All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

[Meandering]

Dear SILSO user,

Mon, Jun 22, 2015 11:42 am

Over the past 4 years a community effort has been carried out to revise entirely the historical Sunspot Number series. A good overview of the analyses and identified corrections is provided in the recent review paper:
Clette, F., Svalgaard, L., Vaquero, J.M., Cliver, E. W.,“Revisiting the Sunspot Number. A 400-Year Perspective on the Solar Cycle”, Space Science Reviews, Volume 186, Issue 1-4, pp. 35-103.

Now that the new data series has been finalized, we are about to replace the original version of our sunspot data
by an entirely new data set on July 1st. On this occasion, we decided to simultaneously introduce changes in several conventions in the data themselves and also in the distributed data files.

There are so many diverse changes that we cannot guarantee that everything will work perfectly on the first try. Our team is too small to make full prior simulations. Therefore, multiple careful consistency checks will be done on July 1st itself, which will slow down the processing. So, please anticipate some delays compared to an ordinary month.

The most prominent change in the Sunspot Number will be the choice of a new reference observer, A.Wolfer (pilot observer from 1876 to 1928) instead of R. Wolf himself. This means dropping the conventional 0.6 Zürich scale factor, thus raising the scale of the entire Sunspot Number time series to the level of modern sunspot counts. This major scale change may thus strongly affect some user applications. Be prepared!

Regarding data files, various files will be replaced by new ones, with new more homogeneous names and new internal column formats. The included information will sometimes change: combining data (e.g. hemispheric numbers together with total numbers), separating data (monthly smoothed numbers in a separate file) or adding new values that were not provided previously (standard errors).

All those changes will be explained in the information accompanying our data, on the web site of the World Data Center SILSO. While the primary files will all be replaced in early July, some other changes will still occur in the next two or three months. During this transitory phase, we thus invite you to visit the SILSO Web site to keep track of the changes, as we are preparing this major transition now scheduled for July 1st, 2015.

An important remark for our faithful observers: the current transition in the sunspot number processing does not change anything to the way you enter your data. So, just proceed as usual on July 1st. Your past k personal
coefficients will simply be recomputed relative to the new re-calibrated sunspot number. We are working on this right now. By the way, the new processing software will open the way towards a better determination of the evolution of each station and so, a better feedback to our observers will become possible in the future.

In the coming weeks, please visit our SILSO Web site:
http://www.sidc.be/silso

____________________

Dr.Laure Lefevre
Royal Observatory of Belgium WDC-SILSO

http://www.sidc.be/silso

UPDATE: A number of commenters got the wrong idea about this article, conflating the process with the sort of questionable adjustment techniques

this adjustment corrects a clear mistake, and therefore should be welcomed. – Anthony Watts

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/06/...-numbers-are-about-to-be-given-an-adjustment/

Good thing those silo guys aren't appraisers.
mistakes are not allowed.

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[Randolph Kinney]

Interesting that a climate denier comes to defend a correction that was needed, where were the global warming alarmist?

 

[Randolph Kinney]

How Utilities Are Profiting From Solar Energy
Goodbye rooftop solar

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2015/10/24/how-utilities-are-profiting-from-solar-energy.aspx

Utilities are buying up interest in or outright ownership of utility scale solar farms. They sell green energy at a markup, of course. Since California has now mandated 50% of electricity be the "green" type, utilities see the long-term cash flows and low risk as a model that fits well within a utility.

The suckers that bought rooftop solar panels will see a rapid depreciation of their investment as the "savings" evaporate from net metering.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Goodbye rooftop solar, hello solar farm direct to you

SALT LAKE CITY — The largest electric utility is launching a new sustainable energy program aimed at meeting the growing demand for alternative sources of power.

