Some are under the very mistaken impression that the wind is free. Wind energy specifically and alternative energy in general will raise your electricity rates and cost you more. You can be guaranteed of that. That is why it is called alternative, it is an alternative to paying less for a service. Even though we have a minuscule amount of electricity being produced by alternative sources in the United States, electric companies are raising rates across the country. Not only will we be destroying our environment and scenic beauty but we will be paying for much, much more for alternative energy. It is hilarious that so many "believe" in alternative energy until they have to start paying for it!
Let's look at this juggernaut in action.
July 12th, 2009 - Austin's clean energy program costing more, selling less
It is the ambition of Austin, Texas to be the clean energy capital of the world. The have a voluntary program where customers can purchase expensive green energy. The problem is only a small percentage of customers want it. Residential customers must pay an additional $58/month to belong to their Green Choice program. That is a whopping 58% more than the average US residential electrical bill!
May 27th, 2009 -Bills to rise for wind power; Consumers Energy surcharges OK'd
Charges approved so that Michigan consumers will extra for state mandated renewable energy.
July 12th, 2009 -State green power plan will cost consumers billions
This California couple already pay $170/month for their modest 2,000 sq ft Cali home. Officials say that rates are going up another 27%, with half of that rise due to renewable energy. Trust me, the price tag will be much, much more! California has the goal of tearing up the country with wind turbines and transmission lines then raising electrical rates through the roof. The new plan seems to be for California to turn into a drug dealer to help pay for the mess they have put themselves into. They don't have the money to pay their state employees nor pay for innumerable other necessary services. But they want to suck your money out of the economy for Green energy.
March 4th, 2009 -Kauai residents face electricity rate hike
It is the same in Hawaii.“For now, we just want everyone to know that we are officially going to begin the process,” Hee said. The utility is studying how to determine a rate structure that will assist it in shifting its reliance away from fossil fuels, continuing to promote energy efficiency, investing in renewable energy, and fulfilling the objectives and goals of the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative. What they means is they are going to raise rates for Clean Energy.
The oxymoron is that they are going to promote energy "efficiency" by making their energy company more inefficient by making it more expensive to do the very same thing. Oh, I guess you can put a green sticker on your window.
June 27th, 2009 - UK - The Price of Going Green
The UK are well ahead of us in diving into the loony bin. They are rushing to destroy their countryside and make the prices of electricity skyrocket. Rates have already gone up and they predict a 10% rate rise this year, and that will only be the start. Last year their energy bills increased by 40% and they paying higher energy bills to meet mandates of green energy. They even coined a new term called "fuel poverty". They say energy companies are investing, I call it throwing money out the window! At least one person in the UK has some sense left, "How Can Wind Turbines Generate So Much Lunacy?"
The example above are only the front end of increased costs, what you will pay directly in your month electrical bill. But there is even a darker side to consider. That is the acceptance that the turbines are built ONLY because of enormous Federal subsidies or tax credits and then ongoing Federal Production Tax Credit(PTC) for each kilowatt hours of electricity produced. In fact for every kWh of green energy that you receive the US Treasury will pay on average an additional 20% behind the back credit, it will just be added to your childrens IOU to China.
You never see these credits, they are directly added to the federal deficit. The UK has the same lunatic structure in their company. In fact around the world Alternative Green Energy and Wind Turbine are ONYL build because the Government pay for most of the cost of construction, then forces the electric companies to purchase their power at inflated rates. Bulldoze a couple acres of forest or farmland, dig a hole in the countryside, fill it with millions of pounds of concrete and steel and then erect an ugly monstrosity. The Government directly pays most of the cost in tax credits and then the wind spins, when it wants to, and produces what amounts to a minuscule amount of electricity. It takes 5,000 of these 3-4 million dollar spinning machines to produce the same amount of kwh's as one Nuclear Plant that runs 24/7 365 days per year. You probably don't even know where your electricity comes from, because the coal/gas/nuclear plants only take a couple dozen acres and are often tucked away out of site.
Obama Alternative Energy Plan Will Make Your Electricity Bills Skyrocket
Don't ever think for a moment that the wind is free. Don't ever think that it is just costly to construct a wind turbine and that after the installation the wind will spin it for free. You Will Pay!To the right is a quote from Barack Obama, video and text found here, where he states in 2008 that his policies would make energy prices “skyrocket” as the energy industry passed along the exorbitant costs of his plan. This his one campaign promise that he is absolutely following
through with. First, find your electricity rate by state here. As of April 2009 the average US rate is 11.59 cents per kWh. In 2001 according the Energy Information Administration statistics, here, the average household use almost 1,000 kWh per month which results in an average electric bill per household of $116 per month. Now here is something critical to our future discussion regarding how much you pay for electricity. Your residential bill only represents one third of your total electrical share of your total energy use. Electricity consumption is divided almost equally between residential, commercial and industrial. You pay your residential bill directly, but in actually your share is triple that amount. The other two thirds you pay for in good, services and taxes to government agencies who use electricity. Above is the chart showing the division in Pennsylvania for 2007. Go here and click on table 8. At the bottom of that link you can find a link for State Energy Profiles to find your own state. (however that link is not working right now).So in reality your electric bill is actually roughly three times $116 or $348 or $4176/year. That is no chump change! So when electrical rates go up by 10% you pay $11.60/mo in your own bill, but there is also another $23.20/mo that is passed on to in by higher prices and taxes. The understanding of the 1/3rd residential concept is vital to understanding the gravity of the situation when Obama states "your electricity rates will skyrocket".
edit: Did anyone catch an error to my 3x your residential electric bill logic? The error is that raising our industrial electricity rates will serve to force many companies overseas to China/India/Etc where they don't have these ridicuous energy policies!
How National Audubon Society Deceives You- Birds and Climate Change - Christmas Count Report - Part 3- Summary of Deception
Let' summarize the deception and "scare-them-to-death" tactics that National Audubon Society used to spread their agenda of "environmental doom". Click links for proof.
1. NAS wrote and publicized their report Birds and Climate Change evaluating four decades of Christmas Count data collected by volunteers such as myself. The report was written to scare their membership into taking action to prevent the crisis they created with their report.
2. Even though most of the Christmas Count data is collected in December, they used a January temperature chart because the temperature trend was almost three times as warmer compared to the December chart. (1.42F per decade vs. .56F/decade)
3. The report was released in February 2009, however they left out data from January 2006 to January 2009 because the temperature trend of those years was dramatically down and would have decreased the averages.
4. They used the years 1966-2006 which was a period of moderate global warming, but they forget to tell you that the period from 1910-1945 has a similar trend of warming.
5. The years 1996-2006 represent a VERY SHORT time of climate data. January temperatures increased 1.42F per decade, however if we choose a longer period of time, 1906-2009 then the temperature trend increase is only .12F/decade. A short period makes the trend 12x worse than using a longer trend which is more representative of climate.
6. They forget to tell you that world climate has always consisted of alternating warmer and cooler periods. The January temperatures of 1953-1979 decreased at an average of -1.75/decade which is a cooling more dramatic than the 1.42F/decade warming of 1966-2006.
7. They scared you by cherry picking the January data rise from 1966-2006, but they didn't tell you that for the past nineteen years from 1990-2009 the trend leveled out and was only slightly warmer at .22F/decade.
8. They didn't tell you that January temperature have been dramatically decreasing from 1998-2009 at -2.32F/decade, greatly balancing out the temperature rise for the 1966-2009 period they used, aka the scare period.
9. On almost every single page there are scare phrases used to urge you to take action to address their misrepresented data. First they deceive you, then they scare you to correct the deceit.
10. They write the count data reveals a 35 mile northward of bird species. They "scare-us-to-death" without giving one bit of evidence that bird populations are decreasing. Maybe the birds are moving northward because population expansions are forcing them into new territory? What is so bad about the birds moving northward? But we are told to be concerned and take action on every single page, without one bit of proof.
11. They have 12 photos of birds highlighting their northward movement during the count. 8 of the birds are waterbirds or shorebirds. The count occurs mostly in December, just as the inland lakes are freezing. December temperature data reveals a small cooling during the data collection period. Of course we could expect that some lakes are freezing a few weeks later in December causing the birds to linger a few more weeks and increasing the count.
12. What is so bad about that? Apparently not much. Because when I used the Audubon graphing tool to create a trend line for the period 1996-2006 I found that of the 12 highlighted birds - 4 birds were increasing, 5 were the same and 3 were decreasing. And maybe there are other factors causing the decreased December population for the 3 decreasing species.
13. The Audubon report recommends Clean and Efficient Energy. On their web site they state they "strongly supports properly-sited wind power as a clean alternative energy source". In Pennsylvania and much of the US Northeast wind power is only efficient on our mountain ridges. They are doing NOTHING in the Northeast states to oppose the planned construction of thousands of wind turbine along our mountain ridges, right along the hawk migration routes!
14. On a mountain ridge each turbine needs about 4 acres of forest clear which includes the immediate area of each turbine, connecting roads and access roads. They mount the turbine on an enormous 30 ft deep base which is filled with over one million pounds of concrete and steel by a procession of concrete mixers and dump trucks. By supporting wind power in Pennsylvania, Audubon is recommending the construction of over five thousand of these turbines to generate even a messily couple percent of our electrical energy needs. And not one coal, nuclear or natural gas plant will be closed after we spend literally BILLIONS of dollars on this boondoggle.
15. Each turbine will permanently alter the scenic beauty of our landscape and FRAGMENT the forest of our precious mountaintop ridges.(link above) These ridges were completely logged over one hundred years ago and only now are starting to grow into a mature forest. Remember the fragmentation studies by us citizen scientists in the 1990's. That focus has been replaced by a new "scare-them-to-death" mantra with the end result of destruction of our landscape and displacement and death to the creatures that inhabit them.
15. Audubon states their mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earths biological diversity. In their 16 page report Birds and Climate they did not give one shred of evidence that the global warming from 1976 to 1998, which was likely the result of natural cyclic temperature fluctuations, resulted in ANY loss of habitat nor population to birds and other wildlife. Yet we do know that wind turbines will kill both birds and many bats. Turbine construction will result in forest fragmentation which will displace many creatures result in predation by cowbirds, raccoons, crows and etc. Roger Tory Peterson is rolling around his grave right now while he observes what conservation and environmentalism has now become!!!
16. Let's get more specific to birds, which is the primary focus of the National Audubon Society and its' hundreds of individual chapters in the US. For now, I refer you to this web page as an introduction. Read here how the NAS sat back while Golden Eagle killing turbines were sited in Washington State. Why? Because the receive grant money by pro windpower foundations! Read more here about how wind turbines kill birds.
17. Finally, while our country languishes in a deep recession, Audubon recommends that we further increase the Federal deficit by funding this debacle by placing the costs of construction of these wind farms on the backs of our children. On page 6 of this report entitled Federal Subsidies in the Energy Markets 2007 the facts are made clear. Per megawatt of power produced, wind power receives 50 times as much subsidy as coal and 16 times as much as nuclear power. In a future post I will lay out the indisputable facts how wind power will also increase your electric bill. THE WIND IS NOT FREE!
18. Audubon has used the "scare-them-to-death" tactics that are now considered basic science, in my next posts I will review one of their answers to this non-existent problem, the Cap and Trade legislation. To be continued in Part 4.
How National Audubon Society Deceives You- Birds and Climate Change - Christmas Count Report - Part 1 - Temperature Trend
Part 2 - The Birds
1. NAS wrote and publicized their report Birds and Climate Change evaluating four decades of Christmas Count data collected by volunteers such as myself. The report was written to scare their membership into taking action to prevent the crisis they created with their report.
2. Even though most of the Christmas Count data is collected in December, they used a January temperature chart because the temperature trend was almost three times as warmer compared to the December chart. (1.42F per decade vs. .56F/decade)
3. The report was released in February 2009, however they left out data from January 2006 to January 2009 because the temperature trend of those years was dramatically down and would have decreased the averages.
4. They used the years 1966-2006 which was a period of moderate global warming, but they forget to tell you that the period from 1910-1945 has a similar trend of warming.
5. The years 1996-2006 represent a VERY SHORT time of climate data. January temperatures increased 1.42F per decade, however if we choose a longer period of time, 1906-2009 then the temperature trend increase is only .12F/decade. A short period makes the trend 12x worse than using a longer trend which is more representative of climate.
6. They forget to tell you that world climate has always consisted of alternating warmer and cooler periods. The January temperatures of 1953-1979 decreased at an average of -1.75/decade which is a cooling more dramatic than the 1.42F/decade warming of 1966-2006.
7. They scared you by cherry picking the January data rise from 1966-2006, but they didn't tell you that for the past nineteen years from 1990-2009 the trend leveled out and was only slightly warmer at .22F/decade.
8. They didn't tell you that January temperature have been dramatically decreasing from 1998-2009 at -2.32F/decade, greatly balancing out the temperature rise for the 1966-2009 period they used, aka the scare period.
9. On almost every single page there are scare phrases used to urge you to take action to address their misrepresented data. First they deceive you, then they scare you to correct the deceit.
10. They write the count data reveals a 35 mile northward of bird species. They "scare-us-to-death" without giving one bit of evidence that bird populations are decreasing. Maybe the birds are moving northward because population expansions are forcing them into new territory? What is so bad about the birds moving northward? But we are told to be concerned and take action on every single page, without one bit of proof.
11. They have 12 photos of birds highlighting their northward movement during the count. 8 of the birds are waterbirds or shorebirds. The count occurs mostly in December, just as the inland lakes are freezing. December temperature data reveals a small cooling during the data collection period. Of course we could expect that some lakes are freezing a few weeks later in December causing the birds to linger a few more weeks and increasing the count.
12. What is so bad about that? Apparently not much. Because when I used the Audubon graphing tool to create a trend line for the period 1996-2006 I found that of the 12 highlighted birds - 4 birds were increasing, 5 were the same and 3 were decreasing. And maybe there are other factors causing the decreased December population for the 3 decreasing species.
13. The Audubon report recommends Clean and Efficient Energy. On their web site they state they "strongly supports properly-sited wind power as a clean alternative energy source". In Pennsylvania and much of the US Northeast wind power is only efficient on our mountain ridges. They are doing NOTHING in the Northeast states to oppose the planned construction of thousands of wind turbine along our mountain ridges, right along the hawk migration routes!
14. On a mountain ridge each turbine needs about 4 acres of forest clear which includes the immediate area of each turbine, connecting roads and access roads. They mount the turbine on an enormous 30 ft deep base which is filled with over one million pounds of concrete and steel by a procession of concrete mixers and dump trucks. By supporting wind power in Pennsylvania, Audubon is recommending the construction of over five thousand of these turbines to generate even a messily couple percent of our electrical energy needs. And not one coal, nuclear or natural gas plant will be closed after we spend literally BILLIONS of dollars on this boondoggle.
15. Each turbine will permanently alter the scenic beauty of our landscape and FRAGMENT the forest of our precious mountaintop ridges.(link above) These ridges were completely logged over one hundred years ago and only now are starting to grow into a mature forest. Remember the fragmentation studies by us citizen scientists in the 1990's. That focus has been replaced by a new "scare-them-to-death" mantra with the end result of destruction of our landscape and displacement and death to the creatures that inhabit them.
15. Audubon states their mission is to conserve and restore natural ecosystems, focusing on birds, other wildlife, and their habitats for the benefit of humanity and the earths biological diversity. In their 16 page report Birds and Climate they did not give one shred of evidence that the global warming from 1976 to 1998, which was likely the result of natural cyclic temperature fluctuations, resulted in ANY loss of habitat nor population to birds and other wildlife. Yet we do know that wind turbines will kill both birds and many bats. Turbine construction will result in forest fragmentation which will displace many creatures result in predation by cowbirds, raccoons, crows and etc. Roger Tory Peterson is rolling around his grave right now while he observes what conservation and environmentalism has now become!!!
16. Let's get more specific to birds, which is the primary focus of the National Audubon Society and its' hundreds of individual chapters in the US. For now, I refer you to this web page as an introduction. Read here how the NAS sat back while Golden Eagle killing turbines were sited in Washington State. Why? Because the receive grant money by pro windpower foundations! Read more here about how wind turbines kill birds.
17. Finally, while our country languishes in a deep recession, Audubon recommends that we further increase the Federal deficit by funding this debacle by placing the costs of construction of these wind farms on the backs of our children. On page 6 of this report entitled Federal Subsidies in the Energy Markets 2007 the facts are made clear. Per megawatt of power produced, wind power receives 50 times as much subsidy as coal and 16 times as much as nuclear power. In a future post I will lay out the indisputable facts how wind power will also increase your electric bill. THE WIND IS NOT FREE!
18. Audubon has used the "scare-them-to-death" tactics that are now considered basic science, in my next posts I will review one of their answers to this non-existent problem, the Cap and Trade legislation. To be continued in Part 4.
