Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

ABrass

Cardew wrote: »

FIT is only ended for new applications.


The scheme has approx another 20 years to run (inflation linked)



The 'news' element was the Election discussions where Farage raised the wider issue of Green Taxes where the 'poor' are subsidising the 'rich'.

Yeah, I know, it's Farrage I should be complaining to about his discussion of the pressing matters of the day for 2010. I'm not sure the quotes are relevant here, it's exactly that with things like VAT and the former FIT.

Martyn1981

Were' gonna need bigger wellies.

Greenland's ice sheet melting seven times faster than in 1990s

Greenland’s ice sheet is melting much faster than previously thought, threatening hundreds of millions of people with inundation and bringing some of the irreversible impacts of the climate emergency much closer.

Ice is being lost from Greenland seven times faster than it was in the 1990s, and the scale and speed of ice loss is much higher than was predicted in the comprehensive studies of global climate science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to data.

That means sea level rises are likely to reach 67cm by 2100, about 7cm more than the IPCC’s main prediction. Such a rate of rise will put 400 million people at risk of flooding every year, instead of the 360 million predicted by the IPCC, by the end of the century.

Oceans have absorbed most of the excess heat arising from our disruption of the climate to date, and much of the carbon dioxide, but they are reaching the limits of their capacity to do so. Sea level rises are driven not only by melting ice but by the thermal expansion of the seas as they warm.

The scale and speed of the ice loss surprised the team of 96 polar scientists behind the findings, published on Tuesday in the journal Nature. The Ice Sheet Mass Balance Inter-comparison Exercise comprised 26 separate surveys of Greenland from 1992 to 2018, with data from 11 different satellites and comparisons of volume, flow and gravity compiled by experts from the UK, Nasa in the US, and the European Space Agency.

Martyn1981

I'm getting old, I can still remember when this would have been considered big.

93 MWh Tesla Megapack Coming To Alaska To Save Customers Cash

A new 93 MWh Tesla Megapack system installed in Alaska by the Homer Electric Association, Inc., will be used to directly offset electricity that would have otherwise required a peaker plant to fire up. The new battery pack will be installed at the Soldotna Power Plant (map), adjacent to the existing natural gas-fired GE LM 6000 turbine currently used to provide electricity to cover peak usage in the area.

Notably, the local electricity cooperative opted to install the new Tesla Energy system as a way of creating a more flexible grid to accommodate more intermittent renewable assets on the grid in the future. Batteries not only serve as peaker units for a grid operator, they are a source of flexibility, one of the most valuable metrics for any grid operator when it comes to keeping everything humming along reliably.

Martyn1981

Scots tidal smashes crowdfunding target

Scottish tidal developer Nova Innovation has raised over £700,000 since launching a crowdfunding campaign two week ago, smashing its initial target of £500,000.

Martyn1981

Not sure that all my peers (old white men) will be as happy as me, but this is great news, certainly helps to raise the profile of the climate crisis too:

Greta Thunberg named Time magazine's person of the year

Greta Thunberg, the teen activist from Sweden who has urged immediate action to address a global climate crisis, was named Time magazine’s person of the year for 2019 on Wednesday. She is the youngest person to have ever received the accolade.

Thunberg, 16, was lauded by Time for starting an environmental campaign in August 2018 which became a global movement, initially skipping school and camping out in front of the Swedish parliament to demand action.

“In the 16 months since, she has addressed heads of state at the UN, met with the pope, sparred with the president of the United States and inspired 4 million people to join the global climate strike on September 20, 2019, in what was the largest climate demonstration in human history,” the magazine said.

“Margaret Atwood compared her to Joan of Arc. After noticing a hundredfold increase in its usage, lexicographers at Collins Dictionary named Thunberg’s pioneering idea, climate strike, the word of the year,” Time said.

Greta Thunberg Is TIME Person Of The Year

Thunberg’s message is simple. “We can’t just continue living as if there was no tomorrow, because there is a tomorrow. That is all we are saying.” What she means is that if the world continues to pour the waste products that come from burning fossil fuels, the Earth’s ability to support human life will be severely degraded if not destroyed altogether.

