First, of let me say I am now cancer free. Second, let me say that taking a break away from posting because of the cancer and the cancer treatment left me fairly lazy, so it is tough getting back to writing these posts. The thought has occurred to me that I might retire at the end of the year. Anyway it is good to be back for now. So without further adieu:

https://springfieldstatejournalregister-il.newsmemory.com/?token=ad88ee2719e187433892376e5ee4084b&cnum=f1ab27f9-ae38-eb11-a0ad-90b11c3d639b&fod=1111111STD-0&selDate=20221001&licenseType=paid_subscriber&for-guid=7b00ad35-cf99-4e2d-8f79-47fcd162e2b9&utm_source=sj-r-DailyBriefing&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=daily_briefing&utm_term=promo&utm_content=NSJR-ILLINOIS-SPRINGFIELD-NLETTER65

FELDHEIM, Germany (AP) — Europeans are opening their energy bills with trepidation these days, bracing for hefty price hikes as utility companies pass on the surging cost of natural gas, oil and electricity tied to Russia’s war in Ukraine. Many are trying to conserve by turning down the heat and shutting off lights this winter.

Not so the people of Feldheim, population 130.

Located about an hour and a half south of Berlin, this modest but well-kept village has been energy self-sufficient for more than a decade.

A bold experiment launched in the mid-1990s saw Feldheim erect a handful of wind turbines to provide electricity to the village. Then it built a local grid, solar panels, battery storage and more turbines. A biogas plant put up to keep piglets warm was expanded, providing extra income to the farmers’ cooperative, which pumps hot water through a village-wide central heating system. A hydrogen production facility is also under construction.

Come on! If a little tiny town can do it, we all can.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Energy Independence – It should be every bodies right appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/02/climate/coal-mines-solar-climate.html

In Martin County, Ky., where coal production has flatlined, entrepreneurs are promising that a new solar farm atop a shuttered mine will bring green energy jobs.

By Cara Buckley

Jan. 2, 2022

Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Solar Farm Converted To A Coal Mine -Yah, I know, that is never going to happen appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

The thing that really bothers me, and you see can it in the article, is that the Republicants make it a cause celeb with false claims about the Turbines, mostly human health related – likes Trump’s – they cause cancer comment. They get everybody riled up and angry because they think it will get people to vote for their candidates in elections and in the end it just screws things up for everyone involved. On top of that the wind farms get built (usually) and nobody is happy.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/josephbernstein/facebook-groups-wind-turbine-construction?utm_source=digg

Joseph Bernstein BuzzFeed News Reporter

Bad vibrations abound. Many of them are obvious: We can sense them, measure the damage they do, try to counteract or avoid them. Others exist in a range outside the limit of normal human perception. Most of us go about our lives oblivious to these. But sometimes a person gains a new kind of awareness, one that gives form and name to the hidden forces in the air, in this country, at this moment. Such a person may become obsessed, tormented, desperate. Such a person may feel obligated to act.

Erik and Chantelle Benko live in rural Sidney Township, Michigan, about 45 minutes northeast of Grand Rapids. They moved there in 2016, to a ramshackle ranch on 40 rolling acres, where they planned to breed American quarter horses and set up an equine-assisted psychotherapy practice. Getting the place in shape took several hundred thousand dollars, they said. But it was worth it to raise their two boys in a place where people knew each other and treated each other with respect, where kids got the first day of hunting season off from school, where you couldn’t pump gas without making friends with the clerk. The first night in his new home, the sky was so clear, Erik Benko said, “you felt like you could reach out and grab a handful of stars.”

One day in October 2020, a post on the Facebook page for the Sidney Township Neighborhood Watch seized the Benkos’ attention. Jeffrey Lodholtz, a member of the township planning commission, had published a screenshot of a text message from Jed Welder, a local farmer and township trustee. Like hundreds of rural and agricultural communities across the country, Sidney Township, open, gusty, and short on cash, was receiving interest from a wind energy company. Wind farms can bring municipal tax benefits, construction jobs, and payments for fallow or devalued cropland. The planning commission was considering a new law to set standards to encourage developmen

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Go there and read. It is a very long article. More next week.

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The post Trouble With Wind Turbines – Everything that is not true of turbines appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.wired.com/story/energy-vault-gravity-storage/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Screw Batteries – Alternative energy doesn’t need them appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2021-11-30/geopolitics-energy-green-upheaval?utm_source=pocket-newtab

It is not hard to understand why people dream of a future defined by clean energy. As greenhouse gas emissions continue to grow and as extreme weather events become more frequent and harmful, the current efforts to move beyond fossil fuels appear woefully inadequate. Adding to the frustration, the geopolitics of oil and gas are alive and well—and as fraught as ever. Europe is in the throes of a full-fledged energy crisis, with staggering electricity prices forcing businesses across the continent to shutter and energy firms to declare bankruptcy, positioning Russian President Vladimir Putin to take advantage of his neighbors’ struggles by leveraging his country’s natural gas reserves. In September, blackouts reportedly led Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng to instruct his country’s state-owned energy companies to secure supplies for winter at any cost. And as oil prices surge above $80 per barrel, the United States and other energy-hungry countries are pleading with major producers, including Saudi Arabia, to ramp up their output, giving Riyadh more clout in a newly tense relationship and suggesting the limits of Washington’s energy “independence.”