How National Audubon Society Deceives You- Birds and Climate Change - Christmas Count Report - Part 1 - Temperature Trend
Part 2 - The Birds
How National Audubon Society Deceives You- Birds and Climate Change - Christmas Count Report - Part 1 - Temperature Trend
Many of the strongest supporters of the global warming theory are nature lovers like myself. I am a long time birder and have participated in many Audubon Society Christmas Counts and May Migration Counts. Also, for the past 6 years I have held the position as a Regional Coordinator(the Poconos) for the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas. I love birds and nature and am outside in the woods just about everyday. Almost all of the nature organizations that I belong to support global warming. They often support it with bogus data and theories. My report below is a perfect example of the Scaring You About Nothing tactics that we have been pummeled with for years.A few months ago I received the Pennsylvania Audubon Society Spring newsletter found here. The headline article is State
Perspective - Bird Movements Reveal Global Warming Threat. The article summarizes the National Audubon Bird and Climate Report found here. The report summarizes on page 3 that "Analysis of four decades of Christmas Bird Count observations reveal that birds seen in North America during the first weeks of winter have moved dramatically northward—toward colder latitudes—over the past four decades. Significant northward movement occurred among 58% of the observed species—177 of 305."On page 4 they show a graph to the right plotting January temperature across the lower 48 states from 1969 through 2006. They created that graph from NOAA National Climactic Data Center US temperature data found here. I recreated the same mean January temperature graph with trend line below to the right. The results are dramatic revealing a 1.63F/decade trend which means it if keeps going that way January temperature will rise 16.3F per century. That is a reason to be concerned! Now look at the graph to the left below which is for December average temperatures from 1966 to 2006. What you can see is that instead of the trend being 1.42F per decade it is only .56F per decade! Us birders know that the Christmas Count is from the 2nd weekend of December to the first weekend in January. We know that 90% of the data is collected in December! Yet Audubon used January temperatures and correlated that with data mostly collected in December. Why? Simply another slight of hand, they used the January temperature graph because it looked much worse than the December graph did!!! We know birds are smart about finding their way around, but do you think they know ahead of time what the temperature is "going to be". But no, the December graph isn't SCARY enough, you can see more huge downswings than the upswings in the January graph. Click graphs to enlarge.
Sometimes a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and that is the case in the Audubon Birds and Climate - Ecological Disruption in Motion report. Here is the rest of the story...Many of us have been fooled by scientists using data from a specific or small time frame who then extrapolate that data forward. If you looked at past results of the stock market in 1999 it would have been obvious to you that the stock market was a good investment in the long run. Counting on past performance of the
stock market for future returns was obviously a bad choice in 1999 for many of us. The same goes for climate.Let's get back to using their January data. Instead of using the very short time span of forty years the NCDC allows us to go back to the late 1800's. To the right I have plotted the same January mean temperature from 1906-2009 and the mean tells a completely different story. What we find is that for the US(lower 48) January temperature have been basically flat for 103 years rising only at the rate of .12F/decade or 1.2F over the entire time frame from 1906-2006.
Now let's see if I can scare you in a different way. To the right I plotted the January mean temperature from 1953-1979 and you can see the downward trend of minus 1.75/decade or 17.5 per century. The downward January mean temperature trend for 26 years was even larger than the upward trend from 1966-2006.
During the late 70's we actually had a global cooling scare with many scientists and news agencies writing articles warning of impending doom. You can read Newsweek's 1975 article, The Cooling World, right here. I have to wonder if the National Audubon Society produced a report in the late 1970's warning about the impending doom from global cooling and pleaded with politicians across the globe to do something, because obviously global cooling would have had to have some effect on wintering bird population.
Now let's take a look at two more charts that plot US January mean temperature data for more recent time periods. You can click the charts to enlarge them for better viewing. The chart below to the left is for the past 19 January's and is completely FLAT! The chart below to the right is for the past 11 years and there is a downward trend. This time the trend is dramatic at 2.32F/decade which extrapolates to 23.2F per century. Now you can see that the National Audubon Society was cherry picking the years they used to create the chart at the top and that if you study all the charts of this page you can see that mean temperature has risen and fallen throughout the past century. Again, most recently, for the past 11 years we are falling again! You can reproduce all of these graphs yourself at the NCDC website.
And to prove to you that the goal of the National Audubon Society Birds and Climate report was to DELIBERATELY DECEIVE you look above at the January temperature for 2007, 2008 and 2009. You can see they were cold and well below the trend line. The report was 2/10/09 and those three January's were available for their chart. But they choose to stop their data at 2006 because that would make trend line higher and warmer! This is the same kind of data mining that we are being exposed on numerous fronts from numerous scientific agencies. They call it the "scientific consensus".
Back to the report. The cover subtitle states " A Briefing for Policymakers and Concerned Citizens on Audubon’s Analyses of North American Bird Movements in the Face of Global Warming", yet using the January mean temperature there is very little warming for the past 19 years. The temperature trend is essentially flat!
On page 2 of the Audubon Birds and Climate report we are instructed that "It will take action by America’s millions of self-proclaimed bird enthusiasts—and their elected representatives—to address the problem of
climate change while there’s still time." Time for what? On page 9 they write "Scientists have long predicted dire consequences from global warming for birds and other species". But what do the scientists say if the world is cooling?Here is how you have been duped. Actually, it is just one of the many, many ways in which you have been duped! To the right is a chart of mean annual US temperature from 1978-2009. Global temperature have risen and fallen throughout world history and this twenty year period was a period of rising temperature. We can all accept that . These rising temperatures gave birth
to the doom and gloom theories that the temperature rise would continue forever, just like the stock markets of the late 1990's. But just like the stock market, temperatures have balanced and are returning to normal. To the right the graph depicts 11 years of US mean annual temperature now trending downward. And this year, 2009 is turning out to be another very cold year throughout the world, it is likely to add strongly to the downward trend, see here. In fact for my Pennsylvania and mid-Atlantic friends, this June was the coldest in over 40 years in Central Park, NYC. It is now mid-July in Pennsylvania, when are we going to have summer?Now that Audubon has us scared by cherry picking their data points and then forgetting to tell us that temperature has been actually trending downward they give a solution to the problem - Repower America with Clean and Efficient Energy. Below are a few pictures of their ecologic environmental actions that we need to take.
Now let's look at a wind project in my home state of Pennsylvania. To the right is a aerial photograph of the Allegheny Wind Farm in Blair and Cambria counties. This photo was taken by Save Our Allegheny Ridges, click here for website. You can count over half of the 40 wind turbines strung out along the forested ridges. These turbines are one recommendation that Audubon suggests to combat the the temperature problem they created above. These turbines are rated at 2MW for a nameplate capacity of 80MW, however wind turbines rarely create more energy than 30% of their rating. So these 40 - 2
MW turbines will create about 24 MW of energy over a years time. The Susquehanna Nuclear plant at Berwick creates 2400 MW of energy in one year. We need 100 of these wind farms to equal the electricity output of one nuclear plant. And unfortunately, the wind blows only when it wants to, about 30% of the time, often at the wrong time of day or season, so we will never replace any coal or nuclear plants with wind. NONE!As you can see all of the turbines are on our highest ridges and separated so as not to cause interference with each other. Each turbine requires about 4
acres of clear cut for their base and access roads which fragments the forest. Each of the 100 wind farms will need separate transformer stations and miles and miles of transmission lines to transport the power where it is needed. Look at the bottom of the Allegheny farm above and notice the how many acres of clear cut the set of transmission lines requires. We already have a power grid and lines, do we need many hundreds of miles more?Each turbine will kill bats and birds and fragment the forest. If you are a nature lover, like I am, I strongly suggest you study this slide presentation by Conservation Biologist, Dan Boone, which evaluates the environmental impact of wind farms on the mid-Atlantic region and specifically Pennsylvania. (it is a slow loader). Also, by placing literally thousands of turbines on forested ridges in Pennsylvania we will destroy the scenic beauty of our state forever!
And to top it all off, these turbines are nothing but a tax shelter project requiring enormous Federal and State subsidies and local tax breaks or they will not be constructed. This chart is found on page 6 here. Click to enlarge it and look at column 3 - Subsidies per Unit of Production($/MW). Coal received 44cents/MWproduced, Nat gas received 25 cents/MW, Nuclear received $1.59/MW, Wind received $23.37/MW.
Wind and solar get 50 time more Federal
subsidies per MW of production than coal, 100 times more than Natural Gas per MW of production and about 16 times as much as nuclear. This is all added to the Federal deficit that our children will inherit from this boondoggle! There is so much more to why wind does not work and I refer you to other posts in my blog and website. On page 13 of the report Audubon recommends a cap and trade program to prevent the temperature rising another 2F. What did they mean by that? The NOAA US temperature chart from 1998 reveals that our January temperature has already declined 2.32F in the past 11 years? Imagine that, worldwide CO2 emissions have continued to rise. Now I am mixed up, January temperature has declined 2.32F in the past 11 years while annual temperature declined
.77F, which one are we to worry about rising 2F, and from when? From now or when they started to go down 11 years ago?Part 2 - The Birds
How National Audubon Society Deceives You- Birds and Climate Change - Christmas Count Report - Part 2 - The Birds
The National Audubon Society Birds and Climate Change report, subtitled Ecological Disruption in Motion is found here. The report is an analysis of bird distribution trends found by studying annual Christmas Count data collected by volunteers such as myself during December and early January for the past 100 years. The report is full of doom and gloom. Another Audubon Society member referred me to the report as proof of how bird life has been negatively affected by global warming.
My reading of the report has just confirmed to me again that our nature organizations are twisting and misusing data to create a crisis that simply does not exist. Audubon uses the following SCARE phrases such as "alerting America to perils", "mounting concerns over accelerating global climate change", "serious biological consequences", "curb the worst impacts of climate change", "take immediate steps", "disrupt ecosystem balance", "over exploitation by humans", "continued population declines", "long predicted dire consequences", "great jeopardy", "failure to prevent the worst impacts" and "tackling this critically important challenge".
The report states that there was an average of 35 mile northward movement of the 305 observed species. They wrote significant northward movement occurred among 58% of the 305 species, with 60 species or 20% moving in excess of 100 miles north. So that means that of the 160 that moved northward "significantly, there were 100 where the movement was less than 100 miles. I would expect some northward movement of wintering species that are likely temperature dependent because we know that during the past four decades of data that was discussed for this study US temperatures rose. My next question was how were the bird numbers affected? I have studied the Birds And Climate report but could find not one word reviewing bird count numbers.
On page 4, 6 & 7 they have enlarged photos of 9 birds with large text under each series of bird pictures, The Climate Culprit, On the Move and To an Uncertain Fate. I was curious as to what that fate was. Were these birds increasing or decreasing in population, that is the bottom line.
National Audubon has a terrific resource for graphing and study of their Christmas Count data found here. You can see historical abundance data by graphing the number seen per party hour for any species back to 1901. Let's look at the Christmas Count abundance data for the twelve pictured species for the four decades from 1966 to 2006 which is the concern of this report. How are they doing with climate change?
I created 1996-2006 charts plotting birds seen per party hour. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a moment to look at the 12 charts which resulted.
Using rough estimate trend lines I concluded population changes in the 12 birds highlighted in the Birds & Climate Report.
Increasing: Ring-necked Duck, Red-breasted Merganser, Northern Gannet, Spruce Grouse
Same: American Goldfinch, Black-bellied Plover, Black Turnstone, Pine Siskin, Brant(increasing?)
Decreasing: American Black Duck, Western Meadowlark, Green-winged Teal (same?)
The abundance graph trend lines showed: 4 birds were increasing, 5 were the same and 3 were
decreasing. And possibly Brant could be moved to increasing and green-winged teal to the same. So at least 9 of the 12 pictured birds were either increasing in population or the same!
In other words we have a 16 page report that scares us about all the "dire" "consequences" of "continued population declines" and urges us to "take immediate steps" because of "great jeopardy" over "mounting concerns over accelerating global climate change"!!! Yet the scientists all agree that the warming stopped OVER 10 YEARS AGO.
Friends, the inmates are running the asylum. If you look at past temperature records over the past centuries you will notice that temperatures have always either decreased or increased. From 1910 to 1945 the temperatures rose at the same pace they are now as our globe began to warm and exit the Little Ice Age. See here for my previous post comparing the two temperature rises. Glaciers began to decline, see here, in the late 1800's as a couple centuries of the Little Ice Age ended. Temperatures stabilized and then decreased until the late 1970's. In those years there was talk of entering another ice age. In the late 1970's to the late 1990's, a period of twenty years of world history, the temperatures once again slowly rose and peaked during the El Nino of 1998. The El Nino of 1998 was very strong and shot temperatures skyward throughout the globe. El Nino's have nothing to do with greenhouse gases and occur regularly because of changes in ocean currents and suface winds, they strongly affect our weather.
This 16 page report is basically a scare report. There are no real lies, because I accept that many birds could have moved northward during a period of global warming. But the report gives absolutely no evidence that our avian friends are in jeopardy. In fact, for the 12 examples of severe movement there is an overall average increase in population!
All of you have heard of the polar bear scare, it is the exact same nonsense. We are being
manipulated with misinformation and disinformation from "scientists" who have an agenda that is NOT the truthful depiction of scientific information. Take a moment to look at the polar bear facts yourself. Here is a post I made previously entitled Polar Bear Populations are Stable and Healthy. I found the official petition that the Alarmist Scientist made requesting the Federal Government to list the polar bear as endangered. In the report the scientists show population data that of the 20 distinct geographic populations, 16 are stable, 2 are increasing and 2 are the same. In other words they want to list a stable population as Endangered all based on What If's? What if the stock market keeps going up forever and the economy stays strong? This is the same urging of dire consequences that National Audubon Society made in their Birds and Climate Change report. If you read that report without really looking into it you would obviously think there is a dire problem and we need to fix it right now.
Now even the Alarmist Scientists are starting to backtrack, recognizing we have 11-12 years where global temperatures have not risen. Look at this post, Real Climate is where the main blog of the Alarmist Gloom and Doom scientists. They now say temperatures might not rise for another 10 years and talk of multi-decadal variability. Why can't the rising temperature time from 1977 to 1998 be simply natural variability?
My reading of the report has just confirmed to me again that our nature organizations are twisting and misusing data to create a crisis that simply does not exist. Audubon uses the following SCARE phrases such as "alerting America to perils", "mounting concerns over accelerating global climate change", "serious biological consequences", "curb the worst impacts of climate change", "take immediate steps", "disrupt ecosystem balance", "over exploitation by humans", "continued population declines", "long predicted dire consequences", "great jeopardy", "failure to prevent the worst impacts" and "tackling this critically important challenge".
The report states that there was an average of 35 mile northward movement of the 305 observed species. They wrote significant northward movement occurred among 58% of the 305 species, with 60 species or 20% moving in excess of 100 miles north. So that means that of the 160 that moved northward "significantly, there were 100 where the movement was less than 100 miles. I would expect some northward movement of wintering species that are likely temperature dependent because we know that during the past four decades of data that was discussed for this study US temperatures rose. My next question was how were the bird numbers affected? I have studied the Birds And Climate report but could find not one word reviewing bird count numbers.
On page 4, 6 & 7 they have enlarged photos of 9 birds with large text under each series of bird pictures, The Climate Culprit, On the Move and To an Uncertain Fate. I was curious as to what that fate was. Were these birds increasing or decreasing in population, that is the bottom line.
National Audubon has a terrific resource for graphing and study of their Christmas Count data found here. You can see historical abundance data by graphing the number seen per party hour for any species back to 1901. Let's look at the Christmas Count abundance data for the twelve pictured species for the four decades from 1966 to 2006 which is the concern of this report. How are they doing with climate change?
I created 1996-2006 charts plotting birds seen per party hour. Scroll down to the bottom of this page for a moment to look at the 12 charts which resulted.
Using rough estimate trend lines I concluded population changes in the 12 birds highlighted in the Birds & Climate Report.
Increasing: Ring-necked Duck, Red-breasted Merganser, Northern Gannet, Spruce Grouse
Same: American Goldfinch, Black-bellied Plover, Black Turnstone, Pine Siskin, Brant(increasing?)
Decreasing: American Black Duck, Western Meadowlark, Green-winged Teal (same?)
The abundance graph trend lines showed: 4 birds were increasing, 5 were the same and 3 were
decreasing. And possibly Brant could be moved to increasing and green-winged teal to the same. So at least 9 of the 12 pictured birds were either increasing in population or the same!
In other words we have a 16 page report that scares us about all the "dire" "consequences" of "continued population declines" and urges us to "take immediate steps" because of "great jeopardy" over "mounting concerns over accelerating global climate change"!!! Yet the scientists all agree that the warming stopped OVER 10 YEARS AGO.
Friends, the inmates are running the asylum. If you look at past temperature records over the past centuries you will notice that temperatures have always either decreased or increased. From 1910 to 1945 the temperatures rose at the same pace they are now as our globe began to warm and exit the Little Ice Age. See here for my previous post comparing the two temperature rises. Glaciers began to decline, see here, in the late 1800's as a couple centuries of the Little Ice Age ended. Temperatures stabilized and then decreased until the late 1970's. In those years there was talk of entering another ice age. In the late 1970's to the late 1990's, a period of twenty years of world history, the temperatures once again slowly rose and peaked during the El Nino of 1998. The El Nino of 1998 was very strong and shot temperatures skyward throughout the globe. El Nino's have nothing to do with greenhouse gases and occur regularly because of changes in ocean currents and suface winds, they strongly affect our weather.
This 16 page report is basically a scare report. There are no real lies, because I accept that many birds could have moved northward during a period of global warming. But the report gives absolutely no evidence that our avian friends are in jeopardy. In fact, for the 12 examples of severe movement there is an overall average increase in population!
All of you have heard of the polar bear scare, it is the exact same nonsense. We are being
manipulated with misinformation and disinformation from "scientists" who have an agenda that is NOT the truthful depiction of scientific information. Take a moment to look at the polar bear facts yourself. Here is a post I made previously entitled Polar Bear Populations are Stable and Healthy. I found the official petition that the Alarmist Scientist made requesting the Federal Government to list the polar bear as endangered. In the report the scientists show population data that of the 20 distinct geographic populations, 16 are stable, 2 are increasing and 2 are the same. In other words they want to list a stable population as Endangered all based on What If's? What if the stock market keeps going up forever and the economy stays strong? This is the same urging of dire consequences that National Audubon Society made in their Birds and Climate Change report. If you read that report without really looking into it you would obviously think there is a dire problem and we need to fix it right now.Now even the Alarmist Scientists are starting to backtrack, recognizing we have 11-12 years where global temperatures have not risen. Look at this post, Real Climate is where the main blog of the Alarmist Gloom and Doom scientists. They now say temperatures might not rise for another 10 years and talk of multi-decadal variability. Why can't the rising temperature time from 1977 to 1998 be simply natural variability?
