Articles like this are pathetic. Worldwide, 2.54% of electricity is produced from dams. Water behind dams is lost to evaporation, causes major environmental changes including impact on human food supplies, requires a steady supply of water that is not yet increasing with temperature, and most sites are taken.
It's a lie to suggest that such installations are anything more than showpiece non-solutions.
Hmmm. Paul Homewood put two and two together apparently and also figured out that the NAO was being ignored by CCC on the basis of an excellent comment by John Cullen. He gave credit to John for the comment. I replied to that comment of John's with a link to this post, which Paul must have somehow missed because I got no credit for getting there first on the NAO! Ah well, never mind, good to know I'm setting the pace for other more popular sceptic websites!
Thanks for the supplementary info link. It's rather concerning that the RS must have known their chosen period covered a predominantly positive NAO, when westerlies were prevalent in winter, yet they apparently made no specific reference to this cautionary fact in their text and chose to hide it away in a separate link to supplementary info.
They really tried to bury it. The supposed link in the main report (or "Summary for Policymakers") 404s. I emailed them about that and they didn't respond. I eventually found the working link on the press release page. Of course, open it and the title page emphasises it is not a Royal Society publication!
I also find it rather odd that they don't appear to credit Staffell & Pfenniger as major contributors, whose long term data they plainly used. Now extended to 40 years (1980-2019 inclusive), but a shame they've not managed to include 2021 and 2023 yet - both with problems for renewables output.
Your series is good, so do consider reading this and the comments, perhaps editing and condensing your cogent posts, and submitting here...https://wattsupwiththat.com/submit-a-story/
Yes, it's referring to a recent study which measured the very rapid increase in aerosols linked to the equally rapid increase in stratospheric water vapour, which resulted in large changes in atmospheric chemistry. What it doesn't mention is that the cooling aerosols will have rained out rather more rapidly than from a 'normal' volcanic eruption and probably all but disappeared by May 2023. Stratospheric water vapour however, is much more persistent. Coincidentally, the planet started to rapidly heat up in June 2023 . . . . .
From the Supplementary Appendices to the Royal Society study:
"Thornton et al15 noted that it is possible that even a 40-year period is not long enough to
sample a representative range of possible changes in wind availability. The Met Office has
compared the period 1980-2016 studied here with large simulations using the UNSEEN
methodology16 and historical data back to 1871. It was found17 that in each winter there is a
1% chance of the mean wind speed in December, January or February being lower than the minimum experienced in any of these months in the period 1980-2016, i.e. there is
approximately a 10% chance/decade of a winter month with wind speeds lower than in
the period 1980-2016 considered in modelling here.
More needs to be known about the persistence and other characteristics of periods of low
wind, which are very likely correlated temporally, as is the case for periods with low
temperatures (Kolstad et.al.18 have shown that temperature anomalies of ‘at least one
standard deviation above or below climatology’ in March were found to be about 20%–120%
more likely than normal if the preceding February was anomalous by 0.5–1.5 standard
deviations). It turns out that wind speeds were lower in 1960-80 than in 1980-2016, as a result
of atmospheric blocking associated with the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation19,
when low wind months such as those seen in the UNSEEN simulation were observed (phases
of the oscillation last for about a month up to about a year and a half: the positive phases were
relatively less frequent and had a smaller amplitude in the years 1960-1980 than in later
years20). If/when weather data for that period have been converted into ersatz wind and solar
output, it will be possible to quantify their effects.
15 Thornton H, Scaife A, Hoskins B, Brayshaw D. 2017 The relationship between wind power,
electricity demand and winter weather patterns in Great Britain. Environmental Research Letters, 12.
16 Thompson V et al. 2017 High risk of unprecedented UK rainfall in the current climate. Nat Commun
8, 107. (doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00275-3).
