It's Too Bad Journalists Don't Read Editorials in Scientific Journals: Units and Energy Literacy.

[NNadir]

The paper I'll discuss in this post is an editorial in a scientific journal: Energy Literacy Begins with Units That Make Sense: The Daily Energy Unit D (Bruce Logan, Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett. 2019, 6, 12, 686-687)

Dr. Logan is the editor of Environ. Sci. Technol. Lett. It is the rapid communications sister journal of Environ. Sci. Tech. I read both regularly.

Recently on this website, someone posted an excerpt of this bit of journalistic nonsense marketing bullshit and unsurprisingly it immediately generated 25 recommends: Tesla's Virtual Power Plant rescues grid after coal peaker fails, and it's only 2% finished.

The qualifications of the author of this piece of benighted marketing is named Simon Alvarez, who proudly - if you click on the link for his name - has this to say about his qualifications to write this bit of "news:"

Simon is a reporter with a passion for electric cars and clean energy. Fascinated by the world envisioned by Elon Musk, he hopes to make it to Mars (at least as a tourist) someday.

As a scientist, all I can say is, "Don't worry about it, Simon. You are already on Mars."

It's pretty funny that I came across this editorial on the same day I came across Simon's Elon Musk worship piece.

Here is how Simon, who is no worse than nearly all of the journalists writing about the grand solar/battery "miracle:"

Once complete, Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant in South Australia will deliver 250MW of solar energy and store 650 MWh of backup energy for the region. That’s notably larger than the Hornsdale Power Reserve, which is already changing South Australia’s energy landscape with its 100MW/129MWh capacity. In a way, Tesla’s Virtual Power Plant may prove to be a dark horse for the company’s Energy Business, which is unfortunately underestimated most of the time. Couple this with the 50% expansion of the Hornsdale Power Reserve, and Tesla Energy might very well be poised to surprise in the coming quarters.

According to Simon, we're "only" 2% along the way for the huckster Musk's "Virtual Powerplant." There's that magic word so popular in this kind of narcoleptic rhetoric that is destroying the world with complacency, "percent."

While the illiterate use of the unit MW is used to describe the solar peak power capacity, Simon is slightly better than most journalists inasmuch as he (in the same sentence) also includes a unit of energy, the MWh, which is equal to 3.6 billion joules.

The big lie we tell ourselves with huge enthusiasm even as the atmosphere collapses in a festival of ignorance is that a 250 MW solar plant is the equivalent of a 250 MW gas or coal or nuclear plant. However, it is rare for a solar plant to ever reach its peak capacity, and overall, even in deserts, the capacity utilization of a solar plant is typically 15% or less. If a gas or coal plant shuts down because a solar plant is producing a significant portion of its rated peak capacity for an hour, it has to burn extra gas or coal to restart, because, as anyone with a cooled down tea kettle knows, if it's cooled, the water does not boil instantaneously when you turn the gas or electric burner back on. A "250 MW" solar plant is thus the equivalent of a 37.5 MW plant that can operate continuously. Moreover, since the solar plant's output is in no way connected with demand, it's not clear that the energy provided by it will be useful.

Simon doesn't tell us how big the tripped coal plant was, but let's say it was a small coal plant, rated at 500 MW. Two percent of 650 is 13. Thirteen MWh means that the Tesla future electronic waste could cover the output of the coal plant (if it's 500 MW) for 13/500 = 0.026 hours = 1.56 minutes = 93 seconds.

Really? It "saved" Queensland Simon?

Because we want to believe this sort of wishful thinking by Simon who wants to go to Mars someday on Elon Musk's
"vision," we are well past the 400 ppm milestone for the accumulations of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere. We passed it (as measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory) permanently in the week ending November 8th, 2015. No one alive now will ever see a reading below 400 ppm again.

Smoke another joint Elon, and tell us all about your solar powered car and your rockets to Mars.

History will not forgive us, nor should it.

