Month: December 2024

Just to keep churning this message about solar to save soil.

Argonne National Lab:

The two studied solar sites were planted with native grasses and flowering plants in early 2018. From August 2018 through August 2022, the researchers conducted 358 observational surveys for flowering vegetation and insect communities. They evaluated changes in plant and insect abundance and diversity with each visit.

“The effort to obtain these data was considerable, returning to each site four times per summer to record pollinator counts,” said Heidi Hartmann, manager of the Land Resources and Energy Policy Program in Argonne’s Environmental Sciences division, and one of the study’s co-authors. ​“Over time we saw the numbers and types of flowering plants increase as the habitat matured. Measuring the corresponding positive impact for pollinators was very gratifying.”

By the end of the field campaign, the team observed increases for all habitat and biodiversity metrics. There was an increase in native plant species diversity and flower abundance. In addition, the team observed increases in the abundance and diversity of native insect pollinators and agriculturally beneficial insects, which included honeybees, native bees, wasps, hornets, hoverflies, other flies, moths, butterflies and beetles. Flowers and flowering plant species increased as well. Total insect abundance tripled, while native bees showed a 20-fold increase in numbers. The most numerous insect groups observed were beetles, flies and moths.

In an added benefit, the researchers found that pollinators from the solar sites also visited soybean flowers in adjacent crop fields, providing additional pollination services.

Things have gone completely exponential in the clean energy, especially solar, space.

Above, solar energy and battery storage in California.

Below, Wind energy in Iowa.

Below, growing demands from Data Centers, and Geothermal solutions.

Continue reading “A Year of Good Reporting on Clean Energy from CBS”

Above, clip from a call-in show in rural Lenawee County, Michigan.

Paul Wohlfarth, a retired Auto worker and union activist, has been stalwart and consistently active in support of clean energy and farmer’s property rights for more than a decade, and has continued to represent for the truth in the face of abuse, harrassement and threats from fossil fuel organized, MAGA style mobs.

He’s become expert at grasping the tools that are available, whether attending meetings, writing letters to the shrinking number of local newspapers, or posting on social media. Paul’s been a valuable source of intel and contacts for my work in supporting local farmers in the midwest, and Michigan in particular.

Or both?

Challenging times for electricity producers.
The move toward electrifying everything, including transportation and building HVAC, in addition to the rise of AI and massive Data centers, and onshoring of US manufacturing for everything from EV batteries to computer chips, to solar panels, has caused load forecasts to jump, jeopardizing some climate goals.
Some increased loads seem inevitable, but worth remembering the lessons of history.
We’ve seen several periods when massive load growth seemed inevitable, but failed to materialize – due in large part to total neglect of the potential for energy efficiency.

Missed this piece when it first came out in the Wall Street Journal.

Wall Street Journal:

The last time independent power producers were this excited about an electricity-boom cycle was in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when demand-growth expectations were fueled in part by the growth of Silicon Valley. It didn’t end well. 

In a piece published on Forbes.com in 1999, Peter Huber and Mark Mills wrote: “Southern California Edison, meet Amazon.com. Somewhere in America, a lump of coal is burned every time a book is ordered online.” The two authors, who co-wrote books about energy, including “The Bottomless Well,” estimated that one billion PCs on the Web would represent electrical demand equal to the total power capacity of the U.S. at that time. The piece drew much attention and pushback, including from scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who said the authors were overstating the impact.

In a 2001 PBS interview, Peter Cartwright, who was then chief executive of Calpine, said, “Silicon Valley, as everybody knows, is well aware—is one of the fastest-growing demand centers in the state, and we have very—hardly any power generated in this area.” Calpine was one of the most aggressive independent power producers of that era. Its installed base grew at a compound annual growth rate of 63% between 1998 and 2002 through both new construction and acquisitions. In addition to demand growth, Calpine and other developers believed that their new gas-fired power plants would come to replace older, less-efficient generators that were built by monopolistic utilities rather than competitive developers.

Continue reading “Will Data Centers Drive Energy Demand, or a Generation Bubble?”

We’re careening down a road to where the unthinkable is looking increasingly inevitable.

But, see below, we’re still a ways from remotely knowing what we are doing.

