Pourquoi Hydro Québec, payera pratiquement 6x plus pour son électricité?

Selon ce document, Hydro-Québec payera un coût moyen de 13.3 cents/kWh pour l’électricité produite par 12 projets d'éoliennes.

Montréal, le lundi 20 décembre 2010

Appel d’offres visant l’achat de 500 MW d’énergie éolienne : Hydro-Québec Distribution retient 12 soumissions totalisant 291,4 MW

Hydro-Québec Distribution annonce qu'elle retient 12 soumissions pour un total de 291,4 MW dans le cadre de l’appel d’offres lancé le 30 avril 2009 et visant l’achat de deux blocs distincts de 250 MW d’électricité produite au Québec au moyen d’éoliennes, l’un issu de projets autochtones et l’autre, de projets communautaires. Les soumissions retenues sont réparties comme suit pour chacun des blocs :  1 soumission pour 24,0 MW pour le bloc autochtone ; 11 soumissions pour 267,4 MW pour le bloc communautaire. Les livraisons d'électricité doivent commencer entre le 1er décembre 2013 et le 1er décembre 2015. Le prix moyen de l'énergie des soumissions retenues est de 13,3 ¢/kWh, ce qui inclut un le coût du transport de 2,0 ¢/kWh pour acheminer l'électricité produite. Ces projets représentent des investissements de l'ordre de 730 millions de dollars pour les parcs éoliens et de 260 millions de dollars pour le transport de l’électricité. Hydro-Québec Distribution complètera les contrats avec les promoteurs au cours des prochains mois. Ces contrats seront par la suite soumis à la Régie de l'énergie pour approbation. Les promoteurs retenus auront la responsabilité d'obtenir toutes les autorisations et tous les permis requis pour la construction des parcs éoliens avant de procéder au début des travaux de construction. Depuis le lancement de l'appel d'offres, Hydro-Québec Distribution a travaillé avec la société Deloitte inc. aux fins de l'application de la procédure d'appel d'offres et d'octroi pour les achats d'électricité et dans le processus d'évaluation des soumissions.  Liste des soumissions retenues Carte des soumissions retenues Des renseignements additionnels sont accessibles sur le site Web d'Hydro-Québec Distribution, au www.hydroquebec.com/distribution/fr/marchequebecois/index.html.

Et selon ce document, le prix moyen de production d'Hydro-Québec est d'environ 2.3 cents/kWh.

Donc nous allons payer pour l’électricité produite par ces éoliennes, pratiquement plus de 6x le prix du coût moyen de l'électricité produite aujourd'hui par notre société d'État.

Est-ce que ceci prend en compte les variabilités d'un tel réseau d'éoliennes et les infrastructures qui seront nécessaires pour compenser quand le vent ne souffle pas ou trop? Comme nous voyons ici, les variations de l'énergie produite par les parcs éoliens ne sont pas très stables. Comment seront compensées ces variations?

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Comment ferons pour être compétitif sur le marché mondial avec une énergie à 13 cents/kWh pensant que la chine produit des réacteurs nucléaire qui produirons à prêt de 100% du temps de l'énergie à 3 cents/kWh?

Les éoliennes appartiennent au passé et non au futur.

Commentaires ?

Statut sur l'Egypte

Je ne pensais pas voir ca de mon vivant... Courage à vous tous.

En date du 28 Janvier 2011

L'Egypte coupée d'Internet

Source

Après deux jours de blocages ponctuels des services de télécommunications et de services Web comme Twitter et Facebook, les autorités sont passées à une méthode plus radicale pour tenter d'empêcher les manifestations prévues ce vendredi : elles ont tout simplement coupé l'accès à Internet dans l'ensemble du pays.

Peu après minuit, de nombreux témoignages ont signalé que l'accès à Internet était bloqué. D'après les données assemblées par l'entreprise de sécurité informatique Arbor Networks, l'ensemble des fournisseurs d'accès à Internet égyptiens ont coupé leurs services ce vendredi matin. Un seul fournisseur d'accès, Noor, était encore connecté au réseau ce vendredi matin. Seule exception à la coupure, les services boursiers : l'EGX 30, l'indice égyptien, dispose toujours d'un accès à la dorsale Internet, le coeur du réseau.

