Posts from — November 2009

Last week I summarized the economics literature on the impact of climate change on human well-being.  Or more accurately, Richard Tol reviewed the economics literature for the Spring 2009 issue of The Journal of Economic Perspectives.  I simply told you about it and tossed in a few observations that I thought relevant.

In short, I reported that the peer-reviewed literature suggests that worries about some climate-induced Armageddon are probably misplaced.  We will likely gain or lose a year of economic growth sometime in the latter half of this century from forecasted changes in the world’s physical climate.  More than that cannot be said with much confidence.

Then, by coincidence, a study crosses my desk from the Institute for Policy Integrity at the NYU Law School.  The study, titled “Economists and Climate Change; Consensus and Open Questions,” reports the findings of a survey of 289 of those economists the institute considers to be “the world’s top economists with expertise in climate change.”  144 of those individuals returned their questionnaire.    Michael Livermore, the executive director of the institute, characterized the findings this way:

The finding that’s gotten the most attention is we asked the economists whether according to mainstream scientific views climate change posed a significant risk to the U.S. and global economies.  And 84 percent of our respondents either agreed or strongly agreed with that statement, so that’s a fairly strong consensus viewpoint that climate change poses economic risks.  That’s probably the single most attention grabbing one.  We also polled on some of the specifics of legislation or policy.  So for example, [Read more →]

My initial post, “Wind Integration: Incremental Emissions from Back-Up Generation Cycling: (Part I: A Framework and Calculator),” provided an overview of a fossil fuel and CO2 emissions calculator. It showed that industrial wind plants do not provide the claimed reductions in these important areas, which brings into question their value as good public policy.

This post provides some background, a base case and the results of taking necessary additional considerations into account. The base case has two scenarios.

The first is that every MWh of wind production directly reduces the full fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions for every MWh of the “displaced” fossil fuel plant, which is a very simplistic view.  The second takes some limited considerations into account, which can show that as much of 85 percent of the simplistic-view savings are still achieved. Calculator runs illustrate how similar results can be produced.

Background

A major consideration is the need for fast-responding gas generation plants to mirror or shadow wind’s highly volatile output, especially during periods of high wind production. Figure 1 illustrates the concept. The gas production is shown in black and is necessary to render wind’s output useful. As the gas production is the complement of that for wind, the vertical axis has to be read in reverse for gas. While operating in a wind-shadowing/wind-mirroring backup role, the gas turbine plants consume more gas and produce more CO2 emissions per MWh than in their normal mode of operation.

Figure 1 – Illustration of the Shadowing/Backup Concept

The calculator treats these two considerations separately. The first, fossil fuel consumption (gas) per MWh, is increased by an efficiency loss factor, or heat rate penalty. The second, CO2 emissions per MWh, is increased by another efficiency loss factor, which is greater than the heat rate penalty and non-linear. This second factor is derived from a paper by White and is not in addition to the heat rate penalty.

The calculator credits wind with the full electricity production contribution as measured over a year, [Read more →]

Editor Note: An environmental civil war is increasing in lockstep with the government’s forcing of industrial windpower. For previous posts against industrial wind parks by grassroot environmentalists, see here, here, here, and here.  Also see this different take at MasterResource on industrial wind “NIMBYism.”

The historic Hall of Flags in the rotunda of the state capitol in Augusta, Maine, was the setting for a November 6th press conference announcing the formation of the Citizens Task Force on Wind Power.  The group is a coalition of citizens from around the state drawn together in the common purpose of advocating for responsible, science based, economically and environmentally sound approaches to Maine’s energy policy, according to co-chair Steve Thurston.  Thurston highlighted the key concerns of the group in the release that is posted here.  Co-chair Monique Aniel, M.D., set the tone for the press conference by recounting how the arrogance of the developer of Record Hill Wind in Roxbury, Maine, ignited her concern over the siting of utility scale wind projects in Maine

Other speakers included economist J. Dwight  who addressed economic problems of wind energy; Gary Steinberg of Friends of Lincoln Lakes who spoke of denial of citizens rights  relating to permitting processes; Carolyn Dodge who spoke of wind developers’ violation of Native Americans’ respect for natural resources; Jon Carter of Forest Ecology Network who spoke of the devastating impact of wind development on the vast forests of the northern two-thirds of Maine.  Bringing the Press Conference to a close, Brad Blake of Friends of Lincoln Lakes used the scale of the Rollins Project proposed by First Wind to demonstrate the huge impact of the state’s goals for utility scale wind power for 2020.

