Global Warming Melting Ice
See also part 2 for articles and videos I have found and posted since 2023
Latest found articles first.
......Tesla recently announced that their Model 3 battery has an energy density close to 260 Wh/kg. Still, it requires a complicated cooling system to prevent overheating and thus takes up a lot of space. On the other hand, because graphene batteries do not overheat or explode, there is no need for a cooling system, and the space could be used for energy-storing batteries in electric vehicles.
A breakthrough in graphene battery technology occurred when GAC Motor Co. Ltd, a Chinese automobile company, announced the launch of the AION V car, which features a graphene battery with a range of 1000 km and can be recharged to 80 percent capacity in 8 minutes. Undoubtedly the ongoing commercialization of graphene batteries will soon outperform conventional batteries for its wider adoption......
April 14, 2022
Noted environmental scientist Katharine Hayhoe says the best way to address the climate crisis is pretty simple: we all should talk about it with people we know. That talk will lead to action, on an individual and then a community level, which will in turn influence governments, businesses, and other organizations to make the large-scale systemic changes necessary to mitigate the potential damage from climate change.
Today the climate is changing faster than any time in the history of humans on this planet. Over tens of thousands of years, the earth’s average temperature has gone up and down. But over the last century, it has gone up so steeply that it is now warmer than any time during human civilization on this planet.
That’s important because our infrastructure, our food, our water systems, our cities, our supply chains, our economy – everything is built on the assumption that the climate is stable. It's been warmer before and it's been colder before, but thousands of years ago we didn't have eight billion humans living on the earth and using its resources.
Climate change is not about the future of the planet itself. The planet will be orbiting the sun long after we're gone. It's about us humans and a lot of other things that share the earth with us. We are the ones most at risk.
When did all of this begin? It was in the 18th century and the Industrial Revolution, when people figured out how to dig up massive amounts of coal, and then oil and gas, from under the ground and burn it. That produces heat-trapping gases. Our planet already has a natural blanket of heat-trapping gases that keep us alive. But by burning fossil fuels, the emissions are like an extra blanket we're wrapping around our planet. and as a result the temperatures on the earth keep rising.
And that affects our weather, causing more dramatic and destructive weather patterns. For example, we just had three 500-year flood events in three years in the city of Houston. We saw a 100-plus degree heat wave in the Pacific Northwest last year.
Back in the 1980s, when they first started tracking this data, there was a $1 billion weather or climate event somewhere in the United States on average every four months. But just in the last decade, we’ve seen a $1 billion weather and climate disaster on average every three weeks (adjusted for inflation). That's a huge change.
Climate change is not a stand-alone issue. It affects everything else that we care about. It affects our infrastructure, our economy, our energy, our water, our natural resources, our health. It affects our food, our biodiversity, our conservation, our justice and equity issues.....
The big solutions to climate change look like this:
Stop putting so much carbon into the atmosphere (mitigation)
Take as much carbon out of the atmosphere as we can (mitigation)
Build resilience to the impacts that are already here, that we can no longer avoid (adaptation) .....
What works is talking about how climate change affects us here and now, in ways that are relevant to our lives today. And then we start to look for solutions, like reducing food waste and eating more plants, biking or walking instead of driving when we can, urging cities and schools and universities to transition to cleaner energy, and so on. Then people will feel empowered and keep pushing for more change.
Our brains are wired this way, to associate forward action with a reward, not avoiding harm. When we produce hope, not dread, it encourages people to act.
By UNIVERSITY OF BIRMINGHAM NOVEMBER 8, 2022
It is estimated that melting ice in the Antarctic could sea levels to rise by up to 50 meters. A new study charts 45,000,000 years of Antarctic temperature change.
Scientists have created the first charts of Antarctic ocean temperatures over the last 45 million years using molecular fossils and machine learning, providing vital insights into future sea level changes.
The researchers, led by experts from Victoria University of Wellington (NZ) and Birmingham (UK), believe their results indicate that we are near a "tipping point" where ocean warming driven by atmospheric CO2 could trigger catastrophic rises in sea levels due to melting ice sheets. Their findings were recently published in the journal Nature Geoscience.
In the study, the scientists examined molecular fossils from core samples taken during ocean drilling projects. The fossil remains are single lipid (water-insoluble) molecules created by archaea, which are single-celled organisms similar to bacteria. The archaea adjust the composition of their outer membrane lipids in response to changing sea temperatures. Scientists can infer the ancient sea temperature that would have surrounded a certain sample as it died by analyzing these changes.
While these molecular fossil techniques are well used by palaeoclimatologists, the team from Wellington (NZ) and Birmingham (UK) went a step further. They used machine learning to refine the technique, giving the first record to date of changing Antarctic sea temperatures throughout much of the Cenozoic period, covering the past 45 million years.
That means scientists are able to pinpoint much more accurately the historic temperatures which caused ice sheets to grow and shrink during that period. The future loss of ice sheets and the retreat of glaciers in the Antarctic is critically important as melting ice in the region could sea levels to rise by up to 50 m.
"The record we’ve produced offers a much more robust overview of fluctuating Antarctic temperatures and how these relate to changes in the amount of ice, and the topography of Antarctica, over this period and paves the way for improved estimates of future events," explains the Birmingham lead author Dr. James Bendle.
The link between CO2, sea-surface temperatures, and the amount of ice in Antarctica is clear through the last 45 million years. But one surprising finding was that ocean cooling did not always correspond to increases in Antarctic ice. Specifically for a 1 million-year-long period of ocean cooling from 25 to 24 million years ago. "We show that this is likely related to tectonic subsidence and the influx of relatively warm ocean water in the Ross Sea region," says Dr. Bendle.
"We can see that ice in Antarctica is currently changing, not least with the loss of some ice shelves and cracks appearing recently in the Thwaites Glacier, one of the largest glaciers in the region. This new study of Earth’s past is one of the clearest indications yet that humans continue to produce CO2 levels for which we can expect major ice loss at the Antarctic margins and global sea-level rise over the coming decades and centuries."
The team plans to continue to apply biomarker and machine learning approaches to reconstruct the climatic evolution of Antarctica and implications for future warming and sea-level rise.
Reference: "Climatic and tectonic drivers of late Oligocene Antarctic ice volume" by B. Duncan, R. McKay, R. Levy, T. Naish, J. G. Prebble, F. Sangiorgi, S. Krishnan, F. Hoem, C. Clowes, T. Dunkley Jones, E. Gasson, C. Kraus, D. K. Kulhanek, S. R. Meyers, H. Moossen, C. Warren, V. Willmott, G. T. Ventura and J. Bendle, 15 September 2022, Nature Geoscience. DOI: 10.1038/s41561-022-01025-x
The study was funded and facilitated by the International Ocean Drilling Programme, Antarctica New Zealand, The Royal Society Te Aparangi Marsden Fund (NZ), The Natural Environment Research Council (UK), the Scientific Committee of Antarctic Research, and the US National Science Foundation. Plus support in kind from the University of Birmingham, Yale University, and the Royal Netherlands Institute for Sea Research (NIOZ).
https://scitechdaily.com/new-study-indicates-that-we-are-at-a-catastrophic-ocean-warming-tipping-point/
From the deep sea to the DRC, countries and companies are scrambling to secure increasingly scarce minerals to meet urgent climate goals.
By Anna Blaustein on September 16, 2022
A milder heat wave in August 2020 had caused California’s electricity demand to outstrip supply, and the state’s grid operator resorted to scheduled blackouts. About 800,000 homes and business had their power cut off for anywhere from 15 minutes to several hours. Just before California’s heat wave struck this September, temperatures and power demand were both projected to be higher than they were two years ago.
But impressively, California’s grid weathered the heat wave. Scientific American spoke with Michael Wara, policy director of the Sustainability Accelerator at Stanford University, about the strategic improvements and unconventional tactics that helped the grid hold up and how power systems can decarbonize and still stand up to climate extremes......
Take action on climate change here
"For the first time, we are forced to consider the real risk of destabilizing the entire planet," says climate impact scholar Johan Rockström. In a talk backed by vivid animations of the climate crisis, he shows how nine out of the 15 big biophysical systems that regulate the climate -- from the permafrost of Siberia to the great forests of the North to the Amazon rainforest -- are at risk of reaching tipping points, which could make Earth uninhabitable for humanity. Hear his plan for putting the planet back on the path of sustainability over the next 10 years -- and protecting the future of our children.
This talk was part of the Countdown Global Launch on 10.10.2020. Watch the full event here
Countdown is TED's global initiative to accelerate solutions to the climate crisis. The goal: to build a better future by cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2030, in the race to a zero-carbon world. Get involved
In this talk, David Wallace discusses the background of his book "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming", how to talk about this subject without spiraling into despair, and what role technology may be able to play for both mitigation and adaptation solutions.
David Wallace-Wells is the deputy editor of New York Magazine. His article, The Uninhabitable Earth, appeared in the magazine in 2017, he then later published a longer work as a full length book titled "The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming". David distills a lot of the dry scientific information about the impacts of climate change into descriptions on a human scale. The book starts with a description of effects from various aspects of climate: water, food, oceans, heat, disease, etc. He then describes impacts to society and how we can use this understanding to take action as a civilization to prevent the worst case scenarios.
David Wallace TED talk on climate change
The Supreme Court has voted to curb the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions. This comes amid a period of increasingly extreme weather around the world. More than 40 million Americans were under heat advisory last week. Kristie Ebi has been researching the health risks of climate change for decades, and she tells Hari Sreenivasan that death rates will increase unless response systems are improved. Their conversation is part of the ongoing public media initiative Peril and Promise, on the challenges and the solutions to climate change.
Originally aired on July 1, 2022
from Huffpost
By Paul Blumenthal and Alexander C. Kaufman
Jun 30, 2022, 10:07 AM EDT | Updated 5 hours ago
Supreme Court Sharply Limits Regulation Of Carbon Emissions The Supreme Court just made it much harder for the U.S. government to respond to climate change in a 6-3 decision in the case of West Virginia v. EPA.
The Thursday decision, written by Chief Justice John Roberts and joined by the other five conservative justices, preemptively strikes down any regulations the Biden administration might consider issuing under a provision of the Clean Air Act to limit carbon emissions at power plants.
The court ruled that EPA regulations aimed at reducing carbon emissions under a specific provision of the 1970 Clean Air Act are not permissible because Congress did not specifically authorize the EPA to regulate CO2.
Carbon functions differently from other air pollutants power plants spew, such as mercury or acid gasses, in that it harms human health primarily by accumulating in the atmosphere and warming the planet. As such, the EPA tried under the Obama administration to regulate power plant emissions by encouraging plant operators to limit emissions across the board, not just from individual facilities.
According to the court, the EPA has the authority to regulate individual (plants), but not to make more sweeping efforts to regulate carbon emissions – that has to come from Congress.
The court’s decision follows the expanding logic of its so-called "major questions doctrine." The doctrine states that the Supreme Court can strike down regulatory action of "vast economic and political significance" if Congress did not specifically delegate a rule-issuing agency to issue that regulation.
"This is a major questions case," Roberts writes. "EPA claimed to discover an unheralded power representing a transformative expansion of its regulatory authority in the vague language of a long-extant, but rarely used, statute designed as a gap filler. That discovery allowed it to adopt a regulatory program that Congress had conspicuously declined to enact itself. Given these circumstances, there is every reason to ‘hesitate before concluding that Congress’ meant to confer on EPA the authority it claims."
Capping carbon emissions from power plants "may be a sensible ‘solution to the crisis of the day,’" Roberts writes. But, he continues, "it is not plausible that Congress gave EPA the authority to adopt on its own such a regulatory scheme." Instead, a regulation of "such magnitude and consequence rests with Congress itself."
This expansive use of the major questions doctrine threatens to resurrect the court’s rarely invoked "nondelegation doctrine." The nondelegation doctrine claims that executive branch agencies cannot update and write new regulations unless Congress specifically delegates that authority to them. The court most famously invoked this doctrine to strike down two New Deal programs in the 1930s. Since then, the court has long relied on other interpretations of law and its own precedents to let Congress delegate rule-writing authority to executive branch agencies without the kind of precise delegation that the doctrine would require.
While not fully resurrecting nondelegation, the court will now no longer just assume that Congress has delegated authority to the agencies. Instead, the major questions doctrine allows the court to pick-and-choose for itself which regulations rise to questions of "vast economic and political significance." This could have significant implications for many executive branch agency regulations, including any that further regulate carbon emissions.
Justice Elena Kagan pointed out the potentially arbitrary nature of the major questions doctrine in her dissenting opinion, which was joined by Justices Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor.
"Courts should be modest," Kagan writes. "Today, the Court is not. ... In rewriting that text, the Court substitutes its own ideas about delegations for Congress’s. And that means the Court substitutes its own ideas about policymaking for Congress’s."
That the case revolves around efforts to combat climate change is "all the more troubling," according to Kagan. The court, she writes, "does not have a clue about how to address climate change."
"The Court appoints itself" instead of Congress or the expert agency "the decisionmaker on climate policy. I cannot think of many things more frightening," Kagan states.
The Supreme Court decision results from years of litigation over the issue of carbon emission regulation across three different administrations, all centered on an obscure clause of the Clean Air Act.
The Obama administration used the law’s Section 111D to justify rules in the Clean Power Plan, its signature plan to cut carbon from electricity-generating stations, spurring utilities to shift production from high-emitting plants to more efficient ones. But opponents of regulation accused the White House of misinterpreting legal language they said only gave the EPA the right to dictate what power station owners could do within the facility’s "fenceline." The Clean Power Plan gave companies options "beyond the fenceline" to comply with the rule by building renewable energy farms or running lower-emitting plants to offset dirtier coal-fired stations.
The Obama EPA’s interpretation was "a reach," said Brendan Collins, a partner at the Philadelphia-based environmental law firm Ballard Spahr. But the policy was really meant to be a stopgap that would give utilities more flexibility until carbon capture technology hardware that can be retrofitted onto the smokestacks of a plant to collect and store carbon gas before it enters the atmosphere became feasible enough to mandate.
"At the end of the day, if EPA isn’t ready to say carbon capture is a technology that’s sufficiently feasible from a technical and financial standpoint that it can impose that obligation, then the best thing you can do is use less coal to make the same amount of electricity," said Collins, whose firm’s clients are not involved in the case.
Whereas the Clean Power Plan gave multiple options for achieving that outcome, including by giving utilities the right to shift generation from dirtier to cleaner plants, the Trump administration’s Affordable Clean Energy, or ACE, rule narrowed the regulation’s scope, requiring power station operators to make coal-fired units more efficient. The rule actually gave plant owners an incentive to burn more coal, as long as the generators in use were more efficient.
Had the Trump administration stopped at just withdrawing and replacing the Clean Power Plan, there might not be a case here today. But the Trump-era EPA specifically argued that its interpretation of Section 111D as limiting federal authority to the area "within the fenceline" was correct.
"The political reason was to lock in the victory," Collins said. "But the Trump administration did not hedge. They did not say, ‘We can only do this, and even if we could do more and had the discretion to make that choice, we exercise discretion to only do this because we think that’s the most technically feasible choice.’ No. They went for it all by saying, ‘We must do no more than this, and we cannot do more than this.’"
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit struck down the ACE rule on those grounds, ruling that Section 111D does, in fact, grant the EPA authority beyond a facility’s fenceline.
In disagreeing with the D.C. Circuit, the Supreme Court has largely left the EPA where it started. The Clean Power Plan was already rescinded, and the Biden administration has said it would not revive the regulation. The ACE rule was already struck down, and the Biden administration said it would not reinstate the regulation. And the EPA has yet to announce what it plans to propose in place of the ACE rule.
Given how much legal doubt the Obama administration’s use of Section 111D caused, few policy observers expected rulemakers at Biden’s EPA to rely on that same statute this time around.
"There isn’t going to be any effect on power plants from this case, win, lose or draw," Collins said ahead of the decision.
But Collins said to expect that the Biden administration’s forthcoming power plant plan will be far more aggressive as a result of West Virginia v. EPA. Stripped of its ability to offer a similar menu of compliance options, the agency will likely have to rely more heavily on emissions cuts directly at facilities. In other words, new solar panels or more use of a gas plant won’t bail out a coal-fired power station; the plant would have to either capture its emissions or shut down.
That, he said, is why the plaintiffs in West Virginia v. EPA were primarily a coal-mining company and Republican states.
"Westmoreland Coal? They’re in the business of selling coal. Red states? They’re in the business of getting elected. So you don’t have anybody who has to deal with the consequences of what this outcome will be," Collins said. "And the consequences would be a more ironfisted approach. It’ll be an uncomfortable world for power generators."
In a footnote on the conservative majority’s opinion, the decision stated that EPA does not have the authority to "direct existing sources to effectively cease to exist," and thus "we doubt it could" enact measures "simply requiring coal plants to become natural gas plants."
The EPA is required to regulate carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act as a result of a doctrine known as the "endangerment finding." The finding, which took effect in 2010, officially designated planet-heating gases as pollutants that reach the Clean Air Act’s threshold for harming human health.
Rescinding that finding would, experts say, require EPA lawyers to disprove the reality of climate science in court. The extreme unlikeliness of that outcome may be why the Trump administration resisted calls from allies to target the finding.
Legal recognition of the danger that greenhouse gases pose does not dictate a prescription for how to reduce them. That ambiguity gave the Trump-era EPA the authority to enact a power plant regulation that, according to models, would fail to cut emissions at the rate U.S. government scientists said was necessary to avoid catastrophic warming.
The systemic shifts in energy use required to keep global temperatures from rising to extreme levels under most mainstream climate models would already amount to an unprecedented economic overhaul. With each passing year, the degree of change that’s needed grows ever more drastic.
But based on the court’s logic in the West Virginia case, it may well find that any other regulation issued by the EPA to limit carbon emissions without specific instruction from Congress violates its major question doctrine. With Congress polarized on whether or not to even respond to climate change, let alone how, the court may well have cut off major avenues for regulation.
In the meantime, U.S. emissions are on pace to spike again this year.
The punishing heat experienced by India and Pakistan in March and April was the most intense, widespread and persistent in the region’s history. A study released Monday finds that human-caused climate change had made this historic event at least 30 times as likely. It determined that climate change elevated temperatures by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (one degree Celsius).
"What was particularly exceptional and particularly unusual was how early it started," Friederike Otto, co-author of the study, said in a news conference on Monday.
India experienced its highest March temperatures in 122 years, and Pakistan and northwestern and central India endured their hottest April. Numerous all-time and monthly temperature records were broken across both countries. Over the two months, extreme heat affected nearly 70 percent of India and 30 percent of Pakistan.
This heat event would have been "highly, highly unlikely" in a world without climate change, said Arpita Mondal, a co-author and professor at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
The heat took an enormous toll on people throughout the region. Workers were no longer able to work full days outside, putting a strain on their livelihoods and the economy. Key farming areas in India are expected to see a 10 to 35 percent decrease in crop yields due to the heat wave, driving up local market prices and reducing global wheat supplies at a time when supplies are already under stress because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Hundreds of forest fires also burned across India. In Pakistan, snowmelt caused a glacial lake to flood and wipe out a key bridge.
