Month: June 2022

Lightning Mapper Satellite Brings Electrifying Imagery

And this, just because it’s so damn cool.

NOAA:

The Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM) instrument, onboard NOAA’s GOES-18 satellite, is now providing striking lightning observations of the Western Hemisphere. GOES-18 launched on March 1, 2022.

Recently, the GOES-18 GLM detected and monitored lightning activity in severe storms across the U.S. A derecho moved through the Northern Plains on May 12, particularly affecting eastern South Dakota and west central Minnesota. Derechos feature unusually widespread wind damage and according to NOAA’s National Weather Service, the May 12 event was one of the most extreme examples on record due to the number of significant wind gusts. This derecho produced straight-line winds between 60 and 100+ miles per hour. Several tornadoes were also confirmed in the area as well as significant blowing dust. The storm uprooted trees, damaged property, caused power outages, and resulted in injuries and at least two deaths. 

GLM detects and maps total lightning—in-cloud, cloud-to-cloud, and cloud-to-ground—continuously over the Americas and adjacent ocean regions. GLM offers insights beyond the presence of a lightning strike, revealing the extent of lightning flashes and the distance they travel. 

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How Solar Fields Can Save Food and Farmland

I was curious about the tweet above and that lead to a conversation. Got some good responses from Steven Leahy below, more on the pic above at bottom of post.
Anti-clean energy types feign outrage at “using all that prime farmland for solar” – but actually clean energy is the way we’ll save our farmland, and preserve it for the future.

Need to Know Blog by Stephen Leahy:

As many as 1.7 billion people in 107 countries face large-scale crisis from record-high food and energy prices and growing levels of debt. These countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Latin America and the Caribbean, had already been struggling with impacts of the pandemic crisis and climate change. 

Exposure to just one additional risk is enough to cause debt distress, food shortages or blackouts, according to a preliminary analysis by the United Nations’ Global Crisis Response Group.

“All of this is hitting the poorest the hardest and planting the seeds for political instability and unrest around the globe.” 

—UN Secretary-General António Guterres:

Grim stuff in what will be a challenging year ahead. Here’s some context. Of the world’s cereal crop production (rice, wheat, corn, etc) : 

  • 48% is eaten by humans 
  • 41% is used for animal feed
  • 11% for biofuels (ethanol, biodiesel) 

Of all the wheat, rice, corn, rye, oats, barley, sorghum grown in the US every year a mere 10% is eaten by people. The rest is for animal feed and biofuels.

Need-to-Know 1: 90% of crops grown in US is used for animal feed or biofuels.

(It is roughly the same proportion (+/-10%) in Canada, Australia, and most of Europe.)

The US converted 121 million tons of its corn crop into ethanol in 2019. Although considered a “green fuel”, ethanol’s lifecycle carbon emissions are no better than gasoline. Some studies say it is worse. 

Globally, some 70 million acres of food-producing land is devoted to biofuels that provide less than 5% of the world’s transportation fuels.

Need-to-Know 2: 70 million acres of farmland is used for biofuels.

Continue reading “How Solar Fields Can Save Food and Farmland”

Grid Girds for Summer Gridlock

Canary Media:

Massive transmission backlogs have become a serious impediment to expanding clean energy and providing customers with reliable and low-cost electricity. Solutions are hard to come by, however. Over the past decade, the scale of the solar, wind and energy-storage projects being planned and built around the country has boomed. But the methods grid operators and utilities use to assess the impacts and costs of connecting these projects to the grid haven’t kept up. 

Grid-impact studies conducted by the major regional transmission organizations and independent system operators, which manage the high-voltage grids providing electricity to about two-thirds of the American population, have become increasingly complicated. These studies determine how much developers will have to pay for upgrades to allow their projects to interconnect to the grid and deliver power. 

“Studies are taking four or five years in some cases,” FERC Commissioner Willie Phillips said at this month’s meeting between FERC and members of the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). ​“This is simply untenable.” 

Politico:

In the Midwest, early coal plant retirements and a lack of replacement power threaten to create a precarious gap between supply and demand as temperatures rise going into June. And aging coal and gas-fired plants across the West risk being forced to reduce their output or shut down entirely as extreme heat and drought conditions threaten their access to water and disrupt required maintenance.

Meanwhile, natural gas prices are expected to skyrocket. Coupled with high demand for power as temperatures spike, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission predicts electricity prices could rise by as much as 233 percent over last summer’s power prices.

Regulators know these issues are leading to an escalation in the risk of widespread and expensive outages, but are divided about how to ensure systems in these regions can reliably provide power this summer and going forward.

“Everybody’s got a good sense of where we want to go in terms of decarbonizing the fleet, and we are moving in that direction,” said John Bear, CEO of the Midcontinent Independent System Operator, which stretches from Minnesota to Louisiana. “Unfortunately we’re moving in that direction quite quickly and I’m worried about the transition.” 

The Midwest region that he oversees faces the highest risk of reliability issues this summer, according to a recent report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation.

While waiting for new technologies such as battery storage to become commercially available, the system continues to add intermittent renewable generation to its fleet, but it is retiring existing fossil fuel units more quickly,Bear said during a press briefing earlier this month hosted by the U.S. Energy Association. 

