Dumbing Down the Energy Debate

Sometimes you can pack an immense amount of useful information into a single graphical image. Other times a graphical image can appear to contain a large amount of information, but in fact it contains virtually zero useful information. An example of the latter is the graphic below, presented by Real Clear Energy:

Content Free Graphic

It is crucial that the Germans get their energy future right -- they are gambling the future of Germany and all of Europe on getting it right. The result of wishful thinking and self deception in this context is likely to be catastrophic. Openness and honesty are vitally important, at a juncture when Germans are shutting down reliable nuclear plants and are exposing their jugulars to expensive, intermittent unreliable forms of energy.

First of all, the data for the graphic apparently comes from Germany's BDEW, but the Real Clear Energy article refers to their source of information as "Germany!"

Germany reported last week that it has been able to generate 26% of its electricity from renewable resources over the first six months of 2012. This is reflective of its effort to ramp up renewable sources in an effort to close all its nuclear reactors by 2020. Renewable sources provided only 20.45% last year and 18.3% the year before. _RCE

To ascribe a statement to "Germany" is absurd. Energy journalists must be specific about the sources of their information -- in this case a specific agency of the German government.

Secondly, the article refers to "percentage of energy generated" without specifying whether the generated "energy" was used, dumped, or exported. Intermittent unreliable forms of energy cannot be treated the same as energy from dispatchable power plants (gas turbines, hydro turbines, backup storage . . .) or baseload power plants (nuclear, many coal plants ...). In fact, Germany's grid came very close to being destabilised by its vulnerability to intermittent unreliables:

The good wind supply situation in December also showed some drawbacks for grid operation. While wind generation in the North of Germany was at a high level, system stability in the South of Germany was jeopardised. On 8 and 9 December 2011, for instance, Germany had to rely for the first time on capacities of Austrian reserve power stations to ensure security of supply. "As a result of strong wind supply in the North, fully utilised networks in the Centre, and generation congestion in the South of Germany, reserve capacities of Austrian gas and oil-fired power stations had to be used to be able to serve demand. This cannot be in the sustained interest of the energy turnaround. _BDEW

The German government is attempting an impossibility, and is betting its future and the future of its people on a sure loser. Intermittent unreliable forms of energy such as big wind and big solar, are qualitatively different from the stolid workhorses of modern utility grids: baseload and dispatchable power.

Not only is it impossible to substitute intermittent unreliable energy sources for dispatchable and baseload power generation, it is actually very dangerous to attempt anything above 20% penetration of the intermittent unreliable energy sources onto the grid.

Germany's grid is due for greater and greater destabilisation as the government attempts to force utilities to depend more and more upon the intermittent unreliables.

Energy media such as RealClearEnergy.org should be able to recognise disinformation, and have the courage to confront information sources with the fact of their disinformation. This is particularly true in the editorial section, where the above graphic was found.

The information in the graphic above is essentially meaningless, because it omits the crucial data specifying the ultimate use of the "generated energy" and the effect which the "generated energy" had upon the power grid and the rest of the installed power generation infrastructure.

Wishful thinking is okay, in private fantasies. But when the entire future of the European continent is being bet on wishful thinking, the grownups need to stand up and speak out.

Green Energy: A Bust in the US, Europe, ...

Instead of trying to pick winners and losers, the private sector message to the Government is clear—create a competitive marketplace with fair rules, no subsidies and turn the private sector loose.  The genius of America is our ability to continuously reinvent ourselves to adapt to change.  The failure of government is impeding that disruptive innovative change. _Private Sector -- Not Government -- Creating almost all new energy

The Obama administration has compiled a long list of investment losers. These green companies gone bust, are only the tip of the iceberg of funds misallocated by the Obama administration in pressing its destructive green agenda:

Abound Solar consumed $70 million of its $400 million Energy Department loan guarantee. The company, based in Loveland, Colo., blamed Chinese subsidy payments and European subsidy cuts for falling prices in its thin-film-panel sector. On July 2, Abound Solar filed for Chapter 7 liquidation and prepared to lock shop and fire its 125 employees.

Solar Trust envisioned Earth’s largest solar-power plant. DOE enthusiastically offered it a $2.1 billion loan guarantee in April 2011, provided that it raised private capital. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar attended the company’s groundbreaking in Blythe, Calif., and hailed “a historic moment in America’s new energy frontier.” Solar Trust missed DOE’s benchmarks, however, and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on April 2.

Energy Conversion Devices, a solar-laminate supplier, received a $13.3 million stimulus tax credit in January 2010 to update its factory in Auburn Hills, Mich., and to hire some 600 people. ECD pleaded Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Valentine’s Day.

Ener1 received a $118.5 million DOE stimulus grant in August 2009. Vice President Joe Biden traveled to Greenfield, Ind., to tour Ener1 on January 26, 2011. “Here at Ener1,” Biden said, “we’re going to harness electricity and bring it to the world, like Edison did more than a century ago.” The electric-car-battery company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on January 26, 2012, exactly one year after Biden’s visit.

Aptera Motors aspired to build three-wheel electric cars. DOE offered it a $150 million ATVM loan, conditioned on Aptera’s raising $150 million in non-government capital. Aptera never convinced private investors to finance glorified tricycles. So, on December 2, CEO Paul Wilber announced that “after years of focused effort to bring our products to the market, Aptera Motors is closing its doors, effective today.”

Massachusetts-based Beacon Power Corp. received a $43 million loan guarantee in October 2010 — DOE’s second such subsidy. The energy-storage concern declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy on October 30, 2011.

Solyndra, the most notorious of Obama’s green-energy baubles, filed for bankruptcy on August 31, 2011. Taxpayers are liable for this solar-panel maker’s $535 million in loan guarantees — the first that DOE made under Obama.

In death, Solyndra has proved anything but green. As San Francisco’s KCBS-TV reported in April, Solyndra’s facility in Milpitas, Calif., features metal drums marked “hazardous waste.” Cadmium, lead, unidentified black chemicals, and othertoxins haunt the premises. A company called iStar said it would remove these poisons — as soon as Solyndra pays its bills.

Solyndra also discarded still-valuable solar-panel components, even though selling them could have generated capital to reimburse its creditors, including America’s taxpayers.

In June 2009, SpectraWatt scored a $500,000 grant from the PV Technology Pre-Incubator project of DOE’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory. In June 2010, it received $150,000 from the National Science Foundation. Facing stiff Chinese competition, this solar-cell manufacturer closed its factory in Hopewell Junction, N.Y., and dismissed all of its 117 workers in April 2011. SpectraWatt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on August 19, 2011.

Raser Technologies received a $33 million Treasury Department stimulus grant in February 2010. As its dreams of a geothermal plant in Beaver County, Utah, turned to steam, its payroll subsequently evaporated from 42 workers to 27 to 10. Raser declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 2011.

