Open Thread Non-Petroleum

219 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum”

1. The models have now come into better agreement that the AO index will have another positive surge, this time possibly into record territory as anything over +5 is extremely rare. Combined with the previous surge in January, this upcoming event will continue to drastically improve Arctic Sea Ice conditions.

   

   1. I’m interested in what causes the Arctic Oscillations in the first place. This is a model that I have developed which essentially follows the AO, the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) and the Pacific North America pattern (PNA) with an essentially common tidal forcing pattern. However, the take-home message is that since this is a purely cyclic pattern and so has a cumulative mean of zero, there is no long-term impact to climate change/sea ice that is being observed. That is better explained by AGW due to increased GHG emissions.

      

2. Edge of the Great Dying: Extinction crisis—Dr Sandra Diaz interview—Radio Ecoshock 2019-05-22

   At least a million forms of life hover at the edge of extinction as humans take over the world. Lead author Sandra Diaz on the shocking new 2019 UN report.

   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VC593ohgJHY

   1. Yep—
      https://www.eskimo.com/~recall/bleed/images/abes2.gif

3. Some interesting thought about PV and the future.

   The solar revolution is at the risk of sputtering out — Quartz
   https://qz.com/1295679/why-the-solar-revolution-is-in-grave-danger-and-how-it-can-be-saved/amp/

   1. “The solar revolution is at the risk of sputtering out.” Good Lord man, don’t say that. Don’t you realize EVs and solar panels are miracle cures that will soon turn Earth back into a Garden of Eden. Maybe better! This said ignoring the fact that species other than ourselves, chickens and cows are going extinct “exponentially”. Meanwhile we have the minor details. Such as: Daily CO2 Feb. 1, 2020: 414.49 ppm Feb. 1, 2019: 410.52 ppm

      1. And in less depressing news, I have been preparing the report on the EIA’s latest Electric Power Monthly with data for November and November 2019 saw the largest batch of retirements of coal fired generation capacity since January 2018 with 3,922 MW being retired. Two of the retirements were the one remaining unit at the largest facility in Pennsylvania and two remaining units at the largest facility west of the Mississippi.

         Searching for information on the facilities that were retired prompted me to do a search for, “amount of coal powered electricity generation retired under the trump administration”. Among the results is the following Reuters article:

         U.S. coal-fired power plants closing fast despite Trump’s pledge of support for industry

         (Reuters) – U.S. coal-fired power plants shut down at the second-fastest pace on record in 2019, despite President Donald Trump’s efforts to prop up the industry, according to data from the federal government and Thomson Reuters. [snip]

         Trump has downplayed climate change threats and sought to revive the coal industry to fulfill pledges to voters in coal mining states like West Virginia and Wyoming, mainly by rolling back Obama-era environmental protections.

         Still, since entering office in 2017, an estimated 39,000 MW of coal-fired power plant capacity has shut.

         If that trend continues, more coal plants will have shut during the first four years (2017-2020) of the Trump administration – an estimated 46,600 MW – than during Obama’s second term (2013-2016) – around 43,100 MW.

         I expect to see this blamed on the Democrats, somehow.

         1. islandboy,

            Yes, I’m sure you will continue to keep us up to speed on all the rose-tinted solar energy news as well (especially in Australia). You’ll certainly want to avoid the following:

            AUSTRALIAN BUSHFIRES TO CONTRIBUTE TO HUGE ANNUAL INCREASE IN GLOBAL CARBON DIOXIDE

            “Australia’s bushfire crisis is expected to contribute up to 2% of what scientists forecast will be one of the largest annual increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide on record. The atmospheric concentration of the heat-trapping gas is projected to peak at more than 417 parts per million in May, and average about 414.2 parts per million for the year, according to the forecast by the British Met Office. It is a 2.74ppm increase above the 2019 average. Science agencies have associated concentrations of more than 450ppm with average temperature rise of 2C above pre-industrial levels, a point at which some catastrophic effects of global heating may become irreversible.”

            https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2020/jan/24/australian-bushfires-to-contribute-to-huge-annual-increase-in-global-carbon-dioxide

            1. Scientists should know better than pretending to have deep understanding what has driven climate changes for millions of years. Just a few weeks ago the local newspaper ran a story explaining how predicting climate and weather more than a week or week and a half away is basically impossible because it’s too complex to model accurately. I was surprised they let the truth out so easily.

               1. Yes we actually know the major factors of what drives climate. But modelling a random day 400 or 400,000 years ago is very complex if not impossible.
                  However looking at statistical (more longer term) and dynamic (more shorter term) analysis one can show general average trends of temperature, rainfall, and correlation with other influences like GHG.
                  Some people who come from a non-scientific background, don’t understand any of these things and usually get their information from various biased nonsensical sources.

               2. > the local newspaper ran a story explaining how predicting climate and weather more than a week or week and a half away is basically impossible

                  Either you or your newspaper are delivering garbled naive messages. “Predicting the climate more than a week” makes no sense.

                  If you want to appeal to authority, try a per reviewed paper, and not just your hearsay about gobbledygook.

               3. Just a few weeks ago the local newspaper ran a story explaining how predicting climate and weather more than a week or week and a half away is basically impossible because it’s too complex to model accurately.

                  You just made that shit up. Only an idiot would confuse climate with weather and use them both in the same sentence, as if they were the same thing. Predicting the weather a week and a half out is difficult. That is what the paper said. You just inserted the word “climate” yourself. So in addition to being a blooming idiot you are also a fucking liar.

               4. And there’s a growing indication that we will be able to predict the regimes that are in between climate and weather — this includes the inter-seasonal modulation in climate relating to the El Nino and La Nina swings.

                  The key is that these are related to tidal cycles, which are extremely predictable. I’ve been working on this angle for awhile, and there is also some other work coming out substantiating this approach

                  Lin, J. & Qian, T. Switch Between El Nino and La Nina is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing. Sci Rep 9, 1–10 (2019).

                  

                  The consensus thought was that the El Nino/La Nina switch was caused by shifts in the prevailing winds, which actually is hard to pin down.

      2. Yeah, it’s a huge job, getting bigger by the day. Only 20 billion panels behind and sinking fast. If daytime power gets cheap, further build will be unprofitable. As I have said many times, storage will be the big money maker.
         I wouldn’t expect co2 rate to fall anytime soon. Even if it does, temps will still rise.

         1. It’s a smaller job than simply keeping FF going. Wind and solar are cheaper.

            Ideally we’d simply stop installing new FF -that’s a no-brainer. The next step would be to replace FF infrastructure before it’s normal decommissioning date, and then you start to recognize the losses of obsolete infrastructure. The FF infrastructure is a sunk loss, of course, but people hate to recognize losses – they delay it as long as possible…

            1. “Wind and solar are cheaper”
               Cheaper than what?

               1. Than global warming

               2. Cheaper than nuclear, coal and gas.

                  Wind and solar are not only cheaper than coal to build and operate, in many places they’re cheaper just to operate – IOW, even if a coal plant is fully depreciated it’s still more expensive than new wind and solar.

                  Now, wind & solar are only slighter cheaper than gas, on average. But, of course, that means that as they get even cheaper that more and more gas installations will be stranded assets.

                  And….yes…that doesn’t include all the external costs: direct pollutants (mercury, sulfur, particulates, NOX, etc); GHGS; security of supply, occupational health, etc. The external costs of coal are in the range of 18 cents per kWH!!! If you include the very, very real external costs, wind and solar are dramatically cheaper.

               3. Good question LT. Reduction, efficiency, elimination of unnecessary actions, material and waste are all far cheaper than any of the energy sources. They also function without maintenance and don’t need replacement. Changing design and changing actions are the big key to energy reduction.
                  The cheapest energy is avoided energy. The best designs serve multiple purposes efficiently, often with no moving parts.

               4. Yeah, I think we’re all agreed on that. Passive houses are a very good example of that: make them sufficiently efficient that no central heating plant is needed.

               5. Not quite true that energy conservation functions without maintenance, as the sad state of my house windows illustrates. But the point is well taken.

                  As long as big money is to be made generating useless energy, interest in conservation will be suppressed. Renewables are much less profitable, and ruin the fun for owners of fossil resources, so renewables will shift the focus to conservation, as people start to notice how pointless new power plants really are.

                  This is already sort of happening with batteries, which deliver energy without generating or mining it.

            2. Bio energy is non-scalable and an ecological disaster. Hydropower is non-scalable and the last places of any size that can be utilized will cause ecological devastation plus large methane outputs.
               Wind power is scalable and will be very biologically harmful if brought to scale.
               Photovoltaic is the most scalable candidate but just to keep up with energy growth, about 4 billion panels would have to be added each year starting last year. That is assuming increased efficiency will allow half use of energy . About 400 million panels were added last year. That is 1/10 the rate needed just to maintain fossil fuels at their current rate of use.

               PV and wind systems will need 8 days of storage for non-critical infrastructure and 30 days of power storage for critical infrastructure to run independently of fuels.
               Storage is expensive and energy intensive to build/maintain/replace.

               1. Wind power is scalable and will be very biologically harmful if brought to scale.

                  Could you expand on that?

                  Storage is expensive and energy intensive to build/maintain/replace.

                  Are you assuming the use of either batteries or pumped storage for seasonal storage (i.e., multiple days)?

               2. If wind turbines were to produce 1/4 of world energy that would mean 15 million bird deaths per year in addition to all the bird deaths from other sources.
                  Large increase in bat deaths and who knows how many flying insects.

                  Of course as normal, the death mumbers would fall as the populations fall. Also humans purposely poison and kill vast numbers of birds each year, so I doubt if any of this will sway homo exterminium.

               3. How did you calculate that 15M?

               4. From Audubon and wind turbine data numbers.

               5. Could you show your calculations?

               6. > Bio energy is non-scalable and an ecological disaster.

                  It is non-scalable, but whether it is an ecological disaster depends on the source. The complaints about wood pellets are usually poorly documented, and ignore the immense inefficiency of the lumber industry, which generates huge quantities of sawdust waste.

                  Furthermore a lot of municipal waste can be burned to generate heat and electricity.

   2. The article doesn’t seem to have much to do with the headline.

   3. There’s no doubt that there’s a real risk that fossil fuel industry will successfully buy enough politicians to stay in business long after it should have retired. Heck, it already has. But, as the article’s summary says:

      “The world may well be bound for the first of the two futures laid out here—and that’s terrifying. But there is cause for optimism: the second future is not science fiction, but rather still an achievable goal. To arrive at it, the world must address the many challenges of realizing solar energy’s sky-high potential—and that will require sharply increasing investment in innovation.”

      And, that innovation isn’t in fundamental tech, it’s in engineering and manufacturing. It’s not so much research as it is development of things that are already here.

      The article is promoting a book about solar power – understandably, it exaggerates the importance of solar, which should only be one component of a diverse energy supply.

      1. “it exaggerates the importance of solar, which should only be one component of a diverse energy supply”

         Maybe not. The sun has been and continues to be, the source of the vast majority of the energy supply of the planet, nuclear and geothermal being the only exceptions that I can think of. Fossil fuels are just stored solar energy.

         1. I know what you mean, but that’s not really how people normally use the word “solar”. They normally think of hydro, wind, biomass etc as different.

            A quibble: Nuclear, geothermal and tidal power could be very big, should we choose to push them.

            1. Nuclear? I hope you mean thorium technology because uranium tech is not scalable and has horrendous waste problems plus very significant dangers.

               1. Yeah, I think thorium would be better, if only because of a lower risk of weapons proliferation.

                  I’m not a big fan of nuclear – it’s more expensive and riskier than either wind or solar, but…it would work if necessary.

      2. To me the main short term impact of solar is reducing the profitability in the electricity business. I am less impressed by the discussion of whether solar “can replace” fossil fuels, since most energy is wasted anyway. How much solar output is in total is less important than how much it outputs at times of day when prices are high.

         The reason the coal plants are closing is that they are not profitable.

