Real Costs of Energy Comparisons Make Nuclear Shine

Solar Panel Costs Do Not Cost the Energy Transformation Correctly

People do not understand energy or the benefits and risks that relate to energy.

Brian Wang
NextBigFuture

John Gorman was the chief executive of the Canadian Solar Industries Association but now he is a nuclear energy advocate. John indicates that nuclear energy is vital to solving the energy issues related to climate change.

An overly optimistic view of renewables has affected major decisions about other energy sources, particularly nuclear. The global focus on renewables has caused existing nuclear plants to be retired early and has stalled investment in new projects. It’s given people a false sense of security that we don’t need nuclear any more when nothing could be further from the truth.

What’s worse, because wind and solar are variable (they produce electricity only when the wind blows or the sun shines), they must be paired with other energy sources to support demand, and these are almost always fossil fuels. In the absence of enough nuclear energy, renewables are effectively prolonging the life of coal and gas plants that can produce power around the clock.

Nuclear is the only proven technology that has decarbonized the economies of entire countries, including France and Sweden.

Oozing Self-Righteousness Will Put Them Above the Law

Extinction Rebellion

One day it will be impossible to criticise the fanatics of Extinction Rebellion. Until then, I’ll tell the truth about those irrational zealots


Peter Hitchens
Mail on Sunday

It will soon be impossible to criticise the fanatics of Extinction Rebellion.   In fact, I will not be at all surprised if, in years to come, I and others face prosecution for having dared to doubt them.

Soon we will be sitting in an impoverished, dark country, with a trashed economy, incessant power cuts and dismal standard of living, caused by their dogma.  We are like a thirsty man refusing to drink from a tap because of a water shortage, while his local water company leaves hundreds of leaks unrepaired, allowing thousands of gallons to drain away each hour

Putting people on trial for warning against this will be one way to keep warm and occupied.

So, while I still may, I’ll say that this is one of the nastiest and stupidest outbreaks of intolerant, irrational zealotry since mankind emerged from the Dark Ages. I speak as a former intolerant zealot, who grew out of it.  I know the fierce joy which comes from despising others, only too well. And I fear it.


So, off we go into the cold and dark, while the red-clad propaganda mummers simper and gesticulate. Protesters are pictured at a 'grief march' in London last week

Perhaps the most dispiriting version of it is to be seen in the painted, beatific faces of the red-robed mime-artists who are to be found on so many of the demonstrations demanding that this country commits economic suicide.

Who can tell what is going on behind those self-satisfied, ethereal expressions?

There is None So Blind . . .

Turning Screws Inside Wind Turbines

We have made the point before--but because it would seem there are heaps of slow learners--we need to make it again.  Wind power is a crock.  As many have observed, wind power is a very expensive and inefficient way to generate electricity.  Regardless of this basic reality, wind power has achieved rock star status as a clean energy.  

The reality is that wind power is inefficient, costly, and erratic.  Any wind power business case relies upon huge subsidies to make it "profitable".  In other words, it can only continue if Peter is thoroughly robbed in order to pay Paul.

The brutal realities have finally been faced up to by a small wind power company in New Zealand.  It may well be the canary in the coal mine.

The new chairman of NZ Windfarms says the company has reached a turning point where it must evaluate its future because of the unpredictability of wind power.

Stuart Bauld spoke of the options as he also announced a $14m loss due to Vector selling its 22 per cent shareholding meaning Windfarms lost millions of dollars in tax benefits under continuity of shareholding accounting rules. [Stuff.  Emphasis, ours.]

In order to make a profit Windpower needs (as is universally the case, it seems) artificial subsidies of one sort or another.  In this case it was tax credits.

