Thursday, December 18, 2014

A Simple Plan

As wind and other renewables get cheaper, intermittency will matter more.

I have an idea that I've alluded to here before and which I've been trying to explain on Twitter but which requires -- a bit -- more than 140 characters to explain.

Here it is in a nutshell: fossil fuels could make great grid-scale batteries.

The problem is this: many clean energy sources are either intermittent (solar, wind) or have the opposite problem, being "fixed" (difficult to adjust to demand) like nuclear or geothermal. This is in contrast to, say, a modern natural gas plant, which can easily adjust its output minute by minute to match the demand.

Conventional batteries continue to get better and cheaper, but right now their capacity is orders of magnitude below what would be needed to store, say two or three weeks of energy.

However we do have a large amount of energy storage in the form of fossil fuels: liquid, solid, and gas. This form of storage is stable on geological time scales and extremely energy dense. Unlike many of the alternatives, including chemical batteries, capicators, pumped hydro storage, or molten sodium, the infrastructure to store and release hydrocarbon energy is simple and cheap -- in the case of petroleum, it can be as simple as a barrel or a hole in the ground.

The storage capacity of the German natural gas network is more than 200,000 GW·h which is enough for several months of energy requirement. By comparison, the capacity of all German pumped storage power plants amounts to only about 40 GW·h (Wikipedia). 

These are some of the reasons, of course, why fossil fuels have dominated our energy mix for so long (especially in the transport sector) and threaten to do so for many decades to come. But in using synthetic fossil fuels intended to store power, rather than provide power, we might be able to sidestep the disadvantages of these fuels, whilst retaining some of the crucial benefits.

Start with a conventional gas plant equipped with carbon capture technology (assuming we ever get serious about perfecting and deploying that technology.) Then, rather than put the CO2 in the ground, feed it into a synthetic natural gas plant and use a clean energy source to turn the CO2 back into gas. Burn, capture, and un-burn as needed in a closed cycle that doesn't release CO2 into the atmosphere.

Such a program assumes an abundance of clean energy [1], since carbon capture and synthesizing natural gas both require large amounts of energy relative to the energy stored in the final product. It can easily accommodate intermittancy as well as fixed or semi-fixed outputs. Since you can package and ship fossil fuels, this also means that the generation capacity can exist far from where the power is needed.

Another advantage is that this repurposes infrastructure we already have. We already use natural gas plants to adjust output to demand. We already have literally hundreds of billions of dollars of global infrastructure dedicated to the storage, transport, and burning of fossil fuels. Using hydrocarbons this way would simply mean that we stop pulling them out of the ground and recycle the emissions back into fuel. Much of the same infrastructure could be used.

I still think you would want a smart grid, dynamic pricing of electricity, HVDC networks, and some battery (or battery-like) grid-scale storage. These might function well enough that you wouldn't need this work-around on a regular basis. But it would be available to you if, say, there was a prolonged period of low solar output, or low wind output, or if a nuclear disaster led the government to shut down some or all of the nation's nuclear reactors.

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1. If we estimate that capturing the CO2 require 30% of the energy of burning the gas, and turning CO2 back into gas requires 120% of that energy, you'd need about 1.5MWh of clean energy for every MWh of emissions-free syngas.




Friday, December 5, 2014

A scary graph

Source
Whether or not you think growth in nuclear power is a smart play -- I think, on balance, it is -- nuclear energy production declining in absolute terms is bad, bad, bad news. It's going to eviscerate efforts to cut CO2 emissions via RE. You are going to end up -- as Germany has -- substituting low carbon renewable energy for low carbon nuclear energy. Leaving fossil fuels dominating the energy mix for decades to come. No es bueno.

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Wind turbines get better

Siemens has just installed a wind turbine with a 154-meter rotor. This is an exciting development because the higher you go, the harder and steadier the wind blows. A report by the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (h/t The Economist) recently looked at the new generation of giant turbines in terms of the areas they open up for productive wind farms:

They made this calculation by assuming a need for a gross capacity factor of 30%. The larger turbines achieve that over a much larger area than those in common use today.

