Re: [ECA-CORE] Tuesday April 18: Beyond Gas: Ontario's Energy Future - 7 pm, Mark Jacobson

[carolchrissy carolchrissy]

Hello ECA and friends,

thanks for this Brian. This is not just a webinar to watch friends. This is an opportunity for you to get involved in climate action.

This April 18th webinar is a follow up to the April 5th webinar which was a call for us to participate in lobbying our elected representatives with great tips on how to do so. I will send you the link to the April 5th one soon.

Why is this so important? The Ford government is planning on building and firing up gas-powered electricity, rolling back all the gains we made getting rid of coal-fired power plants.

Ontario's GHGs will skyrocket because we will be importing fracked gas from the US to run the grid to power our electricity consumption.

We need to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels in this time of Climate Crisis, not ramp it up! Yesterday Fort Lauderdale experienced unprecedented flooding. Somalia is in severe drought. These are not just weather events.

This is Climate Change happening now in our lifetimes. Are we going to sit back and watch it on the news? Or are we going to take action?

This webinar and the previous one show you that we don't need to rely on dirty fossil fuels such as fracked gas to have enough electricity to live.

I hope you can join in this effort!

Love the earth, our only home!

Carol

------ Original Message ------
From: etobicokecom...@gmail.com
To: etobicokeclim...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2023 12:39 AM
Subject: [ECA-CORE] Tuesday April 18: Beyond Gas: Ontario's Energy Future - 7 pm, Mark Jacobson

Hi all,

Here’s the upcoming webinar that Carol and I mentioned in Wednesday’s meeting of our Core Group.

The rationale for the webinar and the campaign it’s supporting, is explained very well below.

I hope you can attend on Tuesday evening.

- Brian MacLean

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Lyn Adamson <ocec....@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 12:16 AM
Subject: Tuesday April 18: Beyond Gas: Ontario's Energy Future - 7 pm, Mark Jacobson
To:

Register: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-gas-ontarios-energy-future-tickets-592182743527

re: Beyond Gas: Ontario’s Energy Future webinar April 18th

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-gas-ontarios-energy-future-tickets-592182743527

UN climate science is clear: rapidly phasing out fossil fuels is urgent https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/syr/. Yet, the Government of Ontario has announced a massive expansion of expensive methane gas-fired electricity, dangerously escalating fossil fuel use and emissions. The importance of informed action by municipal councils has never been greater. This is especially true since the Independent Electricity System Operator included a proviso that municipalities facing gas-plant expansion proposals must actually vote in favour, for expansions to move forward.

This is your invitation to a webinar to learn about excellent renewable energy alternatives to the expansion of harmful, expensive methane gas plants in Ontario. The webinar will feature Stanford University professor, civil engineer and expert in real life renewable energy solutions, Dr. Mark Jacobson (author of No Miracles Needed: How Today's Technology Can Save Our Climate and Clean Our Air) https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/no-miracles-needed/8D183E65462B8DC43397C19D7B6518E3 .

Also hear our Ontario experts Jack Gibbons and Gaby Kalapos.discuss renewables in the local context. With moderator Avis Favaro and OCEC co-chairs Dr. Mili Roy and Lyn Adamson.

BEYOND GAS – ONTARIO’S ENERGY FUTURE

TUES April 18, 2023 @7pm EST/EDT

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-gas-ontarios-energy-future-tickets-592182743527

Toolkits & Resources:

· Beyond Gas - Overview of Ontario’s energy landscape expansionhttps://drive.google.com/file/d/16Z7hNFJbh1_zkvaMax2oqSUkQzw9XbD2/view

· Beyond Gas - summary of impact of fossil gas and renewable energy

solutions.https://drive.google.com/file/d/10n2814nLMnzbpW6nvizj2MnEGCq-dTyq/view

Please join our newsletter lists to stay informed:

