Ed note: Power shortages in California in 2020 and Texas in 2021 have exposed the limits to renewable energy for a reliable grid. The post below complements prior analysis here and here.
“The apparent difference between SDG&E [no blackouts] and PG&E [blackouts] can be attributed to the greater proportion of decentralized green power cooperatives in PG&E’s service area that relied on a greater percentage of green power.”
The anti-energy environmental lobby concluded that natural gas-fired power plants failed during California’s blackouts last summer and should be phased out. But empirical investigation reaches an opposite conclusion, questioning the future of dilute, intermittent energies.
Earthjustice, the Sierra Club and the California Environmental Justice Alliance in the article “Gas Is Failing in California: Time to Move On” (Utility Dive: April 16, 2021) accuse the Wall Street Journal and gas “industry voices” of fear-mongering about renewable’s role in the state’s blackouts during the region’s southwest summer heat wave of 2020.…
Continue ReadingEd note: This article overviews the growth of renewables over the last 20 years from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Annual Energy Review. For convenience, the DOE tables are converted to watts (W), in its billion multiple the gigawatt (GW). The same unit for both generation and consumption enables straightforward comparisons among various efficiencies, capacity factors, site factors, etc. Conversion factors such as Cal, cal, joule, Btu, Wh, each per second, hour, or year, is defined at the end. [1]
“The wind and solar industry claims employment … at about 250 000 jobs. The relative productivity per employee is thus 7.5 kW with solar, and 32 kW with wind. Compare that to 1,300 kW with fossil fuels, and 2,000 kW with nuclear.”
The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) lists six significant sources of renewable energy: Wind, Solar, Hydro, Wood, Waste, and Geothermal.…
Continue Reading” … with adaptation, total costs will be much smaller than the headline-grabbing numbers that climate economists and our government agencies choose to highlight, and with future growth our society will be far better equipped to handle them.” (- Oren Cass, June 2019)
While government mitigation policies flounder and add waste to waste, market adaptation quietly internalizes the alleged negative externality of the human influence on global climate. Part of this influence is increased precipitation and flooding from a warmer world where the air holds more moister from the evaporation below.
MasterResource has reported from time to time on the almost invisible, ongoing climate/weather adaptation process, the unhampered market in action (see Appendix).
Tabasco Plant (2019)
One example that caught my eye a few years back was the McIlhenny Company constructing a 20-foot levee around its Tabasco plant on Avery Island off the Louisiana coast to insure against flooding.…
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