12 Years of Falling US and Flat Global Temperatures
Yes, it is true, temperatures have been falling for the past eleven years. The graph to the right is from NOAA data, found here, plotting average annual temperature for the past 11 years. As you can see the trend is minus .12F/decade. Temperatures across the contiguous United States have been on average very slowly falling for the past 11 years.We have been repeatedly told by the media, Al Gore, Barack Obama and the scientists that our temperatures are rising and likely to spin out of control unless we take immediate action. Now we are told that we have to act now, and pass a cap and trade bill to "cripple our economy" before it is too late. The cap and trade bill is structured to make all of our energy and all the good produced by energy more expensive so that we will use less of it. We are in the midst of the deepest recession, bordering on a depression, that our country has experienced since the 1930's over 80 years. The Senate just passed the Waxman-Markey bill and this September the Senate will consider how to further depress our economy, all in a vain attempt to save the world from rising temperatures which are no longer rising.
The temperature graph above was plotted using average annual surface temperatures at thousands of locations across the United States. Let's take a look at global average temperature of the lower troposphere which is measured by satellite. This includes the area above the oceans. As you can see the graph is essentially flat for the past 12 years. There has been no global warming for 12 years. The graph is plotted from data found here.
The Folly of Home Wind Turbines and Home Solar
We all want to be good citizens, right? Many of you believe that by installing your own home wind turbine or home solar panels you are doing your part to stop global warming and decrease the use of fossil fuel used to create electricity. The more you are off the grid creating your own power, the less fossil your electric company has to burn, isn't that the Mother Earth News message? The fact is, it doesn't work that way. Electricity is not like a hamburger stand, where if you don't buy a hamburger that day it just stays in the freezer.Here is how it works.
You hire a solar contractor and install a $45,000 solar system on your roof, knowing that when the sun is shining it will create electrical energy. The Government gives you a $15,000 tax credit to help pay for this boondoggle. You look at your electric meter and see that when the sun shines indeed you are creating electricity!!! Your meter is running backwards, so you think you are actually contributing power to the electricity grid. You are saving money and doing your part to save Mother Earth, that is what you have been fooled to think!
Now, think this through from the viewpoint of your electrical and grid company, your real power company. They have an extra 15% of electricity available in the form of reserves, fossil burning or nuclear energy, because they are worried that one of their power plants could suddenly breakdown or maybe there will be an unexpected spike in electricity usage. No matter what, they will have enough electricity being produced with a safety cushion, otherwise there will be a blackout.
Tomorrow there could be clear skies, partly sunny or cloudy skies. If the skies are clear your home solar system could be working at 100% and you would be technically "off the grid". But are you? If you are a typical resident and use 30 kWh's per day and it is sunny for 12 hours tomorrow so that you are creating 15kWh's the only way that you truly off the grid is if your power company turns down the burn rate of their power plants so that 15kWh's less of electricity is produced. That won't happen because if the skies suddenly turn cloudy your solar panels will not work and you will be back on the grid sucking electricity from your power company. This is key to understanding both wind and solar. The real power company MUST burn an amount of fuel to decrease their output in the exact amount matching your power production. There are absolutely no savings unless there is less fossil fuel burned.What happens in reality is that you are creating electricity to power your house, partially funded by federal tax dollars and other incentives, while your Power Company is making the exact same amount of electricity as they always do. They have to. If you completely disconnect from the grid 100%, then the power company will redo their calculations and produce power for one less house. But if some days you make power and some days you don't, in a completely erratic fashion, then the power company can't possibly know when you are going to make power and when you are not, so they will make power ALWAYS, knowing that it could be sunny or it could be cloudy.
This is a concept that very few have ever thought of, because you have been convinced and brainwashed to think that getting off the grid, even erratically and intermittently is going to save our society resources. NO, you will still have the same old electrical lines, the same electrical employees, the same amount of fossil burning. In actuality you will be doing the opposite, you will be Ripping Off America! because when the sun is shining you won't be paying "your fair share", even though in actuality your power company will be producing your share. to add to that, you will be Ripping Off America by now paying your fair share of taxes because you will be getting Federal Tax Credits to install your boondoggle.
To add to the folly, because there are 1,000 committing the same folly as you, a new industry of home solar panels was created. They built a building, which uses electricity.
They use materials, which involved mining natural resources and environmental problems associated with that. There is installation and maintenance of the system and it must be disposed of when it not longer works. The materials and energy used to create your $45,000 home solar or home wind is simply a boondoggle and an additional drain on the resources of our society.I am writing this post from the standpoint of a Pennsylvania resident, where we rarely have more than one cloudless, blue sky day consecutively. This post wouldn't completely apply to SW USA because sunshine therefore solar power is more reliable. But even in those areas, would the power company KNOW that you have solar panels installed in your house. Are they calculating how many houses have panels and calculating exactly how much electricity they are creating so that they can reduce their fossil burn rate and electricity production of the real power plant? Do they have a weatherman on site who is making hourly weather predictions in case there is a sudden, unexpected cloudy day or cloudy time? These are all questions that are vital to your understanding of home electricity production.
This blog is primarily about wind power and the same exact principle would apply to your home turbine. Is the electrical company reducing their fossil burn rate on windy days? When your wind turbine is spinning, is that causing and exact and opposite reaction at the power company? Or are you just ripping off America and the other power company customers by not paying your fair share. You are being deceived!!!! Think about it.
To sum it up. The power company knows the average electricity needs for a certain hour on a certain day of each year and they make enough electricity to supply that need, with a 10-20% excess to handle unexpected increases in demand or a sudden power plant failure. They can't possibly consider whether your teeny, ERRATIC electricity production system is going to be working or not due to the vagaries of the ever changing weather. If you cut the cord completely and discontinue your power service the power company will adjust their power production accordingly. Also, if you become an energy conserver and use less power, that will show up in the demand averages, especially if many people become conservers, then the power company will adjust their power production accordingly.
The only way you are not be part of the fictitious problem that the Greenies invented so they can control your mind and your wallet, is to completely cut your electrical service and go 100% off the grid. No electric company, no utility company, live like a caveman.
Wind turbines do not create energy
When we drill a hole and pump oil or dig a hole and mine coal, the fossil fuels obtained result in a net profit to the energy companies. There is a profit because more energy is created than is used to obtain the fossil fuels. They make a profit because the consumer places a certain value on a gallon of gas. It is worthwhile for the consumer to pay $2.75 cents for the fuel to drive 20 miles, instead of walking, bicycling or riding a horse.That is not the case for wind turbines. The energy they create does not even pay for the costs of obtaining that energy, therefore they do not create energy. Energy in our society is represented money. Each dollar represents a certain amount of energy.
A 2MW turbine costs $3.5 million dollars according to wind turbine sources, windustry.org/how-much-do-wind-turbines-cost seen on the right. The lifespan of turbines is estimated to be about 20 years. If you financed the entire $3.5 million at 7% it would be require a payment of $330,000 per year. This does not include the cost of maintenance, transmission line or back-up conventional power plants to balance the fluctuating output.
If we construct the 2MW turbines in a favorable position it will produce an output of 30% of 2MW or .6MW over the entire year. There are 8760hr in the year yielding a production of 5300 MWhours. Multiply by 1,000 to convert to kWh's and the yield is 5,300,00 kWhs.
Each kWh is worth about 5 cents wholesale for a total production of $262,000 per year, yet the owner will have a payment of $330,000 per year to cover capital costs. I give a rough estimate of at least another $70,000 per year to cover maintenance, landowner leases, local government kickbacks, transmission lines and extra costs of conventional power plants backup and "following". I know workers from a wind farm in my locale and there is approximately 1 full time worker for every 4 turbines. Even using the gross UNDERESTIMATION of $70,000 per year of ongoing costs the investors would need $400,000 per year to yield only $262,000 in electricity payments.
But obviously, the investors are making a profit somehow. With double-accelerated capital appreciation, Federal Production Tax Credits and various other Federal/State and Local tax credits and breaks we actually pay the Wind Farms to place these wheels up so we can watch them spin. Also they seriously harm the environment, our scenic beauty and residents in close proximity to the turbines.
PJM Hourly Load versus Wind
In an early post I charted how the monthly demands in the PJM grid which manages the supply of electricity to Pennsylvania and neighboring states. The chart shows that when our electricity supplies are the greatest, in the summer, you can depend on the fact that wind speeds are appreciably lower causing marked decrease in electricity generation from wind. What this means is that it does not matter how many wind turbines you build for a grid, you will ALWAYS have 100% duplication of the installed wind MW by traditional sources, (nat gas, coal, nuclear or hydo) because you can expect the wind to completely die on almost a daily basis for a period of time. My early posts prove that beyond doubt. See the youtube video I created to show how completely unreliable North Dakota wind is, touted as the #1 wind in the country. note: Basin Electric from ND removed their weekly wind chart updates right after I posted that youtube video. 
Today we look at how the wind output is not in sync with the users demand. The line is an hourly demand curve I found for the PJM customers. It is quite typical of how electricity demand varies throughout the day. Demand is lowest at about 4am, then begins to rise as civilization wakes up between 5-6am, rises throughout the morning, levels off and then decreases as business and industry closes at 6pm. It sharply declines after 9pm as we shut off our electricity and prepare for bed. You can view daily updated curves for California here and Ontario here. The problem with wind in Pennsylvania and many locations worldwide is that wind speeds tend to run in exact opposite to the consumer and business demand. The green curve I plotted a PJM hourly output spreadsheet for 2008 found here. If wind output was equal throughout the day it would be about 4% of the total daily output for each hour. You can easily see that wind output varies by about 35% from the low at 3.4% to a high of 4.6%.(those % are the hourly contribution of daily output). When we need the wind the most it is not there, and when we need it less at night, it is blowing more. This created a very interesting scenario for base load coal and for some natural gas plants. Many of the larger plants run at 100% all day long. I would think that for many power grids, with a large amount of wind installed, if the wind output is large, there is more wind power than is needed because demand is low and nuclear, some nat gas and base coal are always running at 100%. This scenario is also more likely during the shoulder seasons of spring and fall, when our air conditioning and heat is off, yet the wind output is higher because seasonally there is more wind in the seasons when we don't need it! This is even more likely to occur on a weekend when many industries are closed. Our total electricity demand is 1/3 residential, 1/3 business and 1/3 commercial or industry. Do you get it?
The demand affects
price. Many grid pays their electrical power plants less for power created during the night because supply is there but demand is less. So when a state created a Renewable Energy Standard forcing the grid and their customers to purchase wind power at a certain price, at any time of the day, then we are paying much, much more for night wind than we would for coal or other traditional. The chart to the right shows you power is more expensive during the summer and less expensive in March and October when wind output is at its' highest. You can see that in the Alberta daily wind charts where there is a rough in of hourly price data for electricity, also discussed on the above referenced youtube video.
I can promise you, if they had the choice your electrical company would never consider putting up turbines and then forcing you to buy the power. Wind power always costs more. Usually those costs are hidden in Federal and state tax subsidies and by the fact that wind is only a small percentage of total electricity generation, even though in many locations they are putting up turbines everywhere, destroying our precious landscape, scenic beauty and natural habitat.
Today we look at how the wind output is not in sync with the users demand. The line is an hourly demand curve I found for the PJM customers. It is quite typical of how electricity demand varies throughout the day. Demand is lowest at about 4am, then begins to rise as civilization wakes up between 5-6am, rises throughout the morning, levels off and then decreases as business and industry closes at 6pm. It sharply declines after 9pm as we shut off our electricity and prepare for bed. You can view daily updated curves for California here and Ontario here. The problem with wind in Pennsylvania and many locations worldwide is that wind speeds tend to run in exact opposite to the consumer and business demand. The green curve I plotted a PJM hourly output spreadsheet for 2008 found here. If wind output was equal throughout the day it would be about 4% of the total daily output for each hour. You can easily see that wind output varies by about 35% from the low at 3.4% to a high of 4.6%.(those % are the hourly contribution of daily output). When we need the wind the most it is not there, and when we need it less at night, it is blowing more. This created a very interesting scenario for base load coal and for some natural gas plants. Many of the larger plants run at 100% all day long. I would think that for many power grids, with a large amount of wind installed, if the wind output is large, there is more wind power than is needed because demand is low and nuclear, some nat gas and base coal are always running at 100%. This scenario is also more likely during the shoulder seasons of spring and fall, when our air conditioning and heat is off, yet the wind output is higher because seasonally there is more wind in the seasons when we don't need it! This is even more likely to occur on a weekend when many industries are closed. Our total electricity demand is 1/3 residential, 1/3 business and 1/3 commercial or industry. Do you get it?
The demand affects
price. Many grid pays their electrical power plants less for power created during the night because supply is there but demand is less. So when a state created a Renewable Energy Standard forcing the grid and their customers to purchase wind power at a certain price, at any time of the day, then we are paying much, much more for night wind than we would for coal or other traditional. The chart to the right shows you power is more expensive during the summer and less expensive in March and October when wind output is at its' highest. You can see that in the Alberta daily wind charts where there is a rough in of hourly price data for electricity, also discussed on the above referenced youtube video.I can promise you, if they had the choice your electrical company would never consider putting up turbines and then forcing you to buy the power. Wind power always costs more. Usually those costs are hidden in Federal and state tax subsidies and by the fact that wind is only a small percentage of total electricity generation, even though in many locations they are putting up turbines everywhere, destroying our precious landscape, scenic beauty and natural habitat.
Recent Global Temperature Rise Same as 1910-1945
This is so very important! This graph, click to enlarge, is plotted from the monthly mean of surface temperatures from 1910 to present, found here. During about 1910, world temperatures began to rise as we came out of The Little Ice Age. The graph was created here, and you can move the date back to 1880 to see that the rise did not really occur until 1910. I plotted a trend line for two periods of rising temperatures. One before mans CO2 emissions were significant and one after. Understand that the Alarmists state that man's CO2 emissions only really increased since the industrial age began in 1940. No Alarmist is claiming the temperature rise from 1910 to 1945 is from man, it is agreed the rise in temperature was due to natural causes and fluctuations. The alarmists claim that the rise in temperature that began about 1975 through the present is all from man's CO2 emissions. They also claim that the recent stabilization of temperatures, discussed in the post below, is from natural fluctuations. But how could the 35 run up of temperatures from 1910 to 1945 be natural and the same 35 year rise from 1975 to 2009 is anthropogenic, ie. man-made?
Global Temperaturs are Flat for 12 Years
The easiest place on the web that I have found to chart world temperatures is woodfortrees.com. There are 4 different series which measure world temperature, two are satellite based, both of which are managed and analyzed by "skeptics". Both the UAH NSSTC and the RSS MSU measure temperature in the lower troposphere or atmosphere. This is where extra warming from a greenhouse effect is supposed to take place, but there is no greenhouse signature. The other two are land based and combination of sea-surface temperature. They are managed by Alarmists. Land based temperature reliability has been questioned because many of them are taken in cities close to concrete and other man-made heat sources that have been shown to increase temperature, especially at night. See surfacestations.org and wattsupwiththat.com for detailed analysis of their shortcoming. This blog post from Jennifer Marohasey discusses the differences between the four series and so does this very excellent review of global temperature. The graph above is an average of all four temperature series combined on woodfortrees.com found here. I would bookmark that link and watch it!The world temperature trend line has been FLAT for the past 12 years. Now can you see why the Alarmists have changed their tune from "global warming" to "climate change". It is impossible for them to hang their hat on a warming
earth, so they are quite willing to now place any change in climate on man's CO2. Always think of CO2 this way, in parts per 10,000. CO2 has increased from 3.15 parts per 10,000 to 3.85 parts per 10,000 in the past 60 years. About 2/3 of 1 extra molecule of CO2 per 10,000 molecules!The graph to the right plots the woodfortrees.com temperature index since 2001, a mathematical combo of all 4 temperature series. For the past 8.5 years temperatures have been decreasing while CO2 continues to increase. The alarmist fear of rising CO2 is not just in the increased greenhouse effect but their theory is that there will be an amplification of the greenhouse because hotter air will hold more water vapor which will greatly increase temperatures, maybe by a factor 3. As you can plainly see, it is undisputed that instead of rising, temperatures have fallen.
In 1998 there was a very strong El Nino which greatly increased temperature world-wide. There was an enormous spike which all scientists agree was not related to CO2, but was caused by El Nino. El Nino's are a complicated phenomena, occurring in the pacific ocean, which occurring periodically and spontaneously. Ocean winds and upwelling affect climate throughout the world. Google El Nino to find more. This web essay is quite detailed and thorough in showing that El Nino drives world temperature. The facts are that although temperatures have been decreasing since 2001, during those years the world likely experienced the highest temperatures since the Great Warming of about 1200AD. I strongly recommend you read The Little Ice Age, only $7 shipped on Amazon, which is a historical study of both the Great Warming and the Little Ice.
My Exxon Mobile Secret - I LOVE THEM! Rant.
I LOVE EXXON MOBILE!!!
Yes I do. They have to be my most favorite company in the world. In fact, they pay for just about everything I do. They never send me money, but they give me time, loads and loads of it everyday and for that I am thankful. Unlike the WACKO FOOLS who have driven hundreds of thousands of miles gladly using their product, and unlike the WACKO FOOLS who have never ever sat through a winter night warmed by wood they cut with a hand saw. (no no no, chainsaws run on gas). These WACKO FOOLS hate the company that provides the most for their money of ANY OTHER COMPANY or ENTERPRISE. Nothing comes close to what Exxon Mobile and the other oil/real energy companies give us in value for our dollars. I can't imagine walking to work 14 miles each way, and I often come home for lunch. Yes, I'm a bad boy polluter, I should eat a cold sandwich instead I guess. I live in the country and not one neighbor has a windmill up to supply electricity. Why would they? Only a fool would consider such an idea, but these fools have no problem in forcing their fool ideas upon us.
