A new energy bill passed by the Florida legislature, which DeSantis is certain to sign, bans offshore wind turbines and prioritizes reliable, affordable electricity over utopian renewable fantasies. According to experts at the Energy Research Institute, this bold move represents a reasoned pushback against the climate activist agenda that has destabilized power grids across America. //

Institute for Energy Research
@IERenergy
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Texas and California produce more renewable energy than all other states, but they also lead the nation in power outages.
instituteforenergyresearch.org
https://t.co/2c8kn8dGX8
As Renewable Energy Increases in the Generation Mix, Power Outages Grow
3:10 PM · Mar 25, 2024

A microgrid is a group of interconnected loads and distributed energy resources that acts as a single controllable entity with respect to the grid. It can connect and disconnect from the grid to operate in grid-connected or island mode. Microgrids can improve customer reliability and resilience to grid disturbances.

Advanced microgrids enable local power generation assets—including traditional generators, renewables, and storage—to keep the local grid running even when the larger grid experiences interruptions or, for remote areas, where there is no connection to the larger grid. In addition, advanced microgrids allow local assets to work together to save costs, extend duration of energy supplies, and produce revenue via market participation.

The development of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Microgrid Program Strategy started around December 2020. The purpose was to define strategic research and development (R&D) areas for the DOE Office of Electricity (OE) Microgrids R&D (MGRD) Program to support its vision and accomplish its goals.

Now we see that in Africa, the great apes are endangered by climate change; it's not like you might think, these apes are endangered by the mining of raw materials for electric vehicle batteries, which is destroying their habitat.

Mining companies hunting critical minerals could wipe out more than a third of Africa’s remaining great apes, a new study has found. //

Mining booms — whether for coal or cobalt — tend to be staggeringly destructive processes: A feedback loop of new roads pushed into the forest, which draw in job-seeking colonists, who further clear habitat.

This dynamic is particularly stark in Africa, where some of the world’s largest reserves of nickel, cobalt, copper and lithium lie beneath the soil — and nearly half a million great apes live in the forests above.

Nika4h @nikit2h
·
Replying to @crit_architect
A hailstorm this month has damaged thousands of solar panels at the 350-MW Fighting Jays Solar Farm in Fort Bend County, Texas, “Golf ball”-sized hail fell in the area on March 15, and aerial footage captured from a helicopter offered a glimpse at the extent of the damage
11:05 PM · Mar 26, 2024 //

Corey Thompson @Roughneck2real
·
BREAKING: Hail storm in Damon texas on 3/24/24 destroys 1,000’s of acres of solar farms.

Who pays to fix this green energy? @StateFarm? @FarmBureau? @Allstate?

Or you the taxpayer?

3:06 PM · Mar 25, 2024 //

Daniel Turner, the executive director of energy watchdog group Power the Future, was even more emphatic about the need to proceed carefully with solar power:

"There's this enormous shell game happening by the Biden administration, by the environmental left, presenting wind and solar as perfectly green, clean, and carbon-neutral," Turner told Fox News Digital. "They use all of these buzzwords. But they're none of that and they also have enormous drawbacks. And it's doing the American people a great disservice to obfuscate these very obvious shortcomings."

He noted that, because solar panels are largely manufactured in China, the destruction of solar farms could be leveraged in geopolitical disputes between the U.S. and China.

"Why would we expect them to race to our aid when our grid is down nationwide, and they are the ones holding the goods that we need to get back up?" Turner said.

The 4,000-acre solar farm called Fighting J's near [Needville, Texas] took a beating during hailstorms on March 16.

"My concern is the hail damage that came through and busted these panels we now have some highly toxic chemicals that could be potentially leaking into our water tables," said Kaminski

"There's numerous makeup in the chemicals on this thing," Fugua said. "The majority of them are cancer-causing."

Consider uranium: the underrated element of awe //

Back to energy density: uranium metal really packs a punch. It is 1.67 times more dense than lead, and 1 kilogram of uranium-235 contains 2 to 3 million times the energy equivalent of 1 kg of oil or coal. This means that a relatively small quantity of nuclear fuel can produce significant amounts of energy through fission. How does uranium compare to other fuels? Calculations vary a little, but through fission, 1 kg of enriched uranium corresponds to roughly 10,000 kg of mineral oil or 14,000 kg of coal. That’s a lot of raw material that can be left in the ground. //

A single nuclear fuel pellet in a typical reactor creates about the same amount of energy as one tonne of coal. //

nuclear energy stands its ground. It’s reliable and dependable, with the highest capacity factor of all energy sources, which means that power plants produce maximum power more than 92% of the time during the year. That’s almost twice as much as natural gas and coal and nearly three times more than wind and solar farms.