Citizens Task Force on Wind Power is concerned that the state government under the leadership of Governor John Baldacci has committed the state to public policy that aggressively promotes development of utility scale wind projects without adequate citizen input to public policy and denial of citizen involvement in permitting processes. [Read more →]

Editor note: Mr. Hawkins’ study is presented to increase the interest in this highly important,  politically sensitive issue of incremental pollution from firming up industrial wind power. This post has been joined by Parts II-V, with Part V providing updates to the calculator and links to the other posts.

Integrating random, highly variable wind energy into an electricity system presents substantial problems that subvert wind technology’s ability to offset the use of fossil fuels–and avoid air emissions, including carbon dioxide (CO2). Measuring this accurately is important because many believe that wind projects significantly reduce such emissions.

This analysis finds that natural gas used as wind back-up in place of baseload or intermediate gas (in the absence of wind) results in approximately the same gas burn and an increase in related emissions, including CO2. Extrapolating from this example to the whole, the working hypothesis is that intermittent wind (and solar) are not effective CO2 mitigation strategies because of inefficiencies introduced by fast-ramping (inefficient) operation of gas turbines for firming otherwise intermittent and thus non-usable power.

Analysis

In the absence of extensive real-time load dispatch analyses at finely grained time intervals capable of accurately and sufficiently assessing all the variables affecting electricity system behavior as wind energy penetration increases, I propose a method – a calculator – that captures a wide range of considerations. I am unaware of any previous attempt that is as inclusive as what I present here and welcome reader comments for improvements on the present framework or alternative approaches.

This model, or calculator, provides a framework for the considerations involved and an interim assessment of their effects until sufficiently comprehensive studies can be performed in the areas indicated. It shows the impact on fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions compared to typical claims by wind proponents and other bodies, including some government policy makers. As it is parameter driven, the calculator allows examination of the sensitivity of these considerations. The result is that the typical claims are not supported, except by ignoring most of the following considerations:

• The amount of wind mirroring/shadowing backup required.
• Inefficient operation imposed on the mirroring/shadowing backup, in terms of both the fossil fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, treated separately.
• The need to make comparisons, with respect to gas plants, of:
  • Case A – The more efficient Combined Cycle plants (CCGT) operating alone, in other words without the presence of wind, versus;
  • Case B – The appropriate mix of gas plant type used to balance wind’s volatile output. This includes the need to introduce less efficient, but faster-reacting, Open Cycle Gas Turbine gas plants (OCGT) to mirror/shadow the wind production, especially as wind penetration increases.
• The effect of reduced wind capacity factor.
• The effect of wind output exceeding 1-2 percentage points of a total electricity system, on a country or regional basis.

The framework used is similar to that of Warren Katzenstein and Jay Apt (see citations below). It focuses on the wind/gas plant combination and has general applicability. Additional considerations involving wind’s impact on other electricity system elements particular to a specific jurisdiction, such as baseload capacity as analyzed by Campbell, will have to be assessed separately and could have implications that further offset wind’s claimed benefits. [Read more →]

“The [Houston Chronicle's] editorial positions have moved in a decidedly liberal and environmentalist direction since its parent, the Hearst Corporation, installed new management in 2002.”

- Bill Dawson, Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media, December 3, 2007.

“One factor [in the industry retrenchment] could be the fate of climate change legislation in Congress, which could add costs to oil and gas producers, refiners, chemical makers and other parts of the energy sector, forcing them to cut jobs. Susan Combs, Texas comptroller of public accounts said: “I think there’s a big bull’s-eye painted on Houston.”