The world is desperate for more ways to curb carbon dioxide pollution. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global greenhouse gas emissions have to peak and decline by 2025 to keep warming this century below 1.5 degrees Celsius. That’s less than 1,000 days away, yet global emissions are still rising. And transportation alone accounts for 20 percent of global emissions.
That’s where hydrogen energy comes in Companies like Toyota think it could be the future, or at least a part of it ("Mirai" means "future" in Japanese). While other clean energy technologies like battery-powered vehicles have gained momentum, they aren’t rolling out fast enough or cheap enough. Hydrogen could help get the world to its climate goals faster by powering not only cars like the Mirai, but also ships and aircraft in the near future.
Hydrogen has potential uses beyond vehicles, too: It can make synthetic fuels and store power for the electricity grid; it can also clean up industries that are notoriously hard to decarbonize, like steel manufacturing.,,,,,
...the momentum behind hydrogen energy is once again building as its demand grows and the technology behind it improves. According to 2018 data, hydrogen fuel cells have dropped 60 percent in price since 2006, while their durability increased fourfold.
In 2021, Toyota sold more than 2,600 Mirais in the US, a record. Other hydrogen cars have entered the market too, including the Hyundai Nexo and the Honda Clarity. As of March 1, more than 12,000 hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been sold or leased in the US. Meanwhile, Delta Airlines and Airbus in March signed an agreement to develop hydrogen-powered aircraft. New hydrogen production plants are in the works in the US. In February, President Joe Biden announced close to $10 billion in funding to boost hydrogen production, infrastructure, and research.
Overseas, China announced plans to produce as much as 200,000 tons of carbon-free hydrogen per year to help run a fleet of 50,000 fuel cell-powered vehicles by 2025. The United Kingdom is aiming to double its hydrogen production. Globally, hydrogen production and transportation has received more than $80 billion in investment.
In a moment when the urgency of the climate crisis cannot be understated, hydrogen is getting another chance to help clean up the planet.....
by DIANA MADSON
FEBRUARY 17, 2021
Megan Renihan is communications coordinator for the Batesville School District. She says that four years ago, teacher salaries were below average for the state, and lower than other districts in the county.
"In order to attract and retain our staff, we wanted to increase the pay," she says.
So the district started looking for ways to cut costs.
At the time, it was spending more than half a million dollars a year on utilities. To reduce its energy costs, the district installed thousands of LED lights, replaced windows and HVAC units, sealed leaks, and improved building insulation.
And it installed almost 1,500 solar panels that now generate about half of the district’s electricity.
"We were the first school district in the state of Arkansas to invest in solar panels," Renihan says.
Together, the solar power and energy efficiency improvements are saving the district more than $300,000 a year. Along with other cost-cutting measures and state funding, those savings have helped raise teacher pay across the district.
"And that money is going to continue to go back into our teachers’ salaries. That’s the whole goal," Renihan says. "We want to be the best in the area for teachers, because that means that our kids are getting the best."
Another short article on this story
Is it possible to build wildlife-friendly windfarms? from Future Planet
By Brianne Hogan, 2nd March 2020
......Failing to address the harm posed to wildlife could lead to "a regulatory or economic slowdown in the wind power production that is needed to tackle climate change", write the US’s National Wildlife Federation’s legal advocacy director Jim Murphy and research associate Lauren Anderson in a 2019 report. Murphy says that while collision risks "are obvious", it’s essential for wind turbine companies to also be aware of habitat impacts. "Habitat risks involve how wind farm siting impacts wildlife behaviour and activity, such as avoidance, breeding and rearing young," he says.
In fact, one study led by Maria Thaker, a professor of ecology at the Indian Institute of Science’s Center for Ecological Sciences, found that the ecological impact of wind farms ripples out into the surrounding ecosystem. Conducted in the mountain plateaus of India’s Western Ghats, Thaker and her colleagues discovered almost four times more predatory birds in areas without wind turbines, while observing more lizards around wind farms.
"We found that density and activity of birds were much lower in areas with wind turbines and that meant that lizards were experiencing less predation risk," says Thaker. "And so, lizards were increasing in number without the typical check of population growth by predation."
To her surprise, the findings revealed the surrounding food chain had been altered because of the wind turbines. "This can have consequences for other aspects of the food chain, such as other species that birds eat or species that lizards eat," she says.
Thaker says she doesn’t believe ecosystems at wind farms "are going to be destroyed and damaged beyond repair, but they have shifted the species composition (meaning which species are there) and the way these species respond." She adds that the death of birds and bats is not the only reason for the environmental concern. "The creation of roads, and human activity under the windfarms disturbs large mammals and so they avoid the area as well."
It’s why Murphy says finding the right place for turbines is vital. "Good siting is must, as is following the wind energy guidelines developed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service. These guidelines provide a series of best management practices to help avoid, minimise, and compensate for wildlife impacts," he says. "It is also crucial that wind energy companies comply with key wildlife laws like the Endangered Species Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act. In practice, this means working with wildlife agencies and stakeholders to identify suitable sites, and using technology and operating practices that reduce impacts on wildlife."
Once the right site is settled upon, the interventions to save wildlife from wind turbines can go further. One option is shutting down the turbines at key moments. "Technology now allows at risk birds like eagles and condors to be identified long before they come into danger and give operators time to shut down turbines that might pose a risk," says Murphy.
One of the more promising technologies being used on eagles is a tool called IdentiFlight, which is essentially a robot that can spot and recognise birds with high accuracy. One study found that IdentiFlight detected 96% of the bird flights that human observers saw, and spotted an additional 5.62 times more besides that the birders didn’t see. It misclassified nine out of a total 149 eagles as non-eagles, giving a false negative rate of 6%. IdentiFlight is currently employed at Top of the World Windpower Project in Wyoming, where Murphy says the technology is coupled with human surveillance to reduce bird collisions. "If the threat [of collision] can be determined with more precision, the curtailment can be more targeted."
In terms of deterring wildlife from the turbines, Murphy says methods that involve acoustics "are showing promise at keeping bats from sites where they could collide with turbines". One solution includes mounting Ultrasonic Acoustic Deterrents, or UAD devices, on the wind turbines themselves. The idea is that these devices make the airspace around the turbine aurally uncomfortable for bats, so they keep away from the turbine blades. Other deterrents include illuminating turbines with ultraviolet light or painting wind turbines purple. While these methods show promise, they also require further testing to prove their efficacy. As Murphy puts it, "the problem is far from solved".
However, Thaker agrees with Murphy that the most important piece of the puzzle is location. "Co-existence is definitely possible, as long as wind energy companies are keen to minimise environmental impact," Thaker says. Placing wind turbines on homes and buildings, as well as on land that is not an important wildlife habitat, would not impact the birds and bats so much, she adds. "What we must not do is convert large areas of natural land to wind farms because we’re rapidly running out of areas for wildlife to exist unhindered."
It’s that fear of losing integral land that occupies Cheverie in his resistance to the new wind turbines in Souris. "These wetlands are composed of black spruce swamps, which are well known as nesting sites of many birds," says Cheverie. "The freshwater ecosystem at East Lake is home to many waterfowl that nest there, including the blue winged teal, ring necked duck, American black duck and mallard duck, all of which are listed as species of importance by Eastern Habitat Joint Ventures Implementation Plan."
An alternative might be sought in offshore wind farms, which have increased in popularity, particularly in the UK and Germany. However, Lena Bergstrom, author of a 2014 study on the effects of offshore wind farms on marine wildlife, says that efforts not to disturb the natural habitat are also a key aspect for offshore windfarms. "This means that the planner should take care to not disrupt the natural species composition in the area, minimise the risk of new invasive species, and of prevailing species becoming displaced."
Areas that are essential for the recruitment or feeding of fish, birds and mammals "should be avoided", she says. And while often offshore wind farms create permanent exclusion zones for fishing, which might protect marine life, Bergstrom says that careful planning of the landscape is essential to find the best possible spot. Monitoring the local habitat before the windfarm is built can also provide useful data for assessing cumulative effects and planning for mitigation of any negative effects on wildlife.
A spokesperson from the Canadian Wind Energy Association says that wind energy project developers ensure there are mechanisms in place to reduce potential risks to birds and bats, and to better understand impacts these animals, using tools such as its Wind Energy and Bat Conservation Review. Back in Souris, the PEI Energy Corporation says that protecting wildlife will be a critical part of its environmental management plan. "We do our utmost to avoid building on sensitive areas and we are committed to no net loss of wetland function," a spokesperson for the corporation says. Based on the results from post-construction surveys completed at existing sites, the spokesperson continues, "the minimum estimated mortality proposed site is quite low when compared to the average avian and bat fatality rates. Despite these low numbers, we are committed to surveying the site closely."
PEI Energy Corporation was not considering adding retrofits, such as radar and GPS to detect incoming flocks, but it did say that the new turbines would include "more features that reduce environmental impact and reduce noise levels". At present, the windfarm is compiling the results of its environmental impact analysis, and awaiting permits before any expansion work can begin.
While it’s evident that turbines have impacts on wildlife, "wind energy is a critical part of the solution to climate change, which is the biggest current threat to wildlife", says Murphy. And while studies have proven wind energy has impacts on ecosystems, Murphy says he believes that these impacts can be reduced to acceptable levels.
Which is a relief considering our planet is in trouble; almost daily we are exposed to dizzying facts, figures, and images about the climate crisis and multiple species of wildlife dying out. Undoubtedly climate change is our earth’s most imminent threat, and with wind energy helping to reduce greenhouse emissions, it’s no surprise that it continues to increase globally from Africa, to America, to Australia.
Perhaps the debate over the wind farm expansion in Souris, can best be seen as a reminder that there is no simple quick fix to save the planet. But with careful planning of sites, the development of urban windfarms, and new deterrents to prevent collisions, reducing carbon emissions with the help of wind could cost fewer animal lives.
Posts mislead about environmental impact of green energy
Elias Huuhtanen, AFP Finland, AFP USA. Published on Thursday 31 March 2022 at 09:30
.....Currently, one of the most comprehensive studies on the environmental impact of different vehicle types, commissioned by the European Union in July 2020, found that electric vehicles "have significantly lower environmental impacts across all vehicle types.".....
Anne Applebaum describes how autocracy around the world is growing and how to resist it, including by rapidly converting away from fossil fuel industries which many tyrannies use to support themselves, and how political and community participation is necessary. Anne mentions pointedly how dictator Orban in Hungary has used legal means to seize power, and how some Republicans model their assault on democracy in the USA directly on Orban.
https://youtu.be/aaldUNn-eOk
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2022/05/autocracy-could-destroy-democracy-russia-ukraine/629363/
Not available on PBS or youtube yet. Richard Gere interview about the film
Feb. 28, 2022
A new United Nations science report warned that the effects of climate change are growing faster and more severe than expected. It cited hunger, disease, poverty and other ills made worse by a warming planet and indicated the repercussions may soon outstrip humanity's ability to adapt. William Brangham reports.
Full report and video from PBS
Democracy Now on this UN report, with Secretary General Antonio Guterres and Bill McKibben
The twin smokestacks of the Moss Landing Power Plant tower over Monterey Bay. Visible for miles along this picturesque stretch of the Northern California coast, the 500-foot-tall pillars crown what was once California’s largest electric power station — a behemoth natural gas-fired generator. Today, as California steadily moves to decarbonize its economy, those stacks are idle and the plant is largely mothballed. Instead, the site is about to begin a new life as the world’s largest battery, storing excess energy when solar panels and wind farms are producing electricity and feeding it back into the grid when they’re not.
Inside a cavernous turbine building, a 300-megawatt lithium-ion battery is currently being readied for operation, with another 100-megawatt battery to come online in 2021. Together, they will be able to discharge enough electricity to power roughly 300,000 California homes for four hours during evenings, heatwaves, and other times when energy demand outstrips supply, according to project developer Vistra Energy.
These aren’t the only super-sized batteries that will soon be operating at the Moss Landing plant. An additional 182.5 megawatts produced by 256 Tesla megapack batteries are scheduled to begin feeding into California’s electric grid in mid-2021, with plans to eventually add enough capacity at the site to power every home in nearby San Francisco for six hours, according to the Bay Area utility, Pacific Gas & Electric, which will own and operate the system. Elsewhere in California, a 250-megawatt storage project went online this year in San Diego, construction has begun on a 150-megawatt system near San Francisco, a 100-megawatt battery project is nearing completion in Long Beach, and a number of others are in various stages of development around the state.
California is currently the global leader in the effort to balance the intermittency of renewable energy in electric grids with high-capacity batteries. But the rest of the world is rapidly following suit. Recently announced plans range from a 409-megawatt system in South Florida, to a 320-megawatt plant near London, England, to a 200-megawatt facility in Lithuania and a 112-megawatt unit in Chile.
The mass deployment of storage could overcome one of the biggest obstacles to renewable energy, its cycling between oversupply when the sun shines or the wind blows, and shortage when the sun sets or the wind drops. By smoothing imbalances between supply and demand, proponents say, batteries can replace fossil fuel "peaker" plants that kick in for a few hours a day when energy demands soar. Experts say that widespread energy storage is key to expanding the reach of renewables and speeding the transition to a carbon-free power grid.
"Energy storage is actually the true bridge to a clean-energy future," says Bernadette Del Chiaro, executive director of the California Solar and Storage Association.
How quickly that future arrives depends in large part on how rapidly costs continue to fall. Already the price tag for utility-scale battery storage in the United States has plummeted, dropping nearly 70 percent between 2015 and 2018, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This sharp price drop has been enabled by advances in lithium-ion battery chemistry that have significantly improved performance. Power capacity has expanded rapidly, and batteries can store and discharge energy over ever-longer periods of time. Market competition and rising battery production also play a major role; a projection by the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory sees mid-range costs for lithium-ion batteries falling an additional 45 percent between 2018 and 2030.
"We’re almost entirely piggybacking on the growth of lithium-ion battery technology, which is driven mostly by electric vehicles and consumer electronics," says Ray Hohenstein, market applications director for Fluence, an energy storage technology provider with storage projects totaling nearly 1 gigawatt (1,000 megawatts) set to come online in California within a year. The money put into research for those applications is driving down costs across the board, says Hohenstein. "It’s just like what we saw with solar panels."
In California, falling battery prices, coupled with the state’s aggressive push toward a carbon-free electrical grid by 2045, have led to a packed pipeline of storage projects. A 2013 bill set a target of 1.325 gigawatts of storage to be commissioned for the state’s grid by 2020. With 1.5 gigawatts of projects now approved, including more than 500 megawatts installed so far, that goal has already been surpassed, according to the California Public Utilities Commission. While there is no precise figure for how much storage California will require to meet its carbon-free goal, the amount depends on the future technology mix, energy use, and other changing factors, some analyses estimate that at least 30 gigawatts of utility-scale storage will be needed by 2045.
When the gigantic Moss Landing project becomes fully operational in mid-2021, it will more than double the amount of energy storage in California. Several other states are also now embarking on major energy storage projects. Among them: New York’s 316-megawatt Ravenswood project will be able to power more than 250,000 homes for up to eight hours, replacing two natural gas peaker plants in the New York City borough of Queens. And the 409-megawatt Manatee system planned for South Florida will be charged by an adjacent solar plant. Touted by utility Florida Power & Light as the world’s largest solar-powered battery system, the facility will replace two aging natural gas-fired units.
Nationwide, a record 1.2 gigawatts of storage have been installed so far this year, according to Wood MacKenzie, a natural resources research and consulting firm. That number is projected to jump dramatically over the next five years, rising to nearly 7.5 gigawatts in 2025. Kelly Speakes-Backman, CEO of the U.S. Energy Storage Association, says that battery storage additions doubled in 2020, and would likely have tripled had it not been for construction slowdowns caused by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite its leadership in renewable energy development, Europe has been slower to get on board with storage. 'In general, Europe is a bit more conservative," says Daniele Gatti, analyst for IDTechEx, a United Kingdom-based market research firm specializing in emerging technology. Energy storage development in Europe has been hindered by a restrictive electricity market dominated by government auctions that tend to undervalue storage. Still, some big-battery projects are now taking shape, including the 320-megawatt Gateway system to be built at a new port facility near London.
Globally, Gatti projects rapid growth in energy storage, reaching 1.2 terawatts (1,200 gigawatts) over the next decade. Key players include Australia, which in 2017 became the first nation to install major battery storage on its grid with the 100-megawatt Hornsdale Power Reserve, and is now planning to add another 300 megawatts near Victoria. The new system will dispatch electricity between states on an as-needed basis, maximizing the efficiency of existing transmission infrastructure and reducing the need for building new power lines that would sit idle most of the time. Similar projects are gearing up in Germany and elsewhere, highlighting an emerging role for batteries as transmission tools.
And Saudi Arabia has just announced plans to overtake Moss Landing’s standing as the world’s largest battery with a massive solar-plus-storage system on the country’s west coast. The facility will provide 100-percent renewable energy around the clock to a resort complex of 50 hotels and 1,300 homes being built along the Red Sea.
With a recent report concluding that most fossil fuel power plants in the U.S. will reach the end of their working life by 2035, experts say that the time for rapid growth in industrial-scale energy storage is at hand. Yiyi Zhou, a renewable power systems specialist with Bloomberg NEF, says that renewables combined with battery storage are already an economically viable alternative to building new gas peaker plants. Pairing electricity generation with storage works especially well with solar energy, which generally follows a predictable daily pattern. In the U.S., costs have also been helped by the federal Investment Tax Credit, a 30-percent tax rebate for new solar installations. In fact, says Zhou, as more solar energy enters the grid, the cost of operating gas plants actually goes up.
Batteries are beginning to reach a size that enables renewables to replace medium-sized natural gas generators. "That’s mainly because they are forced to cycle on and off much more now because of solar penetration," Zhou says. "This adds wear-and-tear, and shortens their lifetime."
Batteries are even beginning to reach a size around 200 megawatts that enables renewables to replace small- to medium-sized natural gas generators, Hohenstein says. "Now we’re able to truly build these hybrid resources, solar, storage, wind, and do the job that was traditionally done by fossil fuel power plants," says Hohenstein, whose company is seeing a surge of interest in such large projects.
Adding storage also makes renewable energy more profitable, says Wesley Cole, an energy analyst with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “One of the challenges of renewable energy is the more you put on the grid, the more the value declines,” Cole says. Storage helps deal with that by soaking up excess energy that would have been lost in the middle of the day, when electricity demand is lower, and moving it to a time when it is more valuable.
While energy storage is thriving in high-value markets, such as California, battery prices still need to come down more to reach large-scale global deployment. In the U.S., proponents hope the incoming Biden administration will pursue more favorable energy policies, including extending the Investment Tax Credit , which ramps down to 10 percent for commercial solar systems and ends for residential solar in 2022, and expanding the benefit to stand-alone storage.
