wind and solar

Residents of Huron County, Living Near Wind Turbines, Must Read This!

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Patti Kellar, from Huron County, shares news about an investigation into health complaints, regarding the noise and vibrations from wind turbines.
Dear Members of the Community,
Your descriptions of the impact on your health and the loss of quality of life for you and your family from the wind turbine project have finally been heard.
Dr. Owen, the Medical Officer of Health for Huron County has authorized an investigation into determining if the source of the health concerns can be considered a health hazard.  Dr. Erica Clark, the Epidemiologist, is the person who will be organizing and conducting the survey to gather evidence, the first step in the investigation.  
Dr. Clark has described this investigation in the following way:
 “We’re treating it as a potential health hazard investigation… exactly as if it were a food disease outbreak or a cancer cluster” .
We can’t stress enough what a breakthrough this is for the Huron County Health Unit, the first one in Ontario, to pursue an investigation but it requires the involvement of all of you who have been impacted. 
If you or your family members are experiencing any of the impacts associated with the wind turbines, you are asked, even strongly encouraged, to register with the Huron County Health Unit. Information on how to do this is contained in the email below. 
Your personal experience of living with wind turbine noise, vibration, body sensations etc, needs to be collected in a systematic way. This systematic approach is the only way that a conclusion to this investigation can be called  “evidence based’ and thus the only way, based on this evidence for any action to be taken.
 Your contribution is vitally important.
There will be a commitment of time (the researcher recognizes the time must be short to accommodate people’s active lives) to record on a daily basis using a paper or online survey. So people who don’t choose computer access, may use the paper form.
To register at the Health Unit, the process is described below. Then, within our own community, we would arrange a meeting of registrants, sometime mid to later April, to discuss what will be involved and to clarify the process.
Providing a response to this email would let us know how to contact you when that meeting is arranged. 
We ask that you register with the Health Unit, as early as possible. The survey will not be launched until May but they need to register the participants to be ready for this time.
Our local meeting of participants will be after your registration, mid to later April and before May launch. Just to remind you that to know who to contact to let you know of date and place of the local meeting, you would need to reply to this email.
Be assured that your information is confidential within the health unit.
We recognize that this is a sensitive topic for our community. It will take courage and perseverance on your part to be involved but it is a means to take back your control over what is important to all of us, our health and the health of our families and friends. 
Thank you for your participation.
On behalf of the Group of Concerned Citizens in Huron County
Jeanne Melady
Gerry Ryan 
Following is the email from the Huron County Health Unit:
Thank you for your interest in the Huron County Health Unit wind turbine investigation.

 

Registration for the investigation will be available on the Huron County Health Unit website, www.huronhealthunit.ca.

 

We will not be contacting anyone about the investigation until after the online complaint tracking form is launched in May 2016.

 

Huron County residents who do not have internet access will be able to register for the paper version of the survey by calling the Huron County Health Unit at 519-482-3416.

 

Please note that only Huron County residents will be able to participate in the wind turbine investigation.

 

Thank you again for your interest in this survey.

 

Sincerely,

 

Angela Sturdy
Executive Assistant
Huron County Health Unit
77722B London Rd, RR #5
Clinton, ON  N0M 1L0
Toll-free 1.877.837.6143

Wind & Solar….Not More than “Novelty Energy”!

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Wind & Solar Power can NEVER Replace Conventional Power Generation

March 9, 2016 by

turbine collapse michigan3

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The death of the wind industry didn’t come about because BIG Coal felt ‘threatened‘ and set out in some kind of John Grisham conspiracy to wreck it by fair means or foul. No. What kills it is the fact that a growing band of ‘eco-travellers’ – of the kind who once placed their faith in the Wind Gods – have woken up to the scale and scope of the great wind power fraud.

For the climate change Chicken Littles, their quest to rid the planet of dreaded CO2 gas (query how plants and every other living thing survive without it?) has seen the more sensible of their number turn their backs on the wind; and to nuzzle up to nukes, instead.

Dr. Alan Carlin has, despite his background with America’s top environmental lobby, the Sierra Club, not only reached the obvious conclusion (viz, that wind power will never replace conventional generation sources), but has repeatedly determined to put pen to paper, to make sure his peers know all about it.

Alan received an undergraduate degree in physics from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. He then entered the PhD program in economics at MIT, with two summers spent at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, CA. His MIT major was in economic development; his thesis research was carried out in India under a Ford Foundation Foreign Area Fellowship. He then took a position as an economist at RAND, where he pursued primarily economic development and transportation economics.

In the mid-1960s he became active in the environmental movement as a result of his outdoor interests, and co-authored economic analyses of proposed dams proposed for the Grand Canyon in Arizona. The dams were turned down by the Federal Government in 1968 after a nationwide campaign by the Sierra Club and other environmental groups. In 1970 he was elected Chairman of the Angeles Chapter of the Sierra Club, then the Club’s second largest Chapter.

Soon after Richard Nixon created the US Environmental Protection Agency in late 1970, he followed his increasing environmental interest by taking a position as a manager in their new Office of Research and Development in Washington, DC, for multidisciplinary research on implementation of environmental pollution control. In the late 1970s he worked for about 7 years primarily as a physical scientist managing the development of criteria documents assessing pollutants for possible regulation by EPA. After Reagan institutionalized the economic analysis of Federal regulations in 1981, he transferred to the EPA Policy Office, where he was a senior analyst and economic research manager.

In the mid-2000s he realized that climate would become the major environmental issue of the decade, and undertook a voyage of personal discovery to understand the issue, including both its economic and scientific aspects. With the advent of the strongly environmentalist Obama Administration in 2009 he found himself at odds with EPA’s misguided attempts to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide, which led to considerable media attention and his retirement in early 2010.

He has authored or co-authored over 35 professional publications in his career to date, mostly in economics and energy/climate. Seventeen of these have been published in journals and 8 as part of books.

Now, here’s Alan’s message to the dwindling band of wind-cultists.

The Total Unreality of Substituting Wind and Solar for Fossil Fuel Electricity
Carlin Economics and Science
Alan Carlin
26 February 2016

One of the crucial unrealistic assumptions of the climate alarmist narrative is the belief that non-hydro renewable sources of energy can be easily substituted for fossil fuels for the generation of electricity.

Proponents pretend that this substitution is simple and mainly involves political will for governments to impose the changes, and occasionally that subsidies must also be provided to encourage it. But the technical problems are actually very daunting for extensive substitution as well as expensive.

As substitution increases, the technical problems become increasingly difficult and with attempted full substitution they become impossible except under special circumstances. This has not prevented advocates from pursuing their campaigns against the use of fossil fuel, nuclear, and hydro power at all levels of American government.

Electric Grids Must Balance Supply and Demand

Electricity grids collapse if supply does not exactly balance demand at all times. Using intermittent and largely unpredictable sources of supply such as wind and solar to meet demand is very difficult, particularly at a modest cost that users can afford.

Grid collapse can be monumentally expensive, as can arbitrary reductions in demand known as load shedding which force users to halt all electricity use, usually on an arbitrary rolling basis between various regional areas. Traffic lights, hospitals, and manufacturing cannot do their jobs without reliable, continuous electric power.

Solar and Wind Cannot Provide Power During Some Periods

There are periods when both solar and wind provide little or no useful electric power because the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. These periods can and have lasted for as much as a week in Germany.

Without other sources of supply the grid will collapse during these periods unless demand is arbitrarily reduced–even if the periods are only for a few minutes. Rapid response fossil fuel or hydro backup is required in order to meet demand during these periods.

Many regions have little hydroelectric capacity and the abundant water required to make it productive. In the US only the Pacific Northwest has abundant hydroelectric resources.

Attempts to build enough wind/solar capacity to meet demand during these periods is not practicable and would be extremely expensive if it were practical. During these periods of little sunlight and low wind, solar and wind will produce little power no matter how large or how numerous these facilities may be.

Meeting demand during such periods without huge load shedding would require building huge wind/solar capacity which would almost never be used in order to slightly reduce the chances of grid collapse. And even then full assurance would never actually be achieved because of the high probability that there will be periods when there will be very little or no wind and solar generation.

Alternatives Require Rapid Response Fossil Fuel or Abundant Hydro Capabilities

The alternative is to build and maintain enough fossil fuel capacity which must be in “spinning reserve” in order to respond instantly to fluctuations in demand and wind/solar supplies.

This effectively doubles the cost of supplying electricity since two generating and even transmission fleets must be built and maintained rather than only one–fossil fuel and nuclear generation–except where abundant hydro capacity is available.