The serious paper written not by a little kid with science fiction dreams, but by a real scientist (Bruce Logan) referenced above at the outset of this post is open sourced, and anyone can read it. I will excerpt it briefly and post a table from it in any case; an interested party who actually is invested in reality can read it in full.

It is amazing how much we learn to perceive things through units that become common in our lives. On a cool autumn morning, you look at the thermostat in the United States and from experience you know how to choose the perfect coat for 52 °F. However, if you hear the temperature in Gallargues-le- Montueux, France, reached 46 °C (this past July), you probably have to Google a temperature conversion to change it to Fahrenheit (115 °F) to understand it. When you go to work and drive on a road posted at 35 mph, you know what that speed feels like, but what if you were in Europe and it was posted in kph? Or what if a European tells you the mileage for her car in liters per 100 km, and you struggle to relate that to numbers you know based on miles per gallon. We develop a sense of things based on experience with certain units, and when those are different, you lose your perception of the quantity.

Most of us do not have a basic sense of the amount of energy we consume for different activities in our lives. One reason is that we find it difficult to compare things that have different units, even if they describe the same property (such as temperature), and units of energy are particularly challenging! We often make comparisons based on something we can relate to, such as saying how many football fields we could cover or how many Olympic size pools we could fill. It is more difficult to relate energy units within one context, such as energy for our apartment or house, to other things in our life, such as fuel for our car.

Dr. Logan does not, unfortunately suggest the general public the opportunity to use the SI unit for energy, which is the joule. It is easily transferred to units of large scale with the prefixes Kilo-, Mega-, Giga-, Terra-... ...Peta-, Exa- Zeta-...

He suggests a unit D for day, which is 2000 calories, the dietary food requirement of a "normal" human being in a single day, which is 2.3 kWh or 8.28 million joules. I think this unnecessary. The Joule is the best energy unit there is.

The world in 2018 passed an energy consumption of 600 exajoules, an all time record. Exa- means 600 with 18 zeros after it. Solar energy, after the expenditure of trillions of dollars on it, doesn't, combined with wind energy, produce 13 exajoules. In the percent language so popular in the lies the public tells itself, led by scientifically illiterate journalists, all this money and all this hype - half a century of it - produces less than 2% of world energy demand, and, in percentage terms, the fraction provided by dangerous fossil fuels is increasing, not decreasing.

In units of energy kWh, Dr. Logan provides the following table, later translating it in a subsequent table into his tortured unit "D." This is the "typical" amount of energy required or produced by each device for a typical day:



He writes below the table:

Note that these units are in energy use per day (kWh/d), which has units of power, and a gallon of gasoline is included as a reference point. Some of these units makes sense to compare, but for others, such comparisons are awkward. For example, the 120 hp engine from your car translates to an engine rated at 2160 kWh, but you would not (I hope) operate your car all day at its maximum power. These units of kWh also span different time frames (you do not eat continuously all day), and some units lack a more personal connection, such as food units in kWh.

The unit of power here MWh/day, is easily converted to a unit of energy by multiplying it by 1 day. Thus it is easily understood as energy. Note that it would take 33 solar cells to produce a single gallon of gasoline, 90 to produce the electricity demand (for all purposes, including labor) as much electricity as a person in this country consumes in a day. The second law of thermodynamics which is almost never discussed in the garbage people like Simon produce, limits how much of the stored energy in a battery, a piece of future electronic waste that will never be sustainable on a scale of hundreds of exajoules, can be recovered.

As long as we cheer for crap like this, we will be doing nothing useful to address the great crime we are perpetrating on all future generations, the permanent destruction of the planetary atmosphere.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[hunter]

1. I propose an energy unit called the Elon.

According to the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station the heating value of dry bullshit is about 8500 Btu a pound.

If we know Elon Musk's weight we can convert this to Kilowatt hours, Joules, or "Days."

Elon's weight in bullshit = (180lb) X (8500 Btu/lb) X (1055 Joules/Btu) = 1614150000 Joules = 448 kilowatt hours = 195 "Days"

The heating value of wet bullshit is considerably less.

[NNadir]

2. I like it. n/t.