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Thursday 26 June 2014

Some charts I made whilst drinking a beer in Singapore

Right now, I'm sitting inside Changi airport. It's humid, I'm tired, I ate a weird burger that had some sauce in it that I did't know what it was, and I'm about to board a 13.5 hour flight. There's a pool of koi gazing curiously at the grey sheen of my equally-exhausted laptop.

Basically, I should have other stuff on my mind, but I can't stop thinking about the electrical output of a certain set of machines in a certain state, on a certain continent. 

Australia's Eastern seaboard has an interconnected electricity market, that's sort-of segregated into states. The states are interconnected, but each has its own price, generation, demand and forecasts, from the perspective of the market operator. 

The National Electricity Market, as illustrated by the market operator
This week, in the South Australian region, wind power has supplied a fairly large percentage of the total generation in the state. I won't pre-empt any post-week calculations by declaring what that percentage is, but it's going to be freaking huge, I bet. 

For now, just revel in a couple of charts comparing the output of wind farms to other generators in SA. 

It's not a big state, and, yes, it can draw power from Victoria during a shortfall of supply, or during network congestion. That doesn't take away from the significance of a chunk of our electricity network managing to actually capture the available wind resource, and offset a huge quantity of emissions (given that we'd otherwise have had to source the power from fossil fuels). 

Here's the generation for the month, showing average daily generation (in megawatts). I think this neatly illustrates that, most of the time, wind power contributes to SA's mix, but sometimes it really dominates, and that's what's happened this week:
It's pretty clear from that chart that the presence of wind seems to correlate with lower output from the fossil fuel generators in SA - coal and gas. At one point this week, the coal-fired power station, Port Augusta, shut off. My bet is that it had something to do with the high levels of wind penetration in the state. It might not be, but that's my suspicion. Wind outdid fossil fuels for most of the week, so far:



At the time of writing this blog post (23:05 26/06/2014 AEST), the percentage of wind power in SA is at 69% of total South Australian generation.

The friendly bartender here at Changi airport told me, as he handed me my refreshing and very-welcome beer, that Singapore's current percentage of wind power is precisely zero. It's nice to know we're ahead of the curve. A little patriotic pride on my global trawl. Here's SA's history, since 2005:


Friday 13 June 2014

'Wind Turbine Syndrome' Causes Mink Mutations, And Other Correlations

Logical fallacies are everywhere. Flick open the newspaper and hear the latest assertion from your politician-of-choice, and you'll see one being used to advocate a course of action, framed in something that sounds popular, but doesn't really make a lot of sense, once you look closer. They're usually swirled with little portions of truth.

Sometimes, we see fallacies in their purest form; devoid of any truth. This happened recently when a group named the 'World Council For Nature' issued an urgent, graphic press release:


Surprisingly, this isn't the first time the issue of wind turbines and mink has been raised. The 'World Council For Nature' is, seemingly, comprised of a single individual - Mark Duchamp, an anti-wind activist based in Europe, CEO of the 'European Platform Against Windfarms'. Presumably, the press release is more credible if it comes from a group with an ambiguous name.

Duchamp sent a letter to the Australian Medical Association (AMA) back in April, after the AMA issued a position statement about wind farms and health issues. He wrote:

"In Denmark, which is the EU’s leader in mink farming, millions of Danish kroners were lost in damaged pelts when wind turbines started to operate near a mink farm. The animals became aggressive, attacking one another, and resulting in many deaths"

In the space of two months, the story had changed from aggressive mink mauling each other to a story of genetic mutations and miscarriages. Duchamp's press release was, unsurprisingly, picked up by the website windutrbinesyndrome.com:


In this instance, the fact that the story was ignored by the media is taken not as a marker of faulty claims, but as evidence of a conspiracy to censor.

As it happens, it was picked up by one outlet - the conservative news/opinion website Breitbart published it in full. They open with sentences no comedian could ever match, in terms of sheer comic perfection:

"A new wind farm has been linked to the premature births of over 1,600 mink at a fur farm in Denmark last month. Veterinarians have ruled out viruses and food as possible causes, leaving the 460ft (140 metre)-high wind turbines as the only variable that has changed since last year"

Your average human being would be able to spot the reasoning error made in that sentence pretty quickly. It seems the website isn't populated by many capable of doing so - the comments are lathered with credulity and outrage. James Delingpole, a conservative commentator with an open disdain for climate science, tweeted it. It's fascinating to see this side-by-side with his avowed climate change denial:




So, what's going on here? This is a textbook example of why the phenomenon of 'wind turbine syndrome' has such a varied list of symptoms attributed to it (currently, 236).