Even without further incentives, however, analysts are optimistic that battery prices will eventually drop low enough for widespread energy storage use.
"We see storage being a large player across effectively every future we look at," says Cole. "And not just one or two gigawatts, but tens to hundreds of gigawatts."
Cheryl Katz is a Northern California-based freelance science writer covering climate change, earth sciences, natural resources, and energy. Her articles have appeared in National Geographic, Scientific American, Eos and Hakai Magazine, among other publications.
New research warns that the earth may be approaching key tipping points, including the runaway loss of ice sheets, that could fundamentally disrupt the global climate system. A growing concern is a change in ocean circulation, which could alter climate patterns in a profound way.
Some of the most alarming science surrounding climate change is the discovery that it may not happen incrementally — as a steadily rising line on a graph — but in a series of lurches as various tipping points are passed. And now comes a new concern: These tipping points can form a cascade, with each one triggering others, creating an irreversible shift to a hotter world. A new study suggests that changes to ocean circulation could be the driver of such a cascade.
A group of researchers, led by Tim Lenton at Exeter University, England, first warned in a landmark paper 11 years ago about the risk of climate tipping points. Back then, they thought the dangers would only arise when global warming exceeded 5 degrees Celsius (9 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. But last week, Lenton and six co-authors argued in the journal Nature that the risks are now much more likely and much more imminent. Some tipping points, they said, may already have been breached at the current 1 degree C of warming.
The new warning is much starker than the forecasts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which critics say has until now played down the risks of exceeding climate tipping points, in part because they are difficult to quantify.
The potential tipping points come in three forms: runaway loss of ice sheets that accelerate sea level rise; forests and other natural carbon stores such as permafrost releasing those stores into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide (CO2), accelerating warming; and the disabling of the ocean circulation system.
Researchers’ biggest fear is for the future of the ocean circulation system, which moves heat around the world and may dictate global climate. The researchers once considered these tipping points to be largely independent of each other. Now they warn that the world faces a "cascade" of abrupt shifts in the planet’s climate system, as global warming takes hold. "We might already have crossed the threshold for a cascade of inter-related tipping points," they wrote in Nature. This "could trigger a shift in the state of the Earth system as a whole," one of the authors, Will Steffen of the Australian National University in Canberra, told Yale Environment 360.
more here:
A cascade of tipping points looms
1. The 12 most dangerous global crises both fueling and accelerating the unfolding of a global collapse that we will face over the next few decades.
2. The primary and secondary warning signs that many conditions essential to your survival will likely collapse, and that you need to get prepared, adapt, or get out of their way!
3. How the collective worsening of the 12 major global crises (listed below) will lead to the mass extinction of most of humanity by mid-century.
4. Almost everything you have been told about the worst climate change consequences arriving late in the 21st century is wrong. These worst consequences will be occurring not just in your children's lifetimes but in yours as well!
5. Almost everything you have been told that we still have until 2030, 2035, or 2050 to make critical extinction-preventing global fossil fuel reductions is also dead wrong.
And most importantly,
6. What we must and can still do to prevent, adapt to, slow down, and survive the cascading convergence of endless catastrophes from the worsening of the 12 global crises disrupting, interacting, and amplifying each other as well as going over their tipping points.
Read this and other related articles here:
The World's Most Critical Global Challenges
Renewable energy skeptics argue that because of their variability, wind and solar cannot be the foundation of a dependable electricity grid. But the expansion of renewables and new methods of energy management and storage can lead to a grid that is reliable and clean.
BY AMORY B. LOVINS AND M. V. RAMANA, DECEMBER 9, 2021
Wind turbines and solar panels in Bavaria, Germany. FRANK BIENEWALD / LIGHTROCKET VIA GETTY IMAGES
As wind and solar power have become dramatically cheaper, and their share of electricity generation grows, skeptics of these technologies are propagating several myths about renewable energy and the electrical grid. The myths boil down to this: Relying on renewable sources of energy will make the electricity supply undependable.
Last summer, some commentators argued that blackouts in California were due to the "intermittency" of renewable energy sources, when in fact the chief causes were a combination of an extreme heat wave probably induced by climate change, faulty planning, and the lack of flexible generation sources and sufficient electricity storage. During a brutal Texas cold snap last winter, Gov. Greg Abbott wrongly blamed wind and solar power for the state’s massive grid failure, which was vastly larger than California’s. In fact, renewables outperformed the grid operator’s forecast during 90 percent of the blackout, and in the rest, fell short by at most one-fifteenth as much as gas plants. Instead, other causes , such as inadequately weatherized power plants and natural gas shutting down because of frozen equipment, led to most of the state’s electricity shortages.
In Europe, the usual target is Germany, in part because of its Energiewende (energy transformation) policies shifting from fossil fuels and nuclear energy to efficient use and renewables. The newly elected German government plans to accelerate the former and complete the latter, but some critics have warned that Germany is running "up against the limits of renewables."
In reality, it is entirely possible to sustain a reliable electricity system based on renewable energy sources plus a combination of other means, including improved methods of energy management and storage. A clearer understanding of how to dependably manage electricity supply is vital because climate threats require a rapid shift to renewable sources like solar and wind power. This transition has been sped by plummeting costs Bloomberg New Energy Finance estimates that solar and wind are the cheapest source for 91 percent of the world’s electricity, but is being held back by misinformation and myths.
Myth No. 1: A grid that increasingly relies on renewable energy is an unreliable grid.
Going by the cliché, "In God we trust; all others bring data," it’s worth looking at the statistics on grid reliability in countries with high levels of renewables. The indicator most often used to describe grid reliability is the average power outage duration experienced by each customer in a year, a metric known by the tongue-tying name of "System Average Interruption Duration Index" (SAIDI). Based on this metric, Germany, where renewables supply nearly half of the country’s electricity, boasts a grid that is one of the most reliable in Europe and the world. In 2020, SAIDI was just 0.25 hours in Germany. Only Liechtenstein (0.08 hours), and Finland and Switzerland (0.2 hours), did better in Europe, where 2020 electricity generation was 38 percent renewable (ahead of the world’s 29 percent). Countries like France (0.35 hours) and Sweden (0.61 hours),both far more reliant on nuclear power, did worse, for various reasons.
The United States, where renewable energy and nuclear power each provide roughly 20 percent of electricity, had five times Germany’s outage rate — 1.28 hours in 2020. Since 2006, Germany’s renewable share of electricity generation has nearly quadrupled, while its power outage rate was nearly halved. Similarly, the Texas grid became more stable as its wind capacity sextupled from 2007 to 2020. Today, Texas generates more wind power — about a fifth of its total electricity — than any other state in the U.S.
Myth No. 2: Countries like Germany must continue to rely on fossil fuels to stabilize the grid and back up variable wind and solar power.
Again, the official data say otherwise. Between 2010 , the year before the Fukushima nuclear accident in Japan, and 2020, Germany’s generation from fossil fuels declined by 130.9 terawatt-hours and nuclear generation by 76.3 terawatt hours. These were more than offset by increased generation from renewables (149.5 terawatt hours) and energy savings that decreased consumption by 38 terawatt hours in 2019, before the pandemic cut economic activity, too. By 2020, Germany’s greenhouse gas emissions had declined by 42.3 percent below its 1990 levels, beating the target of 40 percent set in 2007. Emissions of carbon dioxide from just the power sector declined from 315 million tons in 2010 to 185 million tons in 2020.
So as the percentage of electricity generated by renewables in Germany steadily grew, its grid reliability improved, and its coal burning and greenhouse gas emissions substantially decreased.
In Japan, following the multiple reactor meltdowns at Fukushima, more than 40 nuclear reactors closed permanently or indefinitely without materially raising fossil-fueled generation or greenhouse gas emissions; electricity savings and renewable energy offset virtually the whole loss, despite policies that suppressed renewables.
Myth No. 3: Because solar and wind energy can be generated only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, they cannot be the basis of a grid that has to provide electricity 24/7, year-round.
While variable output is a challenge, it is neither new nor especially hard to manage. No kind of power plant runs 24/7, 365 days a year, and operating a grid always involves managing variability of demand at all times. Even with no solar and wind power (which tend to work dependably at different times and seasons, making shortfalls less likely), all electricity supply varies.
Seasonal variations in water availability and, increasingly, drought reduce electricity output from hydroelectric dams. Nuclear plants must be shut down for refueling or maintenance, and big fossil and nuclear plants are typically out of action roughly 7 percent to 12 percent of the time, some much more. A coal plant’s fuel supply might be interrupted by the derailment of a train or failure of a bridge. A nuclear plant or fleet might unexpectedly have to be shut down for safety reasons, as was Japan’s biggest plant from 2007 to 2009. Every French nuclear plant was, on average, shut down for 96.2 days in 2019 due to “planned” or “forced unavailability.” That rose to 115.5 days in 2020, when French nuclear plants generated less than 65 percent of the electricity they theoretically could have produced. Comparing expected with actual performance, one might even say that nuclear power was France’s most intermittent 2020 source of electricity.
Climate- and weather-related factors have caused multiple nuclear plant interruptions, which have become seven times more frequent in the past decade. Even normally steady nuclear output can fail abruptly and lastingly, as in Japan after the Fukushima disaster, or in the northeastern U.S. after the 2003 regional blackout, which triggered abrupt shutdowns that caused nine reactors to produce almost no power for several days and take nearly two weeks to return to full output.
The Bungala Solar Farm in South Australia, where the grid has run almost exclusively on renewables for days on end. The Bungala Solar Farm in South Australia, where the grid has run almost exclusively on renewables for days on end. LINCOLN FOWLER / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
Thus all sources of power will be unavailable sometime or other. Managing a grid has to deal with that reality, just as much as with fluctuating demand. The influx of larger amounts of renewable energy does not change that reality, even if the ways they deal with variability and uncertainty are changing. Modern grid operators emphasize diversity and flexibility rather than nominally steady but less flexible "baseload" generation sources. Diversified renewable portfolios don’t fail as massively, lastingly, or unpredictably as big thermal power stations.
ALSO ON YALE E360
In boost for renewables, grid-scale battery storage is on the rise.
Read more.
The purpose of an electric grid is not just to transmit and distribute electricity as demand fluctuates, but also to back up non-functional plants with working plants: that is, to manage the intermittency of traditional fossil and nuclear plants. In the same way, but more easily and often at lower cost, the grid can rapidly back up wind and solar photovoltaics’ predictable variations with other renewables, of other kinds or in other places or both.This has become easier with today’s far more accurate forecasting of weather and wind speeds, thus allowing better prediction of the output of variable renewables. Local or onsite renewables are even more resilient because they largely or wholly bypass the grid, where nearly all power failures begin. And modern power electronics have reliably run the billion-watt South Australian grid on just sun and wind for days on end, with no coal, no hydro, no nuclear, and at most the 4.4-percent natural-gas generation currently required by the grid regulator.
Most discussions of renewables focus on batteries and other electric storage technologies to mitigate variability. This is not surprising because batteries are rapidly becoming cheaper and widely deployed. At the same time, new storage technologies with diverse attributes continue to emerge; the U.S. Department of Energy Global Energy Storage Database lists 30 kinds already deployed or under construction. Meanwhile, many other and less expensive carbon-free ways exist to deal with variable renewables besides giant batteries.
Many less expensive and carbon-free ways exist to deal with variable renewables besides giant batteries. The first and foremost is energy efficiency, which reduces demand, especially during periods of peak use. Buildings that are more efficient need less heating or cooling and change their temperature more slowly, so they can coast longer on their own thermal capacity and thus sustain comfort with less energy, especially during peak-load periods.
A second option is demand flexibility or demand response, wherein utilities compensate electricity customers that lower their use when asked. often automatically and imperceptibly, helping balance supply and demand. One recent study found that the U.S. has 200 gigawatts of cost-effective load flexibility potential that could be realized by 2030 if effective demand response is actively pursued. Indeed, the biggest lesson from recent shortages in California might be the greater appreciation of the need for demand response. Following the challenges of the past two summers, the California Public Utilities Commission has instituted the Emergency Load Reduction Program to build on earlier demand response efforts.
Some evidence suggests an even larger potential: An hourly simulation of the 2050 Texas grid found that eight types of demand response could eliminate the steep ramp of early-evening power demand as solar output wanes and household loads spike. For example, currently available ice-storage technology freezes water using lower-cost electricity and cooler air, usually at night, and then uses the ice to cool buildings during hot days. This reduces electricity demand from air conditioning, and saves money, partly because storage capacity for heating or cooling is far cheaper than storing electricity to deliver them. Likewise, without changing driving patterns, many electric vehicles can be intelligently charged when electricity is more abundant, affordable, and renewable.
The top graph shows daily solar power output (yellow line) and demand from various household uses. The bottom graph shows how to align demand with supply, running devices in the middle of the day when solar output is highest. ROCKY MOUNTAIN INSTITUTE
A third option for stabilizing the grid as renewable energy generation increases is diversity, both of geography and of technology — onshore wind, offshore wind, solar panels, solar thermal power, geothermal, hydropower, burning municipal or industrial or agricultural wastes. The idea is simple: If one of these sources, at one location, is not generating electricity at a given time, odds are that some others will be.
Finally, some forms of storage, such as electric vehicle batteries, are already economical today. Simulations show that ice-storage air conditioning in buildings, plus smart charging to and from the grid of electric cars, which are parked 96 percent of the time, could enable Texas in 2050 to use 100 percent renewable electricity without needing giant batteries.
To pick a much tougher case, the dark doldrums of European winters are often claimed to need many months of battery storage for an all-renewable electrical grid. Yet top German and Belgian grid operators find Europe would need only one to two weeks of renewably derived backup fuel, providing just 6 percent of winter output; not a huge challenge.
ALSO ON YALE E360
From homes to cars, it’s now time to electrify everything.
Read more.
The bottom line is simple. Electrical grids can deal with much larger fractions of renewable energy at zero or modest cost, and this has been known for quite a while. Some European countries with little or no hydropower already get about half to three-fourths of their electricity from renewables with grid reliability better than in the U.S. It is time to get past the myths.
Amory B. Lovins is an adjunct professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and co-founder and chairman emeritus of Rocky Mountain Institute. M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security and director of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada.
Living into an Ecological Civilization by Jeremy Lent
https://youtu.be/kO7m8jHN2nc
Author Jeremy Lent points out that after we left our hunter-gatherer lifestyle, in which we were free to roam and looked upon Nature as a gift, in a land populated by spirits, and then through the development of agriculture from c.10000 BC, through to the scientific revolution starting in c.1600, we have developed a "pattern of meaning" or worldview based on these principles:
1. Nature is a machine
2. Humans are separate from Nature
3. Humans are separate from each other
4. Human progress arises from the conquest of Nature
5. The Earth is a resource to be used for human benefit
6. The purpose of life is to get wealthy and powerful (Monbiot calls this the basic principle of neoliberalism)
Jeremy proposes transforming our civilization into one based on ecology that enables both life on Earth and humans too; a story that says we are all interconnected in the web of life, based on these 7 ecological principles:
1. Respect for diversity and the dignity of all people and groups, and of their right to participate in political and economic power.
2. Symbiosis where each living member contributes to the common good.
3. Holarchy: each living being is a part of a common whole, like a hologram or fractile, in which the whole requires each part to flourish (hermeticists and astrologers call this "as above, so below"; Teilhard de Chardin referred to this great principle as "in an organized whole, union differentiates").
4. Locality: society connected to the land and based on the needs of different bioregions.
5. Humans are embedded in the natural world. We activists are not so much just fighting for Nature; we ARE Nature defending itself.
6. A Sustainableworld flourishing for the long-term, and regenerating Nature.
7. Humility about our technology solutions, because complex systems are unpredicable. We need to be reverent guests of Nature.
Lent's circle of ecological living
More on patterns of meaning and ecological civilization here
The Power Grid: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver
John Oliver discusses the current state of the nation’s power grid, why it needs fixing, and, of course, how fun balloons are.
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A University of Arizona-led effort to reconstruct Earth's climate since the last ice age, about 24,000 years ago, highlights the main drivers of climate change and how far out of bounds human activity has pushed the climate system.
The study, published this week in Nature, had three main findings:
It verified that the main drivers of climate change since the last ice age are rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the retreat of the ice sheets.
It suggests a general warming trend over the last 10,000 years, settling a decade-long debate about whether this period trended warmer or cooler in the paleoclimatology community.
The magnitude and rate warming over the last 150 years far surpasses the magnitude and rate of changes over the last 24,000 years. "This reconstruction suggests that current temperatures are unprecedented in 24,000 years, and also suggests that the speed of human-caused global warming is faster than anything we've seen in that same time," said Jessica Tierney, a UArizona geosciences associate professor and co-author of the study.
Tierney, who heads the lab in which this research was conducted, is also known for her contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and climate briefings for the U.S. Congress.
The blue line shows globally averaged surface air temperature since the last ice age, 24,000 years ago, created by assimilating paleoclimate records with a computer model of the climate system. Time is stretched for the past 1,000 years to visualize recent changes. Warming begins at the end of the last ice age, roughly 18,000 years ago, then temperatures stabilize. While previous studies showed a slight cooling over the past 10,000 years, the new analysis shows a slight warming trend. The curve steepens in recent decades with the accumulation of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Credit: Osman et al./Nature
"The fact that we're today so far out of bounds of what we might consider normal is cause for alarm and should be surprising to everybody," said lead study author Matthew Osman, a geosciences postdoctoral researcher at UArizona.
An online search of "global temperature change since the last ice age" would produce a graph of global temperature change over time that was created eight years ago.
These maps show global average surface temperature at different periods in Earth’s history going back 24,000 years. The darker the shade of blue, the colder the temperature compared to today. Credit: Osman et al./Nature "Our team's reconstruction improves on that curve by adding a spatial dimension," Tierney said.
The team created maps of global temperature changes for every 200-year interval going back 24,000 years.
"These maps are really powerful," Osman said. "With them, it's possible for anyone to explore how temperatures have changed across Earth, on a very personal level. For me, being able to visualize the 24,000-year evolution of temperatures at the exact location I'm sitting today, or where I grew up, really helped ingrain a sense of just how severe climate change is today."
There are different methods for reconstructing past temperatures. The team combined two independent datasets—temperature data from marine sediments and computer simulations of climate—to create a more complete picture of the past.
The researchers looked at the chemical signatures of marine sediments to get information about past temperatures. Because temperature changes over time can affect the chemistry of a long-dead animal's shell, paleoclimatologists can use those measurements to estimate temperature in an area. It's not a perfect thermometer, but it's a starting point.
Computer-simulated climate models, on the other hand, provide temperature information based on scientists' best understanding of the physics of the climate system, which also isn't perfect.
The team decided to combine the methods to harness the strengths of each. This is called data assimilation and is also commonly used in weather forecasting.
"To forecast the weather, meteorologists start with a model that reflects current weather, then add in observations such as temperature, pressure, humidity, wind direction, and so on to create an updated forecast," Tierney said.
