Tag: renewables versus fossil fuel

Report: The US power grid is already halfway to carbon neutrality, and it’s saving lives

Popular Science: The US power grid is already halfway to carbon neutrality, and it’s saving lives. We’re seeing fewer pollution-related deaths a year. Renewable energy’s rapid growth is accelerating a national shift to a carbon-free electric power system.

So far 17 states plus Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, have adopted laws or executive orders setting goals for reaching 100-percent clean electricity by 2050 or sooner. And 46 US utilities have pledged to go carbon-free. Now the Biden administration and some members of Congress are proposing to decarbonize the power sector by 2035.

While this much change in 15 years seems ambitious, our new report, “Halfway to Zero,” looks back at the past 15 and finds that power sector emissions are half of what they were projected to be.

We analyzed the “business as usual” projection in the 2005 Annual Energy Outlook published by the Energy Information Administration, the US government’s official agency for data collection and analysis. It projected that annual carbon dioxide emissions from the electric power sector would rise from 2,400 million to 3,000 million metric tons from 2005 to 2020.

Study: Preparing for climate’s impact on renewables

Phys.org: Preparing for climate’s impact on renewables.

Reducing the impacts of climate change will require substantial investments in renewable energy sources. But climate change itself could affect those renewable alternatives: changing yields for biomass crops, reduced streamflow for hydropower, diminished sunlight and increasing temperatures for solar, and altered air density and wind speed patterns for wind power.

“As energy planners evaluate a wide variety of  scenarios, there’s a risk of misrepresenting climate change’s effect on the electric power sector if impacts on all renewables aren’t accounted for,” said Chris Vernon, a senior data scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL). “Lead author Silvia R. Santos da Silva demonstrated that planners need to account for climate impacts on  during capacity development planning to fully understand investment implications to the power sector.”

Vernon was among a team of researchers who explored the impacts of climate change on a variety of , focusing their study on Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that already has embraced renewables. In 2017, renewable sources represented about 56 percent of the region’s electricity generation versus a  of 26 percent, the study notes. Fossil fuels, the authors point out, remain the dominant source of total energy.

The Daily Climate, April 15, 2021

Articles include: 2050 Goals are inadequate; champagne & climate change; 100% clean power; renewable energy powers decarbonization; electric vehicles by 2035; Interior Department and Manchin; Epic Drought; Indian monsoon season; ticks moving into the Arctic; East African oil pipeline; American research station abandoned; food web in the Great Lakes.

The Coast-to-Coast Battle Over Rooftop Solar

Inside Climate News: Inside Clean Energy: The Coast-to-Coast Battle Over Rooftop Solar. As California works on a new net metering policy, other states are grappling with similar issues.

A debate over how best to compensate rooftop solar owners is taking place across the country.

In California, the country’s leading solar market, regulators are working on changes to rooftop solar rules, while utilities and solar advocates are trying to position themselves to shape the process to their liking.

Many of the other policy fights are happening in places where rooftop solar is at the margins, and utilities would like to keep it there.

This century-old technology could be the key to unlocking America’s renewable energy future.

Popular Science: This century-old technology could be the key to unlocking America’s renewable energy future. Pumped storage hydro once propped up coal and nuclear power. Now it’s essential for a clean, growing grid.

Like other parts of the US rushing to transition away from fossil fuels, the Pacific Northwest’s grid is increasingly reliant on wind farms like this one, in addition to solar arrays. That’s great when the wind blows and the sun shines, but as anyone who has walked the drizzly streets of Seattle can attest, you can’t always count on that. To guarantee a smooth, carbon-free supply of electricity despite this variability, the grid requires enormous amounts of energy storage, and projections indicate that the region needs up to 10,000 megawatts of backup reserves to meet 100-percent renewable power goals.

The Daily Climate, April 2,2021

Articles include: climate change stunting farm production; activists doubt transportation plan; Arctic sea ice loss and major snowstorms; coal mining in Canada; EV sales; cheaper and cheaper solar power; California drought and wildfires; Australia fire and flood; reversing efficiency rules; Texas activists fighting natural gas project overseas.

The Daily Climate, April 1,2021

Articles include: Climate change and financial markets; Report: O&G warning – diversify; Tackling climate change will create jobs; Biden and electric vehicles; Rainforests will become savannas – study and  study. EU climate plan and Asia; greening the financial system; low maximum Arctic ice; world bank financing fossil fuels; Canada’s TransMountain pipeline study paper from a team at Simon Fraser University‘s School of Resource and Environmental Management; Increase funding for poor nations; Saudi Arabia, renewable energy, planting trees; frequent flyers; Aussie brewer and solar power; coal shutdowns – German approach; Report (no link provided): Barrier Reef doomed; EPA fires trump appointees.

Report: Wind and solar power aren’t displacing coal nearly fast enough

Axios: Wind and solar power aren’t displacing coal nearly fast enough.

New analysis shows how wind and solar growth are helping to displace coal-fired generation, but not nearly enough to slash overall emissions from electricity at a time of generally rising global demand.

Driving the news: Last year, a 15% rise in wind and solar generation combined with the pandemic briefly halting power demand growth led to a record drop in coal-fired output, the environmental think tank Ember said.

The big picture: Those renewables combined supplied nearly a 10th of total global electricity last year, around twice the share just five years earlier.

Study: Fossil Fuels Are Wildly More Expensive Than Previously Thought

Vice: Fossil Fuels Are Wildly More Expensive Than Previously Thought, Study Says. Overinflated fossil fuel investments might be a ‘worthless’ bubble waiting to trigger the next crash, while renewables seem more appealing than ever.

A new study finds that conventional electric power plants powered by fossil fuels and hydro are massively overvalued by the world’s leading analyst organizations. The report says they are overvalued to such a degree that the trillions of dollars of investment in these industries could amount to a “bubble” similar to the subprime mortgage housing bubble whose collapse triggered the 2008 financial crash.

The stunning findings imply not only that renewable energies such as solar, wind and battery storage are far cheaper than believed, but that they are already outcompeting coal, natural gas, nuclear, and hydro power. This fact, however, has been masked by distorted calculations based on a fundamentally incorrect metric: the ‘Levelized Cost of Electricity’ (LCOE).

The new report by independent technology think tank RethinkX, titled The Great Stranding: How Inaccurate Mainstream LCOE Estimates are Creating a Trillion-Dollar Bubble in Conventional Energy Assets is written by environmental social scientist Dr. Adam Dorr, a Research Fellow at RethinkX, and the think tank’s co-founder Tony Seba, a serial entrepreneur and Stanford University lecturer in technology disruption.