Month: April 2022

Art Installation: Sounds of a Shrinking Glacier

Big Solar vs Rooftop Solar – a Needless Battle

I think we need both.
But a needless battle is going on across the country between Utilities, and small potential solar generators who wish to install systems on their rooftops or in backyards.
Basic conflict is that Utilities say, they are mandated to maintain the local grid, and need a certain amount of reliable revenue to do so.
Others maintain that the savings that accrue to utilities from “million rooftop” programs are considerable, since it can dampen the need for expensive “peaking” power plants that only come into use on hot summer days to serve air conditioning demand – exactly when that small solar will be doing the job.

One interesting aspect of this battle is the alliance of progressive environmentalists with free-market conservatives who tout “Energy Freedom”. It may be that technology and economics will settle the issue, as both solar panels and, critically, battery storage, keep getting cheaper, potentially robbing Utilities of critical Peak-hour revenue. Customers might store cheap electricity at night, and run on battery power during the high-price, high-profit peak daytime hours.
Utilities are hybrid monopolies created by legislation. Legislators can shape the way they are compensated and incentivized.
With the right kind of regulatory reform, they may be incented to become distributors and brokers of electricity, rather than sole providers.
Above, Michigan. Below, Florida.

WQCS Palm Beach County Fl:

Florida-April 12, 2022: A national non-profit conservative group is urging Governor DeSantis to veto a measure that would eliminate the net metering credit. If the measure becomes law, ‘Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship’ says it would gut the rooftop solar industry in Florida and lead to higher power costs for all. 

Dave Jenkins, ‘Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship’ President, says the bill would make rooftop solar panels un-affordable for most and lead to higher power bills statewide. “This legislation, which was written by FP&L,” said Jenkins. “It tries to eliminate roof top solar in the state of Florida by taking away the financial incentives.”

Net metering allows Florida Power and Light customers to connect their roof-top solar panels to FPL’s electric grid. If your solar cells produce more energy than you need, the excess power is sold back to FPL’s grid as a credit. HB 741, now before the governor, would eliminate that credit by the end of next year. 

The ‘Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship’ has 20,000 members nationwide and 6,000 here in Florida. “We’re conservatives who care about conservation and stewardship,” said Jenkins. “We believe in capitalism and the free market and we have these monopoly utilities that are hell bent on squashing competition.”

The power industry and others who support ending the net metering credit argue that solar powered homes are still connected to the grid, and the power lines and poles that make up that grid still need to be maintained and serviced by FPL crews. Supports of Bill 741 say customers without solar arrays are subsidizing the grid-servicing-costs for those with roof top solar panels who are taking advantage of the net metering credit.

However, the Florida Public Service Commission (PSC), which regulates public utilities, has never ruled on, or even made a determination of, what net metering and roof top solar panels may cost a utility. In addition, homeowners with solar panels on their roofs are already required to pay a minimum monthly bill of $25 to cover their fair share of the utility’s fixed costs.

Continue reading “Big Solar vs Rooftop Solar – a Needless Battle”

Solar Recycling a Growth Industry

Solar panels are going to be recycled. They are part of a growing challenge with electronic waste that has to be tackled, and they are really only a small part – we have a lot of work to do on all the other stuff, too.

Health and Safety Impacts of Solar Photovoltaics – North Carolina State University:

To put the volume of PV waste into per- spective, consider that by 2050, when PV systems installed in 2020 will reach the end of their lives, it is estimated that the global annual PV panel waste tonnage will be 10% of the 2014 global e-waste tonnage.

Antarctic Atmospheric Rivers Deliver Warmth to Cold Regions

Dr Hansi Singh continues:

These austral polar atmospheric rivers (AKA moisture intrusions) are generally accompanied by higher-than-average surface temperatures over Antarctica due to condensational heating and greenhouse warming from water vapor.
Atmospheric rivers become more intense and carry more vapor in warmer climates. They are an important, dynamic mechanism for warming the Antarctic continent as global atmospheric CO2 concentrations increase.

Below, Jeff Berardelli mentions the Antarctic heat wave that accompanied an atmospheric river earlier this year. (at :30 if you’re rushed)

Scientists on Climate Extremes and Infrastructure

I recently presented to an audience of small town and rural officials in Northern Michigan, who are more and more finding themselves on the front lines of climate adaptation – as heavy rains increase in the upper midwest, and “weather whiplash” stresses infrastructure beyond the breaking point.
While not all conservative small town and rural folk are completely in agreement with me on climate, they do get it, overwhelmingly, that climate is changing, and it’s affecting their communities in damaging and expensive ways. They just don’t always go along with the “human caused” part.

OK, so let’s work with that.
Above, I chose a selection of recent interview clips of scientists emphasizing what the majority now believe and are actually observing – weather extremes are increasing and the are damaging infrastructure, homes and the built environment. And, as local officials know, it makes the potholes even worse.
Once we’re all in agreement on this, we can begin to talk about the infrastructure hardening that needs to be done, about the funding that is coming thru recently passed Biden Administration legislation, and the best practices for making use of those funds.
We can also talk about the potential benefits for community funding and increased resilience. For instance, we can project that future grid modifications will make “microgrids” for critical facilities, and even small communities, easier – especially for those communities that are already generating wind or solar energy locally.

Below, Jeff Berardelli on Middle America’s climate challenge – Weather Whiplash.

Is Lake Powell in a Death Spiral?

“Lake Powell: storage pond, silt trap, evaporation tank and garbage dispose-all, a 180-mile-long incipient sewage lagoon.” 
― Edward Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang

AZCentral:

If Lake Powell isn’t already doomed, it may soon be.

Insufficient runoff has put the reservoir on a quick and dangerous descent to 3,490 feet of elevation – a water level so low that Glen Canyon Dam’s hydropower turbines can no longer operate. A key part of the Western power grid would be lost.

The city of Page and the LeChee Chapter of the Navajo Nation also would lose their drinking water because the infrastructure that supplies them could no longer function.

Not to mention that if Powell falls to 3,490 feet, the only way millions of acre-feet of Colorado River water can flow past the dam and downstream to sustain Lake Mead – the reservoir on which Arizona relies – is through four bypass tubes, which have never handled that kind of volume, particularly for an extended period. 

Engineers are concerned whether this setup can move enough water, especially if one or more of the tubes were damaged by heavy flows over time. If the bypass tubes move significantly less water than what the eight turbines do now, that could all but guarantee the demise of Lake Mead.

This is serious.

The U.S. Department of the Interior, which operates the two reservoirs via the Bureau of Reclamation, said in a grimly worded letter last week that it must take more drastic actions to slow Powell’s descent.

“We are approaching operating conditions for which we have only very limited actual operating experience – and which occurred nearly 60 years ago,” the letter states. “We hope to be able to delay or avoid operational conditions below (3,490 feet) but we fully realize that absent a change in the recent hydrological conditions, we may not be able to avoid such operations.”

Did you catch that? Interior is essentially saying that if we don’t get more snow (and that snow doesn’t produce more runoff), the best we may be able to do is delay the point at which Powell falls below 3,490 feet.

In other words, we are once again being asked to sacrifice – not to fix the problem, but simply to buy time.

Continue reading “Is Lake Powell in a Death Spiral?”

Voting with Their Feet: Climate has Americans on the Move

Yale 360:

Like a growing number of Americans, the Brazil family realized they could no longer live in a place where they faced soaring temperatures and worsening wildfires driven by climate change, and so decided it was time to move to a less vulnerable part of the country. They chose New England, where Mich, a psychologist, got a transfer from her employer, the U.S. Veterans Administration, to its office in White River Junction, Vermont. After more than a year of living in a series of temporary accommodations near their former Oregon home, they moved last October to an apartment in Enfield, New Hampshire — close to the Vermont border — where they have begun to rebuild their lives.

“I can’t tell you how many times we looked at a map of the whole country and asked, ‘Where do we want to live?’” Forest said in the basement apartment where they now live with their children, ages 5, 3, and 1. “The West Coast was no longer an option. The Midwest didn’t appeal. And then looking out here, we don’t have to worry about drought and fires. We don’t have to worry about smoke and heat.”

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For Roy Parvin and his wife, Janet Vail, several years of living with wildfires around their home in northern California’s Sonoma County finally drove them some 2,600 miles to Asheville, North Carolina, where they pursue their respective careers in writing and publishing in a place where they do not have to be worried about fires, heat, or smoke.

In 2014, the couple thought they had built their dream home in the California town of Cloverdale. But three years later they experienced the first of a series of wildfires that came as close as a quarter-mile to the house. The fires finally convinced them that they could no longer live in the parched expanses of the American West.
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“We left in 2020 after getting tired of being evacuated in the middle of the night by a policeman saying, ‘Pack your cars, take your dogs, don’t pick up anything, just go,’” said Parvin.

As they became convinced that they could no longer live in Sonoma, they briefly considered Bend, Oregon, but dismissed that because of its own fire problems, and Austin, Texas, but decided that would be too hot. They concluded it was time for a move out of the West altogether.

The couple decided to move to Asheville after visiting it on a book tour. They put their house up for sale 10 days before California’s Covid lockdown began in March 2020, and it quickly sold, despite the fire risk and a simultaneous exodus by some of their neighbors. Any doubt that they had made the right move was erased in 2021 when another fire destroyed a mountain cabin that they had sold when they moved to Cloverdale. “Even though we didn’t own the cabin at the time of its demise, the loss did confirm that we’d made the right decision,” he said.

Continue reading “Voting with Their Feet: Climate has Americans on the Move”