Interesting Data On Hourly Wind Energy Production On the ISO New England Grid, 2019.
The data in this post will come from a spreadsheet down loaded from the ISO New England Operations web page, ISO New England being the name of the electrical grid that powers the New England states, including Vermont. The spreadsheet can be found here:New England Iso Operations Reports
The data to which I will refer for the title data is the 2019 hourly wind data spreadsheet, which is current up to the end of June of this year. I have been also working with other spreadsheets from the ISO website, and will produce data from them here without direct reference to particular sheets.
Recently, in one of the political threads here, I argued that the climate policies of Bernie Sanders, as enacted where he lives, in Vermont, helped to make climate change worse, not better.
Many of my fellow Democrats agree with these policies which is unfortunate; the goal of controlling the government should not be merely to win elections and hold power, but rather to govern well, to make our country safe, and sustainable for future generations.
We must not miss this; it is our responsibility as human beings, at least if we embrace "the better angels of our natures," to do something other than posturing and embracing wishful thinking, these being the same as doing nothing.
My claim had to do with his cheering for the closure of the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant, which shut in 2014 after 42 years of operation without a single loss of life. Vermont Yankee was a small nuclear plant, with a rated power of 620 MWe, but despite being small, it was able to produce around 70% of all the electricity consumed in the State of Vermont in a single building in a typical year. The environmental attractiveness of this should be obvious, but isn't, because ignorant rhetoric easily trumps reality in the times in which we live, a regrettable fact. We are all, as a species, dumbing down in times we desperately need to smarten up.
In the period between 2000 and 2014, nuclear power plants in New England the average continuous power produced (based on yearly data processed from other spreadsheets on the ISO NE website) was 4067.1 MW, and the standard deviation was 158.1 MW.
Immediately after the closure of Vermont Yankee, nuclear power production in New England as a whole fell, in 2015, to 3637 MW of average continuous power, an immediate loss of 429 MW of average continuous power.
Of course, whenever opponents of nuclear energy open their mouths, they engage in a big lie which has been demonstrably false since the earliest days of rote and ignorant opposition to nuclear energy, which is that whenever a nuclear power plant is shut it will be replaced by so called "renewable energy."
In New England, if one studies ISO NE data, the largest, by far, other than hydroelectricity, source of so called "renewable energy" to produce electricity is the combustion of wood and garbage. (The combustion of biomass (and garbage) is responsible for slightly less than half of the 7 million air pollution deaths that occur each year on this planet.) In 2015, for example, this type of combustion produced in all of New England 4155 GW-hr (a unit of energy, not power) which translates into average continuous power of 474 MW of power. In 2014, the same figures were 3956 GW-hr (a unit of energy, not power) which translates into average continuous power of 452 MW of power. Thus the increase in this form of so called "renewable energy" in terms of average continuous power from 2014 to 2015 was 22 MW. This increase, by the way, surely killed people with its waste, aka "air pollution."
The second largest form other than hydroelectricity of so called renewable energy in New England is wind power, which is strangely popular among ersatz self described "environmentalists" on our side of the aisle, even though, regarding myself as environmentalist as well, I question whether tearing up pristine wilderness and converting them into industrial parks serviced by huge trucks for wind farms is actually an "environmentalist" attitude.
In 2014, wind power in all of New England - not just Vermont - produced 1929 GW-hr of energy, which translates to an average continuous power of 220 MW.
In 2015, wind power in all of New England - not just Vermont - produced 2157 GW-hr of energy, which translates to an average continuous power of 246 MW, an increase of 26 MW.
Now let's turn to the hourly data for 2019, which is about as up to date as you can get. I have downloaded the spreadsheet and using Excel functions, did some calculations. In 2019, wind power, produced as average continuous power calculated from the hourly as opposed to the annual figures, 438 MW.
This does not tell the whole story however, since it graphically reflects the reliability of wind power, which is the time distribution of the availability of wind power. The highest hourly average continuous power for wind power was 1109 MW, which occurred on March 19th of this year during the hour ending at 6 pm. The lowest hourly average continuous power for wind power was on June 9th of this year in the hour ending at 9 am. when all the wind turbines in New England produced 7.21 MW.
Unsurprisingly for the 4343 hours recorded, about half (52.7%) produced less than the average continuous power for the year as a whole as determined from hourly data, but more telling is that for 10.5% of the hours recorded (457) hours wind power produced less than 100 MW of electricity and for 25.5% of the the hours (1109) recorded, wind power produced less than 200 MW electricity.
It requires energy which does not translate into electrical power to restart a dangerous fossil fuel power plant that has shut because the wind is blowing.
In the year 2000, 54.55% of New England's electricity was produced using dangerous fossil fuels. So far, this year, 2019, in the year to date up to August 25th, 48.91% of New England's electricity was produced by burning dangerous fossil fuels.
The largest source of electrical power in 2019 in New England up to August 25 has been dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped directly into the atmosphere to destroy it. The second largest is nuclear power, nuclear power being the only form of energy which Bernie Sanders wants to shut.
We are experiencing vast increases, accelerating increases, in the concentrations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere. Over the last 5 years, the average annual increases have measured 2.55 ppm/year, an unprecedented figure.
New England is a small outpost on a giant planet. The effort there to address climate change doesn't cut it.
We need to get serious.
I trust that you will have a pleasant Labor Day weekend.
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