Articles include: cannabis; melting ice and bowhead whales; emissions increasing as pandemic wanes; economic effects of climate change; scripture to mobilize faithful; cities moving from gas to electricity; more renewable energy; investment firms and climate change; demand for coal rising; microbes that eat methane; food systems produce 1/3rd of GHGs; flood protection policy.
Tag: electricity
Renewables plus batteries offer Australia the same energy security as coal, research finds
The Guardian: Renewables plus batteries offer Australia the same energy security as coal, research finds. Australia Institute calls for rule change to allow renewables to replace fossil fuels in underpinning grid reliability. [No link provided.]
Renewable energy and batteries can secure Australia’s electricity grid as effectively as coal and gas, new research suggests.
The research, commissioned by the Australia Institute thinktank and released on Monday, found clean technologies provided the fast frequency response service and voltage control needed to secure the energy grid and reduce cost. But the report says regulatory barriers currently limit the ability of renewable energy and batteries to provide system security.
The electricity grid requires controls to keep frequency and voltage within safe limits – a service historically provided by coal, gas and hydro power stations.
Texas grid crisis exposes environmental justice rifts
E&E News: Texas grid crisis exposes environmental justice rifts.
As temperatures plunged below freezing and much of Texas’ power grid collapsed last week, Ana Parras braved the pitch-black night to check on friends in the southeast Houston neighborhood of Manchester.
The majority-Latino, low-income community sits along the Houston Ship Channel, bordered by a major oil refinery and several petrochemical plants.
“The whole community was in the dark, there were no streetlights. Nothing. It was dangerous,” said Parras, co-executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services. “But the road was lit because of the refinery flaring.”
While the height of Texas’ blackouts left more than 4 million homes and businesses without power, some experts say low-income areas and communities of color bore the brunt of much of the crisis. That is partly because people living in poverty often lack access to expensive backup generators, community groups say, and they tend to live in older, poorly insulated homes, where temperatures drop quickly when the power goes out.
A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids
The New York Times: A Glimpse of America’s Future: Climate Change Means Trouble for Power Grids. Systems are designed to handle spikes in demand, but the wild and unpredictable weather linked to global warming will very likely push grids beyond their limits.
Huge winter storms plunged large parts of the central and southern United States into an energy crisis this week, with frigid blasts of Arctic weather crippling electric grids and leaving millions of Americans without power amid dangerously cold temperatures.
The grid failures were most severe in Texas, where more than four million people woke up Tuesday morning to rolling blackouts. Separate regional grids in the Southwest and Midwest also faced serious strain. As of Tuesday afternoon, at least 23 people nationwide had died in the storm or its aftermath.
The Plan to Build a Global Network of Floating Power Stations
Wired: The Plan to Build a Global Network of Floating Power Stations. A lot of thermal energy is trapped in the ocean. An ex-NASA researcher has figured out how it might generate unlimited clean power for aquatic robots.
EARLY LAST YEAR, just a few weeks before the pandemic brought life in the United States to a standstill, Yi Chao and a small team of researchers dropped a slender metal tube into the Pacific Ocean off the Hawaiian coast. After nearly two decades as an oceanographer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Chao had left the space agency to commercialize a seafaring generator that can harness the limitless thermal energy trapped in the world’s oceans. His company, Seatrec, is based just down the road from his old NASA stomping grounds in Pasadena, but Chao regularly travels to Hawaii to test hardware in the tranquil, cerulean waters around the Big Island. On this trip, Chao and his team planned to push their invention deeper than it had ever gone before.
Report: Is nuclear fusion the answer to the climate crisis?
The Guardian discusses Is nuclear fusion the answer to the climate crisis? Promising new studies suggest the long elusive technology may be capable of producing electricity for the grid by the end of the decade.
If all goes as planned, the US will eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from its electricity sector by 2035 – an ambitious goal set by President-elect Joe Biden, relying in large part on a sharp increase in wind and solar energy generation. That plan may soon get a boost from nuclear fusion, a powerful technology that until recently had seemed far out of reach.
Researchers developing a nuclear fusion reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes have shown in a series of recent papers that their design should work, restoring optimism that this clean, limitless power source will help mitigate the climate crisis.
While the new reactor still remains in early development, scientists hope it will be able to start producing electricity by the end of the decade. Martin Greenwald, one of the project’s senior scientists, said a key motivation for the ambitious timeline is meeting energy requirements in a warming world. “Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster,” he said.
NYT Climate Fwd: October 28, 2020
The New York Times discusses: voting to influence US policies towards climate change; calls this election a referendum on climate; points out trump’s attacks on climate science; alternatives to reduce atmospheric warming; how states make electricity; Japan and carbon neutrality; seismic testing in the Arctic; lightening and wildfires.
How Can We Plan for the Future in California?
The Atlantic discusses how we can plan for the future in California. The state’s heat waves, blackouts, and fires—amid a pandemic—offer a warning of our fossil-fuel future.
Last week, a heat wave baked the West. In Death Valley, a world record may have been set for the hottest temperature observed on Earth: 130 degrees Fahrenheit. From Phoenix, Arizona, to the Bay Area, people turned up their air-conditioning, straining California’s electricity infrastructure, because the state imports power from its neighbors. Demand outstripped supply, and the grid operator started rolling blackouts. The cause is climate change: It has made heat waves five times more likely to occur in the western United States.
Missing the point on cities’ efforts to go all-electric to fight climate change
Calmatters discusses missing the point on cities’ efforts to go all-electric to fight climate change.
Dan Walters wrote an odd column that blames systemic poverty in California on “blue-state policies” that cut air pollution and address the climate crisis. He singled out cities passing all-electric ordinances as particularly problematic, framing his argument around a high electricity rate in California.
Actually, Californians have among the lowest energy bills in the country. Our rates are higher than the national average, but the actual dollar amount spent is lower, which is expected from a state implementing solid efficiency programs. Moreover, Walters is missing the point: this is about the health and future of our children.
Report: Falling renewable, storage costs make 90% carbon-free US grid feasible by 2035, UC Berkeley finds
Utility Dive discusses how falling renewable, storage costs make 90% carbon-free US grid feasible by 2035, UC Berkeley finds.
- The U.S. can deliver 90% of its electricity from carbon-free sources by 2035, according to a new report from the University of California, Berkeley, and experts say accelerating clean energy deployments could also play an important role in the country’s economic recovery.
- Building out renewables to achieve this target will add more than 500,000 jobs per year as well as $1.7 trillion in investments into the economy, without raising customer bills, the report found.
- The country is experiencing a cost-crossover, as clean energy resources become cheaper than continuing to run existing fossil fuel resources, Sonia Aggarwal, vice president at Energy Innovation and co-author of an accompanying report outlining policy measures to achieve the 2035 target, told Utility Dive. “I see it as an amazing opportunity for America to create a bunch of jobs to decarbonize our electricity sector, and do all of that without raising electric bills for customers at a time when budgets are awfully tight,” she said.