Tag Archives: renewable energy

more top Longreads of 2020

Here Longreads.com collects their top story from each week of 2020, adding up to…I don’t know…counting on my fingers…50 stories or so. How many stories do they publish per week anyway? Here are a handful that caught my I (TLDRJS – too long didn’t read every word, just skimmed):

  • “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus” – published in February. An accurate story, I would say. The headline is all we need to read now.
  • “Shell is Looking Forward” – I’ve been puzzling over this for awhile. How does an oil and gas company “evolve” into a green energy company, when getting into the regulated electricity utility business, the nuclear business, or the largely decentralized renewable energy/energy storage business means basically shedding their entire business model and becoming a completely different kind of company, and there are already companies operating in those spaces that are going to better at it than some new entry from the outside? This article gave me some clues – modern corporations are somewhat agnostic about what they “do”. They are more like private equity investors. So they will just horde cash for awhile and use it to buy some other companies, including smaller companies and startups they hope will expand. Then they will hang on to the winners and shed the losers. So a company really becomes nothing but a brand name for an operation that can be doing absolutely anything, and the mix of what it is doing will change over time. I just question whether a big established company like an oil giant is nimble enough to pull something like this off. It seems more likely tech or finance companies would be successful at this game.
  • a pair of articles on mass migration driven by climate change – one international and one U.S. focused. These were really TLDR, but the long-term situation is just depressing. Coastlines are going to be inundated, the southern U.S. is going to get too hot, the western U.S. is going to get too dry, and places we grow a lot of food now are going to get too hot and too dry to continue yielding the amount of food we need. The article seems to point to the northeast and midwest. The big northeastern cities are coastal though, so that is going to require some serious commitment to coastal engineering and flood control if it is really going to work. The midwest might be the place to be. Internationally, I just don’t know. Beyond the obviously horrifying humanitarian implications, we’ve already seen migration trigger political instability in Europe and the U.S., and that process seems set to get worse.
  • “Inside the Early Days of China’s Coronavirus Coverup” – It seems there was some denial and censorship. It’s a little easy to judge in hindsight. Would earlier action or more open communication by China and/or WHO have prevented the virus from spreading to Italy? Hard to say. It spread to Korea, and they dealt with it effectively. Thailand, which has extensive travel to Wuhan, contained it through airport screening, contact tracing, and quarantining people in public hospitals. So western countries can point the finger if they want, but their response was just too slow and ineffective early on to contain the situation, and in the case of the U.S. just a completely incompetent non-response.

BP Statistical Review of World Energy

BP has put out its Statistical Review of World Energy 2020. I’m a little short on time so I’m going to quote CNN’s coverage of it. (At least I think this is the report CNN is referring to. I have noticed a trend recently where journalists talk about a “recent report” without naming it or linking to it.) At least, I’m going to try to quote it. WordPress’s block editor is getting harder and harder to use.

In a “business-as-usual” scenario, in which government policies and social preferences evolve in the same way as in the recent past, oil demand picks up slightly following the coronavirus hit, but then plateaus around 2025 and starts to decline after 2030.

In two other scenarios, in which governments take more aggressive steps to curb carbon emissions and there are significant shifts in societal behavior, demand for oil never fully recovers from the decline caused by the pandemic. That would mean that oil demand peaked in 2019…

”As difficult steps go, BP’s pirouette from traditional oil company to green energy giant ranks among the more challenging,” Susannah Streeter, a senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown said in a note to clients.

CNN

What exactly is a “green energy giant”? Carbon capture might be a thing, eventually, but that seems like a risky bet as the only business strategy. If most things are going to electrify, it seems like the green energy giant will be the regulated electric utility business, at least in the United States, and it seems unlikely BP is trying to go there. They can try to supply that industry with things to burn, I suppose, like natural gas and liquid natural gas (coal and oil seem to be on their way out), but I am not sure that is a growth industry. Aviation might move toward hydrogen fuel cells eventually. There must be some tiny demand for rocket fuel. Chemicals, drugs, and plastics will continue to exist, of course, but I am not sure that would be a huge source of annual revenue growth for decades. They can manufacture solar panels, windmills, efficient transportation and electrical equipment of various sorts, get into the smart grid, smart buildings and materials, batteries, etc. But doing all sorts of little bits and pieces like this would seem to get them into industrial conglomerate territory, and there are plenty of companies already there. Maybe that is where they are headed – just make forays into lots of different markets and see if anything sticks.

