Postponing the investment is not necessarily a real alternative in market economy. If you don’t invest early enough, somebody else will. Thus optimizing the timing may mean losing the opportunity.
Investments will be made as soon as they are profitable even if a later investment would be even more profitable.
Planning Engineer — Its not SAIDI per se that I’m interested in. Its trying to find a “metric” that addresses the question of impact of high penetration levels on the Grid. You’ve brought up many of these concerns (which all planning engineers would have). Using Germany (as our laboratory experiment) to “test” these concerns, to date, I’m just not seeing any “smoking gun”. If not SAIDI then what metric should we use?
Maybe a constructive theme is to explore “the engineering methods and their costs” that Germany has incurred to achieve high reliability with high Renewable penetration levels.
Maybe the answer is that you can do almost anything (especially if you’re a smart German, which they are) if you throw enough resources and money at something.
Maybe this is the way to approach this? Has Germany incurred incredible costs in integrating Renewables into their Grid?
Not sure of heck’s temperature (is it also subject to climate change?), but it’s been cooler and wetter than “normal” at my location so I assume it must be hotter and drier somewhere to maintain the incessant increase in global average.
BTW, it is a testament to acclimatization and human adaptability that the Afar people toil mining salts in the hottest place on earth ( The Danakil Depression ) which is strangely where the ‘Lucy’ Australopithecus was found:
But surely that is simplistic. Delta T important but the impacts on the body depend on background T as well. An increase in T by 5C when T=15 impacts the body far less that the same increase if T=40C. I think it matters very much what T is relative to the body core temperature. And, then if you take into account relative humidity, the the impacts are far greater in the warm case above.
“Of course, the heat wave is being blamed on human caused climate change”
When there’s an extreme cold event, it’s called weather. When there’s an extreme warm event, it’s called climate change. Go figure.
A big problem we have here at CE are the absolutism paradigms that people create. Such as 100% Renewables (or extremely high penetration levels) versus Zero Fossil or Nuclear Fuels.
Some of these paradigms are quite amusing. Such as the logic of (A) Criticizing Mitigation Advocates for their catastrophic messaging (CAGW); (B) But then these same people arguing that the only way to meaningfully reduce CO2 emissions to avoid CAGW is through nuclear power.
This week I saw a slide by the Engineering Giant ABB that put things in a “big picture” perspective — addressing something that we rarely (if ever) discuss here at CE: Efficiency Improvements
While most of the more vocal folks come to CE just to fight the ABB slide coupled with a mitigation strategy of Fast Mitigation (reducing smog, CFCs, Black Carbon, Methane) represents some “no regrets” approaches to AGW.
Good news for India? The Western parts look to get some relief.
The bad news? The GFS indicates it might come from a tropical cyclone:
Just to remind nuclear power opponents, Fukushima caused 3 workers to get a below 25 REM dose, which increases cancer risk by roughly 0.1% to 22.1% from 22% over 70 years. The tidal wave and earthquake killed roughly 20,000 in Japan. The tidal wave from Indonesia killed 240,000 world wide. Energy to provide electricity for light, cooking water and sewage treatment will save lives in the poverty stricken parts of the world. We need to lead the way to rationale discussions to put this in perspective. Rich areas like California can afford the high price for environmental solutions that move the state of the art towards economic efficiency but the big impacts come from grid expansion in the 3rd world.
Scott
Evidently, the human body adjusts in many ways.
Heat acclimation or acclimatization plays a large part in the body’s physical responses and overall ability to cope with heat exposure. Heat acclimation is a broad term that can be loosely defined as a complex series of changes or adaptations that occur in response to heat stress in a controlled environment over the course of 7 to 14 days. These adaptations are beneficial to exercise in the heat and allow the body to better cope with heat stress. Heat acclimatization describes the same process, but happens in a natural environment. In either case, the positive adaptations that occur include reductions in:
Heart rate
Body temperature responses
Skin temperature responses
Perceived exertion
As well as increases in:
Sweat rate
Sweat onset (sweating starts earlier)
Heart function/blood distribution
Overall ability to perform in the heat
Other changes include decreased salt losses in sweat and urineas well as an improved blood pressure response.All of these changes improves an athletes’ ability to handle heat stress during exercise.
