Bishop Hill quotes from James Lovelock’s recent letter about windmills in Kent Devon. I liked this quote:
Better still we should look to the French who have wisely chosen nuclear energy as their principal source; a single nuclear power station provides as much as 3200 large wind turbines.
A single nuclear power station would quite regularly supply more power than every wind turbine in the UK … and more power than all the ones ever to be built since the wind does drop to 0.
http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
As long as you don’t look at the effective price per kWh that the French pay. I’m generally a fan of nuclear, but the sad truth is that the energy source that was supposed to be too cheap to meter has become too expensive to build, with huge cost overruns on the construction of plants being the norm. Until they manage to streamline costs (a task which the new modular European design was supposed to address, and whose pilot is currently running a few years behind and almost 50% over budget), I’m skeptical that nuclear is a better choice than gas, wind (in places where wind is good and the grid can support intermittency), and concentrated solar (ditto about good insolation; e.g. not in Germany).
3200 large windmills PLUS the backup power plants the windmills need for when the wind does not blow.
Zeke
“huge cost overruns on the construction of plants being the norm.”
FOAK anything has huge cost overruns. Since there has only been one of the ‘new European design’ I hardly think it’s anything other then a FOAK.
Take a look at the financials for VC Summer #2 and #3.(AP1000 NOAK build…China was FOAK, Vogtle was SOAK and VC Summer is NOAK. VC Summer is on budget.
http://www.scana.com/en/investor-relations/nuclear-financial-information/default.htm
Or we have he Chinese HTR-PM…electricity/high temperature process heat for about $2.5 billion/GW
http://www.iaea.org/NuclearPower/Downloadable/Meetings/2011/2011-07-04-07-08-WS-NPTD/5_CHINA_HTR-PM_TsinghuaU_Dong.pdf
Zeke–
The twitter conversation later lead me here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2012/jun/15/james-lovelock-fracking-greens-climate
And
(OT: I chucked a little at the ” That gave us time to pull our forces together so that we could hit back. “, since it fails to mention that one of the things that came with ‘time’ was Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, Americans entered the war and forces were added to. I’ll admit I’m fuzzy about when Canada, Australia and others entered. But… that’s ok. The point of his discussion is not “the history of WWII” and the Allies working together against the Axis was quite a big thing. And really, the British have reason to be proud about WWII.)
Lucia,
May 1940 to December 1941 must have seemed a very long time over there. I think the book was named 5 Days in London, May 1940 about facing the possibilities. Lonely indeed.
j ferguson– Absolutely. And if the British had folded… Well one can only shudder. (But I shouldn’t have gone OT like this…)
I think you’ll find that Lovelock was writing about Devon not Kent?
Thanks. I don’t know what put ‘Kent’ in my mind. It might have been a WSJ article about the Minute Men (esp. Kentish Guards).
j.fergunson: “Five Days in London – May 1940” by John Lukacs
Lucia, J.Fergunson: a bit O/T and maybe pedantic, but the U.K. was alone until 22nd june 1940. that day Hitler invaded Russia…
Canada, Australia and New Zealand entered the War in 1939
Nuclear technology should be one of the options on the table for reducing our dependence on fossil fuels. Unfortunately, Fukushima means that politically, nuclear is dead in the water now for many years.
Bravenewclimate has been advocating nuclear for years.
http://bravenewclimate.com/
Zeke,
Nuclear only looks expensive when compared to methane burning steam plants, not wind and solar. Many greens only love renewable energy in the abstract. Start planning to actually build large scale plants and there will be resistance from that front. The French cost per kWh is partly due to not running the plants they have at full capacity.
Let the anti-nuke koks and climate extremists duke it out over nuke power. Fukushima was not a failure of nuclear, and the less said about those imbeciles who thing Fukushima caused the tsunami the better.
Pielke’s iron law is going to assure that nuclear power is the eventual choice, which makes all of winners (except the anti-nuke kooks and their pals).
Jorge C.
Ah… er….. June 22, 1941?
DeWitt Payne (Comment #109008)
January 26th, 2013 at 3:11 pm
“The French cost per kWh is partly due to not running the plants they have at full capacity.”
Yes, getting past 40% nameplate capacity…70% of actual generation with nuclear becomes expensive as the law diminishing returns kicks in.
Renewables fans tend to like to talk about nameplate capacity. Nuclear fans like to talk about how much generation occurrs.
No one likes to talk about how to ‘cost effectively’ produce the 30% of generation(60% of nameplate capacity) that constitutes ‘peak load’.
“jorge c. (Comment #109005)
January 26th, 2013 at 2:51 pm
Lucia, J.Fergunson: a bit O/T and maybe pedantic, but the U.K. was alone until 22nd june 1940.”
except for the Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans, Rhodesians, (Jewish) Palestinians, Indians (biggest volunteer army of all time), Jamaicans, The French, The Pole’s, The Czech’s, The Norwegians, The Belgians, The Dutch, The Irish and don’t forget the people from ‘southern Canada’ who fought in the Battle of Britain in Eagle Squadron.
People keep complaining that renewables can’t cope with peaks and weather conditions. There is nothing wrong with having gas fired power plants that can respond much more quickly to ad hoc demand for power. There is also nothing wrong with working around the reasons for massive spikes, which cost a fortune in mostly idle plant and infrastructure.
Bugs,
Could you expand on those thoughts please. Specifically your last sentence.