Il s'agit d'une première historique : jusqu'à présent, aucun régime n'avait eu recours à un blocage total d'Internet en réaction à des manifestations. Lors des manifestations qui avaient suivi la réélection contestée de Mahmoud Ahmadinejaden Iran, les autorités avaient procédé à des blocages massifs de services et ordonné des interruptions de services ciblées géographiquement, mais n'avaient pas ordonné une coupure du service dans l'ensemble du pays.

PAS DE "BOUTON ROUGE"

Considérée comme "ennemi d'Internet" par l'organisation Reporters sans frontières, l'Egypte procédait depuis des années à un harcèlement juridique et policier des blogueurs et internautes dénonçant la corruption ou la politique du régime de Moubarak. Mais contrairement à la Tunisie, l'Egypte n'avait pas mis en place de systèmes de filtrage de sites ou services Web. Une politique qui a changé avec le début des grandes manifestations de janvier : les autorités ont tour à tour bloqué temporairement des services comme Twitter ou Facebook. Jeudi, la ville de Suez, théâtre de violentes manifestations la veille, était presque entièrement coupée du monde, avec de très fortes perturbations dans l'accès à Internet, mais aussi aux réseaux mobiles et fixes.

D'après de nombreux témoins dans le pays, les SMS sont également bloqués ce vendredi. Selon une source proche de Vodafone, qui gère le principal réseau de téléphonie mobile du pays, les autorités ont tout simplement coupé les antennes-relais dans et à proximité des grandes villes.

"Bloquer le Web dans des pays qui exercent un contrôle important sur les fournisseurs d'accès n'est pas difficile, parce que ces entreprises qui exploitent les réseaux de câbles dépendent le plus souvent de licences du gouvernement", explique Craig Labovitz, responsable scientifique pour Arbor Networks. "Il n'y a pas de gros bouton rouge, simplement un coup de téléphone passé à une douzaine de personnes-clés." L'Egypte compte quatre principaux fournisseurs d'accès à Internet : Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt, et Etisalat Misr. Tous dépendent de la licence qui leur est fournie par l'autorité de régulation des télécommunications égyptienne.

Le Monde.fr, avec APSource

As more people take to the streets to protest in Egypt and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei heads back to the country, an activist tells Channel 4 News "huge" demos are planned for Friday.

Police fought protestors in two cities in Eastern Egypt as the unrest continued for the third day. 

The demonstrators, who are protesting against the 30-year rule of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, could soon have a figurehead in the form of prominent reform campaigner Mohamed ElBaradei, who is flying from Vienna to Egypt to join the protests.

He told reporters that is was time for the President to step aside.

"People in the streets are speaking about the demonstrations - normal, regular people." Activist Ramy Raoof

"He has served the country for 30 years and it is about time for him to retire," the former head of the UN Nuclear Agency said.

Friday protests

Mr ElBaradei, who launched a campaign for change in Egypt last year, added: "Tomorrow is going to be, I think, a major demonstration all over Egypt and I will be there with them."

Blogger and human rights activist Ramy Raoof told Channel 4 News that he expected and hoped the demonstrations on Friday would be "huge".

He said: "People in the streets are speaking about the demonstrations - normal, regular people and not only civil society activists. Many, many people have joined the demos in different cities in Egypt.

"People are calling for different things, economic issues, unemployment, against torture and violence, and of course against the current regime and Mubarak."

The protests have seen police fire rubber bullets and tear gas at protestors throwing rocks and petrol bombs in several cities around Egypt. As well as Cairo, there has been unrest in Suez, where demonstrators set buildings on fire, and Ismailia, where hundreds of demonstrators were met with tear gas. 

Witnesses say demonstrators have been dragged away, beaten and shoved into police vans.

An eyewitness in Suez told Channel 4 News: "It is very, very hot. Total chaos and things are out of control. There's an exchange of gunfire between forces and citizens." 

The situation in Ismailia is understood to be similar.

Unprecedented

The protests are unprecedented during President Mubarak's rule, and follow similar unrest in fellow north African country, Tunisia, which saw the incumbent President flee.

Thousands of people have also taken to the streets in Yemen, demanding a change of Government. Protestors in all three countries say they are complaining about surging prices, a lack of jobs, and authoritarian rule that has relied on heavy-handed security to keep dissenting voices quiet.

