Do We Know what "Renewable Energy" means? 67

[zdas04]

Much is made these days about "renewable energy" almost always talking about (in declining order of importance to the narrative) wind, solar, hydro-electric, geothermal, solid biofuels, and liquid biofuels. What I cannot find is a definition that limits how renewable something has be be to be called "renewable".

For example, I have deployed thousands of PV solar panels on remote wellsites over the years. When I'm doing project economics I expect to replace 1/3 of the panels every year and 1/2 of the batteries every year. This is because birds and reptiles are incontinent and their waste on the warm surface tends to short out the electronics. Further, covering a panel with dust or sand reduces its effectiveness towards zero and the first sand storm sandblasts the surface to the point that the electronics can't tell night from day (and cleaning the panels shorts them out about as often as it doesn't). No matter what metric you use, Solar PV does not ever generate as much energy as went into the mining, raw material transport, fabrication, and finished product transport. The industrial units I've deployed return under 5% of the energy required to make them appear on site. Project economics reflect that and the economics often favor Solar PV over bringing in grid power, but the only part that is "renewable" is that fuel cost for operation is zero. The popular literature uses a 25-30 year life for solar panels. Fires and sand blasting experience at large solar arrays seem to make this number laughable if you actually take the panels out of the box.

Forbes Magazine had an article a while back that claimed that grid-scale wind power units get about 83% government grants, subsidies, and tax credits (i.e., a company desiring to install a $500,000 wind turbine would have $415,000 covered by federal programs, state programs would further reduce the cost in most states). Then the federal government has mandated a price that the utility must pay for any power generated beyond the company's need (which is retail price, not the wholesale price that they pay for other power). Expected actual power generation from a unit that size would be worth (both in sell back and in avoided power purchase) about $30k/year which is not enough to service the debt on a $500 k loan. In this case Forbes is using dollars as a surrogate for energy input and energy output, but that is usually a reasonable surrogate--bottom line is that without the government involvement wind energy would not pay for itself. Most "information" available on this topic is like Science Daily that uses nameplate hp, 24-hour/day, 366 days/year operation at 100% capacity and subsidized sales prices to say that the turbines pay for themselves in 5-8 months. This analysis assumes energy storage that has no energy cost (and that it exists, it doesn't). When you factor in back-up power supplies for calm days, and fuel needed for standby plants the 5-8 months becomes laughable, but that is the number that "researchers" in this field continue to use.

Geothermal (where is is a viable option) is likely significantly "renewable" in that you get more energy out of it then you put into it. New research is linking industrial-scale geothermal energy to significantly increased seismic activity (both frequency and severity), but it is renewable.

Hydro-electric represents a love-hate relationship with the environmental movements. The narrative around evil fossil-fuel shows hydro as a huge win (it represents about 6.8% of the U.S. electricity usage), but the land that is taken out of service, the changes to the eco system by changing fast moving rivers to slow moving lakes, and the absence of flooding in river bottoms is depleting soil. Dams silt up and require maintenance/repair. Still, hydro is renewable in that it provides many times the power required to deploy the technology.

Solid biofuels like wood chips and vegetable debris have serious delivery problems (and ash-removal problems and particulate matter pollution problems) that caused the Province of Ontario to have to derate their coal fired plants by half when they were converted to solid biofuels.

Liquid biofuels to date have primarily been oxygenators like ethanol. Adding 10% ethanol to gasoline (petrol) will reduce total fuel efficiency by about 13%. This means that a trip that would have taken 100 gallons of fuel will take about 113 gallons of fuel--101.7 gallons of gasoline and 11.3 gallons of ethanol. In other words it is significantly energy negative. Bio-diesel has about 77% of the specific energy of diesel and tends to gel, absorb water, and requires higher compression ratios. In general without government intervention, this is an idea who's time will never come.

