Welcome to the green #BlackoutState: California to build 5 gas power plants to avoid blackouts
In this newsletter:
1) Biden’s Afghanistan debacle may sink his climate agenda
Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, Forbes, 20 August 2021
2) Growing fire risk of battery cars forces GM to recall its electric vehicles
AP, 21 August 2021
3) China to build 43 new coal power plants
Time Magazine, 20 August 2021
4) Skyrocketing coal prices defy climate goals
Asia Times, 14 August 2021
5) As EU & US go into green decline, emerging oil nations reject climate curbs on exploration & pursue rapid development
Reuters, 19 August 2021
6) Benny Peiser: ‘Heat pump grants will most likely benefit the richest households’
Energy Live News, 23 August 2021
7) Matt Ridley: The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline
The Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2021
The Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2021
8) And finally: Welcome to the green #Blackoutstate: California to build 5 gas power plants to avoid blackouts
Bloomberg, 19 August 2021
Bloomberg, 19 August 2021
Full details:
1) Biden’s Afghanistan debacle may sink his climate agenda
Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, Forbes, 20 August 2021
Republicans are already talking about impeachment, should they win the House in the 2022 midterm elections. Without managing the Afghanistan narrative, he will lose momentum on domestic climate issues, thereby undermining American credibility in the global arena as well.
Nives Dolsak and Aseem Prakash, Forbes, 20 August 2021
Republicans are already talking about impeachment, should they win the House in the 2022 midterm elections. Without managing the Afghanistan narrative, he will lose momentum on domestic climate issues, thereby undermining American credibility in the global arena as well.
News from Afghanistan is grim: pictures of desperate Afghans clinging to American planes, a large number of stranded Americans who cannot reach the Karzai airport, Taliban controlling tens of billions of dollars of American weaponry, the imposition of strict Shariah law, and the desperate plea from Afghan women who seek education, respect, and dignity.
This clumsy American unilateralism has made many countries nervous about American foreign policy. What if Russia grabs Ukraine or China makes a move on Taiwan? Will America take military action?
Could American unilateralism on Afghanistan affect Biden’s climate agenda? One may be tempted to say no, because climate change and Afghanistan are unrelated issues. And in any case, Afghanistan might be a short-term hiccup; the country will be back to skirmishing on masks and vaccines in no time.
We argue, however, that the climate issues might suffer some collateral damage.
Let us separate Biden’s global and domestic dimensions. On the face of it, Afghanistan will probably not affect Biden’s global climate agenda. After all, climate issues do not involve military interventions, forever wars, or nationbuilding, all of which Democrats tend to oppose. Moreover, Biden supporters want him to do more on global climate issues, not less.
However, the domestic climate agenda could be a different story. If Afghanistan continues to swamp the U.S. news cycle with the dominant narrative of a policy failure, the withdrawal will, at the minimum, crowd out climate change. But the more significant concern is that the Afghanistan fiasco narrative might reduce Biden’s ability to push for a muscular federal climate action. He will spend his political capital defending the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Diminished domestic climate achievements could mean that Biden will find it challenging to claim climate leadership. Of course, one might ask the “so what” question. America has become a marginal player and climate progress is taking place despite America. But if American leadership still matters, a domestically enfeebled Biden is bad news for climate progress. […]
The footage from Kabul and the horrors stories about the Taliban’s atrocities could erode Biden’s job approval and undermine his credibility. As of now, Biden has done a poor job of managing the withdrawal narrative. If this continues, moderate Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) or Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) will have even fewer incentives to support Biden’s climate agenda.
If the “Afghanistan failure” narrative takes hold, Biden might get blamed for Democratic party’s political problems, such as losses in the 2022 midterm or Newsom’s recall.
In sum, Biden needs a coherent response to the withdrawal fiasco.
Republicans are already talking about impeachment, should they win the House in the 2022 midterm elections. Without managing the Afghanistan narrative, he will lose momentum on domestic climate issues, thereby undermining American credibility in the global arena as well.
Full post
see also UK officials blame enfeebled Joe Biden for looming COP26 failure
2) Growing fire risk of battery cars forces GM to recall its electric vehicles
AP, 21 August 2021
General Motors said Friday it is recalling all Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles sold worldwide to fix a battery problem that could cause fires. The recall and others raise questions about lithium ion batteries, which now are used in nearly all electric vehicles. Ford, BMW and Hyundai all have recalled batteries recently.
