The Trump Energy Resilience Plan which Could have Saved Texas
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 20, 2021
Has Trump derangement syndrome cost Texan lives? Back in 2017, Secretary of Energy Rick Perry proposed paying Coal and Nuclear Power Stations to keep at least 90 days worth of coal onsite, for disaster resilience.
At the time the resilience proposal was widely criticised as being a thinly disguised Trump scheme to pump government money into the coal and nuclear industries. But in hindsight, a bit more resilience might have saved Texas from days of painful electricity blackouts.
From 2017;
Rick Perry: DOE’s Coal, Nuclear Proposal Is ‘Rebalancing the Market’
Perry doubles down on arguments that the NOPR will protect Americans.
LACEY JOHNSON NOVEMBER 02, 2017
Energy Secretary Rick Perry said a proposed rule to subsidize coal and nuclear plants is “rebalancing the market” to correct for the Obama administration’s support of renewable energy.
They “clearly had their thumb on the scale toward the renewable side,” said Perry, who spoke about his energy policy priorities with Meet the Press moderator Chuck Todd and Axios CEO Jim VandeHei at an event in Washington, D.C. on Thursday.
The DOE’s request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) would upend decades of energy market policy by guaranteeing cost recovery for power plants with 90 days of fuel supply on-site — something that only nuclear power, a few hydropower sites, and some larger coal power plants can provide.
“If you can guarantee me that the wind is going to blow tomorrow, if you can guarantee me that the sun’s going to get to the solar panels…then I’ll buy into that. But you can’t,” said Perry.
The notice of public rulemaking, or NOPR, implies that there is a looming threat to grid reliability due to coal and nuclear power plant retirements. Its conclusions are largely based on an incomplete analysis of the 2014 polar vortex, which could have led to blackouts had several coal-fired plants now slated for closure not been available to serve the load.
The move has been widely criticized by clean energy advocates as politically motivated and factually unproven, and has drawn a backlash from major sectors of the energy industry.
…
Federal regulators rejected the plan, on the grounds that Rick Perry failed to provide enough evidence that retiring coal and nuclear plants was undermining grid stability. The plan was eventually dropped, after vigorous lobbying from gas and renewable energy groups.
Now that the scenario Rick Perry predicted has actually happened in Texas, it seems pretty obvious the Rick Perry was right about the risks. Nuclear power plants and fossil fuel plants which had access to adequate fuel supplies mostly stayed fully operational.
Why is government intervention required to ensure grid resilience?
Keeping several months worth of fuel onsite is a cost which does not contribute to company profits. The cost of all that reserve fuel represents money which could instead have been used to pay down capital debts, or pay out dividends to shareholders. Power companies which choose to wear this kind of expense are at a competitive disadvantage compared to power companies which run leaner operations, by running their reserves down to the bare minimum. The expense of keeping fuel in reserve impacts market share and company growth; consumers frequently flock to the lowest price energy service, without considering the long term consequences.
Rick Perry’s plan would have eliminated the financial penalty for keeping a fuel reserve onsite, by compensating power companies for the cost of maintaining substantial fuel reserves.
Given resilience payments seem to be a workable solution, will President Biden or Texas Governor Greg Abbott implement the 2017 Trump / Perry energy resilience plan, to ensure nothing like the Texas power outage disaster ever happens again?
Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas
By Planning Engineer | Climate Etc. | February 18, 2021
The story from some media sources is that frozen wind turbines are responsible for the power shortfalls in Texas. Other media sources emphasize that fossil fuel resources should shoulder the blame because they have large cold induced outages as well and also some natural gas plants could not obtain fuel.
Extreme cold should be expected to cause significant outages of both renewable and fossil fuel based resources. Why would anyone expect that sufficient amounts of natural gas would be available and deliverable to supply much needed generation? Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class in Texas. The technologies and their performance were well within the expected bounds of what could have been foreseen for such weather conditions. While some degradation should be expected, what is happening in Texas is a departure from what they should be experiencing. Who or what then is responsible for the shocking consequences produced by Texas’s run in with this recent bout of extreme cold?
