RFK Jr. to natgas association: don't worry about solar/wind, you'll profit even more.

[wtmusic]

"Aside: During the clip he also hugely exaggerates both the cost and the time required to build a large nuclear power plant. According to Kennedy, a 1 GWe nuclear plant would take 15-20 years to build and cost $15-$20 billion. End Aside.

I wonder what he tells his ardent supporters in the environmental community who have been taught to believe that wind and solar energy are actually replacing fossil fuels? Does he tell them that utility scale wind and solar installations are simply a means to shift some of the market demand and profits away from the coal industry and to natural gas suppliers? Does he mention just how much natural gas is produced by the same large multinational companies that import most of our foreign oil and who pay little in the way of US taxes?

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is the founder of Waterkeeper, an organization that is currently working diligently to shut down the Indian Point Nuclear Power Station. The most likely replacement fuel would be natural gas."

http://theenergycollective.com/rodadams/47773/robert-f-kennedy-jr-tells-colorado-oil-and-gas-association-wind-and-solar-plants-are-?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=The+Energy+Collective+%28all+posts%29

Someone tell Bobby Jr. about "global warming".

[NickB79]

1. The name "Waterkeeper" is truly ironic

Seeing as how the latest craze to extract natural gas as a new, "clean" fuel is to frack rock formations, and in so doing ruin groundwater.

[wtmusic]

2. Amen.

[Nihil]

4. So true. (n/t)

[gateley]

3. Boy, I'm not getting this. Or, maybe I AM and I'm just disappointed. nt

[GliderGuider]

5. Oh Robert!

How could you? :banghead:

[Nihil]

22. He's a Kennedy ...

... politics first, foremost and forever.

Did you think that there was only one family of "Fortunate Sons"?

:shrug:

[TheWraith]

6. Kicked and recommended.

It needs to be pointed out that given current growth rates, wind and solar are not going to replace fossil fuels any time in the foreseeable future.

[leveymg]

7. Nuclear is not an answer, neither in the short nor long-term.

[GliderGuider]

13. And natural gas is? /nt

[kristopher]

8. Rod Adams - Another pronuclear activist.

And a particularly nasty one at that. Anytime you see him use a small snip of a longer discussion by someone opposed to nuclear power, it is wise to check the context closely as Adams is as bad as Limpballs when it comes to distortion of facts in order to attempt character assassination.

In this case, as we build out renewables and shut down coal plants, there WILL be an increased reliance on the existing natural gas fleet of generators, however, that is a transitional phase that no one expects to last. If we build nuclear it is going to require the same dependence on natural gas as we have now and more besides since the high cost of nuclear power will ensure that natural gas will be the most economic choice well beyond the time that renewables (including biomethane) would have been able to supplant it.

[NNadir]

9. I know Rod Adams. Rod Adams is a friend of mine. RFK's speech is available

as a video, and can be watched in full.

A viewer - who can stand watching the little gas shill RFK speak, his bit on trying to build gas terminals off the California coast is well known - can determine who and who is not lying and who and who is not delusional. It's um, not Rod Adams.

It is notable that even our little resident anti-nukes, after years and years and years and years and years of denial, finally are confessing that increased reliance on natural gas is the real consequence of funding, at the expense of the poor, the so called "renewables" industry.

As for what "everyone knows" you are attempting to speak for a large set of people who are vastly better educated than the anti-nuke squad, which is filled entirely with car CULTists and dangerous fossil fuel shills.

[kristopher]

10. Adams is a dickhead with no sense of obligation to basic honesty.

He is a pathetic excuse for a human being.

[madokie]

12. I thought so too

And as you imply we're wasting time with nuclear as a solution. The names one has to put up with to voice his opposition to nuclear is, well astonishing. In real life it wouldn't happen to my face, simple as that. I guess on a board like this one has to take the good with the bad and ugly.