Ontario Climate Emergency Campaign

Ontario Clean Air Alliance

--

Brian MacLean

Cell: 647.906.5075

E: EtobicokeCom...@gmail.com

Twitter: @EtobicokeF & @TorontoRivers

ETOBICOKE CLIMATE ACTION

Website: www.EtobicokeClimateAction.ca

E: in...@EtobicokeClimateAction.ca

Twitter & Instagram: @EtobicokeCA

​Facebook: www.facebook.com/EtobicokeClimateAction

Youtube: ​www.youtube.com/channel/UCkSLJOs9clCuJhUjKGAx3Wg

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[John Stephenson]

Dear ECA friends - I have been agonizing over whether to just remain silent on this and thereby not create any tension within the group or to give you my honest opinion about Mark Jacobson, which is that he doesn't know what he's talking about.  Evidently I've given in to the latter impulse and the challenge I've thereby created for myself is that it obliges me to take the time to explain why.

Jacobson claims that all our energy needs can be met for about the same cost as today with only wind, water, sun (WWS) and batteries, but that is a false claim for the following reasons.

It might approach some degree of validity in places endowed with big hydro dams that can follow the variations in electrical demand.  Four Canadian provinces (BC, Manitoba, Quebec and NFL) and a small number of mostly small countries (Norway, etc) Brazil being the only bigger one that has more hydro power than Canada.  In fact, there are only 5 countries in the world (all small) blessed with 100% clean electricity (Iceland, also helped with geothermal, Bhuttan, Paraguay, Albania and Ethiopia) ... all the rest are challenged to fully decarbonize their grids because fossil fuelled generation is needed to follow the variations in electrical demand.

And we in Ontario are likewise challenged.  In fact in response to Ministerial Direction in December 2022, the IESO released its Pathways to Decarbonization report that "solves" the problem by proposing 15,000 Megawatts of new gas turbines fuelled with hydrogen.  I am sure I don't need to explain why that is a ridiculous suggestion bordering on an insult to our intelligence.

Part of the solution is indeed, as the IESO report outlines,  more wind and solar and some batteries, a bit more hydro, another tie-line to Quebec and more demand management, but those by themselves probably won't come anywhere near to satisfying the increased demand from electrifying transportation, buildings and industry. 

I have friends in Citizens Climate Lobby who have asked me why they couldn't just keep piling on more wind.  One way I thought of to explain that is as follows.  You've no doubt heard that the wind doesn't always blow (hard enough to produce power).  And Mother Nature, not IESO operators, controls exactly when and where the wind does blow.  But you need to think about this a couple of more steps.  The electricity generated by the first tranche of wind turbines may be fully or mostly utilized.  But the next tranche will be utilized less, because some of it will be when there is already enough generation on the system to meet the demand at that instant.  Then the third tranche will be utilized less still and so on.  So consider the cost of this.  The cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) from the first tranche may be about 4 cents/kWh.  But if, say, only 10% of the electricity generated by the "nth" tranche is actually when there is still unfilled load to be served (taking into account all the other generators on the grid) the effective cost of the useful energy will be 40 cents/kWh. 

Jacobson would be likely to say something like "no problem, the excess wind power can be stored in batteries".  The flaw in that argument is that batteries are very costly - about $200 per kWh storage capacity.  An indication that this may not be the perfect solution he would claim, is in his own home state of California, famous for having lots of wind turbines and solar panels, and quite a few batteries,  but what is the single biggest source of their electricity?  Gas plants.  Germany and Denmark are famous for having lots of wind and solar and their electricity prices are the highest in Europe, about double that of nearby France (which is mostly nuclear) and Germany in particular has double the per capita greenhouse gas emissions of France - very similar countries, same latitude, comparable economies but France is nuclear and Germany is renewables plus coal and it doesn't look like they will be getting rid of the coal anytime soon.

The basic defect in the analysis done by many like Jacobson, (e.g. David Suzuki Foundation, and Guidehouse, formerly Navigant, for Enbridge) is that they fail to model the proposed generation sources against the hourly electricity demand, all 8,760 hours in the year for at least one actual year.  To give it some credit the aforementioned IESO Pathways report did that, as did the following recent reports on the subject of decarbonizing the Ontario grid - from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and from a consultant called Strapolec.  I know personally the people who did the OSPE and Strapolec reports and I know they know what they are talking about.  And I know some of you don't want to hear this (but that doesn't make it untrue) but conclusions reached by those 3, and the IESO, all experienced professionals who know the electricity business (unlike Jacobson) is that Ontario is going to need a lot more nuclear power.  And it will cost a lot more.  Most of you would probably agree with that part.  But we'll have to pay for it because we must decarbonize.  That's the inconvenient truth.