Since less raw material is needed to create the same amount of power, nuclear energy also has a very small land footprint compared to the alternatives. More land is required to mine the coal and dig the metals and minerals used in wind turbines and solar panels out of the ground, and for the sites they are built on, which makes it the most land-efficient source of energy. //

https://xkcd.com/1162/

Interestingly, no eco-activists are blockading the roads into Reinhardswald (site of Sleeping Beauty Castle), or tying themselves to trees to protect the “old growth forests” //

The energy suicide of Germany is rapidly becoming legendary.

Legal Insurrection readers will recall that the nation shuttered its last nuclear power plant in 2023. The German government decided to double down on net-zero dreams and renewable energy promises.

Germany is already big on wind: with nearly 30,000 onshore wind turbines, the country trails only the US and China.

But it’s not enough to meet the country’s climate goals. Today, only 0.8% of Germany’s land area is approved for onshore wind energy. By 2032, the government wants to have 2% of land area allocated for onshore wind power. This means installing between 1,000 and 1,500 new turbines a year, or four to five a day by 2030, as German Chancellor Olaf Scholz recently said.

Germany needs wind energy to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2045, a target it’s currently in danger of missing, according to multiple studies. The country also missed its emissions reduction targets the last two years in a row, according to think tank Agora Energiewende. //

A large area of Reinhardswald, an ancient German forest featured in the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, is being partially cut down in favour of 241-metre tall wind turbines.

Following a months-long construction freeze, administrative courts have allowed heavy machinery to raze parts of the forest, including some trees that are more than 200 years old.

Around 120,000 trees in the 200km² mountainous woodland in the Weser Uplands in the district of Kassel, Hesse, are said to have been condemned to the axe. //

Germany passed legislation in 2019 to shut down all its coal plants by 2038, and last year the country shuttered the last three plants in its once-formidable nuclear fleet (in 1990 nuclear provided a quarter of Germany’s electricity).

As a result, the country has been forced to import electricity and natural gas at substantially higher prices. Germany has recently been delaying planned closures of coal plants and is now also planning new gas plants as well, but the damage has been done. Germany now has some of the highest prices for electricity in the world.

As a result, the entire German economy is in the doldrums. Growth forecasts for this year were recently slashed to just 0.2%, and as inflation is forecast to come in at about 2%, that implies actual economic contraction. Other indicators are also dire, with orders at German engineering firms and overall foreign investment dropping dramatically. //

The study found that the older a tree is, the better it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, the research suggests that almost 70 per cent of all the carbon stored in trees is accumulated in the last half of their lives. //

smooth | March 12, 2024 at 8:51 am
But the climate extremists always say plant more trees to remove CO2 from the air? //

smooth | March 12, 2024 at 9:40 am
France has 56 nuclear power sites. All EU countries combined have over 160 active nuke power sites. Germany going to boycott them all?

The Gentle Grizzly in reply to smooth. | March 12, 2024 at 9:57 am
Yes. Because the master race knows better. Why do things simply with existing technology when one can do it the German way: needless complexity for the sake of it, and then call it “precision engineering”. //

Random US Citizen
7 hours ago edited
I hope the loons win. Because CA deserves it.

On the other hand, maybe Diablo can claim it identifies as a solar plant and ask CA politicians to pay for energy reassignment surgery?

Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius.

Here’s something the Biden administration and CA Gov. Gavin Newsom haven’t talked about: electric cars actually emit more soot and particulate matter than their gas-powered counterparts—because of their tires. //

the WSJ writers argue that tire wear from the far-heavier EVs is more contaminating:

Where do most particulate emissions attributed to cars come from? California speaks as if their primary source is the tailpipe. That was true in the past. But today most vehicle-related particulate matter comes from tire wear. Cars are heavy, and as their tires rub against the road, they degrade and release tiny, often toxic particles. According to measurements by an emission-analytics firm, in gasoline cars equipped with a particle filter, airborne tire-wear emissions are more than 400 times as great as direct exhaust particulate emissions.

