US Grid Needs Fossil Fuels, Not Wind
December 27, 2022
By Paul Homewood
Just to follow up yesterday’s post on the Texas grid, here are two charts for the US as a whole.
The first show how total demand rose by more than 100GW during the cold spell just before Christmas.
The second illustrates how wind power halved in the space of 24 hours at the same time:
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electric_overview/US48/US48
This destroys the idea that the wind is always blowing somewhere, and that all you have to do is distribute surplus power around the country in order to meet demand.
And without gas or some other dispatchable source, how would that loss of wind power and surge in demand have been met?
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
In 2021, the EU+UK fleet of ~384 Gigawatts of Weather-Dependent “Renewables” contributed power output of ~69 Gigawatts to the Grid: data EurObserER.
The recorded productivity, (actual output generated divided by installed nameplate of values Wind and Solar “Renewables”) over the last decade was:
• Onshore Wind power 22.2%
• Offshore Wind power 34.9%
• Combined EU+UK Wind power 23.6%
• Solar PV 11.6%
• Resulting in a ~18% Combined Weather-Dependent power productivity across Europe in 2021.
This performance should be compared to the productivity of Conventional Generation, (Fossil fuel based and Nuclear) capable of 90% productivity, when fully utilised which:
• can run 24/7
• produce much more energy for use by civilisation than the energy they need to build and run, i.e. a good Energy Return on Energy Invested.
• can be turned on when needed to match demand
• use small land areas
• can have massive energy storage on site with no need for batteries
• can be located close to centres of demand
• use limited materials for their manufacture and installation
• according to current US EIA comparative costs Conventional power generat0rs are substantially cheaper for their power production, even at current elevated European Gas prices
These simple sums show that any claim that Wind and Solar power are now cost competitive with conventional fossil fuel generation are patently false.
The comparative costs of each unit of power supplied to the Grid over the year
The US EIA publishes comparative figures power generation both for capital and long-term costs. When those costs are merged with the measured productivities shown above and are compared to Gas-Firing for power generation, the comparisons can be seen for each unit of power actually supplied to the grid.
The overall “Renewables” costs are roughly 10 times that of Gas-firing.
Nuclear power is still cheaper than “Renewables” but by a smaller factor, (only ~2-3 times).
These sums do not account for the additional cost and operational burdens on the Grid that arise from the unreliability and intermittency caused by the Weather-Dependence of “Renewables”, nor for the need for continuous power back-up to replace the Weather-dependent power whenever the Weather fails.
Would anyone sane buy a car costing about 10 times the normal price to buy and run, that can only work one day in five, when you never know which day that might be ? And then insist that its technology is the only way to power the whole economy.
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/3-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
Of course, Ed, as you are very well aware, our Beloved Leaders employ people on very high salaries who are just as capable as you, to produce these graphs.
They also have access (if they want it) to data which will be even more damning than this. But they have control of Academia and the Main Stream Media and can ensure that all this can be suppressed and a bunch of bare faced lies promoted. And that is what people will believe.
So these aren’t bumbling incompetants. The facts you clearly set out, are features of the (severely constrained) future they have designed for the plebs and the middle class. The Tories must be well aware that none of the GangGreen activists will ever vote for them, and they don’t give a shit. The activist Reality Deniers are their useful idiots which is why they never take effective action against them.
Mark Steyn pointed out as soon as it was apparent what was going on with the parallel COVID scam, that he was worried it will all end up with violence on the street. He now says (correctly) that the worry now is that there WON’T be violence on the streets.
One other very important factor to include is service life. The windmills, especially those offshore, are short-lived compared to a reliable generating plant.
They know all this, Ed. They want to bring the West to its knees in order to start the “build back” program and I notice they’re not the slightest bit interested in storage as they well know no economic system exists. It’s going to be a future of expensive and intermittent energy and demand management restrictions on heating, travel and food to balance the Grid.
But thanks for the useful additional information.
Economic storage does exist, but under the ‘fossil fuels’ label, so not acceptable to climate obsessives at any level.
They can read today’s news to see how many Americans are without electricity due to severe cold weather, then imagine what their future indoor heating options will look like if current energy policies are allowed to persist.
All because of the net zero insanity and the watermelons.
My fear is that here in the UK, the green zealots will still rule during 2023. I don’t trust Sunak and his band of many incompetents to change tack.
Not just Sunak, any politician, any party!
Absolutely spot on.
Labour passed the 2008 Climate Change Act, the Lib Dems (in the Coalition Government) ensured the Department of Energy was anything but, and the Conservative Governments that followed continued the follies.
And the Green Party … …. 🙂
I’d be impressed if you could sell heat pumps in North America right now!
Most of them incorporate resistance heaters as backup, and also to try to evaporate or even melt any frozen heat exchange fluids. When it gets really bitter you might want to supplement with additional electric fires, log burners, and kerosene or propane heaters. At least while your power supply holds up. A backup generator might serve to keep a gas furnace running, but not a heat pump plus fires.
New homes are not built with any of the ‘traditional’ forms of heating being possible. In fact only last week I was talking to a woman who had recently had all the fire places removed from her house. I asked her why she did not keep one fireplace in situ at least ? She had no answer. But then even sourcing solid fuels in and around cities is becoming impossible. It is now going to be all electric or nothing.
https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/local-news/landmark-424m-city-leap-deal-7880549
I depair at the lack of fore sight from so much of the population. Surely recent weather here in the UK plus what we are hearing from the USA should create enough cause for concern ?
Heat pumps in US are a southern thing, where winter freezes are only occasional. Since they need air conditioning, anyway, it’s not a bad idea.
