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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Oct 24, 2013 - 06:18pm PT
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Maybe Sumner meant the summer was COOLER because it wasn't the HOTTEST ever.
Accuracy is important to him, after all.
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nature
climber
Boulder, CO
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Oct 24, 2013 - 06:21pm PT
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It's like watching a clown car.
Chuff is driving.
Rong is in the back trying to pass out beers and drinking whiskey - completely clueless as to where they are headed.
Sketchy is next to Rong telling jokes.
Rick is in the passenger seat with the map giving directions.
Every once and a while they pick up a hitch hiker who sits bitch.
Problem is Chuff took too many of rongs beers and is hammered, Sketchy is telling bad jokes and nobody is listening and Rick is holding the map upside down. Instead of driving away from the cliff they are headed towards it.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 24, 2013 - 07:12pm PT
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I'll grant you that Alaska's june and July temps were unusually warm almost statewide. However this followed a cold winter of historic length and a return for most of the state to average temps from august onwards. It dipped below freezing in southcentral and the interior with measurable snow in both locations very early, in September. Overall, the year is still below the average mean.
Nature, we are all driving separate vehicles in a destruction derby with you folks. There is little to no collusion other than what you see on these pages.
I have to admire the tenacity of all you delusional hotheads, you have been dealt nothing but losing hands almost this entire year and yet you soldier on for the cause. If you would just relax, and rip van winkle for awhile, all would be fine and you'll spare yourselves much heartache. The world will go on with the climate doing what it naturally does independent and uncaring of all the hysterical hype.
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Oct 24, 2013 - 07:35pm PT
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That's a very conservative estimate, Anderson.
Do ya think it's the very same source that gives all the predictions?
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Oct 24, 2013 - 07:41pm PT
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"Over the past 50 years,Alaska has warmed twice as fast as the national average"
Tell me Ron,did you miss that?
I know ,Alaska is cooling.
And, I know you can read ,it was last updated 9/9/2013
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Oct 24, 2013 - 07:53pm PT
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Those things MAY be true,but have nothing to do with the trend described.
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monolith
climber
SF bay area
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Oct 24, 2013 - 08:00pm PT
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1996 was an even bigger recovery year. Didn't mean much in the long term.
1996 made up for 15 years, so what.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 24, 2013 - 08:09pm PT
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Wilbeer, absent from your EPA provided information is any discussion of the downward trend in temps statewide since 2000. I've posted the peer reviewed study ( 19 of 20 first order weather stations show a decline averaging 2.4 F since 2000)showing this a number of times.
Thinking about how you guys tenaciously soldier on in the face of one failure after another of your cherished CAGW doom theory has got me wondering if anyone has done investigation of this phenomenon. After a short look I came up with this below.
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/361929/liberal-denial-climate-change-and-energy-jeremy-carl
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Oct 24, 2013 - 08:34pm PT
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Yes Rick ,I am a utopian Liberal.
While I agree NG is a bridge,I do not agree with your opinion of a cooling trend.
Any legitimate links?
Tell me why for instance,If we have so much NG,Why has the price of it not bottomed out?
Why has the Port of Philadelphia been reopened since the time when George Washington was potus?
Why do you think the countryside of PA should be polluted with over 8000 wells?
A bridge to a better source ,yes.A GREED fest of sickening proportion,NO.
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wilbeer
Mountain climber
honeoye falls,ny.greeneck alleghenys
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Oct 24, 2013 - 08:59pm PT
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Brandon,I am not one to tell anybody,but your contributions are as welcome as anyone's.
Not only that ,but you were absolutely correct!
Cheers,Wilbeer.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 24, 2013 - 09:29pm PT
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Norton, Solar radiation 9% greater in the Holocene Optimum than today? What a stunning admission from the catastrophe folk. The whole narrative surrounding AGW is dependent upon all known sources of climate change being identified, quantified, and excluded from causation of "the unprecedented warming" of the late 20th century, except of course CO2. The accepted maximum of solar variation is .01. If they acknowledged a positive variation of 9% they refuted the core of CAGW theory to promote their regional reconstruction. It must be a misprint-they wouldn't have thrown the baby out with the bath water-would they? I'll have to look at it, thanks.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 24, 2013 - 10:13pm PT
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Norton, Solar radiation 9% greater in the Holocene Optimum than today? What a stunning admission from the catastrophe folk. The whole narrative surrounding AGW is dependent upon all known sources of climate change being identified, quantified, and excluded from causation of "the unprecedented warming" of the late 20th century, except of course CO2. The accepted maximum of solar variation is .01. If they acknowledged a positive variation of 9% they refuted the core of CAGW theory to promote their regional reconstruction. It must be a misprint-they wouldn't have thrown the baby out with the bath water-would they? I'll have to look at it, thanks.
