Electric car registrations: a 2% increase of something tiny is still tiny

We have a new Flemish Minister of Energy since two days. As a result of the local elections of October last year, the previous Minister became mayor of his home town Ostend. That is a bit sad, he had the habit of enthusiastically sprouting meaningless claims about energy that were very easily debunked. I wrote several posts about such claims, so I will certainly miss his mindless claims.

The new Minister, Lydia Peeters, took the oath of office the day before yesterday. The first tweet on her twitter account came only a day later and is a retweet of a tweet written by her spokeswoman (translated from Dutch):

Nice increase becomes visible! @Lydiapeeters: “The switch to electric vehicles keeps going on” @BelgaPolitics Read it here:

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Yet another meaningless metric: contribution of solar and wind to total load

“A new record for solar and wind”. This is stated in a tweet by our Flemish Minister of Energy:

The hashtag “stroomversnelling” (the Dutch word for “rapids” and used in expressions it roughly means “speeding up” or “moving faster”) and he often uses it in relation to his policies. So, do I understand it correctly that he connects the current policies are the reason that this record was broken?

That “new record” was solar and wind producing 45% of the Belgian electricity load on Saturday July 28 at 15:00. My first reaction was: “So what?”. It probably would boil down to a few minutes in the weekend. The Minister has a history of unnuanced and misleading tweets, so I thought it would be a good idea to check what that record is all about. I turns out that this record was even less significant than I expected.

Oreskes 2004 and Peiser

As mentioned in previous post on the consensus article in skepticalscience, there was an entry explaining the Oreskes 2004 paper. In the article, it was presented as “Oreskes 2004 and Peiser”. Which was an odd thing. Peiser didn’t write the paper together with Oreskes (otherwise it would be “Oreskes and Peiser, 2004). At the contrary, Peiser wrote a critique on the conclusion of the paper (that not a single paper rejected the consensus position). The author of this article seems to have a lot of confidence also mentioning the critique together with the Oreskes paper.

At that time, I did not know much about the Peiser critique and initially had to rely on the explanation provided by the author of the skepticalscience article. This is how the critique is presented in the article:

Oreskes 2004 and Peiser

A survey of all peer-reviewed abstracts on the subject ‘global climate change’ published between 1993 and 2003 shows that not a single paper rejected the consensus position that global warming is man caused (Oreskes 2004). 75% of the papers agreed with the consensus position while 25% made no comment either way (focused on methods or paleoclimate analysis).

Benny Peiser, a climate contrarian, repeated Oreskes’ survey and claimed to have found 34 peer reviewed studies rejecting the consensus. However, an inspection of each of the 34 studies reveals most of them don’t reject the consensus at all. The remaining articles in Peiser’s list are editorials or letters, not peer-reviewed studies. Peiser has since retracted his criticism of Oreskes survey:

“Only [a] few abstracts explicitly reject or doubt the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) consensus which is why I have publicly withdrawn this point of my critique. [snip] I do not think anyone is questioning that we are in a period of global warming. Neither do I doubt that the overwhelming majority of climatologists is agreed that the current warming period is mostly due to human impact.”

A [snip] in a skepticalscience article? I need to know more about that! What exactly got snipped in that quote from Peiser?

Decreasing demand for natural gas power thanks to wind and solar?

At the beginning of this month, I found an article in a Flemish newspaper that seemed to be inspired by the gas deficit alarm from the UK National Grid. It was titled “Renewable energy gets us though the winter cold”. This is how the story goes: the very cold February of this year did not result in record natural gas consumption. We used less natural gas in February 2018 than six years ago in February 2012. The demand for natural gas from households and industry stayed more or less the same. The difference was the demand for natural gas for electricity production, which was lower in 2018 than back in 2012.

Conclusion of the article: there was no record natural gas consumption in February because renewable energy grew in the last six years and this increased share lowered the demand for natural gas power. Because of this, we currently don’t need as much natural gas than we would only six years ago and there was no shortage in our country.

Renewables covered 100% of energy consumption in Germany (for about 45 minutes)

A curious infographic from the twitter timeline of the Flemish greens (translated from Dutch):

Historic

For the first time, renewable energy delivered 100% of electricity consumption in Germany

Ook ons land is klaar voor 100 % schone energie. Ook jij kan het verschil maken. Teken & deel onze oproep en stap o… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…

—
Groen (@groen) January 08, 2018

That struck me by surprise. I was quite busy in the last few days with another project, so I clearly missed the news.

My first reaction was: 100% delivered by renewables, sure, but how many minutes? The second question: when did this happen? There was no date on that infographic, so it was not very clear when this actually happened. I guess it was somewhat before the tweet was posted (January 8), so I went to the Agorameter website and it showed by default the last 3 days (from January 6 until 9). I removed the conventional sources from the graph and to my surprise, I saw no period in which the production of renewable energy equaled consumption.

Not even close.

Who cares about a lack of PV in December when there is plenty of wind and more sun to come in the coming months?

On the last day of 2017, our Minister of Energy (who is fiercely promoting solar energy) posted a tweet to thank all people who installed solar panel on their during 2017. He got a prompt reaction from someone asking how much electricity those solar panels produced in December. The Minister of Energy replied with this remarkable tweet:

@EtienneBoghmans December 2017 was inderdaad een historische zonarme maand. Maar er was wel wind en in de komende m… twitter.com/i/web/status/9…

—
Bart Tommelein (@Barttommelein) January 01, 2018

Translated from Dutch:

December 2017 was indeed historically low on sunshine. But there was wind and the sun will compensate plentifully in the coming months #HappyNewYear

Basically, solar energy production sucked really bad in the previous month, but, hey, there was more wind and there is more solar energy to come in the coming months anyway.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I would glad to laugh if it was a joke, but his guy is our Minister of Energy and I am afraid that he was serious about it.

China and India: the new “climate leaders”?

It was with quite some surprise that I read this tweet written by Joeri Thijs (spokesman of Greenpeace Belgium) (translated from Dutch):

India and China are gradually becoming the new climate leaders. Europe urgently needs to step it up a notch.

I was surprised reading such a statement, especially related to China which has by far the highest emissions. Also, their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDC) basically said (from memory) that it would peak emissions only by 2030 and afterwards work on energy intensity (which doesn’t necessarily mean a decrease in emissions). So how could he consider both countries to be climate leaders in that regard? Especially compared to the EU, which is actually doing something in order to cut emissions.

On the one hand, the comparison seemed ridiculous, but on the other hand, I think I could somehow understand what he means. As seen in some previous posts (like this one), almost half of new solar PV in 2016 was built in China and India was also in the top 5. So if one only focuses on this specific aspect, then it is very tempting to claim that China and India are world leaders in this area.

That is of course only one side of the story and the other side doesn’t look very favorable.