We Need To Rebuild Our Power Grid – Or suffer devastating increased costs for natural disasters

This is a first for this blog. We have never posted an “OP/ED” piece before, but Ms. Granholm knows what she is talking about. So listen up!

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/17/perspectives/clean-energy-economy-build-back-better-agenda/index.html

Extreme weather keeps knocking out America’s power. Here’s what we must do

Jennifer M. Granholm is the 16th United States Secretary of Energy. The opinions expressed in this commentary are her own.

Perspectives Jennifer M Granholm

The image of a collapsed electrical tower and power lines that Hurricane Ida tossed into the Mississippi River illustrated a fundamental challenge facing the nation: Our power systems weren’t built to withstand extreme weather events. Without major investments to reinforce, modernize and clean our grid, the question will not be whether it fails, but when.

Over the year, we’ve gotten a full view of the dangers ahead. Even before Ida, we had wildfires and heatwaves threatening to overload the grid, droughts straining hydropower generation, and a polar vortex that froze gas production. This pummeling is part of a long trend driven by climate change — one that will continue to worsen if we keep spewing carbon pollution.
As UN Secretary-General António Guterres has said, this is a code red for humanity. But luckily, the Biden administration has a plan to respond: the Build Back Better Agenda, which will make essential crucial investments to protect our infrastructure against climate impacts, and put our nation on track to build a clean energy economy.
While some have questioned the scope of the President’s historic proposals, we should weigh their concern alongside the exponentially skyrocketing costs of cleaning up after extreme weather events. In the 1980s, it cost about $18 billion a year to clean up after climate disasters. Then the extreme weather intensified, so the costs ballooned. In the 1990s, we spent about $27 billion annually to clean up. In the 2000s, it cost almost $52 billion annually. In the 2010s, cleanup costs exploded to $81 billion. Then in the last five years, we’ve spent a whopping $121 billion per year to clean up after an angry Mother Nature.

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Go there and read the rest. More next week.

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Advice On Saving Energy At Home – Not from me mind you, someone who creates content for CIELOWiggle

I know it has been awhile since I did a residential post. I know this started out as a blog about residential energy needs and services. You know, energy efficient roofs, HVAC equipment and other such stuff. But years ago, I got off on energy related environmental stuff and then eventually Global Warming. Then anti-Nuclear stuff. Finally just raw Environmental stuff like obnoxious polluting and horrible deaths. Well today a gentleman named Chris Winters reached out and touched me so I am touching him back, so to speak. As always, I can vouch for his tips because they are somewhat general, but anything specific he is pitching I can not (For instance AC controllers – which his company sells). Also I may have put up this as an addenda to any earlier piece, so if i did forgive me.

https://www.cielowigle.com/blog/energy-saving-tips/

No matter what the season, energy usage tends to increase one way or another. With long running air conditioning and increased wash cycles of sweaty laundry in summer, to high heating usage and wash cycles of bulkier laundry in winter, we simply cannot operate without electricity.

We can be extremely energy efficient and follow energy saving tips and tricks to ingrain some environmentally friendly habits.

Following energy saving tips is essential to lower your costs, but it is also important to decrease your ecological footprint.

With millennials and Gen Z nicknamed “generation green”, there is a strong focus on energy saving, and rightly so. However, global warming is rising more rapidly than ever, and the term ‘climate emergency’ is being used rather than climate change to highlight the situation’s intensity.

All industries such as HVAC are revolutionizing their technology to act on climate change. Since home appliances and devices are a major contributor to our energy consumption, utilizing smart devices such as smart thermostats or smart controllers for air conditioners can make a huge difference on your bills!

Let’s get right to it. Here are 21 energy saving tips that can easily help you decrease your energy consumption:

1. Use Energy Efficient Appliances

Energy efficient appliances are specially designed to consume minimum energy to complete the same tasks that you’d perform with normal appliances.  In addition, some

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Good there and read. More next week.

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When There Is Too Much Electricity – Yah gotta let it out baby

Any Electrical Generation System can generate too much energy in a system where output is unknown. To put it another way where consumption is unknown. And this is just my opinion but I am betting any system would rather have too much than too little product or produce to sell. If the system is really large a little bit too much is way better then a little bit less. But what to do with the excess?  By the way. contrary to this article, you can turn energy generation off, so long as you know when you have to turn it back on.

