Expensive Alternate Power
Remember the crux of this issue. The theory has been falsified and without correlation you cannot have causation.
Introduction
“All revolutions are conceived by idealists, implemented by fanatics, and their fruits are stolen by scoundrels.” -Thomas Carlyle
In the past fifty years, significant efficiency improvements have been made in alternate energy sources. Unfortunately, they still remain very expensive compared with conventional power sources.
On this page of the website we look at both solar panels and wind turbines and suggest there are five reasons for not embracing these power sources;
- The cost is far too high.
- The energy is uncontrollable.
- The energy is inefficient.
- The reason we embraced alternate energy no longer exists.
- And even if we did want to reduce CO2, we are unlikely to achieve much at all.
The Cost of Wind and Solar Power
When the Australian Government decided to force power companies to use a minimum of 20% alternate energy by the year 2020, they tasked the Productivity Commission to establish the cost of alternate energy in Australia. The cost of alternate energy varies significantly all over the World.
The Commission found that in Australia costs varied from State to State but wind power was 2-3 times more expensive than conventional power. Solar power was 4-6 times more expensive than conventional power. The final cost to the consumer depended on the mix of wind and solar in each particular location or State and the size of the government subsidies.
Canberra’s mix of energy was four times the cost of conventional power. To meet the mandated 20% target, Canberra’s power company was paying individuals 50 cents per kWh generated from their subsidised solar panels, while the power company bought conventional power for less than 12cents per kWh. These individuals signed a twenty year contract – locking in very expensive power for twenty years.
A simple calculation [1] showed that on meeting the 20% target, this would increase households’ power bills by 60%. This price increase was not publicly discussed by the politicians, the Media nor the Green Movement.
Most citizens were surprised to see their power bills rising significantly and the politicians, Media and the Green Movement remained silent and never attributed this price rise to the politicians’ mandatory alternate power target of 20%.
In New South Wales where the power companies were signing twenty year contracts to buy electricity at 62 cents per kWh, the price rises were just under 80%. Meanwhile in Spain, investors were guaranteed a 14% per annum return on their money for twenty years if they built wind or solar farms. This subsidy meant Spaniards would be paying eight times the price of conventional power to purchase alternate energy.
With the silence of the politicians and the Media combined with the misinformation campaigns by the Green Movement, most citizens still believe that alternate power is either cheaper than conventional power or, at least, competitive with it. It is not.
Alternate power is very, very expensive.
Note 1. If a household bought 100 units of conventional power costing $1 per unit, they would receive a bill for $100. Then if a household bought 80 units of conventional power at $1 and then 20 units of alternate power at $4, they would receive a bill for $160 – a 60% increase.
Uncontrollable
When a customer turns on a hot plate, conceptually this demand for extra power is detected, and a man ‘revs’ up a generator, in a conventional power plant, to produce electricity to satisfy this extra demand. There are two points being made here. First, power production is controlled by a human. Second, without a commercial sized electric storage system [2], any power produced has to be used near instantaneously – it cannot be stored and kept for ‘later’. Conventional power is the controlled matching of demand and supply.
Alternate power is ‘uncontrollable’, as the wind and sun determines both the amount and timing of the production of power. This causes difficulty in matching supply with demand. If alternate energy produces more supply than the demand, the excess electricity produced is ‘dumped’. This can be a significant inefficiency.
Worse still, if supply from alternate energy cannot meet the demand, it will result in a “brown out” – that is sections of city being cut off from the power grid – or a “blackout” when there is too little power for the whole city.
Because of this serious problem, any alternate power system must have a ‘backup’ supply of power ready to instantaneously generate the shortfall in supply to meet the demand. This can only be achieved with a conventional power plant. This will be an additional cost to the already expensive alternate power cost.
Note 2. Recently, Elon Musk gifted South Australia a large commercial power storage system – one that was three times larger than anything else in the World. However, this facility could only provide power to 26,000 houses. It would be inadequate storage even for a small city like Adelaide with a population of one million.
