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Original thread:
Post 142 made on Thursday December 12, 2019 at 16:59
djy
RC Moderator
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August 2001
34,746
Let me fill in the blanks. Your car, my car, the coal power plant..... All produce anthropogenic CO2

I think by now most everyone is fully aware of what creates CO2, but that's not what I asked. One has not proven a causal link: that the CO2 emitted by my wife’s car caused the flooding in Montreal. Indeed, by your logic, Quebec population growth could equally be as guilty.

Neither have you provided any justification for the spending of trillions on atmospheric 'control', in the hope, it will stopping the flooding, rather than the few billions in practical flood defences that will.

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Increased temperature means melting glaciers; the water from such glaciers raises the sea level.

Previously covered in post 85.

Glacier melt and retreat is nothing new. For several hundred years the Vikings farmed land in Greenland and Iceland was once covered in forest.

Sea level rise has been constant for the past 150 years, which is consistent with a naturally warming world. If it were reacting to increasing atmospheric CO2 content, there would, by now, have been a discernible acceleration. There hasn't been.

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But aren't you the one that does not want to live with the new reality? You are the one bitching about your government building wind farms.

Did one miss the word pragmatic? Spending vast resources on indirect actions that will have no discernible effect on what is assumed to be the problem at hand is illogical, immoral and insanity on a stick. Yes, I freely admit to having issues with other people's unthinking, uncritical stupidity.

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Ok here is your previous quote
"Tell that to the Chinese and Indians, and the other emerging nations to whom the proposals will condemn to perpetual poverty."
I thought maybe there is a language barrier, but according to the oxford dictionary

[Link: oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com] it means "the state of being poor".


Childish pedanticism. Any plans to combat atmospheric CO2 level are meaningless unless China and India come on board. And denying emerging nation’s access to cheap and affordable electricity is condemning them to perpetual poverty.

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Yes, it was rudimentary, did you want more details on how it works? Am I supposed to dismiss a process that takes in many billions of metric tons and renders it inert in the form of biomass just because you wanted to make an invalid point?

I asked for a citation on how CO2 captured by CCS can be stored inertly – which was your claim. You provided a link to a small scale concrete improvement process and a rudimentary description of photosynthesis. Neither answers the request and the childish nature of your reply to the latter was facetious.

The increased level of atmospheric CO2 is already re-greening the planet and aiding agricultural production. If you want to assist by planting more trees, carry on, but that was not the issue under discussion.

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I asked you which day (only need one) there was no wind in the UK. your point is useless because it does not take reality in consideration someone making a similar useless statement could say "how would one load balance a 100% hydro system when there is no water flow" or how would one load balance a 100% solar system when there is no sunny days" or even "how would one load balance a 100% coal system when there is no coal"

There is a vast difference between regulating a known constant input and a randomly variable one. Concentrating on an all or nothing scenario for hydro, coal, gas etc. is total nonsense, but not so in the case of renewables.

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I do listen to experts. It is just that I follow well defined and strict rules for experts while you think any bozo is an expert. I think HQ knows a lot about producing and distributing electricity and since (even with their gouging) our prices are low that means that they are experts on producing cheap electricity. When they say more wind is a way to do that I listen to them.

It is only your opinion that those I reference are bozos. Your arrogance in not providing any reasoning for the assertion (validating your self-proclaimed strict rules) continues to make the claim crass and contemptible.

HQ is not a special case as any half-competent power company could produce low-cost electricity from a grid so dominated by baseload/despatchable hydro.

No doubt HQ see a sound business opportunity, but adding a few more MW of wind power to a grid so dominated by hydro is by no means comparable to its being promoted as a primary source.

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Here is the breakdown of Ontario electricity sources.

I'm fully appreciative Quebec's generation mix (post 138 ref.2), but it has no bearing on the issue of UK renewables generation.

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The issue is you want to blame…

A graph of electricity generation by fuel type has nothing to do with cost. It is, however, interesting to note that the 34GW of installed wind and solar capacity (the equivalent of 57% of total grid capacity) only managed to supply 18.4% to the mix. Such is the inefficiency of wind and solar.

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Math and facts are always meaningless, in your opinion.

No, only your math and 'facts' concerning UK energy costs.