TRADITIONAL PLANNING
Traditionally, responsibility for ensuring adequate capacity during extreme conditions has fallen upon individual utility providers. A couple decades ago I was responsible for the load forecasting, transmission planning and generation planning efforts of an electric cooperative in the southeastern US. My group’s projections, studies and analysis supported our plans to meet customer demand under forecasted peak load conditions. We had seen considerable growth in residential and commercial heat pumps. At colder temperature these units stop producing heat efficiently and switch to resistance heating which causes a spike in demand. Our forecasts showed that we would need to plan for extra capacity to meet this potential demand under extreme conditions in upcoming winters.
I was raked over the coals and this forecast was strongly challenged. Providing extra generation capacity, ensuring committed (firm) deliveries of gas during the winter, upgrading transmission facilities are all expensive endeavors. Premiums are paid to ensure gas delivery and backup power and there is no refund if it’s not used. Such actions increased the annual budget and impact rates significantly for something that is not likely to occur most years, even if the extreme weather projections are appropriate. You certainly don’t want to over-estimate peak demand due to the increasing costs associated with meeting that demand. But back then we were obligated to provide for such “expected” loads. Our CEO, accountants and rate makers would ideally have liked a lower extreme demand projection as that would in most cases have kept our cost down. It was challenging to hold firm and stand by the studies and force the extra costs on our Members.
Fortuitously for us, we were hit with extreme winter conditions just when the plan went in place. Demand soared and the planned capacity we had provided was needed. A neighboring entity was hit with the same conditions. Like us they had significant growth in heat pumps – but they had not forecasted their extreme weather peak to climb as we had. They had to go to the overburdened markets to find energy and make some curtailments. The cost of replacement power turned out to be significantly greater proportionately than we incurred by planning for the high demand. They suffered real consequences due to the shortcomings of their planning efforts.
However, if extreme winter had not occurred, our neighbor’s costs would have been lower than ours that year and that may have continued many years into the future as long as we didn’t see extreme winter conditions. Instead of the praise we eventually received, there would have at least been some annoyance directed at my groups for contributing to “un-needed expenditures”. That’s the way of the world. You can often do things a little cheaper, save some money and most of the time you can get away with it. But sometimes/eventually you cut it too close and the consequences can be extreme.
The Approach in Texas
Who is responsible for providing adequate capacity in Texas during extreme conditions? The short answer is no one. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) looks at potential forecasted peak conditions and expected available generation and if there is sufficient margin they assume everything will be all right. But unlike utilities under traditional models, they don’t ensure that the resources can deliver power under adverse conditions, they don’t require that generators have secured firm fuel supplies, and they don’t make sure the resources will be ready and available to operate. They count on enough resources being there because they assume that is in their owner’s best interests. Unlike all other US energy markets, Texas does not even have a capacity market. By design they rely solely upon the energy market. This means that entities profit only from the actual energy they sell into the system. They do not see any profit from having stand by capacity ready to help out in emergencies. The energy only market works well under normal conditions to keep prices down. While generally markets are often great things, providing needed energy during extreme conditions evidently is not their forte. Unlike the traditional approach where specific entities have responsibilities to meet peak levels, in Texas the responsibility is diffuse and unassigned. There is no significant long term motivation for entities to ensure extra capacity just in case it may be needed during extreme conditions. Entities that might make that gamble theoretically can profit when markets skyrocket, but such approaches require tremendous patience and the ability to weather many years of potential negative returns.
This article from GreenTech media praises energy only markets as do many green interests. Capacity markets are characterized as wasteful. Andrew Barlow, Head of the PUC in Texas is quoted as follows, “Legislators have shown strong support for the energy-only market that has fueled the diversification of the state’s electricity generation fleet and yielded significant benefits for customers while making Texas the national leader in installed wind generation. ”
Why has Capacity been devalued?
Traditional fossil fuel generation has (as does most hydro and nuclear) inherent capacity value. That means such resources generally can be operated with a high degree of reliability and dependability. With incentives they can be operated so that they will likely be there when needed. Wind and solar are intermittent resources, working only under good conditions for wind and sun, and as such do not have capacity value unless they are paired with costly battery systems.
If you want to achieve a higher level of penetration from renewables, dollars will have to be funneled away from traditional resources towards renewables. For high levels of renewable penetration, you need a system where the consumers’ dollars applied to renewable generators are maximized. Rewarding resources for offering capacity advantages effectively penalizes renewables. As noted by the head of the PUC in Texas, an energy only market can fuel diversification towards intermittent resources. It does this because it rewards only energy that is fed into the grid, not backup power. (Side note-it’s typical to provide “renewable” resources preference for feeding into the grid as well. Sometimes wind is compensated for feeding into the grid even during periods of excess generation when fossil fuel resources are penalized. But that’s another article.)
