I don't think that it is possible to neatly separate the home user market for electricity from an industry market one. The more #renewables you connect with the grid, the more traditional power plants you need to avoid net fluctuations. That is: All home users with their IMO naïve idea of "selling back to the grid" ignore that their fantasies presuppose the full-fledged operation and round-the-clock availibility of what they want to abolish: Traditional powerplants (coal, gas, nuclear) in massive sizes, ready to step in any minute. There is, again IMO, no way that renewables can be used meaningfully on a private home-owner basis. Whih is one of the reasons why I think #peakrenewables is far more realistic than some "green electricity" future.
For my story for @thejapantimes I explore how Tokyo is balancing with the social cost and geopolitical risks as it, cautiously, moves forward on its #cleanenergy transition
On Wed: German Foreign Office posted on X mocking #TFG.
TFG criticized Harris’s clean energy approaches -cited Germany.
“Germany tried that & within 1 year -back to building normal energy plants. We’re not ready for it -can’t sacrifice our country for the sake of bad vision” -TFG.
Partly so, in my opinion. I concur with the assessment that dezentralised energy storage capacities will – over a long strech of time – mostly benefit the military and its increasingly electricty-intensive equipment (drones, flight control, interception, AI managed swarms, etc.).
But that does not pertain to volatile #renewables like wind and sun whose effectiveness and suitability far more depend on grid structures, base loads of consumption and conventinal production, electricity markets, network costs, etc. That's one of the reasons, BTW, why I speak of #peakrenewables: They can positively contribute up to 30% in the overall electricity production, marketing, transfer, and consumption – beyond that it mainly increases costs and creates negative price offsets. And storage even for such minor for such capacities is not on the horizon. Hydrogen production on site of renewables is laughable (10% effectivness) and hydrogen powered plants are, well, not in sight.
Thus I think the current Tesla "Megapack" battery units (3.9 Mw/h storage per unit) is currently the best solution not for private, municipal, or commercial solutions but for military.
[Sidenote: And given the demand for batteries, I find it plausible that the vast lithium reserves in the Donbas region provided one of the main reasons for Putin to invade Ukraine.]
#Russia today attacked Kyiv Hydro Power Plant in #Ukraine with rockets and I can’t pass this opportunity to demonstrate another popular media bias related to electricity generation.
Kyiv HPP reservoir is almost 1,000 km2 and the dam is 12 m high with a capacity of 1,500 m3/s. The potential energy of this mass of water is 1.5 GJ, or - if one likes comparisons to nuclear weapons - roughly half a kiloton of TNT per second. In terms of energy released, it’s like a small tactical nuclear weapon exploding every second for days, until all water escapes.
While everyone is getting excited about a hypothetical #nuclear meltdown in Zaporizhzhia or Kursk, the risks of #renewables have already materialised - the Russian destruction of the Novaya Kakhovka hydroelectric plant resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people and the contamination of thousands of km2 of land and the Black Sea. The Russians have already attacked hydropower plants in Dnipro and now Kyiv, and have successfully stopped power generation (but not destroyed the dams themselves). Historically, the biggest energy-related disaster is also not any Chernobyls or Fukushimas, but also hydroelectric plants - the destruction of the Banquiao dam chain in China in 1975, which killed between 50’000 and 200’000 people.
The story of the Russian invasion of Ukraine shows that renewable energy - and hydropower is one of the key renewables because it’s dispatchable - is a source of risks not just hypothetical, like NPPs, but real.
Please do not take what I wrote above about kilotons as an attack on renewables itself, just me poking the media bias and a polite reminder that any source of energy is a potential threat. A sound analysis of the risks associated with these sources involves a quantitative comparison of these risks converted into kWh of energy produced based on facts, not mythology wholesale manufactured by Greenpeace & friends.
97% of new US power plants are carbon-free. The US is pretty much only building #cleanenergy these days, & mostly solar & batteries -but the pace still needs to pick up.
In the 1st half of this year, developers & power plant owners built 20.2 GW of electricity gen. capacity, a 21%⬆️from the 1st half of last year.
The majority of new capacity added this year is from solar, battery storage, wind, & nuclear projects.
⚠️ 😧 Desperate plea for help for this award-winning environment magazine-they have only 5 months of funding remaining so if you know of any possible sponsor(s) please make contact and pass this message along.
😣 In the meantime here's another article:
"Environmentally, Offshore Wind Is … Fine How often can you say that about an energy generation system?"
The World Climate Organization waves the red flag about the climate. Their newest report shows that records were once again broken, and in some cases smashed, for greenhouse gas levels, surface temperatures, ocean heat and #acidification , #SeaLevelRise , Antarctic sea ice cover and glacier retreat. 2023 was the warmest year on record, with the global average temperature at 1.45 °Celsius above the pre-industrial baseline. It was the warmest ten-year period on record.
Here's their animated summary in 75 seconds with some uplifting back-ground music:
Remarkably enough, after 1 minute of doom and gloom about the situation, the animation ends with the message "There is still hope". You know the gig, #renewables#GreenNewDeal#GreenWashing etc.
"... there are effects that have long time consequences. If you don't worry about it now, it's too late later on. So in this issue, as in so many others, we are passing on extremely grave problems for our children, when the time to solve these problems, if they can be solved, is NOW!"
«During peak periods of wind and solar generation, there is not enough population and industry in these areas to absorb all the output, and not enough long-distance transmission capacity to move the surplus east and south. [...]
By 2023, the utilisation rate for wind power had climbed to a remarkable 97.3% and solar had reached 98%, according to the state-run news agency Xinhua.
With rapid deployment of renewable capacity, however, the problem of abandonment is re-emerging, with wind utilisation down to 96.1% and solar down to 96% in the first five months of 2024.»
"California Is Showing How a Big State Can Power Itself Without Fossil Fuels. For part of almost every day this spring, the state produced more electricity than it needed from renewable sources."