A Chevy Bolt is ablaze in a garage near Ashburn, Virginia
President Joe Biden will need electric vehicles to reach a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half 2030 as part of a broader effort to fight climate change.
The GM recall announced Friday adds about 73,000 Bolts from the 2019 through 2022 model years to a previous recall of 69,000 older Bolts.
GM said that in rare cases the batteries have two manufacturing defects that can cause fires.
The Detroit-based automaker said it will replace battery modules in all the vehicles. In older versions, all five modules will be replaced.
The latest recall will cost the company about $1 billion, bringing the total cost of the Bolt battery recalls to $1.8 billion.
GM said owners should limit charging to 90% of battery capacity. The Bolts, including a new SUV, also should be parked outdoors until the modules are replaced.
The original recall was blamed on a manufacturing defect at a South Korean factory run by LG Chemical Solution, GM’s battery supplier. But the company said an investigation showed that the defects are possible in batteries made at other sites. Most newer Bolt batteries are made at an LG plant in Holland, Michigan.
GM issued the first Bolt recall in November after getting reports of five of them catching fire. Two people suffered smoke inhalation and a house was set ablaze.
At first the company didn’t know what was causing the problem, but it determined that batteries that caught fire were near a full charge. It traced the fires to what it called a rare manufacturing defect in battery modules. It can cause a short in a cell, which can trigger a fire.
GM said it began investigating the newer Bolts after a 2019 model that was not included in the previous recall caught fire a few weeks ago in Chandler, Arizona. That raised concerns about newer Bolts.
That fire brought the total number of Bolt blazes to 10, company spokesman Dan Flores said.
Full story
see also Battery fire fears threaten electric car revolution
3) China to build 43 new coal power plants
Time Magazine, 20 August 2021
China is planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces — equivalent to adding about 1.5% to its current annual emissions — according to a new report.
The new projects were announced in the first half of this year despite the world’s largest polluter pledging to bring its emissions to a peak before 2030, and to make the country carbon neutral by 2060.
The news shows that at least some in China are prioritizing economic growth over emissions reductions — although some analysts say they are still optimistic that China will reach its climate targets. “There is this desire in the Chinese political and economic system to keep on building, to continue the infrastructure fever,” says Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace in Beijing.
The report on China’s new coal plants was written by the Helsinki-based research organization the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and the U.S. group Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and released on Aug. 13. It came just days after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published an alarming report that concluded human-caused climate change is an “unequivocal” reality. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the IPCC report a “code red for humanity.”
China is leading the world in new coal power plants, building more than three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined in 2020. It isn’t alone in its reliance on coal, however. China and four other countries, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam, account for more than 80% of the coal power stations planned across the world, according to a June report by the think-tank Carbon Tracker.
Full story
4) Skyrocketing coal prices defy climate goals
Asia Times, 14 August 2021
Coal prices have quadrupled since last September, underscoring the dirty fuel's power-generating staying power
This clumsy American unilateralism has made many countries nervous about American foreign policy. What if Russia grabs Ukraine or China makes a move on Taiwan? Will America take military action?
Could American unilateralism on Afghanistan affect Biden’s climate agenda? One may be tempted to say no, because climate change and Afghanistan are unrelated issues. And in any case, Afghanistan might be a short-term hiccup; the country will be back to skirmishing on masks and vaccines in no time.
We argue, however, that the climate issues might suffer some collateral damage.
Let us separate Biden’s global and domestic dimensions. On the face of it, Afghanistan will probably not affect Biden’s global climate agenda. After all, climate issues do not involve military interventions, forever wars, or nationbuilding, all of which Democrats tend to oppose. Moreover, Biden supporters want him to do more on global climate issues, not less.
However, the domestic climate agenda could be a different story. If Afghanistan continues to swamp the U.S. news cycle with the dominant narrative of a policy failure, the withdrawal will, at the minimum, crowd out climate change. But the more significant concern is that the Afghanistan fiasco narrative might reduce Biden’s ability to push for a muscular federal climate action. He will spend his political capital defending the Afghanistan withdrawal.
