Reposted from NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

APRIL 2, 2021

By Paul Homewood

A round up of Net Zero news:

Yesterday, Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan warned that COP26 will end in failure without hundreds of billions in annual support from the rich West. Developing countries would need about $400 billion a year in climate finance support to shift towards low carbon development pathways, yet developed countries had failed to deliver the $100 billion a year of climate finance promised as part of the Paris agreement.

Now, India has come out fighting, calling the West’s 2050 Net Zero targets “pie in the sky.” India’s energy minister said poor nations want to continue using fossil fuels and the rich countries “can’t stop it”.

According to both the UK and US governments, at the UN climate summit in November all countries should adopt Net Zero emissions targets similar to those adopted by Western nations. The fundamental problem with this expectation is that it contravenes the Paris Climate Agreement which cements the UN’s key principle of ‘Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities.‘ This principle acknowledges that developing nations have different capabilities and differing responsibilities in reducing CO2 emissions.

In a recent interview, India’s climate negotiator Chandrashekhar Dasgupta made clear that the West’s Net Zero agenda undermined the principle of equity and “common but differentiated responsibilities” of developed and developing countries. This position also explains why India is demanding that richer countries adopt “net negative” emissions targets.

India: Net zero targets are ‘pie in the sky’

Sharp divisions between the major global emitters have emerged at a series of meetings designed to make progress on climate change.

India lambasted the richer world’s carbon cutting plans, calling long term net zero targets, “pie in the sky.”

Their energy minister said poor nations want to continue using fossil fuels and the rich countries “can’t stop it”.

China meanwhile declined to attend a different climate event organised by the UK.

Trying to lead 197 countries forward on the critical global issue of climate change is not a job for the faint hearted, as the UK is currently finding out. […]

India, the world’s fourth largest emitter, doesn’t seem keen to join the club.

“2060 sounds good, but it is just that, it sounds good,” Raj Kumar Singh, India’s minister for power, told a meeting organised by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“I would call it, and I’m sorry to say this, but it is just a pie in the sky.”

To the discomfort of his fellow panellists, Mr Singh singled out developed countries where per capita emissions are much higher than in India.

“You have countries whose per capita emissions are four or five or 12 times the world average. The question is when are they going to come down?”

“What we hear is that by 2050 or 2060 we will become carbon neutral, 2060 is far away and if the people emit at the rate they are emitting the world won’t survive, so what are you going to do in the next five years that’s what the world wants to know.”

Meanwhile China continues to plough ahead with coal power:

Despite its pledge to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2060, China continues to burn more coal than any other developed nation, relying on the fossil fuel to satisfy the nation’s surging demand for electricity.

According to a report released Monday by U.K.-based energy and climate research group Ember, China accounted for 53% of the world’s coal-powered electricity in 2020—nine percentage points higher than its share in 2015, when China joined the Paris Agreement.

“Despite some progress, China is still struggling to curb its coal generation growth,” Ember senior electricity policy analyst Muyi Yang said. “[F]ast-rising demand for electricity” in China continues to be satisfied by burning coal.

China’s electricity usage has surged 33% since 2015. According to the International Energy Agency, demand from China’s steel and cement industry—propped up by the state’s heavy infrastructure investment—is one of the primary drivers of electricity consumption, alongside increasing automation of the manufacturing industry.

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And the climate agenda is slipping in France as Macron finds himself stuck between a rock and a hard place!

  The politicians have all left Emmanuel Macron‘s La Republique en Marche (LREM) over the President’s lack of commitment to environmental and social issues. The French leader has failed to stick to his famous “make our planet great again” slogan from 2017, sparking the fury of those both in opposition and in his own party.

Jennifer De Temmerman, an MP and former LREM member, said the President’s commitment was “skin deep”.

She told Politico: “It’s all communication, smoke and mirrors. He lectures others, but in reality, his actions in France don’t pass muster.”

Thousands of protesters took to the street of Paris on Sunday to demonstrate against the President’s climate bill, which environmental campaigners say falls too short of Mr Macron’s promises to change the world.

Ms De Temmerman said: “We were expecting a grand bill, a landmark piece of legislation, and it falls very short of our expectations.