Not one person I know in my entire county has been affected by global warming. There has been a one degree rise in temperature this century, maybe?, but now they want to tax each and every one of us, maybe thousands of dollars, either that or send us back to the impoverished Stone Age. I read per capita like the civil war era, that won't happen, instead they will just take our money and spend it on FOOL IDEAS that no sensible person would ever consider spending money on himself.
I was so happy to see Obama win. I hated that fool war in Iraq form the very beginning. Now we aren't even out of there and don't have time to catch our breath from that disaster, when we have an entire new set of FOOLS trying to ruin our lives. Can you believe they wanted to make the polar bear endangered when there is no proof that the stupid bear is even in danger? We are supposed to worry about some dumb island supposedly sinking in the Pacific when I have bridges and roads that haven't been fixed in years. I would much rather give health care to every poor or even lazy persons, before I would give these BILLIONS or TRILLIONS to the band of ruffians that has taken our country over.
Give us back the 90.'s when the money flowed freely. why did it? I'll tell you why. Because all we cared about was watching Geraldo and laugh at poor Bill for Monica and watch the shenanigans of the OJ trial. That was good fun at someone else's expense and folly. Our government was gridlocked and WE CITIZENS got to keep our money while government was at a standstill. That was when computer geeks actually did something for us. Now they just sit at their screens and create models so they can steal us blind. And most of the sheep in this country don't have ANY clue what THEY are trying to do to them.
Recycling was the start of the stupidity. What could be more STUPID than getting people to save a big box of plastic or glass that is worth either Nothing or 10 cents. Then sending an enormous truck around to pick it up. I am not totally against recycling, because likely newspaper or office has some value. I recycle newspapers at home for convenience and drop them off to get them counted for office paper to skirt around the Mandatory requirements of my offices. A few weeks ago, I followed this enormous truck with black stinky smoke gushing out of the tailpipe, two guys on the truck, picking up containers of plastic that are worth nothing or 10 cents! Two guys getting paid $35,000/year with benefits on a $40,000 truck. Two guys getting paid $500/day or $70/hour riding around a truck that costs almost $100/day to run =$600/day or $90/hour to pick up stuff worth nothing or 10 cents.
Now they say we are running out of landfill space. Another complete idiotic, moronic JOKE. BECAUSE guess what, we just found space for 10,000 or more wind turbines(USELESS TO OUR FUTURE ENERGY NEEDS). I live in Pennsylvania and we have SO MUCH space for landfils that we have two located right in our city boundaries, we accept trash from the heavily populated NJ & NY & Conn and we haven't even started to consider building a landfill on the never ending rural land I have right around me. But no, there is no landfill space, so you have to be a MORON and save your little 10 cents worth of trash. Why? I'll tell you, JOBS. Just like Obama says. We are going to find someway, any way will do, to get another $2 a week from a million people = $2 Million dollars and that equals $100 Million/year and that equals 2,000 jobs and that equals 8,000 or more voters.
This reminds me of the other stupidity I see practiced with GLEE. The saving of aluminum can TOPS! Seriously, there is some value to saving aluminum cans, what, you save a big trash bag and at least you get about 30 cents pound. But they have STUPID PEOPLE running around saving the teeny tiny tops. If you do that all year, then the 100 STUPID people all meet, you end up with $20, get 200 STUPID people to do it and you get $40. SEE. If enough STUPID PEOPLE do enough stupid things, you get a STUPID RESULT. So since we HATE EXXON MOBILE, that's obvious, we would rather cut wood with a saw or ride a shitty horse all over, we will do anything STUPID to fit in with the crowd.
Yes I do. They have to be my most favorite company in the world. In fact, they pay for just about everything I do. They never send me money, but they give me time, loads and loads of it everyday and for that I am thankful. Unlike the WACKO FOOLS who have driven hundreds of thousands of miles gladly using their product, and unlike the WACKO FOOLS who have never ever sat through a winter night warmed by wood they cut with a hand saw. (no no no, chainsaws run on gas). These WACKO FOOLS hate the company that provides the most for their money of ANY OTHER COMPANY or ENTERPRISE. Nothing comes close to what Exxon Mobile and the other oil/real energy companies give us in value for our dollars. I can't imagine walking to work 14 miles each way, and I often come home for lunch. Yes, I'm a bad boy polluter, I should eat a cold sandwich instead I guess. I live in the country and not one neighbor has a windmill up to supply electricity. Why would they? Only a fool would consider such an idea, but these fools have no problem in forcing their fool ideas upon us.
Not one person I know in my entire county has been affected by global warming. There has been a one degree rise in temperature this century, maybe?, but now they want to tax each and every one of us, maybe thousands of dollars, either that or send us back to the impoverished Stone Age. I read per capita like the civil war era, that won't happen, instead they will just take our money and spend it on FOOL IDEAS that no sensible person would ever consider spending money on himself.
I was so happy to see Obama win. I hated that fool war in Iraq form the very beginning. Now we aren't even out of there and don't have time to catch our breath from that disaster, when we have an entire new set of FOOLS trying to ruin our lives. Can you believe they wanted to make the polar bear endangered when there is no proof that the stupid bear is even in danger? We are supposed to worry about some dumb island supposedly sinking in the Pacific when I have bridges and roads that haven't been fixed in years. I would much rather give health care to every poor or even lazy persons, before I would give these BILLIONS or TRILLIONS to the band of ruffians that has taken our country over.
Give us back the 90.'s when the money flowed freely. why did it? I'll tell you why. Because all we cared about was watching Geraldo and laugh at poor Bill for Monica and watch the shenanigans of the OJ trial. That was good fun at someone else's expense and folly. Our government was gridlocked and WE CITIZENS got to keep our money while government was at a standstill. That was when computer geeks actually did something for us. Now they just sit at their screens and create models so they can steal us blind. And most of the sheep in this country don't have ANY clue what THEY are trying to do to them.
Recycling was the start of the stupidity. What could be more STUPID than getting people to save a big box of plastic or glass that is worth either Nothing or 10 cents. Then sending an enormous truck around to pick it up. I am not totally against recycling, because likely newspaper or office has some value. I recycle newspapers at home for convenience and drop them off to get them counted for office paper to skirt around the Mandatory requirements of my offices. A few weeks ago, I followed this enormous truck with black stinky smoke gushing out of the tailpipe, two guys on the truck, picking up containers of plastic that are worth nothing or 10 cents! Two guys getting paid $35,000/year with benefits on a $40,000 truck. Two guys getting paid $500/day or $70/hour riding around a truck that costs almost $100/day to run =$600/day or $90/hour to pick up stuff worth nothing or 10 cents.
Now they say we are running out of landfill space. Another complete idiotic, moronic JOKE. BECAUSE guess what, we just found space for 10,000 or more wind turbines(USELESS TO OUR FUTURE ENERGY NEEDS). I live in Pennsylvania and we have SO MUCH space for landfils that we have two located right in our city boundaries, we accept trash from the heavily populated NJ & NY & Conn and we haven't even started to consider building a landfill on the never ending rural land I have right around me. But no, there is no landfill space, so you have to be a MORON and save your little 10 cents worth of trash. Why? I'll tell you, JOBS. Just like Obama says. We are going to find someway, any way will do, to get another $2 a week from a million people = $2 Million dollars and that equals $100 Million/year and that equals 2,000 jobs and that equals 8,000 or more voters.
This reminds me of the other stupidity I see practiced with GLEE. The saving of aluminum can TOPS! Seriously, there is some value to saving aluminum cans, what, you save a big trash bag and at least you get about 30 cents pound. But they have STUPID PEOPLE running around saving the teeny tiny tops. If you do that all year, then the 100 STUPID people all meet, you end up with $20, get 200 STUPID people to do it and you get $40. SEE. If enough STUPID PEOPLE do enough stupid things, you get a STUPID RESULT. So since we HATE EXXON MOBILE, that's obvious, we would rather cut wood with a saw or ride a shitty horse all over, we will do anything STUPID to fit in with the crowd.
Have Midwest Winters Grown Shorter and Milder?
I read today, June 16th, on ICECAP the article, 
Obama targets US public with call for climate action. The article states "Americans have already been living with evidence of changing climate, the report said. Over the last 30 years winters have grown shorter and milder, with a 2.1C (7F) rise in winter temperatures in the Midwest and northern Great Plains. Hurricanes have become deadlier." So I did a quick check of the historical temperatures of Midwestern cities found here at the US Historical Climatology Network. You can check the temps of your own US city. I selected Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska and randomly selected a city from each state. Here is the result. 
The Missouri city had a definite decrease in the mean annual temperatures from the 1960's through the 1980's. But temperatures have just returned to the same levels of the first half of the last century. There is no real trend in Nebraska and Kansas actually appears to have had lower temperatures since mid 1950's. Like I said, these were the first locations I picked from each state, I didn't cherry-pick. If winter temperatures had increased 7F the past 30 years, then the summer temps must have drastically decreased because the mean temperatures have not really changed. What is so said is most "good people" are just 
going to read this report and trust the scientists and President Obama. But I have found out in so many instances that when claims of these alarmists are checked against the actual data they turn out to be exaggerations or outright lies.
What about the claim that hurricanes are more dead? Well, that isn't really a lie, because Katrina killed so many people in the US and there has been a huge increase in the population of the hurricane zones, causing more destruction and death. But have hurricanes become more deadly? The answer is no. Look at the Atlantic Major Hurricane Index chart, the link is found on my blog. 2005 was a big hurricane year, but less than 1950 and the same as 1963(about). Look at the Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy chart, again we saw a bit of a spike a few years ago, but certainly nothing outside of the normal standard deviation when compared to the early 1900's. The Global Cyclone Energy Index chart only has data from 1979, but you can see there has been no overall global increase in cyclone energy since 1979. Yet they claim more deadly hurricanes in the past 30 years. Here are comments from a NOAA hurricane scientist stating he strongly disagrees with the conclusions of this report.
LIES, LIES AND MORE DAMNED LIES! This is terrible. First we had the Tech Bubble Collapse, then Iraq, then the Financial Mortgage Crisis and now we are told to be scared to death about Global Warming. So much so, that we are to just open up our wallets and pay tax for every bit of energy that we use. And where is that money going? It is hard to take.
Obama targets US public with call for climate action. The article states "Americans have already been living with evidence of changing climate, the report said. Over the last 30 years winters have grown shorter and milder, with a 2.1C (7F) rise in winter temperatures in the Midwest and northern Great Plains. Hurricanes have become deadlier." So I did a quick check of the historical temperatures of Midwestern cities found here at the US Historical Climatology Network. You can check the temps of your own US city. I selected Missouri, Kansas and Nebraska and randomly selected a city from each state. Here is the result. 
The Missouri city had a definite decrease in the mean annual temperatures from the 1960's through the 1980's. But temperatures have just returned to the same levels of the first half of the last century. There is no real trend in Nebraska and Kansas actually appears to have had lower temperatures since mid 1950's. Like I said, these were the first locations I picked from each state, I didn't cherry-pick. If winter temperatures had increased 7F the past 30 years, then the summer temps must have drastically decreased because the mean temperatures have not really changed. What is so said is most "good people" are just 
going to read this report and trust the scientists and President Obama. But I have found out in so many instances that when claims of these alarmists are checked against the actual data they turn out to be exaggerations or outright lies.What about the claim that hurricanes are more dead? Well, that isn't really a lie, because Katrina killed so many people in the US and there has been a huge increase in the population of the hurricane zones, causing more destruction and death. But have hurricanes become more deadly? The answer is no. Look at the Atlantic Major Hurricane Index chart, the link is found on my blog. 2005 was a big hurricane year, but less than 1950 and the same as 1963(about). Look at the Atlantic Accumulated Cyclone Energy chart, again we saw a bit of a spike a few years ago, but certainly nothing outside of the normal standard deviation when compared to the early 1900's. The Global Cyclone Energy Index chart only has data from 1979, but you can see there has been no overall global increase in cyclone energy since 1979. Yet they claim more deadly hurricanes in the past 30 years. Here are comments from a NOAA hurricane scientist stating he strongly disagrees with the conclusions of this report.
LIES, LIES AND MORE DAMNED LIES! This is terrible. First we had the Tech Bubble Collapse, then Iraq, then the Financial Mortgage Crisis and now we are told to be scared to death about Global Warming. So much so, that we are to just open up our wallets and pay tax for every bit of energy that we use. And where is that money going? It is hard to take.
PJM Load versus Wind Turbine Output - Monthly
I live in Pennsylvania and the grid is managed by PJM, which stands for Pennsylvania-Jersey-Maryland. The demand is the need for or use of electricity. To the left the blue line I plotted from data found here. Click these charts to enlarge for better viewing. I used the monthly estimates for 2009 and then calculated the % of yearly electricity used per month. The three highest months are June, July and August when our electricity needs are the greatest because of our need for air conditioning. Those three months each average 10% of the yearly demand, whereas the other months each average about 8%. We use about 20% more electricity in the summer months. The green line is a plot of the wind 2008 MWh output for one of the regions of PJM found here. As you can see the doesn't blow in the Northeast in the summer. The three lowest months are July, August and September. The turbines only supply about 12% of their total output in those months, whereas they should supply about 25% if averaged equally throughout the entire year.
The problem is that when our electricity needs are greatest the wind is not there to supply. I calculated the MWhours supplied per day for July-Sept 2008 from that excel sheet and to the right is a daily plot of those three months. The amount plotted on the vertical or Y-axis represents MWhours per day. The average for that PJM region in July-August is 4,000 MWhours per day, or 167 MW per hour) which is a pitiful small amount of electricity for a society compared to a what a medium sized 1,000 MW plant generates, which is 1,000 MW's per hour or 24,000 MWhours per day. From these simple graphs I hope we can all agree on this - the Obama/Green plan to construct many thousands of turbines will surely create jobs. It will create jobs because we can be absolutely sure that NOT ONE job from our traditional electrical generation will be lost. Not one job. But when you plug in your TV or use your air conditioner or electric heat, it will be the same old heat as always. The product will not be better to any degree by the end use consumer. It will have to be more expensive simply because we will have two systems constructed to supply the same exact product of power. What if Obama said I am going to create jobs by employing more people to supply your tap water or process your social security benefits? Of course, it is claimed, there is a reason for this more expensive electricity and the reason is to save mankind from the perils of global warming. We will leave the question of man-made global warming open for now, but even if man is creating global warming by generating electricity with fossil fuel, I can absolutely assure you it is nonsense that we, our society in the USA, is going to affect global warming by building thousands or even hundreds of thousands of wind turbines. But I guess there are many that will say, we can try anyway!Hats Off to PJM for posting their wind output data online for the public to find. We pay for electricity and these companies are highly regulated semi-public companies. PJM is more honest than Basin Electric in North Dakota who were posting their weekly wind data, until a little over a month ago they stopped. It might be just a coincidence, but after I created a youtube video and analzed their data, they stopped updating their weekly wind output charts. Better to stay hidden so the public can continue to remain ignorant!
Here is a very interesting news article discussing what it is like in the heat of the summer when our electricity needs are the greatest. PJM which supplies me electricity here in Pennsylvania is our WORLD's fourth largest power grid. The journalist is inside the nerve center of electricity supply and captures the tension as the grid managers try to supply our needs so that a brownout or blackout does not occur. You can be sure that on this hot, summer day that the wind was not blowing and the wind turbines were sitting idle and useless!
Polar Bear Populations are Stable and Healthy
Global warming is all about the polar bear. The thin scraggly, tired beast. Bears are why the public is mesmerized and concerned about the Artic ice. Right now their are millions of people living in sewage and starving, but yet our concern is for the polar bear. OUR minds are like a big magnetic, which vibrates with the thoughts we hear and entertain the most. No one would care about how open Artic shipping lanes could increase prosperity in this world, they have been told to care about polar bears. No one cares that we have millions starving, living in squalor, in need of simple electricity and water which could be easily provided if we stopped spending Billions on climate and soon, many Billions on the Cap/Trade Punishment Tax.Here is a nice paper about the poor polar bear. Again, the FEAR is all based on computer projections, not the reality of today.
They write that polar bear populations are in good shape and some studies have shown that polar bears are hurt by cold weather. They are not endangered right now, they are only endangered by what the authors conclude are “unscientific” forecasts based on an “erroneous complex set of assumptions”. They quote an IPCC lead author who states they don’t make predictions, only “what if” scenarios.
I am a nature guy, a state breeding bird atlas regional coordinator, and NO ONE wants to talk about any of this stuff. Almost every single one of them is completely magnetized that the end is near, we are destroying the planet and drastic measures need to be taken, by someone, somehow. They don’t want to look at data, why bother, we have the National Geographic Channel, Audubon, and Sierra Club pummeling us monthly in our nature journals with this NONSENSE, and almost all MASS MEDIA just about everyone else piling on!
Here is the best the “alarmists” can dish out on polar bears. The official Petition to list them as endangered.
to the left are charts(click to enlarge( from pages 20-21 summarizing the 20 distinct bear populations, by region. 16 regions are either stable or unknown, while 2 are increasing and 2 are decreasing. Bottom line: the zzzBest Polar Bear Alarmists come up with a 170 page petition, but the only facts they present are what if’s, projections and worries, but absolutely no evidence that the overall polar bear population is threatened. This is the kind of scientific garbage that is ruling the roost these dark days. This is not science but is politics.