Diminished domestic climate achievements could mean that Biden will find it challenging to claim climate leadership. Of course, one might ask the “so what” question. America has become a marginal player and climate progress is taking place despite America. But if American leadership still matters, a domestically enfeebled Biden is bad news for climate progress. […]
The footage from Kabul and the horrors stories about the Taliban’s atrocities could erode Biden’s job approval and undermine his credibility. As of now, Biden has done a poor job of managing the withdrawal narrative. If this continues, moderate Democrats such as Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) or Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) will have even fewer incentives to support Biden’s climate agenda.
If the “Afghanistan failure” narrative takes hold, Biden might get blamed for Democratic party’s political problems, such as losses in the 2022 midterm or Newsom’s recall.
In sum, Biden needs a coherent response to the withdrawal fiasco.
Republicans are already talking about impeachment, should they win the House in the 2022 midterm elections. Without managing the Afghanistan narrative, he will lose momentum on domestic climate issues, thereby undermining American credibility in the global arena as well.
Full post
see also UK officials blame enfeebled Joe Biden for looming COP26 failure
2) Growing fire risk of battery cars forces GM to recall its electric vehicles
AP, 21 August 2021
General Motors said Friday it is recalling all Chevrolet Bolt electric vehicles sold worldwide to fix a battery problem that could cause fires. The recall and others raise questions about lithium ion batteries, which now are used in nearly all electric vehicles. Ford, BMW and Hyundai all have recalled batteries recently.
A Chevy Bolt is ablaze in a garage near Ashburn, Virginia
President Joe Biden will need electric vehicles to reach a goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half 2030 as part of a broader effort to fight climate change.
The GM recall announced Friday adds about 73,000 Bolts from the 2019 through 2022 model years to a previous recall of 69,000 older Bolts.
GM said that in rare cases the batteries have two manufacturing defects that can cause fires.
The Detroit-based automaker said it will replace battery modules in all the vehicles. In older versions, all five modules will be replaced.
The latest recall will cost the company about $1 billion, bringing the total cost of the Bolt battery recalls to $1.8 billion.
GM said owners should limit charging to 90% of battery capacity. The Bolts, including a new SUV, also should be parked outdoors until the modules are replaced.
The original recall was blamed on a manufacturing defect at a South Korean factory run by LG Chemical Solution, GM’s battery supplier. But the company said an investigation showed that the defects are possible in batteries made at other sites. Most newer Bolt batteries are made at an LG plant in Holland, Michigan.
GM issued the first Bolt recall in November after getting reports of five of them catching fire. Two people suffered smoke inhalation and a house was set ablaze.
At first the company didn’t know what was causing the problem, but it determined that batteries that caught fire were near a full charge. It traced the fires to what it called a rare manufacturing defect in battery modules. It can cause a short in a cell, which can trigger a fire.
GM said it began investigating the newer Bolts after a 2019 model that was not included in the previous recall caught fire a few weeks ago in Chandler, Arizona. That raised concerns about newer Bolts.
That fire brought the total number of Bolt blazes to 10, company spokesman Dan Flores said.
Full story
see also Battery fire fears threaten electric car revolution
3) China to build 43 new coal power plants
Time Magazine, 20 August 2021
China is planning to build 43 new coal-fired power plants and 18 new blast furnaces — equivalent to adding about 1.5% to its current annual emissions — according to a new report.
The new projects were announced in the first half of this year despite the world’s largest polluter pledging to bring its emissions to a peak before 2030, and to make the country carbon neutral by 2060.
The news shows that at least some in China are prioritizing economic growth over emissions reductions — although some analysts say they are still optimistic that China will reach its climate targets. “There is this desire in the Chinese political and economic system to keep on building, to continue the infrastructure fever,” says Li Shuo, a senior global policy adviser for Greenpeace in Beijing.
The report on China’s new coal plants was written by the Helsinki-based research organization the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and the U.S. group Global Energy Monitor (GEM) and released on Aug. 13. It came just days after the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published an alarming report that concluded human-caused climate change is an “unequivocal” reality. U.N. Secretary General Antonio Guterres called the IPCC report a “code red for humanity.”
China is leading the world in new coal power plants, building more than three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined in 2020. It isn’t alone in its reliance on coal, however. China and four other countries, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam, account for more than 80% of the coal power stations planned across the world, according to a June report by the think-tank Carbon Tracker.
Full story
4) Skyrocketing coal prices defy climate goals
Asia Times, 14 August 2021
Coal prices have quadrupled since last September, underscoring the dirty fuel's power-generating staying power
It is only a few days since the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) signaled the dire consequences of human-induced climate change. At the heart of this stark warning by UN Secretary-General António Guterres and the scientists behind the report was the urgent need to heavily reduce coal in the energy mix.
