Weekly clippings #24 - Holy grail, LCOE not useful, green coal

This week in the science category we have social science research about attitudes towards climate change and the remarkable thing is that religiosity is the dominant determinant of attitude. Hmm, it sounds like people who believe in things science can never support often apply the same to their attitude about climate change. Go figure. 

In the Investment/Economics category, we have a focus on the misuse of Levelized Cost Of Electricity (LCOE) to represent the cost of adding wind and solar electrical generation to the electrical grid. Such misuse is widespread, yet investment managers are fiduciaries and expected to do proper due diligence in their security analysis. If they can so often be ignorant of a concept like LCOE, you wonder what other errors they have accepted in their thinking.

In the Absurdity category we have the novel idea of "green coal" and a Canadian political leader backing down on carbon taxes after insisting they were necessary to save the world.

The ‘Holy Grail’ of social predictors of public attitudes toward climate change  "As my book The Grip of Culture sets out, there is an underlying theory explaining international public attitudes to climate change, which leads to an outstanding social predictor at the national level. In other words, there is a Holy Grail: a single social variable that across nations predicts a high proportion of the public attitudes to climate change (33–87% depending upon the attitude), and across a wide range of attitudes too; it is national religiosity."

Grossly underestimating wind’s intermittency and its impact on Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE)  To decrease the power shortcoming to only 5% requires a whopping 7 TWh in battery storage. That’s 700x the size of today’s battery system and increases wind power LCOE 30x from about $40/MWh to 1,200/MWh.

There are other ways to ensure reliable power at low cost, but cheap & reliable wind power is an oxymoron. 

When Is LCOE Not Useful? An electricity system operator trying to match generation and consumption in every moment cannot rely on them always being available at times of high demand, a consideration that is not included in the LCOE metric.

Why LCOE is not a good metric for renewables  “...its main weakness, its inability to include additional costs that the power system would have to incur.”

Is exponential growth of solar PV the obvious conclusion?  In India for example, the LCOE of new solar PV is projected to drop below that of coal-fired power plants by 2025. But the story is different using VALCOE. As the share of solar PV surpasses 10% in 2030, the value of daytime production drops and the value of flexibility increases. After 2030, even with further cost reductions, solar PV becomes less competitive.

Levelized Cost Of Electricity: Renewable Energy's Ticking Time Bomb? The LCOE is like a bad line of code in a software program used to develop other software programs. It has dangerously skewed investors’ understanding of the economics of generating electricity from renewable energy resources.

Comparing the costs of intermittent and dispatchable electricity generating technologies  Levelized cost comparisons are a misleading metric for comparing intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies because they fail to take into account differences in the production profiles of intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies and the associated large variations in the market value of the electricity they supply.

Indonesia Finds a Way to Claim Coal is 'Green' If implemented, all coal-fired plants that supply electricity to industries making sustainable products could receive green financing.

Blink Canada’s Prime Minister Justin Trudeau chose the one-year anniversary of his MPs rejecting a Conservative motion to remove the “carbon tax” on home heating oil … to announce that he was suspending it for three years, at least in Atlantic Canada. See, it’s an essential tool for saving the world from an urgent crisis but then again I see those sinking poll numbers down east and, well, a leader has to set priorities.