Month: August 2022

Carbon Brief:

A UK government auction has secured a record 11 gigawatts (GW) of new renewable energy capacity that will generate electricity nine times more cheaply than current gas prices.

The projects are all due to start operating within the next five years up to 2026/27 and have agreed to generate electricity for an average price of £48 per megawatt hour (MWh) in today’s money. This is nine times cheaper than the £446/MWh current cost of running gas-fired power stations.

Most of the new capacity – some 7GW – will be offshore wind. Notably, for the first time, these projects were cheaper than the 1.5GW of onshore wind or 2.2GW of solar.

Once the pre-approved projects are built, Carbon Brief estimates they will generate 45 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, enough to meet around 14% of current UK demand.

Analysts said they would also save consumers an estimated £1.5bn per year in the late 2020s and cut annual average bills by £58, with most of the projects effectively subsidy-free.

This is the UK’s fourth biannual “contracts for difference” (CfD) auction round (AR4). As well as seeing record-low prices, with 11GW of capacity secured, it is also by far the largest.

The first round in 2015 awarded contracts to 2GW of capacity. This rose to 3GW in the 2017 second round, where offshore wind became cheaper than new gas plants.

The 2019 third round contracted 6GW of capacity, including the first subsidy-free offshore windfarms, with prices below those expected on the open market.

Future rounds will take place every year.

This is expensive, y’all. https://t.co/zCuHph4osY

— Michael E. Webber (@MichaelEWebber) August 25, 2022

Above, Press conference this week following “1000 year rain” event in Dallas, TX, on the heels of record heat, drought, and wildfire which challenged the state’s grid and infrastructure, and are a continuing pattern.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott also continues his pattern of not being able to acknowledge reality, much less level with constituents about what is going on.
The behavior is generic to a dysfunctional Republican Party – along the line of “Yeah, Dad’s making child porn in the basement and we all know it but we never talk about it…”

Below, this comes on the heels of the Governor’s dissembling on May’s hideous Uvalde shooting, and bald-faced lying to a Fox News audience about the causes of last year’s Valentine’s Day blackout.

Continue reading ““Can You Even Say Climate Change?” – Texas Governor’s Dallas Disaster Dysfuntion”

New York Times:

As a punishing drought grips parts of the world this summer, bodies of water have been drying up, exposing submerged World War II relics in Europe, several sets of human remains at Lake Mead outside Las Vegas, and even an entire village in Spain.

The latest find as water levels fall: dinosaur tracks in Texas.

Severe drought conditions at Dinosaur Valley State Park, about 60 miles southwest of Fort Worth, exposed dinosaur tracks from around 113 million years ago that were previously hidden underneath the Paluxy River, according to Stephanie Garcia, a spokeswoman for the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. The tracks, which were discovered this month, belong to Acrocanthosaurus, which are theropods, or bipedal dinosaurs with three toes and claws on each limb.

The dinosaur would have stood 15 feet tall and weighed close to seven tons as an adult. They would have left their tracks in sediment that hardened into what is now limestone, researchers say.

Tick, Tick, Tick..

Above, interview with Neal Dingmann, Truist Securities managing director of energy research, predicting a “super spike” this winter.
This is rocket fuel for the energy transition.

Wall Street Journal:

The 14-year highs reached this week by U.S. natural-gas futures show the unceasing demand for U.S. shale gas across the Atlantic—and likely point to rising prices and market volatility ahead. 

The latest price spike came in response to Russia’s plans to shut down one of Europe’s main fuel arteries for a few days at the end of the month. The closure announced Friday is either the latest episode of unplanned maintenance along the vital Nord Stream gas pipeline or an act of economic warfare on Russia’s part in retaliation for Western Europe’s support for Ukraine.

Prices were climbing again Tuesday before a major U.S. gas exporter said that its fire-damaged plant in Texas would restart later than expected and leave a lot of gas in the domestic market that would otherwise be sold overseas.

Futures for September delivery dropped from a fresh high of $10.028 per million British thermal units to end at $9.193, which is still more than twice the price a year ago. Futures for delivery this winter are even more expensive.

Surging prices in Europe, weather that remains hotter than normal in much of the country and the heart of hurricane season, when storms can knock out production platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, threaten to send prices higher, analysts and traders say.

“Virtually all of our fundamental and technical indicators continue to flash green lights toward higher price levels,” trading firm Ritterbusch & Associates told clients on Monday, predicting that near-term prices could climb to as high as $11.90. 

The last time natural-gas prices were so high was back before the shale-drilling boom flooded the domestic market with cheap gas and the U.S. flipped from importing the power-plant fuel to becoming the world’s leading exporter.

Normally this time of year, prices ease into the mild weather of autumn, encouraging producers and traders to store gas in underground caverns until winter, when demand and prices are usually at their highest.

This year, though, brisk exports, the electricity demand associated with some of the hottest and driest weather on record and sluggish production growth have kept U.S. natural-gas supplies from swelling into heating season. 

The U.S. Energy Information Administration last week reported an unseasonably meager injection into storage facilities that enlarged to 12.7% the deficit to typical inventory levels for this time of year.

“We are beginning to see a lag in storage builds that could lead to a precarious situation during the draw season in the event of a harsher-than-expected winter,” said Neal Dingmann, an energy equities analyst at Truist Securities. “There is potential for a winter U.S. superspike.”

Continue reading ““Super Spike”: Gas Prices Set To Soar”

I’ve been talking to experts for a series of reports on methane and its role in climate warming – this is the first.

