GWPF | 5 May 2015
Time to take a quick look at the sea ice situation down under, as I must have missed it on BBC News. According to NSIDC, a new record high has been set for April, beating last year. Ice is above average virtually all around the continent. Meanwhile, according to Bob Tisdale, Southern Ocean surface temperatures continue to plunge. It really does not take a genius to add two and two together. –Paul Homewood, Not A Lot Of People Know That, 3 May 2015
1) Antarctic Sea Ice Expands To New Record In April – Not A Lot Of People Know That, 3 May 2015
2) IEA: Falling Oil Prices Are Derailing The Future Of Renewable Energy – Fusion, 4 May 2015
3) The Silliness Of Tesla’s Green Battery – Seeking Alpha, 3 May 2015
4) Why Tesla’s Green Battery Is Just Another Toy For Rich Green People – Forbes, 1 May 2015
5) Green Fanatics Outraged Over National Public Radio (NPR) Interview With Freeman Dyson – National Public Radio (NPR), 2 May 2015
6) And Finally: 25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’ – Daily Caller News, 4 May 2015
Falling oil and gas prices have short-circuited rollouts of renewable energy and alternative vehicle use, setting back progress toward reaching climate goals, the world’s top energy body said Monday. Many analysts had been hopeful that renewable investment could withstand the price drop brought about by America’s shale oil and gas boom. But the IEA says it’s not happening. –Rob Wile, Fusion, 4 May 2015
So how much is that battery power going to cost? Adding together your 15 cents per kwh for solar power plus the 15 cents to cycle a kwh in and out of the battery, and you’re looking at 30 cents per kwh for electricity. I think 30 cents per kwh is bonkers. At my home in Texas I pay 10 cents per kwh to Reliant Energy for electricity that is mostly generated by natural gas burning power plants. And here’s where the economics of the Powerwall break down. If you do not have a big enough solar system to get your home entirely off the grid, then there is simply no point whatsoever in paying 30 cents per kwh to get electricity via the Powerwall. At night, when you’re not generating solar power, you could simply get your electricity from the grid. For 10 cents a kwh. –Christopher Helman, Forbes, 1 May 2015
Last week, Tesla introduced a 10kWh home battery pack for back-up use only. It will cost $7140 installed, will be dead in fewer than five hours, and can’t run an entire house or central air conditioning or charge an electric car. In other words, this new back-up battery from Tesla is just another attempted Musk distraction from a core auto business that I expect in this week’s Q1 earnings report will show record GAAP losses and the company’s lowest gross margin in at least a year. –Mark B Spiegel, Seeking Alpha, 3 May 2015
What I would like to emphasize is that human actions have very large effects on the ecology, which have nothing to do with the climate. Carbon dioxide is what we’re producing in big quantities and putting into the atmosphere. This happens to be a very good fertilizer for all kinds of vegetation, good for wildlife, good for agricultural production, so it has many benefits. And this is something you have together with the climate effects, which are much less certain, so it’s a question of drawing a balance. I’m just saying I don’t understand it and neither does anybody else. I’m skeptical because I don’t think the science is at all clear, and unfortunately a lot of the experts really believe they understand it, and maybe have the wrong answer. –Freeman Dyson, National Public Radio (NPR), 2 May 2015
Would you believe it was eight years ago today that the United Nations predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.” This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. from issuing more apocalyptic predictions since. –Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller News, 4 May 2015
1) Antarctic Sea Ice Expands To New Record In April
Not A Lot Of People Know That, 3 May 2015
Paul Homewood
Time to take a quick look at the sea ice situation down under, as I must have missed it on BBC News!
According to NSIDC, a new record high has been set for April, beating last year. Ice is above average virtually all around the continent.
Meanwhile, according to Bob Tisdale, Southern Ocean surface temperatures continue to plunge.
It really does not take a genius to add two and two together.
2) IEA: Falling Oil Prices Are Derailing The Future Of Renewable Energy
Fusion, 4 May 2015
Rob Wile
Falling oil and gas prices have short-circuited rollouts of renewable energy and alternative vehicle use, setting back progress toward reaching climate goals, the world’s top energy body said Monday.
In a new report, the International Energy Agency warns much more investment will be needed in technologies like the one Tesla unveiled Friday because current rates of financing are not enough to allow by less than the 2° Celsius.
Many analysts had been hopeful that renewable investment could withstand the price drop brought about by America’s shale oil and gas boom.
“Even with the price of oil being lower, cheaper materials have made solar still far more practical,” Jeff Osborne, an analyst with financial services company Cowen Group, told CNBC in December.
