Climate Change, Pollution, Clean Energy, and the Environment

[LFC]

More on the increased adoption of renewable energy.

In 2022, renewables provided 22.58 percent of total US electrical generation versus 20.79 percent a year ago. Accordingly, they modestly surpassed EIA's earlier forecast of renewables providing 22 percent of US electricity in calendar year 2022.

Solar was again the fastest growing renewable energy source. Output by solar increased by 24.14 percent and its share of total US electrical generation for the year was 4.74 percent. A year earlier, solar's share was 3.95 percent. Five years ago, it was 1.91 percent and at the end of 2012, solar's share was only 0.11 percent.

Electrical generation by wind also expanded significantly - growing by 14.97 percent and providing over a tenth (10.11 percent) of total US electrical generation in 2022. Combined, solar and wind contributed nearly 15 percent (14.85 percent) of the nation's electrical output last year.

In addition, generation by hydropower grew 4.14 percent and accounted for 6.09 percent of the total. Electrical output by geothermal as well as wood & wood-derived fuels also increased by 6.43 percent and 0.29 percent respectively. Only generation by “other biomass” fell - by 5.06 percent.

Taken together, in 2022, renewable energy sources comfortably out-produced both coal and nuclear power by 17.18 percent and 25.90 percent respectively. However, natural gas continued to dominate with a 39.27 percent share of total generation.

Renewables' growing share of US electrical generation last year mirrored their expansion in other sectors such as transportation and heating.

For example, a second EIA report - its “Monthly Energy Review” released last week - reveals that the mix of renewable energy sources, including biofuels, accounted for 13.03 percent of total US energy production during the first 11 months of 2022. For the same period a year earlier, renewables' share was 12.50 percent.

[pnwguy]

Feb 28, 2023 15:27:05 GMT LFC said:

“The electricity generated from solar and wind in 2022 is enough to power the equivalent of 64 million average American households,” according to the report.

The problem with statements like these are that it's based on current electrical usage per household.  But take fossil fuels out of the equations for heat, hot water, cooking, dryers and other natural gas usage, and the demand goes way up.  Then add in EV charging of vehicles.

I'm all in for eliminating carbon fuels.  But optimism needs to be tamed on expectations.

[LFC]

Feb 28, 2023 18:03:32 GMT pnwguy said:

The problem with statements like these are that it's based on current electrical usage per household.  But take fossil fuels out of the equations for heat, hot water, cooking, dryers and other natural gas usage, and the demand goes way up.  Then add in EV charging of vehicles.

I'm all in for eliminating carbon fuels.  But optimism needs to be tamed on expectations.

I don't see the problem. We're talking about electrical generation which has a massive energy usage footprint. When people spoke of nuclear power for years it was also mostly focused on electrical generation. Home heating and other uses is another topic. An important one, for sure, but let's not fall into the trap of "all things fossil fuel or else it doesn't matter as much."

As an aside renewables have now become the most cost efficient source of electricity in many areas. Depending upon the price of oil and natural gas, and the efficiency of the things that use them, we might see a shift towards more electric appliances, hot water heaters, and even heating if they become cheaper to run.

[LFC]

As a follow-up, there's a lot more "bang for the buck" working on moving the power generation industry towards renewables since they burn a lot more fossil fuels. Plus it's a lot easier than retrofitting millions of homes, homes which will retrofit on their own over time if it's cheaper to go electric supplied by renewable sources.

[pnwguy]

Feb 28, 2023 20:42:02 GMT LFC said:

Feb 28, 2023 18:03:32 GMT pnwguy said:

The problem with statements like these are that it's based on current electrical usage per household.  But take fossil fuels out of the equations for heat, hot water, cooking, dryers and other natural gas usage, and the demand goes way up.  Then add in EV charging of vehicles.

I'm all in for eliminating carbon fuels.  But optimism needs to be tamed on expectations.

I don't see the problem. We're talking about electrical generation which has a massive energy usage footprint. When people spoke of nuclear power for years it was also mostly focused on electrical generation. Home heating and other uses is another topic. An important one, for sure, but let's not fall into the trap of "all things fossil fuel or else it doesn't matter as much."

