ChicagoBoyz: Why alternative energy is and will remain useless

From Shannon Love, writing over at ChicagoBoyz, on why solar and wind won't replace traditional sources of electricity:

Here’s a fact you won’t see mentioned in the public policy debate over “alternative” energy:

There exists no alternative energy source, no combination of alternative energy sources, and no system of combinations of alternative energy sources that can fully replace a single, coal fired electric plant built with 1930s era technology.

Nada.
Zero.
Zilch.

Yet many want to make this group of functionally useless technologies the primary energy sources for our entire civilization.

Most discussions of alternative energy talk only about the cost and reliability of the electricity when it leaves the grounds of the alternative-energy installation. This is called the Point of Generation (POG). However, energy is useless unless you have it where you need it, when you need it. It does no good to have plenty of power in Arizona when your work and home are in Michigan. It does no good to have a roaring fire in July when you’re freezing in January. Therefore, the only real factors that count are the cost and reliability at the Point of Consumption (POC).

All current and forecast alternative energy sources fail miserably at POC. When you look at all the hurdles, redundancies and hypothetical/theoretical technologies you have to invoke to make alternative energy reliable at POC, you see they can’t even come close to matching the 80-year-old coal plant.

An obsolete coal plant using 80-year-old technology can provide power where and when you need it. It can be positioned almost anywhere from the equator to the tundra. (It will even work aboard ships.) It can be positioned immediately adjacent to the point of consumption. It works around the clock and in all types of weather. It can easily store weeks or months of coal reserves in a big pile outside. 99% of its offline time is scheduled and it is trivial to build in redundancy to compensate for both scheduled and unscheduled offline time. For the last 80 years, this type of technology has chugged out the electricity all over the world without pause.

“Alternative” energy sources have none of these attributes. They can only be built in specific locations, and those locations are wholly unrelated to the points of consumption. They can only operate under specific weather/environmental conditions, so they cannot fulfill the when of the point of consumption need.

They operate on nature’s schedule not ours. If we could easily operate on mother nature’s schedule, we wouldn’t need the energy in the first place, because we primarily use the energy to alter natural environmental conditions to keep ourselves alive.

“Alternative” energy is really Weather-Dependent Energy and it has all of the hazards posed by being exposed to the vagaries of weather. Wind turbines only generate power in certain locations, within certain wind speed ranges and only when the wind blows in the specified speed range. Solar panels only generates significant power in certain locations, in certain latitudes, in certain environmental conditions (deserts mostly). It only generates significant power in the daytime, only during certain hours in the day, and random weather conditions like thunderstorms, ice storms or sandstorms can knock it offline completely. (Even hydroelectric power is weather dependent and can be seriously crippled by drought or flood.) ...

Read the rest here, along with the comments.

[Via Maxed Out Mama]

What happens when the wind stops blowing?

Shannon Love over at Chicago Boyz asks the question of all the wind power supporters:

At 6:41 PM, Feburary 26th, 2008, The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) activated a Stage Two emergency response to keep the power grid that supplies most of Texas from failing and triggering rolling blackouts.

The operators balanced the grid by cutting off power to “interruptible” customers. These are customers such as industrial sites that have their own power generators and that pay lower rates in return for being kicked off the grid during emergencies.

Several factors contributed to the emergency. Unusually warm weather caused increased consumption. Two coal plants were offline for scheduled maintenance. The major trigger, however, was an easily foreseeable problem:

Preliminary reports indicate the frequency decline was caused by a combination of events, including a drop in wind-energy production at the same time the evening electricity load was increasing, accompanied by multiple power providers falling below their scheduled energy production. In addition, the drop in wind energy led to some system constraints in moving power from the generation in the north zone to load in the west zone, resulting in limitations of balancing energy availability. The wind production dropped from more than 1700 MW three hours before the event down to 300 MW at the point the emergency procedures were activated.

Let me translate that for you: The wind suddenly stopped blowing. It does that sometimes. The grid couldn’t adapt to the sudden loss of wind-generated electricity and they had to kick people off the grid.

Currently, Texas receives 3% of its electricity from wind, the highest percentage in the nation. A lot of people seriously talk of requiring as a matter of law that we generate up to 30% of our electricity from windpower. If a sudden drop in windpower can destabilize the grid when windpower contributes only 3% of total power, what will our reliability look like when unreliable windpower contributes 10%, 20% or more? ...

Read the rest here. As I wrote almost a year ago (see my post here) about Al Gore's ten year plan to reduce carbon emissions from electricity production to zero, those who think we can just put up a bunch of windmills (sorry, wind turbines) and magically achieve "energy independence" are probably in a state of chemically induced delirium.

Apart from the fact that much of the most desirable parts of the country for wind generated electricity are often hundreds of miles (or more) from the large urban population centers where the electricity is needed, and would thus require massive transmission infrastructure investment, the intermittency problem inherent in wind or solar typically requires lots of natural gas powered electricity generation plants co-sited with these wind or solar farms. Although good luck getting those transmission tower rights-of-way and build permits with all the lawsuits from the environmental and conservation groups that would inevitably follow ("What??? You want to build stuff in the habitat of the endangered blue-speckled red-horned snail darter? Never!")

Of course, the liberal elites in Los Angeles or San Francisco who use all that electricity probably don't give much thought to the idea of besmirching millions of acres of pristine prairie or desert with wind turbines and solar panels as far as the eye can see. After all, that's flyover country, populated by overall-wearing unsophisticates. Paradoxically, however, the coastal elites object to any sort of development in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), a truly remote place where virtually no humans ever visit (and don't even fly over on their way to visit the elites on the other coast), and thus a place where development would go sight unseen. Go figure. So goes the cognitive dissonance of the Leftist mind, I suppose.