Can Solar & Wind Fix Everything (e.g., Climate Change) with a battery break-through?

[B-ManFX4]

As was mentioned in post #6,553, those are the costs without subsidies. Restating your opinion without addressing the facts that prove it to be wrong don't really advance the conversation. Show me how Lazard's is wrong and we can talk.

Tell me - when it is winter in the northern hemisphere, and it is night time in the summer, please oh please show me how inexpensively you are going to build an ESS to support the northern hemisphere's energy needs? You would need to "over panel" the system by 500% or more to try and gather enough energy to charge the ESS. Don't know about you but my house uses power 24/7/365. I've spent over $5K on just the batteries for my system - and they won't fully sustain my house for the hours where solar production is unavailable or very low - and I have 19kW of panels. Not enormous but not tiny either.

The posts by aenyc following your Lazard post should tell you all you need to know as to why people should not take Lazard's reporting seriously. They are way too ambiguous and offer very little commentary to allow the reader to research and agree or refute their claims. In other words, it is not a scientific paper and it should not be quoted or referenced like it is. You show me where Lazard included the cost of buying, building, deploying, wiring, etc. the ESS required to make solar and wind a reality and we can talk.

While I agree nuclear is viable, there simply isn't enough Uranium for the current technology to sustains us (again it was in post #6,553 with a reference). Again, just restating an opinion without addressing facts doesn't advance the topic. Not to say there aren't a ton of promising new nuclear technologies that could work, there are and they can... but can they also have a low LCOE?

As I suspected, the thought that we are going to run out of uranium is not especially accurate. While it was convenient to find something to bolster your argument, it is not especially accurate when you ask others who are more focused on actually mining uranium. This is right from the comments of the video you posted:

Comments on “Is Nuclear Power Green?” By Sabine Hossenfelder

This You Tube clip is one of the best and most comprehensive analyses of the issues around nuclear power that I have seen but unfortunately the final conclusions are seriously flawed due to baseless assertions regarding the current reserves and future cost of Uranium 235. This is a great shame because this presentation will be used by many others to denigrate nuclear power. For this reason, the errors need to be addressed.

Sabine states that if we increase the use of U235 we will only have 20 years of reserves left before it runs out and that the cost of Uranium will therefore escalate, making nuclear power excessively expensive. However, mining companies only ever prove up enough reserves of any mineral to keep the mine going long enough to pay off debt or justify future investments, typically around 10 to 15 years at most. This is because it costs a lot of money to prove up reserves. For example, if the world copper reserves as were known in 1980 were truly the only mineable copper that existed then, we would have run out of copper in around 2010. This would have created quite an issue for renewable sources of energy. Luckily, as existing reserves were depleted, explorers found new deposits and then proved up new reserves.

The same arguments apply to Uranium reserves but it is, however, is a special case. Many countries currently have embargoes against uranium mining and exploration and others are shutting down their existing nuclear reactors. This is because of perceived safety concerns that even Sabine demonstrates are baseless. Therefore, there is at present a very limited market and even more limited future for Uranium miners. Few companies are even bothering to explore for Uranium. In such a situation the few existing suppliers are able to command high prices for their existing production because there are not likely to be any new competitive mines in the foreseeable future.

If however, nuclear power were recognised world-wide as a viable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions the demand for Uranium would sky rocket. If just Germany were to change its policy of shutting down existing nuclear power plants, then explorers would begin exploring for Uranium again, future reserves would increase dramatically and competition between new miners would decrease the cost of their product. Uranium is quite common geologically and the world has abundant reserves for millennia to come.

Sabine uses the same arguments around limited reserves to define Thorium reactors as also likely to be expensive. This couldn’t be more wrong! Australia and other countries have been discarding thousands of tons of Thorium for decades. It is an unwanted biproduct from the mining of Titanium from beach sands (as the accessory mineral monazite). Thorium is a very common element!! Thorium is significantly more abundant than Uranium. Many countries have abundant thorium deposits. However, they haven’t been turned into “proven” reserves because currently there is not much demand for Thorium. Also, the cost of Thorium reactors is bound to be expensive at present because they are all experimental.

Sabine’s arguments appear to be balanced and reasonable. However, her conclusion that nuclear power is not a “green” alternative to fossil fuels is a consequence of her use of the flawed statistics regarding Uranium and Thorium reserves and future costs. I’m sure that around the world millions will be persuaded by her flawed arguments. If not redressed immediately this flawed argument will persist, like the previous false suggested correlation between autism and vaccinations, for decades to come.

Associate Professor Dr. Geoffrey R Taylor
(Head, School of Mines, University of New South Wales, 1992-2002)

I will translate that for you - when the demand for uranium increases, companies will explore for more of it. It is no different than any other material - demand = high means lots of folks looking to supply it. Here's a report that says the same thing:

World’s Uranium Resources Enough for the Foreseeable Future, Say NEA and IAEA in New Report | IAEA and NEA report: World’s uranium resources

www.iaea.org

Here's a link from the US EIA regarding the uranium reserves for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/uranium/production/annual/ureserve.php

Looks to be about 446 million pounds of uranium without further exploration.

Ah! I see what you mean now. You might be interested in this article as it gives an idea as to how rapidly the U.S. is moving towards renewables:

With 3 trillion kWh to go, if we're deploying 200 billion kWh per year, every five years we have a trillion kWh, so in 15 years (not including Dunkelflaute or ESS needs) at the anticipated 2025 rate we'd be fully electrified. So, seems like we can meet our 2050 commitments in regards to electrification and the gap has a wide safety margin. But, obviously, if deployment continues to grow each year by some percentage (which it should given lower LCOEs) then we'd reach the goal sooner.

Not that I think it'll happen quite that quickly...there's a lot of $ in anything being built today and investors, who believe like you that it's not going away (or at least as quickly as it is), will want to see a return. There's also political chicanery, e.g., Florida just made it easier to build pipelines in the state and made it harder to build renewables.

Yeah, that's all nice and feel good but it obviously ignores the elephant in the room - what about the ESS needed to make solar viable? In 15 years our energy demands will have certainly increased as well. Are you factoring that into your "formula"? Also - when does Lazard (and everyone else for that matter) start addressing the other real issues with deploying millions of solar panels? Upkeep, sabotage / security, weather damage, environmental impact of making so many of them, environmental impact of making so many batteries for the required ESS, etc. I didn't recall seeing any of those expenses tagged and accounted for in the Lazard report. Are those not real costs that should be factored into the entire cost equation of "green" energy generation?

 

[Checkthisout]

Tell me - when it is winter in the northern hemisphere, and it is night time in the summer, please oh please show me how inexpensively you are going to build an ESS to support the northern hemisphere's energy needs? You would need to "over panel" the system by 500% or more to try and gather enough energy to charge the ESS. Don't know about you but my house uses power 24/7/365. I've spent over $5K on just the batteries for my system - and they won't fully sustain my house for the hours where solar production is unavailable or very low - and I have 19kW of panels. Not enormous but not tiny either.

The posts by aenyc following your Lazard post should tell you all you need to know as to why people should not take Lazard's reporting seriously. They are way too ambiguous and offer very little commentary to allow the reader to research and agree or refute their claims. In other words, it is not a scientific paper and it should not be quoted or referenced like it is. You show me where Lazard included the cost of buying, building, deploying, wiring, etc. the ESS required to make solar and wind a reality and we can talk.



As I suspected, the thought that we are going to run out of uranium is not especially accurate. While it was convenient to find something to bolster your argument, it is not especially accurate when you ask others who are more focused on actually mining uranium. This is right from the comments of the video you posted:

Comments on “Is Nuclear Power Green?” By Sabine Hossenfelder

This You Tube clip is one of the best and most comprehensive analyses of the issues around nuclear power that I have seen but unfortunately the final conclusions are seriously flawed due to baseless assertions regarding the current reserves and future cost of Uranium 235. This is a great shame because this presentation will be used by many others to denigrate nuclear power. For this reason, the errors need to be addressed.

Sabine states that if we increase the use of U235 we will only have 20 years of reserves left before it runs out and that the cost of Uranium will therefore escalate, making nuclear power excessively expensive. However, mining companies only ever prove up enough reserves of any mineral to keep the mine going long enough to pay off debt or justify future investments, typically around 10 to 15 years at most. This is because it costs a lot of money to prove up reserves. For example, if the world copper reserves as were known in 1980 were truly the only mineable copper that existed then, we would have run out of copper in around 2010. This would have created quite an issue for renewable sources of energy. Luckily, as existing reserves were depleted, explorers found new deposits and then proved up new reserves.

The same arguments apply to Uranium reserves but it is, however, is a special case. Many countries currently have embargoes against uranium mining and exploration and others are shutting down their existing nuclear reactors. This is because of perceived safety concerns that even Sabine demonstrates are baseless. Therefore, there is at present a very limited market and even more limited future for Uranium miners. Few companies are even bothering to explore for Uranium. In such a situation the few existing suppliers are able to command high prices for their existing production because there are not likely to be any new competitive mines in the foreseeable future.

If however, nuclear power were recognised world-wide as a viable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions the demand for Uranium would sky rocket. If just Germany were to change its policy of shutting down existing nuclear power plants, then explorers would begin exploring for Uranium again, future reserves would increase dramatically and competition between new miners would decrease the cost of their product. Uranium is quite common geologically and the world has abundant reserves for millennia to come.

Sabine uses the same arguments around limited reserves to define Thorium reactors as also likely to be expensive. This couldn’t be more wrong! Australia and other countries have been discarding thousands of tons of Thorium for decades. It is an unwanted biproduct from the mining of Titanium from beach sands (as the accessory mineral monazite). Thorium is a very common element!! Thorium is significantly more abundant than Uranium. Many countries have abundant thorium deposits. However, they haven’t been turned into “proven” reserves because currently there is not much demand for Thorium. Also, the cost of Thorium reactors is bound to be expensive at present because they are all experimental.

Sabine’s arguments appear to be balanced and reasonable. However, her conclusion that nuclear power is not a “green” alternative to fossil fuels is a consequence of her use of the flawed statistics regarding Uranium and Thorium reserves and future costs. I’m sure that around the world millions will be persuaded by her flawed arguments. If not redressed immediately this flawed argument will persist, like the previous false suggested correlation between autism and vaccinations, for decades to come.