Doc
what happened on 23 June?
mmm..not sure how many Poles were left in June 1940 since the germans and the USSR had partitioned the country in September 1939…maybe Doc will oblige with details
bugs (Comment #109020)
January 26th, 2013 at 5:38 pm
“People keep complaining that renewables can’t cope with peaks and weather conditions”
Basically, absent a correlation of load…nothing deals with peaks very well.
The problem with ‘some’ renewable’s’ is that they aren’t correlated to load at all. I.E. Heat waves and cold snaps are generally associated with ‘no wind’ conditions.
That leaves us with the prospect of providing 100% backup for renewables.Actually I believe Texas now allows 7% of wind capacity be considered ‘base-load’, so 93% backup.
So ‘windmills’ can be at most a 30% solution.
Of course that creates a problem with something that has been demonstrated to be a ‘reasonably’ cost effective 70% solution…nuclear.
For nuclear to be cost effective it has to ‘own’ baseload.
Baseload is normally 40% of peak load.
So if we take someplace like the UK…we have a need for about 24GW of baseload generating capacity. If we build windmills we have to subtract the windmills from baseload because the wind will blow about 30% of the time ‘off peak’. Renewables UK project 28GW of installed wind power in 2020. Which makes for negative 4GW of baseload. As a result…nuclear is not financially viable in the UK.
They can burn gas at $12/MMBtu couple with wind and watch every industry that depends on energy leave the country.
In the UK they’ve effectively locked in no more then 30% of their power coming from renewable’s and the remainder coming from gas absent a magical breakthrough in energy storage technology.
If a 30% reduction in CO2 emissions from fixed sources is ‘adequate’ to stave off catastrophe then I would argue that no catastrophe was ever imminent to begin with.
Diogenes, in June 1940 there were 35,000 Poles in the UK. The Poles were the largest foreign nationality in the RAF. After Poland was occupied many Poles made their way to France to fight on, when France fell they fought for us.
Did you know this?
j.fergusnson: sorry a clerical error!!!! yes, it was 1941…
diogenes: as I said, Hitler invaded Russia in june 1941.
DocMartyn: there was an army division of Polish volunteers in England, plus some Czechs, norwegians, and of course De Gaulle’s Free French, but they were few, against de mighty german army.
the difference was Russian and Americans’ armies.
Two things:
Nuclear plant down time has decreased drastically, less than 10% in the US, which, given the really bad down time situation when they were first built, is at least equivalent to doubling the number of units, and has allowed decommissioning of many of the early plants.
Interconnectsbetween countries in Europe (including underwater ones) make it irrelevant where the power plants are, so the Germans can be holier than thou and not build nukes, but buy the energy from the French.
Re: bugs (Jan 26 17:38),
Fast spin up natural gas turbine powered plants for backup/peak load aren’t free. Worse, they’re not very efficient. When they aren’t generating power, they’re a dead loss. A proper power grid has base load plants that are highly efficient and run at a high fraction of nameplate capacity most of the time. Then you have intermediate load plants that are less efficient but can supply variable load at reasonable cost for things like seasonal changes in total demand. Finally, you have peak power plants that are the least efficient and have the highest cost/kWh.
Solar and wind are none of these. As harrywr2 pointed out, they displace base load plants and make the whole system less efficient. As a result, it’s not at all clear that they reduce total emissions much at all and they certainly raise costs a lot for the rate payer.
The obvious solution would be efficient and cheap storage. Pumped storage works but is geographically limited. Battery technology isn’t there and may never be there. So, in fact, our most common storage solution is tanks of natural gas.
DocMartyn (Comment #109018)
Sorry to continue the OT.
“don’t forget the people from ‘southern Canada’”
Do you mean Upper Canada, everywhere except Lower Canada, or everywhere except the Territories?
Lucia… from Wikipedia:
—
Britain and France declared war on the Nazi Third Reich on September 3, 1939. Seven days later, on September 10, 1939, the Parliament of Canada likewise declared war on Germany.
—
To the British the entry of us minor players was most welcome and I’m sure we made an impact. Here in Halifax, the convoys were steadily being marshaled. The entry of the Americans, however, must have been a god-send. In a sense, the Japanese did Churchill’s bidding.
Back to the topic. Here in Nova Scotia the electrical utility (i.e. provincial government) has gone big into wind power and the result has been rate increases well above inflation. Proponents say it will pay off in the long run. Myself, I believe it’s a doomed strategy.
harryw2:
Is this based on your experiences or have you seen data from 100-m that show this?
100-m up (which is generally above the inertial surface layer) is a very different beast than 1-m elevation surface winds. Just wondering where your basis for this claim is from.
When I click on the Lovelock letter link (but not the first link to Bishop Hill) I get the following response: (Tried it twice, same thing)
maxBits 60 maxToUnban 60
ZB_block
186.101.81.4,50.17.42.19,62.98.61.179,122.176.153.202,8.8.244.164,41.188.113.143,77.253.252.167,2.26.248.84,72.18.206.125
maxbits= 60 You entered a wrong uri and triggered a protection function which may have resulted in long pause. But you aren’t banned. 🙂
404 Missing. Ban Nasties.
Time since previous ban at cloudflare event= 1693 seconds
Lance Wallace, the reason is lucia’s link directs you to a URI at her site and Bishop Hill’s link directs you to a URI at his site. lucia doesn’t have the file saved in the same location (with the same name) as at Bishop HIll.
