Month: March 2023

Spoiler, Mainers and Scandanavians say yes.

New York Times:

Many heat pumps that are built for cold climates do have hefty upfront price tags. To soften the blow, a federal tax credit from last year’s climate and tax law can cover 30 percent of the costs of purchase and installation, up to $2,000.

As they’ve grown in popularity, heat pumps have increasingly been the subject of misconception and, at times, misinformation. Fossil-fuel industry groups have been the origin of many exaggerated and misleading claims, including the assertion that they don’t work in regions with cold climates and are likely to fail in freezing weather.

While heat pumps do become less efficient in subzero temperatures, many models still operate close to normally in temperatures down to minus 13 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 24 Celsius. Some of the latest models are even more efficient, and many “cold” countries, like Norway, Sweden and Finland, are increasingly embracing heat pumps.

“We’re starting to see evidence that the myth has been kept alive by people with an entrenched interest in avoiding the adoption of heat pumps,” Dr. Calisch said.

There are additional steps homeowners can take to make the most of their heat pumps, like sealing air leaks and drafts and improving insulation, said Troy Moon, the sustainability director for the city of Portland, Maine. Homeowners can also keep their existing furnaces as backup for the coldest days of the year, he said.

Washington Post:

VAN BUREN, Maine — The video starts with a Maine radio show host dressed in a bright-red jumpsuit walking through the snow to a stranger’s door and delighting her with an offer of free heating oil. “My name’s Blake, we’re from Maine Energy Facts, and we want to fill up your oil — it’s on us!” he says at another stop, where a woman thanks him profusely as she cradles her baby.

Funded by a heating oil industry group, the “Fuel Your Love” promotional campaign has a feel-good touch, but it directs viewers to a website dispensing home heating advice that is peppered with overwhelmingly negative, and sometimes misleading, claims about electric-powered heat pumps, saying they “are simply not ideal for climates like ours.”

Continue reading “Can Heat Pumps Hack the Cold?”

More signs of sun setting on oil industry, at least in its current form.

New York Times:

Emma McConville was thrilled when she landed a job as a geologist at Exxon Mobil in 2017. She was assigned to work on one of the company’s most exciting and lucrative projects, a giant oil field off Guyana.

But after oil prices collapsed during the pandemic, she was laid off on a video call at the end of 2020. “I probably blacked out halfway,” Ms. McConville recalled.

Her shock was short-lived. Just four months later, she landed a job with Fervo, a young Houston company that aims to tap geothermal energy under the Earth’s surface. Today she manages the design of two Fervo projects in Nevada and Utah, and earns more than she did at Exxon.

“Covid allowed me to pivot,” she said. “Covid was an impetus for renewables, not just for me but for many of my colleagues.”

Oil and gas companies laid off roughly 160,000 workers in 2020, and they maintained tight budgets and hired cautiously over the last two years. But many renewable businesses expanded rapidly after the early shock of the pandemic faded, snapping up geologists, engineers and other workers from the likes of Exxon and Chevron. Half of Fervo’s 38 employees come from fossil fuel companies, including BP, Hess and Chesapeake Energy.

Executives and workers in energy hubs in Houston, Dallas and other places say steady streams of people are moving from fossil fuel to renewable energy jobs. It’s hard to track such movements in employment statistics, but the overall numbers suggest such career moves are becoming more common. Oil, gas and coal employment has not recovered to its prepandemic levels. But the number of jobs in renewable energy, including solar, wind, geothermal and battery businesses, is rising.

The oil and gas industry had roughly 700,000 fewer workers last year than six years earlier, a decline of over 20 percent. Much of that drop had to do with the slowing of the shale drilling boom and greater automation. By comparison, employment in wind energy grew nearly 20 percent from 2016 to 2021, to more than 113,000 workers.

In more than a dozen interviews, energy workers and executives said they had switched to renewable energy because they felt that the oil and gas industry’s best days were behind it. Others said they were no longer willing to tolerate the extreme ups and downs of oil and gas prices, and the accompanying cycle of rapid hiring followed by crushing layoffs. Many said concerns about climate change, which is primarily caused by the burning of fossil fuels, were a factor in their decision.

