Welcome to the meteoLCD blog

This blog started 28th September 2008 as a quick communication tool for exchanging information, comments, thoughts, admonitions, compliments etc… related to http://meteo.lcd.lu , the Global Warming Sceptic pages and environmental policy subjects.

2011 in review (blog stats)

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 52 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Germany: feed-in cost versus results

Dr.-Ing Helmut Alt is a professor of the  Electromechanical and Informatics department of the FH (Fachhochschule = Technical University) Aachen, and an outspoken realist on climate and energy problems (whose writings I always find very interesting). In a recent presentation he shows a nice diagram which gives the evolution of the yearly sums spent as feed-in tariff for renewables (red curve, left axis) and the percentage of renewable energy produced in Germany (blue curve, right axis):

A question that comes immediately :  is the relation-ship linear (i.e.  is the cost proportional to the result) or is the relationship more complicated ? The usual statistical test to compare different mathematical models is to calculate for each model the goodness of the fit squared (normally called R2, which gives the fraction of the variance explained by the model. R2 = 1 would be a perfect match, R2 = 0 if the model is totally inadequate). I entered the numbers in my Statistica software, and computed 3 different models:

1. an affine model: cost = a + b*percentage

2. a quadratic model: cost = a + b*percentage + c*percentage^2

3. an exponential model: cost = a + b*exp(c*percentage)

Here are the results, rounded to the 3rd decimal:

linear model:…………….R2 = 0.986

quadratic model:………R2 = 0.991

exponential model:……R2 = 0.992

All R2′s are rather high, but the calculation confirms what eye-balling suggests: the costs seem to rise faster than the result; the exponential model reigns!  This comes as a surprise, as the common political wisdom tells that expanding renewables will become cheaper with time. Germany’s  BMU* data show that this is not the case, at least for the time period 2000 to 2010.

It will be interesting to follow this rather unwelcome evolution during the coming years; if the exponential model holds, Germany could run into an unbearable cost wall sooner than expected!

*BMU = Bundesumweltministerium

CCS – Is ArcelorMittal betting on a dead horse?

Carbon Capture and Sequestration was a big subject  in environmental policies up to a couple of months ago. The IEA sees CCS as one oft the most indispensable technologies to limit atmospheric CO2 concentrations (see Newsletter from Sept. 2010).

Meanwhile, things are not running smoothly at all. Environmental groups see CCS as unacceptable, and for once I do share this point of view. Prototype and tests projects are biting dust one after the other: the latest victim is Norwegian Aker Clean Carbon company, which is closing its test side in Scotland (read here). Another  one is AEP (American Electric Power which shut down its  CCS test side in West Virgina.

In Europe Vattenfall continues to run a very small 30 MW pilot plant at Schwarze Pumpe (Germany); this miniscule plant would prepare the way for a larger 300 MW facility added to the existing Jänschwalde power plant. But these plans are also on a rough path, as told by the Spiegel in a July 2011 article. Indeed, when the German  Länder become the deciders for permitting or forbidding CCS on their territory, the future for Jähnschwalde will be bleak.

In a report dated April 2011 Lawrence Berkeley National Lab on China’s energy outlook for 2050, write “ If CCS were implemented … with 500 Mt CO2 captured and sequestered by 2050, total primary energy use would increase by 36 Mtce to 5517 Mtce in 2050 due to CCS energy requirements for carbon separation, pumping and long-term storage, but carbon emissions would decline by 4% in 2050″  . This means that as a CO2 removal technique,  CCS would be only a very small contributor. The gigantic investments surely are more pain than gain.

ArcelorMittal is making big cuts in its European steel works, and will probably shut down major part of its Luxembourg and French mills in the (very) near future.. To sweeten the pill, the French are promised a rosy future for its Florange plant based on ULCOS (Ultra low carbon-dioxyde steel making) which mandatory needs CCS.  So even if ULCOS is quite an exciting project, its reliance upon CCS might be a neck breaker.

The big question remains: Do we really need CCS ? Would it not be possible to direct the research to a route that will use the inevitably emitted CO2 as a fodder for algae that may be converted into hydrocarbons, and give a fuel that while still emitting CO2 would better the overall balance.

