Hillary Clinton’s Energy Blackout America: ‘Heavy reliance on wind & solar = huge costs & frequent failures’
Privately, Mrs. Clinton is as close as you can get to an energy realist in a party completely in hock to the environmental movement. She wants to defend fracking and natural gas, but daren’t in public. As the WikiLeaks hack reveals, she tells a blue-collar audience that environmentalist activists should get a life, but doesn’t tell them that to their faces. “The honeymoon won’t last ten minutes,” green activist Bill McKibben warned earlier this week, threatening to redouble the green onslaught on her from November 9.
In truth, McKibben and his allies have already won. Whatever she thinks, Clinton is a prisoner of her public positions. She promises to install half a billion solar panels by 2020, a sevenfold increase from today, and has set a target to generate one-third of America’s electricity from renewable sources by 2027. It would mean that the U.S. would beat the EU’s 27 percent target by three years and six percentage points.
This is an absurdly vast challenge. Even the Europeans have soured on the costs and immense practical difficulties of integrating unreliable wind and solar into the grid. The benefits of Mrs. Clinton’s plan would flow mostly to China — eight of the top ten manufacturers of solar photovoltaic panels last year were Chinese. Its costs would fall on Americans in the form of spiraling electricity bills, a large part of which would go to pay for grid-management tools to reduce the risk of blackouts, and even these may not work very well.…
18 New Papers Link High Solar Activity To Medieval And Modern Warmth, Low Solar Activity To Little Ice Age Cooling
18 New Papers Link High Solar Activity To Medieval And Modern Warmth, Low Solar Activity To Little Ice Age Cooling
“It is generally accepted that the climate warms during periods of strong solar activity (e.g., the Medieval Warm Period) and cools during periods of low solar activity (e.g., the Little Ice Age).” —Lyu et al., 2016
Within the last 1,000 years, global-scale surface temperatures underwent a warm period during Medieval times, centennial-scale cooling during the 14th to 19th centuries, and another warm period since the early 20th century. According to scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed scientific literature within the last several months (2016), these long-term thermal changes are well correlated with long-term variations in solar activity, namely the Medieval Solar Maximum (Medieval Warm Period), Spörer, Maunder and Dalton Minimums (Little Ice Age), andModern Grand Maximum (20th Century). Scientists Zharkova and colleagues (2015) provide a cogent summary with a user-friendly graphic denoting the solar changes and their correspondence with warming and cooling trends.
“The longest direct observation of solar activity is the 400-year sunspot-number series, which depicts a dramatic contrast between the almost spotless Maunder and Dalton minima, andthe period of very high activity in the most recent 5 cycles [1950s – 2000s], prior to cycle 24. … The records show that solar activity in the current cycle 24 is much lower than in the previous three cycles 21–23 revealing more than a two-year minimum period between cycles 23 and 24. This reduced activity in cycle 24 was very surprising because the previous five cycles were extremely active and sunspot productive forming the Modern Maximum. … We predict correctly many features from the past, such as: 1) an increase in solar activity during the Medieval Warm period; 2) a clear decrease in the activity during the Little Ice Age, the Maunder Minimum and the Dalton Minimum; 3) an increase in solar activity during a modern maximum in 20th century.”
“The corrected series is provided as supplementary material in electronic form and displays secular minima around 1800 (Dalton Minimum) and 1900 (Gleissberg Minimum), as well as the Modern Grand Maximum of [solar] activity in the second half of the twentieth century. The uniqueness of the grand maximum is confirmed for the last 250 years.”
