Alternative Energy Supply vs. Supplemental Energy Supply

I’m sure you’ve all seen headlines, articles, columns and blog posts about how the United States (or whatever country you live in) needs to move away from traditional fossil-fueled (or whatever energy source your country uses) energy supplies to environmentally friendly renewable, or ‘alternative’ energy supplies; i.e. wind, solar, bio-mass, etc. Let’s capture this all in the term “Green Energy.” The latest buzz from both the Obama administration and the main stream media is about the creation of “green jobs” … but only if we give up our addiction to carbon-based energy sources.

I suspect most of the people advocating this position have absolutely no experience with, nor do they understand, the chaos that is present in large dynamic systems.The US electric system covers almost all areas of the nation and consists of what would be most simply described as three separate but interconnecting grids. According to the US Department of Energy’s web site,

The economic significance of electricity is staggering. It is one of the largest and most capital-intensive sectors of the economy. Total asset value is estimated to exceed $800 billion, with approximately 60% invested in power plants, 30% in distribution facilities, and 10% in transmission facilities.

The above statement captures the economic boundaries of the grid, but it doesn’t begin to address the engineering and physical aspects of one of the largest and most complex systems humans have ever created.

What I would like to convey within this post is that moving the existing grid to this vision of a Green Energy world will not happen within the lifetime of my six year old grandson. There are such huge issues to resolve and such massive costs to completely redesign and rebuild the system from generating plants to distribution systems to meters.

I’ll start by excluding myself as a an expert (recognized or self-professed) of the US, or any other national electric grid. My sole claim to experience in energy and power systems is as a customer of these systems and their prevarications, a consultant for the past 30 years developing and implementing energy efficiency programs for utilities and large commercial and industrial electric and natural gas customers, and not lastly a student of engineered systems.

The primary generation systems on today’s grid are made up of very large generation plants, capable of generating 1,000 megawatts (MW) or more of power. To put this in layman’s terms, a megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts or 1,000,000 watts. In other words, one of these plants can create enough power to light 10,000,000 (ten million!) 100 watt light bulbs (or more than 40,000,000 curly-que/compact fluorescent light bulbs).

The Western Systems Coordinating Council is the grid that servers the Western 11 US states and parts of Western Canada and Northern Mexico. In the WSCC there are more than 80,000 miles of transmission lines at or above 115,000 kilovolts (115 kV), more than 180 generating plants larger than 200 MW, and more than 19,000 substations, and many control areas, just to mention a few statistics. I’ll return to these issues later.

Power is the rate that energy is used (or consumed) and is measured in watts. Electrical energy is a measurement of work and measured in joules, calories or watt-hours. The two are not necessarily related. I can use one million kilowatt hours (kWh) over a period of several years in my home, or I can use the same one million kWh in one day in an arc furnace at my steel mill.

Grids are immensely complex, and controlling such a system is truly art. The one element that makes these power systems (yes, I meant power system and not energy system) so different than any other distribution system is storage. Unlike natural gas, oil, or for that matter tissue paper, there is no reasonable or cost effective way of storing power. It is used at the very moment it is produced!

There are several methods of storage in a power system, but little in relation to to overall size of the system, and as I said, it is generally much more expensive than most any generating technology. Probably the most used storage approach is pumped hydro, which utilizes generators and water storage, releasing water during summer afternoons when demand is high and pumping the water back up the hill at night when demand is at it’s lowest. Regardless … very expensive!

So … power is generated and used at the same instant. This in itself creates significant challenges to introduce Green Energy. Solar produces power only when the sun shines, and I’m not just referring to night and day. Below is a graph of a large photovoltaic array located in the Inland Empire area of Southern California showing hourly production for several days in early May, 2009:

Even in an area that isn’t normally affected by the marine layer so often seen along the coast of Southern California in June (the notorious June gloom), clouds have significant influence on the power output of a PV array. The same thing can be said for wind turbines and their power output if the wind stops blowing … or blows to hard. These issues are among several that eliminate wind and solar as viable alternatives to conventional power generation … supplemental, yes but not an alternate.

Note I said ‘eliminate?’ Sure … you could add these generating sources to a grid, but they would have to be backed up 100% by conventional generation sources to insure continuity and reliability. There are two primary reasons for for the need for 100% backup. These “Green” sources cannot be relied upon to produce power when needed (remember … power is used at the instant it is produced). Additionally, and more difficult to envision, power grids are inherently unstable.

