This is so amazing. This is everything I hoped for 30 years ago or so. We do not need coal. We do not need oil. We do not need natural gas. All we need is ourselves.
https://www.cusd1.com/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_ID=1552877&type=d&pREC_ID=1678920
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All the stuff I have been posting lately is real good news and I am so happy about it. If there is plastic in our food sources (especially fish) and the planet virtually shuts down because man has denuded it. What does it matter? I am trying to be optimistic but it is tough.
https://news.yahoo.com/britain-set-first-coal-power-103853088.html
LONDON, May 8 (Reuters) – Britain, the birth place of coal power, is set to go seven days without electricity from coal-fired stations for the first time since its 19th century industrial revolution, the National Grid operator said on Wednesday.
Britain was home to the world’s first coal-fueled power plant in the 1880s, and coal was its dominant electric source and a major economic driver for the next century.
However, coal plants emit almost double the amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) – a heat-trapping gas blamed for global warming – as gas-fired power plants, and were moved out of Britain’s cities from the late 1950’s to reduce air pollution.
As part of efforts to meet its climate target to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 percent compared with 1990 levels in the next three decades, Britain plans to wean itself completely off coal-fired power generation by 2025.
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NOT! Corporations are disgusting things.
Still they are our corporations.
Vistra plans to acquire electricity provider Crius Energy Trust.
Vistra Energy, a retail power provider to 2.9 million customers, announced this week it intends to purchase Crius Energy Trust. DNV GL confirmed to Greentech Media that the acquisition makes Vistra the largest residential retail electric power provider in the U.S. based on number of customers.
A company most recently in the news for its involvement in the record-setting Moss Landing project, Vistra purchased Crius for about $328 million and will assume $108 million of that company’s net debt. Crius, a multi-level energy seller that provides electricity including solar power through a number of brands, has about 1 million customers.
In announcing the deal, Vistra President and CEO Curt Morgan said the Crius portfolio has “a high degree of overlap with Vistra’s generation fleet and complements Vistra’s existing municipal aggregation and large commercial and industrial portfolio in the Midwest and Northeast markets.”
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I do not need to bemoan, because this is a real good thing, but BEMOAN I shall. Now that the feed backs loops have begun to kick in. They were only speculation before. And now that the plastic has begun to swamp the ocean and permeate our food chain. This maybe a little bit too late. Had we done this type of thing 30-40 years ago our species would not be in danger. Still it is a good step. But maybe it would be better off to just plant a trillion trees, to give us breathing space literally for this type of thing to catch up
How a California community succeeded in pushing for a reliability fix that will see the installation of storage projects rather than a natural-gas peaker plant.
What started as a routine gas plant procurement ended as a testament to the changing electrical grid.
This week, utility Southern California Edison selected a roster of energy storage projects to supply local capacity needs around the coastal city of Oxnard, instead of the 262-megawatt natural-gas peaker plant it had chosen previously.
If regulators give their approval, Strata Solar will build and own a 100-megawatt/400-megawatt-hour system in Oxnard, and dispatch it on behalf of SCE.
This system will tie for largest lithium-ion battery in the world when it comes online in December 2020; the AES Alamitos plant of the same size is due around the same time.
SCE wants to complement the massive battery with a portfolio of smaller units, ranging from 10 to 40 megawatts, scattered around the area. Developers of those smaller include E.ON, Able Grid, Ormat, AltaGas and Enel. Swell, which aggregates fleets of home batteries into grid assets, won a 14-megawatt contract for behind-the-meter demand response.
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Can making the world pay the true cost of dirty energy really be implemented!? What would the world do in the face of energy “riots” like what happens in congress when legislators try to pass climate legislation of any kind? One can only imagine what would happen if those protests moved to the street. That is the question this article raises.
Economists have workable policy ideas
for addressing climate change. But
what if they’re politically impossible?
In a Saturday afternoon in early December, inside a soaring auditorium on the campus of Stockholm University, William Nordhaus gave the crowning lecture of his half-century career as an economist. The occasion was his acceptance of the Nobel Prize in economics, which Nordhaus, a trim, soft-spoken Yale professor, had been jointly awarded. The title of the lecture was “Climate Change: The Ultimate Challenge for Economics.”
As a young professor on a sabbatical in Vienna in the mid-1970s, Nordhaus happened to share an office with an environmental researcher, who helped spark his interest in the emerging issue. While there, Nordhaus came up with the target, now famous, of holding global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. He chose the target, as he recently explained to me, because he believed that the earth has experienced similar fluctuations before and that humans had tolerated them.
The Nobel was a tribute to the originality and influence of his work developing economic models that help people think about how to slow climate change. It also seemed to be a cri de coeur from the Swedish academics who choose the economics laureates: Climate change is a threat like no other. Fatal heat waves, droughts, wildfires and severe hurricanes are all becoming more common, and they are almost certain to accelerate. Avoiding horrific damage, as a United Nations panel of scientists recently concluded, will require changes in human behavior that have “no documented historic precedent.”
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Fossil fuels and their burning to generate energy for work, like gasoline in an internal combustion engine in your typical automobile is killing this planet. Humans have used our atmosphere as an open sewer for as long as we can with out killing our species off. Yes if we leave it in the ground it will cause radical changes in our lives and our economy. NO we will not huddle in the cold and the dark. But even if we did is it better to be dead?
https://www.desmogblog.com/2019/02/22/inevitable-death-natural-gas-bridge-fuel-renewables
By Justin Mikulka • Friday, February 22, 2019 – 10:18
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti recently announced the city is scrapping plans for a multi-billion-dollar update to three natural gas power plants, instead choosing to invest in renewable energy and storage.