France’s High Council on Climate, a body set up by The French President himself to advise on climate policy, said the measures will not “fill the gaps in France’s transition to low carbon.

They added the bill will only deliver “between a half and two-thirds of the cuts needed between 2019 and its [40 percent] target for 2030”.

Those who once supported the French President’s green ambitions, now recognise the “contradictions” in his policies.

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It strikes me that the world has actually made little progress (if that is the right word!) since Copenhagen in 2009. Back then the developed world had to agree to allow developing nations the right to carry on increasing emissions, as well as giving them hundreds of billions of dollars. Very little of that money has actually appeared.

Fast forward, and developing nations are still increasing emissions, while demanding ever larger sums of money. Meanwhile the West is finding that the transition to a low carbon world is going to be extremely painful.

No doubt at COP26 in Glasgow (rumoured that it may be postponed again because of the pandemic), the usual fudges will be made. There will be vague promises from poorer countries to “do something” at a time several decades in the future. These will of course be utterly worthless, and be no more binding than their Paris pledges.

The BBC will proclaim that the world has been saved (before reading the small print in a few years time). And a year later, Prince Charles will warn us that we only have X years to save the planet!

Same Old!

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April 4, 2021 at 12:40PM

Today we see SNOW in the forecast for Easter Monday across most of Germany

A few years ago, renowned warmist climate science professor Mojib Latif also chimed in, just after David Viner, in declaring snow and ice also would be a thing of the past in Germany.

The distinguished professor recalled growing up in Hamburg, and claimed “sometimes” seeing snow on Easter.

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we sometimes still had snow at Easter. In the meantime we have really forgotten how a winter really appears – and there can be winters also in times of global warming.”

In case Latif really has forgotten what winter looks like, he’s about to get a reminder  – tomorrow. In his comment above, Latif also used the word “sometimes” to describe the frequency of “having snow at Easter” in the 1960s, implying it occurred more than once.

Only one single Easter day in the 1960s

What follows are the Easter snow ON THE GROUND statistics in cm for Hamburg of the 1960s. To see if Latif was accurate, we look at the period from Holy Thursday through Easter Monday and the respective snowfall for each day. For example on March 30th, 1964 there was 3 cm of snow cover on the ground in Hamburg.

1960: 14-18 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1961: 30 March – 3 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1962: 19-23 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1963: 11-15 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1964: 26-30 March; 0, 0, 0, 0, 3
1965: 15-19 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1966: 7-11 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1967: 23-27 March; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1968: 11-15 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
1969: 3-7 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

Of the 50 days of Easter-time occurring in the 1960s, only one single day saw snow in Hamburg – a whole 3 cm on Easter Monday, March 30, 1964! Obviously personal memories are not reliable sources of data, especially in Prof. Latif’s case.

More snowy Easter days in the 2010s

How does this compare to our last decade, 2010-2019?

2010:  1-5 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2011 21-25 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2012: 5-9 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2013: 28 Mar – 1 Apr; 5, 6, 4, 2, 0
2014: 17-21 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2015: 2-6 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2016: 27-31 March; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2017: 13-17 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2018: 29 Mar – 2 Apr; 6, 0, 0, 0, 0
2019: 18-22 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0

From 2010 to 2019, Hamburg saw snow on the ground on 5 days, i.e. more often than in the 1960s.

Another Easter snow day forecast for Hamburg

The current decade looks as follows:

2020: 9-13 April; 0, 0, 0, 0, 0
2021: 0, 0, 0, 0, but with snow forecast tomorrow in Hamburg.

Snow forecast to sweep across Hamburg and much of Germany on Easter Monday. Image: wetteronline.de. 

That would make Easter in Hamburg seeing snow on the ground on 6 days over the past 10 years, compared to just once in the 1960s. Snow has become more frequent over the past decades, and not less frequent.

But then again it should not be a surprise snow is appearing a bit more frequently in Hamburg at Easter. Just a few days ago we wrote how spring was tending to arrive later in Hamburg, and not sooner like global warming alarmists like to have everyone think it is.

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April 4, 2021 at 12:15PM

Republican-led state capitols are considering bills that would punch holes in President Joe Biden’s green revamp of the US electricity system by promoting fossil fuels or piling costs on to renewable energy.

