Month: July 2017

I’ll say it again.
Distributed Energy Generation will enhance National Security.

Bloomberg:

Hackers working for a foreign government recently breached at least a dozen U.S. power plants, including the Wolf Creek nuclear facility in Kansas, according to current and former U.S. officials, sparking concerns the attackers were searching for vulnerabilities in the electrical grid.

The enemy could be positioning itself to eventually disrupt the nation’s power supply, warned the officials, who noted that a general alert was distributed to utilities a week ago. Adding to those concerns, hackers recently infiltrated an unidentified company that makes control systems for equipment used in the power industry, an attack that officials believe may be related.

The chief suspect is Russia, according to three people familiar with the continuing effort to eject the hackers from the computer networks. One of those networks belongs to an aging nuclear generating facility known as Wolf Creek — owned by Westar Energy Inc., Great Plains Energy Inc. and Kansas Electric Power Cooperative Inc. — on a lake shore near Burlington, Kansas.

Continue reading “Russian Hackers Target Nuclear Plants”

Germany’s power grid, with much greater Renewable energy penetration, is 10x as stable as the US.

Maybe they know something Rick Perry doesn’t. (doesn’t everybody?)

EENews:

The peak season for electricity at the Rim Rock Wind Farm in northern Montana is in the winter, when a steady wind blows from the Rockies and gets 126 turbines spinning. Then the wind flags for a moment, and an unusual chain of events begins.

In San Francisco, at the headquarters of the wind farm’s owner, NaturEner USA, a technician in front of a giant screen observes the downtick. A computer in a locked closet sends an alert to a trader in Vancouver, British Columbia, who immediately buys a small block of electricity from a dam somewhere in Washington state, just enough to make up for the shortfall.

The data about that watery block is routed back to San Francisco, blended with the wind power and delivered on a pre-agreed contract to a utility somewhere on the West Coast, resulting in firm power, the premium stuff, as reliable as any coal plant but with zero carbon emissions.

This is the hybrid solution that a couple of companies in the Pacific Northwest have hit upon as a way to make the wind, the most capricious of elements, into a low- or no-emissions resource than can compete for top dollars in electricity markets.

It also provides a different perspective on the furious debate over “baseload power” now unfolding in Washington, D.C.

Rick Perry, the head of the Department of Energy, is supposed to deliver a report next month that may portray renewable energy as a threat to baseload generation that has traditionally been supplied by power sources like coal and nuclear. Experts across the spectrum have pushed back, saying there is lots of room for renewables to scale up and keep the grid reliable.

NaturEner USA, founded a decade ago with Spanish parentage, doesn’t claim to provide baseload power. But it has gone a step in that direction by figuring out how to provide firm power, where a provider’s hour-ahead guarantee is crucial to shoring up the electric grid.

Another company, Avangrid Renewables, a subsidiary of Spanish wind giant Iberdrola SA, is doing a version of the same thing, supplementing its wind power along the Columbia River with natural gas.

“There has been always this disadvantage, or negative spin, on wind because it’s not firm,” said Candace Saffery Neufeld, NaturEner’s chief operating officer. “And we feel like we’re challenging those presuppositions.”

Continue reading “Baseload: When Wind is the Firmest Energy Source”

I have some good news and some bad news.

Even absent a Permian Extinction wipeout – Earth’s paleoclimate history shows that possible outcomes of a strong greenhouse warming include some pretty dire scenarios.  Avoiding a 90 percent extinction event is nice, but not exactly a “win”.
We’d like to stabilize at something a bit like what we are used to.

Still, recent headlines about Stephen Hawkings warming of a “Venus” scenario for earth, (raining sulphuric acid, etc) need to be addressed, and I see Mike Mann retweeted a necessary corrective on this, excerpted and linked here.

Above, I’ve reposted my video of last year, a sobering enough warning from paleo scientists on the actual science of an ongoing, accelerating extinction, right now.

LiveScience:

Earth could turn into a hothouse planet like Venus, with boiling oceans and acid rain, if humans don’t prevent irreversible climate change, physicist Stephen Hawking claimed in a recent interview.

“We are close to the tipping point, where global warming becomes irreversible. Trump’s action could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees [Celsius], and raining sulfuric acid,” he told BBC News, referring to the president’s decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris climate agreement.

Most climate experts say that scenario is a dramatic and implausible exaggeration: Relative to Venus, planet Earth is much farther from the sun and will never have such a thick carbon dioxide atmosphere, so it could not likely reach temperatures of 482 degrees Fahrenheit (250 degrees C) that Hawking described in the interview, they say. [Doomsday: 9 Real Ways the Earth Could End]

Continue reading “Reality Check: Earth to Venus Unlikely”

The Chinese expected they’d have to compete to become technological leaders of the world. I’m sure they didn’t expect the US would hand leadership over to them – but here we are.

Indy100:

Fortunately though, there are some good news stories on the horizon; with many of them coming from China. The country has been leading the way when it comes to ‘green living’ in recent years, with the government announcing it had completed construction of the world’s largest floating solar farm. Now, in an attempt to curb the production of toxic gasses, the country is continuing to pave the way (so to speak) with the construction of one of the world’s first ‘forest cities’.

Designed by Stefano Boeri, who you might remember also designed two vertical skyscraper ‘forests’, the city is currently under construction in Liuzhou, Guangxi Province.

Once completed, the new city will reportedly host 30,000 people and – thanks to the abundance of trees and plants – will absorb almost 10,000 tons of CO2, 57 tons of pollutants per year and produce approximately 900 tons of oxygen annually.

The city will achieve these rather impressive figures thanks to roughly a million plants from over 100 species, as well as 40,000 trees being planted in facades over almost every surface imaginable.