That brings me to gaseous biofuels. Methane comes from anaerobic biological activity on organic waste. In a recent article I computed that contemporary methane sources are on the order of 5 TSCF/day (the world uses about 0.3 TSCF/day). The organisms on this planet generate so much organic waste that we don't even have to get a lot more effective at re-processing organic waste to supply the world's power needs forever--truly renewable and sustainable. The only hurdle is that the contemporary narrative has methane listed in the "evil fossil fuel" category and not in the "renewable" category. That is it. A small shift in the narrative and the world will turn the engineering community lose on this problem and very shortly we will have unlimited power for an unlimited number of future generations. There are already hundreds of small and medium sized dairy farms, chicken farms, pig farms, and feed lots that are harvesting the animal waste to generate heat and methane for power generation (you get methane from anaerobic digestion which requires a small power input and generates horrible smells, taking the last step in the process into an aerobic digester, which is exothermic, provides heat for the anaerobic process, and gets rid of the worst of the smells). Everyone with knowledge of this process knows that there are a number of things that could be done to improve yields and recover more of the biological energy, but with an EPA focused on "eliminating methane emissions", there is no incentive to commit the engineering effort required.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to change the narrative from "methane causes global warming" to "retail harvest of contemporary methane can be a big part of the solution"?

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[cranky108]

It was once proposed that if the waste from a large feedlot were used to make Biogas, that that gas could feed a local power plant.
The reality was that if all the waste from that feedlot were collected, it would not produce enough gas to keep the 140 MW power plant running. So the whole scheme was dropped. I suspect it was really dropped because the price of gas was so low, as this plant is located close to several large gas fields.

 

[zdas04]

snarkysparky,
Gases react to being struck. It is true, observable, repeatable, scalable. A gas molecule that gets warmer from being struck by a photon will exhibit higher energy and strike other molecules, transferring some of the increased energy. Within a few collisions, the volume occupied by the newly energetic molecule will reach a quasi-stable energy state that is infinitesimally higher than the state prior to the original collision. If that gas molecule is in the open atmosphere, the volume of the quasi-stable state is large and quickly dispersed. In a physical greenhouse the volume is tiny and the mass of gasses is small. The energy transfer is contained to that small mass. The way you cool a physical greenhouse is to release some of the higher-energy mass to the outside and allow lower energy mass to enter. Physical greenhouses work on mass transfer shifting the energy to maintain a temperature. This is not the way the climate works according to AGW. AGW says that so called "greenhouse gases" filter certain wavelengths of radiated heat to bounce them back towards the earth instead of allowing them to radiate into space. If you'll look into Fourier's writings beyond a Wikipedia article that comes to us through the good graces of the Church of AGW you'll find that his description of the energy transfer in the the atmosphere is quite different from the energy transfer within a greenhouse.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[rconnor]

I reject the concept that physical greenhouses work by filtering wave lengths of energy

The atmospheric greenhouse effect and a physical greenhouse are different. Yes. It’s poor naming. Yes. But physical greenhouses are irrelevant to this conversation and the name is, well, just a name. Stick to what’s relevant – the atmospheric greenhouse effect. More specifically – the ability for the atmospheric greenhouse effect to significantly impact surface temperatures of planets.

I reject the scalability of the (few) competent laboratory experiments.

Without the greenhouse effect, here is what we think the temperature of a planet’s surface would be:
[image

http://scied.ucar.edu/sites/default...nt-page/planetary_temperature_eqn_360x120.png

]
(Derivation here)

Earth has a solar constant of ~1361 W/m^2 and an albedo of 0.31. That makes the expected temperature, without an atmosphere, ~254 K. The actual temperature of Earth is ~287 K.

Venus has a solar constant of ~2601 W/m^2 and an abledo of 0.77. That makes the expected temperature, without an atmosphere, ~227 K. The actual temperature of Venus is ~737 K. (source)

Mars, that has a very thin atmosphere, has a solar constant of ~586 W/m^2 and an albedo of 0.25. That makes the expected temperature, without an atmosphere, ~210 K. The actual temperature of Mars is ~210 K. (source)

The atmospheric greenhouse effect has an impact on the surface temperature of planets. The stronger the atmospheric greenhouse effect, the warmer the surface temperature is.

