Month: April 2024

Jeff Berardelli shares the graph above:
Comparing March 2024 SST’s in the Tropical Atlantic with other active hurricane seasons. SST’s can change quickly – and we will still see changes as we head into hurricane season – but these years ultimately produced large numbers of storms. (Season named storm # on right).

Below, Michael Mann’s group at the University of Pennsylvania is now out with their well respected forecast for the coming hurricane season. It’s daunting.

Penn Today:

For more than a decade, climate scientist Michael Mann of School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania and colleagues have annually combed through historical weather data, reviewed current oceanic and atmospheric conditions, and applied computational modeling to forecast of coming hurricane seasons.

The team, comprising Shannon Christiansen, a senior research coordinator in the Mann Group, and Michael Kozar, a former graduate researcher in the Mann Research Group, today released their prediction for the 2024 North Atlantic season, which spans from June 1 to Nov. 30. They forecast an unprecedented 33 named tropical cyclones, potentially ranging between 27 and 39.

“We’ve seen many hyperactive seasons over the past decade, and in just about all cases, like our prediction for this year, the activity is substantially driven by ever-warmer conditions in the tropical Atlantic tied to large-scale warming,” says Mann, Presidential Distinguished Professor in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science and director of the Penn Center for Science, Sustainability and the Media.

Mann says the annual prediction originally started out as a scientific exercise. It began as an undergraduate research project that Michael Kozar, then a Pennsylvania State University student, was doing under Mann’s guidance to improve the predictions other groups were making through a more appropriate statistical framework.

Continue reading “New Hurricane Forecast is Highest Ever”

Fast Company:

Last Saturday, as 39 million Californians went about their daily lives—taking showers, doing laundry, or charging their electric cars—the whole state ran on 100% clean electricity for more than nine hours.

The same thing happened on Sunday, as the state was powered without fossil fuels for more than eight hours. It was the ninth straight day that solar, wind, hydropower, geothermal, and battery storage fully powered the electric grid for at least some portion of the time. Over the last six and a half weeks, that’s happened nearly every day. In some cases, it’s just for 15 minutes. But often it’s for hours at a time.

California first hit the milestone of running on 100% clean power in 2022, but it was only temporary. “In past years, it was only for one or two days, and not consecutively,” says Mark Jacobson, a Stanford professor who has been posting updates about the state’s grid each day on X. “And all of a sudden we’re having now 37 of the last 45 days, and the last nine days straight.”

There’s a caveat: California also has natural gas plants that keep running at low levels in case backup power is needed. Even when the state is producing more than enough renewable energy to cover all of its needs, it’s still exporting some gas power to other states. But it also exports solar power, helping make other grids cleaner. And it keeps getting closer to its overall goals for renewable energy. By 2030, the state plans to run on 60% renewable energy. It’s likely to hit that goal early. By 2045, the state plans to run on 100% zero-carbon energy, and Jacobson argues it’s technically possible to also accomplish that goal faster.

Continue reading “California’s Solar Roll Continues”

I posted recently on new research from Harvard Business School, indicating many Florida home insurers were financially shakier than generally thought, at least partly due to a lack of high standards for Insurance company ratings.
Florida homeowners who think they are insured by a solid company, might not be.

Bloomberg:

Seven property insurers in Florida went bankrupt in 2021 and 2022. The bankruptcies left thousands of homeowners scrambling to get new coverage, which often came with a big increase in cost. Worse, many had outstanding claims for hurricane damage that had not been addressed.

Jacqueline Ravelo, a Miami homeowner, was among them. Her roof was damaged by Hurricane Irma in 2017. Her insurance company, Avatar Property and Casualty, covered the cost of some repairs. But the roof continued to leak and mold grew inside the house, she said. Ravelo sued Avatar to compensate her for further repairs, which she said came to $50,000. When they were on the verge of settling, she said, the company went out of business.

Avatar and the six other companies that folded had something in common: They had all been rated A (“exceptional”) or higher by Demotech, Inc., an Ohio-based insurance ratings firm. (One of those insurers was also rated A- by competitor AM Best Co. Inc.)

Continue reading “More on Florida’s Insurance House of Cards”

Fusion: Just 30 Years away for the Last 50 years.
Or is it about to make some kind of leapfrog?