As an aside renewables have now become the most cost efficient source of electricity in many areas. Depending upon the price of oil and natural gas, and the efficiency of the things that use them, we might see a shift towards more electric appliances, hot water heaters, and even heating if they become cheaper to run.

I'm not trying to downplay all the efforts to renewables, and indeed they now look cheaper than alternatives per kWh.  Warp speed, captain.  I'm merely saying that the gauge used for "average American households" needs to be re-calibrated.  In my personal example, I have natural gas for a range, hot water heater, dryer, and furnace.  If I was eliminating all of those carbon-fuel usages, my electricity needs would likely triple.  And I don't have an electric vehicle yet either.  That not only affects the electrical generation side of the equation, but grid distribution as well, ignoring locally produced options like home solar.

[LFC]

Floating solar panels on man-made reservoirs would both produce electricity and prevent an enormous amount of evaporation of water that many places are desperate to hold onto.

The cost of solar power has dropped dramatically over the past decade, making it the cheapest source of electricity in much of the world. Clearly, that can mean cheaper power. But it also means that we can potentially install panels in places that would otherwise be too expensive and still produce power profitably.

One of the more intriguing options is to place the panels above artificial bodies of water, either floating or suspended on cables. While more expensive than land-based installs, this creates a win-win: the panels limit the evaporation of water, and the water cools the panels, allowing them to operate more efficiently in warm climates.

While the potential of floating solar has been examined in a number of places, a group of researchers has now done a global analysis and find that it's huge. Even if we limit installs to a fraction of the surface of existing reservoirs, floating panels could generate nearly 10,000 TeraWatt-hours per year, while keeping over 100 cubic kilometers of water from evaporating.

On evaporation...

When it comes to saving water, the panels would have an effect significantly larger than their 30 percent coverage would suggest. That's because they act by lowering the water temperature, rather than just blocking sunlight. As a result, evaporation drops by about 45 percent. Overall, the lowered evaporation adds up to roughly 100 cubic kilometers of water a year, which the authors say is enough to meet the needs of about 300 million people.

They specifically cite high-population, water-scarce countries that can benefit, like Egypt and South Africa. The latter, they estimate, could generate 144 of its 205 TWh of annual electricity use by floating solar and avoid losing 1.6 cubic kilometers of water to evaporation.

Yes, there are technical challenges but I suspect they'll be taken head-on in areas where water is precious. I know they've already proposed building out solar panels over canals in places like Arizona and California to provide electricity while reducing evaporation.

Again, all of this will be more expensive than simply installing the panels on land, where years of experience have squeezed a lot of the cost out of building solar plants. There's also a tradeoff in efficiency here. Almost all current land-based panels boost their production by tracking the Sun as it moves across the sky. That's going to be much harder to do on a floating system, and tilting the panels will likely allow significant evaporation to occur.

Those added costs will be balanced against things that are difficult to quantify, such as ensuring an adequate water supply for a variety of users and limiting development of previously unoccupied lands. The costs and uncertainties will need to be sorted out to make floating solar something more than a rounding error—globally, it's not expected to clear 5 GigaWatts of installed capacity before 2027. The US is likely to activate nearly six times that capacity this year alone.

[LFC]

This is just about what you'd expect from a climate change denial corporation.

Readers of the daily email newsletter of one of the country’s leading right-wing, fossil fuel-funded think tanks were treated to a bizarre sight this week: an AI-generated image of a dead whale washed ashore on a beach in front of wind turbines, above a fearmongering story about offshore wind. Unfortunately, what is isolated to one newsletter today could spread around the right-wing ecosystem tomorrow.

I cover climate and read breaking news about renewable energy every day; if there were a real photo of a dead whale in front of a wind farm like this, chances are I would have seen it. Still, the image gave me a jump when I opened the email from the Texas Public Policy Foundation. For a moment, I wondered if I’d somehow missed a huge story about a dead humpback that had washed ashore in front of a wind farm.

The story under the image is old hat for this particular newsletter. The Texas Public Policy Foundation, or TPPF, is one of the leaders in the national right-wing push against renewable energy—specifically against offshore wind. Despite its location in Texas, the group has lent its sizable financial muscle to anti-offshore wind efforts on the East Coast, joining a lawsuit against a project filed by local fishermen and creating an entire movie about the evils of wind energy.