Associate Professor Dr. Geoffrey R Taylor
(Head, School of Mines, University of New South Wales, 1992-2002)

I will translate that for you - when the demand for uranium increases, companies will explore for more of it. It is no different than any other material - demand = high means lots of folks looking to supply it. Here's a report that says the same thing:

World’s Uranium Resources Enough for the Foreseeable Future, Say NEA and IAEA in New Report | IAEA and NEA report: World’s uranium resources

www.iaea.org

Here's a link from the US EIA regarding the uranium reserves for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/uranium/production/annual/ureserve.php

Looks to be about 446 million pounds of uranium without further exploration.



Yeah, that's all nice and feel good but it obviously ignores the elephant in the room - what about the ESS needed to make solar viable? In 15 years our energy demands will have certainly increased as well. Are you factoring that into your "formula"? Also - when does Lazard (and everyone else for that matter) start addressing the other real issues with deploying millions of solar panels? Upkeep, sabotage / security, weather damage, environmental impact of making so many of them, environmental impact of making so many batteries for the required ESS, etc. I didn't recall seeing any of those expenses tagged and accounted for in the Lazard report. Are those not real costs that should be factored into the entire cost equation or "green" energy generation?

Does Sabine have an engineering background?

Nobody should talk about power and energy as an expert without knowing how the basics of how things work.

 

[aenyc]

The Sabine character is interesting. I made some research on her a while ago:


Now we get to Sabine Hossenfelder (Who seems to be very eager to capitalize on the latest scam aka "climate change")

5 minutes of internet research turned out these gems (I decided to look this up because i have quite a bit of interest in various topics in Physics):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/t9t4kc/what_are_your_guys_thoughts_on_sabine

I particularly love this one:

Before I really knew much about physics, I liked Sabine and thought she was “speaking truth to power” in a way. Now that I know quite a bit more, I find that the majority of her audience is more of the “pop-sci” crowd who aren’t really able to form their own opinions and therefore just believe what she says unquestioningly. Among this crowd, she has positioned herself to be an authority, which she really is not. I find her to be extremely opinionated in a way that does not allow for other opinions to exist, meaning that she sees other opinions as being “unable to accept the truth” (where “the truth” here is really just her opinion). One instance of this is how she hates anything related to naturalness and acts like people who want to use naturalness as a motivation for physics are simply “lost in math” (the literal title for her book), but she conveniently leaves out that naturalness has historically been a very good motivator and has found huge success. She also rails against any future colliders, saying they are a waste of money because no one can guarantee any new discoveries will be made at these higher energies, but this is so antithetical to how science works and human exploration in general, not to mention that if you want to complain about wasted money in society, there are WAY bigger fish to fry (like the inflated military budget for instance, which spends more money in 2 days than the entire LHC cost to build over a decade). I am also a bit turned off by the fact that her new role as a “science communicator” (meaning her YouTube channel) comes across as being a bit of a money making ploy, but then again I guess everyone has to pay the bills somehow.

And this

The reason she is something of a controversial figure in the physics community, is that she has very definite opinions - and they are just opinions - about how science should be done.

She presents these in an extremely authoritative way, as if her understanding of philosophy of science is both all encompassing and absolute, when in fact she is not an expert in philosophy of science, and the field is not understood in such an absolute way that views cannot be challenged anyway.

Because her audience is pretty wide, and she may be the only, or one of the few people they listen to on these topics, her opinions can be taken as received wisdom. This has an actual effect on both the popular perception of fields she decides to target (e.g. String theory), even of the perception of these fields by scientists in other areas who haven't studied them, and consequently on the funding that these fields receive.

It's hard to articulate a strong response to what she does, because she's very dismissive. See her recent extremely rude and dismissive twitter thread against a physicist Arttu Rajantie for an example. Arttu argued clearly on historical and scientific basis that an experiment was worth doing and Sabine dismissed him in a horribly disrespectful way, see her replies at the end of his thread. It's hard to see what more could have been done to convince her.

Another reason it's hard to respond to her is that the reasons for thinking string theory is a productive thing to investigate are quite technical sometimes, and although I'm sure some very talented person could make a convincing counterpoint in the popular science sphere, such a person isn't really out there, or if they are they don't have the same platform as Sabine, or people who follow Sabine take it that when she angrily dismisses someone, that's because their point doesn't make sense. This is not the case, her angry dismissals are an effective tactic to convince people to ignore the argument of her adversary.

There are good reasons to think that string theory is a productive field to study. It's not just 'being lost in the math'. Scientists aren't just cynically studying it for the grant money, it represents a possibly huge leap in our understanding of the natural world. When people say it's not testible, well that's a good argument, but you have to keep in mind that the theory is extremely complicated and still quite poorly understood. It is not at all unlikely that continued study will uncover new aspects of the theory which are accessible to experiment. The only way we ensure that this possible resolution to some of the deepest questions about the universe remains forever untested is to cut funding, and stop exploring it, and that's what Sabine wants us to do.

And this, particularly interesting as this goes into her actual field of study, which is Theoretical Physics

The fantasy behind Sabine Hossenfelder's superdeterminism

Our Executive Director critiques physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's proposed 'superdeterminism,' which aims to account for the theoretical difficulties inherent to quantum measurements without departing from physicalist metaphysical assumptions.

www.essentiafoundation.org

 

[Checkthisout]

The Sabine character is interesting. I made some research on her a while ago:


Now we get to Sabine Hossenfelder (Who seems to be very eager to capitalize on the latest scam aka "climate change")

5 minutes of internet research turned out these gems (I decided to look this up because i have quite a bit of interest in various topics in Physics):

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskPhysics/comments/t9t4kc/what_are_your_guys_thoughts_on_sabine

I particularly love this one:

Before I really knew much about physics, I liked Sabine and thought she was “speaking truth to power” in a way. Now that I know quite a bit more, I find that the majority of her audience is more of the “pop-sci” crowd who aren’t really able to form their own opinions and therefore just believe what she says unquestioningly. Among this crowd, she has positioned herself to be an authority, which she really is not. I find her to be extremely opinionated in a way that does not allow for other opinions to exist, meaning that she sees other opinions as being “unable to accept the truth” (where “the truth” here is really just her opinion). One instance of this is how she hates anything related to naturalness and acts like people who want to use naturalness as a motivation for physics are simply “lost in math” (the literal title for her book), but she conveniently leaves out that naturalness has historically been a very good motivator and has found huge success. She also rails against any future colliders, saying they are a waste of money because no one can guarantee any new discoveries will be made at these higher energies, but this is so antithetical to how science works and human exploration in general, not to mention that if you want to complain about wasted money in society, there are WAY bigger fish to fry (like the inflated military budget for instance, which spends more money in 2 days than the entire LHC cost to build over a decade). I am also a bit turned off by the fact that her new role as a “science communicator” (meaning her YouTube channel) comes across as being a bit of a money making ploy, but then again I guess everyone has to pay the bills somehow.

And this

The reason she is something of a controversial figure in the physics community, is that she has very definite opinions - and they are just opinions - about how science should be done.

She presents these in an extremely authoritative way, as if her understanding of philosophy of science is both all encompassing and absolute, when in fact she is not an expert in philosophy of science, and the field is not understood in such an absolute way that views cannot be challenged anyway.

Because her audience is pretty wide, and she may be the only, or one of the few people they listen to on these topics, her opinions can be taken as received wisdom. This has an actual effect on both the popular perception of fields she decides to target (e.g. String theory), even of the perception of these fields by scientists in other areas who haven't studied them, and consequently on the funding that these fields receive.

It's hard to articulate a strong response to what she does, because she's very dismissive. See her recent extremely rude and dismissive twitter thread against a physicist Arttu Rajantie for an example. Arttu argued clearly on historical and scientific basis that an experiment was worth doing and Sabine dismissed him in a horribly disrespectful way, see her replies at the end of his thread. It's hard to see what more could have been done to convince her.

Another reason it's hard to respond to her is that the reasons for thinking string theory is a productive thing to investigate are quite technical sometimes, and although I'm sure some very talented person could make a convincing counterpoint in the popular science sphere, such a person isn't really out there, or if they are they don't have the same platform as Sabine, or people who follow Sabine take it that when she angrily dismisses someone, that's because their point doesn't make sense. This is not the case, her angry dismissals are an effective tactic to convince people to ignore the argument of her adversary.

There are good reasons to think that string theory is a productive field to study. It's not just 'being lost in the math'. Scientists aren't just cynically studying it for the grant money, it represents a possibly huge leap in our understanding of the natural world. When people say it's not testible, well that's a good argument, but you have to keep in mind that the theory is extremely complicated and still quite poorly understood. It is not at all unlikely that continued study will uncover new aspects of the theory which are accessible to experiment. The only way we ensure that this possible resolution to some of the deepest questions about the universe remains forever untested is to cut funding, and stop exploring it, and that's what Sabine wants us to do.

And this, particularly interesting as this goes into her actual field of study, which is Theoretical Physics

The fantasy behind Sabine Hossenfelder's superdeterminism

Our Executive Director critiques physicist Sabine Hossenfelder's proposed 'superdeterminism,' which aims to account for the theoretical difficulties inherent to quantum measurements without departing from physicalist metaphysical assumptions.

www.essentiafoundation.org

She's dumber than Neil Degresse Tyson and with an even more hideous mug.

 

[svetz]

show me how inexpensively you are going to build an ESS to support the northern hemisphere's energy needs? You would need to "over panel" the system by 500% or more to try and gather enough energy to charge the ESS.

And yet the data show the prices are already on par and ESS prices are still falling meaning they'll go even lower.
A reference on the 500% would be nice, given the grid infrastructure can't see us needing that.

I've spent ...

Thanks for helping to reduce the costs for the rest of world. But, the prices you paid aren't what the utilities who buy in significant bulk pay.
Don't forget that building and running a fossil fuel plant is expensive too. If you don't look at the costs of both sides you can't know what's more expensive.

The posts by aenyc following your Lazard post

aenyc is on /ignore for repeated forum violations (personal attacks), so I don't see anything they post. I'm sure if you look into his reference you won't have to much trouble debunking it.

...You show me where Lazard included the cost of buying, building, deploying, wiring, etc. the ESS required to make solar and wind a reality and we can talk.

LCOE includes cradle to grave analysis. Don't forget all power plants have those costs so anything that was ignored for one would be ignored for all. Perhaps you should ask the question, if it's so much more expensive...why is so much being deployed so quickly by private investors?

As I suspected, the thought that we are going to run out of uranium is not especially accurate.