17 Gillian Kay, Anna Maidens, Hazel Thornton, Nick Dunstone, Adam Scaife, Doug Smith (Unpublished,
private communication, December 2020). Preliminary assessment of low winter winds over the North
Sea,
18 E. W. Kolstad, S. P. Sobolowski, A. A. Scaife Intraseasonal Persistence of European Surface
Temperatures, Journal of Climate, 28, 5365 2015
19 Climate Variability: North Atlantic Oscillation | NOAA Climate.gov
So this proves that the authors were actually aware that the period they chose was one where NAO was positive and westerly winds were stronger on average because of the relative lack of atmospheric blocking.
Too much data and not enough critical analysis a la Popper, test the proposition that wind will work by looking for cases (serious wind droughts) that demonstrate that it will not work. Windless nights are the sticking point, especially a succession of windless nights so there is no time to recharge the storage.
There is ample evidence of critically low periods and sophisticated analysis of massed data does not add value, it just becomes a methodological game, like the work criticised here
The system as proposed by The Royal Society depends entirely on the availability of surplus wind to fill the storage. It works for the 37 years in the study, but that's because it has been designed to work for those 37 years. It depends on having a succession of high wind years to fill the storage so that there is enough to compensate for one very low wind year. But that low wind year can happen when the storage is empty. As I explain here:
There is no amount of storage that can work, the only option is to massively overbuild so that there is enough energy produced in the low wind years, or have a flexible supply available for backup.
They do in fact opt for a degree of overbuild. In my view it is insufficient, because the tradeoff between storage and spillage of surplus power is assuming that the round trip cost of energy from storage is low enough because the input cost is assumed to be very low (and because they assume an unrealistically high round trip efficiency). Once you take wind at £100/MWh (or floating offshore wind at £240/MWh) as the input, and then treble it to reflect round trip efficiency the output power no longer looks at all cheap, paying for the rest of the kit to make it happen as well. It is better to reduce the storage requirement and increase the curtailed output. But the system is still ludicrously costly, with marginal curtailment from extra capacity becoming very high.
For an introduction to the trade off, see my Thursday Island article I linked elsewhere in the thread.
Hydrogen production and storage is a totally different kettle of fish than hydrogen wells. You can locate the facility that uses hydrogen right on top of the wells or very close and this works because no storage.
There's also over speed wind, which is even worse. There's no guarantee that there won't be years with disastrously high peak wind speed. Because such years will destroy the windmill fleet faster, and this lowers the EROEI of the windmills, which is already too low to support an industrial society.
On top of that is the nonsense of hydrogen storage.
Yes, wind turbines work most efficiently within a narrow range of wind speeds - the 'Goldilocks Zone'. Above or below that range, efficiency drops off sharply. Above a certain maximum wind speed, they lock and do not produce power at all. They are absurdly inefficient in comparison to fossil fuel generation and especially so when compared against nuclear.
Clearly the meteorologists have been criminally negligent because they never bothered to warn us about wind droughts which are the fatal flaw in the wind and solar programme.
This has been obvious since about 2008 when independent investigators in Australia, Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly with associates started to investigate low windpower periods using the continuous record of the wind farms feeding into the southeastern Australian grid.
These studies revealed critically low levels of wind up to three days in duration across the whole of South eastern Australia
Since that time serious efforts around the world should have been directed to assess the low points of wind power production to see if they were sufficiently severe, prolonged and widespread to exceed the amount of storage that could be feasibly or affordably provided.
Of course the people in positions of power and influenced, and also academic researchers it seems, ignored the work of Lang and Miskelly.
Averages over a week or more wash out the low points in Australia which don’t exceed three days, more ingenuity was required to ignore the Dunkelflautes that can last for weeks, moreover sailors would have known about them for ever, likewise millers grinding grain and pumping water on land.
Its really as simple as ABC.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
So the transition to wind and solar power can’t proceed with current storage technology.
Wind droughts happen.
