Andrew Kenny: The renewable energy illusion

Key topicsIRP2024 backs solar and wind despite failures and soaring global costsLack of grid inertia from renewables blamed for Spain's massive blackoutNuclear and gas offer proven, stable power - ignored by green ideologues.Sign up for your early morning brew of the BizNews Insider to keep you up to speed with the content that matters. The newsletter will land in your inbox at 5:30am weekdays. Register here.Support South Africa’s bastion of independent journalism, offering balanced insights on investments, business, and the political economy, by joining BizNews Premium. Register here.If you prefer WhatsApp for updates, sign up to the BizNews channel here..By Andrew Kenny*.On Wednesday 16 April, Spain’s electricity grid for the first time ran entirely on “renewable energy” (wind, solar and hydro). Five days later, solar power in Spain set a new record, providing 61.5% of total grid electricity. On Monday 28 April, at 12h35 (the middle of the day), the whole of Spain was plunged into darkness..On Wednesday 7 May, there was an energy webinar on South Africa’s provisional Integrated Resources Plan 2024 (IRP2024). Like most of these energy conferences, where “energy experts” speak, the pretence was to analyse energy policy objectively but actually it was just a propaganda exercise for green ideologues promoting solar and wind and condemning nuclear and gas. As usual, it dealt mainly with the virtual world of computer models and ignored the real world of facts, experience and data. I read the transcripts of the webinar. I couldn’t find a single reference to the Spanish blackout, which had happened nine days before.Wind and solar for grid electricity are one of the biggest scams of our age, causing enormous harm to our economies, our environment, our electricity supply and, most of all, to our poor people. The only beneficiaries are the rich renewable energy companies who make the government force us to pay a fortune for unreliable, horribly expensive electricity, and the green ideologues who just love to see thousands of gigantic wind turbines and solar arrays blighting our countryside. Solar and wind for the grid have been an expensive disaster in every country that has tried them.The electricity blackout over the whole of Spain lasted from midday on 28 April until the following morning. Despite Eskom’s appalling record of failures and neglect over the last thirty years, nothing like it has ever happened in South Africa. The whole of South Africa has never been plunged into darkness. Why did it happen in Spain and not in South Africa? Simple. Spain has a lot of solar and wind on the grid and South Africa doesn’t have much..Inertia.Let me try to explain the key factor here: electrical inertia. Inertia or momentum is the property of moving objects to keep moving even when there is nothing driving them. It was discovered by Galileo over 400 years ago. Without inertia, your motorcar engine would run very jerkily, only moving when a cylinder fired. But with inertia – rotational inertia in this case – a great mass of rotating machinery in the engine keeps it running smoothly. I have got a model steam engine with one cylinder and a relatively big flywheel. With the flywheel, it runs quite smoothly.Out of curiosity, I disconnected the flywheel: the engine not only wouldn’t run smoothly; it wouldn’t run at all. With coal, gas and nuclear power stations, there is a large amount of electrical inertia, a large mass of rotating machinery (turbines and generators) that keep the electricity output running steadily, smoothing any ups and downs, any bumps and dips, there might be in the electrical load or the electrical power, keeping the grid stable. With solar photovoltaic (PV, solar panels) and wind there is no inertia at all. Both produce DC current, which is changed to AC through inverters. No rotating momentum at all.Grid electricity must maintain strict control of frequency and voltage. The frequency is measured in revolutions per second or Hertz (Hz). Grid frequency in South Africa is 50 Hz. If the frequency drops much below 49.5 Hz, electrical machinery, such as motors, might be seriously damaged or even wrecked. The primary responsibility of every power station, except for PV and wind stations (which have no responsibility), is to protect themselves. Suppose the load on the grid becomes too much for all the operating stations to meet at the time: the units on the stations will then produce more power to bring the frequency back to 50 Hz. If they are all running at the maximum and cannot produce more power, one of them, wanting to prevent damage to itself, will shut down. But that will slow down the frequency of the rest. Another will shut down, and then another, in a quick cascade, until every station is down and there is a total electricity blackout. To prevent this happening, Eskom has load-shedding, which it implements very successfully. With solar PV and wind, they cannot provide more power, and so they can do nothing to correct the low frequency.In Spain, there must have been some sort of disruption on the grid on 28 April. Such is to be expected in all electricity grids. Grids such as ours have plenty of inertia to smooth over such disruptions so that the grid controller can bring them under control. Spain, because of the large amount of solar and wind, did not have enough inertia to smooth over the disruption and allow the grid to be controlled and so the grid collapsed, causing a blackout lasting over 12 hours. Engineers had warned of this many times in the past. Their warnings were ignored..Devastating.The damage to humans and machines through the Spanish blackout must have been devastating. Lives will have been lost, industries will have been shut down, businesses will have closed, some forever. I worked at an integrated pulp and paper mill in Richards Bay. It would have taken the mill about a week to start up after such a blackout. The Hillside Aluminium Smelter there, costing billions, would have been a total write-off..Read more:.Transforming SA’s energy future: Why we should say goodbye to big power stations.The IRP, produced by the Department of Mineral and Energy Resources, is a vague plan showing the sort of energy technologies South Africa should have for future electricity supply. It is heavily reliant on computer models, and these models are developed by green ideologues determined to replace coal, gas and nuclear with solar and wind. In the past