“Where do we move?” Retirees want to know where they can escape climate change impacts. Those seeking to give their kids the best life they can want to know. The folks from where I live in Austin want to get out of this infernal heat that has come to dominate our lives with 100-degree days…
Monterey County California has given the go ahead to build a 1.2 Gigawatt battery facility that will act as a demand peaker, supplying power at peak times when a natural gas turbine would normally have been utilized. This facility is ten times bigger than the previous largest battery facility in the world – the Hornsdale…
Bloomberg NEF – Battery Power’s Latest Plunge in Costs Threatens Coal, Gas March 26, 2019 It’s happened, decades ahead of schedule. Lithium-ion batteries are at parity with baseload coal, gas and nuclear. Those new gigabattery factories are responsible. it’s amazing what giga scaling can do to costs. The latest cost plummet was 35 percent since…
Climate Change 2018 Review: Part 2 – The Good! by Bruce Melton Climate Change Now Initiative, 501c3 (Link to Article) So much happened in our climate change world in 2018 that we are printing this article in two parts: The Bad, and The Good. We started with the bad. If you missed Part 1, you…
Batteries, Wind, Solar, The Paris Path Arrives – Excel Energy Across Central U.S. Xcel Energy, the dominant electricity and natural gas supplier in eight states from Wisconsin through the Dakotas to Texas, with $11 billion in 2017 revenues, and 3.3 million electric and 1.8 million gas customers, is proving that wind and solar energy…
Are We Really at Battery Parity Already? Let’s make an assumption. I do not believe it is valid based on the work of Mark Jacobson and team at Stanford and The Solutions Project, but for this discussion, let’s say it is. Climate reform culture says we can’t go beyond about 40 percent alternative energy penetration…
Yes, We Can Get 100 Percent of our Energy From Renewable Resources A comprehensive review of hundreds of studies on the feasibility of 100 percent alternative energy. In March 2017, Heard et al., published a study of 24 works on the feasibility of 100 percent renewable energy. Their findings were not favorable. But on April…
Battery Storage Costs Plummet Lazard was founded in 1848 and is a financial advisory and asset management firm that caters primarily to institutional clients. They began preparing a global evaluation of the levelized cost of energy for new energy generation installations in 2009, and for energy storage in 2015. “Levelized costs of energy (LCOE)” are…
Global Environmental Sustainability and a Healthy Climate: Climate Policy 2.0 We all want a healthy climate and assume that emissions reductions will give us this healthy climate, but emissions reductions alone allow triple to quintuple the warming we have already seen. Today, the public and policy makers –almost completely– believe emissions reductions strategies can…
The “moral imperative challenge” is that thing where we feel it is our duty to create a fossil fuel extinction in order address climate change. This is something our climate culture has been striving for since about 1990. It is ingrained in our emissions reductions psyche and emblazoned across our foreheads. For a generation, emissions…
New Climate Culture Our climate culture of the last two or three decades, very bluntly, not working out . Yes, carbon emissions are decreasing, or at least they are not increasing as fast a they were or as fast as projected. Possibly, they are even decreasing. But the bottom line is that current warming…
Scientists have been planning for how to implement a transformation to an alternative energy infrastructure for more than several years now. Jacobson 2013, represents years of effort and others have been doing the same. We know how to evolve our energy infrastructure, how long it will take, how much it will cost, and how efficient…
The driver of our climate system has changed in the last two decades from one that is controlled by annual emissions, to one that is controlled by already emitted CO2. This means that previous strategies to control annual emissions are no longer meaningful and we must now turn our attention to the already emitted climate…
For 24 years we have been attempting to implement climate reform, but because strategies are complex, controversial and inequitable, we have nothing to show for this effort save a near-failing carbon credit program in the EU. By giving ourselves permission to seek zero warming, we go beyond the failed strategies of the past into a…
First Published on Truthout, December 4, 2015 The perceived debate on climate change has discredited traditional climate science communications to such an extent that we are just now implementing policies developed during the Kyoto Protocol era that began in 1992. New climate science knowledge is simply not making it out of academia and into public…
First published on Truthout, December 26, 2014. As we move into 2015, the latest climate science continues to diverge from policy. New science tells us that, because of short-lived climate pollutants, current policies dealing with carbon dioxide pollution alone will likely produce more warming than doing nothing at all. Complete Article
With the IPCC suggesting strong negative emissions, or strong removal of atmospheric carbon, as the only way to avoid dangerous climate change (see here), we have no choice. We must remove already emitted carbon dioxide from our skies. The U.S. Geologic Survey (USGS) is looking at one of the better ways of doing this using…
Forbe’s states: “Higher electricity prices in states producing the most wind power are taking a devastating toll on disposable incomes and the overall economy… From 2008-2013 electricity prices rose an average of 20.7 percent in the top 10 wind power states, which is seven-fold higher than the national electricity price increase of merely 2.8 percent.”…
Direct atmospheric removal (air capture) should not be confused with geoengineering. These air capture techniques, old and new, remove CO2 from the atmosphere just like we remove other pollutants from say, water in our wastewater facilities, or simply sweeping up dirt from the kitchen floor. Existing technologies extract CO2 from the air with chemicals such…
First published on the Rag Blog, August 5, 2014 The future is bright and breezy, not black and dirty. Whatever is going on with Austin Energy misses some very important and fundamental news. AUSTIN — Really? Austin Energy is against alternative energy? A report in the Austin American Statesman on Friday, August 1, says just…
