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.…
Watch: Morano on TV: 1.7 million Australians experience crippling blackout after switch to ‘green’ energy
…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)
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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 …
‘We’re Actually Using More Fossil Fuels Than Ever’
…Folly: All Of Europe’s Wind Power Capacity Only Could Steadily Provide Enough Electricity For Tiny Belgium!
Folly: All Of Europe’s Wind Power Capacity Only Could Steadily Provide Enough Electricity For Tiny Belgium!
Swedish site klimatsans.com posted a chart presented by Rolf Schuster showing Germany’s and much of Europe’s total wind power generation over the first 6 months of this year: Wind power production Germany and Europe. Chart by Rolf Schuster, from klimatsans.com. The first thing one notices is wind power’s extreme supply volatility. In February wind production peaked at 75 gigawatts – enough to power all of Germany (for a few hours). Relying only on wind power, most of Germany would have been completely dark since late March. Every month wind power fell multiple times close to zero, meaning that it would not even be possible to even power little Luxembourg. And even if the technology existed to store the energy for a couple of days, the best all the installed wind power capacity in Europe could hope to consistently provide is some 15 gigawatts – which would be enough to power something on the order of Belgium only. If power could be stored for an entire week, it would only be possible to supply only about half of Germany – the rest of the continent, France, Spain, Portugal, Benelux, United Kingdom, Ireland, Scandinavia, Greece, Austria, Switzerland, all of eastern Europe and the Balkan countries would have to go without. This gives us an idea of how ridiculous the pursuit of 100% renewable energy supply really is.
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Obama’s Green Policies Threaten America’s Energy Security
BY:
The threat of a devastating cyber attack on the U.S. electrical grid is increasing due to the Obama administration’s politically correct policies that spend vast sums on green and smart grid technologies while failing to secure power grids from cyber attack.
A report by the Manhattan Institute, a New York think tank, warns that the push to integrate wind and solar electrical power into the $6 trillion electric utility system has created new vulnerabilities that other nations could exploit in a future cyber war.
“Electric grids have always been vulnerable to natural hazards and malicious physical attacks,” writes Mark Mills, a physicist and engineer who authored the Manhattan Institute report. “Now the U.S. faces a new risk—cyber attacks—that could threaten public safety and greatly disrupt daily life.”
The U.S. electrical power network is not made up of a single grid, but a complex web of eight regional “supergrids” linked to thousands of local grids. Under a drive for improved efficiency, government policymakers and regulators in recent years have spent tens of billions of dollars on so-called “smart grid” technology. But the efficiency drive has not been matched with new technology that will secure grids against cyber attacks.
Utility owners also have resisted improving cyber security over concerns doing so would increase operating costs and force unpopular rate hikes. Yet the failure to take steps now to deal with future threats could prove catastrophic.
The threat, according to the report, is not the current state of security but the future use of greener and smarter electric grids, interconnected and linked to the Internet. “These greener, smarter grids will involve a vast expansion of the Internet of Things that greatly increases the cyber attack surface available to malicious hackers and hostile nation-state entities,” the report warns, adding that cyber attacks overall have risen 60 percent annually over the past six years and increasingly include the targeting of electric utilities.
A recent survey by Cisco Systems revealed t…
Watch: Morano on Fox on failed green energy stimulus: ‘This could be Solyndra 2 — The Heretic!’
‘Risk and Reward with Deirdre Bolton’ – Fox Business – April 22, 2016…
Obama admits ‘solar and wind’ not ‘regular, reliable’ without ‘good ways to store power’
Promoting a transition to renewable energy, President Obama says, “solar and wind don’t work unless we’ve got good ways to store power… so that it can be used in a regular, reliable way.”
PRESIDENT OBAMA: “Thanks to the investments we made in the Recovery Act we’ve seen huge gains in our advanced battery industry. Because, solar and wind don’t work unless we’ve got good ways to store power when the sun’s out or the winds blowing so that it can be used in a regular, reliable way.”
President Obama Speaks on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act
Jacksonville, FL
February 26, 2016…