the BPA should compensate them financially for any prolonged shutdowns ordered by the agency. Their ranks include Puget Sound Energy, which has built wind farms in Washington.

BPA officials say the shutdowns will only happen as a last resort and that wind producers should not receive compensation.

Such payments would raise operating costs and could push up rates for the BPA's major customers — Northwest public utilities, including Seattle City Light, which have endorsed the agency plan.

"We think that is not a fair transfer of costs and puts too much of a burden on public-utility ratepayers," said Doug Johnson, a BPA spokesman.

During the past decade, wind power has attracted billions of dollars of investment, driven in part by tax incentives and state requirements that utilities buy renewable energy other than hydro power.

When the winds are fierce, the Northwest farms are capable of producing up to 3,500 megawatts of power. That's more than triple the energy of the Northwest's sole nuclear-power plant.

Total wind-power capacity could double by 2015.

The BPA manages the regional power-supply system by balancing, minute by minute, the flow of electricity surging through the system with demand.

As the wind industry expands, the BPA has found it more difficult to transmit all that power and still meet other responsibilities, which include selling hydro power outside the region and spilling water over dams to aid the passage of migrating salmon.

Last June, the BPA balancing effort turned into a high-wire act as a late snow melt unleashed a gusher of water down the Columbia River at the same time that winds whipped up the power turbines.

BPA officials said that they couldn't divert all the water around the hydroelectric turbines without putting too much dissolved gas into the river and placing salmon at risk. So they ended up running more water through the dam turbines and giving away their surplus power to utilities all over the West.

That spurred the agency to develop a new proposal to periodically shut down wind-power farms to help balance loads. The plan was embraced by public utilities across the region.

The idea that variable power sources like solar and wind generated electricity can be simply "mandated" politically with no consequences is foolish. Voters who act on "good feelings" and without "hard thinking" create problems that they are completely unaware of. Sad.

Hostility to Wind Power

I'm OK with wind power. But here is a report commissioned by the Scottish John Muir Trust, a conservation society that apparently is hostile to wind farms, looking at some issues with wind power:

The following five statements are common assertions made by both the wind industry and Government representatives and agencies. This Report examines those assertions.

1. “Wind turbines will generate on average 30% of their rated capacity over a year.”


2. “The wind is always blowing somewhere.”


3. “Periods of widespread low wind are infrequent.”


4. “The probability of very low wind output coinciding with peak electricity demand is slight.”


5. “Pumped storage hydro can fill the generation gap during prolonged low wind periods.”

This analysis uses publicly available data for a 26 month period between November 2008 and December 2010 and the facts in respect of the above assertions are:

1. Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08%
   between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.


2. There were 124 separate occasions from November 2008 till December 2010 when total generation from the windfarms metered by National Grid was less than 20MW. (Average capacity over the period was in excess of 1600MW).


3. The average frequency and duration of a low wind event of 20MW or less between November 2008 and December 2010 was once every 6.38 days for a period of 4.93 hours.


4. At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.


5. The entire pumped storage hydro capacity in the UK can provide up to 2788MW for only 5 hours then it drops to 1060MW, and finally runs out of water after 22 hours.

...

During the study period, wind generation was:

• below 20% of capacity more than half the time.


• below 10% of capacity over one third of the time.


• below 2.5% capacity for the equivalent of one day in twelve.


• below 1.25% capacity for the equivalent of just under one day a month.

The discovery that for one third of the time wind output was less than 10% of capacity, and often significantly less than 10%, was an unexpected result of the analysis.

That is not very encouraging. I can report from personal experience that traveling on I-10 going through the San Gorgonia pass between Los Angeles and Palm Springs is quite a large number of wind farms and a disconcertingly large number of the windmills are "out of commission" at any given time. It has always puzzled me. I would think it is expensive to build these farms and to run them at a low utlization rate doesn't strike me as economically sensible.

Update 2011apr13: Here's a video of Tehachapi Pass which is north of the San Gorgonio pass I talk about above. But the video shows a similar condition: lots of idle windmills...



Here's a video of San Gorgonio pass:

History of Civilization on the Fly

Here's a quick zoom through civilization's impact on native vegetation:



Some see the browning (desertification?) of that lovely green as a horror story. I see it as humans taking charge of their fate through their technology. I don't want to pave over paradise, but I enjoy farmland. I think it looks lovely. And I especially love the fruits of the labour of farmers.

Spinning a Food Crisis

This graph should tell you all you need to know about the "food crisis" that doom-and-gloomsters want you to believe is upon us:

Click to Enlarge
The above is from an article by Willis Eschenbach on the Watts Up with That? blog. He examines the claims of professional doomster (oh, I mean "environmentalist") Bill McKibben. What I enjoy about people like McKibben is that they never let a fact get in the way of their prejudices. Go read the article by Eschenbach to see how he demolishes McKibben's claim that:

We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years.