In areas where abundant hydro capacity and water to power it are not available, the only way to solve this problem is to build very extensive pumped storage facilities to generate “artificial” hydro power. This is very expensive since power must be used to pump water uphill during off peak periods and the construction of artificial lakes that is often required at two different elevations is quite expensive and is usually opposed by environmental groups.

Adding unreliable, unpredictable electricity sources such as wind and solar will inevitably decrease system reliability–which means increased risks of system collapse with its monumental costs even if every practical safeguard is used.

These problems are not just theoretical. Germany and Great Britain have experienced them in recent years as their percentage of wind/solar has increased, and they have responded by increasing their investment in fossil fueled plants, just the opposite of what they have tried to do.

Like Germany and Great Britain, Denmark also has increasing electricity costs but has solved the wind/solar substitution problem by entering into very high cost arrangements with their Nordic neighbors to supply hydro power when needed.

Despite all these very real problems, the Climate-Industrial Complex (as explained in my book Environmentalism Gone Mad) continues to promote wind and solar, sometimes with the active support of some prominent politicians.
Carlin Economics and Science

Alan Carlin

Wind Energy will always be “Novelty Energy”.

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The Fantasy of Storing Wind Power: No Commercial System Exists & None is Likely

March 7, 2016 by

unicorn

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The wind industry is the perpetual infant of power generation: always looking for the subsidies to last that little bit longer; always promising to improve its performance; always claiming it will outdo hydro, coal and gas – provided, of course, that the subsidies keep flowing.

STT for one thinks the wind industry has had ample time to grow up and stand on its own two feet.

Like the brat that it is, the wind industry can’t be told what to do and, especially, won’t ever respond to demands from power users about when its product should be delivered.

output vs demand

It’s quite happy to produce plenty of power when it’s not needed at night time; and much less during the day, when it is (as seen in the graph above); and, often, none at all during periods of peak demand: as set out in dozens of our posts, including these:

The Wind Power Fraud (in pictures): Part 1 – the South Australian Wind Farm Fiasco

The Wind Power Fraud (in pictures): Part 2 – The Whole Eastern Grid Debacle

When challenged about its consistent failures to match output with demand, the wind industry and its parasites respond by mumbling about “battery technology improving”.

The pitch is that – one day “soon” – there will batteries big enough and cheap enough to allow huge volumes of wind power produced when it’s not needed, to be stored for the occasions when it is. That way, the “variable” output (as their spruikers put it) from wind farms could be delivered when there might just be a market for it.

As covered in yesterday’s post, Australia’s ‘wind power capital’, South Australia is being crippled by rocketing power prices – a 90% rise in power prices for businesses within 12 months, leaving prices in SA double those of Victoria, is fairly called ‘astronomic’ – rolling wind power blackouts and a grid on the brink of collapse.

Notwithstanding the urgency of the calamity, the limp, pipe-dream responses to its unfolding power supply crisis and market chaos are limited to “an unfunded proposal by [renewable power generator and retailer] AGL to build grid-scale battery storage, and a smart grid proposal from [wind and gas turbine maker] Siemens of Germany to store surplus renewable energy in hydrogen fuel cells”: thought bubbles like massive batteries and hydrogen production, storage and use have never been shown to technically feasible, let alone economic.

The wind industry’s pitch is, of course, made so the subsidies keep flowing to allow an endless sea of these things to be erected now – in order to take advantage of the (so far, elusive) storage technology that’s just over the “horizon”. Except that the “soon” is more like light-years and the “horizon” is a mirage.

Even if a technology was invented (STT likens it to the chances of finding a perpetual motion machine or alchemy turning lead into gold) to store large volumes of the electricity output (in bulk) from all of the wind farms connected to Australia’s Eastern Grid, say (with a notional capacity of 3,669 MW) – the economic cost would be astronomical – and readily eclipse the value of the power produced. Not that the wind industry has ever made any economic sense. We visited the topic a while ago:

The Economic Storage of Wind Power is a Pipe-Dream

And, with the wind industry’s PR spinners becoming more desperate and silly by the day – in a ‘we love kicking a mangy dog when it’s down’ kind of way, we thought it high time to revisit – and launch a final assault on – the wind-cults’ last redoubt.

Their pitch is that cost effective, ‘grid scale’ electricity storage will overcome the chaotic and occasional delivery of wind power, to have it stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the ‘big boys’ – coal, gas, hydro and nuclear.

Here’s a neat little wrap up by Engineer, John Curtis that puts the “we’ll fix it with batteries” line to bed once and for all.

An Engineer Speaks
Wind Farm Action
John Curtis
7 February 2016

A brief consideration of renewable energy production and storage.

As anybody who looks at current wind output figures will know, we are presently blessed with less than 0.2 Gigglewatts of wind power from the total UK wind fleet, the rated capacity of which is close to 8 Gigawatts. For the last 10 days, output has been under 1 Gigglewatt and this means that the actual wind power is probably negative because each machine requires around 200 kilowatts of power just for its life support systems.

It is often claimed that wind and solar will be valuable if only they can have effective storage systems. This set me thinking and I append below a summary of my current thoughts. I would be very pleased to have any comments that can make this case stronger.

Japan has decided to triple the amount of wind-generated power that it will install in future. Traditionally, Japan has relied mainly on nuclear and gas power for its electricity supplies but, post Fukushima, it is shutting down almost all of its nuclear facilities.

Whilst one may criticise the construction of nuclear power stations in a country that is famous for its earthquakes and tsunamis, the fact is that, unlike UK, that small country has very little natural energy reserves and was thus forced into their construction. However, even with this increase, the wind power generation will be under 0.3% of total power requirements.

With such a low penetration it is not to be expected that Japan will encounter the problems in other countries, such as UK and Europe, where high penetrations from wind and solar are causing very significant problems for distribution and in increasing costs.

The report by the Adam Smith Institute – “The Limits of Wind Power”, shows that any amount of wind penetration beyond 20% is prohibitively expensive and that the ‘sweet spot’ is between 10% and 15%. Beyond that point, the cost of having to have standby facilities on line and ready to carry full load becomes very high.

The problem with wind power and many other renewables is that they are inherently unstable and largely unpredictable and are thus quite unsuitable for any form of base load energy supply. Wind, in particular, is very variable and can change from high output to almost zero output and back again on a very short time scale, often on a basis of minutes.

If we are to avoid the very serious consequences of such variability then we must have either a constantly available back up from conventional power sources, or some form of energy storage that would provide a constant and smooth output from the original wind power generation.

In order to overcome the inherent generation instability of wind and some other renewables (such as solar) it is necessary to have the capacity to store energy on large scale for protracted supply times. This, so far, has proved to be either very difficult or very expensive.

There are many possible methods of energy storage, all of which require a change of state from, say, wind to electrical to another form of energy and then a return to electrical energy. Each change of state involves an unavoidable loss of efficiency in that it is impossible to get out all the energy that was originally developed. This is a basic fact of physics that we cannot overcome. All that we can do is to try to minimise losses, often at considerable expense for meagre gains.

In one sense, we all rely totally on energy storage. All our food is actually solar energy that is converted into chemical states in plants, which are then converted again by chemical changes into the energy that keeps us alive. Fossil fuels, biomass and wood are simply ancient solar energy that has been stored as coal and oil and from which the energy is again released chemically into other forms of energy.

However, the immediate problem is to find ways in which we can store electrical energy from renewables in such a way that it can later be released in a controlled manner that is convenient to us. Thereby hangs the problem, for which there are currently few solutions that are operable economically on the large scale that we need.

There are many types of energy storage available to us, of which the main ones are as follows: –

a. Pumped hydro.
b. Pumped air.
c. Chemical conversion.
d. Mechanical.
e. Thermal.

Pumped Hydro

Pumped Hydro is in practical use in many countries. It involves the use of cheap electrical power during off peak times to pump water from a low to a high level. The water can then be released as required to meet sudden peak demands and can respond very quickly. The higher you can raise the water, the less water you will need for a given power output. Therefore, countries such as Norway, which are very mountainous, can install such a system fairly easily.

In UK, we have limited ability to do this and have used most of the readily available sites already. Low lying countries have very little opportunity to do so because the system would require huge land areas to accommodate all the water.

The biggest pumped hydro installation in UK is Dinorwig, in Wales. However, the total installed pumped capacity is equal, to only 1.2 GigaWatt hours of electricity and can deliver approximately 500 Megawatts for 13 to 15 hours until it is exhausted. The total installed capacity of pumped hydro in UK would produce at this level for not more than 22 hours. This means that it is just not capable of covering the capacity shortfall when our UK wind fleet can be producing almost zero power for several days at a time.

