The Energy Advocate: A monthly newsletter promoting energy and technology (Howard Cork Hayden)

The Energy Advocate June 2015 (Vol. 19, No. 11)

A monthly newsletter promoting energy and technology P.O. Box 7609, Pueblo West, CO 81007 Copyright © The Energy Advocate

Renewable Follies It is time to have a look at some predictions about energy from the Carter era (1977-1981).

For one, the Carter Administration predicted that by 2020, 1.4 trillion kWh of electrical energy would be generated by photovoltaics (PV).

In 2014, the total from PV plus solar/thermal/electric plants was 18 billion kWh, a mere 1.3% of the 2020 goal. That is, after 25 years of the 30-year goal, the amount of electricity produced by PV is less than 1.3% of the goal for 2020.

Somewhat surprisingly, the Carter Administration predicted that a trillion kWh would come from wind by 2020—a figure 30% less that that predicted to come from PV. (Reality check: wind presently generates about 50 times as much energy as PV.) In 2011, wind generated 120 billion kWh, some 12% of the prediction for 2020.

The Carter Administration also predicted that by 2020, 83% of the energy the US uses for home heating and domestic water heating would come from solar collectors. One need not do more than look around the neighborhood to see the utter folly of that estimate, but we’ll have a look anyway. The Energy Information Administration says that solar accounts for less than 0.05% of all home heating (2009).

Another prediction of the Carter Administration was that by 2000, 20% of our energy would come from solar sources (including biomass and hydro). In reality, solar sources produced 6.2% of our energy.

In 1981, I began a paper this way [1]: A textbook in natural philosophy, dated 1876, reported that "the heat sent yearly by the sun to the earth would be sufficient to melt a layer of ice 30 metres thick, spread over the surface of the earth." This century-old estimate for the amount of sunlight reaching Earth above the atmosphere is only eight percent lower than the figure we arrive at using devices carried aloft.

I then mused that there must be very good reasons why solar energy accounts for so little of our energy supply. I made a distinction between “natural” solar energy and “technological” solar energy. Nature amasses solar energy in the form of biomass (such as firewood) and mountain lakes. We don’t have to build the trees or gather the water from thousands of square kilometers to avail ourselves of the energy. But for photovoltaics, solar heat collectors, and wind turbines, we can

Dreams of Renewable Energy President Carter expected that the US would get 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2000. Amory Lovins (Figure 1, left) figured on 40%, if only the US would follow his “Soft Technology” prescription. Reality intervened, and the US got 6.2% of its energy from renewable sources, and virtually all of it came from biomass (primarily firewood) and hydropower. By 2013, wind and solar accounted for 1.7% of our energy (Fig. 1, right), somewhat short of the 70% predicted by Lovins.

collect energy only in proportion to the amount of surface area we expose to the elements.

In 1980, the Carter Administration made estimates of what fraction of future energy demand would come from various sources. I made estimates of how much energy might come from those sources as a fraction of the known 1978 demand [1]. For purposes of comparison, our annual energy consumption has been (in exajoules, EJ)  1978 89  2000 104  2014 104 On the reasonable assumptions that the best hydro sites were already in operation, and that we would probably not exceed our maximum energy from firewood (ca. 1870) by much, I predicted that by 2000, we would get between 10% and 25% of our 1978 demand, saying that the lower estimate was more likely. I had made an overestimate. In fact, in 2000, biomass and hydro accounted for about 7.3% of our 1978 demand. By 2011, biomass and hydro gave us 7.9% of our energy. A large part of the biomass contribution comes from ethanol imported from Brazil.

For the “technological” sources, I predicted that 4-15% of our 1978 demand could come from solar and wind by 2000.

That was a gross overestimate. We got about 0.2% of our 1978 demand from solar and wind in 2000. Since 2000, things have changed greatly, primarily because of the huge amount of money thrown at the solar and wind industries.

The amount of energy generated by solar and wind in 2014 was 2.7% of our 1978 consumption (89 EJ), or 2.3% of our actual 2014 consumption (104 EJ). Despite the massive subsidies and 45 billion watts of nameplate power), not a single conventional power plant anywhere has been displaced by wind.

Such are the follies of renewable energy.

The title of this article is deliberately vague, leading one to wonder whether renewable energy schemes are follies or the follies themselves are renewable. Present US energy policy clearly says that follies are renewable: there is no end to them.

[1]

Howard C. Hayden, “Solar Energy: How Bright the Prospect?”

