America’s Biggest Power Source Wasn’t Built for Extreme Weather

[Unum]

https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2023-natural-gas-biggest-us-power-source-also-most-vulnerable/

Natural gas plants, now the top source of electricity in the US, are to blame
for a disproportionate share of outages when the weather gets rough.

Although natural gas is often promoted as a “bridge fuel” to span the
transition from coal power to renewable energy, the country’s vast network of
gas plants, pipelines and the regulations that govern them was largely built
without the realities of extreme weather in mind. Facilities aren’t uniformly
winterized, and some rely on a single gas pipeline for supply. Many generators
don’t have the ability to burn an alternate fuel or keep back-up gas on hand
in case of emergencies.

And since even the newest gas plants are at risk of becoming obsolete once the
transition to clean energy is complete, it’s hard to get the support to build
more pipelines and the other key infrastructure that’s needed to shore things
up.

“As you rely more on natural gas, or one fuel, you will see more and more
spikes in power prices,” Roshan Bains, then director of utilities power and
gas at Fitch Ratings who’s now at Siemens Financial Services, said at the
time. “Rolling blackouts would be more of the norm because of the aggravated
fuel supply.”

[Kym Horsell]

Interesting.
Quick modeling indicates the total
gas pipe mileage in each state
does contribute to power outages.
For selected states their gas pipes
contribute an equivalent risk in number of
extra windstorms toward power outages per year:

State Equiv number of extra windstorms pa
Florida 8
New York 13
Ohio 17
Cal 30
Texas 43

[AlleyCat]

Why Wind And Solar Will Never Meet The World's Energy Needs

Are we heading toward an all-renewable energy future, spearheaded by wind and
solar? Or are those energy sources wholly inadequate for the task?

Here's the reality.

Oil, natural gas, and coal provide 84% of the world's energy. That's down just
two percentage points from twenty years ago.

And oil still powers nearly 97% of all global transportation.

Contrary to headlines claiming that we're rapidly transitioning away from
fossil fuels, it's just not happening. Two decades and five trillion dollars of
governments "investing" in green energy and we've barely moved the needle.

This was supposed to be easy. Why is it so hard? In a word: rocks.

To get the same amount of energy from solar and wind that we now get from
fossil fuels, we're going to have to massively increase mining.

By more than 1,000%. This isn't speculation. This is physics.

Mark Mills, a Senior Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and author of The Cloud
Revolution, compares the energy dream to the energy reality.

Perhaps the biggest lie being pulled on the public today is calling solar
panels and windmills "green energy". And fossil fuels byproducts "pollution".
While in reality, the main byproducts of fossil fuel consumption are CO2 AND
WATER.

The basic ingredients of our carbon-based life on earth! Making FOSSIL FUELS
our ONLY GREEN ENERGY! Hardly pollution. Using fossil fuels to power our modern
world not only makes life better for us... it makes the environment greener,
stronger, more drought-tolerant, and more abundant!

One of my pet peeves is how we allow the left to manipulate the language to
push their climate fraud and other regressive agendas. Abandoning 84% of the
energy that makes us the best fed, most prosperous, longest-living human beings
that have ever existed is hardly "progressive".

Far more appropriate would be to call them "the Regressives", or modern-day
"New Luddites". Germany's Angela Merkel learned a painful lesson trying to push
her failed wind policy. Sadly, too many journalism profs and grade school
teachers need to up their game. And catch up on the science. Because their
ignorance will kill more people than the climate ever has.

=====

June: Soooooo Hot!

Brazilian Cattle Freeze To Death

Sea Ice "Unusually Close" To Icelandic Coast

Western Canada's Growers Are Warning Record-Low Temperatures Could Drop Their
Yields By As Much As 50% This Year

Blizzards Batter Australian Alps

Australia's BOM Denies Shepparton Its All-Time Record Low - Inexplicably Raises
Temp 1.1C

Utah Sets New Avalanche Record

Greenland's Summer Snow And Ice Gains Intensify

Exceptional Cold Strikes B.C.

Heavy Summer Snow Hits Canada And U.S.

Low Temperature Records Felled Across Australia

Scandinavian Ski Resorts Save Record Piles Of Snow

Australia's Cold Front Intensifies, Drops A Foot Of Snow

Rare June Flakes Clip Stevens Pass, Record Cold Yakima

World Still Waiting On First 50C (122F) Of 2023, Latest In Decades

California: "Where Are The 100s?"

Record Cold Australia

Historic Lows And Rare Snows Besiege South America

Greenland Still Gaining

Coldest May On Record North Of 80N

Historic Greenland Snow/Ice Gains

Cool Italy

South America's Extreme Temperature Drop

"Coldest May On Record North Of 80N"
Historic Greenland Snow/Ice Gains
Record Cold Europe
Greenland SMB Climbing
Mt Washington's Snowiest June Ever
California's Summer Snow At 13 Feet
Thick Ice Forces Russian Ships To Take The Long Way Round
Record Cold Across Belarus And Latvia
Chill Stretches Perth Power To The Brink
Alerts Issued As Cold Front Smacks Western Australia
Freezing Lows Sweep New Zealand
June Snow In Colorado
'Gold Rush 2.0" Thanks To California's Historic Snowpack
Impressive Greenland SMB Gains
Bone-Chilling Lows Grip Northern India
Extreme Chills Grip Northern Europe
Shimla's Record-Cold Start To June

[AlleyCat]

We're headed toward an exciting, all-renewable energy future. Wind and solar
will power the world of tomorrow. And tomorrow isn't far off.

