Quotulatiousness

March 7, 2012

Wind turbines are “a technology that isn’t ready for prime time”

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 10:20

Andrew Orlowski on the bad economic and technological decision by the British government to put so much reliance on wind power:

Two studies published this week calculate the astounding cost of Britain’s go-it-alone obsession with using wind turbines to generate so much of the electricity the nation needs.

Both studies make remarkably generous concessions that favour wind technology; the true cost, critics could argue, will be higher in each set of calculations. One study reckons that the UK can still meet its carbon dioxide emissions targets and save £140bn — but only if it dumps today’s inefficient hippie technology. The other puts the potential saving at £120bn — pointing out that the same amount of electricity could be generated using open cycle gas plants at one-tenth the cost of using wind turbines.

“There is nothing inherently good or bad about investing in renewable energy and green technology,” writes economist Professor Gordon Hughes — formerly of the World Bank and now at the University of Edinburgh. “The problem is that the government has decided to back a technology that isn’t ready for prime time, thus distorting the market.”

Hughes’ study — Why is Wind power so expensive? An economic analysis — is published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation today, and simply looks at the costs. The other study, by technical consulting group AF-Mercados, specifically looks at how to reduce CO2 in the cheapest manner — by incurring the least collateral economic damage. It’s called Powerful Targets: Exploring the relative cost of meeting decarbonisation and renewables targets in the British power sector. KPMG originally commissioned the study, but then got cold feet. Both come to similar conclusions: wind is astronomically expensive compared to other sources of energy — and consumers and businesses must pay a high price for the privilege of subsidising such an inefficient technology.

Update, 10 March: A lovely little cartoon from Watts Up With That on this topic:

February 22, 2012

“More Americans fall off the roof installing solar panels each year than have ever been kiled by civilian nuclear power in the US”

Filed under: Environment, Japan, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

Tim Worstall responds to a Naomi Wolf panic-piece about the evils of nuclear power:

    Although there is a scientific consensus that no exposure is safe, no matter how brief,

No love, there isn’t a scientific consensus that says that there is no safe level of radioactivity. Forget hormesis for a moment and just concentrate on the obvious fallacy of the statement. We’re all bombarded with radiation all the time. Everything from cosmic rays through to uranium in the soil to bananas and Brazil nuts. And while we do all fall down dead eventually we’re not all falling down dead from the radiation from these sources.

[. . .]

And then we get the great one:

    Then, Japan was hit by a tsunami, and the cooling systems of the Fukushima nuclear reactor were overwhelmed, giving the world apocalyptic images of toxic floods and floating cars, of whole provinces made uninhabitable.

Well, yes, the tsunami killed lots of people, indeed. And the failure of the nuclear plant has killed no one. So we’d better abolish tsunamis then, eh?

Finally, what’s wrong with the whole piece, indeed, the basic mode of thinking behind it, is that it is looking only at absolute risk, taking no account whatsoever or relative risk. If we decide that we actually do want to have electricity then we need to look at which system of producing the electricity we desire kills the fewest of us. And in that nuclear wins hands down. More Americans fall off the roof installing solar panels each year than have ever been kiled by civilian nuclear power in the US.

Oh, and coal fired power stations distribute more radiation around the world than nuclear power plants do as well.

February 6, 2012

Battery sizes: AAA, AA, C, plus S, M, L, and XL

Filed under: Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:02

Coming to a boutique near you soon: wearable battery clothing.

Scientists charged into the fashion industry this week, unveiling a flexible battery that can be woven into fabric and used to boost the juice of everyday gadgets.

The lithium-ion cells were produced by a group of boffins from the Polytechnic School of Montreal. The team claims their bendy power cells are the first wearable battery that uses no liquid electrolytes, New Scientist reports.

The team sandwiched a solid polyethylene oxide electrolyte between a lithium iron phosphate cathode and lithium titanate anode. These are thermoplastic materials which, when gently heated, can be stretched into a thread.

There is a short-term restriction, however:

The next step is to waterproof the technology before attempts to implement it in future clothing and accessories can go ahead. Backpacks and medical-monitoring garments are said to be the first items the team is planning to add the tech to.