The image is at least recognizably an AI generation: there’s the tell-tale uncanny valley nature of the pattern of the debris of the beach, and the blades of the wind turbines are, well, bendy, in a way that you certainly don’t see in real life. The biggest giveaway is the DALL-E generator watermark at the lower right hand corner of the image. When I plugged in various search terms, like “beached dead humpback whale in front of offshore wind turbines” into the DALL-E generator, I got images that looked a lot like what was at the top of my newsletter. (Some of mine were much better, not gonna lie.)

Still, the image is, at first glance, realistic enough to make me do a double-take, and there’s no label on the image marking it as not a real photograph. Readers of the newsletter who aren’t familiar with how AI images look or who are just skimming could certainly be forgiven for thinking that this is real evidence of dead wildlife near a wind farm.

I reached out to TPPF to confirm that the image was AI-generated and to ask whether the writers considered labeling it as such. I’ll update this story if I hear back.

[LFC]

And right on schedule we have a purveyor of right-wing political cartoon propaganda jumping on the lie. (I did a search for "margolis and cox." The first hit was their website. The second was TownClownHall. Any questions?

[LFC]

Time has run out for some homes in the Outer Banks of NC.

Wave after wave, the ocean had clawed away at the beach until the stilted homes finally gave way. The collapses spread debris — and anxiety — for more than a dozen miles along the Cape Hatteras National Seashore. A video that captured one house surrendering to the surf in May went viral, bringing national attention to the urgency of the problem along this scenic stretch of coast.



Rodanthe’s struggles encapsulate thorny and unresolved issues around risky coastal development, the unevenness of real estate disclosures, questions about personal risk, the difficulties of protecting oceanfront properties and the obstacles to moving people out of harm’s way when necessary.

At least a dozen more houses in Rodanthe remain in serious danger of falling into the ocean. Faced with shrinking options, numerous homeowners are scrambling to move their homes — at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars — further from the tides that seem to creep ever closer. They have filed permits, lined up contractors and teamed up with neighbors, all in a bid to buy more time from the encroaching sea.

As similar shifts befall other communities, scientists say, millions of acres of U.S. land and hundreds of thousands of homes and offices could slip below swelling tide lines over time. Properties in vulnerable areas could lose value, harming homeowners and sapping local tax bases.

“This is a national and a global problem,” said Reide Corbett, an oceanographer and executive director of the Coastal Studies Institute at East Carolina University, who sees in Rodanthe a glimpse of the quandaries that await other places as seas rise, storms intensify and deteriorating shorelines creep closer to human developments.

“We are going to see more and more of these challenges going forward. The process of shoreline erosion is not going to go away,” Corbett said.

[goldenvalley]

It's not been going so well in California either. The LA Times won't let me copy their photos so you'll have to click. This is from last week.  Another atmospheric river is coming in tomorrow and Wednesday. Here's some rather breathless reporting on it. I would stop watching at about 1:30.

[pnwguy]

Mar 17, 2023 17:07:45 GMT LFC said:

And right on schedule we have a purveyor of right-wing political cartoon propaganda jumping on the lie. (I did a search for "margolis and cox." The first hit was their website. The second was TownClownHall. Any questions?

Coming soon to Trump rallies -- 'Save The Whales' flags and T-shirts!


Of course, given the heft of many of the attendees...

[LFC]

There's a lot of reporting lately about heavy rain events but there's still quite a bit of drought in the U.S. Here's the drought tracker that the was the source.

Attachments:

[LFC]

Texass, determined to destroy the planet for profit.

For a crash course in how to fuck up the environment, look no further than the Texas Legislature. At the start of this year’s legislative session, lawmakers have introduced a slew of bills with some jaw-droppingly bad environmental ramifications—including bills that would override the EPA’s authority and punish people for filing complaints with the state’s environmental regulatory agency.

It’s no secret that Texas Republicans are committed to protecting fossil fuels at any cost; this is, after all, the state where the major oil and gas regulatory agency is run by a climate denier. Still, even if you expect the least from Texas, some of the bills on deck seem, for lack of a better word, extremely petty. Take Senate Bill 471, which would charge people a fee for filing a complaint with the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) if the person filing the complaint already has filed three complaints that year that didn’t result in enforcement actions.