(Well, that or her server doesn’t like the spaces in the filename.)
Bradon..not quite. 404’s at my site trigger the code that reads the ZBlock kill file escallating it to cloudflare. It rarely happens for “real” people, but oddly when bots are “attacking” it transfers the block from my local file to cloudflare *quickly*. I need to change the message so people don’t think “huh?!” but that’s what’s happening.
AJ, it was a crime for American citizens to fight in the military of another nation. Officially Americans couldn’t join British forces and so many who joined up described their nationality as Southern Canadian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-British_personnel_in_the_RAF_during_the_Battle_of_Britain
I now get the following message:
Page Not Found
The page /storage/James Lovelock Letter.pdf could not be located on this website.
We recommend using the navigation bar to get back on track within our site. If you feel you have reached this page in error, please contact a site operator. Thank you!
So I think Lucia has fixed the problem if there was one at her end.
Sorry for the interruption. We now return you to our regular programming.
I think I just cut and pasted the incomplete uri from bishop hill who has uploaded a copy. With luck…I’ve fixed….
dang! What is the uri over at bishop-hill?!!
There is a problem at my end. I just want to link to the file on “the bishop’s” server. Do I need underscores? What?
Looks like spaces (%20)
On another note, while popping over there to look I noticed an interesting write up by the Bishop on uniform priors in climate science & the IPCC in general.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/1/25/uniform-priors-and-the-ipcc.html
Worth the read.
lucia, I was just trying to explain why Lance Wallace got a 404 in the first place. I thought it was because you had used this site’s domain instead of Bishop Hill’s.
Your current link should work fine. If I copy and paste it it works. The only difference in HTTP requests between that and clicking on your link is the referrer. As far as I can tell, that means Bishop Hill’s site is blocking requests because they’re referred from your site. That would likely be true for (perhaps all) other referrers too.
Carrick:
Nope. Here are the GET lines in the HTTP request for a copy link and paste and an actual click:
As you can see, they’re identical.
@jorge c.
“there was an army division of Polish volunteers in England, plus some Czechs, norwegians, and of course De Gaulle’s Free French, but they were few, against de mighty german army. the difference was Russian and Americans’ armies.”
The second battle of El Alamein (23 October – 11 November 1942) was a decisive victory by The Allies over Axis forces. It was the first time the Axis advance was categorically stopped, and from then on, Axis forces went backwards all the way to Berlin. It was Britain plus Commonwealth plus free-Europeans. No Americans were involved (although US materiel was very gratefully received).
Hector Pascal: “the first time the Axis advance was categorically stopped”… was in front of Moscow (December 1941). El Alamein was “morally” important for the U.K., not for the war. few days after the battle Americans & English invaded North Africa (Operation Torch)
See Max Hastings “The finest years” (Churchill’s War)”, Chris Bellamy “Absolute War” or Rodric Brathwaite “Moscow 1941”
Lucia: I beg you pardom…
Listen. Peak Oil has turned out to be a feeble joke. Forget the not-fit-for-purpose renewables and unpopular nuclear and just drill and mine all that shale we have laying about all over the place.
Sheesh.
You aren’t paying attention jorge c. The Axis were stopped at Stalingrad and El Alamein. They were turned back at El Alamein (by British, Commonwealth and free-Europeans forces). British forces (England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland) are not “English”. Commonwealth forces include Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders and South Africans as well as Indians and rag tag and bobtail from various bits of the Empire and Europe. They were not and are not “English” and won’t thank you for your inability to discriminate.
You don’t need to lecture me on Operation Torch. My father was there (Royal Artillery). El Alamein was won by then. America distinguished(?) itself at Kasserine Pass. Another battle not celebrated by Americans. Thanks USA for the materiel btw, it was invaluable.
As Dewitt correctly notes, solar and wind become economically viable only if there is a means for cheap storage. Some kind of battery breakthrough seems unlikely (if you can’t make a reliable advanced battery for a 787 airplane, then reliable batteries for load leveling seem very distant indeed). Maybe optimized water/oxygen/hydrogen fuel cells would be durable enough, but the cost looks prohibitive.
.
Much of the sunk costs of nuclear are due to the monumental political battle each plant faces before and during construction. This is an area where some enlightened leadership in Washington could make a huge difference, since Federal supremacy over State and local laws means streamlined approval and construction is at least possible. However, I doubt politicians in Washington have the capacity for enlightened leadership, so we will likely end up with natural gas fired dual cycle plants or coal fired plants (depending on prices) supplying the bulk of the power not supplied by existing nuclear and hydro plants over at least the next few decades. Of course there will be a concurrent vast waste of money on wind and solar (via subsidies and the idiotic substitution of renewables for baseload power). These will hardly reduce emissions at all, but will at least help the environmentally concerned feel happy and smug; all one can hope is that the subsidized renewables remain tiny.
As Dewitt correctly notes, solar and wind become economically viable only if there is a means for cheap storage. Some kind of battery breakthrough seems unlikely (if you can’t make a reliable advanced battery for a 787 airplane, then reliable batteries for load leveling seem very distant indeed). Maybe optimized water/oxygen/hydrogen fuel cells would be durable enough, but the cost looks prohibitive.
.
