Why Van Jones was the right man for the job:
…let’s not miss the opportunity to point out that Jones’s promotion of “green jobs” was just as dubious, if not as reviled, as his dabblings in 9/11 Trutherism. As James Pethokoukis tweeted: “having a truther in charge of green jobs is a good fit… you need a certain willing suspension of disbelief for both”
To buy into the “green jobs” scam, you must have an unshakeable faith in the ability of the government to create a viable industry from whole cloth, because there is no commercial demand for the services these green-collar workers would provide. We don’t have to guess about the future of green jobs; we can look to the ethanol industry.
They never learn.
Actually wind power is working fairly well. Corn ethanol, on the other hand, has always been a mess. IIRC there was already an imposition (I am unsure if it was state of federal) of using it as an additive to regular gasoline before the fluff from the current administration. There is some hype regarding cellulosic ethanol but IMO it is a bad idea. What will happen to the soil composition you remove crop residue from instead of tilling the soil with it?
I have more hope for algae biodiesel. But the most likely replacement for petroleum, if we ever need it in our lifetimes, is coal or gas-to-liquids, and tar sands.
They learn, Rand.
Learn to hide their true goals better (most of the time). đ
Obama was rather explicit during his campaign that “Cap and Trade” and similar policies would cause energy prices “to skyrocket” (his words). The simple plan here is to pass laws that make fossil fuels so expensive that things like wind, solar, and other “soft” technologies seem cheap — but only by comparison. It isn’t worth pointing out or arguing over the fallacies, because they’re beside the point in my opinion. Instead, I’d like to make my own pitch for full green employment. Build 80 million exercise bicycles whose load is an electric generator. Put 3 shifts on it a day, and you’ll get an average of about 10,000 MW continuous power…just enough to run the United States government, which is all that counts in the first place, right?
Wind power works… as long as taxpayers are paying for most of the cost and the builders are keeping the profits.
There’s also the little problem where wind power drops off a cliff in the summer, even when the wind is blowing (same reason that helos don’t like high/hot conditions).
Here’s what Van Jones was saying a few months ago (from an article in the July-August issue of Audubon Magazine about green jobs coming to a small Iowa town):
âThe green economy is a more labor-intensive economy,â says Van Jones, founder of Oakland, Californiaâbased Green for All, a group that links sustainable environmental policy with the fight against poverty, and now the White House special adviser on green jobs. âYouâre relying less on big, dirty, polluting machines and more on beautiful people.â Jones sees opportunities, in particular, in cities and towns like Newton. âWhere you have a lot of industrially zoned land and the remnants of an industrial workforce, a great deal of the greening process is about building stuff,â he says. âPeople talk about energy independence. Well, itâs not energy independence if you go from importing your oil to importing your wind turbines.â
I read that and I immediately thought, “Ah, so these are going to be low paying jobs.” And sure enough a few paragraphs later:
One area where TPI does fall short is wages. At $13 to $15 an hour, it doesnât match the union scale Maytag offered, which typically exceeded $20. Still, the pay is competitive for the county, where entry-level manufacturing wages average $14.39.
These people just can’t connect the dots. My dog knows more economics than they do.
Wind power works as long as you ignore the cost of covering for its unreliability. Having to build backup capacity, and keep much of that capacity in hot standby, destroys most of wind’s supposed advantages. The only time it may make sense is if you have more dispatchability from hydro than you need — but that is at best a niche.
“Actually wind power is working fairly well.”
Does it?
“Back in the day” (i.e. the early 1980’s when I was interested in home wind power), those troglodyte electric power utility people whined about the intermitency of wind, but in my own mind, I held to the view of “let a thousand wind towers spring up” and that the individual fluctuations will average out.
But every theory has to meet cold, hard reality at some point. “Back in the day” there was not much experience to draw upon, but thanks to the green energy policies in Europe, there is such experience.
Wind generation has a capacity factor, that portion, that on average, that can be generated by wind, with the remainder to be generated by “everything else.”