they have proved to be totally wrong. They reckoned that solar and wind would produce the least cost option when in reality they always produce the greatest cost option, as we can see without exception in every country where they have been tried. This is mainly because solar PV and wind, because they are intermittent, can never produce reliable, dispatchable power (power when you want it) for the grid, but only unreliable power – junk power – and seldom when you want it most. To convert the useless junk coming of solar panels or wind turbines to useful power requires back-up, spinning reserve, storage compensation for lack of inertia and other measures, which are extremely expensive. The greens just want you to look at the cost of the junk, not at the cost of making it useful.Germany, once one of the world’s most successful industrial countries, used to get her cheapest, most reliable electricity from nuclear. Then in 2011 the chancellor, bowing to the greens, decided to replace nuclear with wind and solar. Hundreds of billions of Euros were spent on tens of thousands of gigantic wind turbines and huge solar arrays. The result is that Germany now has among the highest electricity prices in Europe, causing energy poverty, shutting down industries, threatening even Volkswagen and crippling the German economy.The UK is not far behind. Her insane dash for net zero (no emissions of the wonderful, safe, clean, life-giving CO2) by spending a fortune on wind and solar power is resulting in electricity prices soaring into the stratosphere. Industries are shutting down. The whole steel-making industry is threatened. The economy is failing. In August 2019 there was a massive blackout affecting most of England, almost certainly caused by wind energy..Coal-fired electricity.In Australia, which mainly had coal-fired electricity, the price of electricity was coming down and down. Then they changed the electricity regime and tried to move away from coal and to wind and solar. Again, electricity prices soared. Worst of all was South Australia, where wind caused record high prices and where in September 2016 there was a blackout of almost the whole state, which would not have occurred when coal was providing most of its electricity.And so on around the world. In the USA, the state with the highest proportion of solar and wind is California, which has the highest electricity prices in the country. Nowhere in the world has solar and wind ever caused electricity prices to drop or the grid to become more stable.The latest IRP is not as wretched as previous ones and has some degree of reality. This reality infuriates the greens who want to live in dreamland. They say that nuclear and gas have been “forced in”. Actually it is only solar and wind that have been forced in. Nuclear and gas have had many successes in providing cheap, reliable electricity. Solar and wind have had none. France had a very successful nuclear programme, providing among the cheapest electricity in Europe before she lost her way a bit – although now seems to be recovering. South Korea, Russia, China, Finland and the UAE have successful nuclear power. Japan did too before the Fukushima accident. The accident harmed nobody with the radiation release and was easily preventable.Nonetheless, the Japanese authorities shut down other perfectly safe nuclear plants, quite unnecessarily. Vietnam, having found solar to be a failure, is now planning 4,000 MW (twice Koeberg’s capacity) of nuclear by about 2035. We should follow the Vietnamese example; it will take about ten years from the decision to build nuclear to get nuclear plants on stream, which is good timing since by then many of our coal stations will be at the end of life. In South Africa, Koeberg provided clean, safe, economical electricity for over 40 years; REIPPPP, our renewable energy programme, has provided only very expensive and unreliable electricity..Money and ideology.There are two reasons why some people back solar and wind for the grid: money and ideology. Solar and wind have made fortunes for rich people by a simple scam. The rich solar and wind companies bully governments into signing very expensive Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs). The governments then compel power companies such as Eskom to buy unwanted, unreliable, extremely expensive electricity, whenever the company is able to supply it! In the market place, the supplier serves the customer; in the company economy of solar and wind, the customer serves the supplier. (Imagine such contracts in water supply: in a drought, when you are thirsty and your tanks are empty, the water company cannot supply you; but in a flood, when your tanks are overflowing and you are nearly drowning, the company forces you to buy more water at an extremely high price.) Of course the banks love these PPAs. If a solar or wind company shows them the contract, the banks trip over themselves in their eagerness to lend them money. This is what happened with our REIPPPP.The second reason is ideology – a sort of religion. The greens, like communists, want to dominate everyone but, unlike the communists, also want to dominate the environment and conquer nature. They want to see us all bowing to thousands of gargantuan wind turbines and colossal solar arrays, disrupting the landscape. They believe in coercion. You must all do what we greens tell you to do! The money men owning the solar and wind companies treat the greens as useful idiots. They finance their campaigns against nuclear power and pay for their court cases against governments who threaten to reduce the subsidies to renewable companies.When I was doing some research for this article, I noticed what I have seen before: that all the mass media, all the university departments studying energy, and some engineering magazines such as Engineering News present only the green anti-nuclear, pro-solar and wind point of view. Wikipedia is heavily biased in the same direction. Google searches send you first to the green sites. No wonder the energy supply of so much of the Western world is in such a mess.It’s high time the West returned to the rationality, to the proper science and engineering, that made it the most successful civilisation in history..*Andrew Kenny is a writer, an engineer and a classical liberal..This article was first published by Daily Friend and is republished with permission

Andrew Kenny: The renewable energy illusion

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