Month: February 2015

Longer piece, deserves a look at the link.  More evidence that the violent gyrations of the fossil fuel prices are more than just volatility. We are observing a global paradigm shift.

Bloomberg Business:

1. The Sun Doesn’t Compete With Oil

Oil is for cars; renewables are for electricity. The two don’t really compete. Oil is just too expensive to power the grid, even with prices well below $50 a barrel.

Instead, solar competes with coal, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear power. Solar, the newest to the mix, makes up less than 1 percent of the electricity market today but will be the world’s biggest single source by 2050, according to the International Energy Agency. Demand is so strong that the biggest limit to installations this year may be the availability of panels.

“You couldn’t kill solar now if you wanted to,” says Jenny Chase, the lead solar analyst with Bloomberg New Energy Finance in London.

2. Electricity Prices Are Still Going Up

The real threat to renewables isn’t cheap oil; it’s cheap electricity. In the U.S., abundant natural gas has made power production exceedingly inexpensive. So why are electricity bills still going up?

Fuel isn’t the only component of the electricity bill. Consumers also pay to get the electricity from power plant to home. In recent years, those costs have soared. Annual investments in the grid increased fourfold since 1980, to $27 billion in 2010, according to a report by Deutsche Bank analyst Vishal Shah. That’s driving bills higher and making rooftop solar attractive.

3. Solar Prices Are Still Going Down

You may have seen this chart before. It’s the most important chart. It shows the reason solar will soon dominate: It’s a technology, not a fuel. As time passes, the efficiency of solar power increases and prices fall. Michael Park, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein, has a term for the staggering price relationship between solar and fossil fuels: the Terrordome.

The chart above shows the price of energy from different sources since the late 1940s. The extreme outlier is solar, which only recently entered the marketplace, at a very high price. Prices are falling so fast that solar will soon undercut even the cheapest fossil fuels, coal and natural gas. In the few places oil and solar compete directly, oil doesn’t stand a chance.

Case in point: Oil-rich Dubai just tripled its solar target for the year 2030, to 15 percent of the country’s total power capacity. Dubai’s government-owned utility this week awarded a $330 million contract for a solar plant that will sell some of the cheapest electricity in the world.

Continue reading “Why Cheap Oil Can’t Kill Renewables”

Something Climatologist Mike Mann just had to get off his chest.

Reuters:

Massive snowfall from Boston’s fourth major snowstorm in two weeks set a record for the city’s snowiest month since weather records were kept, the NWS said.

Boston had seen about 6 feet (1.8 meters) of snow since late January and had already set a record for accumulations in a single week.
–
While still shivering from the brutal cold expected to last through Monday, the East Coast is bracing for another storm front forming near the Tennessee Valley.

Readers of this blog will not be surprised with the following.

 The Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore in the Boston Herald:

Continue reading “Denying Physics: A Tweet”

I’m building up to the release of Robby Kenner’s film of Naomi Oreskes’ and Eric Conway’s book,  “Merchants of Doubt”.

I’ve seen the film, and I believe the timing is right for this to be a very impactful piece – one that will be much discussed, and perhaps finally raise to public awareness the depth of the disinformation scam that’s been executed around climate change.  It’s possible this could be “An Inconvenient Truth” for this decade.

The science-denial movement, cynically created in large part by the tobacco barons, developed a specific set of tactics to deliberately confuse the public about what science is, how it works, and what it does, is directly related not only to the industry around climate denial, but to the breakdown of public trust in, for instance, vaccines,  the rise of “Creation Museums”, “Christians Against Dinosaurs”,  and the fetid sewers of flim flam, conspiracy theory, and nonsense that has poisoned so much of our public discussion.

Also, turns out that I’ve interviewed many of the individuals that the film follows – so I’m building the next “This is Not Cool” video around the movie and its topic.

I first met Director Robby Kenner (who also produced the highly regarded “Food Inc”) at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting several years ago, where he was pulling together the first threads of the film.  He discussed that in our recent chat, so I can shed some light on his process.

This short piece from Climate Reality, above, is a good thumbnail of the infamous-but-not-well-enough-known story of the tobacco industry’s role in sowing doubt on climate science.

Below, trailer for “Food Inc”, if you haven’t seen it.

