Bill Hannahan said:

Stephen, when people are freezing to death in their homes during a severe cold snap due to an extended power failure you can console them with the knowledge that the stationary windmills all around then are technically available.

Jacobson’s paper makes this claim;

“It was found that an average of 33% and a maximum of 47% of yearly averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable, baseload electric power….”

This is what the review comment is about, not windmill availability.

Jacobson wrote; “Nevertheless, because coal plants were shut down for scheduled maintenance 6.5% of the year and unscheduled maintenance or forced outage for another 6% of the year on average in the United States from 2000 to 2004, coal energy from a given plant is guaranteed only 87.5% of the year, with a typical range of 79%–92% (North American Electric Reliability Council 2005; Giebel 2000).”

Note that I used the same database he uses to show that his conclusion is not valid. The reliability of fossil fuel supply is high, so the reliability of fossil based electricity is nearly equal to plant reliability.

Jacobson wrote; “”Firm capacity” is the fraction of installed wind capacity that is online at the same probability as that of a coal-fired power plant.”

This is where the authors have redefined reliability. First they use the term, “Firm capacity,” and then when they write their conclusion it is “reliable.”

Imagine that someone invents a cold fusion generator that is very cheap to mass produce, but can only be operated at rated power for 1 hour in every 10 hours. The “Firm Capacity” of these units is only 10%, less than one fourth the 45% Jacobson claims as the “Firm Capacity” of the windfarms.

A utility would buy enough units to cover its highest demand day, and have a totally reliable grid year round with no backup plants, no storage and no additional transmission lines required. That is because each unit can be scheduled well in advance and dispatched as needed. These are the qualities that give an energy source reliability, and they are not present with wind farms, even if they are interconnected. “Firm capacity” is not an indication of, or correlated with, or equivalent to reliability, except at the end points of 0% and 100%.

Stephen, do you think “Firm Capacity” is a better measure of reliability than IEEE 762?
Jacobson’s entire paper hangs on the assumption that “firm capacity” and “reliability” are equivalent and interchangeable, in direct contradiction of this example, the examples in the comment, common sense and industry standards.

Maintaining grid reliability is a matter of life and death.

People who try to reduce grid reliability to a word game reveal more about themselves than they reveal about our energy options.

So, your unanswered questions are;

1… Jockeying fossil plants to load level wind means many more thermal stress cycles, higher maintenance cost for those plants and higher emissions. It also reduces thermodynamic efficiency. Where are these costs included in your academic wind analysis?

2… How much hydro power would we have built if it only generated power while it rained?

3… Would it be reliable baseload power if we interconnected those rain only hydro plants? It’s always raining somewhere, right?

4… What would the transmission system for that cost?

5… How much money do you think we should be spending on R&D to make reliable, clean, safe, dispatchable energy that is cheaper than burning coal?

6… What is your definition of dispatchable?

7… What is the power industry definition of dispatchable?

8… What is your definition of baseload power?

9… What is the industry definition of baseload power?

10… What does the subsidy for commercial nuclear power (not military or fusion) add up to in cents per kWh? Reference please.

11… What do the taxes paid on nuclear kWh’s add up to in cents per kWh?

You mentioned the insurance issue again. You still have 14 questions to answer on that issue.

http://theenergycollective.com/TheEnergyCollective/60423#4421

12… What are your thoughts on the fact that emissions increased when fossil plants were forced to load level for windfarms?

13… Do you think “Firm Capacity” is a better measure of reliability than IEEE 762?

I’m thinking of making it into a bumper sticker, to place alongside my other sticker on clean energy.

I am thinking of how to make a smoking coal plant look like a hippy-style female impersonator … ;-)

I’ll have to get my creative juices flowing!

I might have to steal it.

have this to say about Nuclear Power. Imagine BP running one of those. Not scared? Then you are not paying attention.

This is simply a spray. You can’t compare the risk in a deep sea drilling operation with megatonnes of dense liquid and a seriously engineered plant which can be gone over with the proverbial fine-toothed comb.

You advance no substantive claim and simply invitye under-informed people to envisage the worst possible thing as if it were technically possible and likely.

The fact is that right now, BP and other companies are in charge of far more prospectively risky technologies with far thinner margins for error that really do kill people on a large scale all the time. You want people to look elsewhere. Whatever you say in theory, in practice, no nuclear = more coal and gas, both of which are far more dangerous day in and day out than nuclear. Do a body count of the miners killed in mining incidents alone in China alone since 1970. Then add in the progressive asphyxiation of people along the transport chain to the coal plant. Then add in those asphyxiated and poisoned, including by radioactive waste and then add global warming and acidication of the oceans and then tell me why nuclear is a comparative worry.

So, if we want a place for or Grandchildren to live we need to find a way to do it with sustainable energy. You may find many ways to say it can not be done. But I ask you, do you really think it is optional?

The answer is that nuclear power is sustainable whereas renewables are not — at least, if we are talking about renewables at a scale needed to foreclose coal and gas on a world scale.