The new Liuzhou Forest City will connect to the existing Liuzhou via a series of fast rail services and electric cars; it will also reportedly house a number of schools and two hospitals. There are also plans to make the city self-sustainable with regards to power, thanks to geothermal and solar energy resources.

History.
In early 2000s, Germany adopted policies encouraging adoption of solar/renewable energy.
Policies were much more successful than imagined, sparking demand bigger than German industry could fill.
China, seeing opportunity, ramped up production.

Solar PV prices crashed globally. Leading to current explosion in deployment and near-monthly new low-cost records.

Same about to happen with Li-On batteries.

Actually, I think Elon will be fine with this.

Bloomberg New Energy Finance:

As Elon Musk races to finish building the world’s biggest battery factory in the Nevada desert, China is poised to leave him in the dust.

Chinese companies have plans for additional factories with the capacity to pump out more than 120 gigawatt-hours a year by 2021, according to a report published this week by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s enough to supply batteries for around 1.5 million Tesla Model S vehicles or 13.7 million Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrids per year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

By comparison, when completed in 2018, Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory will crank out up to 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually.

Lithium-ion batteries have long been used in smartphones, laptops, and other personal electronics, but demand is forecast to explode in the next five years as electric vehicles proliferate and power companies install giant storage systems to smooth the ebb and flow of wind and solar.

Telsa produced nearly 84,000 vehicles in 2016 and has said it plans to make 500,000 in 2018.

While Tesla may be building the biggest and splashiest factory, the Chinese government has launched a sweeping effort to increase the country’s dominant market share.

Roughly 55 percent of global lithium-ion battery production is already based in China, compared with 10 percent in the U.S. By 2021, China’s share is forecast to grow to 65 percent, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

“This is about industrial policy. The Chinese government sees lithium-ion batteries as a hugely important industry in the 2020s and beyond,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance analyst Colin McKerracher said.

In all, global battery-making capacity is forecast to more than double by 2021 to 273 gigawatt-hours, up from about 103 gigawatt-hours today. That’s a huge opportunity, and China doesn’t want to miss it.

“The Gigafactory announced three years ago sparked a global battery arms race,” said Simon Moores, a managing director at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence. “China is making a big push.”

UPDATE: New Battery design Claimed better than Tesla, below: Continue reading “China Will Do to Battery Prices what They Did to Solar Prices”

I used to be dumbfounded at the history of the Islamic world’s turn away from science, or the Pol Pot regime’s war on intellectuals, teachers, and professionals. Now, we get to see the dynamic up close. Fascinating and terrifying.

Verge:

Today, President Trump signed an executive order to reinstate the National Space Council, an executive agency that will be tasked with guiding US space policy during the administration. The council, typically chaired by the vice president, is one that the US has seen before; it was first in operation during the ‘60s and ‘70s and then again under the George H.W. Bush administration, before being dissolved in 1993. Now, it’s back again, and this time with Vice President Mike Pence at the helm.

Other notable members of the executive branch will serve on the council as well, according to a draft of the order obtained by The Verge. Those include the secretary of state and the secretary of defense, as well as NASA’s administrator — though that positioned has yet to be filled permanently. The executive order lays out the main functions of the council, too, which revolve around making recommendations of space policy for the president and how to implement that guidance. It also calls for the creation of an advisory group, comprised of non-government workers and those in the industry to provide advice.

The council’s purview includes NASA, as well as the US Air Force and intelligence community, which rely heavily on satellites for national defense. “Basically this will be Pence’s eyes and ears into our government’s actions in space, whether it’s NASA or the Pentagon,” Phil Larson, a former space policy advisor for the Obama administration, tells The Verge.

Forbes:

In a 2002, Mike Pence delivered a speech in the House of Representatives, a passionate repudiation of evolution aimed at continuing the common rhetorical device of evolution deniers: that evolution is just a theory and should be presented as such.

Continue reading “Science Denier To Guide Science. What Could Go Wrong?”

Oops. Paging Senator Cruz.

“The best data we have” just strengthened the consensus case for climate change.

Now I’ll have to update the video above, but main outlines are still current.
Climate deniers have cited the work of Carl Mears at Remote Sensing Systems to support their claims of slow, or no warming over last decade or so.  Any “Red Team” on climate science would have to include the scientist whose work has so often been cited (misleadingly) as supporting climate denial.
Mears, of course, has always made it clear that Senator Cruz, Judy Curry, and others deliberately distort or misuse his work.  His most recent update further clarifies.

John Abraham in the Guardian:

A new paper just published in the Journal of Climate is a stunning setback for the darling of cherry-picking for contrarian scientists and elected officials. Let’s walk though this so we appreciate the impact.

The vast majority of scientists know that the climate is changing, humans are the main reason, and there are going to be severe consequences. We have decades of measurements that prove our understanding of this process. There is simply no debate or dispute.

Despite this, there are a shrinking number of contrarian scientists, elected officials, and industry representatives that have spent endless time trying to downplay the impact. They have variously argued that the climate isn’t changing, that the changes won’t be very much, or that there are no viable solutions to the problem. Much of their position relies upon finding evidence that the current observations of warming are not great. That is, the Earth is not warming as fast as predictions.

To support this incorrect (and intellectually dishonest) position, contrarians have scoured the data for any evidence at all that suggests the Earth is not warming. They have skipped oceans (which account for 93% of the warming). They skip the Earth’s surface temperature, ignore ice loss, ignore sea level rise, and in fact ignore everything except some select regions of the atmosphere. Their fallback position is that since a part of the atmosphere seems not to be warming very fast, this means the Earth isn’t warming or that climate models cannot be trusted. I know I know, this sounds dumb, and it is. But it is their current argument.

Further clarification from Zeke Hausfather below.

Continue reading ““The Best Data we Have”. Bad News for Deniers – Satellite Data Heats Up.”