Officials in Sweetwater say an out-of-state company has made their town a dump for the seldom-seen trash created by renewable energy.

By Russell Gold
August 24, 2023

Update, September 25: General Electric filed a lawsuit last week claiming that Global Fiberglass Solutions has failed to fulfill its promise to recycle thousands of blades. GE says it paid the company $16.9 million to recycle about five thousand wind turbine blades, but that GFS instead stockpiled them at facilities in Sweetwater and Iowa. “Only after GFS took millions of dollars from GE, did GFS all but shut down its operations without recycling the Blades,” reads the complaint, filed in U.S. district court in New York.

Simply put, these huge industrial sites – we simply must stop using the friendly-sounding term “farms” to describe them – create all manner of negative consequences for local communities. Consequences like loud noise from wind turbines, hundreds of dead birds and bats sprinkled across the countryside, thousands of acres of productive farm or ranchlands taken out of production for many years if not permanently, spoiled views, enormous “graveyards” filled with 150-foot blades and solar panels popping up all over the place, and impacts to local wind and weather patterns that are only now beginning to be understood. //

One West Texas "blade graveyard" alone contains thousands of used blades; these blades cannot be reused, nor can they practically be recycled. Another graveyard, this one in Newton, Iowa, contains a similar eyesore. One of the companies that manufactures the blades, Global FIberglass, has pledged to find a way to begin recycling the blades, but this has not yet happened—and the blades continue to pile up. //

It's all energy density; it's always energy density. To maintain a modern, technological society, like ours, requires greater energy density, not less. The federal government should be held to account; the Energy Department should, at a minimum, stop subsidizing these boondoggles (and, ideally, should be defunded and disbanded). Our society depends on abundant, cheap, high-density energy. //

redstateuser
10 hours ago edited
One of the links in this article brings you to an article that I think is well worth reading in its entirely. I found it eye-opening as to the waste going on with windmills:

https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/sweetwater-wind-turbine-blades-dump/

In Google Maps, I found the dumping ground located in Sweetwater, Texas but, inexplicably, the aerial view had been doctored to make most of it look like raked dirt, poorly doctored yet detectable. Here it is, and you can compare it to the unretouched image in the linked article:

https://tinyurl.com/3vd3b5f7

Giving society cheap, abundant energy ... would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun. -- Paul Ehrlich

https://environmentalprogress.org/why-we-fear-nuclear-1

It'd be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy because of what we would do with it. -- Amory Lovins, 1977

https://environmentalprogress.org/why-we-fear-nuclear-1

A new paper in PLOS ONE, “Land-use intensity of electricity production and tomorrow’s energy landscape 2”, examines the land use requirements of various alternative energy sources. The paper is open access with the full text available at the link or as a PDF file 5. The results are summarised in the following graphic.

The global energy system has a relatively small land footprint at present, comprising just 0.4% of ice-free land. This pales in comparison to agricultural land use– 30–38% of ice-free land–yet future low-carbon energy systems that shift to more extensive technologies could dramatically alter landscapes around the globe. The challenge is more acute given the projected doubling of global energy consumption by 2050 and widespread electrification of transportation and industry. Yet unlike greenhouse gas emissions, land use intensity of energy has been rarely studied in a rigorous way. Here we calculate land-use intensity of energy (LUIE) for real-world sites across all major sources of electricity, integrating data from published literature, databases, and original data collection. We find a range of LUIE that span four orders of magnitude, from nuclear with 7.1 ha/TWh/y to dedicated biomass at 58,000 ha/TWh/y. By applying these LUIE results to the future electricity portfolios of ten energy scenarios, we conclude that land use could become a significant constraint on deep decarbonization of the power system, yet low-carbon, land-efficient options are available.

“The search for geologic hydrogen today is where the search for oil was back in the 19th century—we’re just starting to understand how this works,” said Frédéric-Victor Donzé, a geologist at Université Grenoble Alpes. Donzé is part of a team of geoscientists studying a site at Bulqizë in Albania where miners at one of the world’s largest chromite mines may have accidentally drilled into a hydrogen reservoir.

The question Donzé and his team want to tackle is whether hydrogen has a parallel geological system with huge subsurface reservoirs that could be extracted the way we extract oil. //

It turned out that over 200 tons of hydrogen was released from the Bulqizë mine each year. Donzé’s team went there to figure out where all this hydrogen was coming from.

