The Gronk Gallery – A new series

PhDs trying to get away with lifecycle analyses via interpretative dance

Working in energy and climate can be honestly depressing sometimes, opening up yet another article denying the role of anthropogenic climate change or watching the comments piling up on some social media troll’s outrageous claim.

So The Gronk Gallery is a new series attempting to call out the people and organisations spreading this muck. Partially, it’s cathartic to vent these frustrations. Partially, it’s important to keep calling attention to the strategies used to undermine the energy transition. We hope you enjoy!

If you’re new here, don’t forget to subscribe.

The Inaugural Gronks

We’re starting our series with a clanger from the Centre For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), a conservative American think tank whose entire purpose is to make us not feel so bad about the harm we do. ‘The entire discussion around humans wrecking the earth is just so negative, let’s talk about it in a more positive and constructive light’. And so they do, by ignoring, denying and explaining away the ills of society. Because what is social constructivism if not protecting vested interests and deliberately misleading people.

Unsurprisingly, the Board of Advisors is a veritable who’s of climate deniers, environmental kooks and a network of equally disreputable think tanks.¹ My favourites are:

• Willie Soon, PhD², the noted climate scientist aerospace engineer who’s climate denying research is funded by the world’s largest oil and gas companies.

• David Evans (PhD, of course), who alongside Joanna Nova (yes, that Jo Nova) runs the Australian Science Speak consultancy specialising in bad science and lies. Keep an eye on their Notch-Delay Solar Theory, which is already aging like milk.

• E. Calvin Beisner, PhD³ the founder of The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, an organisation which devoutly promotes the distinctly American evangelical ideal that Jesus says capitalism is great and the world is yours for unmitigated plundering.

Anyway, it’s pretty clear what kind of content we’re going to encounter published on a site like this.

Today, we’re blessed with two gronks for the price of one; Paul Driessen and David Wojick (both PhDs, obviously) are here to inform us that actually, offshore wind farms will increase our net carbon emissions. That they even care about carbon emissions at all is genuinely surprising, but let’s leave our doubt at the door shall we.

But how could this be so? Well, according to the esteemed doctors:

“Offshore wind facilities are enormously expensive and environmentally destructive.”

Oh! This is news to me. How could the environmental movement be so duped? Fortunately for all, our award-winning doctors were not contented to leave us with just an authoritative claim – they provide compelling evidence:

“This study finds that carbon dioxide reductions from local (state and national, as opposed to global) wind power generation are greatly overstated. For starters, any CO2 decrease will be small at best, largely because the intermittency of necessary wind speeds forces backup gas-fired power emissions to increase when the wind isn’t blowing. (Sufficient backup electricity from battery modules is also hugely expensive, heavily reliant on raw materials that are in short supply, and likely a decade or more away.)”

Struggling to keep up? Might be because you’re not a doctor.⁴ So, the wind farms themselves are ok (locally but not globally?) but it’s the reliance on ‘backup generation’ which is the problem.

Also, interesting observation that battery modules are hugely expensive and a decade or more away, someone should probably contact the owners of Australia’s 1.6 GW of commercial utility-scale batteries and let them know.

But the story gets worse! Oh dear.

Often overlooked are the other factors associated with wind energy that actually drive up emissions. For example, supply chain emissions from constructing offshore wind facilities to replace existing generation facilities will be very large. Supply chain emissions include those arising from all the steps required to create an offshore wind facility: mining and processing the necessary metals and minerals, manufacturing components, constructing turbines and substations on site, and operating, maintaining, replacing, and ultimately decommissioning and landfilling worn out, damaged and obsolete equipment. They also include the myriad transportation steps along the way, via ship or truck.

This is shocking. How could the authors of this study, or this study, or this study (and this one) not understand this?! Perhaps those other authors made the mistake of actually putting numbers to their analyses instead of just waving ‘supply chain’ and listing the constitute elements of a (generic) supply chain.

Moving on from the Wikipedia definition of supply chain, the article tackles jobs.

Finally, another justification for building wind farms is that they benefit local job creation. This too is by-and-large false. One reason is that such jobs are subsidized by local electric power ratepayers who will likely see their electricity prices soar, leading to layoffs in many businesses and the closing of businesses and entire industries – making the net benefit minimal, zero, or even negative. Even worse, much of the ratepayer and taxpayer money behind offshore wind facilities will go overseas, because that is where the supply chain exists. In short, the jobs created by wind energy should be viewed as costs, not benefits.

Actually, this one is kind of funny — any local jobs created by the construction of wind turbines will be offset by the job losses due to the apparent likely (imagined?) closure of business and entire industries.

If I could just conjure up various forward scenarios, I too could justify various statements of fact. Despite what you may think about my current athleticism, I will actually qualify for the Olympics in 2032, because my chosen sport (wild hog dressage) will be imminently selected as an Olympic sport and all current champions of the sport will have missed their connecting flights.

The full paper is here but I’ll save you the effort. It’s complete and utter dogshit. There are scant references backing up any of their assertions, and the entire thing is full of logical fallacies, misunderstandings and confusing word salads. It’s not even particularly well written. It’s just a fever dream of two old men wildly gesticulating in the direction of something they don’t understand and don’t like.

But I would like to pull out some choice quotes. Like this statement, in Section II (Roman numerals = smart):

Roughly speaking, wind output increases linearly from zero power below 10 mph, to full power at 30 mph.

