Offshore wind farms could power much of coastal China: study

[Jim__]

From TechXplore.

An excerpt:

Capacity factors and levelized costs of electricity. Spatial distributions of the mean (A) CF and (B) LCOE [$ kWh**-1] over 1980-2018 for the filtered region. Coastal provinces are colored grey. The dashed blue lines denote offshore wind areas that are in closest proximity to particular provinces. Note the different color bar limits in (A) and (B). Credit: Peter Sherman / Harvard-China Project

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...

"We estimate offshore wind costs according to a range of values derived from recent offshore wind farm developments," said Peter Sherman, a graduate student at the department of Earth and Planetary Science and first author of the paper. "Offshore wind turbines have historically been prohibitively expensive, but it is clear now that, because of significant technological advances, the economics have changed such that offshore wind could be cost-competitive now with coal and nuclear power in China."

The researchers estimated that if electricity prices are high, offshore wind could provide more than 1,000 terawatt-hours, or about 36 percent of all coastal energy demand. If electricity prices are low, it could provide more than 6,000 terawatt-hours, or 200 percent of total energy demand.

"Our research demonstrates the potential for cost-effective, offshore wind to power coastal regions, reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve air quality in China," said McElroy.

The full research article is available here

[NNadir]

1. It is also possible that half a century of "could" statements about what wind power "could" do...

could lead to carbon dioxide concentrations approaching 415 ppm in the planetary atmosphere by which wind power experimentally proved that it actually could do less than what people in love with the word "could," being as divorced from reality, couldn't see.

Recent Daily Average Mauna Loa CO2 Accessed 2/22/20

February 20: 414.80 ppm
February 19: 413.53 ppm
February 18: 413.56 ppm
February 17: 413.85 ppm
February 16: 413.81 ppm
Last Updated: February 21, 2020

On the bright side, China is the world's largest producer of steel, which they make using their large reserves of coal, and can make plenty of huge steel towers for offshore wind turbine towers, replacing them every twenty years when the wind turbines become landfill.

If one is interested in boosting the Chinese steel industry, this could be a good idea. If one is interested in addressing the environmental issue of climate change, it is a tired old and discredited idea. Wind power didn't work to address climate change; it isn't addressing climate change and it won't address climate change.

That's a fact.

Facts matter.

[Jim__]

2. "China has reduced growth in its emissions of greenhouse gases, partly attributable to major ..."

... investments in onshore wind."

So, there's a "has" statement.

[NNadir]

3. Really? You think "reducing growth" is addressing climate change?

I spend about 10 to 15 hours a week in scientific libraries. I've been studying energy and climate change for over 30 years in them.

For that entire period I've been hearing about what wind energy could do.

More recently, there's a guy at Stanford named Mark Z. Jacobson who wrote a paper along the lines of how the world could be powered by 100% so called "renewable energy" with the usual "by 'such and such year'" statement: I've been hearing these "by 'such and such year'' year statements my whole damned adult life, going back to when the statement "by 1990." Hell I voted for these things when I was young and stupid and lived in California.

A consortium of scientists, including some at his own institution, criticized his dubious claim: PNAS June 27, 2017 114 (26) 6722-6727

He sued them for 10 million dollars

He dropped the suit ultimately, after disgracing himself and Stanford University, but still, the carbon dioxide concentration increases, despite prodigious efforts worldwide to embrace his idiot rhetoric.

I have largely abandoned the "Renewable energy will save us" forum here at Democratic Underground, because I'm an environmentalist along the line of one of America's earliest environmentalists, John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club to prevent turning wilderness areas into industrial parks: He lost the battle and the Hetch Hetchy dam was built in Yosemite National Park, destroying the second largest valley in it. I oppose turning every pristine ecosystem into industrial parks for wind turbines, including precious offshore benthic zones. So there's that.

Since I am a scientist and not a cheerleader for the wind/steel/gas industry, I now generally write in the science forum here.

We live in a world where truth is unwelcome; it can happen anywhere, even among people who mean well, but would rather repeat comfortable lies rather than look at real data. I am generally unwelcome in such places myself, which is fine, since I'm not really comfortable embracing lies, happy face lies or pernicious lies equally.
Every year, I add the most recent copy of the IEA's World Energy Outlook to my files, starting back in 1995. Here's data from the most recent edition:

In this century, world energy demand grew by 179.15 exajoules to 599.34 exajoules.

In this century, world gas demand grew by 50.33 exajoules to 137.03 exajoules.

In this century, the use of petroleum grew by 34.79 exajoules to 188.45 exajoules.

In this century, the use of coal grew by 63.22 exajoules to 159.98 exajoules.