Until someone can show that some offically renewable energy source capable of supplanting coal and gas is commercially feasible, the demand for renewables is the demand for business as usual with an utterly unimpressive figleaf. It’s coal and gas in drag with green activists pretending this says nothing about their underlying cultural preference.

Well that doesn’t wash. As Gene Preston notes, your demands can only be realised by using fossil fuels less efficiently and probably in greater volume in some settings. Your proposals subvert not only the interests of the grandchildren but the grandparents too. I’m outing you and your fellow travellers as closet fossil fuel advocates, as unwitting purveyors of greenwash.

It’s not too late. Work it through. How does your advocacy contribute to the options available to societies wishing to deploy the reliable industrial scale energy that is fundamental to contemporary life? If it prejudices the choice in favour of fossil fuels, then surely you must modify your advocacy so that it does the opposite? Simply saying “well we will have to find a way without nuclear” is not tenable unless there is a way without nuclear and at the moment, there simply is no such option available.

This is well explained for Amanda.

Renewable energy proponents will respond in one of two ways:

1. reasonable people with an open and enquiring mind will think perhaps they have been misled. They will then start to dig further, using properly enquiring processes to see what is the truth about the claims for renewable energy.

2. The others have closed minds. They are proponents of renewable energy for other reasons, not rational reasons.

The answer is no. All one has to do is look to Europe, which has installed thousands of wind turbines and solar panels over the past two decades. Not one coal fired electricity generating plant has closed due to the introduction of these new generating sources. In fact, European nations are building 50 brand new coal-fired generating plants over the next decade. They are also scaling back wind energy development and the rich incentives required to erect it. Why does anyone expect a different outcome anywhere else?

The number one lie: XYZ wind farm will supply electricity for 5,000 homes. The truth is that all the wind turbines in all the world can’t run a toaster, let alone a home, on their own. It is a lie that is repeated in virtually every news story on wind or solar development. Intermittent energy sources like wind and solar must be paired with a fossil fuel generating plant to produce the steady and reliable stream of electricity your toaster needs to run properly.

Many will suggest it is a worthwhile gamble—that doing something is better than doing nothing. But this is a trap. Doing the wrong thing is worse. Much, much worse. For we are robbing ourselves of the dollars that should be invested in real energy – nuclear energy – not frittered away by making the investors in renewables schemes wealthy.

Would it follow that Bryce’s definition of capacity factor would work for nuclear and coal but not for wind since the latter’s coefficient is not close to one.

Wind is quite different. It’s availability factor is determined by when the wind is blowing, in addition to scheduled maintenance and, for a wind farm of many turbines in total, the occasional failure of an individual turbine. The engineering availability factor might be in the order of 99% for wind too, but the wind ‘fuel’ is quite a different matter. Sometimes it will be blowing strong enough to deliver near 100% of nameplate capacity, other times it will be 50%, or 20% or whatever. Sometimes, when it is becalmed or too windy (such that the turbines are shut off to avoid damage), it will be 0%. On average, over a year, it will be about 35% in good sites. But this power is not ‘dispatchable’ — it cannot be guaranteed (without energy storage), since the wind is fickle.

What the WWS study is saying is that for a widely geographically dispersed set of wind farms, you can guarantee, to the equivalent of an 85% availability, a ‘capacity credit’ of about 12%. So, in rough terms, the 12% capacity credit for wind is the equivalent of the 85% capacity factor of a coal-fired power station. Make sense?

Barry: I have a question about capacity factor or a possible ambiguity in its use. In what you say above, capacity factor seems to mean two things: the ratio of yearly averaged power to nameplate or optimum AND “reliability” in the sense that 85 % capacity factor means “available 85% of the time.”

I have seen others define capacity factor not as the ratio of average power to nameplate but as a metric measuring how often the plant is operating at 100%: Robert Bryce in his book Power Hungry (a book you should review, btw) defines it this way. They are not the same, are they? (self doubt)

Bryce by the way also seems to confuse capacity factor with what we might call base load factor: as in your above number of 1.15 GW, that amount of power available nearly always.

Bryce cites Peter Lang favorably.

off point: Bryce is a libertarian (for the most part) whose view is that capitalism (the only practical way to run the world for him) is trending toward nuclear and natural gas but that the trend is slow and we will be reliant on fossil fuels for many, many years. He’s agnostic about AGW, which is convenient for him. Because if AGW turns out like Hansen says, this guy is basically saying “we’re going to have to adjust.”

it’s a disturbing book for many reasons, filled with insights, but with a potential for monumental apologetics.

We’re all, just now, in the same leaky boat. Problem is that some passengers are bailing water INTO the boat while most of us are trying to bail it out.

Dan

This is as it should be – the government approved the activity in the first place and so is responsible for providing insurance against losses arising from the conduct of that activity.

In the case of nuclear energy, plant owners relieve the government of most of the insurance burden by taking on responsibility for all of the more probable consequences. End of story.