If you’ve been reading this blog lately, you know that the mythical transition to an energy future of pure “green” wind and solar electricity faces a gigantic problem of how to provide energy storage of the right type and in sufficient quantity. To make the electrical grid work, the wildly intermittent production of the wind and sun must somehow be turned into a smooth flow of electricity that matches customer demand minute by minute throughout the year. So far, that task has been fulfilled largely by natural gas back-up, which ramps up and down as the sun and wind ramp down and up. But now governments in the U.S., Europe, Canada and elsewhere say they will move to “net zero” carbon emission electricity by some time in the 2030s. Natural gas emits CO2, so “net zero” means that the natural gas must go. The alternative is energy storage of some sort.
Clearly, it is time to start figuring out how much energy storage we’re going to need, and of what type. Indeed, it is well past time to start figuring that out. If our government were even slightly competent, and also serious about “net zero” electricity by 2035, it would by this time have long since put together detailed feasibility and cost studies and demonstration projects showing exactly how this is going to work. Naturally, they don’t have any of that.
Y2Kyoto: THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING
BREAKING: Singapore and New Zealand to jointly tackle climate change
Weird
Conservative Treehouse: The G7 countries (including the U.S.) announced today they were demanding that Russia accept payment for oil and gas in euros and dollars. This is happening at the same time NATO is demanding (via sanctions) that Russia be blocked from accepting payments in euros and dollars.
Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa
From reader “DN”, on today’s earlier post on spiking ammonia prices;
The lower a product is in the Jenga tower of the modern economy, the more disastrous it is when you screw with it. Hydrocarbons are at the root of absolutely everything. Leftists are trying to replace the entire basis of the modern industrial economy, and they’re trying to do it in a way that has never happened in all of human history. Coal didn’t replace wood, it supplemented it. Oil didn’t replace coal, it supplemented it. Nuclear didn’t replace oil, it supplemented it. Each step involving exploitation of a more energy-dense fuel source didn’t replace the previous source, it merely reduced reliance upon it. People still burn wood and coal, we’re just burning less of it, and allowing it to be used for other things instead of keeping us alive and warm. Humanity will never stop using hydrocarbons; even if we were to replace every oil-fired power plant and vehicle with nuclear/electric, we’ll just redirect the hydrocarbons to places where they’re more profitably used, like fertilizer and plastic.
The one thing that we will never be able to do is “leave it in the ground”. That’s not how a modern industrial economy works. So what the progs are really trying to do is destroy the modern industrial economy – and with it, about 7/8ths of the population of the planet. They are advocating nothing less than deliberate genocide in the service of their Gaia-worshipping death cult. Anyone who knows the basics of science and can perform simple arithmetic understands this. Their ultimate goal is to outdo Hitler, Stalin and Mao combined, by a couple of orders of magnitude.
The funny part is that they think they’ll be the last ones left alive. I wouldn’t bet on that; people facing starvation tend not to go gentle into that good night.
Y2Kyoto: On Second Thought
Nothing sharpens the mind like a cruise missile. (h/t Adrian)
Y2Kyoto: End of Coal
Y2Kyoto: The Planet Has A Fever
Y2Kyoto: I’ll Miss The Ocean Coral
“It looks like a giant rose garden going as far as the eye can see,” says Julian Barbière at UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission.
h/t Chris
Y2Kyoto: Laws Are For The Little People
According to a new report from Transport & Environment (T&E) titled “Climate Impacts of Exemptions to EU’s Shipping Proposals: Arbitrary exemptions undermine integrity of shipping laws”, more than half of Europe’s ships would be exempt from the European Commission’s carbon pricing plan for the sector. Among them: highly polluting if extremely desirable – for the Monte Carlo set yachts.
More from Terry Etam: Private jet/yacht emissions are totally fine, the rest of you can go cuddle your cats to stay warm
h/t Adrian
Y2Kyoto: Think Warm Thoughts
Y2Kyoto: A Watched Pot
It has been an exciting start to the year where I live, because the highest astronomical tide was forecast for 3rd January and there was a cyclone tracking towards us.