New Orleans Legal Examiner:

Finally, after extensive research and planning, and under the Biden Administration’s leadership, BOEM announced the location of two wind energy areas in the Gulf of Mexico in October. The larger of the two will be located off the coast of Galveston, Texas, approximately 24 nautical miles from land in an area of almost 510,000 acres, and will provide electricity to around 2.1 million homes. The second wind farm in the Gulf will be approximately 56 nautical miles off the coast of Lake Charles, Louisiana, in an area of almost 175,000 acres. While smaller, it will still be able to power over 740,000 homes.

Given Louisiana already has a large community of offshore gas and oil workers whose skills can be largely transferred to turbine construction and maintenance, the state is in a good position to move forward with offshore wind farms. With wind lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico opening in 2025, anywhere from 7,300 to 14,700 offshore construction jobs and up to 2,800 permanent positions are expected.

Continue reading “Oil Companies Bleeding Young Talent to Renewables”

Holland Sentinel (Michigan):

A second effort to secure funding for the reopening of the Palisades Nuclear Power Plant has been officially submitted.

Holtec International, which purchased Palisades shortly after it closed in 2022, has filed an application for funding through the U.S. Department of Energy to reopen the plant. 

“Holtec filed an application for funding through the U.S. Department of Energy to support the repowering of Palisades,” Nick Culp, senior manager of government affairs and communications at Holtec, wrote in an email to The Sentinel. “We are encouraged by the broad-based public support we have received from the local community and State of Michigan who recognize the benefits of this important effort. 

“The restart of Palisades not only supports jobs and the regional economy but provides a vital source of safe and reliable baseload generation for Michigan families and businesses.”

The plant closed in May 2022 after more than 50 years in operation. In late June, it was sold to Holtec for decommissioning. Holtec applied for federal Civil Nuclear Credit funding in early July to reopen the plant. The application was made public in September, with support from Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, but was denied in mid-November.

In December, Holtec announced it would apply for the second round of CNC funding when the application window opened. However, Holtec is taking a different route with its second attempt at funding. 

Rather than applying through the CNC program, the company applied for funds from the U.S. Department of Energy loan office.

Holtec has acknowledged there will be “a number of hurdles” to reopening the plant even if funding is secured. Those include financial commitment from the state, procuring a power purchasing agreement, upgrading the switchyard, partnering with a licensed operator for the restart, rehiring qualified and trained staff and maintenance and delayed capital improvements of the facility — the plant closed earlier than planned due to failure of a control rod drive seal.

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The control rod problems at Palisades are long standing. Although the plant has, in recent years, performed relatively well, it has had a spotty history, particularly in the earliest years of operation.

NPR Michigan Radio 2012:

This is the second time this year Palisades shut down to fix a leak related to these control rod drives. Back in January, they replaced some seals on the rods that were worn out.

But the Union of Concerned Scientists notes control rod problems at Palisades that go back decades.

Continue reading “Restarting a Restart at Michigan Nuclear Plant”

It’s not just right wing nut jobs slowing clean energy development, there are a lot of structural barriers and challenges flowing from Covid, inflation, and supply chains.

Wall Street Journal:

Even as developers plan an unprecedented number of grid-scale wind and solar installations, project construction is plummeting across the U.S.

Despite billions of dollars in federal tax credits up for grabs and investors eager to fund clean energy projects, the pace of development has ground to a crawl and many renewables plans face an uncertain path to completion. Supply-chain snags, long waits to connect to the grid and challenging regulatory and political environments across the country are contributing to the slowdown, analysts and companies say.

New wind installations plunged 77.5% in the third quarter of 2022 versus the same period the year before, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence. New utility-scale solar installations likely fell 40% in 2022 compared with 2021, according to a report from the Solar Energy Industries Association and research firm Wood Mackenzie.

The decline belies enormous demand for renewable projects. The industry is ready to launch a would-be building spree after last year’s spending and climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act, extended and increased tax credits for wind and solar projects and introduced new incentives for green hydrogen and battery storage for the electric grid. The success of the IRA, the Biden administration’s climate targets and many state decarbonization plans hinge on adding massive amounts of renewable energy into the grid.

More than $40 billion in wind, solar and battery projects were announced in three months late last year—as much as the total clean-energy investment for all of 2021, according to the industry group American Clean Power Association. Large corporations with climate targets are among the most eager buyers of green power, contracting for enough wind and solar capacity last year to power more than 1,000 data centers.

