Renewables Just a Hood Ornament on Fossil Fuel Power System

Michigan Capitol Confidential ^ | 9/8/2015 | Jack Spencer

[MichCapCon]

General Electric Co. and the Environmental Protection Agency know better than most that renewable energy sources — which are the recipients of billions of dollars of taxpayer largesse in many forms — are in the end dependent on fossil fuels. In a document submitted to the EPA on June 25, 2012, GE urged the agency to keep this fossil fuel dependency in mind when considering emissions standards:

"However, if flexible generation assets, such as gas turbines, are not available, these renewable technologies will not be deployed. In other words, gas turbines are an essential component of renewable energy sources’ ability to penetrate the market.”

Nevertheless, the public remains mostly unaware of the degree to which the heavily subsidized or mandated renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, rely on fossil fuels. More than half the electric generation nominally credited to wind power is actually produced by fossil fuels, mostly natural gas. And on the rare occasions when renewable energy advocates are forced to admit the fossil fuel dependency, they refer to it as only “backing up” the renewable source.

GE, the huge multinational corporation, has been described as President Barack Obama’s “favorite corporation.” It has contributed heavily to Obama’s political campaigns. And like all other large corporations it is vulnerable to the administration’s regulatory arms. So it is not a company one would expect to state so unambiguously facts that the administration would prefer to downplay, such as descriptions of why renewables are dependent on fossil fuels.

Nevertheless, here’s another example from the GE document:

“Renewable power, especially from wind and solar, will be expected to fluctuate hourly and even minute-to-minute with changes in wind speed, cloud cover, and other environmental factors. With this generation mix, electric supply must be available to quickly compensate for the combined variability of demand and fluctuation in the renewable supply."

The GE document is titled: “Comments of the General Electric Company: Proposed standards of performance for greenhouse gas emissions for new stationary sources: Electric utility generating units.” The document includes a great deal of technical information and is available for public viewing. However, as is typical of such documents, it omits the percentage of electricity attributed to the “renewables” that is actually generated by the fossil fuel component. When this information is repeatedly denied to the public it is fair to ask: “What are they trying to hide?”

[HiTech RedNeck]

Why is it a greenhouse gas and not a green plants yummy gas?

[aquila48]

The greenhouse analogy is totally fallacious to start with. Greenhouses operate by preventing convective heat transfer. In an open atmosphere there is no such restriction.

[alloysteel]

Methane, the major component of natural gas, is one of the building blocks of our world, and the world supply of methane is of such stupendous proportions, it dwarfs almost every other energy source/storage medium.

Let’s see, there are pockets of methane gas trapped in layers of shale, which is now finally yielding up through the technology of fracking. Then there is biomass decomposition form thousands of landfills. Almost every oilfield has, in addition to the petroleum, additional vast quantities of methane, but much of this is simply burned off at the wells as it serves its function to force the petroleum up and out of the underground reservoirs. Then we move to the tundra in Arctic and Antarctic regions where a solid known as Methane Hydrate exists as a frozen ice-like mineral, which upon warming, goes through a phase change into water and methane gas, which has to be captured before it escapes to the atmosphere. Then, in every ocean depth of over about 500 meters or so, and where the sea water is at about 4 degrees Centigrade, methane forms an amorphous solid form of this Methane Hydrate, which being heavier than the saline water of the ocean, collects on the bottom either mixed in the sedimentary ooze, or as a distinct layer on the ocean floor. Until 10 years ago, hardly anyone had heard of methane hydrates. But now these chemical compounds in the sea floor are touted to be an energy source of the future. The amount of hydrate-bound methane far exceeds the reserves in conventional deposits.

Fossil fuel companies have not forgotten and they are extremely interested in finding an economical way to extract it from the sea floor. The reason is that the latest estimates put the amount of methane hydrate at 700,000 trillion cubic feet, or more energy than all oil and gas that has ever been discovered.