Much of the sunk costs of nuclear are due to the monumental political battle each plant faces before and during construction. This is an area where some enlightened leadership in Washington could make a huge difference, since Federal supremacy over State and local laws means streamlined approval and construction is at least possible. However, I doubt politicians in Washington have the capacity for enlightened leadership, so we will likely end up with natural gas fired dual cycle plants or coal fired plants (depending on prices) supplying the bulk of the power not supplied by existing nuclear and hydro plants over at least the next few decades. Of course there will be a concurrent vast waste of money on wind and solar (via subsidies and the idi0tic substitution of renewables for baseload power). These will hardly reduce emissions at all, but will at least help the environmentally concerned feel happy and smug; all one can hope is that the subsidized renewables remain tiny.
Re: FergalR (Jan 27 06:56),
It had a certain logic to it, but it was always dependent on price and couldn’t deal with a technological revolution. By the way, the revolution was not hydraulic fracturing. That’s been around for decades. It was the invention of rotary steerable drilling systems, RSS, and measurement while drilling, MWD, that allowed the drilling of long horizontal holes in relatively narrow seams that could then be subjected to hydraulic fracturing.
Carrick (Comment #109034)
January 26th, 2013 at 8:42 pm
“Is this based on your experiences ”
Yes…the non-correlation of wind power and heat/cold waves is based on my experience of observing that it is ‘unusually hot/cold’ and observing that the wind turbines are not turning.
It was unusually cold in the US Pacific Northwest area around January 21st.
http://www.almanac.com/weather/history/WA/Seattle/2013-01-21
The windmills produced just barely over zero January 21st
http://transmission.bpa.gov/Business/Operations/Wind/WindGenTotalLoadYTD_2013.xls
Happens all the time.
And in anticipation of the ‘you just need a bigger grid’ to balance things out here is the California Wind Generation for January 21st.
http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/20130121_DailyRenewablesWatch.txt
The Californian Wind Turbines were producing next to nothing as well.
The West Coast of the US was a nice place to test the ‘wind is always blowing somewhere’ theory because we already had a grid that runs from Canada to Mexico.
Unfortunately…1000 miles North/South separation does not capture the wind always blows somewhere.
That is why West Coast electric rate payers(mostly Californians) in cooperation with Federal tax payers are building windmills in Wyoming and Montana…to ‘test’ if 1,000 miles of East/West separation will result in capturing ‘the wind always blows somewhere’.
Of course if I believe what the Northwest Conservation Council tells me…wind power produced in Wyoming will cost 15 cents/KWh(wholesale) by the time it gets to Seattle.
http://www.nwcouncil.org/energy/powerplan/6/final/SixthPowerPlan_Ch6.pdf
I had hoped my observation about loneliness was to the view held in May, 1940 when the threat of invasion from the continent must have looked very real and not susceptible to any real assistance from abroad. Why not lonely?
Lucacs hints but does not reveal whether capitulation was ever seriously considered. It appears that no one who knew ever discussed it.
harryw2, thanks.
I’ll tell you from personal experience there’s almost no correlation between what you see on the ground and what is happening up higher. You can have absolutely no wind at ground level, and you can have a 10-m/s jet at e.g. 100-m elevation. You can have strong ground winds and little wind up higher.
They do put anemometers on some wind generating systems, but this doesn’t help them against sudden wind bursts, which remains one of the biggest technological problems they face.
The reasons why power systems don’t produce power (especially wind driven ones) can be from other reasons than simply not having wind needed to power the system. You’d have to see whether the power was being demanded for example, or whether they shut it down over concerns about system safety.
I checked your 2013-1-21 data, and here’s the nearest sounding data.
It shows 0 m/s on the ground and a nice 7 m/s jet at 100-m.
My own position on this, the technology really isn’t ready for prime time, large scaled deployments. Most early wind farms were installed without any regard to meteorological issues and have since have to been upgraded and modified. 100-m elevation, where they’ve decided to work, is a very poorly sampled region. Why 100-m? Why not 200-m?
It’s not obvious that horizontal wind-axis turbines are even optimal for large wind farms. They have a large downwind turbulent wake that limits the density of turbines, and they are more prone than vertical axis designs to wind damage.
IMO the technology is very useful when you don’t have ready alternatives, the great NW for example.
I think the push to get wind mill farms set up using government subsidies is a huge error, could cost an enormous amount of money, and could undermine trust in a system that, with future technological innovation, might be usable for wide-spread power needs.
SteveF, there was never much in the way of standardization and mass production in nuclear powerplants. The Westinghouse AP1000 is a wonderful cheap and simple designed power station; designed to be mass produced.
http://www.ap1000.westinghousenuclear.com/
The cost is $7 billion a reactor. The more you buy the cheaper they get.
If you want to use stimulus spending to make the economy surge, then build 100 AP1000’s and gas to liquids and coal to liquids plants.
@Hector Pascal:
actually Hitler’s fate on the long term was sealed by Operation Barbarossa, especially when Russia decided nót to attack Japan, so they could concentrate on the Russian/German front.
There are several main turning points in WW2, El Alamein was one of them, Stalingrad (probably the most important battle according to many historians) and Midway were the others.
Mr.Hector Pascal: 1) You are right, i must have said the “BRITISH EMPIRE”. not English Armies. 2) who took Berlin? Marshal Montgomery or Marshal Zhukov? 3) how many soldiers fought before Moscow? 3 millions; how many soldiers fought in Stalingrad? hundreds of thousands. alone 92.000 germans were taken prisoners by the Russians in that battle. how many soldiers fought the battle of El Alamein? ahhh 4) good for your father. I too will be proud of him. 5) i’m not an U.S.A. citizen, only a man who have read a lot of history, Kasserine was the first serious fight of fresh/novices soldiers against hardened professionals. Stalin (sorry!) said that the British Empire put the time, americans the money and Russians the… blood!
j.fergunson think you are right
and again:
excuse me Lucia!!!