The decade long stillstand in global temperature (or ocean heat content, which might be a much better metric for global warming) tells us that the simplistic and politically correct relation-ship between CO2 emissions and global temperature change seems to be more of a virtual than a true type of reality. The obvious conclusion is that there is no hurry to rush into costly and complicated CO2 removal technologies. Alas, A floundering ULCOS  would still not be good news for Florange .

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Update 15 Dec. 2011:

Vattenfall’s Jänschwalde CCS project has been scrapped: read here.

One Christian Perspective on Climate Change

Australian Cardinal George Pell, the Archbishop of Sidney,  gave the 2011 annual lecture of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). Pell is well known for his intelligent and non-nonsense attitude regarding climate alarmism.

He rightly tells of  “… the climate movement’s totalitarian approach to opposing views, their demonising of successful opponents, and their opposition to the publication of opposing views, even in scientific journals….” and  “…a final point to be noted in this struggle to convince public opinion is that the language used by AGW proponents veers towards that of primitive religious controversy”.

The full text of his lecture is here.

 

Paternalismus und Oekodiktatur

Prof. Ulrike Ackermann from the university of Heidelberg has written an extraordinary lucid and clear article in the Neue Zuericher Zeitung. This should be (mandatory ?) reading for every citizen! See also Pierre Gosselin’s comment and partial translation here.

I am really excited by this article, which resumes in a magnificent way the dangers of a green movement, which from initial well-meaning and sensible care for the environment seems to slip into religious fervor and dictatorial fascination.

Germany’s Ausstieg: Nein Danke!

update 11 Sep2011: Read also this excellent comment “Energy needs in modern societies” by The Scientific Alliance!

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New Scientist had a very good article by David Strahan in its issue from 30th July 2011.

Here is the text (I assume not breaching copyright law here!):

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Europe’s energy consumers will find themselves paying a high price for Germany’s decision to get out of nuclear power

FOR decades, Germany has had some of the most enlightened energy policies in Europe. It has long been admired for setting world-leading growth in wind and solar. But its decision to ditch nuclear by 2022 will set back efforts to decarbonise the electricity supply by 10 crucial years, and could prove expensive for every household in Europe.

Germany’s abrupt about-turn, like all decisions on nuclear, was highly political. Last year the government, headed by Angela Merkel, made the sensible but unpopular decision to extend the life of Germany’s nuclear plants to 2036 as a “bridge technology” towards “the age of renewable energy”. But after the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, public hostility intensified and Merkel retreated. The U-turn may help her in the 2013 federal elections but it is a major reversal for the climate.

Around 23 per cent of Germany’s electricity comes from nuclear and 17 per cent from renewables. That’s a 40 per cent share for zero-carbon in total – one of the highest in the European Union.

The German government has admirable plans to raise renewable electricity to 35 per cent of consumption by 2020. But even this planned increase falls 5 per cent short of filling the hole in zero-carbon electricity left by abandoning nuclear.

How will Germany fill that hole? With coal and other fossil fuels. It has plans to build 20 gigawatts of fossil-fuel power stations by 2020, including 9 gigawatts of coal by 2013. The government now describes fossil-fuel power stations – apparently without irony – as “the new bridging technology”. Some of this may never be fitted with carbon capture and storage because German environmental campaigners don’t like this technology either.

So it looks as though by the end of the decade Germany will at best have about the same amount of zero-carbon generation as today – 40 per cent – and probably less. Had Germany retained its nuclear capacity and achieved its renewables target, the zero-carbon share would have been 58 per cent. We are told this decade is crucial for our emissions reduction trajectory. For Germany it will be a lost decade during which emissions from its electricity generation are likely to rise.

Trevor Sikorski, head of environmental market research at London investment bank Barclays Capital, calculates that Germany will emit an extra 300 million tonnes of carbon dioxide between now and 2020. That is more than the annual emissions of Italy and Spain combined under the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Anti-nuclear campaigners have argued that the market will come to the rescue: the permits that enterprises must buy to be allowed to emit carbon will become more expensive, encouraging emissions savings elsewhere. But this argument is hard to support, certainly in the short term.

