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Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Peter Davies

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Peter Laing said :

“All irrelevant innuendo useless for options comparisons unless you give the cost of electricity on an LCA basis (including all costs) on a properly comparable basis with other options. Every time you do such properly comparable analyses you find a large proportion of nuclear (e.g. 75%) and backed up by hydro where available and by gas where hydro is not viable is the least cost way by far to reduce the emissions intensity of electricity”

Nuclear is a decent technical solution, but in the UK there have had to be commitments to 14.5 cents / kWh price inflation-proofed, for 35 years (i.e. beyond 2050), which makes it much more expensive than 2050 wind and solar is expected to be. Further, although there appear to be good technical solutions to nuclear waste disposal, there is no political solution to it, in that no democratic country in the world has been able to get public agreement as to what should happen to the waste.

Since by 2050 power generation will have to be zero CO2 emissions, then any gas generation would have to be from renewable gas, in which case you come back to using wind and solar as the cheapest means of providing the gas anyway, and might as well use the resources more efficiently to supply the power to the grid directly.


Comment on Senate Hearing: Data or Dogma? by Don Monfort

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My comment went into mod. Link to story on Tornados returning to Cyprus from strikes in Syria. Oldies but goodies, tim. Still kicking bad guys buttocks.

See old workhorses B-52 and A-10. My aunt used to work at Wright Patterson AFB and when I was a little boy went with my uncle to pick her up several times. B-52s were new and it was a thrill to have them fly low over the car on takeoff and landing. Since then I have had them drop bombs within a few hundred meters. You can never have too much firepower, tim.

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Peter Lang

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Davis Swan,

Thank you for the link. It’s interesting but I wonder to what extent the charts shown are cherry picked – they don’t have dates or explain what the Y-values and series are. I’d like to see a year of data, but I haven’t been able to get it despite attempts. Why is the solar industry so reluctant to show their data – especially since the renewable advocates have been accusing the nuclear industry of being secretive for the past 30 years.

BTW, based on the costs and projected annual generation data, I calculated the cost per Watt capacity at A$20/W and cost per average watt delivered at A$31/W average.

Gemasolar, Spain
Commissioned date May-11
Capacity (nominal) 19.9 MW
Energy storage 15 h
Energy pa 110,000 MWh/a
Capacity Factor 63%
hybrid%
Capital cost (M) € 230
Currency €
Base cost year 2009
Exchange rate 0.6
Escalate costs by (% pa) 3% 3%
Capital Cost $395 A$ mil
Cost per kW $19,841 A$/kW
Cost per average kW $31,443 A$/kW average

http://www.nrel.gov/csp/solarpaces/project_detail.cfm/projectID=40
http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleasesAction.do?reference=BEI/09/224&type=HTML
http://www.solarpaces.org/Tasks/Task1/Task%20I.pdf
http://www.torresolenergy.com/TORRESOL/gemasolar-plant/en

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Peter Davies

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Davis Swan said :

“Demand in lower latitudes in summer ramps in the late afternoon – in northern latitudes in the winter it ramps into the night. ”

If the late afternoon ramp is associated with air conditioning, then by 2050, the storage we need is not power storage, but storage of cold. Suitable phase change materials can then be charged up with cold (cooled down) while solar power is available, then allowed to discharge into buildings once the sun goes down.

Similarly, the component of northern latitudes evening consumption which is for space heating can rely on heat storage materials fed from heat pumps during solar power availability, although that does imply a 2050 European supergrid with connections to solar PV and CSP generation in North Africa.

There’s no reason to have to store electricity per se if there’s an end product form of the energy which can be stored better.

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Peter Lang

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I have blogged about every conceivable storage technology and none are within an order of magnitude of being cost effective. Energy storage is where we need to focus and I believe an ISS stype International collaboration is required.

Good point. That’s been my understanding for a long time too. I worked on a lot of hydro plants during my career. A while ago I did a rough estimate of this 9 GW, 400 GWh pumped storage project connecting two large existing reservoirs in the Australian Snowy Mountains Scheme http://bravenewclimate.com/2010/04/05/pumped-hydro-system-cost/ . It’s not viable for technical and economic reasons. I did it as an exercise to help explain to interested readers some of the important factors considered during pre-feasibility studies.

Comment on Senate Hearing: Data or Dogma? by justinwonder

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Curious George

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Is a methane pipeline really couple of orders of magnitude cheaper than an electrical power line? Link, please.

Comment on How sensitive is global temperature to cumulative CO2 emissions? by itsnotco2

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There is absolutely no physics which can be used to deduce that water vapor and carbon dioxide cause the Earth's surface to be warmer. Empirical evidence proves water vapor cools, and so too does all the carbon dioxide, but by less than 0.1 degree. Correct physics explains why. Surface temperatures are not determined by radiation, so radiation from carbon dioxide is irrelevant. This is continued in <a href="http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/12/2015-will-be-the-3rd-warmest-year-in-the-satellite-record/#comment-203117" rel="nofollow">this</a> comment.