“Ten years from now there’s going to be a huge shift in the landscape where there is going to be a significant amount of electricity coming from renewables,” said Matt Birchby, president of renewable-project developer and owner Swift Current Energy LLC. “But getting from A to B is inherently going to be messy.”

Supply-chain and trade issues have complicated planning. Average lead times for securing high voltage equipment have risen from 30 weeks to more than 70, Mr. Birchby said. 

Sourcing solar panels has turned into the stuff of spy stories as companies try to avoid running afoul of trade regulations and navigate risks and complications of global shipping. “You almost feel like you’re in a Tom Clancy novel,” Mr. Birchby said. Swift Current Energy has contracted to purchase nearly $1 billion in American-made solar panels, he said.

Continue reading “Stiff Headwinds Slow Wind, Solar Development”

Matt Schlapp: “When God wants there to be a flood, he makes a flood. When God wants there to be extreme temperatures, that flows from this divine nature system that he setup.” pic.twitter.com/w3MzlzrH5O

— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes) March 1, 2023

High profile Republican leader frequent (until recently) Fox News talker, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC), and now alleged sexual predator Matt Schlapp displays his sophisticated understanding of physics.

E&E News:

At a recent House hearing, two first-term Republicans took the mics after their more senior GOP colleagues had finished talking about federal permitting.

The lawmakers’ districts are polar opposites. Their backgrounds seem wildly different. But their message was the same: Democrats use climate policies as a form of punishment.

“It’s clear that the Biden administration and radical left want to impoverish Americans,” Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) said this month at a hearing of the Natural Resources Committee.

The next lawmaker to speak, Rep. Harriet Hageman (R-Wyo.), hammered a similar point: “I believe that there is a special place in hell for those people who push policies that are intended to increase the cost of housing, food and energy.”

Climate politics are becoming a main course for Republican culture warriors. But the attacks aren’t just coming from old, white men. In a party seeking to diversify its ranks, some of the most aggressive climate criticism has come from the GOP’s freshest faces.

The hostility by Republican backbenchers toward broad elements of climate action is challenging long-held assumptions among political observers that Republicans would turn toward the issue as climate impacts worsen, as opportunities for green jobs spread and as the electorate sheds older voters for younger ones.

Instead, some climate-minded Republicans say, their party’s climate positions remain in the thrall of former President Donald Trump. Some of the loudest opponents of the clean energy transition took office after the 2016 election. And those junior members won their first primaries by forcefully echoing Trump, while the moderates who had once pulled the 2008-era GOP toward addressing climate change are now mostly gone or sidelined.

“It’s like civil rights — two steps forward, one step back,” said Bob Inglis, a former Republican lawmaker from South Carolina who lost his seat in 2010 after pushing his party to address climate change.

With little serious legislating expected under divided government, the next two years will offer Republicans the chance to coalesce around a common energy and climate agenda, much as Democrats did between winning a House majority in 2018 and taking full government control in 2021.

Some top Republicans have sought to lower the temperature around climate — sensing political danger in alienating relatively climate-conscious groups such as suburban women and business leaders, or angling for potential bipartisan policies.

Continue reading “Trumpian Climate Denial Keeps Grip on GOP”

Above, early Jack Kirby illustration for Journey into Mystery number 81, June, 1962.

A friend (who I hope won’t mind me taking liberties) writes:

Just for laughs and giggles I asked ChatGPT (https://chat.openai.com/chat) to weigh in about chronic climate skepticism, and the best strategies to deploy to accelerate acceptance and action. The AI bot’s answer was intriguing:

Me: If the goal is to get skeptics to change their minds and acknowledge climate change, what is the best strategy?