- Brett Clanton, “Big Oil’s Lean Look Fuels Area Jobs Fear,” Houston Chronicle, November 8, 2009.

Cap-and-trade, even in a watered down beginning, isn’t good for Houston. But the Houston Chronicle has been at the forefront of advocating for such open-ended regulation–even rejecting a sober cost-benefit analysis of the issue. And even not having second thoughts about alarmist science that its own science writer Eric Berger (see below) has grown to have.

Why such a crusade at the nation’s 7th leading paper?

Looking for an answer, I stumbled upon a piece on the web by former Houston Chronicle environmental writer Bill Dawson.  Dawson now teaches at Rice University on media issues and the environment.

His post fills in some gaps about why Houston’s paper (the Houston Post folded and merged into the Chronicle in 1995) became such an organ for climate alarmism–even tramping to the Left of the New York Times at times. It also explains the large circulation declines, given that the Houston audience is more free market, conservative, libertarian, and non-alarmist than the Chronicle’s editorial writers and reporters. And the Houston energy industry, as Brett Clanton reported in a front page article in Sunday’s Chronicle, will be a big loser under cap-and-trade. 

The latest circulation news for the Houston Chronicle is rather grim–a year-to-year decline of 13%. One comment on the circulation report said much about the alienated audience:

If you would give any indication you were fair, we would start buying your paper again. I know this isn’t going to happen but I wish it would because I truly believe you folks in the media are the common man’s eye’s and ears, our checks and balances.

As of late, your profession has failed terribly.

Bill Dawson Documents the Bias

Mr. Dawson’s blog brings some very interesting things to light. [Read more →]

The latest peak oil news is simply astounding: a whistleblower inside the International Energy Agency (IEA) claiming that “the US has played an influential role in encouraging the watchdog to underplay the rate of decline from existing oil fields while overplaying the chances of finding new reserves.”

The fact that this report appeared in the Guardian, which has published questionable articles on peak oil, is suggestive.

First and foremost, one is tempted to conclude that this story represents poor reporting, bringing to mind an earlier Guardian story claiming that Fatih Birol, the IEA official in charge of the World Energy Outlook, acknowledged peak oil. It turns out that Fatih was misquoted. And while I might be biased, considering Fatih a friend, the nature of the present story is close to ridiculous, rather than misleading. (Sadly for him, Birol is often a lightning rod for any disagreement about energy forecasts.)

This is a long-standing problem with peak oil advocates, many of whom misrepresent comments as agreeing with them. [Read more →]

A previous post at MasterResource described the findings and implications of a new scientific study published by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi, ”On the Determination of Climate Feedbacks from ERBE Data” published in Geophysical Research Letters.

Lindzen and Choi’s concluded that climate sensitivity to atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations is six times less than generally accepted—a conclusion that potentially overturns the current paradigm of scientific thinking.

Their paper is now under careful scrutiny–as it should be. As I wrote:

This is a major paper. And as with most findings with serious repercussions to our scientific understanding, it will doubtlessly be gone over with a fine-toothed comb and subject to various challenges. It is too early to tell whether Lindzen and Choi’s findings will prove to be the end-all-and-be-all in this debate. There are a few issues concerning the quality of the satellite data, how well the results from tropics represent the entire world, the impact that the eruption of Mt Pinatubo may have imparted on the results, and perhaps a couple of other details. But, even if the resolution of these issues bumps up Lindzen and Choi’s original determination of the climate sensitivity a bit, there is still a long way to go before it comes close to the IPCC’s “best estimate” of 3.0°C.

 Now some of the early results are starting to come in. [Read more →]

Two years ago, in Scenes from the Climate Inquisition, my colleague Steve Hayward and I observed that climate alarmists were growing ever more incendiary in their criticism of people who disagree with them. And these disagreements were not simply about the science, but about the favored policy choices of leftist environmentalists, many of whom had no training in public policy or economics.  As we wrote:

Anyone who does not sign up 100 percent behind the catastrophic scenario is deemed a “climate change denier.” Distinguished climatologist Ellen Goodman spelled out the implication in her widely syndicated newspaper column last week: “Let’s just say that global warming deniers are now on a par with Holocaust deniers.” One environmental writer suggested last fall that there should someday be Nuremberg Trials–or at the very least a South African-style Truth and Reconciliation Commission–for climate skeptics who have blocked the planet’s salvation.

