Treating the Power Grid as a Dumping Ground: Green Intermittency Costs

In April of 2011, the MIT Energy Initiative held a symposium on the challenges of integrating green intermittent power sources into power grids. Today, the PDF report from that symposium was released for public download.

The images below were taken from the MIT report. The full report is downloadable at the link above.

Large electrical power grids are complex systems which help make modern affluent societies possible. Common tells us that we should not put undue stress on systems which are that important.

Intermittent power sources such as big wind and big solar cannot be controlled, because the wind and the sunshine cannot be controlled. This means that if power grids attempt to integrate these unreliable power sources, they will be forced to pay a number of costs on several levels. The cost of maintaining grid stability and reliability will rise. The cost of maintaining existing power plants will rise appreciably. The cost of supporting structures -- such as backup power sources, large-scale energy storage facilities, new grid infrastructures, new power management technologies, etc. is likely to prove enormous.

Environmentalists would like to shut down hydrocarbon and nuclear based power plants and replace them with wind and solar. Making an attempt to do so would prove an unmitigated catastrophe. But even the partial replacement of coal, gas, and nuclear by wind and solar could easily prove disastrous, if the integration of wind and solar were pushed too far, and too fast.

Frequent shut downs and startups of power plants is costly -- both short-term and long-term. Keeping personnel and machine systems on a hair-trigger, just in case wind and solar should pick up or slow down unexpectedly, is ludicrous.

As intermittency takes its toll on machinery and economies, wise and prudent observers should begin to question the rationale for pushing intermittency onto the power grid in the first place.

The "cure" for intermittency is thought to be new energy storage technologies at utility scales. But how long before such technologies become economically feasible?

Again, wise persons are forced to question the underlying rationale behind forcing destructive intermittencies onto the power grid.

You may think that only politicians could be so stupid as to quickly push ahead with intermittent sources long before the problems associated with intermittency have been solved. But that is not quite right. Academics and journalists are every bit as stupid as politicians, on that score, as are government bureaucrats -- and especially environmentalists. There has never been a shortage of stupidity.

There has always been a relative shortage of workable human ingenuity paired with wisdom.

Wake Up Little Stupid Head!

You are being played like a chump in many ways. Here are just 2:

foreign outsourcing of component manufacturing has led to consistent overstatement of U.S. GDP and productivity. The connection goes a long way to explain why we keep losing jobs even as GDP is apparently expanding.

As our economy becomes less competitive due to higher taxes, burdensome and uncertain regulations, and capital flight, more manufacturing and services will be outsourced to foreign firms. However, the flaw in GDP calculation allows the output of those foreign workers to be included in our domestic tally. Since we count the output but not the worker responsible for it, government statisticians attribute the gains to rising labor productivity. To them, it looks like companies are producing more goods with fewer workers.

The reality is that we are producing less with fewer workers. The added “productivity” comes from higher unemployment and larger trade deficits. This is a toxic formula that will have lethal economic consequences. _PeterSchiff

And # 2, look at the taxes!

I keep reading about surveys that show that retail sales are up. But as noted above, no one pays extra sales taxes, or decides they need to pay more income taxes. The surest way to measure retail sales is sales taxes. Want to know how incomes are doing? Look at income tax receipts. Let's look at sales taxes first.

First off, I can find no single source of recent sales tax information. It is all one-off, but it is consistent. Sales taxes in my home state of Texas are down 12.8% year-over-year, and we're in the fifth straight month of decreases of 11% or more. Projections are for sales taxes to continue to decline into 2010.

There is a very revealing study by the Pew Center on state taxes, called "Beyond California". Everyone knows how badly off California is. The Pew Center looks at how the rest of the states are doing, and focuses on 10 states that also have severe problems. Sales tax receipts are down 14% in Arizona, and state income taxes are down 32%.

On average, revenues are down almost 12%. Oregon has seen their revenues collapse a stunning 19%. New York is down 17%, with a deficit of 32%. Illinois has a projected deficit of 47% of its budget, second only to California with 49%. You can see how your state fares here.

