Month: April 2019

How Wind Turbines Make Kids Smarter

Maybe explains why Trump hates them?

Anti-Winders are often folks who have moved to a rural area, have no roots there, and view the local farmers, many of whom are 4th and 5th generation – merely as groundskeepers to maintain a pastoral backdrop for rich folk’s “lifestyle”.
Benefits to local communities not a factor for these types.

Great piece from Tom Henry at the Toledo Blade, excerpted here, but worth a read.

Toledo Blade:

VAN WERT, Ohio — Walk through the newly opened Lincolnview School District Community Center, and the first thing that comes to mind is this: It’s not your father’s community center.

It’s more like a health club for farmers, a state-of-the-art building that could give YMCA directors a hefty dose of jaw-dropping envy.

Located on the Lincolnview K-12 complex in a heavily rural part of Van Wert County, the $4.5 million center that opened last August was largely funded by revenue generated by area wind turbines.

It is cited by Van Wert County business leaders as a shining example of what Ohio’s budding wind industry — even in the face of many well-meaning and fiercely determined critics — can do for local communities.

The center has a 35,000-square-foot imprint. But what’s more eye-popping than its size is its versatility, an obvious playground for an imaginative architect.

There’s a gymnasium with 14 different acrylic basketball backboards, each of which can be electronically moved up or down at the touch of a button from the trainer height of seven feet for children to the regulation height of 10 feet for adults.

Three batting cages can be electronically lowered from the ceiling. There’s a court to play pickleball, a paddle sport that combines elements of badminton, tennis, and table tennis. There’s equipment for indoor volleyball, soccer, and other sports. There’s even a removable part of the floor that allows visitors to do pole vaulting.

The floor itself is pretty amazing: It’s made of rubber that was poured hot, not tiles brought in and assembled. There are no seams to buckle. There is a room with ample free weights and machines, and an indoor track that allows residents to do plenty of long walks and running away from harsh weather.

The cost? A mere $25 annual fee, which also includes use of locker rooms. Any resident of the district can sign up and get an electronic key. There’s also a community room with lots of seating and tables free of charge for many groups. The only requirement is a $50 damage deposit.

“It’s more than athletics,” Jeff Snyder, Lincolnview Schools superintendent, said of the center. “It really does change the culture of our connectivity.”
—

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As Storms Hammer Midwest, Jobs and Workers may Flee

As the storm-battered midwest waits for another monster blizzard..
a reminder that it’s a pattern. I’m seeing it in and around the upper midwest, it shows up in the stats of extreme precipitation events, and it’s eating away at infrastructure, agriculture, waters, and soils across the region.

Des Moine Register:

A large storm system set to bring low temperatures, high winds and severe weather to an area spanning the Rockies through New England will move eastward this week, forecasters say.


Blizzard warnings have been posted in parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Nebraska, South Dakota and Minnesota. Folks in Illinois and parts of Nebraska and Kansas will have to watch for tornadoes.
But in Iowa, the eyes should be on the rivers and streams that will likely swell with rain in the weather system, according to Brooke Hagenhoff, a National Weather Service meteorologist based in Des Moines. 
“With our soil already saturated and having some flooding that we’ve already seen in the past month or so, keeping an eye on local streams is going to be important with adding, across northern Iowa, maybe up to 2 to 3 inches of rain on top of rivers that are already full,” she said. 

Business Insider:

Finding a job in the Midwest is getting more difficult. 


Midwestern cities not only saw hiring decrease in March due to natural disaster, workers are also expected to migrate out of the area at high rates, according to LinkedIn’s Workforce Report for April 2019. 


Record flooding in March devastated farmers in Nebraska and other parts of the Midwest, costing the area hundreds of millions worth in damages. The floods also had an adverse effect on jobs: Omaha, Nebraska; Kansas City, Missouri; and Fargo, North Dakota, all saw significant decreases in hiring rates. Jobs in agriculture, one of the top industries in the region, bore the brunt of hiring slowdowns: the agriculture industry saw hiring drop 16.7% over the last two months.



Millennials could be hit hardest from this recent downtrend in agriculture job growth. The number of farmers aged 25 to 34 is increasing, according to the US Department of Agriculture, and approximately 69% of young farmers have college degrees.

As a result of the flooding, LinkedIn expects a net migration out of the area. After Hurricane Irma devastated Miami, migration out of the city increased 62.9% in the same calendar year. LinkedIn predicts just as significant of a migration out of the Midwest in the coming months to Southwest and West Coast cities like Denver, Dallas-Fort Worth, Seattle, and Phoenix. 
Midwest cities that lost the most workers in the past 12 months include Lansing, Michigan; State College, Pennsylvania; Lincoln, Nebraska; and Wichita, Kansas. Wichita had the biggest population loss, with nearly 320 workers per every 10,000 people leaving the area in the past year.


Green New Nukes?

Good timing on this one, as there has been a lot of chatter about how nuclear power is going to save the climate, following a recent op-ed in the New York Times.
Oftentimes, I’ve heard people say, “Why don’t we just build nuclear plants?”

That’s a little like saying, “If you want to fly to Cleveland, why not just flap your arms really hard?”
There are issues.

One of the common canards one hears from nuclear advocates, is “if the government would just back off on all the silly regulations, we could go forward”
A little history.
The Big Buildout of nuclear that happened in the 1970s glossed over a number of questions about safety systems in the new facilities. In 1971, a series of tests for critical Emergency Core Cooling Systems for the already under construction (!) plants, failed – prompting a hasty few weeks of hearings in Washington, to figure out some kind of industry-acceptable patch for the critical system.

