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Renewable Tuesday: It's All Happening [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-07-11

Chris Hayes turned me on to another source of really good climate news, Heatmap.news, which I had unaccountably not heard about before. Robinson Meyer, the Founding Executive of Heatmap, was Chris’s guest last week.

And here is another amazing source of good news.

The mission of Global Energy Monitor (GEM) is to develop and share information in support of the worldwide movement for clean energy.

See also Climate Central, reported on by the NYT and Rachel Maddow in a story below.

So here is a mix of stories from them as well as the sources we looked at last week. You know it’s a great week in renewables when there is nowhere near room enough in a Diary for all of the excellent developments of that week.

That’s an old one from the DK image library. It is far higher today, at 12% of the global power mix. Wind and solar installations in 2022 were +75 GW of new wind capacity and +191 GW of new solar capacity. (Enerdata World Energy & Climate Statistics – Yearbook 2023)

First, the bad news of the week. Record heat worldwide, the Caribbean as a hot tub. and this NYT story, reported on by Rachel Maddow on Monday.

NYT: Climate Disasters Daily? Welcome to the ‘New Normal’

Around the United States, dangerous floods, heat and storms are happening more frequently. Weather disasters that cost more than $1 billion in damage are on the upswing in the United States, according to a Climate Central analysis of data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. In 1980, the average time between billion-dollar disasters was 82 days. From 2018-22, the average time between these most extreme events, even controlled for inflation, was just 18 days.

2022 U.S. Temperatures and Billion-Dollar Disasters

Yes. Controlled for inflation.

Faster! Faster!

You may depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows that he is to be hanged upon the morrow, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.

Samuel Johnson

Now, we know that that works for most of the population, but by no means all. Or rather, we have a vicious minority that thinks the real disaster is becoming a majority-minority country with actual equality, and dismisses much of science as a hoax, including “Darwinism” and Global Warming. Never mind them. They are busily destroying themselves by chasing out the RINOs, and a third of their own children, every year.

So we are talking about some serious bad news: record heat, and ice loss, and rising seas, and bigger storms and droughts, and forest fires of national scope, and species (including dread diseases and their vectors) migrating to once-cooler climes, and all the rest of it, and the fact that it all becomes more urgent now, day by day.

To my mind, it focuses all of us on just how quickly we have to move towards carbon-free energy, and then, on top of that, like, a crash program to take carbon out of the atmosphere. And the only good news is that there have been some really enormous developments on that front, happening quietly, in the background.

Chris Hayes

Now, regular readers of this series from years back, those who follow climate and renewables news now, know something of what Chris did not, and what nearly all of our politicians do not, even with all of the Green New Deals from several years ago. There is serious good news, better than you think.

Renewable Friday: AOC and the Green New Deal

Renewable Friday: Inslee's Got a Plan, and Beto's Got a Plan, and All God's Chillun Got Plans

As our esteemed (and hard-pressed) President likes to say,

Here’s the deal. No joke. No, I really mean it. Check it out. Check it out. Let’s finish the job.

Meyer cited these facts.

There are two trends right now that I would point to as hopeful, and also showing the full scale of the challenge. The growth trend is really, really good. Every technology that we need to decarbonize the economy is having one of its best years ever right now. 82% of new electricity generating capacity this year will be wind, solar, or batteries. Total demand is about 4 TW, so we have to displace and shut down all that fossil generation. We still have to get that growth rate up faster and faster. There has been an absolute explosion of investment in new battery and new electric vehicle manufacturing and assembly plants in the US. There has been about $50 billion worth of new investment, just since the Biden bills were passed. There are about 75,000 new jobs at these plants. This was not a given three years ago, something that we knew was going to happen.

Coal construction went off the proverbial cliff after coal mining peaked in 2013, with a few notable holdouts.

We are now at Peak Oil. There were holdouts in the car industry, and in every other part of the transportation industry, but no more.

Natural gas is next for the chopping block, for the Death of a Million Cuts to new gas construction, and to new home and business gas appliances, and to keeping uneconomic plants open. Those pesky markets have spoken about Real MoneyTM yet again.

You know, shareholders in power companies that refuse to take that money should get together and sue. Or maybe insurance companies could do something like that. Oh, wait. Yes, Shell, Xcel, Georgia Power, oil driller Continental, Exxon Mobil, Duke Energy are all getting sued over one damned thing or another.