Despite the bankruptcy of Mountain Plaza, Inc., in 2003, the EPA decided to inject$424,000 in stimulus funds for that Tennessee company’s “truck-stop electrification” technology. Nonetheless, Mountain Plaza again went bankrupt, on June 3, 2010. EPA officially awarded those funds twelve days later, despite Mountain Plaza’s insolvency and a related lawsuit. _TheGWPF

The same wasteful cycle of green investment and green collapse has occurred on an even larger scale in Europe -- and is likely to get much worse before it gets better.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s government said it may have to scrap some of its targets for shifting the source of its electricity supply, a move that would water down a commitment to bolster renewable energy in Europe’s biggest economy. Economy Minister Philipp Roesler told today’s Bild newspaper that Germany may readjust targets linked to the plan to exit nuclear energy-generation by 2022 if jobs are threatened.—Bloomberg, 17 July 2012

 Prices for UN-backed carbon credits sank to a record low in morning trading on Wednesday after doubts emerged about European Commission plans to prop up the bloc’s ailing emissions trading market. Carbon prices have fallen to fresh lows at several points over the past nine months as a glut in the supply of EU credits has been exacerbated by sagging demand due to weak European economic conditions.—Pilita Clark and Jack Farchy,  Financial Times, 18 July 2012[

 The end of the world is not going to happen within our lifetimes. That’s the word from Justin Deering, author of The End of the World Delusion: How Doomsayers Endanger Society. “We’re bombarded with end-of-the-world scares practically everywhere you look,” Deering explains. Deering doesn’t care whether the claims arise from religious beliefs or scientific concerns. “It doesn’t matter to me whether they’re a preacher or a scientist, a shaman mystic or an expert researcher. If they’re saying the end is near, they’re wrong.”—Watts Up With That, 18 July 2012

_Benny Peiser

Obama's "investments" that failed, were actually largely payoffs to cronies who helped Obama get elected. If one looks closely enough, he is likely to find a similar political cronyism involved in all areas where green faux environmentalism overlaps with big money politics and government.

Germany's Agenda of Energy Starvation Could not Happen at a Worse Time for European Economies

Germany is proceeding along a path that puts it at greater and greater risk of potentially catastrophic power blackouts.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel is unrepentant -- and almost boastful -- over her energy plan which commits Germany to invest at least $25 billion to upgrade its power grid. The German grid is the power hub of Europe -- if it fails, Europe's grid fails.

The high cost of upgrades to the power grid could not come at a worse time for Germany or Europe, already stressed by a banking crisis. But the $25 billion or $30 billion needed to improve the grid systems is only the barest down payment toward the ultimate costs of Merkel's suicidal energy decisions.

Germany is phasing out its nuclear power plants and attempting to replace its infrastructure of baseload power generation with big wind and big solar installations. Germany publicly hopes to provide as much as 50% of its electrical power from wind and solar within the next few decades.

Unfortunately, large power grids grow unstable when big wind and big solar -- intermittent unreliables -- attempt to provide more than 20% of overall power. Going far beyond that level of dependency on intermittent unreliables would place the German gird -- and thus the European grid -- in an untenable position.
More information
A look at Denmark's unfortunate experience with wind energy (PDF)

Spain was once caught up in the green fantasy of the intermittent unreliables, just like Merkel's Germany. But Spain was forced to admit that it could not afford the green fantasy any longer. Eventually, Germany will be forced to come to the same conclusion. The only question is the price that the German people will have to pay for the stubborn stupidity of its leaders.

Greens are reluctant to admit the problems which intermittent unreliables pose for grid stability, particularly the higher the levels of penetration of the intermittent unreliable sources. But the truth will come out in the most painful ways, and many people will remember who has led them to suffer unnecessarily.

Europe is undergoing a demographic implosion, which is putting increasing -- although still subtle -- pressures on the ability of European nations to maintain technological infrastructures and to pay back large debts. If Europe goes through with this suicidal abandonment of reliable power sources in favour of the intermittent unreliables -- and goes even more deeply in debt in the process -- future generations of Europeans will pay the the price.

Can Markets Deal with the Government Sponsored Green Energy Blight?

Global investment in clean energy dropped to its lowest since the depths of the financial crisis three years ago as the U.S. and European nations cut support for wind and solar projects, Bloomberg New Energy Finance said.

...Spain suspended subsidies to new renewable-energy projects in January, while Germany and Britain have curtailed support to solar power. In the U.S., a Treasury grant program offering as much as 30 percent of development and construction costs for renewable-energy plants expired on Dec. 31, while the Production Tax Credit, which grants an incentive worth 2.2 cents a kilowatt-hour of wind power, is due to end this December. _Bloomberg

The green preference for intermittent unreliables such as big wind and big solar, cannot hide the inability of these wasteful enterprises to compete on a level playing field. In the end, market forces will tell.

Solar manufacturers have been hurt by the global recession, an influx of Chinese panels and declining subsidy programs in Europe. Germany, the world's largest market for solar power, announced in February that it would cut solar subsidies by 30 percent.

"It is clear the European market has deteriorated to the extent that our operations there are no longer economically sustainable, and maintaining those operations is not in the best long-term interest of our stakeholders," First Solar Chairman and CEO Mike Ahearn said in a statement. _AP

First Solar was another of the Obama favourites. Over a dozen Obama green energy picks are struggling for survival, after their politically connected backers picked their bones for personal profits, before passing the massive losses on to the taxpayer.

The production tax credit for wind power, for example, was created in 1992, and is now set to expire at the end of this year.

...Recent attempts in Congress to renew the wind power tax credit have been defeated. Government support for renewable energy has become increasingly contentious in the US as a result of growing opposition in the Republican party.

The collapse of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer that went into bankruptcy last year after borrowing $527m from the government, has been seized on by Republicans as an emblematic example of the mistakes made by Mr Obama’s administration.

Pressure on public spending created by the size of the budget deficit is also constraining the funds available for subsidies.
_FT

Big green energy schemes cannot survive without massive and ruinously expensive government subsidies. Big wind and big solar are intermittent unreliable sources of energy, which are favoured by greens, but represent disaster to power grid management and quality of service for power utilities.

It's a grim prospect for any solar company based in North America or Europe that is battling fierce competition from China, even when such companies are doing much of their production overseas. Yesterday, SunPower announced it was closing one of its two plants in the Philippines. That leaves the company, headquartered in San Jose, with two plants, one in the Philippines and one in Malaysia. The plant it’s shuttering is the oldest of the three, and the decision to close it is connected with SunPower's effort to focus on production of higher-efficiency solar cells.

Four years ago, when the industry was abuzz with talk of a "photovoltaic Moore's law," SunPower and First Solar, based in Tempe, Ariz., were considered the star performers among U.S. PV manufacturers. _IEEEGreenblog

Opportunistic parasites are flocking to green government subsidies in the US and Europe before they expire. The inevitable bankruptcies and vast rusting fields of idle giant wind turbines and solar farms will provide long term testimonies to the folly of opposing underlying market forces in the name of a lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgiast green faux environmentalism.

Green Energy Crashes and Burns from US to EU to China

Everyone is familiar with the multi $billion losses from US President Obama's green company bankruptcies, with about a dozen of Obama's darling fake energy companies in economic trouble. But not as many are as aware of the looming problems of green energy companies in Europe, and the coming bursting of China's wind and solar industry.

If you want a country to fail, just get them to invest in intermittent green energy schemes. Nothing is more like a dead albatross around the neck than intermittent green energy. That is why US President Obama's concern that China may be moving ahead of the US in green energy is so amusing.

