OT Marine cloud brightening

Lomborg is famously crooked. That doesn't mean that the approach couldn't w ork, but if he likes it you need to look for lots of reliable supporting ev idence, and look at all of it very carefully, because his mode of operation is to produce claims that look plausible until you look at them very caref ully.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Why not, just increase snow cover?

Cheers

The Royal Society paper the article is based on is here:

(free access)

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

I linked this article to Blair Trewin, a friend of mine through orienteering. Blair is Australia's leading climatologist (was head of the World Meteorological Survey for a couple of years recently). His first comment was as follows:

"The principles appear sound (although the uncertainties on the modelling outcomes would be large - clouds are hard to model), but the practicalities are formidable - you'd have to be continuously seeding all relevant clouds (probably an area of millions, if not tens of millions, of square kilometres). I couldn't find any background on the costings but suspect that $10 billion might be out by at least an order of magnitude, perhaps much more."

CH

work, but if he likes it you need to look for lots of reliable supporting evidence, and look at all of it very carefully, because his mode of operati on is to produce claims that look plausible until you look at them very car efully.

Right as I said read the first comment too. GH

Thanks, GH

Right, I don't know either. I just thought it was interesting. There are a lot uncertainties... but some sort of study would seem like money well spent. There was data on airplane contrails generated when all the planes were banned from the skies for three days after the 9/11 attacks. GH

It's good to hear frank acknowledgement that we still don't have a good handle on clouds. If clouds behave just slightly differently, the energy balance predictions are utterly undone.

I've been a huge solar fan since I checked a book out of the Santa Monica public library at age seven. I wanted to build the solar-powered model airplane, the solar cooker, and some other projects too. But it's not a solution without storage.

I saw a great graphic of California's sources of electricity. They've gotten up to solar meeting about 50% of demand during the daytime.

But just seeing the limited time-availability in the graphic hits you in the gut -- we all know it, but seeing it drives the point home.

So I expanded the solar production to assume 100% of peak demand, to explore what that would look like, and the ASCII-ized result looks about like this:

(view in Courier font) If California's Solar Generation Doubled

|----. . . . . . . . . . . . .----|

That data did not suggest anything, not even cooling fyi. Cheered

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:> On 10/10/19 11:09 am, George Herold wrote:> > This is interesting,> > ht tps://

arming-for-less-than-10busd-with> > I linked this article to Blair Trewin, a friend of mine through > orienteering. Blair is Australia's leading clima tologist (was head of > the World Meteorological Survey for a couple of yea rs recently). His > first comment was as follows:> > "The principles appear sound (although the uncertainties on the > modelling outcomes would be lar ge - clouds are hard to model), but the > practicalities are formidable - y ou'd have to be continuously seeding > all relevant clouds (probably an are a of millions, if not tens of > millions, of square kilometres). I couldn't find any background on the > costings but suspect that $10 billion might b e out by at least an order > of magnitude, perhaps much more."> > CHRight, I don't know either. I just thought it was interesting. There are a lot u ncertainties... but some sort of study would seem like money well spent. T here was data on airplane contrails generated when all the planes were bann ed from the skies for three days afterthe 9/11 attacks. GH

Hmm OK, this says there were larger daily extremes with no contrails, but doesn't report a net effect one way or 'tother.

surface-temperatures

GH

But there's absolutely no evidence that they ever have.

Water condenses out of rising - thus cooling - air masses, and evaporates a gain when the air come back down again, so cloud cover sticks pretty close to 50% over the oceans. Air travelling across continents has the chance to lose water as train, and can't get it back until it gets to the next ocean.

The denialist enthusiasm for imagining a significant effect from change in cloud cover is just one of the bits of wishful thinking they go in for. Tha t kind of thinking does suite the Koch brothers and people who get money fr om them seem to feel some kind of compulsion to spread this - and other - s illy idea.

Electric cars come with the storage built in.

Musk sold a bunch of his car batteries to South Australia (mainly for the p ublicity it generated) and it turned out to be great investment. Vanadium f low cells seem to be a better solution for grid storage batteries, but they aren't yet being produced in the same kind of volume as batteries for elec tric cars, and denialist shills like James Arthur want this to persist for a long as possible.

If you ignore storage and wind power you can generate all kinds of alarmist graphs.

James Arthur manages to remain ignorant of the of obvious advantage of larg e scale thermal solar generation - using the thermal mass of a lot of molte n salt to store energy for overnight use.

Of course the Ivanpah pilot plant didn't bother to use molten salt as a hea t transfer medium so doesn't demonstrate that. That must have taken a lot o f serious influence from the fossil carbon extraction industry.

Solar Two had had thermal storage back in 1995, and Solar Tres - now being built in Spain - will have enough to make it a 24-hour generator (at least in summer), but Ivanpah managed to miss out.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

Here's a new approach to measuring atmospheric water content, just appeared in the (Australian) National Measurement Laboratory twitter feed:

The nice thing is that the incident signal is available anywhere you care to measure it.