         1. The reason why coal and gas power plants were and are built is because they can sell electricity 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

            Solar panels are obviously useless at nighttime and in the winter months, darkness lasts for 16 hours. Wind in that time can vary greatly over days, some weeks seeing only 15% of average power output.

            This is a good article of the scale of storage needed in the United States.

            2,500 hoover dams worth needs to be built.

            https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2011/11/pump-up-the-storage/

            People who think that batteries or pumped storage can bridge the gap between intermittent wind and solar and demand requirements simply have never done the math

            1. Wayne —

               Please stop confusing the issue with facts. These won’t influence the EV and solar energy crowd but might depress the rest of us. From your link: “Yes, a diverse portfolio of a half-dozen inadequate solutions may be able to add to an adequate solution. But a half-dozen woefully inadequate solutions cannot pull off the same stunt. So far, my quest keeps turning up the woefully inadequate type. The scale of fossil fuel replacement is so daunting that we very quickly get into trouble when putting numbers to proposed solutions.”

               1. Might as well confuse the issue further, for from a state of confusion (versus delusional surety) can come some acknowledgement of reality.
                  An interesting read during a winter that has mostly acted like spring, while the fires rage on the southern continent and the coal/gas/oil/metal mining keeps running at speed.

                  https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/

               2. GF —

                  You’re guilty as well. You are supposed to be bowing to the EV and Solar Energy gods, not touting reality. Now, if you keep chanting EV, EV, EV, EV, you will soon enter into a euphoric state-of-bliss that will make all those bad thoughts (reality) go away.

                  From your link: “We are destroying the life support systems to which all creatures, including man, are dependent, yet it does not appear that any climate disaster no matter how catastrophic will alter mankind’s tragic path to extinction. Wiping out an entire continent’s flora and fauna does not register on the Stock Market. No number of five-alarm fire warnings planet Earth sends will be heeded by this carbon-fueled corporate kleptocracy which carries us all toward a very dark future.”

               3. Shoots coming up from the ground at least 6 weeks early. Saw a wasp flying (rare around here even in mid summer), Lake ice, none. Streams running. About 55F today. Above normal temp predictions for the next 10, some very high.

                  There is no escape.

               4. Yeah, the irises are shooting up and the birds are doing there early spring territorial songs here too.

            2. I love seeing others post Do The Math. Until renewables advocates can post convincing, math based rebuttals of arguments like this, I consider renewables inadequate to the task set before them.

               Saying “batteries will get cheaper and we will discover new techniques” is not a sufficient argument when faced with cold logic of this caliber.

               I am not against renewables. But they WILL NOT allow us to live any way like the way we do now. We will once again have to work when the sun is shining, and rest when the sun is not, and the material and energy throughput of our society will be drastically reduced.

               1. “But they WILL NOT allow us to live any way like the way we do now.”

                  That is the answer, since living like we do is a death sentence for the planet. There will be a lot less of us in the future too, making renewable dreams more achievable, in a way. The madness will eventually subside, one way or another. That much is clear.

               2. I am not against renewables. But they WILL NOT allow us to live any way like the way we do now. We will once again have to work when the sun is shining, and rest when the sun is not”

                  I have long said, since my days of posting at theoildrum.com, that the human race is going to have to re-learn the meaning of “make hay while the sun shines”. There is a very fundamental level of common sense in that saying.

               3. Yeah, that’s Demand Side Management. It’s old and well proven, and very very cheap.

                  But most utilities get paid for capex, not efficiency. California is an exception, and the results are clear: much greater efficiency.

            3. Wayne,
               that kind of calculation is just the point I was trying to make. The idea that all that storage is “needed” is predicated on the assumption that all that energy is needed. In fact, most of the energy we are talking about is wasted anyway.

               You are right that that many batteries would be expensive. It is also clear that traditional energy production cannot compete with solar in a free market. Fossil fuels will compete against batteries and conservation, however. That is the upshot of your article.

               Coal (and nuclear) will die because they have to boil too much water to function, making them too cumbersome to react to high speed changes in demand. Combined cycle gas has a better chance to compete against batteries, but it will be a niche product.

               The real question will be whether it makes sense to build all those batteries or to just stop wasting energy.

               Those Soviet Five Year Plan style arguments like the one you posted don’t much matter anyway. We live in a more or less free market economy. The industries that exist exist because they make a profit.

               If you had bothered to read my post, you would have noticed I remarked that the main short term impact of solar is reducing the profitability in the electricity business. The fossil fuel industry will be massively reduced because it can’t compete. Solar and wind are wrecking balls.

               Why can’t fossil fuels compete? Not because solar is “cheaper” or “greener”. It’s because the cost of solar at the margin is zero. That means once solar is built, nothing can gain market share against it by cutting prices. Even if the company who owns the solar goes bankrupt, the energy still flows. If a gas plant goes bankrupt, suppliers stop delivering fuel, but solar doesn’t have that problem. There is never any incentive to shut solar down, as long as prices stay above zero.

               So every watt of solar that is built means that chunk of the market,even if it is seasonal, is irretrievably gone for 20-30 years. That will be nearly 150 GW of new solar in 2020 worldwide, and that is still growing at double digit rates. Total US capacity is about 1,100 GW. That much new solar should come on line between now and the end of 2025.

               It’s also worth remembering that solar’s maximum output fits air conditioning well (although not perfectly). Air conditioning was god’s gift to the utility business in the 50s, and its only real hope for future growth, other than data centers.

               This kind of conversation was interesting ten years ago, when solar seemed like science fiction, but it’s happening now. Maybe heavy industry will all just move to equatorial Africa, where there is plenty of land and sun year round, or maybe we will just waste a lot less, but the status quo will not survive, and more than typewriters and film cameras did.

               1. alimbiquated

                  It is not the cost I am concerned with, it is the fact that our economies work on having power when we need it.
                  At 5pm in January when there is no solar and little wind. What drives the trains? what powers the hospitals? what cooks your food?

                  https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2020&week=4

                  Germany has far more installed wind and solar than it’s maximum energy consumption. Yet for days in a row they amount to 20% of consumption.

                  As an example at 6.30pm on the 22 of January, how would you power the nation without coal and gas?
                  What would your storage systems be and what would they cost to build at current prices? Of course batteries will be cheaper tomorrow but what do we do today?
                  How would you cover the 70Gw per hour deficit?
                  Also be mindful that German consumers pay the highest rates for electricity in the world to pay for all the wind and solar subsidies.

               2. Germans pay high electricity costs because of high taxes, not because of any subsidies. And from the government’s point of view, high prices are a feature, not a bug. They reduce waste, thus reducing the externalities of wasting energy. The same is true of gasoline prices, btw. Gas is expensive in Europe not because it costs more to produce than in America, but to discourage waste. Notbeing wasteful is one of the reasons Germany runs a high current account and government budget surplus.

                  You view of the issue is completely flawed. You write:

                  The reason why coal and gas power plants were and are built is because they can sell electricity 24 hours per day, 365 days per year.

                  That would make sense if you were working for Gosplan, the Soviet bureau responsible for creating the Five Year Plan, but we live in a market economy. The reason why coal and gas power plants were and are built is because they make profits for their shareholders. This is ending, so the plants are disappearing.

               3. alimbiquated

                  Where would the power come from on the day I showed?

                  If you cannot answer that and give costs, you are wasting everyone’s times.

               4. Conservation Wayne. The entire energy industry is about as useful to the economy as the Pied Piper was to Hameln.

                  And as to your hand wringing about “overcapacity”, it is only overcapacity because there are no takers as yet of near free intermittent energy. I can think of quite a few, for example aluminum recyclers and AI practitioners (like me), but the market needs to mature to the level that it is actually a problem before there is a demand response.

                  For example, desalinated water can be viewed as a form of energy storage. The only real “cost” is the energy that would otherwise not be used.

               5. Wayne, you are confusing capacity with production. Wind produces at about 30 percent capacity and solar at about 20 percent. So for wind and solar to produce 20 percent is normal.

                  What you are really saying is that not enough wind and solar have been installed yet to satisfy consumption. Everyone knows that.

               6. Gonefishing

                  I am not confusing the obvious.

                  What is obvious is people like you will not understand the words intermittent, until you have no power for your fridge or TV.

                  Germany peak demand is about 70Gw and has installed wind power of 60Gw. yet there are many days where it is producing 1-5Gw per hour.

                  https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2019&week=47

                  How would you ensure trains would run and hospitals, restaurants would not be in blackout. 4pm on the 19 of November til 10pm on the 21 November is a good example.

                  https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/german-onshore-wind-power-output-business-and-perspectives

                  If 29 thousand wind turbines produce as little as 5% of demand you really have a job on your hands.

               7. ” Air conditioning was god’s gift to the utility business in the 50s, and its only real hope for future growth, other than data centers. ”

                  Sorry but not so.

                  There’s every reason to believe that there’s a HUGE growth potential for electrical energy in the transportation business across the board, from bicycles to trains, and every step along the way, especially at the automobile and light truck stage, starting RIGHT NOW, and for heavy trucks soon, as battery costs come down.

                  There’s also a HUGE potential to upgrade housing and lots of other buildings to use electricity for space heating, as well as heating water.

                  If it’s cheaper than gas, electricity can also be used to dry grain and lumber.

                  Cheap solar power and or cheap wind power can also be used to pump irrigation water, if it’s available in farm country via the grid, saving some diesel fuel used for that purpose.

                  There are a lot of ways to switch from fossil fuels to wind and solar power that can be implemented at a very economical cost, over time.

               8. That’s really interesting, hadn’t thought about it. I was thinking about historical trends, but lower prices mean more applications.

               9. Well, ideally we’d eliminate fossil fuels for transportation, space heating, industrial process heat, etc.

                  Even with aggressive efficiency improvements that will mean substantial additional electrical consumption.

            4. This is what is known as a “straw man”. People who actually work in this area aren’t proposing batteries or pumped storage to deal with seasonal energy storage. I’ve pointed this out to Tom Murphy on a different entry on his blog, and he did not disagree.

               There are a number of answers to handling seasonal deficits of renewable power – it’s a mistake to think that there’s a single silver bullet. But Germany, for instance, is planning to use “wind-gas”, as well as a lot of other sensible silver BBs, such as overbuilding, long distance transmission, supply diversity, Demand Side Management, etc.

               Our space and time are limited, so here are two primary answers, using Germany as an example:

               Overbuilding: 99GW of wind and solar (56GW of wind, 43GW of solar) can only be expected to produce very roughly an average of maybe 15%, or 15GW, in Germany. So, if you want wind and solar to cover 100% of 60GW of demand (on average in 2016) you’ll need roughly 400GW of capacity. Now, no one ever expects to build to an average – in the US we overbuild capacity by a factor of about 2.5:1 (about 1,150GW of capacity for 450GW of average demand). If we just use a factor of 2:1 for our wind and solar (because it’s more capex intensive) then you’d build about 800GW of capacity. That’s 8x as much as they have now. If Germany’s 99GW of wind and solar produced about 6.5GW, then 800GW would produce about 52GW. That’s 87% of average demand.

               “Wind-gas”: If you overbuild wind and solar by 2:1 that means that you have a vast amount of surplus power to use for storage. That means you don’t need high efficiency. On the other hand, you do want to minimize capex – capex is the problem with batteries. So, convert surplus power to H2 (67% efficiency)*, store it cheaply underground, and burn it cheaply in ICEs or turbines (not expensive fuel cells) for a round trip efficiency of perhaps 25%, and low capex. That would give enough backup to cover supply deficiencies of very roughly 25%, which is far higher than we would see from a 50% deficit for 5 days – that’s a supply deficiency of about 1% of annual demand. Alternatively, overbuilding of just 1.25:1 would still give you a lot of surpluse power, likely more than enough to handle seasonal shortages.

               The key thing: it uses current technology. There’s nothing new. It’s standard engineering, which involves doing something in a slightly new combination, at a larger scale.

