Give us a fracking break!
Discussion
Roy Lime said:
I think they're called Constraint Payments.
As far as I understand it constraint payments are made to all energy producers, including fossil fuel power stations and are simply a way for the grid to compensate the providers when supply over reaches demand. Its a fault of the grid really not to be able to balance supply and demand and a fault of the laws of physics for making electricity quite hard to store efficiently and cheaply. Constraint payments ( in my laymen's understanding) aren't as charachterised above "a subsidy" just a reasonable contractual matter if fact.Renewables (wind/solar) put up bills massively and destabilize the grid.
The technology is already mature, they are NOT going to improve dramatically or get dramatically cheaper now, there is no justification for the massive subsidies.
The costs are frightening - 25,000 Euros per 4 person household in Germany over the next decade, Victoria/Queensland $10 – $20k per family, etc.
Energy cost goes up directly as more solar/wind is added.
We would be experiencing an economic boom now with falling energy prices, if it weren't for wind/solar - they are parasitic costing jobs and transferring wealth from the poorest to the richest.
We haven't even started to feel the real pain in UK domestic electricity bills, but it's all in the pipeline.
The loons are in charge of the asylum, no doubt about it.
The technology is already mature, they are NOT going to improve dramatically or get dramatically cheaper now, there is no justification for the massive subsidies.
The costs are frightening - 25,000 Euros per 4 person household in Germany over the next decade, Victoria/Queensland $10 – $20k per family, etc.
Energy cost goes up directly as more solar/wind is added.
We would be experiencing an economic boom now with falling energy prices, if it weren't for wind/solar - they are parasitic costing jobs and transferring wealth from the poorest to the richest.
We haven't even started to feel the real pain in UK domestic electricity bills, but it's all in the pipeline.
The loons are in charge of the asylum, no doubt about it.
FredClogs said:
I don't know to what you're referring but if it's the feed in tariff then that's already been mentioned and the reasoning for pushing renewables is obvious.
I've not heard of them being paid to not generate.
The list of things that you haven't heard is pretty impressive.I've not heard of them being paid to not generate.
Consider me impressed by your awesome ability to not hear things.
Radio 4 this morning - interview with the septic documentary maker (Josh Fox) who doesn't like fracking.
Interesting contrast in his statement on air that the former head of the EPA lied before congress, had admitted doing so, and had retracted their comments later. So a proven liar? Whereas if a climate sceptic questions government officials they are a conspiracy loon. By default.
But he has access to over 800 peer reviewed papers citing the damage done by fracking. Apparently the evidence of damage is legion, and we've all been fed lies by petro-chemical PR machines.
He is a self nominated expert on fracking. He knows this stuff (it's in the interview). His degree in theatre and film studies must have been the backbone of this.
Quite a good interview - Michelle Hussein tried very hard to pin the man down. Perhaps he was expecting a less hostile reception?
His new film takes him to six continents to look at climate change. By canoe??
Interesting contrast in his statement on air that the former head of the EPA lied before congress, had admitted doing so, and had retracted their comments later. So a proven liar? Whereas if a climate sceptic questions government officials they are a conspiracy loon. By default.
But he has access to over 800 peer reviewed papers citing the damage done by fracking. Apparently the evidence of damage is legion, and we've all been fed lies by petro-chemical PR machines.
He is a self nominated expert on fracking. He knows this stuff (it's in the interview). His degree in theatre and film studies must have been the backbone of this.
Quite a good interview - Michelle Hussein tried very hard to pin the man down. Perhaps he was expecting a less hostile reception?
His new film takes him to six continents to look at climate change. By canoe??
The Don of Croy said:
Radio 4 this morning - interview with the septic documentary maker (Josh Fox) who doesn't like fracking.
Interesting contrast in his statement on air that the former head of the EPA lied before congress, had admitted doing so, and had retracted their comments later. So a proven liar? Whereas if a climate sceptic questions government officials they are a conspiracy loon. By default.
But he has access to over 800 peer reviewed papers citing the damage done by fracking. Apparently the evidence of damage is legion, and we've all been fed lies by petro-chemical PR machines.