Another completely foolish pronouncement by Rick, so mixed up it's hard to know where to start. Not a 'stunning admission from the catastrophe folks,' that's a cartoon on Rick's head. Higher NH insolation at the HCO is well known and in Wikipedia. Resulting from orbital forcing, not variation in the sun. Much of the Southern hemisphere was cooler at this time. Doesn't refute any science, it's already part of the picture. Promoting regional reconstructions, baby, bathwater ... more cartoons in Rick's head.
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 24, 2013 - 10:18pm PT
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Yes my mistake, it's high latitude summer insolation estimated to be 9% greater than current, due to axial tilt and orbital eccentricity in the very early holocene-wasn't clear in Norton's snippet. Can anyone access the whole paper? It will be interesting to see the range of their sampling and methodologies.
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Chiloe
Trad climber
Lee, NH
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Oct 24, 2013 - 10:27pm PT
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A smarter person might recognize that his own ignorance is not proof of someone else's conspiracy. But I think you'll make the same mistake again soon.
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WBraun
climber
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Oct 24, 2013 - 10:43pm PT
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There's tons of smart people with no intelligence .....
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rick sumner
Trad climber
reno, nevada/ wasilla alaska
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Oct 24, 2013 - 11:59pm PT
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Okay guys pile on. You think you've just been dealt some good cards-great.
None of us has seen the paper, methodologies and supporting data yet.
radiocarbon dating is notoriously susceptible to being questioned and overturned by further testing. The devil is in the details.
It might be that they did indeed find a region ( extent undetermined) that
is currently as warm as it has been in tens of thousands of years.
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Splater
climber
Grey Matter
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Oct 25, 2013 - 12:00am PT
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Moving back to meaningful discussion:
Why would the California PUC disallow hydro pumped storage in it's new storage requirements on power companies? Afar as I know, pumped storage is still the best storage technology. Why should the PUC pick winners and losers?
Assembly Bill 2514 had no such restriction.
http://www.electricitypolicy.com/news/6124-calif-puc-wants-1,325-mw-new-storage-for-utilities-no-pumped-storage
"However, pumped hydro storage projects in excess of 50 MW will not be counted toward the targets, out of concern that a large-scale pumped storage project (most are more than 500 MW) could push out other technologies. "
So the PUC was concerned that pumped storage works too well. And now the ratepayers must pay so the PUC can prop up power storage that doesn't work very well.
http://www.smartenergyuniverse.com/regulatory/23309-cpuc-sets-energy-storage-goals-for-utilities
http://www.smartenergyuniverse.com/regulatory/22427-comments-on-california-puc-proposal-for-storage-procurement
DOE Promotes Pumped Hydro as Option for Renewable Power StorageBy JENNY MANDEL of Greenwire Published: October 15, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2010/10/15/15greenwire-doe-promotes-pumped-hydro-as-option-for-renewa-51805.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
. When the wind howls in Denmark and energy demand is low, turbine farms can store energy in a Norwegian reservoir for use the next day.
It's Red States vs. Blue in Legal War Over EPA Greenhouse Gas Rules
But a hard wind in the dead of a Texas night has power companies paying customers to use electricity they don't need.
That is a waste of clean power -- something that U.S. promoters of renewable energy want to change. Among the American boosters of pumped hydro storage is Energy Secretary Steven Chu, who maintains that water-based storage could help ease the integration of renewable power into the electrical grid.
Using pumped hydro to store electricity costs less than $100 per kilowatt-hour and is highly efficient, Chu told his energy advisory board during a recent meeting. By contrast, he said, using sodium ion flow batteries -- another option for storing large amounts of power -- would cost $400 per kWh and have less than 1 percent of pumped hydro's capacity.
