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Category Archives: sustainability

Elon Musk Throws A Tempertantrum – NOone listens

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Really – wouldn’t that be cool? But you know, self absorbed rich young guys with big mouths, the press eats them up. More! More! More! Is he right well? Newsome is no fascist. He is just a little old Democrat. Could the car industry open up? Well probably, slowly. But Elon wants what Elon wants and Elon usually gets. Thus the outburst.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/29/tesla-tsla-earnings-q1-2020.html

Tesla rises as company ekes out a Q1 profit

Lauren Feiner@lauren_feiner
Lora Kolodny@lorakolodny
  • Tesla reported first-quarter results on Wednesday, including a $16 million profit.
  • A Covid-19 outbreak in China forced Elon Musk’s electric-vehicle maker to suspend manufacturing in Shanghai for more than a week in February and in the U.S. at the end of March.
  • Musk and Tesla CFO Zachary Kirkhorn are expected to update shareholders on the impact of the coronavirus on their business so far and their plans to bring production back online in the U.S.

Excerpt:

Musk slammed the Bay Area’s shelter-in-place orders as “unconstitutional” and “fascism” in a profanity-laced tirade on an earnings call Wednesday evening.

He said: “I think we are a bit worried about not being able to resume production in the Bay Area and that should be identified as a serious risk. We only have two car factories now, one in Shanghai and one in the Bay Area.”

And he continued sounding more and more incensed, at one point asking, “What the f–k?”

Musk also ranted about the health orders: “I think people are going to be very angry about this and are very angry. It’s like somebody wants to stay in the house? That’s great, they should be allowed to stay in the house, and they should not be compelled to leave. But to say that they cannot leave their house, and they will be arrested if they do, this is fascist. This is not democratic. This is not freedom. Give people back their goddamn freedom.”

(Leaving a place of residence is not a crime in California under Covid-19 health orders.)

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Go there and listen to loud shouting. More next week.

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HillTopper Wind Farm – It looked magnificent

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During this pandemic I have been getting rid of my housitis by driving around in my car. No touching. No talking. Just driving. At first it was close to Riverton, like to Williamsville or places in Springfield like Lincoln Land Community College or Washington Park. One day I thought, “Let’s drive to Mt. Pulaski” which is about 20 miles away maybe. I had forgotten that they had built a wind farm just shy of there. What a glorious sight. Right along the highway. I was amazed. I pulled off the road in wonder. My faith in humanity was renewed.

(I know this is a company site but it has wonderful Pictures. I can neither vouch for this company nor advise any sort of dealings with this company. I am simply reposting its website)

https://www.enelgreenpower.com/stories/a/2019/01/hilltopper-and-sustainable-future-of-energy-with-egp-ppas

HillTopper wind farm creates energy solutions for a sustainable future

Published on Thursday, 17 January 2019

excerpted:

A Wind Farm “Made in the USA”

Located in Illinois, the US state with the sixth highest installed wind capacity, HillTopper is an example of how our projects contribute to local socio-economic development.

By purchasing wind turbines produced from a local business, HillTopper contributed 50 million dollars directly to the local economy: a clear example of the care Enel Green Power has for the communities that welcome us. As Enel Green Power, we provide sustainable, clean, reliable and affordable energy to several companies, with the goal of creating new value in the heart of Illinois.

The 185-MW wind farm uses General Electric turbines manufactured in the United States and, through a collaboration with Trinity Structural Towers, located just a few kilometers from the site, we’re fostering the growth of the local economy.

The local manufacturer provided about half of HillTopper’s 74 turbines. At nearly 90 meters tall, they provide 570 GWh of energy every year. This power can cover the energy needs of more than 46,300 American households.

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Go there and read all their corporate speak. But look at the picture and imagine the possibilities. More next week.

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Paradise Coal Plant Closed Down – Is it ok to dance on somebody’s grave

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My answer to that is YES! I know in this time of Covid-19 that we are not supposed to wish people ill. Or in general, in the METOO moment say harsh things about the down and OUT! Trust me, this is more exclamation points then I have used in 10 years. The fact that it happens in McConnell’s state and against The Cheeto Burrito’s wishes is just wonderful to me.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/iconic-plants-end-spells-doom-051246740.html

Iconic plant’s end spells doom for struggling coal industry

DYLAN LOVAN
Associated Press

DRAKESBORO, Ky. (AP) — President Donald Trump tried to stop it from happening. The top Republican in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, did too.