Those are all lies. But McKibben has been in the business of lies for a long time. From the Wikipedia site:

His first book, The End of Nature, was published in 1989 by Random House after being serialized in the New Yorker. It is regarded as the first book for a general audience about climate change, and has been printed in more than 20 languages. Several editions have come out in the United States, including an updated version published in 2006.

Yep, for 22 years he has been telling people that "the end is nigh" because of global warming. I guess it is too much to think that he would give up on that theme since he also pushes the Robert Malthus "we are all going to starve to death because population grows faster than food supply" lie that has been around since 1798, that's 213 years and counting.

Credo

Here is a bit from a statement of principles by Ross McKitrick. From his web site we get his statement about the WWF's Earth Hour:

I don't want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes
to see what it’s like to go back to nature. For humans, living in "nature" meant a short life
span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty
and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering,
our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry
and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air
emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into
sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing
something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal
that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks. I like visiting nature
but I don't want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its
tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.

Count me in. I enjoy brief visits to "nature" but I don't want to be one of those half million in northern Japan having to forage for food and warmth and a place to sleep. I'm pretty sure that hundreds are dying each day because the "natural conditions" are just too harsh.

Save the Environment!

I'm thinking I need to sign this petition... You can never be too safe when it comes to something that sounds as threatening a dihydrogen monoxide. Wow! That's got to be really bad stuff... it just plain sounds bad!



Save the whales! Save the redwoods! Save the baby seals! And save us from dihydrogen monoxide!

Where's the Friendly Energy?

From an National Geographic article entitled "Shining Light on the Cost of Solar Energy":

Capturing that power, and putting it to work in the form of electricity, is relatively expensive.

It’s true that the cost of solar electricity has declined over the past ten years. Along the way, the popularity of solar electricity has risen. A decade ago, fewer than 25,000 solar cells and modules were shipped in the United States every year. In 2008, that number had skyrocketed to more than 500,000. But that is still a drop in the bucket. Only about one-tenth of 1 percent of the energy consumed in the United States came from solar sources in 2008.

...

The U.S. DOE’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that it’s the most expensive form of electricity among current technologies for new electricity generation, about $396 per megawatthour for PV. That’s more than double EIA’s estimate of the total system levelized cost of wind, and almost four times the cost of conventional coal.

And that analysis looks at large-scale solar, the kind usually owned by utility companies. Small installations on home rooftops are even more expensive, because they don’t take advantage of buying—or installing—in bulk. To be fair, over 20 years, a homeowner will earn back between 76 percent and 109 percent of the system’s cost in the form of lower electricity bills, because the fuel that powers solar energy is free, according to a 2009 report on financing solar installations in the residential sector by the U.S. DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory.

...

Thanks to the rising cost of coal and natural gas—as well as the short-term cost benefits of cadmium telluride, and falling costs of silicon and other solar options—the National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that solar energy could reach nationwide grid parity by 2017. That’s without any subsidies and with only small, incremental improvements on current technology.

But Seth Darling at Argonne says the United States won’t be likely to see hundreds of gigawatts of solar running at grid parity until 2025, at the earliest.

Go read the original article to get the embedded links.

The article doesn't address one big problem with solar (and wind): the fact that this is an intermittent power source not in sync with power demand. That means you need to build a power storage infrastructure and distribution system to even out the disparity between power creation and power demand. That adds to cost and since power is lost in these intermediate steps, it effectively raises the cost of solar (and wind) generated power.

I've got nothing against solar (and wind) power. But you have to be realistic. The Germans subsidized a huge installation of solar power and they will be paying ridiculous power bills for over a generation to make up for their ideology-driven "green" agenda.

An Inconvenient Truthiness

Warren Meyer runs the website climate-skeptic.com and has made an interesting and informative video on "global warming". This is an excellent anti-dote to Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. It comes in 9 parts:

Part 1:


Part 2:


Part 3:


Part 4:


Part 5:


Part 6:


Part 7:


Part 8:


Part 9:

The Soft Porn of Global Catastrophe

The group 10:10 thinks this is a wonderful way to encourage people to be "civic minded" and encourage participation in a democracy...



Yeah... a democracy where the guys at the top scare you shitless if you don't "conform" to their idea of political correctness!

This group and the Earth First! group scare the pants off me. Their motto seems to be "my way or the highway!"

And this...

If you wonder what it would be like to "interview" the SS guards at a Nazi concentration camp as they finished off a big batch of the "final solution", it would probably have been with giggles like this:



The above gives you a feel for what it was like to be about the "true believers" in the late 1930s in Germany. Lots of enthusiasm and not a clue of how they, as lemmings, were going over a cliff to achieve the maniacal vision of some crazed fanatic, in this case a "global warming" fanatic.

Wolves & Ecology

Here is a bit from a thoughtful piece on wolves & ecology by Chip Ward in Tom Engelhardt's TomDispatch.com blog:

... when we exterminated wolves from Yellowstone in the early 1900s, killing every last one, we de-watered the land. That’s right -- no wolves eventually meant fewer streams, creeks, marshes, and springs across western landscapes like Yellowstone where wolves had once thrived.