My bad, I paraphrased the reference for simplicity. What Sabine said (and Dr. Taylor ignored or got wrong) is it's not so much running out as the scarcity drives the cost up. This is similar to how in the 70s they said they would run out of oil, then again in the 80s, etc. It's just that new oil was at the bottom of the sea or needed a 1500 mile pipeline that increased the costs. I once paid $0.25/gallon for gas. Personally I'd rather see one of the new non-U235 alternatives just because the existing nuclear LCOEs are far too expensive.

... Thorium is a very common element!! Very common? See chart right. Calcium and iron are very common. But I agree in general, lots of Thorium and it can have a breeder reaction (ref). But notice the amount of thorium is about the same as the amount of uranium? The difference is fissionable U235 makes up about 0.7% of all Uranium. So when you hear about how much uranium there is it's good to keep it in context. Fun fact: Only 5% of the U235 in a fuel rod get's consumed (ref). The remaining could be reprocessed, but it's illegal to do so in the United States (ref).

... Also, the cost of Thorium reactors is bound to be expensive at present because they are all experimental.

Thorium's been experimented on for decades and no one has figured out how to commercialize it, it has problems... That's where grants and subsidies play a role, to commercialize promising technologies. Biden has ear-marked funds for that and recently even a $6 billion effort to rescue nuclear power plants at risk of closing (ref).

Here's a link from the US EIA regarding the uranium reserves for 2023: https://www.eia.gov/uranium/production/annual/ureserve.php

Isn't that were Sabine got her numbers?

Yeah, that's all nice and feel good but it obviously ignores the elephant in the room - what about the ESS needed to make solar viable?

What about it? Lazard's numbers include ESS costs. Lazard's also has an ESS report too, but they don't look at any of the new technology that is coming out, or very recently came out (e.g., sodium-ion batteries). So, expect even lower future LCOEs.

In 15 years our energy demands will have certainly increased as well. That's a good question. But is it really "certain"? We're making more efficient devices all the time. For example switching from electric heat to heat exchangers save tremendous power. But at the same time the we also consume more energy doing stuff like bit-coin mining. The chart at the right shows per capita we haven't been increasing and aren't expected to increase.

Master Plan 3 also gives pretty good reasons (mainly that fossil fuel is consumed to process fossil fuel and it's only about 25% efficient (unless used for things like home heating), so switching away so we don't need as much). But I have to wonder how much more power climate change will drive air-conditioners to run longer. So, I don't know that it will certainly increase. But it might increase in the U.S. and will certainly increase everywhere else as we have the highest per capita usage.

But overall, if we need more we'll just install more.

... the other real issues with deploying millions of solar panels? Upkeep, sabotage / security, weather damage,...

Everyone has those same costs. LCOE is the cost over the entire lifetime, so all normal operating costs are covered for all technologies. Note that some, like nuclear, probably have more expensive security costs.

 

[aenyc]

Oopsies....

Kenya Protesters Storm Parliament, Police Fire Live Rounds, After Lawmakers Unleash Eco-Austerity​

The Kenyan capital of Nairobi has descended into violence and mayhem as large street protests by Kenyans outraged at new tax policies and a harsh 'Eco-Austerity' program imposed by the government have resulted in the parliament building being set on fire.

Legislators are evacuating after the anti-tax protesters initially breached parliament. They quickly overwhelmed police soon after the lawmakers voted to pass a bill which introduces new nationwide taxes, including an eco-levy which raises the price of basic goods such as diapers, as part of efforts to curb waste management and be more environmentally friendly.

Via AP

The new taxes were tucked away in Kenya’s Finance Bill 2024, and directly impacts imports, prices, and sales of diapers, batteries/dry cells, smartphones, earphones, clocks, radios, TV sets, cameras... staplers, printers, calculators, photocopying machines, keyboards, mice, projectors and LCD monitors.

The stringent Eco Levy especially impacts those who intend to import plastics into the Kenyan market, imposing a hefty fee per kilo on the products.

Protesters have been shouting while entering parliament, "We’re coming for every politician." There are widespread reports that police have begun utilizing live fire against the throngs, also amid riot control measures such as tear-gas.

Currently, President William Ruto is outside the capital attending an African Union event, but he's tried to strike a conciliatory tone, praising the enthusiasm of the youth - who are by and large the backbone of the demonstrations.

FLASH: The Kenyan parliament has just ERUPTED IN FLAMES as protests against the $2.7 BILLION TAX HIKE turn violent.

The hikes were spurred by Kenya's latest IMF DEAL.

As Harvard Prof. Robert Barro puts it, "THE IMF DOESN'T PUT OUT FIRES, IT STARTS THEM."pic.twitter.com/xyMcAucfNg
— Steve Hanke (@steve_hanke) June 25, 2024

But the increasingly violent confrontations with police on the streets of Nairobi, which have been intensifying since last week when two people died, are also the result of alleged abductions by security services. The AP reports:

The Kenya Law Society President Faith Odhiambo said Tuesday that 50 Kenyans, including her personal assistant, had been “abducted” by people believed to be police officers.
Some of those missing included those who were vocal in the demonstrations and were taken away from their homes, workplaces and public spaces ahead of Tuesday’s protests, according to civil society groups.

Initial reports say at least eight people have been killed, according to a Kenya national broadcaster cited AP. The Kenya Human Rights Commission has also confirmed police are "firing live rounds" at demonstrators.

️Video reportedly from outside Kenya’s parliamentpic.twitter.com/SXOoIHxEB4
— War Monitor (@WarMonitors) June 25, 2024

Dozens more have been injured, and likely the casualty count will rise through the day and evening as the crisis shows no signs of abating.

Lawmakers have reportedly escaped the burning and occupied parliament building unscathed through a tunnel.

Protesters have filmed themselves occupying the parliament building, now emptied of lawmakers and staff...

Protesters invade and feast at the parliament’s cafeteria. pic.twitter.com/CDO3mXBH1b
— Kenya West (@KinyanBoy) June 25, 2024

Sadly all of this is part of a familiar and historic pattern in Africa. The so-called international community and powerful global/Western institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regularly induce governments to take on huge debts, and then begin to impose from abroad drastic societal reform measures on the population.

And in the process of billions being exchanged, corrupt local government figures line their own pockets while imposing stringent and very sudden measures on the lower class and impoverished citizens.

The following lines concerning the Kenya crisis seem like a scenario taken straight out of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man... "The stringent Eco Levy aims to enhance existing weaker and less effective waste and pollution control mechanisms, such as the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations that Kenya embraced two years ago. The EPR is a comprehensive global framework designed to hold manufacturers accountable for the entire lifecycle of their plastic and electronic products."

 

[aenyc]

Svetz keeps bringing up Lazard. Lets not lose focus on these international banksters (See above)

Lets not lose focus on Lazard - the bankster cartel that the shills love to quote

Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud — Lazard Edition​

My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott. In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?

Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

Among the big players in this game, one that stands out is the investment bank Lazard. As an investment bank, Lazard makes its money — in its case quite big money — by causing deals to happen between investors and project developers. Investment banks often promote themselves by issuing reports on conditions for investment in various economic sectors. In Lazard’s case, back around 2008, they decided to become the gurus of green energy investing by issuing annual reports on what they call the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE. They have continued to issue the LCOE reports annually since then, so I’m gathering that this must be quite a lucrative business. Here is a link for the most recent Lazard LCOE Report, which came out earlier this year in April 2023.

The Lazard LCOE Reports are famous for their repeated conclusion that wind turbines and solar panels have become the cheapest sources for generation of electricity. When you read someone in climate advocacy journalism reciting that talking point, most often the source of the point is one of these Lazard reports. In a post back in March 2019, title “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?,” I put together a sample list of half a dozen outlets citing Lazard LCOE studies for the proposition that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity. Those sources included, for example, the Financial Times, CBS News, Australia’s governmental research arm CSIRO, Axios, Think Progress, and others.

For the first decade or so of its LCOE reports, Lazard calculated the cost of energy from wind and solar without including any cost at all for the backup or storage needed to turn those sources into a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electrical grid. But somewhere in there Lazard starting adding to its reports some additional pages on what they call the Levelized Cost of Storage, or LCOS. Remarkably, after adding in the cost of storage, Lazard still seems to be coming to the conclusion that wind and solar generation are usually cheaper than generation from fossil fuels, or at the very least they are competitive. Could this possibly be right?

The Lazard 2023 LCOE Report is presented almost entirely in the form of charts and graphs. There is very little text, and you will struggle to try to figure out what assumptions underlie the conclusions. (From the website Watt-Logic, commenting on the 2023 Lazard LCOE report, and particularly on Lazard’s calculation of the cost of “firming” intermittent renewable generation with storage: “It’s actually quite hard to work out what’s going on here.”; from Andy May at Watts Up With That, December 11, “[T]hey bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.”)

With that introduction, here is the key chart from the 2023 Lazard LCOE Report giving figures for cost of wind and solar power with “firming,” supposedly compared to the cost of generating electricity from natural gas “CT” or natural gas “combined cycle.”

By all means take your time to try to digest all of that. If you go to the Lazard Report for assistance, you will not find any useful text beyond what is there in the footnotes at the bottom of the chart. I read the chart as putting the “levelized cost” of “firming” intermittent wind and solar generation at as little as $23/MWh in the Midwest, up to a maximum of $98/MWh in California. Add this cost of “firming” to the “unsubsidized” cost of wind and solar generation, and you get a total for “firmed” power from wind and solar that is mostly within the range (and often toward the lower end) of costs for generation from combined cycle natural gas plants, and at most toward the low end of the range of costs for generation from natural gas “peaker” plants. In other words, while wind and solar are not proven to always be “the cheapest” after including the costs of “firming,” they are generally toward the cheaper end of the range of costs from natural gas generation, and certainly not out of the range of affordability.

But wait a minute. Where did they get these costs of “firming”? These costs appear ridiculously low compared to amounts that I find in my December 2022 energy storage Report. Study those fine print footnotes all you want, and I do not think you are going to find the answer. Can we find anything anywhere else in this Lazard document to help us understand the difference?