Below is a diagram of a generalised wind turbine power curve, and you probably don’t need to have passed high school maths to know it’s not linear. I tried squinting, and I’m still hard pressed to say it’s linear, or even “roughly linear”. These gronks are either exceptionally liberal with the truth, or it’s time to book that cataract surgery.

Source

This bit on gas turbines is great:

Simple cycle (SC) plants employ generators driven by combustion turbines, similar to jet engines running on natural gas. They have overall efficiencies of 30-38% depending on their age, but they can be turned on and off as needed and reach full power capacity very quickly. That’s why they are often used as emergency power at hospitals and as backup for off-and-on wind and solar facilities.

…

Simple cycle plants are also used to meet “peak” needs, when electricity demand spikes…

[With regards to wind power] It also means simple cycle units are forced to operate in off-and-on mode: constantly ramping power output up and down, while maintaining standby mode in between, to be ready for the next drop in wind speed. This results in very low efficiency, much higher CO2 emissions per unit of electricity generated, and much lower capacity factors for gas power plants that would have very high capacity factors if they were permitted to be operated as designed and intended. Using peakers year-round is very inefficient.

The increase in emissions, the authors inform us, comes because wind farms have low capacity factors (~30%), which means that for every installed MW, more gas will need to be used (?). These Simple Cycle⁵ gas turbines, which are very good at providing peaking generation, are forced to operate in peaking mode (?) to accommodate the intermittency of wind. This results in peaking plant, behaving like peakers, which has higher emissions per MWh generated (?).

The mental gymnastics of trying to convince readers that open cycle turbines designed to be operated as peaking plant, being operated as peaking plant is a bad thing, is subsequently followed up by a section on combined cycle plants, where they come to the conclusion that actually the emissions would be lower if instead of building wind you just let combined cycle plants run continuously.

Other than ignoring the laws of physics, this is the first life cycle analysis I’ve seen completed via interpretive dance. Life cycle analyses typically use numbers, but what would I know. I don’t have a PhD.

In section III (Roman numerals = distinguished) they finally introduce some numbers, albeit extreeeemely back of the envelope ones, and undertake an analysis of the carbon dioxide emissions involved in building an offshore wind turbine. Ignoring the veracity of their numbers, because you can almost see the imprint on the Applebee’s napkin, this is water-is-wet stuff. Yes, building offshore wind turbines generates emissions; and the building of offshore wind is emissions-intensive, especially relative to their onshore cousins of say solar.

But the point of a lifecycle assessment is, and I cannot stress this enough, to assess the emissions output over the entire lifecycle.

No one is looking at Thor Björnsson’s 10,000 calories per day diet followed by most of the day in the gym and accusing him of being a fat bastard.⁶

Section V introduces one of my favourite new phrases “industrializing the ocean” which is funny given oil rigs and trawl net fishing have had the run of wind-free oceans for a good few decades, but I digress.

This section has two things worthy of note:

1. A really good example of sealioning, where the gronks just ask a string of questions, without addressing them or providing any kind of meaningful answers, despite these being fairly well worn topics; and

2. Apparently the lack of cited sources in the article might just be down to their sheer digital incompetence? They cite a source by literally proposing you go to Google Scholar and select one of the top options. Millennials get a bad rap for over-reliance on Wikipedia, but this is phenomenal stuff. I would love to see the empty Endnote file for their PhD dissertations.

Anyway. There is nothing new or insightful presented in this word salad, just lots of hand waving and ‘oooh what ifs’ without any actual numbers, sources or analysis. This white paper reads about the same as a conversation with your weird uncle at Christmas who continually references vague conspiracy theories about immigrants before abruptly changing topics to complain about how beer cans are now all 355 mL.

And for that, these gentlemen get the dishonour of being inducted into our Gronk Gallery. For those of you vying for a future appearance:

And don’t worry about any numbers.

Oh, almost forgot. No, offshore (or onshore, for that matter) wind farms will not increase carbon emissions.

---

Things Happen

• COP28 is happening in the UAE right now, and things are going about as well as expected.

• Pour one out for Stop These Things (2012-2023), a poorly-formatted Wordpress blog authored by angry anonymous climate deniers. STOP THE PRESS! STT is back online and alive as ever. It was just a temporary blip. Thank god, because what a tragedy it would be to lose such an Alexandrian Library of garbage.

• The Brookfield buy-out of Origin Energy has failed. It’s likely not the end of the story, but it’s a tricky road ahead for the giant utility to path its way to a green future. If it does actually go down that path…

1. The more I look into these organisations, the more I realise that what appears to be a cacophony of pro-fossil fuel voices is really just a house of mirrors with a small handful of trolls amplifying their shitty opinions via syndication on poorly formatted blogs.

2. They’re really big on calling out PhDs, as if that infers a level of intellectual sophistication beyond reproach. No one with a PhD (or a Nobel Prize) could possibly have devoted their lives to horrendously toxic viewpoints.

3. I have a working theory that people who go by their first initial are universally assholes; old mate E. Calvin Beisner follows in the footsteps of archetypes like J. Edgar Hoover, L. Ron Hubbard and F. Lee Bailey.

4. Unfortunately, neither of the Currently Speaking unpaid interns (Alex and Declan) are doctors either. We understand if this means you must unsubscribe.

5. Open Cycle is the more typical Australian terminology.

6. Given he’s 6’9”, weighs nearly 200kg and competes in the ‘titanweight’ boxing category, I would very strongly suggest you don’t.