Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

EricMears

GreatApe wrote: »

Plus once this episode is over I doubt you will find anyone who actually supports humans actively trying to drive down FF concentration in the atmosphere. It is a huge risk not worth taking. A warming world is better than an ice age by an unimaginable amount.

Have to say that I doubt any effective way of reducing CO2 content in whole atmosphere will be found. However, if such a process is ever implemented it's unlikely to cause a new Ice Age - surely we'd just switch the system off when we got down to desired level.

NigeWick

EricMears wrote: »

Have to say that I doubt any effective way of reducing CO2 content in whole atmosphere will be found.

Perennial grass to feed food animals. If properly husbanded grass will capture carbon by making more soil underneath that grass. Using permaculture techniques many (if not all) desert areas can be made productive agricultural land (again in some places) capturing carbon. Not a quick fix but I am sure it would work.

Martyn1981

NigeWick wrote: »

Perennial grass to feed food animals. If properly husbanded grass will capture carbon by making more soil underneath that grass. Using permaculture techniques many (if not all) desert areas can be made productive agricultural land (again in some places) capturing carbon. Not a quick fix but I am sure it would work.

I'd forgotten about that option. I think China is now winning the battle against desertification, and is regaining land faster than the desert is taking it now. I think they use some sort of carbon rich gue mixture around the trees/plants that they plant to help feed the new tree and hold water longer.

As you say, not quick and easy, but mixing a char into sand, can be a way of both storing carbon and reclaiming land which in turn will become a carbon sink if the plants/trees survive.

As Eric points out, storing CO2 is a real problem. My understanding is that the Paris target of 1.5C is actually based on us limiting CO2 emissions to a point the planet will only heat up by 2C, then in the second half of this century we remove enough CO2 to reach that 1.5C, or to word it better, to stop the temperature rising to 2C from 1.5C which it would otherwise do based on the 2050 CO2 levels being left unchecked.

GreatApe

People are too optimistic in the short term and too pessimistic in the long term

before the end of the century humanity will be able to control the heavens and the earth.
something as simple as the CO2 content in the air will be trivial to control and manipulate
We probably wont even be biology by the end of the century

Coastalwatch

Sonnen. Residential batteries ready to compete with fossil fuels and nuclear in Germany!

For all the talk about the Uk being at the forefront of renewable energy it would seem that Germany are years ahead of the UK when it comes to home storage and Grid balancing!

Batteries in private households will be now able to perform the “same tasks as a conventional power plant”, across the whole of Germany, the CEO of Sonnen has said, following a ruling that opens up grid services markets to the company’s devices.

CEO Christoph Ostermann told Energy-Storage.news that PCR markets have the highest barrier to entry and the “most challenging” process to get pre-qualification of all Germany’s grid services markets. Primary Control Reserve is the first tier of the German Primary Operating Reserve, or grid frequency regulation, programme, and must be activated within seconds of receiving a grid signal, making itself available to the network for up to 15 minutes. Pre-qualified participants must compete in weekly tenders to supply the service.
“We did that with a network that only consists of home storage systems all over Germany. That has never done before in that dimension anyhere in the world,”

https://www.energy-storage.news/news/sonnen-residential-batteries-ready-to-compete-with-fossil-fuels-and-nuclear

Martyn1981

I first read this headline as phasing out coal by 2025, then realised it was phasing out coal subsidies by 2025:

EU agrees 2025 coal subsidy phase out rules

EU coal subsidy phase-out 'completely inconsistent with Paris deal'

Kind of incredible to read that subsidies still exist, and will last till 2025, when RE subsidies are tumbling or disappearing already.

And Poland gets special exemptions because they use so much coal (80% of leccy generation). Think about that, the country that uses so much coal, gets an exemption from a 2025 deadline to remove subsidies (subsidies not coal).

Anyone who thinks this is a fair fight is Krazeeeee.

But, don't want to end on a low, it is almost Xmas after all, so I guess any move forward is a positive and can be improved upon.

Martyn1981

Solar and hydrogen storage for off-grid housing complexes in Sweden:

Housing complex in Sweden runs fully on stored hydrogen and solar power

Residents of the complex will be 100% disconnected from the electrical power grid.

The project is a breakthrough in sustainable building and clean energy. When the complex is fully finished and operational, a total of 172 flats in six housing blocks will be able to operate exclusively on alternative energy derived from clean sources.

Residents of the building will be fully independent and disconnected from electrical power grids as well as exterior heating sources and fluctuating electricity prices. Counting only the solar panels, these alone will produce enough electricity to meet their energy needs throughout the year. As for the stored hydrogen, it can be converted cleanly and efficiently back into energy when it is needed.

Million homes programme houses become self-sufficient in energy using PowerCell’s fuel cells

The houses are initially two-story buildings but are now being expanded with a third floor to accommodate more apartments and new roofs optimized for the use of solar cells. At the same time, the houses are being made more energy-efficient. The energy that is not used during the summer will be converted to hydrogen and stored. In the winter, the stored hydrogen will be used to run fuel cells which will generate both electricity and heat. The houses will become fully self-sufficient in electricity and heat.

Martyn1981

Big push in China now for storage. That's pretty much the last hurdle for RE generation, so as deployments rise and costs fall, the negative-nancies will have nowhere left to run!

China Making Big Battery Storage Push In 2019

Time for a bold statement, partly for fun, partly because we always need positive news, I'm going to suggest that by the end of this decade (31st December 2020), RE + storage costs will be low enough to beat out both FF and nuclear generation for new builds ...... game over?

Martyn1981

Good thing the UK has both on-shore and off-shore wind resources:

Weatherwatch: global wind speeds weakening over land

Across the world’s land masses, measured wind speeds have been mysteriously weakening for the past 50 or so years, in some regions slowing down by as much as 25%. Several studies have come to the same conclusion, using wind observations from weather stations across the world.

Strangely, the slowdown seems to be happening largely over land. Over the oceans the phenomenon is less pronounced, with some areas even showing an acceleration. One suggestion is that climate change is partly to blame by altering patterns in the global atmospheric circulation. Another suggestion is that urban development and more vegetation is creating a rougher ground surface that slows winds. However, winds have slowed down across Saudi Arabia, mostly desert, which probably means this is only part of the answer. Now an EU-funded project is trawling through historical records back to the 1880s to find out whether this phenomenon is part of a much longer climate cycle.

Martyn1981

This is an excellent article on RE deployment in Australia. The government is almost Trump'like in their approach to renewables and coal, but regardless the cleaner, greener, cheaper technologies are winning.

Looks like a combination of people power, and economics are hard to beat.

In 2018 the Australian government chased its energy tail. Here's a more hopeful story

While the federal government dithered, business, the states and the public took matters into their own hands to dramatically change the energy picture

In the three years from 2018 Australia will install a little over 12 gigawatts of renewables, as much as was installed in the 30 years after the country’s first windfarm opened at Salmon Beach in Western Australia in 1987.

Since 2017, 19 new windfarms and 30 new solar farms have been registered and in early December the two millionth Australian household went solar. Once derided as insignificant, solar supplied more than 7% of Australia’s power over the past three months.

A little over a decade ago, when just 5.2% of our power was from renewables, the Rudd government was swept into office with an aspirational pledge of “20% by 2020”. That target has been met two years early, and analysts Green Energy Markets predict one-third of our power will be from clean energy by 2021.

The transformation of the national electricity market over the decade has been stunning. Highly polluting brown coal use is down 36.6% and black coal (still dirty!) has fallen 9.4%, mostly replaced by wind and solar. Surprising to many, we burn less gas in the NEM now than we did a decade ago.