Focus III: From Confusion to Clarity

While I get ready to move. I intend to repost what are some of my better essays. The occasion for this October 27, 2008 essay was my proposal that the anticipated new President set up an Energy Issues Fact Finding Commission, to help us identify the problems and systematically lay out the choices we have to make. My argument was, and continues to be, that our society as a whole is fundamentally confused about future energy issues.

From Confusion to Clarity

Before people can make good choices they have to understand what their options are, and what the consequences of making different choices choices are. In cases where adequate and clear information is not available, we are likely to make poor choices. One of the major functions of an Energy Issues fact finding commission would be to clear up confusion, misinformation, and misunderstandings about our Energy options.

Let me mention some examples. One of the options that we face in is the extent which we will continue to burn fossil fuels for energy. NASA atmospheric scientist, Dr. James Hanson has called for drastically reducing CO2 emissions. He believes that atmospheric CO2 has reached dangerous levels, and that to proven major climate change with undesirable consequences drastic actions are required in June of 2008 Hanson told Congress and the national press club that:

Requirements to halt carbon dioxide growth follow from the size of fossil carbon reservoirs. Coal towers over oil and gas. Phase out of coal use except where the carbon is captured and stored below ground is the primary requirement for solving global warming.

Oil is used in vehicles where it is impractical to capture the carbon. But oil is running out. To preserve our planet we must also ensure that the next mobile energy source is not obtained by squeezing oil from coal, tar shale or other fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel reservoirs are finite, which is the main reason that prices are rising. We must move beyond fossil fuels eventually. Solution of the climate problem requires that we move to carbon-free energy promptly.

Hanson's position is clear. We have to eliminate fossil fuel use because of global warming, and because we are running out of fossil fuels. There are some who would disagree with Hanson about AGW, but the consensus of the scientific community seems to back the notion that further increases in atmospheric levels of CO2 will lead to increased temperatures world wide, with widespread, adverse consequences. There is less agreement with Hanson's contention tht we are at a climate tipping point, and that if we fail to take drastic action now it may be too late.

Hansor's other contention, that we are running out of fossil fuel resources is also debated, but we have observe dramatic rises in the price of oil during the last decade. We could expect from the rules of classical economics that such a price rise would lead to new producers appearing on the market, with a a consequent increase in oil supply. While new producers have appeared, their production has be largely offset by production declines among older producers. Thus total production has edged up slightly but has not kept pace with rising demand despite dramatic price rises.

The situation with coal and natural gas is does not suggest an immediate peak resources crisis, primarily because supplies are capable of being increased in the face of rising prices. Indeed this has already happened in the natural gas industry, where investments in new technologies have lead to the development of significant new resources, and the identification of even more resources. Never-the-less, these resources are only available at high costs, and will in time reach their peak production and inevitably begin to decline. Thus even if we wish to post pone the evil day when we can no longer rely of fossil fuels for energy, and Hanson makes the case that we should not, we will eventually be confronted with fossil fuels shortages that will increasingly limit our ability to limit the production of energy. Thus critics of Hanson on AGW, have no response to the argument that oil production is peaking, and coal and natural gas will as well sooner, rather than later.

Thus we are confronted with the necessity of replacing our current energy system with a radically different system, one which does not rely on fossil fuels. Our future fact finders will probably find that the use of energy from fossil fuels will greatly decline, in the case of oil by 2050, and should greatly decline in the case of coal and natural gas by 2050. The major question would be then, should any fossil fuel use e permitted in 2050, and if so, how much? This would be an issue for a fact finding commission to determine.

There is in our society at present a great deal of confusion about non-carbon energy sources. Internet personality Jerome a Paris, (Jerome Guillet) is a very articulate advocate of wind energy projects. Jerome believes in the financial viability of these projects, and indeed he puts his money where his mouth is. As a Paris banker, Jerome makes loans for the purpose of financing wind energy projects. Following a recent post by Jerome on the Oil Drum, we exchanged comments on the relative costs and benefits of wind and nuclear. In a way we were talking past each other, because Jerome assumed the current business environment, while I assumed a very different environment that would be created by California's "Proposition 7", which would require that 50% of California's electricity be generated from renewable sources by 2025. I had, using data published by Ed Ring of ECOWorld estimated that there was a very substantial "Green Premium" if California voters chose to mandate the generation of 50% of California power with renewable energy. (Wind comes in at about half the cost of solar generated electricity.) Wind projects capable of generating 50% of California's electricity, would $150 billion dollars more than building reactors capable of generating the same amount of electricity.

Critics of nuclear power often talk about how expensive new nuclear plants would be. They are seldom are open and honest about the cost of solar and wind projects. Indeed it is difficult to obtain current and accurate information about the current and future construction costs of renewable power sources. If our fact finders are going to offer wise decisions, they must find accurate information.

In a book review, Malcolm Slesser, who obtained a grasp of physics through his training as a chemical engineer, notes that

the authors expand the range of anecdotal information, gloss them with science, and extrapolate diminishing dollar costs into the distant future. In this rosy future there will be so much energy saving that oil will scarcely sell for $5 a barrel. To arrive at this sate of affairs they make some heroic assumptions, and incur some thermodynamic howlers. How is the reader to interpret hyperbole like '92% less energy use ' or '100% saving', or the claim that electricity from photo-voltaic devices is of 'higher quality' (p97), or that 'combined cycle gas turbines are not subject to Carnot's Law', or phrases like 'useful work extracted ... to more than 90% of the original fuel energy'? One should not lightly buck the second law of thermodynamics, for no-one has yet succeeded.

Slesser, who set up the Energy Studies unit at the University of Strathclyde and became its first professor, further notes that one of the authors

has a degree in physics. He should know better.