On the highest tide each year, I wonder if the waves will reach to the wave cut notch at the bottom of the cliff face, below Boiling Pot Lookout in Noosa National Park that is about halfway down the east coast of Australia, just near where I live.
I have been going around and standing there on the lower platform (Platform 1) for some years at the time of the highest tide. These tides are in summer in the Southern Hemisphere because that is when the Sun is closest to the Earth, and they usually correspond with a New Moon or Full Moon.
I won’t spoil the ending.
Battered narrative
If the prairie provinces were experiencing a wave of unusually mild weather, stories like this would be front page news in every mainstream outlet. I thought I could hear crickets, but it’s probably too cold for that.
On Christmas Eve, Deadmen Valley in the Northwest Territories recorded a brutally cold temperature of -45C and the only place that was colder was Jakutsk, Russia at -48C at 4:00 p.m. EST. In fact, the bone-chilling air that sent temperatures tumbling so low in Deadmen Valley originated in Russia before it migrated over the North Pole.
Y2Kyoto: Snowfalls Are (Again) Just A Thing Of The Past
A Happy Groundhog Day to us all; God bless us, every one!
A ‘Dickensian’ scene of widespread snow on the ground on Christmas Day could be consigned to British history due to climate change, the Met Office says. It’s not impossible that generous blankets of snow will cover British ground at Christmas again some point in the future, it told MailOnline.
Europe’s Energy Calamity Offers A Global Teaching Moment
There is a website that shows European power prices in the day-ahead market. It is a beauty – a simple map of Europe, with each country’s name and a single power price below. To make it even simpler for us that qualify as the ultra-lazy, the countries are colour-coded by price, higher prices denoted by a different colour. A pretty palette of blues shows prices in the happy 0-50 Euro/MWh range, and prices that exceeded that range shifted to a kind of soft orange colour.
Back in September, the site began showing some discomfort – various countries began appearing in more of an angry orange as prices crossed 120 Euros. Days later, prices edged into the 130s, and the first flushes of red appeared like little faces choking on a bun.
Days later, some countries blew past red and into a new colour scheme of flourescent pinks and purples as power prices hit 200 Euros/MWh, then an angry North-Sea-sky deep blue grey at the 280 mark.
Last week, the whole freaking thing went black as power prices surpassed 300 Euros. The graphic artists presumably threw up their hands and walked out. Subsequent to that, energy news reported that French prices had hit 1,000 Euros one day, but alas I did not visit the site that day to see what they had come up with.
[…]
A month ago, the 30,000+ gathering of the globe-trotting jet-set elites at COP26 brought forth almost nothing except two very watered down pledges: to work towards phasing out coal, and to get rid of “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.
Mere weeks after COP26, we now know that coal usage is accelerating, and that much of Europe is introducing brand new fossil fuel subsidies in the form of capped utility bills for consumers (rioting citizens throw off a lot of heat which is, you know, bad for warming). Not a lot to show for the party, except one great big valuable lesson: ideology is easy, governing is hard.
Y2Kyoto: Enron’s Kyoto Memo Turns 24
The Kyoto Protocol is far past its expiration date of 2008–2012. But Palmisano’s memo, a classic in the history of political capitalism in action, lives on.
COP26: The Coal-Fired Climate Conference
Coal keeps lights on at COP26 as low wind strikes again
…yesterday, 3 November, saw a new record for the total daily cost of balancing the GB electricity grid. The previous record of £38 million, twenty times the current daily average, was smashed by a margin of £6 million, with the new record standing at £44.7m.
The causes are easy to identify from the Balancing Mechanism Reporting Service’s own chart of the Transmission System fuel mix. Wind power, the dark blue bars, was extremely low for most of the day, with a minimum of only 1 GW, under 5% of its capacity.