Proponents of clean energy hope (and sometimes promise) that in addition to mitigating climate change, the energy transition will help make tensions over energy resources a thing of the past. It is true that clean energy will transform geopolitics—just not necessarily in the ways many of its champions expect. The transition will reconfigure many elements of international politics that have shaped the global system since at least World War II, significantly affecting the sources of national power, the process of globalization, relations among the great powers, and the ongoing economic convergence of developed countries and developing ones. The process will be messy at best. And far from fostering comity and cooperation, it will likely produce new forms of competition and confrontation long before a new, more copacetic geopolitics takes shape.

Talk of a smooth transition to clean energy is fanciful: there is no way that the world can avoid major upheavals as it remakes the entire energy system, which is the lifeblood of the global economy and underpins the geopolitical order. Moreover, the conventional wisdom about who will gain and who will lose is frequently off base.

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Go there and reeeeaaad. More next week.

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The post Upheavals Caused By Clean Energy – All the tree huggers make it look like pixie dust appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://digg.com/video/what-happens-when-islands-makes-way-more-power-than-neededs

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Go there and watch. Its only 6 minutes. More next week.

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The post Grid Regulation With Alternative Power – Its almost as important how you turn alternative power off as how you turn it on appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/what-do-we-do-too-much-renewable-energy

What Do We Do With Too Much Renewable Energy?

It’s not easy to turn off a wind turbine, but the electricity has to go somewhere

By Natasha Khullar Relph | Aug 19 2020

We know that green energy is good, but can there be too much of a good thing?

For instance, with unusually low demand during the COVID-19 lockdown, the United Kingdom’s power consumption fell by nearly 20 percent this summer. That caused a surge in unused green energy. In May, the National Grid asked for emergency powers to switch off solar and wind farms and warned of blackouts and a “significant risk of disruption to security of supply.”

Britain is certainly not alone. As the transition to renewable energy gathers pace, early adopter regions like Germany, Denmark, and California are finding that, counterintuitively, too much green power poses problems for their energy supply. Electricity, when generated, must be used instantaneously, and therefore the amount of generation and the amount of demand must be balanced perfectly at all times. This can cause surges in the grid unless there are means of storing or diverting this excess.

Finding that perfect balance is complicated at the best of times, says Cisco DeVries, an energy expert and the CEO of OhmConnect as well as a former aide to the secretary of energy during the Clinton administration. It’s far worse when you throw in sudden surprises such as a global pandemic. Suddenly, people are consuming more power at home, but factories are standing empty. “We’re changing when and where we’re using [energy], and we’re doing it in a way that’s never been done before,” he says. Add the challenges of disconnecting solar power plants and wind farms to changing use patterns, he notes, and you’ve “exponentially complicated the balancing of supply and demand.”

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post When There Is Too Much Electricity – Yah gotta let it out baby appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/08/business/energy-environment/biden-solar-energy-climate-change.html

The Energy Department analysis provides only a broad outline, and many of the details will be decided by congressional lawmakers.

By Ivan Penn

Sept. 8, 2021Updated 4:09 p.m. ET

The Biden administration on Wednesday released a blueprint for producing almost half of the nation’s electricity from the sun by 2050 — something that would require the country to double the amount of solar energy installed every year over the next four years and then double it again by 2030.

The expansion of solar energy is part of President Biden’s effort to fight climate change, but there would be little historical precedent for increasing solar energy, which contributed less than 4 percent of the country’s electricity last year, that quickly.

Such a large increase, laid out in an Energy Department report, is in line with what most climate scientists say is needed to stave off the worst effects of global warming. It would require a vast transformation in technology, the energy industry and the way people live.

The Energy Department said its calculations showed that solar panels had fallen so much in cost that they could produce 40 percent of the country’s electricity by 2035 — enough to power all American homes — and 45 percent by 2050.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The post Joe Biden Is Turning Out To Be My Kind Of President appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://zeroenergyproject.org/our-mission/

The Zero Energy Project is a non-profit educational organization whose goal is to help home buyers, builders, designers, and real estate professionals take meaningful steps towards radically reducing carbon emissions and energy bills by building zero net energy homes and near zero energy homes. We envision the day when positive energy homes, which produce more energy than they consume, will power electric vehicles as well as homes, so that everyone can live well with less expense and without fear of energy price spikes, while greatly reducing our carbon emissions.

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Go there and fool around. More next week.

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The post Energy Web Site Home Builders And Owners Will Love appeared first on Community Energy Systems.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221108194553/https://www.oklahoman.com/story/business/energy-resource/2021/06/19/oklahoma-corporation-commission-concerned-panhandle-wind-farm-broken-turbines-poses-safety-threat/7523260002/

Here is a video peek:

So now I will have to post a more desultory post about how to properly maintain a wind farm and what that costs. But they had some cool pictures of things like a Turbine House destroyed at 300 feet. Turbine blades dangling and swinging in the wind. Everyone called it DANGERous. But here is the more mundane side of things. What the bad boys should have been doing.

https://www.windpowermonthly.com/article/1010136/breaking-down-cost-wind-turbine-maintenance

OR

http://www.renewableenergyfocus.com/view/21860/the-challenge-of-wind-turbine-blade-repair/

The challenge of wind turbine blade repair

07 November 2011
George Marsh

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Go there and yawn. More next week

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The post Dangerous Oklahoma Wind Farm – That was gonna be the piece that I ran appeared first on Community Energy Systems.