I’m not sure about you, but the last thing I want to talk about is the elections. When I think about how much of my precious time has been wasted listening to politics over the past year, I want to vomit. No more from pollsters, talking heads or statisticians.
Well, maybe I mean statisticians, as in the old joke about a man who drowned because he waded through a river that was only three feet deep on average. See, isn’t that better than politics? However, it may be as funny as a statistician drowning, but there is a serious side to the problem when it comes to relying on averages. You can actually die, for a start.
Before going back to death and/or politics again (which I know is redundant), think about using averages. A car can be designed for the average person – one doesn’t find the tallest person on earth and the interior is designed to accommodate them. Exceptions may be hitting their shins or swinging their legs, but that’s how it has to be.
In other areas, it can’t work that way. Do you insulate your house in average conditions? Of course not. Do you install air conditioners for medium conditions? Same. And on that go. As the risk of harm increases, we design for the extreme, not the average. Or we should.
A whole world of trouble will come to you if your plan is built on the average but you cannot live with the extremes. Or even with significant variations. Europe and other advanced energy regions of the world are having a hard time figuring this out.
In the race to decarbonize the energy system, wind and solar have taken the lead. The kernel is widely despised. Hydrogen has potential, but still has a long way to go, as a major player. With the assumption that Hydrocarbons must go at all costs, wind and sun are the winners. Bring in trillions of dong. Throw wind turbines everywhere. Cover the countryside with solar panels.
The media likes to feature energy as fodder for the headlines; Big numbers dazzle everyone. “The United States is on track to install record amounts of wind and solar this year, underscoring America’s ability to build renewable energy at levels once considered impossible…Energy Information Administration amount of US expectation The US will install 37 gigawatts of new solar and wind power this year, breaking the previous record of almost 17 GW in 2016. bleat American Science website has an ironic name. Oh, gigawatts. Don’t know what those are but they sound huge.
What’s the problem with all that power? Well, how good is it? Let’s see… at a 33 percent capacity factor (used by the US government seems reasonable), the average 37 GW is just over 12 GW of electricity contributing to the grid. The seemingly assumption then that 12 GW of dirty old hydrocarbons became obsolete, and for the energy ruble, the figure is even more accurate, 37 GW, because, you know, some days it’s very hot. wind.
But, what happens when that load factor is… 0? Because it happens.
The current poster for this issue is the UK. The UK has installed 24 GW of wind power. The media likes to talk about the total number of installed renewable GW as proof of the progress and the rapid pace of energy transition.
However, over the past few weeks, wind has fallen to almost zero, and output from that 24 GW of installed capacity has dropped to about 1 or 2 GW.
Usually that won’t be a problem – just start up gas-fired power plants or import electricity from elsewhere.
But what happens when that’s not available?
More specifically, what happens when near-zero output coincides with the time when that power is needed most – during heat waves or cold spells? That brings us to the current dire situation facing Europe as Europe enters winter. The gas storage is supposed to fill up quickly this time of year, but that’s not the case for a number of reasons.
However, natural gas is not supposed to be on anyone’s road map. The hip culture site Wire talked (at the beginning of September) on the urgency to limit global warming: “To make the transition, we need to switch to renewables, such as solar, wind and geothermal, now. We are making good progress on this; Solar and wind power is currently cheaper than fossil fuels, and renewables are responsible for about one third of global electricity production in 2020.” The first glimmer of the harms of relying on averages began to emerge.
A few weeks laterWired suggests that a few light bulbs could be on the way: “Governments tend to say that the electricity sector is done, the industry is decarbonised, the renewable energy transition is happening rapidly, and all all those good things,” the article quoted the head of Energy UK.
The author of the article, after thinking that seven UK energy supply companies have gone out of business this year (the result of having to pay more to generate/buy energy than it sells for). their locked rows), gave one of the poignant British expressions of the-my-arms-cut-and-I-seeming-to-be-in-a-kind kind of thing. -old-old-trouble-point: “And in general, we depend on gas more than we think. “No, you idiot, we trust more Friend think. Anyone in the power supply business can tell you that, but the army of idiots won’t listen. And now you pay.
