The Lie of Cheap Renewable Energy

It is a persistent claim of renewable energy advocates that renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuel-generated energy or nuclear energy. The claim is false.
A Proposal For Exposing The True Costs Of Getting Electricity From Wind And Sun
March 18, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Every place that tries increasing the percentage of electricity generation that comes from wind and sun then experiences rapidly rising consumer electricity costs.
  
  
• The reasons why this happens are not complicated. Even at relatively low levels of wind and solar penetration, backup fossil fuel or other generation cannot be closed, so consumers must pay for two duplicate generation systems. At higher levels of wind/solar penetration, things like overbuilding, curtailment, and hugely expensive grid-scale energy storage come into play.
  
  
• In my post of February 8, 2023, I asked “Could anybody possibly be stupid enough to believe the line that wind and solar generators can provide reliable electricity to consumers that is cheaper than electricity generated by fossil fuels?”
  
  
• And yet it is an endlessly-repeated mantra of wind/solar advocates that generating electricity from those sources is “cheaper” than generating the same electricity from fossil fuel sources like coal and natural gas.
  
  
• In this post I will make a proposal for a way to definitively expose the falsity of the claims that wind and solar are “cheaper” than fossil fuels for electricity generation.
  

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First, here is a smattering of quotes from various climate advocates (often masquerading as journalists or politicians) making the “wind and solar are cheaper” claim. Note that these are not just some fringe crazies, but rather are prominent media and political voices — including the President of the United States — who you might think would know at least a little of what they are talking about.

• From Bloomberg News, January 30, 2023: “Replacing US Coal Plants With Solar and Wind Is Cheaper Than Running Them. It now ‘unequivocally’ costs less to build new renewable energy projects than to operate existing coal plants, according to a new analysis.”
  
  
• From the World Economic Forum, July 5, 2021: “Renewables are now significantly undercutting fossil fuels as the world’s cheapest source of energy, according to a new report. Of the wind, solar and other renewables that came on stream in 2020, nearly two-thirds – 62% – were cheaper than the cheapest new fossil fuel, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).”
  
  
• From Utility Dive, February 9, 2023: “Renewables would provide cheaper energy than 99% of US coal plants and catalyze a just energy transition. Investment in lower cost wind and solar resources is an economic opportunity worth up to $589 billion, providing jobs and tax base to coal communities.”
  
  
• From the BBC, September 13, 2022: “Switching from fossil fuels to renewable energy could save the world as much as $12tn (£10.2tn) by 2050, an Oxford University study says. The report said it was wrong and pessimistic to claim that moving quickly towards cleaner energy sources was expensive.”
  
  
• From President Biden in the State of the Union address, February 7, 2023: “Look, the Inflation Reduction Act is also the most significant investment ever to tackle the climate crisis. lowering utility bills, creating American jobs, and leading the world to a clean energy future.”
  

There is a virtually infinite supply of more where those came from. Not a one of those pieces, or hundreds more like them, ever mentions or explains that the “cheap” wind and solar power that they are talking about only includes the costs of an intermittent supply that does not work most of the time and cannot provide reliable and continuous electricity on its own; nor do any of these pieces mention that turning that intermittent supply into something reliable and continuous will entail additional large and unspecified costs.

The problem of exposing the true costs of getting electricity from wind and solar has been complicated by a large error, which is that state governments and utilities have allowed the structure of wholesale electricity markets to be altered to the advantage of the wind and solar generators. In particular, the wholesale electricity markets universally give priority of dispatch to the wind and solar generators, and also allow those generators to bid low prices in a spot market when the wind is blowing or sun shining. These rules have the effect of hiding the cost of covering for the intermittency of the wind and solar generators, and of giving the false impression that the cost of intermittency is not something caused by the addition of wind and solar facilities.

The people who set up this market structure have a fundamental misconception of what the product is that consumers need. Consumers do not want or need electricity that can go on and off from minute to minute. They want and need electricity that is very nearly 100% reliable all the time. The market should be set up to buy only the second product, not the first. . . .