 

[zdas04]

That "poor naming" was not accidental. Everyone knows what a greenhouse is. They are readily accessible to the public and when someone walks into one, they notice both temperature and humidity being different from outside. It is public relations and the voting public has walked into greenhouses and found them to be reasonably unpleasant in the summer. Public relations, spin, propaganda, and computer models are the cornerstones of the AGW hysteria.

Had you said "without the atmosphere" (instead of "without the greenhouse effect") I would agree that the equation presented might represent a credible approximation of the expected surface temperature. That is much like saying "without life, death would be much more common". Meaningless. The atmosphere is there. Deep breath. Yep, gases are moving into my lungs (sorry for the CO2 I'm exhaling). The dynamics of energy and mass transfer within that atmosphere and the relationships between sources/sinks are incredibly interrelated and complex. Some of the energy from the sun is expended in that atmosphere. Some wavelengths of energy are filtered. That filtering process changes the energy state of atmospheric gases. Is that a driving force or a mitigating force? I don't have a clue. There are a lot of theories and hypotheses that say one thing and another, but none of them have gotten even a tiny step beyond being an idea. The state of the field today is that when a competent researcher has one of these ideas, he puts it into a computer model and "proves" it, then the rest of the researchers use that concept in their models. If the data does not match the new concepts then the data can be "fixed". You lose me at "the model is proof" and "the data is negotiable". Both of those concepts turn competent research into politics.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[rconnor]

By the way, I was curious where the comment below came from.

The granularity of "data" just 200 years old is approaching +/- 100 years.

I’d ask you for a source but I know that will cost me an arm and a leg. So I looked it up myself.

In the 200-year-long U.S. ITASE ice cores from West Antarctica, they showed that while the absolute accuracy of the dating was ±2 years, the relative accuracy among several cores was <±0.5 year

(source – Steig 2008)

 

[snarkysparky]

Zdas

Still, longwave radiation does not pass freely back out into space. The conclusion then is that it is trapped here within the Earths boundary.

Do you have any quarrel with this reasoning.

 

[zdas04]

Sorry, statements like:

Of the five sources of uncertainty discussed in the previous section, three of them (timescale uncertainty, spatial uncertainty, sampling uncertainty) can be readily represented by including Monte-Carlo simulations of the influence on the reconstruction that results. Incorporating “timescale wiggle” into such calculations is straightforward and should probably be adopted routinely.

make me stick by my assessment that this analysis is simply making stuff up. The whole report feels like the old saw "you can draw any line you want through a single point". If I look at data from a single site then I can feel confident that THAT volcanic marker came from THAT eruption that is well documented. Never an eruption in Antarctica that isn't well documented? No seasons that didn't quite work like expected? No other source for the isotopes being analyzed? No presence of bias in the input parameters to the Monte Carlo simulation? If the data is this good, why do you need to run a Monte Carlo simulation. Of course you need the computer model because this analysis has to line up several million dots and just a few of them out of their assigned seats turn the results into trash.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[MartinLe]

as an addon to rconnors post:

Nasa, Taking the Measure of the Greenhouse Effect

cranky108
Someone seriously thougt feedlot waste could make a major contribution towards a 140MW power plant? Wow. Some numbers (source):

dairy cattle 289 Nm³ Methan ≙ 1.095 kWhel./head x a*
hog 19 Nm³ Methan ≙ 73 kWhel./head x a*
cattle (meat) 185 Nm³ Methan ≙ 562 kWhel./head x a*
Riding horse 388 Nm³ Methan ≙ 1.472 kWhel./head x a*
poultry(eggs) 164 Nm³ Methan ≙ 621 kWhel./100 head x a*
(head should read: capacity for one animal)
My mantra: Use biogas as part of your waste management, don't bet on it for one-to-one replacement of fossiles.

