Month: April 2019

CleanTechnica:

Pumped hydro storage is a mature technology used around the world. Placing such a system below ground is what makes the new pilot study collaboration quite unusual.
A press release from MTU outlines the basics, which are the same as any hydroelectric power generator: Store water in a high-elevation pond or tank, or behind a dam, then allow the water to flow down through a turbine to generate electricity.
Pumped hydro storage, the researchers assert, is among the cleanest and most efficient way we have to store electrical energy.
Experts have long seen large-scale hydro storage as a tapped-out market in Michigan and beyond, largely because the best locations had already been used, and the projects — which can endanger fish and other wildlife, if not painstakingly addressed — are nearly impossible to permit.
Stored energy for future use is a highly valuable resource for stabilizing the electric grid. Experts see advances in the field as a key piece of goals to slash carbon dioxide emissions in the coming decades by accommodating more intermittent renewable power added to the grid.
“Battery storage cannot match pumped hydro yet in terms of scale,” Jeremy Twitchell, an energy research analyst at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, said at an energy storage conference hosted by Michigan agencies. But in Negaunee’s case, the storage facility would use surplus power to pump water up to a certain elevation. When demand outpaces power supply, the water runs down into turbines, which then generate electricity.
There is another potential benefit to such a hydro energy storage project, as the mines are generally already hooked up to power lines. Such power lines could require upgrades once a storage facility would be ready to go online, but that would be far less expensive than building new hookups. If it works, the researchers hope energy storage could bring more economic development to Upper Peninsula communities besieged by high power prices.

Michigan Tech:

“Imagine, for example, a strong wind generating power at 3 a.m. when nobody needs it,” saidRoman Sidortsov, assistant professor of energy policy. “An efficient battery allows the grid tosmooth out those variations.”
But in Negaunee’s case, the storage facility would use surplus power to pump water up to a certain elevation. When demand outpaces power supply, the water runs down into turbines, which then generate electricity.

Continue reading “To Give Fossil Fuels the Shaft – A Mine is a Terrible Thing to Waste”

Uber Air taxis for 4 within 5 years.

If you wonder why petro-states like Russia and Saudi Arabia have become so bold in attacking democracies around the world, and why a fossil-fuel dominated Republican Party is carrying water for them, look no further.

Financial News (London):

Companies in the oil and gas sector, including large groups such as Shell, BP and Exxon, could lose 95% of their value by 2050 if governments take action to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius, according to new analysis.
The report, from the investment consultancy Mercer, is one of the first comprehensive attempts to model sector-by-sector effects of climate change, and potential regulatory action to combat it, on investors’ portfolios.
It concludes that efforts to keep global warming to 2°C will have a cost impact for equity returns in the coming decades. Overall, efforts to mitigate climate change will cost stock investors in developed markets around 0.2% a year in the next three decades, adding up to foregone returns of 5.6% by 2050.
But because stocks are not the only thing investors put money into — Mercer also looked at the consequences for property, bonds and infrastructure — overall, efforts to curb climate change are expected to benefit investors by between 0.1% and 0.3% a year. Allowing it to run unchecked would hurt returns overall.
But within those averages, the costs and benefits vary wildly. Mercer estimated that in the scenario where governments take “aggressive” action, by 2050 the global demand for oil will have dropped by a third, while the supply of less-polluting natural gas rises 20%. Coal power will be aggressively phased out and electric cars will make up half of new vehicle sales.

In that world, oil and gas stocks will lose 42% of their market value by 2030, and 95% by 2050. On the plus side, investments in renewable energy, such as wind and solar, would soar by 178%.
But if governments fail to take action, and emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise, leading to global warming of 4°C by 2050, there will be no winners, Mercer predicted.
The high-polluting sectors are better off. Instead of falling 95%, oil and gas stocks might be off by only 15% or so. However, Mercer said: “In 3°C and 4°C scenarios, all sectors, apart from renewables, have negative return impacts, to 2030, 2050 and 2100, with return impacts varying between 0.1% p.a. and 7.7% per year.”
Helga Birgden, global business leader for responsible investments at Mercer, said the report showed that for “nearly all asset classes, regions and timeframes, a 2°C scenario leads to enhanced projected returns versus 3°C or 4°C and therefore a better outcome for investors”.
She added: “It’s an opportunity, since although incumbent industries can suffer losses in a 2°C scenario, there are many notable investment opportunities enabled in a low-carbon transition.”

New York Times:

An unsettling fact of Wall Street today is that some of the same people who accurately predicted the housing bubble are now describing another bubble, whose collapse will make the financial crisis of 2008 look mild. Perhaps the most famous is Jeremy Grantham, a founder of the Boston-based asset-management firm G.M.O. and a commander of the British Empire. In 2005, Grantham began to write letters to his investors saying that the housing market appeared overleveraged; in 2007, he warned of “the first truly global bubble.” His latest prediction overshadows the preceding one. We are, he says, in the midst of a historic period of mispricing. Because the global economy depends on hydrocarbons, practically every asset in the world relates in some way to oil and gas. Grantham believes hydrocarbons will be priced, or regulated, into submission. In light of that belief, not only oil companies’ stock but practically everything else on the market looks falsely inflated.

