Stephen: You are being weird. The future of energy will not be swayed by comments on this blog and your attacks do nothing but reveal who you are. Maybe you should let it rest, for your own good. Sincerely
Comment on Myths and realities of renewable energy by rls
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Comment on Myths and realities of renewable energy by Matthew R Marler
Stephen Segrest: Germany shows that Postrel’s absolutism statements that expensive back up power must always be built is flat out intellectually dishonest. As Planning Engineer explained, Germany is most certainly achieving it high reliability because of its inter-connection with evidently high volumes of dispatchable hydro from Norway.
How does that not support the claim that there must always be backup power for wind and solar?
Now, I have a life other than fact-checking every ubiquitous black/white absolutism claim the Wolfpack makes. But for example, there are over two hundred studies that have shown that there will be no major costs or technical problems for a grid until the percentage of renewables is ~30%. Our CE’s “Planning Engineer” cited a percentage of 10%.
Per the EIA, for most electric utilities, we have a long way to go before these thresholds are reached: For the entire U.S., Solar is 0.23% and Wind is 4.13%.
How does that not support the more-or-less extreme view that wind and solar can not make more than a negligible contribution any time soon?
It seems to me that, after reading your comments and recommendation that we get away from black/white thinking, your arguments mostly support the idea that a reliable network that is powerful and substantially powered by wind and solar is both expensive and something for the distant future.
Germany, Spain, California and Great Britain are works in progress. They all depend on backup power and all of them have raised electricity rates substantially. If black is -5 and white is +5, that is somewhere around -4.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Rud Istvan
Jim2, the post proves only that your ‘commodities King’ does not not know very much about oil. IF Lockheed has a viable fusion reactor, they saynit will be small, on the order of 100MW. They did not say whether that was thermal or electrical output. Relates to grid electricity.
Globally, about 75% of crude is made into transportation fuel (gas, diesel, jet kerosene). Some 8 percent is petrochemicals (plastics mostly) and about 4-5 percent is lubricants (motor oil, grease…). Depending on crude quality, 4+% ends up as asphalt (road tar). Globally, only about 4 percent ‘heavy oil/bunker fuel’ is used for electricity generation.
There is literally no way a fusion power source has a major impact in any significant fashion on crude oil consumption. His projection is bunkum.
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Comment on Myths and realities of renewable energy by Matthew R Marler
quick followup: yesterday the CAISO supplied 15% of total demand from wind and solar. From 10am through the rest of the day there was no supply from wind, and of course there was only about 8 hours of solar.
http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/DailyRenewablesWatch.pdf
Right now (10:54 am) solar is supplying 16% of demand, and there has been no wind today at all. If today progresses as yesterday, wind and solar combined will supply close to 0% of demand.
California has high electricity rates, and imports from all neighboring states and Washington.
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Comment on Myths and realities of renewable energy by Matthew R Marler
oops. If today progresses as yesterday, wind and solar will supply 0% of maximum demand.
Quick followup to Norwegian hydropower. CA imports hydropower, but is committed to a policy of no new hydropower. They claim to favor “small” hydropower; one wonders if they are alert to the fact that hydropower is proportional to the product of the mass of the water and the distance it must fall to turn the turbines.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Wagathon
If not for ideological reasons – i.e., Left vs. right politics – why would government scientists purposefully reject observational evidence, like the obvious role of the Sun, and instead adopt climate change beliefs based solely upon unverifiable models?
Solar activity has always varied. Around the year 1000, we had a period of very high solar activity, which coincided with the Medieval Warm Period. It was a time when frosts in May were almost unknown – a matter of great importance for a good harvest. Vikings settled in Greenland and explored the coast of North America. On the whole it was a good time. For example, China’s population doubled in this period.
But after about 1300 solar activity declined and the world began to get colder. It was the beginning of the episode we now call the Little Ice Age. In this cold time, all the Viking settlements in Greenland disappeared. Sweden surprised Denmark by marching across the ice, and in London the Thames froze repeatedly. But more serious were the long periods of crop failures, which resulted in poorly nourished populations, reduced in Europe by about 30 per cent because of disease and hunger.
It’s important to realize that the Little Ice Age was a global event. It ended in the late 19th Century and was followed by increasing solar activity. Over the past 50 years solar activity has been at its highest since the medieval warmth of 1000 years ago. But now it appears that the Sun has changed again, and is returning towards what solar scientists call a “grand minimum” such as we saw in the Little Ice Age.