To start with, the price of carbon permits has slumped since Germany announced its nuclear policy in early June. Sikorski says the price will rise as German utilities are forced to buy more permits to cover their increased emissions, but not by enough to impel matching reductions elsewhere. That’s because there are still far more permits in circulation than carbon being emitted, for which the recession is only partly to blame.

In the longer term, the carbon market may well do its job – but at a price to all of us.

The outcome depends critically on the success or failure of the EU’s new Energy Efficiency Directive. This calls for energy companies to implement efficiency measures that will reduce the amount of energy they supply by 1.5 per cent per year. This could cut emissions by 335 million tonnes by 2020.

Barclays Capital estimates that if the efficiency drive works, the trading system will still have surplus permits in 2020. But efficiency gains are notoriously difficult to sustain across an entire economy because of economic growth and the “rebound effect”, where greater efficiency leads to even greater consumption. For instance, improved insulation makes it cheaper to heat a house, encouraging residents to turn up the thermostat and consume more gas.

But if Europe fails to cut emissions by raising efficiency, by 2020 the trading system will have a shortage of permits equivalent to 120 million tonnes of carbon, according to Barclays Capital. If so, on the basis of today’s fossil fuel prices the carbon price would be forced up to €70 per tonne.

It is then that the supporters of the German nuclear shutdown may wish to reconsider. Had Germany kept its reactors going, the ETS would have had surplus allowances even without the efficiency savings. “Germany will make it more expensive for everybody else. They are requiring a market price to be higher to meet the same reduction target,” says Sikorski.

Even if the efficiency target is achieved, Europe will still have a price to pay. As things stand, the trading system would then have some 200 million tonnes in surplus allowances. Had the German reactors continued to generate, the surplus would have been some 500 million tonnes, meaning carbon prices and energy bills would be significantly lower. “Prices will be higher under any scenario than if Germany had kept its nuclear plants running,” says Sikorski. “We are all going to have to pay more for our power.”

It is widely agreed the cost of carbon is too low and needs to rise to spur more abatement. But the effect of the German decision is to raise unnecessarily the cost of achieving existing targets.

And let’s not forget the climate. If EU members do somehow succeed in reducing emission by 335 million tonnes through energy efficiency, all that effort will almost entirely be negated by Germany’s additional 300 million tonnes.
Thank you, Mrs Merkel.

David Strahan is the author of The Last Oil Shock: A survival guide to the imminent extinction of petroleum man, published by John Murray

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Actually, I have nothing to add to this text. Germany’s emotions-driven politics will  be feasible only if other European countries are willing to help out when times become rough: cold grey weather, long lasting high pressure, low-wind system,  major malfunction of one (and only one is enough) facility, and neighbours who do not have any electricity power to spare.

The report of the Bundesnetzagentur, written in a very prudent style so not to hurt politically correct feelings, is clear enough: Germany’s electrical energy production walks on a tight rope, and its political leaders hope and pray that Austria (and probably France and Czechia) will put up safety nets.

AWS, no pain?

Running an automatic weather station (AWS) should be child’s play and very different from the old pioneers work who three times a day (some even more often) jumped to their Stevenson hut to write carefully down the readings of the different instruments. How lucky are we today to have computers doing this chore! Really?

Today was a good example at meteoLCD how things can go spectacularly wrong. This morning I wanted to make a quick recalibration and a last check before leaving for vacation. Opening the door of the meteoLCD main room, a ghostly silence struck me. Usually there is a whirring of fans, clinking of pumps and many other sounds making for a noisy background. Not so today! The big 5000VA UPS had blown, disrupting many fuses and making a really mess of a normally good working ensemble. When I tried to power it up again, even fuses at a wiring closet further down tripped. I quickly rerouted the power cables, but nothing worked as it should. The radioactivity computer started with a blue screen, the computer interrogating the logger was unable to get a proper RS232 connection, the NOx sensor was stone dead.