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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Joe Biden Is Turning Out To Be My Kind Of President

Do I need to say more?

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

From 4% to 45%: Biden Offers Ambitious Blueprint for Solar Energy

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

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Go there and read. More next week.

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The United States Is Unprepared For The Heat Of Now – Let alone the future

Forget about Humans interaction with our Warming Climate. Think about the infrastructure we build  for the last hundred years where one hundred degree Fahrenheit days ARE NOT THE Norm. Now every State in the union will have days over 1 Hundred Degrees and maybe weeks over one Hundred Degrees. Bear in mind that Minnesota had fires this summer around the Northern Lakes Region for the first time in memory. What is it gonna be like when the phone lines and the power lines come down. What is it gonna be like when the roads blow up. I do not mean catastrophic. I mean disruptive. I think disruptive is worse.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2021/06/portland-seattle-heatwave-warning/619313/?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Nowhere Is Ready for This Heat

The Pacific Northwest is melting now, but all across America the infrastructure we have was built for the wrong century.

The Portland Streetcar is 20 years old, making it relatively sprightly for infrastructure in the United States. Yet it was built for a different geological epoch. On Sunday, while Portland suffered through what was then its hottest day ever, the system started to melt. As the temperature reached 112 degrees Fahrenheit, a power cable on a major bridge warped, twisted around some metal hardware, and scorched. Elsewhere, the wires that run above the track expanded and sagged so much that they risked touching the train cars. By mid-afternoon, the streetcar system had shut down. The trams, which run on 100 percent renewable energy, seem to offer exactly the sort of urban fast transit that the country needs to reduce carbon pollution. But they were not prepared for—they could not withstand—one of the region’s first wrenching encounters with the remade atmosphere.

At first blush, there isn’t much to say about the “heat dome” settled over the Pacific Northwest like a shroud. Here is the story: It is very hot. Portland’s hottest three days on record have been the past three: The city broke its all-time record on Saturday (108 degrees Fahrenheit), smashed it on Sunday (112 degrees), and broke it again yesterday (116 degrees). Seattle-Tacoma International Airport also set an all-time heat record yesterday (108 degrees). Farther north, the temperature in the town of Lytton, British Columbia, yesterday reached 117 degrees Fahrenheit, or 47.5 degrees Celsius—the hottest temperature ever measured anywhere in Canada. America’s northern neighbor now has the same all-time heat record as Las Vegas, hundreds of miles to the south. Portland’s all-time record now exceeds the all-time records for Dallas, Austin, Houston, and Atlanta. It is very hot.

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Go there and sweat. More next week.

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Nuclear Power People Should Be In Jail – But for much simpler crimes

To me, “having nowhere to store the waste” or “there being cheaper alternatives”, should be jailing offenses before the fact.  I think the crime should be digging a giant hole in the ground and putting nothing in it. I think the crime should be building a power plant you will never fuel. I think. I think there should be a nuclear jail for all the nuclear criminals in the US of A. But I guess this will have to do.

https://news.yahoo.com/more-criminal-charges-filed-south-193059123.html

New criminal charges filed against Westinghouse official in SC’s nuclear plant failure

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A second high-ranking employee of Westinghouse Electric is facing criminal charges in connection with the multi-billion dollar failure of the doomed nuclear project in Fairfield County.

Jeffrey Benjamin, a former Westinghouse senior vice president of new plants and projects, faces multiple counts of fraud, according to an 18-page indictment made public Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Columbia.

It is the latest criminal charge in a four-year federal investigation of what went wrong at the highest levels of two substantial American companies — Westinghouse and the former SCANA Corporation.

The charges against Benjamin are “for his role in failing to truthfully report information regarding construction of new nuclear units at the V.C. Summer nuclear plant,” Acting U.S. Attorney Rhett DeHart said in a press release.

Benjamin’s alleged cover-up of billions of dollars in losses at Westinghouse’s troubled nuclear plants in South Carolina and Georgia were part of a series of events leading to the company’s bankruptcy in March 2017, according to the indictment.

