Reposted from The MANHATTAN CONTRARIAN
June 20, 2021 / Francis Menton
Climate fraud advocates use a variety of deceptions to trick the gullible into agreeing to their socialist plans. These delusions range from fairly sophisticated to completely absurd. At the most sophisticated end of the scale we have what I have called the greatest scientific scam of all time – the deception that uses impenetrable computer algorithms to alter (reduce) 50- and 100-year-old temperature records to make it appear as if the global one had Warming has taken place much greater than reality. At the most absurd end of the scale is the claim that the fashionable “renewable” sources of electricity, wind and sun, are actually cheaper than fossil fuels to generate electricity.
I call this claim absurd because the underlying delusion is so obvious that one might think that no one of any intelligence could fall for it. And yet you have certainly read numerous articles in recent years that claim that electricity from wind and sun is now just as cheap or cheaper as electricity from natural gas or coal. To make this claim, proponents of wind and solar power simply leave most of the cost of these sources out of their calculations. That would be the cost of interruption, also known as the cost of providing enough backup or storage to run a stable power grid while wind and solar generation fluctuates widely. (Since wind and sun are becoming an ever larger part of electricity generation in the grid, the costs for the necessary backup and / or storage could easily multiply the electricity costs by a factor of five or more. See for example my article here.).
To divert your attention from that elephant in the room, someone came up with the concept of “tiered energy costs” or LCOE, supposedly to make fair comparisons of the total cost of one energy source with another. There are seemingly sophisticated and technical discussions about life cycles and discount rates. But when you factor in wind and solar costs, they simply leave out the cost of the interruption entirely. I suppose they hope you don’t notice.
If you don’t believe me, check out this Wikipedia article on “Electricity Costs by Source”. The piece cites about five studies on comparative costs of different generation sources. The five studies come from Bloomberg New Energy Finance, Lazard, the International Renewable Energy Agency, the IPCC and the OECD. Representative of the conclusions of the BNEF:
In March 2021, Bloomberg New Energy Finance stated that “Renewable energy is the cheapest option for electricity, accounting for 71% of global GDP and 85% of global electricity generation. Today it is cheaper to build a new solar or wind farm to meet the increasing demand for electricity or to replace a decommissioned generator than to build a new fossil-fuel-fired power plant. …
Feel free to click through to verify my claim that when calculating the cost of wind and solar generation, they simply omit all intermittent generation costs.
The state of Texas, with its own power grid separated from the rest of the country, is leading the development of intermittent renewable generation capacity, particularly wind. While the production of these systems can fluctuate greatly from month to month (depending on wind conditions), Texas gets around 20-25% of its electricity from wind and solar energy in typical months. (It was 23% in October 2020.) Then came February 2021 when Texas had a record cold spell and wind and sun died for several days in a row. Some natural gas and nuclear facilities were also out of order during this time. The result was a huge increase in spot market prices and rolling blackouts by the network operator (known as ERCOT).
Apparently the February event finally got some people in Texas to become aware of the real cost of renewable energy. In March, a bill called SB 1278 was tabled in the Texas Senate by Senator Kelly Hancock of Fort Worth, requiring that renewable energy sources bear the additional costs of disrupting them. Here is the relevant language of the proposed statute:
“[ERCOT] ensures that the ancillary services required to enable the transmission of electrical energy are available at reasonable prices … [and] Costs for additional services incurred by the ERCOT… in order to solve reliability problems resulting from the operation of intermittent wind and solar resources must be allocated directly to these resources by the ERCOT…. . . . “
The bill was passed in the Texas Senate on April 14th with an 18-13 bipartisan vote. However, the bill has been held up in the Texas House of Representatives, and it appears that lawmakers have now adjourned without further action against the bill. Still, it seems that the legislature still has a lot of unfinished business and will convene a special session again sometime during the year.
The delay has given proponents of renewable energy a chance to regroup. A post on May 17th at Utility Dive gives many of these proponents a chance to present their arguments. Most of them are BS. However, I think that there is a significant flaw in the formulation of the draft law in its drafting, namely that it puts the burden on the regulatory authority ERCOT to find out which particular costs are due to intermittent problems. In a mixed system of fossil fuels and renewable sources, this task cannot necessarily be solved so precisely. A guy named Michael Jewell from something called Conservative Texans for Energy Innovation sums it up when he says:
“[C]The root cause for this is unclear, as the reliability requirements vary depending on customer demand and conventional generators such as wind and solar systems can [also] go offline. “
A far better structure would be for the network operator to set up a bidding system in which bidders who offer electricity from wind and solar sources have to combine their bids with sufficient backup and / or storage to provide a fixed amount of fixed electricity over a reasonable period of time , let’s say 24 hours. In a post in July 2018 I put it this way:
[T]The network operator should only look for electricity offers that are stable and reliable for a reasonable period of time, for example 24 hours at a time. If you want to sell wind power to the grid operator, you also need to provide the mix of backup sources (can be fossil-fueled power plants, batteries or whatever you can think of) to make your offer reliable for the required period of time.
With this market structure, the wind and solar operators would have to recognize and calculate the costs of the intermittent systems themselves. The structure would also encourage these operators to reduce the cost of interruptions (ie backup and / or storage) as much as possible.
Read the full article here.
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