We can also look at this system from the point of view of energy losses. Let us ignore any inefficiency from production of power from wind factories and just assume that our electricity is from conventional sources.

When we pump up water for energy storage we have electrical losses to drive the pumps, then there are pumping losses and to this we must add the pipeline energy losses. The end result is that the stored energy loss costs us about 20% to 25% of the input electricity.

When we release the water to generate power we have pipeline losses, water turbine losses and further electrical losses. These may easily be as much as 20% to 25% in total and possibly more at peak powers due to pipeline losses.

Overall, therefore, we would be fortunate to get back as much as 60% of the input power, and would probably not see more than 50%. This is OK as long as we use very cheap, off peak electrical power, but if it is to be supplied by wind turbines we would not have cheap power because of the various incentives that are applied to wind power generation.

One can conclude, therefore, that the use of pumped hydro is only useful in very specific instances for peak power coverage and that it is not suitable for the longer term smoothing that is needed for wind power. Furthermore, any significant extension of pumped hydro installations can only be done at the expense of damming and flooding high level mountain valleys. This may be a problem because people tend to live in valleys rather than mountaintops and there are few available unoccupied mountainous valleys.

Pumped air

This is a very common method of power storage and is widely used for driving pneumatic tools. It simply involves the use of a motor to drive a compressor that supplies compressed air to a reservoir. The compressed air can then be released to drive a suitable machine that may be used to drive a generator to produce electricity.

It is all known technology for which most of the sums have been done and experience gained. The problem is that it has many efficiency losses and is currently used only on small-scale applications where the advantages outweigh the disadvantages. There are very few larger scale systems in operation and these are only experimental at present. In order to operate in the huge scale needed to support renewable energy variability, we need to go very big indeed.

The basic problem of compressing the air is relatively easily solved and could well involve such means as serial axial flow compressors such as are used for pumping on gas pipelines. However, we need to have very big facilities to store the compressed air and to deal with the heat exchange problems when compressing the air and when expending it for power generation. Of these, the storage is the most demanding.

One solution that has been proposed is the use of what are basically very big inflatable balloons that would be moored offshore in very deep water. The compressed air would be supplied to them and then sent back as power is required. There are many problems here, not least of which is the idea of having very large numbers of these devices moored in deep water, together with connecting pipe work and subjected to tidal flows etc. Condensation would be a problem also. For the GigaWatt scales that are needed, this just does not seem to be a sensible solution.

In order to obtain the huge volumes that are needed for air storage we need to think of underground storage in old mine workings, disused salt mines, oil wells etc. This requires that there are sufficient huge underground storage facilities that are easily accessible and reasonably close to the point of use of the power.

Even if we can find suitable storage, we still have the problems of inefficiency in the process. Compressing air is far less efficient than increasing water pressure and the same applies to its expansion to produce power. Even if we ignore possible losses of air due to leakage, it is very doubtful if we could expect more than a 40% overall efficiency.

Chemical conversion

As has been previously said, we rely on chemical conversion for almost all of our energy. However, in this context, we are looking at using renewably generated electricity to cause a chemical change of state to store energy so that it can later be released.

First off are storage batteries, as used in cars, for example. There is a whole range of batteries now available, including some exotics such as LI-on types. All of them rely on a chemical change caused by the incoming electricity so that a reversal of the change will produce electricity.

The amount of storage capacity is a function of its construction and size and construction influences the discharge rate and hence the output capacity. Batteries use all sorts of special and possibly toxic materials and many of these materials cause great environmental problems during extraction. Battery malfunctions are not unknown (such as those currently affecting the LI-on batteries in the Boeing Dreamliner aircraft) and can cause serious fire and chemical risks. There is also the problem of limited life, as we all know from our cars.

There is, as yet, no battery system that can cope with long-term charge and discharge rates that are needed for the huge electrical loads that are required for back up to renewable generation. In any case, there are still the inefficiencies involved in taking a high voltage supply from the grid, reducing it to a lower DC voltage for the batteries and then reversing the process to give a mains output. Whilst this is common on small scales, it has yet to be shown to be viable on very large scales.

Another scheme that is being considered is to use surplus electricity to produce hydrogen by electrolysis. Quite easy, actually, and was a common experiment in my school days. Take water and a pair of electrical contacts in the water and, hey Presto, you get hydrogen and oxygen emitted. Collect the hydrogen and you have a good clean fuel ready to be stored for future use, either in cars or as a fuel for generators to resupply electricity. If the hydrogen is combined with CO2 we can get synthetic methane, another good fuel gas.

The big problems are of storage and efficiency. To be useful, hydrogen storage must be very large capacity, sufficient to run a generator for several days during lack of wind and/or solar power. That is a very big ask when we are dealing in Gigawatts and it has not been achieved so far. As for efficiency, we have to face the age-old problem that, whenever you do something, there is an energy loss. Each stage of producing hydrogen, compressing it, storing it and then releasing it for combustion will involve an energy loss so the end output will be considerably less than the energy input. The system would only be economical if the original input electricity is very cheap and even then, the output power will only be as clean as the source of the energy input.

There are several other possible chemical energy storage systems, but they all suffer from the same problem of storage capacity and process losses.

Mechanical storage

This simply means using various mechanisms to store energy for later release. It is actually quite common and in every day use.

For example, we can use a spring to store energy, as in a clock. Or we can use a weight, as in pendulum clocks. Very easy to use and understand, but quite incapable of storing large amounts of energy.

Another method could be to use a flywheel, which can absorb energy for later release. However, it is very unlikely that we can see any form of flywheel that can absorb the energy needed for compensation of power outages over days. Anybody who has seen an old internal combustion or steam engine running will have noted the huge flywheels that they need to keep a constant speed during power fluctuations for each stroke. These machines, big as they are physically, run only at kilowatt power levels. It us easy to see that a flywheel system to operate at GigaWatt levels for hours or days would have to be absolutely enormous. It is simply not feasible.

Thermal storage

This is a system that uses heat from a power source or direct from solar energy to heat a material so that the heat can be stored. The heat is then used to heat water to provide steam, which will then drive turbines to produce electricity.

The most famous of these systems is the Gemsolar Array in Andalucia, in Spain. This has an enormous array of steerable mirrors that focus solar energy on to a tower. The tower contains molten salts, which are heated and circulated to insulated storage vessels. The hot salts are used, via a heat exchanger, to produce steam, which then drives turbines that produce electrical power. The system has been operational and can produce up to 19.9 megawatts of electrical power. Because there is a large storage capacity of thermal salts, the system can continue operation even during the night, thus overcoming the most difficult problem of using solar energy.

It is theoretically possible to use wind-powered electricity to heat a salt in a similar manner and is not a huge technical problem (think of immersion heaters in hot water cylinders and kettles). However, the actual problems are very big indeed. The Gemsolar array can carry sufficient heat capacity to provide about 18 hours of electrical power before it literally runs out of steam. For any gigawatts scale system the heat storage would have to be enormous and would almost certainly involve substantial underground storage facilities.

Even if such storage were available, we would still have the ever-present losses to accommodate. Just consider this sequence of using a wind turbine to power a system using thermal storage.

Turbine > electricity > electrical converter > heat exchanger > thermal storage > pipelines > heat exchanger > steam generator > steam turbine > electrical generator > electrical grid.

Each (>) represents a stage at which energy will be lost through inefficiencies. If we assume no other losses and that each stage operates at something like 90% to 95% efficiency, which is high, it is easy to see that overall losses will be around 50% at best. This is hardly the basis for an efficient energy storage system and it could only be viable if the initial energy were to be very cheap, which is not the case with wind turbines in the present economic environment.

CONCLUSIONS

From the above it can be seen that there is currently no viable energy storage system that can allow us to use variable renewable energy sources to simulate base load electricity systems with controllable, economic, deliverable power over long periods of time.

The only possible exception is pumped power storage, as at Dinorwig, but this is limited in availability and would require huge extensions of land usage in order for it to be useful. It also requires that the initial supply of energy should be at a low, economic cost.

Absent any new developments of efficient and cheap energy storage, it seems to be impossible for us to have renewable and variable power sources as part of our energy grid at levels beyond, at maximum, 20% penetration. The idea, therefore, of having any country with 100% of its energy supplied from renewable sources, is not tenable.
Wind Farm Action

giant battery 2

Poor Planning, on the Part of Britain’s Energy “Experts”…

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Britain’s Wind Power ‘Leap of Faith’

March 2, 2016 by

leap of faith

The dimwits from DECCs, that coupled Britain’s energy future to wind power, are calling on Britons to trust them in an almighty ‘Leap of Faith’.