The team applied this same idea to past climate.
"With this method, we are able to leverage the relative merits of each of these unique datasets to generate observationally constrained, dynamically consistent and spatially complete reconstructions of past climate change," Osman said.
Now, the team is working on using their method to investigate climate changes even farther in the past.
"We're excited to apply this approach to ancient climates that were warmer than today," Tierney said, "because these times are essentially windows into our future as greenhouse gas emissions rise."
https://youtu.be/xilTMxgJnv4
These PBS reports are based on the UN climate report in Summer 2021. The Secretary General said the report is a code red for humanity.
This independent report was prepared by 234 scientists from 66 countries.
https://news.un.org/en/story/2021/08/1097362
George Monbiot explains what the alternatives are to the climate crisis and to rule by psychopaths, either through growth capitalism or communism. We are all hypocrites, but that should not stop us from acting to stop climate breakdown. Tipping points are upon us, and if we don't change course very soon we are toast. We need a new restoration story in politics.
Climate Change and Capitalism with George Monbiot
https://youtu.be/gm78X0RZNho
Human pressures on the planet as a whole - the 'Earth System' - have now become so great that scientists have proposed that we have left the Holocene, the 11,700-year geologic epoch that has been humanity's accommodating home, and have entered a new geologic epoch, the Anthropocene, characterised by extremely rapid changes to the climate system driven primarily by human emissions of greenhouse gases and growing degradation of the planet's biosphere, driven by a range of direct and indirect human pressures.
Where is the Anthropocene headed? The current trajectory of the Earth System is a rapid exit from the Holocene, accelerating towards a much hotter climate system and a degraded, ill-functioning biosphere. Perhaps most concerning is a possible 'fork in the road' beyond which lies 'Hothouse Earth'. The key element of this trajectory is a 'tipping cascade', in which a series of interlinked tipping points - the melting of polar ice, the conversion of forest biomes to grasslands or savannas, changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation - take control of the trajectory of the Earth System and move it to a much hotter, biodiversity-impoverished, but stable state.
Professor Will Steffen (Climate Council of Australia, Australian National University) argues that avoiding this possible tipping cascade requires fundamental changes to human societies. These changes include not only advances in technologies but also more fundamental changes in societal structures and core values.
Barring a multifaceted miracle, within a generation, we will be facing an exponentially rising tide of climate disasters that will bring this civilization down. We, therefore, need to engage with climate realism. This means an epic struggle to mitigate and adapt, an epic struggle to take on the climate-criminals and, notably, to start planning seriously for civilizational collapse.
https://youtu.be/uzCxFPzdO0Y
5 Reasons Why You Should Consider Investing In Renewable Energy Right Now [Updated 2021]
https://www.greenesa.com/blog/investment-in-renewable-energy
The energy demand is rising with the growth of the global population. People have been using renewable energy sources for energy services. With that, there is one question that arises in the mind of investors: Is it good to invest in renewable energy?
Global warming and climate change are major concerns for the world at present. The use of non-renewable energy sources like fossil fuels like coal, gas, oil, and nuclear energy, is the cause of environmental changes.
Frequent use of non-renewable energy sources for energy services is harmful to the environment and our health. The production of energy from these sources emit heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide. They cause the majority of greenhouse gas emissions in the world.
According to a recent study, if emissions continue to rise and are not controlled, the atmosphere will warm by approximately 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit above pre-industrial levels by 2040 (Stark, 2019).
It takes time to replace non-renewable energy resources with renewables. The alternative sources of non-renewable energy come from renewables.
Renewable energy resources can be replaced easily within a short time scale as they come from natural sources. Examples of renewable energy sources include solar, wind, hydro (water), biomass energy, geothermal, etc.
These energy sources make a positive impact on the environment and our health. They reduce greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere and play an essential role in fighting climate change.
The use of solar for electricity and energy services is common these days. Furthermore, electric/solar vehicles, energy-efficient appliances, solar-powered energy services, wind turbines, geothermal heat pump systems, hydropower, etc., have also come to use.
People have begun to envision a green future. Should you invest in renewable energy? Will it provide good returns, or is it not profitable? We will answer these questions in this article.
Fossil fuels are limited, and they have unpredictable costs. Technological advancements have helped in the production of various energy services with renewable energy sources. Moreover, the governments of many countries have started investing in the renewable energy sector. All these activities have increased growth opportunities in this sector.
Government policies regarding climate change and the use of renewable energy are becoming stringent. The future looks green.
In 2017, the global renewable energy market was valued at $928 billion. It is expected to be around $1.5 trillion by 2025, at an annual growth rate of 6.1%. Astudy by Bloomberg New Energy Finance shows that this industry will receive an investment worth $5.1 trillion by 2030. Further, renewable energy sources will produce over 60% of 5,579 GW of new energy capacity.
Solar and wind can meet world energy demand 100 times over
LONDON/NEW YORK, 23 April 2021
Huge falls in the cost of solar and wind power in the last few years have unlocked an energy reserve that can meet world demand 100 times over, and most is already economic compared with fossil fuels, finds a report from the think tank Carbon Tracker published today.
Solar and wind are inexhaustible sources of energy, unlike coal, oil and gas, and at current growth rates will push fossil fuels out of the electricity sector by the mid-2030s. By 2050 they could power the world, displacing fossil fuels entirely and producing cheap, clean energy to support new technologies such as electric vehicles and green hydrogen.
Kingsmill Bond, Carbon Tracker’s energy strategist and report lead author, said: "We are entering a new epoch, comparable to the industrial revolution. Energy will tumble in price and become available to millions more, particularly in low-income countries. Geopolitics will be transformed as nations are freed from expensive imports of coal, oil and gas. Clean renewables will fight catastrophic climate change and free the planet from deadly pollution."
Global energy consumption in 2019 was 65 Petawatt hours (PWh). [1] However, with current technology the world has the potential to capture more than 5,800 PWh annually from solar PV alone. as much power in a single year as could be generated by burning all known fossil fuel reserves. In addition, onshore and offshore wind could capture nearly 900 PWh a year.
The Sky’s the Limit finds that around 60% of the world’s solar resource and 15% of its wind resource is already economic compared with local fossil fuel generation. By 2030 all the solar and over half of the wind is likely to be economic.
Harry Benham, report co-author and chairman of thinktank Ember-Climate, said: "The world does not need to exploit its entire renewable resource; just 1% is enough to replace all fossil fuel usage. Each year we are fuelling the climate crisis by burning three million years of fossilised sunshine in coal, oil and gas while we use just 0.01% of daily sunshine."
Building enough solar panels to meet global energy demand would take up just 0.3% of land, less than the area occupied by fossil fuels. The world’s largest oilfield, Ghawar in Saudi Arabia, which occupies 8,400 square kilometres, produces the equivalent of 0.9 PWh each year. Building solar panels over the same area would generate 1.2 PWh a year on average globally and 1.6 PWh in Saudi Arabia which is sunnier than average.
The study finds that the opportunity is greatest in emerging markets that have the highest solar and wind potential relative to their domestic demand. Many are still building out their energy systems, and cheap renewables offer a route to bring power to more people, create new industries, jobs and wealth. Africa has a massive 39% of global potential and could become a renewables superpower.
The economic potential of solar has been unleashed by a huge fall in costs, down by an average 18% every year since 2010. It is growing faster than any previous energy technology at this size with an average annual increase of 39% in the last decade – nearly doubling capacity every two years. Wind is on a similar trajectory: over the last decade prices have fallen by an average 9% year while capacity has grown 17% a year. This is driving efficiencies and advances such as better panels and higher turbines which reduce costs further.
Financial markets are waking up to the opportunity: in 2020 for the first time clean energy companies raised more money than fossil fuel companies through public offerings.
The Sky’s the Limit says the key barrier to change is now political, but growth is likely to continue as more countries recognise the potential of renewables, and the opportunity is huge: in 2019 solar generated just 0.7 PWh globally and wind 1.4 PWh.
It identifies three key drivers of change.
Economics: History shows that cheap local energy sources are quickly exploited – the rapid growth of the US shale industry in the 2010s is just one example.
Climate change: Countries are acting to cut their use of fossil fuels in response to the climate emergency and public concern about pollution.
Energy independence: 80% of people live in countries that import fossil fuels, so renewables offer the chance to cut costs, create local jobs and reduce their energy dependency. The scale and falling costs of this vast cheap energy resource is likely to drive continued exponential growth in the deployment of solar and wind generation. The report finds that a growth rate of 15% would see solar and wind generate all global electricity by the mid-2030s and provide all energy by 2050 as falling costs and technological advances overcome the challenges of powering sectors like steel and cement production.
The report is the first to identify four key groups of countries based on their potential to harness solar and wind resources relative to their domestic consumption:
Superabundant, with potential at least 1,000 times greater than demand, mainly low-income countries with low energy use in sub-Saharan Africa. Renewables offer prospects of development fuelled by cheap energy.
Abundant, with potential at least 100 times greater than demand, countries like Australia, Chile and Morocco with well-developed infrastructure and governance. They can aspire to provide renewable power to the rest of the world.
Replete, with potential at least 10 times greater than demand, countries like China, India and the US which have enough renewable potential to satisfy their domestic needs.
Stretched, with potentially less than 10 times demand, countries like Japan, Korea and much of Europe face tough political choices about how to tap their renewable resources most effectively.
Germany has pioneered solar and wind, provoking concerns about the cost of the energy transition and land usage, but the report says it is a special case. It is the third most stretched country in the world, with low potential for renewables to demand, and it subsidised them at a time when they were far more expensive. "The troubles faced by Germany are therefore highly unusual, and if they can solve them then so can everyone else," says the report.
Countries like the UK and Korea with significant constraints on land availability are likely to make greater use of their offshore wind resources instead of pursuing solar.
The report uses BNEF data on the levelised cost of solar energy around the world to calculate what solar production is economic today, taking the mid-price in each country and comparing it with the cheapest fossil fuel. With costs expected to continue falling at similar rates the entire landmass where solar can be placed will likely have economic potential by the end of the decade.
This year is likely to remembered as a turning point for climate change. It’s the year the impacts of rising carbon pollution became impossible to ignore. The world is overheating and vast swaths of the planet have suffered the consequences. At the same time, it’s also a year where world leaders crafted and agreed on a number of plans to try to turn the tide of carbon pollution and move toward a clean energy future. It’s clear 2016 was a year where planetary peril and human hope stood out in stark contrast. Here are the 10 most important climate milestones of the year.
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04-23-2016, 10:06 PM
George Will, who is sometimes intelligent, here insists on going off the deep end into utter stupidity. But, as I refute it, I am at least giving some "free speech" on this little blog to your nonsense, George. I don't want to be an "authoritarian" (meaning any progressive who disagrees with established authority).
The ‘settled’ consensus du jour
George F. Will 11:33 a.m. EDT April 23, 2016
http://www.delawareonline.com/story/opinion/columnists/2016/04/21/settled-consensus-du-jour/83348376/
George Will: Authoritarianism, always latent in progressivism, is becoming explicit. Progressivism’s determination to regulate thought by regulating speech is apparent in the campaign by 20 state attorneys general, none Republican, to criminalize skepticism about the supposedly "settled" conclusions of climate science.
Eric the Green: NO, it's more about reining in the power of big money oil companies to hide the truth they themselves knew, and to fund the deniers who hide it.
George Will: Four core tenets of progressivism are: First, history has a destination. Second, progressives uniquely discern it. (Barack Obama frequently declares things to be on or opposed to "the right side of history.") Third, politics should be democratic but peripheral to governance, which is the responsibility of experts scientifically administering the regulatory state. Fourth, enlightened progressives should enforce limits on speech (witness IRS suppression of conservative advocacy groups) in order to prevent thinking unhelpful to history’s progressive unfolding.
Eric the Green: First, progressives maintain that we need to make progress and solve real problems. I guess that's a "destination," meaning forward; but why call it a destination as if all problems can be solved forever? That's utopia, which these days it's you libertarian trickle-downers who excel at. Second, well yes, we have opinions and naturally we think we're right. So, you don't? Sure! Third, if you don't get your way on policy, you say it was created by experts. No, it was created by politicians. And your Republican ones want corporate experts to control everything instead of the people through politics. Fourth, fraud is not speech, although you want to attribute all fraud to our side because of a few bureaucrats who acted on their own to target conservatives.
Will: Progressivism is already enforced on campuses by restrictions on speech that might produce what progressives consider retrograde intellectual diversity. Now, from the so-called party of science, aka Democrats, comes a campaign to criminalize debate about science.
Eric: Sure, you want equal time on campus for unscientific bullshit. Do you want campuses to offer creationism too? How about conspiracy theory?
Will: "The debate is settled," says Obama. "Climate change is a fact." Indeed. The epithet "climate change deniers," obviously coined to stigmatize skeptics as akin to Holocaust deniers, is designed to obscure something obvious: Of course the climate is changing; it never is not changing -- neither before nor after the Medieval Warm Period (end of the 9th century to the 13th) and the Little Ice Age (1640s to 1690s), neither of which was caused by fossil fuels.
Eric: There is no greater obfuscation in the realm of public discourse today, than for you climate science deniers to say that "climate is always changing."
Will: Today, debatable questions include: To what extent is human activity contributing to climate change? Are climate change models, many of which have generated projections refuted by events, suddenly reliable enough to predict the trajectory of change? Is change necessarily ominous because today’s climate is necessarily optimum? Are the costs, in money expended and freedom curtailed, of combating climate change less than the cost of adapting to it?
Eric: First, to deny that climate science answers the first question, by saying that humans are indeed causing climate change today, is simply to cover up the facts. No-one is saying you can't say things. But be prepared to be called on them.
Second, climate models CAN'T be completely accurate; they are MODELS. To insist on accuracy is typical of folks like you who refuse to follow and understand science.
Third, the results are already being felt and widely reported. You just put your head in the sand and deny these events. Lost species, dying coral reefs, acidic ocean, rising seas, diminishing food and water supplies, more droughts, more floods, more storms, more fires; you call that an improvement? When you say things like that, then don't try to repress us when we call you on it.
Fourth, the costs of acting are inflated by promoters of free market fundamentalism. "Freedom" curtailed indeed: meaning freedom of your wealthy corporations to make money without paying taxes and without regulations. We progressives don't care about the so-called "freedom" of your moguls to pollute, fire people, export jobs, cause recessions, buyout companies, keep wages low, and all the other wonderful stuff you guys do with your "freedom." Reaganomics is dying, and you are clinging to a sinking ship. Get over it and jump out. The costs of finding and making more fossil fuels are rising while costs of alternative energy are falling, and the green energy boom creates millions of new jobs. But you'd rather keep the profits for fossil fuel bosses high. You moguls and mogul-enablers are the only ones who are hurt by the "costs" of responding to climate change; THE ONLY ONES. You are crying wolf because you wolves are running out of meat to hunt and kill for from the rest of us. Shut up and pay for the pollution and climate change you cause, George. Corporations should change to alternative energy, or go out of fucking business. And the sooner the better. And the market itself will kill you soon anyway.
Will: But these questions may not forever be debatable. The initial target of Democratic “scientific” silencers is ExxonMobil, which they hope to demonstrate misled investors and the public about climate change. There is, however, no limiting principle to restrain unprincipled people from punishing research entities, advocacy groups and individuals.
Eric: Oh, let those who benefit from fossil fuels "speak" and tell us how much we depend on their products! It's not enough they buy up the airwaves and regale us with their nonsense in commercials all the time. They seem to somehow remain "free" enough to purse their mindless propaganda campaign!
Will: But it is difficult to establish what constitutes culpable "misleading" about climate science, of which a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report says: “Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward).” Did Al Gore “mislead” when he said seven years ago that computer modeling projected the Arctic to be ice-free during the summer in as few as five years?
Eric: Good, at least you read science from 15 years ago. Why not read science from TODAY? You might be more credible. Climate system models have, if anything, underestimated the amount of global warming, and how long its effects will last. You think some inaccuracies in the timing indicated by some models invalidates the entire thesis and all the measured, real evidence that the Earth's climate IS changing. NO, the models forecast global warming, and global warming IS happening; and it's happening FAST! Case closed!
Will: A 21st attorney general, of the Virgin Islands (where ExxonMobil has no business operations or assets), accuses the company with criminal misrepresentation regarding climate change. This, even though before the U.S. government in 2009 first issued an endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases, ExxonMobil favored a carbon tax to mitigate climate consequences of those gases. This grandstanding attorney general’s contribution to today’s gangster government is the use of law enforcement tools to pursue political goals -- wielding prosecutorial weapons to chill debate, including subpoenaing private donor information from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. You want fraud from our side prosecuted, whether legit or not (the IRS scandal), but fraud from your side is "free speech."
The party of science, busy protecting science from scrutiny, has forgotten Karl Popper (1902-1994), the philosopher whose "The Open Society and Its Enemies" warned against people incapable of distinguishing between certainty and certitude. In his essay Science as Falsification, Popper explains why "the criterion of a scientific status of a theory is its falsifiability, or refutability, or testability." America’s party of science seems eager to insulate its scientific theories from the possibility of refutation.
Eric: It was Exxon that covered up. That's the fact. If your scientists can disprove global warming and its consequences, then PROVE IT. Show us your evidence, and be prepared to debate it, instead of whining about authoritarian progressives and quoting philosophers. Put your mouth where your money is.
Will: The leader of the attorneys general, New York’s Eric Schneiderman, dismisses those who disagree with him as “morally vacant.” His moral content is apparent in his campaign to ban fantasy sports gambling because it competes with the gambling (state lottery, casinos, off-track betting) that enriches his government.
Eric: Because a politician might be wrong about something else, does not make him wrong about climate change. Your reasoning ability is indeed compromised in your old age, it appears, Mr. Will. Is it moral to defend the profits of CEOs while the world careens toward disaster because of THEM? Pardon me if I say, no it isn't moral, and neither are YOU George.
Will: Then there is Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who suggests using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, written to fight organized crime, to criminalize what he calls the fossil fuel industry’s "climate denial apparatus." The Justice Department, which has abetted the IRS cover-up of its criminal activity, has referred this idea to the FBI.
Eric: As well it should. And no, the IRS alleged abuse is not being abetted or covered-up. It was revealed and dealt with. That's just a convenient excuse for your own cover-up and deception, George. Maybe you were disappointed that it didn't lead to the impeachment of Obama. That's your idea of abetting, I guess.
Will: These garden-variety authoritarians are eager to regulate us into conformity with the "settled" consensus du jour, whatever it is. But they are progressives, so it is for our own good.
Eric: The consensus has been settled for quite some time. For you to label it as du jour, is fraud on your part. And regulating the fossil fool CEOs is what we desperately need. Their fraud is criminal indeed. Tell me about real scientists who are repressed. Science is an open process. Your corporate world is not. It's all about greed and conformity, and practically nothing BUT greed and conformity. How many whistle-blowers speak up in corporate meetings, or report misconduct to their bosses, and get away with it? Not many, I reckon. It's go along with the program, or be fired. Just like your Donald says on TV.