Bloomberg:

Diplomats from 197 countries agreed earlier this month to new rulesgoverning how they can buy and sell credits to neutralize carbon emissions. But while they were deliberating, some of the biggest names in climate science, who defined “net zero” in 2009, found something wrong with the math underlying those debates.

“Achieving ‘net zero’ no longer means what we meant by it,” said Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at University of Oxford, one of the authors of a new paper published last month in the journal Nature.

Their new analysis skewers an assumption at the heart of how countries and companies track emissions — that a ton of CO2 is the same everywhere, whether it’s dispersed in the atmosphere, embedded in forest wood or pulled from the air and pumped deep underground forever. That fungibility is the foundation of carbon markets. It lets a ton of CO2 in a forest stand as a fair trade for a ton put in the atmosphere.

That rule-of-thumb turns out to be a vast oversimplification that could render many well-meaning net-zero efforts meaningless.

The confusion stems from a basic fact about how the Earth’s carbon cycle works: Scientists know what humanity emits into the atmosphere doesn’t entirely stay in the atmosphere. Less than half of that total stays in the atmosphere on average. The rest flows into the land and ocean. To keep track of all that carbon — and how they assign responsibility for removing it — scientists keep two ledgers, one for nature and one for humanity. All the CO2 absorbed every year into land, trees and water is a service the planet offers to wash humanity’s past CO2 emissions out of the air. So, these carbon drawdowns go into the nature ledger.

Continue reading “Rethinking GeoEngineering”

A Tesla-owning friend recently expressed frustration at Musk, and noted he had bought a new Ford EV rather than direct more business to Elon.

More from the December 3 meeting at Meade Township, in Michigan’s thumb region.

Attorney Emily Palacios, representing utility and solar developer DTE, explains how terrain following solar racking and native grass and pollinators make solar one of the least impactful forms of energy production imaginable.
Following the presentation, the Meade Planning Commission voted to approve a permit for the project unanimously, 5-0.

I’ve been following the progress of a proposed Solar installation in rural Meade Township, Michigan. There are lessons that apply regionally and nationally – since the deployment of clean energy in the rural midwest is a critical battleground for the global energy transition.
Recently enacted siting reforms in Michigan, (as well as Minnesota and Illinois) have been aimed at breaking a logjam of permitting that arises at the local level, as MAGA style Yahoos have descended on normally sleepy township meetings intimidating and threatening local boards into enacting unworkable (and in Michigan, at least, illegal) “Exclusionary” ordinances that block the development of clean energy.

The legislation has set up a new body at the Michigan Public Service Commission, where developers who believe they have been unfairly treated can appeal local decisions.

The law, passed in November of 2023, officially went into effect last week – but over the last year there has been a clear movement at the local level, empowering cooler heads, and encouraging the mostly moderate, sane, traditional Republicans at the local level to move permitting forward, not only to protect farmer’s property rights, but to take advantage of huge revenue streams that arise from clean energy development.

Continue reading “Making the Case for Clean Energy”

Plummeting prices of Chinese solar panels being snapped up in Pakistan at a breathtaking pace.
It’s putting pressure on a creaking grid that is obligated to continuing payments for fossil fuel power plants, also built by China.
Fossil fuel death spiral test case.

Above, Voice of America.

Below, DeutscheWelle:

A solar surge has reached new heights in Pakistan, sparking what some experts are calling one of the fastest solar revolutions in the world.

Thanks to cheap Chinese solar technology imports, Pakistan is expected to add an estimated 17 GW of solar power in 2024, which is more than a third of the country’s entire generating capacity.

The surge is “probably the most extreme” case “that has happened in any country in the world with the speed that has happened,” according to energy analyst Dave Jones, who tracks the global energy transition at think tank Ember in the UK.

This growth places Pakistan as one of the top installers of solar panels globally for 2024, in the company of much bigger, richer economies like China, the US and Germany, Jones’ team found.

Countrywide, consumers, businesses and industries are rushing to tap into the cheap renewable power source as an alternative to the erratic and expensive state-provided, largely fossil-fuel-based energy.

Continue reading “Surprise Solar Boom in Pakistan Shakes Fossil Fuel Dominance”