While I'm on a roll, I can't resist commenting on one of many fatal flaws with batteries.  About 51% of the cost is for 4 critical metals - lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese.  Sometimes you may read that batteries are coming down in cost.  That has the wrong tense.  They have come down.  But to say they are coming down, implies continued cost reductions, whereas all indications are the opposite. They increased in price last year.  If there is the increased use in both grid scale and for BEV's as some forecast, the supply and demand fundamentals will drive the price of those metals, hence batteries, hence BEV's through the roof.

But that still begs the question how could the Ontario grid shutdown the gas plants and reach zero emissions?  I don't profess to have the definitive, exact answer to that.  I know it will take more than WWS and batteries (and won't involve hydrogen) . Nuclear, wind, solar, a bit more hydro, perhaps another tie-in with Quebec, demand management, perhaps some bioenergy, perhaps some bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) producing negative emissions.  The big idea I'm working on but not with any sense that it could be a silver bullet, (more like a contribution to the silver buckshot) is that the new nuclear plants could easily be designed to also produce useful heat .. this is known as Combined Heat and Power (CHP), aka cogeneration.  This could not only eliminate emissions from buildings by replacing gas burning boilers and furnaces with simple heat exchangers all tied into a district heating loop, but also the nuclear CHP plants could follow the variations in electrical demand by varying their ratio of power and heat output.  When more power was needed, they could generate more power.  The district heating systems don't need to meet the exact heat demand in each hour, just so long as they get enough on an annual basis, because they can store humongous quantities of heat energy in  seasonal thermal energy storage (two ways - either pits or boreholes)  This has been done in Europe for decades.  it's well proven technology.  We just haven't done it here yet because we've been spoiled with having cheap gas.  But that party must come to an end if we are to decarbonize.  The same system could use heat from solar thermal collectors, or waste heat from cooling or industry or sewage.  The latter group would use industrial water to water heat pumps so some electricity but a lot less than air source heat pumps because they would be getting it from warmer sources.  They could even get it from the lake.  In any case it would not require additional electricity infrastructure.  With thermal energy storage, these heat pumps would not need to be turned on at peak times.

So I hope that makes a contribution to your understanding.  I'd be pleased to try to answer any questions or concerns. 

     

Best regards

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John Stephenson

Director - Boltzmann Institute

2493 Lakeshore Blvd West, Apt 416

Etobicoke, ON

M8V 1C7

647-633-3021

[Marta Griffiths]

I agree with all all the issues you have raised . 

Marta 

Sent from my iPad

On Apr 14, 2023, at 11:59 AM, John Stephenson <jstephe...@gmail.com> wrote:



Hello ECA and friends,

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/etobicokeclimateactioncore/CAN%3DKkuoPhtj%2B%3D%2BCRU2PneZ19MVj0L2AefR_hYO-SXos8u9X%2BdQ%40mail.gmail.com.

[carolchrissy carolchrissy]

Hi John,

thanks for your well-informed input on the subject. What should we then be asking our elected officials to back in order to get us off the destruction of fossil fuels? The Climate Crisis is here.

You outlined a lot of valuable energy options, but we need to speak to the politicians in simple yet strong language to effect change.

What do you suggest as a message we can share with them?

thanks for your expertise and help,

Carol

------ Original Message ------
From: jstephe...@gmail.com
To: carolc...@sympatico.ca
Cc: etobicokecom...@gmail.com; etobicokeclim...@googlegroups.com; etobicoke-cl...@googlegroups.com
Sent: Friday, April 14, 2023 10:59 AM
Subject: Re: [ECA] Re: [ECA-CORE] Tuesday April 18: Beyond Gas: Ontario's Energy Future - 7 pm, Mark Jacobson

Dear ECA friends - I have been agonizing over whether to just remain silent on this and thereby not create any tension within the group or to give you my honest opinion about Mark Jacobson, which is that he doesn't know what he's talking about. Evidently I've given in to the latter impulse and the challenge I've thereby created for myself is that it obliges me to take the time to explain why.