The rocks did not contain enough hydrogen to reach that sort of flow rate. One possible explanation is the hydrogen being released as a product of an ongoing geological process called serpentinization. “But for this to happen, the temperature in the mine would need to reach 200–300 degrees Celsius, and even then, it would not produce 200 tons per year,” said Donzé. “So the most probable was the third option—that we have a reservoir,” he added. //

Bulqizë was entirely different. The gas pushed out of the Bulqizë mine is 84 percent hydrogen, one of the highest concentrations on record. Moreover, the hydrogen was not dissolved in water—it bubbled through Bulqizë’s underground pools, making them look like a jacuzzi. //

So Donzé’s team got busy looking for such places, and they found one. “There is a mine in Ural, central Russia, that has the exact same geological configuration as Bulqizë: harzburgite, dunite, and chromite,” said Donzé. “And guess what. They have a problem with explosions.”

Zion Lights @ziontree
One of the reasons I like nuclear energy is its small land footprint.

This video shows the amount of land required by the Olkiluoto 3 nuclear power plant in Finland compared with wind power.

Data visualisation by @Klimavenner

The Hydrogen Ladder is my attempt to synthesise all the information known to me about all the factors driving technology uptake across all sectors of the economy in all countries of the world. Not ambitious at all!

What the Hydrogen Ladder is designed to do is to show how likely it is that any proposed use case ends up being a significant user of hydrogen (perhaps via one of its derivatives) in a decade or so, say 2035. That doesn't mean it's game over, the transition has happened, it just means it is absolutely clear by then that hydrogen is either the answer, or a major answer, to decarbonizing that use case.

In other words, it looks forward to a time after the current firehose of subsidies has subsided to affordable proportions, after there has been enough time for a bit more tweaking of technologies, after the emergence of supply chains, after a bit of familiarity has grown in the project finance sector, and so on.
As for what the rows mean, here's how I think about them:

• A - no alternative (though this does not mean the use case is growing)
• B - decent market share highly likely
• C - some market share likely
• D - small market share plausible
• E - niche market share possible
• F - niche market share in some geographies possible
• G - the Row of Doom

The Hydrogen Ladder is not all about efficiency, as its detractors claim. It does not include information about market size. It does not include information about speed of adoption. It does not include information about relative emissions reduction per kg of hydrogen or kWh of electricity. I leave it to others to add that information to the discussion.

Conversely, it does take into account cost, safety, convenience, critical mineral availability, co-benefits, externalities like air pollution, geopolitics, human behaviour and - underlying it all - thermodynamics, physics, chemistry, other sciences and economics.

The booming sound you may be hearing right now -- especially if you live in San Francisco or Washington, D.C -- could be resulting from liberal heads exploding as they read about what Toyota Chairman Akio Toyoda said during a conference this month. Electric vehicles will only ever make up 30 percent of the market or less, he argued, and politicians should get out of the way and let the markets decide which cars are preferable to consumers. //

No matter how much progress BEVs [Battery Electric Vehicles] make, I think they will still only have a 30 % market share . Then, the remaining 70 % will be HEVs , FCEVs , and hydrogen engines. And I think engine cars will definitely remain.

I think this is something that customers and the market will decide, not regulatory values or political power. [Bolding and underlining theirs.]

That's why Toyota Motor Corporation, which is competing all over the world, has a full lineup of multi-pathway products.

mopani
4 days ago edited

Hydrogen molecules are the smallest in the universe, making it very difficult to make effective seals. First strike.

Hydrogen has an extremely wide flammability range, 4% to 76% of air. Strike two.

While the molar energy density (per molecule) and energy density by weight of hydrogen are exceptional, its volumetric energy density is extremely low, even in liquid form. Compare the size of hydrogen tank to the size of the oxygen tank in the space shuttle. That's one of the primary reasons the SpaceX Super Heavy and Starship rockets use methane instead of hydrogen, because the volumetric energy density is orders of magnitude greater. Strike three.

The Hydrogen energy economy is just another government boondoggle like Solyndra. Attractive on the surface, and sounds intelligent, but ultimately impractical and wasteful.