The bill’s author, Republican State Senator Drew Springer, claims that the legislation is intended to streamline the TCEQ’s work. But those who are familiar with the complaint process say that argument is in bad faith—and could be disastrous to controlling pollution in one of the world’s biggest oil and gas-producing regions.

“Sometimes, TCEQ doesn’t come out [in response to a complaint] until the conditions have changed, so there’s nothing to see when they get there,” Luke Metzger, executive director at Environment Texas, told Earther. “We’re concerned this would have a chilling effect on people looking to file a complaint. We don’t think this bill is necessary, and it could be really counterproductive.”

One person who knows a lot about filing complaints with the TCEQ is Sharon Wilson, known in some circles as the “methane hunter,” who works with Earthworks in Texas to monitor methane emissions and other pollution on the ground. Wilson estimates that she and her colleagues have filed more than 400 complaints with the agency since 2014. She guessed that just a sliver of the complaints she has made have resulted in enforcement actions from the TCEQ.

But wait! There's more!

The TCEQ bill is still in committee, and there’s no guarantee it will advance to become actual law. But the list of potentially disastrous environmental legislation doesn’t end there. Here’s a quick rundown of other bills on deck this session:

• One bill, HB 33, would ban state agencies from helping federal agencies enforce laws around oil and gas production if those federal laws contradict state laws—a move that would hamstring the EPA and other federal bodies’ ability to regulate the oil and gas industry.
• HB 743 preemptively prohibits municipalities or counties from outlawing gas hookups in buildings.
• HB 744 does the same for gas-powered landscaping equipment—a direct response to the city of Dallas considering banning gas-powered lawnmowers as part of its sustainability plan.
• Two bills in the House (HB 820) and Senate (SB 505) set their sights on drivers, creating new (and steep) fees for registering hybrid and electric vehicles.
• HB 1239 prohibits insurers from considering customers’ environmental, social, and governance (ESG) policies when setting rates—a bill that marks the next step in Texas lawmakers’ crusade against ESG measures.

These bills aren’t great news. But what worries Metzger more than restricting complaints to the TCEQ or dings on electric lawnmowers is the suite of bills going through the state Senate that would cripple renewable energy while boosting fossil-fueled power. Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick has deemed these bills a priority for him this legislative session.

The anti-renewables bills, Metzger said, will move to the Senate floor this week or next, where he says they’ll “likely” be approved and move to the House. Last time the Legislature was in session two years ago, bills with similar anti-renewables provisions died on the House floor.

“Our hope is that they’ll do the same with these bills,” Metzger said. But if they succeed this year, bolstered by Patrick’s support, it could dramatically change the landscape of a state that leads the country in generating wind and solar power.

[LFC]

Florida's agricultural industry, especially Big Sugar, has been notorious for fouling local waters which then end up carrying huge amount of fertilizer into ocean. That's the very type of fuel that the Sargassum Seaweed needs to grow in larger quantities than usual. Looks like a multi-million ton chicken has come home to roost.

In the Atlantic Ocean, between the coasts of West Africa and the Caribbean, there’s a disjointed series of mats and clumps of brown, tangled algae known as sargassum seaweed. It’s supposed to be there. Or, at least, some of it is. In the Sargasso Sea—the only sea without a land border, bounded instead by four currents—sargassum offers critical habitat to marine life and is an integral part of the ecosystem.

But in recent years, things have gotten off balance and out of hand, causing problems for people, the tourism industry, and wildlife. The size of the annual seaweed blob has been growing larger, likely because of climate change and increases in nutrient pollution brought on by human activity. Now, this year’s sargassum mass has officially reached record proportions.

The discontinuous blob currently comprises an estimated 13 million tons of algae and spans about 5,000 miles of ocean from east to west, according to the University of South Florida’s Optical Oceanography Lab, which has been tracking these sargassum blooms for over a decade. It’s a “record abundance ... for this time of year,” wrote USF researchers in a March 31 dispatch. And it’s expected to get even bigger before the warm months are through. Generally, the seaweed hits its peak in June and July.

With the newest data in hand, it’s near-certain that the sargassum is set to cause disruption and difficulties for the Caribbean islands and parts of Florida and Mexico, the scientists noted. The seaweed has already started to wash up across the region, and “major beaching events are inevitable around the Caribbean, along the ocean side of Florida Keys and east cost of Florida,” says the USF forecast.