 

More about renewable grift.
Legalized Climate Grifting
Guest Blogger
In short, nothing about “renewable energy” is clean, renewable, sustainable, fair or equitable. . . .

 

Never has been. Quite the contrary.

 

World Energy Data Confirms Fossil Fuels Will Dominate Future Global Energy Use
Guest Blogger
The OECD nations cannot stop this from happening and despite their nefarious efforts otherwise cannot conceal this global energy growth and fuel use (as well as emissions growth) reality. . . .

 

Deforesting To Save The Planet? Europe’s Forests Shrinking As Wood Used For “Green” Energy
By P Gosselin on 22. March 2023

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How wood pellet power plants are fueling climate change


By Klimanachrichten
(Translated/edited by P. Gosselin)

German public broadcasting show SWR3-Wissen had a podcast about burning wood in Europe. In Germany’s forests, less wood is taken than what grows back, but in Europe it’s different. Here, the forest is losing total area, which also means that carbon sinks are disappearing. But deforestation is not the only problem; forests also store water and release it with a delay. These “sponges” are lost after clear-cutting. Apparently, the EU’s plans to substitute wood for coal call for expanding that as well.

In the United Kingdom, the former Drax coal-fired power plant burns significant amounts of wood.

Europe massively subsidizing a forest-destroying energy source

“Nearly nine million tons of pellets per year are burned by the Drax power plant. That’s three times Germany’s pellet production and one and a half times the UK’s wood production. With this huge amount of wood, the power plant generates seven percent of the UK’s electricity needs and gets plenty of subsidies for it: 3.5 million euros per day. Like the British, the EU is also promoting the conversion of coal-fired power plants to wood – with its Renewable Energies Directive adopted in 2009. Taxes on CO2 emissions from fossil energy are rising, but wood-burning is exempt.

Coal plants across Europe are converting to wood pellets

Several power plants in the Netherlands and Denmark have already converted from coal to wood. French power plant operator Veolia has just announced that it is converting a coal-fired power plant in Hungary over to biomass. German power plant operators are currently still hesitant. The operators of the Onyx coal-fired power plant in Wilhelmshaven are considering burning 2.9 million tons of pellets annually. Vattenfall’s power plant in Berlin’s Moabit district is to be converted; and the East German energy company LEAG has already bought two pelleting companies.”

US forests being cut down largescale to make Europe “green”

Wood pellets come to a good part from the USA. In this context, once again the reference to the US documentary Burned. It is about forest loss in the southwestern United States. A review of the film has already been presented in this blog 2020. The documentary has lost none of its topicality.

 

We should just use Nuclear power for electricity.

Launching crap into space is getting cheaper and cheaper, we could just pay Elon to shoot the waste into space.

 

Pursuit of the Green Dream Will Make Inequality a LOT Worse
March 26, 2023/ Jane Menton

• 
  There are different ways of looking at the issue of human inequality.
  
  
• The modern Left obsesses about inequality as measured in dollars of income. But if one measures inequality based on quality-of-life, it quickly becomes clear that we have achieved great progress toward equality on the things that really count.
  
  
• Much of that progress is at risk of reversal from imposition of the green dream.
  

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When I was a young engineer we had a saying- "BOHICA". Stood for "Bend Over, Here It Comes Again".

The latest BOHICA moment courtesy of the UK.

https://thecritic.co.uk/gone-with-the-wind/

 

Virginia opting out?
Breakthrough! A Big Utility Says Net Zero May Not Be Reliable
Charles Rotter
The good news is that Dominion finally admits that the net zero VCEA might not work. . . .

 

Important New Report Explores The Futility Of Wind Power
April 01, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  A reader named Bill Ponton has just produced an important new Report that explores the effects and costs of continuing increases in generation of electricity from wind.
  
  
• The Report has the title “The Cost of Increasing UK Wind Power Capacity: A Reality Check.”
  
