Energy Week #442: 10/28/2021

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Energy Week #442: 10/28/2021

Minute 0: Introduction

Thursday, October 21

Rivian pickup (Rivian image)

Minute 2
¶ “Don’t Buy Another Gas Car!” • Maybe you normally let your cars run five years, ten years, or longer before you replace them. However, when the time comes to replace your car, don’t buy another gas car! The car companies are increasingly making EVs. Within 10 years, we will look on gas cars like we now look on film cameras and tube TVs. [CleanTechnica]

EV battery factory (Image courtesy of Volkswagen)

Minute 5
¶ “Study Shows Recycled Lithium Batteries As Good As Newly Mined Lithium Batteries” • There’s a new study out that found that recycled lithium-ion batteries are as good as and even better than new batteries made with newly mined materials. The study showed that recycled NMC111 cathodes actually are superior in both rate and cycle performance. [CleanTechnica]

Tent Mountain in southwestern Alberta (Montem Resources)

Minute 8
¶ “Instead Of A Coal Mine, This Alberta Mountain May Now Become A ‘Green Energy Complex'” • Montem Resources gave up a plan to develop an open-pit coal mine on Tent Mountain. It has a new proposal to use the mountain for pumped-hydro energy storage, powered by nearby wind turbines, along with a green hydrogen production facility. [CBC.ca]

Friday, October 22

Grassland (Jonathan Farber, Unsplash)

Minute 11
¶ “This Might Just Look Like Grass, But It Has The Power To Absorb A Load Of Our Carbon Emissions” • Forests, peatlands, deserts, and tundra can all absorb and hold stocks of CO₂. Of all the carbon held in land-based ecosystems, around 34% can be found in grasslands, data from the World Resources Institute show. That’s close to the 39% held in forests. [CNN]

Wind farm in Western Australia (Edrabikau, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Minute 13
¶ “Record Levels Of Renewable Energy Drive Down Electricity Prices Across Australia” • Record levels of renewable energy drove down electricity prices across Australia in the September quarter, with prices zero or lower a sixth of the time, AEMO said in a report. Solar, wind, and hydro power supplied a record 31.7% of the electricity. [The Guardian]

Tesla Model 3 in China, with facelift (Jengtingchen, CC-BY-SA 4.0)

Minute 16
¶ “Tesla Switching To LFP Batteries For Standard Range Model 3 And Model Y Cars” • Tesla started using LFP batteries in Model 3s made in China last year. Tesla will use lithium-iron-phosphate (LiFePO₄) chemistry for all standard range cars globally from this point forward. It is also using LFP battery cells in its grid-scale energy storage products. [CleanTechnica]

Saturday, October 23

Arizona traffic (Randy Lisciarelli, Unsplash)

Minute 19
¶ “How America Is Tackling Its Greatest Source Of Emissions” • Cars are central to American culture, giving people mobility and the freedom to travel. But since 2017, transportation has been the single largest source of greenhouses gases in the US, largely due to cars. To reach net zero by 2050 the US needs to rethink its relationship with the automobile. [BBC]

Rugby Run solar farm (Supplied by Adani Australia)

Minute 22
¶ “Solar Farm Output Overloads National Grid, Sparking Calls For Accelerated Transmission” • As Australian homeowners embrace rooftop panels and solar farms pop up, renewable output is outpacing the means of transmission. With a glut of solar energy overwhelming the power grid, there’s been a seismic shift in the electricity network. [ABC News]

Military facility with solar PVs and storage (Ameresco image)

Minute 24
¶ “Ameresco’s 2-GWh Battery Storage For Utility SCE To Help Address California’s Power Reliability Risks” • Clean energy systems provider Ameresco has contracted with California utility Southern California Edison to deliver battery energy storage systems with a total of 537.5 MW of power and 2,150 MWh of energy capacity. [Energy Storage News]

Sunday, October 24

Live oak (Ashley Knedler, Unsplash)

Minute 27
¶ “Florida Is Ditching Palm Trees To Fight The Climate Crisis” • When you think of Florida, beaches and palm trees come to mind. But what if those palm trees were slowly replaced with other trees? That could happen over time because of climate change, and communities in South Florida are trying to save the world from the climate crisis. [CNN]

Storm over California driven by an atmospheric river (NOAA image)