Yet in the run-up to publication, and absent from mainstream news headlines, was the steady ascent of coal prices, past US$100 (£72) per metric tonne in June and then past $130 in mid-July to over $170 today. This is almost four times the price last September.
The rise in prices can be attributed squarely to a resurgence of demand after the depths of the pandemic – especially in emerging Asian markets such as China and India, but also in Japan, South Korea, Europe and the US. Electricity demand, which remains closely linked to coal, is expected to have increased by 5% across 2021 and a further 4% in 2022.
On the supply side, there are also some issues such as China being unable to acquire coal from Australia due to an import ban, and smaller disruptions in the export output of major producers Indonesia, South Africa and Russia.
But there are no long-term supply issues, as the main producing countries have not curtailed their production or export capacity. Prices should not therefore stay high for very long.
The revival of world demand for energy hopefully means the world economy is recovering from the pandemic, but the surge in coal prices is a reminder of how energy still relies on fossil fuels.
Global energy consumption totaled 556 exajoules in 2020, and oil, coal and natural gas accounting for 31%, 27% and 25% of the total respectively. That adds up to more than four-fifths of the total.
Coal has two main uses, electricity generation and steel manufacturing, with the former responsible for about two-thirds of what is consumed. The faster we can remove coal from electricity generation, the higher the likelihood of achieving the Paris Agreement targets.
Yet coal seems to be resilient, if not stubborn, when it comes to its elimination. Since 2010, the percentage share of natural gas in total global electricity generation has stayed the same at 23% even though the world’s power consumption has risen by about a quarter.
The percentage share of renewables, excluding hydroelectricity, has tripled and its actual generation in terawatt-hours (TWh) has quadrupled. Meanwhile, coal has lost share, down to 35% from 40%, but it remains way ahead of natural gas, its closest competitor, and the amount of coal that we burn for electricity has gone up overall.
The reality is that coal makes good business sense. Coal-fired power plants have long been big enough to make the building costs economically viable, with the largest plants boasting a capacity of 5GW. The fuel is relatively cheap most of the time, and the biggest consumers, China, the US and India, all enjoy politically safe supplies.
Coal-fired generation is steady and predictable, making it suitable for ensuring the minimum level of electricity a country continually needs – known as the baseload. This guarantees that the proportion of the fuel converted into electricity, known as capacity utilization, is typically over 70%.
This has been affected by the continuous drive to replace coal with renewables and natural gas, taking it as low as 53% in 2019, but given the current levels of demand, we should expect it to be higher for 2021.
This all translates into steady income flows from selling coal-fired electricity to the grid in many countries, which makes this power source attractive to investors. When it comes to the triptych of supply security, affordability and sustainability, coal serves the first two with ease, even as it leaves a big dirty smudge on the third one.
The spectacular Chinese economic growth of the last 20 years, and the considerable expansion of electrification of the Indian economy, were largely based on coal. Thanks to them, the world has doubled its coal-fired capacity since 2000 to over 2,000GW.
In 2020, coal generated 63% of electricity in China and 72% in India. In the same year, China produced half of the world’s coal, nearly 4 billion tonnes, while India came a distant second with around 750 million tonnes. Between them, the two countries accounted for two-thirds of global consumption and were also the two largest importers. The figures truly boggle the mind. [...]
Coal-fired plants are long-term investments, often 40 to 50 years long. A plant built in 2000 is only halfway through its life, so shutting it down now, however desirable, would wreck the economics for the investors.
Unless coal prices remain permanently high (unlikely), or the cost of carbon emissions is more prohibitive due to taxes or carbon trading schemes (possible, but perhaps not everywhere), or there is direct government intervention to decommission plants, coal may yet surprise us all and persist for longer than we expect.
Full story
5) As EU & US go into green decline, emerging oil nations reject climate curbs on exploration & pursue rapid development
Reuters, 19 August 2021
HOUSTON, Aug 19 (Reuters) - The world's newest oil-producing nations grabbed the spotlight at this week's Offshore Technology Conference with ambitious plans to tap oil and gas discoveries in a race against a global energy transition to lower-carbon fuels.
At the conference highlighting renewable and cleaner-burning fuels and investors moving bets away from fossil fuels, Brazil, Ghana, Guyana, and Suriname laid out agendas to pump massive oil and gas discoveries that could reshape their economies - if they can get them to market before values erode.