Bob Henson for Yale Climate Connections:

Yet another urban center has been seemingly laser-targeted with extraordinary cloudbursts in this strange U.S. summer of drought and flood. A series of “training” storms – well predicted by forecast models two days in advance – dropped torrential rain across the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex from Sunday evening into midday Monday, August 20-21. At least one death was reported as of early Tuesday.

As discussed in a Saturday post at this site, the ingredients included a weak east-to-west frontal zone that straddled the DFW area, upper-level impulses traversing the front from west to east, and huge volumes of moisture drawn into northern Texas from the remnants of Potential Tropical Cyclone 4.

At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, the metro area’s main climate observing site, the total of 9.19 inches from 3 p.m. CDT Sunday to 3 p.m. Monday was the second heaviest on record for any 24-hour span, topped only by 9.57″ on September 4-5, 1932.

By itself, Monday was the metro area’s wettest day ever recorded in August, with 5.66″ swamping the 4.28″ observed on August 28, 1946. Official recordkeeping for the DFW area began in 1898.

Two other local airports notched similar totals from Sunday to Monday, according to Matt Moreland (National Weather Service/Southern Region Headquarters):

Fort Worth Meacham Field:  9.56“

Dallas Love Field:  9.14“

Even heavier totals were observed just east and south of downtown Dallas, on par with amounts one might expect in such a short period only about once every 1,000 years. The highest reported as of Monday night was 15.16″ at a gauge within the Dallas Area Flood Alert System located at White Rock Creek and Scyene Road. At least two CoCoRaHSstations, which typically report once each morning, recorded more than a foot of rain for the entire event, including 12.42″ near Mesquite and 12.31″ just northeast of downtown Dallas.

Mathew Cappuci in Washington Post:

What happened in the Dallas area came after the city and 29 percent of the state were gripped in a top-tier “exceptional” drought that impacted crops and drove water shortages. Some farmers were forced to thin their herds in a process called “culling,” according to the U.S. Drought Monitor. DFW International Airport was 11.11 inches behind for rainfall since Jan. 1.

Then Monday became the airport’s wettest calendar day on record.

The extreme rainfall in Dallas was a “1,000-year rain event,” an episode of flooding that has just a 0.1 percent probability of happening in any given year. It joins the company of 1,000-year rain events that struck Kentucky, St. Louis, eastern Illinois and Death Valley, Calif., since the end of July — all of which were experiencing abnormally dry conditions or in a severe drought beforehand.

Droughts can often make flooding worse. Droughts kill plants and leaves the ground bare, reducing soil absorption. They also harden top soils, which makes it easier for water to run off. The extremely dry ground, combined with the rapid rainfall, can trigger widespread flooding.

While no single weather event is caused by mankind’s influence on the atmosphere, the weather facing the nation bears the fingerprint of a warming world. While it seems contradictory, both drought and flooding are closely tied to human-driven warming and are altering our environment and how we interact with it.

We are witnessing firsthand the effects of ordinary weather events — a product of chaotic randomness and natural variability — supercharged by climate change.

Continue reading “Dallas Deluge Part of USA’s Summer of Floods”

DeutsheWelle:

German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attended an economic conference in Toronto on Tuesday. They were then expected to travel to Newfoundland to sign deals for Germany to import green hydrogen from Canada.

The trip to Canada, Scholz’s first as chancellor, comes as Germany looks for ways to reduce its reliance on Russian gas.

At a press briefing in Toronto Tuesday, Scholz said Canada was the partner of choice, as Germany moves away from Russian energy imports at “warp speed.”

“Your country has almost boundless potential to become a superpower in sustainable energy and sustainable resource production,” he said.

The pair also said they would discuss the possibility of Germany buying Canadian liquefied natural gas (LNG).

To that end, Trudeau said on Monday that “we are looking at every possible different way to help out the German people and Europeans in the short term as they face a real challenge this coming winter.”

“Canada will play a very, very central role in the development of green hydrogen,” Scholz said at the same joint press conference. “That’s why we’re very happy that we can also take this opportunity to expand our partnership in this field.”

Why didn’t I think of this?

Guardian:

The next generation of wind turbine blades could be recycled into gummy bears at the end of their service, scientists have said.

Researchers at Michigan State University have made a composite resin for the blades by combining glass fibres with a plant-derived polymer and a synthetic one. Once the blades have reached the end of their lifespan the materials can be broken down and recycled to make new products including turbine blades – and chewy sweets.

Wind power is one of the dominant forms of renewable energy. However, turbine blades, usually made of fibreglass, can be as long as half a football field and cause problems with disposal, with many discarded in landfills when they reach the end of their use cycle.

To combat the waste, researchers designed a new form of resin. Digesting the resin in an alkaline solution produced potassium lactate, which can be purified and made into sweets and sports drinks.

“We recovered food-grade potassium lactate and used it to make gummy bear candies, which I ate,” said John Dorgan, one of the authors of the paper.

The alkaline digestion also released poly(methyl methacrylate), or PMMA, a common acrylic material used in windows and car taillights.

On eating gummy bears that are derived from a wind turbine, Dorgan says “a carbon atom derived from a plant, like corn or grass, is no different from a carbon atom that came from a fossil fuel. It’s all part of the global carbon cycle, and we’ve shown that we can go from biomass in the field to durable plastic materials and back to foodstuffs.”

He added: “The beauty of our resin system is that at the end of its use cycle, we can dissolve it, and that releases it from whatever matrix it’s in so that it can be used over and over again in an infinite loop. That’s the goal of the circular economy.”