With aging, beyond their use by date, coal-fired power plants being closed this year, British power punters are being promised, by the very idiots that created the mess, that everything will be alright; that the wind will blow on cue; and that candles need only be kept for moments of pure romance.

For ‘believers’ it’s all a matter of digging deeper and matching their ‘faith’ with fat piles of cash: in other circumstances it might be called ‘tithe’, but for those in touch with reality and their wallets, it’s state-sponsored theft.

UK energy supply forecasts ‘into the red’ for first time next winter
The Telegraph
Emily Gosden
26 February 2016

Britain will be forced to rely on imports and costly emergency measures to prevent blackouts, official data suggests.

Britain’s energy supply forecasts have plunged “into the red” next winter for the first time on record, suggesting the country will be forced to rely on imports and costly emergency interventions to prevent blackouts.

Figures from National Grid show that on current plans there will not be enough power plants operating in the UK market to keep the lights on for most of December, January and February.

The supply gap has emerged because a series of old, polluting power stations have been shut down, while hardly any replacement plants are being built.

A separate, “last resort” reserve of back-up power plants is highly likely to be called upon to bolster supplies through much of the winter, adding tens of millions of pounds to consumer energy bills, experts have warned.

National Grid data displaying the surplus - or shortfall - in the UK energy market in megawatts for each week of the year, as of 26/02/2016.

National Grid confirmed that next winter is the first time since the published data system began in 2001 that it has not forecast a surplus margin of spare power plants in the UK market, and has instead forecast “negative margins”.

In mid-December and early January the figures show a shortfall of more than two gigawatts (GW) – roughly equivalent to the electricity needs of two million homes.

For those still inclined to ‘believe’ – no time like the present to stock up on candles, and not the holy sort.

Wind Turbines are Novelty Energy. NOT Fit for Prime Time!

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MIT Study Shows Wind Power Can NEVER Compete with Conventional Sources

March 1, 2016 by

mythbusters2

In their sillier moments, the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers pitch the line that their pointless product is not only getting cheaper all the time, but go so far as to claim that wind power is already cheaperthan gas and coal-fired power. Risible PR antics aside, the wind industry has always had a troubled relationship with the facts.

Now, coming to their aid in that regard is a study pulled together by the heavy-hitters hailing from the hallowed halls of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

When pressed on the facts, the wind-cultist resorts to personal attacks on their challenger’s academic cred. Up against the best and brightest that America has to offer, STT is not so sure that strategy will offer any hope to the wind industry’s already panicked spin kings in resisting the bleeding obvious.

MIT: Green Energy Can’t Work Unless You Tax Everything
The Daily Caller
Andrew Follett
25 February 2016

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have confirmed what many in the energy world already knew: Without government support or high taxes, green energy will never be able to compete with conventional, more reliable power plants.

The study, announced by MIT’s News Office Wednesday, determined that conventional energy would be consistently less expensive than green energy over the next 10 years. The study concludes that the government could make green energy competitive by offering enormous amounts of taxpayer support.

The study confirms that green energy can only work when energy prices are extremely high and require government support. Projections from the International Energy Agency estimate that developing wind and solar power enough to substantially impact global warming could cost up to $16.5 trillion by 2030.

“Windmills, solar panels, and ethanol could not compete with coal, natural gas, and oil without mandates and subsidies even when the price of the conventional fuels was relatively high,” Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “Now that prices for fossil fuels have plummeted, very little new renewable energy capacity will be installed unless the mandates and the subsidies are raised even higher.  The bankruptcy this week of Abengoa’s U. S. solar unit with up to $10 billion in debt is a sign of things to come.”

The MIT study also noted that solar and wind power are more than twice as expensive as natural gas, and tax on carbon dioxide emissions could increase electricity prices enough for green sources to compete. Even environmental groups such as The Sierra Club worry increasingly cheap energy will make the case for green power weaker.

“Wind and solar can’t compete with conventional sources on their own merits,” Chris Warren, a spokesperson for the Institute for Energy Research, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “That’s why the national environmental lobby and their allies are peddling the idea of a carbon tax. They want to punish the use of natural gas, oil and, coal to make their preferred sources appear more profitable. In practice, a carbon tax would have a devastating impact on American families already struggling in the Obama economy–hurting the poor and middle class the most.”

Critics have said carbon taxation disproportionately harms the poorest members of society. A 2009 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that a carbon tax would double the tax burden of the poorest households, making it effectively impossible to have both a carbon tax and a living wage. A tax on all man-made greenhouse gas emissions would make the tax burden of the poorest households three times greater than the richest households, according to the study.

Only four nations  — Ireland, Sweden, Chile, and Finland — actually have carbon taxation today. The largest economy to ever have a carbon tax, Australia, repealed it in 2014 over concerns it was harming the economy. No country taxes carbon dioxide emissions at the levels deemed necessary to substantially mitigate global warming by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“You often hear, when fossil fuel prices are going up, that if we just leave the market alone we’ll wean ourselves off fossil fuels,” Christopher Knittel, an MIT energy economist who co-authored the study, said in a press release. “But the message from the data is clear: That’s not going to happen any time soon.”

Innovative new drilling techniques such as hydraulic fracturing and horizontal drilling have made conventional energy cheaper and reduced dependence on foreign oil and natural gas. America surpassed Russia last year as the world’s largest and fastest-growing producer of oil and natural gas.

High prices aren’t green energy’s only issue. Green energy sources tend to be unreliable as the amount of electricity they generate cannot be predicted in advanced. The output of a wind or solar power plant is quite variable over time. The times when green energy sources generate the most electricity don’t coincide with the times when power is most needed. Peak power demand also occurs in the evenings, when solar power is going offline.

“Cheap gas is inimical to the green energy business (and all other competitors),” William Yeatman, an economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute, told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “But even if gas prices were through the roof, like in early 2008, intermittent wind and solar power still couldn’t compete without subsidies and mandates, for the simple reason that you can’t rely on them.”

Since the output of wind turbines or solar farms cannot be predicted with high accuracy, grid operators have to keep excess conventional reserves running just in case. Adding power plants that only provide power at intermittent and unpredictable times makes the power grid more fragile.
The Daily Caller

turbine collapse michigan3

Novelty Energy is Not Reducing CO2. No Bang for our Billions of Bucks!

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Why Squander $Billions on Wind Power? If CO2 is the Threat, Nukes is the Answer

February 26, 2016 by

 

How to squander ₤4 billion of other peoples’ money.

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If policy is driven by petulant, infantile ideology, instead of cool-headed economics, the result is, without exception, an unmitigated disaster. Here’s a nice little wrap-up based on the latter policy approach, that unpicks the falsehoods of the former.

(Guaranteed) power to the people
Scientific Alliance
12 February 2016

This week saw the opening of a massive energy project centred on Shetland. A consortium led by the French energy company Total has invested £3.5bn in extracting gas from deep undersea over 100 km west of the islands, receiving it onshore at a new complex adjacent to the existing Sullom Voe oil terminal, and then feeding it into the UK mainland gas grid. According to the report “the Shetland Gas Plant is said by its operator Total to be capable of supplying energy to two million homes”(Total turns on gas from west of Shetland Laggan and Tormore fields).

By coincidence, an article last week reported that Hornsea takes the world lead in offshore wind. Hornsea is a project which has two things in common with the Shetland gas terminal: it is offshore (120 kilometres off Yorkshire) and big (with a peak capacity of 1.2 gigawatts, nearly twice the size as the London Array, currently the world’s largest such installation). The big difference, though, is that gas supplies are guaranteed, barring a system failure, while the output of any wind farm varies uncontrollably.

The ‘peak capacity’ quoted for Hornsea would give a theoretical energy output of nearly 10.5 terrawatt-hours. If we take 80% as the actual capacity factor, comparable to an efficient conventional station, this would generate sufficient electricity to power about half a million homes (using the 2011 ONS figure of 16 MWh for total annual household consumption of energy as electricity and gas), if it was available on demand. But in reality, the capacity factor would be half that, so the figure for homes supplied would come down to 250,000.

For more background information, it’s interesting to look at the London Array, as the Engineer journal did in 2013 (Your questions answered: the London Array). This wind farm occupies 100 square kilometres in the Thames estuary. The current 630MW peak output arrangement was intended to be added to in a second phase, but this has now been dropped because of concerns about the impact on overwintering Red Throated Divers.

In response to a question about expected output, the engineering team answered “We expect a load factor of c.40%, giving output of c.2,200,000MWh – enough to meet the electricity needs of around 500,000 households.” On that basis, we can expect the claim for the planned Hornsea project to be for a million homes to be supplied with electricity. However, if we take overall household energy consumption, the output of this giant wind farm will supply only a quarter of that number over a year.