I'd be interested as to the average capacity factor of these larger turbines in areas with optimal wind conditions. Danish offshore wind farms average a capacity factor of about 40%, compared to a US average (consisting overwhelmingly of onshore turbines) of 29%. However, the wind behaves differently over oceans as opposed to on land. It's probably reasonable, as a back-on-the-envelope calculation, to suppose that onshore installations the size of offshore turbines would achieve a capacity factor that would be intermediate between the two.

Improvements in photovoltaic cells get a lot of press these days, but it is worth noting that wind energy is not a stable technology either. It is rapidly getting cheaper and more productive. Now if we as a country would invest in a grid that can ship power cross-country and manage demand with dynamic pricing, you could really see renewable energy explode.

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

What snow machines can tell us about the 21st century

Studies conducted by University of Colorado snow scientist Mark Williams and his colleagues predict that, if we continue to pollute the way we do now, skiing will be confined to the top quarter of Aspen Mountain in average years by the end of the century. Utah’s Park City Mountain Resort will have no snowpack whatsoever. The Great Melt will hit maritime ski resorts in the Cascades and Sierra even sooner. A study in New England found that only four of the region’s 14 major ski resorts will still be profitable by 2100 — if they even survive that long.
 -- "As the climate warms, skiers can kiss their Aspen goodbye"

Madeleine Thomas over at Grist has an article up with the catchy title "In the ski business, there are no climate deniers." To the optimistic mind, this might seem a herald of good things to come, as climate change's effects impact people and businesses so directly and forcefully that it's no longer practicable not to take into account. And so it may come to pass. But lurking in the latter paragraphs of the piece is a stark warning that the actions taken in response to that reality may not be what climate activists hope:
Many resorts across California, normally a Mecca for powder hounds, are being left with no option but to invest in snow-making equipment in order to stay afloat during the winter months — as much as $8 million worth within the last three years at larger resorts like Squaw Valley and Alpine Meadows. But making snow is not without its costs: At resorts like Big Bear Lake, snowmaking equipment can suck up to 7,000 gallons of water from the lake per minute, at a whopping $3,000 per hour.
Economic analyses of the costs of climate change typically assume rational adaptation -- sacrificing places and aspects of are way of life when sustaining them becomes expensive or impracticable. But the opposite reaction is all too plausible -- expending resources lavishly to sustain one's existing patterns of behavior.

We would like a ski resort owner to hasten to DC a purchase a piece of a Congressperson in the service of fighting climate change. But what they are doing in practice is buying snow machines. Just as the people feeling the heat in New Delhi are buying air conditioning. And not just there, of course, but all over the globe:

China is already sprinting forward and is expected to surpass the United States as the world’s biggest user of electricity for air conditioning by 2020. Consider this: The number of U.S. homes equipped with air conditioning rose from 64 to 100 million between 1993 and 2009, whereas 50 million air-conditioning units were sold in China in 2010 alone. And it is projected that the number of air-conditioned vehicles in China will reach 100 million in 2015, having more than doubled in just five years.
As urban China, Japan, and South Korea approach the air-conditioning saturation point, the greatest demand growth in the post-2020 world is expected to occur elsewhere, most prominently in South and Southeast Asia. India will predominate — already, about 40 percent of all electricity consumption in the city of Mumbai goes for air conditioning. The Middle East is already heavily climate-controlled, but growth is expected to continue there as well. Within 15 years, Saudi Arabia could actually be consuming more oil than it exports, due largely to air conditioning. And with summers warming, the United States and Mexico will continue increasing their heavy consumption of cool.
Beyond air conditioning or snow machines, desalinization of sea water, farmed fish, and vertical farming are all examples of energy-intensive "adaptation" that may make the long-term problem worse. This is something we are going to see a lot of in the come years, so we will need a name for it. You might call it local energy-intensive resistance (LEIR.)

I don't begrudge an Indian family a cool place to sleep or, indeed, a ski resort owner their snow, which is, after all, their livelihood. But from the perspective of the larger civilization, these energy- and carbon-intensive solutions are maladaptive, not adaptive. They exacerbate climate change by increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and in exchange temporarily mitigate the harm caused by those emissions. They solve the problem of over-exploitation of the natural world by exploiting it harder.

