A friend of mine was touting the marvels of solar energy in Hawaii. So I wrote him something to try to get him back to reality.
Hawaii has always had very high energy costs. They can afford the high cost of “Green”. That is mitigated to some extent by the tropical climate moderated by oceans. It is a special place. In Great Britian OTOH the move to green energy has caused 30,000 excess deaths in winter. Germany’s industry is becoming uneconomic due to the costs of “Green” energy. So they are scrapping the “Green” plan and moving to coal fired plants. In Spain the “Green” plan has cost 2 jobs for every job created in “Green” industries. Spain has some of the highest unemployment rates in Europe.
Now if you were doing solar cells would a good place for them be near he equator or northern Minnesota?
On top of all that “Green” industries couldn’t survive at their current level without Federal and State subsidies.
Proof that “Green” is a bad idea? It can’t survive without handouts. Your government at work. And yes “conventional” power gets subsidies and more of them. But the correct way to think about its is subsidy/KWh. For the “Greens” it is 10X to 20X higher.
So how is the scam pulled off? Most people don’t run the numbers. Most people don’t get thermodynamics (a wicked subject). Most people don’t get computer models. A good computer model gets you to within 5% and there are multiple ways to make mistakes even then. The best models get you to about 1% and that takes a LOT of effort accounting for second order effects. The climate modelers claim much better than .3% accuracy and the problem involves important third, fourth, and higher order effects. Did I mention unknowns? Did I mention knowns unaccounted for? Did I mention unknown interactions between the knowns? Did I mention chaos and strange attractors? That may have something to do with why temperatures don’t rise steadily but seem to change in jumps. You see it in weather. It tends to change in jumps.
I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in climate models.
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7 responses to “Ah. The Faith Of the Innumerate”
Spanish subsidies for solar power were so high solar operators were using diesel generator to sell power. At night.
“found that between November and January, 4500 megawatt hours (MWh) of solar energy were sold to the electricity grid between midnight and seven in the morning.
It has been suggested that some plants in the regions of Castilla-La-Mancha, Canarias and Andalucía have been using diesel generators connected to their solar panel arrays to illegally benefit from government subsidies.”
I’ve seen reports that overall it takes more power to produce a solar cell than it will generate over its life.
Fun fact about simulations: According to SPICE a 12AX7 triode will have gain with negative voltage on the plate. Simulations may give you some insight into how a system operates over some tightly defined range of parameters, and be entirely wrong outside that range. In no way should they be taken as a substitute for reality.
Ah. The 12AX7. That brings back fond memories of burnt fingers and “Danger High Voltage”. Electronics in the old days was a punishing sport.
BTW the friend who got my reply says he agrees. He was just sending me an FYI.
“I’ve seen reports that overall it takes more power to produce a solar cell than it will generate over its life.”
That’s a claim worth verifying, and I have.
But while checking on it, I found lot of instances of people virulently insisting that it’s a “myth”. While I’m very skeptical by nature, and it’s for this very reason the denials disturbed me: none of the denials I found relied on data, but merely asserted that it’s a myth.
What little proof I’ve seen offered is ridiculous–for example, it only took a couple of days for them to make my solar, but it’s been giving me power for years, ERGO–of course, the timeframe has absolutely nothing to do with how much energy was expended in creating the solar panel.
Now the real story seems to be that scientists think that solar panels have recently just rounded the corner–that is, it *has* been the case that solar panels cost more energy to produce than they’d ever generate, but it *may* be that they now generate slightly more energy than it takes to create them.
Yay, I guess. The article speaks very excitedly about how they think that solar panels will even soon be able to make up for all the power wasted up til now. While that’s fine, it does tend to accidentally expose what a crock this has been up to now.
http://www.theverge.com/2013/4/2/4174204/solar-panels-finally-generate-more-energy-than-they-consume
On climate simulations:
The “climate models” are a three-dimensional FEA with variable forcing functions. I read through the code for the model that was leaked from East Anglia, and if I went back and looked I could probably even tell you what solver they used. But at bottom, they’re doing 3-D FEA with at least one time-varying forcing function (CO2 concentration).
Sit down sometime and try building one of these. You don’t need to know anything about the albedo of clouds or the thermal conductivity of the air/sea boundary or anything like that. Just try building a 3-D FEA with time-varying forcing functions.
Can’t do it. The math is “not even wrong”. You end up with a bunch of terms that have no solution. Sure, you can throw in a bunch of fudge factors to make the solution stable, but then you have two problems:
1) You’ve got to have some very accurate data to back up your fudge factors.
2) You have no idea over what range your fudge factors are valid.
And that is why “catastrophic global warming” is BS.
Nice! In an interesting coincidence, I just received an email from the local neighborhood group practically demanding that everyone help create a local chapter of
http://citizensclimatelobby.org
An organization devoted to breaking up the deadlock in Congress in order to “create the political will for a stable climate.”
They are a bunch of morally sanctimonious zealots who believe they are fighting the good fight, and that anyone who disagrees with them is evil.
Read their typical end-of-the-world hysteria here:
http://citizensclimatelobby.org/ccl-media-packet-january-2014/
Really?
Solar cells have produced more energy over their lifetimes that the energy used to produce them since at least the 1970’s, and the payback time has only improved since then.
http://www.csudh.edu/oliver/smt310-handouts/solarpan/pvpayback.htm
You might not think they energy payback time is quick enough, but they have been a net positive for decades now.