Clifford Heath.

Your drawing is incorrect, the consumption doesn't remain constant during the night.

That graph doesn't show the daily consumption variation. However, assuming that the graph shows all electricity sources and since production must match consumption, one could draw a graph on top of the brown area. This curve would show a peak in the late evening and a minimum early in the morning.

Now, just redraw the picture with orange solar power on top (and now the total consumption curve just above it) and the mismatch does not look that bad. The worst mismatch is that the solar production drops before the evening demand peak.

Apparently most solar plants are aimed towards the South, thus production drops quickly in the afternoon. With more panels aimed towards SE and SW, the power output time would be extended, with a reduction in noon production.

The problem with concentrated solar plant (CSP) is that those do not work well at the extremes (early morning and late evening) simply due to geometry.

CSP also needs some time to build up the steam pressure in the morning and hence needs natural gas in the morning. Using PV panels aimed SE would allow power production earlier in the morning.

On Friday, October 11, 2019 at 3:42:40 PM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wr ote:

r

Ivanpah is oddly unique in needing this. Most concentrated solar plants use molten salts - at about 550C - as the heat transfer mechanism, and it isn' t difficult to have big, well-insulated tanks of the stuff that can store e nough energy overnight to keep the output running steadily for more than 24 hours.

The catch is that the power now costs more than you have to pay for solar c ell output (when it's available).

There are lots of options for energy storage. A recent MIT study said the we needed to get down to a capital cost of about $20 per kWhr for a complet ely renewable power system, but even 5% fast-start back-up capacity allowed you to get away with today's $150 per kWhr solutions.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That was hugely expensive at $2.2 billion for only about 400 MW peak, thus more than $5 / W. Since the capacity is only about 25 %, for such plants (on different continents) would be required a constant 400 MW, so in reality the cost would be more than $20 / W.

Compare that to recent nuclear projects. To produce the same as a

1600 MWe nuclear plant, thus four sites (at different continents) with four CSP plants on each (to reach 1600 MWpeak), thus the total cost would be $35 billion. Even the worst nuclear price estimates sounds cheap :-).

Chump change. Hell, the Demonrat's "health care" plan ("Medicare for no one") is four orders of magnitude more expensive than that.

On Sunday, October 13, 2019 at 2:03:30 AM UTC+11, snipped-for-privacy@downunder.com wr ote:

heat transfer medium so doesn't demonstrate that. That must have taken a lo t of serious influence from the fossil carbon extraction industry.

ng built in Spain - will have enough to make it a 24-hour generator (at lea st in summer), but Ivanpah managed to miss out.

And solar cell farms are even cheaper. They need storage. At the moment the grid battery market is pretty much in the start-up phase, but once solar c ells get their next factor of ten scale-up in volume, halving the unit pric e again, the demand for grid storage is going to increase dramatically, jus tifying the same kind of scale-up in production volume.

This isn't guaranteed to halve the unit price - vanadium flow cells

do depend on vanadium. There's quite a bit around, but not a lot of it is b eing dug up at the moment

It's a transition metal, a good deal less abundant even titanium, but there 's still quite a bit around, and it may take a while to get mining and extr action going in volume.

There are lots of other battery chemistries. Presumably we'll find one that can be produced cheaply, in volume.

And there's always the point that a big gas-fired backup generator doesn't cost a lot to keep ready to go, even if it runs only 5% of the time.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

And the US health care system is half as much again more expensive per head than anybody else's, and delivers poorer outcomes.

That has to be a much more extravagant waste of money. Obamacare did halve the number of Americans who didn't have health insurance - from about 16% to about 8%.

Every other advanced industrial country has some form of universal health, so complaining about the cost of the American system is the kind of idiocy that only someone as brain-damaged as krw could go in for.

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Bill Sloman, Sydney

That is exactly my point, you can get raw PV panels for $0.25/W and I do not expect that a fixed mount and mains inverter would drive the price above $0,5/W, this Ivanpah CSP is just 10 times more expensive at $5/W.

I am not so sure about that.

First of all, there is a big difference between day and night consumption. It is perfectly OK to install solar panels with a peak production as large as the day/night difference. Using 1.5 to 2 times installed capacity so that some panels can be installed pointing to E, SE, S, SW and W.

At low latitudes, in which the sun rises and sets rapidly, the sun is high enough to avoid most air mass loss (AM) the nearly the full power output can be obtained from about 1 hour after sunrise to one hour before sunset. Using tariffs will push some of the late evening consumption to earlier sunny hours.

If significant amount of hydro is available, close the turbines during the day and run them only during the night. This moves upwards the sensible maximum installed solar capacity. Only if too much solar power is installed, then the question of storage becomes significant.

One way to extend the limit of how much unreliable renewable generation (wind/solar) is sensible to install is to use continent wide HVDC links to cross weather systems and also time zones (both consumption as well as solar generation).

One must be a really desperate alarmist if one intends to live with

100 % from (unreliable) renewable and only then are large scale battery storage needed.