Why Is Sargassum a Problem?

When sargassum goes from the open ocean to the coastal ecosystem, it can muck things up, especially in mass quantity. Stranded and decomposing on beaches, it releases rotten egg-smelling hydrogen sulfide gas. On top of being odorous and unpleasant, this can cause potential respiratory irritation, digestive issues, and neurological problems for people nearby. It’s more than enough to ruin a beach day and obviously is a big problem for regional tourism—which depends upon inviting, un-seaweedy stretches of sand.

Resorts in Mexico, the Caribbean, and Florida alike all work to remove the algae when it arrives on their shores, either by employing workers to shovel it by hand or with machines. It can quickly become an expensive endeavor. Last year, Miami-Dade County spend $3.9 million on sargassum clean-up, an increase of more than $1.1 million from the year before, per the Miami Herald.

Aside from the tourism industry, the influx of seaweed can also obviously harm locals who live nearby the coast and/or rely on a coastal industry for their livelihoods. On top of the unpleasant health impacts of large quantities of beached sargassum, mats of the algae can strand boats and impact fishing.

For near-shore ecosystems, the seaweed mats can choke up shallows, blot out sunlight, and smother coral reefs. As the sargassum breaks down, it depletes oxygen in the water column and can degrade water quality, killing fish and other sea life.

[LFC]

This is ridiculous.

The world’s most important climate meeting this year is going to be headed up by one of the world’s most oil-reliant countries. It sounds like the plot of an absurdist play, but it’s reality, and the cracks are already starting to show ahead of an especially crucial year for climate action.

Each year, the UN hosts what’s known as a Conference of Parties, or COP, in a different country to keep the world on track in working toward halting runaway climate change. This year’s meeting will be in the United Arab Emirates, just the second time a major petrochemical nation has hosted a COP, according to Bloomberg. The last time was in 2012, in Qatar, three years before the Paris Agreement. This year, experts have warned that we are on an extremely tight schedule in terms of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. It’s a make-or-break year—and the world is handing the keys to the metaphorical car over to, essentially, the head of an oil company.

Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the UAE’s minister of industry and advanced technology and the CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc), in January became the first oil CEO to take up the COP presidency. Despite Al Jaber’s long list of green credentials—he also heads up a government-owned renewables company—it’s still an undeniably weird position for an oil CEO to be in, to say the absolute least.

[LFC]

Florida is drying out. Interesting that they have a drought while sea level rise is causing more saltwater incursions into aquifers. Oh, well. They can always drink that good clean water flowing from the sugar plantations.

With less than 2 inches of rain this year, Orlando is enduring its second driest stretch from Jan. 1 to April 5 since the late 1800s and also its hottest on record for that period.

The city, Central Florida and much of the state’s peninsula are experiencing a widening severe drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor, a collaboration of universities and federal environmental agencies.

“When was the last time it rained?” said Fran Boettcher, a master gardener at the Orange County and University of Florida agricultural extension center. “Who can remember?”

In Orlando, the last measurable rain was 25 days ago, when just .15 inches barely wetted the ground, boosting the year’s rain to 1.89 inches, or about as much as a single, typical summer downpour can bring.

The Drought Monitor is updated weekly on Thursday mornings. The newest report shows 55% of Florida under severe drought now, up from 20% at the start of this year and less than 1% last year at this time.

Typically, April is a tough month for lawns and landscaping, as spring brings hotter weather but not much rain. On average, the dry season transitions to the rainy season in Orlando on May 27, or five days before the Atlantic hurricane season begins.

Derrick Weitlich, a lead meteorologist and climate program leader at the National Weather Service in Central Florida, said precipitation across the region so far in 2023 has ranged from 1 to 4 inches, which is as much as 6 inches below normal.

He said crops and pastures are wilting, wildfire danger is on the rise and groundwater levels are receding.

The long-range outlook, according to the U.S. Climate Prediction Center, is for rainfall to get back on track by the end of June.

But, with global heating stirring the climate pot, weather has been wickedly fickle during the past half-year.