 

[metman]

What about chem-trails? When I first heard about them, I thought the guy was not palying with a full deck. However, when you see it with your own eyes, it is more than convincing that they are spreading some kind of chemical that last much much longer than jet-streams and covers almost the entire sky. Is this to control some weather patterns along with harps that angels don't play.

Circa 1980 National Geographic published a special issue entitled ENERGY as I recall. I read it cover to cover and was convinced that we would be out of fossil fuel by the year 2,000. This shortly after the long lines at gas stations. Shortly after that special issue, I went to work for National Mine Service Company working on designing underground coal mining machinery to more efficiently mine coal. This was a 5 million dollar DOE project so I figured this would be a lifetime job but M.N.S is no longer in business. Well I guess we did not know what we thought we knew.

Later, while working in West Virginia for a different coal mining machinery company, I heard a saying from a friend that sometimes surfaces on its own. "We know what we know but we -- don't know what we don't know." Sounds kind of mundane but as my Dad would say, "there is a lot of truth and poetry in that saying."

Design for RELIABILITY, manufacturability, and maintainability

 

[cranky108]

I will add here that not everyone who states that they are experts, are in fact experts. And some may in fact be experts, but just wrong on a few matters.

The problem with the large feed lot is now the nitrates have leaked into the ground water. Or maybe that was from the two packing plants in the area.

So maybe there is nothing that is truly renewable in the short term.

 

[rb1957]

@metman ... "chemtrails" are IMHO a hoax. Certainly if you're using the "government secretly spreading chemicals" story. Contrails are simply condensed water vapour; some smart pilot (Patrick Smith) figures that there are engine combustion products getting into these (sure, particularly as some grow from the engine exhaust as opposed to the wingtips) and this might have some unknown (unknowable?) climate influence. This from "science.howstuffworks"

@david ... after an eff of a lot of posts I guess all we can say is that "renewable energy" is two words that mean different things to different people.

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

 

[Sparweb]

I have no facts or beliefs to contribute to the debate/argument where it's going now, but I think this writer does:

http://mysite.du.edu/~etuttle/weather/atmrad.htm

...where it comes to the radiation that passes through the earth's atmosphere (if nobody minds keeping this discussion sidetracked from the original topic...) there is a fairly rigorous scientific understanding of the process, the constraints, and the effect of changes in many of these parameters. Has been for decades. There is no need to exaggerate, nor is there any justification to discard this knowledge.



STF

 

[cloa]

Carbon taxes (as are carbon credits) are rife with fraud. Imposing a tax on a invisible gas that everyone produces either deny everyone produces anything or just expect bogus claims of productions. Are you going to tax animals and nature which emits a lot- much which is difficult to quantify?

http://www.eng-tips.com/threadminder.cfm?pid=1529

Use translation assistance for Engineers forum

Note the rules include No Student posting

 

[zdas04]

Sparweb,
That link, paper so much of the AGW discussion does a workmanlike job of describing a single facet of the dodecahedron, and ignores the other 11 facets. It describe the phenomenon of excitation and wave length shift reasonably well while ignoring that a molecule can also transfer excess energy through collisions. Which action is dominant in the climate? I don't know. I do know that the dominant effect within a physical greenhouse is not the shift to long wave length radiation as the author claims, but energy transfer through collisions.

Science is often the synthesis of a series of detailed analyses of each individual element of a complex interrelationship. The key difficulty is not the understanding of each element (although that analysis is rarely simple), but understanding the boundary conditions and interrelationships. "Climate science" has done a particularly horrid job over the last 50 years of even attempting this synthesis. That paper is among the worst I've seen at it.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[canwesteng]

How could the dominant factor in a physical greenhouse possibly be collisions? The molecules are colliding with the greenhouse material just as well as with the other gaseous molecules. I think anyone would accept that the amount of infrared radiation absorbed by the small amount of gas in a physical greenhouse is small enough so as to be negligible, but the reason it stays warm is that air is a good insulator, and the greenhouse allows visible light to enter, and doesn't allow the warm air to leave.