The match between solar activity and climate through the ages is sometimes explained away as coincidence. Yet it turns out that, almost no matter when you look and not just in the last 1000 years, there is a link. Solar activity has repeatedly fluctuated between high and low during the past 10,000 years. In fact the Sun spent about 17 per cent of those 10,000 years in a sleeping mode, with a cooling Earth the result…
That the Sun might now fall asleep in a deep minimum was suggested by solar scientists at a meeting in Kiruna in Sweden two years ago. So when Nigel Calder and I updated our book The Chilling Stars, we wrote a little provocatively that, we are advising our friends to enjoy global warming while it lasts.
In fact global warming has stopped and a cooling is beginning. Mojib Latif from the University of Kiel argued at the recent UN World Climate Conference in Geneva that the cooling may continue through the next 10 to 20 years. His explanation was a natural change in the North Atlantic circulation, not in solar activity. But no matter how you interpret them, natural variations in climate are making a comeback… (While the sun sleeps, Translation approved by Henrik Svensmark)
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by rls
ATAndB: Cannot uncertainty be too uncertain for error bars? With the sun climate connection are we not at the conjecture state, too early to weigh uncertainty. I take tallblokes comment as, not that the error bars in error, but that it’s a joke to even fathom the use of error bars.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Schrodinger's Cat
There is some evidence that periods of warming are associated with several high activity, relatively frequent solar cycles while periods of cooling relate to a number of consecutive cycles with low solar activity and longer cycle duration.
This suggests that a cumulative effect or a build up is needed and single cycles of whatever activity do not register in our climate. This may explain the difficulty in finding a clear cut relationship between the sun and our climate.
The obsession with radiative warming has focussed attention on TSI, but as pointed out, the change in TSI is very low. However TSI is just one variable associated with the solar cycle amongst many. Some of the others may well influence cloud formation in our atmosphere. Even very small changes in cloud formation could explain extreme changes in climate.
Sometimes I think that climate scientists see the world through the prism of a GHG warmed atmosphere. As a non-climate scientist, I see the sea as a huge heat sink and the sea warms our atmosphere, not the other way around. Solar radiation is the main source of ocean heat and cloud coverage is the main control knob for solar radiation. The sea provides a massive buffer, which implies the relevance of a cumulative effect as well as time lags in observable changes.
It could be that the cloud coverage is affected by changes in the magnetic field, the solar wind, cosmic radiation or the UV content. The changes could be subtle, but integrated over several solar cycles, the result in terms of sea surface temperatures could be significant.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by John
Justin,
see May’s logistic map as an example
The 17 Equations That Changed The Course Of History
Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/17-equations-that-changed-the-world-2014-3#ixzz3HStbHvgh
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Comment on Myths and realities of renewable energy by Matthew R Marler
Stephen Segrest: Response to PA
In that post you seem to lose track of the main point of the thread: if the goal is to rapidly replace fossil fuel use with CO2-free generating technology that is known to work reliably at known costs, then a strong nuclear program is the best option.
The US built 100+ reactors in about 25 years, so they are known. Other reactors are under construction. By contrast, large scale solar and wind are less well known, do not have a comparable record over a comparable span of time, and generate more expensive electricity.
If the goal is to rapidly replace fossil fuel use with wind, solar and hydropower, then the achievement of the goal will take longer and be more expensive — and will likely result in a large cost in terms of lives lost and total environmental pollution.
If the goal is to reduce fossil fuel use over a period of 50-100 years, then spending too much too soon is probably counter-productive in the long run, and the best approach is slowly to introduce wind and solar and hydro and nuclear as the technologies are continually improved.
Having read all of your posts, I think you have made a case that solar and wind are not worth pushing hard at the present time or near future, but should slowly be introduced into small niches where appropriate..
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by John
Lorenzian Waterwheel is another example:
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Comment on Week in review by Faustino
National Grid has warned that its capacity to supply electricity this winter will be at a seven-year low due to generator closures and breakdowns. Spare electricity capacity, which ran at about 5% over the winter months last year, would be nearer 4% this year, National Grid said. Three years ago the margin was 17%. But National Grid said it has contingency plans in place to manage supply, including paying big firms to switch off on cold winter evenings.