But the IEA says it’s not happening.
“It is troubling that advances in those areas that were showing strong promise – such as electric vehicles and all but solar photovoltaics (PV) in renewable power technologies – are no longer on track to meet [2° Celsius] targets,” the group said.
“While the recent drop in fossil fuel prices changes the short-term economic outlook of energy markets, using it to justify a delay in energy system transformation would be misguided in the long term. Short-term economic gains and delaying investment in clean energy technologies will be outweighed by longer-term costs.”
They outline which countries are making progress the most progress toward decarbonizing their energy systems. The largest fossil fuel producers, like the U.S. and Russia, have shown almost none.
That’s despite the fact that renewable energy is no longer more expensive than fossil fuels — one utility CEO, for instance, has said electricity from residential rooftop solar is now as cheap as power from the local grid in half the states in the Union.
“Utility scale solar PV and onshore wind are now competitive with electricity generated by new conventional power plants in an increasing number of locations,” the IEA says. “While the cost gap between electricity from renewables and that from fossil fuels is narrowing, fossil plants still dominate recent capacity additions. Together with a slowdown in deployment rates of PV and wind, this undermines the trajectory needed to decarbonise energy supply and meet the 2DS renewable power targets.”
3) The Silliness Of Tesla’s Green Battery
Seeking Alpha, 3 May 2015
Mark B Spiegel
Last week, Tesla introduced a 10kWh home battery pack for back-up use only. It will cost $7140 installed, will be dead in fewer than five hours, and can’t run an entire house or central air conditioning or charge an electric car.
In an effort to distract investors from its cash-burning car business, as well as to find some use for millions of Panasonic cells that it has committed to buy without being able to sell enough cars to utilize them, Tesla Motors last week introduced a 10kWh home battery pack meant only for emergency back-up power. (It also introduced a 7kWh pack meant for regular use that also makes no economic or utilization sense, but that can be a subject of a different article.)
Tesla is pricing this back-up battery at $3500 before installation costs, and Solar City is offering an installed purchase price of $7140. To put the inadequacy of this product into perspective, here’s a great summary of the power requirements of many household items. It’s pretty clear that without “going crazy”, your house can easily draw 3kw of electricity; and yet, Tesla’s 10kWh back-up battery has continuous output of only 2kw, and thus is inadequate to run even a medium-sized house, and would be completely dead in five hours anyway, with no capacity to run central air conditioning or charge an electric car. (For a medium-sized house, a central air conditioner alone draws nearly 5kw.)
Sure, to make that battery last longer than five hours, everyone could huddle into one broiling hot room and shut off everything but the refrigerator and a few light bulbs, but why would you do that when… … a comparably priced 16kw natural gas-fired generator can run your entire house (including the air-conditioning) for as many hours as needed, at a cost of less than $2/hour (assuming 195 cubic feet/hour consumption at full draw and a New York State gas price of less than $10 per 1000 cubic feet of gas)? […]
In other words, this new back-up battery from Tesla is just another attempted Musk distraction from a core auto business that I expect in this week’s Q1 earnings report will show record GAAP losses and the company’s lowest gross margin (ex-ZEV credits) in at least a year…
4) Why Tesla’s Green Battery Is Just Another Toy For Rich Green People
Forbes, 1 May 2015
Christopher Helman
All the breathless coverage of Elon Musk’s Powerwall battery brouhaha last night is missing the most important thing: a sober discussion of real-world costs. So let’s take a look at the costs and see if this world-shaking, game-changing innovation really makes any sense.
The implication is that a 10 kwh system could supply 1,000 watts of current to your home for 10 hours. That’s a good amount of energy. The average American home draws an average of 1,200 watts of power around-the-clock, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. For a sense of scale, a desktop computer draws about 100 watts, a big TV 200 watts. Refrigerators cycle on and off, but average about 100 watts.
So how much is that battery power going to cost? Setting aside for a moment the cost of making that electricity in the first place, let’s look at just the cost of using the battery to store it and get it out again. Researcher Winfried Hoffman, the former CTO of Applied Materials AMAT +0.91%, has done some interesting work on the falling costs of battery power. He figures that for a lithium-ion system with an initial installation cost of $400 per kwh capacity, 80% efficiency and ability to run 5,000 cycles, the average cost of stored electricity will be 15 cents per kwh.
This might be conservative. Solar installer Sungevity is working with a German battery company called Sonnenbattery, which claims it can do 10,000 cycles.