 

[zdas04]

canwesteng,
The key lies in your last statement "doesn't allow warm air to leave". Greenhouse temperature management is not wave-length management, it is mass-transfer management. If you want to cool a greenhouse, you exchange warm air mass for cooler air mass. The atmosphere does this by moving warm air towards a cooler sink and moving cool air towards a warmer sink. A highly excited CO2 molecule will tend to move to where it can collide with cooler things without limits. In a physical greenhouse, the walls impose physical limits.

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[rconnor]

describe the phenomenon of excitation and wave length shift reasonably well while ignoring that a molecule can also transfer excess energy through collisions. Which action is dominant in the climate? I don't know.

The former.

We observe (and predict through the greenhouse effect):
[ul][li]Less heat exiting the atmosphere along wavelengths associated with CO2[/li]
[li]Increased downward infrared radiation along wavelengths associated with CO2[/li]
[li]Nights warming faster than the day[/li]
[li]Cooling stratosphere, Warming surface[/li]
[li]Rising tropopause[/li]
[li]Cooling and contracting ionosphere[/li][/ul]

While the magnitude of this effect, due to feedbacks, is certainly up for debate, the underlying mechanism is not. To reject this, especially while claiming the entire field of experts are somewhere between incompetent and corrupt, is interesting, to say the least.

 

[zdas04]

rconnor,
Talk about a list of self-fulfilling prophecies. I have never seen such a group of "I'm here, therefore there is a God" arguments.

The evolution of the Earth's climate has been extensively studied [based on what objective standard?] this relationship is complicated by several feedback processes—most importantly the hydrological cycle—that are not well understood [if we don't understand the hydrological cycle how can we rule it out? How do we know that the hydrological cycle is the most important?] ... Changes in the Earth's greenhouse effect can be detected from variations in the spectrum of outgoing longwave radiation[sup]8, 9, 10[/sup], which is a measure of how the Earth cools to space and carries the imprint of the gases that are responsible for the greenhouse effect [Nothing else could possibly be responsible?]

In the Journal of Goephysical Research abstract they take a data set with a standard deviation of 20 W/m[sup]2[/sup], a bias of 2 W/m[sup]2[/sup] and impute a change of 2.2 w/m[sup]2[/sup] to greenhouse gases. I call a change that is about equal to the identified bias as part of the noise. They had quite a lot of data for 35 years, come back when they have quite a lot of data for 350 years.

I'm not sure why you included the Dutch paper. It says

Over 70% of the global land area sampled showed a significant decrease in the annual occurrence of cold nights and a significant increase in the annual occurrence of warm nights.

which argues for mass transfer rather than instantaneous radiative effects.

I'm sorry but in the pnas paper I was only able to read down to

In contrast, we rely on a large multimodel archive

, if I average the outcome of 5,000 Nintendo runs, Princes Peach still can't ride a flying dinosaur.

In the Research Articles (no attribution of where the heck it came from) I only got down to

Comparable increases are evident in climate model experiments. The latter show that human-induced changes in ozone and well-mixed greenhouse gases account for
80%of the simulated rise in tropopause height over 1979–1999.

Sorry, but "models" are simply not "experiments" and anyone who puts those two words together is trying to fool to their audience.

The extract from Science they use the very effective technique of talking about definitions of terms that are not germane, and then

The increase in global surface air temperature during the 20th century has been attributed mainly to the increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases

A statement purported to be "fact" with the implication that the last 3 paragraphs build to that obvious conclusion when in fact they are absolutely unrelated to it. Clever ruse. Far from compelling or even slightly persuasive.

Sorry, but nothing in your list of references even comes close to supporting radiative wave-length modifications as the driving force in the climate. A physical greenhouse works by limiting mass transfer. The atmosphere does not have the necessary small-scale confinement for the same effect to work. If climate is indeed tending towards a warmer "norm", then I still don't see any reason to accept that plant food and microbe food are the cause.


