Killer of Whales

Whales have washed up on the shores in Lincolnshire.

A fifth sperm whale has washed up on the east coast of England.

It follows the death of a beached whale in Hunstanton, Norfolk, on Friday and the discovery of three carcasses near Skegness over the weekend.  -BBC

People with paint took to the whales with anti-nuclear messaging: The campaign for nuclear disarmament’s CND and Fukushima were two messages somebody found important to get on the massive carcasses.

My limited investigation of the scene, via photographs, leads to a different suspect – not that whales disturbed by Fukushima wouldn’t create suicide on the shores of the U.K. to get the attention of the English press, and not that nuclear weapons aren’t related to the power plants (which they aren’t related to) but …

Wind despiser Jame Delingpole wrote, in 2011, a more plausible explanation:

According to researchers at the University of St Andrews, the sound of offshore wind farms is likely to mess with the whales’ sensitive sonar systems and drive them ashore, where they get stuck on beaches and die.

After the boom – what?

The following is written by my father. I post it, in part, for my sons.

It has been a while since David Foot introduced us to the boom babies (Canadians born 1946 to 1964) and the sociological, economic and other significant implications of this cohort. They are still significant.

Only relatively recently have they exercised control over the biggest governments in Canada – the Federal Government, British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec. At the turn of the millennium all of these governments were headed by people born prior to the boom. During this millennium, four of the five jurisdictions have had governments led by boom babies.

How have the boom babies been doing? It’s difficult to say but one measure would be the change in the ratio of debt to gross domestic product during their administrations.

TVO’s Paikin chooses to be a reason “why rates keep rising”

It took Steve Paikin 4 seconds to mislead the viewers of Ontario’s public broadcaster last night.

“Auditor General Bonnie Lysyk’s year-end report found that Ontarians overpaid for electricity by 37 billion dollars. ” – podcast

No, The Auditor General’s year-end report stated, correctly:

Global Adjustment fees, which are the excess payments to generators over the market price, amounted to $37 billion from 2006 to 2014

Should this confuse Mr. Paikin?

The electricity issue is not a a new one in Ontario and the global adjustment, while complex in some respects, does essentially refer to the difference between what a generator is paid, by contract (say $100 per unit), and what the market valued that power at (say $20 per unit).

… “Joining us now to explore why rates keep rising and  other mysteries of the energy file…”

Of a 3 person panel on Paikin’s show, one has a history of distracting people from understanding Ontario’s energy file, and another is actively paid by the government in multiple roles.

Martin Regg Cohn has been the Queen’s Park propagandist at the Toronto Star for long enough to have seen 3 annual auditor general reports critical of policies in the electricity sector. Of the 2011 Report he wrote:

Auditor’s aren’t infallible. This report is sloppy in its reliance on questionable foreign studies that claim every green job costs three or four jobs elsewhere when rates rise. These studies have long been discredited for their dubious methodologies and funding

Regg Cohn responded to the Auditor’s 2014 report by producing a distraction the morning of the report’s release.

Thanks to a whistleblower, we now have the secret details of how Ontarians are being hosed by The Beer Store…

This year Regg Cohn’s response to the 2015  AG report included the irrelevant but ominous:

… who watches the watchdog? Who audits the auditor to determine if Lysyk’s $16.5-million office budget delivers value for money?

$16.5 million is not a big worry among Ontario’s electricity consumers, who saw about $2 billion in charges added to their 2015 bills through the cost shifting of the global adjustment (the cost shifting is not discussed as it is complicated).

The second panel member was lawyer Lisa DeMarco. DeMarco’s attributes include:

• a 2014 appointment to the board of Ontario Power Generation,
• Special Counsel to Ministry of Energy on OEB Energy East Consultations and National Energy Board Hearing
• Member of Ontario government’s Climate Action Group

These attributes don’t necessitate her being evil, but they do make Paikin’s first questions to her ridiculous:

1. Do you think [Lysyk’s] criticisms are valid?
2. So she got it all right except for all the things she forgot?

DeMarco produced pop platitudes predictably.

The third panel member was Brady Yauch, and I’m a fan of his, so I won’t dwell beyond advising all to follow the Consumer Policy Institute blog.

I don’t recommend listening to the show, but I did want to address the most blatant falsehoods presented.

More on 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight and the Council of Canadians “100% Clean economy” by 2050 goal

I am going to be a wet blanket and explain, briefly, why Dr. Jacobson’s ideas, while visionary and incredibly appealing, are also simply not possible.Before I go much further I want to give a hat tip to physicist Dr. Jani-Petri Martikainen at the blog PassiiviIdentiteetti [I copy and pasted that name as I had no chance of spelling it correctly otherwise]. As readers of my blogs know I have already looked at Dr. Jacobson’s work in three previous blog postings:Deconstructing the 100% Fossil Fuel Free Wind, Water and Sunlight USA paper – Part I Why no nuclear power?,Deconstructing the 100% Fossil Fuel Free Wind, Water and Sunlight USA paper – Part II What about those pesky rare earth metals?, andDeconstructing the 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight scenarios – Part III Issues with energy storageIn those blog posts I looked at big picture features of the Jacobson model but I never dug down into the country-specific numbers. This week I was directed to a brilliant blog post by Dr. Martikainen Part 1: Why does Mark Jacobson hate Finland? that humorously skewered the work by looking at the assumptions for a single country (Finland) to show how many of the conclusions aren’t based on reasonable assumptions. This encouraged me to go to the supplementary information that came with the paper, in particular the spreadsheet used to do the calculations. Dr. Martikainen’s blog thus served as the inspiration for this blog post.

Source: More on 100% Wind, Water and Sunlight and the Council of Canadians “100% Clean economy” by 2050 goal

Curtailment of industrial wind turbine production in Ontario soars in 2015

A 2015 year-end review of my hourly estimates indicate the curtailment of output from industrial wind turbines (IWTs) soared in 2015. I show total curtailment exceeding 1 million megawatt-hours, which I assume Ontario ratepayers paid ~$127 million for regardless.

I show the potential supply curtailed rising to 10% from 6%.

 

The increase in curtailment in the Bruce region is galling as an examination of output from one IWT location there revealed that during the peak electricity demand of summer it was often a net consumer of grid power rather than a contributor to supply.

Note in the above graphic that only the Northwest breaks a trend that sees higher curtailment equate to lower market valuation of the output of the zones’ IWTs, with a doubling of curtailment in the Bruce region matched by a halving of market value of production.

Part 1: Why does Mark Jacobson hate Finland?

Source: Part 1: Why does Mark Jacobson hate Finland?