Many islands, states and countries have set themselves the goal of generating 100% of electricity from renewable sources. Roger Andrews puts Texas’ plans under the microscope.
Can Texas go 100% renewable?
Many islands, states and countries have set themselves the goal of generating 100% of electricity from renewable sources. Roger Andrews puts Texas’ plans under the microscope.
Can Texas go 100% renewable?
Once those pesky people are gone, of course you can! Soylent Green = Green power?
I’m not an electrical engineer. I have taken courses on three-phase power supplies. I didn’t see much about the waveform matching that needs to be done to keep the voltages from variable sources in phase. An example for those in Vancouver is the Burrard power station, it’s needed to keep the waveforms from distant hydro power manageable and produce steady, usable electricity.
First order of business; stop being stupid. Call them what they are; UNRELIABLES. Anyone who uses the new speak, I immediately know whatever they have to say is not worth reading.
great link, Euan, but I would have titled it: ” 100% Renewables – in Texas, but only if you build the equivalent of 5,500 reservoirs ( and attendant hydro plants ) of 1600 megawatts capacity to store power when the wind doesn’t blow .” Unfortunately. Mr. Andrews does not calculate the cost of that storage, and what the total price per megawatt would be. The absence of this figure tells me it is likely far more expensive than fossil generation.
The bird beaters were never built until the ruling class started bribing the power companies with huge taxpayer subsidies. Wind will never be anything but a tool of the environmentalist to destroy jobs, impoverish the nation, and establish their dream of a ” progressive ” dictatorship.
Synchronising frequencies has been discussed at length on my blog. But I am no electrical engineer either. My feeling is that the Greenies don’t think this is important and can be easily overcome. The engineers who do know about it take the opposite view. It seems any grid requires some large rotating generators synchronised with each other. These may then draw the RE systems into synchronous line.
We have looked at storage requirements for RE many times and it always leads to the conclusion that we need crazy amounts of it at a scale and cost that means it will never happen. I guess Roger got lazy this time and did not calculate the amount of storage and its cost. The bottom line here is that it is simply dumb to aim for 100% RE since it is far more economical to span wind lulls and to balance load using gas. But the trouble here that Europeans are running into is that the gas generators are losing market share and have to work ever-harder to balance load. A combination of the two is driving them out of business – that is of course unless we subsidies them too. The lead story in the recent blowout was about an Australian proposal to make it incumbent upon the RE generators to provide dispatchable power. That way the load balancing, backup costs falls to them. That is the way it should be.
I, for one, would be sick to death to see the landscape covered in solar panels and windmills. And my experience with such things here at the Altamont Pass reveals that windmills stop turning and begin rusting in place as soon as the developers have milked all the Federal, and State subsides. So called renewables are nothing of the sort … and they are a BLIGHT on the landscape.
Cheaper still, than spanning wind lulls, is remove the wind subsidies, and allow utilities to use the lowest cost mix of power generation.
You mention the ” crazy ” amounts of storage required – the left adamantly opposes reservoir construction , so that avenue would be a non-starter with them. The logic of their position is to impose a radical reduction in electricity usage upon the populace, rather than to permit current, comfortable lifestyles that depend on current rates of electricity usage. Which is where the watermelon’s desire for a ” progressive ” dictatorship comes in, with liberty, and justice, for all . ( whoops, that should read: … to each according to his need, from each according to his ability. )
Siemens in Tillsonburg is making windmill blades as fast as they can and they are being shipped to Iowa for storage before they are moved on to Texas. The Siemens plant in Iowa is also making them as fast as possible. Just the cost of moving these things is huge.
Stop responding to greens as if they have humanity’s interest in mind but are just not into the nuances of math and physics. Greens are leading the charge to de-industrialize the planet and killing off 90% of humanity is a reasonable price to pay for their unadvertised version of the afterlife. They don’t agree with the facts when they conflict with the faith. Greens have broad support from the superficially informed masses who have no clue about the pathos of the ideologues they respect and look up to. Greens are infested with the old leftist steely eyed zealots capable of any and all forms of totalitarian control and “final solutions”. Compromise with this movement is like compromising with a rapist. Pandering to the greens is now the easiest way for politicians and rent seeking corporate whores to gain power and control over the masses. The worst thing one can do in this war is to assume that the greens are reasonable people who can agree to a negotiated or compromised outcome. They must be humiliated, attacked as unreasonable and put on the defensive in all matters. They are never the target of your efforts but merely props to be used in the war of swaying the hearts and minds of the masses. Anything less amounts to surrender.
@ John Chittick, while empathising with the general tenor of your comment, you need to ask how this cancer can be cleansed from the OECD, EU and UN – Canada belongs to 2 of these institutions. Roger and I try to write scholarly articles that win over the minds of the educated public and policy makers. We can document some limited success in this area with the Toronoto Globe and Mail and Deutsche Wella following up on some of our lines of enquiry.
Standing on the roof tops shouting that that Greens are a bunch of totalitarian retards is one approach that may work. That is simple to do and many folks can do that. Our approach is to provide numerical arguments that undermines the Green Bull Crap. Many groups in the UK use the work we do to support their submissions to government enquiries.
It is the case in the UK that all the main political parties bar UKIP have embraced this Green Agenda and these parties are oblivious to the agenda they have signed up to.
Thank you for the comment. I’m glad that the frequency shift and modulation has been discussed at the blog, because that was the first thing that came to mind for me.
The waste that would be caused by having multiple waveforms coming together without proper blending/mixing would be similar to banning storage bins at farms, or banning refrigeration at supermarkets.
Maybe we should consider that as a comparison or an “energy savings” when discussing with greens, noting that if we ban refrigerators then there’s less energy draw?