After spending some time trying to figure this out, the best I come up with is this chart from page 17 of the Lazard LCOE Report:

This appears to be the set of assumptions they apply for how energy storage will be used to “firm” the intermittent wind and solar generation. Let’s pluck a few key numbers out of this chart:

• In the column headed “Storage Duration (Hours),” we find a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4. Four hours of duration just happens to be the norm for the capability of today’s most cost-effective battery storage technology, lithium ion batteries. Unfortunately, the studies that I feature in my energy storage Report calculate that the number of hours duration of storage needed to fully “firm” a system using only wind and solar generation would be at least one month (720 hours), and potentially two to three months (1440 to 2160 hours). Lazard would seem to be off by a factor of somewhere between 180 and 540 of what would be needed.
• Then there is a column headed “90% DOD Cycles/Day.” In each case the entry is “1.” I interpret this to mean that whatever battery we are dealing with here is assumed to have one full charge/discharge cycle per day. The next column tells us they are assuming 350 days per year, so therefore they are assuming that the batteries cycle 350 times per year. So the batteries can spread their costs over 350 cycles per year, or 7000 cycles in 20 years. Unfortunately, as shown in my energy storage Report, due to seasonal patterns of the wind and sun, much of the battery storage capacity needed to “firm” a wind/solar generation system will only go through one full charge and discharge cycle per year. Thus, for this part of the storage capacity, Lazard would appear to be understating the cost of the storage by a factor of 350.

Am I maybe interpreting this chart incorrectly? Perhaps. The Lazard people certainly don’t make it easy to figure out their assumptions. But the two issues that I have identified would be about right in their effects to explain the differences between the costs produced by Lazard, and the costs that I estimated, where the difference is about one to two orders of magnitude (that is, a factor of between 10 and 100).

Now, consider the question of whether cost figures in the Lazard Report are the result of rank incompetence versus intentional deception. Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation? Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?

 

[Checkthisout]

Svetz keeps bringing up Lazard. Lets not lose focus on these international banksters (See above)

Lets not lose focus on Lazard - the bankster cartel that the shills love to quote

Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud — Lazard Edition​

My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott. In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?

Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

Among the big players in this game, one that stands out is the investment bank Lazard. As an investment bank, Lazard makes its money — in its case quite big money — by causing deals to happen between investors and project developers. Investment banks often promote themselves by issuing reports on conditions for investment in various economic sectors. In Lazard’s case, back around 2008, they decided to become the gurus of green energy investing by issuing annual reports on what they call the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE. They have continued to issue the LCOE reports annually since then, so I’m gathering that this must be quite a lucrative business. Here is a link for the most recent Lazard LCOE Report, which came out earlier this year in April 2023.

The Lazard LCOE Reports are famous for their repeated conclusion that wind turbines and solar panels have become the cheapest sources for generation of electricity. When you read someone in climate advocacy journalism reciting that talking point, most often the source of the point is one of these Lazard reports. In a post back in March 2019, title “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?,” I put together a sample list of half a dozen outlets citing Lazard LCOE studies for the proposition that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity. Those sources included, for example, the Financial Times, CBS News, Australia’s governmental research arm CSIRO, Axios, Think Progress, and others.

For the first decade or so of its LCOE reports, Lazard calculated the cost of energy from wind and solar without including any cost at all for the backup or storage needed to turn those sources into a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electrical grid. But somewhere in there Lazard starting adding to its reports some additional pages on what they call the Levelized Cost of Storage, or LCOS. Remarkably, after adding in the cost of storage, Lazard still seems to be coming to the conclusion that wind and solar generation are usually cheaper than generation from fossil fuels, or at the very least they are competitive. Could this possibly be right?

The Lazard 2023 LCOE Report is presented almost entirely in the form of charts and graphs. There is very little text, and you will struggle to try to figure out what assumptions underlie the conclusions. (From the website Watt-Logic, commenting on the 2023 Lazard LCOE report, and particularly on Lazard’s calculation of the cost of “firming” intermittent renewable generation with storage: “It’s actually quite hard to work out what’s going on here.”; from Andy May at Watts Up With That, December 11, “[T]hey bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.”)

With that introduction, here is the key chart from the 2023 Lazard LCOE Report giving figures for cost of wind and solar power with “firming,” supposedly compared to the cost of generating electricity from natural gas “CT” or natural gas “combined cycle.”

By all means take your time to try to digest all of that. If you go to the Lazard Report for assistance, you will not find any useful text beyond what is there in the footnotes at the bottom of the chart. I read the chart as putting the “levelized cost” of “firming” intermittent wind and solar generation at as little as $23/MWh in the Midwest, up to a maximum of $98/MWh in California. Add this cost of “firming” to the “unsubsidized” cost of wind and solar generation, and you get a total for “firmed” power from wind and solar that is mostly within the range (and often toward the lower end) of costs for generation from combined cycle natural gas plants, and at most toward the low end of the range of costs for generation from natural gas “peaker” plants. In other words, while wind and solar are not proven to always be “the cheapest” after including the costs of “firming,” they are generally toward the cheaper end of the range of costs from natural gas generation, and certainly not out of the range of affordability.

But wait a minute. Where did they get these costs of “firming”? These costs appear ridiculously low compared to amounts that I find in my December 2022 energy storage Report. Study those fine print footnotes all you want, and I do not think you are going to find the answer. Can we find anything anywhere else in this Lazard document to help us understand the difference?

After spending some time trying to figure this out, the best I come up with is this chart from page 17 of the Lazard LCOE Report:

This appears to be the set of assumptions they apply for how energy storage will be used to “firm” the intermittent wind and solar generation. Let’s pluck a few key numbers out of this chart:

• In the column headed “Storage Duration (Hours),” we find a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4. Four hours of duration just happens to be the norm for the capability of today’s most cost-effective battery storage technology, lithium ion batteries. Unfortunately, the studies that I feature in my energy storage Report calculate that the number of hours duration of storage needed to fully “firm” a system using only wind and solar generation would be at least one month (720 hours), and potentially two to three months (1440 to 2160 hours). Lazard would seem to be off by a factor of somewhere between 180 and 540 of what would be needed.
• Then there is a column headed “90% DOD Cycles/Day.” In each case the entry is “1.” I interpret this to mean that whatever battery we are dealing with here is assumed to have one full charge/discharge cycle per day. The next column tells us they are assuming 350 days per year, so therefore they are assuming that the batteries cycle 350 times per year. So the batteries can spread their costs over 350 cycles per year, or 7000 cycles in 20 years. Unfortunately, as shown in my energy storage Report, due to seasonal patterns of the wind and sun, much of the battery storage capacity needed to “firm” a wind/solar generation system will only go through one full charge and discharge cycle per year. Thus, for this part of the storage capacity, Lazard would appear to be understating the cost of the storage by a factor of 350.

Am I maybe interpreting this chart incorrectly? Perhaps. The Lazard people certainly don’t make it easy to figure out their assumptions. But the two issues that I have identified would be about right in their effects to explain the differences between the costs produced by Lazard, and the costs that I estimated, where the difference is about one to two orders of magnitude (that is, a factor of between 10 and 100).

Now, consider the question of whether cost figures in the Lazard Report are the result of rank incompetence versus intentional deception. Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation? Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?

Thumbs up without reading first.

 

[Bongbong]

I believe Lazard also includes in the LCO the cost of borrowing money, that cost goes up when the banks think that plants might not be able to make a profit over the project lifetime, if they can borrow at all. Governments can and secure the loans to allow for cheaper borrowing costs, but that can be profitable for governments, but there are also losses, like Solyndra in the U.S.

 

[Bob B]

Here is a study of the health effects of UPF ..... Ultra Processed Food. Veggie burgers and fake meat fall into this category.

From the study:
plant-sourced UPF consumption was associated with a 5% increased risk (1.03–1.07) and a 12% higher mortality (1.05–1.20). The contribution of all UPF was linked to higher CVD risk and mortality, and no evidence for an association between contribution of all plant-sourced foods and CVD incidence and mortality was observed.
The study is here ..... https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7762(24)00115-7/fulltext

 

[D71]

Oopsies....

Kenya Protesters Storm Parliament, Police Fire Live Rounds, After Lawmakers Unleash Eco-Austerity​

The Kenyan capital of Nairobi has descended into violence and mayhem as large street protests by Kenyans outraged at new tax policies and a harsh 'Eco-Austerity' program imposed by the government have resulted in the parliament building being set on fire.

Legislators are evacuating after the anti-tax protesters initially breached parliament. They quickly overwhelmed police soon after the lawmakers voted to pass a bill which introduces new nationwide taxes, including an eco-levy which raises the price of basic goods such as diapers, as part of efforts to curb waste management and be more environmentally friendly.

Via AP

The new taxes were tucked away in Kenya’s Finance Bill 2024, and directly impacts imports, prices, and sales of diapers, batteries/dry cells, smartphones, earphones, clocks, radios, TV sets, cameras... staplers, printers, calculators, photocopying machines, keyboards, mice, projectors and LCD monitors.

The stringent Eco Levy especially impacts those who intend to import plastics into the Kenyan market, imposing a hefty fee per kilo on the products.

Protesters have been shouting while entering parliament, "We’re coming for every politician." There are widespread reports that police have begun utilizing live fire against the throngs, also amid riot control measures such as tear-gas.

Currently, President William Ruto is outside the capital attending an African Union event, but he's tried to strike a conciliatory tone, praising the enthusiasm of the youth - who are by and large the backbone of the demonstrations.


But the increasingly violent confrontations with police on the streets of Nairobi, which have been intensifying since last week when two people died, are also the result of alleged abductions by security services. The AP reports:


Initial reports say at least eight people have been killed, according to a Kenya national broadcaster cited AP. The Kenya Human Rights Commission has also confirmed police are "firing live rounds" at demonstrators.


Dozens more have been injured, and likely the casualty count will rise through the day and evening as the crisis shows no signs of abating.

Lawmakers have reportedly escaped the burning and occupied parliament building unscathed through a tunnel.

Protesters have filmed themselves occupying the parliament building, now emptied of lawmakers and staff...


Sadly all of this is part of a familiar and historic pattern in Africa. The so-called international community and powerful global/Western institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) regularly induce governments to take on huge debts, and then begin to impose from abroad drastic societal reform measures on the population.

And in the process of billions being exchanged, corrupt local government figures line their own pockets while imposing stringent and very sudden measures on the lower class and impoverished citizens.

The following lines concerning the Kenya crisis seem like a scenario taken straight out of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man... "The stringent Eco Levy aims to enhance existing weaker and less effective waste and pollution control mechanisms, such as the Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) regulations that Kenya embraced two years ago. The EPR is a comprehensive global framework designed to hold manufacturers accountable for the entire lifecycle of their plastic and electronic products."

Looks like 6 Jan 2021 like event. Lets’ see if they automotive tire ring anyone and set them on fire. Bbq african …showed one guy eating another last up rising from there. Think haitai did same for a video. Can you imagine tire around your neck and set on fire? That is better than tar and feathers.

