Month: August 2024

Texas Sets New Heat Record: Grid Robust with Solar, Storage

San Antonio Report:

CPS Energy and the Electric Reliability Council of Texas both experienced new all-time high energy demand records this week as temperatures soared across the state, with San Antonio reaching a searing 108 degrees on Wednesday.

Demand on brutally hot days across the state is driven up by the wider use of A/C systems as Texans crank up the air to keep cool. Combined with Texas’ growing population and an ongoing drought, both the state grid operator and CPS Energy have seen energy demand grow year over year for the past three years.

On Wednesday, the municipally owned utility set a new all-time high energy demand record of 5,858 megawatts between 6 and 7 p.m., surpassing the previous record of 5,703 megawatts set on Aug. 21, 2023. One megawatt is enough to power about 250 homes on a hot Texas day.

Continue reading “Texas Sets New Heat Record: Grid Robust with Solar, Storage”

Greens Practice Patience with Dems Focus on Winning

Adopting the correct attitude – For God’s Sake just Win.

Politico:

Kamala Harris’ decision to dedicate a mere half-sentence to climate change in her 40-minute speech accepting the Democratic presidential nomination is perhaps unsurprising.

Despite casting the tie-breaking vote in 2022 for the country’s largest climate law, the vice president has largely avoided the subject since President Joe Biden dropped out of the race a month ago, writes Scott Waldman.

Thursday night was no exception. In talking about fundamental freedoms at stake in the election, Harris noted “the freedom to breathe clean air and drink clean water, and to live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis.” Earlier in the evening, the convention featured a 13-minute segment of speeches and videosin which speakers such as Interior Secretary Deb Haaland hailed the administration’s efforts to use record amounts of spending to fight climate change and create clean energy jobs.

The green groups’ calculation, political strategists say, is a simple one: Former President Donald Trump’s pledge to unravel Biden’s climate gains should he retake the White House is enough to drive environmentally minded voters to the polls for Harris.

Harris’ entry into the race has further stoked excitement among the green base, something Biden had struggled to do — and climate activists say they’re avoiding doing anything that might spoil that momentum. “We don’t want to sabotage her campaign for no valid reason,” Brett Hartl, the chief political strategist with the Center for Biological Diversity Action Fund, told Zack Colman.

Continue reading “Greens Practice Patience with Dems Focus on Winning”

RFK Angles for Secretary of Horse Paste

Delusional hardly begins to cover it.

Repeating Putinist talking points verbatim. Unfreakingbelievable.

RFK Jr suspends campaign, reportedly endorsing Trump, possibly angling for a role in the Trump Administration on Public Health. Holding out for Trump to completely renounce modern biological science.
Says he will pull his name off the ballot in swing states where it would likely help Trump. Seriously willing to tip America into Fascism in service of some of the craziest crackpot theories imaginable.

Bear burgers for everyone?

Right, this should certainly help beat down those “Weird” memes.

Columnist Dave Troy on X:

1. RFK Jr, Cornel West, Jill Stein, Marianne Williamson are all backed by Russia, and their allies.

2. RFK Jr announced today he is backing Donald Trump; Williamson dropped out on June 11.

3. Expect increased Russian support for West and Stein in swing states, to serve as spoilers.

4. Expect RFK to appear more frequently with Trump in an effort to add 1-2 points.

5. Expect Trump to offer Kennedy a cabinet position — perhaps FDA or DHHS.

6. Expect them to try to eliminate the CIA, long a target for the KGB; perhaps under Mike Flynn’s direction.

7. Other moves: Gabbard as SecDef; Musk and Ramaswamy as “slashers in chief,” running the Schedule F guillotine.

These networks have been converging for years. Expect it all to unify in the next few weeks and months. Unless you want to live under the thumb of Putin and Xi, these people must all be defeated. Onward!

Continue reading “RFK Angles for Secretary of Horse Paste”

Batteries, Solar are Game Changers for Grid Stability

Denton Record Chronicle (Texas):

With temperatures climbing over 100 in much of the state, the Texas electric grid set an all-time record for energy demand Tuesday.

Despite the heat wave, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas has yet to ask people to conserve electricity. That’s a big change from 2023, when extreme weather and fear of low power reserves prompted ERCOT to issue 11 requests for conservation through the year.

Grid operators and energy experts are pointing to the rapid growth of solar power and grid-scale batteries as key reasons why residents haven’t been asked to conserve this month.

“We’ve seen significant additions of energy storage resources, solar resources and wind resources, with a few additions also on the gas side,” Pablo Vegas, CEO of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said at an ERCOT board meeting Tuesday. “All of that has helped to contribute to less scarcity conditions.”

In fact, the growth of some of those energy sources has been downright record-breaking.

As the sun and heat bore down, Sunday, Monday and Tuesday brought the top three days for solar power production in the history of the state grid, according to the website Gridstatus.io, which tracks the performance of regional electricity transmission systems.

