The Problem with Wind Energy

"Thar she blows!"
--Captain Ahab, Moby Dick

The wind power industry is in trouble. For illustration, look no further than the UK. A few days ago, low winds brought the country’s output to less than 1% of total generation. Right now, the UK grid regulator is preparing to start throwing cash at wind turbine operators because the next named storm is coming and it will bring strong winds — likely much stronger than is healthy for grid balance.

Meanwhile, in Germany, total wind capacity additions for last year hit 14 GW or 2,400 turbines but at the same time the country is facing a future of coal for longer, to balance the grid. Reports are using the word “may” but we all know they actually mean “will” because you can’t have an unbalanced grid.

--Irina Slav, "Wind, Wind" 

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One of the many things I learned this past year while researching and writing about energy and the grid has to do with that last highlighted phrase, "because you can't have an unbalanced grid." What does this phrase mean? 

The way the energy grid works is that supply and demand must match. Most people don't understand this. And it is one of the reasons energy is becoming more expensive. When the wind fails to blow and the sun hides its face, the power providers must ramp up the backup generators, which is not free. The cost of electricity would be lower if the natural gas or coal plants were able to run as normal, but this Rube Goldberg complexity is altered by the inconsistent variances in wind and solar. 

The three cornerstones of energy policy are Affordability, Reliability and Safety. The notion that wind and sun are free is a myth. The fears regarding the safety of nuclear power have been blown out of proportion and as nearly all of us have experienced, irrational fears are a challenge to control when we lack facts or understanding. 

Here's a comment on the "Wind, Wind" piece by Irina Slav 

The issue from the very beginning of the push for large-scale wind power was whether wind would be reliable enough to provide continuous input, bearing in mind the ABC of intermittent energy.

A. Supply to the grid must continuously match demand.

B. The continuity of wind and solar input is disrupted by nights with little or no wind.

C. There is no grid-scale storage at present using pumped hydro or batteries or any other known technology.

Therefore intermittent inputs from the sun and wind have no place on the grid.

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Much more can always be said, but this (above) is the basic point for today.

Unintended Consequences: Was 1919 the Worst Year in History?

FLASHBACK FRIDAY

Could 1919 have been the worst year in history? Many people were thinking, "Peace at last!" no doubt. The Great War was over. But with the signing of the Treaty of Versailles events were set in motion that would give Adolph Hitler a receptive hearing and fuel to propel his mad, devastating career.

Certainly John Maynard Keynes foresaw this. In his Economic Consequences of the Peace Keynes severely criticized the Versailles Treaty for its vindictiveness, especially as relates to the impossibly high reparations levied against the Germans, among other things. Keynes anticipated the ruin of Europe that would devolve from the economic hardships that were being set in motion.

The war reduced the German economy to shambles and a British enforced blockade made it impossible for Germany to feed its own people. With imports squelched, tens of thousands of Germans were starving, and more every year. When Berlin appealed for 2.5 million tons of food to feed her people, they were denied and the death tolls continued to rise straight through into the post-war peace. The cruelty of this hardship alone was such that British soldiers in Germany after the war pleaded for assistance from Britain. Even when the U.S. Congress approved 100 million dollars in food aid in 1919, it never reached the hungry and starving.

The great flu pandemic of 1918-19 undoubtedly distracted Americans from being overly concerned about Germany's woes. The global communications infrastructure was not in place as it is today. There were no network news broadcasts, though I am sure some of this reached the paper. No Yahoo Buzz or Twitter to follow trending topics such as Germany starvation or Armenian genocide.

Wait, it would appear I have my dates wrong. The Armenian genocide which resulted in 1.5 million deaths at the hands of Ottoman Turks took place from 1915-1918, though slaughter of Armenians did continue into the 1920's. The rest of the world had been distracted at this time by its own Great War. Could this slaughter have occurred had it been during another period of time? Or were the Ottoman's just being opportunists?

On the home front, in 1919 Prohibition kicked in with the 18th Amendment, thus giving birth to the gangsterism of the bootleggers. Since the rich all got theirs without consequence, the common people became still more cynical about their government. More unintended consequences.