This summer’s anticipated tight grid conditions are just the tip of the iceberg as weather grows increasingly unpredictable and the U.S. aims to electrify more high-emitting sectors of the economy — eventually leading to even more demand on the aging power system. Proving the grid can handle periods of high stress in the immediate term is essential to achieving the Biden administration’s longer goal of decarbonizing the power sector by 2035 and the economy by 2050 — and avoiding the worst impacts of climate change that will put further stress on the power system.

The next few years are a crucial bottleneck for clean energy. People see new wind turbines and solar farms going up, and rightly or wrongly, if there are hiccups in the grid, a lot of folks, with a big push from bad actors in the media, could jump to the “green new deal doesn’t work”.
Massive analysis in Canary Media, short excerpts above and below, gives an idea of the magnitude of the problem. I’ll be re-reading this for days to understand – recommended.

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New Research: Atmospheric Rivers Impacting Greenland Ice

Video above from Jason Box discusses new published research examining a stunning heat and rain event that took place in Greenland last August. Rain was recorded for the first time at Summit Station, the ice sheet’s highest elevation.

European Space Agency:

For the first time ever recorded, in the late summer of 2021, rain fell on the high central region of the Greenland ice sheet. This extraordinary event was followed by the surface snow and ice melting rapidly. Researchers now understand exactly what went on in those fateful summer days and what we can learn from it.

The never-before-seen rainfall, on 14 August 2021, made headlines around the world. The upper-most parts of Greenland’s enormous ice cap used to be too cold for anything other than snow to fall, but not anymore.

What caused this extreme rainfall and how did it affect the ice?

Researchers from the Department of Glaciology and Climate at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS) in collaboration with colleagues from France and Switzerland have scrutinised these questions and come up with the answers.

It didn’t only rain at Summit Camp – rain was measured by new automatic weather stations placed across the ice sheet by GEUS’ ice-sheet monitoring projects PROMICE and GC-Net.

Studying detailed data from these stations alongside measurements of surface reflectivity, or albedo, from the Copernicus Sentinel-3 satellite mission and information on atmospheric circulation patterns, the researchers discovered that the rain had been preceded by a heatwave at a time of year when seasonal melting is usually slowing down.

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Returning to Greenland

Isunnguata Sermia

After a 3 season hiatus, I’ll be heading back to Greenland next month.
My last planned trip to the Arctic, which was to have been in Svalbard, was cancelled in March of 2020, collateral damage of the Covid shutdown.
That left me with some significant flight credits that were only going to be good to the end of this year, as well as some remaining funds that needed to be used.

I reached out a few months ago to scientists I have worked with in the past, to see if anyone had any planned activities, and could I tag along? A former colleague in the Dark Snow Project from 2013 and 2014 responded.

Marek Stibal, now of Charles University in Prague, has been working to sample methane releases from melting glaciers, was stoked to have me come along, and I’ve managed to secure the (fingers crossed) flights and accommodations to make things work.

The article here is from 2020, so may not be exactly descriptive of what will be happening this summer – but we will be looking for methane releases from an outlet glacier, Isunnguata Sermia, which is short chopper ride north of Kangerlussuag, a place well known to scientists.

Iforum-Charles University Online magazine:

“I have actually never done anything else,” is how Marek Stibal, who has been studying biological processes in glacial ecosystems for almost 20 years, sums up his career as a scientist. Stibal, from the Faculty of Science at Charles University is the co-author of a study published in Nature that brought evidence of the release of methane from the melting Greenland Ice Sheet during the summer period.

Further research of biological processes under the ice sheet have been made possible by an ERC CZ Consolidator Grant worth CZK 58 million.

As the scientist admits, this will be the greatest challenge he has ever faced. At the same time, there are plenty of reasons to be excited: the boost in funding means he will be able to hire the best possible colleagues for his team. The project will start on 1 July 2020.

Kilometre-deep boreholes

The project will be split into several phases: during the first, six sections of the western margin of the Greenland Ice Sheet will be mapped for methane release. To be able to answer fundamental questions regarding the release of greenhouse gases, he and colleagues will need to obtain samples of undisturbed subglacial sediments. That means taking samples not only from easily accessible areas at the margin of the ice sheet which have been used for research so far, but from places where sediments are not affected, for example, by the presence of oxygen.

“It is this sampling that is potentially going to be the most interesting part of the research,” says Stibal, adding “we will have to get through a layer of ice that in some places is up to a kilometre thick. Due to the demands of the drilling process, this is where we face the greatest risks and have to take the greatest care, but we will at least give it a try”. If the scientists succeed in getting the samples needed, the field phase will be followed by laboratory work with incubation experiments, and computer modelling.

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Have We Reached Peak Combustion Vehicle?

Bloomberg:

BloombergNEF published its annual long-term electric vehicle outlook today, a deep look at the future on two, three, four and more wheels. The trends are clear: Despite the challenges of a pandemic, supply-chain crunches and trouble sourcing critical minerals, electric vehicles are eating into the transportation system and taking bigger bites every year.

Before we jump into the future, it’s worth mentioning the present state of EVs. At the end of this year, there will be more than 27 million electric passenger vehicles on the road out of a global fleet of more than 1 billion. There are currently fewer than 2 million electric buses and commercial vehicles plying streets worldwide.

There are also just short of 300 million electric two- and three-wheelers — the scooters, trikes and tuk-tuks that dominate roads in Asia. Electrifying every one of these segments contributes to reducing global oil consumption. Today, it’s these smallest vehicles that are denting oil demand most, although not enough to make global oil consumption fall, at least yet.

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