David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist

 

[rconnor]

Talk about a list of self-fulfilling prophecies

You have a theory that leads to predictions. You compare those predictions against observations. They match. Is that your definition of self-fulfilling prophecies?

With regards to the M-word, the studies use models because they compare observations against model projections. These papers are doing exactly what you always claim the scientific community is not doing – checking model projections against observations. Just because your ctrl+F for “model” came back with a few hits, doesn’t mean you can dismiss the paper.

Since the late 1970s, satellite-based instruments have monitored global changes in atmospheric temperature. These measurements reveal multidecadal tropospheric warming and stratospheric cooling, punctuated by short-term volcanic signals of reverse sign. Similar long- and short-term temperature signals occur in model simulations driven by human-caused changes in atmospheric composition and natural variations in volcanic aerosols.

Observations indicate that the height of the tropopause—the boundary between the stratosphere and troposphere—has increased by several hundred meters since 1979. Comparable increases are evident in climate model experiments.

[The “Dutch article” (aka Alexander et al 2005)] argues for mass transfer rather than instantaneous radiative effects.

It is an expected outcome of the effect of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. It matches with observations.

See my comments in bold:

The evolution of the Earth's climate has been extensively studied [zd: based on what objective standard?] [rc: do a Web of Science search on “climate change”, see the thousands of hits that come back.] this relationship is complicated by several feedback processes—most importantly the hydrological cycle—that are not well understood [zd: if we don't understand the hydrological cycle how can we rule it out? How do we know that the hydrological cycle is the most important?][rc: You confuse “not well understood” with “we have no idea”. The uncertainty of the impact of the hydrological cycle is mainly due to cloud cover. The range of estimates are between very weakly positive and very weakly negative, with the best estimate is very weakly positive (Clement et al 2008, Lauer et al 2010, Dressler 2010, Sherwood et al 2014 ... Changes in the Earth's greenhouse effect can be detected from variations in the spectrum of outgoing longwave radiation8, 9, 10, which is a measure of how the Earth cools to space and carries the imprint of the gases that are responsible for the greenhouse effect [Nothing else could possibly be responsible?]Nothing else that fits the data so well, unless you’re aware of another theory I don’t know about?]

If climate is indeed tending towards a warmer "norm", then I still don't see any reason to accept that plant food and microbe food are the cause.

If you plug your ears to the evidence hard enough zdas04, you can refuse to accept anything. But rejecting the greenhouse gas theory puts you in a unique club, and that club doesn't include Galileo...

 

[zdas04]

No it doesn't include Galileo. He's dead. Has been dead for centuries. Were he not dead he would have his own opinions. He would apply his own understandings and analysis to the data presented and reach his own conclusions as to the merit of the arguments. I hope we all do that. Your "clarifications" feel very much like a cat scratching on a tile floor to cover up a mess.

As to

It is an expected outcome of the effect of the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations. It matches with observations.

with regard to the Dutch paper on extreme weather events, are you out of your ever loving mind? Climate scientists keep shouting that "climate is not weather". "Extreme weather events are weather not climate". None of the models predict extreme weather. They don't predict weather at all. The "extreme weather", "droughts", "wild fires", "tsunamis", "tornadoes" hysteria has come from table-top what-if analysis with no input from any science or even computer modeling. If is just a bunch of grad students sitting around a conference table in East Anglica spit balling about what could happen a la "Hey, when it get hot things dry up, I bet we'll have more droughts, don't you guys agree" "sure, put it on the list". When geologic evidence seems to indicate that as temperatures rise the deserts shrink (as is happening today)? When atmospheric CO2 improves plant's ability to process water and they need less of it?

David Simpson, PE
MuleShoe Engineering

In questions of science, the authority of a thousand is not worth the humble reasoning of a single individual. Galileo Galilei, Italian Physicist