U. S. Energy Consumption

Estimated U. S. Energy Consumption in 2023: 93.6 Quads

Found this on Casey Handmer's Blog. Click to embiggenate. A quad is a unit of measurement equal to one quadrillion (10^15) British Thermal Units (BTUs). I suspect that Rejected Energy (the gray box in the upper right corner of the chart) is energy that is converted to heat and dissipated, and Energy Services (the block box in the lower right corner) is energy that was used for useful things. So roughly one third of the 93.6 quadrillion BTUs were used to do something useful, and the other two-thirds was was converted to waste heat. This is a bunch, but it is negligible compared to the zillion BTUs the sun delivers every day.

Kerosene Heater

Free heating fuel but it's illegal - £120 8kw Diesel parking heater review from VEVOR
Joshua De Lisle

Kerosene, diesel and jet fuel are all basically the same thing which is why airliners always smell vaguely like a truck stop. Burning anything indoors can easily lead to being dead, which is why we've got safety standards on fireplaces and furnaces and heaters. Most recently, carbon monoxide detectors are all the rage. I am confident that all the trouble comes from shoddy installation by people who are not even thinking of the dangers. This guy does a careful installation, I don't think he will have any trouble.

But the most interesting part is when he starts talking about energy prices in Britain and the impact it is going to have on people this winter, all thanks to that bloody war in Ukraine. Europe really is America's lapdog. Very sad.

In a political crisis, everyone is a potential enemy

I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts (Merv Griffin) (1950)
Padrobus

Lovely bunch of coconuts from The Tories were destined for civil war by John Oxley

Even in the most tense, fractious relationship there can be enormous capacity for calm: for letting things go, for tolerating each infraction for the greater good, for simply getting on with things. Eventually, though, the dam breaks into a cathartic spasm of anger and it all unravels. Buried resentments unearth themselves and heighten every complaint. Suddenly, everything is a battle, from the thing they did that one time to why they must stir their tea so BLOODY LOUDLY.

I've added Unherd to Feedly so I get several articles a day and many of them are about politics in the UK. I don't understand most of it. Prime Minister Liz Truss is no longer Prime Minister but I can't tell you why. UK politics seems to be snarled like a Gordian knot. You can only understand it if you have been well immersed in it for a good long while.

One of the big problems in the UK, or so I am led to believe is huge increase in the energy prices, notably gasoline and electricity. I don't understand this. I know energy prices have rising rapidly all over Europe, but the UK has their whole North Sea oil field which, as far as I know, is still delivering boatloads of oil. You would think with all that oil coming in the price of gasoline would not be skyrocketing. Obviously I'm missing something.

The problem with energy prices is being caused the USA's hybrid / proxy war against Russia. Apparently all of Western Europe are our vassals, so when Joe Biden says 'freeze and starve' they all huddle down and tell everyone they're only going to die a little bit. I'm sorry, even a little bit dead is dead. I hope I'm wrong.

Links

Hard to believe, I know, but stupid government energy policies are getting even stupider:

• Power Company Seizes Control of Thermostats in Colorado During Heatwave
• Filling Gasoline Cars Could Become Cheaper Than Charging EVs In The UK
• G7 unveils plan to enforce Russian oil price cap
• Nord Stream gas supply to EU stopped indefinitely – Russia's Gazprom

Meanwhile, Washington continues its descent into madness:

• Biden's hateful rhetoric against Americans presents the GOP with a sterling opportunity
• Washington refuses to grant visa to Russia’s interior minister to attend a UN summit

On the plus side, Greenpeace continues to tilt at windmills:

• Greenpeace drops boulders in UK sea against ‘destructive’ fishing

Industrial Green Energy

Aerial view of Enviva Biomass facility in Northampton County [Courtesy of Dogwood Alliance]

On one hand it seems like a good idea, on the other it just seems a little shady.

People are trying to be 'green', so they are burning wood pellets instead of coal, the idea being that growing trees suck as much CO2 out of the air as is produced when they are burned, so burning wood is considered carbon neutral. If you are one of Greta's acolytes, you might think that's a good thing.

Problem is the world burns about 8 billion tons of coal a year. I don't know if there are enough forests on the planet to compete with those kind of numbers. Whatever, demand has been growing and now there are a bunch of wood pellet factories operating in the southeast United States, cutting down forests, grinding the logs into wood pellets, and shipping them all over, including Europe.

Here's the shady part:

Biomass is contentious not just locally for the adverse impacts on those who live near wood pellet plants, but also globally for the unusual way its carbon emissions are tallied.

Under global accounting rules, emissions from burning wood are calculated where the trees are harvested, not where the material is burned.

That means countries can avoid counting emissions from their wood-fired plants while reporting the coal displaced as a greenhouse gas reduction. - Aljazerra

Wood pellets also cost more than coal:

Anthracite coal costs a lot less than wood pellets per unit of heat (BTU). A pound of Anthracite coal has almost twice the heat as a pound of wood pellets, therefore pellets have to be almost 1/2 the cost of Anthracite coal to be at the same cost per unit of heat. The cost of pellets would have to drop to $140/ton to be equal to the cost per unit of heat (BTU) of Anthracite coal that cost $250/ton. - Heet

Coal, if you buy it by the trainload, is much cheaper, like $40 per ton.