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"I have previously provided a link to UK government income data which clearly shows their receipt of environmental levies added to energy bills. This is the additional charge added to energy bills to pay for subsidies provided to renewables operators. In 2018/19 alone this amounted to £9 billion, representing an average of £340 per year, per household.

In essence, I am paying as much in environmental levies, per kWh, as you do for your full charge. Environmental levies are not a rounding error."
Do you mean [Link: cdn.obr.uk]?

It does not say the source of environmental levies (I am guessing one of them is the climate change levy but it does not affect domestic electricity)

It says: Environmental levies include levy-funded spending policies such as the renewables obligation (RO), contracts for difference (CfD), feed-in tariffs, the capacity market scheme and the warm home discount. We also include receipts from the ‘CRC energy efficiency scheme’ until its abolition from the 2018-19 compliance year

I am guessing RO might be wind in whole or in part but warm home discount definitely does not sound like it.


I have done you the courtesy of believing what you have to say about Quebec's generation and costs. I would have hoped one would be gracious enough to reciprocate, but clearly not.

[Link: ofgem.gov.uk]

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"I have repeatedly urged you to carry out your own research (which you have patently failed to do)."
I have therein lies your issue with me. You hate that I see through the garbage you post.

No, what I dislike is your continued failure to provide any specifics about what you claim to be garbage. I cannot hate that which I do not know.

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Like I said many pages back capital costs are much higher (it does not matter if it is earth, wind, water or sun). The problem is none of those quotes give me anything else to work with or to put doubt in anything else I said from the beginning. Capital costs look scary but in the end they are not because with time they tend to move to 0 while cost of goods (or in this case consumables) and salaries don’t look scary but they add up over time (and just keep on growing with inflation), your coal plant can’t make electricity if you don’t keep on buying more coal but you don’t need to buy the land and re-build the wind farm every decade, year, month, day, it is a one-time cost.

Having previously supplied example cost scenarios (ref. posts 10, 85 and 114) I believe I'm fully appreciative of capital costs.

Follow the link for the meat and potatoes of the quotes. There will also find your one-time cost assumption about wind farms to be somewhat in error. Onshore/offshore life expectancy is said to be 25/20 years respectively, though research by Dr Gordon Hughes (for the REF [1]) indicates these figures to be overly generous.

Note: Full disclosure dictates I should advise that Professor David Mackay disputes those latter findings [2&3] and that in turn, Dr Hughes rejects the criticism [4]. Plenty of figures, calculations and facts behind the scene to please the most ardent of mathematicians.

Further work on wind farm costs, by Dr Hughes, can be found here [5&6].

[1] [Link: s3.amazonaws.com]
[2] [Link: withouthotair.blogspot.com]
[3] [Link: inference.org.uk]
[4] [Link: ref.org.uk]
[5] [Link: thegwpf.org]
[6] [Link: thegwpf.org]

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That is why there is the fallacy of appeal to authority
[Link: iep.utm.edu]
"You appeal to authority if you back up your reasoning by saying that it is supported by what some authority says on the subject. Most reasoning of this kind is not fallacious, and much of our knowledge properly comes from listening to authorities. However, appealing to authority as a reason to believe something is fallacious whenever the authority appealed to is not really an authority in this particular subject, when the authority cannot be trusted to tell the truth, when authorities disagree on this subject (except for the occasional lone wolf), when the reasoner misquotes the authority, and so forth. Although spotting a fallacious appeal to authority often requires some background knowledge about the subject or the authority, in brief it can be said that it is fallacious to accept the words of a supposed authority when we should be suspicious of the authority's words."
As I said, referencing authoritative work is perfectly valid. If you have issues to that which I refer, provide specifics.

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That is why I don’t care about an individual’s conclusions but I want their calculations (the facts behind the scene). I taught university students how to do these calculations for two years before I got poached in the corporate world. Plus if we are talking about how much electricity a wind farm can produce then the expert would be an engineer in that field, if we are talking about the economics of wind farms then the expert would be an economist, if we are talking about how

Look at Quebec and Ontario back in the 70s we almost took the same path. we were going to go nuclear big time like them until HQ (premiere) went “nuts” and decided to spend 13B$ for phase one of the James bay project instead. But if you divide it by the 50 years since the start of the project or 40 years since it has been producing electricity it becomes 260/325 but those rerouted rivers, reservoirs and dames won’t disappear tomorrow. And if we use 100 years then it becomes 130M per year....