ChatGPT: Changing someone’s mind about climate change can be a difficult task, particularly if they have deeply held beliefs and opinions on the topic. However, there are several strategies that may be effective in convincing skeptics to acknowledge climate change:

1. Focus on shared values: Find common ground with the skeptic and frame climate change as an issue that affects everyone’s well-being, such as public health, national security, or economic prosperity.
2. Use trusted messengers: Research shows that people are more likely to trust and be persuaded by individuals or groups they perceive as having similar backgrounds, beliefs, or identities. Therefore, it may be more effective to use trusted messengers, such as community leaders, religious figures, or fellow conservatives, to communicate the importance of acknowledging climate change.
3. Present evidence in a clear and concise manner: Avoid using technical jargon or overwhelming the skeptic with a lot of data. Instead, present the evidence for climate change in a simple, straightforward manner that they can easily understand and relate to.
4. Appeal to emotions: Climate change is often seen as a distant and abstract threat. Therefore, it may be more effective to use emotional appeals, such as personal stories or images of the impacts of climate change, to make it feel more tangible and urgent.
5. Avoid politicizing the issue: Climate change has become a highly polarized and politicized issue in some circles. Therefore, it may be more effective to avoid framing the issue in political terms and instead focus on the scientific evidence and the practical solutions that can be taken to address it.

In summary, the best strategy for convincing skeptics to acknowledge climate change is to focus on shared values, use trusted messengers, present evidence clearly, appeal to emotions, and avoid politicizing the issue. It may also require patience, persistence, and empathy to build trust and engage in constructive dialogue.

A helpful recap, but I was struck by the “fellow conservative” quip under #2. Where did that come from? That’s quite a political assumption, one that no longer rings true personally, after the fossil-fuel antics of the previous administration, and climate denial and foot-dragging by the GOP over many decades. That has been maddening to watch.

ChatGPT: “It may require patience”. No kidding! Understatement of the 21st century.

Which inspired another friend to try the opposite, producing an amusing, and maybe hopeful, result.

Continue reading “Ask the AI on Climate Denial”

Marine Mammal Commission:

Despite several reports in the media, there is no evidence to link these strandings to offshore wind energy development. For more information on offshore energy development and whales, please see this fact sheet produced by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management.

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management:

How does BOEM ensure that whales are protected from offshore wind leasing and development activities?
BOEM requires strict protective measures for when the offshore wind industry conducts activities offshore, including:

• Exclusion zones around vessels. Operators must establish an “acoustic exclusion zone” for geophysical surveys, so that the zone is clear of any marine mammals and sea turtles for a certain amount of time before acoustic sound sources can be operated.
• Visual monitoring by trained third-party, independent Protected Species Observers. Protected Species Observers are trained professionals that look for marine mammals so that the possibility of vessel strikes is minimized and to shut down any sound sources if marine mammals are detected within a certain distance.
• Independent reporting by Protected Species Observers during geophysical surveys. Any interactions with protected species are immediately reported to NOAA Fisheries and BOEM.

Do offshore wind vessels use seismic airguns for their surveys? Deep penetration seismic airgun surveys are not used for offshore wind energy projects. These types of surveys rely on high-energy sound pulses aimed at penetrating deep (thousands of meters) into the seafloor to map deep geological features, such as oil and gas deposits.

New York Times:

Scientists believe the mortality rate may be tied to an unlikely confluence of factors.

The population of humpbacks, hunted legally until 1985, has rebounded, thanks in part to decades of efforts to clean the Atlantic Ocean and heavily polluted tributaries like the Hudson River. As the climate changes and oceans warm, whales and a favored prey, menhaden, are migrating and feeding in new locations, often closer to shore.

Online pandemic buying habits are also fueling a record-setting surge in cargo shipments that last year made ports in New York and New Jersey the nation’s busiest. Much of the merchandise is now toted on far bigger ships — some of which have altered their routes to help alleviate the supply-chain chaos that last year left some store shelves bare.

As a result, more whales appear to have found themselves in the direct path of more ships.

“When the whales are in these channels,” said Paul Sieswerda, executive director of Gotham Whale, a New York City-based whale research group, “you have to cross your fingers and hope there are no collisions.”

This winter’s quick succession of stranded whales also coincides with work being done in advance of the installation of roughly a dozen large offshore wind farms from Massachusetts to Virginia. Opponents of offshore wind have said that the sonar used by energy companies to map the ocean floor or the noise from seabed rock sampling might be contributing to the whale deaths, though NOAA and the Marine Mammal Commission say there is no evidence that this is true.

The humpback whale found on Feb. 13 in Manasquan, N.J., had been spotted about a month earlier feeding in the Raritan Bay, 30 miles from where it washed ashore.

Sheila Dean’s phone at the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in Brigantine, N.J., rang that day, as it often does when dead whales turn up. It had been an exceptionally busy few weeks for Ms. Dean, who joined the center in 1978 after years working as a sea lion and dolphin trainer on Atlantic City’s famed Steel Pier.