Obama's favourite green energy stimulus payoffs to his political backers are failing right and left, while the forms of energy that Mr. Obama is trying to kill -- natural gas, oil, coal, oil sands, nuclear, etc. -- are what is keeping the US' industry and economy treading water. If Mr. Obama's agenda were actually carried to completion, the US would be drowning, with a doubtful prognosis.

Here are a few of the news stories dealing with the collapse of the global green fake energy industry:

Germany's solar industry in trouble

Europe Rethinks Solar Subsidies

China's wind industry bubble to deflate

China Abandons Solar for Nuclear h/t WUWT

Cheap Natural Gas Kills Green Energy

Another Obama Green Bust

Obama Backer Receives Whitehouse Backing, then Declares Bankruptcy

Electricity Costs: The Folly of Wind Power (PDF)

Can Hydrogen Energy Storage Save Germany from Itself?

Germany will serve as a test case to show whether industrialized countries can compete while relying on renewables _TechnologyReview

Germany -- the economic powerhouse of Europe -- has settled upon a risky energy strategy, staking its industrial future on the intermittent and unreliable forms of energy, big wind and big solar. Germany is turning away from nuclear power, and aims to use renewables to generate 33% of its electric power by 2020, and 50% of its electric power by 2050.

Unfortunately for the future of German industry, the intermittency of big wind and big solar will make it almost impossible for German utilities to provide clean, affordable, and reliable power to industry and other consumers, at the high levels of penetration by intermittent renewables that Germany is trying to achieve. Clearly, some form of utility-scale storage would be needed to make such a scheme "work." That is why German planners are considering the "hydrogen option."

The hydrogen option involves using intermittent renewables to convert water into H2 and O2 using electrolysis, then converting the H2 back to electricity when needed, using fuel cells. Unfortunately, the round trip conversion efficiency of the "hydrogen option" is only about 20 or 25% -- in other words, Germans will lose 75% to 80% of the total energy generated by the intermittent renewables. Which is precious little to begin with.

With that information in mind, here is more about the German plan from Technology Review:

If Germany is to meet its ambitious goals of getting a third of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020 and 80 percent by 2050, it must find a way to store huge quantities of electricity in order to make up for the intermittency of renewable energy.

Siemens says it has just the technology: electrolyzer plants, each the size of a large warehouse, that split water to make hydrogen gas. The hydrogen could be used when the wind isn't blowing to generate electricity in gas-fired power plants, or it could be used to fuel cars.

Producing hydrogen is an inefficient way to store energy—about two-thirds of the power is lost in the processes of making the hydrogen and using the hydrogen to generate electricity. But Siemens says it's the only storage option that can achieve the scale that's going to be needed in Germany.

Unlike conventional industrial electrolyzers, which need a fairly steady supply of power to efficiently split water, Siemens's new design is flexible enough to run on intermittent power from wind turbines. It's based on proton-exchange membrane technology similar to that used in fuel cells for cars, which can operate at widely different power levels. The electrolyzers can also temporarily operate at two to three times their rated power levels, which could be useful for accommodating surges in power on windy days.

Germany, which has led the world in installing solar capacity, isn't just concerned about climate change. Its leaders think that in the long term, renewable energy will be cheaper than fossil fuels, so it could give the country an economic advantage, says Miranda Schreurs, director of the Environmental Policy Research Center at the Freie Universität Berlin. Germany will serve as a test case to show whether industrialized countries can compete while relying on renewables. _MITTechnologyReview

It is fascinating that German leaders would be willing to make Germany a "test case" to determine whether industrial countries can compete when dependent upon intermittent renewables on a large scale. It seems that the gas chamber would be faster and more merciful. My first choice would be to allow Germans to choose from the full range of energy options, given full disclosure. But clearly, that is the last thing which leftist green politicians would like to see happen.

It is not too late for Germans to think this problem through, all the way down to the lowest turtle in the stack. To do this, they would have to ask: "Why are we going through all of these painful and expensive contortions? What is the chain of reasoning involved? And how far are we willing to go, to remain subservient to the conclusions reached through this chain of reasoning?"

German politicians rejected nuclear power on the basis of post-Fukushima fears -- even though Germany is not in an earthquake / tsunami zone, and no one died or got sick from radiation exposure post-Fukushima. Germans reject a large-scale coal and natural gas energy future due to fears of anthropogenic global warming catastrophe and carbon hysteria. Even biomass is suspect in that regard, for Germans. And as we have learned, deep geothermal drilling in crystalline rock can cause small earthquakes.

But don't Germans know that wind turbines kill birds and bats, present a deadly danger to livestock, and make nearby humans agitated and nauseated? And solar power wastes huge sections of land in an inefficient production of low voltage DC current better suited for ringing doorbells or charging cellphones than powering German industry?

There nay be something poetic about a wealthy and powerful nation such as Germany, committing energy suicide purportedly for the sake of its ideals. Is a nation that just 75 years ago wanted to rule the entire world, now risking everything to prove a point?

The people are afraid. Leaders are controlling the people, using those fears. But the leaders themselves are being controlled out of their desire to continue to rule. And who controls the leaders? Now, that is an interesting question.

Comparison of other energy storage options

MIT Report: Managing Large Scale Penetration of Intermittent Renewables

In April of 2011, the MIT Energy Initiative held a symposium on the challenges of integrating green intermittent power sources into power grids. Today, the PDF report from that symposium was released for public download.

The images below were taken from the MIT report. The full report is downloadable at the link above.

Large electrical power grids are complex systems which help make modern affluent societies possible. Common tells us that we should not put undue stress on systems which are that important.

Intermittent power sources such as big wind and big solar cannot be controlled, because the wind and the sunshine cannot be controlled. This means that if power grids attempt to integrate these unreliable power sources, they will be forced to pay a number of costs on several levels. The cost of maintaining grid stability and reliability will rise. The cost of maintaining existing power plants will rise appreciably. The cost of supporting structures -- such as backup power sources, large-scale energy storage facilities, new grid infrastructures, new power management technologies, etc. is likely to prove enormous.

Environmentalists would like to shut down hydrocarbon and nuclear based power plants and replace them with wind and solar. Making an attempt to do so would prove an unmitigated catastrophe. But even the partial replacement of coal, gas, and nuclear by wind and solar could easily prove disastrous, if the integration of wind and solar were pushed too far, and too fast.

Frequent shut downs and startups of power plants is costly -- both short-term and long-term. Keeping personnel and machine systems on a hair-trigger, just in case wind and solar should pick up or slow down unexpectedly, is ludicrous.

As intermittency takes its toll on machinery and economies, wise and prudent observers should begin to question the rationale for pushing intermittency onto the power grid in the first place.

The "cure" for intermittency is thought to be new energy storage technologies at utility scales. But how long before such technologies become economically feasible?

Again, wise persons are forced to question the underlying rationale behind forcing destructive intermittencies onto the power grid.

You may think that only politicians could be so stupid as to quickly push ahead with intermittent sources long before the problems associated with intermittency have been solved. But that is not quite right. Academics and journalists are every bit as stupid as politicians, on that score, as are government bureaucrats -- and especially environmentalists. There has never been a shortage of stupidity.