But this calculation might also not be conservative enough. It’s unclear how many cycles you could expect to get out of Powerwall. Tesla says its 7 kwh Powerwall can cycle daily, while the 10 kwh system would cycle weekly. The cost of the battery is amortized over the total amount of electricity cycled through it over its lifetime. The less you use it, the higher your average unit cost.
Either way, 15 cents per kwh for battery storage seems ball-park reasonable.
To get your real electricity cost, you have to add to that 15 cent battery charge whatever you’re paying for that electricity in the first place. Since the idea is that batteries will work in tandem with solar, we’ll look at what Tesla’s sister company SolarCity charges its customers. According to SolarCity, a customer pays no upfront costs for a system, but then gets dinged for 15 cents per kwh of power generated. In the contract, SolarCity has the ability to increase that rate 2.9% a year, which doesn’t seem like much, but would end up raising your cost per kwh above 20 cents by the end of the 20 year term. So adding together your 15 cents per kwh for solar power plus the 15 cents to cycle a kwh in and out of the battery, and you’re looking at 30 cents per kwh for electricity.
I think 30 cents per kwh is bonkers. At my home in Texas I pay 10 cents per kwh to Reliant Energy for electricity that is mostly generated by natural gas burning power plants.
But it gets worse. Let’s think some more about the real utility of this Powerwall system. Given that the average home uses 900 kwh per month, that equates to 10,800 kwh per year. And it also breaks down to an average round-the-clock power demand of 1,200 watts.
Now with some attention to efficiency, the average home could probably get itself down to 1,000 watts of power demand on average, which would probably be low enough that Tesla’s 10 kwh Powerwall battery could handle the loads for about half the day.
The idea of course is that the solar panels on a 100% solar home would power the house during the day while simultaneously charging the Powerwall batteries, which would keep the power going at night. […]
And here’s where the economics of the Powerwall break down. If you do not have a big enough solar system to get your home entirely off the grid, then there is simply no point whatsoever in paying 30 cents per kwh to get electricity via the Powerwall. At night, when you’re not generating solar power, you could simply get your electricity from the grid. For 10 cents a kwh.
I’ll say it another way: unless your solar-powered home is entirely disconnected from the grid, or your system is big enough to provide for all your electricity needs, an expensive battery backup system like Powerwall does not make economic sense.
5) Green Fanatics Outraged Over National Public Radio (NPR) Interview With Freeman Dyson
National Public Radio (NPR), 2 May 2015
Freeman Dyson is one of the most famous names in science, and sometimes one of the most controversial. Dyson is 91 and was one of the British scientists who helped win World War II.
He spent most years since as a professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. He has won the Max Planck Medal and the Templeton Prize, and written important, oft-quoted books including Disturbing the Universe and The Scientist as Rebel, and newspaper articles that inspire both admiration and debate.
His latest book is Dreams of Earth and Sky, a collection of essays on everything from the history of England’s Royal Society to current hot button issues like climate change and information technology — including, in one essay, the possibility of bioengineering human beings the way people now breed flowers. He tells NPR’s Scott Simon that there are many different reasons for that kind of project.
Interview Highlights
On bioengineering
You have people who are breeding flowers just for fun because it’s beautiful. You make new kinds of tulips and new kinds of roses and you can make new kinds of animals in the same way. Also you can think of preventing hereditary diseases, which are some of the worst, so there are all sorts of different reasons why you might like to do some genetic engineering, either on humans or animals or plants. Each case has to be looked at carefully on its merits, and certainly one set of rules is not going to be applicable to everyone.
On his global warming skepticism
What I would like to emphasize is that human actions have very large effects on the ecology, which have nothing to do with the climate. Carbon dioxide is what we’re producing in big quantities and putting into the atmosphere. This happens to be a very good fertilizer for all kinds of vegetation, good for wildlife, good for agricultural production, so it has many benefits. And this is something you have together with the climate effects, which are much less certain, so it’s a question of drawing a balance. I’m just saying I don’t understand it and neither does anybody else. I’m skeptical because I don’t think the science is at all clear, and unfortunately a lot of the experts really believe they understand it, and maybe have the wrong answer.
Of course [the weather] concerns me, but of course, we don’t know much about the causes of those things. We don’t even know for sure whether it is more variable than it used to be. I mean the worst disasters were the Ice Ages, and nobody really understands for sure the causes of Ice Ages, so I’m not saying the climate disasters aren’t real, I’m merely saying we don’t know how to prevent them. […]
6) And Finally: 25 Years Of Predicting The Global Warming ‘Tipping Point’
Daily Caller News, 4 May 2015
Michael Bastasch
For decades now, those concerned about global warming have been predicting the so-called “tipping point” — the point beyond which it’ll be too late to stave off catastrophic global warming.
