“Today’s civilisation is an entirely energy based civilisation, the first such energy based civilisation in mankind’s history.”
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Nope. Every human society, no matter how advanced is energy based. The difference is that ancient societies relied on energy that was renewable, whereas modern civilization needs to borrow energy that fell on Earth millions of years ago and was converted to fossil fuels. We are living on ancient sunlight.
Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by R. Gates
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by R. Gates
“The fourth essential that defines us as Human as distinct from animals is the use and control of Energy.”
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Nope. All life forms use and control energy. Energy usage and the subsequent conversion of that energy to waste heat increases entropy in the universe and defines “times arrow”.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by David L. Hagen
<b>Compressed Air Energy Storage (CAES)</b>
Planning Engineer
Thanks for highlighting the major grid support and varying demand issues. Some idea of the magnitude of the effort required to manage such major disparities is shown by the Compressed Air Energy Storage (<a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS578US578&biw=918&bih=389&tbm=isch&oq=compressed+air+energy+storage+&gs_l=img.3..0l2j0i24l8.12024.12024.0.12951.1.1.0.0.0.0.127.127.0j1.1.0....0...1c.1.58.img..0.1.126.FAYBh1dOyg0&q=compressed%20air%20energy%20storage" rel="nofollow">CAES</a>) system being developed <a href="https://www.google.com/search?rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS578US578&biw=918&bih=389&tbm=isch&sa=1&q=compressed+air+energy+storage+california&oq=compressed+air+energy+storage+california&gs_l=img.3...4306.4306.0.5185.1.1.0.0.0.0.101.101.0j1.1.0....0...1c.1.58.img..1.0.0.YGARVUrAi20" rel="nofollow">for California</a> by Pathfinder Renewable Wind Energy, Magnum Energy, Dresser-Rand, and Duke-American Transmission Co. See:
See: <a href="http://www.duke-energy.com/news/releases/2014092301.asp" rel="nofollow">$8-billion green energy initiative proposed for Los Angeles.</a>
<a href="http://cleantechnica.com/2014/09/27/inside-8-billion-california-wind-energy-project/" / rel="nofollow">Inside The $8 Billion California Wind Energy Project</a>
I would welcome your perspective on this system.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by R. Gates
“The post is impossibly obvious.”
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Yep. Transparent in both intent and inevitable conclusions.
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Comment on Week in review by jim2
From the article:
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The number of people under “active monitoring” for Ebola symptoms has increased from 117 on Monday to 357 people Wednesday, health officials said.
The vast majority of those being monitored arrived in New York City within the past 21 days from the three Ebola-affected countries, the New York City Health and Hospitals Corporation said in a statement.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Ragnaar
The cost comparisons for such a system should not be based on the difference between average solar or wind energy cost and the average cost of gas generation. Rather the proper cost comparison is the average cost of solar and wind plus the backup costs of gas generation, compared to just gas generation.”
The marginal cost. Change this and what happens to total costs? That additional battery costs of wind and solar should be allocated to wind and solar. Miss-allocated costs if used by management will result in the wrong choices being made. Costs are just a way of saying what is good and not so good. Low costs are good for cheap production. I have to think the utilities are aware of these solar and wind costs and that in their books is a treasure trove of useful cost information. But that type of information is probably not ‘on message’. When the regulators are saying, ‘go green’, that’s pressure to not emphasize it, to give in and build some windmills. Who does miss-allocated costs hurt? The shareholders. Management has a duty to its shareholders. One of them being to provide information that is material to them. They also hurt the consumers. If a company is using the wrong resource mix it can survive with the help of the regulators, but deliver a higher cost product.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Bob Ludwick
@ Rud Isvan
“Instead, CPUC are subsidizing untried grid scale mostly new flow battery technologies from startups wiith no track record and no previous installations, at costs ranging from $625 to $1190/kwh. Completely nuts.”
The Greenunists are demanding that we replace at least 50% of our fossil fuel consumption with ‘renewables’.
Our current generator capacity is around a terawatt, with around 80% of it supplied by fossil fuels.
I would like to see the environmental impact statement for 400 one gigawatt wind/solar farms (average output over a calendar year) and the lead/acid battery production facilities necessary to back each of them up over all anticipated combinations of overcast/calm/darkness to ensure that the 400 gigawatt baseload capacity was available with a reliability equal to or superior to that of the fossil fuel plants that they replaced.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Peter Lang
Ragnaar,
+1
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by jim2
From the article:
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A plan to address excessive noise issues at a Northern Michigan wind plant won’t work, a sound expert said.
Additionally, he said he thinks Consumers Energy, which has offered the plan, knows it won’t work.