Rocky Mountain Power announced Friday that the Utah Public Service Commission has approved a pilot program that allows customers to sign up to receive some or all of their electricity from solar power. The utility had sought approval from the state in June to launch the new subscriber solar program, which would give customers the choice to get their electricity from a planned solar generation facility to be located in central or southern Utah, said Gary Hoogeveen, senior vice president and chief commercial officer for Rocky Mountain Power.

The utility is in final negotiations with a developer to build a 20-megawatt solar farm, which is scheduled to be completed and operational by late 2016, Hoogeveen said.

Participating customers will be able to subscribe in 200-kilowatt hour blocks up to their total usage. The facility will provide a total of 20,000 blocks. If demand exceeds the initial production estimates, then another phase could be developed, he said.

“The average home uses 750-800 kilowatts hours (monthly), so if they bought four blocks, they could essentially use solar power for their entire home,” he said.

Residential customers will receive a “locked-in” generation rate of 7.7 cents per kilowatt hour, plus about 4 cents for transmission and distribution, totaling 11.7 cents per kilowatt hour, Hoogeveen noted. A typical Utah customer would pay an additional $1.26 each month on average for one solar block. Individual costs or savings would vary depending on customer electricity usage.

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/...r-power-from-Rocky-Mountain-Power.html?pg=all

The green energy model eliminates individual residential rooftop solar panels because of economy of scale related to cost. No need to make a giant investment up front or 15 year or longer payback.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Ouch! My value of solar power generated took a big hit

Going solar has never been easier or more practical in South Carolina — unless you’re a Santee Cooper customer.

Last week, the Santee Cooper board approved a solar incentives package that offers some slight improvements over an initial proposal released over the summer. It’s still not enough.

Under the original package, customers with home solar panel installations would earn 4 cents per kilowatt hour for the electricity that they generate. The new plan would increase that to 7 cents, at least for the first 500 customers to take advantage of the deal.

But residential electricity rates for Santee Cooper run about 11 cents per kilowatt hour, meaning that solar customers will be credited at less than retail value for the power they generate.

South Carolina Electric and Gas Co. and Duke Energy both offer solar customers a one-to-one buyback program with additional incentives for residential customers. In other words, they earn retail value plus a few cents for each kilowatt hour of power they generate.

Worse still, Santee Cooper charges solar customers significant monthly fees that it does not charge regular customers. Solar users must pay an $8 per month net metering charge in addition to a standby charge of between $4.20 and $4.70 for each kilowatt of system capacity.

Assuming the average home solar panel system has a 5 kilowatt capacity, solar customers could end up paying more than $30 per month just to generate their own electricity.

Santee Cooper explained that the monthly fees are to cover the fixed cost of providing power to solar customers.

Solar panels aren’t generally able to supply 100 percent of a home’s power usage, so customers using solar power still have to be hooked up to the electrical grid. Maintaining that connection costs Santee Cooper, and the utility argues that the extra fees for solar customers are needed in order to avoid shifting the cost to other customers.

http://www.postandcourier.com/article/20151024/PC1002/151029593

Eventually, each user of the grid must cover the utility's cost plus allowed profit. People who get an advantage now for selling excess solar power back to the utility will get charged more to make all customers even. Now that is fair.

 

[Meandering]

The suckers that bought rooftop solar panels will see a rapid depreciation of their investment as the "savings" evaporate from net metering.

Been saying that from day 1. Once the mandate is met, that's the end of homeowner subsidizes. Homeowners are just the worm on the hook waiting for the big fish.

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[Meandering]

Assuming the average home solar panel system has a 5 kilowatt capacity, solar customers could end up paying more than $30 per month just to generate their own electricity.



Break out that DCF. We'll fix this!

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[Meandering]

Solar Panels & Their Toxic Emissions

Last year Robert Lundahl and I co-wrote an article about a California PV solar factory that is not disposing of their solar panels once their lifespan expires. We could not name the company, as our source still works there, but they use a known carcinogenic called gallium arsenide. This is not believed to be a problem as long as the panels are intact. However, if they end up in a landfill, the panels will be broken and the toxins can leech into the soil. Environment California recently directed me to a study that puts this problem in context and suggests areas where the industry can improve.