"Yet in the United States," he said, "[pumped hydro] has not been seriously planned or looked at -- yet."
This is how pumped hydro storage works: Excess electricity is used to pump water uphill into a reservoir. When power is needed, water is released over a turbine to generate electricity. Water can either be used on a once-through basis and allowed to flow to a river, or it can cycle endlessly in a closed loop.
There are about 40 U.S. pumped hydro facilities, most of which were built on the East Coast in the 1960s, '70s and '80s to complement nuclear plants that produced a steady stream of power around the clock, said Rick Miller, past president of the National Hydropower Association and a senior vice president with Omaha, Neb.-based hydropower consultancy HDR-DTA.
The same principles that made pumped hydro a good choice for nuclear power plants make them good for renewable energy, Miller said.
Consider how the technology is used to help both Denmark and Norway, he said.
Windy Denmark is able to shift nighttime energy resources for daytime use, while Norway -- which gets almost all its electricity from conventional hydropower -- has reservoirs behind its dams that can easily store that excess power. The arrangement helps Norway mitigate some of the risk from drought and other challenges to its hydro-heavy grid, Miller said.
For Norwegians, the system is a great money-maker as well. They pay their neighbor almost nothing for the nighttime wind energy they take on since demand is so low at that time, but charge Denmark a premium for it at peak pricing hours.
"Norway is making a killing," Miller said. "Danish people pay the highest power prices in Europe."
If U.S. utilities could add pumped hydro storage to the grid, they could potentially play both sides of that equation and save money overall by avoiding both the highs and lows of wholesale power pricing.
In addition to the negative electricity prices sometimes seen in Texas, Miller said utilities in the Pacific Northwest sometimes pay people to take power thanks to quirks in conditions on the Columbia River.
Conventional hydropower turbines on the river provide a large amount of electricity to the area's grid, Miller said, but several stakeholders on the river have a say in how they operate. There are no reservoirs to store water behind the dams there, so pumped hydro is not an option, and certain minimum and maximum amounts of water must continually flow over the dams to support fish populations in the river and to keep it navigable for watercraft.
As a result, Miller said, Columbia River hydropower is a "must-run" resource that cannot be throttled down when electricity demand is low. Sometimes, the result is negative pricing.
Miller said situations like these could increase as more utilities face renewable energy portfolio standards, mandates requiring that a certain percentage of electricity be generated using wind, solar and other renewable sources.
Environmental impacts
Advocates say that closed-loop pumped hydro technology is easier on the environment than conventional hydropower projects. Those can drastically change water levels downstream, and if reservoirs are included, they often flood habitats above the dam as well.
Boosters point to the Eagle Mountain project, a closed-loop system proposed for construction near Palm Springs, Calif., by Eagle Crest Energy Co., that is awaiting a permitting decision by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
Eagle Mountain is sited to take advantage of two abandoned iron ore quarries that would be connected with an underground tunnel. Water would be pumped to the higher quarry when power is plentiful and would drop over turbines to the lower one to generate an expected 1,300 megawatts of power, roughly enough to serve 1.3 million homes.
Because the quarries are abandoned and the system would continuously recycle nonpotable water, the project's environmental impacts are projected to be minimal and its cost low, planners say.
With California under a state mandate to generate 33 percent of its power from renewables by 2020, Eagle Mountain could be a valuable resource for balancing the grid.
The environmental group American Rivers has campaigned against conventional hydropower projects and for the removal of dams on rivers. But the group is not opposed to pumped hydro storage when built off-river in closed-loop systems, according to John Seebach, who runs the organization's Hydropower Reform Initiative.
"Closed-loop systems have the promise of not causing the ecological harm to rivers that you see in traditional hydropower [and] traditional pumped storage projects," he said, provided it is done with appropriate environmental reviews and safeguards.
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"I don't think people are really talking about building new on-river projects. Once you move something on-river ... you're going to introduce a lot of harm," he added, pointing out that pumping water for an on-river system can require that the water flow backward -- wreaking havoc on the ecosystem.
'Certainty in pricing'
The complication: While pumped hydro is technically simple, it is expensive to build.