  
• Ponton’s Report follows and builds on prior work of Roger Andrews and Ken Gregory that has previously been featured at this site.
  
  
• The idea of each of these researchers has been to use publicly available data from some jurisdiction as to electricity consumption, and as to electricity generation from each source — natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar, coal, hydro, etc. — to build a spreadsheet that can then be manipulated to investigate what happens on changing various assumptions going forward.
  

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Bill Ponton's "Reality Check" On UK Wind Power: The Issue Of Energy Storage
April 03, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Bill Ponton’s new Report, “The Cost of Increasing Wind Power: A Reality Check,” contains a short but pithy section addressing the question of energy storage.
  
  
• Here’s the question to be addressed: If after the first round of overbuilding, adding new wind generation resources adds little useful energy and most of the added generation ends up getting “curtailed,” then why not just add some batteries or other energy storage to the system? Wind energy advocates suggest that some form of batteries can store the excess electricity production until it is needed, and everything will then just balance out in perfect equilibrium.
  
  
• Is there any problem here?
  
  
• Ponton does the simple calculations with his UK 2022 spreadsheet to derive how much storage in GWh will be needed, and what its functional characteristics must be.
  

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Germans Overwhelmingly Fed Up With Move To Green Energies As Massive Costs Loom
By P Gosselin on 5. April 2023

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“Catastrophic report”: Whopping 88% of those surveyed see move to green energies as unachievable!



Green energies no longer have the support of Germans due to high costs and technical limitations. Image: P. Gosselin.

Most Germans used to be enthusiastic supporters of the country’s Energiewende (transition to renewable energies), especially in the early days when they were brazenly misled about the endeavor’s humungous costs and technical limitations.

Those days are gone. . . . .

 

As observed by Forrest Gump's mother: "Stupid is as stupid does."
British Climate Activist Responds To Ponton's UK Wind Power "Reality Check"
April 06, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Having read Bill Ponton’s very clear “reality check” on the UK’s Net Zero project, you are probably wondering, what are the counter-arguments advanced by the supporters of Net Zero?
  
  
• After all, the Net Zero thing appears to have near-unanimous support in the UK. There is no significant political party in that country that advocates policies dissenting from the Net Zero program, unless you count the UK Independence Party, which at the moment holds zero seats in a House of Commons of 650 members. The currently-governing Conservative Party is fully on board with the Net Zero program, with the partial exception of a small group of about 50 MPs (out of 355 Tories in the Commons) claiming to be “studying” the issue; and all the various parties to the left of the Conservatives advocate even more extreme, immediate and forceful measures to reduce carbon emissions than those that the Conservatives are pursuing.
  
  
• So surely there must exist somewhere a lucid explanation of how this Net Zero thing makes sense and how it can work.
  

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Germany’s Renewable Heating Plan To Cost Many Times More Than Expected: 776 Billion Euros!
By P Gosselin on 11. April 2023

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Germany’s heating debacle takes on even greater dimensions

The Federal Ministry of Economics, headed by Robert Habeck (Green party) has “GROSSLY MISCALCULATED” the cost of removing oil and gas heating systems from homes and buildings, and installing heat pumps in their place by 2045.



Germany’s heat pump cost estimate is spiraling out of sight!

Instead of 132 billion euros cost by 2045 for citizens, the real price tag will be a whopping 621 billion euros!

The total real price tag for all buildings will be 776 billion euros.

“According to calculations by the property owners’ association Haus & Grund, Minister Habeck and his ministry have miscalculated by several hundred billion euros,” reports the German online Pleiteticker.de here.

Habeck’s Federal Ministry of Economics estimated the costs for homeowners at around 135 billion euros by 2045, however “citizens will have to pay many times the calculated costs.”

The president of Germany’s property owners’ association, Kai Warnecke, told Bild newspaper, “The target is 500 000 new heat pumps a year, at an average cost of 40,000 euros per heat pump.” But the real number would have to be 1.5 million heat pumps each year if Germany wishes to reach its stated 2045 target.

