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ps: Ken, how do you rate the chances of reducing CO2 emissions in 2030 by 55% (7.5% p.a.) for +1.5 celsius, 25% for +2 celsius ?
U.S. News Nov. 22, 2019 / 2:30 AM
As coal dwindles, Southwest tribal solar farms pump out power
By Jean Lotus
DENVER, Nov. 22 (UPI) -- New, large-scale solar farms are bringing jobs to reservations and electricity for the first time to families living on tribal lands in remote areas of the Southwest.
Along with selling renewable energy on a large scale to cities like Albuquerque and Los Angeles, solar power generated by tribes pays for infrastructure to power up homes that have been waiting decades for electricity.
The Navajo Tribal Utilities Authority successfully brought online two large solar projects that generate 55 megawatts in Kayenta, Ariz., over the past year. The two sites now provide enough electricity to power the entire 17-million-acre reservation.
Building the two solar farms employed more than 400 people, most of them tribal members, said Deenise Becenti, the utility's spokeswoman.
"Tribal lands in the Southwest are the Saudi Arabia of solar because they're largely under-developed and undeveloped," said Karl Cates, a Santa Fe-based energy analyst for the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank that studies sustainable energy.
"Solar is gaining market share much faster than anyone thought it would have as recently as a year ago, and it's all market-driven," Cates said.
New Mexico's Public Regulation Commission heard a proposal earlier this month to approve the Jicarilla Solar Project, a 500-acre, 50-megawatt solar farm on Jicarilla Apache Nation tribal lands in northern New Mexico's Rio Arriba County.
Through an agreement with Public Service Co. of New Mexico, the deal will provide electricity to supply Albuquerque with 54 percent of its electric demand.
And I think traditional auto makers can scale up their production faster than Tesla can.
Also, it would help if policymakers made the whole process easier for folks!
Tesla lets you order an EV, solar and batteries with a few clicks, and they are working to get more municipalities to accept their generic electronic installation-proposal document, so permitting can take days rather than weeks. More installers should be made able to do this.
Anecdotal but real-world home-charging reports.I thought this was interesting, so I decided to make my own graph. I only have one year of data for solar and one for EV/PHEV, so it's not very smooth (August is an outlier because we were away from home).
May I ask why the suggestion to prohibit teens from using social networks is now such big a topic in this thread? Is this an attempt to hinder Greta's work? It should be obvious that without social networking there would be no Friday for Future and only a few locals in Stockholm would have noticed Greta's school strike. Her superpower was multiplied by social media. And FFF is build on the ability to communicate effective and international.<snip>
All the tech executives tend to be raising their kids tech free.
That is very significant and should make consumerist parents scratch their heads and change their ways.
Maybe interesting in this context:
"Apple's Tim Cook says he wouldn't let a child use social media"
The existing grid is built on receiving power from a relatively few large power sources. The grid will have to be redesigned to take power from a vast array of large and small wind and solar power plants and perhaps take power from and give power to of millions of individual houses / offices / factories.
Plugs ?avoiding cascade failure
Driving the grid close to 100%
the grid must be more robust
Neil, when one reads that, they could get the impression it's hard to install plugs.
Turns out, mankind is pretty good with installing plugs. There are plugs all around you.
With 100% EVs we need 20% more power. It takes like 10-15 years to get near to this 100%. Are you really believing that mankind isn't able to install 20% more (slightly different) plugs in 15 years? C'mon...
As of November 2019, the average cost of solar panels per watt in California is $3.45/watt. A typical 6000 watt (6 kW) solar system is $20,673 before the federal solar credit and $14,471 after claiming the federal solar tax credit.More panels installed the less the cost per W.
According to United States Department of Transportation Federal Highway Administration, Americans now drive an average of 13,476 miles per year. Nov 1, 2018
The more rapidly EV's take over, the sooner someone needs to come up with buckets of cash needed for new infrastructure - at a time when the infrastructure now in place can't be maintained.
Regardless, my argument didn't address any specific EV manufacturer or the suitability of their particular vehicles. If California skewes it's purchases in favor of the PHEV/Hybrid segment my grid argument will fall on its face. If however the governor's edict swings purchases heavily in favor of BEV vehicles, then PG&E and others will need to find bankers with deep pockets who are willing to bet that the utilities can handle a very large, very rapid buildout while remaining solvent and paying their debts.
Lower costs/mile driven regardless of what you're driving is a Wonderful Vision, but just how this occurs while electrical suppliers face the staggering costs of rapid expansion & fossil fuel suppliers face costs associated with lower sales volume must be far beyond my pay grade.
California's addition to the already rapid growth of BEVs simply requires an equally large addition to California's already stretched electrical grid.