Traditional planning studies might recognize that wind needs to be backed up by fossil fuel (more so under extreme conditions) such that if you have these backup generators its much cheaper to use and fuel them, than to add wind farms with the accompanying significant investment for concrete, rare earth metals, vast swaths of land … . Traditional planning approaches often have to go to get around this “bias” of favoring capacity providing resources over intermittent resources.
When capacity value is rewarded, this makes the economics of renewables much less competitive. Texas has stacked the deck to make wind and solar more competitive than they could be in a system that better recognizes the value of dependable resources which can supply capacity benefits. An energy only market helps accomplish the goal of making wind and solar more competitive. Except capacity value is a real value. Ignoring that, as Texas did, comes with real perils.
In Texas now we are seeing the extreme shortages and market price spikes that can result from devaluing capacity. The impacts are increased by both having more intermittent resources which do not provide capacity and also because owners and potential owners of resources which could provide capacity are not incentivized to have those units ready for backup with firm energy supplies.
Personal Observations
Wind and solar have value and can be added to power systems effectively in many instances. But seeking to attain excessive levels of wind and solar quickly becomes counterproductive. It is difficult to impossible to justify the significant amounts of wind and solar penetration desired by many policy makers today using principals of good cost allocation. Various rate schemes and market proposals have been developed to help wind and solar become more competitive. But they come with costs, often hidden. As I’ve written before, it may be because transmission providers have to assume the costs and build a more expensive system to accommodate them. It may be that rates and markets unfairly punish other alternatives to give wind and solar an advantage. It may be that they expose the system to greater risks than before. It may be that they eat away at established reliability levels and weaken system performance during adverse conditions. In a fair system with good price signals today’s wind and solar cannot achieve high penetration levels in a fair competition.
Having a strong technical knowledge of the power system along with some expertise in finance, rates and costs can help one see the folly of a variety of policies adopted to support many of today’s wind and solar projects. Very few policy makers possess anything close to the skill sets needed for such an evaluation. Furthermore, while policy makers could listen to experts, their voices are drowned out by those with vested interests in wind and solar technology who garner considerable support from those ideologically inclined to support renewables regardless of impacts.
A simpler approach to understanding the ineffectiveness of unbridled advocacy for wind and solar is to look at those areas which have heavily invested in these intermittent resources and achieved higher penetration levels of such resources. Typically electric users see significant overall increases in the cost of energy delivered to consumers. Emissions of CO2 do not uniformly decrease along with employment of renewables, but may instead increase due to how back up resources are operated. Additionally reliability problems tend to emerge in these systems. Texas, a leader in wind, once again is added to the experience gained in California, Germany and the UK showing that reliability concerns and outages increase along with greater employment of intermittent resources.
Anyone can look at Texas and observe that fossil fuel resources could have performed better in the cold. If those who owned the plants had secured guaranteed fuel, Texas would have been better off. More emergency peaking units would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?
The incentive for gas generation to do the right thing was taken away by Texas’s deliberate energy only market strategy. The purpose of which was to aid the profitability of intermittent wind and solar resources and increase their penetration levels. I don’t believe anyone has ever advanced the notion that fossil fuel plants might operate based on altruism. Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete.
Biden Administration Sending Emergency Diesel Generators to Texas
By Eric Worrall | Watts Up With That? | February 18, 2021
If you were expecting [proclaimed] President Biden to ship emergency solar panels to Texas, you were wrong. Looks like when renewable energy fails, as it did in Texas, even the Biden administration turns to more reliable forms of energy.
Biden administration sending generators to Texas amid power outages
Ursula Perano | February 18, 2021
… White House press secretary Jen Psaki said at a briefing on Wednesday that the Biden administration is sending emergency generators to Texas amid ongoing power outages and freezing weather.
Why it matters: Huge swaths of Texas have been without electricity for days due to critical failures in the state’s power grid. The outages come while a winter storm continues to pummel the state, causing unsafe conditions and a desperate need for heat. … Read more
Click here to see a video of Jen Psaki explaining the plan to send diesel generators to Texas and other states likely to be affected by winter storms.
