Renewables bring 44% of Portugal's power in 2017

[NeoGreen]

https://renewablesnow.com/news/renewables-bring-44-of-portugals-power-in-2017-597364/

Renewables bring 44% of Portugal's power in 2017
January 11 (Renewables Now)

Renewable power plants met about 44% of Portugal's electricity consumption in 2017, shows data from the Portuguese Association of Renewable Energy (APREN).

The country produced 11.9 TWh of which power, making this the leading green energy source. Wind is followed by hydropower facilities, with 7.3 TWh generated, bioenergy plants with 2.8 TWh and photovoltaic (PV) arrays with 0.8 TWh.

In 2017, thanks to renewable power plants, the average price of electricity in the wholesale market fell to EUR 18.3 (USD 21.8) per MWh, representing savings to the consumer of EUR 727 million. The country also saved EUR 770 million in fossil fuel imports and offset 8.5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, APREN stated in its press release.

With the goal to increase Portugal's energy independence, in line also with the objectives of decarbonisation under the Paris Agreement, APREN together with the Sustainable Earth System Association (ZERO) are calling for greater investments in 2018, especially in solar and bioenergy projects.

[NNadir]

1. Usually the people handing out this line of wishful thinking misrepresent peak power as energy.

Here they confuse energy with power.

That's a switch for our new wrinkle on our planet where measurements , at the Mauna Loa observatory, yesterday showed a concentration 408.74 ppm (January 11, 2018) of the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide in the planetary atmosphere .

Let's get, um, stupid with math while ignoring bad grammar and mangled units confusing energy and power, to wit:

"The country produced 11.9 TWh of which power, making this the leading green energy source."

I think they meant to say over at RENEWABLES NOW! that the country produced 11.9 TWh of energy, making this the leading green energy source, where the word applied to this crap as being "green" is theirs not mine.

Let's help them by using stupid math to convert energy into average continuous power. 11.9 TWh is equal to 3,600,000,000,000,000 Joules. Wow. That sounds like a lot.

But a day has (24 X 60 X 60) = 86400 seconds in it and a sidereal year 365.24 days. Thus there are 31,556,736 seconds in a sidereal year. Thus the the average continous power of the remarkable world changing super percent green so called "renewable energy" is 11.9 * 3,600,000,000,000,000/31,556,736 = 1,357,554,850 Watts.

Wow. Sounds like a lot, doesn't it?

However most power plants on this planet are pretty big, and because of this, they are recorded as having a capacity (and often in nuclear plants, a continuous average power output) measured in megawatts. Dividing 1,357,554,850 Watts by 1,000,000 we get that all the so called "renewable," "green," wind, hydro, dangerous biofuel plants, and solar plants produced an average continuous power of 1,358 MW of power.

This is slightly more than the power output of the gas power plant in Redondo Beach California which the owners describe as "an important source of clean and reliable electricity," even though it's "cleanliness" involves dumping the dangerous fossil fuel waste carbon dioxide directly into the gas industry's favorite waste dump, the planetary atmosphere.

All the "percent talk" about California's "green" so called "renewable energy" scam, which trashed huge tracks of pristine desert by converting them into industrial parks featuring greasy turbines, has not shut this plant, which has operated since 1967.

When I was a young man, I used to bicycle past it pretty much every damned day on my way to work. It's still there, and it's still dumping carbon dioxide. It took me about 3 or 4 minutes on my bicycle, if that, depending on whether I pedaled into the wind or not.

Portugal has the 5th highest electricity prices in Europe, after (in this order) Denmark, Germany, Belgium and Italy according to this promotional site from the energy broker, Selectra.



Of course, you won't care about high electricity prices if you were Portuguese (or Danish or German, Belgian or Italian) and rich but if you're poor, well, fuck you, you deserve it because rich people are "green" and you're, um, not.

The International Energy Agency, the IEA, reports in Table 31 in the Excel Spreadsheet accessed in the data box on this page that Portugal's electricity generation was 58,517 Gigawatt hours in 2016. This means that in "percent talk" favored by the "lipstick on the gas pig" so called "renewable energy" industry that 11.8 TWh is actually 11.8/58.5 = 20.2% not 44%.

But people who write the Renewables Now! website should be excused, because in general these kinds of people are very, very, very, very bad at math.

79.8% of Portuguese electricity was thus produced by dangerous fossil fuels, which is slightly less than the 81% for the world as reported in the 2017 World Energy Outlook, up from 80% in 2000 as I described here: The Growth of "Renewable" Energy Has Exceeded 2007 World Energy Outlook Projections by 55%! with some commentary on the nature of "percent talk" as a toxic marketing tool designed to obscure truth.

Have a nice weekend.