In fact the author in question, who has been depicted in the past as having earned an MA in physics from Oxford, actually received his degree on a complimentary basis. He also holds complimentary PhDs and is sometimes called Doctor, but in truth he has never earned earned any degree in any subject. This explains a whole lot about the intellectual deficiencies of the book. Slesser adds,

Their technique is simple. Some recent technological developments are reported which can cut the energy and materials needs by (say) half. Then new ways of doing things can cut the need for that energy by a further half (half of a half equals a quarter), then, since we have cut some inputs to a quarter, other economies follow in their train. This a very dangerous argument. Here is a quote from page 244:

"Over the next half-century, even if global economy expanded by 6 - 8 fold, the rate of releasing carbon by burning of fossil fuels could simultaneously decrease by anywhere from one third to nine-tenths below current rate. This is because of the multiplicative effect of four kinds of actions. Switching to natural gas and renewable energy, as fast as Shell Oil planners consider likely, would cut by one half to three quarters the fossil-fuel carbon in each unit of energy consumed."

They continue: 'The efficiency of converting that energy into delivered forms, notably electricity, could meanwhile rise by at least half, thanks to modern power plants and recapturing waste heat. The efficiency of converting delivered energy into desired services would also increase by about 4-6 fold' (Why?, How?) '. 'Finally the amount of satisfaction derived from each unit of energy might perhaps be doubled by delivering higher-quality services and fewer unwanted ones.'

The allure of this argument is indeed compelling for it banishes the doom and gloom merchants to their dismal cellars; but it is misleading, for there is one thing they have over-looked: human greed. The evidence is that when you get more from less, you just take advantage of the slack. Economists call this the 'rebound effect', and it is well documented. Is it significant that neither 'rebound effect' nor 'thermodynamics' appear in the index of a book that is astonishingly rich in allusions to energy?

This critique may seem churlish when the environmental problem is so well put and where there are undeniable options for better material and energy use and waste recycle. Are the authors simply deceiving themselves? I think so, and in two ways. Firstly by using monetary measures to extrapolate into the future. Money is an abstraction that does not lend itself to longer term mensuration. Secondly, every single energy- and materials-reducing possibility impacts on the entire economy somewhere, somehow. These options needed to be tested through the medium of a holistic physically-based model of the economy.

Well educated fact finders ought to be able to recognize when a so called energy expert appears to be unaware that the laws of thermodynamics are relevant to the question of whether greater energy efficiency is possible. We then need fact finders who can think independently, who understand the laws of physics as well as having some insight into economics. We need people like Malcolm Slesser who can tell when supposed experts don't know what they are talking about.

Our fact finders need to ask how proposed systems are suppose to work, ferreting out unsatisfactory answers. In July, former Vice-President Al Gore gave a speech in which he called for the all electricity to be produced from non-carbon sources by 2020.

Blogger/Banker Jerome a Paris, using a Department of Energy report titled "20% Wind Energy by 2030" suggested that as much as 50% of American electricity could come from windmills within Al Gore's 2020 time frame.

As I write this I have been looking at "20% Wind Energy by 2030" from the US DoE. I came across the following statement:

Following load net of wind generation, however, creates a wider variability in the magnitude of load change between two adjacent hours. A system with wind generation needs more active load-following generation capability than one without wind, or more load-management capability to offset the combined variability of load net of wind.

This is undoubtedly true, but many of the assumptions in this report are dead on Arival. The most notable example is the cost of the 800 GW project with out assuming the construction cost inflation that has doubled the cost of building windmills during the last 5 years.

The report states that in 2000 the average load in the summer peak time slice was 571 GWs with a peak instantaneous load of 702 GWs. The report also suggests that by 2050 the average load in the summer peak time slice will have risen to 1,249 GWs with a peak instantaneous load of 1,531 GWs. The report does not give the slightest hint where that power going to come from. We know that much of the 800 GWs of wind generating power the report assumes, will not be available to meet summer peak demand. Jerome a Paris has suggested to me that the power will be drawn from existing grid resources, which means primarily coal and natural gas powered generators. But if the goal is to stop the emission of CO2 from the electrical generating system, then the use of a large fossil fuel back up system would be less than satisfactory.

Quite obviously conventional nuclear is too expensive to be used as peak reserve, and is seldom used for its load following capacity. If we want to eliminate the use of fossil fuels from the electrical generation system, how do we follow loads and maintain a large generating stand by capacity for summer peak demand? Shouldn't we have a fact finding committee to come up with answers to such questions, and then in turn carry those answers to their logical conclusions? Isn't it time to stop listening to energy quacks? Isn't it time to really think through the energy issues posed by the need for post carbon energy, and carry those conclusions honestly to where ever they lead?

Clean Energy and the Consequent Loss of Amenity

Water and wind

Although I am generally critical of the over hyping of renewables, I am quite willing to stipulate that there care cases and situations in which renewables work, and even work well. Geothermal often works in areas in which here are active volcanoes. There are limitations. There are not an unlimited amount of geothermal resources. Attempts to tap deep heat sources have as of yet not proven cost effective. Thus in the energy universe geothermal is not a big league player and probably never will be. Anyone who mentions geothermal as a part of the post carbon energy solution is fudging.

Wind works with hydro resources. Wind and hydro compliment each other because electrical output from hydro is easily controlled. Thus hydro can be shut down when the wind is blowing, and quickly begin output as wind drops. Water behind hydro dams is not an unlimited resource., Thus hydro power has to be rationed to conserve water. Water that is not used when the wind is blowing is available when energy consumers demand electricity and the wind is still.

The problem with the hydro wind marriage is the limitations on hydro resources. In the United States hydro resources have been largely developed. Future hydro sites have been marred by long standing controversies, often involving environmental concerns. In some areas like the Pacific North West, wind resources match hydro resources, but in others like TVA, wind resources perform very poorly during the summer period of peak electrical demand, rendering wind generation capacity redundant in any post-carbon electrical plan. Thus intensive development of wind resources would make since in areas where there were significant hydro resources, and reliable and complimentary wind resources. Thus it makes since for China which has significant hydro resources to develop complimentary wind resources. This is however a limited case. When Greens start talking about a hydro-wind partnership as a major key solution of the post carbon electrical problem in the United States, they are being obviously and hopelessly unrealistic.