Amy Galland’s “Clean and Green” was inspired by companies that are not complying with environmental health and safety codes, but she found PV manufacturers actually do more than what is required.

Some beat standards set for emissions, have excellent procedural methods, and reduce waste by recycling materials. Suntech’s panels, for example, are 100% recyclable because 85% of the components are recycled materials. Both Abound Solar and First Solar reclaim and recycle their semiconductor materials at end of life. SolarWorld established a joint venture, SolarCycle, that deals with recycled solar materials.

Another article I’m researching deals with a company whose panels are exceeding their expected performance. A recent Kyocera news release cites tests proving that 10-year-old modules still retain 95% of their original capacity. An installation made 30 years still has 90.4% capacity! As a result of these tests, Kyocera now guarantees that their solar panels will retain 80% capacity for 25 years.

Galland devoted a large portion of her study to correctly handling solar panels, from the manufacturing stage to final disposal. She suggested the ends of some panels should be encapsulated, for added protection and longer life.

One of the carcinogenic’s she identified was cadmium (CdTe). More than 63% of the CdTe found in our bodies is attributed to the fertilizers used for plants — never-the-less, it is also in solar panels. Solar companies need to protect their workers during the manufacturing stage and used panels need to be handled properly. Galland notes that First Solar recycles up to 95% of the CdTe from used panels.

She did not go into detail about gallium arsenide other than to say it is only used in small quantities on satellites and concentrated solar power systems due to the expense.

Though Galland’s study provides an excellent overview of industry practises and suggestions as to how they could improve, it does not resolve the problem of ensuring that solar panels are treated properly after their lifespan expires. Some companies do not appear to be complying with environmental health and safety codes. The toxins from some solar panels are leeching into the soil at landfills. What are we going to do about this?

Galland does provide a perspective of this problem compared with fossil industries:

In examining the challenges facing the solar industry it is important to keep in perspective the relative human and environmental impacts of different types of electricity generation. Even though there are toxic compounds used in the manufacturing of most solar panels, the generation of electricity from solar energy is significantly safer to the environment and workers than production of electricity from coal, natural gas, and nuclear fission. For example, once a solar panel is installed, it generates electricity with zero emissions whereas in 2010, coal-fired power plants in the United States emitted 1,999.6 million tons of carbon dioxide and there were 13,200 deaths in the U.S. directly attributable to particulates from coal-fired power plants.

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/05/01/solar-panels-toxic-emissions/


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[Meandering]

Solar Geoengineering: Weighing
Costs of Blocking the Sun’s Rays

In 1991, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines erupted in one of the largest volcanic blasts of the 20th century. It spat up to 20 million tons of sulfur into the upper atmosphere, shielding the earth from the sun’s rays and causing global temperatures to drop by nearly half a degree Celsius in a single year. That’s more than half of the amount the planet has warmed due to climate change in 130 years.

Now some scientists are thinking about replicating Mount Pinatubo’s dramatic cooling power by intentionally spewing sulfates into the atmosphere to counteract global warming. Studies have shown that such a strategy would be powerful, feasible, fast-acting, and cheap, capable in principle of reversing all of the expected worst-case warming over the next century or longer, all the while increasing plant productivity. Harvard University physicist David Keith, one of the world’s most vocal advocates of serious research into such a scheme, calls it "a cheap tool that could green the world." In the face of anticipated rapid climate change, Keith contends that the smart move is to intensively study both the positive and negative effects of using a small fleet of jets to inject sulfate aerosols high into the atmosphere to block a portion of the sun’s rays.