“This is the beginning of the end of natural gas in Los Angeles,” said Mayor Garcetti. “The climate crisis demands that we move more quickly to end dependence on fossil fuel, and that’s what today is all about.”
Last year America’s carbon emissions rose over 3 percent, despite coal plants closing and being replaced in part by natural gas, the much-touted “bridge fuel” and “cleaner” fossil fuel alternative.
As a new series from the sustainability think tank the Sightline Institute points out, the idea of natural gas as a bridge fuel is “alarmingly deceptive.”
But signs are emerging that, despite oil and gas industry efforts to shirk blame for the climate crisis and promote gas as part of a “lower-carbon fuel mix,” the illusion of natural gas as a bridge fuel is starting to crumble.
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I always try try to stay positive. This may have a chance. They will have to fight hard but it is their future. Not mine. I fought for 50 years. Now it is someone else’s turn. Good luck. God speed. Your only planet depends on it. We got no place else to go.
If the recent report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is to be believed, humanity has just over a decade to get carbon emissions under control before catastrophic climate change impacts become unavoidable.
The Republican Party generally ignores or denies that problem. But the Democratic Party claims to accept and understand it.
It is odd, then, that Democrats do not have a plan to address climate change.
Their last big plan — the American Clean Energy and Security Act — passed the House in 2009 but went on to die an unceremonious death before reaching the Senate floor. Since then, there’s been nothing to replace it.
Plenty of Democratic politicians support policies that would reduce climate pollution — renewable energy tax credits, fuel economy standards, and the like — but those policies do not add up to a comprehensive solution, certainly nothing like what the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests is necessary.
Young activists, who will be forced to live with the ravages of climate change, find this upsetting. So they have proposed a plan of their own. It’s called the Green New Deal (GND) — a term purposefully reminiscent of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s original New Deal in the 1930s — and it has become the talk of the town. Here are Google searches from the past few months:
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It really all comes down to the fossil fuel companies like Exxon. If they would have admitted that Global Warming was happening, like their research showed, then we could have been doing this in the 1980s. As it is now, we are in a horse race and we are losing. Still I try to be positive, this is happening in Texas, red of red states, so there is hope that this example will pick up the pace.
California-based 174 Power Global is breaking ground Thursday on the largest utility-scale solar project in Texas, the company said.
The project is on 1,500 acres of private land in Pecos County, in West Texas, and area that has become a hub of utility-scale solar projects. It’s 236 megawatt capacity can power 50,000 homes a year, and all of its power will be sold to Austin Energy, a utility for the city of Austin. The project will cost $260 million.
174 Power Global is a subsidiary of South Korea’s Hanwha Energy. 174 Power Global has focused on developing solar projects on land without competing interests. The project in Pecos County, for instance, has not oil and gas development and the salinity of the property’s water prevents it from being used for livestock or agriculture.
RELATED: Solar power emerges where oil and gas once dominated
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I’ll put a few more up. Why not start out with the Capitalist’s point of view.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/rrapier/2018/12/23/the-top-10-energy-stories-of-2018/#5f91c2c4799a
As 2018 comes to a close, it’s time to review the top energy stories of the year. This year there wasn’t an overwhelming choice for the top story as we have had in some previous years (e.g., the Deepwater Horizon spill), but many of the year’s biggest developments impacted oil prices.
Here are my picks for the stories that shaped the year in energy.
Oil price roller coaster
The price of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) opened the year at $60/bbl. Brent crude was just under $67/bbl. By early October, on the back of several developments that are covered in other stories below, WTI was closing in on $80/bbl and Brent was above $86/bbl. But then prices collapsed in part because the ongoing trade war with China caused them to stop importing U.S. oil, and in part because sanctions on Iranian exports were waived at the last moment — after Saudi Arabia had already increased production to compensate for Iran’s lost exports. The overall impact was a collapse in the price of oil. As we head into the last week of the year, WTI has fallen to $45/bbl and Brent crude is at $54/bbl.
U.S. shatters oil production record
Early in 2018, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) announced that the previous monthly record for U.S. crude oil production – 10.044 million BPD set in November 1970 — had been broken. U.S. oil production would continue to rise steadily throughout 2018, reaching 11.475 million BPD by September 2018 (the last month for which monthly numbers are available).
China slows solar program
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I hate that last one. Go there and read. More next week.
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What can I say about Trumps environmental policies in general and his energy policies specifically that hasn’t been said before. They SUCK. The economic surge in their direction is so strong that they can’t be stopped. But will it be in time?
Business
Reuters 13 hours ago
By Nichola Groom
(Reuters) – U.S. solar installations fell 15 percent in the third quarter as the Trump administration’s tariffs on overseas-made panels forced developers to put off large projects, according to a report commissioned by the industry’s primary trade group.
Current weakness in the utility-scale market, however, will be offset by larger volumes of projects than had been expected over the next five years because solar energy is now cheaper than ever, the report said.
Quarterly installations of utility-scale solar were 678 megawatts, the lowest quarter since 2015 and a more than 30 percent decline from a year ago, the report by Wood Mackenzie for the U.S. Solar Energy Industries Association said. The total market, which includes residential and commercial installations, came in at 1.7 gigawatts.
The slowdown is a shift for solar, which has experienced runaway gains in the last decade. Through the first three quarters of the year, solar accounted for 30 percent of electricity generating capacity additions.
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