I have reviewed the potential of paring pumped storage and wind, and have suggested that it is more expensive than nuclear while being less flexible.

The paradox of the hydro-wind pairing is that it produces an electrical generation system that is far less safe than nuclear generated power. Dams are vulnerable to to failure die to design flaws, due to poorly understood geological features of the dam setting, and to to unusual and unpredictable rain events. Both in terms of probability and in terms of potential causalities, dam failure constitutes a far more significant risk to neighboring populations than reactor accidents. "Greens" who are quick to point out and even greatly exaggerate the risks involved in reactor use, often ignore the potential risks involved in the construction of dams. Dams of course are renewables, and renewables according to "Green" dogma, are "clean" and "safe."

Finley, dam reservoirs can be a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane from decaying organic materials in reservoir waters, can decompose into methane, which is many times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2 is.

Windmills or LFTRs?

I have argued that in 15 years, per watt of rated generation capacity it could It can cost less to install Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactors to generate post carbon electricity. There would be enormous advantages to the LFTR:

LFTR would generated power when needed. Windmills produce power when the wind blows.

LFTRs can be located near sources of electrical demand. Windmills have to be located where the wind blows.

LFTRs can be located near to the existing electrical grid, eliminating the need for expensive additions to the grid. A single new windmill facility may requite hundreds of miles of new electrical transmission line, costing hundreds of million or even billions of dollars.

LFTRs could produce power at full capacity over 90% of the time. Windmills rarely can produce power at full capacity.

LFTR generation capacity does not change with the time of day or the season of the year. Windmills in many localities produce less power during the day than at night, and less power in the summer than during the winter.

LFTRs can produce power when electricity is most in demand. Windmills typically produce the most electricity when electricity is least in demand.

LFTRs require no fossil fuel backup. Many plans to increase wind generating capacity include increases in carbon-emitting natural gas backup generators.

LFTRs require no expensive and inefficient alternative backup systems. Some Windmill plans call for the use of expensive and inefficient Compressed Air Storage or Pumped Water Storage backup systems for wind generators.

LFTRs can be built at existing power plant locations, saving an enormous amount of money, and lessening existing power plant environmental impacts, while creating no new environmental intrusions. Windmill construction requires spending an enormous amount of money on new roads, electrical gathering capacity and electrical transmission lines. In addition there is the visual and sound intrusion of thousands of windmills which will blight the landscape.

LFTRs are consistent with the highest environmental values. Windmills kill birds and bats.

In short the LFTR is the preference of the true environmentalist. The Windmill is the preference of anti-ecological spendthrifts. Dollar for dollar the LFTR will produce much more electricity than the windmill, and produce it far more reliably. The Windmill will not produce electricity when consumers want it. The LFTR will. The Windmill will create far more environmental intrusions and will require huge expenditures in the construction of roads, electrical gathering equipment, and new electrical transmission lines. Windmills will require large numbers of CO2 emitting natural gas generating facilities, while LFTRs can be backed up by other LFTRs.

Would Vehicle to Grid battery storage work?

Wind advocates like Mark Z. Jacobson claim that a system of using car batteries as a backup to a wind powered grid would compensate for the intermittency of wind. Jacobson states,

One calculation shows that the storage of electricity in car batteries, not only to power cars but also to provide a source of electricity back to the grid (vehicle-to-grid, or V2G), could stabilize wind power if 50% of US electricity were powered by wind and 3% of vehicles were used to provide storage.

There are about 150 million cars registered in the United States. If each car contributed 10 kWh of battery storage capacity to the grid, that would give the grid 1.5 trillion watts, or enough electricity to provide the United States 100% of its average electrical demand for 4 hours. This would at first seem impressive, but would it work in practice? First we should note that the GM Volt's battery pack cam store in theory up to 16 kWh of electricity, and costs a reported $28,000. In practice the battery pack can be charged to 12.8 kWh (80%) of its rated capacity when plugged into the grid. Drawing out 10 kWh from the charged Volt battery would deeply discharge it. The Volt engine starts to recharge the battery when storage drops to 4.8 kWh. Thus it would be impossible to draw 10 kWh from the Volt battery pack without carbon emissions entering the picture.

(This information suggests why the claims of EEstor are so attractive. EEStor claims 52 kWh of storage for its EESU at 10% of the price of the Volt battery pack. )

There are several human behavior issues that need to be considered before we can assess the vehicle to grid scheme issue. First the Volt costs about twice the price of current autos, to replace all 150 million current cars with Volt technology cares would cost $6 trillion dollars. For the sake of argument I will assume that technological improvements in the Volt's battery pack would make 10 kWh available to the grid. How many cars could we count on to provide the full 10 kWh of electricity? First it is unlikely that all 150,000,000 cars would be replaced with electrical cars. We can assume that the doubling of auto price would decrease the car market. People are likely to choose lower cost transportation modes, rather than purchase such expensive cars. Low cost transportation options would include mass transit, and electrical bikes and scooters. For short trips, people will walk. Electrical bikes and scooters would not provide significant storage to the grid, but would be practical for short urban drives.