There has always been a relative shortage of workable human ingenuity paired with wisdom.

Cross-posted from Al Fin Potpourri

Shale Gas Booms Globally -- Big Green Crashes & Burns

A Shale Gas Summit is being held on the 23rd and 24th of April, in Beijing, to assess the global impacts of the shale gas explosion.

Shale gas revolution created nearly 10% of all new US jobs in 2011

The World Economic Forum report, which highlighted the role that the energy industry can play in reviving the global economy, comes during a presidential election year as candiates argue about high U.S. unemployment and energy policy.

The report said the oil and gas industry contributed 37,000 direct jobs in 2011, which led to the creation of an additional 111,000 indirect jobs during the same period. It said the multiplier effect for solar and wind energy were lower during operation, but higher at up to 3.3 times during construction.

“We always suspected that energy had a vital role to play in the economic recovery but we were still surprised when the data uncovered the magnitude of the sector’s multiplier effects,” Roberto Bocca, head of energy Iidustries at the World Economic Forum, said in a release.

Early success for China's shale gas exploration well drilling: China has perhaps the world's largest deposits of shale gas. Once production of Chinese shale ramps up, world energy markets will never be the same.

Meanwhile South Africa may have a shale gas resource in excess of 485 trillion cubic feet. This is said to be enough to create hundreds of thousands of jobs and provide hundreds of years of energy for the troubled nation in southern Africa.

In fact, many analysts are beginning to see the oil shale revolution as the energy equivalent of the Berlin Wall crashing down, in terms of global impact.

On the green energy front, the UK is just beginning to assess its £120 billion wind energy blunder, and what it will have to do to recover from the disaster.

And in the US, the magnitude of damage from Obama's misguided pro-green energy policies is still mounting. The jobs destruction from the president's naive approach to national energy policy will continue long after he leaves office.

It’s unclear how much taxpayers spend on the 94 green building initiatives in the form of grants, loans, technical assistance, and tax incentives. That’s because many are combined with larger programs, and are not priced out individually by federal agencies. Equally unclear is the cost benefit of these programs, because two-thirds are not measured for their performance, GAO reported.

...“If you suggest a program that’s part of a hot issue for the President, like energy-efficiency, you’re likely as an agency to get more favor and funding in the budget,” Ellis said. But that practice results in enormous overhead costs for separate program staffs, and paves the way for the type of overlap that undermines the whole effort, Ellis said. “How can you deliver services and achieve the overall goal of saving energy when every cook in the federal government is trying to get their hands in the energy-efficiency pot?” Ellis said. _FiscalTimes

US President Obama Stars as Little Orphan Annie on Pennsylvania Avenue

President Obama is the Little Orphan Annie of presidents. He is always singing that the sun will come out tomorrow and shine on the American economy and his dreams of green energy. Yet companies such as Solyndra have proved the rule rather than the exception, producing more pink slips than green jobs as solar power and alternative energy continue to be eclipsed by advances in fossil fuel production.

The latest casualty is Abound Solar Manufacturing. The Longmont, Colo.-based recipient of a $400 million federal loan guarantee to expand solar panel production said Tuesday it is laying off 280 workers and delaying a new factory in Indiana. That amounts to a 70% reduction in its workforce. _IBD

President Obama's green energy initiatives have been multi-billion dollar disasters for the US economy. But in a way, it may be fortunate for most Americans that Mr. Obama's big green plans have failed so dismally. Because if big wind and big solar ever grew big enough to constitute a significant portion of US power capacity, the entire country would be in very big trouble.

Analyst Robert Bryce takes a look at the renewable energy mandates put into place by a number of US states, and the effect they will have on energy and power prices:

Motivated by a desire to reduce carbon emissions, and in the absence of federal action to do so, 29 states (and the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) have required utility companies to deliver specified minimum amounts of electricity from "renewable" sources, including wind and solar power. California recently adopted the most stringent of these so-called renewable portfolio standards (RPS), requiring 33 percent of its electricity to be renewable by 2020.

Proponents of the RPS plans say that the mandated restrictions will reduce harmful emissions and spur job growth, by stimulating investment in green technologies.

...our analysis of available data has revealed a pattern of starkly higher rates in most states with RPS mandates compared with those without mandates. The gap is particularly striking in coal-dependent states—seven such states with RPS mandates saw their rates soar by an average of 54.2 percent between 2001 and 2010, more than twice the average increase experienced by seven other coal-dependent states without mandates.

Our study highlights another pattern as well, of a disconnect between the optimistic estimates by government policymakers of the impact that the mandates will have on rates and the harsh reality of the soaring rates that typically result. In some states, the implementation of mandate levels is proceeding so rapidly that residential and commercial users are being locked into exorbitant rates for many years to come. The experiences of Oregon, California, and Ontario (which is subject to a similar mandate plan) serve as case studies of how rates have spiraled.

...we have compared the costs of electricity in RPS and non-RPS states, using price information from the EIA. Our analysis has revealed a pattern of mostly higher costs in states with RPS mandates:

1. In 2010, the average price of residential electricity in RPS states was 31.9 percent higher than it was in non-RPS states. Commercial electricity rates were 27.4 percent higher, and industrial rates were 30.7 percent higher.
2. In the ten-year period between 2001 and 2010—the period during which most of the states enacted their RPS mandates—residential and commercial electricity prices in RPS states increased at faster rates than those in non-RPS states.
3. Of the ten states with the highest electricity prices, eight have RPS mandates.
4. Of the ten states with the lowest electricity prices, only two have RPS mandates.
5. Sixteen of the 18 states with residential rates that are higher than the 2010 U.S. average residential rate are RPS states.
6. Nineteen of the 21 non-RPS states have residential rates that are below the U.S. average.

_Robert Bryce Manhattan Institute

Read the entire report

President Obama is becoming known as the "energy starvation president." He is lauded for his anti-energy policies by the dieoff.orgy lefty-Luddite greens, who are among his strongest supporters. But those who are paying higher prices for energy and fuels are not so impressed or amused by the clown president's antics on energy.

Analysts and journalists tend to make the most of high gasoline prices, and the threat which they may represent to Obama's re-election. But the true danger is to the US as a whole, should Mr. Obama be re-elected, and continue to institute his agenda of energy starvation and his war against the US private sector.

Little Orphan Annie was cute on the stage. She is not so charming in the Oval Office -- particularly when played by a grown male actor who requires a teleprompter to say his lines.

A "Nation-Sized Storage Battery" and the Wind Power Delusion

In "How Big a Battery Would it Take to Power the USA?" a recent Scientific American article asks whether the US is ready to be powered by wind and solar. Wind and solar are intermittent energy sources, inherently unreliable.

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, when intermittent sources such as solar or wind reach about 20 percent of a region’s total energy production, balancing supply and demand becomes extremely challenging: rolling blackouts can sometimes become inevitable. The same problem exists elsewhere, notably in Germany, where a vast photovoltaic capacity has sprung up thanks to generous subsidies.