Despite their best efforts to make good on Trump’s campaign promise to save the beleaguered coal industry, including an eleventh-hour pressure campaign, the Tennessee Valley Authority power plant at Paradise burned its last load of coal last month.

The plant’s closure — in a county that once mined more coal than any other in the nation — is emblematic of the industry’s decadeslong decline due to tougher environmental regulations, a major push toward renewable energy and a rise in the extraction of natural gas. The shuttering of businesses nationwide and a reduced need for energy amid the global coronavirus pandemic threatens to deal coal yet another devastating blow.

“It’s not just one 1,000-megawatt unit closing; they’re going down all over the place,” said John Rogers, a former mine owner who lives in western Kentucky near the Paradise plant, located in Muhlenberg County.

When coal-burning plants close, coal mining loses its best customer. Since 2010, 500 coal-burning units, or boilers, at power plants have been shut down and nearly half the nation’s coal mines have closed. No U.S. energy company, big or small, is building a new coal-burning plant.

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Go there and YIPPEE. More next week.

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I Love The Coronavirus – Less than a million dead

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And it has had a huge positive impact on the environment. Take this as exhibit one. China literally has cleaner air.  We need more viruses like this. Scare the world off fossil fuels.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-51691967?utm_source=digg

Coronavirus: Nasa images show China pollution clear amid slowdown

  • 29 February 2020

 

 

Related Topics

Satellite images have shown a dramatic decline in pollution levels over China, which is “at least partly” due to an economic slowdown prompted by the coronavirus, US space agency Nasa says.

Nasa maps show falling levels of nitrogen dioxide this year.

It comes amid record declines in China’s factory activity as manufacturers stop work in a bid to contain the coronavirus.

China has recorded nearly 80,000 cases of the virus since the outbreak began.

It has spread to more than 50 countries but the vast majority of infections and deaths are in China, where the virus originated late last year.

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I know this is being sick. It is sarcasm. Go there and read. More of this next week.

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GeoEarth Power – Forget fusion power, nuclear, coal or natural gas

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If we can perfect this method, who needs any other form of energy? Yes we should keep producing Solar, Wind and Local geothermal. But with Deep Geothermal the only horizons we would have to conquer to be carbon free would be water shipping and air transport. Maybe Deep Geo could even make electric water transport possible. This stuff is so cool.

https://www.wired.com/story/want-unlimited-clean-energy-just-drill-the-worlds-hottest-well/?utm_source=digg

Daniel Oberhaus

Science

Want Unlimited Clean Energy? Just Drill the World’s Hottest Well

An engineering team bored 2 miles into hot rock without causing major earthquakes—a good sign for harnessing the Earth’s heat as a power source.

There’s treasure buried deep beneath the viridescent foothills of Tuscany’s Apennine Mountains, where the stark metal trusses of the Venelle-2 drilling tower mark its location like an X on a map. This geothermal well reaches nearly two miles beneath the surface to a region where temperatures and pressures are so high that rock begins to bend. Here, conditions are ripe for supercritical geothermal fluids, mineral-rich water that exhibits characteristics of both a liquid and a gas. It’s not exactly gold, but if Venelle-2 could tap into a reservoir of supercritical fluids and use them to spin a turbine on the surface, it would be one of the most energy-dense forms of renewable power in the world.

But getting there isn’t so easy. Boring deep into the ground risks triggering an earthquake if a large chunk of rock slips out of place. This risk was amplified at the Venelle-2 well, which aimed to breach the K horizon, a poorly understood boundary between the hard rock near the surface and the more pliant rock below. What would happen when the drill punched through this layer into the supercritical fluids below was anyone’s guess.

And for now, the mystery remains. Drilling at Venelle-2 stopped just shy of the K horizon when temperatures at the bottom of the well overwhelmed the equipment. Sensors at the bottom of the well indicated temperatures had breached 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit and pressures 300 times greater than at the surface. Nevertheless, Venelle-2 is the hottest borehole ever created, and it demonstrated that it’s possible to drill at the extreme end of supercritical conditions. And this week, a paper published in the Journal of Geophysical Research showed that it could be done without producing any major seismic activity.