Let us assume that the 150,000,000 cars are replaced by 75,000,000 cars, and 75,000,000 electric bikes and scooters: that would cut our theoretically available auto battery storage capacity in half. Vehicle to grid advocates claim that only 8% of all vehicles are on the road at any one time. In fact they hold that this 8% figure is true in the middle of the night and at rush hour. We will overlook this issue for the time being. Assuming that people are not driving constantly during the six hours of morning and evening rush hour, we can assume that about 25% of cars are involved in rush hour commutes. That will give us about 37.5 million home to work commuters, a figure that is obviously too low. Assuming the same number of commuters in the electric car era, this would mean that half of all cars would be involved in commuting. Now the battery charge of commuting vehicles would not be available for grid back up, because the commuters need it to get to work and drive home. This would leave us with only 37.5 million cars available for battery back up. We cannot assume that the car owners will want to daily devote 100% of their battery charge to grid back up. People own cars for transportation purposes, not to back up the grid. Assume 50% battery storage is surplus, that would leave us with a little less that one hour of battery back up from the vehicle to grid system. Now Jacobson would have us believe that only 3% of the current American car fleet or 4.5 million cars could provide backup for the entire wind powered grid. This would mean that Jacobson believes the entire grid can be backed up with 45 billion Watt hours of electricity from back up batteries, assuming the batteries were on a 24 hour a cycle. A single nuclear plant could produce 24 billion watt hours of electricity in a day, or over half the electricity that Jacobson claims will back up a wind penetrated grid. To appreciate the magnitude of the backup problem it should be pointed out that on February 28, 2008, Texas wind electrical production dropped from 1,700 megawatts to about 300 megawatt in a 10 minute period. 1100 MW of backup capacity were brought on line during the wind outage. This outage would require the battery storage of 110,000 Texas cars if the wind outage continued for an hour. Clearly Jacobson has failed to conduct a serious analysis of the V2G idea, and this failure is consistent with Jacobson's generally shoddy standards of analysis.

It is clear that given Jacobson's account of V2G wind backup, the V2G system would clearly not provide enough backup to manage wind intermittency without resorting to other massive resources.

Wind and Neodymium

Jack Lifton's research on mineral resources make him an important figure in projecting the future of energy. Lifton spotted the Lemhi Pass thorium reserve discoveries early on, Lifton has recently focused on world rare earth production, and as Lifton has pointed out, rare earths will play important roles in the future of energy. Lifton pointed out the importance of the rare earth element neodymium for the wind generation industry.

There’s another rare earth metal that’s critically important to our society—neodymium. In 1984, General Motors and Sumitomo developed the neodymium iron boron alloy for permanent magnets, which is the basis of all modern electric motors because it allows you to make a very small electric motor with the highest possible power density. Neodymium total world production is less than 20,000 tons. That may sound like a lot to you, but it’s tiny. And the fact is it’s recently been projected that a single wind turbine electric generator producing 1 megawatt of electricity requires one ton of neodymium.

Lifton claims that some time between 2011 and 2013 China plans to stop exporting rare earths. At that point if no other source of rare earths is found, wind generation manufacturers would no longer have access to neodymium magnets used in wind generators.

I have been unable to find independent verification of Lifton's claim that one ton of neodymium or so is required for every MW of wind generating capacity. This is quite typical about renewables data sources. Renewables advocates almost always ignore questions about materials inputs into renewables technology. Most renewables advocates themselves have no idea what a rare earth is and what neodymium does in a generator. Lets face it, if all of the wind advocates left the country, the average IQ would go up substantially.

Substitution for neodymium is possible in wind generators, but apparently at a price. Neodymium lowers magnet weight. Magnets built with alternative materials and alternative technologies weigh more. Heavier turbines will require more support, which means more concrete and steel in the support tower, and greater materials and construction cost for the wind turbine. Lifton's latest assertions about neodymium demonstrate that the implications of the renewables paradigm are poorly worked out, and there is a great deal renewables advocates don't know about the technology they are hyping.

Clean Energy from Wind?

Greens rave on and on about how clean wind power is. 

This rosy picture has no basis in reality. As T. Boone Pickens once remarked Wind towers are ugly and degrade the quality of life experienced by people who live in their vecinity. 

On Friday, Rod Adams posted an interesting little essay

questioning the logic of considering industrial scale wind energy as a "soft" or "clean" energy path . . .

Rod pointed to a wind project at Cefn Croes, Wales. This project was from the start so incredibly obnoxious that even the UK Green Party objected to it.  The above picture amply demonstrates the rape of the once beautiful Cambrian Mountain countryside, by this environmentally insensitive wind project.  

Critics of the Cefn Croes project point out numerous examples of environmental damage inflicted on the Welch landscape and environment by this project.  

!. From construction of new access roads. Because of the climb from the A44 to the plateau, the 1.7km of new road has three hairpin bends, and because of the size of the low-loaders (42m long, 5m wide), those bends are enormously wide, resulting in heavy and irreparable landscape scarring, made all the more obvious by wide swathes of clear-felling, and by opportunistic quarrying from the adjacent hillside.

2. From widening of pre-existing forest roads. First there was clear-felling, then banks were ripped up and drainage ditches dug, then roadstone was dumped and levelled. Familiar tracks quickly became unrecognisable, and landmarks were lost.

3. Habitat loss. Not just little mossy banks with heather, lichens, mosses and saplings, but moorland habitat and grassland.

4. Peat disturbance and destruction. Peat is one of the world's rarest habitats. One foot depth of it takes one thousand years to develop; peat sequesters within it many millions of tons of CO2, which is released as it is cut and dumped to dry out.  Adjacent to turbine 37 is a 2m bank of peat; no amount of restoration can reverse damage on this scale.

5. Hydrology disturbance. Streams blocked, polluted and diverted. The run-off from workings drained into previously pristine streams and rivers.

6. Wildlife disturbance. Especially to birds, due to noise and pollution close to nesting sites during the breeding season.

7. Peripheral damage.
Off-site, due to:
Vehicle emissions, pollution, noise, dust and vibration from thousands of HGV movements, bringing in aggregates, site cabins, cranes, and cement; and from enormous low-loaders bringing the turbine components themselves, with police escorts and queues of slow traffic;
Physical damage from passing heavy traffic, to buildings, bridges and drains, road surfaces;
Economic damage through disruption of commercial and tourist traffic, and the communities through which they passed.

It should be noted that many wind projects have the potential to cause similar environmental damage, but thatr supposibly pro-environmental "Greens" are utterly indifferent to the environmental problems created by wind energy projects.

Many of the problems of the Cefn Croes project are common to all upland wind projects, as this Indian report suggests:

To set up a windmill in hilly areas, a minimum of 50-metre long and wide concrete platforms were needed.

The towers, generators and the machines with gearboxes would have to be lifted with the help of trawlers.

To shift this, roads with a width of 10 to 12 metres had to be laid.