Comment on Senate Hearing: Data or Dogma? by timg56

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Guess i should have checked.

I might have been thinking of the Germans, but they still have one operational and one conversion squadron flying the Tornado.

Growing up they used to have an airshow at Andrews AFB. Somewhere my dad has slides of me and one of my brothers sitting in the pilot seat of a static display B-52.

The US AF has been trying to get rid of the A-10 since the day it entered service. They were on track to do so when Desert Storm rolled around. The aircraft performed so well that it has taken another 25 years to get it out of the inventory and they are still active with ANG units.

As to never having too much firepower – agreed.

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Curious George

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Thank you, Peter. The ITM materials are exciting – in a 2050 time horizon. They seem to concentrate on a refueling of hydrogen-powered cars at the moment. I did not understand how they intend to convert hydrogen back to electricity, or whether or how they want to store oxygen. Marketing materials, not technical ones.

Comment on Senate Hearing: Data or Dogma? by bobdroege

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Not only no, but you know the rest.

How about including modern 21st century temperatures on the graph?

I would put the 2010 Greenland summit average temperature just about off of your chart, and warmer than the last 11,000 years.

But it is just one location and one year.

Comment on Senate Hearing: Data or Dogma? by gjw2

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In 2001 I realized the importance of Congressional hearings when the highlight of a Senate hearing on international trade was the argument between the primary witness and the hearing’s chair over which one of them was poorer growing up. I never attended another hearing. However, sometimes I do enjoy reading the testimony. I suspect, however, the committee members hear the testimony but don’t listen, and I would be shocked if they actually read any of the testimony.

Comment on How sensitive is global temperature to cumulative CO2 emissions? by aaron

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Paleological evidense suggest that the airborn fraction trends isn’t likely to change any time soon. The large bio mass exposed by melting glacier (e.g. forests less than 1000yrs old in Alaska) and locked away in frozen tundra suggest that our ability to emit GHGs is unlikely to outpace sinks for very long.

The very existence of fossil fuels suggest very large potential sinks.

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by Stanton Brown

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Other than the thousands who died, the much higher price people have had to pay for energy, and the fact that it hasn’t done a damn thing for the climate, Germany has a success.

Comment on Bill Gail: Don’t let climate debate hinder the economy by ristvan

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Good points. I was thinking about hard adaptations like flood defenses or irrigation systems. No question that better forecasting (e.g. Narrower hurricane cone of uncertainty, intensity) enables better soft adaptation.


Comment on How sensitive is global temperature to cumulative CO2 emissions? by opluso

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…the models that are used suggest that the airborne fraction increases along most of the higher emission pathways? This is really all I’ve been saying.

It just took aTTP 5000 words to say it…

Comment on Hiatus controversy: show me the data by 5 Facts the Left Isn't Trumpeting About Paris and Climate Change

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[…] An analysis by Judith Curry comparing five data sets of actual global temperatures found that all but one showed that global warming is on a […]

Comment on German Energiewende – Modern Miracle or Major Misstep by AK

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Nice try, though.

Nice drive-by ign0rant nonsense.

Comment on Bill Gail: Don’t let climate debate hinder the economy by foias

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Better information can only refine expectations about future uncertainty, improve decision making and enhance economic efficiency. But this should probably not be overstated, specifically the following:

“Deviations from normal climate were cited by The Wall Street Journal as a major cause for the gross domestic product drop of 2.9% in the first quarter of 2014. Can nature really push around our nation’s great economic engine so easily?”

In fact, on revision, this was a contraction of 0.9% as a consequence of severe winter weather. It seems reasonable to suggest most of this lost output was made up in the two subsequent quarters – growth of 4.6, 4.3% respectively, way above the prevailing trend. Obviously, it depends upon the specific kind of adverse weather how much output is actually lost in the final analysis.

Comment on Bill Gail: Don’t let climate debate hinder the economy by nhill

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Cutting back on NASA's Earth Sciences budget is not necessarily an attack on Climate Change research. Over the past decade the percentage of NASA's budget that has been allocated to Earth Sciences has increases significantly relative to other areas of research at NASA. <a href="http://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NASA_Earth_Space_Science-Funding.png" rel="nofollow">http://spacenews.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/NASA_Earth_Space_Science-Funding.png</a> An argument could be made that the business of NASA is <i>aeronautics</i> and <i>space</i> research and that Earth sciences research should be redirected to other agencies (e.g., NOAA). NASA's funding that is currently going towards Earth sciences is diverting funds away from other research areas that are perhaps more in line with NASA's core mission (e.g., the James Webb space telescope).
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