               The electrolysis stack can also be used as a fuel cell. OTOH, this is an inexpensive asymmetric solution: the electrolysis would take place during the majority of the year (whenever there was a surplus of renewable power – the percentage of time would increase along with the relative amount of over-building – if we overbuilt as much as 3x then the surplus would exist for 90% of the time, and there would be a deficit only perhaps 1% of the time).

               So…if your electrolysis is happening 90% of the time, and your backup generation is only happening 1% of the time, the ratio of electrolysis equipment to generation equipment would be 90:1. That means that you don’t need much of the expensive equipment. If, say, your grid generation averages 450GW and you need 300GW for 10 days for backup, you can build 10 GW of electrolysis which will operate for 300 days, and 300GW of less expensive turbines (or even ICEs) that will only operate for 10 days. Or 290GW of turbines in combination with the 10GW of fuel cells (electrolysis in reverse).

               * https://www.pv-magazine.com/2017/08/30/future-pv-the-feasibility-of-solar-powered-hydrogen-production/

               1. Nick

                  I think hydrogen from electrolysis is the only hope, but could it really be done on such a scale.
                  Hydrogen would also have to be used to heat building which consume half the gas in Europe.
                  When you add every vehicle powered by fuel cells, the task is monumental.

               2. I doubt that passenger vehicles would be a good application for hydrogen. Batteries work well for that. Trucks could go either way. Container ships would work pretty well with hydrogen.

                  I’d guess that a passive-house approach would be better for buildings: hydrogen is hard to distribute with existing infrastructure. Retrofits are a real challenge, but insulation, windows upgrades and heat pumps would be generally useful.

                  There are other forms of seasonal storage, like metals. Metal powder, especially iron, could be used in external combustion engines for transportation or seasonal electrical generation backup.

                  “The idea of burning metal powders is nothing new – they’ve been used for centuries in fireworks, for instance. Since the mid-20th century, they’ve also been used in rocket propellants, such as the space shuttle’s solid-fuel booster rockets… metal powders: when burned, they react with air to form stable, nontoxic solid-oxide products that can be collected relatively easily for recycling – unlike the CO2 emissions from burning fossil fuels that escape into the atmosphere.

                  The energy and power densities of the proposed metal-fueled heat engines are predicted to be close to current fossil-fueled internal combustion engines, making them an attractive technology for a future low-carbon society.”

                  Iron could be the primary candidate for this purpose, according to the study. Millions of tons of iron powders are already produced annually for the metallurgy, chemical and electronic industries. And iron is readily recyclable with well-established technologies, and some novel techniques can avoid the carbon dioxide emissions associated with traditional iron production using coal… the use of low-cost metallic fuels, like iron powder, is a worthy alternative to petrol and diesel fuels.”

                  https://phys.org/news/2015-12-metal-powders-potential-fossil-fuels.html

               3. It really doesn’t cost all that much to retrofit an older building to make it easy to heat, compared to the cost of PAYING for that heat over the long term.

                  I’ve done it myself half a dozen times. You don’t even have to be all that highly skilled a worker, and the oldest and worst deteriorated of the existing housing stock is going to have to be replaced piecemeal anyway.

                  What most people fail to realize, when they pee and moan about the cost of doing this sort of work on the grand scale is that reducing the CONSUMPTION of gas also has the effect of reducing the PRICE of gas, and the need to pay for imported energy with hard earned foreign exchange.

               4. Nick, when you say “If you overbuild wind and solar by 2:1 ” what do you mean. What is the :1 you are talking about?

               5. Well, again: “Overbuilding: 99GW of wind and solar (56GW of wind, 43GW of solar) can only be expected to produce very roughly an average of maybe 15%, or 15GW, in Germany. So, if you want wind and solar to cover 100% of 60GW of demand (on average in 2016) you’ll need roughly 400GW of capacity. Now, no one ever expects to build to an average – in the US we overbuild capacity by a factor of about 2.5:1 (about 1,150GW of capacity for 450GW of average demand). If we just use a factor of 2:1 for our wind and solar (because it’s more capex intensive) then you’d build about 800GW of capacity.”

                  So, the base in that ratio is the 400GW of capacity needed to produce the average level of consumption (which, of course, would be too high very roughly 50% of the time, and too low very roughly 50% of the time). Overbuilding in the ratio of 2:1 (two to one) means building 800GW. If the capacity factor is 15% then you’ll get average production of 120GW (15% of 800GW). 120GW is twice the average demand of 60GW.

                  There’s one thing that’s unclear in the first paragraph above: the 99GW of wind and solar in the first sentence. I should have explained that was the installed capacity in Germany year-end 2017. It was a starting point for describing an overbuilding scenario.

               6. Nick , if you haven’t already, you might want to examine the Mark Jacobsen paper.
                  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0960148118301526

                  Building twice the average demand means doubling the buildout time (which is already very long) and wasting a lot of material, plus increasing the carbon plume while doing so (or depressing certain populations by removing their energy availability).

                  There are many other “solutions” to overbuilding, in fact I recommend a much smaller energy system for the future.

4. One of the precious metals used in catalytic converters — Rhodium — has reached a price of $10,000 per ounce.
   https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2020/01/23/why-are-rhodium-prices-on-a-roll

   “When Anna Scott left her Honda Jazz in a commuters’ car park outside Oxford on January 10th, she had little reason to think that criminals would take an interest in the 12-year-old car. Yet the next afternoon a group of shifty characters were spotted sawing off its catalytic converter. Such incidents have become more frequent across Britain as prices for palladium and rhodium, metals contained in the devices, have rocketed. The price of rhodium has risen by 63% in the first three weeks of January alone, to $9,850 per ounce, around six times that of gold. There is no telling when it will fall back to earth.”

   My uncle, who sells cars, last week had around 20 of his cars stripped of their catalytic converters by thieves going after the rhodium and platinum in the CC units. Unfortunately, the insurance is based on a deductible PER car and so he will have to eat the losses.

   1. Catalytic converters are scrapping around here for about $200. Varies with size of car.

5. Is there anybody here who agrees with me that an oil and or gas supply crisis will result in a a huge boost to the growth of the wind and solar industries as the result of various energy importing countries working to reduce their dependence on imported energy?

   I’m personally convinced that the odds of such a scenario are as high or better than for any other particular turn of events.

   Such a crisis would have the effect of bringing it home to that portion of the public CAPABLE of thinking a little that oil and gas are one time gifts of nature, and that they will not, cannot last forever.

   1. I disagree. Firstly such an even occuring in the near future seems very unlikely. Look at gas prices. There is such an oversupply that prices are near an all time low.
      Oil demand is very weak at the moment and again we are in an oversupplied market.
      You need high consumption rates -> inflation, for such an event to occur from the supply side.

      And if such an event was to occur say 5-10 years from now, i disagree that this will result in a huge boost to wind and solar. Where would the money come from ? If there is anemic growth, such an event will never occur.

      Anyways just my opinion. I don’t know what the future holds.

   2. OFM –
      I live in Germany and gas costs something like $6 a gallon. People waste less, but not monumentally less.

      So maybe. I think it will have a bigger effect in America than in countries where taxes are higher because the taxes cushion the blow of price gyrations.

      1. People waste less, but not monumentally less.

         The last time I looked, the average European used about 18% as much fuel for personal transportation: roughly 60% as many cars, 60% as much VMT per car, 60% as much fuel per mile/km.

         That’s a big difference. So, why isn’t European oil consumption lower? AFAIK, it’s because industrial/commercial fuel use isn’t taxed the same way as personal fuel. In particular, lots of fuel is wasted on trucks, because rail freight is under-used.

         1. Wow, that’s better than I thought. You are right about wasting fuel on trucks.

         2. Truck Diesel is as expensive as car Diesel. It’s somewhat cheaper as gas, at the moment 1.27€ / litre.

            Rail freight is underused because the infrastructure is simply not there.

            When I was in the USA train freight I saw was mainly imported goods from some harbour to the mainland.

            Here it is industrial production from one factory to the next – there are much industrial pre products until you have a finished good.
            For this a complete new rail network would be needed, optimized for distances of only 100-300 miles travel distance and many crossings (sorting of train). This would cost a nice triple digit billion sum and take a few ten years to build – with all the protest of Nimbys and Enviromentalists.

   3. I doubt oil and gas will both peak and decline anywhere near the same time. But that is another story.

      However, an oil crisis will be nothing to celebrate. When the decline starts it will last forever. There will be hunger and misery around the world. Producing nations will start to hoard their oil. They can sell a much smaller percentage of their production and still get as much revenue as before because the prices are so high.

      And don’t forget, there will still be plenty of coal. People will put survival over climate change and produce electricity from coal. Electricity prices will increase of course because of all the EVs. But a lot of people will not be able to afford them… or the electricity that powers them.

      I doubt it will be much of a boost for renewable energy because that only produces electricity. Of course production of wind and solar will increase but it will not be the boom you believe.

      1. Hi Ron,
         I should have made it clear that I wasn’t thinking about an oil crisis in terms of a permanent and continuing decline in production.

         I intended the question to be about a serious but temporary crisis, such as might result from a war, with the oil and gas supply returning to normal after a while, but the scare changing public perceptions about DEPENDING on imported energy.

         People have responded to such crises before by changing various laws and putting in various new programs such as building flood walls in cities, levees along rivers that are prone to flood, etc.

         And as far as MONEY is concerned, money is always found when a LEVIATHAN, a nation state, comes to believe its own existence is in danger.

         The Brits were desperately hard up in the thirties for instance, but they found the means to fight WWII.

   4. How’s this for a scenario: Oil peaks, supply starts to drop, suppliers hoard. Renewables are built out as fast as they can be, but they can’t be built out fast enough to cover the hoarded supply. Coal starts a gradual upward trend, as it takes a while to install coal furnaces and turbines. Population keeps growing.

      It all adds up to a Red Queen situation: renewables and coal facilities won’t be able to be built out fast enough to cover declining supply and increasing population, and the divide will grow with time.

      Needless to say, everything that can be burned, will be burned. All of it.

      1. “How’s this for a scenario?”

         Probably as realistic as anything else floating around these days. You might want to add this to your scenario. Because, numerous reports have projected by 2050 there are likely to be more than 4.5 bn air conditioners, making them as ubiquitous as the mobile phone is today. An interesting feedback loop: warmer temperatures leading to more air conditioning; more air conditioning leading to warmer temperatures.

         And, “This summer, the publication of a New York Times article asking “Do Americans need air conditioning?” touched off a thousand furious social media posts, uniting figures from the feminist writer and critic Roxane Gay (“You wouldn’t last a summer week in Florida without it. Get a grip”) to the conservative professor and pundit Tom Nichols (“Air conditioning is why we left the caves … You will get my AC from me when you pry it from my frozen, frosty hands”).”

         https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/29/the-air-conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world

         1. The Air-Cons are just another cult, much like the TVer’s and the Lazy-Boyer’s. Propane driven BBQ grillers have been a massive growth cult too. Add in the LawnMowists and the LeafBlowiteers just to make the set more complete.

            Think about how much propane is used to heat the outdoors and grill food outside. Of course this makes the Air-Cons unhappy because it limits some use of Air-Con so they just turn down the temp another degree or two. Luckily the banks have glassed in air conditioned and heated areas that leak energy like sieves and have installed TVs too.

            Maybe we can get Greta to talk to world legislators about making summer illegal, thus cutting Air-Con’s and BBQers to a minimum. Probably cut down on that drunken cult the HOTtubbers.

            In the background lurk all those Refrigertors and Freezers. Cults so ubiquitous and around for so long that people forget about them.