The Science Teacher, Volume 48, Number 4, April 1981.

In the late 1970s, there were reasons for some people to predict an energy future without much energy. It was said that the world was running out of oil, and that we had scant supplies of natural gas. The views were just based on trends, however, with no insight into science, economics, policy, or sociology.

The “Peak Oil” concept of M. King Hubbert is simple enough: if there is a finite resource, and demand for it grows exponentially, then production will grow for a while, peak out, and then slack off as the resource decreases inexorably toward zero. The mathematics is unassailable, even if the application to reality is not.

Glaciers Ice cores from Antarctica date back something like 800,000 years. Those from Greenland date back 110,000 years to the last interglacial, called In other words, the ice in the Eemian.

Antarctica has been there through about 7 or 8 glacial periods, while that in Greenland has been through one.

Figure 1. Left: The “Soft Technology” takeover, according to Amory Lovins. Right: Energy Reality, according to the Energy Information Administration.

US oil production peaked in about 1970. Now consider yourself as an oil magnate. You need to supply oil to customers, and you have to drill holes in the ground to get the oil. Are you going to drill somewhere in the US, or in Saudi Arabia, where a mere drinking straw begets a gusher, so to speak? Why, then, would anybody regard the drop-off in US oil production as an example of Hubbert’s Peak?

In the 1970s, US energy policy kept the price of natural gas so low that there was no profit in providing it. Who would spend money drilling for natural gas if there was no hope of recovering expenses, let alone making a profit?

The Environmental Protection Administration started raising requirements for fuel efficiency during the Carter Administration. Suddenly, there was a big demand for Japanese cars, because they were small and well-engineered.

American auto manufacturers now had to compete, and the quality of their cars increased dramatically over the years.

The computer revolution played a huge role in the improvement, both in the role of robotics at the factory and in the cars themselves. For efficiency and exhaust cleanliness, there is simply no comparison between a modern car and a 1970s car. Computer-controlled fuel injection allows engines to use non-leaded gas, with the result that spark plugs almost never need to be changed. Electronic spark control, with oxygen sensors, air-flow sensors, temperature sensors and ping detectors all contribute to high combustion efficiency.

What little hydrocarbons are left are consumed in the catalytic converter, so that the car emits basically nothing but CO2 and H2O. None of that involves renewable energy.

The consumption of petroleum dropped by 15% between 1978 and 1983, but rose back to 1978 levels by 2000.

Consumption was primarily driven by cost. Consumption has dropped by 13% since 2005, and the main reason seems to be the economy. Renewable energy played no role.

Another estimate that has turned out to be way off the mark was done by The National Academy of Sciences. They estimated [2] that by 2010, the nuclear-energy capacity would be 700 GW; unfortunately, it is only about 100 GW. They did not foresee the Three Mile Island accident that hurt nobody, but that nonetheless called a halt to nuclear development.

They didn’t foresee that a poor Russian design would cause the deaths of about 30 people in Ukraine when incompetent operators caused a severe meltdown, or that the Japanese would build the Fukushima Dai-Ichi power plant with insufficient protection from tsunamis.

[2]

National Academy of Sciences, “Energy in Transition, 19852010: Final Report of the Committee on Nuclear and Alternative

Energy

http://www.nap.edu/catalog/11771.html

Systems,”

Figure 2: The temperature record from Vostok ice cores in the Antarctic for the last 400,000 years. The glacial periods are indicated by blue, and the brief interglacials by pink. The present interglacial is at the right.

What about glaciers that are not in either Antarctica or Greenland? John Kehr, in a book I highly recommend [3]. points out a few things about glaciers that ought to be widely circulated. The first one is that, aside from the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, most glaciers are not remnants of the last glacial period. In other words, when the great ice sheets began to melt around 18,000 years ago, the warming climate also claimed the glaciers in the Alps and other mountain ranges.

Kehr mentions several examples. The Hans Tausen Ice Cap in Peary Land, Greenland (not part of the main Greenland ice sheet) is only 4,000 years old. For another, he writes [3, page 118] In 2002 Lonnie Thompson expected to find an ice core that was at least 18,000 years old at Mount Churchill (a few hundred kilometers east of Anchorage, Alaska). He has done ice cores around the world based out of Ohio State University.

What he found surprised him and many others. The oldest ice at the bottom of the 460m (1500ft) glacier was only 2,500 years old (82). Meaning that mountain was ice free prior to that. That region of Alaska has cooled enough in the past 2,500 years to grow a glacier that is 5 football fields thick and 64 km long (40miles).