Continue reading “Doubt is Our Product – the Story of Science Denial”

People under 25 might not realize it, but ‘Thundersnow” was not a common part of North American winter in the 20th century.
I had never heard the term till the last decade or so.

So many surprises in store..

 

Yes, and more. Except without all the social dislocation, environmental poisons, climate disruption, and oh,…. profits for Big Oil.

Forbes:

Will solar power transform electricity markets as significantly as shale transformed oil and gas?

That is the question posed in a new study by Wood MacKenzie, an international energy research and consulting company.

“Just as shale extraction reconfigured oil and gas, no other technology is closer to transforming power markets than distributed and utility scale solar,” writes Prajit Ghosh, an energy analyst at Wood MacKenzie and the study’s primary author.

Based on the study’s persuasive analysis, it seems difficult to dispute that solar technology will transform – and in some states already is transforming – wholesale power markets.

Woods MacKenzie:

The reach of solar in the market is now well beyond California alone and is expected to grow across multiple markets.  Wood Mackenzie’s outlook emphasizes that the levelized costs of solar energy are already at grid parity* in many states and will continue to fall while combined cycle costs, in contrast, remain on the rise. By 2020, solar energy in 19 states is expected to reach grid parity with twice as many states reaching grid parity by 2030.  Wood Mackenzie has identified many evolutionary parallels to shale and believes that solar has the potential to make a similar scale of transformation across markets. Wood Mackenzie’s forecast for the US assumes 26 gigawatts (GW) of distributed solar and about 45 GW of large scale solar by 2035, which totals over 71 GW of solar. Ghosh adds: “While the potential for solar energy penetration could be much larger in North America, reliability concerns, legal statutes, and other factors could limit growth prospects. There is little material linkage between lower oil prices and solar energy penetration. However, the indirect impact of lower oil prices on drilling activity and consequent gas prices could potentially hurt solar economics.”

Current wholesale market structures are not designed to accommodate large amounts of solar energy. Should solar energy penetration rapidly increase, other forms of capacity will still be necessary to meet needs during low-solar hours such as night time and periods of heavy cloud cover, Wood Mackenzie asserts. Keeping backup capacity on the grid becomes increasingly difficult as solar energy lowers power prices and worsens the economics of other technologies.  Thus, Wood Mackenzie emphasizes that today’s energy and capacity market design and compensation mechanisms will need to evolve to maintain reliability. “Similarly, rate design on the retail side will need to change. Solar rooftops reduce the need for grid-connected power but do not eliminate it.  Thus, issues around assigning fixed cost charges to maintain the grid have and will continue to arise” Ghosh concludes.

 

Above, I chatted with Jennifer Francis of Rutgers back in the spring of 2013, and the topic turned briefly to  snowcover in a warming world, and some interesting paradoxes.

To kick this off, here are some graphs from the Rutgers Snow Lab. Can you spot the global warming effects?

Listen to Francis, above, read this excerpt from Kevin Trenberth’s recent piece on this topic – and look again.

Kevin Trenberth in The Conversation:

There is a saying that it can be “too cold to snow”! Of course, this is a myth but it has a basis in fact because the atmosphere gets freeze dried when it is very cold. That’s because the amount of moisture the atmosphere can hold depends very strongly on temperature. Under cold conditions, the snow is likely to consist of very small crystals and sometimes is very light and fluffy and like “diamond dust”.

By contrast, the heaviest snowfalls occur with surface temperatures from about 28°F to 32°F – just below the freezing point. Of course, once it gets much above freezing point, the snow turns to rain. So there is a “Goldilocks” set of conditions that are just right to result in a super snow storm. And these conditions are becoming more likely in mid-winter because of human-induced climate change.

The physics behind this phenomenon is governed by a basic law that tells us the maximum amount of moisture in the atmosphere increases exponentially with temperature – that is, the warmer the atmosphere, the more moisture the air can hold and thus, the more potential for precipitation.

For most conditions at sea level, there’s a rule of thumb that says the atmosphere can hold 4% more moisture per one degree Fahrenheit increase in temperature. Some complications come in as the ice phase enters, but we set those aside for now. That translates into a big difference in moisture across temperature differences: At 50°F (10°C) the water-holding capacity of air is double that at 32°F (0°C) and at 14°F (-10°C) the value is only 24% that at 50°F.