Since LEIRs are available only to the comparably well-off, they additionally have the pernicious effect of weakening solidarity in confronting a crisis that threatens both rich and poor. The ski resort owner with his snow machine is not likely to become a climate warrior, even though the cost of climate change is real and immediate to him. He has made a separate peace.




Friday, September 12, 2014

It's official: ENSO is fucking with us

We are now in the longest Nino-less period since NOAA record-keeping started:

Source
The last three-month period classified as El Nino was March-April-May of 2010. 51 months have passed since then (with more likely in the pipeline, given a 0.0 anomaly now.) This chart only goes back to 2002, but the full record shows what an anomaly this is. Fifty month gaps occur in 1959-1963 and again in 1978-1982. The present 51 months is longer than either.

So, how is this significant? Most simply, recent temperature trends are likely to under-estimate the long-term trends, unless a suppressed El Nino is a long-term consequence of AGW. That's possible, but most climate models predict El Nino will become more frequent and strong in a warmer world, rather than the converse.




Monday, June 30, 2014

Hell, yes!

In a Guardian piece on things that annoy climate scientists -- a piece that hit all the usual marks about ignorant politicians, people who don't understand uncertainty, etc. -- was this gem:
The thing that bugs me most about the way climate change is talked about in the media is journalists citing scientific papers without providing a link to the original paper.
Readers often want to get more details or simply check sources, but this is very difficult (or sometimes impossible) if the source is not given. I've raised this a few times, and get lame excuses like 'readers get frustrated when the journals are paywalled' but that's not good enough. Media should provide sources – end of.
-- Professor Richard Betts, chair in Climate Impacts at the College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, UK

 Dear God, that irritates me to no end! Not only no link, but often they don't even give you the name of the paper, or the issue of the journal it's in! (Or is going to be in.) It's 2014, cite your fucking sources! Preach it, Dr Betts, preach it!

Saturday, June 28, 2014

"Good Anthropocene" and other clickbait

Well, Andrew Revkin successfully suckered me into listening to his talk. The faux-controversy over the title and Clive Hamilton's hissy fit sucked me in.

Nowhere in the talk does Revkin actually say that we are going to have a good Anthropocene. It's mostly just Revkin being Revkin -- "Don't scare the nice people, wear more bright colors, you'll never find a husband if you don't smile more."

Clive Hamilton's response, meanwhile, could be a prearranged piece of performance art intended to strengthen Revkin's argument about the limitations of "Woe is me, shame on you" rhetoric:
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dp
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”

Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
untly. In short, I think those who argue for the “good Anthropocene” are unscientific and live in a fantasy world of their own construction. - See more at: file:///Users/robertfarrell8/Downloads/The%20Delusion%20of%20the%20%E2%80%9CGood%20Anthropocene%E2%80%9D_%20Reply%20to%20Andrew%20Revkin%20@%20Clive%20Hamilton.html#sthash.zbjDOsCe.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.elSdryoA.dpuf
Why not say the word "bad" a few more times, Clive, then I'm sure we'll get it.

The irony of this is that Revkin's "Smile more" argument cuts very little ice with me or, really, anyone, but if you wanted to drive the point home that the rhetoric of "Woe is me, shame on you" is dominating the climate discourse to an unhealthy extent, you could not do better than to point to Clive's demand that we all unite behind a vision of the 21st century as an unending hell of pain and despair in which the living will envy the dead.

I think Revkin underestimates the power of shaming and blaming in the process of achieving social change, as I've argued before. But that doesn't excuse Hamilton. Look, one of the fundamental principles of rhetoric is that you vary your approach. From Lincoln to King to Kennedy, you can see this principle in action. Long sentences and short sentences. More formal language and more colloquial language. Conciliation and righteous anger. Anything which is unvarying and repetitive becomes wearying and, ultimately, background noise.