            🙂

            1. Speaking of cults, you forgot mobile phones, after Religion, perhaps the biggest current cult of all. No, maybe bigger than religion? 😉

               BTW An average smartphone user has 63 interactions on her phones a day. Further smartphone usage stats say that 86% of people constantly check their phones while talking to friends. According to GSMA real-time intelligence data, there are exactly 5.13 billion people in the world who own mobile devices. That is 66.5% of the world’s population. Research reveals that 56% of children aged between eight and 12 have a cell phone. Yip, sounds like an addiction (or cult) issue to me.

               https://leftronic.com/smartphone-usage-statistics/

               1. Yep, virtual tribal substitute.

               2. Doug,

                  I have just started reading a book titled, “The Hive Mind”. It is written by a research psychologist and her opening premise is that the cult of the phone and social media is because people have lost their connections to their tribe long ago, and are now a part of this electronic hive to fill the void and help with their loneliness and disconnect.

                  (Cell phones don’t work where I live and we wouldn’t use them, anyway.)

                  As an aside, I was participating in a Ham radio workshop this past Sunday. We were sending text and emails via 2M band radio (Packet). Anyway, when we were done the techie facilitator got in touch with me and asked if I would build a Facebook page about our emergency comms group, and asked if I was on WhatsApp, and a few others….so we could stay connected with the other emergency comm groups on Vancouver Island..

                  He was absolutely astounded that our lifestyle does not include social media beyond email and online sites such as this. I could have been a martian to him. I told him we use land line, emails, snail mail, and ham radio.

                  For God’s sake, isn’t this enough? My buddy told me that he does not receive phone calls from his kids. They will only text. He said it is almost as if they have forgotten the skills to have conversation with others in his family.

         2. Most expenditure on heat and air conditioning in America is down to bad architecture. In extreme climates you need to build up, not out.

            I am reminded of Boston’s famous snow pile:

            https://www.wbur.org/news/2015/07/14/boston-giant-snow-pile-gone

            What can be done? It’s easy: reduce lane widths by 20-30%, and close unnecessary roads. Ban surface parking. Build up not out. It is idiotic to have sprawl where heavy snow is the norm.

            1. By the time Boston would make changes, they will be underwater! Snow won’t be a problem, it will be a rare event.

               https://www.citylab.com/environment/2013/02/these-scary-maps-explain-what-sea-level-rise-will-mean-boston/4591/

         3. You need a lot less air conditioning if you build right. Compare this neighborhood in Southern Spain
            https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3953674,-5.998109,3a,75y,337.04h,86.17t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sl3-me-fbSO25R4fLCNSIyA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo3.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3Dl3-me-fbSO25R4fLCNSIyA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D194.85573%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i13312!8i6656

            To this one in Arizona

            https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4686892,-112.0090911,3a,75y,32.08h,66.54t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1segA8G4ya1coJ5rvBiWECoA!2e0!6s%2F%2Fgeo2.ggpht.com%2Fcbk%3Fpanoid%3DegA8G4ya1coJ5rvBiWECoA%26output%3Dthumbnail%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26thumb%3D2%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D265.05878%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192

            Both require AC, but by minimizing roof area, you reduce the amount of energy required for cooling.

            1. The Spanish buildings minimize other things as well: the overall ratio of surface area to cubic space; window area; and the walls are very thick for both insulation and thermal mass.

               These basic design principles certainly help. On the other hand…overall average energy consumption per square foot in the US is higher for multiple unit buildings, vs single family homes! That’s very likely because building standards have improved sharply since those rental buildings were built.

               So, the insulating efficiency of walls, floors, ceilings and windows is probably more important. . You can build a low efficiency multiple family, and you can build a high efficiency single family.

      2. Lloyd,

         Case in point? Japan is in the process of building 22 coal-burning power plants, in 17 locations. They lost all that nuclear, you see, so what’s a country going to do?

         1. They lost all that nuclear, you see, so what’s a country going to do?
            Well, somebody’s gotta buy all that Australian coal….perhaps the Japanese can pay for it with air conditioners.

6. Smart Devices in ——-> Garbage Out.

   Every smart device you love will die.{an early death}
   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXE2yj87Rk0

7. Hmmm, what could adding 10 New York Cities worth of people to the planet every do accomplish?

   Of course during the time since 1950 population has tripled, while both energy and material use increased by 5X.

   Is it 15 years to 9 billion or 15 years to 6 billion (or less)? Time will tell, the Arctic will signal.

   

   1. Is there ever anything positive going on in your little world?

      1. Yep, stupidity is showing a positive increase.

         1. ?

   2. Hey, in the past few of years I have heard a lot about falling fertility rates. I thought that was supposed to turn that damn ever-increasing population line in another direction. /sarc

      1. Probably 10 years after peak oil. 🙂

         1. No, when it’s cold and the lights are off people have more kids. Nothing else to do.

      2. 1st, it takes a while for the demographic bulge to pass through the great snake.

         2nd, death rates keep falling, which delays the completion of the transition. It’s hard to see that as a bad thing…

         1. Yes, Nick, but what about the extinctions? Why aren’t you talking about the extinctions!?! Dung beetles and naked mole-rats deserve a place to live too.

            1. Absolutely. Especially the naked mole-rats – they’re fascinating little guys, who appear to not age at all.

      3. Hi Ron,
         Old guys like us are supposed to have learned that major changes take a long time in terms of our own lives but only an eyeblink in terms of history.

         But I’m as impatient as you are to see the population peak, and I’m willing to bet whatever sum I can cover that there will be some regional human die off events within ten to twenty years…… events large enough to put a halt to world wide population growth.

         In the meantime, we need some super rich guy to parachute millions of tv’s with local language soap opera programming into the population hot spots. They will need solar cells and a battery built in, and a dedicated satellite channel, etc.

         The idiot box can open the eyes of women to the possibility of a better life for themselves a hundred times better than any thing else.

         It played a major role in the dramatic drop in the birth rate in Brazil, once the women there could see other women on tv with lives of their own and only one or two kids.

8. https://www.rawstory.com/2020/02/i-would-like-a-medal-for-smoking-old-radio-shows-haunt-rush-limbaugh-after-he-reveals-advanced-lung-cancer/

   Couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy!

   1. Terrible

      

      1. https://youtu.be/x3-pFBYc_3I

         How did he just get the Presidential Medal of Freedom at the SOTU ???

   2. Repug Propagandist don’t often have healthy lifestyles.
      Comes with the game.

      [added by mod

      

      ]

      1. So, he lived to see how wrong he was to disregard the dangers of smoking. Pity he won’t likely live long enough to see how wrong it is to disregard the dangers of global warming. That’s the sad thing about global warming denial, most of the purveyors will not likely be around for the “OH SHIT!” moment (when TSHTF).

         1. Hint:
            Repug Propagandist are sociopaths (or psychopaths).
            Global Warming would not be a issue showing up (it already has)

9. What does it mean when the daily lows are mostly above the monthly average temperature?

   1. It means no snowmobile activity in much of Maine–in January.

   2. It means one should expect a dramatic rise in average temperatures.

      1. At + 1.5C two out of three years will have summer heat waves. At 2C, there will be heatwaves every year. At least that is what is forecast.
         Winters around here seem to be warming up faster than summers.

         1. On Vancouver Island we are getting both more hot and more cold days. (Greater extremes). As the jet stream breaks down we get the arctic highs sagging and big outflows. We were supposed to get rain overnight. Instead, we woke up to 8 inches of snow. We have already had a couple of weeks of up to minus 15 this past month. Summers, we now get some very long hot dry spells, at least on the south half of the Island. Fog moderates the north end.

            Anyway, I had ordered a tandem truck of 10 yrds of navvy jack for this morning. I am rebuilding our greenhouses that collapsed in a heavy snowfall this winter….a place that rarely sees snow, period. Anyway, I delayed the order until the roads are plowed. Hopefully by Friday.

   3. It means the peach buds are swelling. And likely no peaches this year.

   4. believe what you want.. so will i.. have a great day, enjoy winter..

      1. I’m a pro farmer, retired, in apple and peach country.

         We haven’t lost this year’s crop YET…… but if this unseasonably warm weather lasts another week or two……… the odds are ninety percent or so that we WILL.

         Not my problem anymore. Retired.

10. For those who are interested in keeping tabs on the coronavirus, this page is updated daily.

    wuflu.live

    You will have to copy and paste the link, or just type it in. The .live prevents it from showing up as a link.

    Notice that the extension is .live, not .com or .org.

    1. The virus has spread all over China. Go to the link I posted above, then scroll down to the map of china. Then mouse over each province and it will give you the number of confirmed cases, deaths, and recovered. Hubei Province is obviously the worse but there are also confirmed cases in every other province of China.

       1. Hubei went under lockdown at about 1000 cases. Several provinces will likely be there in the next few days, especially Guangdong that borders Hong Kong. Will be interesting to see CCP reaction. Also several countries with poorly developed health care systems and lots of Chinese tourists this time of year have not reported any cases – Indonesia, Laos, Cambodia – new hot zones are likely to develop over the next 4-6 weeks making things very complicated

11. US SEA-LEVEL: 2019 DATA ADDS TO TREND IN ACCELERATION

    “The annual update of their sea level “report cards” adds evidence of an accelerating rate of sea-level rise at nearly all tidal stations along the U.S. coastline. The analysis now includes 51 years of water-level observations, from January 1969 through December 2019. The three highest rates of sea-level rise in 2019 occurred along the Gulf Coast at Grand Isle, Louisiana (7.93 millimeters per year) and at Rockport (6.95 mm/yr) and Galveston (6.41 mm/yr) Texas. The difference between the linear rates used in NOAA’s sea-level forecasts and the non-linear, accelerating rates used in VIMS’ report cards can lead to sharply different forecasts of our sea-level future.”

    https://phys.org/news/2020-02-sea-level-cards-trend.html

    1. Meanwhile,

       RECORD WARM WATER IN ANTARCTICA, POINT TO CAUSE BEHIND TROUBLING GLACIER MELT

       “Scientists have observed the presence of warm water at a vital point underneath a glacier in Antarctica — an alarming discovery that raises concerns about sea-level rise around the globe.”

       https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200129174526.htm

12. Wind and solar are very costly

    It is all very well for people to say wind and solar are cheaper then coal or gas or whatever.

    However wind and solar have to work as part of a grid and not just provide electricity to your garage.
    A real life example of the costs involved in trying to remove fossil fuels from the energy sector is Germany.
    No other nation has gone so far in the last 20 years in installing so much wind and solar as a proportion of capacity.

    https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power

    As you can see, the cost of the subsidies for wind and solar have been considerable. Further costs include upgrading the grid in order to cope with dramatic and rapid increases and declines of power from wind and solar. Often wind and solar output can decline together when demand is increasing, this causes great difficulties in maintaining grid stability. At least that is what people who maintain the grid say. and hence the huge increase in expenditure over the last 15 years.

    After 20 years of investment and $300 billion dollars of subsidies, Germany is still using coal, gas and nuclear for half of it’s needs.

    The storage problem is still no where in sight.

    1. How costly are fossil fuels when pollution, health effects and global warming are factored in?

       1. One could just as well ask, how costly are batteries when pollution and health effects are factored in? I have visited that ugly corner of Inner Mongolia where a radioactive toxic lake wider than the eye can see has been “developed” to feed OUR thirst for batteries, smartphones and other consumer gadgets. You could probably say the same about Congo’s cobalt mines. Out of sight, out of mind!

          IS YOUR PHONE TAINTED BY THE MISERY OF THE 35,000 CHILDREN IN CONGO’S MINES?

          https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/oct/12/phone-misery-children-congo-cobalt-mines-drc

          1. Remember, extra hard steel and Diesel (for de-sulphuring) need kobalt, too.

             The children is a problem of a bad government – millions of children are working for clothing industry. But nobody cares, only batteries is bad.

             1. Eulenspiegel, your post makes no sense whatsoever. No one is claiming that children working in sweatshops are not a problem. “No one cares?” Bullshit man, get a grip on reality. People can care about children working in cobalt mines as well as children working in sweatshops.

          2. Doug, you are creating a false equivalence but, I think you know that. There is a fundamental difference between non-renewable and renewable energy. As plants that use non-renewable energy are built, more sources for the fuel must be found and the more fuel must be consumed creating an ever increasing waste stream, which in the case of C02, cannot be recycled on a time scale relevant to humans or most other lifeforms to be honest.