Elections are due in Egypt in September, but the expectation is that the 82-year-old President will either stay in power or pass it to his son Gamal, 47.

Three protestors have been killed in the Egypt unrest, and one policeman. Al-Arabiya television said that 40 protestors had been charged with "trying to overthrow the regime", and the Interior Ministry said 500 people had been arrested in the country of 80 million people. An independent coalition of lawyers said 1,200 had been detained.

"The millions will decide the future of this nation, not demonstrations even if numbered in the thousands." Egypt Interior Minister

But the country's Interior Minister, Habib al-Adli, has dismissed the demonstrations.

"Egypt's system is not marginal or frail. We are a big state, with an administration with popular support. The millions will decide the future of this nation, not demonstrations even if numbered in the thousands. Our country is not shaken by such actions," he told Kuwait's al-Rai newspaper, according to the newspaper's website.

Egypt's stock exchange stopped trading on Thursday after it fell for more than six per cent for a second day. The Egyptian pound is at its lowest level in six years against the US dollar.

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Sensor Measurement Uncertainty and A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action

At last we have some graphics to show that the temperature increase over the last 130 is not statistically significant.  When you can draw a straight line through your data and be inside the error bars, there is no way to safely confirm any temperature increase. Source

What is a temperature anomaly?
The term “temperature anomaly” means a departure from a reference value or long-term average. A positive anomaly indicates that the observed temperature was warmer than the reference value, while a negative anomaly indicates that the observed temperature was cooler than the reference value.

Grapgic: The global surface air temperature anomaly series through 2009, as updated on 18 February 2010, (http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/). The grey error bars show the annual anomaly lower-limit uncertainty of ±0.46 C.


More technical on this study here.

Here's a good read from doctor Richard Lindzen : A Case Against Precipitous Climate Action
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The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations. Such hysteria simply represents the scientific illiteracy of much of the public, the susceptibility of the public to the substitution of repetition for truth, and the exploitation of these weaknesses by politicians, environmental promoters, and, after 20 years of media drum beating, many others as well. Climate is always changing. We have had ice ages and warmer periods when alligators were found in Spitzbergen. Ice ages have occurred in a hundred thousand year cycle for the last 700 thousand years, and there have been previous periods that appear to have been warmer than the present despite CO2 levels being lower than they are now. More recently, we have had the medieval warm period and the little ice age. During the latter, alpine glaciers advanced to the chagrin of overrun villages. Since the beginning of the 19th Century these glaciers have been retreating. Frankly, we don’t fully understand either the advance or the retreat.

For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause. The earth is never exactly in equilibrium. The motions of the massive oceans where heat is moved between deep layers and the surface provides variability on time scales from years to centuries. Recent work (Tsonis et al, 2007), suggests that this variability is enough to account for all climate change since the 19th Century.

For warming since 1979, there is a further problem. The dominant role of cumulus convection in the tropics requires that temperature approximately follow what is called a moist adiabatic profile. This requires that warming in the tropical upper troposphere be 2-3 times greater than at the surface. Indeed, all models do show this, but the data doesn’t and this means that something is wrong with the data. It is well known that above about 2 km altitude, the tropical temperatures are pretty homogeneous in the horizontal so that sampling is not a problem. Below two km (roughly the height of what is referred to as the trade wind inversion), there is much more horizontal variability, and, therefore, there is a profound sampling problem. Under the circumstances, it is reasonable to conclude that the problem resides in the surface data, and that the actual trend at the surface is about 60% too large. Even the claimed trend is larger than what models would have projected but for the inclusion of an arbitrary fudge factor due to aerosol cooling. The discrepancy was reported by Lindzen (2007) and by Douglass et al (2007). Inevitably in climate science, when data conflicts with models, a small coterie of scientists can be counted upon to modify the data. Thus, Santer, et al (2008), argue that stretching uncertainties in observations and models might marginally eliminate the inconsistency. That the data should always need correcting to agree with models is totally implausible and indicative of a certain corruption within the climate science community.

