Green, ethical, energy issues in the news

Martyn1981

Batteries are already tending to win the contracts for fast frequency response and some peaker services already, so diesel farms and fast starting but inefficient OCGT gas generation is on the way out.

Exiled_Tyke

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-scotland-57991442 

Fantastic news for the renewables industry. Things just get bigger and better!

Martyn1981

Just to show the scale of battery storage and its rapid ramp up, we see Tesla talking about possibly producing 1m Powerwalls per year, being sold out on their Megapacks through 2022, and how global battery production needs to ramp up to 1 or 2TWh pa.

Want A Tesla Megapack? Get In Line And Wait Your Turn.

“We have a significant unmet demand in stationary storage. Megapack is basically sold out through the end of next year, I believe,” Elon Musk said in response to a question from New Street Research analyst Pierre Ferragu. That’s right. If you are a utility company or a renewable energy company that wants to add a Tesla Powerpack or two (or a hundred), get in line.

“As all transitions to sustainable energy production, solar and wind are intermittent and by their nature really need battery packs in order to provide a steady flow of electricity. And when you look at all the utilities in the world, this is a vast amount of batteries that are needed. That’s why in the long term, we really think sort of combined Tesla and suppliers need to produce at least 1,000 gigawatt-hours a year, and maybe 2,000 gigawatt-hours a year,” Musk said on Monday.

Martyn1981

This sounds a bit provocative to start with, but it's a good read, and is more about trying to bring home the reality of the climate crisis, and the impact that burning FF's is having, and will have, rather than individual blame.

Three Americans create enough carbon emissions to kill one person, study finds

The analysis draws upon several public health studies to conclude that for every 4,434 metric tons of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere beyond the 2020 rate of emissions, one person globally will die prematurely from the increased temperature. This additional CO2 is equivalent to the current lifetime emissions of 3.5 Americans.

The research, published in Nature Communications, illustrates the vast disparities in the emissions generated by people’s consumption in different countries around the world. While it takes just 3.5 Americans to create enough emissions in a lifetime to kill one person, it would take 25 Brazilians or 146 Nigerians to do the same, the paper found.

Under Nordhaus’ DICE model the 2020 social cost of carbon is $37 a metric ton but Bressler’s addition of the mortality cost brings this figure up to $258 a ton. This change to the model would imply that an economically optimal policy would be to radically reduce emissions to reach full decarbonization by 2050, a scenario that has also been backed by climate scientists as one that would avoid the worst ravages of global heating.

Bressler said that while his paper looked at the emissions caused by individual activity, the focus should instead be on policies that impact businesses and governments that influence carbon pollution on a societal scale.

“My view is that people shouldn’t take their per-person mortality emissions too personally,” he said. “Our emissions are very much a function of the technology and culture of the place that we live.”

Cardew

https://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/bills/article-9832029/Ministers-want-green-homeowners-sums-seldom-add-up.html

Martyn1981

Looks like the start of really bad news for Australian coal interests:

Origin Energy slashes value of Australia’s biggest coal-fired plant due to impact of cheap renewables

Origin Energy has slashed the value of its assets, including Australia’s biggest coal-fired power plant, by more than $1.5bn as cheap power from renewables floods the national grid.

In a statement to the ASX, the company said it had cut the value of its power stations by $583m due to lower power prices “driven by new supply expected to come online, including both renewable and dispatchable capacity, impacting the valuation of the generation fleet, particularly Eraring power station”.

In December the Japanese company Sumitomo wrote the value of Australia’s newest coal-fired power plant, Bluewaters, down to zero and in June the Queensland government warned that its state-owned plants would be unable to pay dividends within two years due to competition from cheap renewable power.

On the supply side, the mining giant BHP is trying to sell its energy coalmine at Mount Arthur in the Hunter Valley of NSW after slashing its book value down to almost nothing.

Coastalwatch

Not as ambitious as the pre Trump era but moving in the right direction all the same!