Replacing Nuclear Power Plants in Pennsylvania with Wind Power
Let's consider how nuclear power plants contribute to the electricity grid in Pennsylvania. At left are official government statistics, found here, of the capacity and net generation of the five nuclear plants in Pennsylvania. Capacity Net in MW(s) refers to the maximum power output while Net Generation in Million kWh refers to the energy produced. Think of power as a instantaneous push, akin to how much weight can a weight lifter can lift, while generation refers to energy which is a certain amount of push or power measured in time. One kilowatt hour is the energy needed to light 10, 100 watt light bulbs for one hour.In 2007 Pennsylvania used 152,000,000 MWhours of electricity. How much did our 5 nuclear plants contribute to our electricity needs? Convert the 76,000 million kwh nuclear generation by dividing by 1,000 to convert to MWhours and then multiply by 1,000,000 to convert from million MWhours to simple MWhours and the result is 76,000,000 MWhours. Almost half of the electricity needs of Pennsylvania were produced by 5 nuclear plants.
How many wind turbines would we need to replace these 5 nuclear plants? Most of the turbines in Pennsylvania now are rated at 1.5 MW, however the new ones constructed are rated at 2 MW. The wind turbine only produce electricity when the wind blows greater than 12 mph making their average output somewhere between 25-30%, we will use 27%. This means that a 2 MW tubines with a 27% output yields an average of .54 MWhours throughout the entire year. To find out how much electricity that is we must multiply by the hours in a year which is 8760. One 2 MW turbine makes about .54 MW x 8760 = 4,730 MWhours per year. We would need 76,000,000 divided by 4,730 or 16,000 large turbines to replace our 5 nuclear plants.
The United States Department of Energy wrote a report that stated that wind power could supply 20% of the United States Electricity by 2030. How many wind turbines in Pennsylvania would it take to to do that right now? Since it would take 16,000 turbines to replace the nuclear plants which supply 50% of our electricity, it would take at least 6,000 turbines to satisfy 20% of our needs right now.
But we could NEVER EVER replace 5 nuclear plants with 16,000 turbines, because the nuclear plants run almost all the time producing a constant output, while the wind turbines only produce when wind speed is greater than 12 mph. And their output is only a trickle until the wind is over 20 mph. I refer you to the post below which explains why turbines don't even produce their maximum power until the wind speed is greater than 25 mph.
Our electricity needs have grown about 1.7% per year these past ten years. At that rate in 2030 we will need 50% more electricity or 9,000 turbines. For simplicity, let's use 2007 energy statistics. Each wind turbine needs about 4 acres of clear cut so we would need to bulldoze and clear over 36,000 acres which is 56 square miles of turbines, if they were put in one place. But the wind in Pennsylvania is weak except on our ridges which are generally narrow. Turbines too close don't operate at maximum efficiency so they are spread out at about 6 per mile, resulting in a line of turbines 1,000 miles long stretched out along our ridge tops.
Then the problems begin. Our electricity needs are greatest in the summer when the wind speeds are at a minimum with many days of very little or no wind, meaning no electricity produced. Also, statistics clearly show that the wind tends to blow more at night than during the day when our electricity needs are the greatest. And the conundrum that we face is that our electricity need are greatest during the night and in the summer, just when the wind DO NOT BLOW!!!
This 20% of wind power would need 100% of backup at all time because it is not uncommon for turbine output to go from close to 80% output to less than 10% output in six to eight hours, even when spread out over a wide area such as Pennsylvania. Look at the Alberta post below or look at the wind power output right now in Ireland. Irelands maximum output if over 725 MW and keep clicking the previous day button and note that there are very few days when maximum output is achieved. Also, for further confirmation, read my study of Texas wind power below, which is claimed to be the second best state for wind power.
We keep hearing about the green jobs that will be produced with alternative energy and that is a correct statement. Because there will not be one single traditional power job lost with the introduction of wind power, because wether wind power is 2% of the total or 20%, the traditional power plants will need to be fully staffed at all times. In fact, they will need more workers and a new wind integration department and likely more plant maintenance to integrate the wind and maintain their equipment as fights the never ending battle to increase and decrease output in synch with the vagaries of the wind. We haven't even mentioned the hundreds or maybe thousands of extra miles of clear cut power lines that we will need for this energy to reach its' customers.
This is GREEN ENERGY. The National Audubon Society, which I have been a member of for many years, supports and promotes this green energy, all because of the threat of climate change. Since the late 1880's our planet has been recovering from the coldest temperatures in over 2,000 years. Those lower temperatures created the glaciers which have been receeding for over 130 years. The warmer climate we are experiencing has led to enormous benefits to our agriculture and society as a whole. Yet the global warming we have experienced has been less than 2 degrees fahrenheit over the past century. Why would anyone want colder temperatures than we have now?
But for now we will forget about global warming the theory of complete destruction of our planent and way of life that is promoted by the media and some climate scientists. On our next post we will further evaluate the enormous damage to the environment those thousands of turbines are sure to cause. And what is so intriguing about this folly, is that those turbines are going up because the environmentalists, like National Audubon Society, Sierra Club and MANY other of our groups formed to protect our environment are promoting and demanding green energy. Green Energy is NOT GREEN. We are now facing the greatest environmental crisis of our time, completely and 100% caused by so-called ENVIRONMENTALIST.
Man-made and Natural CO2 in the atmosphere
Guess where I'm at? I'm in a hotel in Washington DC and tomorrow I'll be attending the Third International Conference on Climate Change. I am truly looking forward to a terrific lineup of speakers. My heroes of the truth.Two important concepts of AGW theory. (anthropometric or man-made global warming).
CO2 has been officially measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii since 1957. during that time it has risen from 315 parts per million to 385 parts per million. That is claimed to be responsible for the warming on planet earth which we have experienced since the late 1970's through 2001. World temperatures are flat since 2002. The chart above is from Wikipedia CO2. I want to discuss two important points which the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, make when promoting the theory of AGW.
Point #1 - CO2 has risen over 30% during a period of general rising temperatures on planet earth. AGREED. But that is parts per million. Make it parts per 10,000 and that means CO2 rose from 3.15 to 3.85 parts per 10,000, or less than one extra molecule per 10,000. Keep that in your mind. One extra ball per 10,000 balls.
Point #2 which is what I want to discuss in this post. Click on the chart to right which comes from the Energy Information Agency, a Government Agency that promotes AGW. All scientists agree that CO2 from fossil fuels is only a small part of CO2 expelled into the atmosphere. By far the majority is from two other categories, Vegetation and Soil(VS), and the Ocean. There is a tremendous amt of CO2 stored in biomass, which is rotting trees and vegetation. Note the blue arrow numbers. VS & oceans expels 210.2 billion metric tons while they have a sink or take back 212.4. This give and take of CO2 into the atmosphere and back into plant matter or the oceans is all natural and accepted theory, but the numbers can only be estimates or guesses. Now here is the problem. Bad-man comes along and he drives cars, turns on lights and keeps pipes from freezing and expels 7.2 billion metric tons of CO2, which is 3.4% of what the total estimated to be created from natural sources. The earth is enormous and all of these estimates can be though of only as very wild computer guesses, like what will the DOW be at in 6 months, blah blah blah).
But what happens is that of the 7.2 bmt, 212.4 minus 210.2 = 2.2 is taken back into the earths CO2 sink and we are left with about 5.0 bmt extra. Please note the oceans stores 38,000 bmtons while the V & S stores 2,300 bmtons. Now why doesn't the V&S and Ocean sinks take back the entire 7.2 bmt of CO2? The Alarmists (aka paid to scare scientists) simply say the computer jibberish balderdash say it can't. 7.2 is only 3.5% of the value naturally expelled into the atmosphere. That's the theory they promote. That 3.5% builds up and up each year and that is what is causing the greenhouse effect. That is what you have to believe. Here is the official version, which the number of above were taken from. Chapter 7 of IPCC report. But it is quite laborious reading and it loads slow.
If you are a climate change newbie, then note this quote from the EIA site above. "Assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggest that the Earth’s climate has warmed between 0.6 and 0.9 degrees Celsius over the past century and that human activity affecting the atmosphere is “very likely” an important driving factor.1 The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (Summary for Policymakers) states, “Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
Note they only claim the climate has warmed less than 1 degree Celcius and the warming since mid-20th Century is from man. But the climate had a slight cooling from 1947 to about 1977. The man-made warming they are referring to ocurred from 1977 to 2002, everything else including the temperature stabilization since 2002 has been natural. Their theory - If The Shoe Fits Wear it!
Also note this point, man-made climate change... "is very likely that it is not due to known natural causes alone.”1According to the IPCC “very likely” indicates that there is a 90 percent chance that this is the case.
What that sentence above means is that the IPCC does not KNOW that man-made climate change is a FACT, they state it is a THEORY, meaning they are very likely or 90% sure. Many uninformed public think this AGW is completely proven, but it is not, it is a theory.
Tomorrow, I spend time with the truthsayers of global warming. Men who are not afraid of their convictions and who are not afraid to stand up for what is right when everyone else is wrong.
I highly recommend you read this paper for more explanation.
Here is one of my greatest heroes of real global warming science. Read this, it is the most important reference on this blog. I am going to try to post twice a week.
The variability of Alberta wind and the difficulties of fossil power plants matching output
Alberta Electrical System Operator (AESO) is one of the few power companies that posts their weekly wind power input. Below are the 4 charts for April that can be found here. Hats off to Alberta for revealing to their consumers the contributions of wind to the power grid. 
Click pic.'s to enlarge.
Let's look at the week of April 5th. The top blue line represents the load or demand of electricity and is scaled on the right. You can see the daily needs vary between about 6600 MW and 8200 MW. The peak needs are during the middle of the day and the demand crashes down at night. Alberta has a significant amount of wind power in their grid. From these charts it appears the maximum wind input is 500 MW(the left Y axis scale) or about 6% of peak demand in April.
Look at how the peak demand is much lower on April 10th & 11&. April 10th was Good Friday and I assume there was a holiday which closed industries and decreased demand. Most demand graphs show a decrease use of electricity on weekends.
The chart of the next week April 12-18th shows
that the demand on Friday April 17th, normalized to the weeday output. Electricity needs are less on Sunday April 12th than on Saturday April 18th. There is almost no wind power production on April 16th. Notice that in all these Alberta graphs the wind power can easily double or half in just a few hours, in fact that would be typical.
Click here to look at the next week of April 19th. There are even more erratic with enormous swings seen each day. On April 22nd at about 2am we are at peak wind of 430MW, then it quickly crashes to about 60 MW at 1pm, only to rise back up to 400 MW at 6pm and then crashes to 0 MW at midnight.
These enormous fluctuations of power all contribute to the electrical grid but the question we have to ask is Alberta able to follow that dramatically fluctuating wind input with an equal, exact and instanteous decrease or increase of fossil fuel consumption. AESO produces almost all of their electricity by either coal or natural gas, with only small contributions from nuclear and hydro.
The company slide to the right is from California ISO presentation, found here, and reveals how Cali handled these huge swings on March 23, 2005. Look at the left up arrow when at 1:30am wind is producing 1000 MW, that is a tremendous amount of power, equal to a medium sized power plant. The forecast is for the wind to die and by 10am that 1000 MW is now ZERO. There is no wind power for four hours until 2pm when the wind power steeply builds until it reaches 800 MW output at 10pm. These dramatic changes are typical for not only Alberta and Cali but for anywhere where turbines produce power.
The question we all have to ask, was the wind power to the right of the up arrow and to the left of the down arrow wasted, or did a natural gas plant follow this change in output instantaneously. Another very important question. The steep decrease in output occurred exactly as the morning demand was rising, causing the power plants to actually have to work twice as hard to follow the, Increased Demand + Decrease Wind Power = VERY FAST RAMPING, which is defined as change in output. Natural gas plants are better suited to change power output quickly because their output can be quickly changed by simply varying the amount of natural gas burns. A natural gas plants could follow this load change, if they wanted to. But the problem is the unpredictability of the wind.
In the evening as wind output was increasing, the needs curve of California ISO consumers were decreasing. The traditional power plants has to suddenly and quickly decrease their power output to match this. Look here for the daily California ISO demand curve.
Cali ISO likely forecasted a decrease in wind speed, but they would have difficulty in determing how quick would the power output change would occur. Remember, as discussed in post below, wind output does not vary equally with change in wind speed but Energy=xVel3, as a cube of wind speed. What if the wind decreased by 500 MW and then spiked up 200 MW for an hour or two, only to quickly spike down to zero. By looking at the Alberta output and any other outputs you can see that is the daily reality. This is not a problem when wind represents a small percentage of the total grid, because the power company has plenty of excess to make up for any shortfall in wind, they always have about 10% excess capacity to handle a short spike in demand. But we pay for this difficult to measure and unpredictable wind energy either way. When their predictions are inaccurate, that is what causes a blackout. A few posts below I stated RELIANCE on wind power will cause a blackout. I didn't say that wind power will cause blackouts, just a RELIANCE on wind will. We can't rely on wind!
Finally, there are two conclusions of this post. One - it is quite obvious that wind, even dispersed over a wide geographical area like Alberta, regularly falls to zero output. The Alberta grid is almost 50% coal. Do you think they will ever shut down a coal plant in Alberta, no matter how many wind turbines they build? President Obama mistakenly thinks that by raising taxes on coal that we will be able to put coal out of business and substitute wind? How can we possibly do that unless we either want blackouts a couple times per week or want to substitute reliable but expensive natural gas or nuclear for those coal plants. YOUR ELECTRIC BILLS ARE GOING UP!
Point two is that it is obvious that because of these very steep changes in wind output and input, traditional power plants are not able to act as a complete substitute. Instead there is a partial duplication of the wind energy with fossil energy. According to this slide from Cali ISO, they duplicated all of the wind output with traditional power between the left up arrow and the right down arrow. The real question is how much duplication is there averaged out? Is it only 5% or 20% or even 40% as calculated in this paper from Germany on page 6. (3.2 TWh of compensation and regulation by fossil for 8.3 TWh wind feed-in). Other papers put this figure to be much lower and I would hope so.
Again, this is not an extreme example, but typical of all wind farms, no matter how widely dispersed over a geographic region. America meet your new power supply, it is expensive, ugly and damaging to the environment. Take a look at the daily updated total wind output in Ireland and you will see it is the same. Click previous day and it is easy to get the message.
Speaking of environment, I have gotten to that yet. So far we have been talking dollars and cents. But environment is what has called me to this cause and we will get there soon. It will start to get bloody.
.
Click pic.'s to enlarge.Let's look at the week of April 5th. The top blue line represents the load or demand of electricity and is scaled on the right. You can see the daily needs vary between about 6600 MW and 8200 MW. The peak needs are during the middle of the day and the demand crashes down at night. Alberta has a significant amount of wind power in their grid. From these charts it appears the maximum wind input is 500 MW(the left Y axis scale) or about 6% of peak demand in April.
Look at how the peak demand is much lower on April 10th & 11&. April 10th was Good Friday and I assume there was a holiday which closed industries and decreased demand. Most demand graphs show a decrease use of electricity on weekends.
The chart of the next week April 12-18th shows
that the demand on Friday April 17th, normalized to the weeday output. Electricity needs are less on Sunday April 12th than on Saturday April 18th. There is almost no wind power production on April 16th. Notice that in all these Alberta graphs the wind power can easily double or half in just a few hours, in fact that would be typical.Click here to look at the next week of April 19th. There are even more erratic with enormous swings seen each day. On April 22nd at about 2am we are at peak wind of 430MW, then it quickly crashes to about 60 MW at 1pm, only to rise back up to 400 MW at 6pm and then crashes to 0 MW at midnight.
These enormous fluctuations of power all contribute to the electrical grid but the question we have to ask is Alberta able to follow that dramatically fluctuating wind input with an equal, exact and instanteous decrease or increase of fossil fuel consumption. AESO produces almost all of their electricity by either coal or natural gas, with only small contributions from nuclear and hydro.
The company slide to the right is from California ISO presentation, found here, and reveals how Cali handled these huge swings on March 23, 2005. Look at the left up arrow when at 1:30am wind is producing 1000 MW, that is a tremendous amount of power, equal to a medium sized power plant. The forecast is for the wind to die and by 10am that 1000 MW is now ZERO. There is no wind power for four hours until 2pm when the wind power steeply builds until it reaches 800 MW output at 10pm. These dramatic changes are typical for not only Alberta and Cali but for anywhere where turbines produce power.
The question we all have to ask, was the wind power to the right of the up arrow and to the left of the down arrow wasted, or did a natural gas plant follow this change in output instantaneously. Another very important question. The steep decrease in output occurred exactly as the morning demand was rising, causing the power plants to actually have to work twice as hard to follow the, Increased Demand + Decrease Wind Power = VERY FAST RAMPING, which is defined as change in output. Natural gas plants are better suited to change power output quickly because their output can be quickly changed by simply varying the amount of natural gas burns. A natural gas plants could follow this load change, if they wanted to. But the problem is the unpredictability of the wind.
In the evening as wind output was increasing, the needs curve of California ISO consumers were decreasing. The traditional power plants has to suddenly and quickly decrease their power output to match this. Look here for the daily California ISO demand curve.
Cali ISO likely forecasted a decrease in wind speed, but they would have difficulty in determing how quick would the power output change would occur. Remember, as discussed in post below, wind output does not vary equally with change in wind speed but Energy=xVel3, as a cube of wind speed. What if the wind decreased by 500 MW and then spiked up 200 MW for an hour or two, only to quickly spike down to zero. By looking at the Alberta output and any other outputs you can see that is the daily reality. This is not a problem when wind represents a small percentage of the total grid, because the power company has plenty of excess to make up for any shortfall in wind, they always have about 10% excess capacity to handle a short spike in demand. But we pay for this difficult to measure and unpredictable wind energy either way. When their predictions are inaccurate, that is what causes a blackout. A few posts below I stated RELIANCE on wind power will cause a blackout. I didn't say that wind power will cause blackouts, just a RELIANCE on wind will. We can't rely on wind!