The important point is that this quarter of a million is simply the expected output of the wind array divided by the average household energy consumption. It should not be confused with a real figure; it is by no means a guarantee that this number of houses could be supplied with energy at any one time.

To continue the comparison, Hornsea is said to cover an area more than five times the size of Hull, which would make it at least 350 km2. The developers will not reveal the cost, but the London Array cost £1.9bn, so let’s assume around £4bn. The Shetland gas terminal, on the other hand, is reported to be part of an overall £3.5bn investment by Total and its partners and the biggest construction project in the UK since the London Olympics. However, it has a footprint of only about half a square kilometre (this and other facts from Building the Shetland Gas Plant on the Petrofac website).

Gas will, of course, be sold at market prices, although in practice often on long-term contract. Some will go directly to homes and commercial premises for heating, and some to power stations, which will provide electricity also at market prices. On the other hand, we read that World’s biggest offshore wind farm to add £4.2 billion to energy bills.

Under a contract agreed in 2014 with Ed Davey, Energy Secretary in the then coalition government, electricity from Hornsea will cost £140/MWh – four times the current market price – for a guaranteed 15 year period. It is estimated that this will cost domestic and commercial consumers £4.2bn in total, or an average of £280 million each year.

The National Audit Office was critical of the deal, and with good cause. In 2015, a competition for available subsidies for existing wind farms resulted in prices as low as £115/MWh being agreed. By way of comparison, the troubled Hinkley C nuclear project would attract a price of £92.50/MWh, which has been widely condemned as being unnecessarily expensive. Against the price for offshore wind, it begins to look like a real bargain.

So, what we have in the case of Laggan/Tormore and Hornsea can be summed up as follows. One is a plant with capital costs of £3.5bn, which should not increase energy bills (and may help to keep them down) and will not cost taxpayers anything over its lifetime, capable of supplying the entire energy needs of two million homes reliably (that’s 8% of national energy demand).

The other has much the same capital costs and will add an estimated £4.2bn to energy costs over 15 years (and more if it lasts longer). On a straight comparative basis, it is theoretically capable of supplying the energy needs of a quarter of a million houses, or about 1% of total UK energy use. Not factored into this are the additional costs of accommodating the fluctuating output into the grid and the need to have conventional backup to maintain a stable supply.

The simple question to ask is why a government would support a project with at best one-eighth of the output of Laggan/Tormore and costing the country at least twice as much over its (almost certainly shorter) lifetime? The answer would of course be to meet emissions reduction targets. But there is a much more reliable way of doing that, which is to build nuclear stations.

The fact that we are still so far from doing this is down to problems with finance and lengthy design approval as well as the arbitrary inclusion of targets for renewable energy to emissions reduction goals. To have a secure, affordable, low carbon energy system, we need more nuclear and gas use rather than more massive wind farms. Unfortunately, in the case of offshore wind, it seems to be a question of out of sight, out of mind, at least until the bills start ratcheting up.
Scientific Alliance

Australia’s Federal Government is, under its Large-Scale RET, set up torob power consumers of $45 billion, designed to be thrown at wind power outfits; the ‘bottom line’ of which will be laid out a decade or so from now, as thousands of these things rusting in some dimwit’s top paddock, the end of energy hungry businesses – like mineral processors – and thousands of households rubbing along with candles and kero fridges.

If a fraction of that colossal sum was directed to a couple of nuclear plants  – starting now – Australia could avoid an unmitigated energy disaster, retain a manufacturing industry, keep mineral processors operating on Australian soil; and see future generations able to enjoy lasting employment, not least in the high-end work that comes with nuclear power generation.

As an added bonus, there would still be more than $25 billion of REC Tax/Subsidy leftover in change – who know’s Greg Hunt, Patrick Gibbons & Co might even stick it in an envelope marked ‘Return to Sender’?

Oh, and if CO2 gas is really the serious threat that we’re constantly harangued about, then those plants ought to satisfy the global warming catastrophists, too.

After cold beer (with a lasting job to generate the thirst for it), hot showers and, instead of random wind power blackouts, 24 x 365 reliable power – that’s affordable and satisfies the CAGW crowd? Then it’s nukes or nothing.

nuclear-power-a

One Billion Dollars to “Fix” Mistakes that Should NOT Have Been Made!

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‘Saving’ South Australia from its Self-Inflicted Wind Power Disaster Needs $1 Billion Right NOW!

February 21, 2016 by

head slap

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Wind and solar create headaches for energy market operator
Australian Financial Review
Mark Ludlow
19 February 2016

State governments may have to spend billions of dollars to duplicate the electricity network to cope with the unreliability of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar, according to the national energy forecaster.

As the Australian Energy Market Operator released a report [press release here and the full report here: Joint AEMO ElectraNet Report_19 February 2016] that found there could be reliability issues for the South Australian market, which has embraced renewable technology, its chief executive, Matt Zema, said the rise of wind and solar could also create problems throughout the country.

“It is becoming more and more of a challenge. We might need to build another interconnector to the South Australian market to improve reliability and in the longer term another bigger loop across the nation to be a back-up,” Mr Zema told The Australian Financial Review.

Electricity prices spiked in South Australia late last year after problems with the Heywood interconnector to Victoria, effectively cutting off South Australia from the NEM. South Australia did not have enough of its own locally generated power to cope with demand, which significantly pushed up prices.

A joint report between AEMO and South Australia’s electricity transmission company Electranet found there will be ongoing issues with controlling reliability in the state’s power network either during or following any future loss of the Heywood interconnector and the closure of coal-fired power stations.

Interconnectors are high-voltage transmission cables connecting electricity markets.

“Measures can be taken in the short term to address some of the immediate operational effects, but as the power system continues to evolve, in the longer term there could be an increasing need for changes to market arrangements or infrastructure to continue to meet security and reliability expectations, particularly at times when SA is synchronously islanded [separated] from the remainder of the NEM,” the report found.

AEMO is conducting further studies to maintain power system security in South Australia if it becomes isolated from the NEM.

Grappling with implications

Mr Zema said state governments were still grappling with the implications of moving away from the more reliable coal and gas-fired generation. He said they may have toINVEST billions of dollars in a back-up “loop” of interconnectors to ensure there are not reliability issues which could lead to blackouts.

“South Australia is at the front end of this [renewable] curve, Tasmania is not far behind as they are finding out with Basslink connection to the mainland,” Mr Zema said.

“If you build another interconnector to Victoria you may well extend it from Victoria to NSW.”

A new interconnector between South Australia and Victoria which would cost about $1 billion.

Mr Zema said the only alternative to building back-up interconnectors or more gas-fired power stations to cover for wind and solar – when the sun isn’t shining or the wind is not blowing – would be to dismantle the NEM.

“You either strengthenTHE GRID and have more reliability and more paths or you break it up and its gets smaller and smaller and each state becomes an island,” he said.

“You either become better connected toTHE GRID or you become your own grid which would result in huge price fluctuations.”

South Australia is leading the charge towards renewable energy, especially with the closure of coal-fired power stations, including Alinta Energy’s coal-fired power stations at Port Augusta.

South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill last year said the price fluctuations would not last and the state would benefit from leading the adoption of wind and solar power.

The precarious nature of the electricity network was further demonstrated by Tasmania also being isolated due to problems with the Bass Strait undersea power cable.

Victoria’s energy market could also be facing an overhaul with Alcoa’s Portland smelter – a large energy users – close to closure. It is negotiating with AEMO about an energy subsidy for its poles and wires.
Australian Financial Review

jay weatherill

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SA’s vapid Premier – a former worker’s compensation solicitor – wouldn’t be STT’s first pick when it came to sorting out a power market in absolute crisis and a grid on the brink of total collapse. His ‘belief’ that betting his beleaguered State’s failing ‘fortunes’ on more of the same smacks of child-like delusion, but, given more sensible (but costly) moves made recently (albeit under pressure) politically driven deception.

Contrary to Jay’s let’s all ‘hold-hands-around-a-turbine’ chanting Kumbaya – and Matt Zema’s line about “moving away from the more reliable coal and gas-fired generation” – SA’s Labor government has just signed their constituents up to throw $50 million a year in subsidies at the French owner of a mothballed CCGT plant at Pelican Point.

That panicked move is all about ensuring something like a reliable power flow (for the time being); and, at the political triage level, is an attempt to avoid any more ‘unhelpful’ wind power blackouts: like the one that plunged almost the entire State into Stone Age darkness last November; and that has businesses, like Uni SA coping with power supply ‘interruptions’ and total blackouts on a regular basis.

email ML

Once upon a time, thanks to the pragmatic vision of its longest-ever-serving Premier, Sir Tom Playford, South Australians enjoyed both energy autonomy and the cheapest and most reliable power in the Country – if not the world; and, with it, unparalleled growth in population, employment and incomes. Now, the reverse is true on all counts.