Gerontocrat's excellent chart shows that the largest addition to California's grid comes not from solar, wind, or renewables, but from importing ever larger quantities of electricity from outside the state. This isn't cheap and it may not be sustainable if the surrounding states find that domestic EV usage is cutting into their exportable power.
Who is going to lend them money for a massive expansion when they can't even cover their existing liabilities?
That truth said, they are already losing ground,
SimCity is often deployed in an educational context, integrated in some higher-ed and K-12 curricula. And it’s by far the most visible “face” of urban planning. Copies of SimCity were preloaded on computers bound for India during the One Laptop Per Child program, a techno-optimistic initiative to solve rural education deficits by giving every child a computer. An educational version of SimCity called SimCityEDU leads children through a series of challenges like planning school bus routes, “increasing jobs,” or reducing air pollution.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/education-gamification
But only certain kinds of cities are possible in SimCity and its successors. The city of your dreams must be car-centric, modernist, and usually grid-based. Vehicles in SimCity conveniently don’t emit pollution, or even need parking: When cars reach their destinations they simply disappear.
The disappearing cars of the simulated city are a way to make the game more accessible by preventing eternal gridlock. But they also elide many of the most heated debates in real-life urban planning. Parking spaces are battlegrounds, and drivers fight for them against more bike or pedestrian-friendly infrastructure. Students playing the base game or the educational version of SimCity are presented with an environment where cars are neutral, unproblematic, and essential, rather than a deliberate policy choice.
Other elements of SimCity are more troubling. Worker sims have no permanent homes. They cycle endlessly between whatever businesses or dwellings have available slots. Homeless sims are created when a house becomes “abandoned” due to falling property values. These sims lose their identity, gender, and “citizenship” within the game. They wander aimlessly between public spaces and abandoned buildings, eating garbage on their way. They cannot be helped, only removed through stringent trash collection and bus depots out of town. Race, social mobility, real estate speculation, and community aren’t simulated at all. Omissions like this aren’t just matters of design. Their absence from the game is a statement of its own.
OK, Boomer.We are living in a world of change. Adults can't guide the kids through this. We don't know the internet, it's too new and ever-changing. It's a whole new cultural technique we have to learn as humanity as a whole. And then climate change. We know nothing. We can only assume.
The kids feel that. No fucking wonder they are insecure.
It's time to listen to the kids for once. Let's be insecure together.
No. It's time for parents to wake up and take the smartphones away from their kids.
Kids don't need smartphones.
They need a dumb phone so they can communicate with parents as needed. Yes, they may send sms's also.
Plus a strict limit on screentime. 40 minutes per day. After schoolwork is done.
That will give your kids back to you, among other positive effects.
Kids will scream at first and protest at your new regime, but they will accept it. And eventually they will enjoy being different.
U.S. Rig Count Crashes Again: Loses Nearly 100 Rigs In 3 Months
By Julianne Geiger - Nov 15, 2019, 12:20 PM CST
The US oil and gas rig count continued its downward slide this week, according to Baker Hughes, as the rig count piles on a string of losses with a drop of 11 rigs for the week, according to Baker Hughes.
For oil rigs specifically, this week marks eleven decreases out of the last thirteen weeks, falling 96 rigs in that timeframe.
The total oil and gas rig count now stands at 806, or 276 down from this time last year.
The total number of active oil rigs in the United States decreased by 10 according to the report, reaching 674. The number of active gas rigs fell by 1 to reach 129.
Oil rigs have seen a loss of 214 rigs year on year, with gas rigs down 65 since this time last year.
What can they do?
We are investors and fiduciaries for what is widely considered the best public research university in the world. That makes us fiscally conservative by nature and by policy — “Risk rules” is one of the 10 pillars of what we call the UC Investments Way. We want to ensure that the more than 320,000 people currently receiving a UC pension actually get paid, that we can continue to fund research and scholarships throughout the UC system, and that our campuses and medical centers earn the best possible return on their investments.
We believe hanging on to fossil fuel assets is a financial risk. That’s why we will have made our $13.4-billion endowment “fossil free” as of the end of this month, and why our $70-billion pension will soon be that way as well.
So what’s the bottom line?
In April 2014, when Jagdeep arrived to become UC’s chief investment officer, UC Investments had a total of $91.6 billion in assets under management. As of June 30, the total portfolio stood at $126.1 billion. In five years, that includes $2.4 billion in value added above our benchmarksand a savings of $1 billion in reduced costs of management.
During that same time frame, we made no new investments in fossil fuels and four years ago, we sold our exposure to coal and oil sands. We found them too risky — and it’s worth noting that Jagdeep joined UC from one of Canada’ sovereign wealth funds in the heart of the oil sands region. We continue to believe there are more attractive investment opportunities in new energy sources than in old fossil fuels.