2010s: order of magnitude increase in renewable energy cost-effectiveness

This article in Project Syndicate presents the numbers on renewable energy cost-effectiveness for the decade.

The costs of solar and wind power have fallen more than 80% and 70%, respectively, while lithium-ion battery costs are down from $1,000 per kilowatt-hour in 2010 to $160 per kWh today. These and other breakthroughs guarantee that energy systems which are as much as 85% dependent on variable renewables could produce zero-carbon electricity at costs that are fully competitive with those of fossil-fuel-based systems.

Project Syndicate

November 2019 in Review

Most frightening and/or depressing story:
  • The Darling, a major river system in Australia, has essentially dried up.
Most hopeful story: Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

hydrogen fuel cell buses

The transportation agency serving the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign is using fuel cell-powered buses and planning to produce and store its own hydrogen supply.

The cost of acquiring the two new buses, a fueling station and fuel storage equipment will be about $3.5 million, of which $1.5 million will be covered by federal grants…

MTD plans to produce the hydrogen for its fuel-cell buses itself. It could use solar power, wind turbines or, if need be, gas from the local landfill to separate the hydrogen from oxygen in water molecules for the buses.
The transit agency will soon be accepting bids for the equipment it will use for that conversion. It plans to add a total of 12 hydrogen fuel-cell buses by 2023, or about one-tenth of its fleet. By that time, the rest of its buses will be diesel-electric hybrids.

I’ve always thought that nuclear power, fuel cells, and membranes for water treatment would go together pretty well for a coastal city. You could size the nuclear reactor for peak demand, then use the excess energy to desalinate and electrolyze sea water whenever you are not at peak demand, storing the hydrogen to use in transportation vehicles and any other applications where you need decentralized or off-the-grid energy. You can use the membrane technology to produce drinking water and water for industry, either from seawater or treated sewage. I think you could substitute LNG for the hydrogen in this system if you need to for some reason, for example if the nuclear reactor were down for maintenance. You would have that occasional pesky problem of nuclear waste to deal with, but I am gradually coming around to the idea that managing the risks of nuclear reactors and nuclear waste may be preferable to the certainty of destroying the planet’s ecosystems and oceans. Inventing fusion power would be nice.

May 2019 in Review

This wasn’t my most prolific writing (or reading) month ever. In fact, it my have been my worst. But here are a few highlights of what I did get around to.

Most frightening and/or depressing story:

  • Without improvements in battery design, the demand for materials needed to make the batteries might negate the environmental benefits of the batteries. I’m not really all that frightened or depressed about this because I assume designs will improve. Like I said, it was slim pickings this month.

Most hopeful story:

  • Planting native plants in your garden really can make a difference for biodiversity.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both:

  • Joseph Stiglitz suggested an idea for a “free college” program where college is funded by a progressive tax on post-graduation earnings.

 

renewable energy, batteries, and demand for metals

This report from the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology, Sydney talks about the increasing demand for metals driven by renewable energy and battery technology. Basically, recycling has to be improved a lot if current technologies are going to scale up without damaging the environment as much as they help.

I got to work with the Institute for Sustainable Futures once, which was fun. They had a worm compost bin in their office. They were also one inspiration for the title of this blog. I don’t know any of the authors of this report.

generating hydrogen from solar panels

It makes sense that you could use electricity from solar panels to split water vapor into hydrogen and oxygen, but why do that instead of just using the electricity? I guess if storing and using the hydrogen gas is more cost-efficient or reliable than charging a battery. Still, it seems like the days of storing and burning dangerous gases and liquids rather than electrifying might be numbered.

space based solar

The government is finally getting serious about space based solar. The government of China, that is. The U.S. government (Jimmy Carter, NASA) was serious about it back in the 1970s as I recall (actually, I don’t recall because I was an infant, but I have since read). Our cynical government stopped looking into shortly thereafter and the public imagination withered and died. The interesting thing is that the Earth is in the path of only an infinitessimal portion of the sun’s energy. However much energy we need and are able to harness with our technology, we should be able to intercept it and beam it back, without depriving anyone or any natural ecosystem of their fair share. Utlimately, the limit would probably be how to deal with waste heat rather than any upper limit on how much energy we could intercept and beam back to Earth.