Wind Farms are subsidy farms.
————————————-
“Inquiries by The Spectator have revealed a scam known as ‘de-rating’. Green businesses are modifying large turbines to make them less productive, because perverse government subsidies reward machines that produce less energy at nearly double the rate of more efficient ones. It’s extraordinarily profitable for a few beneficiaries, even if it clutters the countryside and does little to save the planet.
Under the government’s Feed-In Tariff (FIT) scheme, which aims to make renewable energies competitive with fossil fuels, the size of a turbine is measured not by height but by power output. If a turbine pumps out more than 500kW, its owners receive 9.5p per kilowatt hour. But a ‘smaller’ sub-500kW one receives a subsidy of 17.5p per kilowatt hour, supposedly to compensate for its lower efficiency. ”
http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/8766481/the-great-british-wind-scam/
Re: Carrick (Jan 27 09:19),
Isn’t that sort of shear going to generate a lot of turbulence between 0 and 100m? Horizontal axis turbines don’t like turbulence. Mild turbulence reduces efficiency. Higher turbulence can cause failure.
Carrick (Comment #109067)
“Nearest Sounding Data”
You are kidding right? Quillayute is a protected Rain Forest. You can’t cut down rain forest to put up a wind farm.
How would one anchor a 100 meter tall wind turbine in an area that gets more then 100 inches of rain per year?
The ‘Windfarms’ in Washington State generally have 70m towers with blades in the 80 meter range. They are generally located in close proximity to the Columbia River in order to leverage the existing transmission capacity from the hydro-dams.
Sorry…but if the wind turbines in Washington State are ‘still’…it’s mostly because there is no wind.
It has nothing to do with what the wind speed is at 100 meters in a protected rain forest.
Re: Zeke (Comment #108989)
January 26th, 2013 at 12:51 pm
It’s odd that you should think this, Zeke. Wholesale electricity supply costs in France are a little over half the costs of surrounding countries. For more details, see
http://www.creg.info/pdf/Etudes/F995ENG.pdf
The end-user or retail cost has little to do with the supply cost, since it is subject to three levels of taxation, but current French retail electricity costs are still below its neighbours’.
I live in France. Somewhat ironically, I can install solarpholtaic panels with a hefty government subsidy via tax credit, and then sell the electricity into the grid for a higher price than I pay for electricity consumed. Strangely enough, French electricity prices are now predicted to increase by 30% by 2016. I can’t imagine why.
DeWitt (Comment #109008)
“The French cost per kWh is partly due to not running the plants they have at full capacity.”
My understanding is they struggle to meet/manage peak demand in cold weather – electric domestic heating is is very popular there. Seasonal variation being what it is, something will always have to be run below capacity in the summertime.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2012/11/14/france-capacity-market-idUKL5E8MECO620121114
http://www.rte-france.com/uploads/media/pdf_zip/publications-annuelles/rte-be09-en-02.pdf
Sorry this is totally OT but I’ll try justifying it in an Amazon style by saying people who liked the Lovelock quote might also like this one attributed to James Annan
“”Well, the press release is a bit strange, because it sounds like it is talking about the Aldrin et al paper which was published some time ago, to no great fanfare. I don’t know if they have a further update to that.
Anyway, there have now been several recent papers showing much the same – numerous factors including: the increase in positive forcing (CO2 and the recent work on black carbon), decrease in estimated negative forcing (aerosols), combined with the stubborn refusal of the planet to warm as had been predicted over the last decade, all makes a high climate sensitivity increasingly untenable. A value (slightly) under 2 is certainly looking a whole lot more plausible than anything above 4.5.””
It’s about the Norwegian low climate sensitivity paper and is buried in the comments of this Andy Revkin post (http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/26/weaker-global-warming-seen-in-study-promoted-by-norways-research-council/). Sorry it’s OT but I just had to share it. It seems quite extraordinary to me.
harryw2:
Normally you are sane, but I have no idea what you are even on about here.
I was discussing vertical wind speed profiles not locations for wind farms.
Got it. Religiously held beliefs should not be challenged, and if they are they get met with straw men.
You made the statement:
You made the claim and I asked on what basis you knew it to be true, then pointed you to a nearby data source for vertical wind speed profiles. Had you looked at that site, you’d find that wind speeds at 100-m often are unrelated to wind speeds on the ground. You’d also find 1) the wind speeds are generally larger and 2) there is less variability as you move up in altitude.
No. Really?! 🙄
DeWitt:
I was wondering about that too–whether they are getting shut down because of wind sheer. Putting them on top of cliffs isn’t necessary going to improve your situation in that respect either.
You may feel no wind on the ground but it can be blowing very strongly at the top of the wind turbine. My point to harry was that you can’t tell what the winds are doing aloft from what you feel on the ground. It may be the stationary turbines are that way not because of no wind, but because wind conditions are outside of the range for safe operation.
Interestingly, the winds are lower speed near the surface, but I’ve seen conditions (& the data I pointed to had some like this too) where the winds actually diminished as you went up. 7 m/s near the ground an a dead zone at about 150 m or so.