The chain of effects went roughly like this: no wolves meant that many more elk crowded onto inviting river and stream banks where the grass is green and the livin’ easy. A growing population of fat elk, in no danger of being turned into prey, gnawed down willow and aspen seedlings before they could mature. Willows are both food and building material for beavers. As the willows declined, so did beaver populations. When beavers build dams and ponds, they create wetland habitats for countless bugs, amphibians, fish, birds, and plants, as well as slowing the flow of water and distributing it over broad areas. The consequences of their decline rippled across the land.

Meanwhile, as the land dried up, Yellowstone’s overgrazed riverbanks eroded. Life-giving river water receded, leaving those banks barren. Spawning beds for fish were silted over. Amphibians lost precious shade where they could have sheltered and hidden. Yellowstone’s web of life was fraying and becoming threadbare.

The unexpected relationship between absent wolves and absent water is just one example of how big, scary predators like grizzlies and mountain lions, often called “charismatic carnivores,” regulate their ecosystems from the top down.

...

Today, wolves are thriving in Yellowstone. The 66 wolves trapped in Canada and released in Yellowstone and the Idaho wilderness in 1995-96 have generated more than 1,700 wolves. More than 200 wolf packs exist in the area today and the effect on the environment has been nothing short of astonishing.

There was one beaver colony in the park at the time wolves were reintroduced. Today, 12 colonies are busy storing water, evening out seasonal water flows, recharging springs, and creating habitat. Willow stands are robust again and the songbirds that nest in them are recovering. Creatures that scavenge wolf-kills for meat, including ravens, eagles, wolverines, and bears, have benefited. Wolves have pushed out and killed the coyotes that feed on pronghorn antelope, so pronghorn numbers are also up. Riverbanks are lush and shady again. With less competition from elk for grass, the bison in the park are doing better, too.

Elk are the sole species that has been diminished -- and that, after all, was the purpose of putting wolves back in the game in the first place. The elk population of Yellowstone is still larger than it was at its low point in the late 1960s, but there are fewer elk today than in recent decades. The decline has alarmed elk hunters and the local businesses that rely on their trade.

Worse yet, from the hunting point of view, elk behavior has changed dramatically. Instead of camping out on stream banks and overeating, they roam far more and in smaller numbers, browsing in brushy areas where there is more protective cover. Surviving elk are healthier, but leaner, warier, far more dispersed, and significantly harder to hunt. This further dismays those who had become accustomed to easy hunting and bigger animals.

A lively debate is underway among game wardens, guides, and wildlife biologists about just how far elk numbers have declined, what role drought and other non-wolf variables may be playing in that decline, and whether elk numbers will -- or even should -- rebound. State wildlife agencies that once fed hay to bountiful populations of elk to keep them from starving during harsh winters depend on hunting and fishing licenses to fill their coffers. Predictably enough, they have come down on the side of the frustrated big game hunters, who think the wolves have killed too many elk. Hunters have been a powerful force for conservation when habitat for birds and big game is at stake, but wolf reintroduction hits them right in the ol’ game bag, and on this issue they seem to be abandoning former conservation allies.

...

In this regard, ecological literacy is not a side issue. It’s a prerequisite for survival. The articulation of reality is more primal than any strategy or policy. If greed is turning the Earth into a scorched planet of slums, ignorance is its enabler. Just as American farmers once realized that erosion follows ignorance and learned how to plow differently, just as most of us finally learned that rivers should not be used as toxic dumps, so today we must learn that environments have the equivalent of operating systems. Predation by large carnivores is written deep into the code of much of the American landscape. Today, a rancher who expects to do business in a predator-free landscape is no more reasonable than yesterday’s industrialist who expected to use the nearest river as a sewer. Living with wolves may be a challenging proposition, but it’s hardly impossible to do -- as folks in Minnesota or Canada can attest.

There's a lot more interesting detail in the article, go read the whole thing.

I tread a line between Chip Ward's "Mother Earth knows best" and the ill-informed eco-nuts who love pandas and baby seals and ignore ecological detail. My viewpoint is that nature is a complex of life that is indifferent to humans. We are part of the web and if we push the web too hard it will snap and we will pay a price. But the great biomass of the planet is at tiny lifeforms that we mostly ignore. Ants make up a mass as great as us and bacteria overwhelm us in total mass. We are not the masters of creation.

To be successful we have to be smarter about our real place in life. I've got nothing against humans having an outsize piece of life on earth. I like humans. But we do have to recognize that we don't "own" earth and that we can push ecosystems too hard. I'm not a "back to nature type". I have nothing against humans reshaping vast tracts. On the other hand, I enjoy wild vistas of "untouched" nature, so I'm eager to save these. I'm a middle-of-the-road type. We shouldn't feel we sit in the catbird seat and we shouldn't picture ourselves as the bogey man. We have a role to play. We just have to remember to keep our activities in context.