Egypt Brings New Gas and Wind Plants on Line.

[NNadir]

This news item is here: Egypt Brings New Natural Gas and Wind Power Plants Online

An excerpt:

New natural gas-fired power plants and wind farms are part of Egypt’s strategy to increase the country’s power generation by at least 50%. It began delivering on that plan in July as it brought three gas-powered plants online in addition to one of the world’s largest wind facilities. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi on July 24 said “Today is a day of hope” as he unveiled the 4,800-MW New Capital plant (Figure 1) near Cairo, in an area that will serve as the country’s new administrative capital...

And of course, the lipstick on the pig, the wind plant:

The Gebel el-Zeit wind farm in the Red Sea province (Figure 2) also was opened on July 24. Officials said the facility has 580 MW of generation capacity and cost $673 million. Egypt wants to produce at least 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2022 and as much as 40% by 2035. The country currently receives about 3% of its electricity from renewables.

The usual dishonest technique of reporting the dangerous fossil fuel plant - which despite being a dangerous plant is fully capable of running continuusly - and the wind plant in terms of power and not energy operates here.

Around the world, wind turbines typically operate with a capacity utilization of between 30% and 40%, with the higher figure being rather unusual.

One can show, by appeal to the Master Register of Danish Wind turbines that the capacity utilization of all commissioned wind turbines that their capacity utilization is typically in the high twenties for the nation as a whole.

Thus the 580 "MW" wind plant, at 30% capacity utilization will be the equivalent of a 174 MW gas plant, and at 40% - which I personally doubt given where it's located - a 232 MW gas plant. And of course, the wind plant needs the gas plant to be worth anything, since it is generally recognized among all but the most delusional people in the world, that the wind sometimes does not blow.

The lifetime of Danish wind turbines averages less than 18 years, and they're not located among sand dunes as the Egyptian wind plant is:



One does not need a degree in mechanical engineering to have some appreciation of the fact that blowing sand is not good for things with moving parts exposed to the elements.

Egypt's government says it wants to produce 20% of its electricity by so called "renewable energy" with the usual "by such and such a date" statement, "such and such a date" in this case being 2035, 17 years from now. By that time their new wind plant will most likely be sand blasted inoperative junk waiting to be disassembled for metals scavengers who will face the toxicity of the stuff therein and the grease cheerfully, because that's what impoverished people do, suffer for our bourgeois sins.

Egypts new capacity, accounting for the huge difference in capacity utilization between wind and gas plants is on the order of 5%, at least for as long as the wind plant lasts. It is worth noting that the restart of a gas plant because the wind is blowing wastes gas. It's probably more economic to simply run the gas plant full bore without shut down whether the wind is blowing across the sands or not.

[Finishline42]

1. Let me clear something up that you love to hammer

There is a thing called the 'capacity utilization paradox' for windmills. Basically you can have a higher utilization rate with a smaller windmill, one that works in lower wind speeds, but the output is less because of a simple fact - doubling the diameter of the blades cubes the output. So while they only output their rated capacity 30% of the time, a larger windmill creates more total energy than if you had a bunch of smaller windmills.

[NNadir]

2. Let me see if I can clear something up for you.

A very simple fact is that to determine the capacity utilization of any energy system over a period of time, you take the rated capacity in units of watts, and multiply it by the period of time being studied in units of seconds.

A sixth grader should know this much physics: A Watt = Joule/second, 1 W = 1 J/s

So, if I go to the data table on the master register of wind turbines in Denmark (accessed 9/27/2018) and use simple Excel operations to sum column C, I can find that all of the operating wind turbines in Denmark, all 6211 of these soon to rot pieces of shit, I find that the total rated capacity is 5,717,454 kW, or 5,717,454,000 W.

Now I can go over to the most recent completed column, that of August 2018 - which is column BM in the very same spreadsheet - I can find out how much energy all 6,211 of the Danish bird and bat grinders produced in that month, in units of kilowatt-hours. The Danes have happily provided this number in their spreadsheet at the bottom, so one doesn't even if one is, say a dumb guy in Greenpeace who can't use the "sum" function in Excel, he can still see that the sum for the entire month of August 2018 was 940,024,330 kwh.