The contrast between their goals and governments moving to impose net-zero carbon emissions rules by 2050 was clear in the first large U.S. oil technology conference and exhibit since the pandemic.
Historically a place for oil firms to boast of deepwater breakthroughs, this year's Houston conference showcased cleaner fuels and the urgency of emissions reduction, accentuating low-carbon tech, offshore wind and clean-burning hydrogen.
"We have millions of people without electricity in Africa," said Ghana Energy Minister Matthew Opoku Prempeh in an address echoed by other emerging energy producers. "Energy transition does not mean we'll see our resources unexploited."
With three-quarters of Guyana covered by forest, carbon emissions from massive oil and gas discoveries just beginning to be tapped can be absorbed, Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana's vice president, told the conference.
"We have been called to leave our oil in the ground. We believe that's totally unfair," said Jagdeo. "Being a small country, we will not have the capacity and the framework for an optimum operation of the oil industry right now, but we will continue improving."
Full story
The move comes after California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the power grid on concern about supply shortages during hot summer evenings when solar production wanes. The order, issued last month, aimed to free up energy supplies and speed up power plant development to help avert blackouts. It also temporarily lifted air-quality rules.
Full story
Yet in the run-up to publication, and absent from mainstream news headlines, was the steady ascent of coal prices, past US$100 (£72) per metric tonne in June and then past $130 in mid-July to over $170 today. This is almost four times the price last September.
The rise in prices can be attributed squarely to a resurgence of demand after the depths of the pandemic – especially in emerging Asian markets such as China and India, but also in Japan, South Korea, Europe and the US. Electricity demand, which remains closely linked to coal, is expected to have increased by 5% across 2021 and a further 4% in 2022.
On the supply side, there are also some issues such as China being unable to acquire coal from Australia due to an import ban, and smaller disruptions in the export output of major producers Indonesia, South Africa and Russia.
But there are no long-term supply issues, as the main producing countries have not curtailed their production or export capacity. Prices should not therefore stay high for very long.
The revival of world demand for energy hopefully means the world economy is recovering from the pandemic, but the surge in coal prices is a reminder of how energy still relies on fossil fuels.
Global energy consumption totaled 556 exajoules in 2020, and oil, coal and natural gas accounting for 31%, 27% and 25% of the total respectively. That adds up to more than four-fifths of the total.
Coal has two main uses, electricity generation and steel manufacturing, with the former responsible for about two-thirds of what is consumed. The faster we can remove coal from electricity generation, the higher the likelihood of achieving the Paris Agreement targets.
Yet coal seems to be resilient, if not stubborn, when it comes to its elimination. Since 2010, the percentage share of natural gas in total global electricity generation has stayed the same at 23% even though the world’s power consumption has risen by about a quarter.
The percentage share of renewables, excluding hydroelectricity, has tripled and its actual generation in terawatt-hours (TWh) has quadrupled. Meanwhile, coal has lost share, down to 35% from 40%, but it remains way ahead of natural gas, its closest competitor, and the amount of coal that we burn for electricity has gone up overall.
The reality is that coal makes good business sense. Coal-fired power plants have long been big enough to make the building costs economically viable, with the largest plants boasting a capacity of 5GW. The fuel is relatively cheap most of the time, and the biggest consumers, China, the US and India, all enjoy politically safe supplies.
Coal-fired generation is steady and predictable, making it suitable for ensuring the minimum level of electricity a country continually needs – known as the baseload. This guarantees that the proportion of the fuel converted into electricity, known as capacity utilization, is typically over 70%.
This has been affected by the continuous drive to replace coal with renewables and natural gas, taking it as low as 53% in 2019, but given the current levels of demand, we should expect it to be higher for 2021.
This all translates into steady income flows from selling coal-fired electricity to the grid in many countries, which makes this power source attractive to investors. When it comes to the triptych of supply security, affordability and sustainability, coal serves the first two with ease, even as it leaves a big dirty smudge on the third one.
The spectacular Chinese economic growth of the last 20 years, and the considerable expansion of electrification of the Indian economy, were largely based on coal. Thanks to them, the world has doubled its coal-fired capacity since 2000 to over 2,000GW.