Finally, there are two conclusions of this post. One - it is quite obvious that wind, even dispersed over a wide geographical area like Alberta, regularly falls to zero output. The Alberta grid is almost 50% coal. Do you think they will ever shut down a coal plant in Alberta, no matter how many wind turbines they build? President Obama mistakenly thinks that by raising taxes on coal that we will be able to put coal out of business and substitute wind? How can we possibly do that unless we either want blackouts a couple times per week or want to substitute reliable but expensive natural gas or nuclear for those coal plants. YOUR ELECTRIC BILLS ARE GOING UP!
Point two is that it is obvious that because of these very steep changes in wind output and input, traditional power plants are not able to act as a complete substitute. Instead there is a partial duplication of the wind energy with fossil energy. According to this slide from Cali ISO, they duplicated all of the wind output with traditional power between the left up arrow and the right down arrow. The real question is how much duplication is there averaged out? Is it only 5% or 20% or even 40% as calculated in this paper from Germany on page 6. (3.2 TWh of compensation and regulation by fossil for 8.3 TWh wind feed-in). Other papers put this figure to be much lower and I would hope so.
Again, this is not an extreme example, but typical of all wind farms, no matter how widely dispersed over a geographic region. America meet your new power supply, it is expensive, ugly and damaging to the environment. Take a look at the daily updated total wind output in Ireland and you will see it is the same. Click previous day and it is easy to get the message.
Speaking of environment, I have gotten to that yet. So far we have been talking dollars and cents. But environment is what has called me to this cause and we will get there soon. It will start to get bloody.
.
What Does Climate Change Have To Do With Electricity?
This blog is primarily concerned with the viability of wind as a source for electricity. Don't confuse yourself and think this blog is stating that wind is useless as an electrical power source. Of course wind turbines produce electrical power. What concerns me are the motives for it's use and the price. Price meaning more than cost, which is dollars and cents, but also the terrible environmental price of the natural scenic beauty of our landscape, the creatures which are affected by the turbines and the human being who live in the direct vicinity of the turbines.
Our society has to make many decisions as a group for what is best for the entire group, even though a small amount of people may be adversely affected to benefit the needs of the many. Consider the interstate highway running one mile from my house and with an open window I can hear in the distance. Many farms were divided and a few houses were destroyed to make room for the highway under eminent domain. Yet, 30 years later, many thousands of people continue benefit each day from those dislocated properties and peoples. It was a good trade off for our society.
For wind power it is the opposite, the severity of the trade off greatly depends on the location. Building the turbines on beautiful ridges in Vermont or Pennsylvania forever destroys the scenic beauty of the area(at least until they are removed and the concrete pads will never be removed, never!) and fragments the valuable forests on these ridges. For years the environmentalists preached the gospel of the danger of fragmentation to our ecosystem, yet now many environmental groups fervently support and promote wind energy, maybe without ever considering that we need literally thousands and thousands of these enormous skyscrapers to make any difference whatsoever. I am not as concerned with turbines being constructed on the prairies of Texas, however my study still does not find them a viable electricity source because of enormous cost to construct them and the fact that they are an intermittent and unreliable source of power.
Why do many well meaning environmental groups support wind energy? What business do they have in recommending one type of electricity over another? Climate Change, that's why. For the past two decades they have been promoting the climate change scare, that the end of our environment as we know it is near and drastic changes are necessary to stop the catastrophe to our ecosystem. The fact of the matter is that there is climate change. Temperatures have warmed since we exited the Little Ice Age in the late 1880's. Most scientists agree the planet has warmed a degree or two since 1880.
This warming has caused changes to our earth. I serve as a breeding bird coordinator for the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas which is in its' final year of data collection. Last year I casually analyzed preliminary data and my interpretation was that there appeared to be a northward movement of some species, this would be consistent with the slight warming found from the Pennsylvania climate data which can be find here. Look up the city where you live and do your own study.
Check out the links under Climate Now. There you will find graphs of the Atlantic Hurricane Index(Majors) and also the Atlantic Cyclone Energy(ACE) index chart. I created them from data available here. My blog might be the only place on the internet where the ACE chart is available. Note the global cyclone energy index also.
I have more interesting material to post, interesting for us nerds that are fascinated by this entire puzzle and picture. The fact of the matter is that the general public only knows what they see on television or in their environmental magazines. I applaud you for trying to find out the truth and hopefully this blog will give you just a little more. The seekers who sincerely want to find the truth of Climate Change and overwhelming outnumbered by the hoards who just watch TV to find their truth.
Wind turbines do produce energy and that energy is a contribution to the system. But what is the value of that energy and what is the price and the cost? I believe considering those factors wind can not play a viable role in meeting our future electrical needs. Especially when you consider that replacing a 1000 MW traditional power plant would need at least 2,000 x 2MW turbines operating at 25% capacity.
Environmentally those 2,000 turbines need about 4 acres of clear cut forest and destroy the forest where they are constructed forevermore. In the early 1900's almost every single tree in Pennsylvania was cut down and the character of our land was altered for hundreds of years. The forest is growing back any may take hundreds of years to reach its' former majesty, but I doubt it ever will. But the concrete pads will always be with us, they will never rot away, never.
There are also cost consideration. These turbines would not be built without huge Federal Tax Credit giveaways which essentially return to the owners almost 70% of the construction costs within 5 years. The power companies are forced to buy the power no matter when it is produced at a price that is greater than or equal to what they would pay for comparable fossil powered kilowatts. And then, there is a Federal Production Tax Credit of 2.1 cents per kWh, which the owners receive from the Gov't. Along with these are additional tax breaks and benefits which state and local governments give. When you hear townships or landowners receiving site fees for turbines, who do you think is paying those fees? It is the electricity purchasers. US!
If you think wind turbines are going to lower your electrical bill you are grossly mistaken. The wind is not free, just like coal, oil, gas and nuclear fission. In essence all those sources of energy are free, they are in the ground, just dig a hole and up the oil will come or run the excavator over the mountaintop and dig out the coal. Wind is not free just like the other source of energy.
If you think your electric bill is going to go down, I suggest you look here, at government EIA statistics, and take note of the electricity cost in Denmark, Netherlands and Germany, which have the highest per capita wind power in the world.
I have more to say on this blog and some very interesting statistics, charts and analysis, if you are into that kind of stuff! I am. I look forward to sharing it with you. Hopefully, I will be able to make about 2-3 posts per week. Look past any defects you might find here, because there are some nuggets of truth that you can find.
Our society has to make many decisions as a group for what is best for the entire group, even though a small amount of people may be adversely affected to benefit the needs of the many. Consider the interstate highway running one mile from my house and with an open window I can hear in the distance. Many farms were divided and a few houses were destroyed to make room for the highway under eminent domain. Yet, 30 years later, many thousands of people continue benefit each day from those dislocated properties and peoples. It was a good trade off for our society.
For wind power it is the opposite, the severity of the trade off greatly depends on the location. Building the turbines on beautiful ridges in Vermont or Pennsylvania forever destroys the scenic beauty of the area(at least until they are removed and the concrete pads will never be removed, never!) and fragments the valuable forests on these ridges. For years the environmentalists preached the gospel of the danger of fragmentation to our ecosystem, yet now many environmental groups fervently support and promote wind energy, maybe without ever considering that we need literally thousands and thousands of these enormous skyscrapers to make any difference whatsoever. I am not as concerned with turbines being constructed on the prairies of Texas, however my study still does not find them a viable electricity source because of enormous cost to construct them and the fact that they are an intermittent and unreliable source of power.
Why do many well meaning environmental groups support wind energy? What business do they have in recommending one type of electricity over another? Climate Change, that's why. For the past two decades they have been promoting the climate change scare, that the end of our environment as we know it is near and drastic changes are necessary to stop the catastrophe to our ecosystem. The fact of the matter is that there is climate change. Temperatures have warmed since we exited the Little Ice Age in the late 1880's. Most scientists agree the planet has warmed a degree or two since 1880.
This warming has caused changes to our earth. I serve as a breeding bird coordinator for the Pennsylvania Breeding Bird Atlas which is in its' final year of data collection. Last year I casually analyzed preliminary data and my interpretation was that there appeared to be a northward movement of some species, this would be consistent with the slight warming found from the Pennsylvania climate data which can be find here. Look up the city where you live and do your own study.
Check out the links under Climate Now. There you will find graphs of the Atlantic Hurricane Index(Majors) and also the Atlantic Cyclone Energy(ACE) index chart. I created them from data available here. My blog might be the only place on the internet where the ACE chart is available. Note the global cyclone energy index also.
I have more interesting material to post, interesting for us nerds that are fascinated by this entire puzzle and picture. The fact of the matter is that the general public only knows what they see on television or in their environmental magazines. I applaud you for trying to find out the truth and hopefully this blog will give you just a little more. The seekers who sincerely want to find the truth of Climate Change and overwhelming outnumbered by the hoards who just watch TV to find their truth.
Wind turbines do produce energy and that energy is a contribution to the system. But what is the value of that energy and what is the price and the cost? I believe considering those factors wind can not play a viable role in meeting our future electrical needs. Especially when you consider that replacing a 1000 MW traditional power plant would need at least 2,000 x 2MW turbines operating at 25% capacity.
Environmentally those 2,000 turbines need about 4 acres of clear cut forest and destroy the forest where they are constructed forevermore. In the early 1900's almost every single tree in Pennsylvania was cut down and the character of our land was altered for hundreds of years. The forest is growing back any may take hundreds of years to reach its' former majesty, but I doubt it ever will. But the concrete pads will always be with us, they will never rot away, never.
There are also cost consideration. These turbines would not be built without huge Federal Tax Credit giveaways which essentially return to the owners almost 70% of the construction costs within 5 years. The power companies are forced to buy the power no matter when it is produced at a price that is greater than or equal to what they would pay for comparable fossil powered kilowatts. And then, there is a Federal Production Tax Credit of 2.1 cents per kWh, which the owners receive from the Gov't. Along with these are additional tax breaks and benefits which state and local governments give. When you hear townships or landowners receiving site fees for turbines, who do you think is paying those fees? It is the electricity purchasers. US!
If you think wind turbines are going to lower your electrical bill you are grossly mistaken. The wind is not free, just like coal, oil, gas and nuclear fission. In essence all those sources of energy are free, they are in the ground, just dig a hole and up the oil will come or run the excavator over the mountaintop and dig out the coal. Wind is not free just like the other source of energy.
If you think your electric bill is going to go down, I suggest you look here, at government EIA statistics, and take note of the electricity cost in Denmark, Netherlands and Germany, which have the highest per capita wind power in the world.
I have more to say on this blog and some very interesting statistics, charts and analysis, if you are into that kind of stuff! I am. I look forward to sharing it with you. Hopefully, I will be able to make about 2-3 posts per week. Look past any defects you might find here, because there are some nuggets of truth that you can find.
Texas Wind Doesn't Work, Why Boone Pickens Plan is Hot Air
The American Wind Energy Association makes the claim that Texas is ranked second in the US as a wind power resource. Number one is North Dakota and you can see their recent weekly output under the Wind Output Now link in upper right corner of the blog and on this youtube video.
Texas is Boones Pickens country and we were all bombarded with commercials and television appearances by the legendary oilman who went green and hoped to construct enormous Texas style wind farms and sell us wind --to save the day!!! Let's see how his claims stand up in reality.
Load is the term to describe the demand of electricity at a point in time and the highest load in
Texas is during the summer afternoons when the air conditioning needs are the highest. This is the case for almost all of the United States. The companies plan and ensure they have enough capacity to supply the electricity for these few short months. In some areas, they have special peak units that are only used a few times per year on these very special high demand days. The chart to the left, from here, shows that at the time of peak demand only 342MW of 2300 MW of installed wind produced electricity, or 14%. (Double-click any charts to enlarge for better view) 2300 MW represents about 1500 turbines spread out across the enormous state of Texas. It's big they say. Each of these turbines cost approximately about $2-3 million dollars to build or a total of $3-5 billions dollars was spent on these turbines which only produced 7% of their total ability on this day. Please note: without getting too deep into cost detail now, coal plants cost more per MW to construct, while natural gas costs less and nuclear somewhat more, but all in the same ballpark when capitalized over 20-30 years per MW installed. These estimate vary and are increasing rapidly and a separate post is necessary to compare different construction estimates. Texas makes most of its electricity using natural gas, see their profile here.
The slide to the left, click to enlarge, shows you the 2005 annual capacity for those 1500 turbines is 29%. That means that the 2300 MW of potential power referred to in the slide above only averages out to less than 800 MW over an entire year. 667 MW is a ONE small coal or natural gas plant which might sit on 20 to 50 acres, while the 1500 turbines each sit on a large concrete pad requiring 4 acres of clear cut in a forested area, a total of 6,000 acres. If we assume the capitalized cost per MW for construction is similar, then the 30% capacity of the wind means the output cost is almost 3 times as much per unit of electricity.
America paid about three times as much per unit of output to build these beasts and let's see what we got for our money. Our money, because if you are a US Citizen you paid for them in federal tax credits which returned almost 70% of the construction costs to the investors within the first five years.
The slide to left the electricity graphs output for ALL 1500 turbines from January - July 2006. Ercot is the grid manager who provides the transmission of electricity to Texas. Outpout is often close to zero and is never over 1750 MW which means turbine output never breaks 75% of their potential, not even for a moment. The output is completely variable during these seven months of data.
Can you see the smoothing of power that is so often referred to?Electricity grids in the US are strained to provide their highest use in the summer months because almost all most air conditioning is produced with electricity. To the right you can see that there is an enormous daily fluctuation of output and output frequently reaches close to zero for these 3 billion dollars worth of turbines. If we had output graphs for nuclear, coal or natural gas the could be essential flat, however natural gas and some coal plants can be precisely adjusted to match the demand of users.
In the blog post below I address that each 15 minute interval has wide oscillations of output and for wind to work their has to be a substitution of fossil energy. Meaning, for every MW produced their has to be a synchronous and immediate decrease in fuel consumption whether that is nat gas or coal. If the speed of the wind varies even by a couple percent that will drastically alter the MW output because E = xV3(velocity cubed, see below or google it for yourself, that is accepted by the wind industry).
To the right is the wind output for July 2006 but in terms of capacity.
The capacity averages about 25% for most of the month with an output rise during the end of the month. Boone Pickens proposes this kind of erratic energy is what America needs and his plan is to construct wind farms then spend billions more to build power lines to supply America with electricity. This might work if we constructed millions of turbines and only needed electricity a few hours per day, when the wind felt like blowing.Consider that the yearly capacity is 29%, but for that number to be "real" it needs to replace it's output with an EXACT synchronous amount of fossil fuel. That doesn't happen because the grid can't possibly follow those steep curves around. At both the top and the bottom, they would have to be EXACTLY synchronized to wind output and either reducing or increasing the amount of fuel on the fire, and without loss of efficiency. Just like your cars gas mileage becomes less or more efficient at high or low speeds, the same concept generally applies to thermal power plants. Power plants do follow the varying demands of our daily electricity needs, 60% variation in a day is typical, so they are certainly capable of varying their output suddenly, but the fluctuation problem remains. A grid has to ensure that they have an extra reserve so they won't be caught off guard by a sudden unexpected decrease in wind output. The estimates are that anywhere between 20-40% of the wind output is wasted because of a combination of duplication and loss of efficiency of thermal power by the fossil plants. This fluctuation problem is widely discussed in grid company internal documents wherever wind is installed. Look at the charts on my website and you can see this is an universal problem.
Here is another set of slides where ERCOT, the Texas grid company, considers this problem. Just about every line on those slides is considering the fluctuation and intermittent characteristics of wind, which means ERCOT needs to duplicat a small of wind output with fossil to provide reliability also know as robustness to the grid. But even a 20% duplication lowers the true capacity of a turbine. Are you starting to realize why our electricity experts never thought of this before their state legislatures mandated that they are required to play this silly game! They comply because this is a political decision, not what is best for the consumer. We have no choice, we buy it.
This means that instead of the 29% the figure is only 70% of that if we consider that about 30%(ave of 20/40%) of that energy is duplicated by the fossil to compensate for the fluctuating wind so we get only 20% capacity output. To replace ONE medium-sized 1,000 MW coal or natural gas plant you would need 5,000 turbines, however that would not work because quite often there is little output from the turbines as the charts plainly show.
30 miles from me is a nuclear plant(environmentally friendly, on about 30 acres) that is rated at 2400 MW and it ran at that level continuously all last year. The same amount of energy would need over 6,000 MW turbines with 25% yearly capacity and 80% replacement of fossil fuel to match its' output. 6,000 x 2 MW x .25 cap x .80% fossil replement = 2400 MW. But, the charts above demonstrate that the turbines often produce almost nothing in the summer and in the middle of the afternoon when our needs are the highest.
Either Boone
Pickens is a great shyster or he doesn't understand wind!!!You electricity grid is always planning for the worst case scenario and that is the peak electricity use during the hot summer months of high air conditioning needs. Especially in Texas! The chart to the right graphs the wind output at 5PM during the hot month of July. An eyeball average would be 350 MW output with some days only 100 MW produced, out of a possible 2300 MW! On those days billions of dollars of transmission lines will side IDLE, click, yes billions.
To the left is the same MW output but expressed in terms of capacity. The output often stays below the 10% line for much of the month, meaning if the constructions costs were similar, you are getting only 10% of wind for your money compared to coal or gas. ERCOT, the electricity grid company of Texas, needs a margin of safety while planning and originally gave the wind farms a 2.9% capacity credit while planning, which they call their "confidence factor". See page 19 here. (later they considered raising it to between 5-16%).If you are an American who cares about our deficit, this should bring tears to your eyes. Much of the wasted cost on construction and further production tax credits are piled right on our federal budget. Then the states force the grid companies to purchase the wind output and provide additional state incentives and tax breaks. Finally a federal Production Tax credit of 2.1cents is given for every kWhour produced which for many states is 20% of your per kWh electric bill.