Even if a storm like this only happens every 20 years, going 100% renewable is clearly now unacceptable. People who rely on electricity for heating are in deadly danger, if the only source of power is renewable energy, and the renewable energy systems freeze solid during severe ice storms.
If the plan is to maintain enough diesel backup to keep the lights on when renewables fail, renewables will never be affordable. Consumers will be saddled with the expense of maintaining the renewable infrastructure, and the additional expense of maintaining a complete second set of power infrastructure at operational readiness, ready to switch on when the renewables fail.
Midwest Have No Surplus Power For Texas
By Paul Homewood | Not A Lot Of People Know That | February 18, 2021
Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO)
It is claimed that Texas would be better off as part of a wider grid. The obvious one would be MISO, to which there is already a small interconnector.
However MISO has been having severe difficulties due to the cold spell:
https://www.misoenergy.org/mcsnotification/?id=1131
As with Texas, MISO is currently relying almost entirely on coal, gas and nuclear power. If they had been operating with a quarter of the power from wind, as Texas was last week, I suspect that they would have been experiencing the same blackouts as Texas has had.
https://www.misoenergy.org/#
It is also not much bigger capacity wise than Texas, which has been running at around 60 GW this week. I suspect that any extra demand from Texas would quickly destabilise the MISO grid.
There is an interesting backstory to this.
The Natural Resources Defense Council says the Midwest energy grid operator known as MISO hasn’t planned enough interstate transmission lines.
MISO manages the system of utilities and transmission lines that operate in a wide region, from Manitoba, Canada to Louisiana.
John Moore is a senior attorney with the Council. He says MISO for too long has approved numerous local transmission projects, but only a tiny number of interstate transmission lines – which operate much like interstate highways, moving energy, rather than vehicles, from state to state.
He says MISO needs to plan more aggressively to meet the economic and environmental needs of the region.
“If we let business as usual take its course, then MISO may not be as bold as it needs to be,” he says.
Moore says the lack of interstate transmission capacity is leaving clean energy projects on the table.
That includes 42 clean energy proposals in Michigan since 2016 that were unable to proceed, because the existing transmission system couldn’t handle them.
https://www.michiganradio.org/post/nrdc-midwest-grid-operator-plan-blocking-clean-energy
Installing more wind power inevitably means more long distance transmission capacity is needed. The unpredictability of wind power results in huge surpluses at times, which require transmitting to areas short of power. This could often be over distances of hundreds of miles.
Since that is the case, surely it is a cost that wind farms should be paying, something that would probably make them totally unviable economically.
America’s future is in the hands of inept cretins while creativity and innovation are needed more than ever
By Helen Buyniski | RT | February 16, 2021
The US’ future looks grim indeed in the face of a ‘Great Reset’ proposed by the same powers that steered it into a deadly economic quagmire. Why are Americans allowing those who broke their world the privilege of ‘fixing’ it?
Americans with more power and connections than sense have rushed forward over the last year, attempting to seize the right to ‘fix’ a society broken by shockingly stupid responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entire generations are being rendered suicidally depressed, unemployable, hopelessly alienated, and worse, while the likelihood that the current generation of children will mature into functional adults is rapidly shrinking. There is no one-size-fits-all solution for such a heterogenous population, and this moment calls for an unprecedented degree of creativity and imagination if we are to survive as a society.
So why are those most victimized by this system running into the arms of the same crew of unimaginative, solipsistic sociopaths who have repeatedly wrecked society in the first place? Whether it’s the ‘too-big-to-fail’ banks who asset-stripped the American middle class in 2008, overloading the country’s already fragile social safety net and driving a stake through the heart of the once-achievable American Dream, or the World Economic Forum, a breeding ground for selfish and self-interested corporate hacks who just want to fly their private jets in peace with the option to lecture the ground-bound hoi polloi on their carbon usage, those who’ve put themselves in charge are precisely the wrong ones for the job.
Indeed, the WEF – whose conveniently-timed book Covid 19: The Great Reset surfaced just in time to be seized upon by world governments as a supposedly better-than-nothing playbook for lifting humanity out of a mess even its writers admitted wasn’t nearly as disastrous as it seemed – was the first to claim experimental sovereignty over the poor unfortunates its leaders consigned to misery. Acknowledging they were putting humanity through the largest psychological experiment in history, one which technically violates the Geneva Convention and Nuremberg Code given that informed consent from its experimental test subjects was never obtained, is perhaps the worst possible messiah substitute to lead humanity into a brighter future.
