Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In addition to being a much more powerful contributor to climate instability than carbon dioxide, methane leakage can contaminate groundwater, kill vegetation, create air pollution and waste valuable economic resources.
In addition to our deep dive on PURPA and around-market reforms, we’ll also discuss some of the likely implications of Trump’s new direction in energy policy, implications for the Clean Power Plan, and how the federal government’s leadership role on climate might be changing.
The issue here is about science and uncertainty. So first, What is ‘science’? It is a process for how we find, measure and then evaluate the real world in order to identify how it works. The problem is, particularly for contentious debates in the media and politics, that we seldom hear about the degree of confidence attached to scientific findings, or the uncertainties that surround them.
“How can we reconcile our desire to save the planet from the worst effects of climate change with our dependence on the systems that cause it? How can we demand that industry and governments reduce their pollution, when ultimately we are the ones buying the polluting products and contributing to the emissions that harm our shared biosphere?”
However, determining whether storage can indeed solve the problem of intermittency of wind or solar requires assessing the ‘energetic productivity’ of using energy storage in combination with variable renewables.
If you’ve heard that the net energy of renewables is too low to run society, and that as a result the renewable energy transition is destined to fail…then you need to listen to this interview with net energy researcher Rembrandt Koppelaar and check out his new research. His findings will probably surprise you.
Carbon taxes are witnessing a huge uptick in attention. The advent of the Trump era is causing clean energy and climate defenders to pursue alternative policy priorities to those of the Obama era.
The Paris Agreement on climate change is designed to weather the peaks and troughs of political commitment, over time and from country to country, while ensuring that ambition ratchets inexorably upwards over time.
So, are wind and solar killing coal and nuclear? Yes, but not by themselves and not for the reasons most people think. Are wind and solar killing grid reliability? No, not where the grid’s technology and regulations have been modernized. In those places, overall grid operation has improved, not worsened.
What do you do if you are running out of oil, and your neighbour’s President, who has plenty of oil, seems to hate you? The answer is that you develop a renewable-powered economy as fast as you can.
Even under normal circumstances South Korea’s energy security is not very high in comparison to other countries. An assessment of risks for 25 countries undertaken by the US Chamber of Commerce (Institute for 21st Century Energy) in 2015 had South Korea at the 3rd lowest level.
So don’t let a title like When Trucks Stop Running give you the impression that Friedemann’s book is simply one about the energetic options for the trucking industry, since what it actually does is use trucks as an interesting starting point for how to understand the viability of the various energy options available to our declining industrial way of life.