It's time to wake up. You're having a dream. Here's the reality. Oil, natural
gas, and coal provide 84% of all the world's energy. That's down just two
percentage points from 20 years ago. And oil still powers nearly 97% of all

global transportation.

Contrary to headlines claiming that we're rapidly transitioning away from

fossil fuels, it's just not happening. Two decades and $5 trillion of
governments investing in green energy, and we've barely moved the needle.

This was supposed to be easy. Why is it so hard? In a word, rocks. To get the

same amount of energy from solar and wind that we now get from fossil fuels,

we're going to have to massively increase mining by more than 1,000%.

This isn't speculation. This is physics. Copper, iron ore, silicon, nickel,
chromium, zinc, cobalt, lithium, graphite, and rare earth metals like
neodymium.

We need them all.

And then those metals and materials have to be turned into motors, turbine
blades, solar panels, batteries, and hundreds of other industrial components.
That also takes lots of energy, which requires even more mining.

As a World Bank study put it, these green technologies are in fact
significantly more material intensive than our current energy mix. That may be
the understatement of the century. Raw materials account for 50 to 70% of the
costs to manufacture both solar panels and batteries.

Until now, it hasn't really mattered that much because wind and solar still
account for only a few percentage points of the global energy supply.
They're an applause line for environmentalists, not a major energy player, and
it's unlikely they will be in the foreseeable future.

But for the sake of argument, let's say we sharply ramp up mining. Where would
these new mines be located? Well, for one, China. That country is today the
single largest source of most of our critical energy materials.

The United States is not only a minor player, but is dependent on imports for
100% of 17 critical minerals. Do we want to give China more political and
economic leverage? Europe has made itself dependent on Russia for 40% of its
natural gas.

How well has that worked out?

Ironically, we have all the minerals we need right here in North America, but
good luck trying to get them out of the ground. Proposals to build mines in the
United States and increasingly almost everywhere else meet fierce opposition,
if not outright bans.

[AlleyCat]

To give just one example, in 2022, the Biden administration canceled
the proposed copper and nickel mine in northern Minnesota. This was after years
of delays navigating a maze of environmental regulations. And yes, the same
environmentalists and green-leaning politicians who tout all the benefits of
electric cars are the same people who make mining the materials essential to
build those cars, like copper and nickel, all but impossible.

Try to square that circle. So far, we've only talked about today's energy
needs. What about tomorrow's? Future energy demand will be far greater than
today's. That's been true for the entire history of civilization. The future
will not only have more people, but also more innovations.

And entrepreneurs have always been better at inventing new ways to use energy
than to produce it. It's obvious, but worth stating, before the invention of
automobiles, airplanes, pharmaceuticals, or computers, there was no energy
needed to power them.

And as more people become more prosperous, they will want the things others
already have, from better medical care, to vacations, to cars. In America,
there are about 80 cars for every 100 citizens. In most of the world, it's
about 5 per 100 citizens.

Over 80% of air travels for personal purposes, so that's 2 billion barrels of
oil a year. Hospitals use 250% more energy per square foot than an average
commercial building. And the global information infrastructure, the cloud,
already uses twice as much electricity as the entire country of Japan, the
world's third largest economy.

The massive data centers at the heart of the cloud alone consume almost 10
times more electricity than the world' s 10 million electric cars. E-commerce
has taken off, and it's propelling record growth in warehouses increasingly
filled with energy-hungry robots.

America's truck freight index more than doubled in the past decade to deliver
the goods to and from those warehouses. These are today's known trends. While
we can't predict the future, we can predict there'll be more innovation
in robotics, drones, quantum computing, biotechnology, and new industries not
yet imagined.

All of it will require more energy, a lot more. Fossil fuels, nuclear energy,
and yes, renewables will be required. But if you think we could get it all
from wind and solar, dream on.

[Bret Cahill]

Man will never fly. Hits a fak.

[Kym Horsell]

On Wednesday, June 28, 2023 at 11:11:33 AM UTC+10, AlleyCat wrote:
> Why Wind And Solar Will Never Meet The World's Energy Needs

Cloud
...


LOL. 1960s oil pr bullshit.

The earth has been running for 4 billion years on renewable energy just fine.

Even oil is a poor kind of solar energy where it takes the energy of once-living things that got *their* energy from the sun, waits 100 million years for it to concentrate up, then blows 80% of the stored energy on waste heat and exhaust gasses that return the climate to the way it was when those dead things were once alive a long time before the planet was fit for human habitation.

It's all about the mighty dollar and the power and prestige of some tiny part of the human population and their various lackies and poodles. A blind man can see that.

It's an era that is fast coming to a close if not from competition then from running out of the low-hanging fruit that lined the relevant pockets after the bottom fell out of the buggy whip biz.

--
Don't worry, we'll never run out of oil
Interesting Engineering, 9 Nov 2022
That being said, at current consumption, we have by some accounts an
estimated 47 years of oil left to be extracted. That equates to somewhere in
the region of 1.65 trillion barrels of proven oil reserves. Other sources up
this estimate a bit, but most agree we have around 50 years left, give or take.