He is a self nominated expert on fracking. He knows this stuff (it's in the interview). His degree in theatre and film studies must have been the backbone of this.
Quite a good interview - Michelle Hussein tried very hard to pin the man down. Perhaps he was expecting a less hostile reception?
His new film takes him to six continents to look at climate change. By canoe??
I heard this and could almost see the flecks of spittle flying from his mouth. Mishal Hussein (for it was she) needed an umbrella!Interesting contrast in his statement on air that the former head of the EPA lied before congress, had admitted doing so, and had retracted their comments later. So a proven liar? Whereas if a climate sceptic questions government officials they are a conspiracy loon. By default.
But he has access to over 800 peer reviewed papers citing the damage done by fracking. Apparently the evidence of damage is legion, and we've all been fed lies by petro-chemical PR machines.
He is a self nominated expert on fracking. He knows this stuff (it's in the interview). His degree in theatre and film studies must have been the backbone of this.
Quite a good interview - Michelle Hussein tried very hard to pin the man down. Perhaps he was expecting a less hostile reception?
His new film takes him to six continents to look at climate change. By canoe??
FredClogs said:
help us meet our climate change commitments (I suspect you're one of these that doesn't believe in climate change or fossil fuels, in which case this whole conversation is largely a waste of everyone's time).
We shouldn't have to 'believe in it' like it's some form of new religion! Models fail to work, climate doesn't follow the 'plan' - then it's a religious level of fervour that requires no more than 'Faith'! Sorry, I like my science un-tainted.jshell said:
FredClogs said:
help us meet our climate change commitments (I suspect you're one of these that doesn't believe in climate change or fossil fuels, in which case this whole conversation is largely a waste of everyone's time).
We shouldn't have to 'believe in it' like it's some form of new religion! Models fail to work, climate doesn't follow the 'plan' - then it's a religious level of fervour that requires no more than 'Faith'! Sorry, I like my science un-tainted.If anyone was looking to reduce carbon emissions, it would be smart to avoid building wind and solar plants in the first place.
Green engineers confirm that renewable energy ‘Simply won’t work’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
One commentator on the engineers' report said:
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on.
Another commentator on the engineers' report said:
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
It would be better not to start - or having started, make do with the current number of vanity projects and call a halt. Renewables are a superb and extremely expensive non-solution to a non-problem we didn't cause.turbobloke said:
jshell said:
FredClogs said:
help us meet our climate change commitments (I suspect you're one of these that doesn't believe in climate change or fossil fuels, in which case this whole conversation is largely a waste of everyone's time).
We shouldn't have to 'believe in it' like it's some form of new religion! Models fail to work, climate doesn't follow the 'plan' - then it's a religious level of fervour that requires no more than 'Faith'! Sorry, I like my science un-tainted.If anyone was looking to reduce carbon emissions, it would be smart to avoid building wind and solar plants in the first place.
Green engineers confirm that renewable energy ‘Simply won’t work’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
One commentator on the engineers' report said:
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on.
Another commentator on the engineers' report said:
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
It would be better not to start - or having started, make do with the current number of vanity projects and call a halt. Renewables are a superb and extremely expensive non-solution to a non-problem we didn't cause.The Google research concluded that in 2011 green energy could not compete with coal on cost and that CO2 persists in the atmosphere for a century, meaning we've already done the damage and without large scale carbon capture we cannot reverse this. This technology doesn't currently exist.
The second article that you quoted from, made a poor headline "green energy isn't the answer" then wrote a bunch of stuff about recouping energy costs without any basis in facts or reference. Exactly the same shots that were fired at New, efficient cars a decade ago and have been proven wrong countless tomes.
Evanivitch said:
turbobloke said:
jshell said:
FredClogs said:
help us meet our climate change commitments (I suspect you're one of these that doesn't believe in climate change or fossil fuels, in which case this whole conversation is largely a waste of everyone's time).
