“Two-thirds of the US population faced snowstorms, high winds, or frigid winter weather over the Christmas holiday weekend, leading to at least 52 deaths and pushing the electricity grid to the brink of failure. And in many instances, it did. At its peak on Christmas, an estimated 1.7 million businesses and homes faced power outages.
It was the coldest Christmas in recent memory, and that meant a predictable surge in heating demand as temperatures dropped. The Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides power for 10 million people, for instance, said demand was running nearly 35 percent higher than on a typical winter day.
In many states, utilities and grid operators only narrowly averted greater disaster by asking customers to conserve their energy or prepare for rolling blackouts (when a utility voluntarily but temporarily shuts down electrical power to avoid the entire system shutting down). Some of the largest operators, including Tennessee Valley Authority and Duke Energy, used rolling blackouts throughout the weekend. Others, like National Grid, experienced some outages and asked some consumers to reduce gas usage. Texas also barely got through the emergency. On Friday, the US Department of Energy permitted the state to ignore environmental emissions standards to keep the power on.
One major transmission company that regulators thought would be well-prepared for the winter storm was caught off-guard: PJM Interconnection, which serves 65 million people in 13 eastern states, faced triple the power plant outages than it expected.
Officials probably could have met the higher demand if not for another predictable event that overwhelmed the system. Because of the extreme conditions, coal and gas plants and pipelines froze up too, taking them out of commission to deliver energy in areas that run mostly on gas.
The events over Christmas show how utilities and regulators continue to overestimate the reliability of fossil fuels to deliver power in a winter storm.”
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“It wasn’t that the country didn’t have enough gas to go around to meet the high demand. There was plenty of gas, but the infrastructure proved vulnerable to the extreme weather. Enough wells and pipes were frozen or broken to bring the grid to its brink.”
“Researchers at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, home of the world’s most powerful laser, announced on Tuesday that they crossed the critical threshold in their pursuit of fusion power: getting more energy out of the reaction than they put in.
This is 1) a massive scientific advancement, and 2) still a long, long (long) way off from harnessing fusion, the reaction that powers the sun, as a viable source of abundant clean energy. On December 5, the team fired 192 laser beams at a tiny fuel pellet, producing slightly more energy than the lasers put in, “about 2 megajoules in, about 3 megajoules out,” said Marvin Adams, deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, at a press conference Tuesday.
To make fusion something that could actually produce electricity for the power grid, it can’t just inch over the ignition finish line; it has to blow past it. This announcement is an important incremental advance, but the breakthrough doesn’t go far enough to be of practical use. Because NIF itself is a research laboratory, its technology is not intended to produce power. So designing a fusion reactor to harness this new approach will be its own engineering challenge.”
“what happens inside doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Furnaces and water heaters have to vent their emissions directly outdoors, for example (stoves and ovens face no such requirements), and that pollution doesn’t just disappear. The consequences are exacerbated in communities of color, where homes tend to run on less efficient appliances and communities already bear the burden of greater outdoor particulate matter. One analysis by RMI found that Black Americans are 55 percent more likely to die prematurely from the impacts of fossil fuel appliance pollution compared to white Americans. Another study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Science Advances, found residential gas combustion and commercial cooking to be the largest drivers of the racial disparity in pollution exposure for people of color compared to white people.”
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“As the grid is getting cleaner, buildings hooked up to electricity will also have a dwindling footprint and, hopefully, use less energy overall with more energy-efficient machines. But a building that runs on gas will always burn a fossil fuel for its heat. And today that footprint is considerably large: 13 percent of the nation’s climate pollution comes directly from these gas-burning machines.”
“when added up, thousands of small actions, like switching off lights during a heat wave, buying efficient appliances, or voting for politicians who will act on climate change, can become a larger force than what governments and businesses can muster on their own. Put another way, a comprehensive approach to climate change demands actions, both large and small.
“It’s a mistake to only focus on governments and big companies,” said Paul Burger, head of the sustainability research group at the University of Basel, who studies consumer decisions on energy. “It’s also a mistake to only focus on individuals.””
“Speaking of Fukushima, according to the Financial Times, Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida has announced that the government plans to allow the restart of at least 10 more of the nuclear power plants it shuttered after the 2011 disaster. In addition, Kishida is pushing for research on and the construction of new safer nuclear plants as a way to protect Japanese consumers from erratic global fossil fuel markets and reduce his country’s greenhouse gas emissions. Kishida foresees Japan becoming a major exporter of nuclear generation technology to power hungry developing countries around the world.”
From spinning turbines to hydraulic fracturing to refining fuel, the flow of water is critical to the flow of electrons and heat. About 40 percent of water withdrawals — water taken out of groundwater or surface sources — in the United States go toward energy production. The large majority of that share is used to cool power plants. In turn, it requires energy to extract, purify, transport, and deliver water.
So when temperatures rise and water levels drop, the energy sector gets squeezed hard. The consequences of water shortages are playing out now in swaths of the American West, where an expansive, decades-long drought is forcing drastic cuts in hydroelectric power generation. At the same time, exceptional heat has pushed energy demand to record highs. As the climate changes, these stresses will mount.
The United Nations Environment Programme warned..that if drought conditions persist, the two largest hydroelectric reservoirs in the US — Lake Mead and Lake Powell —could eventually reach “dead pool status,” where water levels fall too low to flow downstream. Lake Mead fuels the Hoover Dam, which has a power capacity topping 2,000 megawatts while Lake Powell drives generators that peak at 1,300 megawatts at the Glen Canyon Dam.”
“Global known reserves of natural gas would last nearly 50 years at current rates of consumption. Burning natural gas to generate electricity emits about half of the carbon dioxide that coal does. This is why many environmental activist groups a little more than a decade ago hailed natural gas as “the bridge to the clean energy future.”
In fact, the mostly market-driven switch from coal to natural gas to generate electricity in the U.S. has served as a bridge to a cleaner energy future. The replacement in the U.S. of coal-fired power plants by those fueled by natural gas is responsible for a 32 percent reduction since 2005 in carbon dioxide emissions from that sector. Overall, annual U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have fallen by around 23 percent since 2005. Despite the undeniable role that the switch from coal to natural gas has played in significantly reducing U.S. carbon dioxide emissions, many environmental activists now perplexingly denounce natural gas as a “bridge to nowhere.””
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“What about nuclear power? The fact that splitting atoms to generate electricity produces no greenhouse gas emissions should be enough to establish nuclear power as a “climate-friendly” energy technology. Last week, the International Energy Agency released a report arguing that global nuclear power capacity needs to double from 413 gigawatts now to 812 gigawatts by 2050 in order to meet greenhouse gas emissions targets set in international agreements addressing the problem of man-made climate change. Meanwhile, in response to pressure from environmental activists, Germany is going in the opposite direction, shutting down perfectly good nuclear power plants while firing up electricity generation fueled by coal.
The ecomodernist Breakthrough Institute has just released a new study setting out various scenarios of how the development and deployment of advanced nuclear reactors in the U.S. could unfold over the next 30 years. In the optimistic scenario, U.S. nuclear power generation capacity would rise from 95 gigawatts from conventional nuclear plants today to as much as 470 gigawatts generated by advanced reactors in 2050. Expanding nuclear power production would both help smooth out the intermittency of wind and solar generation and further cut climate-warming greenhouse gas emissions.”