The authors say they hope their study will assuage fears that all geothermal drilling causes earthquakes. After all, the public usually hears about geothermal wells only when something goes wrong. But Venelle-2 shows that “there are also many positive cases of wells drilled for geothermal purposes,” says Riccardo Minetto, a researcher at the University of Geneva and coauthor of the study.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Climate Change Is Speeding UP – Those pesky Feedback Loops l

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Only speculated on several years ago. Feedback Loops are things that speed up or slow down climate change. The two that concern us here are the most obvious, clouds and ice shrinkage. The more water in the atmosphere the more clouds and the hotter the earth – the more water. But the killer one is, ice is very very reflective. What replaces it it is not and in the case of “dark” water, it is incredibly absorptive. The question has always been when would they kick in? I always said we would know when it was too late. Here we are.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-03/climate-models-are-running-red-hot-and-scientists-don-t-know-why?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why

The simulators used to forecast warming have suddenly started giving us less time.

By

There are dozens of climate models, and for decades they’ve agreed on what it would take to heat the planet by about 3° Celsius. It’s an outcome that would be disastrous—flooded cities, agricultural failures, deadly heat—but there’s been a grim steadiness in the consensus among these complicated climate simulations.

Then last year, unnoticed in plain view, some of the models started running very hot. The scientists who hone these systems used the same assumptions about greenhouse-gas emissions as before and came back with far worse outcomes. Some produced projections in excess of 5°C, a nightmare scenario.

The scientists involved couldn’t agree on why—or if the results should be trusted. Climatologists began “talking to each other like, ‘What’d you get?’, ‘What’d you get?’” said Andrew Gettelman, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, which builds a high-profile climate model.

“The question is whether they’ve overshot,” said Mark Zelinka, staff scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  Researchers are starting to put together a­nswers, a task that will take months at best, and there’s not yet agreement on how to interpret the hotter results. The reason for worry is that these same models have successfully projected global warming for a half century. Their output continues to frame all major scientific, policy and private-sector climate goals and debates, including the sixth encyclopedic assessment by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change due out next year. If the same amount of climate pollution will bring faster warming than previously thought, humanity would have less time to avoid the worst impacts.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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America Wastes More Energy Than It Uses – This is so disturbing that it could kill us

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Think about it. Global Warming is speeding up and this could be why. We are literally consuming ourselves to death with no mechanism to stop it. Should we start singing “Good Night Irene”?

https://digg.com/2020/how-america-uses-its-energy-visualized

WHAT AMERICA RUNS ON

How America Uses Its Energy, Visualized

Digg · Updated:

America is consuming more energy than ever before, according to the Energy Information Administration. With scientists sounding the alarm that we need to reduce our usage of greenhouse gas-intensive fuels soon, it’s interesting to take a look at what sources from which we derive all of our energy.

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory crunched the numbers, looking through data from the EIA, and produced an energy flow chart depicting energy by sector and source — including solar, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind, geothermal, natural gas, coal, biomass and petroleum. See the full-sized image here.

One key takeaway from the energy flow chart is how much energy we waste (labeled in the chart as “rejected energy”), the vast majority of which seemingly comes from fossil fuel sources. The reason why “rejected energy,” the waste heat resulting from the process of electricity generation, occupies such a large part of the system is mostly due to the inefficiency of our current energy systems.

And as you can also see from the chart, despite the dogged efforts of figures like Elon Musk, who has grand ambitions for his solar business, America’s biggest energy product is still petroleum.

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Go there and stare. There is no more to read. More if there is a next week.

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Greta Thunberg Sailed The Ocean Twice This Year – Why are we making a teenager carry the weight of the world

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I find it amazing that she beat The Orange Baby out for Time’s Person of the Year Cover. I find it disgraceful that the Cheto Bureeto then attacked and tried to bully her on Twitter. I find it uplifting that she fought back and made a wannabe President back down. Way to go Grrrl.

https://newrepublic.com/article/156101/passion-greta-thunberg?utm_source=digg

The Passion of Greta Thunberg

The icon of the movement for action on climate change is a teenager. Shouldn’t that worry us?

By Ben Ehrenreich
Add to Pocket

I didn’t feel good about asking Greta Thunberg for an interview. She’s a kid still; stardom rots the soul; and the spotlight is clearly torture to her—a torture she has chosen freely, but a torture all the same. And her celebrity has never seemed entirely healthy: this Nordic child, from one of the most comfortable and privileged societies the Earth has ever known, leading a movement to confront a planetary crisis that disproportionately harms people who do not look anything like her—people who live in Mozambique, the Bahamas, Somalia, San Juan, whose lives could not be more different from hers. Wasn’t the media playing the same tired, old game, elevating a photogenic white savior figure so that it wouldn’t have to deal with voices and faces that might make it uncomfortable? And wasn’t I part of that media?