It turns out that there is a much more fundamental and unambiguous check of the role of feedbacks in enhancing greenhouse warming that also shows that all models are greatly exaggerating climate sensitivity. Here, it must be noted that the greenhouse effect operates by inhibiting the cooling of the climate by reducing net outgoing radiation. However, the contribution of increasing CO2 alone does not, in fact, lead to much warming (approximately 1 deg. C for each doubling of CO2).

The larger predictions from climate models are due to the fact that, within these models, the more important greenhouse substances, water vapor and clouds, act to greatly amplify whatever CO2 does. This is referred to as a positive feedback. It means that increases in surface temperature are accompanied by reductions in the net outgoing radiation – thus enhancing the greenhouse warming. All climate models show such changes when forced by observed surface temperatures. Satellite observations of the earth’s radiation budget allow us to determine whether such a reduction does, in fact, accompany increases in surface temperature in nature. As it turns out, the satellite data from the ERBE instrument (Barkstrom, 1984, Wong et al, 2006) shows that the feedback in nature is strongly negative — strongly reducing the direct effect of CO2 (Lindzen and Choi, 2009) in profound contrast to the model behavior. This analysis makes clear that even when all models agree, they can all be wrong, and that this is the situation for the all important question of climate sensitivity. Unfortuanately, Lindzen and Choi (2009) contained a number of errors; however, as shown in a paper currently under review, these errors were not relevant to the main conclusion.

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the greenhouse forcing from man made greenhouse gases is already about 86% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 (with about half coming from methane, nitrous oxide, freons and ozone), and alarming predictions depend on models for which the sensitivity to a doubling for CO2 is greater than 2C which implies that we should already have seen much more warming than we have seen thus far, even if all the warming we have seen so far were due to man. This contradiction is rendered more acute by the fact that there has been no statistically significant net global warming for the last fourteen years. Modelers defend this situation, as we have already noted, by arguing that aerosols have cancelled much of the warming (viz Schwartz et al, 2010), and that models adequately account for natural unforced internal variability. However, a recent paper (Ramanathan, 2007) points out that aerosols can warm as well as cool, while scientists at the UK’s Hadley Centre for Climate Research recently noted that their model did not appropriately deal with natural internal variability thus demolishing the basis for the IPCC’s iconic attribution (Smith et al, 2007). Interestingly (though not unexpectedly), the British paper did not stress this. Rather, they speculated that natural internal variability might step aside in 2009, allowing warming to resume. Resume? Thus, the fact that warming has ceased for the past fourteen years is acknowledged. It should be noted that, more recently, German modelers have moved the date for ‘resumption’ up to 2015 (Keenlyside et al, 2008).

Climate alarmists respond that some of the hottest years on record have occurred during the past decade. Given that we are in a relatively warm period, this is not surprising, but it says nothing about trends.

Given that the evidence (and I have noted only a few of many pieces of evidence) strongly implies that anthropogenic warming has been greatly exaggerated, the basis for alarm due to such warming is similarly diminished. However, a really important point is that the case for alarm would still be weak even if anthropogenic global warming were significant. Polar bears, arctic summer sea ice, regional droughts and floods, coral bleaching, hurricanes, alpine glaciers, malaria, etc. etc. all depend not on some global average of surface temperature anomaly, but on a huge number of regional variables including temperature, humidity, cloud cover, precipitation, and direction and magnitude of wind. The state of the ocean is also often crucial. Our ability to forecast any of these over periods beyond a few days is minimal (a leading modeler refers to it as essentially guesswork). Yet, each catastrophic forecast depends on each of these being in a specific range. The odds of any specific catastrophe actually occurring are almost zero. This was equally true for earlier forecasts of famine for the 1980′s, global cooling in the 1970′s, Y2K and many others. Regionally, year to year fluctuations in temperature are over four times larger than fluctuations in the global mean. Much of this variation has to be independent of the global mean; otherwise the global mean would vary much more. This is simply to note that factors other than global warming are more important to any specific situation. This is not to say that disasters will not occur; they always have occurred and this will not change in the future. Fighting global warming with symbolic gestures will certainly not change this. However, history tells us that greater wealth and development can profoundly increase our resilience.