The boulders and stones on the way would have to be blasted with dynamite.

Apart from this, a substation building, permanent quarters for staff and guesthouses had to be built.

Trees would have to be felled to draw high-tension wire to transmit 66 kV or 110 kV power.

Rep. Alan Mollohan, D-W.Va., has recently expressed concerns about the environmental and social impact of large scale wind farming in his state.

“With regard to wind energy, the prospects are that West Virginia will be relegated to something of a colonial status,” he said, “with its resources being exploited by and for the benefit of outsiders, and with West Virginians being left with a legacy of environmental damage.

“If this set of circumstances sounds familiar to West Virginians, that’s readily understandable, because it’s happened here before.

“Up to now, the environmental damage suffered by this state has taken such forms as past, unregulated mountaintop mining and acid mine drainage,” Mollohan said. “This time, the prospect is for destruction of wildlife and scenic views from a proliferation of industrial wind turbines on the state’s mountain ridges.”

where the environmental intrusions of windmills. Burning windmills are not environmentally cool. And wind projects are huge.

Kurt Cobb, who is pro wind calculated 500 MW coal-fired power plant occupied about 300 acres. Only 30 acres. one tenth of the total area is actually used. Kobb referenced 5 MW windmills and calculated that in order to match the 70% capacity factor of the coal fired power plant, with 30% capacity factor windmills, 233 windmills would need to be erected.

The spacing between towers is typically at least five diameters of the rotor. That doesn't sound like much. But for the 5-megawatt towers in this example, the spacing would be 2,065 feet times 232--we don't need to separate the last tower from another tower beyond it. Then we'd add the diameter of the rotors--413 feet times 233--and we get a distance equivalent to about 110 miles.

Cobb adds,

The power density problem for solar energy is no less daunting. . .

When we contemplate renewable energy sources, we rarely contemplate the land area required to deploy them. Just the problems involved in obtaining rights-of-way alone are beyond anything we've ever experienced. And, the enormous scale of manufacturing required to produce the panels and wind towers would dwarf our current energy industries. The coal-fired power plant by comparison seems like a wonder of compact energy generation.

This is not to make a case against renewable energy. We will need it and deploy it because we must--either because of the dangers that burning fossil fuels pose to the climate or because of increasing fossil fuel scarcity, or both. The real case to be made here is against business-as-usual. It is hard to see how a transition to a renewable energy society, however rapid and earnest, will give us all the energy we want at prices we will like.

. . . it is glaringly obvious that the energy sources we rely on now are one to two orders of magnitude smaller by land area per unit of energy produced than the industries and buildings they service are per unit of energy consumed. That means it takes a relatively small land area to service the enormous area devoted to commercial, residential and industrial buildings. Just the opposite will become the case using renewable energy sources. We will be obliged to devote vast tracts of space--far more vast than the buildings they serve--to support the energy use of our current infrastructure.

Cobb's conclusions reflect his personal anti-nuclear fanaticism, but reflect on the burden which he and his fellow renewable advocates will impose on our country.

This may not be impossible, but it will certainly be costly and socially disruptive. And, that brings us back to the windmills now increasingly dotting our landscape. We can certainly look forward to many more of them. But if we choose to oppose them on the grounds that they are "ugly" or "disruptive," then we will essentially be choosing a much lower energy future, far below what we've come to expect from fossil fuels.

Cobb deploys the usual repertory of anti-nuclear arguments, starting with the usual we are running out of uranium ploy.  Cobb does not rely on peer reviews studies for this contention, rather he refers to a study paid for by the by the anti-nuclear German Green Party.   Needless to say, Cobb does not even hint that a case could be made for the opposing view.   Cobb next deploys arguments against breeder reactors.  He demonstrates a typical Green lack of knowledge by ignoring Thorium technology completely, which allows him to dispatch breeder reactors with the nuclear proliferation fallacy.   Next Cobb argues that it would be impossible to build enough nuclear power plants to replace existing fossil fuel power plants.  

Of course with nuclear power we can have our energy cake and eat it too. But Cobb would rather sacrifice the benefits of a high energy civilization that to acknowledge the possibility that nuclear generating facilities can be built at a sufficient rate to replace fossil fuel generating plants.  Astonishingly Cobb maintains

Nuclear plants require vast amounts of fossil fuels to build and then maintain.

 This is, of course, absurd. Nuclear plants require no more fossil fuels in their construction and operation than renewables do. We don't have enough energy to build new nuclear plants Cobb maintains.   Cobb is closer than most Greens to knowing the score on renewables, but he still maintains the party line against nuclear power.  

Awareness

The United Kingdom faces an crisis. During the next decade power plants representing one third of the countries generating capacity are slated to be shut down. While the British Government has made some plans, including the construction of a 40 GW wind generation system serious doubts remain about those plans. Professor Ian Fells who has recently writing a report of the British electrical crisis, describes the British situation as "watching a slow-motion train crash".

I have pointed out some of the problems with the UK wind plan, a plan which the current government believes will both fulfill EU renewable electrical generation mandates, and fill the electrical generation gap. In fact the UK wind plan is in shambles. A recent investigation by the Guardian reveals just how badly the plan is failing.

Yesterday I pointed to a report by the Carbon Trust, which simply ignored the issue of inflation in assessing the projected cost of a 29 GW off shore wind development. The Guardian noted that the output of windmill manufacturers had already been booked up for the next 5 years. The wind industry is in the grips of a demand driven inflation that has seen the price of wind double during the last 5 years. Considering the wind craze, there is no reason to expect the wind inflation will stop until investors and politicians recover their sanity.

The Guardian noted that environmental opposition to wind mills in the UK is growing. That opposition does not come from traditional environmental groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, but from grassroots local movements, that object to windmills because they are ugly, and the will destroy some of the most beautiful landscape (and sea scape) in the UK.

The story quotes Stephen Tinsdale, a wind industry spokes person, 'It can cost up to £200,000 just to put an application in, and you can expect it to take three to four years to go through planning. Two-thirds of all applications are refused. On top of that, there are conditions from the Ministry of Defence over radar and conditions by local authorities on when we can and cannot erect them. England has very few places left where you can build large farms. There are potential delays at almost every stage."

