Month: May 2018

Calling out “Cocaine Mitch” and unnamed “wealthy Chinaperson”,  Coal Baron Don Blankenship is out of prison and running for Senate. Do I have to tell you which party?

CNN:

West Virginia GOP Senate candidate Don Blankenship defended on Tuesday his use of the term “Chinaperson” to describe the father-in-law of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

During a Fox News GOP primary debate, Blankenship said his earlier use of the term “wealthy Chinaperson” to describe the father of McConnell’s wife, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, is not racist.

“This idea that calling someone a ‘Chinaperson’ — I mean, I’m an American-person — I don’t see this insinuation by the press that there is something racist about saying a ‘Chinaperson,'” Blankenship said. “Some people are Korean-persons, some people are African-persons — it’s not any slander there.”

James Chao, McConnell’s father-in-law, was born in China, but moved to the United States before starting the Foremost Group, a shipping company, in New York. Blankenship has said McConnell is “soft on China” and that his marriage to Elaine Chao raises “the potential for conflict of interest.”

Earlier this week, Blankenship’s campaign also released an ad calling the majority leader “Cocaine Mitch,” pointing to a 2014 article in The Nation that reported cocaine was found on a ship belonging to Chao’s company.

Earther:

Our planet is a cool and good planet. To prove this point, I would simply point you to the map above.

The ethereal black and white image shows the thickness of all of Antarctica’s ice. It speaks to both the grandeur of the seventh continent and human ingenuity. Why humanity is on a course to melt all that ice is beyond me.

The map comes courtesy of Kevin Pluck, a software engineer, statistician, and animator, who pulled a massive dataset of Antarctic ice known as Bedmap2 for a project he was working on (more on that in a moment). The dataset is the compilation of a number of different observing methods, including airborne radar and satellite measurements. It took scientists years to compile and is one of the most comprehensive datasets of Antarctica’s ice and underlying bedrock.

“After downloading the enormous data files, I needed a way to check that I had processed them correctly so I thought the simplest way to do it was to plot a grey pixel based on the thickness value,” Pluck told Earther via Twitter direct message. “Out popped what you see here. I was stunned, I had never seen something so beautiful come from pure data before.”

Indeed.

Continue reading “Ghostly and Magical Map of Antarctica”

One particularly bright spot in the ongoing energy revolution is the rapid drop in the cost of energy storage technologies, and the multiplying types of storage being developed around the world.

However, the technology is double edged. On a grid that is still heavily carbonized, storage can actually increase carbon emissions.

Institute for Policy Integrity – Managing the Future of Energy Storage:

Energy storage systems, undoubtedly, will be a key part of the future of the electric grid. They have the potential to provide many benefits to the grid, such as lowering the price of electricity at peak demand times, and deferring or avoiding new capacity investments. However, contrary to the prevailing wisdom, energy storage is not guaranteed to reduce emissions, and may, in fact, increase emissions if policies are not designed carefully. Further, while this oft -cited (but not guaranteed) benefit of storage dominates headlines in policy discussions around the country, many other types of benefits that energy storage systems can provide are not well recognized in policymaking.

Longish summary from Vox excerpted here.
Shortish summary: We need a damn carbon price.

Vox:

By way of background, it’s important to understand that while energy storage can provide a wide array of services to the grid (more on that later), these days it is primarily used for energy arbitrage — storing energy when it is cheap (usually at night) and discharging it when it is more valuable (usually during the day).

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There are two reasons why energy storage deployed for the purpose of arbitrage increases emissions:

1) Storage increases the value of the energy sources it draws from (a source that can store some of its energy can generate more) and decreases the value of the energy sources it competes against when discharging. If the energy sources it draws from are more carbon-intensive than the energy sources it competes against, then it will have the effect of increasing the carbon intensity of the overall power mix.

Say a battery bank absorbs cheap energy being produced by coal plants overnight and then discharges it in the day, competing with natural gas combined-cycle (NGCC) plants. The net effect will be to favor coal against natural gas, thus increasing net emissions.

2) Every bit of energy stored also represents a bit of energy lost. The “round-trip efficiency” of energy storage — the amount of energy it releases relative to the amount put in — ranges, depending on the technology, from around 40 to 90 percent.

Let’s take, for representative purposes, 80 percent, a relatively optimistic assumption for the efficiency of lithium-ion batteries. For every 1 megawatt-hour put in, 0.80 megawatt-hours comes out.

That means, if it is stored along the way, getting 1 MWh to the customer requires generating 1.25 MWh. The more energy that gets stored, the more generation has to increase to compensate for the round-trip losses.

If the generation that increases to compensate for the losses is more carbon-intensive than the energy that storage displaces, net emissions nudge up.

Even when a battery stores zero-emissions renewable energy, it is not increasing or decreasing total generation; it’s just moving it around (unless the renewables would otherwise have been curtailed; see below). If coal steps in to cover for the renewable energy that is stored, but it displaces natural gas when it’s discharged, it still might increase net carbon emissions.
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Theoretically, the emission-boosting effects of energy storage will decline as grids get greener. But they will have to get quite a bit greener. In a separate paper, Hittinger and colleagues model the emission effects of energy storage on a grid with increasing renewables. They find that in the Midcontinent ISO (MISO), the coal-heavy Midwestern regional energy market, wind and solar would have to reach 18 percent of total generation capacity before storage started reducing emissions on average. And that’s with today’s low natural gas prices. If natural gas prices increase, it would take even longer.

(There’s one important exception to note here: When and if it stores renewable energy that would otherwise have been curtailed, i.e., wasted, then energy storage clearly reduces net emissions. That’s not very common in the US today, but it could get more common as renewable energy grows.)

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Continue reading “Getting Energy Storage Right”