The proposed legislation reverses a dynamic that played out over the past four years, when lawmakers in states controlled by Democrats moved to counteract Donald Trump’s climate rollbacks. One analyst described a “Biden backlash”. 

Legislators have sharpened their focus since a winter storm caused blackouts in Texas and Midwestern states in February. Despite a varied set of causes, some have invoked the crisis to propose new constraints on solar and wind power. 

If enacted, the bills would cloud Biden’s objective of driving down carbon emissions from the electricity sector, one that he intends to bolster with a $2tn federal infrastructure plan announced last week.

In Texas, where the legislature has been consumed by the blackout debacle, bills introduced by state House Republicans would tax renewable energy projects, keep new wind turbines at least a mile apart and require solar and wind farms to procure back-up power to cover some of their down time. 

Full story (£)

The post Biden’s Green Deal faces backlash from US states appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum.

via The Global Warming Policy Forum

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April 4, 2021 at 11:12AM

“Some of the biggest men in the United States, in the field of commerce and manufacture, are afraid of somebody, are afraid of something. They know that there is a power somewhere so organized, so subtle, so watchful, so interlocked, so complete, so pervasive that they had better not speak above their breath when they speak in condemnation of it.”

― Woodrow Wilson

FOR SOME TIME I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas.

– Harry Truman, December 23, 1963

23 Dec 1963, 26 – The Capital Times at Newspapers.com

via Real Climate Science

Posted on April 4, 2021 by tonyheller

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April 4, 2021 at 10:26AM

Reposted from Dr. Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.

Posted on April 2, 2021 by curryja | 

by Roger Caiazza

Environmental justice organizations are currently a major driver of environmental regulation in New York. A new report “The Fossil Fuel End Game, A frontline vision to retire New York City’s peaker plants by 2030” illustrates the campaign strategy they are using to shut down peaking power plants in New York City.  Unfortunately their claims are based more on emotion than fact.

Background

In the spring of 2020 Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers (PSE) for Healthy Energy released a report Opportunities for Replacing Peaker Plants with Energy Storage in New York State.  The text for the New York specific report describes the alleged problem:

Across New York, 49 oil- and gas-fired peaker power plants and peaking units at larger plants help meet statewide peak electric demand.  These include both combustion turbines designed to ramp quickly to meet peak demand, and aging steam turbines now used infrequently to meet peak needs. More than a third of New York’s peaker plants burn primarily oil, and three-quarters are over 30 years old resulting in numerous inefficient plants with high rates of greenhouse gas and criteria pollutant emissions for every unit of electricity generated. Some of these plants are in very urban areas: ten plants have more than a million people living within three miles. One-third of the plants are located in areas the state considers to be environmental justice communities, where vulnerable populations typically already experience high levels of health and environmental burdens. New York has set energy storage targets and recently designed peaker plant emission reduction targets, providing an opportunity to replace inefficient, high-emitting peaker plants in vulnerable communities throughout the state with energy storage and solar.

These findings were picked up on by the New York City PEAK Coalition.  They released a report in June 2020 entitled: “Dirty Energy, Big Money”.  Most recently they followed up with The Fossil Fuel End Game, a frontline vision to retire New York City’s peaking power plants by 2030.  The campaign is succeeding because the New York Senate passed the Pollution Justice Act of 2021 on March 3, 2021 that mandates that the peaking power plants have to be retired consistent with these reports.

This campaign is deeply flawed from the get go.  The premise is wrong because peaking power plants are not inherently bad because they provide critical support to the electric system when needed most and that will be the focus of this post. The rationale is incorrect that these peaking power plants are directly affecting air quality in adjacent environmental justice neighborhoods because the health impacts are claimed from secondary pollutants that do not form before they are transported away from the neighborhood.  Replacing all the peaking plants in the time frame as suggested is extremely risky because the technology available today is not up to the task.