In 2020, coal generated 63% of electricity in China and 72% in India. In the same year, China produced half of the world’s coal, nearly 4 billion tonnes, while India came a distant second with around 750 million tonnes. Between them, the two countries accounted for two-thirds of global consumption and were also the two largest importers. The figures truly boggle the mind. [...]
Coal-fired plants are long-term investments, often 40 to 50 years long. A plant built in 2000 is only halfway through its life, so shutting it down now, however desirable, would wreck the economics for the investors.
Unless coal prices remain permanently high (unlikely), or the cost of carbon emissions is more prohibitive due to taxes or carbon trading schemes (possible, but perhaps not everywhere), or there is direct government intervention to decommission plants, coal may yet surprise us all and persist for longer than we expect.
Full story
5) As EU & US go into green decline, emerging oil nations reject climate curbs on exploration & pursue rapid development
Reuters, 19 August 2021
HOUSTON, Aug 19 (Reuters) - The world's newest oil-producing nations grabbed the spotlight at this week's Offshore Technology Conference with ambitious plans to tap oil and gas discoveries in a race against a global energy transition to lower-carbon fuels.
At the conference highlighting renewable and cleaner-burning fuels and investors moving bets away from fossil fuels, Brazil, Ghana, Guyana, and Suriname laid out agendas to pump massive oil and gas discoveries that could reshape their economies - if they can get them to market before values erode.
The contrast between their goals and governments moving to impose net-zero carbon emissions rules by 2050 was clear in the first large U.S. oil technology conference and exhibit since the pandemic.
Historically a place for oil firms to boast of deepwater breakthroughs, this year's Houston conference showcased cleaner fuels and the urgency of emissions reduction, accentuating low-carbon tech, offshore wind and clean-burning hydrogen.
"We have millions of people without electricity in Africa," said Ghana Energy Minister Matthew Opoku Prempeh in an address echoed by other emerging energy producers. "Energy transition does not mean we'll see our resources unexploited."
With three-quarters of Guyana covered by forest, carbon emissions from massive oil and gas discoveries just beginning to be tapped can be absorbed, Bharrat Jagdeo, Guyana's vice president, told the conference.
"We have been called to leave our oil in the ground. We believe that's totally unfair," said Jagdeo. "Being a small country, we will not have the capacity and the framework for an optimum operation of the oil industry right now, but we will continue improving."
Full story
6) Benny Peiser: ‘Heat pump grants will most likely benefit the richest households’
Energy Live News, 23 August 2021
Heat pump grants will most likely benefit the richest households. That’s the suggestion from Dr Benny Peiser, Director of the London-based think tank Global Warming Policy Forum who spoke to ELN about the new reported government scheme that will allegedly offer grants of £7,000 to households to replace their gas boilers with low carbon heat pumps.
“It’s a complete political disaster. Boris Johnson's green advisors seem to be oblivious of the huge damage this would cause to Boris, his premiership and to the Conservative Party.
“Only very wealthy people can afford a heat pump nowadays. Heat pumps are perhaps somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000 if you include the necessary installation and insulation. So even £7,000 would only make part of the overall cost.”
The reported £400 million scheme is also branded by Dr Peiser as a ‘stupid idea’ and he doubts it will go ahead.
Listen to the full interview here.
Energy Live News, 23 August 2021
Heat pump grants will most likely benefit the richest households. That’s the suggestion from Dr Benny Peiser, Director of the London-based think tank Global Warming Policy Forum who spoke to ELN about the new reported government scheme that will allegedly offer grants of £7,000 to households to replace their gas boilers with low carbon heat pumps.
“It’s a complete political disaster. Boris Johnson's green advisors seem to be oblivious of the huge damage this would cause to Boris, his premiership and to the Conservative Party.
“Only very wealthy people can afford a heat pump nowadays. Heat pumps are perhaps somewhere between £10,000 and £20,000 if you include the necessary installation and insulation. So even £7,000 would only make part of the overall cost.”
The reported £400 million scheme is also branded by Dr Peiser as a ‘stupid idea’ and he doubts it will go ahead.
Listen to the full interview here.
7) Matt Ridley: The radical potential of nuclear fusion exposes the folly of our net zero deadline
The Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2021
Future technology that could power a city with a device the size of a shipping container may prove a better bet than harnessing the wind.