I’m not a meteorologist so I wouldn’t be able to explain what causes this, though I’d guess it has to do with interactions between mountain generated wind and the geostrophic flow.
Anyway, my big problem with all of this “gung ho” to put out wind farms is that it’s difficult to get good data at e.g. 100-m, certainly not at the micrometerological scales needed for optimal wind turbine siting. That means you need models to accurately predict the winds. These are possible for sites that are on flat plains well away from e.g. mountains (we would call these regions with “good fetch” and “well developed turbulence”).
I don’t really know how you’d do that on the Columbia River Gorge for example. Sounds like a kind of gnarly problem to me.
If the powers that be in Washington had the gumption and the guts to follow the agenda outlined by Jesse Ausubel in 2003, we would all be better off.
very cool thread
Alex Heyworth,
Skimmed that. Interesting – though the eventual end is no surprise – nuclear plants to split water and provide hydrogen; electricity, with liquid fuels as energy storage/carriers.
Interesting sidebars: references to work being done at TEPCO; and this gem:
corporate rent-seeking? scientific-technological elite?
time for me to put away the tinfoil hat
Carrick
The NETA web page (http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm) details the UK electricity generating mix in real time 24/7, you will need to use Internet Explorer, the graphics are not compatible with Firefox, Chrome or Safari. Scroll down for the more interesting data!
Here is a link (http://tinyurl.com/a8wea5s) to a screen cap from Feb 3, 2012, of one of the data sets showing Wind actual contribution to the grid less than at 10% of rated capacity of 4MW.
Feb 3rd in the UK saw -11C overnight temperatures as a substantial high pressure system covered most of the country.
Monitoring via the NETA site confirms that, as in all similar weather patterns, actual Wind contribution to the grid varies between 5 and 15% of nominal capacity. Annually Wind has never achieved more than 33% of rated capacity.
As a glider pilot I am very familiar with wind shear, extreme cold and extreme heat in the UK are almost always associated with deep high pressure systems with strong inversions where mean wind speeds approach zero below 300m and are frequently below 2.5m/s through 1000m
The current & previous UK governments are committed to a policy of 30% of energy generating capacity to be from renewable sources by 2020, the best industry estimates (http://tinyurl.com/97cuuxt) are that frequent & wide spread power outages will occur as early as 2016 during similar weather patterns due to planned closure of current fossil fuel generating plant with no planned replacement.
For the UK, Wind energy is a real, short term threat to energy stability, current UK politicians need to understand the consequences, many of them will still be in office when the lights go out
Gras, thanks for the comments. However, my comments have absolutely nothing to do with politically driven debates over the efficacy of wind power. I’ve already weighed in that I think there are issues (I could write a lot more on community noise issues and how industry & state governments are avoiding addressing this problem, but that’s too much of a diversion), anyway it drives me crazy when people use plausible sounding science fiction to argue against a proposition, especially if there valid non-made-up reasons to oppose it.
Here, I’m simply interested in the proposition that harryw2 made relating wind power generation to wind conditions.
I can tell you than I was involved in a campaign to measure gravimetry up a 600-m tethered TV tower near Indianola, MS. This region has the lowest mean wind speeds of anywhere in the contiguous United States, being on the Mississippi Delta, it also is one of the flattest regions in the US. We selected the site because no only was the surface flat, but subsurface features were also minimal.
We were collecting data only at the points where the tethers connected to the tower. Because these were where the strobe likes were located, they also had mesh flooring installed at these heights. Since these points corresponded to nodes of oscillation, you could collect gravimetry data as long as winds were light enough.
It turned out that for this region, you could generally measure as high vertically as there were light winds, under 3 m/s.
There was a skinny elevator that took you to the “top”, which at 560-m, right below the radiation barrier protecting you from the RF signal from the TV antenna. It took about 20-minutes to go from bottom to top, and the way you fit two people on it was to have one person ride on top of the elevator.
Unfortunately I had a lot more experience with the trouble in finding low wind conditions aloft.
We tried all sorts of conditions, days with heavy clouds, cold winter days, hot summer days with a high pressure dome, and so forth. Finally after two years of trying, we finally collect data over the entire tower.
At least in Mississippi a deep inversion almost never extends above 200-m in elevation with “deep” referring to the differential in temperature rather than height of the inversion layer. Typically, even with an inversion present,we still get a low-alitutude wind jet, which typically peaks somewhere close to 100-m up. Daytime summer conditions turned out to be idea for measurements, with nighttime conditions typically involving so much tower shake that the data were unusable even on the bottom-most station.
Since then I’ve changed fields of study and done a fair amount on outdoor sound work, and one thing that we’re always conscious of there is vertical temperature and wind speed profiles. We have multiple units of each of these (two each): sodars, tethersondes and radiosondes (and a nice 10-m swing up tower with multiple weather stations on it). We’ve also collected met data near ocean shores, on the Mississppi Delta, and in range & basin areas (New Mexico and Utah). I don’t think I have seen a profile that extends above 100-m where there are winds below 3 m/s.
Carrick (Comment #109124)
January 27th, 2013 at 9:25 pm
Anyway, my big problem with all of this “gung ho†to put out wind farms is that it’s difficult to get good data at e.g. 100-m
It’s called putting a device called an anemometer on a tall post.
It’s actually one of the things that goes into ‘site selection’.
http://ww2.wapa.gov/sites/western/renewables/Documents/windhandbook_edit3.pdf
You are correct…micro-climates can seriously distort whatever data the weather service collects. I know this…I live at the bottom of a bowl.