Former Vice President Al Gore has proposed that the media stop covering climate skeptics, and Britain’s environment minister said that, just as the media should give no platform to terrorists, so they should exclude climate change skeptics from the airwaves and the news pages. Heidi Cullen, star of the Weather Channel, made headlines with a recent call for weather-broadcasters with impure climate opinions to be “decertified” by the American Meteorological Society. Just this week politicians in Oregon and Delaware stepped up calls for the dismissal of their state’s official climatologists, George Taylor and David Legates, solely on the grounds of their public dissent from climate orthodoxy. And as we were completing this article, a letter arrived from senators Bernard Sanders, Pat Leahy, Dianne Feinstein, and John Kerry expressing “very serious concerns” about our alleged “attempt to undermine science.” Show-trial hearing to follow? Stay tuned.

Desperation is the chief cause for this campaign of intimidation. The Kyoto accords are failing to curtail greenhouse gas emissions in a serious way, and although it is convenient to blame Bush, anyone who follows the Kyoto evasions of the Europeans knows better. The Chinese will soon eclipse the United States as world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, depriving the gas-rationers of one of their favorite sticks for beating up Americans.”

At the time, we naively hoped that there would be a moderation of such language, as some saner voices were beginning to push back against the whole slander-denier complex.

Alas, the venom-spitting of the the climatistas is increasing in direct proportion to the probability of failure in enacting their world-girdling eco-theocracy. And the leader of the pack, Joseph Romm of Climate Progress (Center for American Progress), turns out to be one of the least civil human beings to tread the planet. [Read more →]

This article, “Energy to Spare” by David Warren, published in the Ottawa Citizen on November 4, 2009, says much in few words. Energy reality is that the sun’s work over the ages has produced energy sources (oil, gas, and coal) that far exceed the dilute energy from the sun. The stock beats the flow–by a country mile.

This article is reproduced below as a Weekend reading feature:

Will technology solve our energy problems? This seemingly fatuous question is actually stupider than first appears. For we already have the technology to power anything within reason, with minimal if any environmental fallout.

Yet under the inspiration of the Green Zeitgeist, I cannot go into a magazine shop without finding some science-lite cover story on new prospects for harnessing solar, thermal, wind, tidal, or whatever “renewable” forces. There is an immense credulous audience out there, willing to be entertained by such nonsense.

No one with a grasp of high school physics should take any of these schemes seriously. In each case, we are looking at a crank idea from the hippie era, which has not since been significantly improved, because it can’t be.

All are basically bureaucratic arrangements: the idea being to live by taxing wealth produced elsewhere, in this case the kinetic energy in wind and water, or the radiant light and heat from the sun. Hydro was the original big government idea: to install the equivalent of a massive toll booth right across a river, flood everything behind it and starve everything in front. Conservationists going back a century were right to apprehend that the “renewable” paradigm is crazy.

To my mind, as well, the great Hoover dam, built on a scale to choke the Colorado River, was a monument to hubris. On Saturday I mentioned the Aswan dam, that choked the mighty Nile. The Three Gorges in China, the string of hydro dams straddling the geological faults along the Indian face of the Himalayas — unspeakably destructive to the productivity of the lands both before and behind them — are catastrophes patiently waiting for their earthquakes.

And likewise, the scale of desecration that is required for a landscape to supply the kind of power a large hydro dam provides, by alternative “taxation” schemes. Hundreds upon hundreds of gigantic propeller windmills, at each of many dispersed locations. Or, countless miles of coastline impounded to exploit the tides. Or, millions of acres of monotonous solar panels, that work only when the sun is shining.

Moreover, we can know that the environmentalists who demand these things will turn on them as soon as they are built. They are, as all utopians, not people who can be satisfied, and it makes sense to frustrate their ambitions decisively — before, rather than after, their tyranny has been consolidated.