When the Money Spigot Shuts

Renewmaggedon – Solar, Wind Industries Die

Subsidies Dry Up…

James Delingpole
BreitbartLondon

See if you can work out what these recent stories from around the world have in common:

This one (from PV Tech):

 This one (from BNN)

and this one (from Motor1 News)

Yes. That’s right. Slowly, deliciously, like a leech starved of blood, the renewable energy industry is withering away and dying. It can only survive through government enforced subsidies or bribe-incentives. Once those dry up, so does its trade.

I wish I could say it gave me no pleasure to see all those jobs being lost, all those businesses collapsing, all those investors losing their shirts. But I’d be lying. The jobs aren’t productive ones, the businesses are an ugly manifestation of crony capitalism, and the investors should have realized that in finance there’s no such thing as a one way bet.

South Australia's Backward-to-the-Future Move

Energy Insecurity

South Australia had a bit of a storm a few days ago.  It resulted in a state-wide power black out.  How did that happen?  Green energy.

South Australia has become seriously committed to wind power.  It plans to help stop the world warming up, and this is a great way to do it.  Now over fifty percent of South Australia's electricity comes from wind power.  There is just a wee problem.  The storm winds a few days ago were so powerful, the state's wind turbines were automatically shut down.  Ergo: brown outs and no electricity.

Australia's Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull lost no time pointing out the obvious:

. . . Mr Turnbull told reporters [South Australia Premier] Mr Weatherill still had a case to answer to “keep the lights on” in his state.  “What we need to do across all levels of government is this - we have to deliver energy security. Rule one - keep the lights on,” he said.  “Second, we have to ensure that energy is affordable. SA has the highest wholesale energy costs in Australia.  So that is a problem for SA and the government, Mr Weatherill has to answer for that.”  [Newscom.au]

The first official report into the disaster concluded that the state's wind power over-capacity was the first cause of the problem.  Everything else cascaded down from that.  This was not a politically correct conclusion, but facts can be stubborn things, it seems.

The Dreams of Children Become the Stuff of Nightmares

The Spirit of Canute Is Still With Us

As other people's money runs out, green energy companies are crashing faster than Wall Street in 1929.  Canny folk who did not get caught up in the "flavour of the month" euphoria surrounding wind power and solar power have that "I told you so" look on their visages.  It has taken a few years for the money to run out, but green companies are now crashing and burning.  

The great and noble cause of facing what President Obama grandly and sonorously declared to be the greatest strategic threat before mankind--global warming and balmy temperatures--is turning out to be a stinky dog's breakfast.  Almost every day now we are hearing about the collapse of another green company.  The first high-profile company collapse was Solyndra--millions of millions of tax payer funds were flushed down the sewer.  Never mind, you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs, said Pressie Obama at the time.  Double the recipe and do it again.

A Sad Spectacle

Hot Gasses and Carbon Eructations

It could be argued that President Obama is one of the laziest and most narcissistic men ever to occupy the US White House.  At one speech after his successful election in 2008 he gravely informed the world that at the moment of his electoral success the world had started to cool and rising sea levels had begun to abate.  At first blush one thought that these statements were mere rhetorical hyperbole.  But the more Obama has subsequently flapped about along like a fish out of water we wonder whether indeed he really did believe his own hyped exaggerations.

His approach to combating "climate change" has been replete with his signature moves: lots of soaring (hollow) rhetoric about the grave dangers facing humanity coupled with various histrionic acts.  But throughout Obama cannot forge a political consensus to push through his agenda (assuming he has a substantial agenda.)  This would require effort and work.  Obama, however, appears to believe he is like the gods.  Merely to speak something is to call it into existence.  Far be it from the Great One to get down and dirty in constructive bi-partisan negotiations with Congress to reify his dreams (albeit in a compromised form).

We, of course, are thankful for his incompetence.  The latest gimmick has been to pronounce that all coal fired electricity plants and other coal and oil and gas dependant industrial processes will be made to disappear.  He has so pronounced.  It will happen.

Christopher Booker, writing in The Telegraph on the other side of the Atlantic, tells us what the reality will be.