We shouldn't have to 'believe in it' like it's some form of new religion! Models fail to work, climate doesn't follow the 'plan' - then it's a religious level of fervour that requires no more than 'Faith'! Sorry, I like my science un-tainted.If anyone was looking to reduce carbon emissions, it would be smart to avoid building wind and solar plants in the first place.
Green engineers confirm that renewable energy ‘Simply won’t work’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
One commentator on the engineers' report said:
Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on.
Another commentator on the engineers' report said:
The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.
It would be better not to start - or having started, make do with the current number of vanity projects and call a halt. Renewables are a superb and extremely expensive non-solution to a non-problem we didn't cause.Evanivitch said:
The Google research concluded that in 2011 green energy could not compete with coal on cost and that CO2 persists in the atmosphere for a century, meaning we've already done the damage and without large scale carbon capture we cannot reverse this. This technology doesn't currently exist.
What damage are you referring to, and where is there any established causality in the data attributing this damage to humans?If you didn't already know that there's no visible causal human signal in any global climate data, you do now.
Evanivitch said:
The second article that you quoted from, made a poor headline "green energy isn't the answer" then wrote a bunch of stuff about recouping energy costs without any basis in facts or reference. Exactly the same shots that were fired at New, efficient cars a decade ago and have been proven wrong countless tomes.
Now there's another question about who hasn't read which sources fully, and/or hasn't understood the implications.The reference you missed was Weißbach et al., Energy, 52 (2013) 210
EROEI data shows that renewables cannot power a western society with schools, universities, hospitals, shops, factories and so on.
Have another read of the following, or a first read maybe.
"Several recent analyses of the inputs to our energy systems indicate that, against expectations, energy storage cannot solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar power. Not for reasons of technical performance, cost, or storage capacity, but for something more intractable: there is not enough surplus energy left over after construction of the generators and the storage system to power our present civilization."
When was the intermittency problem solved? And when did renewables' EROEI increase and how?!
Surely there was ample opportunity to spot that the two sources that I and others post from time to time are basically saying the same thing for the same reason, so why you coo over one and boo the other is rather odd.
We've already got more than enough pointless and expensive vanity projects based on wind and solar, it's time to get back to reality and keep the lights on.
This is veering off topic but when I was a lad in the 1980s when utilities were publicly owned and not run for profit the mantra was not to produce and consume more but to use and waste less. Perhaps we should not be worrying too much about keeping the lights on if no one is at home, for example... Turbobloke.
FredClogs said:
This is veering off topic but when I was a lad in the 1980s when utilities were publicly owned and not run for profit the mantra was not to produce and consume more but to use and waste less. Perhaps we should not be worrying too much about keeping the lights on if no one is at home, for example... Turbobloke.
When I was a lad in the fifties you couldn't buy gas or electric cookers on the high street you had to go to a 'showroom' where prices were fixed, and service was grim. It was like some totalitarian state institution. The utilities were publicly owned - well government controlled anyway. turbobloke said:
Green engineers confirm that renewable energy ‘Simply won’t work’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
Misleading people again. Here's that quote in context:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
Google engineers said:
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
And the original article rather than the propaganda version:http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it...
Here's Google's page on the RE<C (cheaper than coal) initiative it refers to:
https://www.google.org/rec.html
And their current scheme:
https://www.google.com/green/bigpicture/
motco said:
When I was a lad in the fifties you couldn't buy gas or electric cookers on the high street you had to go to a 'showroom' where prices were fixed, and service was grim. It was like some totalitarian state institution. The utilities were publicly owned - well government controlled anyway.
Haha, I remember those places in the early 80s. Also:
http://petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com/?petition...
18,000 signed, only 1000 of them from the Fylde
durbster said:
turbobloke said:
Green engineers confirm that renewable energy ‘Simply won’t work’
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
Misleading people again. Here's that quote in context:http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/shocker-top-...
Google engineers said:
As we reflected on the project, we came to the conclusion that even if Google and others had led the way toward a wholesale adoption of renewable energy, that switch would not have resulted in significant reductions of carbon dioxide emissions. Trying to combat climate change exclusively with today’s renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.
And the original article rather than the propaganda version:http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it...