The glacier at the 2nd-highest mountain in North America, Mt. Logan, in southern Canada, is only 8,000 years old. The Fremont Glacier in Wyoming is only 300 years old. The Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru is only 1,500 years old. These ages are known, because in all cases, scientists have drilled through them, right down to bedrock.

Kehr emphasizes the relationship between the Milankovitch cycles and glacial conditions. Basically, it all depends on how much sunlight there is above 65º N latitude.

That quantity peaked about 10,000 years ago, and has been on the decline ever since. It reached the long term average (amount of sunlight above 65º N) about 3,000 years ago. Kehr writes [3] There is an even more important lesson being told by glaciers in the NH [Northern Hemisphere] though. That story is even more important to understand. Most glaciers in the NH have only formed in the last 4,000 years. While these new

glaciers are often used as evidence of global warming, that these glaciers have formed in the past few thousand years is actually evidence that the Earth and the Northern Hemisphere specifically are cooler now than they were in the past few thousand years. … The last 1,000 years have been the COLDEST of the past 10,000 years.

[3]

John Kehr, “The Inconvenient Skeptic: The Comprehensive Guide to the Earth’s Climate.” ISBN-13: 978-0984782918

Cooling the Past There is an admonition against speaking ill of the dead. This proscription evidently does not apply to our “climate experts” who have no embarrassment about manipulating past data beyond recognition. Exhibit A is the temperature record from Maine, from John Hindraker [4]. The temperature record in Lewiston (green) is, of course, not presumed to be representative of the state of Maine. The black line is the temperature of Maine as figured by NOAA in 2013; the blue line represents the rewrite of the temperature history done in 2015. Notice that the reduction of temperature is greater farther back in time, resulting in a greater (if you can believe it) increase in temperature from 1900 to 2015.

But it is worse than it seems. According to NASA, the world was much warmer in the 1970’s than it was in the 1920’s – yet the CIA reported a large increase in Arctic ice and worried about the threat to national security from global cooling. [5]

There is no reason, of course, why the temperature in the Arctic has to follow the same pattern as the earth as a whole, but it beggars the imagination that NASA could simultaneously believe that warmer worldwide temperatures could be associated with arctic ice expanding, and then conclude that the Arctic is now heralding a warmer world.

Paul Homewood has a nice example [6] of how adjustments to the data reduce past temperatures and thereby increase the temperature trend. Figure 4 shows the temperature data from De Bilt, Holland, and the adjusted data. Regarding the raw data, Homewood says, “We can see the all too familiar pattern of warm years in the 1930’s and 40’s, followed by a much colder interval, and then a recovery since the 1980’s.”

Figure 4: The temperature record in De Bilt, Holland, 1880-2015, showing raw data (left) and adjusted data (right)

Homewood writes [6]

Figure 3: Temperature data from Maine.

Green: Lewiston. Black: NOAA reconstruction of Maine, as done in 2013. Blue: NOAA reconstruction of Maine, as done in [2015. From ref. 4]

As to rewriting the past, Steve Goddard [5] takes up the cudgel by noticing how NASA produces graphs that seem to defy reality.

We have previously noted the Their cooling of the past disappearance of most Arctic to keep the global warming ice in 1922 (TEA Oct. 2013, meme alive reminds me of September 2012, September the old Soviet joke – the future is known, it is the 2007).

At that time, the past that keeps changing.

Arctic was obviously warmer than usual, and that was David Archibald certainly due to ocean currents.

In the 1970s, amidst worries of the coming ice age, it was reported that Arctic ice was expanding. How, then, could it be that the 1970s were warmer than the 20s?

According to NASA, 1923 was one of the coldest years ever, even though the North Pole was melting and the Arctic was experiencing “unheard of high temperatures.”

Altogether, temperatures prior to 1950 have been adjusted down by as much as 1ºC. Now, of course, it may be possible that the original temperature record was in error. But the funny thing is that similar adjustments have been made at every other nearby station, with records prior to 1950. (Aachen and Lille have no data between 1900 and the 1990’s).

He then shows that the same data manipulations were applied to Uccle, Trier-Pertisb, and Hannover.