Green Energy Meets the Real World

Renewable Energy

So Useless That Even Greenie Google Gave up on it

by James Delingpole  

22 Nov 2014

Breitbart London

Some people call it "renewable energy" but I prefer to call it "alternative energy" because that's what it really is: an alternative to energy that actually works (eg nuclear and anything made from wonderful, energy-rich fossil fuel.)

Now a pair of top boffins from uber-green Google's research department have reached the same conclusion.
Ross Konigstein and David Fork, both Stanford PhDs (aerospace engineering; applied physics) were employed on a Google research project which sought to enhance renewable technology to the point where it could produce energy more cheaply than coal. But after four years, the project was closed down. In this post at IEEE Spectrum they tell us why.

We came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.

Wild Exaggerations

The Sheriff of Nottingham Redivivus

While Rome burns, hapless world "leaders" like UN Secretary General, Ban Ki Moon and US President Barack Obama, drone on about how climate change is the world's biggest imminent threat.  Never has so much misdirection been attempted by so many, convincing so few.

Meanwhile, more and more heretics are taking to the hustings to deride the whole sordid conspiracy.

Recantation

Britain's Former Environment Minister: Abandon Carbon Targets and Embrace Shale and Nuclear

by Nick Hallett  

15 Oct 2014

BreitbartLondon

LONDON, United Kingdom – Former Environment Secretary Owen Paterson has called for Britain to abandon is carbon targets, saying that renewable energy cannot help Britain meet its energy needs and only a combination of shale gas, Combined Heat and Power and more, smaller nuclear power plants can provide renewable energy for the foreseeable future in Britain.

Speaking to the Global Warming Policy Foundation in London, Paterson also derided wind farms, saying that Britain's wind energy policy is the "single most regressive policy we have seen in this country since the Sheriff of Nottingham," calling it: "The coerced increase of electricity bills for people on low incomes to pay huge subsidies to wealthy landowners and rich investors."  He added that it was "immensely costly, regressive and damaging to the environment", and has had virtually no impact on carbon emissions.

Dumb and Dumber

The Wondrous Works of Windmill Tilters

Electricity power  prices in New Zealand are rocketing northward.  The official Left-wing political party, Labour is thinking that it can make political capital out of the pain of rising power bills.  The gaffe-prone leader, David Cunliffe tweeted the following:

Hat Tip: Keeping Stock

He was immediately confronted with a howl of raucous Twitter ridicule.

Letter From the UK (About Wind Farming)

True cost of Britain's wind farm industry revealed

Every job in Britain’s wind farm industry is effectively subsidised to the extent of £100,000 per year

By Robert Mendick, and Edward Malnick

5 Jun 2013

The Telegraph

 

A new analysis of government and industry figures shows that wind turbine owners received £1.2billion in the form of a consumer subsidy, paid by a supplement on electricity bills last year. They employed 12,000 people, to produce an effective £100,000 subsidy on each job.The disclosure is potentially embarrassing for the wind industry, which claims it is an economically dynamic sector that creates jobs. It was described by critics as proof the sector was not economically viable, with one calling it evidence of “soft jobs” that depended on the taxpayer.

The subsidy was disclosed in a new analysis of official figures, which showed that:

The Last Dodo

RIP, "Think Big"

In the early 1980's the government in New Zealand decided that it was smarter than the average joe when it came to business.  The government was going to pick some economic winners.  The policy was dubbed "Think Big" which had more than a communist, central-economic-planning ring to it. 

It had been the oil shocks jolted the government into action.  Borrowing vast sums of money on world money markets, the government persuaded lenders that huge government sponsored and endorsed energy projects were pretty much risk free.  Whilst they could never stack up on a risk/return basis in the open market, they sure could if the gummint were the borrower.  In time, Think Big delivered, according to Wikipedia:

Letter From the UK (About the Cold)

More Deadly Government Kindness

The cost of heating has risen throughout the world due to greenist policies.  Oil--a plentiful, cheap energy source--has been successively taxed in the vain attempt to nudge everyone towards "green" energy: solar, hydro, and wind power.  Moreover, further oil exploration and exploitation has been actively prevented in places such as the United States and New Zealand.  It's Tower of Babel stuff. 