Always the mendicant State, SA’s Labor government – having willingly signed up to an economic suicide pact – will do what it does best: beg like fury for the Federal Government to bail it out, which means its neighbours will end up footing the bill for the most ridiculous power ‘policy’ ever devised.

tom playford-anzac-parade

Wind Contracts….Dancing with the Devil!

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The Anatomy of a Wind Farm Contract – Part 2

Posted on February 15, 2016by

noisy turbines

 

In my previous blog I explained how a typical wind farm contract consists of two divisible parts, an Option and a Lease. When looking at an Option, I came to the inescapable conclusion that by selling the wind farm developer an Option, the landowner essentially gave up any control over his own land for extended (potentially endless) periods, in return for often trifling sums of money.

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In this blog I want to start looking at the second part of the contract – the Lease. This part forms the majority of the contract document, and we may need more than one blog to cover it all.

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These contracts are about money, and clearly we need to know just how much a landowner can make, how quickly he or she can make it, and whether on a purely monetary basis it is a worthwhile exercise for a landowner to consider.

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So let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. Once the wind farm is up and generating, what sort of money can a landowner make? Remember that as this is now a lease; the landowner is now the “Landlord”, and the wind farm developer is now the “Tenant”:

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“… the Tenant from the Commencement Date for the Term YIELDING AND PAYING therefore to the Landlord during the first ten years of the Term the Rent of three per cent (3.0 %) of the Gross Operating Proceeds per annum and after the first ten years the Rent of three and a half per cent (3.5%) of the Gross Operating Proceeds subject to the provisions for review as hereinafter contained or €5,000.00 per Megawatt of capacityINSTALLED on the Premises or proportionately in respect of any part of a Megawatt of capacity so installed whichever of (i) or (ii) shall be the higher;

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The first thing to realise is that the payments made by the developer (the Tenant) to the landowner (the Landlord) are now called ‘Rent’. As the term of contract in my contract is 25 years, what the landowner receives in cold cash is three percent of the Gross Operating Proceeds for ten years, and thereafter three-and-a-half percent of the Gross Operating Proceeds for fifteen years. However, 25 years is actually one of the shorter periods you will find on one of these contracts, so look very carefully at the definition of “Operating Period” when faced with one of these contracts.

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The first question obviously is: what is meant by ‘Gross Operating Proceeds’? Well, I am not a bookkeeper but I do remember my lessons which told me that “Gross” means all your money as you make it, whilst “Nett” means the money you have left after you have paid what you owe (your “take home”).
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Wind developers clearly speak a different language compared with the rest of us. Their definition of “Gross Operating Proceeds” is this:

“x-y:
Where x = the gross receipts (excluding VAT or any substituted or similar tax) from electricity sold by the Tenant and generated by the Wind Turbine(s) on the Premises excluding any together with the receipts if any that may arise from the sale of green credits or other similar environmental scheme and;
y = such costs as the Tenant may have to pay in respect of the electricity generated by the Wind Turbine(s) on the Premises but limited to (i) the costs and charges to join and remain a member of the Pooling and Settlement System, if any and; (ii) any non-capital costs or charges associated with the purchase from the Electricity Supply Board or any third party purchaser of electricity for the provision of auxiliary power to the Accommodation Works or the Wind Turbine(s) as certified from time to time by the Auditors Certificate and; (iii) any transmission, metering or distribution costs.”

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Now that is a different meaning to the “gross” as ordinary people understand it.

“Gross = x-y”.     What?

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And then when looking at “x”, which is the amount of the so-called “gross receipts”, that is the money received by the developer for electricity actually sold by the developer. If the developer does not sell any electricity, or is forced to dump electricity, that means there is no receipt. And even these ‘receipts’ have deductions made from them, namely tax, green credits, and subsidy payments.

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And once we reach the nett value of the “gross receipts”, we now have to subtract “y” from those. The value of “y” is essentially all and any operating costs, including the IWEA membership fees, and the cost of electricity to run the back-up power when the wind turbines are not generating their own electricity, which in winter is most of the time as the wind blows too hard and the turbines are shut down, whilst in summer there is little wind.

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As there is no electricity sold, the landowner loses out. Of course, the developer does not lose out, as it is getting the subsidies (money paid by electricity customers in the form of the PSO Levy) and curtailment payments (money paid to the developer by the taxpayer for not generating). However, as these payments are not for electricity sold, the developer does not have to share that with the landowner. No wonder IWEA are always asking for increased subsidies, and no wonder, in countries other than Ireland, when the subsidies have been withdrawn, the “green” developers have vanished into thin air.

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Wow! Is there anything left of this “gross” after that? And the landowner gets a measly 3% for the first ten years, at which stage the turbines are probably burnt out and need to be replaced (given what we now know about the life cycle of these giant turbines – you are lucky if you get ten years out of them – more likely three to six years), which in turn means massive operating costs = more money taken off the so-called “gross” amount.

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I would guess that because of this creative bookkeeping, most landowners will be plumping for the €5000.00 per MWINSTALLED option.

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Interestingly enough, the word INSTALLED” is not defined in the contract. If something is not specifically defined in a contract, it is given its ordinary meaning. I would suggest thatINSTALLED means up and running and connected to the grid (as opposed to ‘erected’), which might mean more delays before the landowner actually sees some of that cold hard cash.

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“… and where no turbines are installed on the Premises the following payments will be made:
10,000EURO per annum for a site sub-station and ancillary equipment;
5,000EURO per annum for a Grant of Deed of Right of Way and Wayleave;
2,500EURO per annum for a consent to erect turbines on neighbouring premises and where such consent is needed because of reduced distance to neighbouring boundaries only;
all of which payments shall be exclusive of any Value Added Tax which may from time to time be properly chargeable and charged thereon by the Landlord clear of all deductions save those required by law.”

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This clause confused me. If these payment options do apply to the landowner that is actually hosting the wind farm, one would think that the host-landowner wouldMAKE MORE MONEY by not having the turbines built, as the Gross Operating Proceeds don’t seem to be enough to feed the dog, let alone make a nice living without all the hard work that constitutes farming (assuming that most landowners that host wind farms will be farmers or at least owners of rural land / farm land).

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However, It is doubtful that the wind developer is going to enter into the Lease before the wind farm is up and running – that is what the Option is for, and the developer will rather pay you your tenEURO (a year, hopefully) for the Option for as long as the developer can stretch that Option out.

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One would imagine that the developer will only enter into the Lease with the landowner who is accommodating the actual wind farm when the wind farm is definitely going up, and the Option is exhausted. Otherwise the landowner will be strung along, essentially at the mercy of the developer.

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I am therefore guessing that these other forms of payment are for landowners with land adjoining the wind farm premises. This might be the landowner hosting the wind farm, where their land is big enough to also take a sub-station, or where the wind farm is situated in the middle of the property, in which case a right of way might be necessary. I am guessing that this contract is a ‘one-size-fits-all’, and can accommodate those landowners who agree to have a wind farm built on their land, but can also be used to bind those landowners that own land adjoining the host property, assuming that they are willing to contract. Of course they might have no choice if their opposition to planning permission was fruitless, and the wind farm is now destroying their health and their livelihood. These secondary payments will only need to occur once the wind farm is built and operating, and not before.

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€2500.00 per year as compensation for being driven crazy by the noise and flicker from the neighbouring wind farm? Count me out.

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print money

The final sting in the tail concerning payment?

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Well, going back to the assumption that theVAST majority of landowners that host wind farms will be farmers or owners of agricultural land, there is the issue of the effect on the zoning of that land.

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After waiting for ten years, the Option is exhausted and the farmer is now looking to cash in on these larger payments of €5000.00 perINSTALLED MW.

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Firstly, these payments are fully taxable as rental income, which cannot be set off against ordinary agricultural costs.

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Secondly, there is the question of agricultural land tax-reliefs. Some lease agreements do say that the wind-farm company will compensate farmers for the loss of certain farm reliefs. These are usually written in such a way that they cover the farm reliefs that exist at the time of signing. They do not cover subsequent or amended farm reliefs that may be introduced in the future. Again, when we consider that I have seen wind farm lease agreements lasting 60 years, many farmers that have entered into these agreements with wind developers must now accept that the loss of future farm reliefs and payments, coupled with the fully taxable nature of the wind-farm payments that they will receive, will mean that they will be in a financially worse position than they are at the moment. Many struggling farmers grabbed the wind farm option with both hands (encouraged all the way by the IFA). Some of these stories might have very sad endings.