So what if Revkin wants to spin things a little happier and Hamilton wants to play the role of a discount Hebrew prophet? Can that variety not also be a source of strength and persuasiveness? Has Hamilton never heard of Good cop/Bad cop?
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.pOAOt3bb.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.pOAOt3bb.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.pOAOt3bb.dpuf
In the end, grasping at delusions like “the good Anthropocene” is a failure of courage, courage to face the facts. The power of positive thinking can’t turn malignant tumours into benign growths, and it can’t turn planetary overreach into endless lifestyle improvements. Declaring oneself to be an optimist is often used as a means of gaining the moral upper hand: “Things may look bad but, O ye of little faith, be bold and cheerful like me.”
Things are bad, and if we carry on as we are things will be very bad. It is the possibility of preventing bad turning into very bad that motivates many of us to work harder than ever. But pretending that bad can be turned into good with a large dose of positive thinking is, even more so than denying things are bad, a sure-fire way of ending up in a situation that is very bad indeed.
- See more at: http://clivehamilton.com/the-delusion-of-the-good-anthropocene-reply-to-andrew-revkin/#sthash.pOAOt3bb.dpuf

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Chart from the Wikipedia

Source
So a few interesting things here that we maybe all know, but are worth reviewing. Fossil fuels are dominating the energy mix in every sense. They are the largest component of the energy mix, and they are growing the fastest. We would need between five and six times the amount of low-carbon energy currently in existence to phase out fossil fuels, assuming demand remained static. And demand is not going to remain static.

Renewables produce twice the energy provided by nuclear power plants. An inconvenient truth for climate-conscious white individualist hierarchist males who whilst crying up nuclear power delight in dismissing renewables as pie-in-the-sky hippie moondust, but the truth, nonetheless.

And the excuse that this is mostly hydropower, and hydropower can't be scaled up, won't wash here, because we can see renewable energy as a category is rapidly growing -- if only the hydro resources matter, where is the growth coming from?

When I look at the share of fossil fuels, though, and the tiny shares of its rivals, I'm reminded of how guerrila organizations like the IRA or Fatah and Hamas, faced with an overwhelmingly powerful and dominant force, turn on each other and their own people in sheer frustration, fighting over turf like rival gangs, murdering informants, acting like criminals.

It's stupid and self-destructive, but sometimes when you're tired of losing you ache for a fight you can win. For environmentalists, nuclear is an easy target, because it's unpopular, expensive, and people are just plain afraid of it. All things we wish could be said about fossil fuels. The environmental movement, aided by public mistrust and fear and lack of corporate investment, are within striking distance of shutting down an entire industry. It's just that it's the wrong one.

What the hippie-punching nuke-boosters want is a little more complex. I don't think it's really about the climate for them. They want to fight the cultural wars, bash greens, promote big and manly and heterosexual things -- but they are smart enough not to go down the road of denying the science.

And the beauty of it is, they don't have to! By lining up with James Hansen and other smart greens behind a policy of more clean nuclear energy, they have found the one part of the argument between environmentalists and conservatives that they can actually win. For once they have (a part of the) real solutions, and the other side is sticking their heads in the sand.

Meanwhile the first column keeps growing.

UPDATE:



 H/t blueshift, via the Rabett, from BP.

What this chart adds to our understanding is that, as far as the last decade is concerned, anti-nuclear environmentalists are winning the aforementioned pointless catfight. And what they have won is a total stagnation in the proportional of non-fossil-fuel energy. And make no mistake, the blue line is what history will judge us on.

Friday, June 13, 2014

"New" Indian nuclear plant illustrates what's right and wrong about nuclear power

The first unit of the Kudankulam nuclear power plant, in the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, is up and operating at full power, a mere 26 years after it was commissioned as part of a joint project by Indian and the Soviet Union. Big victory for the international trade and diplomacy of the Soviet Union! Hey, where'd they go?



So what is good about this? It is 1 GW of very low carbon energy. When the second unit is operating a full capacity (which is scheduled for May 2015, but so far the builders have not stuck to their schedule very well) it will provide 2 GW of power, with a carbon footprint comparable to wind or solar, but compared to a solar or wind energy project, a lot bigger.

The photo above is of the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System (ISEGS) in California’s Mojave Desert. It's currently the largest solar thermal project in the world. It generates 1,000 GW-h annually, compared to Kudankulam's roughly 17,000 GW-h.