[LFC]

Remember the mindless, thoughtless, dishonest spoutings from the denial community that more carbon would be good for all the plants so it would be a net positive? Yeeeahhhh, maybe not so much.

It’s tough out there for a hungry grasshopper on the Kansas prairie. Oh, there’s plenty of grass to eat, but this century’s grass isn’t what it used to be. It’s less nutritious, deficient in minerals like iron, potassium, and calcium.

Partly due to that nutrient-deficient diet, there’s been a huge decline in grasshopper numbers of late, by about one-third over two decades, according to a 2020 study. The prairie’s not hoppin’ like it used to—and a major culprit is carbon dioxide, says study author Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

Atmospheric carbon dioxide is at its highest in human history. That’s probably fine for plants like the grasses the hoppers munch. They can turn that atmospheric carbon into carbohydrates and build more plants—in fact, plant biologists once thought all that extra carbon dioxide would simply mean better crop yields. But experiments in crops exposed to high carbon dioxide levels indicate that many food plants contain less of other nutrients than under carbon dioxide concentrations of the past. Several studies find that plants’ levels of nitrogen, for example, have fallen, indicating lower plant protein content. And some studies suggest that plants may also be deficient in phosphorus and other trace elements.

The idea that plants grown in today’s carbon dioxide-rich era will contain less of certain other elements—a concept Kaspari categorizes as nutrient dilution—has been well-studied in crop plants. Nutrient dilution in natural ecosystems is less-studied, but scientists have observed it happening in several places, from the woods of Europe to the kelp forests off Southern California. Now researchers like Kaspari are starting to examine the knock-on effects—to see whether herbivores that eat those plants, such as grasshoppers and grazing mammals, are affected.

The scant data already present suggests nutrient dilution could cause widespread problems. “I think we are in canary-in-a-coal mine territory,” Kaspari says.

[LFC]

Oh, look. Republicans and right-wingers are suddenly concerned about the environment, in particular the whales.

In case you missed it, conservatives deeply care about whales and the oceans now.

At least, that’s the message being sent by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that in 2021 filed suit against an offshore wind project in New England. Despite taking a lot of money from the oil and gas interests, TPPF has waged a battle over the past year and a half claiming deep concern for the whales allegedly at risk from offshore wind turbines. (I don’t remember this kind of distress coming from conservatives over how increased offshore oil development in the Gulf of Mexico may harm whale habitat, or alarm over any of the myriad studies showing that a rapidly warming ocean is going to fundamentally change life on earth, but no matter.)

[goldenvalley]

Apr 25, 2023 21:31:35 GMT LFC said:

Oh, look. Republicans and right-wingers are suddenly concerned about the environment, in particular the whales.

In case you missed it, conservatives deeply care about whales and the oceans now.

At least, that’s the message being sent by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank that in 2021 filed suit against an offshore wind project in New England. Despite taking a lot of money from the oil and gas interests, TPPF has waged a battle over the past year and a half claiming deep concern for the whales allegedly at risk from offshore wind turbines. (I don’t remember this kind of distress coming from conservatives over how increased offshore oil development in the Gulf of Mexico may harm whale habitat, or alarm over any of the myriad studies showing that a rapidly warming ocean is going to fundamentally change life on earth, but no matter.)

Are there flying whales in the Gulf?

[LFC]

Texas has been leading the nation in adoption of renewables. As you can imagine, Greg Abbott and the Republicans have decided that shit has got to stop.

The same combination of low taxes, sparse regulation and cheap real estate that drew corporate giants such as Tesla Inc. and Oracle Corp. to Texas has hooked another industry associated with progressive California: solar power. In just three years, oil-rich Texas has added the solar equivalent of 12 nuclear reactors, putting it on the cusp of surpassing the Golden State as the top producer of electricity from solar farms. It’s already No. 1 in wind, making it the largest clean energy market in the US.

That’s a remarkable feat for a place almost synonymous with fossil fuels. But it stems from a philosophy that until recently was held dear by Texas Republicans: Government shouldn’t get in the way of business.

In Texas, solar permitting is uncomplicated. Connecting projects to the electric grid is straightforward. Then there’s cheap labor, homegrown energy expertise, plenty of sunshine and an anything-goes ethos. “There’s no ‘Mother, may I?’ here,” says Doug Lewin, who worked in the Texas Legislature on energy policy and now advises power companies. “In Texas, it’s just easier to get things done.”