Burton Richter, a physics Nobel laureate who was on a recent panel that studied California's power supply situation, told The New York Times blogger Andrew Revkin that because of intermittency, utilities would need to keep fossil fuel–burning plants as a backup that can quickly ramp up generation as need be. This large-scale load following, as it is called, "can only be done with natural gas," Richter told Revkin. _SciAm

And what if the wind stops blowing for several days in a row? The author speculates on the possibilities of using a giant, nation-sized storage battery to power the entire US national grid. Unfortunately, he does not quantify the speculations, but he does help fuel the undying wind and solar fantasy, if the comments are any judge.

Fortunately, UCSD physicist Tom Murphy has looked at this question quantitatively in "A Nation-Sized Battery."

...solar and wind suffer a serious problem in that they are not always available. There are windless days, there are sunless nights, and worst of all, there are windless nights. Obviously, this calls for energy storage, allowing us to collect the energy when we can, and use it when we want.

... We’re not a nation tolerant of power outages. Those big refrigerators can spoil a lot of food when the electricity drops away. A rule of thumb for remote solar installations is that you should design your storage to last for a minimum of three days with no energy input. Even then, sometimes you will “go dark” in the worst storm of the winter.This does not mean literally three days of total deprivation, but could be four consecutive days at 25% average input, so that you only haul in one day’s worth over a four day period, leaving yourself short by three.

So let’s buy ourselves security and design a battery that can last a week without any new inputs (as before, could be 8 days at 12.5% average input, or 10 days at 30% input). This may be able to manage the worst-case “perfect” storm of persistent clouds in the desert Southwest plus weak wind in the Plains.

Let’s also plan ahead and have all of our country’s energy needs met by this system: transportation, heating, industry, etc. The rate at which we currently use energy in all forms in the U.S. is 3 TW. If we transition everything to electricity, we can get by with 2 TW, assuming no growth in demand.

...Running a 2 TW electrified country for 7 days requires 336 billion kWh of storage. We could also use nuclear power as a baseload to offset a significant portion of the need for storage—perhaps chopping the need in two. This post deals with the narrower topic of what it would take to implement a full-scale renewable-energy battery. Scale the result as you see fit.

...Large lead-acid batteries occupy a volume of 0.013 cubic meters (13 liters) per kWh of storage, weigh 25 kg/kWh (55 lb/kWh), and contain about 15 kg of lead per kWh of storage.

How do we put this into more familiar terms? A 12 V battery rated at 200 A-h (amp-hours) of charge capacity stores 2400 W-h (watt-hours: just multiply voltage and charge capacity), or 2.4 kWh. 200 A-h means that the battery could discharge a 10 amp current (120 watts) for 20 hours, or a one amp current (12 watts) for 200 hours—though in actual practice the capacity is lower at higher currents.

I can’t resist the temptation to ask: what is the minimum amount of lead that is theoretically needed to build the battery? The chemical reaction for a lead-acid battery is such that each interaction involving the transformation of one lead atom to PbSO4 liberates one electron at a 2.1-volt potential. This electron then is bestowed 2.1 electron-volts (eV) of energy, amounting to 3.4×10−19 J (see page on energy relations). One kilowatt-hour is 3.6 million Joules (1000 W times 3600 seconds), so that it takes 1025 lead atoms (where every one participates). If you remember that Avogadro’s number is 6×1023, we need about 20 moles of lead atoms. At 207 g/mol, this comes out to about 4 kg per kWh of energy, which is a factor of four less than the realized value above.

...Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 km (one mile) on a side. The size in itself is not a problem: we’d naturally break up the battery and distribute it around the country. This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 billion tons) of lead.

...A USGS report from 2011 reports 80 million tons (Mt) of lead in known reserves worldwide, with 7 Mt in the U.S. A note in the report indicates that the recent demonstration of lead associated with zinc, silver, and copper deposits places the estimated (undiscovered) lead resources of the world at 1.5 billion tons. That’s still not enough to build the battery for the U.S. alone. _Tom Murphy

So we are confronted with "the limits to lead." Not only is such a battery unaffordable, but it is unobtainable. Trying to use any other technology in place of the old standby, lead acid, would make the impossibility of a national battery even worse.

Dreams are wonderful things. But they should not distract us from the things that need to be done. Lefty Luddite dieoff.orgy greens have taken over the governments of much of Europe, North America, and Oceania. Their delusions -- when put into law -- threaten to make it impossible for their societies to achieve an abundant future.

What the residents of those nations choose to do when their power cliques are operating with a destructive and delusional mindset, is up to them.

More: The German government's decision to precipitously close all nuclear power plants, and to rely upon unreliable big wind and big solar for industry-critical power, is creating an economic disaster. More on dealing with intermittency:

The industry is concerned that it isn't clear how the government intends to guarantee the power supply in the future. Pumped-storage hydroelectricity plants would have to be built to store energy for periods when there is little wind or solar energy. But hardly any new facilities are currently in the works. Billions would also have to be invested in reliable power grids so that wind-generated electricity can be transported from the coast to the industrial Ruhr region and to the southern states of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg. But national and state politicians are still fighting over where the lines should be installed and whether it will be necessary to bury all cables underground. Finally, additional natural gas-fired power plants are urgently needed. Not surprising, however, very few companies are prepared to invest in facilities that may or may not be profitable, depending on which way the political winds happen to be blowing.

...The energy supply is now "the top risk for Germany as a location for business," says Hans Heinrich Driftmann, president of the Association of German Chambers of Industry and Commerce (DIHK). "One has to be concerned in Germany about the cost of electricity," warns European Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger. And Bernd Kalwa, a member of the general works council at ThyssenKrupp, says heatedly: "Some 5,000 jobs are in jeopardy within our company alone, because an irresponsible energy policy is being pursued in Düsseldorf and Berlin." _Spiegel

Angela Merkel: "I Should Have Chosen A Different Century to Give Up Nuclear Power!"

German abandonment of nuclear energy in response to the Fukushima Daiichi accident in Japan could cost 1.7 trillion euros ($2.15 trillion) by 2030 if renewables replace much of the power, Michael Suess told Reuters Tuesday. That amounts to about two thirds of Germany’s 2011 GDP. If natural gas plants replaced much of the lost electrical generation, he said the estimate would be considerably lower, at 1.4 billion euros.

German legislators voted in May to eventually decommission all 17 of the Siemens-built reactors that once provided nearly a quarter of the country’s electricity. In response, Siemens announced in September that it would withdraw from the nuclear power industry. At the consumer level, the German Energy Agency (Dena) recently estimated the nuclear withdrawld could hike electric bills 20 percent by 2020. _NuclearStreet

Another take here

All of this is happening at a time when the World Bank is warning of a potential global economic doomsday, originating in Europe. As the economies of Europe are hit harder, in succession, Merkel is likely to rue her rash choice.

Here is the punchline: While the Siemens estimate of the transition costs to the German economy are higher than what greens and sycophants have been telling the German government, the estimate of over a $2 trillion penalty paid by Germany is almost certainly too low. Perhaps by an order of magnitude or larger. Why? Because Siemens is only looking at the capital costs involved in converting to a nominal equivalent power capacity in renewables. It is not looking at the details where the devil resides, details which largely derive from the destructive intermittency and unreliability of wind and solar, and the much shorter lifetimes of the resource-intensive machinery of big wind and big solar..