Part of the propaganda drive supporting this Canutelike overreach has been to klaxon forth the threat to human life from global warming.  People die of heat, don't you know.  Well, yes it's true.  But people die far more from the cold.  In Britain, if a new Ice Age--or, at least, a period of colder temperatures--is coming, the old will die at a far faster pace.  They will be unable to afford the high prices of energy.  This year, Britain has weathered an unusually cold winter.  Many more elderly have died because they cannot afford the higher prices of energy--higher prices which have come about due to greenist energy policies. In order to save us all, Britain's Canutish government must first kill some off. 

This from The Telegraph:

Energy, Energy Everywhere

Abundance and Plenty

In New Zealand we have been learning that a state owned enterprise, Solid Energy which mines coal is on the brink of collapse.  It owes over 300 million dollars to its bankers.  Apparently it decided to "diworsify" away from coal mining and invested heavily in "alternative" energy sources, by which we should probably understand "green energy". 

The government was absolutely stupid to let that happen, but then again the NZ government pays lots of lip service to "green energy" so it would have been somewhat difficult to object.  The reality is that "green energy" has proved to be a big black hole down which billions of dollars have been poured and lost.  An article in the The Weekly Standard reviews the current global state of play.

A New Energy Age

Irwin M. Stelzer

February 23, 2013 12:00 AM

“The tectonic plates are shifting” is a much over-used expression. But when it comes to the international energy industry, the expression is apt.

Here in America, where policymakers have spent decades worrying about over-dependence on oil from unstable or hostile regimes, a new technology—fracking—is producing such an abundance of supplies of crude oil that refineries are having difficulty processing all of the crude being produced, and talk of exports can be heard from Wyoming to Houston. As for natural gas, this writer remembers when supplies were so short that burning gas for decorative illumination was forbidden in some states and frowned on in others. 

Now the same technology that is making America the next Saudi Arabia (to borrow the jargon of overwrought analysts) is also adding decades of supplies of natural gas to its available resource base, driving down the price and making it possible for us to become a major exporter of natural gas. Unless, of course, the government accedes to the wishes of DuPont and other large users of natural gas and refuses to allow exports, no matter their potential for reducing our trade deficit. 

The discovery of virtually unlimited supplies of natural gas comes at a convenient time—just when the Obama administration has decided to make the construction of new coal plants effectively impossible, and is to tighten regulation of existing plants to the point of making many uneconomic to operate. Natural gas has already taken a big bite out of the coal market, and is making it more difficult than ever to justify the construction of costly nuclear plants, especially since the administration refuses to activate the nuclear waste repository in Nevada, the home state of the leader of the Senate’s majority Democrats and an opponent of bringing nuclear waste into his state. A few plants will be built here, as some utilities reckon that their customers are willing to pay for insurance against a spike in natural gas prices, and they do have some non-trivial government subsidies. But most of the 60 reactors under construction worldwide are in countries such as China, Russia and South Korea, where governments can saddle taxpayers and customers with the relatively high cost of nuclear power as part of a national quest for energy security.

Meanwhile, in Britain energy shortages loom. Renewables have proved expensive and difficult to get built; coal is being phased out pursuant to made-in-the-UK green policies and orders from EU headquarters in Brussels; and nuclear power is so costly that one company has pulled out of a nuclear construction project, and another, France’s EDF, is insisting that the government guarantee it will be allowed to charge a price high enough to cover costs and a profit. Clearly, it is assuming that power from its nuke will be uncompetitive in energy markets.

