This is a pretty balanced report report from Environment 360 on the hurdles in front of a green-energy future. Some key excerpts . . .
First up, for those in the “China is kicking our butt” camp:
From the dust-blown steppes of Inner Mongolia to the waters off Shanghai, China installed more wind turbines in the first half of 2010 than any other country — 7,800 megawatts of potential power production, or more than the United States, the European Union, and India combined. In fact, in northeast China alone, autumn and winter winds now produce some 17 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, roughly 5.5 percent of the total power generation in the region. That’s up from 534 million kilowatt hours just five years ago.But despite this rapid progress, wind energy still only generates a tiny fraction of China’s electricity. Indeed, even with aggressive government backing and green energy mandates, such “new energy” — including wind, solar, nuclear power plants, and biomass — accounts for less than 3 percent of China’s electricity production, compared to more than 70 percent provided by coal, which produces roughly 3 metric tons of carbon dioxide for every metric ton of the dirty, black rock burned. And as China’s economy continues to expand at a dizzying rate for the foreseeable future, wind and other renewable sources of energy will not even be able to keep pace with new demand, meaning fossil fuel burning will continue unabated.
And are you ready for some NIMBY here in the U.S.?
Assuming the U.S. will require roughly 4 terrawatts of power by 2050 (a conservative estimate, given that we already use more than three), replacing all that fossil fuel would require at least 4 million wind turbines — necessitating building 12, three-megawatt wind turbines every hour for the next 30 years, according to Griffiths. The numbers are similar for solar — 160 billion square meters of photovoltaic cells or concentrating mirrors. “We need to be making a square yard of solar cells or mirrors every second for the next 40 years to install that much in North America,” Griffiths calculates.It’s not just a matter of making the necessary equipment, it’s also a question of finding the space for it. A coal-fired power plant produces 100 to 1,000 watts per square meter, depending on the type of coal it burns and how that coal is mined. A typical photovoltaic system for turning sunlight into electricity produces just 9 watts per square meter, and wind provides only 1.5 watts per square meter.
Is nuclear the answer? If so, we better start building:
Just to supply one-quarter of its current energy mix from a resource that emits far fewer greenhouse gases — nuclear power — the U.S. would need to build 1,000 one-gigawatt nuclear reactors by 2050. Yet construction has begun on only two nuclear reactors in the U.S. since 1974. And just to power an electric car and truck fleet to replace the U.S.’s current gas and ethanol-fueled one would require 500 new nuclear power plants. There are currently 442 reactors in the entire world, of which the U.S. has 104 — the most of any nation.
This reminds me of an op-ed I read in the WSJ a few months before the tech-bubble burst. The op-ed basically argued that if you tally up all of the projections from the tech sector and take them even at a discounted value, there was not enough electricity in the U.S. to meet the demand for the projected sales. Either power plants needed to be built, or the numbers from the tech sector would prove bogus. And since no construction of the scale needed to meet the tech industry projections was underway, said projections would fail. And pop went the bubble.
Anybody see 12 wind turbines getting built per hour? Yeah, me neither. Which means all of the construction and money we’re spending won’t dent what the policymakers say is the problem of carbon emissions.
Everybody knows about Spain’s solar bubble, but did you know France had one too?
Two years ago, the National Assembly adopted one of those solar “feed-in tariffs” — a cute misnomer for a mandate that forces utilities to buy expensive renewable electricity at ridiculously high prices. Flush with visions for the solar future, the legislature set the price at 546 euros per megawatt-hour, almost ten times the market price of 55 euros that customers pay for electricity from other sources. Electricitie de France (EDF), the national utility, was obligated to buy from all comers, covering the costs with a special levy on other customers.
The result was an avalanche of expensive rooftop projects. Whereas EDF had received only 7,100 applications a year for such connections before 2008, by last December it was fielding 3,000 per day. “We didn’t see it coming,” French lawmaker Francois-Michel Gonnog toldBloomberg News. “What is in the pipeline this year is unimaginable. Farmers were being told they could put panels on hangars and get rid of their cows.” The government cut the price support twice last year but was finally forced to impose a three-month suspension in December.