In this post I am going to concentrate on the reason for peaking power plants rather than the holes in the environmental arguments against them.  For more information on those aspects, I refer readers to posts on my blog.   The first post on the Peak Coalition report provided information on the primary air quality problem associated with these facilities, the organizations behind the report, the State’s response to date, the underlying issue of environmental justice and addressed the motivation for the analysis.  The second post addressed the rationale and feasibility of the proposed plan relative to environmental effects, affordability, and reliability.  I also discussed the original report Opportunities for Replacing Peaker Plants with Energy Storage in New York State document that provided technical information used by the PEAK Coalition.  I  summarized all three of these technical posts in simpler fashion.  I looked at the trends of inhalable particulates in New York City relative to the claims of a dire health threat.  Finally, I recently wrote a post on the Pollution Justice Act.

New York has implemented rules to replace the old, inefficient and dirty combustion turbines that are a real problem.  I believe it is more appropriate to allow the load-serving entities, generators, and system operators to consider alternatives and implement proven solutions that are cost-effective and enhance rather than risk reliability with new alternatives until those alternatives have been fully vetted.

Blackouts and Peaking Power Plants

There is a long history of blackouts in New York City (NYC).  After a blackout in July 2019 AMNY published a brief history of blackouts in New York City.  In 1959 and 1961 surges in electrical use caused blackouts and “The outage spurred changes to better protect the city’s power grid from future blackouts”.  The 1965 blackout was the first regional blackout and was caused by a transmission problem in Ontario causing a wave of disruptions in the transmission system.  Over 30 million people and 80,000 square miles in Ontario, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont were left without power for up to 13 hours. As part of the response to that event New York set up a power pool to manage electricity generation and transmission. 

The over-arching issue for electricity reliability in New York City is geography.  Most of New York City is on islands so there is a natural load pocket.  There was another blackout in 1977 that was limited to NYC directly related to the load pocket.  It was caused by storms cutting off transmission into the City and in-City generation being unable to replace the load.  Without sufficient local power, protective devices turn off overloaded lines and transformers to prevent physical damage to the equipment and this led to the outages.  As a result of this blackout, reliability constraints were implemented to ensure that when storms threaten transmission into the City that sufficient in-City generation is available to prevent a re-occurrence.  In 2003 there was another regional blackout caused by a computer software problem.  Grid operators identified the cause and then developed procedures to prevent it from happening again.  In 2012 tropical storm Sandy caused massive blackouts exacerbated by flood protection weaknesses.  Since then, there have been massive investments to strengthen the infrastructure to prevent a reoccurrence. Note that after every blackout the electric system owners and operators have developed strategies to prevent a reoccurrence.

The New York State Reliability Council is an independent entity “whose mission is to promote and preserve the reliability of electric service on the New York State Power System by developing, maintaining, and, from time-to-time, updating the Reliability Rules which shall be complied with by the New York Independent System Operator (“NYISO”) and all entities engaging in electric transmission, ancillary services, energy and power transactions on the New York State Power System”.   Among their rules that govern reliability are those that address the strategies developed after these blackouts. It turns out that that New York City’s peaking power plants are part of those strategies and are needed to provide additional in-City generation within short periods of time. 

Releasing the report less than a month since the Texas energy debacle should give pause to the organizers of this campaign to consider the ramifications of what happened there to New York reliability requirements.  While there have been reports that dozens of deaths are tied to the storm in Texas, experts say the death toll is likely far larger. Just how many won’t be known for weeks or months.  The blackouts cost the state economy upward of $130 billion in damages and losses, and some people who did have power saw their bills spike by thousands of dollars. Grid operators say that the situation could actually have been a lot worse, with the system minutes away from a months long blackout. 

Clearly the history of blackouts shows that they pose an enormous risk that should be avoided if possible.

Fossil Fuel End Game Report

The report claims to be the “first detailed strategic and policy road map to retire and replace an entire city’s fossil-fuel peaker power plants”. It lays out a community-led strategy to replace about half of New York City’s existing fleet of polluting peaker plants with a combination of offshore wind, distributed solar, energy efficiency, and battery storage by 2025. They claim that the remaining peaker plants could be reliably and cost-effectively replaced with this mix of resources by 2030.