Our money and time will be much better spent on renewables, solar, wind and waves. At the moment we have a real stinker, co2 wise at most all our city waste water plants. They all put off copious amounts of methane which could be captured and used for some of what gas we'll need to be using in the near future. I was reading something about this the other day but don't remember where I read it but a city, I believe it was, installed covers over their waste water ponds and was harvesting the gas and selling it. Any way we're going to be using natural gas to cook and heat with for quite some time so it'd be good if some of it was coming from an otherwise high polluting source such as a waste water plant. Once the gas is methane it matters not that it came from a sewer pond or not, makes no difference in the big scheme of things.

[NNadir]

27. Rod is an officer in the United States Navy, and a graduate of the US Naval Academy.

I'm quite sure he couldn't care less what the little twerps in the anti-nuke cults think of him.

I know that my high opinion of Rod is not colored at all by what mindless anti-nuke cultists think of him.

I have a very strong opinion of what constitutes a "pathetic excuse for a human being." Usually it involves mindless cut and paste mavens who are notable for having never had a single original thought in their life time, something that becomes more and more obvious every time they open their mouthes.

I am reasonably satisfied that there is NOT ONE anti-nuke on this board who has ever come close to being qualified for admission into the United States Naval Academy, since you need to know some science to gain admission.

It is - to use Jefferson's words - self-evident that anti-nukes know no science.

[Kolesar]

19. Yeah, and you had a child so that you could carry him to market in a papoose?

[GliderGuider]

11. OK, here's something we haven't seen before from Mark Z. Jacobson.

I don't think kristopher has posted this tidbit yet. It's from a 2007 study reported by Stanford:

Study finds that linked wind farms can result in reliable power

"The idea is that, while wind speed could be calm at a given location, it could be gusty at others. By linking these locations together we can smooth out the differences and substantially improve the overall performance," Archer said.

As one might expect, not all locations make sense for wind farms. Only locations with strong winds are economically competitive. In their study, Archer and Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford, evaluated 19 sites in the Midwestern United States with annual average wind speeds greater than 6.9 meters per second at a height of 80 meters above ground, the hub height of modern wind turbines. Modern turbines are 80 to 100 meters high, approximately the height of a 30-story building, and their blades are 70 meters long or more.

The researchers used hourly wind data, collected and quality-controlled by the National Weather Service, for the entire year of 2000 from the 19 sites. They found that an average of 33 percent and a maximum of 47 percent of yearly-averaged wind power from interconnected farms can be used as reliable baseload electric power. These percentages would hold true for any array of 10 or more wind farms, provided it met the minimum wind speed and turbine height criteria used in the study.

Read that again - 33% to 47% of the average output (not average capacity) of interconnected wind farms can be considered baseload. That means that 1 GW of turbines (200 5MW monsters) would generate about 80 to 100 MW of baseload power. What makes up the difference between that and peak demand? Natural gas. If that 1 GW of wind farms were sized so that peak demand coincided with their average capacity factor, they'd need around 150 MW of gas-turbine capacity to back them up.

No wonder the gas industry would prefer us to build wind instead of nuclear power...

[kristopher]

14. That is a simplistic and misleading "interpretation" of the data

Just as in the present grid there is going to be a range of different technologies fulfilling different roles in a distributed grid. Natural gas is going to perform an important role as we move away from coal since it is only about 40% of the carbon emissions of coal and since it is available on demand.

Those qualities, however, are going to become increasing less important as the full range of renewable solutions* are deployed. Wind will be a part of the package but so will all the rest. Predicting that all the variance between wind and the standard use profile would be taken up by natgas is, as Big Ed would say, "psycho talk".

However with nuclear taking the lead roll it captures (by legislative mandate) the market share that we need to propel renewable price reductions and investment. So we don't build out renewable infrastructure at the level that reaps the benefits of mass production - we basically continue the same system we have now where a few elite entities control the flow of energy to every home and business out there.