Winter is Coming

Winter is Coming

ZeroHedge has a good story about how stupid the bureaucrats in Europe are about energy supplies. This paragraph is prime:

And there you have it: after demonizing Russia for much of the past decade, with countless fake news reports out of the liberal media in the US seeking to portray Putin as the world's biggest mastermind and effectively in control of the Trump White House, while helping send western relations with Russia to fresh post-Cold War lows, the chicken are coming home to roost and they are finding the temperature to be rather frigid. 

Basically, Europe is very dependent of natural gas from Russia, but the bureaucrats have screwed things up and the price of that gas has gone through the roof. Prices might fall back a bit in a month or two, but you know politicians - never let a crisis go to waste. I'm sure they'll find some way to keep the crisis going.

This doesn't affect us too much, most natural gas is delivered by pipeline rather than ships. We don't have any trans-oceanic pipelines, but some natural gas is delivered by ships. The whole energy infrastructure is interconnected, so even if natural gas prices don't affect us directly, it's going to make everything from Europe more expensive.

Previous post on the subject.

The Green freeze

Winter is Coming

Stolen entire from The Green freeze by Richard Fernandez. First he posts a quote from Oil Price (warning: it's a browser eater):

Gas prices in Europe are breaking record after record. The UK is facing supply shortages reminiscent of the late 1970s winter of discontent. Chinese factories are shutting down because of power shortages, and the outlook is grim. In fact, it may be the first crisis of many.

When gas prices in Europe started rising faster and faster last month as the continent prepared for winter and found out it was not the only one, gas suddenly became important. That’s after being excluded from the list of low-carbon energy sources and after the EU’s green transition chief Frans Timmermans said gas had no place in the transition. It now appears Timmermans and his fellow Brussels bureaucrats could not have been more wrong. - Irina Slav on Oil Price

And then he comments:

What is politically significant about the global energy crisis is that it will disproportionately hurt the poor, who are already economically hit by the pandemic. Green policies are one step from looking like class warfare.

H. Wilson Sundt Generating Station

AREVA Solar Power System Adjunct to the Tucson Power Plant
I noticed this power plant shortly after I got here. It's a big industrial looking establishment, but it doesn't really look like a power plant - no giant smokestacks, no billowing clouds of steam. Looks like it might be a cement factory, but it's very clean looking, much cleaner than a cement factory ought to be. And there's this weird, long, silver rail propped up on stilts. Looks like one rail for a gantry crane, but like I said, there's only one. Iaman tells me it's some kind of solar dohickey, which is what the video is about.
    Our basic way of making electricity is to spin a generator using a steam turbine. You can make steam any number of ways; by burning fossil fuels, concentrating radioactive isotopes till they get hot, or use the sun like they are doing here. Disadvantage of using the sun is it only works during the daylight hours, but that's also the time you need power for your air conditioners, so perhaps here it works out.
   5 megawatts = 6,705 hp. I think they said that's enough for 600 homes. Utilities need to plan for worst case which means you've got everything turned on, and in a big house that could come to 10KW. This solar contraption cost about $8 million, which is kind of steep for that much power production, but then it doesn't use any fuel.

Toothpicks

I was looking at the chili factory in Fort Madison because I thought it belonged to Hormel, but it turns out that it belongs to Pinnacle Foods. But I'm looking at the map and on the other side of the main railroad line I see all these toothpick like things lying on the ground and I wonder what the devil could they be. Telephone poles, maybe? No! They are wind turbine blades. This here is the Siemens factory.

Power for you, Power for me

India. Construction of the Koodankulam Nuclear Power Plant.

I was just reading about 'load balancing' for electrical power utilities, and it occurred to me that we are overlooking something here. Seems to me that while everyone is concerned about the cost of power, residential users are more sensitive to power rates than businesses are. I'm not sure why this is. Perhaps because electrical power is such a small part of the budget for any kind of going concern, except perhaps for an aluminum foundry, but for a family living on wages, the power bill can be significant.
    I remember seeing an episode of Connections a while back where the hero was talking about how India was planning on building a giant new power plant to provide more power, but if they would have just replaced all their inefficient refrigerators with more efficient ones they could have cut their electrical consumption by a like amount. Supposedly replacing nine zillion refrigerators would have been cheaper than building a new power plant. They built the power plant anyway.
    Dustbury calculated that some personal computers cost as much to operate for a year as they cost to buy. I'm not sure I buy that, but doing the calculations to figure out if he is right or not would be a lot like work, and what I really want right now is a nap.
    I'm wondering if maybe we should have a sliding rate for electricity and water usage. Everyone gets their first kilowatt (or megawatt or whatever) for the same low rate. If you use more, the rate goes up. People who hold their consumption down to 'authorized' levels get off with a small bill. Wasteful sinners have to pay.

Inspired by Tam and The Silicon Greybeard