Grand designs: A fusion power plant could be based on a spherical tokamak design such as that used at the UK's Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak based at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. (Courtesy: Culham Centre for Fusion Energy)
In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the size of a lemon pip at the rate of 10 quadrillion watts (joules per second), albeit for only 100 trillionths of a second. That’s roughly 500 times faster than the entire human population consumes energy.
The experiment is a reminder that the energy density achieved when atoms merge is vastly greater than anything in a lump of coal, let alone a puff of wind. It is also far bigger than can be achieved by nuclear fission and much safer too: no risk of meltdown and with much less high-level radioactive waste.
The problem, of course, is that reliable fusion power stations were 50 years away in 1950, and were still 50 years away in 2000, so milestones on the road to fusion are greeted with sceptical yawns. But almost everybody in the industry now thinks that jibe is out of date: the stopwatch has started, as one insider put it to me. We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid.
Two bits of evidence support that conclusion. First, the British Government will soon announce that it has chosen a site for a prototype government-developed power station, known as Step, the spherical tokamak for energy production, which will be operating around 2040. Secondly, there has been a gold rush of nearly $2 billion of private money into commercial fusion companies: several in the United States, one in Canada and two in Britain.
In terms of expertise and infrastructure, the UK is near the front of the peloton in this technology. The recent progress is mainly because of technical breakthroughs. In one design, called magnetic confinement, better superconductors have led to stronger magnets needing less cooling which allows more compact, spherical designs that can stabilise the “plasma” for longer spells of time. In another, inertial confinement, lasers developed for the star-wars missile defence programme have brought ignition temperatures within reach.
Before you get cynical, indulge in a bit of hope. If this were to work, then a device the size of a shipping container could power a small city, running on tiny quantities of fuel: some deuterium extracted from seawater and some tritium continuously “bred” inside the thing itself from a little lithium. The output is helium-4, an inert, non-radioactive gas. The environmental footprint would be negligible: no carbon dioxide emissions, no waste, no pollution, very few materials and a pocket-handkerchief of land. We could retire the rest of the energy industry altogether – oil rigs, coal mines, wind turbines, solar farms, hydro dams and all – and set about raising everybody’s standard of living indefinitely, while telling Greta Thunberg to cheer up.
Yet even if all goes to plan it will not be till after 2050 that fusion starts to make a big difference. So those countries that rushed to net zero by 2050, like us, using immensely expensive, resource-hungry, land-hungry renewable energy, will look foolish if fusion comes along just after. A bit like – only on a far grander scale – the way we made a huge mistake by mandating the switch to ineffective, unreliable, unsafe compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of waiting for more efficient and better LEDs.
The point is not that fusion will certainly come to our rescue, but that there’s probably a 50-50 chance that it will, and governments need to clear the runway to make sure it at least gets a chance to take off. That means learning the lessons from how we killed nuclear fission by driving up its cost. Far from getting cheaper like computers did, fission reactors grew steadily more expensive. This was because we never gave them the chance to profit from experience, to learn by doing.
Designs were approved ever more slowly and expensively, gold-plated in a doomed attempt to reassure the public, never improved by tinkering during construction, rarely mass produced to bring down the unit cost, and then built by cost-plus contractors ripping off naive governments.
We have made a start in this country. The Regulatory Horizons Council, on which I sit, has recently produced a report arguing that it makes much more sense to regulate a fusion plant as if it were a chemical plant – through the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency – than through the Office for Nuclear Regulation. That is because the risks do not include meltdowns, or high-level (or long-lasting) radioactivity, but are much more like those of a conventional industrial facility.
Investing in a technical fix like fusion looks more likely to deliver net zero – albeit not before 2050 – than frantically trying to soup up a 13th-century technology to extract energy from an ultra-low-density source: the wind.
The Daily Telegraph, 21 August 2021
Future technology that could power a city with a device the size of a shipping container may prove a better bet than harnessing the wind.
Grand designs: A fusion power plant could be based on a spherical tokamak design such as that used at the UK's Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak based at the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy. (Courtesy: Culham Centre for Fusion Energy)
In a key milestone on the road to harnessing fusion power, Lawrence Livermore laboratory announced this week that it had extracted energy from an object the size of a lemon pip at the rate of 10 quadrillion watts (joules per second), albeit for only 100 trillionths of a second. That’s roughly 500 times faster than the entire human population consumes energy.
The experiment is a reminder that the energy density achieved when atoms merge is vastly greater than anything in a lump of coal, let alone a puff of wind. It is also far bigger than can be achieved by nuclear fission and much safer too: no risk of meltdown and with much less high-level radioactive waste.