Minimum wind generation coincided neatly with peak demand, and as a result system prices reached stunning levels, with a maximum of just over £4,000 a megawatt hour, nearly 100 times the wholesale price normal before the current crisis started, as can be seen in this BMRS chart…
These prices brought coal and gas back on to the system to save the day, but emergency measures are expensive, and the cost to consumers and the wider economy was little short of horrifying.
h/t Adrian
Y2Kyoto: State Of Anorexia Envirosa
Hostility toward fossil fuels in the West is already having an adverse effect on individual access to energy and on economies in general. The U.K., which has adopted an anti-fossil fuel stance, is facing severe increases in natural gas prices.
“Wholesale gas prices have surged by 250% this year, including a 70% rise since August,” reported Sky News. This is a major blow for 22 million households that are dependent on gas for heating and cooking. In addition, gas is a key fuel for electricity generation and industrial processes.
One immediate impact could be felt by food processors, who uses carbon dioxide derived from natural gas for carbonation of drinks, refrigeration and animal slaughter. The chief executive of the British Meat Processors Association said that product could be disappearing from supermarket shelves in two weeks.
So, what led to the U.K. gas crisis? Part of the answer lies with government policy to not extract the country’s massive gas reserves, depending instead on imports.
Philip Cross for the Financial Post: Record prices in Europe and Asia have siphoned off 10 per cent of U.S. natural gas production, with American exports rising 42 per cent in the past year. The U.S. had the foresight, appetite for risk and co-operation of governments to build LNG export terminals, mostly along the Gulf coast. Canada didn’t.
Faster, please: Gripped by Energy Crisis, Europe Considers Breaking Climate Promises and Turning to Coal
A millstone, not a milestone….
If one were honest about the actual cost of facilities like this one in Iceland, it would become clear that the chattering classes of the western world are incentivizing the digging of holes that not only bury carbon, but literally bury valuable capital as well.
That is less than 1% of the annual emissions of a single coal-fired power plant, according to EPA emissions data and an International Energy Agency report on the technology. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has estimated that, to avoid the worst impacts of global warming, the world needs to remove 100 billion to 1 trillion tons of carbon from the atmosphere by the end of the century.
Keynes may not have imagined this in his wildest dreams.
Y2Kyoto: Schadenfrozen
One of Germany’s biggest challenges in the fight against climate change is to keep the lights on.
As Europe’s biggest economy shuts its last nuclear reactor next year and utility RWE AG warns that coal plants may close earlier than planned, critics say green energy isn’t being added quickly enough. Germany’s ability to meet peak demand is poised to shrink rapidly over the next two years, increasing the risk of blackouts.
In a last push to save her fading reputation as ‘The Climate Chancellor’ before stepping down after next month’s election, Angela Merkel announced Europe’s strictest emissions goals. But the green power revolution she fronted for almost two decades is running out of steam just as the electrification of the economy will increase demand. […]
A supply squeeze would send power prices soaring for the many thousands of companies that make up the backbone of the economy. Wholesale rates have already jumped almost 60% this year to their highest level since 2008. That increase will feed through to the nation’s 40 million homes already paying the highest bills in the European Union, partly to fund the energy transition.
The green-hucksters at Bloomberg buried that third paragraph at the bottom of the article, and this one at the end:
In the meantime, Germany may have to rely more on neighboring markets for imports. But the closure of fossil-fuel plants in other nations too means that availability could be limited during harsh winters, just when the power is needed the most…
Return of the Hockey Stick
Despite years of being told that defects in prior hockey stick temperature reconstructions “don’t matter” because the Hockey Stick “doesn’t “matter”, the first figure of new IPCC Summary for Policy-Makers is a Hockey Stick.
When ordinary Canadians hear the phrase “warmest in more than 100,000 years”, very few know that Canada was under a mile of ice for most of that period. So when Michael Mann and IPCC zealots demand that we “Make the Climate Great Again”, people, especially Canadians, need to think whether the climate was really all that “great” in the Ice Age, when there was a mile of ice over most of Canada