And since we are stuck at less than 10GW of new NG per year, all of this will come from batteries. Everyone knows it except for maybe this guy. If only he had all of the experts working for him that he could call. https://t.co/E73DdwpGGc
Above, Jigar Shah points out that due to constricted supply of combined cycle gas turbines (CCGT), the Trump administration’s plan to block inexpensive and quick-to-build solar, wind, and battery projects, (and presumably speed construction of gas plants with unspecified magic), is a dangerous fantasy.
Have I told you the Energy Secretary Chris Wright is a Galactic scale pseudo-intellectual boob and fossil fuel shill?
Demand for gas turbines is soaring — and the price of a combined-cycle gas turbine is too, new research finds. Projects slated for completion in 2030 or 2031 are now “routinely reporting costs of $2,000 per kilowatt or more,” a jump of as much as 75% over near-term prices.
(As a point of comparison, projects that are slated to come online in the coming years reported costs of between $1,116 per kW and $1,427 per kW.)
One of the earliest predictions, and now well observed effect, of climate science, is that “wet areas get wetter, dry areas get dryer.” New research says drying is winning.
Changes in terrestrial water storage (TWS) are a critical indicator of freshwater availability. We use NASA GRACE/GRACE-FO data to show that the continents have undergone unprecedented TWS loss since 2002. Areas experiencing drying increased by twice the size of California annually, creating “mega-drying” regions across the Northern Hemisphere. While most of the world’s dry/wet areas continue to get drier/wetter, dry areas are now drying faster than wet areas are wetting. Changes in TWS are driven by high-latitude water losses, intense Central American/European droughts, and groundwater depletion, which accounts for 68% of TWS loss over non-glaciated continental regions. “Continental drying” is having profound global impacts. Since 2002, 75% of the population lives in 101 countries that have been losing freshwater water. Furthermore, the continents now contribute more freshwater to sea level rise than the ice sheets, and drying regions now contribute more than land glaciers and ice caps. Urgent action is required to prepare for the major impacts of results presented.
China first. Remarkable new details emerged yesterday of a trend we’ve been talking about for years in this newsletter: the rapid spread of clean energy and its associated appliances not only in China but in all the countries increasingly in their sphere. The folks at the Net Zero Industrial Policy Lab at Johns Hopkins published a huge new study detailing the “rapid scale- up of overseas Chinese clean-tech manufacturing investments.”
Investment volume: Chinese firms have pledged at least USD 227 billion across green manufacturing projects. A high-end estimate approaches USD 250 billion. This surge of overseas green manufacturing investment is unprecedented; it now surpasses the USD 200 billion (in current 2024 dollars) invested by the US over four years of the Marshall Plan, at a time of similar American dominance of manufacturing in key industries.
I want you to go back and reread the last sentence of that paragraph—bigger, in real dollar terms, than the Marshall Plan. The Marshall Plan, of course, was what America spent to rebuilt the world in the wake of World War II, and it was a key driver of what became the most prosperous economy the world has ever seen. The American century was built in no small part on making sure that our allies (and enemies) in the Second World War recovered and were fitted into our trading system. Now the Chinese are doing the same thing, except somewhat bigger and faster. Bloomberg’s Sheryl Tian Tong Lee gives some sense of where the money is going:
Above, good report and update from WFAA Tampa. This surprised me – “41 percent more clear air turbulence over the USA, 55 percent over the North Atlantic…”.
Below, most recent severe turbulence incident happened on a Delta flight this summer.
Passengers who weren’t buckled aboard a Delta Air Lines flight to Europe were violently thrown into the ceiling and back down to the floor in July when the plane encountered severe turbulence in a thunderstorm over Wyoming, according to a new report on the incident.
The National Transportation Safety Board said Tuesday that passengers endured 2.5 minutes of turbulence that caught the pilots by surprise on July 30 even though they had already altered their route to try to avoid the storms. The seat belt sign was off so passengers, flight attendants and drink carts were thrown around the plane.
This video is actually 4 years old, but it’s a useful exercise in that Kirk basically regurgitated 2009 vintage climate denial tropes, and this video ably demolishes them. Useful in case you have some Kirk acolytes in your family.
The lesson that a lot of right wing influencers raised themselves on is, make yourself a useful tool for the richest, greediest, most destructive criminals on the planet, and you can get a lot of support, and make a lot of money.
The term “plant” is often used to describe someone whose success was not solely the result of a grassroots movement, but instead bolstered by powerful corporate interests who secretly poured massive amounts of money into ensuring their fame.
For example: Charlie Kirk was a fossil fuel industry plant. The right-wing activist murdered last week built his massive platform for racism, sexism, transphobia and climate denial in part by using anonymous funding from Big Oil.
Turning Point USA, the group Kirk founded to ignite a culture war on college campuses, has managed to hide much of its funding sources. Roughly half of the group’s $40 million in income in 2020 came from 10 anonymous donors, NBC News reported.
But in 2017, Kirk admitted that some of the group’s anonymous donors “are in the fossil fuel space.” Speaking to The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Kirk disclosed that he’d fundraised for TPUSA at the annual meeting of the Independent Petroleum Association of America (IPAA), as well as the 2017 board meeting of the National Mining Association.
Above, short news piece from CGTN, China Global Television Network. It accurately reports that nations across Africa are in the process of leapfrogging fossil fuels and expensive transmission grids and racing to install increasingly inexpensive solar panels, which we know are primarily Chinese made. Instructive to compare to the catastrophic implosion and withdrawal from the developing world being implemented under the current fossil-fuel controlled Administration in the US.
The latest data provides evidence that a solar pick-up is happening at scale in many countries in Africa.
Solar is not new to Africa. For more than two decades, solar has helped improve lives across Africa, in rural schools and hospitals, pay-as-you-go in homes, street lighting, water pumping, mini-grids and more. However, South Africa and Egypt are currently the only countries with installed solar capacity measured in gigawatts, rather than megawatts. That could be about to change.
The first evidence of a take-off in solar in Africa is now here:
The last 12 months saw a big rise in Africa’s solar panel imports. Imports from China rose 60% in the last 12 months to 15,032 MW. Over the last two years, the imports of solar panels outside of South Africa have nearly tripled from 3,734 MW to 11,248 MW.
Above, Joe Dominguez, CEO of Constellation Energy, one of the US’ largest electric generators, affirms, “gas sets the price of electricity, 90 percent of the time.”
To cut thru all the bullshit from fossil fuel apologists about the price of electricity, it helps to understand a few fundamentals about how electricity is priced.
Jesse Jenkins: If I’m just a utility operating on my own, I want to basically run my fleet on what we call economic dispatch, which is rank ordering them from cheapest to most expensive on a fuel or variable cost basis, and trying to maximize my use of the less expensive generators and only turn on the more expensive generators when I need them.
That introduces this idea of a marginal generator, where the marginal generator is the last one I turned on that has some slack to move up or down as demand changes. And what that means is that if I have one more megawatt-hour of demand in that hour — or over a five-minute period, or whatever — or 1 megawatt-hour less, then I’m going to crank that one generator up or down. And so the marginal cost of that megawatt-hour of demand is the variable cost of that marginal generator. So if it’s a gas plant that can turn up or down, say it’s $40 a megawatt-hour to pay for its fuel, the cost on the margin of me turning on my lights and consuming a little bit more is that that one power plant is going to ramp its power up a little bit, or down if I turn something off.
And so the way we identify what the marginal value of supplying a little bit more electricity or consuming a little bit more electricity is the variable cost of that last generator, not the average cost of all the generators that are operating, because that’s the one that would change if I were to increase or decrease my output.