Happy New Year Paul. Thanks again for your indefatigable work over the years in skewering the politically correct morass that the ‘Global North’ is subconsciously luxuriating in. I’d compare your work to the work volunteers engage in picking up litter and getting rid of graffiti. Its merely losing less badly. Since St. Greta arrived I keep getting it wrong – about how the hype surely can’t get any worse – where climate alarmism further magnifies beyond belief every year.
The fatal flaw of government elites’ (redundant?) drive for electrification via renewables is that power generation is by private* companies. If there is to be ‘gas or some other dispatchable source,’ it will have to be private companies.
How they are going to keep the critical backup sources in business is not part of their plans. It is a decadent assumption that they’ll always be there. As I have said many times, the more renewables penetrate the market place, the worse the business case for conventional sources. Plus the nudge of certain politicians attacking the remaining conventional sources for charging exorbitant prices when called on.
All this WILL cap the growth of renewables, the only question is how many must die before the geniuses in charge figure it out. Renewables can never be more than supplemental. They cannot exist without conventional sources.
*”Private” in the American sense, not owned by the government. “Private” in English English might be different.
“And without gas or some other dispatchable source, how would that loss of wind power and surge in demand have been met?”
Especially gas for all of the conventional vehicles that will be doing the work.
All petrol and diesel vehicles are being phased out in much of the UK. Even those deemed as less polluting. It is a planned phasing out.
Along with the excuse of emissions control come other attacks on the ice vehicles. For example – a very real reduction in places to park. One only has to look around to see which way the wind is blowing, so to speak.
The problem with wind power is the governing bodies involved are so busy giving tax breaks and incentives to the utilities that build these monstrosities, that they forget to include a Magic Unicorn with every windmill. How are these turbines expected to produce Terra Watts of power without a magic unicorn? Get real people, and spring for the MU.
Whoever in EIA developed the graphs either didn’t know what they were doing or wanted to deliberately mislead. Why did they plot energy against a time axis? It should be power (GW). It is hard to determine how much smoothing is done but the time intervals would normally be 30 minutes or less. Looking at the steps, it looks about this, but it may just be a function of the plotting program.
On the graph drawn, you cannot even determine the actual energy used. 600GWh per 5 minute interval is a lot more 600GWh per 30 minutes
The time interval in the presented charts is hourly, so MWh and MW are equivalent. However, you can play with the charts. Once you specify more than 31 days, hourly data are no longer charted – just daily totals. Click the link and then try the gear settings icon on a chart or two to see.
A modern “heat pump” is great technology – suitable in many cases but not all situations. Retrofitting a heat pump into an older building is probably not a good idea.
Heat pumps (Heating, Ventilation, & Air Conditioning [HVAC]) work well in a house built with under-floor insulated ducts and ample wall and ceiling insulation. Proper sizing and placement of the ducts is important and requires expertise to have an efficient system.
Modern buildings will have 5.5 inches (14 cm) of insulation in the walls and a foot or so in the attic.
Most places in the USA (except the south half of Florida) need a back-up heat source not dependent on electricity. A modern catalytic converter wood stove is a good choice. Inexpensive electricity is desirable.
For emergencies, a 3 week supply of the alternative fuel (wood or wood pellets) ought to be stockpiled.
Every grid, not only the USA, needs a combination of “fossil fuels” and nuclear to ensure reliability.
I stitched together 12 months of hourly downloads of the generation data. I took total generation as a proxy for demand, ignoring the trade with Canada and Mexico. I checked the nominal capacities of wind and solar as at 2021 (the latest EIA data easily found), and then created a pair of columns for wind and solar that are simple multiples of the actual generation, with the multiplication constant and hence the implied nominal capacity separately settable for each. A further column of hourly surplus and deficit is created by adding the two scaled up generation columns and subtracting the demand. The surplus/deficit column maximum defines the input capacity of the storage conversion required to utilise all the surpluses. The (negative of the) minimum defines the output capacity needed by the backup generation: this turns out to be similar to average demand with these data. The grid has to be able to handle the maximum generation from wind and solar to supply the demand and route the surplus to storage. Total generation less total demand gives round trip storage losses when the rest of the calculations are set up.
The next column is constructed to handle storage. The amount in storage in the previous period (from the cell above) is added to if there is a surplus in the previous column, scaled by the efficiency of storage: if there is a deficit then the amount in storage is reduced to fill it, allowing for the efficiency of conversion back to electricity from the storage medium by multiplying the deficit by 1/efficiency. If you run the calculation with initial storage set to zero, then the minimum of the column will be the amount you need in storage at the start of the year to avoid running out, and the difference between the maximum and the minimum is the volume of storage required. Using different efficiency assumptions allows comparison between storage technologies.
Create a cell that is the difference between the initial and final storage volume. This will allow a simple way of calculating feasible combinations of generation capacity and storage. Use the cell as the target in a goal seek calculation with a target value of zero. The variable should be one or other of the capacity multipliers for wind or solar, so that it is scaled to generate sufficient to meet demand including demand supplied via storage. Then you can manually adjust the other multiplier and re-optimise and compare results. Cost the various capacities and you can see where the optimum combination lies, and how sensitive it is to the variables.
I found that the amount of storage required is surprisingly insensitive to wide ranges of different composition of generation between solar and wind (amounting to just under a month of average demand), but that there is a level of solar which is effectively a minimum because lower values start requiring substantially more storage. That is not a surprise given that peak US demand is in summer, driven by aircon. Combinations with higher amounts of solar also require larger increases in grid capacity and storage input capacity. Cost will be dominated by storage.
These calculations are not difficult: any reasonably competent teenager ought to be able to replicate my work. Slightly more involved are calculations that look at the trade off between storage capacity and additional generation which is subject to being curtailed. But even those are not particularly difficult.
Presumably this freezing cold weather is exactly what we should expect to see in a warming climate.