Another huge mistake made by Habeck’s Ministry is forgetting that heat pumps have a lifetime of only 20 years, so already by 2045 the pumps will need to begin being replaced. Habeck pledges to support citizens in replacing their oil and gas heating systems, but provides no details on the plan.

Kai Warnecke warns of the huge costs in the pipeline for Germans: “If we assume that about 80 per cent of the buildings are in the hands of the citizens, they will have to pay about 620.8 billion euros of the total 776 billion euros.”

Already critics are calling the proposed bill incoherent and the feasibility of the project to be non-existent. Many homeowners are already struggling financially from high electricity prices and inflation.

More than 1 trillion euros for a statistically insignificant climate benefit

And when the costs of extensive home renovation get added in, the total price tag soars to well over a trillion euros. Yet, the impact on the globe’s temperature from Germany’s planned contribution will be statistically insignificant.

 

The Unbearable Lightness of Renewables – In Time
Guest Blogger
By: Leen Weijers, VP Engineering, Liberty Energy Wind and solar don’t work most of the time. You may think intermittency is acceptable because the sun shines for free and the…

Wind and solar don’t work most of the time. You may think intermittency is acceptable because the sun shines for free and the wind blows for free. Capturing these diluted energy sources, however, is anything but free. If you require electricity to be available at the flip of a switch from renewables, their temporal lightness requires massive overbuilding, making wind and solar the most expensive sources of primary energy.

Solar and wind’s capacity factor, the actual energy output vs the maximum energy output over time, is only 14% for worldwide solar and only 26% for worldwide wind. If this strikes you as low, that is true, as this number is weighted toward installations by Europeans, for example Germans, who are ahead in installations in some areas most unsuitable for solar. But there are other reasons solar and wind work even less than you think. . . . .

 

New York Goes Full Central Planning For The Electricity Sector
April 19, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  Here in New York State, we have an electricity system that, as of this moment, is functioning just fine. Granted, we pay more for the electricity than we should — probably in the range of 50% or more extra — mainly because we have banned the exploitation of our own abundant natural gas resources from the Marcellus and Utica shale formations in the upstate areas. And granted also that we just in 2020 and 2021 closed the two big nuclear reactors at Indian Point, about 40 miles north of New York City, which had supplied more than 25% of the City’s power.
  
  
• It is not news that our existing, functional electricity system grievously offends the sensibilities of environmental activists, particularly due to its high reliance on natural gas to generate the power.
  
  
• No feasibility study or demonstration project for us! The only option is Full Speed Ahead, without a clue as to whether this will work or not.
  
  
• We will go Full Central Planning. Has that ever proved to be a problem anywhere in the past? Not that anyone here seems to recognize.
  

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Right, OilPrice.com, Wind Power is Unprofitable
ECONOMIC COSTS APRIL 21, 2023
A recent article at OilPrice.com explains how wind power is unprofitable, going into detail on some of the economic hurdles that industrial wind power development has encountered. Supply chain problems, inflation, likely the high price of fossil fuels, and other issues have resulted in billions of dollars in losses. Despite this, wind power companies are unconcerned about going bankrupt, due primarily to the fact that governments are mandating that increasing numbers of wind turbines be added to the electric grid pursuit of net-zero carbon dioxide emissions policies, complete with generous subsidies.

The author of the OilPrice.com article, “Wind Power Has A Profitability Problem,” Felicity Bradstock, points out that despite massive investments and mandated construction by governments leading to growth in the wind power industry, “companies are realizing that it is difficult to translate wind power into profits.” Bradstock says the return on investment has not been what companies expected, writing:

In June last year, there were reports that some of the world’s biggest wind energy companies were battling heavy losses. Vestas Wind Systems, General Electric Co., and Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy all faced extremely high raw material and logistics costs following the pandemic when supply chains were disrupted. This came after an arms race in which wind majors were competing to build the tallest, most powerful wind turbines at whatever cost would put them ahead of the rest.

