Month: April 2024

A second death, reportedly by suicide, in Ohio’s sprawling utility and racketeering scandal.

This one has a connection to someone we know well here across the border in Michigan. Randazzo was a friend and long time associate of Kevon Martis, a self-described “Senior Fellow” with the Washington DC based fossil fuel lobbying firm E&E Legal. In the recently uncovered video below, from 2017, Randazzo describes Martis as a “hero” who “inspired” him.

That was just before Randazzo’s appointment to the Public Utility Commission of Ohio, and a cascade of events leading to multiple indictments agains Randazzo, including accepting a 4 million dollar bribe for his help in saddling Ohio ratepayers with millions of dollars in bailout money for coal and nuclear plants in both Ohio and Indiana.

He was just about to testify. Who knows what we might have learned?
Occam’s razor suggests this is nothing more than it seems.
and I know nothing about the circumstances, but this reminds me of more than one movie.

Cleveland.com

Sam Randazzo was pronounced dead just before noon by the Columbus Division of Fire, according to a spokesman for the Franklin County Coroner’s office. He was found by police unresponsive, hanging by a rope in the rafters of a Columbus property. The coroner’s spokesman said it is a suspected death by suicide but will be confirmed in an autopsy.

News5 Cleveland:

His death is being investigated as a “suspected suicide,” the coroner’s office said. A ruling on the cause and manner of his death will be made following a scheduled autopsy.

Damn that was every bit as good as advertised.
Traveled to a small town in Northeast Indiana, Portland, and found a beautiful, peaceful park with only a handful of watchers, and a bench all to myself.
The moment when the darkness falls is indescribable.

No Brainer. Please proceed.

New York Times:

One of the biggest obstacles to expanding clean energy in the United States is a lack of power lines. Building new transmission lines can take a decade or more because of permitting delays and local opposition. But there may be a faster, cheaper solution, according to two reports released Tuesday.

Replacing existing power lines with cables made from state-of-the-art materials could roughly double the capacity of the electric grid in many parts of the country, making room for much more wind and solar power.

This technique, known as “advanced reconductoring,” is widely used in other countries. But many U.S. utilities have been slow to embrace it because of their unfamiliarity with the technology as well as regulatory and bureaucratic hurdles, researchers found.

“We were pretty astonished by how big of an increase in capacity you can get by reconductoring,” said Amol Phadke, a senior scientist at the University of California, Berkeley, who contributed to one of the reports released Tuesday. Working with GridLab, a consulting firm, researchers from Berkeley looked at what would happen if advanced reconductoring were broadly adopted.

2035 and Beyond:

While some technological solutions may offer greater transmission capacity increases in specific cases, reconductoring with advanced conductors offers the most significant and relatively unexplored opportunity to substantially increase transmission capacity, considering costs, permitting, and implementation speed. The vast majority of transmission lines in the U.S. are short (i.e., <50 miles) and thus most likely limited by the conductor’s thermal capability. In these cases, reconductoring with advanced conductors, combined with marginal substation additions as needed (reactive power compensation, transformer replacements, relay and breaker upgrades, etc.), can up to double the power transfer capacity within an existing ROW. For the 2% of lines that are too long to benefit from reconductoring and compensation (i.e., >50 miles), sectionalization—i.e., the addition of new substation(s) with active and reactive power generation sources along the line—can help improve voltage and angular stability, allowing grid planners to reap the high-capacity benefits of advanced conductors.

Continue reading “Needed: New Transmission. There’s a Quick Way to Expand the Grid”

Description:

Dan Levy, Barclays senior equity analyst, joins ‘Squawk Box’ to discuss the state of the EV market, the pivot to hybrid vehicles from automakers, demand outlook, and more.

Problem is, here in the midwest, you simply can not find plug in hybrids.
I was ready to buy a Prius plug in late last year, had check book in hand, but unable to secure one locally, not even if I was willing to wait for months.

Dealer claimed all the plug ins were going to the West Coast.
EV choices were all still a bit beyond our budget, and my spouse, like a lot of consumers, still has range anxiety. She points out that women are particularly sensitive to the risks, however small, of being stranded. Since women make a lot of the economic decisions in households, carmakers and policy makers need to amp up the urgency of bringing cheaper vehicles and better charging networks on line.

We ended up getting a regular RAV 4 hybrid. Nice car, but a disappointment for me.
I’m nursing my 11 year old prius until I can afford a full on EV, we’ll see when that is.

