Author: greenman3610

In an administration where corruption is the rule, one of the more bald-faced payoffs to big fossil donors are these “emergency” orders to keep obsolete, expensive and polluting coal plants open, a direct transfer of ratepayer’s money to oligarch’s pockets. The kicker, they don’t even run to provide that vaunted “baseload” power.

Utility Dive:

Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy ordered the owners of 10 generating units at six power plants — five of them coal-fired — to run the units past their retirement dates to address what DOE says is a reliability emergency across most of the country’s grid.

So far, the emergency orders’ impact on power production has been mixed. One power plant hasn’t operated at all under its 202(c) order, one ran for a two-week stretch, three are producing less power than they did at the same time in previous years and one is generating electricity roughly in line with its previous output, according to data from the Energy Information Administration.

Combined, five of the power plants produced 1.5 million MWh in the first quarter of this year under the DOE’s orders, down 65% from the 4.3 million MWh they generated in the same period last year. One of the six plants, in Pennsylvania, hasn’t reported its output to the EIA this year. It generated just 27,000 MWh in the first quarter last year.

Never before in the Energy Department’s nearly 50-year history has it ordered generating units to continue producing power after their scheduled retirement dates. To do so, it has used a string of 90-day emergency orders issued under the Federal Power Act’s section 202(c). DOE has reissued those orders for all the units before the initial orders expired.

Continue reading “Trump’s “Emergency” Coal Plants Not Producing”

The Slate truck is a basic body that you can customize to your heart’s content, but the 25k price is what has people’s attention.

Wall Street Journal:

A new automotive startup is betting that Americans are so fed up with high car prices they will consider buying a two-seat, all-electric pickup truck with hand-crank windows and no radio. 

Slate Auto, a Michigan-based carmaker backed by Amazon.com AMZN 1.74%increase; green up pointing triangle founder Jeff Bezos, is racing to begin production later this year of its first model: an overtly spartan, compact truck that will start at $24,950, the company said on Wednesday. Trucks like these have been missing from U.S. roads for over a decade.

Car buyers today have only eight new models to choose from under $25,000, with automakers warning that it is difficult, if not impossible, to turn a meaningful profit on such vehicles. 

Slate thinks it can buck that trend. “A U.S. automaker can make an affordable vehicle—and not only an affordable vehicle, but an affordable vehicle that people love,” said Peter Faricy, Slate’s chief executive.

Continue reading “25K Modular EV: First Look”

Not fast enough to head off climate change, but nevertheless satisfying.
Judge me if you will.

Nature -The political polarization of health outcomes in the USA:

Abstract:

Public health disparities provide an important lens for understanding social and political change in the USA. Using individual-level medical data and death records, this study shows that conservative Americans experienced worsening health and higher mortality than liberals during the 2010s. Here we find evidence consistent with two potential mechanisms. First, demographic realignment within political coalitions brought less healthy individuals into the conservative camp. Yet by the 2020s, demographic change, public policy and COVID-19 do not fully account for the widening gap in mortality rates. Public opinion data are consistent with a second mechanism: declining trust in medical professionals among right-leaning individuals, including lower willingness to seek care, follow clinical advice or believe in medication effectiveness, even for issues unrelated to COVID-19. These patterns suggest that growing ideological divides in health behaviours are leaving conservative Americans increasingly vulnerable to preventable health risks.
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We find that conservative Americans in this cohort, who were about as healthy as liberals in the early 2010s, experienced worsening health through the 2010s and higher mortality in the early 2020s. Roughly half of this new health gap is due to people changing their ideology over time, with new entrants to the conservative coalition being less healthy than new liberals. But another sizeable share is due to people who were already liberal or conservative diverging more in health over time. Changes in the socio-economics of the liberal and conservative coalitions—including education, income and insurance status—contribute to both processes.

Continue reading “Science Denial Killing MAGA”

Bio movie about storm chaser Reed Timmer promises some wild footage, and maybe a little science.

Art of the Deal.