For solar developers, though, that golden age of laissez-faire may be drawing to a close, as state agencies and the Republican-controlled Legislature move to slow the greening of the grid. GOP officials contend that intermittent renewable energy isn’t as reliable as electricity generated from fossil fuels, so they’ve proposed measures to bolster natural gas. Green energy skeptics say they’re trying to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic 2021 grid failure that left hundreds of people dead, which they attribute to renewable energy, even though analysts say fossil fuel plants were more to blame.

The battle is part of a broader political push by Republican leaders in the state. Governor Greg Abbott wants to thwart companies that he says prioritize Democratic goals such as fighting climate change over doing what’s best for shareholders—part of the GOP’s campaign against ESG investing, which weighs environmental, social and governance issues in decisions on capital allocation.

“This could indeed chill the continued expansion of renewables in the state,” says Barry Rabe, a professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on environmental policy. It’s part of a backlash against clean power happening in other fossil-fuel-producing states, he says, such as Ohio and West Virginia.

Republican lawmakers in Texas have introduced bills designed to expand the use of gas-fired power. Most notable is one that calls for spending taxpayer dollars to build gas plants. The plan, backed by the Senate earlier this month and also supported by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, may cost as much as $18 billion, according to a Texas utility. That bill is wending its way through the House.

Another leading proposal floated by GOP lawmakers is a plan to pay generators, especially those using natural gas, for being online during the most critical times of the year. They’ve also moved to tighten permitting requirements for renewables and vowed to bar green projects from tapping a new program under discussion that would offer subsidies to businesses in exchange for job creation.

Texas is projected to get almost 40% of its power this year from green sources, according to a US Energy Information Administration forecast. That trails California’s 52%, but because Texas is a bigger market, it’s produced more power from renewables (excluding hydropower) than any other state since 2014, EIA data show.

C'mon. It's not like none of us didn't know that the mantra of "Let the market decide!" would be thrown away the instant that the market didn't decide "correctly."

[goldenvalley]

Apr 26, 2023 17:02:57 GMT LFC said:

Texas has been leading the nation in adoption of renewables. As you can imagine, Greg Abbott and the Republicans have decided that shit has got to stop.

The same combination of low taxes, sparse regulation and cheap real estate that drew corporate giants such as Tesla Inc. and Oracle Corp. to Texas has hooked another industry associated with progressive California: solar power. In just three years, oil-rich Texas has added the solar equivalent of 12 nuclear reactors, putting it on the cusp of surpassing the Golden State as the top producer of electricity from solar farms. It’s already No. 1 in wind, making it the largest clean energy market in the US.

That’s a remarkable feat for a place almost synonymous with fossil fuels. But it stems from a philosophy that until recently was held dear by Texas Republicans: Government shouldn’t get in the way of business.

In Texas, solar permitting is uncomplicated. Connecting projects to the electric grid is straightforward. Then there’s cheap labor, homegrown energy expertise, plenty of sunshine and an anything-goes ethos. “There’s no ‘Mother, may I?’ here,” says Doug Lewin, who worked in the Texas Legislature on energy policy and now advises power companies. “In Texas, it’s just easier to get things done.”

For solar developers, though, that golden age of laissez-faire may be drawing to a close, as state agencies and the Republican-controlled Legislature move to slow the greening of the grid. GOP officials contend that intermittent renewable energy isn’t as reliable as electricity generated from fossil fuels, so they’ve proposed measures to bolster natural gas. Green energy skeptics say they’re trying to prevent a repeat of the catastrophic 2021 grid failure that left hundreds of people dead, which they attribute to renewable energy, even though analysts say fossil fuel plants were more to blame.

The battle is part of a broader political push by Republican leaders in the state. Governor Greg Abbott wants to thwart companies that he says prioritize Democratic goals such as fighting climate change over doing what’s best for shareholders—part of the GOP’s campaign against ESG investing, which weighs environmental, social and governance issues in decisions on capital allocation.

“This could indeed chill the continued expansion of renewables in the state,” says Barry Rabe, a professor at the University of Michigan who focuses on environmental policy. It’s part of a backlash against clean power happening in other fossil-fuel-producing states, he says, such as Ohio and West Virginia.