There are portions of the US Central Plains that are said to have a capacity factor of 40 percent. That means that 40 percent of the time you can get electricity from wind, the remaining 60 percent of the time, you have to burn coal or natural gas somewhere else.
But these capacity factor estimates need to be proven in operation. The European experience was hoping for a 30 percent capacity factor, but actual operation is finding the capacity factor closer to 20 percent.
So one thing about wind, is that wind generation does not add a single kilowatt to generation capacity. Not one. Every wind kilowatt needs to be “backed up” with some other source — natural gas, coal, nuclear, and perhaps to a limited extend, hydro.
I have a colleague at the U who is internationally recognized as a scholar and expert on the subject of “electric power network security” (i.e. having enough transmission and generation capacity to avoid blackout), and he seemed to tell me that my argument about wind not adding a single kW was in error, that “even a nuclear or a coal plant has outages sometime and also needs backup.”
I am an electrical engineer with a specialization far removed from electric power network security, but I believe that my esteemed colleague is flat out wrong. There may be some circumstances that all nuclear power plants, not just an isolated plant, needs to be “down” — perhaps there is some defect in the design of the common type of PLWR that has been uncovered and all plants have to be taken out of service until this is corrected, but I have not heard such a thing happening. I doubt there is any reasonable scenario where all coal or natural gas plants, as a class, need to be “off line.” On the other hand, the European experience has shown that wind plants can be in some instances be becalmed on a continental scale for weeks at a time. So indeed, wind power needs 100 percent backup and a wind tower does not add a single, slim kilowatt to network capacity.
Next, what does the 20 percent capacity factor mean in practice. John Rowe, CEO of Exelon, the largest operating company of nuclear power, a self-proclaimed “believer in Global Warming and the need for the electric power industry to accept restrictions on carbon, explained in a talk at the U recently that “wind is a natural gas play.” What he meant by that is that if you “go the wind route”, for every 80 units of natural gas, you can top this off with 20 units of wind. What you have done is by an indirect way made your natural gas plant about 20/80 or 25 percent more “energy efficient” in using natural gas.
So if you have a 40 percent efficient natural gas plant, by adding wind to the mix, you are still generating most of your power with natural gas, but you have made it seem as if it is 50 percent efficient.
Suppose you could make your natural gas power plant 50 percent efficient by adding a steam-generation “bottoming cycle” instead of putting up wind towers. Then it is a question of what is more cost effective, the steam-generation equipment or putting up the wind mill? The wind mill is politically more effective because you can change the visual landscape with those things and have pictures of wind towers on your glossy annual report, whereas the steam generation equipment is tucked away inside a building and doesn’t have the same PR impact.
My esteemed colleague, who is very environmentally committed, would tell me that one needs to do both, add the steam generation cycle to the natural gas plant and build the wind towers, and he adds, that we need to build more nuclear plants as well.
OK, maybe wind is a success, that the 20 percent capacity factor means we get 20/80 or 25 percent more kWHr out of each MBTU of natural gas, and that is a Good Thing. But people see the wind tower and think that we can get all of our power “for free” if it weren’t for those Big Bad Oil, Gas, and Coal companies and Stupid Conservatives (TM) who want nuclear plants. The wind tower is like the part of the iceberg you see — most of the iceberg is below the water, much like the natural gas consumption that goes with that windmill.
One local food store has “subscribed to 100 percent wind power” and brags about how green they are (they are making themselves to be the local competitor to Whole Foods). I feel like snarking, “100 percent wind power — does this mean you turn off your freezers and meat chillers when the wind stops blowing.” No, in any practical terms, they are not 100 percent wind power, and again, that they brag how green they are to customers in this fashion is misleading.
OK, “go green”, dot the landscape with wind towers, and brag about the green jobs, but the real green jobs are held by the men and women at Exxon Mobil and other companies who have “cracked the code” regarding new methods of getting gas from non-porous rock, producing the recent reduction in natural gas prices making this whole windmill thing possible.