Which leaves natural gas. Britain will be bidding against Asian countries for overseas gas supplies prompting, Alistair Buchanan, outgoing head of energy regulator Ofgem, to predict that imported gas will be extraordinarily expensive, especially if protectionists succeed in persuading President Obama to ban exports. Worse still, natural gas, now 30 percent of power-station fuel, will account for 60 -70 percent by 2020.

Germany is not in much better shape than Britain.  Its pursuit of what are probably the greenest policies of any industrialised country, combined with the phasing out of nuclear to calm safety concerns, has the country headed towards severe energy shortages. And, paradoxically, has at least for now driven up reliance on coal—it seems that when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine renewables are problematic sources of energy. Indeed, in order for its manufacturing industries to remain competitive in world markets Germany has decided it needs to keep energy costs down, and so is building some new coal-fired plants to replace older ones that are being retired. Those German plants will be among the 1,000 being planned worldwide, three-fourths of them in China and India. 

         

Although renewables remain the power source of choice for greens, they require such massive subsidies that their role in meeting soaring electricity demand will remain incidental. Spain is only one country that has decided that it can no longer afford the subsidies that renewables require, and only Obama’s antipathy to fossil fuels, his war on climate change, and the political clout of some of his donors keep subsidies flowing to uneconomic solar and wind companies.

China is doing more than subsidizing renewables and building coal and nuclear plants, although it is doing plenty of each of those. It is locking up overseas supplies of crude oil. Its state-owned enterprises (SOEs) are in a position to include in their bids for oil supplies the value assigned by the regime to security of supply, while private-sector bidders have to base the prices they will pay only on the commercial value of the resources. The SOEs—among them CNOOC and Sinopec—are estimated to have spent almost $100 billion acquiring foreign oil companies in the past few years, and the International Energy Agency estimates that by 2015 China will have doubled the overseas output under its control from levels in 2011, and match such OPEC producers as Kuwait in overall controlled production.

The Chinese are also acquiring foreign energy technology, either by making access to its markets conditional on the handing over of important technology, or by what we might politely call less overt means.

It is obvious from even this partial list of the changes in the energy markets that we are entering a new energy age. With major geopolitical implications.

·     An oil- and gas-rich America will care less about ruckuses in the Middle East, although even a self-sufficient America remains subject to developments in international markets. Even more important, Jin Zhongxia, head of the research arm of China’s central bank, says America’s new energy opulence assures that “The dollar’s global dominance will continue.”  

·     China is using its lock-up of oil supplies to extend its political influence in Africa. Private-sector companies can’t compete with China’s SOEs in countries in which China’s rulers can add a new port, an airport, an air traffic control system to supplement the SOEs’ cash bids. The regime is also becoming more belligerent in offshore areas believed to hold large deposits of oil and gas, causing a shift of some U.S. military assets to the Pacific region.  

·     Europe and the UK, their economies already under strain, are finding that green comes dear, and that costly energy is interfering with their export-led growth strategies.  

·     The energy deck is being reshuffled. Fracking is likely to drive down oil prices in the long run. Coal will remain a major player, green wishes notwithstanding. Renewables continue to be dependent on subsidies, which cash-strapped countries are putting under review.  Nuclear power is a high-cost option, its role largely dependent on how much governments are willing to extract from customers and taxpayers or, in a few instances, how much utilities are willing to pay to avoid too-great dependence on natural gas.

Real tectonic plates move slowly, about at the rate that your fingernails grow. The energy economy’s plates are moving far faster than that, with profound political adjustments to follow.

Douglas Wilson's Letter From America

No Bureaucratic Shadow 

Culture and Politics - Politics
Written by Douglas Wilson
Wednesday, 20 February 2013

All the early returns indicate that the available supply of energy in North America is virtually inexhaustible. Using words like inexhaustible is problematic to Malthusians, but it looks to be a good description. Energy, it appears, is about as abundant as salt water. With the discovery of new reserves and the development of new technologies of extraction, it has become apparent that if we had an unregulated energy economy, we could drive back and forth across the country for pocket change on the gallon, and do so without getting permission from a single federal official. And that, at least to them, presents a problem.