Grid connections are another pressing issue, In Scotland alone, 115 renewable projects with a total generating capacity of 9 GWs, are waiting for grid hook up approval, projects have been told to expect a wait of up to 13 years and are expected to deposit Millions of pounds for the right to hook up to the grid.

The National Grid believes that offshore windmill targets are not credible, and that it cannot hook up more than 12.9GW of off shore wind projects. Government plans call for 5 to 6GW wind farms located 10 to 20 miles offshore. Even the Carbon Trust doubts the practicality of this scheme, and wants to move the windmills closer to land. Some off shore backers are getting cold feet.

Planners may also have underestimated the challenge of building a large number of very large off shore windmills. An enormous amount of resources will be needed. One executive stated:

'We are going to need different boats, a whole fleet of vessels, offshore cable installers, helicopters. We are already getting close to our hurdle rates. If things get worse, it makes it a marginal decision whether we invest in them or not. It's all very risky. Because the UK is a difficult place to do business, the utility companies will just go elsewhere. We are not threatening to go, but if a utility finds a project which it can build quickly, it will go there. We are committed to the UK, but it is difficult.

'Until you get absolute consent from government, people will dither and it will take longer to install farms. Industry costs have become very, very expensive, and both government and companies need to work hard to tackle this.'

What we have is a premature plan, paradoxically premature, because the implementation of the plan appears to have begun to late. Yet the implementation is being delayed by by planning flaws, and a lack of commitment. Both the Government and the people of the UK lack a sense of urgency and a commitment to resolving the crisis. They are not fully aware of what is going to happen if the crisis is not addressed, and completely unaware of what will be neccessicary to address the crisis. The crisis threatens the standard of lliving enjoyed by the people of the UK, and threatens their ability to not pay attention to it. Unfortunately if the people of the UK wait till the crisis is upon them it will be too late. In this they are not alone. Nor is this the only energy related crisis faced by the people of the UK and the rest of the world during the next few years.

On The Cost of Wind Reliability

Wind advocates point to a study by CRISTINA L. ARCHER AND MARK Z. JACOBSON
“Supplying Baseload Power and Reducing Transmission Requirements by Interconnecting Wind Farms”.

This study shows, wind advocates claim that systems of windmills, given proper grid interconnection, can supply base power. I will not dispute this conclusion, however, I do wish to point to some aspects of the Archer and Jacobson study that wind advocates often ignore, and which demonstrated that base wind power has undesirable features.

Archer and Jacobson based their model on wind data for the southwest. They chose 19 sites in Kansas, Oklahoma, New Mexico and Texas. They calculated that the average capacity factor for each site was around 0.45. Thus given the installation of a standard 1.5 MW windmill, the average output per windmill would be around 670 KWs. They were able to calculate that 79% of the time windmills from the combined sites would be able to produce at least 312 KWs, or 47% of the average output. Thus the base wind production from the 19 facility system would be .45 X .47 of the rated outputs of the 19 wind facilities or a little over 21% of rated capacity. Producing electrical energy 79% is about as good as your average coal fired steam plant. So this puts wind into the base capacity ball park. But consider how much this is going to cost.

Yesterday I used the figure of $2.5 Million per megawatt for wind costs. We would have to tack on the cost of the interconnecting grid, but we can ignore that for right now. How much would our wind base power cost? Well, if base power is 21% of rated capacity, we can get the figure by deviding the cost of rated capacity, by .21. At $2.5 million per MW, with a 1.5 MW system our wind mills will cost $3.75 million a pop. So how much is our base power going to cost us. Well $3.75 divided by .21 = $17.86 per base MW. Wow, now that is expensive!

Now Google wants to have 380 GWs of wind generators by 2030, how much of that if going to count as wind basic? The answer is 380 x .21 - 79.8 GWs. That seems like a very credible addition to our wind generations system until we realize that there is a serious performance fly in the ointment.

The capacity factor of wind generators drop on hot days. Really drop, and the hotter the day, the bigger the drop. This is a problem because it is hotter during the summer than during the winter. To make matter’s worse, electrical demand goes up during the summer. How bad does it get? In Texas and California on the hottest days, wind capacity factors drop to as low as .02 during periods of peak electrical demand. Thus when the system needs reliable base load capacity the most, wind base capacity is unavailable. If the .02 capacity factor for very hot days held for the entire Google 380 GW national wind system, the combined electrical output of the entire system during the hottest hours of the day would be 7.6 GWs. About the amount of electricity produced by 4 very large nuclear plants.

In order to have its desired wind generation system by 2030 we will have to build 360 Billion GWs of windmill generating capacity. This will cost about $900 billion. The same amount of money will buy 112 reactors. And those reactors will have a .9 capacity factor. Instead of the average output of 79.8 GWs of base power, you will get an average output of 101 GWs of base power from the reactors. But instead of only 7.6 GWs output during the summer peak demand periods, the reactors will and average of 109.76 GWs of output at any given time during the period of summer peak demand.

Summer wind power will never be able to compete with nuclear power as a reliable source of electricity, and any money spent on windmills would buy far more reliable power if spent on nuclear power.

The British Wind Scam

Richard North of EU Referendum, and Patrick Sawyer and Christopher Booker of The Sunday Telegraph have this weekend been taking 2 by 4s after British windmills over the issue of subsidies. This amounted to piling on after the BBC's Simon Cox socked it to the Windmills earlier this month.

Together they supply a devistating critique of the wind industry, and the corrupt motives that lie behind T. Boone Pickens' energy plan.

Simon Cox reported on the BBC about the problems of the Danish wind model:

Denmark is the poster boy for wind power - 20% of the electricity it generates comes from wind, it claims. Horns Rev can provide enough power for 150,000 homes. On the day I visited it would be lucky to power a village,

Cox interviewed energy expert Hugh Sharman, who described Denmark's export of wind generated electricity:

"Every time the wind is high, the exports are high. Every time the wind is low, of course there are few exports".