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Thirdly, Revenue has made it clear that farmers may no longer qualify for the significant agricultural tax-relief on their lands should they wish to transfer their lands by gift or inheritance. A wind farm turns your land into an industrial site, which means that you are no longer a ‘farmer’ as defined byTAX LAW, and your lands may fail to satisfy the definition of ‘agricultural land’ under the capital acquisitions tax legislation.

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While you might getTAX RELIEF as a business, this is a more restricted capital acquisitions tax relief, as the family home does not qualify for business relief. When we consider that most farms and homes are passed through generations of farming families, using the vehicle of the substantial agricultural reliefs available, farmers face a scary future prospect of not being able to afford to remain on their farms if these taxation reliefs are jeopardised. That means that unless the wind developer is paying you more money than you were getting when you qualified for all the agricultural tax relief that is currently available, you are making a nett loss. When the wind farm leaves, it will be a long time before you can have your land rezoned as agricultural land so as to restore those tax reliefs.

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It is for that reason that I would plead with farmers to obtain good and sound legal advice before entering into one of these wind farm contracts.

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All that glitters is most definitely not gold.

Novelty Energy, Like Wind & Solar, will NOT Keep the Lights ON!

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India’s Quest for ‘24/7 Reliable Power’ Means Munching More Coal, Not Praying for the Wind to Blow

February 13, 2016 by

poverty india

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Among the selfish conceits peddled by the wind industry, its parasites and spruikers is the notion that a wholly weather dependent power source – which is 4 times the cost of coal-fired power and which will always require 100% of its capacity to be backed up, 100% of the time by conventional generation sources – represents the ‘salvation’ of nations like India, where some 250 million people have no power at all; and, accordingly, live in Stone Age poverty, cooking on twigs and dung and otherwise living a life of misery.

The pontificators that assembled in Paris, and sought to impose what Indians quite rightly regard as “fake electricity”, couldn’t care less about the world’s huddled masses and are, instead, happy to destine them to a world of eternal darkness and poverty. However, thankfully, India’s Power Minister, Piyush Goyal has other ideas.

India’s challenge is 24/7 electricity for all
The Australian
Greg Sheridan
13 February 2016

Piyush Goyal is a name you haven’t heard. But this week he has made one of the most important interventions of any foreign politician in an Australian political debate.

He is India’s Minister for Power, Coal and Renewable Energy. He is a big success politically and in line for more promotion.

I’ll give you his direct quotes in a moment. But let’s cut to the chase. Here are the important things he said in a lengthy interview with The Australian.

India will increase coal imports from Australia. Quite independently from that, if the Adani mine in Queensland goes ahead it is an integrated project and will be its own main customer, so India’s efforts to increase its coal production would not reduce the viability of the Adani project.

India is passionately committed to caring for the environment but also to economic development. That means a huge increase in coal-fired power stations as well as coal’s role in making steel.

The Indian government wants 24/7 reliable energy for all its people. Some 300 million Indians will move from rural to urban living in the next couple of decades. They will be on proper power grids. India’s baseload power will be provided by coal.

India will expand its renewable energy sector but, as the minister says, renewables have never provided baseload power for anyone.

India also will expand nuclear power and keep its gas power stations at roughly their current level.

The massive urbanisation in India means a surging demand for steel. Goyal says coking coal exports from Australia will increase particularly strongly. (Thermal coal goes to power stations, coking coal makes steel). Already nearly a third of India’s coal imports are coking coal.

Goyal’s remarks could not be more clear. Every Greens spokesman and climate-change jihadist who argues on the ABC that India is turning away from coal is inverting reality. Far from coal being a “dying industry”, as Geoff Cousins argued in a ludicrous article, the International Energy Agency forecasts Indian coal imports more than doubling by 2040.

Goyal does want to crank up India’s domestic production of coal but its coastal power stations are geared to take imported coal and that will continue, he tells me.

Now, dear reader, if you ever again hear anyone on the ABC claim that India is moving away from coal, or that Australian coal is not essential to get hundreds of millions of Indians out of poverty, you will know they are talking pure moonshine.

No one more consistently misrepresents what is happening all over Asia than the green lobby. The general ignorance of Asia among journalists allows these claims to be aired uncritically, especially on the ABC.

So let’s take up the Indian story in Goyal’s own words: “The first challenge of our government is to make sure that all Indians get 24/7 reliable power. We will expand the total energy output significantly.

“We are a very environmentally friendly country. We have been for generations. India is one country that has respected and even worshipped nature. So we will give renewed thrust to our renewable energy program. We are scaling it up massively, from 34 giga­watts to 175GW over the next six years. This is the world’s largest renewable energy rollout in the history of mankind.”

It is statements like this that green propagandists sometimes misuse to pretend renewable will replace coal in India. Nothing could be less true.

Gas power, Goyal says, will remain roughly where it is. But: “We will be expanding our coal-based thermal power. That is our baseload power. All renewables are intermittent. Renewables have not provided baseload power for anyone in the world.

“After all, solar works when the sun is shining, wind works when the wind is blowing, hydro works when there is water in the rivers. You must have coal.” Goyal says India will expand its nuclear power but this is a slow process and although nuclear will increase in absolute terms and as a percentage of India’s power overall, he continually comes back to the expansion of coal and its irreducible part in development.

“India does have certain development imperatives which we expect the world to accept. All ourINVESTMENT in coal is either supercritical power stations or ultra-super critical.” These produce about half the greenhouse emissions per unit of power as do older coal-fired power stations.

He refuses to accept lecturing from the West on India’s environmental responsibilities: “The people of India want a certain way of life. They want jobs for their children, schools and colleges, hospitals with uninterrupted power. This needs a very large amount of baseload power and this can only come from coal.

“I do wish people would reflect on the justice of the situation. Europe and America and Australia have messed up the world and the planet, and they’re saying to us, we’re sorry but you Indians can only have power for eight hours a day. The rest of the time you must live in darkness.

“We are fortunate that countries like Australia and Canada enter into serious agreements and we can rely on an uninterrupted flow of fuel.”

India is the fastest growing substantial economy, with a growth rate above 7 per cent in an anaemic global economy. This growth will be central to global economics. Goyal believes India will hit double-digit growth next year or the year after and stay there for a decade. If he is right, the development, and the economic opportunity this offers for Australia, is enormous, beyond anything that has yet entered the Australian imagination.

He says: “In the next couple of decades, imagine 300 million people moving from rural to urban centres. As we improve productivity in agriculture, the population will shift to manufacturing and services. Energy consumption will go up in agriculture itself with greater use of technology. There will be increased energy use in infrastructure. The government wants decent homes for every Indian by 2022; that means millions of homes will be built.” He points out that India’s per capita energy consumption is still below that of the US in the middle of the 19th century and says it will increase for decades.

India will not commit to a year when its greenhouse emissions will peak. This is “immaterial”, he says. On China’s commitment to such a year, his polite scepticism is robust: “We’ve all seen the reliability of that data. It’s up to you to judge what is optical and what is real.”

He is pro-Australian and wants the warmest relationship, but is utterly unimpressed with lectures from Australians about global warming: “Australia’s power consumption is coming down now anyway. Its economy is not growing, manufacturing is moving overseas, your economy is moving to services. You have jobs for everyone and a society satiated with energy. It’s easy for you to nominate a peak year. We have 250 million Indians without energy now. We have years and decades of growth ahead.”

Every word he says is true. It would be good if Australians listened.
The Australian

piyush goyal

The Wind Turbine Disaster in South Australia…

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Wind Power Disaster: South Australians Grapple with Rocketing Power Prices, an Unstable Grid & Rolling Blackouts

February 9, 2016 by

koutsantonis

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In Australia’s wind farm capital, South Australia the terms ‘chaos’ and ‘crisis’ are used to describe the aftermath of an energy policy ‘designed’ on desktops by dimwits, who haven’t got the faintest clue about how power generation works (or much else, for that matter).

Wind power collapses and blackouts are now part of South Australian life: Wind Industry’s Armageddon: Wind Farm Output Collapse Leaves 110,000 South Australian Homes & Businesses Powerless

The Genesis of the wind power debacle was pretty well captured by Leo Smith in our recent post – Why Weather Dependent, Intermittent & Unreliable Wind Power is as ‘Useful as a Chocolate Teapot’ – and summed up as follows:

There is, above all, one salient feature that emerges across the board. Sanity and rationalism have been cast aside, and the whole arena is now a political and ideological battleground whose main protagonists understand little or nothing about the industry they seek to bend to suit their ideological (and possibly commercial) needs.