Yet even Keith acknowledges that there are serious concerns about solar geoengineering, both in terms of the environment and politics. Growing discussion about experimentation with solar radiation management has touched off an emotional debate, with proponents saying the technique may be needed to avert climate catastrophe and opponents warning that deployment could lead to international conflicts and unintended environmental consequences — and that experimentation would create a slippery slope that would inevitably lead to deployment. University of Chicago geophysicist Raymond Pierrehumbert has called the scheme "barking mad." Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki has dismissed it as "insane." Protestors have stopped even harmless, small-scale field experiments that aim to explore the idea. And Keith has received a couple of death threats from the fringe of the environmentalist community.

Clearly, there are good reasons for concern. Solar geoengineering would likely make the planet drier, potentially disrupting monsoons in places like India and creating drought in parts of the tropics. The technique could help eat away the protective ozone shield of our planet, and it would cause air pollution. It would also do nothing to counteract the problem of oceanacidification, which occurs when the seas absorb high levels of CO2 from the atmosphere.

Some worry that solar geoengineering would hand politicians an easy reason to avoid reducing greenhouse gas emissions. And if the impacts of climate change worsen and nations cannot agree on what scheme to deploy, or at what temperature the planet’s thermostat should be set, then conflict or even war could result as countries unilaterally begin programs to inject sulfates into the atmosphere. "My greatest concern is societal disruption and conflict between countries," says Alan Robock, a climatologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

As Keith himself summarizes, "Solar geoengineering is an extraordinarily powerful tool. But it is also dangerous."

Studies have shown that solar radiation management could be accomplished and that it would cool the planet. Last fall, Keith published a book, A Case for Climate Engineering, that lays out the practicalities of such a scheme. A fleet of ten Gulfstream jets could be used to annually inject 25,000 tons of sulfur — as finely dispersed sulfuric acid, for example — into the lower stratosphere. That would be ramped up to a million tons of sulfur per year by 2070, in order to counter about half of the world’s warming from greenhouse gases. The idea is to combine such a scheme with emissions cuts, and keep it running for about twice as long as it takes for CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere to level out.

Under Keith’s projections, a world that would have warmed 2 degrees C by century’s end would instead warm 1 degree C. Keith says his "moderate, temporary" plan would help to avoid many of the problems associated with full-throttle solar geoengineering schemes that aim to counteract all of the planet’s warming, while reducing the cost of adapting to rapid climate change. He estimates this scheme would cost about $700 million annually — less than 1 percent of what is currently spent on clean energy development. If such relatively modest cost projections prove to be accurate, some individual countries could deploy solar geoengineering technologies without international agreement. The idea of solar geoengineering dates back at least to the 1970s; researchers have toyed with a range of ideas, including deploying giant mirrors to deflect solar energy back into space, or spraying salt water into the air to make more reflective clouds. In recent years the notion of spraying sulfates into the stratosphere has moved to the forefront. "Back in 2000 we just thought of it as a ‘what if’ thought experiment," says atmospheric scientist Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science, who did some of the first global climate modeling work on the concept. "In the last years, the thing that’s surprising is the degree to which it’s being taken more seriously in the policy world."

In 2010, the first major cost estimates of sulfate-spewing schemes were produced. ‎ In 2012, China listed geoengineering among its earth science research priorities. Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s summary statement for policymakers controversially mentioned geoengineering for the first time in the panel’s 25-year history. And the National Academy of Sciences is working on a geoengineering report, funded in part by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.

Solar geoengineering cannot precisely counteract global warming. Carbon dioxide warms the planet fairly evenly, while sunshine is patchy: There’s more in the daytime, in the summer, and closer to the equator. Back in the 1990s, Caldeira was convinced that these differences would make geoengineering ineffective. "So we did these simulations, and much to our surprise it did a pretty good job," he says. The reason is that a third factor has a bigger impact on climate than either CO2 or sunlight: polar ice. If you cool the planet enough to keep that ice, says Caldeira, then this dominates the climate response.

continued

 

[Meandering]

But there are still problems. Putting a million tons of sulfur into the stratosphere each year would probably "contribute to thousands of air pollution deaths a year," Keith acknowledges. Because solar geoengineering doesn’t affect the amount of carbon dioxide in the air, ocean acidification would continue unabated. And sulfates would alter atmospheric chemistry toward formation of ozone-destroying chlorine compounds, which could lead to a moderate increase in skin cancers or ultraviolet damage to plant life. Sulfates would also make the sky a little whiter than usual and sunsets more dramatic, scientists say.