It’d be a bit unpleasant to have your shirt packing “hundreds of volts” discharge unexpectedly just because you broke a sweat …

Brazil fights back against celebrity oppression

Filed under: Americas, Economics, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:25

John Conroy on the recent backlash in Brazil against foreign celebrities using domestic issues as platforms for moralizing:

Film director James Cameron, responsible for Terminator, Titanic and, more recently, Avatar, has been working on a considerable side-project for a few years now. Cameron film fans shouldn’t get their hopes up, however. This side-project is more political than filmic. He has been trying to prevent the Brazilian government from constructing Belo Monte, the world’s third-largest hydroelectric dam, on the Xingu river which runs through the Amazonian rainforest.

[. . .]

But then something very curious happened. Another tribe of Brazilians, normally so fearful of being seen outside of their natural habitat, fought back. Geeky university students and their professors made a film with zero production values undermining every argument used by Cameron, the NGOs, the Kayapo and TV Globo. These are the myths they challenged:

  • The Indians will have nowhere to live. Actually, a student from Brasilia University who has done little else but study the impact of the project on indigenous lands responded that not one of the indigenous lands in the region will be flooded. There are 12 indigenous territories near the project in an area of 56,000 square kilometres with 2,200 indigenous people living on them. That’s two-and-a-half times the size of Wales. Thirty consultative meetings were held in tribal villages and recorded on video.
  • The dam and its reservoirs will flood and destroy 640 square kilometres of rainforest. Not exactly. The reservoirs will cover an area of 502.8 square kilometres of which 228 square kilometres are already within the body of the river itself.
  • The dam will starve the Xingu National Park of water. This is not true. The students displayed a map revealing that the park is in fact 1,300 kilometres up river of the dam.
  • For eight months of the year the region above the dam is nearly a desert making the dam inefficient and only capable of generating a third of its installed capacity. The implication here is that there is insufficient water to drive the turbines at full power. However, during the high-water period of the year, the river empties 28 million litres of water per second at the point of the turbines, creating an extraordinary potential energy generation of 11,233 megawatts (MW). Even at the river’s lowest levels in the month of October, it delivers 800,000 litres per second. The annual average energy production of Belo Monte will be 4,571MW, or 41 per cent of the potential generating capacity, not one third. This will power 40 per cent of Brazil’s entire residential energy consumption.

January 20, 2012

Renewable energy: the ethanol scam writ even larger

Filed under: Economics, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 11:24

Patrick J. Michaels looks at what he calls the “Great Renewable Energy Scam” and shows what happened with the ethanol fuel program which preceded the current programs:

… here in the U.S. there are some 30 different statewide “renewable portfolio standards” (RPSs) that also mandate pricey power, usually under the guise of fighting dreaded global warming.

RPSs command that a certain percentage of electricity has to come from wind, solar, geothermal, or biomass. Given that this power generally costs a lot more than what comes from a modern coal or gas plant, your local utility passes the cost on in the form of higher bills, which the various state utility commissions are only too happy to approve in the name of saving the planet.

[. . .]

One needs to look no further than ethanol as a motor fuel, mandated by the feds. Sold as “renewable” and reducing pernicious carbon dioxide emissions, it actually produces more in its life cycle than simply burning an equivalent amount of gasoline. It also — unconscionably — consumes 40% of U.S. corn production, and we are the by far the world’s largest producer of this important basic food.

The popular revulsion against ethanol has succeeded in cutting its massive federal subsidy, of $0.54 per gallon, which ran out on Dec. 31. But that doesn’t stop the federal mandate. Last year it was for roughly 14 billion gallons from corn and it will be nearly 15 billion in 2012. By 2022, up to 20 billion gallons will be required — all from corn — unless there is a breakthrough in so-called “cellulosic” ethanol, which, no matter how much money the government throws at it, hasn’t happened. Indeed, the largest cellulosic plant, Range Fuels, in Camilla, Ga., just went bankrupt. The loss to American taxpayers appears to be about $120 million, or about 25% of a Solyndra.

[. . .]

Having seen the ethanol debacle, will the states put solar and wind in their rightful (small) niches by repealing the RPSs? Increasing utility bills with renewable mandates is politically dangerous, and there is less and less political will to subsidize and otherwise prop up energy sources and technologies that cost too much.

January 12, 2012

Toronto Hydro takes hostages, threatens eternal darkness if demands not met

Filed under: Cancon, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:05

Ah, it must be the time of year for Toronto Hydro to lose its collective shit and start the crazy talk:

Last week, the Ontario Energy Board denied Toronto Hydro’s request for a rate hike for homes within the city limits. The hike, which would have meant a monthly increase of five dollars for a typical household, was necessary, Toronto Hydro said, to renew the city’s electrical transmission grid. Failure to do so, they warned, could result in more, and longer, blackouts.

