Month: December 2024

I’ve been a no-show at the American Geophysical Union’s Fall meeting last few years – partially due to Covid concerns, partially due to funding issues.
The Arctic Report card is always much anticipated, as painful as the updates have become.

NBC News:

The Arctic just experienced its second-hottest year on record. And concerningly, the region’s tundra has transitioned from being a sink for carbon to a source of emissions as permafrost melts to release methane. 

That will only amplify the amount of heat-trapping gases that enter the atmosphere, paving the way for further warming. 

The findings, shared Tuesday in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Arctic report card, show how climate change is scrambling ecosystems and shape-shifting the landscape in the part of the planet where global warming is most intense.

Considered a bellwether region for the effects of climate change, the Arctic is heating up far faster than places at lower altitudes — two to four times as quickly, depending on the baselines scientists use for comparison and which geography they include in assessments. The last nine years in the Arctic have all had the highest average temperatures recorded since 1900. 

That dynamic is the result of a phenomenon called Arctic amplification. As the Arctic loses snow cover and sea ice, more dark-colored ocean water and rock emerge. Those dark surfaces reflect less radiation back to space, absorbing heat, instead. In addition, patterns of circulation in the oceans and the atmosphere are increasingly transporting heat toward the Earth’s poles. 

Together, that means the Arctic is a fundamentally different place from what it was just 10 years ago, said the lead editor of the new NOAA report, Twila Moon, deputy lead scientist and science communication liaison at the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

“The Arctic is in sort of a new regime, not a new normal, of course, but it’s decidedly different than it was even just a couple of decades ago,” she said.

Continue reading “2024 Arctic Report Card is Here”

That time of year again. Polar Vortex season.

Everybody’s heard about the Texas Valentine’s Day Blackout of 2021 – in which Winter Storm Uri wiped out a significant portion of generation across the Texas Grid, known as ERCOT (Energy Reliability Council of Texas).
Others may not know that there has been a pattern of similar events, common enough to make it clear that dependence on gas generation during cold extreme events is risky, and becoming riskier, as my interviews above, with Judah Cohen of MIT, and Martha Shulski, who at the time was Nebraska’s State Climatologist.
The concern is that in a climate change regime, these events may be getting more frequent and severe.

One less discussed example of the problem is the near train wreck outages that occurred on December 21-24, 2022, on the PJM, which is the nation’s largest Grid System operator, covering more or less the Mid-Atlantic and some Southeastern portions of the US.

Winter Storm Elliott Frequently Asked Questions – PJM:

1. What were the operating days like on Friday, Dec. 23, and Saturday, Dec. 24?
   
   At the start of the day on Dec. 23, PJM had approximately 12,000 MW of forced (or non-planned) outages among its generation fleet. To account for the uncertainty of the weather conditions, PJM set up the operating day by committing approximately 133 GW of energy in the Day-Ahead Market and an additional 9 GW of available 30- minute reserves. In addition, approximately 13 GW of short-lead units were reported as available based on the
   operating parameters submitted to PJM, for a total of 155,750 MW of available generation that Friday. 

This well exceeded the PJM load forecast peak of about 127,000 MW for the day.

The weather on Dec. 23 was unprecedented for that time of year, given the severe temperature drop and resulting spike in load. The record-breaking plunge of 29 degrees over 12 hours on Dec. 23 surpassed the previous PJM record of a 22-degree drop during the 2014 Polar Vortex.

Continue reading “Getting Ready for Winter’s Weather Whiplash”

Milwaukee Independent:

Total electricity goes up, then down, then up, then down — capturing the company’s constant rebuilding each time Russian missile attacks take out a facility, which include wind and solar farms and thermal (coal or gas-fired) generating stations. The Russian strikes are part of a campaign to target energy infrastructure to reduce power in Ukraine as winter looms.

“What other choice do we have?” said Timchenko during an interview on the sidelines of this year’s U.N. climate talks, taking place in Azerbaijan. “Sit and wait and pray that they don’t hit us, or do our job and bring lights back to our people?”

The nearly three-year-long Russia-Ukraine war, which has left large swaths of Ukraine destroyed, has accelerated a transition to clean energy. At Ukraine’s pavilion at COP29, on display is a large smashed solar panel, destroyed in an attack this year.