First, as I intimated earlier, the grid is really one machine with many parts. The power flows within each section of the grid depend upon synchronization between the hundreds of generators. The interconnects between the three sections are not capable of carrying as much power as the transmission lines within each section. The graphic below shows most of those connections.

Second, the instability of the grid is challenging to control. For an AC power grid to remain stable, the frequency and phase of all power generation units must remain synchronous within narrow limits. A generator that drops 2 hertz (Hz) below 60 Hz will rapidly build up enough heat in its bearings to destroy itself. So circuit breakers trip a generator out of the system when the frequency varies too much. But much smaller frequency changes can indicate instability in the grid. In the Eastern Interconnect, a 30 mHz drop in frequency reduces the power delivered by 1 gigawatt.

Introducing thousands, or as dreamed by the Enviros’, hundreds of thousands of small, distributed generating plants driven by variable “energy” sources such as wind or solar radiation will make control of the grid more difficult by several magnitudes. Further, even if all this new Green Energy were added to the grid, all of it would have to be backed up by more reliable sources of generation.

This would double the capital costs and some of the backup generation would have to run at the same time the Green Energy was running just to control flows within the grid. This doesn’t even address the requirement for generation running in a standby mode, commonly referred to as spinning reserve, in the event of the loss of a generating unit or an entire plant.

When more power is being generated than is being used, the excess is turned into heat and is wasted. Again recall … power is used at the instant it it produced. If not used on the load side … instant waste heat! This in turn would cause higher system operating costs.

I’ve thought long and hard for an analogy to an electric grid that can make all this more understandable to the layman … and the best I’ve come up with so far is an ocean. Open your mind and think of the Pacific Ocean; it has currents, swells, waves, temperature variations, and other phenomenon that create and drive its parts. Likewise, an energy grid has generation systems, transmission systems, distribution systems and finally, the load, or if you prefer, the air conditioners, refrigerators and other electric appliances in your home.

A large underwater earthquake that causes the sea floor to shift, or a massive underwater landslide will cause a column of water to suddenly rise which in turn produces a tsunami or tidle wave, as occurred off the coast of Indonesia on December 26, 2007. Humans can do nothing to stop the resulting force; only move to higher ground until the sea settles.

Likewise in the grid, something seemingly so small as a transmission line sagging as it heats and then touching, or grounding, against a tree can cause much of the grid generation to disconnect (move to higher ground) to protect itself, thereby shutting down large pieces of the grid … as happened in Ohio on August 14, 2003, resulting in a blackout that affected over 55 million people in the US and Canada for hours.  That cascade is similar to the power outage that occurred in 1965 as a result of a failed relay at a power station in New York, darkening the Northeast for 12 or more hours (and purportedly causing a spike in the birthrate nine months later).

What does all this have to do with Green Power? Our current grid is not sophisticated enough to be able to control the immense vagrancies imposed by massive numbers of generating sources distributed across the grid and therefore outside the control of the artists responsible for making this immense machine work. One of the current buzz-phrases is “smart grid” (of which I’ll discuss in another post). The cost to make the grid “smart” will be ginormas all by itself … over and above the cost of all the Green Energy!

… and that doesn’t include the need for Obama to declare the second and third laws of thermodynamics unconstitutional!

Down in flames …

Californians have spoken! Ballot initiative Propositions 1A-1E have gone down to flaming defeat … by a large majority. As I write this post, 1A is losing 66 to 34% statewide, and in Orange County it is losing 76-34%. In the city where I live it is even more dramatic … 80-20%. Prop 1F, the proposition that freezes legislator’s salaries any time the state budget is expected to be in deficit, is passing 76-24% statewide.

I can only hope that the Sacramento Spenders get the message. However I would put money on them saying that their junk initiatives would have passed if the turnout would have been greater than the almost 3 million who performed their citizenship duties and voted today. Unfortunately, they would most likely have been correct on that point. After all … this is the land of fruits and nuts.

Regardless, the pols are now going to be forced to deal with their drunken spending and have to start reigning in the State’s budget by at least $20 to $25 BILLION. I suspect that will be just the beginning. In 2010 we need to boot every politician out of Sacramento who has been there longer than four years.

We have a very rough row to hoe if we have any chance of turning California back into a place that welcomes business … and everyone … equally.