Professor Jim Watson of the UK Energy Research Centre, said: “I think it’s… very unlikely we will see blackouts in the UK, but what it does mean, this tight situation, is that lots and lots of extra measures are having to be layered on top of an already complicated policy framework.”
National Grid’s assessment, made in its 2014/15 Winter Outlook report, is based on similar demand to last winter but a fall in supply, due to generators closing and breaking down, and new plants not coming online quickly enough to replace them. Since 2012, 15 power plants have been closed or partially closed, taking out a large chunk of the UK’s energy-generating capacity.
In the event of disruption of Russian gas supplies to Europe, National Grid said more expensive gas could be imported. This would only happen in the “most extreme scenario”, it said.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Matthew R Marler
Jim D: <i>There is a contrast with the sun, which is expected to have the largest effect in the low-latitude dark surface areas (tropical oceans) rather than high-latitude light-surface areas (polar regions). </i>
If that was addressed to me, then I have to point out that it was non-responsive to my post. Where, for example, does the CO2 theory explain the difference between the Arctic and Antarctica over the last 30+ years?
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Comment on Myths and realities of renewable energy by Faustino
The UK has a heavy emphasis on wind and on shutting down coal plants. Currently on BBC online:
National Grid has warned that its capacity to supply electricity this winter will be at a seven-year low due to generator closures and breakdowns. Spare electricity capacity, which ran at about 5% over the winter months last year, would be nearer 4% this year, National Grid said. Three years ago the margin was 17%. But National Grid said it has contingency plans in place to manage supply, including paying big firms to switch off on cold winter evenings.
Professor Jim Watson of the UK Energy Research Centre, said: “I think it’s… very unlikely we will see blackouts in the UK, but what it does mean, this tight situation, is that lots and lots of extra measures are having to be layered on top of an already complicated policy framework.”
National Grid’s assessment, made in its 2014/15 Winter Outlook report, is based on similar demand to last winter but a fall in supply, due to generators closing and breaking down, and new plants not coming online quickly enough to replace them. Since 2012, 15 power plants have been closed or partially closed, taking out a large chunk of the UK’s energy-generating capacity.
In the event of disruption of Russian gas supplies to Europe, National Grid said more expensive gas could be imported. This would only happen in the “most extreme scenario”, it said.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by aaron
“if it is due to TSI heating at the surface”
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by ATAndB
A fair comment, the error bars would simply need to be to large to be displayed to not be displayed on the graph. I would like, however, further discussion of what range the error is. Given that we have a graph it would seem to me that someone has at least thought about the uncertainty and I would expect that the published source for the graph would have a discussion of it.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Mi Cro
Matthew R Marler commented
There is a contrast with the sun, which is expected to have the largest effect in the low-latitude dark surface areas (tropical oceans) rather than high-latitude light-surface areas (polar regions).
As I was reading this something popped into my head, higher latitudes have a longer path through the atmosphere before photons would hit the ground, and at the pole, it’s go straight through the atm missing ground entirely, x-rays in particular.
Don’t ask me what difference it’d make, I don’t know, but maybe someone else does.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by DocMartyn
Doug, you are spoiling the narrative; solar output is constant to three decimal places and there is NO difference in the conversion of an energy packet of photons at 200 nm, 400 nm, 800 nm and 12000 nm in terms of heating. Shining uv and ir on the ocean or atmosphere gives you EXACTLY the same effects; ask Pekka.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Mi Cro
ATAndB commented
A fair comment, the error bars would simply need to be to large to be displayed to not be displayed on the graph. I would like, however, further discussion of what range the error is. Given that we have a graph it would seem to me that someone has at least thought about the uncertainty and I would expect that the published source for the graph would have a discussion of it.
Here’s the surface station count for NCDC’s GSoD dataset.
My thinking is that surface temperature error would grow inverse proportionally to the sample count.
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Comment on Climate Dialogue: influence of the sun on climate by Mi Cro
DocMartyn commented
Doug, you are spoiling the narrative; solar output is constant to three decimal places and there is NO difference in the conversion of an energy packet of photons at 200 nm, 400 nm, 800 nm and 12000 nm in terms of heating. Shining uv and ir on the ocean or atmosphere gives you EXACTLY the same effects; ask Pekka.
When the flux is expressed as W/m^2 it would be approximately the same (differences in conversion efficiency), the Photon count would vary based on wavelength since shorter wavelengths have higher energy than longer wavelengths.
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