Russian forces continue to make small but steady gains in capturing Ukrainian territory at a time when there are questions about how much the United States, which has been providing weapons and money, will continue to support the country once President-elect Donald Trump assumes office in January. During the campaign, Trump repeatedly said he could quickly end the war if elected, although he hasn’t said how.

Whatever the future, the decentralized nature of some clean energies, in particular wind and solar, has allowed Ukraine to quickly restore power in ways that would be impossible with Ukraine’s more traditional energy sources, such as coal-fired power plants.

Continue reading “In Ukraine, Clean Energy is Resilient in a War Zone”

Black carbon is a pollutant that has a huge warming potential, and is relatively easy to mitigate, whichcould be targeted as low hanging fruit in the climate mitigation fight.

Billy Bob Thornton should know better than this.

Newsweek:

Landman, a new TV series from Yellowstone writer Taylor Sheridan, includes examples of false and misleading writing about renewable energy and climate change technology, Newsweek‘s Fact Check team has discovered.

The show, streaming on Paramount+, stars Billy Bob Thornton as a crisis manager in the Texas oil industry. The cast also includes Demi Moore, Jon Hamm, Michelle Randolph, Ali Larter and Jacob Lofland.

While reviews among critics and audiences have been mixed, the show’s debut episode, released on November 17, scored 14.6 million viewers during its first seven days across its streaming service and linear premiere, TheWrap reported, making it the biggest global premiere week for a Paramount+ original show.

A scene in a later episode has also been a hit with conservatives, going viral on social media.

n episode three, Thornton’s character, Tommy Norris, invectively describes the lifespan of renewable energy tech to attorney Rebecca Falcone, played by Kayla Wallace.

After Norris drives Falcone to take a look at a wind farm up close, he says: “Do you have any idea how much diesel they have to burn to mix that much concrete?

“Or make that steel and haul this s*** out here and put it together with a 450-foot crane? You want to guess how much oil it takes to lubricate that f****** thing, or winterize it? In its 20-year lifespan, it won’t offset the carbon footprint of making it.

Continue reading ““Landman” Repeats Lazy Fossil Fuel Misinformation”

Above, CNBC summary of the momentum for Small Modular Nuclear reactors coming from tech industry types, concerned about load growth for AI and Data Centers.
Nuclear seems to be popular among the tech bros.

Utility Dive:

• NextEra Energy continues to evaluate the possibility of reopening the Duane Arnold nuclear power plant in Iowa amid growing interest from data center companies, CEO John Ketchum told investors Thursday during a third quarter earnings call.
• Duane Arnold’s boiling water reactor could make it easier to restart and operate economically than other nuclear power plants, Ketchum said. New nuclear technologies like small modular reactors remain uneconomical, Ketchum said.
• Nuclear will likely supply just a fraction of the 900 GW the U.S. needs to add by 2040 to keep up with demand, Ketchum said.

Despite the recent fervor among tech companies and investors about nuclear energy, Ketchum held that renewables and storage will likely play a greater role in meeting new energy demand for at least two decades to come.

“Nuclear will play a role, but there are some practical limitations,” he said. “There are only a few nuclear plants that can be recommissioned in an economic way … But even with a 100% success rate on those recommissionings, we would still only meet less than 1% of that [new] demand.”

Equity analysts had anticipated that the company might announce a deal to restart the 601 MW Duane Arnold plant during the Thursday call despite potential challenges such as competition with robust regional wind resources, according to Jefferies Research Services. And although the expected announcement did not come, Ketchum said the plant could be among the few that could reopen and operate economically. The company is currently running engineering assessments and speaking with local stakeholders about what it would take to reopen the plant, he said.

Continue reading “CEOs Conflicted on Nuclear”

Cut regulations. Create more competition.
Right, that ought to work.

Description:

Representative Briscoe Cain is getting an earful from Texans about the surging homeowner insurance rates.

Houston Chronicle (paywall):

Hurricane Harvey’s catastrophic flooding tore down scores of structures southeast of Houston’s city center. This year’s Hurricane Beryl took its toll on the suburban stretch, too, leaving thousands of homeowners in need of aid.

That hasn’t stopped developers from building new homes in the attractively-affordable area. But extreme weather is making homeownership there more challenging – and expensive.