After Fukushima, the German government jumped away from nuclear like a hysterical girl jumping from a spider or a mouse -- reflexively, and without thinking it through. If the Germans persist in pursuing this perverse green policy, the butcher's bill will be well into the $trillions and tens of $trillions, over the years. And Merkel's will be a name damned by future generations of Germans -- not the forgotten names of the greens who drove the woman to promote such a fateful choice.

Is Obama the Venture Capitalist of Doom?

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES' subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

Others are also struggling with potential problems. Nevada Geothermal -- a home state project personally endorsed by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid -- warns of multiple potential defaults in new SEC filings reviewed by CBS News. It was already having trouble paying the bills when it received $98.5 million in Energy Department loan guarantees. _CBS News

It is a matter of judgment. The marketplace will test your judgment like nothing else can do. If you have never been tested in the fires of competitive business venture, you will be at a loss when trying to select potential winners and losers. And if you are paying with hard-earned tax dollars in the middle of an extended recession -- sooner or later the spotlight is going to hit you in the eyes like a dart.

The Obama administration’s track record with taxpayer-funded, green-tech subsidies is severely flawed, and according to new documents obtained by CBS News, its failures were all too predictable. The Energy Department's $535-million loan guarantee to Solyndra is, at least publicly, its most illustrious investment blunder, as the company went bankrupt last year leaving taxpayers with a hefty bill and putting more than 1,000 employees out of work.

All in all, 12 green energy companies are in financial disorder after collectively receiving more than $6.5 billion in government assistance, five of which have already filed for bankruptcy, including Solyndra, Beacon Power, SpectraWatt, Evergreen Solar, and AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy. According to CBS News, these green-tech ventures were junk-bond-rated companies with red flags planted all over them.

...Other green-tech investments the Obama administration has championed are currently facing severe financial challenges. Nevada Geothermal, which develops "clean" electrical power from high temperature geothermal resources, displays warnings of multiple defaults in new SEC filings reviewed by CBS News. In fact, the company was already struggling to pay its bills when it harvested $98.5 million in federal loan guarantees.

Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), one of the Obama administration’s most trusted congressional assets, was instrumental in securing the Energy Department’s financing for Nevada Geothermal. "Mr. Reid has taken the nascent geothermal industry under his wing," the New York Times reported last October, "pressuring the Department of Interior to move more quickly on applications to build clean energy projects on federally owned land and urging other member of Congress to expand federal tax incentives to help build geothermal plants, benefits that Nevada Geothermal has taken advantage of."

The Times pointed out that Nevada Geothermal’s financial misfortunes are all too reminiscent of Solyndra’s collapse, and that such trends have debunked the myth that government can effectively prop up enterprises which private investors avoid altogether _NewAmerican

Suicide by Idiocracy: Governments Pursue Big Solar and Wind Over a Cliff

The alternative energy market is still an artificial market; except for a handful of novelty customers rich enough to afford inefficient green tech, firms and households only choose green tech when subsidies bring the price within range or regulations force people to choose expensive green products.

Two years ago, when delusional greens thought they were on the way to a global carbon treaty, green tech looked hot. But as that project collapsed under its own weight, the prospects for the green market withered. The recession strengthened public opposition to expensive new green regulations, and the European financial crisis means that countries like Spain...and Greece have no more budgetary room for frills. _WRM

Government subsidies and mandates are still pushing the development of unreliable and expensive big wind and big solar projects. In fact, as a direct result of subsidies, big wind and big solar investments are rivaling investments in more reliable and traditional forms of energy. The resulting destruction will not occur as a result of the spending on wind and solar, but rather will be due to the lack of spending on more reliable forms of energy. Energy starvation -- with resulting failure of industries and loss of jobs -- will be the inevitable result of underinvestment in essential and reliable forms of energy.

Government subsidies for big wind and big solar are having other adverse effects. According to uber-technologist and venture capitalist Nathan Myhrvold, government support of the wind and solar industries is hampering essential innovation in those fields. The "kiss of death" for many industries seems to be the over-generous support of government, often as a form of payback for campaign supporters.

While US President Obama is complaining that the Chinese are subsidising their own solar industry, the Chinese are beginning to look into the Obama administration's support of insider wind and solar companies such as Solyndra. Investigations into corrupt dealings can be a two-way street, and Chinese crony capitalists do not appear to be willing to be pushed around by crony capitalists in the US.

Chinese solar firms are taking huge losses. And yet, despite the losses, Chinese solar companies continue pushing price levels downward for solar panels. The problem for the solar industry in China is unlikely to go away soon.

Big Wind A Catastrophic Choice: Fatal Policy of Blackouts

'Unstable' renewable energy sources increase the risk of 'supra-regional' electricity blackouts with multi-billion pound consequences, insurance giant Allianz has warned....

"Traditional scenarios only assume black-outs for a few days and losses seem to be moderate, but if we are considering longer lasting blackouts... the impacts on society and economy might be significant," the report said.

Outages could also be trigged by cyber attacks, terrorist action, natural disasters or solar storms - eruptions of charged particles from the surface of the sun which can distort magnetic fields and destroy electricity transmission lines. One such storm knocked out power for six million Canadians in 1989, with the next forecast for 2012. _Telegraph_via_GWPF

But as more of Europe comes to depend upon unreliable and dangerously volatile sources of energy such as big wind and big solar, the chances for devastatingly prolonged blackouts rises along with this dangerous dependency.

Telegraph
Humans living in advanced societies have come to take their electrical supplies for granted. They assume that when they flip the switch, the electrical device will instantly and reliably turn on. But green energy policy makers in the EU are aiming to give their constituents a taste of third world quality in their electrical service. And the odds are, that one Europeans catch on to what is being done to them, they will revolt.

In eastern Germany, turbines in strong wind can produce more than all German coal and gas plants put together, while the need to switch off turbines in high winds causes a drop-off in electricity of 12GW - equal to two nuclear power plants. Outages are likely if there is too little demand or storage capacity to accommodate the jumps in supply.

Leading risk analysts modelled a worst-case scenario in which transformers are knocked out in the United States, causing outages to cascade through the grid into Canada, Russia and Scandanavia.

Credit cards and cash machines would stop immediately, and petrol pumps and refineries would shut-down within six hours. Back-up generators powering hospitals, stock exchanges, emergency services and sewerage plants could run out of fuel within days.

Industry would grind to a halt, cooling equipment would fail and homes would go without food supplies, water or heating, leaving families spending winter around open fires. Allianz predict it would take a year to get the transformers back online. The cost to insurers would top one trillion dollars and chronic power shortages would continue for up to a decade.

"Blackouts during the last ten years in Europe and Northern America have demonstrated an increasing likelihood of supra-national blackouts with accompanying large economic losses," the analysts wrote. _Telegraph_via_GWPF

Greens of the lefty-Luddite persuasion have shown themselves to be particularly indifferent to the possibilities of catastrophic energy and power disruptions arising from the energy policies which they advocate. This is not so surprising, given the covert-but-understood subtext of dieoff.orgiasm that lies at the heart of green energy policies. Greens wish for the human population of Earth to die off to the point that there are only somewhere between 100 million humans and 1 billion humans remaining. But now that greens have come to power in the US and the EU, they are beginning to implement the very policies which could create the long series of cascading catastrophes which could help trigger such a die-off.