             Increasing renewable energy consumption on the other hand, only requires increases in the scale of the harvesting plants (wind turbines, solar farms, hydro facilities etc.). It is conceivable that at some point there would be enough plant to service the needs of the existing population, at which point the only new plants needed would be those required to replace existing plants that are being retired having reached the end of their commercially useful life.

             At the end of their useful life, it is conceivable that much of the material that went into the building of both renewable and non renewable energy plants can be recycled. Not so for the fuel. See:

             More than 5,000 tons of modules collected for recycling in France

             Solar waste organization PV Cycle recycled more than 280,000 end-of-life photovoltaic panels in France last year. Around 95% of them, PV Cycle said, will be processed at the Triade Électronique factory in Rousset, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department of southern France.

             The factory is operated by a unit of French environmental services provider Veolia which specializes in the treatment of waste electrical and electronic equipment. The panels are ground and separated into glass, silicon, plastics and copper.

             PV Cycle said the annual volume collected has multiplied by a factor of more than 13 since solar waste recycling began in earnest in 2015. In 2030, the amount collected is expected to reach 50,000 tons, the organization added.

             An intriguing twist on the “PV waste” issue:

             Italian PV panels sent for recycling were instead smuggled to Syria and Africa

             Bertrand Lempkowicz, from the PV Cycle recycling organization maintained by the solar industry, said the EU’s Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive authorizes re-use of modules and a lack of legal detail in some territories can leave loopholes which can be exploited by recycling entities. “It is obvious that PV Cycle does not support this practice, simply [that] there are no guidelines strictly defining what is a second-hand photovoltaic panel or a re-used panel,” Lempkowicz told pv magazine. “When is a panel considered waste or second hand? The vagueness of this question is too great.”

             A real case of one man’s trash being another man’s treasure! 😉

             1. LOL “false equivalence”, guilty as charged. Of course I knew (know) this but I enjoy teasing you. 😉

             2. Islandboy said”It is conceivable that at some point there would be enough plant to service the needs of the existing population, at which point the only new plants needed would be those required to replace existing plants that are being retired having reached the end of their commercially useful life.”

                But it’s all about growth, 2.3% energy growth globally in 2018. Renewable energy such as PV and wind are nowhere near meeting the growth, let alone reducing the already existing demand.

                1. If you read deeply into the statement “It is conceivable that at some point there would be enough plant to service the needs of the existing population,”, you will realize that there is more than one path to this conclusion, the key being “the existing population”!

                2. existing = in existence or operation at the time under consideration; current.

                   The existing population is getting very little of it’s energy from PV and wind. If you mean future existing population, supposedly that will be much larger with near double the the energy demand of today.
                   If you mean a future existing collapsed population, then the industrial production will have collapsed too.
                   So what do you mean?

                3. Under the best of circumstances (wishful thinking), instead of rising, population would gradually decline to match the available resources. That is highly unlikely and the current situation in China points to the dangers of having everything “made in China” as an example of what the future might hold in terms of collapsing industrial production.

                4. If population was to decline, and consumerism decreases as a result. The global economy will collapse. Chaos will follow.
                   There is no happy endings to our predicament no matter how it unfolds in my humble opinion.

                5. IM, some people(led by academics) are trying to formulate a civilization that will rise out of the ashes of this one. They seem to think collapse is inevitable.
                   The rest of life (ROL) seems to like that situation.
                   Sad, since humans do have the potential to be really helpful. They just need to get over themselves.
                   As someone said lately, I wish something would happen to prove Carlin wrong, just one thing. 🙂

                6. Yeah Islandboy, I was thinking about that the other day. We don’t need people to communicate the viruses, material good will do if conditions are right. The fast shipping of goods might be another vector for viruses.

    2. The cost of subsidies and investment in wind and solar energy in Germany have been recovered and amply rewarded by the savings resulting from AVOIDING the purchase of gas and coal to generate electricity, by export earnings selling wind and solar equipment, domestic employment in the renewables industries, healthier people, improved national security, etc.

       Germany going forward is going to have an ever growing advantage over other countries that are still paying ever increasing prices ( long term) for fossil fuels.

       1. Oldfarmermac

          There is some truth in what you say, but much of German coal was home produced. This provided work for tens of thousands of miners.
          The main point you missed is much of the wind power installed at great cost has gone to replace nuclear plants closed down 10 to 20 years before they needed to be.

          https://www.energy-charts.de/energy_pie.htm?year=2003

          these nuclear plants were running at minimal costs and provided huge amounts of very low carbon electricity.

          also all this solar and wind cannot be that effective if Germany needs another gas pipeline from Russia.

          https://www.gazprom.com/projects/nord-stream2/

          1. The gas is mostly for heating, not electricity.

             Windmills haven’t gone to replace nuclear plants. They partly replaced coal, but mostly drove an increase of net electricity exports by Germany. In 2018 something like 10% of total electricity generation was exported. Thanks to higher carbon prices, there is another wave of coal plant shutdowns in 2019, and that reduced exports to about zero.

             Look at your own source for 2019 instead of 2003. Coal fell from about half of electricity production to about 30%, down 20 percent points. Wind went from 4% to 24%, up 20 percent points. Coal also got a lot more efficient, meaning coal consumption fell more, though the chart doesn’t show it. Gas went for 8% to 10%. Solar went from 0% to 9%. Production fell from 521 TWh to 518.

             Meanwhile demand for electricity continues to fall.

             1. alimbiquated

                I did not say coal had not fallen, it is obvious from the charts that it has.
                Partly filled by gas increasing from 39 Twh to 53 Twh.

                Germany electricity production has only changed a fraction.
                Nuclear generation has fallen from 156 Twh in 2002 to 71 Twh in 2019 and the intend close all their nuclear power stations. That is a massive drop which wind and solar had to fill.

                My point was, for a large part, really cheap low carbon electricity was replaced by very expensive low carbon electricity.

                1. So Wayne, are you telling us Germany figured out a way to deal with the disposal of nuclear waste and then they decided to trade that in for solar and wind? Nuclear is never cheap.

                   Yes, there are issues to be dealt with, but the back and forth about replacing 24/7/365 fossil based energy is tiresome. And yes, nuclear is, to my knowledge, the only thing that comes close to being able to fill those big fossil shoes – yet it hasn’t because there are issues with it, both long and short term.

                   I’m of the opinion that we just might not be able to continue having 24/7 on demand access to energy once tshtf. Life will definitely not be the same. And I don’t think there’s gonna be any kind of smooth transition to that future. Chaos.

                   I’m 63, drawing SS, a pension and have 3 vacation rentals. My house and 2 of those rentals are paid up. My partner/spouse hopes to retire next year and he’ll start drawing SS, pension and help with rentals. Our SS, pensions and rentals all depend on the shit NOT hitting the fan. I haven’t planned for chaos. And I don’t know anyone who has.

                2. Nuclear is never cheap.

                   Yes. And, don’t forget the costs of accidents like Fukushima – that “external cost” is why Germany is abandoning nuclear.

                   we just might not be able to continue having 24/7 on demand access to energy

                   The traditional utility strategy is called “load following” – it encourages expensive capital investment:

                   “Usually, the goal of demand-side management is to encourage the consumer to use less energy during peak hours, or to move the time of energy use to off-peak times such as nighttime and weekends.[3] Peak demand management does not necessarily decrease total energy consumption, but could be expected to reduce the need for investments in networks and/or power plants for meeting peak demands. An example is the use of energy storage units to store energy during off-peak hours and discharge them during peak hours.[4] A newer application for DSM is to aid grid operators in balancing intermittent generation from wind and solar units, particularly when the timing and magnitude of energy demand does not coincide with the renewable generation.[5][6]”

                   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_demand_management

                3. Nick g

                   Great idea, I will start cooking my evening dinner from now on at 3AM and watch TV then also. I shall also do my ironing just after.

                   Do you really understand what you are saying?

                4. Edgy

                   What is it with people like you who feel they need to twist what people say?
                   I said what I said.

                   https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/history-behind-germanys-nuclear-phase-out

                   Germany voted to close it’s nuclear power plants. Full bloody stop. A nuclear plant once built has negligible running costs. It would have been better to run the plants to the very end of their lives. Because they were producing lots of clean energy.
                   The nuclear waste is there anyway.

                   If you are concerned about climate chaos, stop buying Chinese goods. China burns as much coal in a fortnight as Germany does all year.

       2. No, we’re not going to have this advantage.

          Because the last few federal governments have killed the domestic PV industry and are hell-bent on doing the same to the wind industry.

          Wind and PV capacity increase has been far too low in the last few years:
          https://energy-charts.de/power_inst.htm?year=all&period=annual&type=inc_dec

          10 GW of wind added per year would be a good start…

          1. You could think of German investment in scaling up wind and solar as a gift to the world.

             1. I do.

                Best foreign aid ever.

    3. How about the costs of this:

       Airport Runways Underwater: Rising Seas Threaten 80 Airports (Maps)

       “While global climate-related threats like droughts, wildfires and biodiversity loss get a lot of attention (and rightfully so), one problem is quietly creeping up on us, and it could have disastrous consequences,” Mansie Hough at the World Resources Institute (WRI) recently wrote in an email to CleanTechnica.

       “Even if we get emissions under control and temperature rise is limited to 2 degrees Celsius, about half a meter of sea level rise is likely by 2100 – and this would put 44 airports around the world underwater, according to new analysis of sea level rise data from Resource Watch. This poses serious economic, public health and security threats to the countries whose airports are affected.”

       Some of these at-risk airports include:

       For example, half a meter of sea level rise would render both of the two major international airports in Jamaica useless, along with those listed in the article.

       1. What is the expected lifetime of the buildings and runways (if they need runways in 2100)? Typically large buildings have 30 to 50 years of useful life at best. Some are even shorter.
          Runways have 15 to 20 year lifetimes.
          So there is plenty of time to move infrastructure, if we even need it in the future. Cities will have to wall up or move too.

          Analysis of Airport infrastructure needs.
          Terminally Challenged
          https://airportscouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/2019TerminallyChallenged-Web-Final.pdf

13. The march of the windmills continues.

    Denmark sources record 47% of power from wind in 2019
    https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climate-change-denmark-windpower/denmark-sources-record-47-of-power-from-wind-in-2019-idUSKBN1Z10KE

14. So, the five last years have been the hottest on record, as was the ten-year period 2010-2019. Let’s hear what the Denialists (and flat Earth people) have to say.

    JANUARY 2020 WARMEST ON RECORD

    “Last month was the warmest January on record globally, while in Europe temperatures were a balmy three degrees Celsius above the average January from 1981 to 2010, the European Union’s climate monitoring system reported Tuesday. And, across a band of countries stretching from Norway to Russia, temperatures were an unprecedented 6C above the same 30-year benchmark.”

    2 degrees C doesn’t seem that far off does it?

    https://phys.org/news/2020-02-january-warmest-eu-climate.html

    1. Doug, not even all the particulates from increased coal and oil burning since the 1990’s has been able to stop the warming trend. Looks like the annual rise is similar to the annual variation so it’s hard to mask the signal now.

       This graph about describes it and the land temps alone should be a little higher.
       What is disturbing is the delay factor, we may be seeing the effects of the the 1990 era GHG and some of the brightening as catalytic converters and other particulate changes were made to burning fossil fuels. Now the GHG is higher and particulates are still in play.

       

       1. Ah yes, the “delay factor”. Maybe best to pretend that doesn’t exist. Too depressing!

          1. The rate is impressive. Average rates during the PETM were much less than this, though we don’t have the resolution needed to see if it happened in spurts. However, 5C over 10,000 or more years is far different than 5C in three centuries.

15. Population Hotspot – India

    0-14 years: 26.31% (male 185,017,089/female 163,844,572)
    15-24 years: 17.51% (male 123,423,531/female 108,739,780)
    25-54 years: 41.56% (male 285,275,667/female 265,842,319)
    55-64 years: 7.91% (male 52,444,817/female 52,447,038)
    65 years and over: 6.72% (male 42,054,459/female 47,003,975) (2020 est.)