George Will’s email address is georgewill@washpost.com.
Happy Earth Day, George. You have a strange way of celebrating it.
04-23-2016, 09:18 PM
Editorial: Is the Paris climate accord too little, too late
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/editorials/la-ed-0422-climate-change-accord-20160422-story.html
Representatives from more than 160 nations will gather at the United Nations on Friday to sign the accord they hammered out in Paris last December to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and slow the effects of climate change.
But is it too little, too late? The accord was an extraordinary achievement, but in the end, it was only a nonbinding agreement, and everyone understood that the real, daunting challenge would be in working together to meet the accord's stated goals.
And even that may not be enough. Experts have warned that the accord's goal of capping global warming at “well below 2 degrees Celsius” still might be insufficient to avoid a catastrophic rise in sea levels. What's more, the world is already experiencing more violent storms and cycles of drought and floods. The Paris accord came near the end of 2015, which was the warmest year earth has experienced since recordkeeping began in 1880. The first few months of 2016 have continued the upward trend — February's increase in temperatures over previous years was described by NASA officials as "a shocker."
Then there's this problem: Neither of the leading Republican candidates for president , Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, even believes the conclusion reached by an overwhelming consensus of scientists that global warming, driven by human activity, is well underway. Both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, the Democratic contenders, accept that fundamental reality. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the third Republican contender (barely) standing, has acknowledged global warming as real but has balked at some of the administration's tougher responses.
So what will be accomplished by the signing of the agreement in New York? That's unclear. The accord requires the signatory nations to develop plans for reducing greenhouse gases by 2030, but the plans unveiled so far fall short of what is needed. Their aggregate effect will only limit global warming to about 2.7 degrees Celsius at best. Because of that, the nations are supposed to update their plans every five years, beginning in 2020, to reach the less-than 2 degrees target. How they will reach that mark is crucial.
The U.S. has pledged to cut emissions to at least 26% below 2005 levels by 2025. But President Obama's Clean Power Plan, a linchpin of his climate change strategy, was derailed two months after the Paris accord was reached, when the U.S. Supreme Court halted implementation until legal challenges could be resolved. If it is ultimately tossed out, that would set back Obama's chances of reaching the nation's 2025 goals for reducing carbon emissions even though the administration has taken other steps, including a 54.5 mpg standard by 2025 for cars and light-duty trucks, limiting methane emissions from future natural gas and oil wells, and declaring a moratorium on new coal mining leases on federal land.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit could speed things up by reaching a quick decision on the stalled Clean Power Plan after it hears the oral arguments that are scheduled for June. Still, if the fight goes to the Supreme Court, a final decision isn't likely until the next president takes office. If the Environmental Protection Agency prevails, states will still have time to meet the plan's deadlines for moving away from coal-fired energy production (which they should be doing even without the federal plan). If the regulations are shot down, the next president ought to work with Congress to achieve the same or an even more ambitious goal.
Unfortunately, climate change isn't waiting. As the global temperature rises, glaciers are retreating, shrinking polar ice is threatening Arctic species, river and lake ice has been breaking up earlier, plants and animals are shifting ranges, and flowering cycles for trees are occurring earlier in the season.
The signing of the accord, while historic, won't solve those problems. It merely starts the world on the right, though very belated, path. While ambitious, it is also cautious, and contains vague wording that the signatory nations pledge to "reach global peaking of greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible." The world needs to accelerate the pace. Slow and deliberate means lost species, drowned seaside cities, disappearing island nations and more political instability in the most affected nations.
Despite the urgency of the issue, discussion of climate change has been depressingly limited in the presidential campaign. Whoever wins the White House needs to recognize the enormity and gravity of the problem, and lead the way to a more habitable world.
MARCH 31, 2016
Climate Catastrophe, Coming Even Sooner?
BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT
http://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/climate-catastrophe-coming-even-sooner
New research indicates that, due to global warming, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) may be headed for an unavoidable and disastrous collapse, triggering a rapid rise in sea levels.
One of the first people to propose that climate change could result in rapid sea-level rise was an eccentric British geographer named John Mercer. A hesitant speaker in public, Mercer was less restrained in private. He was once arrested for jogging naked. It was said that he liked to do his fieldwork in the nude—a curious habit for a man who studied glaciers.
In a seminal paper published in 1968, Mercer proposed that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, known in scientific circles as WAIS, was vulnerable to collapse. The reason, he wrote, was that the ice sheet rests on land that is below sea level. It is buttressed by floating ice shelves that extend far out to sea, but were these to disintegrate, Mercer wrote, then "changing horizontal forces" would cause the ice sheet to lift off its base. At that point, the sea would rush in and WAIS would start to warm from below as well as above. This would initiate the ice sheet’s demise, which would be "rapid, perhaps even catastrophic." Several meters of sea-level rise would ensue.
More recent research has tended to confirm Mercer’s worst fears. The latest example comes from a study published Wednesday, in the journal Nature. "Antarctic Model Raises Prospect of Unstoppable Ice Collapse," ran the headline in the news story that accompanied it.
The new paper, coauthored by Rob DeConto, of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and David Pollard, of Pennsylvania State University, arose out of frustration. The two researchers had spent years working on a computer model that did not seem to capture rises in sea level that were already known to have taken place. Before the last ice age, about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, for instance, sea levels were at least twenty feet higher than they are now. But DeConto and Pollard found that unless they programmed the model with temperatures that were unrealistically high for that period it could not account for such levels.
Then the two got an idea from a colleague, Richard Alley, also of Penn State. Alley suggested that they look at what would happen if the floating ice shelves were lost. This would leave towering cliffs of ice exposed to the sea, which could make them vulnerable to rapid collapse. (A version of this process seems already to be under way in parts of Greenland.)
When DeConto and Pollard revised their model to account for this possibility, the results, as the Times put it, were striking. The revised model could account for earlier sea-level rises. More significantly, it suggested that what had happened then could easily happen again. The researchers concluded that just a few more decades of unabated carbon emissions could result in more than three feet of sea-level rise from WAIS by the end of this century. (The over-all rise would be much greater, as ice would also be lost from Greenland and from mountain glaciers.) Over the longer term, melt from Antarctica could raise sea levels by fifty feet.
This is, of course, alarming news for those living near sea level, which is to say anyone in New York or Boston or New Orleans or Miami or Mumbai or Jakarta or Guangzhou. And it couldn’t come at a much more alarming time. In spite of the flood of disturbing reports coming from both the Antarctic and the Arctic—just a few days ago, the National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that the extent of the Arctic ice cap in winter had hit a record low for the second year in a row—the issue of climate change has rarely come up during the Presidential primary campaign. To the extent that the Republican candidates have addressed the issue at all, it has only been when forced to, and the results have been, well, let’s just say that no one is winning any ribbons at this science fair. Trump has repeatedly used Twitter, his favored policy platform, to scoff at the very notion of climate change. "Hoax" and "con job" are some of his more nuanced comments. "Bullshit" is another.
Ted Cruz is, if anything, worse; he recently claimed that the federal government was "cooking the books" to demonstrate warming that doesn’t exist. Cruz has said he will rescind rules the Environmental Protection Agency has put in place to limit emissions from power plants, while Trump has said he would eliminate the agency altogether. (The E.P.A.’s Clean Power Plan rules are being challenged in a suit brought by more than two dozen states and many industry groups; that case is expected to be heard by the D.C. Circuit Court in June.) Even with the power-plant rules, it’s possible that global temperatures will rise enough to set in motion the sort of catastrophic melting of West Antarctica that John Mercer warned about almost half a century ago. Without the rules, disaster is looking like an increasingly good bet.
04-04-2016, 07:58 AM
OUR NEW MOON SHOT: RESTORE A HEALTHY CLIMATE BY 2070
We can restore the climate of the 1980s by 2070. It won’t require a miracle or big sacrifices, just the will and policies to do it. Top climate scientists confirm this is possible.
Restoring the climate requires that we switch to carbon-free energy by 2030-2050, as described by Stanford’s Prof. Mark Z. Jacobson, and let the ocean continue absorbing the carbon dioxide we’ve emitted.
In 1961, President Kennedy declared: "We will send a man to the moon and bring him back safely by the end of the decade." At the time we had just sent a man into space for 15 minutes. We did not have the rockets, the navigation or the life support systems for a moon trip and most people, including my parents, thought it was complete folly. Seven years later we had developed and demonstrated the technology ahead of schedule. We had a clear ambitious goal and a deadline, and we rose to the occasion.
We can do that again with the climate. Shifting the world’s energy from fossil fuels to renewables could be accomplished before 2045, with CO2 levels peaking about 430 parts per million. That is up from 280 ppm a hundred years ago, 400 ppm now, and our goal of 350 ppm, which is considered to be a safe level and last seen in 1988.
Scientists and skeptics agree that about half the CO2 emitted globally has been absorbed by the oceans already, and expect that half of future emissions will be absorbed over the next 25-35 years. The oceans will continue to acidify, and the only way to slow that is to reduce emissions. We might even decide to actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere to hasten a restored climate. If so, there are dozens of companies working on it and we have dozens of years to perfect some creative methods.
The shift to renewables would be accomplished mainly by using wind and solar power. Only wind and solar are ready for utility scale now at the low costs we need. The market will decide which alternative sources, such as biofuels or nuclear, may become cheaper and better over time.
Wind generation has been growing at over 25% per year for the last six years. It provides 3% of our country’s electricity now. If we maintain that growth rate, it will provide 50% in 2025. This would be something like 2,000 modern 5-megawatt turbines per state. Solar provides 1% of our electricity now, and is growing at over 50% per year. If we keep up that pace, it will produce the other 50% of our electricity by 2025.
China is already building panels at ten times the US rate, so catching up to and even surpassing their production is plausible. Efficiency improvements will provide at least a 30% reduction in our requirements. For example cars are slated to double their mileage by 2025 and LED lights are now ten times more efficient than old incandescent bulbs.
Twenty years is plenty of time to develop the missing links such as batteries, smart grids and domestic manufacturing capability. Compare that to the 5 years we spent building the 300,000 aircraft that helped us win WW II, using 1940’s technology, or the 7 years developing the technology for the moon program with 1960’s technology. We now have Google, computers, 3D printers, and millions of highly educated engineers connected by the internet.
The looming issue is the rapidly growing CO2 emissions in China and India. China is working hard to slash its fossil fuel consumption and severe air pollution–since 2012 China has been building more new wind capacity than new coal and the New York Times reports that China is expected to reduce its net coal imports to zero by 2015.
India’s neighbor, Bangladesh, has set an example by installing solar roofs at a rapid pace, without subsidies, thereby skipping the development of expensive and unreliable utility and fossil fuel infrastructure. They already have 2.5 million solar roofs powering LED lights, phones, refrigerators, and TVs. This is fifteen times as many as California has now.
As solar panel production soars, its cost plummets It is below the cost of fueling kerosene lamps in most developing countries, and will soon fall below the cost of utility electricity in the cities. For that reason, India is now starting work on the world’s largest solar plant: 4 gigawatts.
Switching to renewables will create many local jobs in the US, while costing some fossil fuel jobs. It will stabilize energy prices because the sun and wind are free and the technology costs are steadily decreasing. It is shown to improve network reliability because with thousands of solar panels and wind turbines, the loss of a few has little effect.
Two policies are critical to achieving our rapid transition to renewables: First is instituting a gradually increasing carbon disposal fee, aka a carbon tax, as recommended by almost all economists. Political expediency requires that the fee be revenue-neutral, returned 100% to households and corporations. This fee will send a convincing message to corporations and investors that society is placing a value on its future, and that smart investments from now on will be in clean energy.
The second policy is promoting investment in clean energy. Fossil fuels still receive six times more subsidies than renewables and they attract more than twice the investment. If you ask companies that are installing renewables, you’ll find that their limiting factor is acquiring capital, despite good returns. That will change when investors see that we’re committed to and headed to a future of a healthy climate.
Tell your children, the President and your representatives the legacy you want to leave: A healthy climate by 2070. That is our moonshot. There is room for small government fans and everyone else to contribute in this game.
Peter Fiekowsky is a physicist, business owner, and volunteer for Citizens Climate Lobby.
04-02-2016, 04:53 AM
New Antarctic Melting Study Confirms Voting Republican Would Trigger Worldwide Catastrophe
By Jonathan Chait Follow @jonathanchait
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/antarctic-study-gop-would-trigger-catastrophe.html?mid=facebook_nymag#
The good news on climate change is that the politics and the technology arrayed to transition the world away from greenhouse gasses are both moving rapidly and in tandem. The bad news is that the scale of the challenge itself may also be accelerating. A new study finds that the West Antarctic ice sheet may be melting at a far more rapid pace than previously believed. Sea-level rise is just one of the dangers posed by climate change, but that danger may be more imminent than anybody believed.
Let’s review the state of play heading into the presidential election. The Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan is the largest element of its domestic program to reduce carbon emissions; it’s a set of targets for every state to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions from its power system. The Clean Power Plan faces a legal challenge from Republicans. The Supreme Court recently froze implementation of that plan until the courts resolve its status.
The challenge will be heard in the D.C. Circuit court on June 2. The panel hearing that case will consist of two Democratic appointees and one Republican appointee, and is nearly certain to affirm the administration’s plan. Republicans will then appeal the case to the Supreme Court. But since the Court is currently tied 4–4, and five votes would be needed to overturn the D.C. Circuit, the case would be upheld. However, if Republicans block the appointment of Merrick Garland to the Court, which seems likely, and win the presidential election, which is possible, they can appoint the deciding justice. And that justice could well be seated in time to hear the appeal, quite likely dooming the Clean Power Plan.
A president determined to keep working to limit climate change could easily regroup in the face of a legal defeat and design a different set of climate regulations. The Clean Power Plan’s requirements do not take effect until 2022. But a Republican president would not do anything to limit climate change. The Republican Party is institutionally committed to blocking any action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The largest and most influential bloc of thought within the party dismisses the field of climate science as a massive hoax concocted by scientists to increase their own power (a theory expounded by Senator James Inhofe, chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, author of The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future, and a believer that the existence of snow in February in Washington disproves climate science).
Senator Snowball.
http://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2015/02/26/26-james-inhofe.w529.h352.jpg
A tinier, far less influential bloc within the party accepts the legitimacy of climate science but argues against any political action on the grounds that it would be impossible or hopelessly expensive. For instance, the Manhattan Institute’s James Manzi, one of the most moderate voices on climate science within the party, has urged Republicans to come up with non-science-denying reasons to permit the continued cost-free dumping of greenhouse-gas emissions into the atmosphere. "The challenge posed by climate change is not one of averting a global disaster in which Manhattan becomes an underwater theme park", Manzi wrote in his last climate manifesto. "Despite the dire warnings from progressives, the best models show us that global warming is a problem that is expected to have only a limited impact on the world economy."
In reality, the Manhattan-as-underwater-theme-park scenario remains very much in play. The latest modeling projects a sea rise of five to six feet by the end of the century, with a sea-level rise of a foot per decade after that. That rise could be mitigated if the political response under way worldwide continues. And things are happening. China is reducing the carbon intensity of its economy very rapidly. Innovators in the private sector, responding to signals from political leaders who have committed to carbon reductions, have brought down the cost of clean energy nearly to parity already, and the cost curve is continuing to head downward. It sounds partisan to say, but it remains true: The fate of humanity rests to a very large degree on keeping the Republican Party out of power for as long as possible.
The latest climate change research and observations are downright frightening
Desdemona Despair: blogging the end of the world
04-02-2016, 04:08 AM
UK carbon emissions fall below 1920s levels. Renewables on the rise as coal declines.
04-01-2016
Indigenous peoples need respect to help stop climate change.
03-26-2016
Adorable Cat Builds Mini Igloo for Himself During Denver Blizzard
nice music too :)
03-26-2016
Watch Solar Power Bloom in China’s Desert
China leads the world in renewable power growth
JUN 18, 2015
Emily J. Gertz is an associate editor for environment and wildlife at TakePart.
http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/06/18/china-solar-power-expanding-rapidly-gobi-desert-images?cmpid=tp-san
These solar energy farms in China's Gobi Desert grew nearly threefold between 2012 and 2015. (Photos: Jesse Allen/NASA Earth Observatory)
Only three years separate these two images of solar panels in China’s Gansu province in the Gobi Desert. But it’s clear that the carbon-free power plant grew nearly threefold over that time.
According to information gathered by NASA Earth Observatory, the total installed solar power capacity in Gansu province hit 5.2 gigawatts last year, and the country is targeting an additional half gigawatt by the end of this year. Nationwide China’s installed solar capacity was just more than 28 gigawatts by the close of 2014—that’s three times the capacity installed in 2013.
Just halfway into 2015, that capacity has grown to 33 gigawatts.
China has expanded its renewable energy resources remarkably fast, with hydro-, wind, and solar power growing to nearly 10 percent of the nation’s energy mix between 2006 and 2013. China has also become the world’s largest producer of photovoltaic panels and wind turbines.
But China has continued to expand its coal-fired power capacity at the same time. In 2007 the country outpaced the United States to become the biggest greenhouse gas polluter on Earth: China burns around 4 billion tons of coal a year, more than four times the amount that the U.S. burns.
It’s important to put China's coal use into the population context: China, with a population of about 1.4 billion, emits between 10 and 11 million tons of carbon pollution a year, while the United States, with about one-quarter the population, is the No. 2 carbon polluter, emitting around 6.5 million tons a year, according to the World Resources Institute.
So, Why Should You Care? Because burning fossil fuels is the leading driver of global warming, energy decisions made by China and the United States have a major impact on the health and welfare of nearly every living thing on Earth. In November, President Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping announced ambitious plans to reduce their carbon pollution in the next 15 years.
Lately, China is slowing its coal power expansion, driven in part by terrible air pollution problems as well as the country’s growing sensitivity to its international standing in the fight to curb global warming. The government has pledged to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions after hitting a peak in 2030 and to double its carbon-free energy generation at the same time.
03-26-2016
After 115 Years, Scotland Is Coal-Free
BY ALEJANDRO DAVILA FRAGOSO MAR 24, 2016 4:08 PM
After some 115 years, Scotland has burned its last lump of coal for electricity.
The Longannet power station, the last and largest coal-fired power plant in Scotland, ceased operations Thursday. What once was the largest coal plant in Europe shut down after 46 years before the eyes of workers and journalists, who gathered in the main control room.
"Ok, here we go," said one worker moments before pressing a bright red button that stopped the coal-fired turbines that generated electricity for a quarter of Scottish homes.
Longannet’s closure comes as Scotland, a country of some 5 million people, aims to have enough renewable energy to power 100 percent of its electricity demand by 2020. And while Europe has lowered its investment in renewables recently, Scotland seems well on its way to meeting its green energy goals. Renewable electricity output has more than doubled since 2007 and is equivalent to half of the electricity consumed. This surge in renewables follows a massive investment in onshore and offshore wind, which has established Scotland as a renewable energy leader in the region. In fact, Scotland’s largest wind farm is also the largest in the United Kingdom. Whitelee Windfarm near Glasgow has a 539-megawatt capacity and generates enough electricity to power just under 300,000 homes.