[4]

John Hinderaker, “NOAA Caught Rewriting US Temperature History (Again),” 5/5/2015, http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/05/noaa-caught-rewriting-us-temperature-historyagain.php

[5]

https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/page/7/

[6]

Paul Homewood, “Cooling the Past in Holland,” April 9, 2015. https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2015/04/09/cooli ng-the-past-in-holland/

Ignoring the Past To be a successful athlete in a competitive sport, one must have a short memory. You simply cannot let a previous defeat keep your mind from concentrating on winning today’s game.

So it is with the present Administration, hell-bent on its war on CO2: Ignore the past! Figure 5 shows the North Atlantic hurricane Power Dissipation Index (PDI). The upper graph is from the 2014 National Climate Assessment, and shows the PDI data from 1970 to the present. Patrick Michaels and Chip Knappenberger made the lower graph from PDI data dating back to 1920.

Clearly, the Administration has cherry-picked the data to emphasize a frightful trend that, alas, just isn’t there.

Ozone is more of a tailpipe problem than a smokestack problem, but that’s not the important part of the issue. If there are harmful pollutants, attention should be focused on the harmful pollutants. CO2 is not one of them, and should not be used as an excuse.

[9]

Sabrina Tavernise and Coral Davenport, “E.P.A. Carbon Emissions Plan Could Save Thousands of Lives, Study Finds,”

New York Times, 5/4/2015

When in Doubt, Build a Propaganda Museum It had to happen sometime. Miranda Massie “quit her job as general counsel for New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, assembled a team of advisers, enlisted a small army of pro-bono lawyers, and, in 2014, founded the Climate Museum Launch Project” [10]. “If we don’t solve the climate crisis, there’s a sense in which the social-justice issues that have animated me are moot,” she said.

The New York Times says [11] And Ms. Massie’s goal is far more ambitious. The New York museum would aim to attract at least a million visitors a year and seek to influence the world, including political leaders in the United States.

Figure 5: The Power Dissipation Index (PDI), as given in the President’s 2014 National Climate Assessment (top) and as recorded from 1920 to the present.

[7]

Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger, “A Clear Case of Selective Data Usage from the U.S National Climate

Assessment,”

http://www.cato.org/blog/clear-case-

selective-data-usage-us-national-climate-assessment April 22, 2015.

Intrepid Leader After years of study of military history, naval warfare, and the science and engineering of watercraft, US Coast Guard Academy graduates got to hear a lecture from President Obama about the real security problem facing the nation: climate change.

“I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country,” Mr. Obama told about 4,200 people on an athletic field overlooking the water here, including about 200 graduates in crisp white dress uniforms.

“And so we need to act, and we need to act now.” [8] [8]

Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Obama Recasts Climate Change as a Peril With Far-Reaching Effects,” 5/20/2015 New York Times

Saving Humanity By all measures, the air quality in the US these days is far better than it was fifty years ago, in spite of the fact that the population and energy consumption have both more than doubled. Emissions from power plants, factories, cars, and trucks are such that the harm of remaining polluting substances cannot even be measured.

Referring to an article in Nature Climate Change, S. Tavernise and C. Davenport of the New York Times [9] tell us that an indirect benefit of limiting “carbon emissions” (correctly, CO2 emissions) will be the saving of thousands of lives because other emissions “such as soot and ozone” will be reduced. The investigators mapped out where the power plants are, and then constructed maps of how diseases from said pollutants would be reduced.

[10]

Carolyn Kormann, “The Museum of Unnatural History,” The

New Yorker, May 16, 2015 [11] Michael Forsythe, “Director of Climate Change Group Looks to Hong Kong for Museum Ideas,” New York Times, 5/20/15

STEM Notes You can—in principle—dim a light by just putting a resistor in series with the light. The resistor, however, would consume a lot of power and get hot. A light dimmer is a gadget that allows you to dim lights without getting hot.

Inside the light dimmer is a device (a TRIAC®) that acts like a fast-acting switch that can be turned on, but can’t be turned off until the line voltage reverses.

The drawing shows what happens.

The dotted line represents the line voltage, and the red line represents the voltage fed to the light. When you adjust the dimmer, you are adjusting (see green arrow) the turn-on point. The voltage remains on until the line voltage returns to zero, and the behavior is repeated with every half-cycle.

The Energy Advocate Publisher: Vales Lake Publishing, LLC. Editor Howard Hayden, Ph.D., (for identification only) Professor Emeritus of Physics, University of Connecticut. The Energy Advocate, PO Box 7609, Pueblo West, CO 81007. ISSN: 1091-9732. Fax: (719) 547-7819, email: corkhayden@comcast.net.

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