    Population Growth Rate 1.1% (2020 est.) (adding 15 million people per year)
    Current population estimate 1369 million.

    

16. Africa – Population Hotspot
    Current population 1341 million
    Growth Rate 2.5 percent (adding 33 million per year)
    Estimated population 2050 2489 million

    China – Population Hotspot?
    Population 1439 million
    2020 Population Rank 1
    2020 World Percentage 18.47%
    2020 Growth Rate 0.41% ( adding 5.8 million per year but growth expected to go negative by 2035)

    Southeast Asia
    Year Population Density (km²) Growth Rate
    2020 668,619,840 154.04 1.00%
    2025 699,798,433 161.22 0.86%
    2030 727,293,777 167.55 0.72%
    2035 750,506,245 172.90 0.57%
    2040 769,258,274 177.22 0.44%
    2045 783,731,984 180.55 0.33%
    2050 794,001,991 182.92 0.22%

    1. It’s really mainly Africa and MENA: the land of misogyny.

       India, for instance, is now at a replacement rate level for Total Fertility Rate. The demographic bulge is still creating nominal growth, but it’s temporary.

       It’s fascinating to note the tens of millions of men in India who will never find wives. If their parents generation hadn’t been misogynistic and killed off their potential wives, they’d be a lot happier…

       1. India is projected to reach 1649 million in 2055. Pakistan is projected to double before the end of the century.
          Not that anyone believes these projections, I hope.

          1. I’m not a fully qualified biologist, but you can take this to the bank, speaking from the pro farmer pov.

             Barring technological and economic miracles on the grand scale, the populations of these hot spots will never be as high as the projections.

             Crop failures are virtually GUARANTEED, on that same grand scale, for numerous reasons well known to all the regulars here. Erosion and degradation of soil, limited water supplies, development of farmland, shortages of fossil fuel inputs, climate going crazy, blights, bugs, virus, war, epidemic disease…….

             And reserves of grain or any other food adequate to provide for hundreds of millions of people simply DO NOT EXIST.

             1. GF said “Not that anyone believes these projections, I hope.”
                OFM, no knowledgeable thinking person actually takes those projections seriously. Do you?

                Are you aware of the major planting and conservation projects already in full swing in India? It may not be enough but at least they are not pulling a US.

17. Thanks Ron.

18. Interesting:
    Amplified Rossby waves enhance risk of concurrent heatwaves in major breadbasket regions
    https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0637-z.epdf?referrer_access_token=8QfNuRoEfxiJEwS5BjIhR9RgN0jAjWel9jnR3ZoTv0NbkxDv-B7uaAUvJg7UJyPDMcjH9SjHrpGhhq78UBFrzPuvY4lRy5dCvQdTLv7UqI5IekspEw8O2PP2SU_Eii5gXdYGo7CPlgDz-eNEGTaQg7yJCOUhy4EiXpq-8459FiOClfHwTeX2S3TFgPx4x0AE51T2KfiaqPP7zBOm9qSpzUXwnCyAT6t9tVhp8R4_TctugSxFvEOqObwRvIj0djZOAIe6S1qDBOnfrw6lcRoMpXIKT9dJpa22cVduKySYRZiSv0U-MXZlhP7xpiQlmXpd-9OuUwQRssAODfRzTc0t4A%3D%3D&tracking_referrer=blogs.scientificamerican.com

19. Climate Models vs. Real World
    James Hansen

    http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2020/20200203_ModelsVsWorld.pdf

    1. James Hansen is wrong!

       1. This is the part that I don’t believe :
          

          No way that they could keep a computer running on a single model for a “few years”, unless they did it piecemeal using checkpoints and then stitching the results together. Still, running a model for a few years shows a huge amount of discipline and perhaps insanity in belief in the results of that lengthy a calculation. Perhaps this run could be done in a few minutes with today’s computing power?

          If true, it shows that they had to choose wisely for the climate sensitivity since the only had essentially one shot.

          1. Paul, get real. Requiring a few years to complete a project using only one computer does not mean the program must run for years non-stop. No one would make such a stupid claim as that. All such programs are capable of being stopped and restarted at certain points.

             1. The claim that James Hansen made was that it took a “few years to complete them on our computer” back in 1970s. That was for one climate sensitivity set to 4C. I assume they did a later one at 2.8C which took another few years, which he then applied in a paper for 1981.

                Now the problem with the current batch of climate models is they can’t figure out why they are “running hot”.

                Climate Models Are Running Red Hot, and Scientists Don’t Know Why — https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-02-03/climate-models-are-running-red-hot-and-scientists-don-t-know-why

                The claim now is that the models may be too complex and so they can’t systematically change the input parameters to determine what the causative factors are.

                In a series of tweets, Gavin Schmidt said:

                1) the codes are indeed complex (~1 million loc).
                2) different processes are first worked on independently, using small scale/specific observations.
                3) the improvements are then coupled together, either adding one at a time, or a bunch together
                4) this often reveals changes to the emergent properties of the simulation that are non-linear and sometimes unexpected.
                5) skill of the overall simulation in matching large scale observations is used to constrain choices (‘tuning’)
                6) some changes have step change impacts
                7) given limited time and resources, groups try their best to produce a model with the highest skill.
                8) future projections however are not generally part of the skill evaluation
                9) things like the climate sensitivity are not obvious functions of model skill.
                10) so odd things can happen (as has occurred this time around).
                11) the correlation of odd things happening in independent development groups is interesting – but perhaps explainable (ppl working on common biases, w/same new observables, finding similar solutions).

                https://twitter.com/ClimateOfGavin/status/1224452096663023616

                1. Paul,

                   I don’t know if this is pertinent to your discussion but we were always faced with people who thought advances in geophysics were due to some great technological advance(s) (I refer especially to seismic) when in fact mostly they boiled down to availability of more-and-more powerful computers. The math had mostly been worked out a century, or more, earlier. A good example is Fourier analysis as refined by Lagrange. Alas, my first seismic analyses required going somewhere that had a mainframe computer and shuffling hundreds of “punch cards”.

                2. Yup, a few years of stacking punch cards and waiting for the results. I kind of forgot about that aspect.

                3. Yea, I remember that—-
                   That last run.

20. I’ve been making fun the people in the psychology field for decades, with ample reason.

    They’re just now figuring out why people believe as they do.

    All the great novelists knew the answer to THAT question centuries ago.

    People believe what they WANT to believe……. and they WANT to believe anything consistent with tribal dogma.

    The TRIBE comes first. Good standing in the tribe is more important than anything else. It’s always been US versus THEM. Been saying it forever. Well only about sixty years, it took me a while to grow up and read some good books, lol.

    Anybody who has a problem understanding politics should read the book mentioned in this article.

    https://theconversation.com/humans-are-hardwired-to-dismiss-facts-that-dont-fit-their-worldview-

21. Coronavirus projection.

    http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article66536.html

    Infections have increased from 2,000 to 30,000 and 2 weeks, but the real number is probably far higher. Several reports of dead who have not been tested are simply cremated.

    https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/10813398/coronavirus-chinese-hospital-video/

    The number infected in just 2 weeks would fill 28 very large hospitals

    1. Data from Wuflu.live

       Infections Feb 3rd 20,654
       Infections Feb 4th 24,575
       One Day Increase 3,921

       But speculation is that these numbers are woefully under-reported. The actual numbers may be well over 100,000. There were 10 on a cruise ship in Japan just yesterday.

       Princess Cruises quarantines 3,700 for two weeks on ship after 10 aboard test positive for coronavirus

       1. This article highlights how under reported the virus is. Many members of a family are sick yet only one diagnosed because hospitals are overwhelmed. People are put big open plan halls with little medical care.

          https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/02/05/802896668/in-quarantined-wuhan-hospital-beds-for-coronavirus-patients-are-scarce?t=1580925297978

          1. For comparison: Influenza in the US
             “While the impact of flu varies, it places a substantial burden on the health of people in the United States each year. CDC estimates that influenza has resulted in between 9 million – 45 million illnesses, between 140,000 – 810,000 hospitalizations and between 12,000 – 61,000 deaths annually since 2010.”
             https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/burden/index.html

             1. Meanwhile, nobody’s paying attention to Africa. That is where the virus is most likely to spread

                1. That has been on my mind also—-

                2. Until now no confirmed cases in Africa, more than five weeks after the first ones

22. Whoopee doo, we’re champs. With a territory that has 0.5% of the Earth’s population we have firm plans to use up nearly a third of the planet’s remaining carbon budget. So, does that mean we get the gold metal? Well, the booby prize then?

    WHEN IT COMES TO CLIMATE HYPOCRISY, CANADA’S LEADERS HAVE REACHED A NEW LOW

    “Canada, has elected a government that believes the climate crisis is real and dangerous – and with good reason, since the nation’s Arctic territories give it a front-row seat to the fastest warming on Earth. Yet the country’s leaders seem likely in the next few weeks to approve a vast new tar sands mine which will pour carbon into the atmosphere through the 2060s. They know – yet they can’t bring themselves to act on the knowledge. Now that is cause for despair.

    The Teck mine would be the biggest tar sands mine yet: 113 square miles of petroleum mining, located just 16 miles from the border of Wood Buffalo national park. A federal panel approved the mine despite conceding that it would likely be harmful to the environment and to the land culture of Indigenous people. These giant tar sands mines (easily visible on Google Earth) are already among the biggest scars humans have ever carved on the planet’s surface. But Canadian authorities ruled that the mine was nonetheless in the “public interest.” Sigh!

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/feb/05/when-it-comes-to-climate-hypocrisy-canadas-leaders-have-reached-a-new-low

    1. Meanwhile,

       OIL-RICH NORWAY [AND AUSTRALIA ? ] SIMPLY EXPORTS ITS CARBON EMISSIONS

       “Indeed, Norway’s citizens have developed a strong affinity for electric cars and green building. Nevertheless, more global energy experts are quick to point out those efforts are a drop in the massive emissions bucket when one includes the total carbon footprint of Norway’s fossil fuels generated outside of the country’s borders. “The emissions of CO2 that occur within Norway’s territory are dwarfed by the emissions that result from combustion of all the oil and gas Norway produces.””

       Here’s how Justin Trudeau, recently re-elected as Canada’s prime minister, put it in a speech to cheering Texas oilmen a couple of years ago: “No country would find 173 billion barrels of oil in the ground and leave them there.”

       https://www.triplepundit.com/story/2017/oil-rich-norway-simply-exports-its-carbon-emissions/16631

    2. Doug, your government is just planning for the future. (wink, wink)
       It is not very likely that fossil fuels will stay in the ground, unless there is major civilization collapse. Any short term reduction will probably be accessed later. For the climate that doesn’t mean much unless it is thousands of years later.

       Meanwhile, during a time not for the people but more importantly not for all the other animals and plants of the world.
       Court victory for disputed Trans Mountain pipeline project
       https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-51317384

       1. My son works for a large support company in Ft Mac…several thousand employees. They have so much work booked ahead that all employees are spoken for , for a few years, anyway. They only hire qualified and experienced trades so new hires will have to come from other companies.

    3. It’s idiotic for any politician to take a policy, drive it to the extreme and tell everybody “our country isn’t going to grow at all”.

23. Even the Koch Brother is having doubts about fossil fuels.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-04/koch-buys-rest-of-infor-in-deal-valuing-software-maker-at-11-billion

    Yours truly used to work for this company.

24. Providing an update to the first post: the model ensembles are now in great agreement that the AO index is headed toward a record high in the coming days.

    The top 5 highest daily AO index readings on record (going back to 1950):
    Feb 2, 1990: +5.911
    Mar 8, 2015: +5.588
    Jan 14, 1989: +5.582
    Mar 7, 2015: +5.581
    Feb 27, 1990: +5.359

    

25. Why Texans Don’t Want Any More Californians
    Derek Thompson

    https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/01/the-truth-about-the-california-exodus/605833/

    Across a frightened nation divided by politics and culture, a fragile harmony is ascendant, as Americans in small towns and large cities alike cry out in trembling unison: Hey, where did all these Californians come from?