America’s Paris Agreement Goals Are Actually Within Reach

New research reveals the U.S. has a plausible but narrow path to accomplishing its international climate commitments. The country still needs a few more big policies to get over the line. Cities, states, companies, and the federal government must slash carbon pollution in ways that go beyond what the Inflation Reduction Act, Biden’s signature climate law, will achieve. Even then, emissions must plunge more than twice as fast over the next seven years as they did over the past 17. [sigh] The bane of my existence, back when I was a paid global high-tech Senior Market Analyst, was people, including other analysts, who could not grasp the exponential function, and the related logistic function. The whole point of the exponential function is that its growth rate is proportional to its current value. The practical result of this is that it has a constant doubling time. The same is true for the first half of the logistic function shown above, until a new market is halfway saturated. Unless, as now, the technology is still advancing and costs are coming down at an unprecedented rate, until even the ICE deadenders will have to admit that there are no more gas stations. So when we double the amount of renewable energy we produce, we will double its rate of growth. Exactly what the doctor ordered. In fact, if the Republicans implode as expected next year, so that the US gives the Democrats full control of Congress, we can do much better than that in 2025. Don’t hope. Organize. The rest of the world is also accelerating its shift away from carbon fuels much faster than their politicians and technocrats ever imagined. China is now the world leader in renewable power construction, even as it continues to dominate the ever-shrinking coal construction market. Industry Data Gathered by DOE, analyzed by GEM, described above. GEM Data on Energy Plants Coal gas solar wind # countries 107 130 157 151 # units 13,650 boiler/turbines 9,899 boiler/turbines 15,903 farms 25,191 farms 2,000+ owners 2,028 owners 434 GW now 786 GW now 12 GT CO₂ per year 748 GW in development 1,184 GW planned 1,807 GW planned That’s just the current state of things. We will come back to them and look at their analysis of past and future trends.

Formula One Racing Without Carbon

How Le Mans Became an Unlikely Laboratory for Cleaner Cars The world’s greatest auto race is pushing the limits of cleaner combustion. That’s what I’ve always loved about Le Mans: It pushes the boundaries of automotive technology. The stuff you see one year may vary wildly just a couple of years later. Ten years ago, the most unbeatable cars were diesel Audis; the cars from this year’s top Hypercar class are all hybrids now, as they are in Formula One. Could those cars get even cleaner someday? Potentially. That’s the series’ goal, in fact; recently its governing body announced plans to make all of the top-class cars run on zero-emission hydrogen by 2030. That’s the same year the Le Mans race aims to be fully carbon-neutral. Aircraft Batteries ACS Energy Lett. Performance Metrics Required of Next-Generation Batteries to Electrify Commercial Aircraft We divide commercial aircraft into three categories: regional, narrow-body, and wide-body. Regional aircraft typically fly short missions, about 500 nautical miles (nmi) and carry low passenger loads (30–75), while wide-body aircraft carry high passenger loads (200–400) and fly much longer missions (>2000 nmi). Narrow-body aircraft fall in between, carrying medium passenger loads and flying ranges of ∼1000 nmi. We find that the major factor in determining the specific energy required of aircraft is the range that the class of aircraft typically flies, meaning that smaller, short-range aircraft will require less demanding battery performance metrics than larger, longer-range aircraft. The highest specific energy for rechargeable lithium batteries achieved in the lab is somewhat over 700 Wh/kg, not quite enough for narrow-body commercial aircraft. We want to double that for wide-body aircraft. Aluminum-air batteries have the right specific energy, 1300 Wh/kg (achieved)-2000 Wh/kg (theoretical). However, they cannot be recharged. If the aluminum oxide produced in use is removed and replaced with fresh aluminum after each flight, one could imagine this working, but there are formidable obstacles to making this practical. Such batteries are being considered for marine applications.

Lightning Round

No room for details! You’ll just have to click through. Except on the severely paywalled sites.

Your next BBQ could feature an electric grill

Notice how much bigger the deals are today, and how varied.

America's largest ever wind farm 3.5GW SunZia lines up two turbine makers: Pattern CEO

RWE hires Joe Biden's offshore wind pioneer Amanda Lefton to lead US east coast push

First IEA critical minerals review finds demand soaring but market responding

'On track to be the biggest' | CIP raises €5.6bn for latest renewables fund

'It'll take compromise to get this done' | Biden's green project permitting tightrope

'This will set the bar' | All eyes on California for historic first US floating wind auction

Making enough green hydrogen for 12 EU steel plants 'would need 85GW of new wind power'

Japan's pioneer spirit in floating wind moved to rise anew with opening of vast deepwater zone

Russia's 'threat from east' puts western Sweden on pole for giant floating wind: Freja CEO

'We know what it takes' | Winners Fred Olsen and EDF shift Irish wind to gigascale

GE onshore wind chief sees US market doubling as green law fuels 'exponential growth'

Note

I wasn’t well the day before yesterday. If I had been, I could have dug even deeper. But we’ll get there. The planet isn’t going away any time soon.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/11/2179910/-Renewable-Tuesday-It-s-All-Happening

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