Many people assume that the wind is always blowing somewhere not far away but there are periods of very little wind power, approaching zero, across the whole of the SE Australia for periods up to 3 days. Remember that the wind speed has to reach 4- to 5 metres per second before turbines start to generate power.
Only scratches the surface of the lies which are increasingly easy to expose with grid generation data, which fortunately are easily obtainable for the NEM. Prof Andrew Blakers was AEMO's pet protector of the myths about wind blowing somewhere. I investigated what he had done, which was to take correlation measures on a very short time scale for wind generation across some 39 geographical areas of NEM, and then use a Monte Carlo technique to produce longer "histories" that had the same short term correlations. It utterly fails to pick up the correlations that matter, due to large weather systems persisting for long periods, while reducing the real correlations by concentrating on decorrelation of gusts. He then claimed that Far North Queensland would be even less correlated, which motivated me to investigate, resulting in my article at Euan Mearns' Energy Matters site, where I tried to keep the analysis very visible - debunking his claim in the process.
There is information from King Island, Flinders Island and several others nowadays although I dont monitor them. There are still only 5 facilities in Queensland and 2 are recent arrivals.
I look at the live dashboard for King Island periodically, and also at the data presented at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map which shows that the wind turbines on King Island seem to be in trouble these days, with quite heavy reliance on diesel the norm.
I note with some amusement that Ergon finally decided to refurbish the existing wind turbines on Thursday Island, and to contract for 1.5MW of rooftop solar that THEY control to prevent grid overload on sunny days.
I’m convinced that the meteorological authorities, no doubt aided and abetted by Google et al, deliberately make it difficult to research areas they don’t want the general public to know about.
Take the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). If it follows its regular pattern, it will soon usher in about 30 years of global cooling but it is not mentioned in any UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers report. Try Googling it and all you find are graphs which have not been updated for years. Paul Homewood found this in 2021 but the NOAA source link he used no longer works: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/image-154.png.
The same applies to mean annual wind speed statistics. I’ve searched the Met Office website and I’ve discovered that they hold a dataset called sfcWind, Variable: Mean wind speed at 10 m, Description: Average of hourly mean wind speed at a height of 10 m above ground level over the month, season or year (knots), Start date: 1969. This would give a useful cross-check on Jamie’s study but I simply can’t locate it. If anyone else can find it, please post the results.
https://www.science.org/content/article/how-giant-water-batteries-could-make-green-power-reliable
Articles like this are pathetic. Worldwide, 2.54% of electricity is produced from dams. Water behind dams is lost to evaporation, causes major environmental changes including impact on human food supplies, requires a steady supply of water that is not yet increasing with temperature, and most sites are taken.
It's a lie to suggest that such installations are anything more than showpiece non-solutions.
This article says it is about 15 percent.https://www.hydropower.org/publications/2023-world-hydropower-outlook#:~:text=Hydropower%20currently%20provides%20over%2015,including%20214%20GW%20of%20PSH.
I have not researched it, yet regardless, hydro for battery storage is absurd. Not certain how that relates to the main post.
That's different than the report I last read. I'll have to compare them to see if it's correct.
I think the difference is in electrical generation, vs total society "power" needs, like all the petro for cars.
Which may well show how absurd and impossible the whole EV plan is.
Hmmm. Paul Homewood put two and two together apparently and also figured out that the NAO was being ignored by CCC on the basis of an excellent comment by John Cullen. He gave credit to John for the comment. I replied to that comment of John's with a link to this post, which Paul must have somehow missed because I got no credit for getting there first on the NAO! Ah well, never mind, good to know I'm setting the pace for other more popular sceptic websites!
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2024/01/26/ccc-wind-power-plans-ignore-the-nao/
I reposted by finding from the Royal Society supplementary info, and credited you specifically there. It will show up eventually.
Thanks for the supplementary info link. It's rather concerning that the RS must have known their chosen period covered a predominantly positive NAO, when westerlies were prevalent in winter, yet they apparently made no specific reference to this cautionary fact in their text and chose to hide it away in a separate link to supplementary info.