UPDATE 5/20/09 17:11: The more I thought about what the possible resolutions could be, the more concerned I’m becoming. At a minimum, we can expect “fees” will begin showing up for, or being increased on all manner of state services. Fees are just another name for taxes, but in California they don’t require a 2/3 majority of the legislators for passage.

Another senario I can envision is the Feds stepping in and providing California a ‘big brother’ bailout. This would give Obama deeper hooks into how and where the state spends its money and it makes Obama a hero to the state employee unions that wouldn’t be as impacted in terms of layoffs. For Obama, a two’fer … for Californians, socialism writ large!

Chicken … or Egg? Only Algore Knows

I ran across this story written by Scott Canon and published in the Kansas City Star on May 6th. The story notes the lack of sunspots over the past year and a half and asks what it means. I posted on sunspots previously here. Scott says:

New research suggests the sun might be calming, erupting in fewer solar flares and winds that send cosmic rays spraying out toward the planets.

That could mean colder weather. And although it’s not time to put away your Ray-Bans, the sun also could be dimming ever so slightly.

A similar phenomenon caused what’s often called the Little Ice Age that chilled Europe and North America enough to form an ice barrier around Greenland and freeze solid the canals of the Netherlands.

Scientists don’t yet know if the seemingly calmer sun will linger in this lull. It’s too early to tell.

He goes on to cite different ‘experts’ prognostications. However, further on in the article is this:

“The problem is if the sun is, indeed, going into a minimum, which we don’t know yet, people will think that we don’t have to act on climate change,” said Angela Speck, an astrophysicist at the University of Missouri. “The sun came back out of that minimum in the 18th century” — when the River Thames turned to ice — “and it will come back out of this.”

“I’m inclined to think the effects are real,” said Adrian Melott, another KU astrophysicist. “But the evidence is nowhere as solid as it is for the carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere” and climate change.

“My worry,” he said, “is that it will lower temperatures and cause people to think it’s OK to burn all that coal and oil.”

My first reaction to the two comments was “but couldn’t it be as probable that the increase in sunspots since the Maunder Minimum be the cause of the average temperature rising to where it is today?” There have been a greater number of sunspots since the1950s than any time since sunspots have been tracked. Why is it that any increase in temperature since 1950′s be caused by AGW, but the current slight decease be attributed to the absence of sunspots?

Secondly, the author quotes Adrian Melott “But the evidence is nowhere as solid as it is for the carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere” and then adds ‘and climate change’ without attribution. Did Mr. Melott actually say the evidence for climate change was a solid as the evidence for carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere, or did the author assume Melott meant that but just didn’t express that sentiment outright?

The reason issues of sunspots isn’t on the front page of every major publication is because  the study of sun spots is relegated to the realms of science, whereas Anthropogenic Global Warming is a core to the religion to those who believe. That religion is Environmentalism.

Michael Crichton delivered a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco in September 2003 on Environmentalism as the fastest growing religion in the Western world. In his speach, Crichton described the tenets of the religion:

There’s an initial Eden, a paradise, a state of grace and unity with nature, there’s a fall from grace into a state of pollution as a result of eating from the tree of knowledge, and as a result of our actions there is a judgment day coming for us all. We are all energy sinners, doomed to die, unless we seek salvation, which is now called sustainability. Sustainability is salvation in the church of the environment. Just as organic food is its communion, that pesticide-free wafer that the right people with the right beliefs, imbibe.

Eden, the fall of man, the loss of grace, the coming doomsday—these are deeply held mythic structures. They are profoundly conservative beliefs. They may even be hard-wired in the brain, for all I know. I certainly don’t want to talk anybody out of them, as I don’t want to talk anybody out of a belief that Jesus Christ is the son of God who rose from the dead. But the reason I don’t want to talk anybody out of these beliefs is that I know that I can’t talk anybody out of them. These are not facts that can be argued. These are issues of faith.

And so it is, sadly, with environmentalism. Increasingly it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us, or one of them.

Am I exaggerating to make a point? I am afraid not. Because we know a lot more about the world than we did forty or fifty years ago. And what we know now is not so supportive of certain core environmental myths, yet the myths do not die. Let’s examine some of those beliefs.

There is no Eden. There never was. What was that Eden of the wonderful mythic past? Is it the time when infant mortality was 80%, when four children in five died of disease before the age of five? When one woman in six died in childbirth? When the average lifespan was 40, as it was in America a century ago. When plagues swept across the planet, killing millions in a stroke. Was it when millions starved to death? Is that when it was Eden?