Having said that…people who are investing more then a billion dollars in a wind farm don’t just put them up anywhere or depend on models. The subsidies make for financial viability but they are business people and maximizing profit is what business people tend to do.
They do siting studies that involve verifying that the winds at turbine height are suitable in the proposed locations. Of course since the studies are paid for by private firms you will not find them on the internet for free.
IIRC The capacity factors for the Wind Farms in the PNW run at about 32% which would indicate good siting. Having visited most of them personally the wind does blow well where the wind turbines are located. Obviously if I am standing in a bowl and the turbine is on a ridge where I am standing isn’t representative.
IMHO The biggest challenge facing adoption of wind as a significant source of energy is the amount of geographic separation one needs to avoid the ‘all or nothing’ posed by blocking high pressure weather systems.
Blocking high pressure systems are frequently characterized by light winds, they can be 1,000+ miles in diameter and can last days to weeks. That poses a significant challenge as to what to do for energy when such an event occurs. We don’t know how to store ‘days to weeks’ worth of energy at a price anywhere near what anyone would willingly pay and are unlikely to figure it out anytime soon.
Carrick
I beg to differ, in a non adversarial way, you may not be aware of a resource that can provide large volumes of measured data.
This link (http://tinyurl.com/bk2u642) is a screen dump of the flight log of a 300km task I flew in my sailplane on Aug 10 last season, as you can see the bottom section details the wind direction and speed recorded by the differential GPS during the flight, between 0ft and 5,500ft above the take off airfield (itself 490ft above sea level) no wind strength greater than 5kts (2.5m/s) was recorded during the 4 hour task.
I logged 50 flights last season and have around 1000 traces dating back 20+ years, there are 10,000 glider pilots in Britain, 100,000+ in Germany and many many in the US, most carry flight recorders. Just how much actual recorded data on real wind speeds do you want?
The data from Germany, Holland & the UK is consistent, annually commerical Wind turbines generate less one third of their rated capacity due to wind strengths being below or above their operating limits.
Gras, I would be happy to be wrong on this, but what is needed for planning for deployment of wind turbine systems is stationary measurements over one location at a fixed (low) altitude, not lots of measurements over disparate locations at typically a much higher altitude. These systems are pretty close to the ground compared to where you guys typically fly.
Regarding flight data recorder products, is it the case that this is publicly available? I wasn’t aware that it was. The best resource I have available to me is the radiosonde program run out of the US. If you look at the Western US (which is the area we were discussing), a cursory look through the data doesn’t suggest that low wind speeds are typical for that location. (I will try, if I have time, to put together some frequency data on that.)
The UK may be different, I have exactly zero experience with it.
harryw2:
Good luck finding very many sites 10 years of data at 100-m with one of those thingies, at least at the areas where the wind farms are being installed. (There are some towers, one is in Lubuck TX, another in Echo, CO, but these are typically located in relatively flat terrain to minimize terrain effects.)
If you wanted to model the effects of local topography, the closest I’ve seen is large eddy simulations that start with regional scale geostrophic forcing and include local scale terrain effects (I have a code from NCAR that does this). Unless they’ve progressed really rapidly since last I looked, they could handle gentle hills, but not steep cliffs.
Then you’d better include in your model the effect of atmospheric stirring associated with the wind turbines themselves. (Turbulence reduces the amount of vertical stratification present and can lead to nocturnal warming events.)
Like I said to Gras, I’d love you guys adversarially or otherwise put it in my face that I’m wrong about data availability. This would be very useful to know about when trying to estimate community noise associated with a particular wind farm. (Wind farms aren’t always very cooperative either when it comes to issues like this, for obvious reasons.)
harryw2:
Of course this is the big problem… the distortions with a gung ho subsidy is that it short circuits the sort of engineering studies that are needed to have any guarantee that the project will actually work.
Without that you are dealing with what I call “cut and try carpentry” style of engineering (the problem is not new). Generally you can expect most of these types of subsidized projects to fail after the subsidization ends.
I think the biggest problem facing wind energy is the lack of forethought given to it, to figure out what it’s good for and what it isn’t. It may be there are a lot of things that people are using it for that it just isn’t suited for, and it may have a useful niche in the power network.
Without data and analysis, though, I don’t know how you draw any useful conclusions.
Re: Carrick (Jan 28 16:40),
In Quality Management training that was referred to as the “We don’t have time to do it right” fallacy.
Carrick (Comment #109173)
January 28th, 2013 at 4:40 pm
“the distortions with a gung ho subsidy”
Actually it’s not the subsidy causing the major distortions(At least in the US). It’s a 20% renewables target that is causing the distortion.
If I simply want to reduce CO2 emissions from stationary sources by 20% then the cheapest way to do that is with windmills backed up with natural gas.
That was the stated policy goal. 20% renewable(which doesn’t include existing hydro or nuclear) by 2020 is the stated goal of the Western Regional Green House Gas Initiative.
There is nothing wrong with the subsidy…it is accomplishing it’s goal. Even without the subsidy the windmills would have been built to fulfill the Western Greenhouse Gas Initiative.
The Western US Utilities aren’t going to build any more windmills then it takes to reduce their emissions by 20% and they are going to do it in the cheapest possible manner.
Of course the ‘climate concerned’ will say 20% is merely a down payment…we need to reduce 80% or more. In which case in my humble opinion most of the money we have spent on windmills in the US has been wasted money.