They really tried to bury it. The supposed link in the main report (or "Summary for Policymakers") 404s. I emailed them about that and they didn't respond. I eventually found the working link on the press release page. Of course, open it and the title page emphasises it is not a Royal Society publication!
I also find it rather odd that they don't appear to credit Staffell & Pfenniger as major contributors, whose long term data they plainly used. Now extended to 40 years (1980-2019 inclusive), but a shame they've not managed to include 2021 and 2023 yet - both with problems for renewables output.
Wow. Smoking guns are turning up here, there and everywhere these days, it seems!
A bit off topic, but here is a recent WUWT article on Hunga Tunga.https://wattsupwiththat.com/2024/02/05/hunga-tonga-hunga-eruption-sent-enough-water-vapor-into-the-stratosphere-to-cause-a-rapid-change-in-chemistry/
Your series is good, so do consider reading this and the comments, perhaps editing and condensing your cogent posts, and submitting here...https://wattsupwiththat.com/submit-a-story/
Yes, it's referring to a recent study which measured the very rapid increase in aerosols linked to the equally rapid increase in stratospheric water vapour, which resulted in large changes in atmospheric chemistry. What it doesn't mention is that the cooling aerosols will have rained out rather more rapidly than from a 'normal' volcanic eruption and probably all but disappeared by May 2023. Stratospheric water vapour however, is much more persistent. Coincidentally, the planet started to rapidly heat up in June 2023 . . . . .
From the Supplementary Appendices to the Royal Society study:
"Thornton et al15 noted that it is possible that even a 40-year period is not long enough to
sample a representative range of possible changes in wind availability. The Met Office has
compared the period 1980-2016 studied here with large simulations using the UNSEEN
methodology16 and historical data back to 1871. It was found17 that in each winter there is a
1% chance of the mean wind speed in December, January or February being lower than the minimum experienced in any of these months in the period 1980-2016, i.e. there is
approximately a 10% chance/decade of a winter month with wind speeds lower than in
the period 1980-2016 considered in modelling here.
More needs to be known about the persistence and other characteristics of periods of low
wind, which are very likely correlated temporally, as is the case for periods with low
temperatures (Kolstad et.al.18 have shown that temperature anomalies of ‘at least one
standard deviation above or below climatology’ in March were found to be about 20%–120%
more likely than normal if the preceding February was anomalous by 0.5–1.5 standard
deviations). It turns out that wind speeds were lower in 1960-80 than in 1980-2016, as a result
of atmospheric blocking associated with the negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation19,
when low wind months such as those seen in the UNSEEN simulation were observed (phases
of the oscillation last for about a month up to about a year and a half: the positive phases were
relatively less frequent and had a smaller amplitude in the years 1960-1980 than in later
years20). If/when weather data for that period have been converted into ersatz wind and solar
output, it will be possible to quantify their effects.
15 Thornton H, Scaife A, Hoskins B, Brayshaw D. 2017 The relationship between wind power,
electricity demand and winter weather patterns in Great Britain. Environmental Research Letters, 12.
16 Thompson V et al. 2017 High risk of unprecedented UK rainfall in the current climate. Nat Commun
8, 107. (doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00275-3).
17 Gillian Kay, Anna Maidens, Hazel Thornton, Nick Dunstone, Adam Scaife, Doug Smith (Unpublished,
private communication, December 2020). Preliminary assessment of low winter winds over the North
Sea,
18 E. W. Kolstad, S. P. Sobolowski, A. A. Scaife Intraseasonal Persistence of European Surface
Temperatures, Journal of Climate, 28, 5365 2015
19 Climate Variability: North Atlantic Oscillation | NOAA Climate.gov
20 https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/climate-variability-north-atlanticoscillation
So they knew, but failed to do anything about including it.