Any event that occurs with a variable radius of wind turbines (the largest I've seen is 125 kilometres, so far) is, in the eyes of proponents of 'wind turbine syndrome', a candidate outcome of the disease. This is what happens when we decide careful scientific examination is irrelevant, with regards to establishing causality.

More interesting is the ideological fervour driving this attitude. Delingpole's intense, sarcastic skepticism directed at climate science and scientists (now easily on par with your standard anti-vaxxer in terms of sheer archaic denial) is contrasted starkly against the absolute, unquestioning credulity with which he accepts the increasingly absurd claims being issued in press releases by anti-wind groups.

You can make your own spurious correlations using a tool called Google Correlate. Using this, I found that 'wind turbine syndrome' interest peaks at the same time as interest in Wonder Woman. Coincidence, or evil green socialist comic conspiracy? You be the judge.

Wednesday 4 June 2014

If Gas Is 'Renewable', Nothing Is

In the Victorian government's as-yet unreleased submission to the panel currently reviewing Australia's federal renewable energy legislation, there lies a fairly outlandish suggestion, one that I feel really deserves some close scrutiny. Tom Arup writes for The Age, describing the suggested course of action:

"The Napthine government says it is concerned that "reliable baseload capacity" is being driven out of the electricity market and calls for consideration of including gas-fired power under the target to help the power grid cope with times of peak demand"

The legislation lists the types of generators that are eligible for inclusion in the renewable energy target scheme:

"17  What is an eligible renewable energy source?
             (1)  The following energy sources are eligible renewable energy sources:
                     (a)  hydro;
                     (b)  wave;
                     (c)  tide;
                     (d)  ocean;
                     (e)  wind;
                      (f)  solar;
                     (g)  geothermal‑aquifer;
                     (h)  hot dry rock;
                      (i)  energy crops;
                      (j)  wood waste;
                     (k)  agricultural waste;
                      (l)  waste from processing of agricultural products;
                    (m)  food waste;
                     (n)  food processing waste;
                     (o)  bagasse;
                     (p)  black liquor;
                     (q)  biomass‑based components of municipal solid waste;
                      (r)  landfill gas;
                      (s)  sewage gas and biomass‑based components of sewage;
                      (t)  any other energy source prescribed by the regulations.
             (2)  Despite subsection (1), the following energy sources are not eligible renewable energy sources:
                     (a)  fossil fuels;
                     (b)  materials or waste products derived from fossil fuels."

It's this subsection that we can presume Napthine is advocating the alteration of. Namely; shifting fossil fuels upwards. 

For every unit of energy you get from gas, you get about half of the carbon emissions, compared to coal. But gas makes up about 12% (it varies across the year) of the fuel types used to make electricity on the National Electricity Market (NEM): 


Despite gas having a lower emissions intensity than coal, it's still a fossil fuel, and it still comes burdened with carbon pollution. In 2012, usage of natural gas for electricity generation was responsible for 21,259,810 tonnes of carbon emissions. 


The RET legislation doesn't define 'renewable', but I like this one, from the US Energy and Information Administration, which outlines the advantages and limitations of renewable energy: 
"Renewable energy sources are energy resources that are naturally replenishing but flow-limited. They are virtually inexhaustible in duration but limited in the amount of energy that is available per unit of time. Renewable energy resources include: biomass, hydro, geothermal, solar, wind, ocean thermal, wave action, and tidal action"
It takes millions of years for natural gas deposits to form (note that creationists beg to differ). For natural gas to be classified as renewable we'd have to use insanely tiny amounts of it. 

Categories are meaningless if we decide the rules governing them can be broken at will. Incentivising production from lower carbon sources (in addition to low-carbon sources) has benefits and disadvantages, but clumsily deciding that the term 'renewable' can apply to anything isn't a fantastic idea. 

If gas is 'renewable', then coal immediately qualifies as renewable, too. The term then becomes synonymous with 'fuel', and loses all meaning. 

Using gas instead of coal does reduce carbon emissions. But, using gas and renewable energy instead of coal reduces carbon emissions even further (and it's cheap). We can get that done without savaging the categorisations in our energy system.