If you care about environmental issues at all, you've probably hear of Ivanpah. You've probably never heard of Kudankulam, built in the poor, underdeveloped (but proud and growing) state of Tamil Nadu. Yet Kudankulam will generate -- is already generating -- amounts of low-carbon electricity that dwarf Ivanpah as well as almost any renewable project in the world.

So what's wrong with Kudankulam? They have been trying to build it for twenty-six years, and it's still half-finished. This has taken so long that one of the countries that agreed to build the plant no longer exists. It's been delayed by bitter anti-nuclear protests, by the collapse of the Soviet Union, by technical problems. In the time it took to build this one plant, the cost of solar PV cells fell by 90%:

Building nuclear plants is too damn slow (for a combination of human and technical reasons). And that means that innovation and the spread of new technologies is too damn slow. And that means that by the time we could slog through another quarter-century nuclear construction project, both the renewables industry and the climate will have moved greatly on. And that in a nutshell is the greatest problem for nuclear energy.




Wednesday, June 11, 2014

GISTEMP redux: (Still) 2nd warmest April in the temperature record

+.73C, an increase of .03C compared to March and the hottest April ever, bar 2010 (as an aside, the first half of 2010 was a scorcher.)

How hot is that? Well, prior to 1970, the hottest April since records begin was in May 1969, +0.15C. The people alive in 1970 had never seen a April within half a degree of what we just saw. Given the inherent variability of monthly temperatures, that's pretty amazing.

Friday, May 23, 2014

GISTEMP: 2nd warmest April in the temperature record

We seem to be venturing back into the dismay routine of record-breaking. And El Nino is just getting into gear (maybe). But don't worry, it's not like the world's major ice sheets are crumbling.

Wednesday, May 7, 2014

Presented without comment: Neil deGrasse Tyson on AGW

[W]e’re dumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at a rate the Earth hasn’t seen since the great climate catastrophes of the past, the ones that led to mass extinctions. We just can’t seem to break our addiction to the kinds of fuel that will bring back a climate last seen by the dinosaurs, a climate that will drown our coastal cities and wreak havoc on the environment and our ability to feed ourselves. All the while, the glorious sun pours immaculate free energy down upon us, more than we will ever need. Why can’t we summon the ingenuity and courage of the generations that came before us? The dinosaurs never saw that asteroid coming. What’s our excuse?

 -- Neil deGrasse Tyson, Cosmos

h/t Grist

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Jar Jar Pielke

Meesa gonna normalize those costs, boss.


So Roger has joined Nate Silver over at the new 538, and the reviews are not good.

There's not really much to say about Pielke. He is what he is. His posts are error-ridden, cherry-picked and logically incoherent, which will surprise no one who has read his blog (or his twitter feed.) (Although I wish I had come up with Ryan Cooper's description of Pielke's output: "the Breakthrough Institute program for hippie-punching your way to fame and fortune.")

The real question of the hour is how Nate Silver, who became the intellectual crush of thinking people everywhere by taking a hard-nosed statistical approach to the squishy world of political analysis, has now seemingly embarked on a career, as the poet said, of "peddling freakonomics-lite contrarianism."

I guess we're seeing another example of successful people not understanding why they were successful in the first place, and either totally neglecting the stuff that made them great or overdoing it to the point of nausea.

You can point to Silver's hiring of Pielke as a mistake, but really, why is he making that mistake? There are a number of factors:

A) He does not have expertise in this area himself.
B) It is a lot more time consuming and difficult to become an expert in climate science and policy than, say, the dynamics of running for Congress.
C) He wanted a contrarian take, which he wrongly believes is what people are looking for from 538.

Unlike politics and sports analysis, where contrarianism is easy and fun because they are saturated with sloppy methodology and magical thinking, climate science is populated mostly by an elite group of highly trained specialists, and that makes successful contrarianism much, much harder.

One can imagine how this might be done. You could get someone very, very good at statistics (not Pielke, obviously) and go through important climate papers, and see what shakes out. One of the troubles with that, obviously, is that to all but a select few, that sort of thing is boring as hell.