“The defendant’s misrepresentations and omissions, as well as the associated cover-up, resulted in billions of dollars in losses to (SCANA), ratepayers and investors,” the indictment said.

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Go there and get mad. More next week.

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Energy Web Site Home Builders And Owners Will Love

Every once in awhile I return to CES’ residential roots. So, here is another pass. You know what I say in these situations – Buyer Beware. This site looks really really good. I think it is sexy that it is a nonprofit organization. But I have never used this organization. I am a homeowner who has made very little in the way of energy IMPROVEments – insulation, metal roof and efficient air conditioner but the furnace in my house is 20 years old. Nonetheless these people look cool.

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.

The mission of the Zero Energy Project is to provide information and education to prospective home buyers, builders, designers, real estate professionals and advocates about zero net energy homes and to advance the prevalence of these homes in the mainstream housing market. We seek to facilitate connections between industry professionals and buyers, remove perceived barriers to entry, and provide resources to people from all walks of life, empowering action towards a robust zero energy built environment.

 

We aim to provide all stakeholders with the necessary resources for understanding, designing, constructing, and selling affordable zero energy homes. We are committed to providing homebuilders, designers, and realtors with the marketing tools they need to convince their clients of the benefits of zero net energy homes.

This mission takes on new urgency in light of “Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math.”

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Go there and fool around. More next week.

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Dangerous Oklahoma Wind Farm – That was gonna be the piece that I ran

But the Oklahoma Newspaper put up a stinking pay wall that pissed me off. So here is the reference to that:

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

Breaking down the cost of wind turbine maintenance

Cutting costs by preventing failure instead of running wind turbines until they break lies at the heart of a new approach to operations and 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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Unions And Climate Change – Some of their stances are just bad

As A HUGE disclaimer, my wife are both union members. Our prents were Union members. My great grandfather was a card carrying Socialist and ran for City Alderman in Chicago as such. So I believe in Unions. But when they get stuck on saving jobs no matter what. They get a little lost and sometimes real lost. These becomes apparent with police unions – though appropo to this topic. They protect bad cops for jobs sake. Well, the IBEW and other unions are no better. Instead of saying, “We will change power plant jobs for better jobs in the green sector”. They say, “We will not lose the jobs we have”. They act like it is heroic when it is pathetic.

https://www.vox.com/2019/5/22/18628299/green-new-deal-labor-union-2020-democrats

The Green New Deal is fracturing a critical base for Democrats: unions

National labor leaders oppose the Green New Deal but some state unions endorse it. That’s a challenge for presidential contenders.

As a statement of principles and goals, the Green New Deal seems to take economic justice and workers’ rights pretty seriously. It calls for a federal jobs guarantee. It says we need workforce retraining, strengthening collective bargaining rights, retirement security, and universal health care.

The resolution decries “antilabor policies” and says it must be fleshed out with input from “frontline and vulnerable communities, labor unions, [and] worker cooperatives,” with the goal of creating “high-quality union jobs.”

Which is why it was so surprising that the leader of the national AFL-CIO — the largest federation of labor unions in the United States, representing more than 12.5 million workers — recently came out against the proposal.

“We weren’t part of the process, so the worker’s interest wasn’t really figured into it,” AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka said in April. “We would want a whole bunch of changes made so that workers and our jobs are protected in the process.”

(Disclosure: I was on the bargaining committee of the Vox Media Union. We organized with Writers Guild of America, East, which is affiliated with the AFL-CIO.)

But this week, Maine Gov. Janet Mills signed her state’s version of a Green New Deal with the backing of labor unions.

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Go there and read. More next week

 

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People Don’t Think NonCarbon Fuels Can Power The World – Well they can

Again, I rarely publish Videos. Because this is a print blog. But this is a good one and it makes the point, that if you structure the infrastructure right you can power the world with Solar and Wind.

https://digg.com/video/heres-what-would-happen-if-you-covered-the-entire-sahara-desert-with-solar-panels

Trending

HERE COMES THE SUN

Here’s What Would Happen If You Covered The Entire Sahara Desert With Solar Panels

With our climate crisis and other problems with fossil fuels, what if we attempted to cover the Sahara Desert with solar panels? Could we power the entire planet?