Month: October 2021

In studying some of the data on eagles, and their sources of mortality, what’s stunning is how unstunning the number of wind turbine related deaths there have been.

As wind energy has boomed, so has the population of bald eagles.

Los Angeles Times:

The number of bald eagles — a species that once came dangerously close to extinction in the United States — has more than quadrupled over the last dozen years despite massive declines in overall bird populations, government scientists announced Tuesday.

A new survey by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service found that since 2009, when the last count was taken, the number of eagles had soared to an estimated 316,700 in the lower 48 states. At the species’ lowest point in the 1960s, there were fewer than 500 nesting pairs in those states.

Though bald eagles have been steadily recovering, the latest figures surprised even scientists who study avian populations.
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Some of the increase may be due to the Fish and Wildlife Service’s new method of counting the birds. The agency has long used aerial surveys to monitor the species, but its latest update includes crowdsourced data from the online ornithological database eBird.

About 180,000 bird watchers around the nation reported their bald eagle sightings to the database, according to Amanda Rodewald, senior director for avian population studies at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which maintains eBird. Those sightings provided government scientists with an entirely new view of the species, particularly in parts of the country that aren’t easily surveyed from above.

Though there’s no way to know for sure how much of the growth is because of the crowdsourced data, said Brian Millsap, national raptor coordinator for the Fish and Wildlife Service, the latest estimates line up with other survey data.

“While the eBird data has improved the estimates, the vast majority of this increase really is attributed to bald eagle population growth,” Millsap said.

The dark side of anti-clean energy activists is that, as this news report from Iowa shows, when those damn wind turbines just aren’t killing enough birds, the wing nuts take matters into their own hands.

New York Times:

The Biden administration announced on Wednesday a plan to develop large-scale wind farms along nearly the entire coastline of the United States, the first long-term strategy from the government to produce electricity from offshore turbines.

Speaking at a wind power industry conference in Boston, Interior Secretary Deb Haaland said that her agency will begin to identify, demarcate and hope to eventually lease federal waters in the Gulf of Mexico, Gulf of Maine and off the coasts of the Mid-Atlantic States, North Carolina and South Carolina, California and Oregon, to wind power developers by 2025.

The announcement came months after the Biden administration approved the nation’s first major commercial offshore wind farm off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts and began reviewing a dozen other potential offshore wind projects along the East Coast. On the West Coast, the administration has approved opening up two areas off the shores of Central and Northern California for commercial wind power development.

Taken together, the actions represent the most forceful push ever by federal government to promote offshore wind development.

“The Interior Department is laying out an ambitious road map as we advance the administration’s plans to confront climate change, create good-paying jobs, and accelerate the nation’s transition to a cleaner energy future,” said Ms. Haaland. “This timetable provides two crucial ingredients for success: increased certainty and transparency. Together, we will meet our clean energy goals while addressing the needs of other ocean users and potentially impacted communities.”

Mr. Biden has pledged to cut the nation’s fossil fuel emissions 50 percent from 2005 levels by 2030 by designing policies to promote the use of electric vehicles and clean energy such as wind and solar power. In particular, the administration has pledged to build 30,000 megawatts of offshore wind in the United States by 2030.

In Congress, Mr. Biden is pushing for passage of a major spending bill that includes a $150 billion program that would pay electric utilities to increase the amount of electricity they purchase from zero-carbon sources such as wind and solar, and penalize those that don’t.

Mr. Biden has also sought to unite his Cabinet in finding ways to promote renewable energy and cut the carbon dioxide that is warming the planet under what he has called an “all-of-government” approach to tackling climate. Experts in renewable energy policy said that the Interior Department’s move represents a major such step.

You know that the original Captain Kirk of TV’s Star Trek, 90 year old William Shatner was launched into space this week. You may not have seen his overwhelmed reaction,].

Do we have to launch rich guys into space to get them to understand what some of the world’s poorest people have known from the beginning?

Shatner’s reaction is so spontaneous and overflowing, he’s clearly describing the effect that many astronauts have been describing from the beginning. This utterly beautiful video is essential.
“A new kind of self awareness.”

Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark has posted stunning satellite views of the massive surface melt that I mentioned here in August.

For comparison, see helicopter views below showing more familiar, typical surface from 2016.

I’ve been following the energy crunch in Europe, which is indeed serious. The fundamental shortage is gas, which fell off a cliff during the Covid shutdown, and has been slow restarting as the economy has taken off this year. New data shows how much demand was avoided with clean energy.

Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air:

Power generation from zero-carbon sources avoided a gas bill of €33 billion across the European Union (EU) in the first three months of the gas shortage (July-September), as well as €2.3 (£2.0) billion in Great Britain, according to new CREA analysis. The share of zero-carbon generation in the region reached an all-time high of 66% in the third quarter of the year, helping keep the lights on and cut fossil fuel import bills.

Power prices in Europe and the UK have skyrocketed in recent months as a result of rallying wholesale prices of coal, gas and carbon in tandem with power demand rebounding to pre-pandemic levels, and against a background of low fuel reserves in Europe and delays in commodity exports from producing countries. The last week of September saw these commodities trading at all-time highs — coal delivered to Europe traded at $233 per tonne, while fossil gas reached €92/MWh and CO2 emissions priced at nearly €65 per tonne.

The price volatility in EU and UK power markets are a timely reminder that reliance on fossil imports is risky and expensive. During this time, renewables in most European countries covered a significant portion of demand, despite reports of lower generation output, shielding some part of the mix from the effects of fuel costs that would have likely required more gas.
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Our analysts scrutinized renewable generation from July to September, as some commentaries around Europe’s situation have gone as far as to claim that the crisis means intermittent renewables “require fossil fuel back-up” as they were unable to meet peak demand,” implying that the energy transition has gone too fast, too soon.

However, our analysis of the contribution of wind and solar to meeting peak loads in July to September shows that solar and wind generation provided 28 GW worth of firm capacity in the EU. Notably, wind&solar generation during this time was higher than the average wind&solar output in 2016-20 (Figure 4). Great Britain is the notable exception to this, as wind&solar generation was 11% less than the average 2016-20 output over the same period, but wind&solar still provided 3.2 GW of firm capacity in Great Britain.

This amount of additional thermal power capacity would have needed to run at peak hours if the wind&solar capacity hadn’t been in place. We quantified the contribution of wind and solar to peak loads by comparing hourly electricity demand in each country to electricity demand with wind and solar generation subtracted, and assessing how much lower the residual load was. If there were events in the data where combined output from wind and solar was zero during times of peak load, this contribution would be zero, even if they had generated at other times. The methodology is documented in the CREA report on fossil fuel overcapacity in Europe, Ripe for Closure.

Continue reading “Despite Hype, Renewables Saving Europe Gas and Euros in Crisis”

Moo-thane is a planetary problem. Seaweed feed can help.

Above, another stellar report from Diana Olick at CNBC on climate impacts.

US News:

Around a quarter of all critical infrastructure in the U.S. “are at risk of becoming inoperable today” due to flooding, a new report found. And that portion is only expected to grow. 

Amid months of contentious debate surrounding a massive investment into the country’s infrastructure, a new study from nonprofit research and technology organization First Street Foundation found that roughly 25%, or around 36,000 facilities, are at risk of failure due to flooding, and over the coming decades, climate change will only make matters worse. 

“Over the next 30 years, due to the impacts of climate change, an additional 1.2 million residential properties, 66,000 commercial properties, 63,000 miles of roads, 6,100 pieces of social infrastructure and 2,000 pieces of critical infrastructure will also have flood risk that would render them inoperable, inaccessible, or impassable,” the report says.

The study, which evaluated flood risk to infrastructure including airports, hospitals, fire stations, schools, roads, residential and commercial properties, found that in addition to the 25% of all critical infrastructure at risk of becoming inoperable today, 23% of all road segments throughout the country are at risk of becoming impassable. An additional 20% of all commercial properties, 17% of social infrastructure facilities like schools, and 14% of all residential properties also face operational risk, the report found.

E&E News:

The U.S. Navy is at war against a surging sea. It has yet to notch a victory. 

Despite tens of millions of dollars spent on studies, risk assessments and guidance documents dating to the 1990s, the most climate-fraught U.S. defense agency hasn’t completed a single large-scale resilience project across more than 40 domestic installations.

Only one major initiative, a $21 billion program to raise dry docks and modernize the Navy’s four primary shipyards, has turned dirt. Many other Navy installations — from Key West, Fla., to Pearl Harbor, Hawaii — have yet to complete base-wide resilience plans, even though such plans are required by Congress.

Continue reading ““Inoperable, Inaccessible, Impassable”: Infrastructure, Defense, Vulnerable as Climate Extremes Ramp Up”