On Sunday, the top day for solar production, Texas solar farms produced 20,832 megawatts of power. It’s worth noting that this number does not include energy produced by rooftop panels on homes and businesses.

Continue reading “Batteries, Solar are Game Changers for Grid Stability”

We’ve Had Decades of Climate Policy. What Works?

Wall Street Journal:

An evaluation of more than 1,500 climate policies in 41 countries found that only 63 actually worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. 

Subsidies and regulations—policy types often favored by governments—rarely worked to reduce emissions, the study found, unless they were combined with price-based strategies aimed at changing consumer and corporate behavior. 

“The commonality in those successful cases is where we see subsidies and regulations being combined with price-based policy instruments,” said Nicolas Koch, senior researcher at the Berlin-based Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change and an author of the study. “This means carbon pricing, and it could be energy taxes, it could be vehicle taxes.”

The study, published today in the journal Science, used an AI algorithm to sift through a database of environmental prescriptions compiled by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, a Paris-based economic agency, between 1998 and 2020. These policies ranged from energy-efficient standards for household appliances to a carbon tax on fossil fuels like oil and gas.

The fraction of policies that worked combined financial incentives, regulations and taxes, according to the study.

The authors evaluated policies adopted by each nation’s electricity, transportation, building and industrial sectors. They programmed the algorithm to cross-reference each policy with subsequent changes in greenhouse gas emissions from each country. 

Continue reading “We’ve Had Decades of Climate Policy. What Works?”

Not Just Home Insurance – Crop Insurance Hammered by Climate Extremes too

Inside Climate News:

The country’s farmers took in a record $19 billion in insurance payments in 2022, many because of weather-related disasters, according to a new analysis that suggests climate change could stoke the cost of insuring the nation’s farmers and ranchers to unsustainable levels.

The Environmental Working Group, which has for decades critically scrutinized the Federal Crop Insurance Program, published new researchThursday, finding that the cost of the program has soared from just under $3 billion in 2002 to just over $19 billion last year.

“We found between 2002 and 2022 the crop insurance program sent over $161 billion to farmers, and annual payouts in 2022 were 546 percent more than they were in 2001,” said Anne Schechinger, an agricultural economist and director at EWG. 

The crop insurance program has become increasingly popular with farmers over the past 20 years as a way to protect themselves from drops in prices and weather-related disasters.

Taxpayers subsidize about 60 percent of the premiums; farmers cover about 40 percent and pay deductibles on smaller losses.  

Continue reading “Not Just Home Insurance – Crop Insurance Hammered by Climate Extremes too”

Young WhipperSnapper Climate Activists – Perspective Needed

Why, when I was your age…

Seriously folks, there are certain people who get their jollies and raise their profiles on the “they’re all the same” narrative.
In fact, I’m so old I remember when Ralph Nader mislead a lot of mostly young, mostly naive, mostly lefties, into the notion that “There’s not a dime’s worth of difference between George Bush and Al Gore”.
Al Gore.

I know most of a million people in the Middle East who would like to take issue with you, but they can’t – because they’re dead. So please reconsider.

As an example of the confusion, one can cite climate campaigner’s anger about the Biden administration’s permit for the Willow Project in Alaska, an oil drilling project.
Let’s be clear. There is no universe in which this project didn’t get some kind of permit, due to actions of previous administrations that created a legal dilemma for the Biden administration.

New York Times:

According to the two people familiar with the deliberations, the administration concluded that it doesn’t have the legal authority to deny permits to ConocoPhillips, which has long held leases on the land in the petroleum reserve.

The cornerstone of Mr. Biden’s new Arctic environmental pledges is a declaration that the entire Arctic Ocean will be off limits to oil and gas leasing, completing an effort that began under President Barack Obama.

Continue reading “Young WhipperSnapper Climate Activists – Perspective Needed”

Battleground States Big Clean Energy Winners

As Joe Biden mentioned the other night, Red States have been big beneficiaries of the boost that clean energy is bringing to the economy.

Bloomberg:

In Georgia, the heart of the US green manufacturing boom, a new electric vehicle gigafactory is nearing completion. Spanning 3,000 acres, the plant is expected to create 8,500 new jobs. Hyundai Motor Co. has tapped incentives from President Joe Biden’s signature climate law, the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, which together with the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law helped unleash a wave of investment in clean energy technologies.

Those investments and jobs may hang in the balance if Donald Trump wins the presidential election in November. Trump has vowed to dismantle Biden’s climate policy. A frequent critic of electric cars, he’s taken aim at pollution rules that incentive automakers to sell more EVs and could curtail the IRA’s EV tax credits. 

Representative Buddy Carter, a Republican whose district is home to the gigafactory, didn’t vote for the IRA — no Republicans in Congress did. But he said he doesn’t want to see projects like the plant jeopardized.

“I’m going to discourage [the new administration] from making a sudden change,” Carter said.

Continue reading “Battleground States Big Clean Energy Winners”