For a typical 1,000 megawatt facility, DOE estimates the cost at between $1 billion and $2 billion. That makes pumped hydro cheaper on a per-megawatt basis than any other large-scale storage option except for one, a strategy that stores compressed air in naturally occurring cave formations. But pumped storage, while flexible and relatively inexpensive, still costs too much for any but the biggest utilities to finance on their own.
Today, pumped-hydro projects take five years to permit and five years to build, comparable to what is needed for a nuclear plant.
A major hurdle for stored-hydro projects, according to the Hydropower Association's Miller, lies with regulations and pricing around the grid services that storage provides.
"The industry understands the physics of it, but the markets don't have an ability today to monetize the benefits of pumped storage," he said.
Grid services like load shifting and reliability are difficult to price into electricity rate structures. Regulated utilities do not have a good way to charge for them, and deregulated utilities have little incentive to raise prices to fund capital-intensive projects that won't be completed for years.
Energy regulators view pumped storage as a transmission tool, while the technology shows up on utility maps as an energy sink because it spools out slightly less energy than is fed into it.
Many of the questions over how pumped hydro is priced come back to rules set by FERC.
Miller said reworking those rules to recognize the contribution that storage makes would be the biggest help for the industry. "The industry is not looking for tax handouts; they're looking for certainty in pricing so they can get project financing," he said.
But if storage technologies were to become eligible for an investment tax credit, or ITC, he said, pumped storage should be included. "An ITC alone is not going to be enough, alone, to get financing," he added. "But a more certain market, alone, would be enough to get financing."
The regulation of carbon emissions would also help, Miller said.
Without such regulations, utilities often opt to build new natural gas plants to add power that can be provided as needed to balance the less-than-steady supply from renewables.
But it is unclear, Miller said, which option is cheaper long term for utilities, and the answer depends in part on the price of natural gas. A price on carbon, he said, would likely weigh in favor of hydropower.
DOE as a catalyst
Energy Secretary Chu's stated interest in hydropower can help the technology move forward, but DOE's abilities there are limited.
Jacques Beaudry-Losique, manager of DOE's Wind and Water Power Program, which includes hydropower, said the program convened a stakeholder workshop earlier this month in Washington, D.C., to help it put together a playbook, due out later this year.
One thing slowing DOE down is that in 2006, its own hydropower program was shut down.
Beaudry-Losique said that with budgets tight, it was argued that hydropower was already commercial, so it did not need a research program. Then about 18 months ago, the program was restarted, with storage technologies as a focus.
The budget for pumped storage is about $2 million a year, Beaudry-Losique said, as compared with between $15 million and $20 million per year for the conventional hydropower program.
One request from participants at the recent workshop, according to Beaudry-Losique, was to get pumped hydro projects included in DOE's loan guarantee program. Discussions around that are under way.
He said DOE can also play a "catalyst role" by working with FERC to address permitting and other regulatory issues.
A DOE-funded study by the Electric Power Research Institute will examine what grid services pumped hydro provides, potentially contributing to structural market changes. FERC "Chairman [Jon] Wellinghoff has been very supportive of pumped hydro storage," Beaudry-Losique added.
The department is also providing technical assistance to the industry.
DOE is working with the Interior Department and the Army Corps of Engineers to publish a report on technical development, cost and site development models that could help project planners move faster, thus trimming cost. Beaudry-Losique said DOE can help shave a year off the permitting and a year off the construction phases.
The department is also assessing "every single stream in the country," he said, for conventional and pumped hydro storage.
As renewable portfolios are put in place, the need for power storage solutions will grow.
"Now is about the time" to focus on it, Chu told his advisory board, "because when you're at 1 percent, 2 percent of the electric supply system you don't really care. But when you're at 10 percent, you care."
Copyright 2010 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.
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command error
Trad climber
Colorado
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Oct 25, 2013 - 02:08am PT
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The Black Cat analogy
Philosophy is like being in a
dark room and looking for a black cat.
Metaphysics is like being in a
dark room and looking for a black cat that isn't there.
Theology is like being in a dark room
and looking for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!"
Science is like being in a dark room and
looking for a black cat with a flashlight.
Climate Science is like levying a tax on the public
so you can be paid handsomely for producing doomsday reports
on how important it is to search for black cats in the dark rooms
that aren't there.
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