*
wind
solar PV
solar thermal
geothermal
wave
ocean current
tidal
and various types of small/medium/large scale storage

[GliderGuider]

15. I notice you didn't say "it's incorrect".

To a first approximation, considered on a global scale (which CO2 is) with existing technologies (which is what we have right now), yes - "all the variance between wind and the standard use profile would be taken up by natgas" is correct. There are no other alternatives on this scale. In the future, and in some locations, maybe.

Mass production of wind turbines doesn't help the variability issue. At the moment it just makes it easier to build out more need for natural gas.

[kristopher]

16. That is nothing but more of the hyper-parsing pronuclear activists MUST use

to argue for such a bad technology; it even mirrors the strategy used in the OP where the most desirable options are excluded from analysis with a very carefully worded research question. There was no attempt to honestly address the types of technologies we need, rather there was an attempt to spin a preselected and dishonest meme for nuclear industry activists.

It is incorrect since existing technologies does indeed include the full range of renewable technologies I listed.

[GliderGuider]

17. .

Wow. Just ... wow. :thumbsdown:

[leveymg]

18. I got the feeling the OP was a hit piece against Kennedy with a pro-nuke slant.

Gotta love these guys. They don't give up easy.

[wtmusic]

20. We're almost as tenacious as the pro-greenhouse gas crowd.

Do you represent some kind of orchid-growing lobby? :D

[Confusious]

21. Where are your farms then?

Not one of these has an operational farm anywhere in the world. They are all under study right now. People are "working on them" which means another 10-20 years.

geothermal
wave
ocean current
tidal

As far as geothermal, I'm taking about Iceland geothermal. None anywhere outside a hot zone like Iceland. Little heat pumps ain't gonna cut it.

How do these things fit into your mom and pop "distributed smart grid?" I like how you bounce back and forth as the need arises.

By the time any of this stuff gets built there will be palm trees in anchorage, Alaska.

[XemaSab]

26. 4.5% of energy in California is derived from geothermal

http://www.energy.ca.gov/geothermal/index.html

Which I suspect is about as far as it's going to go. Which really doesn't make a lot of sense, because there are geothermal pockets all over the state. :shrug:

But anyways, geothermal is probably not going to power the country anytime soon. :P

[Kennah]

28. If by little heat pumps you mean ground source heat pumps ...

... in terms of efficiency and payback it's hard to argue with them.

In and of themselves, are ground source heat pumps going to save us from ourselves in the long run?

Absolutely not. However, electrification of transportation and heat pumps offer the prospect of some tremendous gains.

[Nihil]

23. I'm sure that - now you've brought it to his attention - we'll see a lot of it in the future ...

There again, maybe not?
:evilgrin:

> No wonder the gas industry would prefer us to build wind instead of nuclear power...

Be fair, the gas industry would prefer us to build anything instead of
nuclear power ... they get to win regardless ...

[txlibdem]

24. 33% average output from wind farm

You have correctly summarized the situation we have now: Natural Gas provides peak power generation in our grid today, as they did before significant numbers of wind turbines/wind farms came online. Those are the facts: electrical supply must at all times exactly match the demand. That puts the utilities in a bind economically because those peak power generators either need to be running for hours but kept offline till their power is needed (even Natural Gas plants cannot be ramped up in seconds, it takes over an hour), until the plant gets up to speed and up to operating temperatures it is running inefficiently, so for that and other reasons the end result is that "peak power generation" is the most expensive power of all.

[XemaSab]

25. Note that they're trying to pull a fast one with the numbers

33% is the AVERAGE and 47% is the PEAK, so it's not 33% to 47%, it's 19% to 47%.

Nineteen to forty-seven is a LOT of variability. And you'd have to have natural gas peakers for that 28% between the two numbers, which means that you would almost have as much energy generated from natural gas as from wind in this scenario.

[Nihil]

29. Suddenly *certain* so-called "wind supporters" are revealed for what they are ...

... nothing but natural gas supporters behind a very thin façade.

(Please note that I am not saying this for *all* wind supporters BTW;
just certain highly "cut & paste" proficient individuals.)