Not so, the Energy Board ruled. They said that Toronto Hydro had not demonstrated that Toronto’s power grid needed the kind of urgent repairs that were being proposed, and also chided Toronto Hydro for failing to make necessary productivity gains, implying that the requested money was not so much about urgent repairs as needing more cash. Toronto Hydro’s response has been swift: 700 contractors have been let go, and 20% of its workforce is being told that they’re next — that’s another 350 or so jobs. Oh, and without the cash, the city is probably going to go dark.

Do these guys know how to play hardball or what?

January 11, 2012

Pro-nuclear power opinion piece on the BBC

Filed under: Environment, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 10:01

December 17, 2011

The traditional lightbulb may be safe for a bit longer

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

From the Washington Times:

Congressional negotiators struck a deal Thursday that overturns the new rules that were to have banned sales of traditional incandescent light bulbs beginning next year.

That agreement is tucked inside the massive 1,200-page spending bill that funds the government through the rest of this fiscal year, and which both houses of Congress will vote on Friday. Mr. Obama is expected to sign the bill, which heads off a looming government shutdown.

Congressional Republicans dropped almost all of the policy restrictions they tried to attach to the bill, but won inclusion of the light bulb provision, which prevents the Obama administration from carrying through a 2007 law that would have set energy efficiency standards that effectively made the traditional light bulb obsolete.

H/T to Virginia Postrel for the link.

December 5, 2011

Why GM is very worried about the reported battery fire risk in the Chevy Volt

Filed under: Economics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:13

If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll know I’m not over-optimistic about electric cars in the short-to-medium term (for example, here, here, here, and here) and I’m especially underwhelmed with GM’s most recent offering, the Chevy Volt:

Let’s talk economics first. Electric and hybrid-electric vehicles are more expensive to make and bring in less profit than other cars. They cost more to finance, more to repair, and more to insure. Their sales depend heavily on tax incentives, which means that selling more of them will require more taxpayer dollars. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) estimates that plug-in hybrid vehicles cost $3,000 to $7,000 more than regular hybrids, even though the performance differences between the two models are slight, and the really fuel-efficient hybrids cost $12,000 to $18,000 more than the conventional brand. Consider the GM Volt. When it was first announced, the price estimate from General Motors (GM) was $30,000. That soon jumped to $35,000. Today, they sell for nearly $40,000.

Hybrids are also more expensive to insure, which has been known for some time. Back in 2008, online insurance broker Insure.com showed that it cost $1,374 to insure a Honda Civic but $1,427 to insure a Honda Civic Hybrid. Similarly, it cost $1,304 to insure a Toyota Camry but $1,628 to insure a Toyota Camry Hybrid. According to State Farm, hybrids cost more to insure because their parts are more expensive and repairing them requires specialized labor, thus boosting the after-accident payout.

And that, of course, presumes they don’t burst into flames, which brings us to today’s not-so-“ideal” headlines. Several crash tests have suggested that the plug-in hybrid Volt, the flagship vehicle at Government Motors, has a bit of a problem: when hit or badly disturbed in accident tests, the Volt’s Lithium-Ion (Li-ion) battery packs have been seen to spark, or burst into flames afterward.

H/T to Monty.

October 12, 2011

Britain decides not to follow German lead on nuclear power

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 07:55

Unlike their European partners, Britain will continue to depend on nuclear power to provide a large part of their electricity needs:

Britain breathed a collective sigh of relief yesterday. The question on everyone’s lips had been answered. Following the Fukushima accident in Japan, was it safe to continue using nuclear power here in the UK? The answer from chief nuclear inspector Mike Weightman and his team, who had spent months undertaking research, was ‘yes’.

Of course, that finding didn’t actually come as a shock to anyone. And not just because the interim report, published earlier in the year, had already made it clear that the UK nuclear-power industry could learn few new lessons from the accident in Japan — but also because you didn’t need a PhD in nuclear-reactor design to recognise the Fukushima disaster was a unique situation that arose in an area of the world prone to earthquakes and tsunamis with a different, older model of nuclear-power station than that used in the UK. A similar event would be highly unlikely here, or anywhere in Europe, and existing safety regulations are extremely tight. Furthermore, despite the full force of nature being thrown at the outdated Fukushima plant — an earthquake measuring 9.0 on the Richter scale leading to tsunami waves up to 40.5 metres high — the disaster was largely contained and, to date, not a single individual has died from the radiation that leaked out.