BTW look man that place Kenya is where Obuma’s dad is from or so they say…stop knocking it…..The place Obuma stated can’t return because of human rights violations. What he didn’t say was they kill gays there. Felony.
I am all for ignorant queers supporting these places and then being eliminated once the ppl there were supported ….. …get put in charge.
Death by their own pushed hand. Ouch can’t touch this.
Muslim Communist. Hmmmm>………



Problem with Africa is Communist. Mandela was celebrated and idolized rarely out right stated as a communist though. Why the Left loved him. They let the diamond brokers and cobalt miners and so on …… exploiters destabilize their govts in Africa. and then robbed - ransack the wealth.

Now the chinese are playing the race baiting game and if mention higher iq chinese are pushing presence in Africa to gain control are called a racist. Been there. Called Anti-Chinese too. Duh yeah. Sound familiar? Anti muslim, antisemitic, antichristian so on. Wait that last one anti-christian is seldom stated. Those Christians are also persecuted in Africa. Yet homosexuals here be like we love Muslims Islamic religion great we gays stand for Islam.

As long as chinese can get what they need to make China 1st it is okie doo doo. Biden's campaign on youtube said “he was adding non college jobs that can’t be out sourced like solar” …I say since we don’t make much of anything solar installers - here basically work for china for most sales and installs. Give the chinese internet access and they control the installed battery bms and inverters. Rut ro.

Gay pride flag.


Africa doubled their population in around 25-30 years….and we are the World concert event feed them. They - rest world need queers to slow the birth rates and abortions too. They have over populated the World in China, Africa and India each one has about our population plus a billion more ppl each. Those places like to have mindless sex and multiple. They aren’t worried……About over population.

Edit added quickest way make them stop fighting is turn all men gay.

 

[aenyc]

 

[k490]

Did we benefit from climate change by driving down the cost of solar panels, inverter technology, and lithium battery innovation?

 

[svetz]

Here is a study of the health effects of UPF ..... Ultra Processed Food. Veggie burgers and fake meat fall into this category....

Thanks Bob! Surprising that UPF plants had the same risk as animal meat. Their conclusion seems to be to avoid all meat and ultraprocessed foods: ...the reduction of meat, red meat, or animal-sourced foods but also the need to avoid all UPF. It was disappointing that they averaged in processed cereals and sugars with processed plant substitutes for meat, I would have preferred them as separate categories. Are all highly processed foods bad? What is that makes them bad? I found: UPFs are harmful to our health when they include high levels of saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars or when nutritional benefits, e.g., protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals, are stripped away.

Ultra-processed plants as bad as "real" meat​

It stands to reason that just as food can be processed to remove nutrition and add unhealthy stuff, it can also be processed to add healthy stuff and remove bad stuff. So, the term "ultra processed" can't really be used to determine if the food is healthy or not.

The whole goal of the fake meat industry is to create something healthy, no matter how much they have to process it. I think they've succeeded to some extent anyway as a quick search turned up that AHA endorses Beyond Meat:

Beyond Steak’s nutrition profile meets the distinguished and trusted Heart-Check Mark criteria from the American Heart Association, which certifies products based on heart-healthy nutrition requirements ref

Similarly, this study found:

Among generally healthy adults, contrasting Plant with Animal intake, while keeping all other dietary components similar, the Plant products improved several cardiovascular disease risk factors, including TMAO; there were no adverse effects on risk factors from the Plant products.

So, as I said earlier, it seems complicated to me and it's an evolving science. ; -)

Did we benefit from climate change by driving down the cost of solar panels, inverter technology, and lithium battery innovation?

I would say that the world at large has benefitted from early adopters becoming consumers of solar panels and batteries (e.g., in EVs). It was those early adopters (and yes, even the government subsidies) that helped drive the costs down. Necessity is the mother of invention. Would it have happened without the threat of climate change? Probably, although it may have take a lot longer. ; -)

But is quicker change really a benefit? Prices for early adopters were higher, current prices are only on par so not much benefit there. Climate change in the mean time costs us in a myriad of ways most people are unaware of. For example, if you look at just the cost of > billion dollar disasters adjusted for inflation you'll see those costs mirror the global warming curve and have grown to over half a trillion dollars per year since 1990:

There are lots of hidden costs... Insurance rates have gone up, heat waves destroy crops and cattle causing food prices to go up, there's migration of bugs and bacteria, etc. Folks in northern elevations (e.g., Canada, Siberia, and Iceland) may feel differently ; -).

 

[B-ManFX4]

@svetz - You mentioned having aenyc on ignore or whatever because you don't like her / his posts, etc. However, after reading this post and then reading quite a few more on the inter-webs I have come to the conclusion that Lazard is full of shit, just as I suspected.

BTW - in your response to me you have me quoted as saying thorium is plentiful and something about thorium reactors. I never said anything about thorium or thorium reactors. Please edit your response and correct it.

Finally, please take some time to read what is written below. It confirms what I said about Lazard - they are often quoted as being a "scientific" report but they lack the information required for any meaningful peer review - and peer review is essential in keeping people honest, as well as helping to ferret out mistakes, wrong assumptions, etc.

Read the comments posted at the end of this relatively short post about a supposed "energy independent" island. The comments are essentially the peer review of the faulty data published by euronews.green. https://www.manhattancontrarian.com...te-advocacy-incompetence-or-intentional-fraud

Below in my next post is the aenyc posting I am referring to. Because I want to be sure you can see it I removed the BB Code that attributes it being a post by her / him. I hope that is OK - I think it important you read what was written. If you are making an argument you need to have more than one source of information to reinforce your position. Please supply another peer-reviewed anything that comes to the same conclusion as the Lazard "report" does. I have not been able to find a single one.

 

[B-ManFX4]

Climate Advocacy: Incompetence Versus Intentional Fraud — Lazard Edition​

My last post, on December 14, asked readers, when considering climate advocacy journalism and reports promoting wind- or solar-generated energy, to ask themselves whether the author is merely incompetent versus perhaps committing intentional fraud. The post focused on a particular piece that had been published in November in euronews.green, byline Lauren Crosby Medlicott. In that piece, Ms. Medlicott had egregiously cherrypicked some operating data from the Spanish El Hierro Island wind/storage electricity system to make it appear that that system is a success, when in fact it is a disastrous failure. Could this really have been mere incompetence on her part, or was Ms. Medlicott intentionally seeking to deceive her readers?

Ms. Medlicott’s piece was so appalling that I was unable just to let it pass. On the other hand, to be honest, Ms. Medlicott is a relatively small fish in the climate advocacy game. Are the larger fish any more honest?

Among the big players in this game, one that stands out is the investment bank Lazard. As an investment bank, Lazard makes its money — in its case quite big money — by causing deals to happen between investors and project developers. Investment banks often promote themselves by issuing reports on conditions for investment in various economic sectors. In Lazard’s case, back around 2008, they decided to become the gurus of green energy investing by issuing annual reports on what they call the Levelized Cost of Energy, or LCOE. They have continued to issue the LCOE reports annually since then, so I’m gathering that this must be quite a lucrative business. Here is a link for the most recent Lazard LCOE Report, which came out earlier this year in April 2023.

The Lazard LCOE Reports are famous for their repeated conclusion that wind turbines and solar panels have become the cheapest sources for generation of electricity. When you read someone in climate advocacy journalism reciting that talking point, most often the source of the point is one of these Lazard reports. In a post back in March 2019, title “Why Do Renewable Energy Sources Need Government Subsidies?,” I put together a sample list of half a dozen outlets citing Lazard LCOE studies for the proposition that wind and solar are the cheapest source of electricity. Those sources included, for example, the Financial Times, CBS News, Australia’s governmental research arm CSIRO, Axios, Think Progress, and others.

For the first decade or so of its LCOE reports, Lazard calculated the cost of energy from wind and solar without including any cost at all for the backup or storage needed to turn those sources into a fully-functioning 24/7/365 electrical grid. But somewhere in there Lazard starting adding to its reports some additional pages on what they call the Levelized Cost of Storage, or LCOS. Remarkably, after adding in the cost of storage, Lazard still seems to be coming to the conclusion that wind and solar generation are usually cheaper than generation from fossil fuels, or at the very least they are competitive. Could this possibly be right?

The Lazard 2023 LCOE Report is presented almost entirely in the form of charts and graphs. There is very little text, and you will struggle to try to figure out what assumptions underlie the conclusions. (From the website Watt-Logic, commenting on the 2023 Lazard LCOE report, and particularly on Lazard’s calculation of the cost of “firming” intermittent renewable generation with storage: “It’s actually quite hard to work out what’s going on here.”; from Andy May at Watts Up With That, December 11, “[T]hey bury critical details in the fine print and do not define their terms.”)

With that introduction, here is the key chart from the 2023 Lazard LCOE Report giving figures for cost of wind and solar power with “firming,” supposedly compared to the cost of generating electricity from natural gas “CT” or natural gas “combined cycle.”

By all means take your time to try to digest all of that. If you go to the Lazard Report for assistance, you will not find any useful text beyond what is there in the footnotes at the bottom of the chart. I read the chart as putting the “levelized cost” of “firming” intermittent wind and solar generation at as little as $23/MWh in the Midwest, up to a maximum of $98/MWh in California. Add this cost of “firming” to the “unsubsidized” cost of wind and solar generation, and you get a total for “firmed” power from wind and solar that is mostly within the range (and often toward the lower end) of costs for generation from combined cycle natural gas plants, and at most toward the low end of the range of costs for generation from natural gas “peaker” plants. In other words, while wind and solar are not proven to always be “the cheapest” after including the costs of “firming,” they are generally toward the cheaper end of the range of costs from natural gas generation, and certainly not out of the range of affordability.

But wait a minute. Where did they get these costs of “firming”? These costs appear ridiculously low compared to amounts that I find in my December 2022 energy storage Report. Study those fine print footnotes all you want, and I do not think you are going to find the answer. Can we find anything anywhere else in this Lazard document to help us understand the difference?

After spending some time trying to figure this out, the best I come up with is this chart from page 17 of the Lazard LCOE Report:

This appears to be the set of assumptions they apply for how energy storage will be used to “firm” the intermittent wind and solar generation. Let’s pluck a few key numbers out of this chart:

• In the column headed “Storage Duration (Hours),” we find a minimum of 1 and a maximum of 4. Four hours of duration just happens to be the norm for the capability of today’s most cost-effective battery storage technology, lithium ion batteries. Unfortunately, the studies that I feature in my energy storage Report calculate that the number of hours duration of storage needed to fully “firm” a system using only wind and solar generation would be at least one month (720 hours), and potentially two to three months (1440 to 2160 hours). Lazard would seem to be off by a factor of somewhere between 180 and 540 of what would be needed.
• Then there is a column headed “90% DOD Cycles/Day.” In each case the entry is “1.” I interpret this to mean that whatever battery we are dealing with here is assumed to have one full charge/discharge cycle per day. The next column tells us they are assuming 350 days per year, so therefore they are assuming that the batteries cycle 350 times per year. So the batteries can spread their costs over 350 cycles per year, or 7000 cycles in 20 years. Unfortunately, as shown in my energy storage Report, due to seasonal patterns of the wind and sun, much of the battery storage capacity needed to “firm” a wind/solar generation system will only go through one full charge and discharge cycle per year. Thus, for this part of the storage capacity, Lazard would appear to be understating the cost of the storage by a factor of 350.