So this proves that the authors were actually aware that the period they chose was one where NAO was positive and westerly winds were stronger on average because of the relative lack of atmospheric blocking.
Too much data and not enough critical analysis a la Popper, test the proposition that wind will work by looking for cases (serious wind droughts) that demonstrate that it will not work. Windless nights are the sticking point, especially a succession of windless nights so there is no time to recharge the storage.
There is ample evidence of critically low periods and sophisticated analysis of massed data does not add value, it just becomes a methodological game, like the work criticised here
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/01/careless-expensive-barely-relevant/
Link to the Supplementary Appendices
https://royalsociety.org/-/media/policy/projects/large-scale-electricity-storage/Large-Scale-Electrricity-Storage-Report---Supplementary-Information.pdf
The system as proposed by The Royal Society depends entirely on the availability of surplus wind to fill the storage. It works for the 37 years in the study, but that's because it has been designed to work for those 37 years. It depends on having a succession of high wind years to fill the storage so that there is enough to compensate for one very low wind year. But that low wind year can happen when the storage is empty. As I explain here:
https://johnd12343.substack.com/p/the-energy-storage-conundrum
There is no amount of storage that can work, the only option is to massively overbuild so that there is enough energy produced in the low wind years, or have a flexible supply available for backup.
They do in fact opt for a degree of overbuild. In my view it is insufficient, because the tradeoff between storage and spillage of surplus power is assuming that the round trip cost of energy from storage is low enough because the input cost is assumed to be very low (and because they assume an unrealistically high round trip efficiency). Once you take wind at £100/MWh (or floating offshore wind at £240/MWh) as the input, and then treble it to reflect round trip efficiency the output power no longer looks at all cheap, paying for the rest of the kit to make it happen as well. It is better to reduce the storage requirement and increase the curtailed output. But the system is still ludicrously costly, with marginal curtailment from extra capacity becoming very high.
For an introduction to the trade off, see my Thursday Island article I linked elsewhere in the thread.
https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2024/meetingapp.cgi/Session/32826?et_rid=704190052&et_cid=5076179
Hydrogen production and storage is a totally different kettle of fish than hydrogen wells. You can locate the facility that uses hydrogen right on top of the wells or very close and this works because no storage.
There's also over speed wind, which is even worse. There's no guarantee that there won't be years with disastrously high peak wind speed. Because such years will destroy the windmill fleet faster, and this lowers the EROEI of the windmills, which is already too low to support an industrial society.
On top of that is the nonsense of hydrogen storage.
Yes, wind turbines work most efficiently within a narrow range of wind speeds - the 'Goldilocks Zone'. Above or below that range, efficiency drops off sharply. Above a certain maximum wind speed, they lock and do not produce power at all. They are absurdly inefficient in comparison to fossil fuel generation and especially so when compared against nuclear.
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1312/10/12/1965
Failure in the 1st 5 years of warranty service.
The irritating thing, whether it is incompetence or deliberate dishonesty, is that nobody will be held accountable at all.
True.
Clearly the meteorologists have been criminally negligent because they never bothered to warn us about wind droughts which are the fatal flaw in the wind and solar programme.
This has been obvious since about 2008 when independent investigators in Australia, Anton Lang and Paul Miskelly with associates started to investigate low windpower periods using the continuous record of the wind farms feeding into the southeastern Australian grid.
These studies revealed critically low levels of wind up to three days in duration across the whole of South eastern Australia
Since that time serious efforts around the world should have been directed to assess the low points of wind power production to see if they were sufficiently severe, prolonged and widespread to exceed the amount of storage that could be feasibly or affordably provided.
Of course the people in positions of power and influenced, and also academic researchers it seems, ignored the work of Lang and Miskelly.
Averages over a week or more wash out the low points in Australia which don’t exceed three days, more ingenuity was required to ignore the Dunkelflautes that can last for weeks, moreover sailors would have known about them for ever, likewise millers grinding grain and pumping water on land.
Its really as simple as ABC.