[. . .]

Despite their best attempts to win over new recruits, the tiny handful of aging anti-nuclear protesters saw no swell in numbers, no matter how they tried to draw comparisons between the European situation and the disaster in Japan. Despite holding vigils and undertaking stunts, such as releasing balloons outside a nuclear-power plant symbolising how many days it had been since the disaster, hardly any of their planned ‘wave of protests’ were deemed newsworthy or interesting.

Actually, UK public opinion has shifted in favour of nuclear power. The results of a Populus poll published last month revealed that 41 per cent of the population believed the benefits outweigh the risks, a three per cent increase on the previous year; 54 per cent wanted more nuclear-power stations or at least the replacement of existing stations with new ones. There was, in fact, an eight per cent drop (to 28 per cent) in people opposing nuclear power, compared to 2010.

September 18, 2011

Solyndra: not just crony capitalism as usual

Filed under: Environment, Government, Law, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:28

Andrew C. McCarthy shows the difference between the collapse of Solyndra and ordinary crony capitalist use of government funds:

Homing in on one of the several shocking aspects of the Solyndra scandal, lawmakers noted that, a few months before the “clean energy” enterprise went belly-up last week, the Obama Energy Department signed off on a sweetheart deal. In the event of bankruptcy — the destination to which it was screamingly obvious Solyndra was headed despite the president’s injection of $535 million in federal loans — the cozily connected private investors would be given priority over American taxpayers. In other words, when the busted company’s assets were sold off, Obama pals would recoup some of their losses, while you would be left holding the half-billion-dollar bag.

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

[. . .]

The criminal law, by contrast, is not content to assume the good faith of government officials. It targets anyone — from low-level swindlers to top elective officeholders — who attempts to influence the issuance of government loans by making false statements; who engages in schemes to defraud the United States; or who conspires “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof, in any manner or for any purpose.” The penalties are steep: Fraud in connection with government loans, for example, can be punished by up to 30 years in the slammer.

September 15, 2011

Why first-gen electric vehicles will be a hard sell for Canadians

Filed under: Cancon, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

It’s not just that (at least in Ontario) we’re facing potentially huge electricity price hikes to pay for our new alternative energy strategy, it’s also that electric cars don’t handle winter weather very well:

On Wednesday, Jan. 26 a major snowstorm hit Washington D.C. Ten-mile homeward commutes took four hours. If there had been a million electric cars on American roads at the time, every single one of them in the DC area would have ended up stranded on the side of the road, dead. And, before they ran out of power, their drivers would have been forced to turn off the heat and the headlights in a desperate effort to eek out a few more miles of range.

This illustrates the biggest drawback of BEVs, which is not range, but refueling time. A few minutes spent at a gas station will give a conventional car 300 to 400 miles of range. In contrast, it takes 20 hours to completely recharge a Nissan Leaf from 110V house current. An extra-cost 240V charger shortens this time to 8 hours. There are expensive 480V chargers that can cut this time to 4 hours, but Nissan cautions that using them very often will shorten the life of the car’s batteries.

No doubt some conventional cars ran out of gas while trapped in the massive traffic jams that occurred in and around the nation’s capital the night of January 26. However, a two-gallon can of gasoline can get a stalled conventional car moving again in a few minutes. In contrast, every dead BEV would have had to be loaded on flatbed tow truck and taken somewhere for many hours of recharging before it could be driven again.

Nissan claims that the range of a Leaf is about 100 miles. However, in their three-month extended road test, Car and Driver magazine obtained an average range from a full charge of 58 miles. Cold weather and fast driving can shorten this to as little as 30 miles.

September 14, 2011

Broken CFL? “The four-page document that followed read more like reactor-core meltdown protocols than simple reassurance”

Filed under: Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:49

As the compact fluorescent lightbulb (CFL) becomes the only readily available replacement for boring old incandescent bulbs, more people are discovering that cleanup after breaking a CFL is not child’s play:

Not long ago, Dan Perkins was in his New Haven home when his wife told him that she’d broken a lightbulb. She’d been cleaning in the attic bedroom of their seven-year-old son when she knocked over a lamp. The bulb, one of those twisty compact fluorescents, shattered onto the carpet next to their son’s bed.