Minute 30
¶ “Weather Whiplash: A Series Of Storms Could Ease California Drought, But Also Unleash Flood Hazards” • Parts of the West Coast will go from extreme drought to facing a series of bomb cyclones, and an atmospheric river. The Pacific Northwest and Northern California will have rains, flash floods, debris flows, and potential hurricane-force winds. [CNN]

Testing the Caltrain EMU trainset (Peninsula Corridor Joint Powers Board)

Minute 32
¶ “Caltrain Pushes For Renewability With Electric Trains” • After a period of delayed funding, Caltrain’s electrification project is finally coming into place. Its mission is to transform all of Caltrain’s diesel trains into fully electric ones. The change will see benefits of quieter, faster, and less polluting train service, according to one employee. [Scot Scoop News]

Monday, October 25

Tidal wetlands on Chesapeake Bay (Jennifer Schmidt, CC0)

Minute 35
¶ “What Are The Chesapeake Bay’s Marshes Worth? New Study Suggests Billions” • Large swaths of the marshes along the coasts of Maryland and Virginia are expected to disappear under rising water by 2100. That loss will rob many low-lying communities of a critical natural buffer that protects them from storm surges and widespread flooding during hurricanes. [Bay Journal]

Dead trees in Yellowstone National Park (Evan Boehs, Unsplash)

Minute 38
¶ “The Environmental Disasters We’ve Almost Fixed” • There are no simple solutions to complex problems like climate change. But there have been times in the past when the world has come together to try to fix an environmental crisis. We dealt with acid rain and the hole in the ozone layer. Do those examples have lessons for tackling global warming? [BBC]

Climate protest sign (Markus Spiske, Unsplash)

Minute 40
¶ “Covid Looms Over Crucial Climate Talks As Some Leaders Snub The Event” • In the battle against climate change, the summit in Glasgow is still of vital importance, but there is now a question about whether it will adequately flesh out the 2015 Paris Agreement. Some G20 countries have not disclosed their plans yet, and some key leaders will not attend. [CNN]

Tuesday, October 26

Wind farm (Charl Folscher, Unsplash)

Minute 43
¶ “New Research Findings Showing That Renewables Are Poised To Crush Fossil Fuels In The Market” • Costs of renewables have fallen faster than expected. And deployment has been faster than predicted, reducing costs even further. With this virtuous cycle, we have come to a point that a rapid clean-energy transition is the least expensive path forward. [interest.co.nz]

Tesla (Beat Jau, Unsplash)

Minute 46
¶ “Tesla Surpasses $1 Trillion Valuation After Hertz Order” • Tesla surpassed a market value of $1 trillion, after it struck a deal to sell 100,000 vehicles to the car rental firm Hertz, which drove shares up 12.6%. It is the fifth company to top $1 trillion, after Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, and Google-owner Alphabet. Elon Musk’s Tesla shares are worth $230 billion. [BBC]

Another bomb cyclone off the coast of New York (NASA image)

Minute 48
¶ “West Coast Slammed By Record-Breaking Bomb Cyclone” • The last installment of a parade of storms barreled into the West Coast on Sunday, unloading more heavy rain that resulted in serious flooding and debris flows across drought-stricken and wildfire-ravaged California. The storm even broke some all-time 24-hour precipitation records. [Yahoo News]

Wednesday, October 27

DOE worker on hydrogen project (US DOE image)

Minute 51
¶ “Renewable Hydrogen ‘Cheaper Than Conventional’ By 2030: Australia CEFC Executive” • By 2030, the cost of green hydrogen will fall below that of conventional hydrogen produced by fossil fuels with carbon capture, on the back of economies of scale and consumer choice, according to the head of the Australian Clean Energy Finance Corporation. [S&P Global]

Global warming emissions (Marek Piwnicki, Unsplash)

Minute 54
¶ “Climate Change: UN Emissions Gap Report A ‘Thundering Wake-Up Call'” • National plans to cut carbon fall far short of what’s needed to avert dangerous climate change, according to the UN Environment Programme. Their Emissions Gap report suggests the world is on course to warm around 2.7°C with hugely destructive impacts. [BBC]

NREL Flatirons Campus (Werner Slocum, NREL)

Minute 56
¶ “High-Renewables Systems Are Scalable, Resilient, And Secure With Communication-Less Controls” • The National Renewable Energy Laboratory says transitioning to renewables is achievable. It showed that relatively simple controls can enable power grids to operate with 100% wind, solar, and storage, without dedicated device-to-device communications. [CleanTechnica]

Minute 59: Finis