Keep your eyes open, and get to work on your own redundant systems -- just in case.

US President's Clueless Policies Continue to Weaken US

If the United States chooses to cut itself off from its largest, most reliable, and most durable supply of crude oil, from where will it, with its continuing high use of transportation fuel, get its future imports? Crude oil production in two other major U.S. suppliers in the Western hemisphere, Mexico and Venezuela, has been declining (by, respectively, more than 20 percent and more than 15 percent between 2005 and 2011), and in the Middle East the United States faces enormous competition from China.

By preventing the oil flow from Canada, the United States will thus deliberately deprive itself of new manufacturing and construction jobs; it will not slow down the increase of global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion (OK, by two weeks, perhaps); it will almost certainly empower China; and it will make itself strategically even more vulnerable by becoming further dependent on declining, unstable, and contested overseas crude oil supplies. That is what is called a spherically perfect decision, because no matter from which angle you look at it, it looks perfectly the same: wrong. _Vaclav Smil

Vaclav Smil
If the US President were to pay attention to intelligent voices for a change -- such as the voice of Vaclav Smil, quoted above -- he would probably make a lot fewer mistakes, and his country would be in a much stronger position.

Unfortunately, Obama's bad ideas are not limited to the energy sector:

President Barack Obama continued his efforts to make China stronger and America weaker during last weekend’s Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Hawaii. How? By pressuring Chinese President Hu Jintao to increase the value of the yuan relative to the dollar. If successful, this policy will make Americans poorer relative to the Chinese.

The theory behind the Obama Administration’s weak dollar policy is seductive, but wrong. _Forbes

One must look for a long time to find anything that Obama has done right. So sad, and so preventable.

Obama has invested deeply into the green scams and bubbles of his crony friends and supporters, while suppressing and prohibiting all possible forms of energy which are reliable and plentiful.

Without huge government subsidies, big solar and big wind are not viable. Neither are truly viable even with the huge subsidies which are proving ruinous to government budgets from Spain to California -- but without the subsidies, these renewables quickly go nose down into a crash and burn.

If the US re-elects their clown president, they will be committing suicide as a nation. Even with a more rational administration, there is no guarantee that the US can pull out of its steep nosedive.

Hope for the best. Prepare for the worst.

Green Luddites: Fighting Delusions with Delusions

On one side, green Luddites treasure delusions of carbon catastrophe and energy resource depletion doom. On the other side, they intend to utilise "green energy" such as big wind and big solar, to combat the prior twin delusions of doom. Unfortunately, green energy -- big wind and big solar -- is one of the biggest delusions of them all, certainly nowhere near ready for prime time.

If you define grid parity as "delivering electricity whenever you want, in whatever volumes you want," says David Victor, the director of the Laboratory on International Law and Regulation at the University of California, San Diego, then today's new renewables aren't even close.

...we are probably not just a few breakthroughs away from deploying cheaper, cleaner energy sources on a massive scale. Though few question the value of developing new energy technologies, scaling them up will be so difficult and expensive that many policy experts say such advances alone, without the help of continuing government subsidies and other incentives, will make little impact on our energy mix. Regardless of technological advances, these experts are skeptical that renewables are close to achieving grid parity, or that batteries are close to allowing an electric vehicle to compete with gas-powered cars on price and range.

...Although some alternative energy technologies might eventually achieve grid parity, few, if any, can survive without subsidies now, as they improve their cost and efficiency. Even with subsidies, including tax incentives and cash grants, most are struggling to narrow the cost gap with fossil fuels....Deploying energy alternatives will be far more expensive and, in some ways, far more difficult than inventing new ones. Given today's political climate and the lack of a coherent energy policy around the world, it might truly take a miracle. _TechnologyReview

It is not very difficult to believe in miracles, if you are delusional enough. And we know that lefty-Luddite dieoff.orgy greens are plenty delusional in a multi-faceted way.

So even though the obsession with green energy by government, media, academia, foundations, philanthropists, and the faux environmental movement is costing you a lot of money and wasting a lot of today's resources which will be sorely missed tomorrow, you may as well sit back and enjoy it for the entertainment value. If Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, The Three Stooges, Laurel and Hardy, Jackie Chan, and other slapstick comedians can entertain us -- why not relax and allow the loony delusions of the green establishment do the same?

For more information on the follies of wind energy, see John Droz, or Ted Rockwell. You will never again look at big wind energy in the same way.

Wind and Solar Exorbitantly Expensive, and Can't Meet Demand

"Without...fossil fuels, we would be returned to the incredible environmental destruction and nasty living conditions and incredibly hard labor of the 19th century," he says. "We would be living in dire poverty." _World

Promoters of big wind and big solar energy have not done the math, nor have they looked at the true economic costs of attempting to convert from a fossil fuel infrastructure to a wind and solar energy infrastructure. Severe cost increases plus energy cut-backs would be devastating to any economy -- but much more so to an economy stuck in a global depression.

Math and physics offer stark realities about wind and solar energy. The most obvious problem: The sources are intermittent.

As Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, ranking member of the Subcommittee on Energy and Water Development, told Environment and Energy Daily: "The wind doesn't always blow and the sun doesn't always shine."

To make the energy sources consistently reliable on a wide scale would require massive amounts of reliable storage—technology that doesn't exist on a cost-effective basis. Forcing utility companies to generate more of their power using wind and solar would likely raise energy costs for U.S. consumers.

Another problem: Wind and solar require massive amounts of land to produce and transport energy. The Nature Conservancy, a U.S. environmental group, published a report last year estimating that wind power requires about 30 times as much land as nuclear energy, and four times as much land required for natural gas.

... if wind and solar remain unrealistic for large-scale, cost-effective energy, natural gas has already proven itself on both counts: Natural gas provided nearly a quarter of the nation's energy for electricity in 2009, second only to coal.

Advances in technology over the last five years have created a mini-revolution in extracting natural gas using new methods, opening up new gas supplies all over the country. Hayward of AEI says fields are so vast, it's conceivable that the United States could become an exporter of natural gas over the next few decades. The new technology could also hold promise for developing countries still creating their power systems, if they embrace natural gas as a major source of energy that is far cleaner than coal.

Peter Huber, author of The Bottomless Well (Basic Books, 2005), sees another major use for natural gas: transportation. The United States consumes massive amounts of oil for vehicles each year, but Huber thinks natural gas could compete. He notes that some 10 million vehicles worldwide already run on natural gas. Vehicles would require more natural gas to travel the same distance, but Huber says modifications to vehicles over the coming years could accommodate the change. And since natural gas is cheaper than oil, the option could still be cost effective.

...Despite the devastating BP oil spill, oil advocates point out that major spills are rare, and that relying more heavily on imports could lead to tanker spills—already much more common than well leaks.