Losses were seen across the board in 2022, to the tune of $2 billion for GE’s renewables division, $1.68 billion for the largest turbine manufacturer Vestas, and Siemens Energy lost $943.48 million. . . . .

 

South Africa And The Green Energy Wall
April 25, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  It’s obvious to any person with the faculty of critical thinking that intermittent renewable “green” energy will never work to power a modern economy.
  
  
• So as various U.S. states and foreign countries press forward on their crash programs to go fully “green” with their electricity generation, the next obvious question immediately arises: who will be first to hit the green energy “wall”? That is, which state or country will be the first to find that without enough reliable generation its electricity system no longer works? And how will that impact the population?
  
  
• But let’s now look at South Africa.
  

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RE has it's place if you live remotely or somebody is subsidizing it, but it can't be our primary energy with existing technology. We don't have adequate energy storage at reasonable prices. Batteries either are made from rare materials, can't handle daily discharge/recharge cycles, or cost a fortune. DC from solar can't be distributed large scale without an inverter to turn it into AC. Solar only works on Sunny days and wind less than that unless you live on top of a mountain or Clovis, NM.

I doubt all politicians are too stupid to understand that RE won't work as our primary source without drastically reducing our standard of living. I used to think that politicians were just in it for the money by taxing fossil fuels, but as it becomes more apparent that RE won't meet all of our needs, I'm thinking that politicians just want to control our lives.

If I'm going to use RE or get an EV, it will be for MY benefit and on MY terms.

 

Killing whales.
Feds admit offshore wind can kill whales!
Guest Blogger
Of course these admissions are well hidden, buried in the depths of thousand page documents . . . .

 

Silence of the Grid Experts
Posted on May 3, 2023 by curryja | 33 comments
by Planning Engineer (Russell Schussler)

There are many reasons why grid experts within the electric utility industry have not spoken out when unrealistic “green” goals were being developed and promoted over the last 20 years or so. A more open debate during this period might have helped provide a more realistic foundation for future development. This posting describes some reasons as to why at the corporate level electric utilities did not speak out more in defense of grid reliability. Collectively these factors tended to eliminate grid experts from playing any role in the development of policies impacting the grid.

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The renewables lobby is still hiding facts about the Texas freeze-out.
Electrified Compressors and the Great Texas Blackout (a threat to grid reliability everywhere)
Guest Blogger
But gradually, compressors were electrified so slowly that, to follow the parable, they, like the frog, didn’t notice what was about to happen. . . .

 

FERC commissioners tell senators of major grid reliability challenges, with some blaming markets
Charles Rotter
There is a “looming reliability crisis in our electricity markets,” FERC Commissioner James Danly said. . . .

 

Unreliable Green Energy Has the World Running Back to Coal and Nuclear
Guest Blogger
…the reality of energy demand beckons these advanced economies to fall back on trustworthy fossil fuels and embrace highly efficient nuclear energy. . . .

 

Advocates of renewable energy have descended to fraud.
Finally, A Solution To The Problem Of Intermittent Power Generation -- The "Virtual Power Plant"
May 20, 2023/ Francis Menton

• 
  As discussed here many, many times, the big problem with generating electricity from wind and solar sources is that they are intermittent. Sometimes they work, and sometimes they don’t. And sometimes they don’t work for days on end. The times when both wind and sun fail at the same time for multiple days tend to be concentrated in the very coldest days of the winter. This poses a huge problem for central planners’ dreams of “net zero” electricity. Try to solve the problem with grid-scale batteries, and suddenly you’re talking wildly unaffordable costs in the trillions of dollars.
  
  
• Not to worry. Recently everywhere talk has emerged of a new and seemingly easy solution to the problem of intermittency. Have you heard of it? It’s the “Virtual Power Plant.” I mean, today pretty much everything can be “virtual” if you want it to be. We have the “virtual” meeting, the “virtual” office, and the “virtual” school — even “virtual” reality. So why not a “virtual” power plant?
  
  
• But, in the context of generating electricity, what does this business of “virtual” mean?
  

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