In short the world is full of people who have an opinion about power generation, who understand nothing about how it actually works or even what actually works. …

Rational scientific analysis shows conclusively that renewable energy cannot ever deliver on the very basis that it has been sold to the public. It’s not cheap, it’s anything but free, it’s not environmentally desirable, it offers no energy security, and it cannot exist in isolation from other technologies that are either even more costly than it itself is or have grave risks associated with them.

What we find when we analyse the intermittency problem, is that intermittent non-dispatchable power actually carries very little value at all. What society requires, is dispatchable power – power that can be on tap when it’s required, and turned off when it’s not, and it requires in addition a large component of cheap baseload power, that never needs to be turned off. What it does not require is wilful power that’s here today and gone tomorrow.

Just like SA’s 17 wind farms’ ‘efforts’ during May 2015:

May 2015 SA

And it’s the erratic delivery of ludicrously expensive wind power ($110 per MWh versus $40 per MWh for the reliable stuff) – and the insane cost of paying operators of highly inefficient Open Cycle Gas Turbines that their owners refuse to fire up until the spot price rockets to over $2,000 per MWh, when the wind drops – that has journos using ‘chaos’ to describe SA’s power market and ‘crisis’ to describe the economic aftermath meted out on struggling business, like Nyrstar’s Port Pirie Smelter.

The thing that kills the wind industry is the cost of attempting to integrate a wholly weather dependent power source (abandoned in the 19th Century, for obvious reasons) into a modern power system – where that cost, as it manifests in ever-rocketing power prices, simply can’t be hidden from the voting public.

Here’s another take on the South Australian wind power debacle from Richard Blandy (Adjunct Professor of Economics in the School of Management at the University of South Australia Business School) who – unlike the hacks at Adelaide’s The Advertiser – has a very solid head for numbers, due his background in that dismal science.

Oh, and to help illustrate Richard’s piece we’ve added a few pics courtesy of the boys over at Aneroid Energy – showing the output from SA’s 17 wind farms (with a notional capacity of 1,477MW) on the occasions referred to.

Crunching the numbers on SA’s high electricity prices
InDaily
Richard Blandy
19 January 2016

South Australia has set its energy sights on a renewable future but, asks Richard Blandy, at what cost?

On Christmas Day, according to the average price tables published by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), the Regional Reference Price (average spot price) for a megawatt hour of electricity in South Australia was $91.67.

SA 25 Dec 15

The corresponding prices in New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland were $37.33, $20.38 and $36.20.

SA DEC 15

The average daily spot price for a megawatt hour of electricity in December 2015 was $62.19 in South Australia, $43.37 in New South Wales, $46.84 in Victoria and $42.08 in Queensland.

SA 17 Dec 15

On December 17, the average spot price for a megawatt hour of electricity in South Australia was $259.59, while on December 26 it was only $5.06.

SA 26 Dec 15

It is clear that South Australia has the most expensive and most variable power on the eastern states grid.

The reason for the high (and extremely variable) price of electricity in South Australia is our very high dependence on solar and wind generation compared with the other states.

This results from the rapid expansion of renewable energy generation in South Australia.

According to a Deloitte Access Economics study recently released by the Energy Supply Association of Australia, South Australia’s solar and wind generation capacity per head of population is already more than three times that of any other state or territory.

A new Climate Change Strategy for South Australia was released by Premier Jay Weatherill and Minister for Climate Change, Ian Hunter, on November 29. The strategy was conveniently (if implausibly) rebadged as an economic development initiative.

In it they said to realise the benefits, we need to be bold. That is why we have said that by 2050 our state will have net zero emissions. We want to send a clear signal to businesses around the world: if you want to innovate, if you want to perfect low carbon technologies necessary to halt global warming – come to South Australia.

South Australia can be a low carbon electricity powerhouse. We have the ability to produce almost all of our energy from clean and renewable sources and export this energy to the rest of Australia.

But people want electricity to be available when they want it, and for it to stay on, with a steady current, while they want it – not just when the wind is blowing or the sun is shining.

The trouble with solar and wind generation is that it only generates electricity intermittently. Covering this intermittency is expensive in terms of idling standby plant.

Generators with the required flexibility (peaking generators using natural gas) produce expensive electricity, but are becoming more and more needed as the penetration of wind and solar in our energy generation mix increases. This is why electricity prices have risen in South Australia.

Wind farms and other renewable-energy generators also undercut the prices offered by efficient, base-load, coal and gas power plants, because they receive guaranteed, non-market, returns from selling Generation Certificates to electricity retailers under the Commonwealth Government’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) Scheme.

Under RET, electricity retailers must buy enough certificates to demonstrate their compliance with the RET scheme’s ever-increasing annual targets.

The revenue earned by each wind farm from the sale of certificates is additional to the revenue received, if any, from its sale of electricity to the electricity market.

The yearly RET targets imply significant annual investment in wind farms, while the sale of certificates to retailers is designed to guarantee a return to wind farms sufficient to justify the required investment, irrespective of the return they receive from actually selling electricity to the market. Well done, wind farm lobby.

If sales of electricity are growing only slowly (as they are in South Australia’s slow-growing economy), the subsidised market share of wind farms and other renewables will rise and the sale of electricity from conventional base-load power plants will fall.

At some point the coal and gas-fired conventional power plants will become unable to contribute towards their fixed costs, and they will go out of business. This is what has happened in South Australia.

But this is the whole point of renewables in climate change terms – to knock off CO2-producing coal and gas-fired power plants, thereby helping to save the planet from climate change.

The Port Augusta power station is closing because of Commonwealth and South Australian Government policy to expand renewable energy generation. This is not an accident. To save the planet, it was always intended to have this effect, but maybe not next year. Leigh Creek is shutting down as an unintended consequence.

Pelican Point has been mothballed and Torrens Island is also slated for closure.

If the demand for electricity is low – on a public holiday, say – while the wind is blowing and the sun is shining, the price of electricity in South Australia will be low. Conventional generators will make losses, while the market losses of the renewable generators will be covered by their sale of Generation Certificates.

If the demand for electricity is high – a heat wave on a working day, say – and it is a still, overcast day, the price of electricity in South Australia will be high, because it will be mostly produced by high-cost, back-up, peaking generators.

The high cost of maintaining back-up generation capacity (sufficient, essentially, to duplicate the generation capacity of the renewables) means that the average price of electricity produced in a system dominated by renewables will always be expensive without strong interconnection, such as in Denmark, to large, inexpensive, electricity-producing regions nearby, that produce most of their electricity from coal, gas or nuclear sources.

We are not in that fortunate position. According to Deloitte, South Australia’s interconnectors with Victoria are able to supply only 23 per cent of South Australia’s peak demand (although their capacity is presently being increased).

According to a report in the Australian Financial Review in December, South Australian Treasurer and Energy Minister Tom Koutsantonis called a meeting of energy users and suppliers to deal with the sharp rises and falls in wholesale electricity prices that, in particular, threaten the economics of the lead and zinc smelter at Port Pirie operated by Dutch company, Nyrstar.

South Australian businesses face electricity prices in 2016-18 of between $87 and $90 per megawatt hour, compared with $37-$41 in Victoria and $43-$48 in New South Wales.

South Australian irrigators are said to be facing electricity price increases of more than 100 per cent next year.

According to the AFR, forward electricity prices in South Australia are far higher than when Nyrstar signed up in May.

Further, the threat of disruption of supplies if the inter-connectors to Victoria fail, or become inadequate to meet the demand for electricity in South Australia on peak days, are of understandable concern to the company. Nyrstar is scheduled to start operations in mid-2016.

Options for the Government to stop Nyrstar quitting all look expensive.

In the short run, the Government’s main option could be to cover the extra anticipated cost of electricity and the cost of any supply disruptions with a further subsidy to Nyrstar over and above the $291 million it has already promised. This subsidy could be substantial.

In the long run, the Government’s main option could be to pay for even more interconnection to Victorian, New South Wales or Queensland coal or gas-powered electricity generators.

It will have to do so to protect the stability of the electricity grid in South Australia soon, anyway, as well as to put a cap on wholesale prices (the price of base load electricity interstate plus the cost of shipping it here through an interconnector). This will also be costly.

The high price of electricity in South Australia is eating away at our economic competitiveness. The probability that we will become, sometime in the distant future, a “low carbon electricity powerhouse” looks extremely low.

As often happens with Government initiatives in South Australia, significant Government subsidies are likely to be offered to appropriate companies to locate here, so that the Government’s aspirations appear to be vindicated.

Richard Blandy is an Adjunct Professor of Economics in the Business School at the University of South Australia.
In Daily

nyrstar port pirie