The Liscio Report notes that all states had negative year-over-year sales tax collections in October, and the weighted average decrease was 10.2%, down from a negative 7.2% in September. _SeekingAlpha

One more thing: do you really believe those unemployment numbers they try to feed you?

As I noted last week, the number of unemployed actually soared by 558,000, to 15.7 million, as measured by the household survey, not the 190,000 you read about in the mainstream media. Unemployment is sadly continuing to rise by significant amounts.

In August, I did an interview with CNBC from Leen's Fishing Lodge in Maine. The unemployment numbers had just come out. I did a back-of-the-napkin estimate that we would need about 15 million new jobs over the next five years just to get back to where we were when the recession started. _SA

President Obama thinks he can speak the country out of the recession with his teleprompter and 1960s era speechwriters.

He thinks that by paying off his supporters in the big unions, big Wall Street firms, big trial lawyer partnerships, and big overseas illegal campaign contributor scams, that somehow everything will magically get better.

How, Mr. Obama? By taxing small and medium business into oblivion? By destroying the coal industry, hamstringing the oil industry, and paralyzing the nuclear industry? By giving the auto industry to your union chums to destroy, and regulating the energy industry out of existence? By creating a monster of a government health care bureaucracy that drives the economy into the mud even more quickly than all previous entitlements put together?

Hey little stupid head! Wake up and decide if you are going to put up with this green rookie incompetent clown president you stumbled into electing. Because despite what you may have been told, the world really did need a prosperous, strong US -- for a lot of reasons.

Is Competence Dying Out In the Obama Age?

Within the next five years, an estimated 45 percent of engineers in U.S. electrical utilities will be eligible for retirement or will leave for other reasons, according to a 2008 survey by the Center for Energy Workforce Development. That percentage translates into some 7,000 power engineers that will be needed in the electric utility industry alone. But the problem doesn't stop there. According to the report, two to three times as many electric power engineers may be needed to fulfill the needs of the entire economy. PW

The shortage of qualified engineers for the power industry, the oil industry, the nuclear industry, the construction industry, and many other industries, threatens to stifle plans for a vibrant, sustainable future. Without the manpower to turn ideas into working industries, jobs, and economies, you may as well start mixing the final kool-aid.

This looming shortage of competence is the end result of a designed dumbing down of schools -- from K-12 through the university. The substitution in the curricula of political indoctrination in the place of competence-building procedural and declarative knowledge has created at least one lost generation so far. Under Obama, the process toward brain-wasting will only accelerate.

But competent generations eventually retire, and die off. If all you are left with is psychological neotenates, academic lobotomates, and incompetent Obama zombies, your future will be dismal. But that is precisely the direction the western world is headed.

Even if universities and colleges were teeming with engineering students, the educational institutions may not be well equipped to handle the demand. The Collaborative estimated that within the next five years, 40 percent of full-time senior engineering faculty will be eligible for retirement and that 27 percent may actually do so. A number of historically strong power engineering programs have ended or are close to doing so. _PW

The rapidly depleting supply of competent engineers is just the beginning of the problem. As young minds are being rapidly destroyed by a dysfunctional educational system and popular culture, their dimming consciousness is incapable of selecting career paths for the future.

The recent debacle on Wall Street involving faulty computer models and suicidal risk instrument derivatives suggests that the mind rot extends all the way to the Ivy League cream of the crop. And under Obama, millionaire investment bankers are being bailed out by custodians, auto mechanics, garbage collectors, and taxi cab drivers -- via forced taxation of hard-earned income. Corruption on top of incompetence! Is this the future of hope and change? It seems so.

Counter-Intuitive Graphics

This graphic demonstrates an inverse relationship between CO2 concentration and temperature. Watts Up With That?
This graphic demonstrates the growth of US government spending in the human resources sector while spending on national defense and everything else stagnates or even declines slightly. Under a President Obama defense spending would drop significantly while increases in human resources and new spending would likely be ten times the cuts in defense.

The "Catch 22" of human resource spending is that it is tied to cost of living, and can only go up. As the elderly population grows older, as the highly skilled craftsmen of industry grow old and retire and are not replaced, as high IQ populations die off and are replaced by lower IQ immigrants who can never take their place--paying for the exponential increases in government spending coming down the pipe will be impossible.