Jacobson claims that all our energy needs can be met for about the same cost as today with only wind, water, sun (WWS) and batteries, but that is a false claim for the following reasons.

It might approach some degree of validity in places endowed with big hydro dams that can follow the variations in electrical demand. Four Canadian provinces (BC, Manitoba, Quebec and NFL) and a small number of mostly small countries (Norway, etc) Brazil being the only bigger one that has more hydro power than Canada. In fact, there are only 5 countries in the world (all small) blessed with 100% clean electricity (Iceland, also helped with geothermal, Bhuttan, Paraguay, Albania and Ethiopia) ... all the rest are challenged to fully decarbonize their grids because fossil fuelled generation is needed to follow the variations in electrical demand.

And we in Ontario are likewise challenged. In fact in response to Ministerial Direction in December 2022, the IESO released its Pathways to Decarbonization report that "solves" the problem by proposing 15,000 Megawatts of new gas turbines fuelled with hydrogen. I am sure I don't need to explain why that is a ridiculous suggestion bordering on an insult to our intelligence.

Part of the solution is indeed, as the IESO report outlines, more wind and solar and some batteries, a bit more hydro, another tie-line to Quebec and more demand management, but those by themselves probably won't come anywhere near to satisfying the increased demand from electrifying transportation, buildings and industry.

I have friends in Citizens Climate Lobby who have asked me why they couldn't just keep piling on more wind. One way I thought of to explain that is as follows. You've no doubt heard that the wind doesn't always blow (hard enough to produce power). And Mother Nature, not IESO operators, controls exactly when and where the wind does blow. But you need to think about this a couple of more steps. The electricity generated by the first tranche of wind turbines may be fully or mostly utilized. But the next tranche will be utilized less, because some of it will be when there is already enough generation on the system to meet the demand at that instant. Then the third tranche will be utilized less still and so on. So consider the cost of this. The cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) from the first tranche may be about 4 cents/kWh. But if, say, only 10% of the electricity generated by the "nth" tranche is actually when there is still unfilled load to be served (taking into account all the other generators on the grid) the effective cost of the useful energy will be 40 cents/kWh.

Jacobson would be likely to say something like "no problem, the excess wind power can be stored in batteries". The flaw in that argument is that batteries are very costly - about $200 per kWh storage capacity. An indication that this may not be the perfect solution he would claim, is in his own home state of California, famous for having lots of wind turbines and solar panels, and quite a few batteries, but what is the single biggest source of their electricity? Gas plants. Germany and Denmark are famous for having lots of wind and solar and their electricity prices are the highest in Europe, about double that of nearby France (which is mostly nuclear) and Germany in particular has double the per capita greenhouse gas emissions of France - very similar countries, same latitude, comparable economies but France is nuclear and Germany is renewables plus coal and it doesn't look like they will be getting rid of the coal anytime soon.

The basic defect in the analysis done by many like Jacobson, (e.g. David Suzuki Foundation, and Guidehouse, formerly Navigant, for Enbridge) is that they fail to model the proposed generation sources against the hourly electricity demand, all 8,760 hours in the year for at least one actual year. To give it some credit the aforementioned IESO Pathways report did that, as did the following recent reports on the subject of decarbonizing the Ontario grid - from the Ontario Society of Professional Engineers, from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI) and from a consultant called Strapolec. I know personally the people who did the OSPE and Strapolec reports and I know they know what they are talking about. And I know some of you don't want to hear this (but that doesn't make it untrue) but conclusions reached by those 3, and the IESO, all experienced professionals who know the electricity business (unlike Jacobson) is that Ontario is going to need a lot more nuclear power. And it will cost a lot more. Most of you would probably agree with that part. But we'll have to pay for it because we must decarbonize. That's the inconvenient truth.