Am I maybe interpreting this chart incorrectly? Perhaps. The Lazard people certainly don’t make it easy to figure out their assumptions. But the two issues that I have identified would be about right in their effects to explain the differences between the costs produced by Lazard, and the costs that I estimated, where the difference is about one to two orders of magnitude (that is, a factor of between 10 and 100).

Now, consider the question of whether cost figures in the Lazard Report are the result of rank incompetence versus intentional deception. Could the people at Lazard who produce all these fancy and complex charts and graphs really not know that 4 hour duration batteries cycling once per day are not going to come close to solving the intermittency problems of wind and solar generation? Or do they really know that, and they are just hoping to sell a few hundreds of billions of dollars worth of wind turbines and solar panels before the stupid politicians and investors figure out the scam?

 

[svetz]

climate triage
Opinion: It's a scary concept:

Climate triage is a concept that applies the principles of triage to the challenges posed by climate change. Triage is a process of prioritizing actions when the need is greater than the supply of resources1. It emerged on the battlefields of World War I and is widely used today in fields ranging from disaster medicine to ecosystem conservation and software development1.

Norway starts stockpiling grain, citing the pandemic, war and climate change

Health officials tell US doctors to be alert for dengue

...You mentioned having aenyc on ignore or whatever because you don't like her / his posts,

No, it's because they repeatedly broke forum rules with personal attacks proving they didn't want to be engaged in discussion. If I ignored people just because I didn't like their posts there would be a lot more people on /ignore ; -).

BTW - in your response to me you have me quoted as saying thorium is plentiful and something about thorium reactors. I never said anything about thorium or thorium reactors. Please edit your response and correct it.

That was me quoting your post in which was embedded:

... to define Thorium reactors as also likely to be expensive. This couldn’t be more wrong! Australia and other countries have been discarding thousands of tons of Thorium for decades. It is an unwanted biproduct from the mining of Titanium from beach sands (as the accessory mineral monazite). Thorium is a very common element!! Thorium is significantly more abundant than Uranium. Many countries have abundant thorium deposits. However, they haven’t been turned into “proven” reserves because currently there is not much demand for Thorium. Also, the cost of Thorium reactors is...​

The system just works like that. When quoting someone else it helps to use the quote feature so readers immediately understand they're not necessarily your views. I do that, and frequently add "opinion" just so people know my thoughts vs. the quotes (a lot of what I post is news, not that I necessarily agree with it).

Read the comments posted at the end of this relatively short post about a supposed "energy independent" island. The comments are essentially the peer review of the faulty data published by euronews.green. https://www.manhattancontrarian.com...te-advocacy-incompetence-or-intentional-fraud

You'll have to be more precise as to what comment you'd like me to comment on. That an island had 28 days of fossil fuel independence out of 31 just means they're well on there way, not that they are done or that renewables don't work.

...I think it important you read what was written. If you are making an argument you need to have more than one source of information to reinforce your position.

Can you summarize where exactly Lazard's was wrong and by how much? I skimmed it, the use of innuendo to discredit them automatically makes me mistrust it. I also saw they don't know where the numbers came from, but how hard did they look? Most of it is public information if you know where to look (and they probably get a lot of data from their clients), for example here's a report with the operating cost and budget of my local power co-operative. If it's about the 4 hours of battery, I believe that's about peaker plant replacements.

 

[B-ManFX4]

OMG - stop already. Other people and myself have told you what is wrong with the Lazard paper - they do not provide meaningful footnotes, explanations, sources etc. for the "data" they like to display in their charts and graphs. Put the cool-aid cup down and READ.

You obviously did not read a single sentence of the link I posted. The island did NOT have 28 days of fossil fuel independence. The entire article was a lie. But people like you suck it up and then regurgitate it as fact, helping to propagate the lie.

Take a simple calculation like this one. The Turkey Point nuclear power plant has two 802MW PWR reactors. Those two reactors supply power to approximately 900,000 homes. Let's just take one of them and convert it to solar.

The largest commercial solar panel I could find is 700 watts. It is 94" x 51", or 33 square feet. Divide 802MW / 700 and you will see you need 1,145,714 of these panels operating at 100% output to match the reactor. That many panels = 868 acres of panels. Let's pretend these panels cost $100 each. You are at $114 million dollars just for the panels. Now add mounts, labor, wiring, electronics, etc. Oh yeah, you gotta buy the 1,000 plus acres of land to sit all of this on. And all of this is for just one of the reactors - you need to replace TWO of them.

Now, let's talk about capacity. How many extra panels do we need to ensure we can produce at least 802MW of power during the daytime hours? I'll let you tell us that. I have an idea but you probably wouldn't like it. (Hint: more than double)

Now lets figure out how we store all of this power for use on early mornings, late evenings, night time, cloudy days, winter time, etc. Seems like it is going to take an enormous ESS to store that much power, no? Tell me again how much batteries cost for large scale storage? This is one reference you can look at. https://atb.nrel.gov/electricity/2024/utility-scale_battery_storage

If you scroll down they estimate $1,906 per kW for a 60MW system with 4 hours of capacity. You will need 14 of these systems to store 802MW. If my math is correct it is just over $1.5 billion dollars for the ESS for just the 4 hour scenario. You want to tell us all how much that equates to if you want to match the 24/7 output of just the one reactor?

The Turkey Point complex cost $1 billion in 2007 dollars - and that included TWO 802MW reactors plus TWO 404MW fossil-fuel generators. They took just 5 years to build and have been generating power nearly non-stop for over 50 years now. The plant has been running for over 50 years and is licensed for another 30. Of course there is always ongoing maintenance costs but the fact is those two reactors have been generating huge power for decades, cheaply and reliably. The enormous price tags and lengthy construction times for nuclear power plants we see today are nothing more than government stupidity. Period.

I stand by the assessment that the Lazard paper is full of shit.

 

[Bob B]

Thanks Bob! Surprising that UPF plants had the same risk as animal meat. Their conclusion seems to be to avoid all meat and ultraprocessed foods: It was disappointing that they averaged in processed cereals and sugars with processed plant substitutes for meat, I would have preferred them as separate categories. Are all highly processed foods bad? What is that makes them bad? I found:

View attachment 224703 Ultra-processed plants as bad as "real" meat​

It stands to reason that just as food can be processed to remove nutrition and add unhealthy stuff, it can also be processed to add healthy stuff and remove bad stuff. So, the term "ultra processed" can't really be used to determine if the food is healthy or not.

The whole goal of the fake meat industry is to create something healthy, no matter how much they have to process it. I think they've succeeded to some extent anyway as a quick search turned up that AHA endorses Beyond Meat:


Similarly, this study found:

So, as I said earlier, it seems complicated to me and it's an evolving science. ; -)


I would say that the world at large has benefitted from early adopters becoming consumers of solar panels and batteries (e.g., in EVs). It was those early adopters (and yes, even the government subsidies) that helped drive the costs down. Necessity is the mother of invention. Would it have happened without the threat of climate change? Probably, although it may have take a lot longer. ; -)

But is quicker change really a benefit? Prices for early adopters were higher, current prices are only on par so not much benefit there. Climate change in the mean time costs us in a myriad of ways most people are unaware of. For example, if you look at just the cost of > billion dollar disasters adjusted for inflation you'll see those costs mirror the global warming curve and have grown to over half a trillion dollars per year since 1990:

There are lots of hidden costs... Insurance rates have gone up, heat waves destroy crops and cattle causing food prices to go up, there's migration of bugs and bacteria, etc. Folks in northern elevations (e.g., Canada, Siberia, and Iceland) may feel differently ; -).

Thanks Bob! Surprising that UPF plants had the same risk as animal meat. Their conclusion seems to be to avoid all meat and ultraprocessed foods: It was disappointing that they averaged in processed cereals and sugars with processed plant substitutes for meat, I would have preferred them as separate categories. Are all highly processed foods bad? What is that makes them bad? I found:

View attachment 224703 Ultra-processed plants as bad as "real" meat​

It stands to reason that just as food can be processed to remove nutrition and add unhealthy stuff, it can also be processed to add healthy stuff and remove bad stuff. So, the term "ultra processed" can't really be used to determine if the food is healthy or not.

The whole goal of the fake meat industry is to create something healthy, no matter how much they have to process it. I think they've succeeded to some extent anyway as a quick search turned up that AHA endorses Beyond Meat:


Similarly, this study found:

So, as I said earlier, it seems complicated to me and it's an evolving science. ; -)


I would say that the world at large has benefitted from early adopters becoming consumers of solar panels and batteries (e.g., in EVs). It was those early adopters (and yes, even the government subsidies) that helped drive the costs down. Necessity is the mother of invention. Would it have happened without the threat of climate change? Probably, although it may have take a lot longer. ; -)

But is quicker change really a benefit? Prices for early adopters were higher, current prices are only on par so not much benefit there. Climate change in the mean time costs us in a myriad of ways most people are unaware of. For example, if you look at just the cost of > billion dollar disasters adjusted for inflation you'll see those costs mirror the global warming curve and have grown to over half a trillion dollars per year since 1990:

There are lots of hidden costs... Insurance rates have gone up, heat waves destroy crops and cattle causing food prices to go up, there's migration of bugs and bacteria, etc. Folks in northern elevations (e.g., Canada, Siberia, and Iceland) may feel differently ; -).

As usual, we are able to look at the exact same data and come to different conclusions ...... Some of the wording in their conclusions are easy to misinterpret.

My take away was the while the consumption of a whole food plant based diet resulted in more healthy outcomes, the introduction of highly processed plant based food had the opposite effect ..... It didn't matter if the highly processed food was plant or animal based .... it was all bad for you.

From the study ..... Easy to misinterpret if reading too fast.

We observed that higher dietary contribution of plant-sourced non-UPF were associated with a lower risk of fatal and nonfatal cardiovascular events, while contribution of plant-sourced UPF was associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular events.