Even Einstein's proof of the Theory of Relativity that year had unintended consequences as the notion of relativity was eventually mis-applied, with corrosive effect, into the realm of morals and ethics.

Maybe it wasn't the worst year in history, but it has a lot of reason to get nominated to this ignominious honor. In a few months we'll celebrate its hundredth anniversary.

What year would you call history's worst? And, of course, why?

Catching Up with Artist Carla Hamilton

This month Carla Hamilton's work has been on display at The Red Mug in Superior. Her next show will be at the Duluth Art Institute in February. It seemed like a good time to catch up and see what else is happening in her world.

Sunday afternoon we met for a bit at Beaners in West Duluth. She began with a re-cap of her summer. "I was in Detroit this summer and fell in love with Detroit. There was art everywhere. We did AirBnB.... Madison, Ann Arbor, Detroit and the U.P. ... It was beautiful everywhere," she said, describing some of what she experienced including some spectacular murals. From here I got a preview of her upcoming DAI show.

"My next show is at the DAI in February, a collection of episodes that started when I was profiled last spring by the Duluth police," Hamilton explained. "I got stopped for 'walking while black' on Superior Street. This show reflects my feelings about what happened."

The aim of this show is not to bash the police, she said. "My goal of this show is not to bash the police. My goal is to create uncomfortable conversations and create dialogue. We can't change things if we don't talk about it." True dialogue, however, makes us uncomfortable.

What I found especially intriguing is that Carla did not just accept what happened. She took action to make this into a learning opportunity for the police. "I have since had mediation and good open dialogue. I felt heard. Most of the police involved were open to critique."

Two of the piece that are currently on display at her Red Mug exhibition reflect the new direction she is taking with her art. Carla Hamilton had been living in the Washing Studios initially when she returned to the U.S. from Germany, but now lives in a house in the East Hillside area. "I have a house now but don't have the space (for making art). I'm working in my garage." When I ask what she's currently working on, she replies, "I currently have some old maps. I'm doing a lot of prep and organizing things. I have 600 slides from one source and am using these for ideas. I don't know what I'm going to do yet but am letting them percolate.

"Making frames and stretching canvas... Getting bloody knuckles." Laughs, shows me her hands.

Her theme at this time is, Hate Equals Fear, Fear Equals Hate.

"You don't have to do anything wrong to get arrested," she said. "I get stereotyped all the time."

"How are you addressing this in your art?" I ask.

"I'm hoping to create a dialogue. Maybe it will offend you or maybe not, but I'm going to put it on the table."

She's hoping to throw a little humor into it, which will "hopefully make it easier to approach or discuss it. Topics included prohibition, opioids, the stereotypes we have with each other. These assumptions we have... disadvantaged or successful.... assumptions about people that are all wrong."

"How did living in Germany change how you see America?" I ask.

"That's a loaded question. It made me see that a lot of Americans live in a bubble," Hamilton replied. "A lot of Americans feel really self-righteous and entitled."

Her upcoming show came about like this. "I approached Annie Dugan when the Gorilla Girls were here. I had a piece in the Great Hall and we talked... and I wrote a small proposal and now we're here."

The racism she has experienced is not readily observed. "I grew up in Wrenshall and we had to be friends or you didn't have friends. The racism here resulted in getting beat up... I would get spit on with parents around. Even as bad as I was treated it was nothing compared to what I saw with Native Americans and how they were treated." Can we fix it?

"We can start to. You can be yourself and work on yourself and hopefully that will work out. I try to model it for my son, and am willing to say, 'That was wrong.' It's hard to be hated." She followed this with stories told about being typecast, about stereotyping... "Everyone wants to put you in a drawer. I don't like being defined this way."

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I, for one, am looking forward to Carla Hamilton's upcoming show at the Duluth Art Institute. If you are here in the Twin Ports, Carla's work current work is on display at Red Mug in Superior. I would encourage you to take a lunch there sometime this week and enjoy the great salads, sandwiches, wraps and soups. Special thanks to Suzanne for her support of the arts.