Certainly, no one elected the WEF to guide Americans through the troubled times its members have largely created. The US is trapped in an identity crisis, crushed between the media establishment’s portrait of Our Democracy™ having narrowly escaped orange-tinted fascism and a newly-inaugurated administration that literally admitted to stealing the election on the front cover of Time Magazine. Joe Biden’s administration has claimed for itself the right to ‘Build Back Better’, its plagiarism-prone president once again ripping off his battle cry, this time from the World Economic Forum itself. A scriptwriter who submitted such an on-the-nose screenplay to their producer would be fired on the spot, yet Americans are expected to live with it.
Far from ushering in a golden age of democracy, Biden and his henchmen have held the reins of power in Washington for decades, bringing nothing but suffering to the American people. Despite his cabinet’s swaddling the iron fist of neoliberalism in warm fuzzy buzzwords like “inclusion” and “sustainability,” Biden himself is in large part responsible for the Patriot Act, which stripped American citizens of their most important constitutional rights. He also authored the 1994 crime bill that set up mandatory minimum sentencing for minor drug infractions, funneling tens of thousands of mostly black men into lifetime prison sentences. While he’s finally admitted the latter was a “mistake,” he nevertheless tried to dodge responsibility for having written the disastrous legislation by blaming individual states for how they implemented it. Expecting him to lead Americans into a bright new future is like expecting immaculate table manners from a starving grizzly bear.
Barely unable to keep from gibbering and squealing about a proposed new plan to tackle “domestic extremism,” Biden and his diversity all-stars – whose diversity stops at skin level as they march in ideological lockstep – are as much a menace to American society as the WEF member corporations pulling their strings behind the scenes. Americans seem helplessly caught in the vicious cycle of an abusive relationship, unable to flee the “devils they know” despite full awareness they will come away from their next encounter with a black eye (or an empty bank account, or utter social collapse). Embracing the WEF’s ‘Great Reset’ – a future of “fusion of our physical, digital and biological identity,” according to the organization’s founder Klaus Schwab, who further clarified this involves technology that can “intrude into the hitherto private space of our minds, reading our thoughts and influencing our behavior” – is perhaps the worst possible future humanity could enter. Yet we are sleepwalking into precisely this outcome, unaware that we have any other options.
Even as Americans emerge from the fear-based fog that has consumed them for the better part of a year, they’re still – whether they know it or not – following the directions of the same class of authority figures that led them into this mess in the first place. But these figures have no idea what they’re doing any more than those who are merely following their “leaders” out of habit. Why, having suffered so under the leadership of these utterly worthless figures, would they continue to follow? There is no precedent among the current generation for the economic collapse that has seized the US and no evidence that the WEF, or a wildly incompetent presidential administration, or corona czar and resounding failure Dr. Anthony Fauci, have any idea what to do about it.
At this point, diverging from the dysfunctional and downright deadly paths forged by these repulsive figures is not even a matter of making the right choice – it is a matter of survival.
Helen Buyniski is an American journalist and political commentator at RT. Follow her on Telegram.
Biden Attacks Farms – Comprehensive War on Global Food Supply – Engineered Famine
Ice Age Farmer | January 29, 2021
The Biden admin’s executive actions in the last 48 hours are attacking farms and implementing the technocratic takeover of food, accelerating a global collapse in food production by paying farmers NOT to grow food, cutting their financial support, tasking Tom Vilsack’s USDA with a Net-Zero goal, changing COVID guidance on grocery stores, restaurants, and meatpacking plants. Meanwhile, the media is finally acknowledging the soybean shortage, and the US is now also experiencing a fertilizer shortage, which will further increase costs and cause yields will collapse. As other countries stop exporting to protect domestic supplies, the US has been wholly sold out. This confluence of issues and cascading failures merits our attention urgently — start growing food today.