The great thing about being a Leftist is that your policies are the solution no matter what the problem.
Ain’t it great how the 19th century politics of the proletarian can, unchanged, become the “green” politics of the 21st!. Sorta like how the New Deal policies just happen to be identical to those policies needed to cure Global Climate Warming Change.
My view is that this has been tried before. Two key places where “green jobs” have been created is in pollution cleanup and recycling. Far as I know, despite decades of effort, recycling paper and plastics are still not cost effective for most locations and recycling efforts put a considerable burden on the public (to sort refuse). Recycling metal is, but that would have been done anyway.
Pollution cleanup (namely, removal or in situ remediation of polluted soil) only is a real job because the US had very polluting industries and because a huge bunch of money, mandated by federal law, is going to pollution cleanup. Now that we don’t (at least at a scale that matters) have significantly polluting industries, we’ll eventually cleanup any locations that need cleaned up. Then that’s it for the industry.
Bill made a good point. We don’t need a lot of low paying jobs since we don’t have a low of unemployed workers willing to work for that. That’s not working to the actual strength of the US, which due to high labor expenses needs to exploit any job that adds a lot of margin. My view is that if the US switches to some sort of “green jobs” economy, eventually, they will need to address the things that keep wages and benefits (particularly health care) high.
Given that it’ll likely would be some sort of “socialist” solution, I expect a one payer universal health care system with lower benefits than present and various cost cutting things (that they’d never let private health care get away with) like good malpractice immunity and reducing the use of expensive doctors in health care. They’ll probably inflate their way out of having to lower the minimum wage and entitlement spending.
Which of course explains why China, with billions of “beautiful people,” has air completely unsullied by pollution.
Oh, wait…
Great comments.
I like wind and solar, but in their place as niche players. We need 500 new nuclear plants, like tomorrow.
Leftists have latched onto environmentalism because it is a plausible justification for totalitarian policies. Green is the new Red.
How is this for irony. The folks in China according to the WSJ are concerned about the US deficits as far as the eye can see and the temptation to use inflation to pay for socialist programs.
Get this, even the Chinese Communists are worried about Mr. Obama.
If you build 500 nuclear plants(preferably 1000), you won’t need to worry about wind and solar. When sanity finally prevails the worst of the visual pollution of the wind (tax) farms will be removed by relatively small quantities of C4.
Just out of curiosity, has anyone who advocates wind as an energy panacea figured out what interrupting air circulation patterns will do to the climate? It isn’t an inconsiderable point, because the energy content of available surface winds (over land) is one of the few natural phenomena on an energy scale comparable to our needs. In other words, we can make a significant dent in in it.
I already know the answer, by the way.
” weâll eventually cleanup any locations that need cleaned up. Then thatâs it for the industry.”
As long as trains wreck and trucks turn over, there will be a need to clean-up Hazmat.
I once joked on Dustbury.com that the proliferation of wind turbines in Oklahoma would eventually starve Texas of air.
As long as trains wreck and trucks turn over, there will be a need to clean-up Hazmat.
True enough. I was thinking of the sexy money in cleaning up Superfund sites. I don’t know how it compares to these more mundane chores in terms of overall revenue, but I bet it’s a lot higher profit margin.
Paul, you wrote:
So one thing about wind, is that wind generation does not add a single kilowatt to generation capacity. Not one. Every wind kilowatt needs to be âbacked upâ with some other source â natural gas, coal, nuclear, and perhaps to a limited extend, hydro.
As you state later, even in its role as a “natural gas play”, wind increases the effective generation capacity of natural gas plants by 25%. That is a significant number of kilowatts. I imagine a similar thing holds for hydro plants which is the only other power source listed above that doesn’t run best always on.
Then there’s the matter of energy storage. I think at some point, we will figure out a good enough solution that can store power from wind and remove most of its variability.
Karl: what (the other) Paul was saying was that wind adds zero dependable capacity to the system. Instead, it increases the average fuel efficiency of the gas turbines on the grid. However, the maximum load you can support dependably is not increased.