Reuters:

Private U.S. nuclear fusion company Helion Energy will provide Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab with electricity in about five years, the companies said on Wednesday, in the first such deal for the power source that fuels the sun but has been elusive on Earth.

Government labs and more than 30 companies are racing to generate power from fusion, which could one day help the world slash emissions linked to climate change. Unlike today’s fission reactors, it could generate power without producing long-lasting radioactive waste.

Fusion occurs when two light atoms such as hydrogen, heated to extreme temperatures, fuse into one heavier atom, releasing large amounts of energy. So far, earthly fusion reactions have been momentary and suck up more energy than they release, but companies have raised about $5 billion in private funding in the quest to achieve net energy gain.

Helion’s plant is expected to be online by 2028 and will target power generation of 50 megawatts or greater after a one-year ramp-up period, it said. One megawatt can supply up to about 1,000 U.S. homes on a typical day.

“Fifty megawatts is a big first step of commercial-scale fusion, and the revenue feeds right back into us developing more power plants and getting fusion out on the grid both in the United States and internationally as fast as possible,” David Kirtley, Washington state-based Helion’s founder and CEO, said in an interview.

Polaris, Helion’s seventh-generation machine, should come online next year and demonstrate electricity generation, using pulsed high-power magnet technologies to achieve fusion, Kirtley said. In 2021, Helion was the first private company to achieve 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) and the optimum temperature for fusion is about twice that, Kirtley said.
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Andrew Holland, head of the Fusion Industry Association, said nothing about fusion has been easy and that the power purchase contract likely had clauses regarding the timing of the delivery of electricity. But he said the deal shows trust is building.

“The business world is starting to understand that fusion is coming and perhaps sooner than a lot of people thought,” Holland said in an interview. “It’s a vote of confidence that Helion is on its way, as are other companies building their proof-of-concept machines now.”

Utility Dive:

Type One Energy and Commonwealth Fusion Systems both received multimillion-dollar commitments last year from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program. Six other fusion companies were included in the award, which could provide funding until 2028, depending on Congressional appropriations.

By then, Commonwealth Fusion Systems expects to have “first plasma,” or an initial fusion reaction, at a demonstration facility it’s building near Boston, Needham said. He said that could happen as early as 2026, with net energy to follow soon after. Commonwealth could deploy its first 400-MW commercial plant in the “early 2030s,” he said.

Continue reading “Could Fusion Beat Advanced Fission Reactors to Market?”

Inflation Reduction Act funding now coming available for boots on the ground solar policy.

Do we need AI?

American Nuclear Society:

Talen Energy announced its sale of a 960-megawatt data center campus to cloud service provider Amazon Web Services (AWS), a subsidiary of Amazon, for $650 million.

The data center, Cumulus Data Assets, sits on a 1,200-acre campus in Pennsylvania and is directly powered by the adjacent Susquehanna Steam Electric Station, which generates 2.5 gigawatts of power.

“We believe this is a transformative transaction with long term benefits,” said Mark “Mac” McFarland, Talen president and chief executive officer of Talen, on a Monday call with investors and media. As power demand continues to rise worldwide, “data centers are at the heart of that growth,” he added.

“Several years ago, Amazon set an ambitious goal to reach net-zero carbon by 2040—ten years ahead of the Paris Agreement. As part of that goal, we’re on a path to power our operations with 100 percent renewable energy by 2025—five years ahead of our original 2030 target,” an Amazon spokesperson said. “To supplement our wind and solar energy projects, which depend on weather conditions to generate energy, we’re also exploring new innovations and technologies and investing in other sources of clean, carbon-free energy. This agreement with Talen Energy for carbon-free energy is one project in that effort.”

BBC:

And the advent of artificial intelligence (AI), which requires far more processing power than standard computing, has put rocket boosters under the data centre world. 

His company has just built a huge new data centre in Portland, Oregon dedicated to AI. Just how different is this from an ordinary data centre?

“A normal data centre needs 32 megawatts of power flowing into the building. For an AI data centre it’s 80 megawatts,” says Mr Sharp.

AI systems are using all this extra electricity simply because they are doing so much more processing than standard computing. They are chewing through far more data.

Mr Sharp also points out that the entire web of technical support demanded by AI is greater. “You have five times more cabling, for instance.”

Continue reading “Do We Need Nuclear to Power AI?”