.... and the snippet from my original post again ..... Clearly plant based UPF is BAD for you.

plant-sourced UPF consumption was associated with a 5% increased risk (1.03–1.07) and a 12% higher mortality

It seems to me the question at hand is whether or not highly processed food like fake meat are good for you or not .... Clearly they are not.

 

[svetz]

As usual, we are able to look at the exact same data and come to different conclusions ...... Some of the wording in their conclusions are easy to misinterpret.

It's amazing isn't it? I did say this was a complicated topic!

First off, I don't disagree with anything you said (e.g., non-UPF plants are less prone to cause Cardiovascular problems). I think that's been well established multiple times. The problem I think is you stopped there rather than consider the data.

In order to declare "fake meat is worse than real meat" you can't compare fake-meat to unprocessed plants. You have to compare UPF plants converted into fake meat with "real" meat. They lumped all cereals and sugar based data into the fake-meat data. But, even then that data (and the error margins) in the paper said they were the same as "real" meat. The only thing worse was UPF animal products. So, your study doesn't say fake meat is worse than real meat, it says it is the same. This is evident in the graph from the paper I posted in #6,614.

In fact, because the UPF plants were so broad in the study I went the extra mile for you and linked up the AHA's statement that Beyond Burger was considered heart healthy. What does the AHA say about beef:

The American Heart Association (AHA) has stated that eating red meat, including beef, can be associated with heart disease1

So that my friend is how we ended up with different conclusions.

Take a simple calculation like this one. The Turkey Point nuclear power plant has two 802MW PWR reactors. Those two reactors supply power to approximately 900,000 homes. Let's just take one of them and convert it to solar....Oh yeah, you gotta buy the 1,000 plus acres of land to sit all of this [solar] on

Turkey Point sits on 3,300 acres (ref). So, 1000 acres seems like a bargain. But honestly, distribute them across rooftops over America for free land-space and as a by-product that also reduces the load on the grid minimizing costs needed to expand it.

Let's pretend these panels cost $100 each. You are at $114 million dollars just for the panels. Now add mounts, labor, wiring, electronics, etc. Oh yeah, you gotta buy the 1,000 plus acres of land to sit all of this on. And all of this is for just one of the reactors - you need to replace TWO of them....If my math is correct it is just over $1.5 billion dollars for the ESS... The Turkey Point complex cost $1 billion in 2007 dollars - and that included TWO 802MW reactors plus TWO 404MW fossil-fuel generators.

ROFL... the "$1B" was the salesman talking. Look into actual costs....

FPL estimated the total overnight costs [a rough estimation of construction costs as if the plant could be built overnight] of the power plants, including first fuel load, at $6.8–$9.9 billion, and the total project cost at $12.1–$17.8 billion.[11

Then there were the costs overruns. There were the repairs and mishaps (e.g., fire/explosion, Andrew, canal leakage. There's a long litany of associated costs. The last one was the upgrade so they could operate until 2050 and the current one (which probably won't happen) is because it has the same emergency generator setup as Fukushima's (making Miami uninhabitable would be bad press for FPL).

You also left off operational costs and fuel costs. What do you think takes more maintenance and TLC? Nuclear driven steam turbines? Or, solar panels? How much do fuel rods (and their disposal) cost compared to sunshine? When it comes time to dismantle it all, what's more recyclable, leaded glass and silicon, or radioactive concrete? ; -)

 

[Bob B]

It's amazing isn't it? I did say this was a complicated topic!

First off, I don't disagree with anything you said (e.g., non-UPF plants are less prone to cause Cardiovascular problems). I think that's been well established multiple times. The problem I think is you stopped there rather than consider the data.

In order to declare "fake meat is worse than real meat" you can't compare fake-meat to unprocessed plants. You have to compare UPF plants converted into fake meat with "real" meat. They lumped all cereals and sugar based data into the fake-meat data. But, even then that data (and the error margins) in the paper said they were the same as "real" meat. The only thing worse was UPF animal products. So, your study doesn't say fake meat is worse than real meat, it says it is the same. This is evident in the graph from the paper I posted in #6,614.

In fact, because the UPF plants were so broad in the study I went the extra mile for you and linked up the AHA's statement that Beyond Burger was considered heart healthy. What does the AHA say about beef:

So that my friend is how we ended up with different conclusions.

What you are doing is called spin.

Nowhere in the study did they directly compare plant based high processed food to eating meat ..... You want to throw out some general statement about the AHA and red meat .... and then decide that eating red meat and highly processed plant based food are equally bad.
That study did quantify the danger of eating highly processed plant based foods.

Unless you can find a study that directly compares those 2 things, you are just spinning things to suit what you want to believe.

 

[aenyc]

How Climate Racketeers Aim To Force Us Into Smart Gulags​

Shocking evidence is emerging from Australia and New Zealand of how the climate scam is being used to impose a techno-totalitarian smart-city future.
The criminocratic global imperialists often use their Commonwealth colonies to try out the most insidious escalations of their tyranny – think of Canada, New Zealand and Australia during Covid.

We can therefore assume that this is going to be the blueprint for the roll-out of their Fourth Industrial Revolution agenda across the world.

The sinister scheme in question, called “Managed Retreat”, has been exposed by independent researcher Kate Mason on her excellent Substack blog aimed at “deconstructing 4IR narratives”.

The idea is that exaggerated “modelling” of the imagined effects of “climate change” is being used to define certain areas as unsuitable for human settlement.

Working hand in hand with the state is the insurance industry – long a central part of the corrupt criminocratic empire – which deems homes in these areas to be “uninsurable”.

Banks are also playing their part (of course!) saying they are unwilling to provide mortgages for these “uninsurable” properties.



In her latest article, Kate refers to a TV report about Kensington Banks, near Melbourne city centre, which has been newly declared a flood zone.

She writes: “Property prices are expected to plummet by 20 percent. I think that’s rather conservative – who is going to buy in a flood zone? Unless it’s a developer who will raze it all to the ground and build a Smart Resilient complex”.

Meanwhile, in New Zealand, residents are up in arms about attempts to impose “retreat” from coastal areas under the pretext of a predicted rise in sea levels.

As this media report shows, they are not buying the scaremongering climate propaganda.

Tim Rees said. “I’ve lived by Paraparaumu Beach since 1965 and the beach is actually getting bigger. For 45 years I’ve dived off Kāpiti Island and the rocks are still at the same height at low tide”.

Added Tania Lees: “The science isn’t settled and there is no consensus. We don’t believe the sea levels are rising significantly and [that] we will all be flooded.”

Central and local government couldn’t fund “a process on this scale”, she said. “So far, the ratepayers have paid in excess of $4 million for the Takutai Kāpiti process.

“We simply can’t afford to spend more. If implemented, managed retreat would be in excess of $1 billion.”

As for the agenda behind all this, Kate writes:

Finding the information on climate change modelling and insurance has joined the dots for me regarding the enormous amount of pack and stack housing developments going ahead in Australia.
They’re going to need to put us all somewhere when our houses are uninsurable and we have to sell them for a pittance.
It is clear that this is ‘Resilient’ Smart Cities. Everything hooked up to the internet and data collected, stored and used as modelling to dictate increasingly dystopian government measures of control and enforcement”.

By way of confirmation, she reveals that the Insurance Council of Australia, involved in Managed Retreat, works within the Public Private Partnership model and adheres to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, even being a foundation member of the United Nations Principles for Sustainable Insurance.



The UN’s smart gulag agenda was paraded in their 80-page booklet entitled “Centering People in Smart Cities: A playbook for local and regional governments”, as we reported in 2022.

Also in 2022, a body called the Australian Climate Council released a study which estimated that 1 in 25 of all homes and commercial buildings in the country would become effectively uninsurable by 2030 because of “worsening extreme weather events”.

River flooding posed the biggest risk, according to the study, with flash flooding and bushfires identified as the other main hazards contributing to properties becoming “uninsurable”.

As well as calling for “managed relocations”, the report stressed the need for “upscaling public investments in resilience” and to “support communities to ‘build back better’”.

It declared: “Towns, cities and communities must be rebuilt – where appropriate to do so – in a way that takes into account the inevitable future changes in climate and makes them more resilient”.

It comes as little surprise that this report was proudly showcased on the website of the World Economic Forum…

 

[42OhmsPA]

Enjoy.

 

[B-ManFX4]

Turkey Point sits on 3,300 acres (ref). So, 1000 acres seems like a bargain. But honestly, distribute them across rooftops over America for free land-space and as a by-product that also reduces the load on the grid minimizing costs needed to expand it.

As usual - you are unable to think for yourself and resort to just skimming and posting gibberish from the Internet. So, for you to deploy enough panels to replace the 2 - 802MW reactors, you would need well over 4,000 acres just for the solar panels. How much more land will you need for the ESS to replace those reactors?

Tell me something - how in the hell are you going to "distribute them across rooftops over America" and tie them into an ESS to supplant all of the down-time solar is subject to? You should read and learn more, and type less, when engaged in discussions with adults.

ROFL... the "$1B" was the salesman talking. Look into actual costs....

Then there were the costs overruns. There were the repairs and mishaps (e.g., fire/explosion, Andrew, canal leakage. There's a long litany of associated costs. The last one was the upgrade so they could operate until 2050 and the current one (which probably won't happen) is because it has the same emergency generator setup as Fukushima's (making Miami uninhabitable would be bad press for FPL).

Again, you expose your willful ignorance and laziness. Here is the DATA for the plants: https://www.eia.gov/nuclear/state/archive/2010/florida/

In 2007 dollars the plant cost $1.013 billion to build. Please stop with the stupid posting. Your quote from FPL for an "overnight build" costing was for them adding two AP1000 reactors to the site in 2017 and 2019. Those numbers had nothing to do with the original plant build cost.

Even with those estimates, the total overnight costs of the power plants including first fuel load is put at between $6.8 billion and $9.9 billion, giving a price per installed kW of generating capacity of $3108 to $4540. How much does it cost to provide the same amount of power via solar and ESS ?

You also left off operational costs and fuel costs. What do you think takes more maintenance and TLC? Nuclear driven steam turbines? Or, solar panels? How much do fuel rods (and their disposal) cost compared to sunshine? When it comes time to dismantle it all, what's more recyclable, leaded glass and silicon, or radioactive concrete? ; -)

I left nothing off - you didn't read (again). Speaking of operational costs, you will have to replace all of those solar panels at least twice during the same life span as a nuke plant. How many times will the batteries in the ESS be replaced over the same 80 years of operation? How about hail storms, hurricanes, lightning strikes, etc.? We have proof positive that Turkey Point has been running for over 50 years - and it was hit DIRECTLY by hurricane Andrew in 1992, yet suffered minor damage that was quickly repaired. At no point were the reactors in a dangerous state. The same is true with the fire article link you provided above.