    Talk of a “California Exodus” is sweeping the country—and so are anxieties about its effects on the rest of the West. In October, the Boise mayoral candidate Wayne Richey proposed at an election forum to build a $26 billion wall to keep out people moving from the Golden State. (His backup plan to stop the invasion of Boise? “Trash the place.”) A viral Wall Street Journal article recounted the plight of a small Idaho town buckling under the stress of thousands of inbound Californians. And this month, Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a warning on Twitter to Californians moving to his state: “Remember those high taxes, burdensome regulations, & socialistic agenda advanced in CA? We don’t believe in that.” The sentiment was echoed in various warnings in Dallas newspapers about the awful “California-ing” of North Texas.

    In 2016, President Donald Trump swept the Republican primary with a simple message: Build a wall to keep out the immigrants. Today, a new anti-migration theme is sweeping the country: Build a wall to keep out the Californians.

    1. We don’t mind Californians coming to Texas as long as they are conservative refugees coming in. Liberals see billboards like this around the state, because we want to keep em out!

       

       1. Reality has a liberal bias.

       2. 100 years from now historians will ask: “Why were conservatives of the early 21st century such blooming idiots? Why did they elect such a downright fool and narcissistic moron for a president?”

          1. The answer is clear: an extraordinary propaganda campaign over the last decades, via Fox, talk radio, and right wind newspapers, which is only getting more aggressive:

             “ The president’s reelection campaign was then in the midst of a multimillion-dollar ad blitz aimed at shaping Americans’ understanding of the recently launched impeachment proceedings. Thousands of micro-targeted ads had flooded the internet, portraying Trump as a heroic reformer cracking down on foreign corruption while Democrats plotted a coup. That this narrative bore little resemblance to reality seemed only to accelerate its spread. Right-wing websites amplified every claim. Pro-Trump forums teemed with conspiracy theories. An alternate information ecosystem was taking shape around the biggest news story in the country, ”

             https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/03/the-2020-disinformation-war/605530/

             1. And a broken constitution that allows minority rule.

26. Good Lord, so now we’re expected to face not just another flood (I’d guess that means from sea level raise) but Cascading Environmental Crises. It doesn’t seem fair when all we’ve done is follow His dictate — being fruitful and multiplying.

    MULTIPLE ECO-CRISES COULD TRIGGER ‘SYSTEMIC COLLAPSE’

    Climate change, extreme weather events from hurricanes to heatwaves, the decline of life-sustaining ecosystems, food security and dwindling stores of fresh water — each poses a monumental challenge to humanity in the 21st century. Out of 30 global-scale risks, five topped the list both in terms of likelihood and impact: Not surprisingly they include Extreme heat waves and Biodiversity loss.

    “Human society will be faced with the devastating combined impacts of multiple interacting climate hazards. They are happening now and will continue to get worse. That is true even in optimistic emissions reduction scenarios.”

    https://phys.org/news/2020-02-multiple-eco-crises-trigger-collapse-scientists.html

    1. Mother Nature’s singing a new song

       I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair,
       I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair,
       I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair,
       And send him on his way.
       I’m gonna wave that man right outa my arms,
       I’m gonna wave that man right outa my arms,
       I’m gonna wave that man right outa my arms,
       And send him on his way.
       Don’t try to patch it up
       Tear it up, tear it up!
       Wash him out, dry him out,
       Push him out, fly him out,
       Cancel him and let him go!
       Yea, sister!
       I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair,
       I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair,
       I’m gonna wash that man right outa my hair,
       And send him on his way.

       If a man don’t understand you,
       If you fly on separate beams,
       Waste no time, make a change,
       Ride that man right off your range.
       Rub him out of the roll call
       And…
       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odcCzb-h3Fo

       1. She didn’t seem to rinse very well.

27. Have you ever really thought about how a car is made? Here it is easier to conceive since it happened all in one place. From ore to car all in one place. High energy and highly complex.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vMlPonSrqVo

    1. tyranny

       arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.

       the government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler.

       a state ruled by a tyrant or absolute ruler.

       oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler.

       undue severity or harshness.

       a cruel or harsh act or proceeding; an arbitrary, oppressive, or tyrannical action.

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRsaAJEZQDs

       The ad that must be seen to view the video had my local Republican challenger ad campaign . Why this video ?

       1. HB has blown a gasket? Putting up Hitler speeches in response to a Ford Rouge plant documentary about making cars is just weird.
          There is no ad in either video. Curiouser and curiouser.

28. I said here a year or three or so back that the pipelines needed to get Canadian oil to market would be built, one way or another.

    From McLeans Canada, this excerpt

    Welcome to a sneak peek of the Maclean’s Politics Insider newsletter. Sign-up at the bottom of the page to get it delivered straight to your inbox.

    The long and winding saga of the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion found its way to Federal Court in Ottawa, where justices sided with the government’s argument that it properly consulted with Indigenous people whose lands overlap the proposed route. Read the whole ruling here, in which the judges call the consultation “anything but a rubber-stamping exercise” that produced meaningful conditions tied to the project’s approval.

    The Trans Mountain pipeline and the end of the ‘veto’ fallacy: Maclean’s Alberta correspondent Jason Markusoff explains that the decision “finally exorcised the misbegotten spirit of a Justin Trudeau comment at Calgary’s Petroleum Club on Oct. 30, 2013, which he made months after winning the Liberal leadership: ‘Governments may be able to issue permits, but only communities can grant permission.’” The four nations fighting the feds may yet pursue any and all legal recourse. But whatever happens in the courts, Markusoff writes, the resistance won’t end there:

    The final true battle will be protest and civil disobedience, with Standing Rock in the North Dakota and the Coastal GasLink pipeline fight in Wet’suwet’en territory as likely models. Expect cross-border solidarity to bolster the protesters’ numbers, as it did at Standing Rock, while the RCMP and government authority response in the GasLink fight may provide a preview of enforcement against Trans Mountain resistance.

    (Fun fact: John B. Laskin, one of the justices whose name is on the TMX decision, is the nephew of former Supreme Court chief justice Bora Laskin.)

    Personally I was expecting more bribery, promising material goods to the local people, etc, and less court action.

    But either way, there’s too much money, some of it tax money, at stake for the people of Canada to resist.

    1. Choices, choices. It’s all in the choices that are made.
       What if another choice was made instead? Take the other road, it’s been open for a while now.

       What if Canada had spent $200bn on wind energy instead of oil?
       https://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2018/jun/15/canada-oil-sands-pipeline-trans-mountain-what-if-invest-renewable-wind-energy

       1. That’s a nice illustration.

          Oil is expensive, polluting and risky.

       2. Wind energy makes all the sense in the world for Canadians…… except that you can’t easily ship it overseas in exchange for imported goods and services.

29. Global warming now more measurable, science summit hears
    New maths model takes into account GDP, gas emissions and population growth

    The model, based on mathematical probabilities, takes into account trends in the economy, including gross domestic product (GDP), CO2 emissions and population growth. To test the model, the researchers used data from the 1980s to predict global warming over the following 30 years, which proved to be correct, Prof Raftery told the SFI conference on Monday in Croke Park in Dublin.

    A major study published recently in Nature Climate Change analysed the past 50 years of trends in world population, per capita GDP and “carbon intensity”, (the amount of CO2 emitted for each dollar of economic activity), rather than look at how greenhouse gases will influence temperature.

    The Paris accord commits to holding the average global temperature to “well below 2 degrees” above pre-industrial levels and sets an aspirational goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. Prof Raftery said their research shows there is a 1 per cent chance temperatures will rise by less than 1.5 degrees.

    Prof Raftery said their research shows there is a 1 per cent chance temperatures will rise by less than 1.5 degrees.

    https://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/global-warming-now-more-measurable-science-summit-hears-1.3290733

30. https://cleantechnica.com/2020/02/06/the-next-big-solar-technology-intersolar2020/

    Wind and solar farm owners are already ripping out ten year old equipment with decades of useful life still unused, and replacing their old stuff with brand new state of the art turbines and panels.

    Within another ten years or so, I’m thinking it’s going to be a no brainer for any country that’s an energy importer to build wind and solar farms on the basis of dollars and cents accounting, to cut back on the need to pay for imported coal, oil, and gas.

    The storage problem can be dealt with for the most part by simply maintaining existing ff generating capacity as night time and bad weather backup.

    This would be a far from optimum arrangement, but it would serve to justify the build out of wind and solar capacity on the grand scale, and people can and will adapt their life styles to take advantage of cheap intermittent power.

    A new home buyer could for instance specify a couple of extra truck loads of structural concrete in the drawings, reducing the need for lumber while also serving as thermal mass…….. which would store heat enough when wind and solar juice is in surplus to get thru a spell of bad weather. Combine thermal storage with a double or triple sized water heater and plenty of insulation and the house itself can serve as a defacto battery.

31. https://www.engadget.com/2020/02/06/chargepoint-natso-ev-chargers-highways-rural-areas/

    Chicken and egg…….

    There’s zero doubt in my mind that a strip mall type business located on a major highway will soon find it NECESSARY to install charging stations in order to hold onto the restaurant and room rental business of the traveling public. Otherwise the people driving electric cars will be stopping ACROSS the road where there ARE charging facilities.

    A couple eating dinner at anywhere from twenty bucks up, and renting a room for the night at anywhere from even the cheapest these days, say sixty bucks, stopping across the road means close to seventy bucks of lost marginal profit, for the loser, and that much MORE profit for the winner.

    And of course the people driving nice new electric cars will be buying more expensive dinners and renting more expensive rooms. A charging station could bring in as much as three or four hundred bucks worth of marginal business in a single night, from a traveling family.

    Personally I’m convinced that most of the people who can afford a new electric car, for now, while the prices are still at least midrange, can charge at home, excluding only young professionals who rent, and my thinking in that scenario is that charging stations are going to be installed at nearly all new upscale rental housing, and retrofitted at most older but nicer rentals as well, within the next decade or so.

    1. US crossed 1 million EVs on the road back in mid 2018.

       The number of EVs on U.S. roads is projected to reach 18.7 million in 2030, up from 1 million at the end of 2018. This is about 7 percent of the 259 million vehicles (cars and light trucks) expected to be on U.S. roads in 2030.
       Annual sales of EVs will exceed 3.5 million vehicles in 2030, reaching more than 20 percent of annual vehicle sales in 2030. Compared to the prior forecast released in 2017, EV sales are estimated to be 1.4 million in 2025 versus 1.2 million.
       About 9.6 million charge ports will be required to support 18.7 million EVs in 2030. This represents a significant investment in EV charging infrastructure.

       https://www.eei.org/resourcesandmedia/newsroom/Pages/Press%20Releases/EEI%20Celebrates%201%20Million%20Electric%20Vehicles%20on%20U-S-%20Roads.aspx

       OFM, we have had the technology and capability to build plus 100 mpg ICE sedans since the 90’s, as demonstrated by the Rocky Mountain Institute. Three wheeler passenger cars have been built with 300 mpg diesel power. I find it strange that there is no pushback from the ICE auto industry yet against EVs since they get pollution competitive at about 40 mpg.
       The Chevy Volt got 40 mpg running gasoline so it polluted about the same from electric grid or gasoline (actually less from gasoline since a lot less coal and natural gas is involved).
       EVs do start to have an advantage if you drive them slowly or get stuck in stop and go traffic. However, an 80 mpg gasoline car could beat them all easily as would just about any similar sized hybrid. Stop-start tech as well as a small electric assist would put them well beyond EV on grid all over the country for another couple of decades.

       https://www.citylab.com/environment/2015/06/where-electric-vehicles-actually-cause-more-pollution-than-gas-cars/397136/

       https://www.nber.org/papers/w21291

       Of course the lower maintenance of EV (except battery and electronic) and highly variable cost of liquid fuel make the EV cheaper in the first decade of running. However, what is to stop electricity becoming more expensive, especially during the storage buildout of renewables? Flood the air with methane, CO2, arsenic, mercury, NOx, radioactive species, SO2 from electricity or CO2 plus less of the previous from oil.
       Both have pollution into waterways but the latest fracking spree is really nasty that way.
       So pick your poison or put PV on the roof at home to directly charge your EV during the day.
       The tires and other materials plus roadways all have their environmental costs.
       Happy motoring, except for the ROL.