Republican lawmakers in Texas have introduced bills designed to expand the use of gas-fired power. Most notable is one that calls for spending taxpayer dollars to build gas plants. The plan, backed by the Senate earlier this month and also supported by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Energy, may cost as much as $18 billion, according to a Texas utility. That bill is wending its way through the House.

Another leading proposal floated by GOP lawmakers is a plan to pay generators, especially those using natural gas, for being online during the most critical times of the year. They’ve also moved to tighten permitting requirements for renewables and vowed to bar green projects from tapping a new program under discussion that would offer subsidies to businesses in exchange for job creation.

Texas is projected to get almost 40% of its power this year from green sources, according to a US Energy Information Administration forecast. That trails California’s 52%, but because Texas is a bigger market, it’s produced more power from renewables (excluding hydropower) than any other state since 2014, EIA data show.

C'mon. It's not like none of us didn't know that the mantra of "Let the market decide!" would be thrown away the instant that the market didn't decide "correctly."

If someone would dig deep enough into the convoluted corporate holdings of big oil they'd find that big oil is well invested in alternative energy sources like solar and wind.  If they can make money doing it and still maintain the veil of "big oil" to impress those who have been brainwashed they will do it.

[LFC]

Strap in. This could be one rough year.

[pnwguy]

Apr 26, 2023 17:43:52 GMT goldenvalley said:

Apr 26, 2023 17:02:57 GMT LFC said:

Texas has been leading the nation in adoption of renewables. As you can imagine, Greg Abbott and the Republicans have decided that shit has got to stop.
C'mon. It's not like none of us didn't know that the mantra of "Let the market decide!" would be thrown away the instant that the market didn't decide "correctly."

If someone would dig deep enough into the convoluted corporate holdings of big oil they'd find that big oil is well invested in alternative energy sources like solar and wind.  If they can make money doing it and still maintain the veil of "big oil" to impress those who have been brainwashed they will do it.

The same skills in geotechnical analytics and advanced deep drilling that the oil and gas industry already has is able to be channeled into deep geothermal well systems for 24x7 electricity generation

[LFC]

More "natural fluctuations."

[LFC]

Oh, FFS! If you are a policymaker and don't understand the problem by now, you're either an idiot or you are actively ignoring the piles of information and researchers available to you.

Scientists failed for decades to communicate the coming risks of rapid sea-level rise to policymakers and the public, a new study has found.

That has created a climate catch-22 in which scientists have soft-pedaled the kinds of catastrophic risks most easily headed off by cutting emissions.

While scientific communication has improved in the 2020s, this trajectory led policymakers to make decisions based on risks that are better understood, easier to quantify — and also easier to write off as an acceptable long-term risk.

The findings published Monday in Nature Climate Change suggest a fundamental weakness in the past 30 years of communication by climate scientists: a profound difficulty in assessing the possible impacts of breakdowns in the Earth’s biggest and most complex systems.

The Nature paper focused on sea-level rise — a hallmark of planetary heating that is influenced by a wide range of processes both well and poorly understood.

For some of these processes, “we understand the physics quite well – for example, how the ocean takes up heat and expands in response to that,” said lead author Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University.

This kind of process is marked by “quantifiable uncertainty” — the sort that scientists know how to factor it in.

But other processes — like those that keep ice sheets whole, or drive their sudden collapse — “involve factors we don’t understand that well … but might nonetheless be able to cause rapid sea-level rise,” Kopp said.

That, he added, is the realm of “ambiguity,” which he defined as “a form of deep uncertainty that cannot be well represented quantitatively.”

For decades, scientists writing public-facing documents — like the annual “assessment” reports put out by the United Nations’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — have had to juggle both forms of uncertainty.

While the complexity of the underlying physics makes that a tough proposition on its own, the political dimension makes it even harder. Over the short term, Kopp noted, ambiguity around sea-level rise is relatively minimal. The past century of burning fossil fuels has locked in a fixed amount of heating, and the impacts of our current energy policy debate have not had time to take effect — for good or ill.

But for the second half of the century, the prediction game gets far more plagued by ambiguity — and is much more influenced by changes to how much society is able to restrict burning and the accompanying release of greenhouse gasses, over the near term.