Those who grasp basic physics will know that there will be no serious improvements in the efficiency of any of these “renewable resources.” The sun may be a superbly powerful ball of energy, but its radiation diminishes as the square of distance, and by the time it reaches earth is not intense. Wind is diffuse; water runs slowly.

A candid look at nature reveals that creatures live by finding and burning fuels, as food. We should trust nature to have found the inevitable solutions. Hence, by analogy, fossil fuels. They may not hold out perpetually, but the known reserves continue to grow faster than we can burn them. The engines we’ve designed are vastly less efficient than the engines of nature; but vastly more efficient and practicable than anything that “renews.”

And what do we mean by “renewable” anyway, in a universe as abundant as this one? Nature burns fuels far more efficiently, and could do so more efficiently still, were she not calibrated instead to produce so many useful by-products, that get used without exception.

One-billionth of the potential power in a litre of gasoline is released by the way we burn it, and the same can be said for coal and wood. This is a very poor show!

Some idea of what is possible when we employ more brains comes from comparing nuclear power, where the energy released in splitting a uranium atom is several million times greater than that from merely breaking the carbon-hydrogen bond.

As the journalist William Tucker and many others have repeatedly explained, instead of hundred-car trainloads arriving daily to feed the flames of a large coal-fired generator, we have a single truckload of fuel rods arriving about every third month. And while the waste product may frighten the incurably neurotic, it is small and easily contained. In nuclear reactors, the energy required to power a city the size of Ottawa, for a year, comes from the transformation of less than one ounce of matter.

Not that I would wish to put coal-miners out of their jobs. For as Baudelaire said of Ingres and Delacroix, “Let us love them both.” I love a coal fire, and there are all kinds of wonderful by-products of coal production.

Nor have I the slightest objection to sheeting the sails of my imagined yacht to the pleasure of Aeolus, but the idea of powering cities with rank after rank of these malicious bird-killing propellers is too droolingly idiotic. Let us tilt against them with the power of a million Don Quixotes!

———————-

David Warren’s column appears Sunday, Wednesday and Saturday. © Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen

Among those hoping that global warming is real we should now count the EU.  As winter approaches there is, quelle surprise, the initial hint of yet another gas supply crisis between Russia, Ukraine and Russia’s EU customers.  The problem is that those pesky pipelines have to go through somewhere to reach the market and that somewhere happens to be the Ukraine (unless it’s Poland, more on that later).

Source: US DOE, for better map resolution

All those red lines running Northeast-to-Southwest carry gas from Russia to the EU countries.  There is just no getting around the Ukraine for most of the transits; it is big and (if you are Russian) in the wrong place.

Gas: The Great Green Hope for Europe

As noted previously, gas use in Europe is roughly the same as that of the US, a bit over 20 tcf annually.  Unlike the US, gas production in Europe is falling not rising, with net imports currently at about 10 tcf/year and going up by 0.5-1 tcf annually.  Russia provides about 80% of Europe’s imported gas (about 80%), with the remainder mostly arriving in the EU as LNG.

As coal-fired power plants face increasing environmental opposition, and as a new generation of nuclear plants proves difficult to finance and construct European nations have turned increasingly to gas.  Power generation in the EU currently uses about 6 tcf/y, about the same as the US, and the US Department of Energy expects this to rise to the 6.5-7.5 tcf/y range by 2015-2025.

With falling conventional production and limited import alternatives, Russia looks to maintain its key role in EU gas supplies in coming years.  For all of the touted alternative routes and sources – Nabucco, trans-Med pipelines, LNG – the EU remains wedded to Gazprom.  In fact, Russia has made a play for even greater EU dependence with its Nord Stream (Baltic) and South Stream (Black Sea) pipelines.  Completion of those two lines will permit Gazprom to supply Germany, Austria, Italy and others without transiting Ukraine or Poland.

Energy Security or Energy Hardball – Why spend all that money for half-full pipelines?

Russia will invest more than $40 billion in new pipeline capacity without any substantial increase in its gas exports to Europe.  Why?  One view is that it is all about control: [Read more →]