Sherman stated that Denmark only uses 9% of the the electricity it generates. Cox demonstrates that the only way the Danish system works is the ability of Denmark to export electricity to Scandinavia and Germany, and import it back. cox observed that the UK does not have the import-export option. Of course UK "environmentalists", like Nick Rowe of the Friends of the Earth, support the use of fossil fuels as wind back up. But Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at Oxford University, thinks this is

"about the worst possible thing that one could conceive of given what's going on in Russia and given our dependence on Russian gas supplies".

Cox notes that the wind plus natural gas back up scheme

could also prove costly. The energy company, E.On recently estimated back-up power could cost up to £10bn per year across all the energy suppliers. That would add £400 to the average annual household energy bill.

Patrick Sawyer's Telegraph article is dependent on information from the Renewable Energy Foundation , a UK energy think tank, that is not afraid the lay out the facts about renewable energy. Sawyer notea:

Critics insist that wind energy is too inefficient to replace the creaking network of fossil fuel power stations. Even with modern turbines, wind farms are unable to operate at full capacity because of the unreliable nature of Britain's wind.
The industry admits that for up to 30 per cent of the time, turbines are idle because wind speeds are either too low to turn the blades, or too high, risking damage to the machines.

Sawyer extensively relies on a REF report by John Constable and Robert Barfoot, which bitterly criticized wind subsidies in the UK. Sawyer observes

In 2006-07 more than £217 million was paid to energy firms under the subsidy scheme, known as the Renewables Obligation. Under the scheme, energy companies must obtain a proportion of their power from renewable sources, 6.7 per cent at present rising to 15 per cent by 2015. Those that fail to meet these targets pay a fine that is then shared between all the companies that have obtained energy from "green" sources. For every megawatt of green energy they sell, a company receives about £50 at present.

The Renewable Energy Foundation says that consumers ultimately end up funding the subsidies because energy firms that pay fines pass the costs on to customers.

Sawyer further states:

Critics have estimated that by 2020 the cost of the Renewables Obligation could rise to more than £3 billion.

Booker is on the warpath against wind. Like me, Booker was not always a wind opponent. "Six years ago", Booker stated,

when I first seriously looked at what they actually contribute to our energy needs and our environment, I had a profound shock. It was clear that the craze for wind energy had become one of the greatest self-deceptions of our time.

Far from being “free”, wind is one of the most expensive ways of generating electricity yet devised. Without an almost 100 per cent subsidy, unwittingly paid by all of us through our electricity bills, no one would dream of building giant wind turbines in Britain, because their cost is not remotely competitive.

Turbines are hopelessly ineffectual. The amount of electricity they deliver is derisory. The total power generated by all the 2,300 turbines so far built in Britain — covering hundreds of square miles of countryside and sea — averages just over 600 megawatts in a year, less than that contributed by a single medium-size conventional power station.

Most serious of all, however, is the fact that wind energy is hopelessly unreliable, for the simple reason that wind speeds are not only constantly changing but wholly unpredictable. One minute a turbine may be whizzing round, generating at full capacity; the next the wind drops and the turbine is contributing only a fraction of its capacity or nothing at all.

Booker's findings track closely with my own. Thus while I disagree with many of Booker's views including his skepticism about climate change, I think he is correct about wind.

Booker scores against the fundamental dishonesty of the wind Lobby:

The best-kept secret of the wind industry, however, which continues to fool both politicians and the media, is its trick of referring only to the contribution of windmills in terms of their “installed capacity”, as if that is what they will actually deliver. They talk about a “16 megawatt” wind farm “powering x thousand homes” as if that is the contribution it will make to our electricity needs. Yet in reality, thanks to the intermittency of the wind, a turbine will on average produce through the year only a quarter of its capacity.

The success of this deception means that politicians almost invariably exaggerate the potential benefits of wind power by a factor of four. And of course the other great trick is to conceal the fact that all this must be paid for by that huge hidden subsidy.

The real danger of the “great wind scam” is that it takes the eyes of politicians off the real energy crisis fast approaching us, so that we are not building the proper power stations we need to keep our lights on. That is why it will one day be looked back on as having been one of the most incomprehensible blunders of our age.

Richard North comments:

The main problem is that the generosity of the subsidy scheme is diverting cash from investment in longer-term schemes such as nuclear, and also driving generators to invest in increasingly expensive gas, this being the most suitable back-up for wind.

North quotes Constable and Barfoot:

"The market for renewable energy is an artificial one created and maintained by government legislation. The question is whether this consumer-derived money is well spent. It is worth noting that the excessive subsidy offered to onshore wind development has drawn developers even to sites where the wind resource is very weak and the environmental impact severe."

North describes how British wind is a tremendous scam on the pun;ic:

As an example of the way the rip-off works, pictured above left is one of the existing subsidy wind farms – 23 x 400 KW turbines at Ovenden Moor, on the bleak flanks of the Pennines just outside Halifax. Built in 1993 at the cost of £10 million with the aid of an EU grant of £1.3 million (approx), last year the installation earned for its owners, E.on, a cool £1,004,850 in Renewables Obligation Certificate (ROC) subsidy, recovered by a surcharge on electricity bills.

This is an installation rated at 9.2 MW, theoretically capable of producing 80,592 MWh but, with a load factor of only 27.71 percent, it actually produced 22,330 MWh. At today's inflated wholesale price of £85.58 MWh for electricity, that output would earn £1.9 million in sales, potentially earning the installation just short of £3 million a year when the ROC subsidy is added. For an investment of less than £9 million, this is an extremely attractive rate of return and it is thus easy to see why generators are piling into wind.

And you wonder why T. Boone Pickens loves wind so much.