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LINKS: (see FULL SHOW NOTES above!)
https://www.cleveland.com/politics/2021/01/biden-signs-orders-strengthening-efforts-to-battle-climate-change.html
https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/biden-vows-to-pay-farmers-to-plant-cover-crops-and-put-land-in-conservation
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/09/27/boris-johnson-commits-restoring-nature-30-per-cent-britain-2030/
https://www.agriculture.com/news/business/ag-role-in-climate-mitigation-net-zero-emissions
https://returntonow.net/2020/12/29/biden-picks-mr-monsanto-tom-vislack-to-head-the-usda/
https://www.agweb.com/news/policy/politics/government-cameras-hidden-private-property-welcome-open-fields
Kamala: yes, we should eat less meat:
https://news.yahoo.com/snap-expansion-worker-safety-bidens-175300671.html
https://www.lonesomelands.com/new-blog/2021/1/24/americas-family-owned-farms-now-face-the-greatest-threat-to-their-existance
https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2021/01/27/family-farms-continue-power-us-agriculture
Josh Linville (Fertilizer)
https://www.agriculture.com/markets/newswire/us-soybean-crushers-buy-up-extra-beans-as-supply-scramble-looms
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-01-27/china-is-so-thirsty-for-soy-that-america-could-soon-be-importing
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-ethanol-idUSKBN29V282
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2020/dec/15/food-giants-seek-to-ban-soybeans-from-deforested-b/
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/22/shipping-container-shortage-is-causing-shipping-costs-to-rise.html
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3116798/chinas-food-security-requires-local-communist-party-members
https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3115004/china-food-security-beijing-calls-biotech-breakthrough
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/china-vegetable-prices-hit-record-104350266.html
Shafting The Poor
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | February 5, 2021
Let me start with a couple of the most callous and heartless quotes that I know of. Here’s a description from Politico of the first one:
President Barack Obama’s Energy secretary unwittingly created a durable GOP talking point in September 2008 when he talked to The Wall Street Journal about the benefits of having gasoline prices rise over 15 years to encourage energy efficiency.
“Somehow,” Chu said, “we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe.”
And here’s the second quote, from President Obama:
“Under my plan of a cap-and-trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket, regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad, because I’m capping greenhouse gases”
In agreement with the beliefs of President Obama and Secretary Chu, and a vain attempt to fight the imaginary menace of CO2, the countries of Europe have driven up the price of energy. This is supposed to make people use less of it, and thus reduce CO2 emissions.
As a result of the European policies, the current energy price situation looks like this:
Not a pretty picture …
So consider the effect of this on the poor. To begin with, the poor spend a much larger part of their income on energy than do the rich.
Now, the energy prices in Europe are more than twice what they are in the US. So if the US doubled to match the fantasies of Secretary Chu and President Obama, the richest fifth of the nation would only be paying 10% of their income for energy … but the poorest fifth of the nation would be paying close to half of their income for energy. And as I pointed out about the poorest of the poor in my post “We Have Met The 1% And He Is Us“,
Those people have no slack. They have no extra room in their budgets. They have no ability to absorb increases in their cost of living, particularly their energy spending. They have no credit cards, no credit, and almost no assets. They have no health insurance. They are not prepared for emergencies. They have no money in the bank. They have no reserve, no cushion, no extra clothing, no stored food in the basement, no basement for that matter, no fat around their waist, no backups, no extras of any description. They are not ready for a hike in the price of energy or anything else.
The result of all of these factors is what is called “energy poverty”. That’s where you don’t have enough energy to keep your home warm. That’s where you’re a single mom with three kids and your old car you need to get to work drinks gas faster than your ex-husband drank whiskey … so if gas prices double your kids will do without something important. That’s where you and your family sit in the cold and the dark and shiver because you can’t pay your energy bills.
And that’s where a study from the Jacque Delors Institute says (emphasis mine):
During this winter of 2020-2021, hundreds of millions of Europeans are constrained to stay at home because of lockdowns and curfews instituted to contain the propagation of COVID19. For millions of them, this means staying in poorly heated houses, which causes both discomfort and a threat to their own health.
This policy paper gives an overview of the state of energy poverty in the European Union (EU) and the way this issue is currently addressed by Member States and by the EU. While it appears that energy poverty has generally been decreasing over the last years, in 2019 there were still over 30 million Europeans who claimed to be unable to heat their home adequately in the winter.
Thirty million Europeans, many of them pensioners, many of them kids, all of them poor, sitting in unheated houses … that’s about the population of California. Or for the folks across the pond, it’s about the population of Hungary, Austria and the Czech Republic combined. Again per the report, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Greece, Portugal and Cyprus are the countries with the highest share of the population who are unable to heat their homes.
