Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
A lot of money and effort is spent in order to find technological solutions for storing the energy produced by renewables, but very little to understand what the real problem is. How much energy storage do we really need? And is it true that if we don’t have 100% energy storage then renewables are useless, as some people say?
Jeff Rubin is currently touring his new book, The End Of Growth. As the former Chief Economist for CIBC World Markets he brings an intimate knowledge of financial markets and how they work to the peak oil/end of growth community populated by other venerable thinkers such as Richard Heinberg, Chris Martenson and John Michael Greer.
-Busting the carbon and cost myths of Germany’s nuclear exit
-The truth about Germany’s nuclear phase-out
-Germany sets new solar power record, institute says
-Germany Stalled on the Expressway to a Green Future
G8 leaders meeting last weekend in Camp David will have been cheered by the recent slide in oil prices – albeit that the weakening in price is largely a consequence of the increasingly dire economic news. Nevertheless the group issued a statement to the effect that should the price start heading back in the other direction they will be calling on the IEA to take action…
We’ve all heard that wind energy is too expensive, and that massive investments in wind will drive up electricity rates for consumers. This argument is based on the belief that wind energy is more expensive on a per kilowatt-hour basis than traditional fossil fuels. While even this premise is up for debate (for example, wind is now the least expensive option for new generation for some utilities in the upper Midwest), the bigger problem is that this argument ignores how electricity markets actually work.
-Busting the carbon and cost myths of Germany’s nuclear exit
-The energy transition juggernaut
-Clean energy as culture war
The prospect of weaker oil demand in the face of the Euro crisis was balanced this week by warnings from the IEA and Saudi Arabia. Sadad al-Husseini, the former head of Exploration and Production at Saudi Aramco, wrote that “$100 for Brent is quite a correction and it will be a challenge to sustain such a low price beyond the short term”…
Fears of a new phase in the European debt crisis, a decline in oil imports to China in April, and the prospect of a new round of international talks on Iran’s nuclear programme have seen oil prices drop back from recent highs in the past two weeks. Despite all this however, and reports from OPEC that it bolstered supply by 320,000 barrels in April, Brent oil still stands around $112/barrel.
– Thomas Homer-Dixon: Exploring the climate “mindscape” (oil supplies and energy junk)
– Government influence is negative for energy fuel policy
– The German Switch from Nuclear to Renewables
– Scientists’ Arctic drilling plan aims to demystify undersea greenhouse gases
– Ancien directeur de TOTAL: Nouvelles découvertes et gaz de schiste retarderont à peine le pic pétrolier
In this post, I consider the limited impacts of climate policy on fossil-fuel production and discuss estimates of fossil-fuel production in the long run.
The shale gas ‘revolution’ suffered another blow this week as the US Securities and Exchange Commission announced an investigation into dealings between industry leader Chesapeake Energy and its chief executive Aubrey McClendon. It emerged recently that McClendon had been taking a private stake in each well the company drills and, unbeknownst to shareholders, borrowed over $1 billion against them…
A question that seems to garner a lot of debate whenever the topics of climate change and peak oil are raised is what our future sources of energy might look like. This is a common feature of groups involved in the Transition movement, since the vast majority of us in the north depend so much on finite sources of fossil fuels to power our modern, civilised lifestyles. Ever since the advances of the industrial revolution allowed us to harness the power of coal and oil, we have built our society around the potential of fossil fuels to provide us with the concentrated energy necessary for the processes involved in heavy industry. These days, access to affordable, reliable electricity is seen by many as a basic human need.