A. Input to the grid must continuously match the demand.
B. The continuity of RE is broken on nights with little or no wind.
C. There is no large-scale storage to bridge the gaps.
So the transition to wind and solar power can’t proceed with current storage technology.
Wind droughts happen.
Many people assume that the wind is always blowing somewhere not far away but there are periods of very little wind power, approaching zero, across the whole of the SE Australia for periods up to 3 days. Remember that the wind speed has to reach 4- to 5 metres per second before turbines start to generate power.
And there is more!
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/06/19/its-about-the-wind-droughts-stupid/
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/11/approaching-the-tipping-point/
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/04/30/dark-deeds-of-the-official-wind-watchers/
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/09/16/latest-evidence-windpower-wont-work-rafe/
https://newcatallaxy.blog/2023/07/18/lets-all-follow-germany/
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2020/07/no-gusts-no-glory/
This post by the Energy Realists of Australia provides a guide to the data sources for wind and other generators in Australia.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/20-2-four-icebergs-in-the-path-of-renewables-titanic
This is a comment on the island effect.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/renewables/21-3-the-island-effect
This is the list of briefing notes circulated to 800 politicians and many journalists.
https://www.flickerpower.com/index.php/search/categories/general/list-of-briefing-notes
Forgot to mention an interactive site for Australian data created by MIke O'Ceirin.
https://www.spasmodicenergy.com/Pages/Home.aspx
Only scratches the surface of the lies which are increasingly easy to expose with grid generation data, which fortunately are easily obtainable for the NEM. Prof Andrew Blakers was AEMO's pet protector of the myths about wind blowing somewhere. I investigated what he had done, which was to take correlation measures on a very short time scale for wind generation across some 39 geographical areas of NEM, and then use a Monte Carlo technique to produce longer "histories" that had the same short term correlations. It utterly fails to pick up the correlations that matter, due to large weather systems persisting for long periods, while reducing the real correlations by concentrating on decorrelation of gusts. He then claimed that Far North Queensland would be even less correlated, which motivated me to investigate, resulting in my article at Euan Mearns' Energy Matters site, where I tried to keep the analysis very visible - debunking his claim in the process.
https://euanmearns.com/wind-and-solar-on-thursday-island/
There is information from King Island, Flinders Island and several others nowadays although I dont monitor them. There are still only 5 facilities in Queensland and 2 are recent arrivals.
I look at the live dashboard for King Island periodically, and also at the data presented at https://app.electricitymaps.com/map which shows that the wind turbines on King Island seem to be in trouble these days, with quite heavy reliance on diesel the norm.
I note with some amusement that Ergon finally decided to refurbish the existing wind turbines on Thursday Island, and to contract for 1.5MW of rooftop solar that THEY control to prevent grid overload on sunny days.
https://www.ergon.com.au/network/our-network/isolated-and-remote-power-stations/isolated-networks-solar-capacity
I should really have charged them a consultancy fee....
Excellent analysis Jaime. I hop you don't mind, I have cross-posted this to my Substack too.
Thanks David and I very much appreciate the cross-post.
I’m convinced that the meteorological authorities, no doubt aided and abetted by Google et al, deliberately make it difficult to research areas they don’t want the general public to know about.
Take the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO). If it follows its regular pattern, it will soon usher in about 30 years of global cooling but it is not mentioned in any UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers report. Try Googling it and all you find are graphs which have not been updated for years. Paul Homewood found this in 2021 but the NOAA source link he used no longer works: https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/image-154.png.
The same applies to mean annual wind speed statistics. I’ve searched the Met Office website and I’ve discovered that they hold a dataset called sfcWind, Variable: Mean wind speed at 10 m, Description: Average of hourly mean wind speed at a height of 10 m above ground level over the month, season or year (knots), Start date: 1969. This would give a useful cross-check on Jamie’s study but I simply can’t locate it. If anyone else can find it, please post the results.