Now, there’s an old saying, “No pain, no gain.” Me, I think that’s crazy because I’ve had lots of painless gains. But if there is pain, well, there should at least be some gain to go along with it. So … shall we take a look at the purported gain in the question of CO2 emissions?
I mean, all those countries signed on to the Paris Climate Discord, they all have followed President Obama’s and Secretary Chu’s theories and drove their energy prices through the roof to reduce greenhouse gases, so now at the end of the day there must be some real gains in per capita CO2 emissions, right?
Here you go:
Thirty million Europeans are freezing in the winter, unable to heat their homes, and for what?
For nothing. Zip. Niets. Diddley-squat. Ingenting. Zero. Nada. Rien. Nichts. Not one thing.
Despite Europe creating widespread energy poverty, despite the US not being in the Paris Agreement, the US has reduced emissions more than any of the countries shown above. Europe is condemning old people and children to shiver in the dark and cold, and for absolutely no gain at all.
Look, I don’t think CO2 is the secret knob that controls the climate. I think that’s a simplistic scientific misrepresentation of a very complex system. As a result, I think that the “War On CO2” is a destructive, costly, and meaningless endeavor.
However, perhaps you do think that the climate, one of the more complex systems we’ve ever tried to analyze, is ruled by just one of the hundreds of different factors affecting the system. If so, I presume you think the European actions are justified because you believe you will be helping the poor people in the year 2050 or 2100.
So … if those are your motives I ask you, I beg you, I implore you, don’t wage your war on CO2 by screwing today’s poor to the floor!
Because I can assure you, possibly helping tomorrow’s poor by actually hurting today’s poor is a crime against humanity, one you absolutely don’t want to have on your conscience.
My best to all, regardless of your views regarding the climate control knob,
w.
Russia ramps up natural gas supplies to China via Power of Siberia mega-pipeline
RT | February 1, 2021
Russian energy major Gazprom pumped more gas to China in January via the Power of Siberia pipeline than it had initially planned, boosting daily supplies by as much as 2.5 percent.
“The export of gas to China through the Power of Siberia gas pipeline continues to grow. Supplies regularly exceed Gazprom’s daily contractual obligations,” the company said in a statement, adding that the volume of gas delivery last month “was 2.9 times higher than in January 2020.”
The 3,000km (1864 mile) cross-border pipeline started official deliveries of Russian natural gas to China in 2019. The so-called eastern route’s capacity is 61 billion cubic meters of gas per year, including 38 billion cubic meters for export.
The agreement on gas supplies via the Power of Siberia pipeline was reached in 2014, with Russia’s energy giant Gazprom and the China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) inking a 30-year contract. It is Gazprom’s biggest-ever agreement and the first natural gas pipeline between Russia and China.
Gazprom exported some 2.3 billion cubic meters of gas along the route during the first eight months of 2020. It plans to boost exports by an additional six billion cubic meters.
Russia is set to further increase supplies of piped gas to China, including via the Power of Siberia 2 project. The latter pipeline entered the design stage last year, and will be capable of delivering as much as 50 billion cubic meters of gas once finished.
Gazprom intends to become China’s biggest supplier, making up more than 25 percent of gas imports by 2035.
Bright Green Impossibilities
By Willis Eschenbach | Watts Up With That? | January 27, 2021
After reading some information at Friends of Science, I got to thinking about how impossible it will be for us to do what so many people are demanding that we do. This is to go to zero CO2 emissions by 2050 by getting off of fossil fuels.
So let’s take a look at the size of the problem. People generally have little idea just how much energy we get from fossil fuels. Figure 1 shows the global annual total and fossil energy consumption from 1880 to 2019, and extensions of both trends to the year 2050. I note that my rough estimate of 2050 total annual energy consumption (241 petawatt-hrs/year) is quite close to the World Energy Organization’s business-as-usual 2050 estimate of 244 PWhr/yr.
Figure 1. Primary energy consumption, 1880-2019 and extrapolation to 2050. A “petawatt-hour” is 1015 watt-hours
So if we are going to zero emissions by 2050, we will need to replace about 193 petawatt-hours (1015 watt-hours) of fossil fuel energy per year. Since there are 8,766 hours in a year, we need to build and install about 193 PWhrs/year divided by 8766 hrs/year ≈ 22 terawatts (TW, or 1012 watts) of energy generating capacity.