The end of Longannet was long expected. Two years ago, Scottish Power, which owns Longannet, said regulations made the plant too costly to operate. According to the Guardian, the plant bowed to a mixture of old age, rising transmission costs and higher carbon taxes. The energy burden will now fall on the shoulders of nuclear and gas plants, as well as renewable energy, particularly wind farms.
"Coal has long been the dominant force in Scotland’s electricity generation fleet, but the closure of Longannet signals the end of an era," Hugh Finlay, generation director at Scottish Power, told the Guardian. No decisions have been made on what will be done with the site, though several proposals are under discussion, including one that would make Longannet a center for renewable energy expertise. Scottish Power said they will outline a plan before the end of the year.
For their part, local environmentalists welcomed the end of Longannet, noting the station burned around 4.5 million metric tons of coal a year, and was responsible for a fifth of Scotland’s climate change emissions. "For a country which virtually invented the Industrial Revolution, this is a hugely significant step, marking the end of coal and the beginning of the end for fossil fuels in Scotland," Richard Dixon, Director of Friends of the Earth Scotland, said in a statement. With the closure of Longannet, the only major fossil fuel plant in Scotland is a gas plant at Peterhead, in the northeast.
In the United States, the Sierra Club also praised the plant’s closure. "Scotland is done with coal," Maura Cowley, director of the Sierra Club’s International Climate and Energy Campaign, said in a statement. "The U.S. is moving beyond coal with 232 plants announced for retirement, and just today China announced new measures to stop unnecessary new coal plants."
Indeed, China’s National Energy Administration ordered 13 provincial governments to stop approving new coal-fired power plants until the end of 2017, according to published reports. Yet even approved coal-fired power plants aren’t safe there, as 15 provinces were told to stop building new plants. A Greenpeace analysis says this could affect up to 250 Chinese coal plants.
Coal may be under stress in much of the world, yet the role of fossil fuels is expected to remain strong for some time, according to multiple reports. That’s despite scientists saying global emissions need to substantially drop to avoid the most dramatic effects of climate change. Renewable energy is, however, expected to continue the surge it has been enjoying. In fact, a new United Nations-backed report found that coal and gas-fired electricity generation drew less than half the investment made in solar, wind, and other renewables in 2015.
Big solar is heading for boom times in the US
Riding three strengths, overcoming one weakness. Updated by David Roberts on March 10, 2016, 9:30 a.m. ET @drvox [email]david@vox.com[/email]
When people think of solar power, they tend to think of panels on rooftops. That kind of small-scale, distributed solar power is the most visible, gets the most press, and, from the consumer perspective, has the most sex appeal.
But the humble workhorse of solar power is the utility-scale solar power plant, usually defined as a solar array larger than 5 megawatts.
Solar power plants can consist in either PV panels or mirrors that focus sunlight on a fluid that boils and turns a turbine ("concentrating solar power," or CSP). In practice, most new solar plants these days use PV, which has gotten so cheap so fast that it's outcompeted CSP and every other solar segment, at least for now.
In 2007, there were zero utility-scale solar power plants in the US. Today there are hundreds, ranging from the 579 MW Solar Star project (the world's largest solar farm) in California down to dozens upon dozens of 10, 20, and 50 MW projects in communities across the country. (SEIA counts 2,100 solar PV projects over 1 MW.)
Big solar power plants still provide a measly 0.6 percent of overall US electricity. But they are headed up a steep growth curve.
Residential rooftop solar is the fastest growing solar segment, but utility-scale solar is bigger. There's more installed, so even with its slower growth rate it adds more capacity each year in 2015, it accounted for 57 percent of all new installed solar capacity.
What's more, there's a ton of utility solar in the pipeline. According to the Energy Information Administration, 9.5 GW of utility solar is scheduled for installation in 2016 more than from any other single energy source, including natural gas.
That would make 2016 a banner year, with utility solar accounting for more than three-quarters of installed solar capacity, installing more in a year than in the past three combined.
That's serious growth. A new report from GTM Research is also optimistic about utility-scale solar passing something of a milestone in 2016.
For years, the growth of big solar was driven by state-level renewable energy mandates; utilities had to build these plants. This coming year, GTM expects more than half the growth in big solar to come outside those mandates.
In other words, utilities are beginning to voluntarily opt for big solar.
Why is that? Utility solar is being boosted by three strengths and it's making progress against its one weakness........... Big solar is about to get unstoppable
Big solar used to be almost entirely driven by policy, mainly state renewable energy standards and federal tax credits. It has all but outgrown the first and will outgrow the latter over the next five years.
It's about to stand on its own two feet, outcompeting even rivals that are allowed to dump carbon emissions into the atmosphere for free. It won't be long before the discussion about environmental benefits is moot. Utilities will demand solar because it's the cheapest power available.
Antarctic Ice Loss Accelerating 03.05.2015
by Morgan Kelly, Princeton University
During the past decade, Antarctica's massive ice sheet lost twice the amount of ice in its western portion compared with what it accumulated in the east, according to Princeton University researchers who came to one overall conclusion " the southern continent's ice cap is melting ever faster.
The researchers "weighed" Antarctica's ice sheet using gravitational satellite data and found that from 2003 to 2014, the ice sheet lost 92 billion tons of ice per year, the researchers report in the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. If stacked on the island of Manhattan, that amount of ice would be more than a mile high " more than five times the height of the Empire State Building.
The vast majority of that loss was from West Antarctica, which is the smaller of the continent's two main regions and abuts the Antarctic Peninsula that winds up toward South America. Since 2008, ice loss from West Antarctica's unstable glaciers doubled from an average annual loss of 121 billion tons of ice to twice that by 2014, the researchers found. The ice sheet on East Antarctica, the continent's much larger and overall more stable region, thickened during that same time, but only accumulated half the amount of ice lost from the west, the researchers reported.
Global sea levels rising faster due to global warming
Man-made climate change responsible for fastest rise in sea levels in the past 2,800 years.
Sea levels are rising several times faster than in the past 2,800 years and are accelerating because of man-made global warming, according to new studies.
An international team of scientists dug into two dozen locations across the globe to chart gently rising and falling seas over centuries and millennia. Until the 1880s and the world's industrialisation, the fastest rise in sea levels was about 3cm to 4cm a century, plus or minus a bit.
During that time the global sea level really did not get much higher or lower than 7.62cm above or below the 2,000-year average. But in the 20th century the world's seas rose 14cm.
Since 1993 the rate has soared to 30cm and two different studies, published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, said that by 2100 the world's oceans would rise between 28 and 131cm, depending on how much heat-trapping gas Earth's industries and vehicles expel.
"There's no question that the 20th century is the fastest," said Bob Kopp, Rutgers earth and planetary sciences professor and the lead author of the study that looked back at sea levels over the past three millennia.
"It's because of the temperature increase in the 20th century, which has been driven by fossil fuel use." If seas continue to rise as projected, another 45cm of sea-level rise will cause lots of problems and expense, especially with surge during storms, said study co-author Stefan Rahmstorf, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany.
The link to temperature is basic science, the study's authors say. Warm water expands. Cold water contracts. The scientists pointed to specific past eras when temperatures and sea rose and fell together.
Both studies project increases of about 57 to 131cm if greenhouse gas pollution continues at the current rate. If countries fulfill the treaty agreed last year in Paris and limit further warming to another two degrees Fahrenheit, the rise in sea levels would be in the 28cm to 56cm range.
2015 smashes record for hottest year, final figures confirm
Experts warn that global warming is tipping climate into ‘uncharted territory’, as Met Office, Nasa and Noaa data all confirm record global temperatures for second year running
Damian Carrington
@dpcarrington
Wednesday 20 January 2016 10.30 EST
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jan/20/2015-smashes-record-for-hottest-year-final-figures-confirm?CMP=share_btn_fb
2015 smashed the record for the hottest year since reporting began in 1850, according to the first full-year figures from the world’s three principal temperature estimates.
Data released on Wednesday by the UK Met Office shows the average global temperature in 2015 was 0.75C higher than the long-term average between 1961 and 1990, much higher than the 0.57C in 2014, which itself was a record. The Met Office also expects 2016 to set a new record, meaning the global temperature records will have been broken for three years running.
Temperature data released in the US on Wednesday by Nasa and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa) also showed 2015 shattered previous records.
Experts warned that the record-breaking heat shows global warming is driving the world’s climate into "uncharted territory" and that it showed the urgency of implementing the carbon-cutting pledges made by the world’s governments in Paris in December.
Heatwaves have scorched China, Russia, Australia, the Middle East and parts of South America in the last two years, while climate change made the UK’s record December rainfall, which caused devastating floods, 50-75% more likely.
The Paris agreement commits the world’s nations to limit warming to below 2C compared to pre-industrial times, or 1.5C if possible, to avoid widespread and dangerous impacts. But the Met Office data, when compared to global temperatures before fossil fuel burning took off, shows that 2015 was already 1C higher.
A strong El Niño event is peaking at the moment, putting the “icing on the cake” of high global temperatures. El Niño is a natural cycle of warming in the Pacific Ocean which has a global impact on weather. But scientists are clear that the vast majority of the warming seen in 2015 was due to the emissions from human activity.
"Even without an El Niño, this would have been the warmest year on record," said Prof Gavin Schmidt, director at Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. He said he expected the long trend of rising global temperatures to continue because its principal cause – fossil fuel burning – was also continuing.
"It is clear that human influence is driving our climate into uncharted territory," said Prof Phil Jones, from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which produces the temperature record "called HadCRUT4" with the Met Office. Peter Stott, at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, said 2015 was the first year global average temperature was more than 1C above pre-industrial levels.
NOAA’s global temperature records stretch back to 1880 and it also found 2015 was the hottest year yet, beating the previous high by a record margin. The agency also found December was warmer than any other month in the record, when compared to long-term averages. Ten of the 12 months in 2015 had record high temperatures for their respective months, according to Noaa.
NASA’s new data for 2015 also shattered its previous record and showed 15 of the 16 warmest years on record have occurred since 2001. "Climate change is the challenge of our generation," said Nasa head Charles Bolden. "Today’s announcement is a key data point that should make policymakers stand up and take notice - now is the time to act."
The Nasa, Noaa and HadCRUT4 temperature records all use independent methods to calculate the global average. They use many thousands of temperature measurements taken across the globe, on land and at sea, each day.
Can you guess which country just set a new world record for wind power?
By Brian Kahn on 18 Jan 2016
Wind turbines are as ubiquitous as clogs, Legos, and tall people in Denmark. Unlike the latter three, though, Denmark’s wind turbines were busy setting a world record in 2015.
According to Energinet, Denmark’s electric utility, the country’s turbines accounted for the equivalent of 42 percent of all electricity produced for the year. It’s the highest proportion for any country — breaking a record the country set just last year — ?and represents more than a doubling compared to just 10 years ago.
There are other countries that generate more wind energy each year, but Denmark gets the largest chunk of its energy from wind by far. The government has committed to generating 50 percent of its energy from wind by 2020 and 84 percent by 2035. Denmark is part of the European Union, which committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions 40 percent by 2030 at the recent Paris climate talks.
In western Denmark, the heart of the country’s wind industry, turbines spun up more energy than the region could use for more than 16 percent of the year, letting the country sell some of its surplus power to its Scandinavian neighbors (though on less gusty days, Denmark also bought nuclear, hydro, and solar power back from them).
The sheer number of turbines is one key ingredient for generating a huge amount of wind power. The other is, of course, wind, and as luck would have it, the winds blew harder than normal last year (note this is probably not due to El Niño, for a change).
The amount of offshore wind generated in Denmark is also staggering. The country has more than 1,200 megawatts of generating capacity already installed and two other major projects in the works that will generate an estimated 1,000 megawatts, or enough to power 300,000 American homes.
In comparison, the U.S. has a whopping zero megawatts of offshore generating capacity, representing what scientists say is a huge “missed opportunity” for clean energy. That’s slated to change in 2016 with the Block Island facility set to open off of Rhode Island. It’ll only have 30 megawatts of generating capacity, but hey, you have to start somewhere.
Oklahoma Ordered To Cut Fracking After Unusual Spike In Earthquakes
http://yournewswire.com/oklahoma-ordered-to-cut-fracking-after-unsual-spike-in-earthquakes/
Recent observations from satellite gravimetry (the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) mission) suggest an acceleration of ice mass loss from the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014JB011755/full
http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/24485-arctic-warming-and-increased-weather-extremes-the-national-research-council-speaks
Batteries are being developed around the world
Off grid batteries like the Tesla powerpack are too expensive yet for most homeowners. Other home batteries exist, but don't last long enough. Staying on the grid seems the best solution at the moment for most people. But solar panels at home can still produce much of people's household needs, and being connected to the grid assures continuous power.
In the long run though, as batteries improve, then off the grid will be more viable. Staying on the grid will probably require paying a service charge, which is not the case right now in northern CA. Such a charge is counter-productive now when we are trying to ramp up alternative energy. But unless the utility companies want to become solar panel and battery companies, they will likely need to charge for grid service to stay in business. If off-grid becomes the norm, then these utilities may go the way of the do do birds. They won't be the first type of business to go belly up in this high-tech day and age.
We need to reduce carbon emissions now, so we can't wait until off-the-grid works for everyone. Allowing a 4C global temp rise is not acceptable. Meanwhile, salt batteries are being used at some solar power plants, and new kinds of batteries at solar and wind power plants will soon enable utilities to reduce reliance on nuclear and natural gas sources. Coal needs to be phased out as soon as possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium%E2%80%93sulfur_battery
From http://www.ecmag.com/section/green-building/first-solar-power-tower-plant-united-states-use-molten-salt-storage
Published: February 2011 By Mike Breslin
Finally, there is a practical solution to store huge amounts of solar electricity that is generated by large-scale solar plants: molten salt technology.
In mid-December, SolarReserve, a U.S. developer of solar power projects, received environmental approvals from the Arizona Power Plant and Transmission Line Siting Committee to build its Crossroads Solar Energy Project. The 150-megawatt project will be located in Maricopa County, Ariz., and uses an advanced molten salt technology developed by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, a division of United Technologies, Hartford, Conn. <
A HREF="List of energy storage projects">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_energy_storage_projects
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/e5/12-05-08_AS1.JPG/300px-12-05-08_AS1.JPG
The 150 MW Andasol solar power station is a commercial parabolic trough solar thermal power plant, located in Spain. The Andasol plant uses tanks of molten salt to store captured solar energy so that it can continue generating electricity when the sun isn't shining.
This looks so cool! :)
Germany opens first stretch of bicycle ‘autobahn’
by Alex Bowden December 29 2015
- See more
http://road.cc/sites/default/files/styles/main_width/public/images/News/Munich%20bike%20Autobahns.jpg?itok=N_Rz2Aln"
Study estimates track should take 50,000 cars off the roads every day
AFP (link is external) reports that Germany has just opened the first 5km stretch of a traffic-free bicycle highway that is set to span over 100km. Running largely along disused railroad tracks, the network will connect 10 western cities in the Ruhr region.
Cities to be linked include Duisburg, Bochum and Hamm as well as four universities. Martin Toennes of regional development group RVR said that almost two million people live within 2km of the route and will be able to use sections for commuting. A study by the group calculates the track should take 50,000 cars off the roads every day.
Munich is also planning a series of four-metre wide, two-way segregated lanes, unsullied by crossroads or traffic lights and Birgit Kastrup, who is in charge of the project, said it was important to find a means of funding them. Further bicycle highways are in the pipeline for Berlin and Frankfurt. Most will feature lit paths which will be cleared of snow in winter.
In Germany, cycling infrastructure is the responsibility of local authorities. For the first 5km stretch of track in the Ruhr region, the cost was shared, with the European Union funding half, North Rhine-Westphalia state contributing 30 per cent and the RVR investing 20 per cent.
Toennes said that talks were ongoing to raise the €180 million needed for the entire 100km route. "Without support, the project would have no chance," he said. The state government is therefore said to be planning legislation to take the burden off municipalities. Berlin, meanwhile, is looking into a private financing model based in part on advertising along its routes.
High speed intercity bike travel? Dutch could open 45kph e-bike paths for commuters:
http://road.cc/content/news/144613-high-speed-intercity-bike-travel-dutch-could-open-45kmph-e-bike-paths-commuters
This might be a good article to follow the subsidies to the fossil fuel industry
ExxonMobil, the world’s biggest oil company, knew as early as 1981 of climate change seven years before it became a public issue, according to a newly discovered email from one of the firm’s own scientists. Despite this the firm spent millions over the next 27 years to promote climate denial.
The email from Exxon’s in-house climate expert provides evidence the company was aware of the connection between fossil fuels and climate change, and the potential for carbon-cutting regulations that could hurt its bottom line, over a generation ago, factoring that knowledge into its decision about an enormous gas field in south-east Asia. The field, off the coast of Indonesia, would have been the single largest source of global warming pollution at the time.
Exxon first got interested in climate change in 1981 because it was seeking to develop the Natuna gas field off Indonesia,” Lenny Bernstein, a 30-year industry veteran and Exxon’s former in-house climate expert, wrote in the email. This is an immense reserve of natural gas, but it is 70% CO2,” or carbon dioxide, the main driver of climate change.
However, Exxon’s public position was marked by continued refusal to acknowledge the dangers of climate change, even in response to appeals from the Rockefellers, its founding family, and its continued financial support for climate denial. Over the years, Exxon spent more than $30m on thinktanks and researchers that promoted climate denial, according to Greenpeace.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jul/08/exxon-climate-change-1981-climate-denier-funding
By Chris Mooney December 18 at 11:08 AM
Why the Paris agreement could mark the beginning of the end for global warming denial
After 195 countries agreed in Paris Dec. 12 to a sweeping agreement to try to bring global warming under control, there has been much analysis of what this means for the future of energy. But there are reasons to think that it also may have a surprising impact on the future of politics, even in the U.S. namely, by taking away some of the motivations and dynamics that, for so long, have driven global warming skepticism, doubt and denial.
That may at first seem surprising after all, even as negotiators drove toward an agreement in Paris, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz was hosting a hearing in which he once again claimed that there hadn’t even been any significant global warming” in the past 18 years (even as we’re witnessing what is by far the warmest year on record). And we can expect to hear more of the same throughout the campaign season (although climate change was curiously absent from the latest GOP presidential debate).
However, if you take a longer term perspective and if you examine the history of politicized, public scientific debates then you see that the world is littered with forms of scientific doubt and denial that eventually declined and dwindled away. There used to be huge skepticism that chlorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, were damaging the planet’s stratospheric ozone layer or that smokestack and car emissions were causing acid rain. And we all know how much doubt there used to be about the health dangers of smoking.