The text of Michael’s speech can be found here and I encourage you to read the entire speech. It describes to a tee the fanaticism of those who espouse that the only possible explanation of recent temperature change to be the increase of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere.

It appears, based on the quotes attributed to them, both Angela Speck and Adrian Melott are followers of Environmentalism. They are both saying “well … the climate may be cooling because of less sunspots … but that isn’t important because once the sunspots start up again … it’s going to get REAL hot if we keep burring coal and oil,” i.e. “putting” carbon dioxide into the atmosphere! Do you think the occupants of those mid-evil castles around 1680 would have been disturbed by a bit of “climate change?”

And born-again Christians are called crazy!

If you like the DMV …

Kimberley Strassel wrote and article in today’s Wall Street Journal about the Republican’s response (or more precisely, lack thereof) to Obama’s push to take over America’s health care industry. Kimberley wrties:

Listen. That sound of silence? That’s what’s known as the united Republican response to President Barack Obama’s drive to socialize health care.

The president has a plan, and he’s laid it on the table. The industry groups that once helped Republicans beat HillaryCare are today sitting at that table. Unions are mobilized. A liberal umbrella group, Health Care for American Now, is spending $40 million to get a “public option,” a new federal entitlement that would kill off private insurance. Democrats passed a budget blueprint that will allow them to cram through that “public option” with just 51 votes.

Republicans? They’re trying to figure out what they think.

Well, not all of them. Earlier this week I ended up in the office of Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn, where the doctor was hosting North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr. The duo is, for the second time, crafting a comprehensive reform that would lower costs, cover the uninsured, and put Americans in control of their health care. And while the senators decline to talk GOP politics, their bill raises the multitrillion-dollar question: Will the party have the nerve or sense to coalesce behind some such conservative alternative to the Democratic product?

Kimberley does an excellent job of pillorying the Republicans and I encourage you to read the entire article, but her writings got me to thinking along another line. I am wondering how much people think about the what it is really going to mean when/if the Federal Government becomes the sole provider of health care.

Obama and other liberals say “Americans want health care reform.” On that point I agree. However, I disagree that the solution is to have the government  become the sole provider. Let me first make a disclaimer; I am not nor have I ever been in health care or any related business.

The reason our health care has become so expensive is the same reason the housing market collapsed; government intervention in and regulation of the health care industry and other supporting industries. I’ll start with insurance.

Laws that prohibit me from shopping accross state line for health insurance that best fits my needs is one of the most costly issues for Americans. I don’t know all the reasons for this, but one is so state regulators can force their own agenda on insurers. Here in California insurance companies are required to cover things such as sex change operations and other favorite liberal causes. I cannot opt out of those clauses when I purchase insurance, and therefore all policy holders are contributing to the cost for some very minor increment of the population who may want to give rise to their more feminine/masculine side.Why does the rest of society have to support such narcissism?

Another issue I have with the direction insurance has gone isn’t related to insurers and possibly not the regulators, but to so many insured. With so many policies covering the vast majority of the cost, the insured no longer believe they have a stake in the cost of health care. If the out-of-pocket cost for a visit to the doctor’s office is five dollars, why does the insured really care what the total cost is?

Well … let’s start with supply and demand. I know people that run to the doctor at the first sneeze or a minor ache. After all, it only costs five dollars! No … the insurer pays the health care provider $75 or $100 for that ‘minor’ visit. and when that same person makes 20 or 30 such visits over the course of a year, it starts to rack up the price for everyone. People need price signals and when they are missing, there is little to control demand.

The next issue is the interjection of “cost control measures” so many insurance companies have implemented. In my opinion, the primary reason for interjecting a layer of bureaucracy between the insurer and paitent is driven by law suits. Sure, there was some degree of over-medicating or doctors preforming unneeded procedures to increase their income. However, Most doctors began to call for tests and procedures that generally would not have been necessary to protect themselves from malpractice law suits. All of these “unnecessary” procedures put additional pressures on costs.

This is the segue to the costs caused by the law suit industry. Yes … it is an industry and very profitable, I might add. I’ll continue this in a future post, but I’ll leave on this note:

If you think the DMV is efficiently run, how will you like your doctor’s office run by the same folks?