Meantime, art goes on all around you. Engage it.

German Connections, Labyrinths and Muscular Prose

Every once in a while certain words seem to become trendy. You don't notice them at all and then suddenly they begin to appear everywhere. About 25 years ago it seemed like the phrase hunker down was being used everywhere, from camping to politics. The word of the day right now seems to be muscular. Last weekend I noticed the word in an essay about Walt Whitman's poetry. Nearly every day this week I heard something be referenced as muscular. "The U.S. needs to make a muscular response to the situation in Iraq," was on the news this morning.

If you hear someone use the word muscular today, let me know how it was used.

On this day in 1877, German artist Kurt Schwitters was born. Next Thursday Germany will face off with the U.S. in the World Cup. My story "Two Acts That Changed the World" is about a German scientist during WW2 who discovers the solution to the atomic bomb but feels compelled to thwart Hitler while conveying the solution to American scientists pursuing the same objective. The story, which originally appeared on my website in the mid-nineties, is the lead story in my first volume of stories Unremembered Histories.

I began building my first website in 1994-95 as a way to learn about the World Wide Web and also as a means for sharing some of my creating work, similar motives for the development of this blog. I usually learn new skills by reading books, buying a few for my personal library, and then applying through doing. One of the books I purchased was titled How to Learn HTML in Two Weeks. I am not a great programmer, but the rudimentary HTML that I learned at that time has gotten me out of many a jam, including here on Blogger.

When Adobe Pagemill was introduced in the mid-nineties, they were in such a rush to get it to market that they forgot to include certain important information inthe User Guide. The day I got it, I went online to a PageMill user group to find out this crucial information. The author of the instructions was in the group! She said that they would add that info immediately.

My website included articles, art and short stories, plus a Labyrinth which I created as a tribute to Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine short story writer perpetually fascinated by labyrinths. I am certain he would have loved the labyrinthine hyper-linked connectedness of the web, pages with links to other pages with links to other pages, much like a house with infinite rooms. Don't see a room to your liking? You simply create a new room, fill it with objects and hyperlink it to the rest of this cyber-construct, an amazing, ever-expanding virtual universe.

This weekend, more than 8,000 marathoners will be in town for Grandma's Marathon. If you like crowds and activity, there will be plenty here in the Northland. For what it's worth, John Bushey of Highway 61 Revisited will be all set up at Valencia's on London Road, playing Dylan music for the runners as they pass the half way point, reminding all those out-of-towners that one of Rock's great singer-songwriters was born here up on the hillside. Valencia's is across the street from the Duluth Armory where young Robert Zimmerman at age 17 had come to hear Buddy Holly and the Crickets and when Buddy Holly looked at him "he felt a spark tingle to his bones."

Meantime, life goes on all around you. Embrace it.

Peace In Our Time?

I remember many years ago reading a detailed article by futurist Alvin Toffler about the future of war. (Wired magazine, I believe, in the early to mid nineties.) In the article he made a case for the decentralization of war into world hotspots. Instead of a global war involving all countries lining up in two groups like the Axis and Allies, there would be the kind of world we have come to see today, with military action in Afghanistan, Somalia, Bosnia, Iraq, etc.

No one has perfect prescience when it comes to things future. In 1963 Decca Records, for example, failed to sign up the Beatles because their internal futurist believed "the guitar is on the way out." In this instance, it appears that Mr. Toffler not only made a good case for his views, history seems to be confirming them. The Mumbai terror assault is only the latest episode in the string.

When events like Mumbai occur, there is no way to predict what will happen next. First, we do not even have all the facts. Who were these people who did this? What was their ultimate objective? Were there really only ten terrorists in this special op? India and Pakistan have been on the threshold of war for years. And the Israel component in this equation is a similar unknown quantity.

Yesterday I addressed the issue of torture. Noting that many reports on the web seemed from one source, I wasn't sure how far to go with regard to pushing this notion. Today, the Jerusalem Post had a story suggesting that the hostages may not have been tortured after all. They were simply so shot full of holes that doctors were appalled by the destruction of human life. Even this matter is as yet an uncertainty.