The problem is setting an ‘incremental goal’ without regard for the ‘end state’ goal.
We see the problem manifested in the UK. Given the price of natural gas and coal in the UK financing nuclear power plants should be somewhat less complicated then financing an automobile.
Unfortunately…the UK was a Kyoto signatory and signed up for hard incremental targets…which the markets met in the cheapest possible way(with the help of subsidy) which was windmills with natural gas.
Unfortunately…they can not get past that target with windmills, Vlad Putin has decided he wants a bit more for his gas, and no one will finance a nuclear power plant that doesn’t have ‘exclusive right’ to base load.
Good ‘trip planning’ generally involves deciding what your ultimate destination should be.
Since the ‘ultimate destination’ was originally a 20% reduction in emissions then no one should be surprised that the solutions ‘dead end’ at 20% reduction.
HR (Comment #109119)
I liked it! An interesting shift in position since 2006. http://julesandjames.blogspot.com.au/2006/03/climate-sensitivity-is-3c.html Quite understandable of course, and I hope to see something similar reflected in IPCC 5. In an ideal world, a few more statements of this sort would trigger a more constructive dialog on policy rather than howls of triumph/dismay from the extremes.
Hi,
Just a quick WWII rememberance for some others:
Greece fought from 1940 and never gave up and suffered more than half the number of fatalities as either the UK or the US from a very much smaller population.
Yugoslavia fought from 1940 and never gave up and suffered more fatalities than the US and the UK combined from a much smaller population, one about twice that of Greece.
China fought from before it started till the bitter end and probably suffered more fatalities than any but the USSR.
And others too numerous to mention including somewhat neglected anti-fascist partisans in the occupied coutries, Italian and exiled Spanish fighters.
Some win, some lose, but casualities are the first truth of war.
Alex
That’s always been James’ position. Look up his comments on the uniform prior and Myles Allen’s stuff.
http://julesandjames.blogspot.com/2009/09/uniform-prior-dead-at-last.html
Carrick, if you want an example of a site which has been studied to death for wind try Altamont Pass.
The claim is that the 4,000 wind turbines in the San Gorgonio pass between LA and Palm Springs generate 893 GWh/year from a nameplate capacity of 359MW. That’s a duty factor of about 28%. In this case peak generation occurs in the summer, which, conveniently, is when you need it. However, I’ve been to Palm Springs many times because that’s where my parents moved when my father retired. Every time I’ve been through the pass, most of the turbines weren’t turning.
This has always been Lovelock’s position, too. And I’d be willing to bet that most of those who are both serious and informed about climate change are also pro-nuclear. And if the political climate is against us, it’s our responsibility to change the political climate. Nuclear power is the safest form of energy ever invented. Number of radiation deaths at Fukushima: zero. Number of anticipated radiation deaths at Fukushima: zero.
Zeke, FYI concentrating solar is probably the most expensive form of energy ever invented. It’s not even in the same ballpark as nuclear on an LCOE basis.
Humm.. If past Bayesian estimates are reconsidered using a more sensible prior, then the most likely value for CS will be lower and the long tail mostly gone. A reasonable question might be: how do the diagnosed climate sensitivity values for the IPCC models compare to the best estimate of the probability distribution? My guess is that most models would be in the low probability part of the distribution…. “left out in the warm”, so to speak. It therefore seems unlikely that a nonuniform prior will be accepted as ” best practice” by the IPCC for AR5, or maybe ever. The climbdown from very high sensitivity is going to be long and difficult. But it will happen.
Thanks for the link Matt and Rabett.
I’m not sure it is quite the same position. The 2009 position of Annan seems to be ‘chop off the long tail’. The present quote seems to suggest he thinks the answer lies closer to the head than the butt. Not the same thing.
I’ll abstain from the main topic of nuclear power, being a bit biased from 10 years in the industry and having a father who spent almost 50 years in nuclear and a brother who is VP of Nuclear for a big utility. I personally believe the US should double the percentage of generation it gets from nuclear and really like some of the new modular small reactor designs that could be built (if the Federal government would allow it.)
What does interest me is the side discussion. Following Dunkirk, there were something like 40,000 Polish troops in England. I believe the two primary formations were the the 1st Polish Armoured Division and the 1st Polish Independent Para Brigade. Both units performed with distinction in WWII.
While there are many books one can read, one of my favorites is 6 Armies in Normandy, by the late John Keegan. And if one is ever in Normandy, I recommend spending time in Chambois. There is a museum above the town dedicated to the battle at Hill 262, where the Poles took the high ground overlooking the rear end of the Falaise Gap, trapping the German 7th Army. The Poles held in the face of repeated attacks from both front and rear, which included hand to hand fighting, until relieved by a Canadian division (can’t recall the unit at the moment).
I’d have to go back and confirm the number, but I recall that casualty figures for the Poles where in the range of 30 – 40%. For those not aware, a unit suffering 10% casualties is considered to be combat ineffective and in need of removal from the line for rest and reconstitution. Losses in the 20 – 30% range usually mean a unit is effectively destroyed – i.e. not suitable for rebuilding. These numbers did not hold for the German army, whose units often suffered casualty rates of 50% or more and were still able to be combat effective. (Units with high espirit de corps – such as the US Marine Corps, the US 442nd Regimental Combat Team and most airborne units – also were capable of sustaining significant casualties and continuing to fight.)