After a lot of detective work, it was clear that at least one hidden fault showed now up: the logger computer had a flat BIOS battery, so that it was total amnesic to correct restarting after new BIOS settings. A connector of the RS232 cable had a loose solder joint, and the blue screen was a document that the power loss had damaged the boot sector of the hard disk. Making a repair with the W2k system CD solved the last problem. Also resoldering the RS connector was not a big feat. The cause of the NOx sensor death remains a mystery.
Another rather spooky fact was that the clock of the main logger computer which runs quite a lot of Automate scripts was really corrupt, and indicated a next operation at a time in the past. I use a short program called Rockettime to fetch the clock from the internet (the sync feature was introduced only with WinXP).

Finally I managed to find in our small town a shop which had a 1000VA UPS (1000VA corresponds to about 432 W), barely enough to drive the 6 computers. Luckily I had one of these male EU connectors which goes into the UPS outlet, so I could make this cable with a normal DIN socket (one never has a spare of these…). I finished work in the evening, after spending about 7 hours on this repair.

Tell me about modern lazy AWS operators and about the wonderful world of  constantly perfectly working computers!

(picture courtesy www.treatmentscancer.info)

A Vast Machine

Let me say this clear and loud:  Paul N. Edwards is not a climate realist, his faith into the integrity and innocence of politically correct  climate science and IPCC working is not troubled by Climategate or Himalayagate, because this book was finished in 2009, before these eye-opening events came to light.  Nevertheless it is in my opinion a very good book, even if quite a couple of statements make me wince.

P.N. Edwards writes a refreshingly good style, and shows the professionalism of an extremely well documented author. His book is about climate models and climate data, and the politics of global warming. Three ideas appear everywhere in this book:

1. data friction, i.e. available data are incomplete, uncertain, and hinder investigations like mechanical friction hinders the smooth running of an engine.

2. infrastructural inversion, i.e. you have to put the data gathering infrastructures upside down, to get information how data are gathered, and how there might be faults or shortcomings in that process. The admirable work of Anthony Watt’s www.surfacestations.org project falls into that category (even if Edwards does not hold this enterprise in very high esteem)

3. modelling (both data and climate). This is the recurrent leitmotif: without models there are no data,  and only models can make data global. Edwards uses the concept of “model” in a very broad sense. Take for instance the  MSU data from a satellite. Without wringing these data through several (mathematical) procedures, I won’t get values for tropospheric temperature.  As today nearly all data will go through one or more of these procedures, Edwards has a point. But he stretches it a bit too far in my opinion, as he uses that point to silence all these who do not 100% buy into the global climate models. Also being models, there is in my opinion a big difference between both, a difference Edwards knowingly minimizes.

Edwards writes a vast story, beginning in the 19th century and ending 2009, of the development of weather and climate models, out from physical basics (like conservation of mass and momentum) and data collection. There is an awesome wealth of interesting details in this story, but you never will be told the difference between scenario and prediction (Edwards takes GCM outputs flatly as predictions,  the best we can rely upon to take political decisions).

At the end of the book, he takes a look at the blogosphere and names the McIntire/Mc.Kitrick battle against the hockey stick, minimizing the stubborn resistance of the HS-team to make their data (and methods) available for scrutiny.

There are some critical reflections on consensus climatology, but as said above, it is a pity that the great tsunami of the Climategate email scandal happened after the book was finished.

Edwards is not a coward, and he lays his cards open quite at the beginning, writing “Yes I think climate change is real, and I think it’s the biggest threat the world faces now…”. I do not buy into the last part of this sentence, but must honestly confess that I really liked this outstanding book, and will if time permits read it a second time.

Climate Coup

Most books on climate usually recap the same well-worn paths: paleo-climate, greenhouse gases, global climate change, extreme weather events, potential future catastrophes etc… This is true as well for the alarmists as the realists writing, the difference being that the first insist on potential dangers and urge for rapid live style changes, the second stressing the natural climate variability, the poor quality of data and models and the financial rewards that can be expected from spreading climate fear.

Patrick Michaels is the editor of a book that concentrates mostly on the political questions,  as stated in the sub-title “Global warming’s invasion of our government and our lives”.  So you find in 8 chapters written by 8 different authors (Michaels being one of them) only a few graphs, no calculations and no physics.

Pat Michaels is a former state climatologist and president of the American Association of State Climatologists, an ex-research professor of the University of Virginia, a fellow of the Cato Institute and the author of  “The Satanic Gases” and “Climate of Extremes“. He is also the author of the well known and excellent World Climate Report, one of the oldest blogs on global climate problems.