Yet today, while some individuals may still harbor scientific doubt on those matters, there are no longer significant movements around them, and they are no longer substantially a focus of debate or public policy. The matters feel settled now. The same, someday, will likely happen with global warming — but the question is when, and what will trigger the shift?
Psychologists have conducted considerable, often fascinating research on what drives climate change doubt, and it’s these findings that explain why Paris could potentially help to end it. Not immediately, to be sure, and not alone. The outcome will also depend heavily on what happens domestically with President Obama’s Clean Power Plan, which will have at least as much of an impact on thinking and the tenor of debate in this country.
But the key point is that the Clean Power Plan and Paris agreement are both solutions. As such, they move people from a world of fighting over the science in order to determine whether action is justified, to a world of taking action and consulting the science. The dynamic is fundamentally different.
Thus it’s over the long term, as the reality sinks in that the entire world has now moved to address the climate problem, that there are indeed reasons to think that doubt will slowly decline.
Shifting the status quo. One key idea that suggests this conclusion is the notion that climate change denial is, in part, a manifestation of what is called “status quo” bias — implicit and default justifications of the current, industrial system for getting energy. This system not only benefits many people, but is also simply what we are more familiar with. And there is mountainous evidence suggesting that we tend to be biased toward the familiar and the well-established.
Status quo biases make political and social systems very hard to change, but at the same time, once they actually do change, the same biases then work to enforce the new status quo.
"Historically speaking, many people once opposed child labor laws, voting rights for women, fluoridation of drinking water, admissions of minority students into universities, and so on," says John Jost, a social psychologist at New York University who has written widely on what he calls this "system justification" tendency. Once these initiatives became established policies, the opposition slowly dissipated. For better and for worse, the status quo exerts a kind of motivational force on our thinking.
In the context of this idea, what’s striking about the Paris accord is that it establishes a new global status quo that is built around comprehensive, country-by-country action to address climate change. And over time, based on this theory, that could lessen the motivations behind denial.
"Climate change denialism has become completely marginalized now, because the world is moving on," says Michael Mann, a climate researcher with Penn State University. Indeed, even prior to Paris, there were clear signs of public opinion shifts, in favor of more and more Americans accepting that global warming is happening (a majority position in the public at large).
Undercutting "solution aversion." On top of this idea about shifting status quos, there is also the key insight that the denial of science on climate change isn’t really motivated by science at all — even though it comes adorned with scientific claims, such as Ted Cruz’s assertion that satellite data don’t support the idea that it has been warming lately.
Rather, climate change doubt or denial appears to actually be a way of rationalizing a deep rejection of the perceived solution to climate change. On the political right, this is believed to be a command and control intervention in the economy (read: the Clean Power Plan) so as to favor some types of energy over others, and thus deeply inimical to libertarian or free market values.
Duke University researchers Troy Campbell and Aaron Kay published a paper late last year suggesting that “Republicans’ increased skepticism toward environmental sciences may be partly attributable to a conflict between specific ideological values and the most popularly discussed environmental solutions.” They called this “solution aversion.”
The Paris agreement presents just such a solution — so they are likely to oppose it strongly. The Clean Power Plan is even more ideologically offensive because of the way it uses government regulation to change the energy system.
However, once these solutions take hold, and people see that the world won’t end because of them and that there won’t be economic calamity, then the whole affair will simply be a lot less worth fighting over. Solution aversion could lose its force as the solution works, and as the status quo shifts.
But there’s a key catch here, explains Troy Campbell, lead author of the solution aversion paper and now a professor at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist College of Business.
"We know from past work that often, once something becomes the status quo, we stop fighting it as much as we did, and we will stop fighting things the more we see they are solidified and unchangeable," says Anderson. But he cautions, "People can persist, and if people are surrounded by other people who disagree with [the Paris agreement], they can [persevere] in that disagreement, and it will be especially true if people believe they can overthrow these things, or they can resist this."
The fight isn’t over yet. Campbell points to Obamacare, where the changed status quo hasn’t stopped congressional Republicans from voting repeatedly to repeal the now implemented law. They clearly feel that the battle isn’t totally lost, that the status quo hasn’t really changed. (On the other hand, if they fail in these battles, their children will grow up with that new status quo and likely be far less motivated to question it).
On the climate deal, Campbell notes that for now, despite the fact that they can’t do anything about the actions of 194 separate countries in joining the agreement, opponents still clearly feel empowered to resist it at home. Here, the fight will be principally over the Clean Power Plan, which is centrally tied to the Paris agreement because it is the number one piece of evidence showing the world that the U.S. is really serious about cutting emissions.
Campbell cites, in particular, a recent statement by Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: "Before [Obama’s] international partners pop the champagne, they should remember that this is an unattainable deal based on a domestic energy plan that is likely illegal, that half the states have sued to halt, and that Congress has already voted to reject."
This is also a key reminder that while Republican presidential candidates really haven’t attacked the Paris deal much yet, the GOP and allies in industry have been systematically fighting the Clean Power Plan, both legally and rhetorically. But here too, notes Greg Sargent, there are hints of more compliance by state-level Republican elected officials, who might realize over time that hey, this policy isn’t actually so bad, or so hard to live with.
There is, in other words, another potential status quo shift here in the form of this policy. Moreover, the growth of the clean energy industry, which is already happening but will be further driven by the Clean Power Plan, will also create a new status quo and a new energy establishment that will become entrenched around acceptance of climate change, not its rejection.
Granted, all of this is theoretical and could be derailed by future events — like legal attacks on the Clean Power Plan, or a future Republican president who vows to halt the Clean Power Plan or withdraw from the Paris accord.
Moreover, not everyone is convinced these sorts of dynamics are yet in play. One skeptic that Paris will kill climate denial is Princeton climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer, who recalls the science denial that emerged around threats of ozone depletion and acid rain. He pointedly observes that one major round of skepticism about the role of ozone-depleting chemicals actually came shortly after the adoption of the Montreal Protocol, the global treaty that, today, is widely viewed as having addressed the problem.
"Denialism draws its oxygen from larger political agendas and Paris won’t put an end to those," says Oppenheimer. "There will still be plenty of opposition to regulating greenhouse gas emissions, to regulation in general, and to any sort of international cooperation."
One thing seems clear: with campaign season in full force, and President Obama’s moves around climate change hotly opposed on the political right, the climate issue will not die down immediately. When it comes to attacking climate science, Paris may give added oxygen, for a time.
But around 2020, as temperatures continue rising and as the world begins the first round of assessing how effective the Paris climate accord has been, well, matters then may feel very different indeed.
Climate Deal Is Signal to Industry: The Era of Carbon Reduction Is Here
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS and KEITH BRADSHER DEC. 13, 2015
With the ink barely dry on a landmark climate accord, nations now face an even more daunting challenge: how to get their industries to go along.
If nothing else, analysts and experts say, the accord is a signal to businesses and investors that the era of carbon reduction has arrived.
It will spur banks and investment funds to shift their loan and stock portfolios from coal and oil to the growing industries of renewable energy like wind and solar. Utilities themselves will have to reduce their reliance on coal and more aggressively adopt renewable sources of energy. Energy and technology companies will be pushed to make breakthroughs to make better and cheaper batteries that can store energy for use when it is needed. And automakers will have to develop electric cars that win broader acceptance in the marketplace.
"It’s very hard to go backward from something like this," said Nancy Pfund, managing partner of DBL Partners, a venture capital firm that focuses on social, environmental and economic development. "People are boarding this train, and it’s time to hop on if you want to have a thriving, 21st-century economy."
Wall Street is clearly paying attention.
Top executives from Bank of America, Citibank and Goldman Sachs dropped by the Paris talks or related side events, as did philanthropist business leaders like Bill Gates and Richard Branson. Chief executives of blue-chip companies like Coca-Cola, DuPont, General Mills, HP and Unilever all expressed support for an ambitious deal.
On Twitter on Saturday night, BP, the British oil giant, called the Paris agreement a “landmark climate change deal” and pledged to be "a part of the solution." In June, BP, Royal Dutch Shell and Total called for a tax on carbon emissions, saying it would reduce uncertainty and help oil and gas companies figure out the future....
More:
Climate Accord Draws Mixed Reactions
The U.K. Is Testing Electric Highways That Would Charge Your EV As You Drive
This could solve the charging problem that has been slowing electric car adoption for years (if it works). Electric Highwats could make it easier to fuel an EV
Brits are getting into electric cars more and more. Sales jumped up 366% in the first quarter of 2015. Still, when the U.K. government surveyed consumers and businesses, they found the chicken-and-egg problem that haunts EVs elsewhere. Some consumers don't want to buy an electric car without a full infrastructure for charging in place. But the business case for building that infrastructure is weak without more EV drivers on roads.
The U.K. plans to add plug-in chargers every 20 miles along highways, so drivers don't have to worry about getting stranded on a road trip. And the country does already have thousands of chargers in place. But now they're testing out something new to make driving an EV even easier: Electric highways that can wirelessly charge cars as they drive.
If the tests go well, the new highways would add to the existing network of plug-in chargers, and make it even simpler to fuel up a Tesla than a standard gas-guzzling car. "This has the benefit of saving time and improving the distance that electric vehicles can travel," says Nic Brunetti, a spokesman for Highways England. "The combination of both types of charging technologies could help to create a comprehensive ecosystem for electric vehicles."...................
Green storage for green energy
Rechargeable battery to power a home from rooftop solar panels
Date: September 24, 2015
Source: Harvard University
Summary: Researchers have demonstrated a safe and affordable battery capable of storing energy from intermittent sources -- like rooftop solar panels -- that is suitable for the home.
(excerpt)
Hogan says net metering is one of a series of "regulatory gimmicks designed to make solar more attractive" and predicts that eventually consumers with rooftop photovoltaic panels will lose the option of exchanging electricity for discounts on their utility bills. When that happens, these homeowners have an incentive to invest in battery storage.
That's the emerging market opportunity that Tesla Motors entrepreneur Elon Musk hopes to leverage with his company's recently-announced Powerwall system. But the flow battery design engineered by Aziz and his Harvard colleagues offers potential advantages in cost and the length of time it can maintain peak discharge power compared to lithium batteries.
"This has potential because photovoltaics are growing so fast," Aziz says. "A cloud comes over your solar installation and BAM -- the production goes crashing down. Then the cloud goes away and the production goes shooting up. The best way of dealing with that is with batteries."
Watch video: How a flow battery works- [url]https://youtu.be/4ob3_8QjmR0[/url].
(end excerpt)
Batteries are a growing option. Reselling back to the grid needs to continue while solar is being established. Eventually though, the electric utility companies will likely be allowed to charge customers a flat fee for a hookup to the grid. That's only fair, and this might be a good deal if batteries are still too expansive. But if not, then it looks like the big electric companies may be out of luck and go out of business. It might be wise for them to go into the renewable energy and battery business instead! Either way, batteries and the grid makes solar and wind power at homes into baseload power.
Here's a good article on the issues of solar power:
Posted: 06/28/2010 5:12 am EDT Updated: 05/25/2011 4:20 pm EDT
Eco Etiquette: How Green Are Solar Panels?
It seems like a good thing that solar is getting popular, but what about all the materials that go into making the panels, recycling them, etc.? Is solar really as green as it's made out to be?
-Griffin
Alas, there's a cloud in every green lining. Just when environmentalists think we've uncovered a win-win solution to some ecological ill, it turns out there's a downside to be dealt with: Compact fluorescent bulbs reduce electricity consumption by 75 percent but come with a dash of mercury; a new Prius takes 46,000 miles of driving before paying off the energy cost of manufacturing (if you make it that far); even tofu, as it turns out, may have a higher carbon footprint than chicken.
It's not surprising, then, that solar panels also have a dark side; namely, greenhouse gases and toxic chemicals involved in manufacturing, and a lack of regulation regarding recycling. First, though, let's take a look at the big picture.
Solar far outshines electricity produced from fossil fuel sources: Per kilowatt, it offsets up to 830 pounds of nitrogen oxides, 1,500 pounds of sulfur dioxide, and 217,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year. What's more, because photovoltaic (PV) panels generally have a long lifecycle -- up to 30 years -- the amount of waste generated by panels past their prime is relatively small, especially when you consider the three-to-four-year turnover of other electronic waste like computers, televisions, and cell phones.
But with solar growing in popularity thanks to falling prices and various tax incentives, we could see a wave of e-waste in the next 20-some-odd years if the industry doesn't take action now: The Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition (SVTC), which works to promote eco-friendly practices in the high-tech industry, warned in a 2009 report that "little attention is currently being paid to the potential risks and consequences of scaling up solar PV cell production. The solar PV industry must address these issues immediately, or risk repeating the mistakes made by the microelectronics industry."
(Mistakes is a nice way to put it; the United States' failure to regulate e-waste has resulted in our hazardous junk being shipped off to developing nations, where it piles up in digital dumping grounds that pollute the air and groundwater and sicken people who live nearby.)
So what are some of the issues surrounding solar? And how can solar become greener (ironic though that question may be)? Let's take a look:
Toxic chemicals. While it's nowhere near the amount produced by, say, coal-fired power plants, a number of nasty chemicals are used in solar manufacturing, including arsenic, cadmium telluride, chromium, and lead. While one immediate risk may be to the workers who construct these panels, the long-term hazard is where all these materials will go once the panels are no longer useful.
Companies in the US are working to address these concerns, implementing take-back programs like the one offered by thin-film manufacturer First Solar, which recycles over 90 percent of the materials collected from old panels. Another thin-film company, AQT Solar, is looking into safer alternatives to cadmium like zinc sulfide. "Our goal is to definitely reduce our dependence on toxic materials, and if possible, eliminate them completely," says AQT CEO Michael Bartholomeusz.
Greenhouse gases. The whole goal of solar-generated electricity may be to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide going into the atmosphere, but unfortunately, there are even more potent greenhouse gases involved before a panel is ever plugged in. The SVTC report states that sulfur hexafluoride (SF6), which is 22,000 times more powerful than CO2, is used to clean the reactors used in silicon production.
Nitrogen trifluoride (NF3), another global warming whopper (17,000 times more powerful than CO2), is used in the manufacturing of thin-film PV panels. This wasn't an urgent issue a few years back, when thin-film only made up a small percentage of the solar market; but thanks to cheaper manufacturing costs, thin-film is expected to double its market share by 2013. Luckily, alternatives exist: German-based startup Malibu has developed a technology that uses fluorine, a gas with zero global warming potential.
Manufacturing. It would be great if all solar panel production facilities were powered by, well, solar power, but this isn't always the case: The manufacturing side of solar can be very un-green, since its energy-intensive processes are often powered by fossil-fuel based electricity. The need to construct brand-new facilities for production also can add to a solar company's footprint.
One possible solution? Use existing (but dormant) auto-manufacturing plants to house production, a la traditional PV manufacturer Skyline Solar. The company also uses about 90 percent less silicon in its panels compared with traditional solar installations, to help minimize the high environmental cost of silicon production.
So, do any of the above disclaimers mean we should say see ya to solar? Of course not. Even with the energy and waste involved, PV power in exchange for all our fossil fuels would still reduce air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions by 90 percent.
Hope this has been enlightening!
Memo to Ottawa: We can solve climate change in our lifetime
Provincial climate policy has improved drastically in recent years. Now it's time for Ottawa to step up and do its part in Paris.
This Sunday, the day before the UN climate summit begins in Paris, thousands of concerned Canadians will take to the streets of Ottawa to send a loud and clear message to our leaders: We can and must solve climate change in our lifetime.
The summit comes at a critical juncture. This year carbon pollution topped 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, above what scientists believe to be the safe limit. The earth has already warmed by one degree. Extreme weather events: droughts, wildfires, floods-- have become all too common.
Action is needed and it’s needed now. We need an agreement in Paris that ensures that global warming stays well below 2 degrees Celsius.
The good news is that success in Paris is possible. The solutions to the climate crisis are at hand. The money is moving away from fossil fuels. The momentum is building.
In 2014, carbon emissions from energy sources flatlined while the global economy continued to grow, something that’s never happened in the 40 years the International Energy Agency has been tracking these statistics. The belief that economic growth must come with pollution growth is breaking down.
Fossil fuel projects are being axed. U.S. President Barack Obama rejected the Keystone XL pipeline. Coal mines are being shuttered in Alberta and B.C. Shell pulled the plug on an 80,000-barrel-a-day oilsands project and abandoned drilling in the Arctic.
The money is moving too. Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global dropped 114 companies on climate grounds. The Church of England divested from the most heavily polluting fossil fuels. All told, investors managing US$2.6 trillion in assets are shifting their holdings away from fossil fuels. On the flip side, renewable energy investments broke yet another record last year. Over $6 trillion is expected to be invested in clean technology over the next decade.
A renewable energy revolution is unfolding before our eyes. Last year, the world added more electricity capacity from renewables than from oil, coal and gas combined. Solar panel costs have dropped by a whopping 73 per cent over the past five years, the cost of wind power has declined by 10 per cent per year for each of the last six years, and power from solar panels is now cheaper than wholesale grid electricity in 30 countries. Major companies, including Starbucks, Nike and Walmart, have pledged to shift to 100-per-cent renewable energy.
Canada is part of this revolution. We are the fourth largest producer of wind, water and solar power in the world. Canada’s clean energy sector added jobs at a greater rate than any other sector in the country. Since 2008, renewable energy has created 250,000 jobs in Ontario alone.
Meanwhile, governments around the world are accepting that there are economic, health and environmental costs associated with carbon pollution, and they’re starting to make those costs visible. Over 40 countries and more than 20 cities, states and provinces have or are planning to implement carbon pricing. In a few years, more than half of the global economy will have a price on carbon. China, the world’s largest polluter, has committed to a cap-and-trade system to price emissions, and it has pledged to stop and reverse pollution growth by 2030.
Here in Canada, British Columbia, Quebec, Ontario and now Alberta have all put or promised to put a price on carbon. These four provinces represent over 86 per cent of the economy and over 80 per cent of Canada’s carbon pollution.
This week Alberta unveiled a historic climate plan. A cap on emissions from the tarsands, a coal phase-out, a commitment to increase renewable electricity supply and an energy efficiency program should mean that emissions in the province will soon peak and then start to decline. With this move from Alberta, there’s nothing standing in the way of Canada’s federal government from setting and reaching for a meaningful climate reduction target.
The new federal government has spoken well about the need for action on climate. It appears ready to turn the page after a decade of inaction. In Paris, Canada can shift from being a roadblock on climate progress to being an active driver of that progress.
A solution to this great challenge is possible. In fact, progress is well underway. As our federal leaders sit down in Paris to forge the way forward, they should think of the thousands who will march in Ottawa this Sunday and know that the public is behind them and the wind at their back.
Keith Brooks is director of the Clean Economy Program, Environmental Defence.
Why are so many Americans skeptical about climate change? A study offers a surprising answer
Climate change has long been a highly polarizing topic in the United States, with Americans lining up on opposite sides depending on their politics and worldview. Now a scientific study sheds new light on the role played by corporate money in creating that divide.