Really good, snappy and illustrative weather report from Jeff Berardelli at WFLA Tampa, showing how El Nino is giving way to La Nina – with some possible consequences.
Jeff Berardelli is really setting a standard here for weather reporting.

“It’s now reasonable to project that half of the electric grid will be powering the digital-Internet economy within the next decade.” – Peter Huber and Mark Mills, Forbes, “Dig More Coal, the PCs are Coming”, Forbes, May 31, 1999

There is general agreement that electricity demand is going to grow as we electrify home heating, transportation and industrial sectors.
In somewhat of a curve ball, there’s been a kerfuffle lately about unexpectedly rapid demand growth from Data centers, especially due to the breakout of AI applications.
A number of utilities have revealed plans to meet that demand by building a number of gas turbine generators, and that’s sparked some needed discussion. The controversy is especially intense in the Southeastern US, where Georgia Power, among others, has released a fossil-heavy IRP (Integrated Resource Plan).

Robinson Meyer in HeatMap:

Citing the return of load growth, utilities across the South are trying to go around normal regulatory channels and build a slew of new natural-gas-burning power plants. Across at least six states, utilities have already won — or are trying to win — permission from local governments to fast-track more than 10,000 megawatts of new gas-fired power plants so that they can meet the surge in demand.

These requests have popped up across the region, pushed by vertically integrated monopoly power companies. Georgia Power won a tentative agreement to build 1,400 new megawatts of gas capacity, Canary reported. In the Carolinas, Duke Energy has asked to build 9,000 megawatts of new gas capacity, triple what it previously requested. The Tennessee Valley Authority has plans to add 6,600 megawatts of new capacity to its grid.
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Utilities compete against each other to secure big-name customers — much like local governments compete with sweetheart tax deals — so when a utility asks regulators to build more capacity, it doesn’t reveal where potential power demand is coming from. (In other words, it doesn’t reveal who it believes will eventually buy that power.) A company might float plans to build the same data center or factory in multiple states to shop around for the best rates, which means the same underlying gigawatts of demand may be appearing in several different utilities’ resource plans at the same time. In other words, utilities are unlikely to actually see all of the demand they’re now projecting.

Even if we did know exactly how many gigawatts of new demand each utility would see, it’s almost impossible to say how much of it is coming from AI. Utilities don’t say how much of their future projected power demand will come from planned factories versus data centers. Nor do they say what each data center does and whether it trains AI (or mines Bitcoin, which remains a far bigger energy suck).

Continue reading “Electricity Demand will Rise, But How Much?”

Interesting discussion on the effects of El Nino vs La Nina on Tornado formation in the US. Going to be an interesting summer.

Just in time for the sequel to the classic “Twister’.

Below, Ryan Hall give some detail.

Continue reading “Tornado Season Ramps Up”

Losing the electric vehicle race will doom the United States to second class status for the coming century. On a level with vaccine denial in its sheer stupidity.

Reuters:

Republican attorneys general from 25 states on Thursday sued the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to block rules intended to reduce planet-warming emissions from cars and light trucks and encourage electric vehicle manufacturing, arguing the agency exceeded its legal authority.

The lawsuit challenging the regulations for passenger vehicles, finalized on March 20 by President Joe Biden’s administration, was filed by attorneys general from states led by Kentucky and West Virginia in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

The EPA rules aim to cut fleetwide tailpipe emissions for cars and light trucks by nearly 50% over 2026 levels in 2032, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 7.2 billion tons through 2055.

Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman said the rules would harm the American economy, threaten jobs and raise prices while undermining the U.S. electricity grid. Coleman also said there is very little consumer interest in electric vehicles in his state.

Republican state officials have said the rules amount to an attempt by the administration to transform the American passenger vehicle market improperly through strict rules that make it difficult for manufacturers to not go electric.

“The Biden administration is willing to sacrifice the American auto industry and its workers in service of its radical green agenda. We just aren’t buying it,” Coleman said.

West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey called the rules “legally flawed and unrealistic, to say the least.”

The EPA declined to comment.

The regulations are among the most significant environmental rules implemented under Biden, who has made tackling climate change a key pillar of his presidency. The EPA has forecast that between 35% and 56% of new vehicles sold between 2030 and 2032 would be electric under the rules – a range that reflected the flexibility the agency has said automakers have to pursue different pollution-cutting technologies.