Here's Google's page on the RE<C (cheaper than coal) initiative it refers to:
https://www.google.org/rec.html
And their current scheme:
https://www.google.com/green/bigpicture/
ked. "Those calculations cast our work at Google’s RE<C program in a sobering new light. Suppose for a moment that it had achieved the most extraordinary success possible, and that we had found cheap renewable energy technologies that could gradually replace all the world’s coal plants—a situation roughly equivalent to the energy innovation study’s best-case scenario. Even if that dream had come to pass, it still wouldn’t have solved climate change. This realization was frankly shocking: Not only had RE<C failed to reach its goal of creating energy cheaper than coal, but that goal had not been ambitious enough to reverse climate change."
Also to add...they are hoping something gets invented...at some point.
"We’re not trying to predict the winning technology here, but its cost needs to be vastly lower than that of fossil energy systems. For one thing, a disruptive electricity generation system probably wouldn’t boil water to spin a conventional steam turbine. These processes add capital and operating expenses, and it’s hard to imagine how a new energy technology could perform them a lot more cheaply than an existing coal-fired power plant already does.
A disruptive fusion technology, for example, might skip the steam and produce high-energy charged particles that can be converted directly into electricity. For industrial facilities, maybe a cheaply synthesized form of methane could replace conventional natural gas. Or perhaps a technology would change the economic rules of the game by producing not just electricity but also fertilizer, fuel, or desalinated water. In carbon storage, bioengineers might create special-purpose crops to pull CO2 out of the air and stash the carbon in the soil. There are, no doubt, all manner of unpredictable inventions that are possible, and many ways to bring our CO2 levels down to Hansen’s safety threshold if imagination, science, and engineering run wild.
We’re glad that Google tried something ambitious with the RE<C initiative, and we’re proud to have been part of the project. But with 20/20 hindsight, we see that it didn’t go far enough, and that truly disruptive technologies are what our planet needs. To reverse climate change, our society requires something beyond today’s renewable energy technologies. Fortunately, new discoveries are changing the way we think about physics, nanotechnology, and biology all the time. While humanity is currently on a trajectory to severe climate change, this disaster can be averted if researchers aim for goals that seem nearly impossible."
Edited by London424 on Tuesday 18th October 10:32
Oakey said:
Haha, I remember those places in the early 80s.
Also:
http://petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com/?petition...
18,000 signed, only 1000 of them from the Fylde
To be fair the vast majority of the signatures on that petition are from the Fylde and surrounding areas, Wyre, Preston North, Lancaster, Blackpool North and South. Nobody in south Ulster signed the petition - tsk...Also:
http://petitionmap.unboxedconsulting.com/?petition...
18,000 signed, only 1000 of them from the Fylde
London424 said:
I've read through most of that original article and i'm not sure what you're trying to critisize...it is basically saying they failed, and even if they had succeeded beyond their wildest dreams we'd still be fked.
Basically, editing the quote like that suggests Google have declared renewables are not A solution, when they're actually saying they aren't THE solution. Building a sked. tload of wind farms and solar panels is not going to solve the problem of climate change on its own. If Google really thought renewables are a dead end, they wouldn't be investing hundreds of millions of $ into them.
But yes, I think your analysis that unless somebody comes up with a solution we're basically f
ked is correct 
Anyway, I didn't open this thread up to rehash the same tired arguments from the climate change thread, I was hoping to find out a bit more about fracking as I'm not sure where I stand on it yet.
motco said:
FredClogs said:
This is veering off topic but when I was a lad in the 1980s when utilities were publicly owned and not run for profit the mantra was not to produce and consume more but to use and waste less. Perhaps we should not be worrying too much about keeping the lights on if no one is at home, for example... Turbobloke.
When I was a lad in the fifties you couldn't buy gas or electric cookers on the high street you had to go to a 'showroom' where prices were fixed, and service was grim. It was like some totalitarian state institution. The utilities were publicly owned - well government controlled anyway. Gassing Station | News, Politics & Economics | Top of Page | What's New | My Stuff