There is no amount of green utopia wishful thinking(ie. their prayers) that will allow Texas to contribute useful energy to our electricity grid nationally. NONE! 3% CONFIDENCE, remember that number, and next time you see Boone tell him you are 3% confident in his Big Man's Plan! Maybe instead of wind farms we should call them swindle farms. And remember, Texas is number two! I couldn't bear the misery of looking at the reality of our other states that are not so windy. The Wind is not FREE!!!
Presentation taken from company slides here.
July 9, 2009 Update: Pickens calls off massive wind farm in Texas
How Often Does The Turbine Produce Power?
A number of people have told me that they have seen the turbines spinning and they seemed to have used that as proof that wind power is efficacious and valuable. Let's talk about how power output of a wind turbine is affected by wind speed.To the left is a power curve of two models of the General Electric 1.5 MegaW turbine which produces 1.5 MW or 1500Kilowatts at maximum power. This chart is directly from the GE turbine literature. GE bought this turbine business from Enron. This turbine is the most commonly used turbine in the US right now.
Look at the bottom axis and you will see at 3.0 m/s the output of power is zero. To convert m/s to the mph divide by .45 and the result is 7 mph. What this means is that the wheel may be spinning somewhat but it isn't producing ANY power until the wind speeds reach 7 mph. We can double that wind speed to 6 m/s or 13 mph and the power output of the turbine is only .3 MW or 1/5 of it's total ability, referred to as capacity. (For our purposes today let's average the two different models). To get to where the turbine is producing 1/2 of it's rated capacity we must have a wind speed of about 7.5 m/s or 17 mph. To reach 2/3 of the turbine output capacity and have an output of 1 MW we must have a wind speed of about 8.5 m/s or 19 mph, which is a very, stiff wind! The turbine only reaches nameplate capacity output of 1.5 MW at 28 mph windspeed.
Wind _____Output_PercentPower__ Beautfort Scale
7 mph____ 0_____ 0% __________Leaves rustle
13 mph __ .3 MW___20% ________Leaves and twigs in constant motion
17 mph___ .5 MW__33%________ Moderate breeze, small branches move
19 mph___ .7 MW__66%________Small trees begin to sway
28 mph__ 1.5MW__100% _______Umbrella use difficult, large branches in motion
Another factor to consider while you watch the wheel spin is that they don't necessarily spin faster as the wind blows stronger. Their power output is produced by torque, not by speed of the wheel. The spinning wheel will look the same if the wind is blowing either at 13 mph or 28 mph windspeed, yet they are only producing 20% power at 13 mph.
Why is this? Well, wind turbines are powered by the sun! The sun is what produces the varying atmospheric pressure gradients and this factor produces moving air or wind. Moving air per cubic inch weighs 900 times less than water so at a very low speed it is not possible for it to produce much power. The kinetic energy of wind is measured as E=MV3 where M=mass of air which is very low and V3= the velocity of moving air cubed. So with all other factors constant, going from 10 mph to 15mph equates to 1,000 vs 3,375 or a 50% increase in wind speed yield a 3.3 fold increase in power! This is how you get the insane fluctuations for wind hourly output pictured to the above right.
Now for the bad news,
the output of power is actually much, more variable! Because the Nine Canyon Output chart is hourly and we must consider that the power output of a wind farm actually fluctuates more dramatically when measured for smaller intervals of time. The chart to the left is from a Germany grid study and is found here. It is 12 days of data with the red being the maximum 15 minute wind input to the grid and the green being the minimum for that 15 minute. Look at the enormous fluctuations. This is an enormous grid in Germany and represents THOUSANDS of turbines spread across the country. How can the German grid manager possibly follow this wind and make corresponding cuts to their power burn rate when the wind clearly fluctuates 100% in an 15 minute period!!! Certainly some accommodation is made, but wind energy can't be stored, how could they decrease their fossil fuel burn rate when within a 15 minute time span the wind input to the grid likely to double or half? Click the picture to study it. This study referred to above and demonstrated by this picture concluded that "compensation and regulation" costs were 40% of the electricity generated, meaning 60% of the wind electricity generated was subsittuted 1:1 for fossil fuel. This is a far cry from the 100% 1:1 figure that the wind proponents are so fond of repeating.
The chart to the right is from a small windfarm on the PJM grid in the Northeast USA. There is 15 days of 10-second data that is compressed, but you can tell the dramatic changes that occur just about any day of the 15 day study. Now do you know why our electric companies NEVER thought of this clean, renewable wind energy as a viable source of electrical power until the Federal Government forced them to buy the energy.
What is my point? The point is that for wind energy to be a viable REPLACEMENT of fossil fuel the power company needs to predict ahead of time what the speed of the wind and output of the wind plant is going to be and then they have to instantaneously increase or decrease their fossil fuel burn rate to match the oscillations of the wind plant output. Is this possible, yes it is to some degree. On my web site www.nofreewind.com under the integration tab are many very long and detailed insider white papers where the power companies discuss this factor. It is a universal problem and one they HAVE to adapt because in all countries where wind power is used for commercial electricity it is mandated by the central governments. There are a few excellent editorials which discuss this problem, here, here and here.
Now we must accept the fact that there are power plants called load-follower or peaking units which are built to change their output very rapidly. This ocurrs every single day as as a society's electricity needs ebb and wane dependent on the time of day. But these changes are expected, easily planned for and accomadated by every power grid in the world. Click to see daily electricity demand changes in Ontario and California. Note that those smooth changes in demand look nothing like the power output curves above. You can go to my charts page for even more power output curves and see this is a universal problem.
There is much, much more to this issue. That is one reason the general public is so easily fooled. We must consider the time of day of the wind energy ouput compared to the need. We must look at how a power plant looses efficiency as it's maximum output decreases. AND the one thought that every Grid Manager and Electric Company keeps foremost in is mind is THERE WILL BE NO BLACKOUT!!!! No matter how much extra it costs the public the take in the wind energy to the grid, our electricity suppliers will ensure that their always will be reserves to accommodate this fluctuation of wind energy. THERE WILL BE NO BLACKOUT! To be continued.
One Pesky CO2 Molecule = World Catastrophe?
You are reading this blog because you are interested in wind power for electricity. The story behind the story is one of the most fascinating of our current times. Windmills have been used for centuries. In the very interesting book I am now reading, The Great Warming: Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations, the author discusses how windmills were used back about 1000 AD to pump water and grind grain. They are absolutely nothing new under the sun. Consider that the first commercial electricity was used in about 1880 to light streetlights in Manhattan. Here is an interesting article on the history of commercial electricity. Man didn't use wind turbines for electricity until about 1980-1990, even though there was some experimentation before that time. Look here for history of the wind turbine.
Mankind, ever ingenious when looking for a solution to a problem, applied himself to building jet planes carrying hundreds of passengers, building enormous skyscrapers, inventing the personal computer and building modern society as it is today, but never "thought" of wind turbines for electricity until about solving a myriad of other more complex problems to advance our civilization. That should make you skeptical, why didn't they think of this before. Just like our children, they will likely see a decade or two of positive stock market returns and will wonder, why is Dad so skeptical about the stock market! Wind turbines for electricity were never considered by your old fashion electric company until Government tax credits made building them a worthwhile investment and then your electric company was forced to buy the power under state renewable energy acts.
We are forced to buy wind because it is classified
as renewable energy but this post is about the story behind the story. This story built on fears of future catastrophic global warming and that entire "theory" is built on increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. In 1957 a scientist figured out how to measure the very small amount of CO2 in the atmosphere at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. It has been measured here continuously ever since and has been accepted as being a reliable measurement because the air is exceptionally pure. (note: there are some detractors who thoughtfully point out that these measurements might be contaminated because of the regional volcanic activity. There is more to this story but let's accept this for now).As you can see from the graph above CO2 has risen from 300 parts per million in 1950's to
almost 400 parts per million today. That is a 30% rise and a very alarming trend to some. But let us divide by 100 so we can get our head around this number. The result is that CO2 has risen from 3 to 4 molecules per 10,000. The entire "theory" of man-made global warming is based on the premise that this one extra molecule of CO2 is creating a greenhouse effect in our atmosphere. In my next post we are going to talk one of the greenhouse gases that make up part of the other 9,996 molecules of the atmosphere. This is water vapor and the concentration of water vapor is almost 100 times greater than CO2.
Al Gore wants you to live like a caveman
Right now Congress is considering a bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions to 83% below 2005 emissions by 2050. They are only shooting for a 20% drop by 2020.This has to be the most absurd act that I have ever seen my Congress consider. Let's consider that we use 100 units of emissions or energy right now in 2009. The graphs at the right shows you how CO2 emissions are created by various categories. They are almost equally divided between transportation, industrial, commercial and residential.
The sky is falling and we have to do something so let's pass a law. Google The Waxman-Markey bill would reduce the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions to 20 percent below 2005 levels by the year 2020, and by 83 percent as of 2050 and you will come up with the absurd. It's true, these people are not kidding!
Now let's look at the fine print. If our energy useage in 2005 was 100 units per household and we cut it by 83% we will be now using 17 units per household. But this bill plans ahead to 2050 and energy consumption considering past trends of growth in useage could increase 1-2% per year or it will just about double by 2050 to 200 units. So we are now passing a law that we will use 17/200 or 8.5 units per household which is a decrease of 91.5%. Right now I don't see ANY ideas whatsoever that are plausible to reduce our energy useage by anything more than a couple percent at most. CO2 Emissions have grown steadily throughout the civilized world and are skyrocketing in the third world countries. So Al Gore and Company is legislating we drive 90% less, we use 90% less electricity at home and we use 90% less goods and services in 2050. This is complete insanity. BUT....there i
s a catch. As long as we partcipate is this Crime and pay him and his associates by paying our Carbon Taxes or Credits then we will receive absolution for our sinning ways. Then we can keep on sinning and using energy. To the left is one of Al's companies, he is the Chairman of the Board, that will sell us credits for our sins. Of course you are not going to walk or bicycle the 20 miles to work nor are you going to give up your big screen TV nor a vacation now and then nor your laptop, instead you will just pay him!!! Here is a nice article to explain how Al has already profited from his global waming campaign and this is just the start.Watch the YouTube video of Al trying to explain to Congress why his big plan is not like Enron. This web site, CO2folly.com, goes into this subject in great detail and expertise.
This is all based on the "theory" that man is causing global warming. The CO2 rose in the atmosphere from 3 parts per 10,000 to 4 parts per 10,000 over the past 60 years. That one extra molecule of CO2 is why you and me are going to have to pay, pay, pay. Man-made global warming is all based on a "theory", it is not a FACT.
Video: Reliance on Wind Power will cause BLACKOUTS
Wind plant power output curves for North Dakota, Alberta and more. Double click video to go directly to YouTube. As you can see, if we place ANY reliance on wind to supply our electricity needs we will have regular blackouts of our power grid. But this will not happen, or if it does it will happen very infrequently, because surely our power plant engineers will continue to build new REAL power plants that produce reliable electricity to fulfill the needs of our society.
NOTE: This video is locking at 48 seconds, try clicking slight ahead at 60 seconds or click right on the video a few times so that you view it directly in YouTube.
NOTE: This video is locking at 48 seconds, try clicking slight ahead at 60 seconds or click right on the video a few times so that you view it directly in YouTube.
Video: Sample of power output supplied to electricity grid
Electricity use curves for California, France and Ontario. Double click video to go directly to YouTube. (note: I stated the power grids supply hundreds of thousands but certainly this amount of electricity supplies millions, we will work on how to calculate the number in a future post).
Electricity Basics: The Demand Curve (Load)
This is today's, 5/10/09, electricity demand curve from Ontario electric power company (IESO), updated daily here. (You can look at updated curved from California or France.) As you can see the demand is lowest at the middle of the night bottoming at about 11,200 MW's. As the people of Ontario wake up after 6am the electricity useage increases quite steeply to 14,400 at noon at which point it levels off. The green line stops at 15:00 (4pm) because that is what time it is now. The demand is projected to fall steeply at 9pm as people go to bed. IESO anticipates this rise and fall in demand and matches their power output to the grid to meet the demand. This as a typical daily electricity demand curve. The power below 11,200 MW is called base power and there will be either nuclear or coal plants running full time at an efficient output to meet this base demand. The power needed from 11,200 to 14,400 in many cases will be supplied by what are known as cyclic load following generators. These are flexible power plants, burning coal or natural gas and they can follow or anticipate the demand by adding fuel to the fire, which increases power and generates more electricity. In general the cyclic, load followers are smaller, less than 1,000 MW, but are more expensive to operate, with the wholesale fuel costs being twice as much as the large and more efficient base plants.In the next blog post we will consider the implications of adding a wind plant to the grid. Basin Electric Power Cooperative in North Dakota posts the weekly output of their wind farms here and their chart will serve as an excellent live example because wind industry states "North Dakota has the greatest wind energy potential of any state in the country."
A picture of wind versus load that is worth thousands of words
If you want to know how useless wind energy is as a commercial electrical power source you only need to spend a few minutes studying this picture. Click here to see a much bigger picture.This chart details a week of wind and load in Alberta Electrical System Operator grid. (AESO). They have a couple years of data here. The top light blue line represents the system load also known as the demand. You can find other load curves on the front page of my web site and more there in the charts tab. The blue line corresponds to the right axis and you can see the load varies daily between about 7600 MW in the dead of night and 9000 MW at peak. The red line represents the amount of Megawatts generated by the wind, that varies between 0 MW and its' peak of 350 MW. AESO was very nice in supplying us price data which is represented by the green dots near the bottom.
What do we see? Look at line A - Tuesday Feb 17th. There was no wind power generated that day. On that day Alberta was likely suffering through a cold front with bright days, cold nights and NO WIND. The cold temps are likely the reason why the electricity load is the highest on that day. This is an example of when we need wind the most it is not there. I hope that Alberta does not follow the US lead and put the coal plants our of business as Obama is suggesting. It would be mighty, mighty cold and dark that day.
Line B: Look to the left of B at the morning of February 18th. The wind is blowing hard in the middle of the night, but the load is at the lowest point and so is the price. The price of your NoFreeWind is going to be as high as ever considering the subsidies and fixed price. Wind is ONLY in the grid through enormous Gov't subsidies and the fact that utiliteis are forced to buy it. Now what else is happening in the middle of the night. In a typical electricity generation mix the nuclear plants are running as usual, at full output. The coal plants are ramping down because the operators can generally predict the amount of load(ie. electricity). They are placing less coal on the fire to conserve fuel, however the power plant operators know that at 7am people are going to wake up, take a shower, turn on their HDTV and coffee maker and then go to work. Industry, business's and government offices will all be requiring a big surge of power through the morning hours. Now look right at Line B, the demand is rising throughout the day but the wind input has now fallen off the roof.
Apparently a front blew in on Feb 19th and on Feb 20th as is quite typical during the winter months, the wind died and now the wind turbines are providing no useful energy to the grid. Feb 21th and line C is a duplication of Feb 19th. The wind is blowing strong in the middle of the night when it is not needed because the conventional resources have to run all night to be ready for the next day and certainly you can never depend on the wind for more than a few hours. You really don't need to know any more about wind power than this one simple graph. Now you know why our society has had commercial electricity beginning in 1880 and yet we never before thought of putting up these thousands and soon tens of thousands of wind turbines so we could get our electricity Free! There is NoFreeWind.
This is not a cherry-picking, this is how it is at the wind farm every single day(more) of the year except for maybe July and August. Because, when it is ninety degrees and dripping wet humid, you can be assured the wind will likely not be blowing for days at a time.
Save God's Country - Potter County, Pa
Potter County township supervisors are in the process of approving 80 turbines as part of the new renewable energy plans in Pennsylvania. They are plans to place 80 turbines and spoil God's Country for at least the next generation. I'll never forget my week of backpacking I spent in the beautiful unspoiled wilderness as a youth. The renewable energy train moves forward blasting away any sensibility with the promise of free energy and reduced "emissions" from wind. Both of those promises are false. 
Here is what you can expect it to look like very soon. What is the cost and what are the benefits?
There are the aesthetics to consider and the damage and certain destruction and fragmentation of priceless habitat. But what is the value of the electricity production of those turbines to our society. The 80 turbines will only be providing a "spit in the wind" amount of power, not enough enough to serve the needs of Potter County residents. 80 turbines spread out at 6 per mile and there will be 12 miles of turbines likely visible from throughout the county.
These plans are heartbreaking to me considering what the value of this unspoiled land represents to our state. 80 turbines, each rated approximately 1.5 MegaWatt generating electricity erraticly about some 25-30% of the time will add NOTHING to supplement our growing energy needs here in Pennsylvania. Let's take a closer look at the the numbers. The electricity in Pennsylvania is delivered by the PJM grid. PJM coordinates all the movement of wholesale electricity through out state and all or parts of 13 states in the Northeast. In my previous posts I just started to break into the complicated discussion of just how much electricity does a wind turbine provide? PJM Know Electricity and in a recent report (page 13) they assigned only a 13% capacity credit to a wind energy turbines. Why so much lower? Because they know that the energy potential of the turbine is not to be counted on during peak hours.
The Numbers. 80 turbines each rated at 1.5 Megawatts can be depended upon to produce useful electricity at an approximate "capacity" of 27% of the nameplate capacity of 1.5 MW.
To find the yearly electricity(energy) production we must mutliply by 8760 hours in a years.
80 x 1.5 x .27 x 8760 = 280,000 MegaWatt Hours per year.