Basic physics shows that warming from sunlight boosts the planet’s water cycle more than warming from carbon dioxide. This is because sunlight adds more energy to the system, like turning up the heat on a stove under a pot of water, while carbon dioxide simply puts a lid on the pot. So counteracting greenhouse warming by reducing sunlight would likely make the planet drier — models predict a 1 percent reduction in rainfall for every degree Celsius of warming counteracted, says Axel Kleidon of the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. "When you try to fix one problem you create other problems," says Kleidon, who opposes pursuing such techniques.

The Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project (GEOMIP) recently looked at how solar alterations might affect regional climate patterns. It concluded that the tropics would be over-cooled and the poles under-cooled. While the project concluded that solar radiation management would likely protect more than 90 percent of the globe from the serious changes in rainfall predicted from climate change, summer monsoons might start to dry up, requiring a change in agriculture or water storage systems to adapt to the new climate.

The upshot is that things would get better for some people and worse for others, though the details are hard to predict. Rice production might go down in China because of water cycle changes for example, but could increase because of increased carbon dioxide to feed the plants, says Caldeira. Despite the drop in sunshine, crop productivity would probably increase worldwide because of higher atmospheric concentrations of CO2.

Because sulfates only remain in the atmosphere for a few years, a geoengineering program could be stopped at any time if unanticipated disaster ensues. But then the temperature would race upward as the planet readjusts to the amount of carbon dioxide in the air. If geoengineering were used to counteract 2 degrees C of warming over 50 years, for example, that 2 degrees of warming would come back quickly once the geoengineering stops. And there is no governance system at present to oversee if and how a program should start or stop. A group called The Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative has held a few workshops in recent years to discuss these questions.

Such concerns have led some people to take a hard-line stance against any kind of geoengineering. This started with environmental organizations like ETC Group protesting against iron fertilization of the seas — an idea meant to stimulate phytoplankton growth and so suck up carbon dioxide from the air, which controversially interferes with the base of the ocean’s food chain. This led to a 2008 Convention on Biological Diversity moratorium against iron fertilization, which in 2010 was expanded to any geoengineering.

These agreements are non-binding, but still have influence, even on apparently harmless experimentation. When the Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering (SPICE) research group attempted to run a small field experiment in 2011 to spray water into the air from balloons as a way of testing a stratospheric delivery system, protestors forced the group to stop. This irritates Caldeira. "I think it’s very dangerous
to tell scientists that an experiment with no risk in itself cannot be performed because we don’t like what it might lead to," he says.

To date, no solar geoengineering field trials have taken place, aside from a study or two looking at the idea of seeding more reflective clouds. Keith argues that some experiments would be good to test the risks and efficacy of such a strategy, and he has proposed a meeting of researchers to hash out a list of suitable work that should be done. He and his colleagues are currently planning experiments that would inject less than a hundred kilograms of aerosol material into the stratosphere in order to investigate some of the ensuing chlorine chemistry. They haven’t yet gotten to the stage of an official proposal.

But Robock argues that while modeling and indoor experiments should be pursued, outdoor field trials are problematic. "You can’t see a climate response unless an experiment is so large as to actually be geoengineering," Robock says.

Keith concludes that it "makes sense to move with deliberate haste towards deployment of geoengineering," so long as early work supports the theoretical promise of the technique. Caldeira is less bullish, saying, "Climate change is not going to extinguish us as a species. Geoengineering will always be a decision, not a necessity."

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/solar_geoengineering_weighing_costs_of_blocking_the_suns_rays/2727/