It seems like every year the “tipping point” is close to being reached, and that the world must get rid of fossil fuels to save the planet. That is, until we’ve passed that deadline and the next such “tipping point” is predicted.
Would you believe it was eight years ago today that the United Nations predicted we only had “as little as eight years left to avoid a dangerous global average rise of 2C or more.”
This failed prediction, however, has not stopped the U.N. from issuing more apocalyptic predictions since.
To celebrate more than two decades of dire predictions, The Daily Caller News Foundation presents this list of some of the “greatest” predictions made by scientists, activists and politicians — most of which we’ve now passed.
1. 2015 is the ‘last effective opportunity’ to stop catastrophic warming
World leaders meeting at the Vatican last week issued a statement saying that 2015 was the “last effective opportunity to negotiate arrangements that keep human-induced warming below 2-degrees [Celsius].”
Pope Francis wants to weigh in on global warming, and is expected to issue an encyclical saying basically the same thing. Francis will likely reiterate that 2015 is the last chance to stop massive warming.
But what he should really say is that the U.N. conference this year is the “last” chance to cut a deal to stem global warming… since last year when the U.N. said basically the same thing about 2014’s climate summit.
2. France’s foreign minister said we only have “500 days” to stop “climate chaos”
When Laurent Fabius met with Secretary of State John Kerry on May 13, 2014 to talk about world issues he said “we have 500 days to avoid climate chaos.”
Ironically at the time of Fabius’ comments, the U.N. had scheduled a climate summit to meet in Paris in December 2015 — some 565 days after his remarks.
Looks like the U.N. is 65 days too late to save the world.
3. President Barack Obama is the last chance to stop global warming
When Obama made the campaign promise to “slow the rise of the oceans” some environmentalists may have taken him quite literally.
In 2012, the United Nations Foundation President Tim Wirth told Climatewire that Obama’s second term was “the last window of opportunity” to impose policies to restrict fossil fuel use. Wirth said it’s “the last chance we have to get anything approaching 2 degrees Centigrade,” adding that if “we don’t do it now, we are committing the world to a drastically different place.”
Even before that, then-National Aeronautics and Space Administration Goddard Space Flight Center head James Hansen warned in 2009 that Obama only “has four years to save Earth.” I wonder what they now think about their predictions?
4. Remember when we had “hours” to stop global warming?
In 2009, world leaders met in Copenhagen, Denmark to potentially hash out another climate treaty. That same year, the head of Canada’s Green Party wrote that there was only “hours” left to stop global warming.
“We have hours to act to avert a slow-motion tsunami that could destroy civilization as we know it,” Elizabeth May, leader of the Greens in Canada, wrote in 2009. “Earth has a long time. Humanity does not. We need to act urgently. We no longer have decades; we have hours. We mark that in Earth Hour on Saturday.”
5. United Kingdom Prime Minister Gordon Brown said there was only 50 days left to save Earth
2009 was a bad year for global warming predictions. That year Brown warned there was only “50 days to save the world from global warming,” the BBCreported. According to Brown there was “no plan B.”
Brown has been booted out of office since then. I wonder what he’d say about global warming today?
6. Let’s not forget Prince Charles’s warning we only had 96 months to save the planet
It’s only been about 70 months since Charles said in July 2009 that there would be “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.” So the world apparently only has 26 months left to stave off an utter catastrophe.
7. The U.N.’s top climate scientist said in 2007 we only had four years to save the world
Rajendra Pachauri, the former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in 2007 that if “there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late.”
“What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment,” he said.
Well, it’s 2015 and no new U.N. climate treaty has been presented. The only thing that’s changed since then is that Pachauri was forced to resign earlier this year amid accusations he sexually harassed multiple female coworkers.
8. Environmentalists warned in 2002 the world had a decade to go green
Environmentalist write George Monbiot wrote in the UK Guardian that within “as little as 10 years, the world will be faced with a choice: arable farming either continues to feed the world’s animals or it continues to feed the world’s people. It cannot do both.”
In 2002, about 930 million people around the world were undernourished, according to U.N. data. by 2014, that number shrank to 805 million. Sorry, Monbiot.
9. The “tipping point” warning first started in 1989
In the late 1980s the U.N. was already claiming the world had only a decade to solve global warming or face the consequences.
The San Jose Mercury News reported on June 30, 1989 that a “senior environmental official at the United Nations, Noel Brown, says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.”
That prediction didn’t come true 15 years ago, and the U.N. is sounding the same alarm today.