She and a team of 10 volunteers arrived on the beach the next morning and found a whale known by her markings as NYC0298.

There is no way to X-ray a creature as large as a school bus on a beach, so researchers check for injuries manually, pulling back thick layers of blubber and reaching up to a foot into the body cavity to look for parasites, scarring or bruises, a telltale sign of a vessel strike. The work is strenuous, and the smell is foul.

“Our job is to find out what is killing them,” Ms. Dean said.

On Feb. 17, another volunteer necropsy team was called to the Rockaways, in Queens, to investigate the death of the minke found with deep propeller gashes in its side.

Harry Wallace, chief of the Unkechaug Nation, a Native American tribe from Long Island, was there, too. He performed a burial service after the whale sleuths had finished their work.

After the prayer, a front-end loader pushed the minke into a deep hole in the beach and covered the carcass with sand — the method used to dispose of most beached whales. The animals are buried deep enough to avoid a stench; over time, extra sand is often needed to fill in the divot as the whale decomposes and the grave settles.

“It’s our responsibility to recognize and remind that all living things have a spirit,” Chief Wallace said after the ceremony.

Continue reading “No Evidence for Wind vs Whale Connection”

Total area occupied by wind turbines and solar photovoltaic infrastructure (solid colored boxes) is roughly equal to the land occupied by railroads. (Map courtesy of NREL)

New Study for NREL helmed by Paul Denholm, who I have interviewed in the past.

Steve Clemmer for Union of Concerned Scientists:

Critics of wind and solar routinely raise concerns about how much land would be required to decarbonize the US power sector. Fortunately, the answer is relatively little. A recent National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) study shows that it would take less than 1 percent of the land in the Lower 48—that’s an area comparable to or even smaller than the fossil fuel industry’s current footprint. And when wind and solar projects are responsibly sited, the environmental and public health impacts would be far less harmful than those from extracting, producing and burning fossil fuels.

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NREL found that the land area directly occupied by wind and solar infrastructure by 2035 would make up less than 1 percent of the land in 94 percent of the country and less than or equal to 7 percent of total land area in just three states. A key reason why a relatively small amount of land is needed is because only 2 percent of the total area within a wind farm is occupied by wind infrastructure, while the remaining 98 percent is available for agriculture, grazing or other uses. Offshore wind turbines also have a relatively small footprint and are able to use much larger turbines than land-based projects. Rooftop solar deployment, meanwhile, doesn’t require any land.

Of course, to deliver all this clean energy from wind-rich regions in the Midwest and Plains states to major load centers in the East will also require a lot of additional transmission lines. NREL found that total US transmission capacity would have to increase by 1.3 to 2.9 times current levels by 2035. This would require 1,400 to 10,100 miles of new high-capacity lines per year, assuming new construction began in 2026.

But the big news is NREL found that the total amount of land needed by 2035 to achieve our clean power goals with wind, solar and long-distance transmission lines (19,700 sq. mi) would be:

• equivalent to the land area currently occupied by railroads (18,500 sq. mi)
• less than half the area of active oil and gas leases (40,500 sq. mi)
• less than one-third of the area currently needed for ethanol production (59,500 sq. mi), and
• only slightly more than the historically disturbed land area for coal mining (13,100 sq. mi).

Plus, NREL’s main “All Options” scenario projects roughly 250,000 wind turbines in the United States, which is considerably less than the nation’s 1.5 million oil and gas wells.

Continue reading “NREL: How Much Land for Renewables?”

Reuters:

India is likely to experience heat waves between March and May, especially in the key wheat producing central and northern states, the weather office said on Tuesday, as the country recorded its highest ever maximum temperature in February.

A heat-wave for the second straight year could dent production of wheat, rapeseed and chickpeas, and complicate governments efforts to bring down food inflation.

Higher temperatures could also lift power consumption above supplies during the summer season.

“Enhanced probability of occurrence of heat wave during March to May season is likely over many regions of Central and adjoining Northwest India,” the India Meteorological Department (IMD) said in a statement.

In March, the crucial month for the maturity of winter-sown crops, above normal maximum temperatures are likely over most parts of the country except peninsular India, it said.