Martyn1981

'Drill baby drill' ...... no I haven't gone to the dark side:

The Boring Company + Pumped Hydro: Proposal For Elon Musk — CleanTech Talk

When most people think of pumped storage, they think of putting a dam on a river and pumping water from below the dam to the top. In fact, as Mike explains, putting a dam on a river has huge environmental impacts, including changes in upstream and downstream ecosystems and carbon dioxide emissions from decomposing vegetation. Instead of blocking a river, closed-loop pumped-storage hydropower significantly reduces environmental impacts and dissipates much of the controversy surrounding hydropower and dams. Furthermore, Mike believes that for closed-loop pumped-storage hydropower, there is a hundred times more resource potential than our storage needs globally.

Martyn1981

Divestment from FF's is looking more and more sensible. [Note that FF company values reflect their known reserves, and those reserves total far more than the accepted max carbon budget before runaway global warming would be unavoidable, so they can never be extracted anyway.]:

Chevron Will Write Down Its Assets By At Least $10 Billion

Chevron announced this week it will write down the value of its assets by between $10 and $11 billion in the fourth quarter of this year, according to a report by the Associated Press. The reason for the write-down is oil and natural gas prices that stubbornly refuse to rise despite increases in demand. Those lower prices mean the value of the company’s stated reserves is less than anticipated. More than half the write-down is related to gas drilling operations in Appalachia.

Such write-downs are becoming more commonplace in the industry. Last week, Spanish oil company Repsol took a $5.3 billion write-down of its oil and gas assets as part of its promise to reduce carbon emissions from its operations and products. In late October, BP took a $2.6 billion charge after it sold some US assets as part of a $10 billion divestment plan. The sale brought lower than expected prices, a further indication that the industry may be facing serious financial trouble in the months and years ahead.

Martyn1981

UK wind generates new record

Wind power in the UK set a new generation record on 10 December of almost 17GW, just 48 hours after setting the previous record, according to National Grid data.

Martyn1981

Big day for politics, EU politics:

Info on the proposed European Green deal:

European Green Deal will change economy to solve climate crisis, says EU

Nearly every major aspect of the European economy is to be re-evaluated in light of the imperatives of the climate and ecological emergency, according to sweeping new plans set out by the European commission on Wednesday.

The comprehensive nature of the European Green Deal – which encompasses the air we breathe to how food is grown, from how we travel to the buildings we inhabit – was set out in a flurry of documents as Ursula von der Leyen, the new commission president, made her appeal to member states and parliamentarians in Brussels to back the proposals, which would represent the biggest overhaul of policy since the foundation of the modern EU.

Von der Leyen said the package was aimed at economic growth and increasing prosperity. “[This] is our new growth strategy, for a growth that gives back more than it takes away,” she said. “It shows how to transform our way of living and working, of producing and consuming, so that we live healthier [lives] and make our businesses innovate. We will help our economy to be a global leader by moving first and moving fast.”

But three countries are holding out, particularly Poland which gets 80% of its leccy from coal:

EU leaders meet to try to agree on carbon neutrality by 2050

European leaders meeting at a summit in Brussels will make a new attempt to set the European Union on course for carbon neutrality by 2050, in a test of the bloc’s credibility on the climate emergency.

Most EU member states support the plan to make the EU carbon neutral by 2050 but Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic are refusing to sign up, raising the prospect of a dramatic setback for Europe’s green credentials in the final days of the UN climate conference in Madrid.

Failure to agree the EU-wide target a second time, after a previous attempt in June, would be a blow to the European commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, who on Wednesday set out her vision for a green deal that would transform every aspect of economic life.

The green deal – a sweeping plan to change food production, industry, transport, buildings and energy use – is based on a target for net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. Von der Leyen wants a €100bn (£84bn) fund of public and private money to help countries abandon fossil fuels, in addition to a plan from the European Investment Bank to incentivise €1tn of green investment between 2021 and 2030.

Martyn1981

Renewables 'top UK investors chart'

Renewable energy is the top investment sector for UK investors with almost one-third (30%) regarding it as the area they would actively put their money into for long-term gain, according to a survey from GraniteShares.