USA to return to stricter vehicle emissions standards

The administration of US President Joe Biden is apparently aiming for a return to stricter consumption and emission standards for cars. There is also progress in the legislative process on President Joe Biden’s slimmed-down infrastructure programme.

First, on fuel economy and emissions standards for vehicles, which had been softened under former President Donald Trump. According to information from the Associated Press, the Biden administration initially wants to adopt nationwide, starting with the 2023 model year, the 2019 agreements concluded by the California Environmental Protection Agency (CARB) with Ford, Volkswagen, Honda, BMW and Volvo for voluntary CO2 reductions in the US state. In the following years, these limits are to be successively tightened. The goal is for 40 per cent of all new car sales to be electric vehicles by 2030.

https://www.electrive.com/2021/07/29/usa-to-return-to-stricter-vehicle-emissions-standards/

Coastalwatch

Not a good day at the office for FF's in Oz then, or the Morrison Government in general given their poor record on the roll out of vaccines making the headlines this week!

Mining giant unveils AU$73m solar-plus-storage project

BHP announced on Friday it has signed a power purchase agreement (PPA) with the Australian arm of Canadian energy major TransAlta Renewables which will allow it to build two solar farms and a battery energy storage system (BESS) to help power the mining giant’s Mt Keith and Leinster operations in Western Australia’s (WA) northern Goldfields region.

The AU$73 million (US$53.9 million) Northern Goldfields Solar Project will comprise a 27.4 MW solar farm at Mt Keith and a 10.7 MW solar farm and 10.1 MW/5.4 MWh battery energy storage system (BESS) at Leinster which will displace power currently supplied by diesel and gas turbine generation.

https://www.pv-magazine.com/2021/07/30/mining-giant-unveils-au73m-solar-plus-storage-project/

Martyn1981

Another great vid from Just Have a Think, giving some info on the Iron-Air battery, and its economic progress. It's big and heavy, to say the least, but that really doesn't matter too much for large scale stationary storage, where the most important word tends to be, or perhaps needs to be 'cheap'.

New Iron-Air Battery outperforms best Lithium Ion tech. Cheap. Abundant. Non-toxic & Carbon Free.

Martyn1981

I don't know if this sort of stuff is of interest to anyone else, but suing FF companies for the damage caused by AGW, or the expenditure needed to reduce the impacts, is happening a lot in the US. It reminds me of the way Big Tobacco was taken to court, though of course it took decades to beat them.

I kinda doubt that Big Oil will lose big (sorry had to pop that pun in), though perhaps they may try to settle in some cases, but if they lose one big case, and it can be used as precedence in other cases, then they would probably be crushed, but I can at least hope that some sensible balance can be achieved, though it's too late to undo the many decades of damage caused, or added too, as a result of their misinformation campaigns.

Climate crisis has cost Colorado billions – now it wants oil firms to pick up the bill

Boulder county estimates it will cost taxpayers $100m over the next three decades just to adapt transport and drainage systems to the climate crisis, and reduce the risk from wildfires.

The county government says the bill should be paid by those who drove the crisis – the oil companies that spent decades covering up and misrepresenting the warnings from climate scientists. It is suing the US’s largest oil firm, ExxonMobil, and Suncor, a Canadian company with its US headquarters in Colorado, to require that they “use their vast profits to pay their fair share of what it will cost a community to deal with the problem the companies created”.

“These lawsuits are one of the tools to hold both these companies accountable,” he said.

Finn said there was no doubt that people moving into the mountains have contributed to the damage from wildfires in part by stopping the natural processes of thinning out the forest.

But the Gold Hill fire chief said the climate crisis was “a big part” of the surging heat and number of fires, and that corporate campaigns to deny the warnings from scientists played an important role.

“The science has been there for years. The problem is that you have half the population who don’t want to believe in science because it means they couldn’t make as much money,” he said.