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Politics : Politics of Energy -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (69576)	4/16/2016 9:51:31 AM
From: Brumar89	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

The Under-reported Disaster Of Renewable Energy Schemes April 15, 2016/ Francis Menton If you consume mainstream media sources in the U.S., you very likely have the impression that renewable energy sources like solar and wind are advancing smartly and soon will be providing half or more of the energy that is produced. The reality is very much the opposite. If you want to learn what's really going on, you will never find out from reading the New York Times or Washington Post, whose missions in this area are basically to suppress all information that is important to know. What you need to read is the daily email put out by a guy named Benny Peiser of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in England. You can go here to subscribe. Although it has a number of prominent scientists on its Academic Advisory Council, GWPF does not itself dabble much in the quasi-scientific debate over whether global warming is occurring and if so by how much and from what cause. Rather, its niche is government policies that are supposedly designed to address the global warming crisis, and particularly how much they cost and whether they work. Each day they provide multiple links to sources that report on these issues, most often from national publications in particular countries or from relatively small-circulation outlets. If you haven't been reading the GWPF newsletter recently, here are a few things you may have missed just this week: About a quarter of the windmill capacity in the Netherlands is operating at a loss and is threatened with near-term closure. (What, you thought wind power was free?) From Financieele Dagblad (Dutch language, translated) on April 13: Due to the low energy prices wind turbines are making losses on a large scale. The maintenance costs are higher than the benefits of the energy generated. Windmills are now being demolished according to a survey by Financieele Dagblad. According to estimates Association of Private Wind Turbine Operators (Pawex) 'potentially 500 to 750 megawatts' are making a loss or are at risk of doing so. That is a quarter of the power generated by onshore wind energy in the Netherlands. Britain recently cut subsidies for household solar installations, and the pace of such installations immediately fell by three-quarters. From The Guardian on April 8: The amount of household solar power capacity installed in the past two months has plummeted by three quarters following the government’s cuts to subsidies, according to new figures. The size of the drop-off will dismay green campaigners who want take up on clean energy sources to accelerate. The cuts were announced just days after energy secretary Amber Rudd helped agree the historic Paris climate deal, and have bankrupted several solar companies. SciDev.net on April 11 covered a new report out from something called the International Renewable Energy Agency, saying that many major developing countries are backing away from renewables and turning more and more to fossil fuels in light demand among their people for cheap energy. Nicholas Wagner, an IRENA programme officer who helped prepare the report, says countries such as Brazil, Ethiopia, Kenya and Nigeria . . . have . . . turned to fossil fuels to power greater demand for heating, cooling and transport, he says. Renewables formed nearly 50 per cent of Indonesia’s energy mix in 2000, but this had dropped to under 40 per cent by 2013, the report found. China, India and Mexico have also seen their renewable share fall over this period. You probably have read somewhere about the threatened closure of much of the remainder of Britain's steel industry caused energy prices that have been intentionally driven to high levels to limit fossil fuel use. But did you read about the massive demonstrations by steel workers in Germany seeking to stave off a similar fate for their industry and their jobs? From Die Tagesshau (German language, translated), April 11: Tens of thousands of workers in the German steel industry have taken to the streets to demonstrate for their jobs. The IG Metall union spoke of 45,000 participants. . . . The steelworkers . . . fear the introduction of stricter climate policies by the EU. Federal Economics Minister Gabriel promised the steelworkers his support. He said, he would not agree to any climate policy that threatens the future of the German steel production. According to industry figures, the planned tightening of the EU emissions trading scheme would lead to additional annual costs of one billion euros for the German steel industry. And did you know that Germany is in the process of backing away from massive subsidies for wind energy, leading many to predict the imminent "collapse" of its wind industry (which cannot survive without subsidies). From Berliner Zeitung, April 7: If the green energy plans by the German Federal Government are implemented, the expansion of onshore wind energy will soon come to a standstill and then go into reverse. In early March, German Economy Minister Sigmar Gabriel presented a draft for the amendment of the Renewable Energies Act (EEG). The new rules regulate the subsidy levels for renewable energy. The new regulations are to be adopted in coming months. A study by consultants ERA on behalf of the Green Party’s parliamentary group concludes that under these provisions the development of wind energy will collapse fairly soon. The coming wind collapse is just a small part of Germany's disastrous "Energiewende" (energy transformation) that has made it so that Germans pay about triple what Americans pay for electricity, but they have recently had to turn to building coal plants to replace energy from closed nuclear plants and also to deal with the intermittency of solar and wind. From the Wall Street Journal on April 14: [ German electric rates are triple American? Maybe we SHOULDN'T copy that country. ] All of this—the job losses, the unreliable power supply, the astonishing amounts of spending that could top €1 trillion over the coming decades, and the rising coal emissions to boot—amounts to one of the more monumental blunders of modern governance. And really, you could go on with this as long as you want. Peiser puts up at least five of these every day. Billions upon billions of dollars spent -- all going straight to the energy bills of the populace -- with essentially no noticeable effect on global CO2 emissions, let alone global warming. You owe it to yourself to check this out. http://manhattancontrarian.com/blog/2016/4/15/the-under-reported-disaster-of-renewable-energy-schemes

To: Brumar89 who wrote (69576)	4/16/2016 9:53:04 AM
From: Eric	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 86355