Now costing 1 billion euros per year, the program does not expire until 2017 and has put the utility in trouble. EDF’s stock declined 20 percent last year, compared to only a 3.7 percent decline for the rest of Europe’s Stoxx 600 Utilities Index. The utility is now 57 billion euros in debt. Plans to upgrade its aging fleet of 53 nuclear reactors — which provide 75 percent of France’s electricity — have been thrown into doubt. The utility has been forced to raise the renewables levy on other customers from 4.50 euros to 7.50 euros per megawatt-hour, but financial analysts say they will have to pay up to 12.90 euros — almost 25 percent above the market price — for EDF to break even.
Unlike Spain, which entertained hopes of becoming a world leader in solar manufacturing, France seems to have created its bubble out of sheer delusions over the “renewable future.” “Most panels installed in France were made in China with a highly questionable carbon footprint,” Environment Minister Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet told parliament last month. “Policies should create jobs in France, not subsidize Chinese industry.”
They should also recognize that running the world on solar energy is a disastrously expensive fantasy.
According to Atlanta Journal Constitution, the plow collapsed the roof of the garage, even though the garage was deemed structurally sound. Global warming does have a way of damaging buildings not used to oppressive heat . . .
Richard Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at M.I.T. writes:
The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century.
For warming since 1979, there is a further problem. The dominant role of cumulus convection in the tropics requires that temperature approximately follow what is called a moist adiabatic profile. This requires that warming in the tropical upper troposphere be 2-3 times greater than at the surface. Indeed, all models do show this, but the data doesn’t and this means that something is wrong with the data. It is well known that above about 2 km altitude, the tropical temperatures are pretty homogeneous in the horizontal so that sampling is not a problem. Below two km (roughly the height of what is referred to as the trade wind inversion), there is much more horizontal variability, and, therefore, there is a profound sampling problem. Under the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that the problem resides in the surface data, and that the actual trend at the surface is about 60% too large. Even the claimed trend is larger than what models would have projected but for the inclusion of an arbitrary fudge factor due to aerosol cooling. The discrepancy was reported by Lindzen (2007) and by Douglass et al (2007). Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.
A great mash-up of the BBC’s one-sided coverage of global warming and the consequences to Britain’s economy, interviews with AGW-skeptical scientists, as well as a discussion of the IPCC’s political nature:
Australia was told to prepare for droughts as a result of climate change, and let down its guard against flooding
Ever more alarming facts are emerging to show how Brisbane’s floods were made infinitely worse by cockeyed decisions inspired by the obsession of the Australian authorities with global warming. Inevitably, the country’s warmist lobby has been voluble in claiming that such a “freak weather event” (as the BBC called it) is a consequence of man-made climate change. But far from being an unprecedented “freak event”, the latest flood was nearly a foot below the level of one in 1974 and 10 feet below the record set in 1893.
For years, Australia’s warmists have been advising the authorities that the danger posed to the country by global warming is not floods but droughts: not too much rain but too little. One result, in Brisbane, was a relaxation of planning rules, to allow building on areas vulnerable to flooding in the past. As long ago as 1999, this was seen as potentially disastrous by an expert Brisbane River Flood Study (which was ignored and for years kept secret). Instead of investing in its flood defences, Australia spent $13 billion on desalination plants. (Queensland’s was recently mothballed because of the excess of rain.)
Last week’s most disturbing revelation, however, was the contribution to Brisbane’s flooding by the South East Queensland Water company’s massive release of water from its Wivenhoe dam upstream from the city (for details see “Brisbane’s Man-Made Flood Peak” on the Regionalstates blog). Instead of controlled releases through the previous week, the company allowed the level to rise to within a few inches of the top of the dam before releasing a vast volume of water, with devastating consequences for Brisbane 36 hours later.
Which brings us to California, which has had a similar infatuation with all things green to prevent a hotter planet. AOL New:
Is a ‘Superstorm’ the Next ‘Big One’ for California?
For years, California residents have worried about warnings from the U.S. Geological Survey that someday the state will be hit by a giant earthquake known as the “big one.” Now the agency is warning of a new type of big one — a “superstorm.”
The USGS says California could experience what it calls the “ARkStorm Scenario,” a potential meteorological pattern that could produce weather of epic proportions, including up to 10 feet of rain, extensive flooding and more than $300 billion in damage. It’s estimated that one-quarter of the homes in California would be affected by some sort of flood damage in this scenario.
The goal of the analysis is not to generate fear but to prepare residents and emergency personnel for what could be the worst-case scenario from a meteorological perspective. The project is part of the National Real-Time Flood Mapping initiative to improve national flood management.
The massive ARkStorm is considered a plausible weather scenario based on previous flood records, including modern and prehistoric, along with projected climate-change projections.