And I know in your mind wind and water are completely different and yes wind is a bit more temperamental, but the water levels in upstream and downstream affect how much electricity can be produced just like wind turbines depend on the wind. Water also has the issue of water management (can’t flood places upstream or downstream for the sake of electricity) and ice

Look at the Netherlands for centuries they have been using wind power to pump out the water beyond the dikes some of those mills have been doing that job since the 1400’s (600 years sure takes a bite out of capital cost ;) )


Once again, a mishmash of confused thinking.

From those who seek to challenge the orthodoxy you demand numbers, calculations, "the facts behind the scene". Yet it's clear, from what you've written here, that you place no such strictures on the claims made of CO2 by the IPCC. Logic and rationality do not enter into that particular equation. Apparently, we must spend trillions, trash the economies of goodness knows how many nations and care not one jot about the ensuing civil unrest and the bodies in the streets. But at least your friend's house won't get flooded again - well, maybe. I wonder what an economist, or any sane person, would think of that rationale. That now in the 21st century, the blind and ignorant are once again demanding we regress to a culture of human sacrifice in the hope it will appease the climate gods.

And yet, amusingly, this is the view of one who readily admits to having little understanding of the issues:
"And even though this is nowhere near my field of expertise if you have something better to bring up please do so."
I duly obliged and proffered multiple references: including some from luminary climate scientists, engineers, economists (Old Uncle Tom Cobley and all). But it seems that all I've been engaged in is an esoteric form of dumpster diving. One is clearly not impressed by the vast array and depth of evidence countering the consensus view. That, contrary to what the IPCC would have one believe, it's not just a few maverick scientists demanding a more open and realistic approach to climate science. Not only have you not troubled yourself to read the links and reports provided (evident, amongst other things, by your lack of understanding of the life cycle of a wind turbine), you dismiss it all out of hand and refer to the authors in unsavoury terms. And thus endeth the golden age of the 'scientific method' – replaced by the Mannian era of muddle and strife: if you can't argue the science, trash the messenger’s reputation instead.

You proclaim possession of strict guidelines for the acceptance of expert opinion. You proudly claim I don't, but in doing so, you misapply the logical fallacy of 'Appeal to Authority'. As I previously said (and as your own quoted extract implies) there is a distinct difference between citing an authoritative source as a reference and proclaiming something merely because 'so and so' said it was so. I'm led to believe, for example, that David Mackay's book 'Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air' is a seminal work, but I've not read it. It would, thus, be wrong for me to cite it, and a logical fallacy for me to do so based on Bill Gates claiming it to be: "one of the best books on energy that has been written." That is the appeal to authority, whereas your version would have all references, even those in academic papers, considered such.

The most disappointing aspect of this dismal affair, however, is that your failure to acknowledge this library of work condemns you to remain ignorant of reality. One can teach the theory and fundamentals of costings to whomsoever one pleases, but in the real world, your trite assumptions, particularly about UK energy policy and costs, are leading you hopelessly astray.

A simple internet search of energy prices across Europe will quickly reveal the higher electricity prices paid by consumers in those countries heavily invested in weather-dependent renewables. It will further show that the greater the penetration, the higher the cost. Hence the reason why those in Germany are paying the equivalent of 45 Canadian cents per kWh as opposed to my paying circa 30 Canadian cents. There is a reason for this, and it's called intermittency.

This is where your simplistic model fails. Intermittency is something which cannot be dismissed out of hand. Wind is not merely a more temperamental version of hydro; in this regard, it is a fundamentally different beast. You can deny the science and arm wave as much as you like, but 'ye cannae change laws of physics', hence...

"There’s so much delusion, it's so dangerous for humanity that people allow themselves to have such delusions, that they are willing to not think carefully about the numbers, and the reality of the laws of physics and the reality of engineering….humanity does need to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics." Professor David Mackay.

But, but, but, the Dutch have been using wind power pumps for centuries. Indeed, and yet one would have us believe it beyond the ken of the modern world to protect itself from a modest sea-level rise. There is also another delicious irony here: that when the Somerset levels suffered massive flooding over the winter of 2013/14, it was Dutch pumps which were called in to save the day - but they weren't powered by wind…

Last edited by djy on December 13, 2019 20:18.


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