With any major energy transition still years away, Hayward says oil is here to stay for at least decades. "The 'problem with oil' is that it's such a terrific fuel, it's hard to match its performance and cost with anything else." Bryce agrees, and bristles when politicians complain about an abundance of fossil fuels.

"Without those fossil fuels, we would be returned to the incredible environmental destruction and nasty living conditions and incredibly hard labor of the 19th century," he says. "We would be living in dire poverty." _World

Nuclear Energy Facts PDF

Wind Energy Facts SlideShare

Renewable Energy Facts

If you digest the material in the above links, you will know 100 times more about the energy problem than the average university educated person, and over 1000 times more about energy than President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senator Boxer, or Secretary Salazar.

Which should tell you something about the dunces who are running the US government.

3rd Carnival of Nuclear Energy at NextBigFuture

Brian Wang presents a 10 entry edition for the 3rd Blog Carnival of Nuclear Energy.

The 3rd Carnival highlights the life and death struggle going on between nuclear power and "renewables" such as solar and wind. People who promote solar and wind often oppose nuclear energy -- and vice versa. Here are some entries from the 3rd Carnival dealing with this "cold war" of the energies:

4. Nucleargreen also had the Social Construction of Ignorance: Knowledge Pollution and Nuclear Power.

This is the third of a series of articles in which I attempt to determine if opposition to Nuclear Power is a type of "denialism." In this post I explore Kenneth Boulding's concept of Knowledge Pollution, and explore the possibility that the constructs of knowledge pollution and "denialism" can be applied to nuclear opponents.

5. Brave New Climate provides a detailed analysis of capacity factors for different energy sources

Capacity factor (CF) is the amount of energy a power station generates over time (usually a year) compared to what it could have produced if it had been running at full power for the whole period. (Please read TCASE 2, Energy Primer, for a fuller explanation). The CF for coal-fired and nuclear power stations averages 85-90%, wind farms ~20-35%, solar farms ~15-40% (the higher figure is for CSP with thermal storage). Gas or hydro can be high or low — depending…

It’s very tempting to use these percentages as though they were directly interchangable, and indeed I’ve found that most journalists and bloggers happily do this (or else ignore CF completely and cite ‘peak’ power as though it were the same thing). It turns out, however, that this is a seriously misleading practice,

6. Yes Vermont Yankee looks at renewables and the cost of conservation.

the bottom lines were: Renewables can be built and probably should be built, but they can't take over the load from Vermont Yankee.
It takes money for conservation
Conservation, like renewables, is frequently oversold as an answer to energy issues.

7. Atomic Insights notes a San Diego Union Tribune article that renewables need helping hand from gas.

The article describes how combined cycle gas turbine plants work, with gas turbine exhausts feeding steam plant bottoming systems. It talks about air cooled condensers and about the use of peakers to supply power during periods when renewable energy system outputs change rapidly

8. Atomic Insights had an article which at the end described how the BeyondNuclear.com activists operate.

Nextbigfuture answered the question of who funds BeyondNuclear.com. It is activist celebrity actors and singers.

When you combine the anti-fossil fuel fervour from carbon hysterics and the Obama - Pelosi policy of energy starvation, plus the anti-nuclear fervour from misguided wind and solar advocates, there will really be very little energy left to run an advanced tech-society's infrastructure. Political peak oil as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If these dieoff.org green for brains morons see devastation in their nightmares, just wait until they reap the horrific reality they are working so hard to bring about. The general aim for leftist dieoff.org greens is to eliminate 90% of the Earth's human population. Going the route of energy starvation is a bit indirect, but it should be an effective genocidal approach. First they kill off the parts of the advanced world that fell for the "green energy" jive talk, then they sit back and watch as the cities of the third world die off from lack of support from the first world.

Well, no, actually, "they" will have been long since dead, so they will not be sitting back and watching. But they imagine they will be.

Real Energy Numbers For a Change

Here are a few basic energy numbers from David MacKay. As the importance of moving away from dictator-controlled energy grows more apparent, we will need to pay more attention to the underlying numerical comparisons between various energy loads and energy supplies. We will need to become more literate in the mathematics of energy.

One kilowatt-hour (kWh) is the energy used by leaving a 40-watt bulb on for 24 hours. The chemical energy in the food we eat to stay alive amounts to about 3 kWh per day. Taking one hot bath uses about 5 kWh of heat. Driving an average European car 100 kilometers (roughly 62 miles) uses 80 kWh of fuel....

To supply 42 kWh per day per person from solar power requires roughly 80 square meters per person of solar panels.

To deliver 42 kWh per day per person from wind for everyone in the United States would require wind farms with a total area roughly equal to the area of California, a 200-fold increase in United States wind power.

To get 42 kWh per day per person from nuclear power would require 525 one-gigawatt nuclear power stations, a roughly five-fold increase over today's levels....

Most prototype hydrogen-powered vehicles use more energy than the fossil-fuel vehicles they replace. The BMW Hydrogen 7, for example, uses 254 kWh per 100 km, but the average fossil car in Europe uses 80 kWh per 100 km.

.....The problem with hydrogen is that both the creation and the use of hydrogen are energy-inefficient steps. Adopting hydrogen as a transport fuel would increase our energy demand. And, as I hope the numbers above have shown, supplying energy to match our demand is not going to be easy. _CNN

H/T Ron Rupper

For a genuine education in the numbers of energy, go to David MacKay's website.

Large Scale Wind Power Is a Nightmare! How to Manage the Green Disaster

Wind energy is fine for small, off-grid applications or for small grid - intertie. But on a large scale, wind power is an unpredictable whipsaw of a disaster -- almost impossible for a power utility to manage.

"It's a war zone, trying to keep the lights on," said Philip LeGoy, senior consultant, Electricity Supply Board International (ESB), in Dublin, Ireland. "We are reacting out of panic. I feel like a member of a platoon, not an engineering group."

Speaking at the Renewable Energy World Conference & Expo. held March 10 to 12 in Las Vegas, Nev., LeGoy was not talking about a battle with guns and explosives. He was explaining how difficult it is to balance the Irish grid now that wind power generates 25 percent of its power. The wind availability in Ireland is typically around 30 percent, while traditional thermal plant has generation availability of about 85 percent.

Peak demand on the island of Ireland is about 6.5 GW. The system itself is practically an isolated island, with just a small 400 MW interconnector between Northern Ireland and Scotland. Before 2000, there was practically no wind generation. Today, more than 800 MW of wind is connected to the system with variability that runs from practically zero to more than 700 MW—and the government has set targets of 3,000 MW of wind generation and 500 MW of ocean energy generation by 2020.

"It's a shock to the grid," said LeGoy, "and what Ireland is going through is a good example of what's to come for others." _PowerEngineering

One possible solution for both wind and solar energy on the utility scale, is the use of a new technology called reversible fuel cells. When the wind or solar arrays are producing excess power, the reversible fuel cell will be in electrolyser mode: producing hydrogen. When the wind stops blowing and the sun stops shining, the fuel cells will switch to fuel cell power generation mode. As a load leveling method for wind and solar, such reversible fuel cells -- if scalable -- hold the potential to open these technologies up to the larger world. Without such utility scale regenerative power storage systems, large wind and solar will remain overpriced disasters.