“Limit pollock” | Watts up with that?

Guest posts by Willis Eschenbach

Christopher Monckton recently made a fascinating post titled “The final nail in the coffin of ‘renewable’ energy”. In it, he references the work of a man named Douglas Pollock, who has suggested that there is a limit to the amount of energy a given renewable source can supply to the grid without battery backup. Furthermore, Pollock says the limit is the “power factor,” the fraction of the nameplate power that a renewable source can actually deliver.

A refutation of this was brought up as a post titled “Sealing the “renewable” energy coffin may take a few more nails“, and Lord Monckton posted a rebuttal titled”Why climate skepticism hasn’t worked out yet“.

(Unfortunately, in the comments of the following post, I fear that I beeswax when Christopher wrongly accused me of being “openly and deliberately dishonest“…well, I know that science is a bloody sport, but I won’t take that from any man. However, I digress…)

While interesting, Lord Monckton’s paper is a theoretical exercise. He didn’t provide any actual data to back them up. And when I looked at the data, I discovered a problem—most countries are well below the “Pollock limit,” and so they can’t say anything about what will happen when the rate Wind energy’s share of total electricity production is close to the Pollock limit.

Figure 1. Wind power share by country. The dotted line represents the global average wind power factor, which is the average portion of the nameplate power that a wind turbine can actually deliver in the real world.

However, some countries have renewable energy holdings that exceed the Pollock limit. I choose Ireland as a test case. I have received annual information on Ireland’s electricity supply from BP statistical assessment of world energy. Here, on a year-to-year basis, is the annual ratio of wind energy to Ireland’s total electricity to annual installed capacity (red/black line), as well as the annual capacity factor (colored line). black gold).

Figure 2. Annual Irish wind ratio to installed wind capacity and wind power factor. 2022 the value is from here and is preliminary.

There are some interesting insights from Figure 2. First, contradicting the proposed numerical value of the Pollock limit which is equal to the power factor, the share of wind power in Ireland’s total electricity is much higher than that of the power factor. wind power factor.

Next, what’s interesting is how the wind power factor varies from year to year, fluctuating about ±5% above and below the mean,

Next, in accordance with the concept of the Pollock limit, as the installed capacity increases, the proportion of wind energy increasingly shifts parallel to the wind power factor.

Finally, the past four years have been particularly interesting. Between 2019 and 2022, Ireland added around 4 TWh of wind labeling capacity… but the share of the total generated by wind has only increased slightly. So it certainly appears as if it is approaching a certain limit.

These facts taken together show that there is a limit, like Pollock’s limit, but in the case of Ireland, it is higher than the capacity factor.

To picture this in a different way, I looked at the annual rate of wind power as a percentage of the annual power factor. Here is that result (yellow line), along with theoretical calculations of what the result would be if the Pollock limit were 100% power factor (blue/black dashed line) and also the curve what could be the real limit (red/black line).

Figure 3. Ireland’s annual wind power share of total electricity generation as a percentage of annual wind power factor (“Limit pollock”)(in yellow), along with the theoretical Pollock (blue dashed) and the possible real world (red) Level.

In Figure 3, the curves show the situation when the ratio of total electricity production reaches some physical limit li, each addition of wind capacity will make less and less difference as it gradually increases. reach the limit.

So… is there any limit?

The Irish data strongly imply that such a limit exists. And at least in the case of Ireland, it is likely to be 22.5% above the current value above the Pollock limit. Is it at 40% above the Pollock limit as illustrated by the red speculative curve? Maybe. Maybe not.

The problem is that we don’t really have enough data to say for sure what limit is in place for Ireland, or even if it exists. What is shown in Figure 3 may be just a temporary slowdown… or not. A few more years will make things much clearer.

And that’s what I found out about the Pollock limit. I have absolutely no idea why Ireland is able to exceed the Pollock limit. The claim is that, without a grid-scale battery, the Pollock limit is a real physical limit equal to the power factor. But that is certainly not the case for Ireland. It was 22% higher than the power factor. Why? How?

The reason cannot be economics, because Christopher’s mathematical origins in his original post do not contain any terms related to economics. (Or alternatively, if economics is the reason, Christopher’s math must be incomplete.)

All thoughts on that question are considered, though perhaps unanswered. Too many drummers, too little time…

My sincerest thanks go to Christopher, Lord Monckton for highlighting Pollock’s most interesting theory.

w.

As always: When you comment please quote exactly the words you are referring to. I can defend my word. I cannot defend your (wrong) interpretation of my words. Thanks.

A note worth noting: I am an honest man. I do my best to speak the truth that I know and see. Yes, I was wrong, and more than once. And when I’m wrong, I admit it. Heck, I even have an article called “Wrong again“, and to wrap that up, another post titled “Wrong again, wrong again – who does it but a serious honest man?

But even though I’ve been wrong on matters big and small at times, wrong more times in my life than I’d like, I try my best to be honest so that I never lie, hide the truth, misrepresent the truth, or deceive people. People.

So I’m going to thank everyone to avoid accusing me of any wrongdoing, because that makes my blood angry. And if that happens, it could lead to my conjecture about the probable species and personal hygiene of some of your recent ancestors… and it would also involve a substantial opportunity to I politely invite you to engage in anatomically improbable acts of sexual self-satisfaction and self-congress…