But I was also on my way to Madrid to cover December’s United Nations climate summit, and it was sufficiently important to Thunberg to be heard there that she sailed across the Atlantic twice. It felt irresponsible not to try to interview her, if only to ask her the same questions I was asking myself. Plus, she and the other youth activists would be the more lively subjects in those windowless convention center halls. Without their idealism and anger, the event would look like just another bureaucratic death march.

I found an email address for interview requests. Greta wasn’t even on land yet at that point, but she had internet on the catamaran. She was tweeting still, and occasionally posting selfies. I couldn’t help but notice that out there in the swells and spray, she looked much happier and more at ease than she had on any of the stages I had seen her on over the previous month, each day looking more and more exhausted. Every time I saw her happy, I realized, I felt happy too. But this was part of the problem, wasn’t it? That I—and I knew I wasn’t alone in this—had become so invested in her individual happiness; that I had managed to funnel a portion of my rising panic over the climate crisis into her, brave little Greta, with the fierce eyes and the stainless steel backbone, those earnest pigtails a reminder that she was, despite it all, a child.

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Go there and read. More next week.

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Germany Shuts A Nuke – The Power Industries sputter complaints

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Don’t do it! You’ll never replace it! Make you more dependent on oil and natural gas. Stop. Wait. what do you think you are doing….. HaHA it is so funny when an industry that never should have been created (too cheap to meter) dies off. All I can say is Tah Tah. don’t let the screen door hit you in the ass.

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-shuts-down-atomic-plant-as-nuclear-phase-out-enters-final-stretch/a-51845616

https://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2011/03/15/in-panic-germany-to-shut-pre-1980-nukes/#38e2062f6881

please note:  this originally appeared in the nyt but it is an associate press piece and the Times kept screwing with how I  posted it with a stupid algorithm so I posted the forbes page instead. Then realized that it was a 2011 so I then posted the deusche welle piece as the update.

Germany Shuts Nuclear Plant as It Phases Out Atomic Energy

By The Associated Press

BERLIN — Germany is shutting down one of its seven remaining nuclear power plants as part of a planned phase-out of atomic energy production by the end of 2022.

Utility company EnBW has said it will take the Philippsburg Nuclear Power Plant off the grid at 7 p.m. (1800 GMT) Tuesday. The plant’s license to operate expires at midnight.

Under Germany’s “energy transition” plan, the country aims to replace fossil fuels with renewable energy sources over the coming decades. The government agreed earlier this year to stop producing electricity from coal-fired plants by 2038 at the latest.

Proponents of nuclear power argue that shutting down the remaining reactors will endanger Germany’s energy security, making it more reliant on greenhouse gas-producing coal and gas and on electricity imported from neighboring countries that still have atomic plants.

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Go there a celebrate. More next week.

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India Can Have A Great Energy Policy – America’s Energy Policy Sucks

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The Big Article is the one about India’s overall energy policy which compared to America’s is wonderful. The Smal Article is the one I am interested in because it is the side deal in the “thrird” world that could save the day.

https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/industry/energy/power/india-set-to-cross-100gw-renewable-energy-capacity-mark-in-2020/articleshow/72977561.cms

India set to cross 100GW renewable energy capacity mark in 2020

Presently, the issues hampering growth of renewables in India are lack of interest of financial institution to fund renewable energy projects, safeguard duty on imported solar panels, ambiguity over goods and services tax (GST) on solar equipment …

India is all set to cross the 100GW renewable energy capacity mark in 2020 and can make rapid strides towards the ambitious 175GW clean energy target by 2022 provided the government keeps a close eye on key issues and deals with those well in time.

The government however needs to promote storage to ensure 24X7 clean energy supply as coal fired thermal power still remains the base load in the country.

Presently, the issues hampering growth of renewables in India are lack of

interest of financial institution to fund renewable energy projects, safeguard duty on imported solar panels, ambiguity over goods and services tax (GST) on solar equipment and low investor sentiment due to delayed or non-payment by discoms to clean energy developers.

Cabinet approves pact with Guinea on renewable energy

The areas of cooperation include solar energy, wind energy, bio-energy, and waste to energy, small hydro storage and capacity build.

But the real kicker for me is the deal that they cut with Guinea that really impresses me. My brother just came back from there and he reports that these people have nothing but a bauxite mine, yet India is willing to do this.

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More next week. Go there and read.

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