Inefficient
Alternate power has several types of inefficiencies. The ‘rated’ power (i.e. maximum power) of a conventional generator will be used when there is high demand, then reduced to a lower output when demand falls. Consequently, by matching supply with demand, conventional power stations operate at 100% efficiency. Because of downtime for maintenance etc., average efficiency is above 95%
Using decades’ worth of data, the efficiency of wind farms in Europe is a little over 30% as they cannot match supply and demand. Consequently, although a wind turbine could operate at its ‘rated’ level it rarely does that. So if wind power is to have any chance of meeting “peak” power demands, there needs to be three times the number of turbines than what might be expected by just looking at the ‘rated’ power in isolation.
Obviously this very high capital cost is an inefficient way of meeting ‘peak’ demands which only occur for small periods of time.
Also with three times the number of wind turbines, more waste will occur when supply outstrips demand. Another inefficiency.
The necessary back up power system also increases the inefficiency of the whole system. For example, coal is used to heat water producing steam to spin a turbine that rotates the shaft driving the generators making electricity. Because it takes several hours to heat up a boiler to produce steam, the back up system is not laying idle. It has to have steam ready to respond very quickly.
On a perfect day for renewable power sources, the conventional power back up system will use up to 80% of its coal to produce steam that is then vented into the atmosphere because no conventional electricity is needed. This is like keeping your kettle boiling 24/7, but never making a cup of coffee. Another inefficiency in this mixed system.
The Australian Capital Territory’s politicians lie to their citizens claiming they are going to build a 100% renewable power system. Let us look at this square peg of a dream and see how it fits into the round hole of reality.
Of course they are not the only ones lying, hundreds of organisations claim to be 100% renewable – just to keep the dream alive. Each one is plugged into the grid to have back up power from conventional sources. In Michael Moore’s film “The Planet of the Humans” he highlighted just some of the companies lying to us.
No large organisation can be 100% renewable!
Canberra justifies its mix of solar panels and wind energy on the grounds that that if the wind is not blowing enough, the solar panels will provide the shortfall.
However in the 100% renewable dream there has to be enough solar panels to provide all the power that Canberra needs for those days when winds are either too light or too strong and wind power is out of action. Similarly, there has to be enough wind power to supply all of Canberra’s needs if solar panels are out of action for any reason (e.g. at night).
Then at night, when the winds are light, Canberra will have no power. This is the lie – there has to be a backup conventional power system. Canberra politicians will not tell their citizens that this conventional power will come from out of state, because it shatters the dream.
Now stand back and look what we have built here. We now have three power generating systems each of which must have the capacity to meet all of Canberra’s power needs when any of the other systems fail to do so. This triplication of systems is increasing the cost and is another inefficiency.
And guess what? We are using the two most expensive systems first in the hope we won’t have to use the cheapest system. The most expensive system (solar) cannot work at night so it will be chosen over the next most expensive system (wind) during the day. Wind will then be used during the night, often when there is very little wind. Is this really a good design of a triple power system running in parallel, each built to supply all of Canberra’s electricity.
And there is the cheapest electricity source, conventional power burning coal 24/7 but only used as a back up some of the time. The rest of the time the coal is still burnt, releasing carbon dioxide but not producing electricity.
So why are we doing this?
Carbon Dioxide is No Longer a Threat
With our growing irrationality and our diminishing critical thinking skills, we have been conned by the Greens into believing that “the sky is falling in” – yet again .
We believed in a Green campaign that told us that CO2 was the sole or main driver of global temperatures and Man was contributing to an increase of CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. We needed to reduce Man’s CO2 to prevent the Armageddon consequences.
After forty years, we know with certainty that is not the case. So there is no longer a need to reduce Man’s CO2 and, consequently, no remaining reason to embrace a very expensive three tiered power system.
Are we still doing this because we have lost sight on our primary goal – reducing dangerous global warming – and are fixated on the surrogate goal – reducing CO2 . Reading 4.2.1 explains the “Curse of the Surrogate Goal.