Some are concerned about Indo-Pakistan relations because the future between these armed powers is potentially nuclear. Both have nuclear weapons; Pakistan 60-80 missiles and India an arsenal of bombs. Re-arrange the word NUCLEAR and it spells UNCLEAR.

The following is an example of the unreliability of prognostication. This is from a blogsite called Understanding Each Other, Diversity & Dissent The writer is a Pakistani named Agha, identified here as pacocalvary.

Having said that I must add one incident that my father narrated when he visited West Germany in 1988. He asked the hosts, " Can the Germanies unite?" "Not in our lifetime," came the reply.... and it happened in 1991. So prophecy in history is not easy. Sometimes all that we assess proves wrong. So let's hope for the best. ~pavocalvary

If you are seriously interested in following the analysis of these troubling events, there are plenty of voices out there in blogs across the cyber-universe striving to help bring clarity. Here's an interesting one: In From the Cold. And here's another: Tikun Olam

And if your only serious interest is pie recipes, Google will help you find those as well.

Report from Germany

We hear all the time how good life is in this country, but many Americans have nothing to benchmark it against. It is usually our only experience.

Frequently, we hear about the low cost of health care in Sweden of France and the damage being done to our uninsured and underinsured here. Some people get incensed as if it's un-American to say some things might be better elsewhere. Naturally, we don't always know whose reports are reliable or what things are being reported with an agenda.

For this reason I thought my friend's observations below were insightful and worth sharing. He had lived in Germany for a number of years. Came to the States in 2007 and was surprised how bad our roads were as well as our houses. I asked him in an email to elaborate on some of the differences between life in these United States and life in Germany. I share this exchange below.

Dear S.
Thanks again for visiting Friday eve. I found your comments on the inferior quality of American roads and run-down-ness here to be interesting. I was wondering if you could go into more detail on that sometime. What was it like in Germany? Susie asked me a few questions that I failed to ask and didn't know re: the politics, the education system etc.
The very best to you and yours,
ed

Hi Ed and Susie,

This is a long-delayed response to your email, and I’ll try to answer some of the questions.

I think Germany has three things going for it. First, it is basically a homogenous culture, where most of the people think and act pretty much the same. So they can pass laws that actually represent the will of the people, and they are all willing to obey them. Second, they are Germans, and that means that their culture values things like quality, longevity, and promptness. So things tend to get done right the first time, and they are not afraid to pay a bit extra to get the best. Third, they are letting the U.S. spend its resources to be the leader of the developed world. They give a token amount to various good causes, but mostly they use their economic growth to benefit themselves. We spend an inordinate amount outside of our own country, particularly at this time.

If we had these three things going for us, we would be the leader of the world in deed, not just in word. However, our culture is hardly homogenous, and therefore we can hardly pass any laws that the majority of the people respect. We value what is inexpensive and transitory, and most everything around us shows it – houses, cars, clothing, body fitness, entertainment. And of course, we are spending billions in foreign countries that other countries are not.

The German school system separates children into two tracks at about 4th grade – one track into the trades and one track into the professions. I am not sure I like that, but one benefit of it is that the universities are not cluttered with people who have no business being there. And the blue collar workers are paid enough and given enough respect that they are happy with their lot and not always jealous of the "rich."

The politics of Germany is basically all the planks of the Democratic party platform taken for granted. There are no arguments about things like abortion, the environment, gay rights, etc. The society accepts all these "hot button" issues as already settled and not worth discussing. Our culture is still wrestling with these ethical issues, and there are many more Bible-believing people here than there.

Even the Bible-believing Christians in Germany are more liberal socially than we are here though. I might see that as a sign of maturity that comes from having a culture with ancient roots, or it might be a sign of a post-Christian society that is only going downhill morally. Both might be right.

Take care and God bless you and yours.

S.

P.S. I looked at your blog and it is very interesting. I added it to my "favorites" list and will explore it further!