Perkins, who draws the political comic This Modern World under the name Tom Tomorrow, was vaguely aware that a broken compact fluorescent bulb might be more problematic than a broken conventional incandescent.

“I knew that they had some mercury in them,” Perkins says. “That had been kind of a propaganda point for the right wing in the debate over bulb efficiency, so that was on my radar.”

To learn what kind of risk the broken bulb posed and what he ought to do about it, Perkins turned to Google, which sent him to a fact sheet put out by the Connecticut Department of Public Health entitled “Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: What to Do If a Bulb Breaks.”

“Stay calm,” the fact sheet instructed. But the four-page document that followed read more like reactor-core meltdown protocols than simple reassurance. It cautioned that small children, pregnant women, and pets should be sequestered from the breakage site and called for an immediate shutdown of any ventilation systems.

Here’s a post on the incandescent bulb ban and CFL breakage from earlier this year. Tom Kelley posted an informative comment to that post, addressing several issues including the energy efficiency of CFLs:

I don’t use enough of the CFLs to notice a difference in the electric bill, but in a straight-across, lumen for lumen, hour for hour comparison, these bulbs should lower one’s kW/hr electricity consumption (so says the Mythbusters tv show).

BUT, and this is a real big BUT, that does not translate into a reduction in the raw energy needed to create the electricity, due to a small detail known as “power factor.” While resistive loads like an incandescent bulb (typically) have a power factor of 1.0, the CFL bulbs have a 0.5 to 0.6 power factor rating, meaning that the CFL consumes as much as twice the raw “energy” (VA (Volt Amps) at the generator), as the electric meter measures in W (Watts).

So, one can go ahead and buy CFLs if one thinks the bulbs may lower one’s electric bill, but one should not be under any illusion that the CFLs are saving any consumption of coal, oil, gas, etc.

September 7, 2011

How much more will “green” renewable power cost?

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Environment, Government, Technology — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 09:37

In short, lots more than ordinary power generation:

The Telegraph has obtained a policy document, dated July, that seems to suggest that the government is considering a walk away from the most expensive renewables — and now we can see the full copy online. Two No 10 advisers challenge the Department of Energy and Climate Change’s utopian cost predictions, and say energy bills will be much bigger than we’ve been told.

What isn’t in contention is that energy itself will be much more expensive. DECC’s argument is that we’ll all start insulating our homes more — so our utility bills won’t reflect the higher per-unit energy costs. No 10’s energy expert thinks this is nonsense.

The Cameron advisors also suggest that government policy should be “open” to ditching some of the most expensive renewables — such as offshore wind power.

What’s the real cost of wind and solar?

     The former power director of the National Grid, Colin Gibson, now estimates that the lifetime per unit cost of onshore wind is £178 per megawatt hour (MWh), and offshore wind at £254/MWh. Nuclear is £60/MWh. The figures DECC provides don’t account for the huge additional transmission costs of wind.

     Note how much more expensive reality is than the clean, green vision. Government figures reckoned onshore wind cost £55/MWh and offshore wind £84/Mwh [. . .] compared to gas at £44/Mwh. Politicians seeking to dump the renewables policy could argue that green-minded civil servants sold them a pup. They’d be right.

September 4, 2011

James Delingpole forced to offer an apology

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:45

Yes, it’s true. Delingpole made an error in a recent column and has to make a full apology for the error:

It has been brought to my attention that this blog owes Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt. an apology. In a recent column entitled Green Jobs? Wot Green Jobs? (Pt 242), I carelessly suggested that Sir Reg — beloved dad of the famous environmentalist “Sam Cam”; distinguished father-in-law of the Prime Minister of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, no less — is making nearly £1000 a week from the wind turbines on his estates.

The correct figure is, of course, nearly £1000 a day.

In other words, Sir Reginald is making the equivalent of roughly 1000 looted widescreen plasma TV screens every year from the eight 400 foot wind turbines now enhancing the view for miles around on his 3,000 acre Normanby Hall estate, near Scunthorpe.

There will be those who suggest that my mistake is a resigning matter. I do share their concern. However it is my view that if a journalist is going to resign on a point of principle these days, it has to be over something immeasurably trivial, rather than over something merely quite trivial. What I do nevertheless agree is that I owe Sir Reginald Sheffield, Bt, an apology.

A big apology.

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