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Continue reading “Bubble: Oil and Gas Could Lose 95% of Value”

Not one to miss an opportunity, Bernie Sanders has a new social media spot lambasting Donald Trump’s ignorance in regard to climate, and wind energy.

Newsweek:

Bernie Sanders, a Vermont senator and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, has attacked President Donald Trump’s statements on wind turbines, calling Trump the “only person in the world” who believes these wind-energy converters cause cancer.
Sanders took the president to task over statements he made while talking about this renewable form of energy earlier this month, lampooning him in a video posted on Instagram.
“As many of you know, President Trump has said the noise coming from wind turbines causes cancer. Actually Donald Trump is the only person in the world who believes that,” Sanders said in footage posted by his 2020 presidential campaign.
The Instagram post then cut to a clip of the president speaking at a National Republican Congressional Committee dinner a week ago, where he mimed a noise supposedly made by wind turbines.

“Actually, standing here, you can’t hear a thing except cars going by on the road,” Sanders said, while standing in an Iowa field against a backing track that would not be out of place on Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
“The fact is that Iowa gets about 35 percent of its electricity from wind turbines all over the state, which by the way provides revenue to farmers who desperately need that revenue. So, President Trump, once again, try to get your act together and try to tell the truth. It won’t hurt,” Sanders promised.
The president has been questioned about his comments linking wind turbines with cancer.

Continue reading “Sanders Jumps on Trump Wind Ignorance”

Austin American Statesman:

Last fall, Keith Uhles, an engineer with the oil and gas firm CrownRock Minerals, invited other young West Texas professionals to join him at a popular Midland Mexican restaurant for a conversation about renewable energy subsidies.
The event promised to explore ways to reduce the “public costs and restore transparency and meaningful public participation” to renewable energy policy, according to the invitation. It was organized by the Midland Liberty Leadership Council — Uhles is the chairman — an arm of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the conservative, influential Austin-based policy institute. 
The dinner, in the de facto capital of the Texas fracking boom, was part of a much larger effort to slow the progress of wind energy. An American-Statesman investigation has found that oil and gas, and other fossil fuel, interests, working in league with the nonprofit foundation, are funding an effort at the Capitol to stamp out state subsidies, pegged at more than $1 billion per year, that benefit renewable energy.
The Texas Public Policy Foundation, with annual revenue approaching $20 million, launched a barnstorming effort over the past year and recently has produced videos to criticize the renewable energy industry. This legislative session, according to Texas Ethics Commission filings, the foundation has employed more than 20 of its staffers as lobbyists, paying them as much as $395,000, to target renewable energy subsidies, among a range of bills that align with the group’s small government focus.
The initiative comes as wind energy has transformed over the last few decades from a boutique alternative energy source to a full-blown, big-business competitor to fossil fuels. At stake is the lucrative and volatile fuels market, especially for electrical power generation.

Continue reading “In Texas, Fossil Barons Fighting Wind”

The Verge:

Tree-lined streets turn to rivers in the Charleston, South Carolina, of the future. Street lights hang suspended just feet from the water’s surface as a meteorologist perched on a rooftop explains that this is the view we might see in the year 2100 if climate change continues at its current pace.
The scene is from The Weather Channel’s latest mixed reality segment, which connects the flooding of tomorrow to the melting glaciers and sea level rise of today. It marks a slight deviation from its ongoing campaign to put its meteorologists in the middle of virtual but hyperrealistic extreme weather events. 
Some of these have touched on climate change and its role in worsening the wildfires that scorch the West Coast every year or the thinning ice coating the surface of lakes. But this is the first to focus entirely on the effects of climate change, according to Matthew Sitkowski, executive weather producer at The Weather Channel. “This time, we decided to really wrap our hands around climate change and make it the star,” he says.

To make these segments, The Weather Channel uses a popular video game development platform called the Unreal Engine to adjust the graphics in real time. Using camera tracking technology, the production team puts the meteorologist in the scene. The result is a vivid, near-realistic cinematic scene that captures the viewer’s attention for the same reasons that video games do, says Edward Maibach, the director of the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication, who wasn’t involved in producing this clip. “By engaging our senses of sight and sounds — and our tendency to focus on things that move — they earn our full attention, and are experienced more like real lived experience than like book learning,” he says in an email to The Verge.

And who says you even deserve an electric car?

Former Secretary of State John Kerry got into a contentious exchange with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) over Kerry’s college degree and the evidence of climate change during a House Oversight hearing.

UPDATE:
Rep. Massie’s clueless follow-up tweet, complete with smirking emoji.

Have you noticed that the scientists who feel most qualified to weigh in on climate science are political scientists? 😉#sassywithmassie

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) April 10, 2019