Watch: Morano on TV: 1.7 million Australians experience crippling blackout after switch to ‘green’ energy
…New Research Confirms Past Findings: Solar Activity Tied To Weather Events & Climate Changes
New Research Confirms Past Findings: Solar Activity Tied To Weather Events & Climate Changes
Extreme weather incidents – i.e. disastrous flooding from extreme precipitation – has always existed … and well before the introduction of human industrial/consumer CO2 emissions … the name Noah rings a bell, yes? Image source Much research has been done…
— gReader Pro…
Another Statewide Blackout: South Australia’s Wind Power Disaster Continues
Another Statewide Blackout: South Australia’s Wind Power Disaster Continues
By Paul Homewood Traffic in total darkness around the streets of Adelaide as residents are left without power on Wednesday night Hard on the heels of a “near miss” in July when it narrowly averted widespread blackouts, South Australia was warned on Wednesday night to prepare for an extended loss of electricity in the wake of wild weather. Described as a once in a 50-year storm, the statewide disruption prompted power companies to warn that users of medical equipment should prepare to use back-ups, and mobile phone users to conserve batteries. “We are experiencing a state-wide outage which means we have no supply from the upstream transmission network,” electricity distributor SA Power Networks told clients late Wednesday. In an unprecedented development, the state was cut-off from the national electricity network, the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) said “resulting in a state-wide power outage in South Australia”. As a result, the entire electricity market in the state had been suspended as it sought to work with electricity transmission company ElectraNet “to identify and understand the severity of the fault, as well as determine a power restoration time”. There were no implications for other states from the extensive blackout in South Australia, the energy market operator said. The extensive disruption follows the narrow avoidance of widespread blackouts in South Australia in July. At that time, the state government brought pressure to bear on a local power company for an idled power station to be restarted to avoid potential disruptions, following a lack of electricity generated from wind and solar sources at a time when it was unable to “import” sufficient supply from Victoria. But Wednesday’s event will trigger renewed debate over the state’s heavy reliance on renewable energy which has forced the closure of uncompetitive power stations, putting the electricity network in South Australia under stress. Earlier this week, the Grattan Institute warned that South Australia’s high reliance on renewable energy sources left it exposed to disruptions. It pointed to the fact that while the renewable energy target had encouraged the development of wind and solar generation, it had the potential to undermine supply security at a reasonable price, because it forced the closure of inefficient power stations without encouraging the construction of the necessary new generation supply sources. http://www.thegwpf.com/back-to-the-dark-ages-south-australia-pays-the-price-for-heavy-reliance-on-renewable-energy/ I have not commented yet on South Australia’s black out yesterday, as …
Renewable Energy Poses Growing Security Risk, GWPF Warns
Renewable Energy Poses Growing Security Risk, GWPF Warns
http://www.thegwpf.com/renewable-energy-poses-growing-security-risks-gwpf-warns/
In light of the statewide blackout in South Australia, the GWPF is warning that intermittent wind and solar energy pose a serious and growing energy security risk and threaten to undermine the reliability of electricity generation. A paper published by the GWPF two years ago (UK Energy Security: Myth and Reality) shows that the ability of the electrical grid to absorb intermittent renewable energy becomes increasingly more hazardous with scale. In fact, wind and solar power, because of the intermittent nature of the electricity generated, are the real risk to security of supply. Full paper (PDF)
— gReader Pro…
4 New Papers Link Solar Activity, Natural Ocean Cycles To Climate – & Find Warmer Temps During 1700s, 1800s
As of mid-September, there have already been 77 peer-reviewed scientific papers authored by several hundred scientists linking solar activity to climate change. There were 43 as of the end of June, as seen here. In other words, there have been 34 more papers linking solar forcing to climate change made available online just since July.
This publication rate for 2016 is slightly ahead of the pace of published papers linking solar forcing to climate change for 2015 (95 Solar-Climate papers ) and 2014 (93 Solar-Climate papers). At this rate, it is likely that a list of 300+ scientific papers linking solar forcing to climate change will have been made available between 2014 and 2016.
In addition, there have already been 41 papers published in science journals this year linking natural oceanic oscillations (i.e., ENSO, NAO, AMO, PDO) to climate changes. There were 27 such papers as of the end of June.
The solar-ocean oscillation climate connection has gained widespread acceptance in the scientific community. For example, see “35 New Scientific Publications Confirm Ocean Cycles, Sun Are the Main Climate Drivers”
The latest papers linking solar activity as well as ocean oscillations to climate changes are listed below. Not only do these papers describe solar activity and ocean oscillations as the dominant mechanisms of climate change, they provide evidence that the modern, post-1950 period does not contain the highest temperatures of the last few hundred years. In fact, these papers each document that temperatures during some periods of the 1700s and/or 1800s were just as warm or warmer than present temperatures.
That periods with much lower CO2 concentrations (of about 280 parts per million, or 0.028% of atmospheric gases) could have warmer-than-now temperatures (with present CO2 concentrations reaching 400 parts per million) defies claims that variations in CO2 primarily (or even exclusively) determine the temperature of the planet’s water and air, and that natural variations in solar activity, ocean heat distribution/cycling, clouds, volcanic activity…play little to no role in long-term climate change.
Perhaps this CO2-drives-climate paradigm needs to be updated to reflect the growing body of scientific evidence that the Sun and natural ocean cycling are primarily what drive temperature variations — not CO2.
1.