One can convert kWh to Joules by multiplying by 3600 (the number of seconds in an hour) and 1000 (for the "kilo" ) and find out that the all 6,211 greasy Danish wind turbines produced 3.380488 petajoules (peta = 10^15) on a planet where humanity consumed (as of 2016) 587 exajoules (exa = 10^18) in that year.

Now, this may be hard for a person who has been unable to grasp what it means to all future generations that more than a trillion dollars has been squandered on the wind industry in the last ten years with the result that the concentration of carbon dioxide has risen, as of September 2018 by 23.32 ppm over September of 2008, but using these numbers, and simple arithmetic, one can calculate what the capacity utilization of all of Denmark's wind turbines were in August 2018.

And unless there are a whole bunch of fucking Danes running around changing the blades every time the wind speed changes, remarks about the size of the blades could do if they were a different size don't matter a fucking wit, even though the Danes do list the turbine blade sizes in column D in their spreadsheet.

The month of August is 31 days long. A day has 24 hours in it, and each hour has 3600 seconds. By multiplication, this means that the month of August has 31 X 24 X 3600 = 2,678,400 seconds.

Again, the rated capacity of any power plant, a nuclear plant, a gas plant, a coal plant, a wind plant, a solar plant is its peak rating times the number of seconds in the period being discussed. So the 6,211 wind turbines in Denmark, with a capacity of 5,717,454,000 W for a period of 2,678,400 seconds should produce 15.31363 Petajoules if they operated at 100% capacity utilization.)

(As a practical matter, only nuclear plants actually operate at 100% capacity utilization for extended periods of time: The capacity of US nuclear plants can be found here. Overall in 2018 US nuclear power plants had a capacity utilization of 92.2%, with 23 of them operating at 100% or greater than their rated capacity.)

Now - I hope this isn't too hard - we calculated that the actual energy produced by the 6,211 Danish wind turbines that a future generation will have to disassemble (or watch rot) in about 30 years, with the largest percentage falling into "decommissioned" garbage in 20 years, actually produced 3.380488 Petajoules. So if we divide 3.380488 by 15.31363 and multiply by 100 to make that magic "percent" word that the people who bet the future of humanity on so called "renewable energy" so love, we find that the 6,211 bird and bat grinders in Denmark had a capacity utilization of 22.0985%

We can also find the average continuous power for all 6,211 wastes of concrete, aluminum, steel, copper and polymers was in August 2018: We divide the number of joules produced in August of 2018 by the number of seconds in August to find that the average continuous power was 1,263,473,561 kw or 1,263.474 Megawatts.

This is remarkably close to the average power rating of a single reactor in Pennsylvania, the TalenEnergy Susquehanna Nuclear Power Plant, a reactor which produced 100.3% of its 1,298 MW capacity for all of 2018 up to July, the last month listed in the spreadsheet linked above.

It produced that much energy in a single small building, as opposed to a whole fucking European country:



Here's a picture of the reactor core where all that energy was produced:



It is the extremely high energy to mass ratio that makes nuclear energy cleaner than all other options.

Thanks for the smug lecture on wind turbine blades. It is, of course, as one might expect when one is going to suffer through defense of this indefensible crap, meaningless. Convoluted and tortured defenses like these may have something to do with the fact that despite all of the bullshit defenses of this unconscionable attack on all future generations - betting the planetary atmosphere with on so called "renewable energy" with Kavanaughesque drunken recklessness - the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste was, for the week beginning September 16, 2018, 405.69 ppm, whereas just ten years ago, and a trillion bucks of "wind investment" ago, it was 383.32.

It can be shown by anyone who gives a shit about humanity - anyone who cares a wit and keeps track of these things - that 23.32 ppm in a ten year period, 2.33 ppm/year, is the fastest rate of atmospheric degradation ever recorded going back to the late 1950's, in any decade.

Facts matter.

And it is a fact that people don't run up to wind turbines and change the blades when the wind speed changes.

The wind industry is not working. It has never worked. It won't work, if "working" means arresting climate change, something that environmentalists care about, if not people for calling for turning every damned mountaintop to a wind industrial park for their stupid fantasies about Tesla electric cars and other consumer electronic crap.

Heckuva job wind freaks! Heckuva job! You must be very, very, very, very, very proud.

I wish you a pleasant Friday.