Fear Mongering on (dare I pun?) Steroids

Ahanald announced yesterday that if his ballot propositions to extend the tax increases in California for two additional years failed at the ballot box on May 19 he would have to lay off 1,700 fire fighters. Imagine that  … out of all the stuff a state does for its citizens, the only service that can possibly be cut … the first and only cut … is one of the basic services required by the state constitution!

Why is it that every time a government agency faces budget cuts, the only option available is to eliminate or reduce vital services?  Do you think the public would respond the same way if Ahnald threatened to stop mowing the grass at the interchange of Interstate 405 and Interstate 605? Somehow, I think not.

His pronouncement can be classified as pure fear mongering. I’ve written about my opinions on Ahanald and the other Reduplicates here, here and here. What I’m talking about in this post is universal to almost all politicians and certainly to all bureaucrats. That is, the inability of “public servants” to look economic reality in the face and not cry.

Government workers are the biggest crybabies in this country … probably the world. California’s spending has increased almost 100% in the past ten years, but it is never enough. Do you think there may be some dim corner of the state’s attic where they might find a way too not fund thirty state employees’ attendance at next year’s conference on environmentally proper methods of putting gas in an automobile’s fuel tank? … in Copenhagen … at the Royal Palace???

I’ve worked with an organization, admittedly one of those capitalist pig companies, who’s client … also a capitalist pig organization … has asked them to reduce their multi-million dollar budget by about 10% last year and 25% this year … and they didn’t cry! They went to work and figured out how they could reduce their costs, put the plan in front of their client and then implemented it … not without a tear, for it cost them some very loyal employees … but they went ahead and did it! That’s life! It has happened before and it will happen again.

We voters need to accept responsibility for creating the mess we find ourselves in today. The politicians we have … and continue … to elect have put in place the bureaucracies we are saddled with. It all goes back to wanting “something for nothing.” And now its time to pay the piper!

Is that enough metephors for today?

Science on Trial?

I’ve just read a post over at Watts Up With That on a kerfuffle going between the the Atmospheric Sciences Research Center at the University at Albany, New York, Professor Wei-Chyung Wang and a British scientist by the name of Doug Keenan.

Wang is a renowned, world recognized scientist who has published hundreds of papers on anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Keenan has accused Wang of scientific fraud. Unless Wang produces the requisite data his science relies on, it seems the fraud charges have substantive merit.

From what has been made public (mostly on WUWT), it is very apparent the University at Albany, New York has at a minimum covered up sloppy science and at the other end of the spectrum perpetrated a fraud itself. It’s actions have demonstrated why an organization … ANY organization … cannot be trusted to investigate itself!

I applaud WUWT’s focus on the effect of this debate on the scientific process rather than on the AGW and Climate Change argument. However, IMHO, the issue rises far above science; the power structure has seen AGW as a way in which to implement policies by which to control entire aspects of our society. I left the following comment:

I’ve only followed WUWT for a few weeks and have appreciated what I’ve seen as a forum that considers all reasoned points of view (unlike many sites with an agenda). Not that there isn’t an agenda amongst the majority of contributors and commenters; that of unearthing the truth.

I doubt exposing a fraud such a Wang, should it turn out he has followed in the footsteps of Steig, Mann, Santer, et al will be the tipping point to “expose” this entire AGW fraud. This isn’t about science … its about politics and power. Exposure of the “hockey-stick” fraud should have been enough to blow the entire AGW theory to kingdom come if it were about the scientific process.
There is far more at stake here than science.

Obama promises his administration will be “based on scientific fact”

President [Obama] said in remarks before an audience of lawmakers, scientists, patients advocates and patients in the East Room, is to ensure that “we make scientific decisions based on facts, not ideology”: a line that drew more applause than any other.

Why do I have problems believing his declarations?

Pure Instinct and Observation, Branches of Government

While the title should say it all, I will say upfront that this is purely my Instinct on the situation. Barack Obama and his Administration are making a power play to nab all three branches of government. He has the Executive, Legislative, and now he will make a play for the Judicial with the upcoming retirement of Justice Souter. My question is, how has this man been persuaded to retire now?

The shear power of this administration should frighten all Americans. Never before in history has the goverment had complete control. Our forefathers purposely pitted the three branches of goverment against one another so that We The People would be protected from One Governing Body.

My advice to all Americans would be to Take Off Your Blinders. Remember we live on EARTH and not in HEAVEN. Ideals will not protect you here, only you can protect yourself.