Starting from today, January 25, 2021, there are 10,568 days until January 1, 2050. So we need to install, test, commission, and add to the grid about 22 TW / 10568 days ≈ 2.1 gigawatts/day (GW/day, or 109 watts/day) of generating capacity each and every day from now until 2050.
We can do that in a couple of ways. We could go all nuclear. In that case, we’d need to build, commission, and bring on-line a brand-new 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every single day from now until 2050. Easy, right? …
Don’t like nukes? Well, we could use wind power. Now, the wind doesn’t blow all the time. Typical wind “capacity factor”, the percentage of actual energy generated compared to the nameplate capacity, is about 35%. So we’d have to build, install, commission and bring online just under 3,000 medium-sized (2 megawatt, MW = 106 watts) wind turbines every single day from now until 2050. No problemo, right? …
Don’t like wind? Well, we could use solar. Per the NREL, actual delivery from grid-scale solar panel installations on a 24/7/365 basis is on the order of 8.3 watts per square metre depending on location. So we’d have to cover ≈ 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) with solar panels, wire them up, test them, and connect them to the grid every single day from now until 2050. Child’s play, right? …
Of course, if we go with wind or solar, they are highly intermittent sources. So we’d still need somewhere between 50% – 90% of the total generating capacity in nuclear, for the all-too-frequent times when the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing.
To summarize: to get the world to zero emissions by 2050, our options are to build, commission, and bring on-line either:
• One 2.1 gigawatt (GW, 109 watts) nuclear power plant each and every day until 2050, OR
• 3000 two-megawatt (MW, 106 watts) wind turbines each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming there’s not one turbine failure for any reason, OR
• 96 square miles (250 square kilometres) of solar panels each and every day until 2050 plus a 2.1 GW nuclear power plant every day and a half until 2050, assuming not one of the panels fails or is destroyed by hail or wind.
I sincerely hope that everyone can see that any of those alternatives are not just impossible. They are pie-in-the-sky, flying unicorns, bull-goose looney impossible.
Finally, the US consumes about one-sixth of the total global fossil energy. So for the US to get to zero fossil fuel by 2050, just divide all the above figures by six … and they are still flying unicorn, bull-goose looney impossible.
Math. Don’t leave home without it.
My very best wishes to everyone, stay safe in these parlous times,
w.
PS—As always, to avoid misunderstandings I request that when you comment, you quote the exact words that you are discussing so we can all be clear about who and what you are referring to.
Technical Note: These figures are conservative because they do not include the energy required to build the reactors, wind turbines, or solar panels. This is relatively small per GW of generation for nuclear reactors but is much larger for wind and solar.
They also don’t include the fact that wind turbines have about a 20-year lifespan, so after 20 years we’ll have to double the turbine construction per day. And with solar the lifespan is about 25 years, so for the last five years, we’ll have to double the solar construction per day. And then we will have to decommission and dispose of hundreds of thousands of wind turbines and square miles of solar panels …
The figures also don’t include the fact that if we go to an all-electric economy we will have to completely revamp, extend, and upgrade our existing electrical grid, which will require a huge investment of time, money, and energy.
They also don’t include the cost. The nuclear plants alone will cost on the order of US$170 trillion at current prices. And wind or solar plus 75% nuclear will be on the order of US275 trillion, plus decomissioning and disposal costs for wind turbines and solar panels.
So it is even more impossible … speaking of which, is it possible to be more impossible?
Because if it is possible … this is it.
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From the Archives
Alarmist climate science as a textbook example of groupthink
By Paul MacRae | May 1, 2012
A while ago, I received an email from a friend who asked:
How can many, many respected, competitive, independent science folks be so wrong about [global warming] (if your [skeptical] premise is correct). I don’t think it could be a conspiracy, or incompetence. … Has there ever been another case when so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?
The answer to the second part of my friend’s question—“Has there ever been another case where so many ‘leading’ scientific minds got it so wrong?”—is easy. Yes, there are many such cases, both within and outside climate science. In fact, the graveyard of science is littered with the bones of theories that were once thought “certain” (e.g., that the continents can’t “drift,” that Newton’s laws were immutable, and hundreds if not thousands of others).
Science progresses by the overturning of theories once thought “certain.” … continue
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