Month: February 2016

The renewables are coming.

The history of technological innovations shows us that when a technology reaches a certain critical level, it makes a quantum leap – witness television, cell phones, digital photography, the internet.
For renewable energy, that time is now.   Your state, city, county, utility companies, or country, – can lead, follow, or be road kill.

Joe Romm in ClimateProgress:

Once upon a time, people imagined that replacing fossil fuels with renewables like solar and wind would jeopardize the electric grid’s reliability. Then along came some major countries who showed that it didn’t, and that there really are no limits to renewable integration.

The result was explained last year in a Bloomberg Business piece aptly headlined, “Germany Proves Life With Less Fossil Fuel Getting Easier”: “Germany experiences just 15 minutes a year of outages, compared with 68 minutes in France and more than four hours in Poland.”

Germany is the most powerful economy on the planet to depend so much on renewable electricity — renewables currently deliver 28 percent of Germany’s total grid power (and up to 40 percent in some regions). The United States has a very long way to go to hit that level, by which time there will be an even wider range of cost-effective strategies to deal with much higher levels of renewables.

Part One of this series explained why the International Energy Agency now projects that, for the planet as a whole, “Driven by continued policy support, renewables account for half of additional global generation, overtaking coal around 2030 to become the largest power source.” Part Two explained why renewables are going to grow so quickly in this country over the next couple of decades, especially wind and solar power, at the expense of both coal and natural gas.

In this post I’ll discuss why it is turning out to be less challenging than expected to incorporate more and more renewables into the electric grid — and to handle periods of time when demand is high but the wind isn’t blowing and/or the sun isn’t shining. As the lead energy specialist at the World Bank, Morgan Bazilian, told Bloomberg after 20 years studying this issue, “Very high levels of variable renewable energy can be accommodated both technically and at low cost.”

Continue reading “Why Renewables are Now Unstoppable”

As climate change accelerates, and as long-ignored infrastructure in the US continues to decay, there will be more Flints. Marshall Shepherd is feeling the outrage.

Dr. Marshall Shepherd, 2013 President of the American Meteorological Society,
Dir., Atmospheric Sciences Program/GA Athletic Assoc. Distinguished Professor (Univ of Georgia), Host, Weather Channel’s Sunday Talk Show, Weather (Wx) Geeks

Marshall Shepherd in Forbes:

The Flint, Michigan water crisis is sickening to me. In recent weeks, it has come to light that researchers were sounding the alarm about high levels of lead in the drinking water supply and the blood of children.  One unbelievable aspect of this story is captured in this article by the Detroit Free Press,

In January of 2015, when state officials were telling worried Flint residents their water was safe to drink, they also were arranging for coolers of purified water in Flint’s State Office Building so employees wouldn’t have to drink from the taps, according to state government e-mails released.

Just as Flint’s water supply is making people sick, this revelation literally makes me sick.  Flint’s crisis is a full blown environmental crisis with potent questions swirling about the water delivery infrastructure, environmental justice, and public health. However, as I watch this event play, some key lessons are emerging for the public about weather and climate.

One of the first lessons is that when it comes to environmental or natural hazards issues, the public and policymakers exhibit “crisis mode” behavior. Officials are resigning. Organizations and celebrities are scrambling to send clean water to Flint. The public is asking how this can happen. In reality, there were likely warning signs of this looming crisis all along. We see this often in weather and climate. For example, it took Hurricane Sandy to drive dramatic budget increases for the computing power boosts that meteorologists long knew that it needed to improve weather prediction capabilities in the United States. And as Jeffrey Kluger wrote in Time magazine,

GOES-East (weather satellite) was now winking out — in the final month of a hurricane season (note: 2012,the one that gave us Sandy)

Over the past few years, there has been concern about whether new replacement polar and geosynchronous weather satellites would make it to orbit before older systems failed. Crises like the one Kluger describes amplify the urgency. For now, it seems that things have stabilized on this front after the Government Accountability Office placed this issue in its “high risk” report in 2015.

Here, NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco describes the challenges of budgeting for vital weather/climate observation satellites with a science challenged congress.  Go to 2:17 for the incredible punch line if you’re rushed..

Continue reading “Flint Water Crisis: Microcosm of Climate Denial and the Coming CYA”