In view of the above, one may reasonably ask why there is the current alarm, and, in particular, why the astounding upsurge in alarmism of the past 4 years. When an issue like global warming is around for over twenty years, numerous agendas are developed to exploit the issue. The interests of the environmental movement in acquiring more power, influence, and donations are reasonably clear. So too are the interests of bureaucrats for whom control of CO2 is a dream-come-true. After all, CO2 is a product of breathing itself. Politicians can see the possibility of taxation that will be cheerfully accepted because it is necessary for ‘saving’ the earth. Nations have seen how to exploit this issue in order to gain competitive advantages. But, by now, things have gone much further. The case of ENRON (a now bankrupt Texas energy firm) is illustrative in this respect. Before disintegrating in a pyrotechnic display of unscrupulous manipulation, ENRON had been one of the most intense lobbyists for Kyoto. It had hoped to become a trading firm dealing in carbon emission rights. This was no small hope. These rights are likely to amount to over a trillion dollars, and the commissions will run into many billions. Hedge funds are actively examining the possibilities; so was the late Lehman Brothers. Goldman Sachs has lobbied extensively for the ‘cap and trade’ bill, and is well positioned to make billions. It is probably no accident that Gore, himself, is associated with such activities. The sale of indulgences is already in full swing with organizations selling offsets to one’s carbon footprint while sometimes acknowledging that the offsets are irrelevant. The possibilities for corruption are immense. Archer Daniels Midland (America’s largest agribusiness) has successfully lobbied for ethanol requirements for gasoline, and the resulting demand for ethanol may already be contributing to large increases in corn prices and associated hardship in the developing world (not to mention poorer car performance). And finally, there are the numerous well meaning individuals who have allowed propagandists to convince them that in accepting the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate change, they are displaying intelligence and virtue For them, their psychic welfare is at stake.

With all this at stake, one can readily suspect that there might be a sense of urgency provoked by the possibility that warming may have ceased and that the case for such warming as was seen being due in significant measure to man, disintegrating. For those committed to the more venal agendas, the need to act soon, before the public appreciates the situation, is real indeed. However, for more serious leaders, the need to courageously resist hysteria is clear. Wasting resources on symbolically fighting ever present climate change is no substitute for prudence. Nor is the assumption that the earth’s climate reached a point of perfection in the middle of the twentieth century a sign of intelligence.

References:

Barkstrom, B.R., 1984: The Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE), Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 65, 1170–1185.

Douglass,D.H., J.R. Christy, B.D. Pearsona and S. F. Singer, 2007: A comparison of tropical temperature trends with model predictions, Int. J. Climatol., DOI: 10.1002/joc.1651

Keenlyside, N.S., M. Lateef, et al, 2008: Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector, Nature, 453, 84-88.

Lindzen, R.S. and Y.-S. Choi, 2009: On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data, accepted Geophys. Res. Ltrs.

Lindzen, R.S., 2007: Taking greenhouse warming seriously. Energy & Environment, 18, 937-950.

Ramanathan, V., M.V. Ramana, et al, 2007: Warming trends in Asia amplified by brown cloud solar absorption, Nature, 448, 575-578.

Santer, B. D., P. W. Thorne, L. Haimberger, K. E. Taylor, T. M. L. Wigley, J. R. Lanzante, S. Solomon, M. Free, P. J. Gleckler, P. D. Jones, T. R. Karl, S. A. Klein, C. Mears, D. Nychka, G. A. Schmidt, S. C. Sherwood, and F. J. Wentz, 2008: Consistency of modelled and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere, Intl. J. of Climatology, 28, 1703-1722.

Schwartz, S.E., R.J. Charlson, R.A. Kahn, J.A. Ogren, and H. Rodhe, 2010: Why hasn’t the Earth warmed as much as expected?, J. Climate, 23, 2453-2464.

Smith, D.M., S. Cusack, A.W. Colman, C.K. Folland, G.R. Harris, J.M. Murphy, 2007: Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model, Science, 317, 796-799.

Tsonis, A. A., K. Swanson, and S. Kravtsov, 2007: A new dynamical mechanism for major climate shifts, Geophys. Res. Ltrs., 34, L13705, doi:10.1029/2007GL030288

Wong, T., B. A. Wielicki, et al., 2006: Reexamination of the observed decadal variability of the earth radiation budget using altitude-corrected ERBE/ERBS nonscanner WFOV Data, J. Climate, 19, 4028–4040.

Richard Lindzen is the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the GWPF’s Academic Advidory Council

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