Sam Evans must produce videos with the same efficiency that Tesla produces cars, by shamelessly borrowing, ok, stealing material, and recycling video clips. (I would never do that, of course)
Nevertheless, if you watch them, over time, you learn stuff.

I love hearing it from the horse’s mouth – this is a firehose of information I’ll have to listen to more than once, from Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University, which just released one of the more widely watched hurricane forecasts, predicting a very active, if not record breaking, season.

Washington Post:

Hurricane researchers from Colorado State University are predicting that nearly two dozen named tropical storms will form, including 11 hurricanes, during the season that officially begins June 1. Accumulated cyclone energy, a measure that accounts for storms’ frequency and longevity, could rise nearly twice as high as normal, to a forecast 170 percent of average by the season’s end Nov. 30.

The forecast released Thursday is the latest indication that a surge in global heat over the past year, far beyond the gradual warming observed across recent decades, could translate to greater extreme weather risks.

The predictions are so aggressive, they would mean the Atlantic basin could exhaust a list of 21 storm names for a second time in four years, and the third time since 2005. After that, meteorologists would start using a list of supplemental storm names the World Meteorological Association adopted in 2021, replacing a practice of using Greek letters.

Continue reading ““Uncharted Territory”: Extremely Warm Atlantic Will Mean Active Season”

Bloomberg:

Sweet-toothed consumers are facing double trouble with storms lashing the world’s top producer of vanilla – a beloved flavor for ice cream – even as surging cocoa prices bite into chocolate.

Madagascar’s key vanilla-growing region has been slammed by Cyclone Gamane, whose rain and high winds have flooded fields and stripped vanilla pods from their vines.

Georges Geeraerts, president of the Indian Ocean island’s union of vanilla exporters, said the deluge could halve the vanilla harvest.

“On a bad year, production is about 1,500 tons compared with a range of 2,000 to 2,500 tons,” Geeraerts said via telephone. “A conservative estimate, ahead of more detailed analysis from the growing region, means that the output for the current harvest could be as low as 1,000 tons.”

Adverse weather is hammering Africa, with drought conditions in the south withering crops and contributing to higher food inflation, while West Africa’s cocoa producers have seen yields collapse from heavy rain and disease, more than tripling prices to as much as $10,000 a ton.

That’s forcing chocolate makers to raise prices and trim portions for customers. The good news for ice cream lovers is that vanilla’s supply constraints are not expected to be prolonged, and its cost has still not recovered from a recent glut in supply.

“This year’s lower impact will bring equilibrium as from 2025,” said Geeraerts. “The market is liberalized and the current pricing per kilogram is about $60” from $250 two years ago.

Gas Outlook:

A lawsuit filed in the U.S. state of Colorado hopes to hold an oil and gas company accountable for allegedly transferring ageing oil and gas wells to a separate entity that was designed to go bankrupt, leaving the public saddled with the clean-up costs. Those manoeuvres, the lawsuit states, amounts to a “massive fraud that is, to this day, endangering Coloradans.” 

In February, the environmental law charity ClientEarth filed a class action complaint on behalf of a group of landowners in Colorado against HRM Resources. The lawsuit seeks to hold the company accountable for “unlawfully” abandoning 200 wells. 

At issue is the seemingly common practice by oil and gas producers of handing off ageing wells to successively smaller entities, until ultimately those wells are abandoned and not cleaned up. 

The majority of the 200 wells in question were originally transferred from Noble Energy (since acquired by Chevron) to a Denver-based company called HRM Resources.

HRM operated and profited from those wells for a period of time, before transferring them to another company called Painted Pegasus in September 2018. The problem was that Painted Pegasus filed for bankruptcy and liquidated a few years later, and the liabilities associated with cleaning up those wells were left with no owner. The state of Colorado was ultimately forced to pick up the tab — those 200 wells ended up in Colorado’s Orphaned Well Program. 

ClientEarth alleges that this was all by design. “The demise of Painted Pegasus was inevitable; in fact, Painted Pegasus’ failure was the plan,” the complaint states.

The lawsuit states that HRM Resources “fraudulently transferred” those wells into a company destined to fail. 

“It means that the transfer was made with an intent to defraud,” Camille Sippel, a staff attorney at ClientEarth, told Gas Outlook in an interview. “Fraudulent transfer,” she said, is a novel legal theory, one that could be replicated in many other parts of the country that are dealing with the same problems and similar industry practices surrounding the enormous crisis of orphaned oil and gas wells.

Continue reading “In Colorado: Oil Oligarchs Offload Orphan Oil Wells on Taxpayers”