On Feb. 7, Consumers Energy submitted a mitigation plan to address noise levels at its Lake Winds Energy Plant, located south of Ludington in Mason County. The submission of this plan was ordered by the 51st Circuit Court, where the utility is contesting the county’s ruling (the first of its kind in Michigan) that the $250 million, 56-turbine wind plant is in violation of its noise ordinance.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by Ragnaar
Ludington. Trying my best here. Capacity of 1,900,000 kilowatt hours. The page says kilowatts, but think they mean kilowatt hours. With a 5 cent/kW peak trough differential profit (assumed), and 100% efficiency that’s $95,000/day. Assuming 300 perfect days/year, that’s a differential profit of $28,500,000/year. Backing this number down with 75% efficiency that’s $21,375,000/year. There are other costs as well.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by poitsplace
Pumped (high pressure) air is a short term storage method. If you want REAL long term storage capacity, you convert the excess energy to hydrogen and then just burn it in a conventional plant for peaking. Main difference is that you have to line the tunnels you bore with metal so it won’t leak badly. The losses are quite high (about 55-60%), but there’s just aren’t a lot of ways to store weeks worth of energy.
OR…you could just use nuclear and small amounts (only a fraction of a day’s requirement) of storage for peaking.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by ordvic
Peter,
I wouldn’t know about that mix, but I do know that even though it’s more expensive coal, gas and biomass are going to have to have carbon sequestration:
http://www.fuelcellenergy.com/advanced-technologies/carbon-capture/
http://www.technolgyreview.com/news/527036/two-carbon-trapping-plants-offer-hope-of-cleaner-coal/
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2013/11/30/3005441/epa-biomass-forest-carbon/
In the letter from the scientists:
Burning of grasses, bamboo and hemp instead…fast growing…forests are carbon sinks don’t diminish them
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by captdallas2 0.8 +/- 0.2
Cloud radiative effect is much better than just generic feedback fer sure. Sometimes it is better to just describe changes than try and assign causes to the changes.
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by ianl8888
Yes, Pirila has waffled with gobbledegook
He’s done this to avoid saying directly: “In my opinion, to save the planet you must accept a significant cut in living standards”. He fears (probably correctly) that such a direct statement will lose political support – so the gobblededook and obfuscation. On this topic, it has always been so
Beware “smart” grids. Their major attraction is the ability to cut power remotely from individual consumers when it is considered they have consumed enough
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by beththeserf
Dizzie? But he took the leap in the dark!
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by rls
Stephen
It’s not important to me but might be to some. I think your statement “How does one clearly know what is correct?” is relevant. Its a very good question and worthy of discussion. Adults, overtime, learn that not all information is equal. I say adults because children do not have the same ability; it indicates that the ability to distinguish useful information is learned. However, there are some adults who we might describe as naive; those who have a weak ability to learn this. What do they lack? I don’t know but pride myself in distinguishing BS from useful stuff; it was an essential ability in the job I had and I think it was acquired through experience and discussions with coworkers. Basically, I think, it involved a keen sense of logic. However, I also learned very soon that people desiring a certain end could not always be trusted to provide useful information; sometimes distorting the information and sometimes hiding relevant information.
So, my recommendations regarding your question:
1. Try to get all relevant information and question everything.
2. Dig and get opinions on each side
3. Ask yourself “does this make sense?”
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Comment on More renewables? Watch out for the Duck Curve by rls
Also like getting that tune out of my head. Or possibly, not being of the literary, like “Out Damn Spot”.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by vukcevic
I normally only look at the North Hemisphere’s temperatures, since the South has a high uncertainty even for the most recent decades.
Here is a simple reconstruction of HADCRUT4
from just two external variables..
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by ROM
Two items I rarely ever see mentioned in connection with cloud formation particularly oceanic cloud formation.
The first is the biological influences on cloud formation with some known oceanianic bacterial and virus species being actively involved in low level cloud formation. which implies that as the ocean currents regularly swing between moving vast amounts of warm and cold surface waters from one part of the global oceans to another, the biological activity will vary according to water temperatures and the bacterial and virus nutrient load of those surface waters.
I don’t know if such cloud forming / water droplet conglomerating bacterial and viral effects are included under the “aerosol” definition in cloud research but I doubt that they are as assessing such biological activity on cloud and cloud droplet and ice crystal formation is an extremely complex bit of research compared to the far easier job of just calculating the effects of some inert aerosols on cloud formation.