While I'm on a roll, I can't resist commenting on one of many fatal flaws with batteries. About 51% of the cost is for 4 critical metals - lithium, nickel, cobalt and manganese. Sometimes you may read that batteries are coming down in cost. That has the wrong tense. They have come down. But to say they are coming down, implies continued cost reductions, whereas all indications are the opposite. They increased in price last year. If there is the increased use in both grid scale and for BEV's as some forecast, the supply and demand fundamentals will drive the price of those metals, hence batteries, hence BEV's through the roof.

But that still begs the question how could the Ontario grid shutdown the gas plants and reach zero emissions? I don't profess to have the definitive, exact answer to that. I know it will take more than WWS and batteries (and won't involve hydrogen) . Nuclear, wind, solar, a bit more hydro, perhaps another tie-in with Quebec, demand management, perhaps some bioenergy, perhaps some bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration (BECCS) producing negative emissions. The big idea I'm working on but not with any sense that it could be a silver bullet, (more like a contribution to the silver buckshot) is that the new nuclear plants could easily be designed to also produce useful heat .. this is known as Combined Heat and Power (CHP), aka cogeneration. This could not only eliminate emissions from buildings by replacing gas burning boilers and furnaces with simple heat exchangers all tied into a district heating loop, but also the nuclear CHP plants could follow the variations in electrical demand by varying their ratio of power and heat output. When more power was needed, they could generate more power. The district heating systems don't need to meet the exact heat demand in each hour, just so long as they get enough on an annual basis, because they can store humongous quantities of heat energy in seasonal thermal energy storage (two ways - either pits or boreholes) This has been done in Europe for decades. it's well proven technology. We just haven't done it here yet because we've been spoiled with having cheap gas. But that party must come to an end if we are to decarbonize. The same system could use heat from solar thermal collectors, or waste heat from cooling or industry or sewage. The latter group would use industrial water to water heat pumps so some electricity but a lot less than air source heat pumps because they would be getting it from warmer sources. They could even get it from the lake. In any case it would not require additional electricity infrastructure. With thermal energy storage, these heat pumps would not need to be turned on at peak times.

So I hope that makes a contribution to your understanding. I'd be pleased to try to answer any questions or concerns.

Best regards

On Fri, Apr 14, 2023 at 9:37 AM carolchrissy carolchrissy <carolc...@sympatico.ca> wrote:

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[John Stephenson]

Dear Carol - good question - for starters I recommend everyone take the opportunity offered by the Environmental Registry of Ontario to submit comments on the IESO's Pathways to Decarbonization Report.  Just go to this website, hit the Submit a Comment Button, a box opens up for you to type in or copy/paste from Word or Speechtexter, whatever you work in.  But before that you could click on Proposal Details for a summary of the report and specific questions.  You don't have to  answer all the questions.  In my mind there are 3 key questions and I've pasted in my answers below - feel free to copy, amend or make up entirely different answers but if you read mine you'll get the general idea - it's important to not let the government use the high cost of decarbonization identified by the IESO as an excuse for no action or ineffective action on the climate emergency.

Do you believe additional investment in clean energy resources should be made in the short term to reduce the energy production of natural gas plants, even if this will increase costs to the electricity system and ratepayers?

Yes. There is no time to waste.  Zero grid emissions must be achieved at the latest by 2035 to comply with the federal Clean Electricity Regulation and to enable decarbonization of other sectors through electrification, thereby fulfilling the emission reduction targets of three levels of government and Canada’s international obligations.  The UN’s latest IPCC report urges wealthier nations like Canada to phase out fossil fuels by 2035.  Any delay would hurt Canada’s international standing and be unprincipled, unethical and highly irresponsible.

Are you concerned with potential cost impacts associated with the investments needed? 

Yes, I am concerned.  The IESO estimates rates will increase by 20-30% in real terms and about half of that looks like it is unnecessary because it is for capacity to meet the heating peaks which could be looked after more efficiently by district heating.

 Do you have any specific ideas on how to reduce costs of new clean electricity infrastructure?

Develop a policy environment enabling municipalities and the private sector to develop district heating not at the expense of electricity ratepayers and using local, low-grade sources of energy.

I hope you follow through on this.  Cheers