Continue reading “The Weekend Wonk: Global Warming and Snow Cover”

Does this mean we have to invade Egypt? Just asking.

Al Jazeera:

The presidents of Russia and Egypt have announced after talks in Cairo, that the two countries are to build Egypt’s first nuclear power plant together, as well as boosting natural gas trade among other deals.

Vladimir Putin and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi made the announcement on Tuesday at a joint news conference in the Egyptian capital, where they signed an agreement on the plant’s construction.

“If final decisions are made, it will mean not just building a nuclear power plant, it means the creation of the entire new atomic industry in Egypt,” said Putin.

I’m sure they’ll build one of those newfangled nuclear plants that don’t create weapons-useable material.

Right?

 

“What do you do when the wind stops blowing?”
Well, you relax, for one thing. You could check your email.  You might watch the game. Have a beer.

What you wouldn’t do is worry about the electrical grid.

The American Wind Energy Association has released a report that gives a good snapshot of how utilities across the US are integrating wind power into their generation mix with minimal need for extra back up or storage.  I covered a lot of this in my first “Wind Energy Solutions” video, above.

Midwest Energy News:

Overwrought concerns about wind’s reliability often center on a fundamental misunderstanding of how the grid works, the report indicates. Since its inception more than a century ago, the grid has inherently handled a constant flux of supply and demand. All power sources involve some level of variability, and demand can vary greatly minute by minute. For example, AWEA points to energy demand during a 1990 World Cup game between England and Germany when demand spiked sharply during breaks, presumably as people quickly turned on appliances or electronics then turned them off once the game resumed.

Fluctuations in supply or demand from any given source do not matter to grid operators, said report author and AWEA research director Michael Goggin. All they care about is the total supply and demand on the grid at any given moment. As the AWEA report puts it, “The total variability is far less than the sum of its parts.”

“Grid operators only care about total variability on the power system,” Goggin said. “They don’t care what any one wind plant is doing or even what all wind plants are doing.”

Hence variations in the level of wind energy output are easily smoothed out over the grid as demand also rises and falls frequently and often unpredictably, and as output levels from other energy sources fluctuate. And the more wind power is added to the grid, the less variable wind energy as a whole becomes.

Wind output variations “are being canceled out by totally unrelated changes in supply and demand,” Goggin said. “What happens is you get a very smoothed-down profile across all these sources of variability.”

Goggin said that the variable output of wind is actually in some ways less problematic than variability from conventional power plants. That’s because changes in wind energy can be predicted in advance with considerable accuracy, whereas an outage at a power plant is usually sudden, unexpected and involves a more drastic reduction in power.

AWEA:

– How much does it cost to integrate wind?
Grid operator data show that the cost of the incremental flexible reserves needed to accommodate wind amount to pennies on a typical electric bill. In fact, the cost of accommodating the unexpected failures of large conventional power plants is far higher.

Continue reading “Wind Power Reality Blows Away Myths”

Above, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker dodges question about evolution from a Brit interviewer.
Governor Walker, of course, is ever mindful of the concerns of his base –  which kind of mitigate against open discussion of, well.. reality.

Below, a spokeswoman for “Christians Against Dinosaurs” (CAD) opines that that this whole “dinosaur” thing is just another hoax for scientists to make money.  (You know, like climate change) See if this reasoning sounds familiar…..

RawStory:

If the group is a hoax, however, it is a convincing one. CADministry has been spreading her gospel in other online forums, and “Christians Against Dinosaurs” has a YouTube channel featuring videos dating back months in which a woman explains how “the dinosaur hoax” has been perpetrated.

“A fossil is not actually a piece of bone,” she says. “It’s actually a bone that was once in the ground that has been filled with limestone, calcium, and other stone-like deposits, so at the end of the day, it’s a rock made out of rocks.”

“So,” she continues, “you have a rock that’s [six-inches long], and you hand it to a paleontologist, who chips away at it until you have something looking like a bone — and that is a fossil.”

She then dumps a cup full of broken shards on the table in front of her, and asks viewers to pretend that they are paleontologist and put those shards back together into whatever they originally were. “If you’re a paleontologist and you want to keep your job,” she says, “you turn that into a brachiosaurus skull.”