Financial Times:

Instead, the best immediate hope for emissions reduction is China, ironically a vast consumer of coal that has frequently resisted binding carbon targets. Its accidental co-conspirator is Trump, an outright climate change denier. For the past 15 or so years, China has poured trillions of dollars in spending and tax breaks — often buttressed by tariffs and regulations — into renewable energy and other green tech, particularly electric vehicles.
As a massive net oil importer, it was driven more by energy security and strategic industrial policy than global environmental stewardship. Still, the planet should take its wins where it can get them. The increase in oil prices from the Iran war has acted as the world’s most unexpected carbon pricing scheme, with Trump being China’s best salesman. As data from the think-tank Ember shows, sales of green tech have shot up, including in the US, to replace demand for oil. The art of the deal, indeed.

It’s not necessarily being done in a way economists would endorse. You might disapprove of Chinese solar panels flooding the world market as state-subsidised overcapacity, or approve of it as production for a market where rising demand will match supply. Or, like me, you might simply not care either way as long as massively cheap panels are available. The positive externalities of low-cost renewable energy surely exceed the inefficiency from distorting market signals. (More complex technology with security implications, such as electric vehicles, is a harder question.)

Continue reading “Trump is China’s Best Salesman”

California has been a punching bag for anti clean energy trolls, due to the high retail, residential prices of electricity. But those prices are due in large part not to the price of production, which is very competitive, but to the added costs of hardening the transmission and distribution system to increasing impacts from fires and extreme weather, volatility of natural gas prices, and the cost of recent natural gas leaks such as the Alliso Canyon disaster.

Lawrence Berkeley National Lab:

Data from the EIA show that the states most dependent on natural gas experienced some of the greatest increases in retail electricity prices through 2022–2023 (see SI-9), followed by some of the largest price decreases. The relationship between state-level natural gas share and retail electricity price variability is illustrated (see bottom).

Continue reading “California Prices Showing Impact of Clean Energy”

More stories about unexpected synergies of Solar and wildlife.
We are in a biodiversity crisis as severe as our climate crisis, and there are a number of stories emerging about how solar fields, oftreplacing industrially farmed crops, are creating habitat for a diverse set of species, large and small.

Pulse:

A subtle revolution is happening deep in Colombia.

More than a quarter of a million solar panels at El Paso are quietly going about their job. But a secret process is unfolding underneath the arrays.
Prey species of wildlife are moving in, appreciating the “sanctuaries.”

But motion cameras recorded the remarkable moment one elusive predator decided to make the panels its home.
What rarely seen cat is covertly thriving inside Colombia’s largest solar farm?

Enel Green Power is the international energy powerhouse behind the El Paso Solar Park in Colombia’s picturesque César region. 

It’s the first large-scale solar endeavor of its kind in the country. The solar farm leaves a massive footprint with 250,000 photovoltaic panels and supporting infrastructure. 
Its installed capacity is 86.2 MW, supporting around 100,000 homes. This is an incredible figure for Colombia.

Yet, the El Paso farm has had an unexpected effect on wildlife. 

The fencing off of the solar farm has created a secure perimeter. The land is undisturbed by hunting and deforestation, and animals were quick to take advantage. Species that have never even seen such high-tech equipment before think it’s the perfect setup for living.

In fact, one of Earth’s most secretive and shy mammals was recorded moving in with her whole family.
What is it about an industrial power plant that could attract a creature ordinarily so reclusive?

Continue reading “Columbian Solar Field is Refuge for Rarely Seen Cat”

“I’ve never seen this before.”

New York Times March 22, 2024:

Golf balls, tennis balls, softballs. All sound like the stuff of fun games — except when they are used to describe the size of the hailstones that often accompany severe thunderstorms.

Those hailstones can cause significant damage to homes and cars, a growing worry as warming temperatures fuel more destructive storms. This month, baseball-size hail, sometimes called “gorilla hail” because of its heft, was reported in Kansas and Missouri.

The insurance industry reported $60 billion in losses from “severe convective storms” — a catchall name for thunderstorms that may spawn hail, heavy rain, lightning, high winds and tornadoes — last year, said Mark Friedlander, a spokesman for the Insurance Information Institute, a trade group. In 2022, the industry reported $31 billion in losses.

Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Storm Prediction Center show 5,879 reports of hailstones of one inch or larger in 2022, up 17 percent from 5,020 in 2021. Preliminary data for 2023 show 6,962 reports, including a significant increase in reports of very large hailstones of two inches or more.

Continue reading “Monster Hail Killing Crops, Cratering Ground as Midwest Storm Damage Grows”