In this century, the solar, wind, geothermal, and tidal energy on which people so cheerfully have bet the entire planetary atmosphere, stealing the future from all future generations, grew by 9.76 exajoules to 12.27 exajoules.

12.27 exajoules is slightly over 2% of the world energy demand.

2019 Edition of the World Energy Outlook Table 1.1 Page 38] (I have converted MTOE in the original table to the SI unit exajoules in this text.)

Here's a table I've prepared from recent data, including some of the "percent talk" that is so popular in the "renewable energy will save us" community, most often expressed with extreme mathematical illiteracy:



Here's my post over in the science forum, where I now write, because I'm a [ii]scientist who actually cares about the environment, including in that caring an eye on reality, because caring will do nothing divorced from reality: World Energy Outlook, 2017, 2018, 2019. Data Tables of Primary Energy Sources.

We have squandered over two trillion dollars in the last ten years alone on this "wind and solar will save us" chimera in the last ten years alone: This information is here, in the UNEP Frankfurt School Report, issued each year: Global Trends In Renewable Energy Investment, 2018

I have exhaustively analyzed the Master Register of Danish Wind Turbines several times over the last ten years. The mean lifetime of these grotesque pieces of machinery is less than 18 years.

This means that every generation following us would need to replace these pieces of wilderness destroying crap every twenty years, driving diesel trucks through roads built to mountain tops to haul this crap back and forth, digging mining and refiningcopper to lace power lines to these unreliable pieces of shit, or floating diesel powered bargest out to rip them out of the seabed where there used to be crabs and oysters and kelp beds growing.

If someone thinks that reducing the rate of destruction is a good thing as opposed to stopping the destruction dead in its tracks, they're not paying attention.

The growth rate of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere has reached an average of 2.4 ppm/year, the highest rate ever observed, this while we prattled on endlessly about wind power, throwing trillions of dollars at it on a planet where more than two billion people lack access to basic sanitation.

Annual Mean Growth Rate for Mauna Loa, Hawaii



Our contempt for all future generations is fully expressed in this "by 'such and such a year'" rhetoric I've been hearing for my whole damned life, during my membership in this awful Reagan, Bush and Bush, and Trump installing baby boomer generation, a generation that will thankfully die off, and hopefully our stupid rhetoric with it.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

[Jim__]

4. Yes, reducing growth of emissions is a first step toward addressing climate change.

The potential, as explicitly stated in the article cited in the OP, is to use wind to generate all the electrical energy required by coastal provinces in China - that's an actual reduction in emissions. You complained about that because they used the word "could" - you know, could, as in this is a study. But, other than criticizing the use of the word could, you haven't actually criticized any specific claims made in the study. Rather than just blathering on about how much you know, if you actually want to make a difference and you see errors in the research report cited in the OP, you could point those errors out to the lead authors:

Peter Sherman
Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Harvard University
Cambridge, MA 02138

Xinyu Chen
State Key Laboratory of Advanced Electromagnetic Engineering and Technology
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering
Huazhong University of Science and Technology
Wuhan 430074, China

Of course you'd probably want to include a cover letter citing your credentials in the field.

[NNadir]

5. Thank you for your telling response.

I really don't need to defend my familiarity with how the scientific literature works.

My journal here on this website contains many hundreds, if not more than well more than 1,000, references to the primary scientific literature.

As a regular and constant reader of the primary scientific literature, I am very aware that scientists can and should question one another's papers. In fact, a major journal that I read frequently - papers from which I discuss here often, albeit with some level of sarcasm in some cases - Environmental Science and Technology - often has in the Table of Contents at the end of each issue, a set of papers that have a title that begins with the words "Comment on..." usually with a companion paper titled "Response to comment on..."

The current issue, accessed 2/22/20, is no exception. Here are the current examples: Comment on “Oxygen Regulates Nitrous Oxide Production Directly in Agricultural Soils” and "Response to Comment on “Oxygen Regulates Nitrous Oxide Production Directly in Agricultural Soils.”

One hears, from time to time, people who assert that the appearance of a paper in the "peer reviewed scientific literature" is synonymous with truth, which any credible scientist knows, usually from experience, is not true. Scientists often publish papers in the peer reviewed scientific literature that disagree strongly on technical or policy issues, and most scientists take this as a matter of course, since the history of science is littered with corrections to previously held accepted "truths."

Of course, scientists often correct themselves.

Here is a paper from another journal that I regularly read, Energy and Fuels, that is retracted by the authors - and not the journal - because of a serious error: Retraction of “Dynamic Simulation and Mass Transfer Study of Carbon Dioxide Capture Using Biochar and MgO-Impregnated Activated Carbon in a Swing Adsorption Process”

The authors write:

The authors retract the Article entitled “Dynamic Simulation and Mass Transfer Study of Carbon Dioxide Capture Using Biochar and MgO-Impregnated Activated Carbon in a Swing Adsorption Process” (DOI: 10.1021/acs.energyfuels.9b00923) because the assumptions used for modeling need further refinement, and as a result of this refinement, the corresponding results are unreliable.