The authors of this book are climate realists, and, as typical for more conservative Americans, people who see with suspicion Big Government expanding its reach into matters that they think should remain in the hands of more local organizations. This anger in loosing freedom to decide to state organizations like the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) pervades all the chapters. A second Leitmotif is that vast numbers of organizations, political, environmental, academic, military and industrial have developed a big interest in keeping the climate change fear alive. Many of them thrive (and survive) by keeping public subsidies flowing, hiding the fact that this money ultimately comes from the taxpayer and is lost for other means.

Every chapter of the book begins with a short comment by P. Michaels, summarizing the salient features. For instance he concludes this summary of the first chapter by Pilon & Turgeon “The Executive State Tackles Global Warming” by:  “The result is rule by unelected, largely unaccountable bureaucratic “experts” making decisions that in the end are often value-laden and political.”

Here the list of all authors, from chapter 1 to chapter 8:  Roger Pilon &Evan Turgeon, Patrick Michaels, Ross McKitrick,Ivan Eland, Sallie James, Indur M. Goklany, Robert E. Davis, Neal McCluskey.

Mc Kitrick (successful crusader with Steve McIntyre against the foolish Hockeystick paper) writes a hair-raising story on the peer review process, which shows that scientific integrity is in bad shape in the world of politically correct climate science.

A highly recommended book!

Wind Power

As about everywhere else, there is also a strong pro and contra debate going on in Luxembourg concerning wind turbines. The Greens put all their energy eggs into the wind and solar basket, so they can’t readily accept any criticism. My personal opinion is that a reasonable and intelligent use of wind power should be a welcome contribution to the energy mix.  But one should never forget the real production data, which are now available for many wind parks. These tell quite a different story than the usual green hype. I think that the visual aspect on the landscape never has been incorporated as a cost; depending on your sensibility and love of pristine nature, these costs could be extremely high.

I wrote a short paper with real numbers (in French:  Réflexions sur les éoliennes, pdf ).  I heavily used Eirgrid’s excellent website which holds a treasure of production and ancillary data. Ireland makes a  good object for research into real wind power. The country has about 1425 MW wind power installed, and is geographically well delimited and wind friendly.

The most important factor in wind energy generation is the capacity factor, i.e. the percentage of the yearly power produced in respect to the installed power. For Ireland this is about 23% in 2010, a shocking low number for a country with such good wind conditions. More disturbing is the negative trend in this country wide capacity factor: (picture from Eirgrid, red arrow added)

I have calculated the linear trend since 2002:  every year this factor falls by about 0.93  (slope of the regression line). Most certainly this negative trend is caused by lower wind velocities ( in the adequate range for wind turbines).  These numbers are not good news for the wind energy industry. Now 9 years do not yet define a climate change, and one really has to wait if this trend continues, reverses or shows up as part of a cycle. It will be interesting to look up other wind producing nations for a similar trend.

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Update 01-Nov-2011:

There is a growing opposition to plans to install a great number of wind-turbines in the french speaking part of Belgium (Wallonny). Read here the open letter of Dr. Alain Marchandise. The home page of the organization “Vent de Raison” is here.

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Update 07-Nov-2011:

There is a discussion in NatureNews on the diminishing wind velocities over much parts of the globe: Why winds are slowing and also an article from AWS True Power questioning the results of the Nature paper by Vautard et al.

The report for the second quarter Q2 of 2011 documents below normal wind velocities in many parts of Europe.

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Update 15-Dec-2011:

Here a graph from the BDEW with my comments, showing yet another example of diminishing capacity factors during the last years. For Germany this would by a hefty -3.8% per year.

A similar negative trend can be found for 4 Luxembourg wind parks; these are unofficial approximate numbers, taken from graphs, so I will keep the sites anonymous (numbers are percent)

Site     2009    2010   2011 (up to Nov.)

site1     18        16         16
site2     19        17         17
site3     12        10        11   (outch!!!)
site4     14       13         12
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These numbers show a grim picture of the efficiency of that green energy which should save the world!