Windmill hazards

As T. Boone Pickens acknowledged, windmills are ugly. They are loud. They interfere with radio and TV signals. Visually they can produce a strobe like effect under certain lighting conditions. Prof Arnold Wilkins of from the University of Essex psychology department and Prof Graham Harding, an expert on photosensitive epilepsy, from the University of Aston have expressed concerns about windmills triggering epileptic seizures. [url]http://www.wind-watch.org/news/2008/04/29/wind-turbines-can-trigger-seizures-say-scientists/[/url]

For more information see, "Wind turbines, flicker, and photosensitive epilepsy: Characterizing the flashing that may precipitate seizures and optimizing guidelines to prevent them," by Graham Harding, Pamela Harding, and Arnold Wilkins.
ABSTRACT

Wind turbines are known to produce shadow flicker by interruption of sunlight by the turbine blades. Known parameters of the seizure provoking effect of flicker, i.e., contrast, frequency, mark-space ratio, retinal area stimulated and percentage of visual cortex involved were applied to wind turbine features. The proportion of patients affected by viewing wind turbines expressed as distance in multiples of the hub height of the turbine showed that seizure risk does not decrease significantly until the distance exceeds 100 times the hub height.

Since risk does not diminish with viewing distance, flash frequency is therefore the critical factor and should be kept to a maximum of three per second, i.e., sixty revolutions per minute for a three-bladed turbine. On wind farms the shadows cast by one turbine on another should not be viewable by the public if the cumulative flash rate exceeds three per second. Turbine blades should not be reflective.

Doctors around the world as studying a condition called "Wind Turbine Syndrome". "Out of Kirby Mountain" reports that Dr. Nina Pierpont of Malone, N.Y., is one of those researchers. She testified about "Wind Turbine Syndrome" before the New York State Legislature Energy Committee. She stated:

Three doctors that I know of are studying the Wind Turbine Syndrome: myself, one in England, and one in Australia. We note the same sets of symptoms. The symptoms start when local turbines go into operation and resolve when the turbines are off or when the person is out of the area. The symptoms include:

1. Sleep problems: noise or physical sensations of pulsation or pressure make it hard to go to sleep and cause frequent awakening.

2. Headaches which are increased in frequency or severity.

3. Dizziness, unsteadiness, and nausea.

4. Exhaustion, anxiety, anger, irritability, and depression.

5. Problems with concentration and learning.

6. Tinnitus (ringing in the ears).

Not everyone near turbines has these symptoms. This does not mean people are making them up; it means there are differences among people in susceptibility. These differences are known as risk factors. Defining risk factors and the proportion of people who get symptoms is the role of epidemiologic studies. These studies are under way. Chronic sleep disturbance is the most common symptom. Exhaustion, mood problems, and problems with concentration and learning are natural outcomes of poor sleep.

Sensitivity to low frequency vibration is a risk factor. Contrary to assertions of the wind industry, some people feel disturbing amounts of vibration or pulsation from wind turbines, and can count in their bodies, especially their chests, the beats of the blades passing the towers, even when they can’t hear or see them. Sensitivity to low frequency vibration in the body or ears is highly variable in people, and hence poorly understood and the subject of much debate.

Another risk factor is a preexisting migraine disorder. Migraine is not just a bad headache; it’s a complex neurologic phenomenon which affects the visual, hearing, and balance systems, and can even affect motor control and consciousness itself. Many people with migraine disorder have increased sensitivity to noise and to motion -- they get carsick as youngsters, and seasick, and very sick on carnival rides. Migraine-associated vertigo (which is the spinning type of dizziness, often with nausea) is a described medical entity. Migraine occurs in 12% of Americans. It is a common, familial, inherited condition.

... Data from a number of studies and individual cases document that in rolling terrain, disturbing symptoms of the Wind Turbine Syndrome occur up to 1.2 miles from the closest turbine. In long Appalachian valleys, with turbines on ridge-tops, disturbing symptoms occur up to 1.5 miles away. In New Zealand, which is more mountainous, disturbing symptoms occur up to 1.9 miles away.

Windmills can be iced in the winter, and moving blades can throw large chunks of ice. See "RISK ANALYSIS OF ICE THROW FROM WIND TURBINES", by Henry Seifert, Annette Westerhellweg, and Jürgen Kröning.

Wind turbines are normally erected far away from houses, industry, etc., as the wind
conditions are not favourable in the vicinity of large obstacles. Furthermore, with regard to
acoustic noise emission and shadow flicker certain distances are required by national
regulations, when wind farms are planned in the neighbourhood of residential areas. Thus,
wind turbines should not cause risks as far as ice throw is concerned. However, the turbines
are erected close to roads or agricultural infrastructure in order to avoid long and expensive
access roads for erection and maintenance. This induces a risk for persons passing by the wind
turbines, cars passing the streets if ice fragments fall down from a turbine.

In addition to the health related problems and icing related falls, Paul Gipe reports that work related deaths associated with windmills have occurred. [url]http://www.wind-works.org/articles/BreathLife.html[/url]

Gipe reports,

it appears that the current mortality rate of wind energy of 0.15 deaths per TWh is roughly equivalent to that of mining, processing, and burning of coal to generate electricity according to some researchers. (This data doesn't include increases in mortality from the air pollution that results from burning coal.) Data from other researchers indicates that wind's mortality rate is about half that for the occupational mortality rate for coal.

Windmills also are hazardous to wildlife, especially insect eating bats.

T. Boone Tells It Like It Is

From a T. Boone Pickens interview with Fast Complany.com's David Case.

Pickens: "I'm not going to have the windmills on my ranch. They're ugly. . . ."

Question: "So whose land is it going on?"

Pickens: "My neighbors', . . ."

Question: "What happens if Congress doesn't extend the $20-per-megawatt-hour Production Tax Credit for wind -- set to expire December 31? On a project this size, that's an $80,000 deduction every hour at full capacity."

Pickens: "Then you've got a dead duck. It would be hard to go without a subsidy."

Question: "What about when the wind doesn't blow?"

Pickens:"That's the problem with wind generation. You've got to supplement it with a gas-fired or coal-fired source so whoever buys it gets continuous 24-7 generation."

Comment: Do you get the picture?