In the simulations, it was assumed that the gas–solid equilibrium was not affected by treatment/activation methods because carbon dioxide adsorption was physisorption in this case, and the various sample treatment and activation methods changed the pore volume/size distribution of the samples, which affected the mass transfer in macropores and micropores. Therefore, using the same isotherm for all samples in the mass transfer modeling was wrong, and the modeling results need corrections. The results for the steam activated carbon are correct because its actual isotherm was experimentally determined and used in the mass transfer modeling.

The original Article was published on May 24, 2019, and retracted on February 6, 2020.

(In most scientific self-corrections, full retraction is relatively rare: they range from corrections in the spelling of author's names to typographical errors in equations, to incorrect graphics.)

This is from the current issue, which I've been going through this week.

By the way, I do frequently read papers on "swing" approaches to carbon dioxide capture even if I no longer read bullshit about what wind power could do. Now saying that I no longer read bullshit papers about what wind power could do, implies that at one time I did read such papers. I used to read a large number of such papers, but stopped doing so, oh I guess, about 15 years ago. The week of February 20, 2005, 15 years ago, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 379.97 ppm when measured at Mauna Loa. The last weekly data posted, for the week of February 9, 2020, it was measured at 414.40 ppm.

Thus I could say I stopped reading scientific papers about what wind power could do - with the exception of papers by the highly amusing but intellectually weak Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of Civil Engineering at Stanford University - roughly 34 ppm ago using the concentration of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide as a measure of time, although in truth, rises in these concentrations is not linear with respect to time.

So no, I didn't read your wonderful "Wind energy could..." paper. I don't have to do so. I have plenty of experience, decades of experience with such papers.

The authors criticizing Jacobson's paper, as referenced in my previous post, did this job, commenting on his scientific claims, with the result not of a "response to comment" paper from Jacobson, but a lawsuit. Lest I get sued by Jacobson for expressing my opinion of his intellect, let me say that I am offering an opinion of him and not a fact. The facts speak for themselves.

Mark Z. Jacobson used to get - maybe still gets - a lot of mention here by a person who made it to my wonderful ignore list, always with a cut and paste reference to his papers, along with a statement of his credentials, one such credential being the fact that he is a professor at an Ivy League school, Stanford. (If my son wants to go to graduate school at Stanford, I will object, although he can do what he wants to do.) This was before Jacobson became famous for being an ass.

One could spend one's entire life commenting on papers in the "peer reviewed" literature that are wrong, if one wished to do so. And of course, one could - we love that word could - be wrong when one makes a correction. "Comment on..." and "Response to comment on..." paper series often border on nastiness, although there are some such series that are appreciative of the criticism. A scientist who cannot stand correction is usually not a very good scientist. Mark Z. Jacobson's paper on how so called "renewable energy" could power the whole world was published in a very, very, very, very reputable journal, PNAS, the journal being one of the respondents in his dropped lawsuit, when a consortium of other scientists commented on his paper and were published in the same journal, PNAS.

There are people who think that reliance on credentials passes for critical thinking. In my career, I have known thousands upon thousands upon thousands of people whose credentials include a Ph.D. degree. I have no idea how many people with Ph.D degrees with whom I've conversed, but I do know that there is seldom a work day where I don't interact with at least 4 or 5 people with Ph.Ds. In addition, pretty much every day, I spend several hours reading the writings of people with Ph.D degrees.

Some people who hold this credential are super impressive; among them one can encounter polymaths, people who are not only great scientists but who are also broad and inspiring thinkers. Other people who hold this degree leaves one wondering how they learned to operate a can opener, never mind write a thesis.

The fact is that reporting a credential as an argument for or against a position of what is true has a name in the annals of bad thinking. It is known as the Appeal to Authority Fallacy.

It could be true that my credential could be towel washer at the local car wash. I could also be CEO of Vestas Wind. I could be a greeter at Walmart or the fifth grade English teacher at a failing school. I could be the Chairman of the Physics department at UCLA, or the janitor at a school for juvenile deliquents. None of these credentials would have any bearing on whether or not my statement that all the thousands upon thousands of scientific papers about what wind power could do, all the web pages and websites devoted to statements of what wind power could do, all of the blog posts about the same, all of the books written about the same have had no bearing on what wind power has done and is doing to address climate change.

The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere speaks for itself.

