Educated Opinions on Climate change - a denouement or a hoax? Part 2.0 29

[dawei87]

Efficiency is definitely the best bang for the buck. It's proven, quick, easy, and can result in huge gains. However, it also happens to be very boring. I’m reminded of scenes of people laughing and handing out mock tire pressure gauges amid chants of 'drill baby drill'. Building a giant dam, or a huge oil platform, or a vast wind farm, or what have you--they are simply more likely to excite a politician's base than better distribution lines or subsidies to insulate your attic. It sounds trivial but pitfalls human psychology like this can be quite powerful. It's unfortunate but true.

Then there is the separate roadblock of why a few select efficiency measures--such as using smaller cars or more efficient light bulbs--result in millions of paranoid people shouting about how the government is using these measures as an excuse for some sadistic, communistic power-grab. But that's its own mystery.

 

[zdas04]

rconnor,
Conventional wisdom says you are exactly right about wind turbines having no ongoing emissions. Trouble is that conventional wisdom generally glosses over the details.

I've read three different articles over the last year where people who operate fossil fuel power plants are claiming that they have to take their plants all the way cold when the wind turbines are generating power (because of the pressure they are under to minimize CO2 exhaust), and when the wind starts to die they have to do a cold start really fast. All of their emissions control stuff requires hot, steady state operations and they all have a Startup/Shut-down/Maintenance (SSM) exemption to the emissions standards. So if they have to cold-start the plant 2-3 times a day, the total harmful emissions is much higher than it would be without the turbines. CO2 is lower, but NOx, SOx, BTEX, and VOC is much higher. I think you can lay the increased HAP and VOC at the door of the wind turbines and say that they are far from zero emissions.

Hydro is another iffy topic. The dams that contain the water used in hydro-electric power are there for a bunch of reasons. The primary one is usually flood control. The flood control goal has a release schedule built into it. Generally that (very complex) release schedule has very little flexibility built into it and if they are releasing more water than the turbines can use then they bypass the turbines--throwing the potential energy away. Every gallon of water that is bypassed because of wind turbines is a unit of potential energy that was wasted. Somewhere in the future some amount of fossil fuel will have to be burned to do the work that the bypassed gallon of water would have done.

I'm a big fan of retail "renewables". A solar panel on a remote well site to operate the automation is amazingly effective. A windmill lifting water for a stock pond has been a great idea for hundreds of years.

When we try to make "renewables" wholesale the economics simply don't scale up. Happens all the time, if one beer makes you feel good 30 should make you feel great, right? The law of unintended consequences just keeps raising its ugly head.

David

 

[dawei87]

30 makes you feel great if they're taken within the right time frame. 1 hour is bad, 10 years is pointless...but 3-4 days, and you've got a nice little weekend.

Shouldn't it be the same for energy solutions? Too slow and they don't make a respectable impact, too fast and you waste money trying to do too much before you're really ready do it effectively. Then the project collapses and for years you vomit at the mere thought of touching that particular variety of energy.

 

[jmw]

Uh oh, I think I need to correct myself.
I implied it was wind turbines the government was cutting the feed in tariff on but I think now it is solar panels.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[SnTMan]

dawei87, "Shouldn't it be the same for energy solutions?" and it would be if it weren't for axes being ground and so forth. If a thing makes economic sense, it gets done, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

Really like the line about the beers

Regards,

Mike

 

[rconnor]

zdas04,

A lot of very good points.

The uncertainty in the generation of wind means that other plants are cycling up and down to try and keep up, this is no good. However, I see wind as a back-up, not as a primary form of generation, and that it can have a role, if used properly.

As dawei87's metaphor alluded to, if you rush these renewable forms in, because it improves your chances of re-election, and they fail then you could turn people off of a technology. This is exactly what is happening and the results are that people are starting to discount them across the board. This is wrong, they have a role now (maybe smaller scale like you said or back-up to other forms) and, I believe, will have an increasingly important role in the future.

You also have to remember that conventional forms of generation have had decades of development and lessons learned from successful/failed implementations. We need to expect renewables to have growing pains as they do require more research and development.

 

[zdas04]

rconnor,
On a retail scale, wind as a backup could make some sense, but I'm having trouble coming up with a scenario where I can tolerate a grid outage on a calm day if my backup is a wind turbine (or on a cloudy day if it is solar). Maybe if I'm using the turbine to keep a monster UPS charged (or pumping water to a catchment on top of a bluff and plan to run a water turbine for backup, in which case I'd run a pump off the blades instead of a generator, but that is just an effeciency tweak on the same concept).

If I install a 500 MW wind farm, my rate of return is going to suck if it is just a backup. People making that kind of investment are planning on it being primary and any backup is someone else's problem. And we put extra junk into the air.

David

 

[dawei87]

If a thing makes economic sense, it gets done, if it doesn't, it doesn't.

Usually true. Except, we were talking about government

The uncertainty in the generation of wind means that other plants are cycling up and down to try and keep up, this is no good.

They do this anyway as people's use of electricity changes, for varying reasons and frequencies. If they can accept the challenges of uncertain demand, I see no reason they cannot also learn to accept the challenges of uncertain supply.

You also have to remember that conventional forms of generation have had decades of development and lessons learned from successful/failed implementations. We need to expect renewables to have growing pains as they do require more research and development.

Great point.

 

[cranky108]

dawdi, It's not the changes in demand, or supply that make cycling an issue. It is the rate of up or down in the cycling, and the number of cycles per day that is the problem.

Each design of plant has a ideal, and maximum ramp rate, and to exceed that rate just dosen't happen easy.

I thought wind power coupled with pumped water storage was a good idea. But once you understand the losses in the storage are around 50%, and wind power in many cases costs more, then it dosen't look so good.

But on a small scale lots of ideas look good. They just don't scale very well.

 

[jmw]

For anyone interested, Richard Linzen gave a seminar in the House of Commons.
The pdf transcript is available.

JMW

http://www.ViscoAnalyser.com

 

[owg]

Thanks jmw.

HAZOP at

http://www.curryhydrocarbons.ca