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Then there are the chemical releases of the phytoplankton blooms , the aerosol part of ocean biological activity in cloud formation;
From Georgia Tech
November 7, 2006
The Biology Connection: Researchers Link Ocean Organisms with Increased Cloud Cover — and Potential Climate Change;
[ Selected quotes ]
Researchers had previously theorized that dimethyl sulfide (DMS) – which is also emitted by phytoplankton – affects the formation of clouds by increasing the number of sulfate particles, which can absorb moisture and form cloud droplets. When oxidized, isoprene may enhance the effect of DMS by increasing the number and size of the particles while helping them to chemically attract more moisture. The impact of isoprene on atmospheric particulate matter was previously thought to be important only for terrestrial plants, Nenes said.
[ Graphic shows changes in the concentrations of cloud droplets over the Southern Ocean. Researchers believe emissions from phytoplankton are increasing cloudiness in the area.
Image courtesy Nenes/Meskhidze ]
The researchers stumbled upon the phytoplankton-cloud connection quite accidentally. “While looking at the satellite pictures, I noticed that cloud properties over large phytoplankton blooms were significantly different from those that occurred away from the blooms,” recalled Meskhidze, now an assistant professor in NC State’s College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences.
The Southern Ocean normally has relatively few particles around which cloud droplets can form. The isoprene mechanism could therefore have a significant effect on the development of clouds there – and may account for most of variation in the area’s cloud cover.
“If a lot of particles form because of isoprene oxidation, you suddenly have a lot more droplets in clouds, which tends to make them brighter,” Nenes explained. “In addition to becoming brighter, the clouds can also have less frequent precipitation, so you might have a build-up of clouds. Overall, this makes the atmosphere cloudier and reflects more sunlight back into space.”
In their paper, the researchers estimated that the isoprene emissions reduced energy absorption in the area by about 15 watts per square meter. “This is a huge signal,” said Nenes. “You would normally expect to see a change of a couple of watts.”
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Another never mentioned item in cloud effects is the almost invisible cloud halos of water vapour surrounding clouds out as far as tens of kilometres around clouds
From Nature; 2007
Every cloud has an invisible halo;
Unseen particles may confuse climate models.
[ http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070424/full/news070423-6.html ]
[ selected quotes ]
Clouds are bigger than they look, according to new measurements by atmospheric scientists in Israel and the United States. They say that clouds are surrounded by a ‘twilight zone’ of diffuse particles, invisible to the naked eye, extending for tens of kilometres around the cloud’s visible portion.
These vast, sparse haloes of droplets may have been overlooked in atmospheric studies, the researchers say. And they think that this could have skewed attempts to understand how clouds influence climate.
&
Koren and his colleagues first demonstrated that it is relatively easy to see from digital photographs that clouds are surrounded by an invisible haze, made up of these water-coated, or humidified, aerosols. If the parts of the photo containing visible white stuff are masked out, the surrounding haze comes into view.
This haze extends far further than anyone has ever imagined. “People may have seen these extended haloes anecdotally,” says Koren’s colleague Lorraine Remer of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “But thanks to a new generation of instruments, the satellite observations have got much better, and we can look on larger scales, with more sensitivity and at finer resolution.”
Satellite images of clouds over the Atlantic Ocean show that the sky’s reflectance — a measure of how much humidified aerosol it contains — falls very gradually with increasing distance from the edge of a cloud, and is still declining at least 20-30 kilometres away, Koren’s team says.
Into the twilight zone
To study these twilight zones further, the researchers studied several years’ worth of images collected by a global network of ground-based lightmeters called AERONET, usually used to ðmonitor the brightness of the Sun.
Sudden dips in the light detected by these instruments are automatically logged as indicating the passage of a cloud. Koren and colleagues discovered that it can take well over an hour for light levels to recover fully after a cloud has passed, indicating that their haloes are very broad.
Not all clouds will have a big twilight zone, the researchers say. For example, the halo might be tightly reined in around the sharp-edged white cumulus clouds that form when moist, warm air rises and cools. But they estimate that for typical global cloud coverage, the halo could encompass as much as two-thirds of the sky usually classed as cloud-free.
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As an old glider pilot who has been flying since late 1959 I have regularly seen very diffuse layers of water vapour, extremely diffuse, invisible from angles more than a few degrees above or below the layers of water vapour which are found at the atmospheric temperature inversions where
[ cloud forming ] thermal activity will cease as the warm air of the surface created thermal hits the layer of warm air above the cooler air at the inversion levels..
Obviously to myself, these extremely diffuse and very wide spread layers of invisible even to the naked eye except at very low angles, layers of water vapour will through their sheer scale and area have a significant effect on the energy radiation transfers between surface emmissions of energy and incoming radiation energy.
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Comment on Climate dynamics of clouds by ROM
Oops! Georgia Techs article URL;
The Biology Connection: Researchers Link Ocean Organisms with Increased Cloud Cover — and Potential Climate Change;
[ http://www.gtresearchnews.gatech.edu/newsrelease/phytoplankton-clouds.htm ]
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