The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry are awarded to John Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham and Akira Yoshino “for the development of lithium-ion batteries”. Through their work, they have created the right conditions for a wireless and fossil fuel-free society, and so brought the greatest benefit to humankind..
WARSAW (Reuters) - Poland is on track to import a record amount of electricity this year as power traders buy cheaper and cleaner electricity from neighboring countries, reducing demand for the mostly coal-fired energy produced by state-run utilities.
The majority of Poland’s electricity imports this year came from Sweden and Germany, where average wholesale prices in the first half of the year were 175 zlotys ($44.71) and 165 zlotys per MWh respectively compared to 229 zlotys in Poland.
Exports amounted to 2.9 TWh and 4.2 TWh in 2018 and 2017 respectively. Until 2014, Poland exported more energy than it imported.
Analysts said that while Poland continues to produce most of its electricity from coal, prices will be higher than in neighboring countries, which use more green energy sources.
Just a typo. I use a Paraguayan keyboard and "t" and "p" are next to each other.
Thank heaven that salt water isn't corrosive. And that raw sewage won't be flowing through restaurants or soaking into everyone's carpets.
Time to move to higher ground. Permanently.
Terry
Archimid has a separate agenda - that of exaggerated the effects in order to promote action.
In case you mean i.e. a Model 3 or a Model S Tesla, they way 1 Ton more and transport the same number of people and a similar payload over a similar distance.
Result is that the battery has to be twice as big, materials need are almost double, rubber (micro plastic) production is almost double, space on roads needed is almost double, electricity needed to move the car is double (42kw against 95kw battery back for the same achievement) etc. etc.
Numbers and factors i mentioned are rough estimates, no time and no mood to make huge calculation only to find someone who will moan over a second digit after the comma
From a geopolitical point of view it is very intelligent for China to reorient their natural gas and oil imports to friendly nations with over-land transportation. Same as attempting to ramp up domestic natural gas production. This helps remove their oil and gas imports as a weakness that the USA can utilize in a conflict (just like with Japan just before Pearl Harbour). They have also built up a very large strategic oil reserve.
They should also be going full speed with EV's as they replace imported oil with domestic electricity production (coal, natural gas, nuclear and renewables). Their removal of subsidies to EV's and the renewable sector is very short sighted geopolitically and really bad for the climate. Even at 80% coal share in electricity production EV's generate less CO2 due to the efficiency of the electrical engine (and power generating stations).
General Electric profits have been hammered recently because a large part of its business involved supplying generating systems powered by steam. As the world transitions to renewable energy, steam turbines are less and less in demand and GE’s business has suffered as a result.
But the company is reinventing itself as a provider of grid scale energy storage systems and has recently received two important contracts — one to provide a total of 100 MWh of battery storage at three locations in California and another for 300 MWh of storage in South Australia.
Totalitarian ?I am not sure who the bolded statement refers to, but as it's plural I'll make a response.
YES, it's necessary but you don't get it
Democracy at it's current stage is bankrupt and doomed and will lead to less benevolent totalitariism than my totalitarian proposal to put limits to private transport.
You want changes but refuse anything that has a REAL effect which is why nothing happens, hence you are guilty hypocrites.
The $47 Trillion Death Sentence For Oil & Gas
By Cyril Widdershoven - Sep 23, 2019, 5:00 PM CDT
The future of hydrocarbons is becoming bleak if plans presented by international banks, representing around $47 trillion in value, will be fully implemented.
Around 130 international banks, all present at the UN climate change summit in New York, have committed themselves to decrease their support and investments in the oil and gas sector the coming years. The banking groups have signed the so-called Principles for Responsible Banking, which entails a promise by financial institutions to fully support the implementation of the Paris Agreement, by decreasing hydrocarbon investments while promoting renewables. This statement is going to be a major earthquake for oil and gas companies, threatening upstream and downstream operations worldwide, forcing oil & gas producers to either reduce their impact on the environment or to seek new sources of investment. It is already becoming more difficult for oil and gas companies to find new financing, and on top of this, a large group of institutional investors, representing a value of $11 trillion, are already actively divesting their oil and gas assets.
International banks, such as Deutsche Bank, ABNAmro, Citigroup, Barclays, and ING, are joining the framework. Under the title of action against global warming, the largest financial institutions now seem to be headbutting oil and gas operators. The impact of activist shareholders and NGOs is sending shockwaves through the sector. If the framework is successfully implemented, the hydrocarbon sector shouldn’t fear unrest in the Middle East, but rather their current financiers.
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