The problem, of course, is that reliable fusion power stations were 50 years away in 1950, and were still 50 years away in 2000, so milestones on the road to fusion are greeted with sceptical yawns. But almost everybody in the industry now thinks that jibe is out of date: the stopwatch has started, as one insider put it to me. We are probably less than 15 years away from seeing a fusion power station begin to contribute to the grid.
Two bits of evidence support that conclusion. First, the British Government will soon announce that it has chosen a site for a prototype government-developed power station, known as Step, the spherical tokamak for energy production, which will be operating around 2040. Secondly, there has been a gold rush of nearly $2 billion of private money into commercial fusion companies: several in the United States, one in Canada and two in Britain.
In terms of expertise and infrastructure, the UK is near the front of the peloton in this technology. The recent progress is mainly because of technical breakthroughs. In one design, called magnetic confinement, better superconductors have led to stronger magnets needing less cooling which allows more compact, spherical designs that can stabilise the “plasma” for longer spells of time. In another, inertial confinement, lasers developed for the star-wars missile defence programme have brought ignition temperatures within reach.
Before you get cynical, indulge in a bit of hope. If this were to work, then a device the size of a shipping container could power a small city, running on tiny quantities of fuel: some deuterium extracted from seawater and some tritium continuously “bred” inside the thing itself from a little lithium. The output is helium-4, an inert, non-radioactive gas. The environmental footprint would be negligible: no carbon dioxide emissions, no waste, no pollution, very few materials and a pocket-handkerchief of land. We could retire the rest of the energy industry altogether – oil rigs, coal mines, wind turbines, solar farms, hydro dams and all – and set about raising everybody’s standard of living indefinitely, while telling Greta Thunberg to cheer up.
Yet even if all goes to plan it will not be till after 2050 that fusion starts to make a big difference. So those countries that rushed to net zero by 2050, like us, using immensely expensive, resource-hungry, land-hungry renewable energy, will look foolish if fusion comes along just after. A bit like – only on a far grander scale – the way we made a huge mistake by mandating the switch to ineffective, unreliable, unsafe compact fluorescent light bulbs instead of waiting for more efficient and better LEDs.
The point is not that fusion will certainly come to our rescue, but that there’s probably a 50-50 chance that it will, and governments need to clear the runway to make sure it at least gets a chance to take off. That means learning the lessons from how we killed nuclear fission by driving up its cost. Far from getting cheaper like computers did, fission reactors grew steadily more expensive. This was because we never gave them the chance to profit from experience, to learn by doing.
Designs were approved ever more slowly and expensively, gold-plated in a doomed attempt to reassure the public, never improved by tinkering during construction, rarely mass produced to bring down the unit cost, and then built by cost-plus contractors ripping off naive governments.
We have made a start in this country. The Regulatory Horizons Council, on which I sit, has recently produced a report arguing that it makes much more sense to regulate a fusion plant as if it were a chemical plant – through the Health and Safety Executive and the Environment Agency – than through the Office for Nuclear Regulation. That is because the risks do not include meltdowns, or high-level (or long-lasting) radioactivity, but are much more like those of a conventional industrial facility.
Investing in a technical fix like fusion looks more likely to deliver net zero – albeit not before 2050 – than frantically trying to soup up a 13th-century technology to extract energy from an ultra-low-density source: the wind.
8) And finally: Welcome to the green #Blackoutstate: California to build 5 gas power plants to avoid blackouts
Bloomberg, 19 August 2021
California, a state that has been aggressively weaning its power grid off of fossil fuels, is now working on adding several natural gas-fired plants in an effort to keep the lights on this summer.
Bloomberg, 19 August 2021
California, a state that has been aggressively weaning its power grid off of fossil fuels, is now working on adding several natural gas-fired plants in an effort to keep the lights on this summer.
The California Department of Water Resources is in the process of procuring five temporary gas-fueled generators that have individual capacities of 30 megawatts, said spokesman Ryan Endean. The units will be installed at existing power plants and are expected to be operating by the middle of September.
The move comes after California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a state of emergency for the power grid on concern about supply shortages during hot summer evenings when solar production wanes. The order, issued last month, aimed to free up energy supplies and speed up power plant development to help avert blackouts. It also temporarily lifted air-quality rules.
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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