Tag: Department of Energy (DOE)

Daily Climate, April 29, 2021

Articles include: The climate solution actually adding millions of tons of C02 into the atmosphere; Joanne Chory is harnessing plants to stop climate change; The Exxon of green power: A Spanish company and its boss set sky-high goals; Poland clinches ′historic′ deal to phase out coal by 2049; DOE unveils grid plans to unlock renewables; A warming world threatens Colombia’s coffee future; Study: Reversing warming quickly could prevent worst climate change effects; Study: ‘Life support’ measures could buy Great Barrier Reef another two decades.

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.

Report: The U.S. Is Closer to a Zero-Carbon Grid Than It Seems

Gizmodo: The U.S. Is Closer to a Zero-Carbon Grid Than It Seems.

The U.S. has a lot of work to do to draw down carbon emissions. But a new report shows that when it comes to the energy grid, things are actually in better shape than researchers thought it’d be by this point.

The analysis from the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory takes a look back at federal projections from the Energy Information Administration from 2005. The agency forecast that carbon pollution tied to electricity generation would increase 600 million metric tons between 2005 and 2020, a 25% increase from 2,400 million tons.

That’s not what happened, though. Instead, carbon emissions from the grid actually fell to 1,450 million metric tons in 2020. That’s a 40% reduction compared to 2005 and 52% below where the EIA thought grid-related emissions would be by now.

The Daily Climate, March 30,2021

Articles include: Eastern Kentucky and flooding; Biden offshore wind farms; Massachusetts law and gas ban; Japan’s cherry blossoms peak; Electric vehicles; investigating trump attacks on science; Russian oil leaks; DOE & carbon capture; Study: China and coal-based electricity (published by Ember, the London-based energy and climate research group – no link provided); Biden reducing methane emissions.

How Trump Tried, but Largely Failed, to Derail America’s Top Climate Report

New York Times discusses How Trump Tried, but Largely Failed, to Derail America’s Top Climate Report. The White House repeatedly attempted to thwart the country’s premier climate science document, one meant to steer policy for years. Scientists got in the way.

The National Climate Assessment, America’s premier contribution to climate knowledge, stands out for many reasons: Hundreds of scientists across the federal government and academia join forces to compile the best insights available on climate change. The results, released just twice a decade or so, shape years of government decisions.

Now, as the clock runs down on President Trump’s time in office, the climate assessment has gained a new distinction: It is one of the few major U.S. climate initiatives that his administration tried, yet largely failed, to undermine.

The first evidence of this tension came in the summer of 2018, as federal scientists were finishing the fourth National Climate Assessment. The report warned that climate change would endanger public safety and economic growth. And it said that cutting emissions “can substantially reduce climate-related risks,” in contradiction of the Trump administration’s efforts to reverse such cuts.

How Biden Can Put the U.S. on a Path to Carbon-Free Electricity

Yale Environment 360 discusses How Biden Can Put the U.S. on a Path to Carbon-Free Electricity. Even without strong action by Congress, President-elect Joe Biden will have a wide array of tools — from expanding renewables on federal lands to pushing the financial industry on climate change — that could put the U.S. on a trajectory to decarbonizing its electricity sector by 2035.

President-elect Joe Biden campaigned on a goal of “a carbon pollution-free power sector” by 2035. The United States is now at 38 percent — 19 percent from nuclear, 18 percent from renewables — and the challenge of moving from 38 percent to 100 percent in 15 years is even more daunting than it looks, given the upcoming retirement of nuclear power plants and the prospect that Biden may not get much help from Congress.

A deeper look, however, shows that the Biden administration — with its commitment to make fighting climate change a core goal across the federal government — has a wide array of actions it can take to move the U.S. far closer to decarbonizing its electricity sector. These steps include everything from significantly expanding solar and wind power installations on federal lands, to reforming the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the Department of Energy to favor renewable energy development over fossil fuels, to using the levers of government to ensure that dealing with climate change becomes an important priority for the country’s financial industry.

DeSmogBlog, October 30, 2020

Articles include:  Detroit Knew of Climate Risks;  Right-Wing Think Tank Behind Herd Immunity;  Affordable Housing & Toxic Oil Fields;  Koch Behind DOE’s Renewables Research Censorship;  Most Pennsylvania Voters Oppose Fracking;   Climate Disinformation Database: American Institute for Economic Research.

Study: DOE says Solar-hydro projects could power 40% of world

E&E News discusses a DOE study: Solar-hydro projects could power 40% of world.

Linking floating solar panels with hydropower could produce the equivalent of 40% of the world’s electricity, according to a new study by researchers at the Department of Energy.

Published this week by a team at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, the study provides the first global look by federal researchers at the technical potential of the hybrid concept.

The research found that by constructing solar panels on the surface of hydro reservoirs and feeding the power they generate into the same substation, both energy resources might become cheaper, more efficient and more reliable.

By turning to solar production during dry seasons, hydropower operators could conserve more of their impounded water, the NREL team said. Transmission lines could also tap into a second, intermittent source of electricity, bringing them closer to their total capacity. Under the concept, solar energy could be used for energy storage purposes by pumping water into upper reservoirs for later use.

Solar operators, meanwhile, could count on a firmer resource as backup during cloudy periods, allowing them to claim a higher capacity credit — and curtail less production.

The largest slice of the world’s technical potential would come from North America, the study said. A separate study from NREL this summer found that about 10% of the nation’s power could come from floating solar sited on man-made bodies of water alone (Energywire, July 11, 2019).

Corporate America Is Irrationally Enthusiastic About Carbon Capture

New Republic discusses why Corporate America Is Irrationally Enthusiastic About Carbon Capture. Pulling carbon from the air is a noble goal. But that’s not why fossil fuel executives are embracing it.

Between 2010 and 2018, the Department of Energy poured $5 billion worth of research and development funding into carbon-capturing technologies, which aim to extract the greenhouse gas from power plants and other industrial activities, limiting the extent to which they warm the planet. In 2018, Congress also passed a generous tax break known as 45Q, encouraging companies to partake. This summer, however, the only coal-fired power plant capturing a meaningful amount of carbon in the United States—the country’s main showcase for that technology—unceremoniously closed down following months of inactivity. It’ll be “mothballed” (switched off) until market conditions improve.

DeSmogBlog, Week of June 16, 2020

This week’s articles include: