Month: May 2022

As Coal Fades, Mines Get New Life in Energy Storage

I interviewed Dr. Peter Schubert, a Professor of electrical and computer engineering and the Director of the Richard G. Lugar Center for Renewable Energy (LCRE) at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI). 

Dr. Schubert is working to enable greater clean energy penetration in Indiana and across the midwest. Among the topics I was excited to discuss was the potential for rehabilitating abandoned underground coal mines for energy storage using well-understood, off-the-shelf pumped storage technology.

PowerMag:

Boston, Massachusetts-based Rye Development, which has a current in-design or operational portfolio of 25 projects in 10 states, on Jan. 4 announced it was developing the 200-MW Lewis Ridge Closed Loop Pumped Hydropower Storage project in Bell County. The company has filed for a permit for the project with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC).

Michael Rooney, vice president of Project Management for Rye Development, told POWER on Jan. 5 that Rye expects the FERC application process will take a few years, while providing at least three-to-five-year construction process that would bring Lewis Ridge online by 2030.

“This is the first project we are pursuing on a former coal site,” said Rooney, who said it could be a model for future sites that could reclaim abandoned coal mines. “Rye recognizes the opportunity that certain brownfield sites offer for closed-loop pumped storage projects. Oftentimes these sites have characteristics that are beneficial for large power generation or storage applications such as existing transmission access, favorable zoning, etc.”

The project site has what Rye said is “beneficial topography,” along with proximity to transmission infrastructure.

The U.S. Dept. of Energy (DOE) has said pumped storage facilities are the most common form of energy storage in the U.S., representing 95% of all utility-scale storage. Most U.S. pumped storage facilities were built between 1960 and 1990, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA). The agency has said about 21 GW of pumped storage is in use today. The group said that while FERC has approved a handful of new pumped storage projects since 2014, the U.S has not added any new pumped storage capacity since 2012—with just two new plants coming online since 2000.

Continue reading “As Coal Fades, Mines Get New Life in Energy Storage”

India’s Renewable Transition in Race Against Heat Impacts

Above, CEO of major Indian energy company JSW on energy transition across India, Renewable assessment starts at 2:50. (90 percent of additions last year were renewable)

Meanwhile, India and Pakistan are some of the most vulnerable countries to climate extremes.

Jeff Masters at Yale Climate Connections:

A brutal, record-intensity heat wave that has engulfed much of India and Pakistan since March eased somewhat this week, but is poised to roar back in the coming week with inferno-like temperatures of up to 50 degrees Celsius (122°F). The heat, when combined with high levels of humidity – especially near the coast and along the Indus River Valley – will produce dangerously high levels of heat stress that will approach or exceed the limit of survivability for people outdoors for an extended period.

The latest forecasts from the GFS and European models predict an unusually strong region of high pressure intensifying over southern Asia in the coming week, bringing increasing heat that will peak on May 11-12, with highs near 50 degrees Celsius (122°F) near the India/Pakistan border. May is typically the region’s hottest month, and significant relief from the heat wave may not occur until the cooling rains of the Southwest Monsoon arrive in June. But tropical cyclones are also common in May in the northern Indian Ocean, and a landfalling storm could potentially bring relief from the heat wave.

Continue reading “India’s Renewable Transition in Race Against Heat Impacts”

For Wildfire Fighters, an Emotional Burden

The mental strain of climate disruption hitting those on the front lines first.
But soon we’ll all be on the front lines.

Aspen Institute:

Even without experiencing severe weather first-hand, many students are grappling with the long-term impacts that climate change will have on their lives. For some, this can turn into eco-anxiety—persistent worries about their own futures and the prospects for future generations. During a K12 Climate Action listening session, Dr. Aaron Bernstein of Harvard Chan C-CHANGE shared that strong relationships with supportive adults at school can be a protective factor for eco-anxiety. Schools can also help reduce this anxiety by teaching students about climate action and how they can be part of climate solutions.

War, Covid Recovery Creating Energy Gridlock

UPDATED:

Let’s see if I can describe this.
Production of coal, oil and natural gas were down sharply in the wake of the Global Covid shutdown.

Covid recovery spiked global energy demand.
Prices went up sharply, particularly in Europe and Asia.

Russia threw a spanner into the works with a war of choice.
That war clarified as never before the West’s security exposure to a (now obviously) hostile and uncooperative trading partner. Prices spiked even more in Europe.
Oil majors have been unwilling to boost production rapidly, fearing another crash, and feeling overwhelming demand from their shareholders to make good on a decade of unfulfilled promises of profit, so invested in stock buybacks instead of production.

The situation has made the need for an energy transition painfully apparent, at the same time it has heightened the short term need for natural gas. That would require investment in very expensive Liquified Natural gas infrastructure, but at the same time recognizing that those structures have a short useful life cycle, if we’re going to move quickly to renewable, non-fossil fuels.

We’re asking for major fossil companies to commit resources that may never be fully paid back, simply to save humanity, the life support system of the planet, and a livable society for their children.

I’m traveling at the moment. I’ll fill in the blanks on this later today, the elements of the story has been well reported in major media, but not well put together for a wider public.

Houston Chronicle:

The world’s largest oil companies are churning out massive profits in the first few months of the year even as they face uncertainties created by Russia’s war with Ukraine, a pandemic that continues to slow parts of the world, and calls to simultaneously increase production and focus on climate change efforts.

Together these issues signal how globally interconnected the energy industry has become, especially as a war half a world away affects boardroom discussions here in Houston. At the heart of those discussions is whether to boost production while oil is at $100 a barrel, which could reduce the price of gasoline and other fuels — and help ease inflation.

The oil companies, however, remain keenly focused on keeping investors happy with higher dividends and stock buybacks. On Friday, Exxon said it would triple its buyback plan to $30 billion while Chevron vowed to repurchase $10 billion worth of shares this year.

New York Times:

 Oil and gasoline prices are climbing. Energy company profits are surging. President Biden, who came into office promising to reduce the use of fossil fuels, has effectively joined the “drill, baby, drill” chorus. Europe would love to end its dependence on Russia.

Yet most U.S. oil businesses are not eager to capitalize on this moment by pumping more oil.

Production of oil by U.S. energy companies is essentially flat and unlikely to increase substantially for at least another year or two. If Europe stops buying Russian oil and natural gas as some of its leaders have promised, they won’t be able to replace that energy with fuels from the United States anytime soon.

U.S. oil production is up less than 2 percent, to 11.8 million barrels a day, since December and remains well below the record 13.1 million barrels a day set in March 2020 just before the pandemic paralyzed the global economy. Government forecasters predict that American oil production will average just 12 million barrels a day in 2022, and increase by roughly another million in 2023. That increase would be well short of the nearly four million barrels of oil that Europe imports from Russia every day.

“You had this bombastic, chest-pounding industry touting itself as the reincarnation of the American innovative spirit,” said Jim Krane, an energy expert at Rice University. “And now that they could be leaping into action to pitch in to bring much-needed oil to the world, they are being uncharacteristically cautious.”

Continue reading “War, Covid Recovery Creating Energy Gridlock”

Possible Indicator: Rapey Climate Denier Loses Michigan Special Election

Above, revealing remark from Michigan State Legislator “RJ” Regan in conversation with fellow Republicans.
“I tell my daughters, “If rape is inevitable, you should just lie back and enjoy it.”

As is so often the case of truly odious people, RJ is a climate denier.

In a possible indicator of what Monday night’s leaked Supreme Court decision, Mr Regan lost to a young Democratic woman.

Jeff Timmer is former Executive Director of the Michigan Republican Party.

Continue reading “Possible Indicator: Rapey Climate Denier Loses Michigan Special Election”

As Heat Wave Builds, Fire Season Comes Early in Southwest

Give the Gif above time to load.

NOAA:

On April 29, 2022, the GOES East satellite captured this dynamic imagery of massive grayish-white smoke plumes emanating from the Cerro Pelado, Cooks Peak, and the combined Calf Canyon and Hermits Peak fires in New Mexico, while a brownish dust storm raced southward from the Colorado Plains. 

According to the National Weather Service, wind gusts in Colorado reached up to 60 mph due to a boundary diving southward, and the dust carried caused visibility to drop to near zero in what was called “brown-out” conditions. 

As of May 2, 2022, the fires in this imagery had consumed roughly 181,000 acres (283 square miles) combined, an area about the size of Lexington, Kentucky.

Welcome to fire season 2021.

Continue reading “As Heat Wave Builds, Fire Season Comes Early in Southwest”

Red State’s Blue Hydrogen Might not be Green

Senator Manchin’s idea of clean energy might not be.

WESA Pittsburgh:

At an industrial site on the banks of the Ohio River, Vance Powers pointed to a brand new building – a big blue box with pipes coming in and out of it.

Inside the building is a 485-megawatt electric generator owned by Long Ridge Energy Generation. Since opening two years ago, Long Ridge has run the plant on natural gas from the nearby Marcellus and Utica shale region.

But a few weeks ago, it began an experiment that its owners hope is the start of new, cleaner way to power the economy – on hydrogen.

In March, the plant, in Hannibal, Ohio, started feeding its combustion turbine with a small percentage of hydrogen, trucked in from a nearby chemical plant.

“We think that what we’re doing here today is ahead of the curve,” said Powers, the company’s chief financial officer. The company says it’s the first of its kind to blend hydrogen with natural gas to make commercial power.
–

Bo Wholey, Long Ridge’s CEO, said the company started exploring ways to lower its plant’s carbon footprint a few years ago, in response to what customers want — electricity that doesn’t produce carbon dioxide, the key driver in climate change, which the UN has called a “threat to human wellbeing and (the) health of the planet”. Without deep and rapid cuts to carbon pollution, the UN recently reported, the earth could see catastrophic warming by the end of the century.

Wholey said he was hoping to lure a data center to this stretch of the Ohio-West Virginia border by the promise of low-carbon energy.

“We’re really responding to what the market wants,” Wholey said. On top of that, investors are starting to demand lower carbon footprints, he said. “I think any new power plant project is going to have to have some pathway to decarbonize. I don’t know that financing would be possible without that in today’s market.”
Eventually, the company wants to run the plant completely on hydrogen. Right now, Long Ridge gets a few truckloads of hydrogen a month in big, white tubes from a nearby chemical plant. But it would need much more to run completely on hydrogen.

Most industrial hydrogen is made from natural gas, in a process called “steam methane reforming.” This method — known as “grey hydrogen,” creates CO2.

Long Ridge says it wants to capture that CO2 and store it underground, a method known as “blue” hydrogen.

Around the country, others are beating a path to hydrogen, which the federal government has been trying to support since the George W. Bush administration.

President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill included $8 billion to create four “hydrogen hubs” around the country — where facilities create, store, and use hydrogen in industrial settings. A consortium of companies is hoping to land one in the Pennsylvania, West Virginia and southeast Ohio region. That has Wholey excited.

There is a problem.

Smithsonian:

Blue hydrogen is derived from methane in natural gas. It has previously been touted as a better alternative because the production emissions are captured and stored deep underground. However, new research indicates that this energy alternative could actually be worse than burning coal.

Continue reading “Red State’s Blue Hydrogen Might not be Green”

Should You Get and Induction Stove?

Canary Media:

I wanted to tackle this subject by answering the basic questions that a lot of people still aren’t clear on. Why should someone consider switching to induction? What pots and pans work on induction stoves? How fast does it boil water? How well does it cook various foods? I rent my home, so I’m not in a position to replace the stove. Instead, I bought a portable induction cooktop — an affordable way to try out this new tech. 

Watch the video for a crash course in induction fundamentals. I’ll just say that the new stove surprised me with how powerful it is. It crushed my gas stove in a head-to-head race to boil water. I burned some onions because it browned them so much faster than I expected. 

Induction has a learning curve, because you can cook at highly specific, digitally controlled temperatures, unlike anything one can do with a gas flame. How hot should your pan be to fry an egg? I cook a lot of eggs, but never cracked open that question. Once you get the hang of this specificity, it’s a real boon — you can simmer soup stock for hours knowing it will never boil, for instance. 

Then there’s the cleanliness. You aren’t combusting fossil fuels in your home, so your air quality is better. But you’re also not throwing off excess heat into the kitchen, since the magnetics heat the metal of your pan, not the surrounding air. And tidying up means simply wiping down a flat glassy surface.

US Offshore Wind Ready to Grow, If Courts Give Go Ahead

CleanTechnica:

Russia’s murderous rampage through Ukraine has lit a spark of hope in the chests of fossil fuel stakeholders, who are banking on the war to spur more oil, gas, and coal extraction. However, they better keep that bubbly on ice. In the latest indication that the fossil fuel economy is withering on the vine, the Biden-Harris Administration is forging ahead with new offshore wind plans that will go where no wind turbines have ever gone before.

The technical electricity generation potential for wind turbines located in US waters is more than 2,000 gigawatts, but almost none of it has been tapped as yet. To date, the nation’s stock of offshore wind turbines in commercial operation clocks in for a combined capacity of just 42 megawatts, shared between a 5-turbine array in Rhode Island and a 2-turbine pilot project in Virginia.

Political interference has gummed up the works along the Atlantic coast, while economic and political factors are both at work in the Gulf coast, and technology challenges have stymied offshore development along the Pacific coast.

So much for the bad news. The good news is that the US offshore wind industry has plenty of room to grow. The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management laid the groundwork for a growth spurt several years ago by developing the nation’s first ever streamlined process for leasing federal areas for offshore wind development.

BOEM put the finishing touches on that process during the Trump administration, which is somewhat ironic considering the former President’s notorious aversion to wind turbines, especially those located offshore.

Nevertheless, the process is finally in place, and the US offshore wind industry is poised to blow right past President Biden’s somewhat modest goal of 30 gigawatts by 2030.

Last September, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory ran the numbers and observed that the US wind industry is off to a healthy re-start, with projects totaling more than 3.5 gigawatts already in the pipeline.

So far, all that pipeline activity is taking place along the Atlantic coast, where the relatively shallow waters enable standard fixed-platform, monopile offshore wind turbine construction. The Pacific states are far more challenging, as the water is generally too deep for standard turbine construction.

That’s where new floating turbine technology comes in. The field has taken off like a rocket in recent years, thanks in part to taxpayers in the US, who funded early-stage floating turbine R&D at the Energy Department’s test site in Coos Bay, Oregon during the Obama administration.

As is usual now, there are those privileged folks with narrow agendas seeking to gum up the works.

Continue reading “US Offshore Wind Ready to Grow, If Courts Give Go Ahead”