It's funny actually, if not ironic, that the volumetric energy density of hydrogen is so poor, but as soon as you combine it with some other element, say carbon, its volumetric energy density and practical usability go off the charts! I'm sure some commercial enterprise will discover this and exploit it real soon, and I'm willing to wager that it won't take any government money to build an absolutely booming economy out of it either!!

Just skip the hydrogen! If you're not going to exploit the most efficient energy store in the universe by using a hydrogen compound (hydrocarbons), why do you want to use only half of it, the hydrogen alone?

One should not too quickly dismiss what several generations of the most brilliant minds have already developed and streamlined into an efficient system with sophomoric thinking that somehow believes is an overlooked insight into the fundamentals of the universe.

What is being overlooked is the fantastic energy available from fissioning atoms. The most powerful chemical reaction generates 9 electron volts of energy per molecule. The energy from the fission of one atom (of which there are at minimum three in any chemical reaction) is almost 2 million electron volts. We know how to safely harness an energy source that is six orders of magnitude more powerful than any other, and yet it is rejected. You have to ask why.

"What about the nuclear waste?" It's not waste, it is used fuel, and it can be reused, except that Jimmy Carter, who calls himself a "nuclear engineer" although he never completed the Navy nuclear school, decreed that reusing spent fuel was too dangerous.

Consider too, that nuclear power plants are the only source of energy that completely contain all of their waste/byproducts. The used fuel from all of the nuclear power plants in 70 years of operation in the United States would not fill one single Walmart store.

Annual fuel use for one reactor is 35 tons of uranium fuel -- one semi truck load, although it would only fill a couple of milk crates. The same size coal power plant requires 100 coal cars per day.

Much Hoon, Very Flerp -> mopani
3 days ago

Mo, if you don’t mind my asking, what is it you do for a living? That’s probably the best short form explanation of the issue I’ve ever heard or read. Thank you.

mopani -> Much Hoon, Very Flerp
a day ago edited

Thank you for the compliment. I'm a missionary radio engineer that manages diesel generators and some solar plants because of poor energy supply in Africa.

I've been reading about and studying "renewables" and energy most of my life; I've come to the conclusion that most of the world's leaders are at the energy sophomore phase I was at in high school. Will they ever grow up? Doubtful, to be honest.

If you want a really well-rounded perspective on the whole energy and environment picture and not just the hot takes, read Michael Shellenberger's Apocalypse Never. Fantastic book, and hard to put down! His website is http://environmentalprogres... and is the only thing I've ever seen come out of Berserkely that I could whole-heartedly support. =)

[Edit: I should also give a shout-out to David MacKay's Sustainable Energy -- Without the Hot Air, available on Amazon and online at http://www.withouthotair.com. There is not a better "whole picture" view of energy use out there. ]

One of the best nuclear reactor designs was the Molten Salt Reactor, built and tested at Oak Ridge National Labs from 1965-1969. Thorcon Power wants to mass produce this proven design on a ship-yard assembly line. If CO2 emissions are an existential threat, then we need to be building one hundred 1GW nuclear power plants per year.

A molten salt reactor doesn't need to exchange fuel when the fission product isotopes start to poison the reaction, because the worst poisons ("neutron eaters") are noble gases, and if your fuel is liquid, they can easily be removed instead of being trapped in a solid fuel pellet. So instead of 35 tons of fuel per year, it would only need 1 ton of nuclear fuel per year, and it would extract at least 30% of the potential energy instead of 1%, like the typical Pressurized Water Reactors (Boiling Water Reactors are similar efficiency).

Besides Thorcon's website, visit http://www.daretothink.org to learn more about Molten Salt Reactors; I recommend starting with the "Numbers" page. //

mopani > C. S. P. Schofield
2 days ago
"Hydrogen has its own problems"

Yes, yes it does. It may have the highest energy per molecule, but it is also the smallest molecule, making it very difficult to seal. It also has the worst volumetric energy because of its low density. It's funny how combining it with a couple of carbon atoms fixes that! I wrote a long comment about this the other day on Ward Clark's article about hydrogen.

What would really be interesting, and I think is being ignored for obvious reasons, is hydrocarbon fuel cells, combining the simplicity of the electric drive train with the efficient energy storage of hydrocarbons. It also makes it very easy to make it a hybrid, and if we're wanting to improve efficiency and lower emissions, every vehicle should be a hybrid to recover braking and downhill energy. But hybrids with internal combustion engines add significant complexity.