Those changes resulted in large cost increases and schedule delays of plants well along in the construction phase. Regulators and tree huggers were blamed, but when Three Mile Island melted down in 1979, it was precisely that safety system, jogged by some human error, that was at fault, burning up 2 billion dollars in gear in 20 minutes, and effectively stopping the industry in its tracks.
Those who were carefully watching the technology knew that, economically, the industry was already dead in the water even a few years earlier.

And, right, I’ve heard all the “but nobody died” arguments. See how that helps when you’re asking investors for 12 billion dollars over 15 years.

Arguments can certainly be made, as above, for other forms of nuclear technology, but nothing can speed up the timetable that proving such systems requires.

Indeed, the same “ready, fire, aim” approach is still very much a part of the industry’s playbook – and may be responsible for enormous cost overruns in recent US projects that resulted in the cancellation of the V. C. Summer plant in South Carolina, and similar issues at the still-building Albert Vogtle plant in Georgia.

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The Catch with Carbon Capture

I interviewed Mark Jacobson for this month’s video, which is coming this week.
One topic we touched on was the viability of burning fossil fuels with carbon capture technology – of which we are both skeptical.
New research supports that position.

NatureAsia.com

Efforts are underway to capture and store the carbon dioxide released when coal, oil and natural gas are burned for electricity generation. But a study led by Sgouris Sgouridis at Khalifa University in Abu Dhabi suggests that investing in renewable technologies generally provides a better energy return than carbon capture and storage (CSS).

“Our research is going against the grain by challenging perceptions of the need for CCS,” says Sgouridis, who collaborated in the analysis with researchers in USA, UK, Norway and Italy.

“This paper correctly concludes that carbon capture and storage is a waste of energy relative to investing in clean, renewable wind and solar,” says energy and climate scientist Mark Jacobson of Stanford University, USA, who was not involved in the analysis. The paper could have gone even further to emphasize the air pollution and mining damage associated with fossil fuel use, which is avoided with renewable energy sources, he adds.

Sgouridis became interested in undertaking the analysis when his own research, indicating that renewable energy was becoming the cheapest energy resource, conflicted with the prevailing views supporting CCS. He and his colleagues performed a net energy analysis of carbon capture and storage systems in comparison with solar and wind power generation. In essence, they compared the ratio of net energy output over energy input for each technology.

“We show that constructing CCS power plants for electricity generation is generally worse than building renewable energy plants, even when we include the effects of storage systems like batteries and hydrogen,” says Sgouridis. The researchers also discuss significant challenges that CCS promoters would need to address to upscale the technology sufficiently for it to become useful. “These challenges should make the energy policy community very apprehensive about relying on such a solution rather than considering it as a last resort,” Sgouridis says.

He is careful to acknowledge, however, that the research team is not dismissing the use of CCS altogether, but only challenging its use in fossil fuel electricity generating systems. “CCS could be a perfectly valid tool for reducing greenhouse gas concentration in the atmosphere,” he says. But the potential of CCS to tackle the problem of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere should not be used to encourage continued fossil fuel burning rather than investing in renewable energy sources.

Not a Joke: Trump to Run on Environmental Record

Bloomberg:

Donald Trump is preparing a novel campaign strategy for a president who’s pulling the U.S. from the international Paris accord on climate change, cheer-leading for coal, one of the dirtiest source of power, and suggesting that wind turbines cause cancer.

He’s going to tout his environmental credentials.

Administration officials are developing talking points on climate change and cultivating a list of environmental “success stories,” from cleaner air to reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, said a person familiar with the plans who asked not to be named describing internal deliberations.

“President Trump believes you can grow the economy and protect the environment,” said Judd Deere, a deputy White House press secretary.

In attempting to demonstrate that the U.S. is getting greener while still rolling back what Trump sees as job-killing constraints on industry, a key cheerleader may be Andrew Wheeler, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

“Today we have the cleanest air on record, and we are ranked No. 1 in the world for access to clean drinking water,” Wheeler said at the Washington Auto Show on April 4. “As we continue to reduce pollution, we’re also reducing burdensome regulations.”

——

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The Stupid, it Blows


Mike Mann in Newsweek:

Unlike President Trump’s inability to pronounce the word “origins,” his recurring anti-windbloviating isn’t a sign of mental decline. Sure, it is stupid and wrong to say the sound of wind causes cancer (just who is the “alarmist” by the way?) or reduces real estate values (it doesn’t.) But it’s also dangerous. This and other anti-science campaigns like the ones against vaccinations and evolution are not just silly ignorance. They’re weaponized stupidity.

Trump’s tirades aren’t reflective of any deeply held belief or well-informed opinion, but instead appear to be informed by, and in service of, Big Oil’s anti-wind propaganda. For decades fossil fuel companies have attacked clean and renewable competition, from working to block local wind power installations to fighting state policies promoting wind. Key to that effort is spreading myths about wind power’s potential as well as its progress, which our Fox News President predictably regurgitates.

For example, take Trump’s bizarre recurring joke were he pretends to be someone who watches a lot of television (ok—no need to suspend disbelief on that part,) but has to turn it off when the wind isn’t blowing. Trump’s own Department of Energy debunks that ridiculous reliability argument (hi, batteries!) along with other energy myths. Wind power kills less birds than other forms of energy, it poses no human health threat, and it is increasingly more competitive than fossil fuels.

The sad irony of Trump’s weaponized stupidity is that it hurts the rural communities and red states who are benefiting “bigly” from wind power. For example, on November 9, 2016, the very day Trump was elected President, the Omaha World-Herald published a story about how “wind has saved family farms across a wide swath of the heartland

Continue reading “The Stupid, it Blows”