> This will stop the unnecessary, economy-damaging, unjustified rise in American power costs through the addition of inefficient unreliable undispatchable dirty land-wasting renewables.
Compare and contrast:
Think about the wolves. They’re anti-Grrrrowth.
> Evidently
The link under that word:
http://ksi.uconn.edu/prevention/heat-acclimatization/
The Indian population, the military, and athletes. Same same.
Eddy
‘Yes.
I work with a heat stress model the military uses.
The ‘acclimatization’ period in this model is two-weeks.
The human body changes ( water storage and the like ) and more capable in coping with heat stress ( presuming available hydration ).
So it’s delta-T that matters, not so much temperature, particularly in areas where people are acclimatized.
However, the issue of predictability horizon is separate.
Obviously, the greater in advance one can predict such events,
the greater amount of time is available for warning and preparation.”
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I dont want people to think I am being critical of peter’s approach.
Getting a 14 day warning is important, AND its also important to have a system like Kalsteins that is actually Tied to HISTORICAL MORTALITY for that particular city. Bottom line is what action plans are associated with each.
As you note there is a period of Acclimatization. The first form of this is Gruesome. Its called harvesting. A heat wave early in the year kills the most vulnerable and so subsequent heat waves are less deadly.
They’re anti-Grrrrowth.
Willard, the grrrrowth. thing is particularly effective at evoking it’s utterance.
However, have you ever considered you are wrong about growth?
US per capita CO2 emissions peaked in the 1970s – the technologies that led to improved efficiencies came from economic growth.
Economically developed nations ( the kind that had grrrrowth ) are the ones with declining birth rates while the undeveloped remain with high birth rates.
Economically developed nations are the ones with urbanizing populations ( decreasing the footprint in the rural areas ).
Economically developed nations are the ones that have available resources to pay for environmental protection ( luxury of the rich ).
Unbridled free markets don’t necessarily look out for the common good and we have to decide as a democracy what that is.
But as a general rule, economic freedom and growth have proven a benefit to the environment and economic stagnation a harm.
Dont take my comments as a criticism. I spent some time doing a small project with Larry’s approach and I really liked the synoptic approach. Not sure if that will hold together out past two days. In any case I can well envision a system that has various levels of warnings and even different types of detection/prediction approaches. Larry and scott were really eager to share experience and work, so I learned a lot in a short period. I think their stuff is worth a read, they were very generous with their time explaining stuff to me. FWIW.
Also, I have some questions about your forecasts. I’m currently using GFS for my tmax max forecasts ( for heat related death of certain mechanical systems) and frankly it is somewhat flakey So, I’d be interested is seeing what you guys are doing.
Nice work! Nice to see climate models put to productive use (instead of the opposite)!
This new letter from prominent physicists confirms that the science is far from settled:
GFS is relatively flaky. We work with GFS also, but ECMWF is substantially superior. We do a lot of ensemble post processing, to eliminate bias and distributional errors.
Re synoptic approach, we find the models are WAY better on 2 day time scales; synoptic approach (weather regimes; substantially different than Kalkstein’s synoptic approach) adds value at the sub seasonal timescales 2-6 weeks
Yes, Kim we miss you, it’s time to come home. WUWT is just a choir thingy:-)
Stephen that has been on my list for years. If you want more solar for example you start with energy efficiency first to reduce local energy storage needs and move from there. Just sticking grid connected solar on system not designed for intermittent complicates the process. It also tends to limit “private” options by increasing connection costs to more than usage costs.
As far as reducing smog, CFC’s BC etc., the US and most developed nations are close to limited returns. There are improvements that can be made, but the warm and fuzzies are jumping on PM2.5 and PM1.0 band wagons along with Mercury etc.more in order to kill coal than improve quality of life. That will lead to less coal research making the developing nations dirtier in the long run. Governments should set goals and get out of the way. The warm and fuzzies have grown fond of the iron fist though when they need to be passing out more carrots.