In order to evaluate their alternatives, we need to understand how they think peaking plants are used. The report points out that:

“Electricity from peaker plants is the most expensive energy resource in the system as it comes from centrally-located assets that are used infrequently but must be paid for and maintained to allow availability at times of peak demand. Central location, low utilization and the need for technologies that provide flexibility drive the costs of generation way above those from other energy assets.  For this reason, peaker owners charge for the electricity they produce, and more importantly, also charge for the availability of their resources during system peaks. Such availability is paid through the capacity market, designed to ensure that the system has enough capacity to provide energy during the times of highest energy demand. While NYC is not the only region with a capacity market, it has some of the highest capacity prices in the country. When capacity costs are averaged over the hours of operation, peaker electricity in New York City is up to 1,300% more expensive than the average cost of electricity in the rest of the state.”

It is frustrating to me that the authors don’t recognize the value of assets that provide power when it is needed most.  It is also telling that Texas does not have a capacity market.  In order to ensure power is available whenever it is needed ratepayers have to cover the costs for that availability.  In that light the relatively low costs of Texas electricity do not appear to be such a good deal now.

The report goes on:

Another factor that makes peaker energy more expensive than average is operational inefficiency caused by technological limitations and distribution constraints. For example, there are costs associated with turning on and off certain generating assets that lead plant managers to run them at uneconomic times, driving up consumer costs and increasing local emissions. From a market perspective, peakers are also called to run uneconomically to ensure local reliability. According to the state’s Market Monitor, Potomac Economics, supplemental commitment of NYC’s peakers occurs frequently to increase the amount of supply available in real-time for local load pocket reliability.  Those requirements ensure that there are enough resources to meet load in case of a problem such as the loss of the two largest Bulk Power System elements supporting a particular load pocket, for example, the loss of multiple central generators due to contingencies in the natural gas system. This supplemental commitment tends to undermine market incentives for efficiently meeting reliability requirements and often uplifts market prices, which are eventually passed on to customers. Some of these costs could be alleviated through market reforms or through deployment of modern inverter-based resources like locally-sited battery storage which could provide valuable operating reserves in these load pockets. In 2019, NYC accounted for 87 percent of the State’s total reliability commitment.

These factors are outside my area of expertise but it is my understanding that many of these issues are legacies from the switch from a regulated, vertically integrated utility to New York’s de-regulated market.  Consolidated Edison designed the generation, transmission, and distribution system when they were responsible for all three aspects of the system.  When the market was de-regulated ownership of these assets was not necessarily chosen to ensure operational efficiency.  Anecdotally I have heard from colleagues that it is not clear how these units are dispatched so I suspect at least some of these criticisms have merit.

The report acknowledges that “peakers play an important role in supporting reliable electric service for New Yorkers” and points out that some of them also “produce steam that feeds the city’s “district heating” system, providing heat and cooling to many buildings in Manhattan”.  However, the report offers no recommendations how the steam system would be replaced with their recommended technology.

The analysis evaluates historical data to develop a replacement plan: “More specifically, the peaker fleet was analyzed on a unit-by-unit, hourly basis using historic generation profiles as reported to the EPA for the years 2017, 2018 and 2019”.  Therein lies the a problem.  They argue that over those three years the full capacity of the fleet of peakers in New York City has not been required to meet peaking needs in NYC but because New York’s reliability rules are based on loss of load expectation over ten years their time frame is too short.

They also argue that “In 2018, the year with the most challenging peak, only 4,790 MW out of 6,200 MW (or about 77% of total peaking capacity) was ever used simultaneously. Moreover, more than half of the peaker fleet is rarely used simultaneously, in fact, this only happened during 44 hours of the year (0.5% of the time) and in very short event durations.”  They also analyze operating characteristics. “An analysis of the peaker starts and run duration showed that many of the peakers run for relatively short durations that could be served by energy storage at competitive costs”.  As mentioned before, the short duration of their evaluation period makes these findings weak.  The short-comings of the NYC transmission and distribution system also affect peaker operations and further reduce the credibility of these findings.

