At Powerline;
This is the point: the federal government produces figures on the “levelized cost of energy,” comparing coal, natural gas, nuclear, wind, solar and so on. Most people naively assume that the government’s numbers are authoritative. In fact, as usual when it comes to energy, the government’s thumb is firmly on the scale in favor of crony energy that funds politicians…
Related – no need to panic even if the worst case scenario comes true.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/11/30/u-s-climate-resilience-tool-kit-greenland-stays-frozen-in-2100-even-under-rcp8-5/
This is the one that always gets me. Termites globally emit more Green House Gas than everything that man can do with all his gas and diesel every year. Somebody call Al Gore to start a Jihad against the Termites. Maybe he can write a new book called The Inconvenient Termite.
Termites produce more CO2 each year than all living things combined
December 20, 2014 by Robert
Termite and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Facts:
Scientists have calculated that termites alone produce ten times as much carbon dioxide as all the fossil fuels burned in the whole world in a year.
Pound for pound, the weight of all the termites in the world is greater than the total weight of humans.
Scientists estimate that, worldwide, termites may release over 150 million tons of methane gas into the atmosphere annually. In our lower atmosphere this methane then reacts to form carbon dioxide and ozone.
It is estimated that for every human on Earth there may be 1000 pounds of termites.
On the average Termites expel gas composed of about 59% nitrogen, 21% hydrogen, 9% carbon dioxide, 7% methane, and 4% oxygen.
It is thought “There are 2,600 different species of termites, and it is estimated that there are at least a million billion individual termites on Earth, that they emit two and four percent of the global carbon dioxide and methane budget, respectively-both mediated directly or indirectly by their microbes.
So proponents/advocates/radicals in favour of wind and solar, no-matter-what are fudging their numbers? Who woulda guessed?
There needs to be a standardized metric that compares apples to apples. That compares the value and cost of a longlife, conventional, dispatchable baseload power plant with a shortlife , green, intermittent power source. Levelized cost is not it. It doesn’t account for intermittentcy very well.
Something more accurate would be a calculation of the electricity sources ability and cost to produce power 24/7 80-90% of the time…on it’s own. Reliable, dispatchable power on demand is essential. Solar and wind would then either have to 1) calculate and include the cost of storage systems or 2) calculate and include the cost of backup power. No more freeloading.
I’m not sure how you’d include lifespan into the calculation but it shouldn’t be too difficult.
Solar must include the environmental costs of mining the components. It must also include the full costs of recycling and or disposing used solar panels. For northern climes it should also include the cost of clearing snow off the solar panels.
Perhaps we should also include the environmental costs of mining materials for storage batteries and the cost of recycling and disposing the sames.
It’d probably be comparable to the environmental, mining and decommissioning costs of conventional power.
Google engineers could not get wind power to produce enough green energy to overcome its CO2 footprint from manufacturing and construction. Neither can conventional power generators but they can produce affordable, reliable power.
LC you are probably correct, but I rarely see the effects I named above in discussions from environmentalists. Nor does our Dear Leader mention it. If it is mentioned it is called something to be done in the future. Having been involved in many decommissioning and reclamation projects for the industry, I suspect the “green” projects are seriously underestimating the effects.
An example:
Compare a 300MW natgas plant with a 300MW wind farm. Calculate the ability to produce 300MW 85% of the time for an average 24hr period and a 7 day period.
The natgas plant can meet the 85% standard 100% of the time in the average 24hr and 7 day period for 50 weeks per year (2 week maintenance)
The wind farm can not meet the 85% standard in any 24hr or 7 day period because it can only produce about 30% of its rated capacity. If they’re lucky they might produce the 85% standard a few days or weeks per year. The wind farm should be required to build its own storage and/or a backup natgas plant to meet the 85% standard.
Right now wind and solar are allowed to get the backup power that guarentees consumers 24/7/365 electricity reliability for free from their competitors.
Reliability is a great point. Wind and solar should include the cost of back up power, or battery storage.
It should not be unreasonable to expect the same reliability out of an electricity generating source that we’d expect out of our car, our cell phone service or cable tv. Can you imagine the anger if you were paying premium price (plus government subsidies) for any other service that only worked about 30% of the time? Particularly for essential products like water, heat, electricity.
re: 1:18 pm, sadly LC, the truth is you lost all the lieberals with the 2nd sentence.
(has to do with lieberal based ‘edjukayshun standards?’ (and note, ‘standards? is now a new word. the Q mark is part and parcel
of the spelling.) hey, wtf, in an age when up is down, black is white, M is F, F is M, and you go to jail for incorrect pronoun use . . . .)
Remember folks, there is the AGW religion heavily involved in this whole issue as well as crony capitalism to fill the pockets of the wind and solar companies. They are working together.
AGW=AlGoreWidget religion
Just another huckster