The report, a systematic review of 20 years’ worth of data, highlights the connection between corporate funding and messages that raise doubts about the science of climate change and whether humans are responsible for the warming of the planet. The analysis suggests that corporations have used their wealth to amplify contrarian views and create an impression of greater scientific uncertainty than actually exists.
"The contrarian efforts have been so effective for the fact that they have made it difficult for ordinary Americans to even know who to trust," said Justin Farrell, a Yale University sociologist and author of the study, released on Monday in the peer-reviewed journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
As Congress debates climate change, global temperatures surge
Numerous previous studies have examined how corporate-funded campaigns have helped shape individual views about global warming. But the Yale study takes what Farrell calls the “bird’s-eye view,” using computer analytics to systematically examine vast amounts of printed matter published by 164 groups—including think-tanks and lobbying firms—and more than 4,500 individuals who have been skeptical of mainstream scientific views on climate change.
The study analyzed the articles, policy papers and transcripts produced by these groups over a 20-year period. Then it separated the groups that received corporate funding from those that did not.
The results, Farrell said, revealed an “ecosystem of influence” within the corporate-backed groups. Those that received donations consistently promoted the same contrarian themes—casting doubt, for example, on whether higher levels of man-made carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere were harmful to the planet. There was no evidence of such coordination among the non-funded groups.
The existence of corporate money “created a united network within which the contrarian messages could be strategically created” and spread, Farrell said.
"This counter-movement produced messages aimed, at the very least, at creating ideological polarization through politicized tactics, and at the very most, at overtly refuting current scientific consensus with scientific findings of their own," he said.
The report did not examine the impact of outside money on the messages of groups that encourage activism on climate change. Farrell suggested that there were qualitative differences between such groups and those that sought to advance corporate interests by promoting skepticism about science.
"Funders looking to influence organizations who promote a consensus view are very different from funders looking to influence organizations who have the goal of creating polarization and controversy and delaying policy progress on a scientific issue that has nearly uniform consensus," he said. New York prosecutors investigate whether Exxon Mobil misled the public on climate-change risks
The publication of the report comes two weeks after New York prosecutors announced an investigation into whether Exxon Mobil misled the public and investors about the risks of climate change. The probe was prompted in part by reports in the Los Angeles Times and the online publication Inside Climate News, alleging that Exxon researchers expressed concerned about climate change from fossil fuel emissions decades ago, even as the company publicly raised doubts about whether climate-change was scientifically valid.
Exxon has declined to comment on the investigation while acknowledging that its position on climate-change has evolved in recent years. "Our company, beginning in the latter part of the 1970s and continuing to the present day, has been involved in serious scientific research, and we have been supporting since that time scientific understanding of the risk of climate change," Exxon’s vice president of public and government affairs Ken Cohen told reporters after the New York probe was revealed.
Weather disasters have become twice as frequent in 20 years, UN says
Amount due to climate change unknown, but upward trend continues
Thomson Reuters Posted: Nov 23, 2015 2:27 PM ET
Certain disaster types such as floods are 'definitely increasing,' said Debarati Guha-Sapir, professor at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at UCL University in Louvain, Belgium, which co-authored the U.N. report. Certain disaster types such as floods are 'definitely increasing,' said Debarati Guha-Sapir, professor at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at UCL University in Louvain, Belgium, which co-authored the U.N. report. (IRIN/Tung X. Ngo)
Weather-related disasters such as floods and heatwaves have occurred almost daily in the past decade, almost twice as often as two decades ago, with Asia being the hardest hit region, a UN report said on Monday.
While the report authors could not pin the increase wholly on climate change, they did say that the upward trend was likely to continue as extreme weather events increased.
Since 1995, weather disasters have killed 606,000 people, left 4.1 billion injured, homeless or in need of aid, and accounted for 90 per cent of all disasters, it said.
A recent peak year was 2002, when drought in India hit 200 million and a sandstorm in China affected 100 million. But the standout mega-disaster was Cyclone Nargis, which killed 138,000 in Myanmar in 2008.
While geophysical causes such as earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis often grab the headlines, they only make up one in 10 of the disasters trawled from a database defined by the impact.
The report, called "The Human Cost of Weather Related Disasters," found there were an average of 335 weather-related disasters annually between 2005 and August this year, up 14 per cent from 1995-2004 and almost twice as many as in the years from 1985 to 1994.
"While scientists cannot calculate what percentage of this rise is due to climate change, predictions of more extreme weather in future almost certainly mean that we will witness a continued upward trend in weather-related disasters in the decades ahead," the report said.
A damaged structure is pictured in this aerial photo in Index, Washington after a storm blew down trees and triggered mudslides and flooding, killing at least three people last week. Since 1995, weather disasters have killed 606,000 people and left 4.1 billion injured, homeless or in need of aid, a new U.N. report has found. (Jason Redmond/Reuters)
The release of the report comes a week before world leaders gather in Paris to discuss plans to curb greenhouse gas emissions and prevent world temperatures rising.
The United Nations says atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming, have risen to a new record every year for the past 30 years.
'Floods are definitely increasing'
"All we can say is that certain disaster types are increasing. Floods are definitely increasing," said Debarati Guha-Sapir, professor at the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters at UCL University in Louvain, Belgium, which co-authored the report..............
Mark Jacobson: Barriers to 100% Clean Energy are Social and Political, Not Technical or Economic
The Solutions Project | November 20, 2015 8:53 am
As world leaders prepare to gather in Paris for a landmark climate summit, a new analysis from Stanford University and University of California researchers lays out roadmaps for 139 countries, including the world’s major greenhouse gas emitters, to switch to 100 percent clean, renewable energy generated from wind, water and sunlight for all purposes by 2050.
Mark Z. Jacobson, a Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford University and director of the school’s Atmosphere/Energy Program, said the roadmaps should give negotiators and leaders confidence that they can meet energy demands in all energy sectors—including electricity, transportation, heating and cooling, industry and agriculture—with clean sources.
“The main barriers to getting to 100 percent clean energy are social and political, not technical or economic,” Jacobson told members of Congress and ambassadors from countries participating in the negotiations during a forum Thursday in Washington, DC.
All the roadmaps are available via an embeddable collection of interactive maps on The Solutions Project’s website.
Jacobson and his colleagues found that future costs for producing clean energy are similar to a business-as-usual scenario of about 11 cents per kilowatt hour, similar to the average cost in America today. The air pollution and climate costs due to fossil fuels, however, are virtually eliminated by clean–energy technologies.
Overall, the analysis found, the business, health, plus climate costs of a 100 percent clean and renewable energy system were more than 60 percent lower than those of a business-as-usual system.
Switching to 100 percent clean energy would prevent four to seven million premature deaths each year globally from pollution associated with fossil fuels. By comparison, about six million people die prematurely each year from smoking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Globally, the transition to clean, renewable energy would create more than 20 million more jobs than would be lost in the transition. It would also stabilize energy costs, thanks to free fuels such as wind, water and the sun; reduce terrorism risk by distributing electricity generation; and eliminate the overwhelming majority of heat-trapping emissions that contribute to climate change.
The researchers also calculated that just 0.3 percent of the world’s land footprint would have to be devoted to energy production under a 100 percent clean energy scenario. That is less than the size of Madagascar.
Jacobson and his colleagues are also slated to publish a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Nov. 23 which examines how to achieve reliability under a 100 percent clean energy scenario for the U.S.
The countries in the roadmap include the world’s major emitters, and were selected based on available International Energy Agency data. Last week, the IEA’s energy outlook concluded for the first time that renewables are already set to outpace coal as the world’s leading source of electricity.
"The past few years have seen dramatic increases in the growth of renewable energy," Jacobson said. "Countries can ramp that up even faster and enjoy a host of economic and health benefits by doing so."
Earlier this month, National Geographic highlighted Jacobson’s earlier research on clean energy roadmaps he drew up for all 50 U.S. states, calling the project a “blueprint for a carbon-free America.” The magazine will highlight his new research on the 139 country roadmaps to clean energy later this month. The paper, along with underlying data and tables are available on Jacobson’s faculty website. The analysis uses the same methodology as a previous study published in Energy and Environmental Science, and will be formally published in a journal next year.
US kids' lawsuit over climate change gathers steam
A lawsuit over climate change filed by 21 young Americans has gained the attention of the fossil fuel industry, which is joining the US government to oppose the kids' demands for sharper pollution cuts
The plaintiffs, aged eight to 19, include the granddaughter of renowned climate scientist James Hansen, formerly of NASA and a well-known advocate of reducing the greenhouse gases that are causing the planet to heat up.
The plaintiffs want the government to commit to significantly reduce carbon dioxide emissions and implement "a science-based climate recovery plan" that protects the Earth for future generations, according to the Oregon-based group, Our Children's Trust.
"This case will put indisputable science about climate change squarely in front of the federal judiciary," said the group, which filed its lawsuit against President Barack Obama's administration in August, and has filed multiple state lawsuits over the past several years.
They are calling on the US District Court of Oregon -- the state where most of the plaintiffs live -- to order the government to "swiftly phase down carbon dioxide emissions" so that atmospheric CO2 concentrations "are no more than 350 parts per million by 2100."
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is currently around 400 ppm, a level unprecedented in modern history and one that has raised alarm among many climate scientists.
Meanwhile, the planet is on track for its hottest year since 1880, amid key climate talks later this month in Paris that will reveal how much world leaders are prepared to do to save the environment.
In a sign that the kids' lawsuit is causing some concern to industry interests, powerful oil and coal companies filed earlier this month for permission to join the US government in opposing it.
They include the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers -- which represents ExxonMobil, BP, Shell, Koch Industries and more -- the American Petroleum Institute and the National Association of Manufacturers.
"The fossil fuel industry doesn't want additional pressure on the federal government to run a stricter climate change program," said Cornell University law professor Gerald Torres, an expert on environmental law who is not involved in the case.
"It does suggest they are taking this lawsuit seriously. And I think it ought to be taken seriously," Torres told AFP.
- Dangers ignored -
The plaintiffs say the federal government has known about the danger of carbon emissions since 1965, but has not done enough to stem them.
Specifically, pledges in the 1990s by Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency to significantly reduce CO2 emissions and stop global warming were "never implemented."
This lack of action shows that the "federal government has violated the youngest generation's constitutional rights to life, liberty, property, as well as failed to protect essential public trust resources," Our Children's Trust has said.
In other words, the government has jeopardized such vital natural resources as the air, seas, coastlines, water and wildlife...........
11-20-2015
Another look at thorium from a green perspective
I'm not saying I agree.
There are possibilities for current fission nuc tech, if meltdowns can be prevented, and the waste can be recycled. The article suggests depleted uranium, which is plentiful, could be used.
Renewable energy isn’t boosting electric bills study contends
Renewable energy is seen as the culprit behind higher electricity bills by Colorado Republican lawmakers, but a new study contends it just ain’t so.
The Colorado Senate passed a bill rolling back the state’s renewable energy standard , which requires that investor-owned utilities get 30 percent of their energy from renewable sources by 2020 and rural electric coops to get 20 percent, to 15 percent for both.
"We want to make sure we’re not pushing the envelope so far that we’re hurting consumers, especially the rural consumers," said the sponsor, Sen. Ray Scott, R-Grand Junction.
And handing out graphs of comparative rates, Rep. Dan Thurlow, R-Grand Junction, said, "We’ve gone from being one of the lowest-cost states, to being higher than most of our neighbors in the mountain states." The bill, however, died in the Democratic-majority House.
It is true that Xcel Energy, the state’s largest electricity provider, has had a series of rate hikes over the last few years, but $347 million in increases between 2006 and 2009 were the result of the utility’s new $1 billion Comanche 3 coal plant coming on line. A lot of the rate increases were also driven by Xcel adding long-deferred infrastructure, such as transmission lines.
Putting that aside, have wind and solar installations increased the cost of electricity? A study by Nancy Pfund and Anand Chhabara says there is no evidence to show they have.
The study "Renewable Are Driving up Electricity Prices: Wait, What?" looks at the top ten states for renewable energy, the ten states with the least renewable energy, and the nation averages.
"Basically we didn’t find much difference and I think that’s the point," said Pfund, who is a managing partner in DBL Investors, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm specializing in clean technologies and sustainable products and services.
Chhabara, who is working on dual law and business degrees at Stanford University, was a summer associate at DBL.
In their analysis the top 10 states in renewable energy had an average increase in retail electricity prices of 3.06 percent between 2002 and 2013. The 10 states with the least renewable energy generation had a 3.74 percent increase, while the national average was 3.23 percent.
The numbers don’t prove anything one way or another, but they don’t particularly support the contention that renewables boost rates. On the other hand, they don’t give any sense of what the rates would have been in those leading renewable energy states if they hadn’t had wind and solar.....
Sunshine revolution: the age of solar power
The suburbs of Las Vegas do not look like the cradle of a revolution. Golden stucco-clad houses stretch for street after identical street, interspersed with gated communities with names such as Spanish Oaks and Rancho Bel Air. The sky is the deepest blue, the desert air is clear and the distant mountains are beautiful. The only sounds are the buzz of a gardener’s hedge trimmer and a squeaking baby buggy pushed by a power-walking mother. The bright lights of Sin City seem a very long way away.
Yet these quiet streets are being changed by a movement that is gathering momentum across America and around the world, challenging one of the most fundamental of economic relationships: the way we use and pay for energy. There are now more than 7,000 homes in Nevada fitted with solar panels to generate their own electricity, and the number is rising fast. Just five years ago, residential solar power was still a niche product for the homeowner with a fat wallet and a bleeding heart. Not any more. Technology, politics and finance have aligned to move it into the mainstream. Solar power has become the fastest-growing energy source in the US.
For decades the electricity industry has been a cautious and conservative business, but the plunging prices of solar panels, down by about two-thirds in the past six years, have woken it up with a bang. Dynamic rooftop solar power companies have entered the market, in the most radical change to electricity supplies since the industry was born in the 19th century. It has been described as the equivalent of the mobile revolution in telephony, or the PC in computing.
A shift away from fossil fuels and towards renewable energy will be a central issue at the UN climate talks in Paris, which begin later this month. Although countries will arrive having made commitments to curb their future greenhouse gas emissions, analysis of the pledges so far suggests they are unlikely to be enough to meet the internationally agreed goal of stopping global temperatures rising by more than 2C from levels before the Industrial Revolution. The hope is that countries will do more, including developing more renewable energy.
On a global scale, solar power is still tiny, providing only about 1 per cent of the world’s electricity, according to the International Energy Agency, the think-tank backed by developed countries’ governments. It is now clear, though, that it has the potential to contribute much more than that. Solar power and onshore wind power are the two most cost-effective forms of renewables but solar has the greater capacity for costs to fall further. "Wind is basically mechanics; solar is electronics. And the progress there is much more rapid, and will continue," says Gérard Mestrallet, chief executive of Engie, the French energy group. Solar is also flexible in scale: it can power a calculator, or a city.
Yet for some the disruptive potential of solar power is not so much a promise as a threat. Established electric utilities are facing challenges they had not dreamt about five years ago. Many are starting to push back. It is a battle that will shape the future of the industry and possibly of the climate.....
Henning Gloystein and Aaron Sheldrick, Reuters
Analysts: Solar energy is on the verge of a 'global boom'
SINGAPORE/TOKYO (Reuters) - One by one, Japan is turning off the lights at the giant oil-fired power plants that propelled it to the ranks of the world's top industrialized nations.
With nuclear power in the doldrums after the Fukushima disaster, it's solar energy that is becoming the alternative.
Solar power is set to become profitable in Japan as early as this quarter, according to the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation (JREF), freeing it from the need for government subsidies and making it the last of the G7 economies where the technology has become economically viable.
Japan is now one of the world's four largest markets for solar panels and a large number of power plants are coming onstream, including two giant arrays over water in Kato City and a $1.1 billion solar farm being built on a salt field in Okayama, both west of Osaka.
"Solar has come of age in Japan and from now on will be replacing imported uranium and fossil fuels," said Tomas Kåberger, executive board chairman of JREF.
"In trying to protect their fossil fuel and nuclear (plants), Japan's electric power companies can only delay developments here," he said, referring to the 10 regional monopolies that have dominated electricity production since the 1950s.
Japan is retiring nearly 2.4 gigawatts of expensive and polluting oil-fired energy plants by March next year and switching to alternative fuels. Japan's 43 nuclear reactors have been closed in the wake of the 2011 meltdown at the Fukushima power plant after an earthquake and a tsunami - since then, renewable energy capacity has tripled to 25 gigawatts, with solar accounting for more than 80 percent of that.
Once Japan reaches cost-revenue parity in solar energy, it will mean the technology is commercially viable in all G7 countries and 14 of the G20 economies, according to data from governments, industry and consumer groups.
A crash in the prices of photovoltaic panels and improved technology that harnesses more power from the sun has placed solar on the cusp of a global boom, analysts say, who compare its rise to shale oil.
"Just as shale extraction reconfigured oil and gas, no other technology is closer to transforming power markets than distributed and utility scale solar," said consultancy Wood Mackenzie, which has a focus on the oil and gas
Oil major Exxon Mobil says that "solar capacity is expected to grow by more than 20 times from 2010 to 2040."
Investors are also re-discovering solar, with the global solar index up 40 percent this year, lifting it out of a slump following the 2008/2009 financial crisis, far outperforming struggling commodities such as iron ore, natural gas, copper or coal.
Cheaper panels
By starting mass-production of solar panels, China is the driving force in bringing down solar manufacturing costs by 80 percent in the last decade, according to Germany's Fraunhofer Institute.
In Japan, residential solar power production costs have more than halved since 2010 to under 30 yen ($0.25) per kilowatt-hour (kWh), making it comparable to average household electricity prices.
Wood Mackenzie expects solar costs to fall more as "efficiencies are nowhere near their theoretical maximums."
Solar is already well-entrenched in Europe and North America, but it is the expected boom in Asia that is lifting it out from its niche.
China's new anti-pollution policies are making the big difference. Because of these policies, Beijing is seeking alternatives for coal, which makes up almost two-thirds of its energy consumption.
China's 2014 solar capacity was 26.52 gigawatt (GW), less than 2 percent of its total capacity of 1,360 GW.
But the government wants to add 17.8 GW of solar power this year and added 5 GW in the first quarter alone, with plans to boost capacity to 100 GW by 2020.
Coal-dominated India, with its plentiful sunlight, could also take to solar in a big way.
Despite this boom, fossil-fueled power is far from dead.
"Additional generating capacity, such as natural gas-fired plants, must be made available to back up wind and solar during the times when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing," Exxon says.
By Mark Jaffe The Denver Post
source: AP
(typos corrected)
Ed Crooks and Lucy Hornby
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/488483ca-8334-11e5-8e80-1574112844fd.html
http://im.ft-static.com/content/images/7ee3248c-8a03-4498-a36d-d6794980a1a7.img
Apr. 25, 2015, 10:19 PM