The consultant who did the work, Strategen, “used a 90th percentile approach on duration to determine the replacement needs of NYC fossil assets while taking in consideration five factors that would otherwise overestimate the reliability value of peakers in a traditional “longest peaker runtime” approach. These include 1) peaker unit dispatch versus available zone level capacity, 2) peaker unit dispatch versus plant level capacity, 3) peaker unit dispatch for localized non-peaking needs, 3) inconsistent levels of peaker output during longer-runtimes, and 5) unit operational constraints.” There is no question in my mind that this approach under estimates the worst case.  For heaven’s sakes they are saying don’t worry about what happens ten percent of the time at the same time they are addressing peaking units that run less than 5% of the time.

“Assuming a 90-percentile approach on unit duration to account for system characteristics and its reliability needs”, Stategen determined that “28 units with 765 MW of installed capacity have maximum durations of four hours or less, making them attractive candidates for replacement with storage even in a 1-to-1 basis”.  The proposed solution is replacement with energy storage that has a cap on how long power can be provided so it is less flexible, does not consider that energy storage discharge capacities are not 100%, and overlooks life expectancy of batteries two or three times less compared to a fossil generator.  There are 52 other peaking turbines that ran for longer durations which only exacerbates the limitations.  Finally, they propose to replace nine large steam units, accounting for 3,882 MW or 64% of the total fleet capacity. These units “have maximum dispatch durations that go from 80 to 1,500 hours but are also the perfect example of over-dispatch driven by technology constraints”.  Those facilities certainly would not be purpose-built for their present role but they provide dispatchable, in-city power from small foot print facilities and can produce firm dispatchable power for very long periods. 

Clean Energy Vision

According to the report’s overview: “The report lays out a plan for New York City focused on local, distributed solutions. This decentralized approach creates a more resilient power system than the current grid, which depends on centralized fossil-fuel power plants.”  The “Clean Energy Vision for New York City” depends on four resources: offshore wind, community and residential solar, energy efficiency and energy storage.  I will address each below.

Despite the fact that there hasn’t been any offshore wind development so far, the vision counts on this resource and expects that it can be developed faster than proposed.  New York State has a goal to develop 9 GW of offshore wind by 2035.  I have not seen whether this resource will be considered “in-city”.  If not and I would argue that it isn’t, then this is a non-starter.  Because the State has only approved four projects and needs to develop infrastructure to support building those projects, I suspect that development will take longer than proposed.

The report recognizes that there are inherent difficulties siting solar in NYC: “New York City is afflicted with many of the canonical challenges that inhibit rooftop solar development including challenging local regulation, shared rooftop space, a significant population that rents, and aging buildings and electrical infrastructure”.   Because they claim there is a lot of value in having it, they blithely assume that the obstacles can be overcome and assume that 5.4 GW of solar can be developed in NYC.

The analysis relies on energy efficiency to markedly reduce energy use in order to reduce the energy needed during peak periods.  There is a complicating factor that I don’t think they address.  New York’s climate legislation mandates electrification of everything to meet its 2050 zero-emissions goal.  As a result, heating and transportation will have to be electrified and all analysts agree that means that the annual peak load will shift from the summer when solar can provide meaningful power to winter when it cannot. 

The biggest problem I have is with their analysis of energy storage.  They used a linear energy dispatch model to determine how much storage is needed to replace peaker plant generation for their plan.  In their methodology “Energy storage was modeled to provide energy arbitrage services, that is, storing clean energy when it is produced but not used, and discharging it into the grid at times of need.”   Aside from the practical matter that the quantity of energy storage requires significant space which could be an issue in the crowded city there are other concerns.  They only used a single year for the analysis and there is no suggestion that discharge capacity limits were considered.  The analysis does not recognize that in order to replace fossil peakers two types of energy storage are needed.  Longer-duration storage needs to cover, for example, night time for solar resources.  That appears to be the storage addressed.  However, fossil-fired combustion turbines used for peaking operate at fixed loads but solar resources, for example vary if it is a partly cloudy day.  Therefore, energy resources are needed for this short-term variation.  But that’s not all.  Fossil units also provide ancillary services such as frequency control.  The point is that they did not calculate how much energy storage has to be allocated for these other services.