Refer to my post below where I calculated that each household uses about 30 MegaWatt hours of electricity per year. 10 MWh in their own house and another 20 Mwh by utilizing industry and commercial goods and services as a part of our society.
Divide 280,000 by 30 and the result is 9,200. That means that in theory, the people who live in 9,200 homes in our state will receive enough electricity from these turbines to serve their needs throughout the year. That is "theoretical" because the wind blows erratically and the turbine will only be producing useful electricity about 50% of the time. Also, much of the electricity is produced at the wrong time of day or during the fall/spring when our electricity needs are low because we don't use much heat or electricity during moderate temperatures.
What is the dollar value of this amount of electricity? We pay for electricity by the kilowatt hour and the price right now is about 11 cents per kwhour. There are 1,000 kilwatts in 1 megawatt. The wind company sells the electricity wholesale to our grid at about half that price or about 4-5 cents per kwhour. At times the wholesale price is less during the night and weekends.
280,000 MegaWatt hours x 1,000 x .05 = approx. 14 Million dollars of Electricity produced. That might seem like a lot, but there are many, many factors to consider. Most importantly, while the electricity is being produced the grid managers can not depend on a constant input from the turbines and must keep a very significant amount of backup running at all times.
We have now entered a new era. The era where it doesn't seem to matter whatsoever to compare the amount of electricity that is produced by a coal generation plant or by a nuclear plant. Logic and reason have all gone with the wind.
Above I explained that our electric company only calculates a 13% capacity for the turbine because much of it produced at off peak hours or erraticly. This would mean the 80 wind turbines in Potter County will produce 140,000 MegaWatts hours of useful electricity according the experts, while Susquehanna Nuclear Plant at Berwick produced 19 millions MW hours. Simple math shows that we would need to construct 136 wind farms of 80 turbines each to produce the energy of one nuclear plants that have been in operation for over 30 years. I hate to say what has not become a very "dirty" word in our vocabulary. COAL! But we would need to construct almost 100 wind farms to replace just one coal plant like there is at PPL Montour.
Using the 27% figure results gives us the result that we would need 78 of the proposed Potter County wind farms to replace Susquehanna Nuclear Plant at Berwick or 50 of them to replace the PPL Montour coal power plant.
There is so much more to this problem and this analysis and we will get to more later. Do you think my numbers don't add up. Do you think I'm exaggerating or underestimating the value of the wind farm in Potter County. Look here to read the company spokesman for the Waymart wind plant say their 43 turbines produce $7 million/year in electrity. Or she said they have the capacity to do that, I wonder if they even make that much!
Take a look at that article and you will see what should shock you as it has me! The company spokesman reports that the expense to produce
that $7 million of electricity was a SHOCKING $6.5 million dollars. And you thought the Wind was Free.Goodbye God's Country, Potter County, Pa, You are now the site of Man's Greatest Folly.
How many wind turbines per household??
I live in Lackawanna County Pennsylvania. There are 200K people and 90,000 housing units.
The average kwh of electricy per residential unit use is 874kwh per month or about 10 MegaWatthours per year.(1MW=1,000KW) However residential energy use is only about 1/3 of total electricity use, with 1/3 going to Industrial (manufacturing) and 1/3 to Commercial (business/gov't etc). So each of the 90,000 units uses about 30 MegaWatt hours per year.
Most turbines are 1.5 MegaWatt and have a capacity here in Penna of 27% (between 25-30) and over a years time(multiply by 8760 hours per year) produce 3500 MegaWatt hours of energy.
So if wind worked like other power plants and could be depended on and dispatched, then 3500 MWhours/30MWper household = 116 or one turbine per 116 households. We have 90,000 households and so we would need 775 turbines.
Most people don’t have a clue how wind power works. There is no storage, the wind varies constantly throughout the day, and very often, blows the most at night while we are sleeping and our electricity needs are very low. But even so, to get the proper capacity the turbines are spread out 6 per mile to reduce turbulence and increase efficiency. So that is literally 130 miles of turbines in my county.
OR we could have one nuclear plant like we have in Berwick about an hour from me. Two big smokestacks spewing water vapor, otherwise you don't know it is there. Their web site say they made 19 MILLION Megawatt hours last year, a record! One reactor worked nonstop for over 700 days, 100% capacity, before being shut down for routine maintenance.
Our 90,000 households used 30 MWhours per year or 2.7 MILLION Megawatt hours total. That means that one nuclear plant on about 15 acres could supply over 7 counties such as mine. So on a technical basis we could put up one nuclear plant for 7 counties or 5400 turbines. Whereas the wind turbines take about 4 acres of clearcutting per acre which means in 7 counties we have 5,425 turbines spread out over 22,000 acres. 22,000 acres of turbines, popping out of every nook and cranny of ridge and farmland or one nuclear plant that no one hardly even knows is there. Not one nuclear plant death in our country and just one, in retrospect, fairly minor mishap at Three Mile Island.
Now I know no one is suggesting we put up 775 turbines in Lackawanna County, actually wind is considered a Tier I Renewable Energy and we are mandated at 8% of which most or likely 6% of electricity consumed is to be wind. That is 46 turbines. But the point here is to compare the efficiency of these two methods of power production.
Now do you know why no one every thought of this before??? Sure they did, it took about 10 seconds for our power companies to realize this was not something they would DO TO US. You would have been laughed out of a PP&L meeting 10 years ago if you suggested such nonsense! We didn't even get into the cost. That is a another very ugly store.
Now do you still BELIEVE in wind power? It appears to me you would have to BELIEVE in this great swindle, otherwise why would you ever do it? It is actually much worse than this and I will explain as I go along.
There is NOFREEWIND!
Here is a text file where you can review/rint the data and math above in a text file.
The average kwh of electricy per residential unit use is 874kwh per month or about 10 MegaWatthours per year.(1MW=1,000KW) However residential energy use is only about 1/3 of total electricity use, with 1/3 going to Industrial (manufacturing) and 1/3 to Commercial (business/gov't etc). So each of the 90,000 units uses about 30 MegaWatt hours per year.
Most turbines are 1.5 MegaWatt and have a capacity here in Penna of 27% (between 25-30) and over a years time(multiply by 8760 hours per year) produce 3500 MegaWatt hours of energy.
So if wind worked like other power plants and could be depended on and dispatched, then 3500 MWhours/30MWper household = 116 or one turbine per 116 households. We have 90,000 households and so we would need 775 turbines.
Most people don’t have a clue how wind power works. There is no storage, the wind varies constantly throughout the day, and very often, blows the most at night while we are sleeping and our electricity needs are very low. But even so, to get the proper capacity the turbines are spread out 6 per mile to reduce turbulence and increase efficiency. So that is literally 130 miles of turbines in my county.
OR we could have one nuclear plant like we have in Berwick about an hour from me. Two big smokestacks spewing water vapor, otherwise you don't know it is there. Their web site say they made 19 MILLION Megawatt hours last year, a record! One reactor worked nonstop for over 700 days, 100% capacity, before being shut down for routine maintenance.
Our 90,000 households used 30 MWhours per year or 2.7 MILLION Megawatt hours total. That means that one nuclear plant on about 15 acres could supply over 7 counties such as mine. So on a technical basis we could put up one nuclear plant for 7 counties or 5400 turbines. Whereas the wind turbines take about 4 acres of clearcutting per acre which means in 7 counties we have 5,425 turbines spread out over 22,000 acres. 22,000 acres of turbines, popping out of every nook and cranny of ridge and farmland or one nuclear plant that no one hardly even knows is there. Not one nuclear plant death in our country and just one, in retrospect, fairly minor mishap at Three Mile Island.
Now I know no one is suggesting we put up 775 turbines in Lackawanna County, actually wind is considered a Tier I Renewable Energy and we are mandated at 8% of which most or likely 6% of electricity consumed is to be wind. That is 46 turbines. But the point here is to compare the efficiency of these two methods of power production.
Now do you know why no one every thought of this before??? Sure they did, it took about 10 seconds for our power companies to realize this was not something they would DO TO US. You would have been laughed out of a PP&L meeting 10 years ago if you suggested such nonsense! We didn't even get into the cost. That is a another very ugly store.
Now do you still BELIEVE in wind power? It appears to me you would have to BELIEVE in this great swindle, otherwise why would you ever do it? It is actually much worse than this and I will explain as I go along.
There is NOFREEWIND!
Here is a text file where you can review/rint the data and math above in a text file.
Wind is not my religion
Wind is all about numbers and I am going to explain the numbers to you. But first, let's get this straight. Wind is not my religion. I keep hearing it said, "I believe in wind power", "I believe in renewable energy", "I believe we have to do something about the energy crisis".I understand what a belief system is because I have one myself. I'm 50 years old and am a long-time member of the United Methodist Church. I believe in Methodism and the principles and beliefs that defines it. I believe that Jesus walked the earth 2000 years ago, he was born of the virgin Mary, died and rose from the dead. I believe that God has the power to forgive me for my sins. Please don't email me any studies, facts or opinions that might disprove my beliefs. Although I consider myself a scientific person, and my background and life history is such, I don't care to entertain anything which would get in the way of my religious beliefs. If you send me such or ask me to question my beliefs, I will likely get uncomfortable and feel irritated by you. To me the science of Jesus is settled. I believe!
Why would I believe in Methodism when in fact there is a small voice in me that sometimes questions if everything I am told is true? In fact, in my exploration of trying to find what is true and what is not in this world, I read a book that appeared quite scientific and questions whether the basic tenets of Christianity were historically true. I considered that information, then made up my mind that I wanted to keep my belief system because it worked so well in my life.
I have learned to enjoy being in church and my wife and I have participated on committees for many years. We have made many friends in our church and we both feel it makes a deeper part of our community. I am grateful that we were able to have our children grow up in that atmosphere and influence. Certainly I respect the religious sacraments of marriage and death. Religion really comes in handy sometimes.
Our society appears to have made up their mind that wind power is something they should accept without question. It appears that the value of wind as a commercial electrical power source is as a religion and not a science, we shall see..
Wind Turbines for Lackawanna County cont.
According to Waymart Wind Energy Center all we have to do is quadruple their current wind farm and that would supply all the houses in Lackawanna County. Those 172 turbines need to be spaced at about 6/mile to reduce turbulence and increase their efficiency so that works out to 30 miles of turbines spread out on our ridges to catch the best winds. I know many of you are hoping that we replace our current electrical generation with wind, but seriously the goal for right now is only about 20% renewable energy, so that would mean instead of 172 turbines we only need 34 turbines or only about 6 miles of them. That doesn't seem too much does it. Let's look more closely.
First item to consider is that all the Renewable Energy mandates that have been passed are based on total electrical consumption or purchase, NOT on Residential houses. A quick check will tell you that Residential housing is only one third of the TOTAL electricity pie.
Why don't you look at your house electricity bill. The average Kwh used per Pennsylvania household for 2006 is 874 kWhours or times 12 is 10,500KWhours per year. This is easier to describe as 10 MWhours per year. (divide by 1,000 to convert from KiloWatt to MegaWatt). Total electricity can be broken down into commercial, residential and industrial. Commercial meaning stores, government agencies and service business's while industrial is factories where goods are created. Each of the 3 represents about a 1/3 equal share of total electricity used. So in actuality each household consumes aproximately 30 MWhours per year, considering that all households participate in an equal share in our economy and lifestyle.
This 30 MWhour is the number that we will be working with to determine number of turbines, not the 20,000 households given to us by the turbine men.
First item to consider is that all the Renewable Energy mandates that have been passed are based on total electrical consumption or purchase, NOT on Residential houses. A quick check will tell you that Residential housing is only one third of the TOTAL electricity pie.
Why don't you look at your house electricity bill. The average Kwh used per Pennsylvania household for 2006 is 874 kWhours or times 12 is 10,500KWhours per year. This is easier to describe as 10 MWhours per year. (divide by 1,000 to convert from KiloWatt to MegaWatt). Total electricity can be broken down into commercial, residential and industrial. Commercial meaning stores, government agencies and service business's while industrial is factories where goods are created. Each of the 3 represents about a 1/3 equal share of total electricity used. So in actuality each household consumes aproximately 30 MWhours per year, considering that all households participate in an equal share in our economy and lifestyle.
This 30 MWhour is the number that we will be working with to determine number of turbines, not the 20,000 households given to us by the turbine men.
How many wind turbines do we need in Lackawanna County to supply electricity to the houses(residential)?
Did you think the wind was free? I don't think so. Let's start at the start, because frankly this question is a game of numbers and common sense and observation.
I live and work in Lackawanna County(PA) on the edge of the Poconos in Northeastern Pennsylvania. There are 209,000 people living in 86,218 households. How many wind turbines do we need to meet the needs of Lackawanna County residents? We are gong to start at the start and let's consider the number based on numbers supplied by a local wind farm.
Waymart Wind Energy Center is right up the road in Wayne County and they have 43 turbines each rated 1.5 MW for a total of 65 Mega Watts of power which they state will supply 20,000 homes.
To supply Lackawanna County residential homes with wind, according to WWEC, we would need 172 of the 1.5 MW turbines. Almost all the turbines in Pennsylvania are 1.5 MW, however many 2.0 MW turbines are being placed into service around the country.
There ARE going to be more turbines going up in our state, many, many of them. Because the Pennsylvania State Legislature passed an Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard Act which makes it a law to have a certain amount of various type of alternative energy production. We will be looking into what the consequences of that will be.
I live and work in Lackawanna County(PA) on the edge of the Poconos in Northeastern Pennsylvania. There are 209,000 people living in 86,218 households. How many wind turbines do we need to meet the needs of Lackawanna County residents? We are gong to start at the start and let's consider the number based on numbers supplied by a local wind farm.
Waymart Wind Energy Center is right up the road in Wayne County and they have 43 turbines each rated 1.5 MW for a total of 65 Mega Watts of power which they state will supply 20,000 homes.
To supply Lackawanna County residential homes with wind, according to WWEC, we would need 172 of the 1.5 MW turbines. Almost all the turbines in Pennsylvania are 1.5 MW, however many 2.0 MW turbines are being placed into service around the country.
There ARE going to be more turbines going up in our state, many, many of them. Because the Pennsylvania State Legislature passed an Alternative Energy Portfolio Standard Act which makes it a law to have a certain amount of various type of alternative energy production. We will be looking into what the consequences of that will be.
Ontario wind power, aka You Must Eat $8 hamburgers at 6am.
A wind farm is like selling hamburgers. Most of us like a hamburger at noon or for supper. But what if the Government decided to go in the hamburger business and hamburger stands were only open from 4am to 8am. Not many people would want hamburgers and to get people to buy them at that hour a good strategy would be to cut the hamburger price down from $4 to $2 that would work. That is pretty much what happens when a Utility is buying electricity at night for you, they buy $2 hamburgers for YOU! Now we put the Gov't in and what they do is make an early morning hamburger and then they force you to buy the burger for $8 and then force you to eat them at 6am. And of course, all the while, they have all these programs and public service info on why the morning hamburger is the best thing for you! And before you know it, the citizens all decide they like $8 hamburgers at 6am, even if they cause them indigestion, heartburn and clogged arteries.
Now let's look at some raw data of the our energy source. Does the graph below of wind ouput resemble your daily electricity use? If this was the operating hours of a hamburger joint or any other business would you admit that the operation of the is not dependable. Do you think this energy source needs a backup? I would never call it anything but NONSENSE! Maybe we should just keep "trying" it, then it will work!
from Review of Wind Power Results in Ontario: May to October 2006
California wind not there when you need it
Here are two graphs from an evaluation of the wind energy grid in California. Find the entire 147 page report here.
Graph 1: The blue line is the load or electricity used/demanded from this customers of this California Utility. Study the blue line and notice how the least demand occurs at 4-5am, rises throughout the day and peaks about 5pm then trends down and then dives as people go to bed at about 10pm.
Now study the green line which is the contribution of wind power on a summer day. As you can clearly see the electricity Load and the wind Power run almost contradictory to each other. As people wake up and need electricity the wind dies down from it's nightly blow. Then as people leave work and business's close throughout the day, the wind picks up again in the evening.
Each evening the grid manager turns down the electricity generating power plants because he knows the demand will lessen throughout the evening. If the plant is a coal generating plants burning tons of coal per day, do you think the engineer can turn down the coal fire even to compensate for both lower customer demand and increased wind power availability? Instead, the Utility is forced to buy this evening/night electricity because they need the renewable energy credits, the coal fire continues to burn because it is going to be needed again in the morning.
Isn't it clear this is a zero sum game?
This graph just confirms the above and shows you how you can absolutely depend that wind energy will be undependable. Each day at the peak of customer electricity demand, that is the lowest point of wind energy availability for that day.
Graph 1: The blue line is the load or electricity used/demanded from this customers of this California Utility. Study the blue line and notice how the least demand occurs at 4-5am, rises throughout the day and peaks about 5pm then trends down and then dives as people go to bed at about 10pm.
Now study the green line which is the contribution of wind power on a summer day. As you can clearly see the electricity Load and the wind Power run almost contradictory to each other. As people wake up and need electricity the wind dies down from it's nightly blow. Then as people leave work and business's close throughout the day, the wind picks up again in the evening.
Each evening the grid manager turns down the electricity generating power plants because he knows the demand will lessen throughout the evening. If the plant is a coal generating plants burning tons of coal per day, do you think the engineer can turn down the coal fire even to compensate for both lower customer demand and increased wind power availability? Instead, the Utility is forced to buy this evening/night electricity because they need the renewable energy credits, the coal fire continues to burn because it is going to be needed again in the morning.
Isn't it clear this is a zero sum game?
This graph just confirms the above and shows you how you can absolutely depend that wind energy will be undependable. Each day at the peak of customer electricity demand, that is the lowest point of wind energy availability for that day.
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