Physicist: Proof that alternatives burn more fossil fuels
By Physicist Denis G. Rancourt, PhD
I provide a proof that alternative energy production technologies (wind, solar, ocean energy, biofuels, etc.) necessarily burn more fossil fuel, per quantum of energy generated, than the energy production technologies that directly burn fossil fuel.
(Note: Hydro-electricity is “renewable” but it is not an “alternative” energy.)
If this were not the case, or if there was a realistic potential for this not to be the case, then alternatives could be more economical on a true-coast basis and would be experiencing a consequential surge in development and implementation, without disproportionate (per energy quantum) public investment.
Whereas, the global reality looks like this:
The increases in the insignificant alternatives are tied to disproportionate government investment, incentives, and subsidies, which transfer artificially high costs to citizens and users. As soon as government commitments are reduced or terminated the sector crashes [1].
Here is the said proof.
The true (no public subsidy) cost of any “alternative” is a fair proportional measure of the fossil-fuel expenditure needed to create and maintain the said “alternative”.
This is true because a large fraction of the said true cost is to buy the mechanical (machine) work to entirely manufacture and maintain the alternative technology.
The said mechanical work is needed for every aspect of the production, from mining and transporting ore (or raw material), to making materials from the ore, to making components from the materials, to assembly of the components, to computer design (having built the computers), to feeding and clothing and housing and transporting all the workers involved… (i.e. labour costs), to installing the technology, and to maintain the technology. Operational life-time and disaster installation-replacement must also be counted, as part of “maintenance”.
Maintenance costs are significant. Here are a few provocative pictures that illustrate the point:
The required said mechanical work is energized by the available energy sources. Since 87% or so of energy used, which powers all machine activity, is fossil fuel (not to mention hydro and nuclear), therefore the said mechanical work is mostly energized by burning fossil fuel.
Since the true cost of alternative energy produced is higher than the true cost of fossil fuel energy produced, since true cost is a measure of available energy consumed in producing the energy, and since available energy is mostly (87%) from fossil fuels, it follows that alternative technologies burn more fossil fuel …
New Scaffeta paper finds planetary resonance drives cosmic rays & climate change
New Scaffeta paper finds planetary resonance drives cosmic rays & climate change
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2016/09/new-scaffeta-paper-finds-planetary_46.html
A new paper by Dr. Nicola Scafetta et al published in Earth Science Reviews finds an astronomical origin of the ~2100-2500 year Hallstatt cycle found in “cosmogenic radioisotopes (14C and 10Be) and in paleoclimate records throughout the Holocene.” The authors, “show strong evidences for an astronomical origin of this cycle. Namely, this oscillation is coherent to a repeating pattern in the periodic revolution of the planets around the Sun: the major stable resonance involving the four Jovian planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – which has a period of about p = 2318 years. Inspired by the Milanković’s theory of an astronomical origin of the glacial cycles, we test whether the Hallstatt cycle could derive from the rhythmic variation of the circularity of the solar system disk assuming that this dynamics could eventually modulate the solar wind and, consequently, the incoming cosmic ray flux and/or the interplanetary/cosmic dust concentration around the Earth-Moon system.” According to the authors, “the rhythmic contraction and expansion of the solar system driven by a major resonance involving the movements of the four Jovian planets appear to work as a gravitational/electromagnetic pump that increases and decreases the cosmic ray and dust densities inside the inner region of the solar system, which then modulate both the radionucleotide production and climate change by means of a cloud/albedo modulation.” On the astronomical origin of the Hallstatt oscillation found in radiocarbon and climate records throughout the Holocene Nicola Scafettaa, , , Franco Milanib, Antonio Bianchinic, d, Sergio Ortolani Abstract An oscillation with a period of about 2100–2500 years, the Hallstatt cycle, is found in cosmogenic radioisotopes (14C and 10Be) and in paleoclimate records throughout the Holocene. This oscillation is typically associated with solar variations, but its primary physical origin remains uncertain. Herein we show strong evidences for an astronomical origin of this cycle. Namely, this oscillation is coherent to a repeating pattern in the periodic revolution of the planets around the Sun: the major stable resonance involving the four Jovian planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – which has a period of about p = 2318 years. Inspired by the Milanković’s theory of an astronomical origin of the glacial cycles, we test whether the Hallstatt cycle could derive from the rhythmic variation of the circularity of the solar system disk assuming that this dynamics could eventually modulate the solar wind and, consequently, the incoming cosmic ray flux and/or the …