There is another flaw in this approach.  They looked at the characteristics of energy load and how peaking units provided that energy and proposed a solution based on off-shore wind and solar resources assuming that those resources would be available.  I have argued that one of the biggest shortcomings in New York’s implementation process is that have not yet done an evaluation of the availability of wind and solar at the same time over a long period.  To date the primary planning problem has always been the peak load but it is conceivable that the bigger problem for a future grid reliant upon wind and solar will be low coincidental resource availability.  However, because the peak loads are associated with the coldest and hottest weather and those periods are associated with high pressure system with light winds, it is likely that low renewable resource availability will be worst when it is needed most.  In any event, the Strategen analysis did not consider resource availability at all.

Conclusion

Even though there are other shortcomings in the analysis, this post is too long so I will wrap it up.  At this time, environmental justice organization are conducting a well-orchestrated effort to replace peaking power plants in New York City.  New York energy and environmental policy initiatives are catering to these organizations and the New York Senate has even passed a law codifying the approach proposed.   I suspect that this approach will become evident on the national level soon.

There are many inherent advantages to fossil-fired power plants.   In the New York City context, they provide reliable power when needed from relatively small footprints and are a key component to the reliability standards developed from hard experience.  Unfortunately, the arguments to replace them are based more on emotion than fact and seem to be driven by the urge to eliminate one over hyped risk while ignoring the unintended consequences of their solutions which may create other risks that could cause bigger problems.  

In my opinion, it is particularly troubling that the problem of peaking power plants has already being addressed.  Last summer New York promulgated rules to replace the old, inefficient and dirty combustion turbines that are a real problem.  This study and others expand the definition of peaking power plants to other units that cannot be replaced easily.  I think that the organizations behind this report are unwilling to accept any perceived risks from new efficient and clean fossil generating plants partially based on the naïve belief that renewable solutions are only a matter of political will.  Given that political policy decisions played a hand in the recent Texas energy debacle, I think that is a dangerous path to take.

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Roger Caiazza blogs on New York energy and environmental issues at Pragmatic Environmentalist of New York.  This represents his opinion and not the opinion of any of his previous employers or any other company with which he has been associated.

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April 4, 2021 at 09:07AM

Could indicate that a magnetic reversal is imminent.

________

The accelerating nature of magnetic field collapses

Lloyd Robbins

It concerns me that in every discussion I read on the subject of magnetic reversals, one aspect is consistently either unacknowledged or ignored, that being the accelerating nature of magnetic field collapses. Even studies that do talk about accelerating magnetic field declines skirt around the issue of imminent field collapse as if it is still some time off. We hear of the accelerating decline of the Earth’s magnetic field, but it’s usually stated almost rhetorically. The truth is that it’s not rhetorical at all.

The production of the Earth’s magnetic field is theorised to be via the circulation of the liquid iron core. Due to induced electrical currents, this circulation supports and amplifies the existing field, so it’s a positive feedback mechanism. When the field begins to decline, this means that the positive feedback mechanism has already started to fail, dating back to when the field initially started to decline. A fair analogy is a spinning top which has already started to wobble and fall.

Once in decline, this can only accelerate, unless there is some other mechanism which kicks in that we don’t know about. As the theory has no concept of this secondary mechanism and geomagnetic signs in the crust do not suggest it, it should therefore be assumed that no such mechanism exists. Given this, the decline of the magnetic field should be considered to be exponential in nature – the decline accelerates the decline – ie a collapse.

It has been stated by Robert in his books that ice ages can establish themselves in the space of one season. My feeling is, that as alluded to by Robert, this could be linked to magnetic field collapse which could happen in a similar very short time frame. Once the magnetic field drops to a certain critical level, it will simply collapse from there because it can’t continue to fight its own decline.

Unlike when the magnetic field re-establishes itself, building the new field from that of the Sun, the old one having completely disappeared, the collapse of the old field is irreversible and unavoidable. My guess is that there are scientists who actually do fear this if not actually know it, but that they are either not speaking up or being ignored or silenced because the truth is being hidden.

People like to believe they have time, that cataclysmic events are not going to happen while they are alive. But if what I’m writing about is true, it could be about to happen very shortly, in the space of perhaps only a few years. Looking at the graphs of magnetic field declines, it’s obvious to at least me that this is an accelerating process which is already targeting a zero magnetic field in the space of only a few years.

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April 4, 2021 at 08:59AM