They can easily ask experts, such as hydrocarbon suppliers. But those people are lepers today. No one cares about their opinion for fear of the appearance of cooperation. (Trudeau established a “Net Zero Advisory Body” tasked with identifying net zero pathways; NZAB has post logs of meetings to date (24); only once – once – the word ‘oil and gas’ was mentioned in the filing, and the context was confusing: “Members received a basic oil and gas sector briefing from federal officials .” FROM FEDERAL OFFICERS. Meanwhile, NZAB also heard a live presentation from the David Suzuki Foundation. This will wrap up.)
Let’s tackle this energy conundrum a little better for all of these people who, as Principal Skinner told the Simpsons, “wink their brows in a futile attempt to understand the situation.”
The world has been sold a faulty bill of goods, based on a pathetic simple vision of how renewable energy should work. A US government website highlights the problem with the following example: “The average turbine capacity in the US Wind Turbine Database is 1.67 megawatts (MW), with a power factor of 33%, That average turbine would generate more than 402,000 kWh per month – enough for more than 460 average homes in the US.”
Thus, officials, bureaucrats, and armed fools head straight for the promised land by multiplying the number of wind turbines by 460 and surprising and appalling themselves with the results. Damn, we don’t need natural gas anymore (as they told me exactly those words).
So they all started dismantling the natural gas system – not directly by tearing down pipelines, but indirectly by blocking new pipelines, by advocating a ‘removal campaign. fossil fuels’, by getting advice on energy policy from Swedish teenagers – and then standing there shivering in the dark. – witnessed the stupor when the wind stopped blowing, and the world’s energy producers were unable to produce more natural gas.
It’s not just Britain that is worried. A Bloomberg article (which I cannot link to because I would never be willing to send Bloomberg a dime) notes the following disturbing news: “China is facing a winter of power shortages. further, threatens to slow the country’s economic recovery as a global energy supply crisis causes fuel prices to skyrocket. The world’s second-largest economy risks not having enough coal and natural gas – used to heat homes and power plants – despite efforts over the past year to stockpile fuel. as rivals in North Asia and Europe compete for limited supply.
It is extremely important to realize that these comments are coming from Bloomberg – a ‘news’ organization that is going far, far beyond its path to bringing down, protesting and beheading the hydrocarbon industry. By the way, that hydrocarbon industry is making major breakthroughs in ways these vandals consider impossible – developing carbon capture/storage, reducing methane emissions, researching solutions hydrogen and even succeeded in bringing in First Nations as demonstrated by groups like Project Reconciliation (trying to buy TransMountain) and recent purchases of an oil sands pipeline by 8 local First Nations and Sunscreen. The same hydrocarbon industry is doing its best to solve its emissions problems and attract First Nations.
A lot of the madness of today’s global energy transition stems from the fundamental inability to grasp certain fundamentals, which isn’t hard to understand if one wants to, but it’s not. It is possible for those who ask for an energy villain to add justice to their lives. campaign. You can set all the wind and solar you want, but if their output can be zero and more importantly if their output is more likely to go to zero when it’s needed most (extreme heat) (weak wind, inefficient solar panels) or extreme cold (weak wind, obvious lack of solar power)), then you don’t have a power system at all. And don’t raise your hand to say the battery is coming soon. The math on replacing NG is even funnier.29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Yes, yes, I can hear it, horrible, hitting a bunch of unlucky choir commentators. Yes, about that. That train is cutting off the world’s fuel supply. There will be consequences. serious people.
Hundreds of millions of people without enough heating fuel in the dead of winter is nothing particularly funny. If a cold winter were to come, all today’s cheeriest energy-switching dogs would disappear into the woodwork, away from the misinformation they propagated and the disaster they created. . Those in charge will have no choice but to say out loud the words they haven’t dared to utter for a decade: you need hydrocarbons, today, tomorrow and for a very long time to come. So start acting like it.
Buy it while it’s still legal! Before the burning begins…check out “The End of Fossil Fuel Madness” at amazon.ca, indigo.caor amazon.com. Thanks for the support.
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam This, or email Terry This.
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