Or you could do what I do, and what a lot of other much better informed and more witty people do, and be a contrarians to the contrarians. That's far easier. Their mistakes are glaring, their personality disorders, amusing and dramatic. Since many of the worst offenders are public officials and those that are not get a relentless stream of free publicity from the right-wing hate machine, in contrast to the scientists many people know who they are.

But perhaps Nate did not like all the competition in this space, or perhaps he is shy of embarking on a course which, yet again, would enrage reality-phobic conservatives. But for whatever reason, the new 538 is looking like a caricature of the old 538, leaving bewildered former admirers to ask, do you really not see the difference between the great stuff you were doing before, and the shlock you're putting your name to now?





Saturday, March 8, 2014

Solar activity at a ten-year high

Source
This is the peak of the solar cycle, so this is not at all unexpected. Still, given how anemic cycle 24 has been to date, the last few months of regression towards the mean have been striking.

Monday, March 3, 2014

Pielke Jr applies mathematics to social policy, misunderstands both

Pielke the younger has a strong if not-very-coherent message for anti-growth advocates (such a huge problem these days.) He is on to their tricks:
Some try to sugar-coat their anti-growth arguments by focusing their attention on the rich world. But with most of the world’s expected growth to occur in the poor parts of the world, such arguments are simply mathematical non sequiturs. The reality is that to be anti-growth today is actually to be anti-growth with respect to poor countries. The fact that very few, if any, anti-growth activists are openly demanding that poor countries remain poor tells us how powerful a force growth is in today’s global politics.
So in other words, people who see limits to growth typically focus on rich countries -- countries which are presumably running up against those limits. They do not focus on poor countries, whom everyone realizes need a significant amount of growth (growth which hopefully, in contradistinction to America's recent experience, will not send 95% of its benefits to the richest 1% of the population.)

So, is it mathematically impossible to be against growth in rich countries and for it in poor countries? Let's consider an analogous argument:
Anti-obesity campaigners disguise their anti-nutrition agenda by claiming to focus on people who are unhealthily overweight. Yet the hard fact remains that the majority of rapid weight gain occurs in babies. So the reality of being anti-weight gain today is to favor malnourished babies. The fact that very few, if any anti-obesity campaigners openly advocate starving young children tells us how politically weak (not to mention dishonest) they are.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Distributed energy storage

Tom Murphy thinks energy storage for a mostly solar- and wind-powered grid would be impractically large
Putting the pieces together, our national battery occupies a volume of 4.4 billion cubic meters, equivalent to a cube 1.6 km (one mile) on a side. The size in itself is not a problem: we’d naturally break up the battery and distribute it around the country. This battery would demand 5 trillion kg (5 billion tons) of lead.
 The figures he uses to get there:
Let’s also plan ahead and have all of our country’s energy needs met by this system: transportation, heating, industry, etc. The rate at which we currently use energy in all forms in the U.S. is 3 TW. If we transition everything to electricity, we can get by with 2 TW, assuming no growth in demand. Why? Because we currently use two-thirds of our energy supply (or 2 TW) to run heat engines, getting only about 0.6 TW out for useful purposes in the bargain. An electrical system could deliver this same 0.6 TW for only 1 TW of input, considering storage and transmission efficiencies.
Running a 2 TW electrified country for 7 days requires 336 billion kWh of storage.  We could also use nuclear power as a baseload to offset a significant portion of the need for storage—perhaps chopping the need in two. This post deals with the narrower topic of what it would take to implement a full-scale renewable-energy battery. Scale the result as you see fit.
This raises the question, if you have converted all transportation to run on electricity, how much of the storage requirement can be met by those batteries alone?

There are 254.4 million registered passenger vehicles in the United States. There are also several million commercial trucks and bus that are significantly larger than your average passenger vehicle. I'm going to count them as several "passenger-vehicle equivalents" and round that number to 300 million. Assume they are driven about 4 hours a day, and otherwise available to the grid, and give each one of Tesla's 85kWh batteries:

85 * (3*10^9) * (5/6) = 21.25 billion kWh.