Creation's Abundance

Energy and Ignorant Greenists

We are all familiar with the Greenist propaganda concerning "Peak Oil".  It has been thoughtlessly trotted out as a reason to "invest" in alternative forms of energy: wind, solar, and tidal.  The case betrays the Greenists' ignorance of economics, on the one hand, and their relentless penchant for tax and spend fiscal policies, on the other.

A knowledge of  economic history of energy development shows repeatedly that new energy sources replace current sources long before the current energy source runs out.  As Sheik Yamani of OPEC observed in the 1970's, the steam age ended long before wood and coal ran out; likewise the oil age would end, long before oil ran out.  Yamani has been proved correct.  But the difference between a market led change (diminishing oil supply leads to gradually higher prices making alternative energy source development economical over several decades, providing time to develop a replacement infrastructure to deliver a new energy source in an efficient and lower-cost fashion) and government fiat led is that the latter results in huge market and economic dislocations, false starts and blind alleys, exorbitant waste of tax payers' money, and massive economic costs--which we all have to pay for.  Greenist hubris and folly does not come cheap.

Messianic Pretensions Blowing Up

Wild and Restless Spirits

When governments get the-grand-idea and seek to bring it to pass for the good of mankind the results are always disastrous.  God is a jealous God; He does not brook pretenders to the throne of  Heaven. 

Climate change has seen a flowering of false messianism.  Governments have set out to save the world and have ended up looking like stupid chooks.  Germany and windpower imbroglios are the latest--which is particularly ironic since Germany has been hailed by greenists everywhere as the poster nation for where the rest of the world needs to go.

The Telegraph compares how the UK is still cheerleading for wind power, attempting to imitate Germany, while in the latter country people are starting to rue the day they ever went down that ephemeral and unpredictable track.

Letter From the UK

Ignorant Luddites and Their Greek-Chorus Government

On extracting gas from rock, or putting it in there, the greens are equally confused  
The push for 'carbon capture' and the row over 'fracking' are both misguided. 

Christopher Booker  
The Telegraph

A delightful parable unfolded last week over the scarcely believable shambles we are making of our national energy policy. Ever more people are waking up to the fact that “renewables” such as windmills are absurdly expensive and hopelessly inefficient. Meanwhile, our nuclear plans have been thrown into disarray, our North Sea gas is fast running out, and we have turned our back on coal, even though it still often provides us with half our electricity. So how will we keep the lights on?

There were headline stories last week from two areas of energy policy that highlighted our predicament.

Letter From the UK

Wind No Longer in the Sails of "Green" Energy Companies

Command and control economies produce one thing consistently--massive waste.  The government push to "green energy", of which subsidized wind "farms" are an example, illustrates the problem.  Wind farms will never get off the ground literally until they can demonstrate that wind turbines can produce electricity as cost effectively and as efficiently as other energy sources.

To date, without massive government subsidies wind farming is like colonising the moon: a grandiose form of economic waste.

It seems that the mood is changing in the UK.  Wind farms are being seen for what they are.  Troughing big businesses--looking to cash in on a pile of government money--are now rethinking.  Risks are rising for them as government funding becomes more and more uncertain.

This from The Guardian:

Letter From Denmark

A Massive Money Pit

 

2012-02-16

Bjorn Lomborg

COPENHAGEN – One of the world’s biggest green-energy public-policy experiments is coming to a bitter end in Germany, with important lessons for policymakers elsewhere.

Germany once prided itself on being the “photovoltaic world champion”, doling out generous subsidies – totaling more than $130 billion, according to research from Germany’s Ruhr University – to citizens to invest in solar energy. But now the German government is vowing to cut the subsidies sooner than planned, and to phase out support over the next five years. What went wrong?