Or are we irrationally still trying to pound the square peg of a dream into the round hole of reality while ignoring the cost and damage it is doing to our society.
The direct additional cost to our collective electricity bills, in “pre-Renewable Energy years”, is over $50 billion a year. It is quickly growing to over $100 billion a year. Australia has moved from one of the countries with the lowest electricity prices to be amongst the countries with the highest electricity prices. We are conservatively paying three times more for electricity than countries with cheaper electricity.
This figure significantly under-estimates the cost of embracing alternate energy. Just as high, is the cost of all the Government subsidies for renewables. We tend to forget that this is not “government money” but taxpayers’ money being spent on our behalf. Then there are all the flow on costs.
The electricity bills for every business organisation will also go up. For example, Woolworths and Coles have large electricity bills to keep food cool or frozen. The rising electricity prices will mean more expensive food. The cost of every “goods and services” that we consume will go up as a result of using expensive renewable energy.
Green followers who consider the Greens to be environmentalists try to defend this damage by saying “Does it really matter? They have done some really good things”. Yes it does matter as explained in Reading 4.2.2
As a result of the Corona virus response, Australia has increased its debt by 300 billion dollars and many cannot see how we could repay this. If we hadn’t embraced Renewable Energy we could have paid off this debt in 3-5 years with the money we are wasting each year on renewables. Yes, it does matter.
Only a Small Effect on CO2
Even if we still believed in the Armageddon tale, we are spending a large amount of money for very little reduction in CO2 . The dreamers amongst us think that all conventional power stations will disappear and this will reduce Man’s six percent contribution to the total CO2 in the atmosphere by 30% – i.e. by 2%.
Because backup power needs steam to be ready at all times, the only reduction in CO2, at best, is likely to be 20% of this figure (i.e 0.4%). To turn that figure into a reduction in global temperatures we find that once again we are dealing in trivial amounts measured in thousandths of one degree. That result is not worth the price we are paying.
Because the sky is not falling in, we should not be paying anything because we are not going to get anything in return.
So Why Are We Doing This?
We panicked. We were told that the human race would become extinct – we had to act quickly. In our panic, we believed the ‘Henny Penny’ tale.
Hey, but wait a moment. By now we should have all died twice – lucky that we missed that bus! However, the Greens have more buses on the way. We can catch the 2027 bus or the 2035, 2050 or the 2070 bus to extinction, if we really believe it is for the best.
If we were rational and realised the Greens’ theory had been falsified numerous times, and that you cannot have causation without correlation we would know that the sky was not going to fall in. With that realisation, would you really build a power system that had three separate systems running in parallel with the most expensive power given priority. What are we thinking?
Conclusion
Although we have discussed five reasons not to embrace renewable power, we only need one to make that decision. The cost is far too high.
The only reason we pay more for anything, is we believe we are going to get more. The electricity is exactly the same, so there were meant to be other benefits to justify the four fold increase in the cost of electricity. Even looking very hard, we cannot find anything that justifies that expense – unless of course you have a vivid imagination.
Some Additional Readings
Reading 4.2.3 This page has summarised some of the problems of using wind farms to supply electricity. Reading 4.2.3 goes into more details about the problems that are the “showstoppers” that should have had us rejecting alternate power sources.
Reading 4.2.4 Apart from the “showstoppers” problems, there are more than a dozen other minor problems when using alternate power. Reading 4.2.4 discusses a few of these problems.
Reading 4.2.5 Although it is a moving “feast”, many people believe it is a wonderful investment to “invest’ in solar panels on the roof of our houses. Be very careful. Reading 4.2.5 shows that it would be better to put your money under your mattress rather than invest in solar panels in Canberra in 2014.
A summary of some of the drawbacks of alternate power is explain in a five minute video in Reading 4.2.6. Keep on reminding ourselves that we are taking on all these drawbacks but still require a conventional power station as a back up. It will be burning the nearly the same amount of fuel and producing nearly the same amount of carbon dioxide.
Do we still believe we are behaving rationally?