Home insurance costs in the southeastern slice of the Houston metropolitan area are higher than almost everywhere else in the country, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Homeowners in that area can pay upwards of $3,740 for fire, hazard and flood insurance annually. That’s nearly three times the national average and about 60% higher than the Texas state average.

There is no single explanation for the record-high costs, which extend to much of the greater Houston-Galveston area and neighboring coastal counties. Higher rates of inflation driving up the price of home construction and repair are partly to blame; the surging costs insurers face to offset growing numbers of losses are another factor. One of the key culprits, however, appears to be the territory’s all-too-frequent catastrophic weather.

Chris Wright, a gas executive nominated to be Secretary of Energy in the Trump administration, has had a video online for quite a few months where he makes provocative, and false, statements about the impacts of climate change.
Wright asserts that climate change is not a crisis, and then claims to cite the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s most recent report to say that extreme events are not increasing.
Climate scientists say no.
One of the scientists cited by the Post, Jim Kossin, is a recently retired NOAA expert that I’ve interviewed in the past, so I called him up to elaborate.

Jim had a lot to say, so I’ll be sorting thru and doling out some of his other jewels of wisdom in the coming week. For now, here’s the low down on Trump’s DOE nom.

Washington Post:

Oil executive Chris Wright, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Energy Department, accepts that burning fossil fuel is warming the planet, but he departs from the mainstream over the consequences, contending that there is no climate crisis.

Wright cites scientific studies to argue that global warming “alarmists,” as he calls the majority of climate scientists, have it all wrong. He rattles off data to support his contention that a warmer Earth has reduced deaths from cold weather. And he points to published research to assert that hurricanes and other major storms are not growing in intensity, despite observations by meteorologists.

The references to scientific research make his arguments seem more compelling, but the authors of those studies told The Washington Post in interviews that Wright has misrepresented their work.

“What he is saying is flat-out wrong,” said Jim Kossin, a climate and atmospheric scientist who was an author of a section of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report about dangerous weather that Wright cited in a recent video on LinkedIn. Other researchers accused Wright of cherry-picking bits of data to support his thesis while ignoring abundant evidence of climate dangers.

Continue reading “Wright is Wrong. Trump DOE Pick’s Climate Claims Called out by Scientists”

Bloomberg:

Prices for batteries in China are plummeting, and the implications are just starting to ripple outward for the global automotive market.

Over the last year, the price for lithium iron phosphate, or LFP, battery cells in China has dropped 51% to an average of $53 per kilowatt-hour. The average global price of these batteries last year was $95/kWh.

There are several factors driving prices lower. The first is raw-material prices, which have fallen sharply over the last 18 months. The cathode is where most of the raw-material costs in a battery come from, and the cathode share of total cost for an LFP cell in China has fallen from 50% at the beginning of 2023 to less than 30% this year.

The second driver is overcapacity that’s leading manufacturers to cut prices to maintain market share. China’s battery production is already higher than global EV demand, and that overcapacity problem is set to get worse before it gets better.

Overcapacity tends to lead to competitive shakeouts that shift volume toward the most efficient plants with the newest production technology, while others fall by the wayside. Average capacity utilization of battery plants in China fell from 51% in 2022 to 43% in 2023, and will be lower again this year.

BNEF’s bottom-up battery cost model shows how close average prices are now to estimated manufacturing costs, indicating that margins for vendors are shrinking.

Above, speaking in Baku, Azerbaijan, Governor Jay Inslee of Washington State makes the case that climate and clean energy action will continue in the US despite the inauguration of Donald Trump.

Seattle Times:

Voters firmly rejected an initiative that was designed to kill Washington’s fledgling carbon market.

Early election results Tuesday evening showed 62% against the measure.

Redmond hedge fund manager Brian Heywood dumped millions into Initiative 2117 to take down the carbon market along with a slate of other conservative initiatives that dominated the state’s political landscape this year.

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Below, I attended the Great Lakes Renewable Energy Association annual meeting on Saturday, in Lansing, Michigan, and spoke to Ed Rivet, who has been a friend and colleague for a number of years in supporting clean energy, despite the fact that Ed is a conservative Republican, and I’m, well, not.
Ed gave a similar assessment to Inslee, and fleshed out his reasoning.

Continue reading “Chill Baby, Chill. Climate Solutions will Continue”