So you could meet about 7% of the week's worth of power Mr. (Dr.?) Murphy estimates we might need (there's no point in being falsely precise in an exercise like this.) However the numbers look better if we make the scenario a little more realistic; for example, if we presume about 40% of the normal load will be baseload power -- about what a smart grid is thought to require to be stable. We can meet this through a combination of hydro, geothermal, nuclear, tidal, and/or space-based solar.

We should also suppose a dynamic pricing model for electricity, something the UK is already experimenting with. When solar are wind farms are idle, power costs more, reducing consumption. It seems likely that you could reduce energy consumption by a fair amount by this method -- 35% perhaps.

Now, in our nightmare scenario of unending darkness and perfectly becalmed winds, we have 35% of demand met by conservation, 40% by baseload power, leaving 25% to be covered by batteries. That's still more than we have, so let's add some hydroelectric storage.

In investigating the potential of hydroelectric storage -- no mean feat, when existing hydro storage plants tend to be rated by output (MW) not total storage (MW hours) I found myself right back with Tom Murphy:
The U.S. has 78 GW of hydroelectric capacity installed. In a year, these plants produce 272 TWh. Divide by 8766 hours in a year, and we find 0.031 TW (31 GW) of average power. This implies a 40% capacity factor.
In this post he is looking at hydroelectricity's potential as a power source, rather than as a form of storage, but let's borrow the numbers.
When we built things

We can suppose that most of the convenient sites where a large amount of water can flow abruptly downwards are occupied by these sites. We can further presume that if we can control the flow of water downwards, we can also, with the necessary infrastructure, pump the water upwards.

The potential of the dams for storage would reflect the amount of time we could run them at full capacity (78GW) instead of average capacity (31GW) presuming we were using intermittent renewables to "top off" the dam reservoir. Let's say, in the spirit of Fermi estimation, that that time is one week. That would give us a major boost to our storage capacity:

(78GW - 31GW) = 47GW
47GW * 24 hours = 1128 GW-h
1128 GW-h = 1,128,000,000 kW-h * 7 days
7.896 billion kW-h

So that puts us at 29.146 billion kW-h. Note that this is not a hard upper limit; reservoirs can be created artificially near the sea and energy stored via pumped sea water. But that's probably not necessary, because . . .

The Strategic Petroleum Reserve has a capacity of 727 million barrels (30.5 billion gallons, 115.4 billion liters). Let's fill that with biodiesel, which has a specific energy of about 35MJ/liter. That would provide a reserve of 115.4 billion * 35MJ = 4 trillion MJ. That's 1.1 trillion kW-h.

Now we have about 16 weeks of stored energy based upon the assumptions above (40% baseload power, 35% drop in consumption secondary to dynamic pricing) or almost four weeks based on Dr Murphy's pessimistic scenario (no adaptive drop in consumption, absolutely no baseload power, not even the 10% of our electrical supply currently provided by hydroelectric dams.

That's almost excessive, but we can trim it down by using imported sugarcane ethanol from Brazil, to give us one of the cleanest biofuels in the world (remember, we are not using this for everyday consumption, but rather as an emergency reserve, so we can acquire it gradually over time.) Ethanol is a little better than half as energy dense as biodiesel, which still gives us a nice margin under either set of assumptions.

So there you have it. Do we need billions of tons of lead to acquire the infrastructure to store a week's worth of energy? No, in fact we have it already!

Tuesday, February 4, 2014

David Keith vs the apocalypse

David Appell highlights this passage from David Keith's new book:
Imagine how effectively the world might collaborate if we discovered a massive asteroid inbound for a 2050 impact. But, this is not what we face. The claim that climate change threatens an imminent catastrophe is an attempt to play a trump car of (seemingly) objective science in order to avoid debate about the trade-offs at the heart of climate policy and about the role that values play in driving each of our personal judgements of the moral weight we accord to competing interests. But climate change is one of many problems, so there is no substitute for realistic assessment of our risks and open debate about the trade-offs between them, for we cannot avoid all risk or solve all problems.

-- David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering
There's no question that there is a strain of apocalyptic thinking in environmentalism (is there any ideology that does not have some element of this?)  But as so often when you try to ascribe motives to people, Keith does not have this quite right.