Extreme weather patterns are common in California, and when established, the weather patterns often produce a nearly nonstop barrage of storms for days or weeks on end, resulting in excessive low-elevation rainfall and mountain snow in a topography especially susceptible to mudslides and flash flooding.
Regardless of what you think of global warming, the point is that politicians are ignoring inevitable, short-term threats — a flood in California, a hurricane hitting NYC, an earthquake in the Midwest, multiple genocidal dictators in Africa, etc. — while spending an inordinate amount of resources and dialogue on the long-term implications of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
As President Obama and his team of regulators bring domestic oil production to a crawl via their moratorium on offshore drilling, standstill on drilling permits, and myriad regulations on accessing oil on public lands, is it any wonder that oil and gas prices are climbing toward the record highs we saw in 2008, prior to the economic collapse?
Last week, Greenwire reported that there were fewer new wells drilled for oil on public lands in 2010 than in any other year in the past decade, and that as many as two-thirds of the permits issued to the oil and gas industry for drilling on federal lands were unused.
Kathleen Sgamma, government-affairs director for the Denver-based Western Energy Alliance, said the Obama administration’s regulations have discouraged new drilling in the West, where BLM controls some 250 million acres. “We were surprised,” Sgamma said, “to see just how much the additional regulatory burden has discouraged drilling in the West.”
Meanwhile, U.S. crude supplies have fallen for the sixth straight week, oil is inching toward $100 a barrel, the highest since October 2008, and retail gas prices are close to $3.00 a gallon.
This has scary implications for an economic recovery — as Ben Bernanke alluded to last week when he testified that he was “closely watching” increasing gas prices which could hurt economic growth.
Some experts are even warning that rising energy prices could push us into another recession. According to Sabine Schels, a commodity strategist for Merrill Lynch:
Back in 2008, [U.S.] crude oil . . . traded above $100 a barrel for about six months before the world economy collapsed into the worst crisis since the 1930s.
Other studies, too, show a strong correlation between rising oil prices and economic recessions. This week’s Fiscal Times:
A 2006 paper from the U.S. Energy Information Agency said, “most of the major economic downturns in the United States, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region since the 1970s have been preceded by sudden increases in crude oil prices.”
James Hamilton of UC San Diego produced a report in 2009 saying that higher oil prices in 2007-2008 impacted domestic spending and auto purchases to such an extent that “in the absence of those declines, it is unlikely that we would have characterized the period 2007 to 2008 as one of economic recession for the U.S.”
— Dana Joel Gattuso is director of the Center for Environmental and Regulatory Affairs at the National Center for Public Policy Research.
After a week on Planet Gore, the Detroit Auto Show returned to Planet Earth Saturday as the media cleared out and the public poured in.
For five strange days, automakers preened green for a politically correct press and Washington pols. Executives talked of saving the planet, Hollywood celebrity-turned-radical environmentalist Ed Begley Jr. endorsed Ford electric cars, and global-warming fighting subcompacts fronted exhibits even as the streets were paralyzed by snow outside.
But when the doors opened Saturday for the buying public, the big iron was back.
“Thousands of chrome, horsepower, style and luxury enthusiasts poured through the doors when the show opened at 9 AM,” reported the Detroit News’s Tom Greenwood as the people that really matter — consumers — made a beeline for pickups, big sedans, and gas-guzzling sports cars. Of course they did. In the last year, truck sales roared back to over 50 percent of the market, while hybrid car sales plummeted 17 percent.
“Greg Summers will be checking out the minivans,” reports Greenwood of one show customer. “‘But I’ll also be looking over the Audis, BMWs, Jeeps and Ford Explorers,’ he said.”
“If I had to choose my favorites, I’d say it’s the Jaguar for a foreign car; domestically, I’m really drawn to the Chrysler 300,” another visitor told Greenwood of two vehicles that get barely 20 mpg — a far cry from the 35 mpg Washington will improbably mandate in just four short years. “While many pay lip service to ‘going green,’ true lovers of ‘Detroit Iron’ get excited for torque, horsepower and muscle, muscle, muscle.”
“It’s all about cars like this, not hybrids and electrics,” an attendee in a yellow Corvette convertible (21 mpg) said. “That’s why you really come to the auto show.”
Exchequer Immelt Is the Perfect Pick
In case there existed any doubt that Barack Obama (D., Goldman Sachs) is Big Business’s man in Washington, he has . . .Go