Although I have, in addition, no interest in discussing credentials with anyone whose credentials obviously involve possessing credulity, I will state that my career is not in climatology or energy related fields, but what I say and write here on these subjects in the science section of Democratic Underground and elsewhere speaks for itself.

I really, really, really, really have a very different view of what being an environmentalist is all about than is common here in this forum, and I really shouldn't write in this forum at all.

Good luck sharing what wind power could do. I'm sure many people, not me of course, will find that credible. Of course, many people thought that the appropriate way to address the bubonic plague was prayer, even though the actual answer to the riddle of curing that disease proved to be antibotics instead.

Have a very pleasant weekend.

[Jim__]

6. To be clear, you have no specific criticism of the study referenced in the OP.

And, based on your post, you haven't read the study:

So no, I didn't read your wonderful "Wind energy could..." paper. I don't have to do so. I have plenty of experience, decades of experience with such papers.

Talk about telling responses.

[NNadir]

7. Right. I know from the title it's pablum, because of the conditional word. It is telling and...

...clear.

The way I know this is the result of education based on long experience. If wind energy were going to be a meaningful strategy for addressing climate change, fifty years of similar papers would have had a result on climate change.

It hasn't; it isn't having a result; and it's very clear it won't have a result.

I, unlike the people who promote these papers, year after year, decade after decade, am interested in climate change, not in tearing up the environment to make pristine wildernesses into industrial parks for wind farms.

[Finishline42]

8. And yet we see this from Europe

Yesterday, wind produced 27% of all electricity for Europe!

Top-5 by share of total:
Denmark 116%
Germany 75%
Ireland 67%
Sweden 41%
UK 35%

Top-5, millions of kWh produced:
Germany 987
UK 288
France 189
Sweden 161
Poland 112

above copied from @Sustainable2050

What would be the CO2 readings without this?

Again from @Sustainable2050

If you think that coal-fired electricity in the UK was replaced by gas, have a look at this graph. Gas-fired electricity is at the same level as it was in 2000. It’s indeed renewables that replaced coal.

Link to tweet

/photo/1

[hunter]

9. Sometimes the wind blows, more often it doesn't.

Week 4 in Germany this year, for example, they were burning a lot of gas and coal because there wasn't much wind.

https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2020&week=4

Supplemental wind and solar energy inputs will not save the world.

The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels.You can't quit fossil fuels if you are relying on them to power your economy when the wind doesn't blow and the sun doesn't shine.

[Finishline42]

10. But here's the thing

Adding wind and solar capacity happens in small pieces which is why 10 years ago there was very little. Next year there will be more than today. And as more wind and solar is being used it drives up the cost of fossil fuels and nuclear because of the fixed cost of equipment and the cost of fuel having to be paid for with decreasing use. As those costs go up wind and solar and batteries and other storage technologies become cheaper.

The world is reliant on fossil fuels but they are on the way out - it's just a matter of time.

[hunter]

11. No, they are not on the "way out." That's the big lie.

Wind and solar energy cannot support a high energy industrial economy without fossil fuel inputs.

You can't have one without the other.

Even if solar and wind cut fossil fuel use by some large fraction, optimistically say 50%, then that 50% fossil fuel use is still going to destroy the earth's environment as we know it. Worse, if the world economy is growing overall, as it is now, then fossil fuel use still increases.

If China or Germany choose to be high energy industrial economies and they build nuclear plants instead of fossil fuel plants then they simply won't need the environmentally destructive wind turbines.

If they build wind turbines and fossil fuel plants instead, then they are simply lying to themselves about the the contribution of their fossil fuel plants to global warming.

[Finishline42]

12. You have always held Nuclear in high regard as a Zero carbon solution

But you ignore the high carbon energy inputs required to mine, process, and then store the waste for 100's if not 1000's of years.

A typical nuclear plant uses around 20 tons of fuel rods a year. Most of the spent fuel rods are stored on site where the cost of storage is 'buried' in the operational costs of the plant. What happens when that plant is no longer running? Where does the money come to keep them stored safely for even a hundred years?

BTW, 'environmentally destructive wind turbines' - you have got to be kidding. Did you forget that they don't require fuel to generate electricity? All the energy inputs are in the mfg and installation. There's no continued mining for fuel to keep them going vs all other fossil fuel power plants.

The thing about electricity is that it doesn't matter where it's created, it will still run a high energy industrial economy.

[hunter]

13. How much nasty brown coal does Germany burn?

What is the tonnage of toxic coal waste?

Twenty tons is nothing in comparison.

Yeah, I hate wind turbines. They are natural gas industry bullshit.

There's more than enough natural gas in the ground to destroy us and we seem hell bent on extracting it.

Natural gas power plants are a far greater threat to whatever remains of earth's natural environment than nuclear power, possibly because people think natural gas is somehow benign. It is not.