Yes, some people picture climate change as an "imminent catastrophe." And depending on your definition of "catastrophe" or "imminent" you could be right by your own lights. But I don't think the appeal of the end-of-the-world thinking is that it short-circuits a debate about "values." The idea that we are having a conflict about values is just wrong, wrong, wrong. So what is the appeal?

In the first place you have to acknowledge the general appeal of extremism in political debates. This has been apparent for thousands of years, ever since there was a need to appeal to large groups of unrelated people using abstract ideas. Go back to the Greece of Thucydides, 2,500 years ago, and you find oligarchs swearing that democracy will lead to economic collapse, famine, incest, and cannibalism, and democrats swearing that oligarchs will crush the life out of the people, steal their money, rape their women, and so forth.

Extremism makes it easy to talk to low-information voters, which has always been a prime need of all political activists. Keith views environmental extremists as cunningly evading a serious and rational weighing of the relative risks and benefits of alternate courses of action. In reality, of course, insofar as shouting calamity from the rooftops is strategic at all, the strategy is to compete with other prophets shouting a different kind of doom from other rooftops.

An Assyrian clay tablet dating to around 2800 B.C. bears the inscription: “Our Earth is degenerate in these later days; there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end; bribery and corruption are common; children no longer obey their parents; every man wants to write a book and the end of the world is evidently approaching.”[1]


Then, too, there is the even longer tradition of prophecies of doom, predicting an apocalypse that will consume the wicked. This goes right back to the Hebrew Bible and even before that. What appeals about these stories is not that they change the narrative of values -- prophets will have that conversation with you all day, every day, firmly in the belief that they are getting the best of the exchange. It is to reconcile their certainty that their values are correct and that they are in harmony with the universe with all the evidence around them that they have little power and the world is not ordered as it should be. This is the appeal of apocalypse stories to the devout, be they Christians, Muslims, extreme environmentalists, or libertarians (for libertarians, of course, the part of the Beast is played by fiat currency.)

The people who think the world is ending, imminently, should not be confused with the people who think the world is on a bad path, and needs to get on the right one, imminently. The two groups have plenty in common. They don't like large parts of the society we live in. They may dress funny. They may be strident and intolerant of gradualism. But while the former are in retreat from reality, the latter most decidedly are not. They are the Quaker abolitionists smuggling slaves to freedom, the women's suffragettes being dragged off to jail, the marchers on Selma and Washington braving the fire hoses and the dogs. And they are also, very proudly, the scientist arrested fighting mountaintop coal mining and the activist laying down in front of trucks to stop pipelines.

There is the judicious weighing of risks by armchair intellectuals, and there is action by those who have weighed the risks to those that cannot defend or protect themselves and chose to act, according to their own moral code. The latter may or may not succeed in affecting significant change; the former never will.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

EU backs off rigid renewable targets

The EU is dialing back on rigid, county-by-country targets for renewable energy:
Tempering its environmental ambitions in the face of harsh economic realities, the European Union on Wednesday proposed an end to binding national targets for renewable energy production while aiming for an overall cut of 40 percent in Europe’s carbon emissions by 2030.

Under the plans, outlined after tough internal negotiations, country-by country targets for renewable energy would be replaced by an overall objective for Europe, which would aim to increase the proportion of its energy provided by renewables to 27 percent.
I think this is a good move, climate-wise. It gets the focus back to GHG emissions rather than mandating a particular route to get there.

The old renewable targets, while expensive, have provided some obvious benefits in maturing these technologies and expanding the renewable energy sector:

Source
Obviously in the long run it is not a natural situation for Spain, population 47 million, to have a tenth of the world's installed solar capacity, or Germany, population 81 million, to have over a third of it. Two-thirds of the world's installed PV (1) is found in just a few countries in the EU; obviously the hard targets played a big role in that. Subsidies have driven innovation and adoption; appropriate infrastructure (a smart grid with an HVDC backbone), utility reform (ultra-local power companies with profits set by law are unlikely to nimbly respond to market incentives) and a realistic carbon price are all that's needed for renewables to truly explode in the US.


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1. In 2010; obviously the situation is changing rapidly.