The two dams generated a puny amount of power and were more expensive to operate than getting power directly from BPA. Not to mention they were becoming a maintenance headache due to their age and possible earthquake hazard which was not taken into account when they were built. I remember my dad taking the family up there in the late 1950's. He called it a "baby dam". A very stark contrast to the other dams here in Washington he took us to when I was very young including Grand Coulee. Power down: Elwha dams' turbines silenced after decades [Gallery and Video} By Paul Gottlieb Peninsula Daily News John Settle, left, and Kevin Yancy, right foreground, stand next to generator No. 3 as it slowly spins down during the process of shutting down the Elwha Dam power plant Wednesday. -- Photo by Chris Tucker/Peninsula Daily News PORT ANGELES — The Glines Canyon and Elwha dams have lost their reason for being. After providing electricity to help Port Angeles and Port Townsend grow, the dams were cut off from the Bonneville Power Administration grid Wednesday in another step toward tearing them down. Their four giant generators — three at Elwha Dam, one at Glines — were in almost continuous operation for nearly a century. They generated vital power, but the dams west of Port Angeles, built without fish ladders, also destroyed a rich salmon run. “Our objectives are real simple,” power plant supervisor Kevin Yancy said before setting out to neutralize the dams' ability to create electrical power, as the Elwha Dam has done since 1913 and the Glines Canyon Dam since 1927. “We want to shut down both dams and power plants, and we are going to reroute the current water running through the turbine generators over the spillway.” As the turbines' roar turned mute at Glines at 8:20 a.m. and Elwha at 9:19 a.m., the silence signaled the end of nearly a century of generating power — and a significant step toward tearing down the dams beginning in September and restoring the river's fisheries. Yancy signed the maintenance log in the Glines Canyon Dam power plant at 8:10 a.m. Wednesday, leading about a dozen reporters to a tiny desk before which stood a generator 18 feet across. “K. Yancy on site to shut down Glines Canyon Power plant — Final Day of Operation!” he wrote. “End of an era. Good by Glines.” At 8:20, he wrote, “Main unit off-line!” His entry at the Elwha Dam: “Elwha P.H. [power house] Shut Down — Final.” “Let bygones be bygones,” Yancy said as he separated the Elwha Dam's transmission line from the Bonneville Power Administration grid. “It's the end of an era on the Elwha,” he added. Robert Elofson, the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe's director of river restoration, also was on-hand for the depowering of the Elwha Dam. He saw the shutdown a little differently. “When [Yancy] said ‘the end of an era,' I was thinking more the return of another era for the river,” Elofson said. “I am glad that this is the first step in taking the dams down. It's a hard process to get here.” Rendering the dams essentially useless, he added, “means a lot of hard effort has led to a result we wanted.” Also in attendance was Olympic National Park Superintendent Karen Gustin. “It's a little more emotional than people expected,” she said. “It's the beginning of the beginning of another phase.” Olympic National Park Superintendent Karen Gustin, right foreground, looks up at the Elwha Dam control room as giant generators inside the powerhouse slowly spin down to a stop Wednesday. In the next 30 to 45 days, hazardous fluids will be removed from machinery and the dams decommissioned. Chris Tucker/Peninsula Daily News Beginning in the next few weeks, the Lake Aldwell reservoir behind the 108-foot-tall Elwha Dam will be lowered, followed by the Lake Mills reservoir behind 210-foot-tall Glines Canyon Dam beginning late this month or in early July. The lakes' waters will shrink 18 feet down to the level of the dams' spill-gate sills in preparation for the dams being dismantled. Barnard Construction Co. of Bozeman, Mont., will begin tearing down the dams Sept. 17 in a three-year $26.9 million contract with the National Park Service. By then, Yancy and seven other federal Bureau of Reclamation workers who staff the dams and provide administrative support will have lost their jobs. The Elwha watershed is in the national park, as is Glines Canyon Dam, while the Elwha Dam squats just 4.9 miles upstream from the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The dams are being dismantled as part of the $327 million Elwha River Ecosystem and Fisheries Restoration Act in the largest removal of dams in the nation's history. Between 21 million and 28 million cubic yards of sediment sit behind both dams combined, much of which is expected to coat the riverbed for marine habitat for five species of severely depleted salmon in a process never conducted in this magnitude. Dam removal was set in motion in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when then-owner Crown Zellerbach sought to license the Elwha Dam and relicense the Glines Canyon Dam in applications to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. The National Park Service challenged the energy commission's jurisdiction over the Glines Canyon Dam, which was absorbed into park boundaries in 1940, when the park expanded. The Lower Elwha Klallam tribe called for dam removal and ecosystem restoration in 1986, and the energy regulatory commission's environmental study determined in 1991 that only dam removal would result in fisheries restoration. That same study also determined that “the cost of power produced by the dam retention would equal or exceed the cost of power from the Bonneville Power Administration,” according to a National Park Service fact sheet at tinyurl.com. The Elwha River restoration act, signed into law by President George H.W. Bush in 1992, stayed the FERC license applications and called for “full restoration of the Elwha River ecosystem and native anadromous fisheries.” The dams generated an annual average output of 19 megawatts and produced up to 25 megawatts for the BPA grid. That's a “tiny” amount compared with the more than 12,000 megawatts that run through the grid, BPA spokesman Doug Johnson said last week. ________ Senior Staff Writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com. peninsuladailynews.com