       1. GF, I take it you have not yet looked at something I linked to in a comment in a previous thread:

          The Underestimated Potential of Battery Electric Vehicles to Reduce Emissions

          This paper by Auke Hoekstra rebuts just about any study that underestimates the potential of BEVs to reduce emissions.

          As far as projections of future EV sales from your first link:

          “Annual sales of EVs will exceed 3.5 million vehicles in 2030, reaching more than 20 percent of annual vehicle sales in 2030.”

          Tony Seba recently published a new version of his “Clean Disruption” presentation in which he projects that ICE powered vehicle sales will fall to zero by about 2025, that is 100% EV by 2026. In this latest presentation Seba spends a fair amount of time discussing why “the experts and the insiders” fail to anticipate let alone lead disruption, giving an insight into the reasons why most of the mainstream projections are rubbish. If you cant be bothered to watch the entire video, you can just skip to about the point where he talks about the market tipping point (https://youtu.be/y916mxoio0E?t=1918). The link to the entire video is below:

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y916mxoio0E

          Last week saw the “Fully Charged Live” event at the “Circuit of the Americas” in Austin, Texas. One of the presentations was all about disruption:

          The END of the Gasoline Car is Sooner Than You Think:

          The presenter takes things a little bit further than even Seba does but, the conclusion is clear, price parity for EVs vis a vis ICE powered vehicles is just around the corner, the next couple of years. The presenter posits that when price parity happens ICEs will quickly disappear. He also goes in depth to a whole host other reasons this disruption will be inevitable (e.g. insurance).

          1. IB, it’s not about EVs, its about the fossil fuel driven electric grid. EVs will be made good enough to sell. However, unless fuel prices skyrocket, ICE can be made that compete with EV and do better as far as pollution. So you think that 17 million EV will be selling in the US by 2026? Sounds very farfetched to do that in five years.

             1. From Seba’s RethinkX -Transportation report:

                

                1. Seba is depending upon TaaS to deplete the car sales. We do not have fully autonomous cars yet. However, it will be easy to check that graph since by 2022 sales will have dropped to 6 million.
                   We can also easily follow the TaaS businesses and the sales of EV.

                   Sounds exciting. Might even help a little but if the grid does not change a lot the pollution won’t fall much.

                2. In about three weeks the EIA’s Electric Power Monthly with the data for December should be published and we will be able to look at the full year’s data for 2019. I expect the contribution from solar for 2019 to come in at somewhere above to 2.5 % (2.71% ytd from the latest data). Wind is 7.27% ytd. If solar were to double twice by 2025 and wind were to double once we would be looking at upwards of 10% of US electricity coming from solar and close to 15% coming from wind. If the contribution from nuclear and hydro were to remain roughly at 19% and between 6% and 7% respectively, that would translate to just over 50% of US electricity coning from zero emission sources by 2025 as opposed to less than 38% in 2018.

                   Does anybody think that is far fetched?

                3. Islandboy,

                   Don’t forget to question whether the premise is true. In this case, it’s not: even in a country like China, which is 55% coal, an EV can still run mostly on low-carbon power. An EV can charge on mostly or all wind, solar or nuclear even in a grid that’s dominated by fossil fuels.

                   EVs can charge when low-carbon sources are at their peak: at night, or at noon. They are highly computerized, and most have much more storage than is needed for daily driving of 50 kms (in the US) or 30 kms in the EU or Japan: that means they can charge either at typical low-carbon times, or in response to utility price or DSM signals.

                   Even where low-carbon sources are a low percentage of the grid, EVs can still seek them out. This will raise prices at those times and incentivize even more low-carbon power.

                   They can also help reduce the cost of grid/frequency management, and improve the stability of the grid by soaking up power during periods of peak renewable production.

                   If you want to accelerate the grid’s transition to low-carbon, you want EVs installed ASAP.

                4. Sounds good Islandboy, maybe it will happen.
                   Lets look at the evidence so far.
                   2.6 GW of solar PV was added third quarter of 2019.
                   4X2.6 is 10.4 added annually. At that rate by the end of 2025 about 52 GW will be added (there has been no increase in additions for three years running). That would increase the amount by 70 percent. Going to have to be a huge boost to increase it by 400 percent in 5 years.

                   US wind power grew by 8 percent in 2018. Doubling in 5 years means a growth of 14 percent. It’s growth has been linear for the last eight years, so it can grow by about 40% in 5 years.

                   A big change has to happen in the US to stimulate renewables otherwise, they will take forever to catch up. Or demand needs to fall.
                   What will trigger this exponential rise in renewable energy in a country that has left the Paris Climate Agreement and appears to be just diddling along? Please tell us.

                5. In my area, which has a lot of nuclear, a 70 mpg car would outperform an EV as far as carbon intensity. Plus it would not have the pollution involved with coal burning.

                6. Well, a 70 MPG car would emit more carbon in any area with substantial nuclear: just charge at night, and use nuclear (and wind).

                   Plus, I’m not aware of any 70MPG pure ICE cars in the US. Developing one would mean additional substantial investment of monetary and intellectual capital into an obsolete technology, a dead end.

                7. No nick, the carbon intensity stays about the same here day and night this time of year. The spare capacity is mostly coal, some natural gas. Useful in summer. 3 percent renewable now, 40 percent nuke.

                   You really need to look up the definition of the word obsolete. Yes, we are headed to s dead end no matter what we drive. Yes the high mpg prototypes engineered and built up to three decades ago were ignored, as I have previously said. You also have lost the thread of this conversation. Fiddling and BSing while the living planet gets screwed seems to be a hobby.

                8. After losses 1 pound of coal produces 1 kWh. Burning 1 pound of coal produces 3.7 pounds of CO2 or 1680 grams. EV’s in warm places running on the level without wind and no heat or air conditioning running will do about 0.25 kWh/mile. With heat on in the winter, about 0.33 kWh /mile (or worse). So lets say 0.28 kWh real (not counting battery charging losses which are generally never counted).
                   So that is 470 g/mile for an EV running from a coal plant. If the coal portion of the electricity is 1/3 then that is 156 g/mile just for 1/3 of the power. Since natural gas overall is as bad as coal (or worse) as far as GHG, that makes 312 g/mile equivalent.
                   Even if you take the discounted version of natural gas it’s 234 g/mile for electricity at 1/3 carbon free.

                   A Prius running at 50 mpg emits 182 g/mile. An average car (not a real car) emits about twice that.
                   Notice that all are in the same ballpark, no big change here at all. We don’t need to eliminate living creatures, we need to eliminate GHG emissions and pollution.

                   Really guys, you can’t refute stoichiometry. It’s got nothing to do with lies, paid shills, Hitler or any other crap you post. It’s just reality, the chemistry and energetics of oxidation.
                   I have put tons of pro EV stuff up on this site in the past. This is not anti-EV it is a realistic look at the system and real world EV.
                   EV’s can be made more efficient, ICE can be more efficient, more PV can be added to the system, etc. Nick brings in timing of charging, which might help if it’s implemented.
                   But until all those changes are made on large scale the EV will be better in some areas and worse in others. On average one can do better with a hybrid. One can break even with an ICE Corolla and a little restraint or ride sharing.

                   I am looking for a tripling to 10 times better than any of that. The only thing that does that so far are a direct EV-PV combo or some of the failed commercial and pilot builds that the public and manufacturers would not run with.

                   The key is the engine. If the engine does not produce pollution and/or GHG then the vehicle works. Anything less than that is failure by degree and needs to be addressed immediately. Immediate means cut the driving down now. We can’t wait for the system to change.

                   In a few decades all the vehicles will be zero carbon, so we are told. Maybe most of the sources (engines) will be too.

                   We are also told that the present and the coming decade are the most important time in determining the future of humanity and the ROL. Maybe there is no “truth” in that but I wouldn’t bet the life of the planet on that or on failure by degree.

             2. There won’t be 17 million EVs sold in America in 2026. Total light vehicle sales may be less. There will be a lot of 48V vehicles sold, however, and they will be much more electrified than current vehicles.

                Electrification isn’t just about batteries and/or hydrogen. The industry is rethinking overall system architecture and replace mechanical gizmos with software and electric motors everywhere in the car. That means shift by wire instead of automatic transmission, steer by wire instead of power steering, regenerative braking and brake by wire, electronic turbo injection, active suspension, hybrid acceleration and coasting, electric differential control, etc. The upshot will be smaller IC engines, lighter, easier to maintain vehicles and more power.

                Electric vehicles are vastly better than ICEs for the end user. The only thing really standing in the way is battery production. Battery production is increasing by 20-30% a year, but that means there will only be about five times as many available in 2026 as now. But hybrids use less battery, so they should spread faster.

                1. Here is a guy driving his ICE powered vehicle at over 80 mpg.

                   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MagFE3GCilc&t=1346s

          2. Islandboy (and others who have interest in transition)
             if you seek truthful information and analysis, rather than opinion from naysayers or paid proponents of the oil industry, you may find this of interest and utility-
             https://afdc.energy.gov/vehicles/electric_emissions.html

             1. Losers use personal attacks. Cowards try to do it behind their backs.

                1. “HB has blown a gasket?”

                   ‘Losers use personal attacks”

32. Trump withholding $823 million for clean energy program.
    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-05/trump-withholding-823-million-for-clean-energy-democrats-say?sref=Vi7wu7Hv

    1. ‘Trump also kicked out the twin of impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman, apparent retaliation for his brother’s testimony

       The twin brother of impeachment witness Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman was fired from the White House on Friday, in an apparent act of retaliation by President Donald Trump.

       https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-also-kicked-out-the-twin-of-impeachment-witness-lt-col-alexander-vindman-apparent-retaliation-for-his-brothers-testimony/ar-BBZLSIx?ocid=spartanntp

       tyranny- oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler

33. A new non petroleum post is up:

    EIA’s Electric Power Monthly – January 2020 Edition with data for November 2019

    Discussions relating to oil and gas production should remain under the post titled “US Production Growth Surges”

34. http://churchandstate.org.uk/2019/11/the-christian-right-could-be-irrelevant-by-2024/?fbclid=IwAR3_CuMeuaSRjAX9o-RuQAN0zLo7-C3V13tz8C5Fg4IAsdeVMcMAq6a3MCg

    Those of us who are worried about the American political situation can take comfort in what this article has to say, which is in general terms what I have been saying here for quite some time, this being that the days of evangelical or fundamentalist influence in American politics are at or past the all time peak, and will be waning fast in the future.
    The churches are mostly actually empty or near empty, the folks attending are mostly older adults, the kids all have smart phones, hardly any of the evangelical kids are in private schools, all of them are exposed to television, some science even in grade school, etc.

    My generation is the last one left that’s REALLY religious. My Daddy is still living, but bed ridden in his nineties, with uncles and aunts disappearing FAST, none will be left in two or three more years, likely as not.

    I don’t think ANY of my really young relatives take the biblical dogma literally, at least not so far as I can tell, although some of them attend church.

    The preachers these days are fast modifying their message to avoid anti science and anti women propaganda, in spite of the impression created by the news media that evangelicals are crazy about the orange orangutan. Some are, but the younger women don’t kiss their husband’s ass these days, as a rule, and they don’t and won’t go to a church that preaches women are second class citizens. Their GRANDMOTHERS continue to attend and listen to such preaching……. but their grandmothers are dying off fast.

35. My 93 year old mother’s life is mostly sleeping in her chair or sitting on the toilet

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