According to eia.gov, Turkey Point's nukes produced 11,305,000,000 kWh of energy in 2010. Since at least 1/3 of that power will be required when the sun isn't shining, you need to store 3,768,333,333 kWh of energy.

In the NREL example they stated 240MWh of energy is required to provide 4 hours of backup for the 60MW power system. What if you want to provide 8 hours of runtime for both the 802MW reactors? Let's do the math. 802,000,000 x 2 reactors x 8 hours backup = 12,832,000 kWh of storage needed. If you use the 3.65V, 304AH LiFePO4 cells we are familiar with to build this ESS, you would need 11,564,528 of them. 3.65 x 304 = 1,109.6 Wh. Divide 12,832,000,000 Wh by 1,109.6 Wh per cell = 11,564,528 total cells. Even if you used physically larger cells - you need the same equivalent amount of LiFePO4 to store the energy. Whatcha gonna do with all those cells once they die? Makes it easy to visualize, huh?

So - let's say we get 100% output from the solar panels 8 hours every day. That means we need to store power for use during the other 16 hours each day. So our solar array has to provide the 1,604MW for consumers AND it has to recharge the ESS too. Obviously we're gonna need a LOT more solar panels...

According to this report: NREL Solar / BESS it will cost $168 million to build a 100MW solar array with 4 hours of backup. Multiply that by 16 to equal Turkey Point and you are at $2.7 billion - and you haven't touched the issue of only 4 hours of backup, or of having to recharge a massive battery bank.

So yeah - both technologies have serious issues regarding recycling at their end of life. For you to act like solar and ESS is a panacea is silly. To state that it is on par with traditional power generation is an outright lie. The math is there - you just have to be willing to do it.

Finally - Bank Of America commissioned a study in 2023 on the reasons we need more nuclear power, not less, if we are to get to zero emissions. What they did, as opposed to the Lazard folks, was offer a document that has plenty of research notes, exhibits and, most importantly, EXPLANATIONS of how they arrived at their conclusions. They also determined that “Levelized cost of energy” (LCOE) is NOT the correct way to look at the cost of generating electricity via solar - unless you factor in the ESS component as well. They did factor it in - and solar is almost dead last behind all of the traditional ways we generate and use power. The correct acronym (and measurement method) is called "Levelized full system cost of energy" (LFSCOE) and it measures an energy source’s lifetime costs divided by energy output, and is a common standard for comparing different energy projects.

Most LCOE calculations do not account for factors like natural gas or expensive battery backup power for solar or wind farms. Solar and wind look more expensive than almost any alternative on an unsubsidized basis when accounting for those external factors (Exhibit 20).17 This is especially true when accounting for the full system costs (LFSCOE) that include balancing and supply obligations (Exhibit 21). Nuclear appears to be the cheapest scalable, clean energy source by far.

Critics cite examples of cost overruns and delayed construction as some of the main reasons for choosing other technologies. Initial capital costs for nuclear are high, but energy payback, as measured by the “energy return on investment” (EROI), is in a league of its own (Exhibit 22). EROI measures the quantity of energy supplied per quantity of energy used in the supply process. A higher number means better returns. The EROI ratio below 7x indicates that wind, biomass, and non-concentrated solar power may not be economically viable without perpetual subsidies.

Funny - they mention the Lazard report - and they show where the norm is to get an average across all items when conducting research. They point out the Lazard calculations were all done on a single nuclear plant model, Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which is famous for all of the issues they have had with delays and nonsense perpetuated by the idiots in our federal government.

Footnote 17 - "LCOE estimates in the recent literature vary widely for all sources. For nuclear power, the International Energy Agency cites a range from $49 to $102/MWh ($69 average) in 2020; in 2022, the US Energy Information Administration estimated $88/MWh. The Lazard estimate uses the costs from a single project, Plant Vogtle in Georgia."

 

[svetz]

What you are doing is called spin. Nowhere in the study did they directly compare plant based high processed food to eating meat .....

Spin? Honestly Bob, I'm more surprised how anyone can look at the data in the study and say plant-derived meats are worse than real meats in regards to heart disease. I'll repost the graph from the study again so you don't have to scroll up. The top line is plant-sourced processed foods (which includes sugars, cereals, and fake-meats). The second is animal-sourced unprocessed foods (which is basically real meat). The final one is processed animal foods (e.g., hotdogs, baloney) and not germane AFAIK to our conversation. The top two lines have essentially the same numbers, therefore equally as bad.

I didn't make the graph or the numbers up, it's all there in the study you linked. It would be nice if you would stop jumping to wild conclusions as to what my motives are when I clearly stated the reasons to my conclusion and they could have been easily verified. Yes, I believe climate change is real, but the reason I do is because of the evidence which seems incontrovertible. I don't have a "motive", if you have proof that climate change is a hoax, please post it so we can discuss it. No, I haven't studied all fake meats and I don't know for a fact that Beyond Burger is healthier than "real" meat, I just posted what the AHA said. Please verify and don't vilify. If there is evidence to the contrary please post it, I'd like nothing more than to discover that climate change isn't happening.

I think you're also confused that processed foods are "always" bad. That's discrimination based on labeling. UPFs are harmful to our health when they include high levels of saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars or when nutritional benefits, e.g., protein, fiber, vitamins, and minerals, are stripped away. But the act of processing doesn't have to do that, it can improve the food quality too.

As usual - you are unable to think for yourself and resort to just skimming and posting gibberish from the Internet.

You were the one who said solar would take 1000 acres, I just pointed out that the Turkey Point nuclear facility was on 3,300 acres. BTW, your EIA reference agreed the site was 3,300 acres.

BTW: Please don't speak disparagingly of fellow forum members, it's against the forum rules as well as being discouraging to polite discourse. Yes, this mild compared to what others have said, but I fear it will escalate without a gentle reminder. If I have something wrong, just say so. I try to state why I believe what I believe and provide references to make it easy for people to see why I have that belief/understanding. But I'm by no means an expert and I appreciate it when misinformation I have is corrected. But don't offer me opinions.

Tell me something - how in the hell are you going to "distribute them across rooftops over America" and tie them into an ESS to supplant all of the down-time solar is subject to? You should read and learn more, and type less, when engaged in discussions with adults.

I'm not doing it! But if I were to vote for someone who said they were doing it I'd probably vote for someone that suggested tax credits on both solar and ESS for homeowners and buildings with large rooftops (e.g., malls), pushing for VPP/V2G standards, either build-up home-grown manufacturing or eliminate tariffs or solar/ess, and minimize red-tape. Mainly all I do is link up the news I see of interest of climate change.

As to engaging with adults, I started the thread so by posting on it, it seems to me that if you're unhappy with the discourse it's your own fault for engaging. But, if you think it's all gibberish and prefer not to see my posts, please feel to use the /ignore feature on me.

BTW: engaged in discussions with adults, is yet another personal attack. I understand it can be frustrating to have your opinions picked apart with information of which you not previously aware, but if the information is wrong please challenge the information and not the messenger. Again, I provide references for things I believe. That doesn't mean they are correct and if they are wrong it would be great to learn why they are wrong. I am not perfect, and definitely not a climate change expert.

According to this report: NREL Solar / BESS it will cost $168 million to build a 100MW solar array with 4 hours of backup. Multiply that by 16 to equal Turkey Point and you are at $2.7 billion - and you haven't touched the issue of only 4 hours of backup, or of having to recharge a massive battery bank.

Construction costs are not the be all end all and yes solar does have a high front-end cost. You have to go cradle to grave in your analysis.
If you want to show the math for nuclear being less expensive than solar please go for it, but be sure to include all the costs.

In 2007 dollars the plant cost $1.013 billion to build. Please stop with the stupid posting. Your quote from FPL for an "overnight build" costing was for them adding two AP1000 reactors to the site in 2017 and 2019.

If it costs ~$18 billion for the "overnight build" expansion in 2017/19 (which means the reality is it will cost more), why are you using $1 billion for a new startup of two nuclear reactors to compare against a current build cost of $2.7 billion for solar?

BTW: Yet more personal attacks? Attacking other people doesn't bolster your argument.

For you to act like solar and ESS is a panacea is silly. To state that it is on par with traditional power generation is an outright lie.

What I stated was Lazard's data said it was on par. I haven't done all the math. But, I still believe Lazard's is accurate in their assessment as I haven't seen anything significant enough to believe otherwise.

BTW: Two more personal attacks.

Finally - Bank Of America commissioned a study in 2023 on the reasons we need more nuclear power, not less, if we are to get to zero emissions.

Sounds interesting. Link please? (Yes, I could look it up, but then I might not be looking at what you're looking at which could lead to further miscommunication).

What they did, as opposed to the Lazard folks, was offer a document that has plenty of research notes, exhibits and, most importantly, EXPLANATIONS of how they arrived at their conclusions. They also determined that “Levelized cost of energy” (LCOE) is NOT the correct way to look at the cost of generating electricity via solar - unless you factor in the ESS component as well.... subsidies...

So, two banks with different assumptions... what makes one more right than the other? Looking forward to the reference.
Agreed, you have to factor ESS in. Lazard's LCOE states it includes ESS and is an unsubsidized analysis:

Nuclear isn't highlighted, but I believe you are the first ever on the thread to suggest that nuclear has a lower actual LCOE than solar and natural gas. It's only since last year that renewables with storage have become on par with natural gas.

Nuclear appears to be the cheapest scalable, clean energy source by far.

You could be right, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

...Plant Vogtle in Georgia, which is famous for all of the issues they have had with delays

Hmm, in your prior post there was innuendo that no one knew where the data Lazard's used came from. So, Reference link please?

Footnote 17 - "LCOE estimates in the recent literature vary widely for all sources. For nuclear power, the International Energy Agency cites a range from $49 to $102/MWh ($69 average) in 2020; in 2022, the US Energy Information Administration estimated $88/MWh. The Lazard estimate uses the costs from a single project, Plant Vogtle in Georgia."

There's obviously a lot of misinformation on the topic. In discussion on controversial topics it's generally not enough to present a quote as evidence as it could be from anyone and unfounded. For example, there are lots of references poo-pooing nuclear, doesn't mean they are from nuclear experts. Providing a link allows the statement to be reviewed.