Cold Air from Wordpress

Tom Adams and Ross McKitrick have a column in the Financial Post which promotes their  study being released tomorrow by the Fraser Institute. This promises to be a report I'll appreciate, having noted many times the systemic costs of growing intermittent renewables (very recently here ) How green energy is fleecing Ontario electricity consumers  Green industry advocates, including the consulting firm Power Advisory and advocacy group Environmental Defense, have added up the direct payments to new renewable generators, and concluded that since those costs are relatively small, the impact of renewables on the total cost of power is likewise small. However, such analyses ignore the indirect costs that arise from the way renewables interact with the rest of the power system. Adding renewable generating capacity triggers changes throughout the system that multiply costs for consumers through a mechanism called the Global Adjustment. Our new study, released Wednesday by the Fraser Inst...

"...note how the ground keeps shifting, but always in such a way as to inflate costs for nuclear power and fossil fuels." Jani-Petri Martikainen's blog may lead to additional reading. Hopefully that includes a recent post of mine commenting on the same Ecofys study: Levlised Cost confusion disguises rate impact of intermittent renewables

More good advocacy advice from Australia - a country with no commerical reactors generating electricity in a system with very high emissions.

Strange moment in history of the word "standard" Feeling unable to pass climate legislation through the legislative bodies of the country he was elected President of, Barack Obama turned to the country's Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to set regulations on the emissions of carbon dioxide. The New York Times reported early in July that a lobby group produced much of the complex legislation , and because it's an anti-nuclear lobby group, Rod Adams of Atomic Insights was noting by the end of the summer that the complex regulation appeared to reward states for replacing nuclear with natural gas. The other day I read a tweet attributing the following graph to Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF): Curious, I hopped over to the U.S. Energy Information Administration and grabbed a couple of data tables from the most recent Electric Power Annual page . I've calculated the CO2 intensity per kWh (CIPK - g/kWh) for each state as per 2012 CO2 emissions and generation fi...

The rebound effect - or Jevon's paradox - is probably a fringe interest, which is unfortunate in that few will appreciate just how asinine Time magazine senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald's tweet is.

This was first posted within a longer post on Cold Air Currents In Canada, the focus on expanding industrial wind seems to be swinging to Alberta, although they are still swinging in Toronto too. AESO 2013 Annual Market Statistics CBC news somewhat foolishly headlined an article built on a Lazard's report,  Solar, wind cost-competitive for peak energy, study finds : As a source of peak energy — that is, power at times when there is the greatest demand on the electrical grid — photovoltaics are more flexible and cost-competitive than conventional technologies, Bilicic said Bilicic apparently isn't from around here, where Ontario returned to a winter peak in 2014 (early evenings), and Alberta always has had a winter peak - which I assume is also early evening. Solar is completely useless for those winter peaks, but certainly useful for summer peaks, and Bilicic has a point on solar for summer peaking jurisdictions. Wind is demonstrably not reliable for summer peaks in Ontario,  ...