Vermont Utility Plans to End Outages by Giving Customers Batteries

 

 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/energy-environment/green-mountain-home-batteries.html

Oct. 9, 2023

Many electric utilities are putting up lots of new power lines as they rely more on renewable energy and try to make grids more resilient in bad weather. But a Vermont utility is proposing a very different approach: It wants to install batteries at most homes to make sure its customers never go without electricity.

The company, Green Mountain Power, proposed buying batteries, burying power lines and strengthening overhead cables in a filing with state regulators on Monday. It said its plan would be cheaper than building a lot of new lines and power plants.

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Why American Aluminum Plants Emit Far More Climate Pollution Than Some of Their Counterparts Abroad

 

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/06122022/why-american-aluminum-plants-emit-far-more-climate-pollution-than-some-of-their-counterparts-abroad/

 

By Phil McKenna
December 6, 2022

This article was published in partnership with NBC News.

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Though considered non-toxic by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration,  tetrafluoromethane (CF4) and hexafluoroethane (C2F6), PFCs that are unwanted byproducts of aluminum production, are among the most potent and longest-lasting greenhouse gases on the planet. They belong to a class of synthetic, fluorine-containing chemicals known as “the immortals” because of how long they remain in the atmosphere. Once the gases are released, they are “essentially permanent additions to the atmosphere,” the Environmental Protection Agency notes.

PFCs threaten “the public health and welfare of current and future generations,” according to a 2009 determination by the EPA as part of a sweeping “endangerment finding” on greenhouse gases. However, unlike carbon dioxide and methane, the EPA does not regulate PFCs.

CF4, the primary PFC released by Century Aluminum, is 7,380 times worse for climate change than carbon dioxide on a ton-for-ton basis over a 100-year period. But, unlike CO2, which remains in the atmosphere for approximately 300-1,000 years, CF4 remains in the atmosphere for 50,000 years. 

In 2021, the Sebree plant, the largest U.S. aluminum production facility operating at full capacity, vented 24 tons of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) into the air. The emissions equal the annual greenhouse gas emissions of 40,000 automobiles—ones that will remain on the theoretical road for tens of thousands of years.

Meanwhile, a newer plant also owned and operated by Century Aluminum in Grundartangi, Iceland, emits just one sixth the perfluorocarbons (PFC) emissions per ton of aluminum, as compared to the company’s Sebree plant, according to an Inside Climate News assessment of Environmental Protection Agency data as well as financial and environmental reports published by Century and Nordural, its Icelandic subsidiary.

-----

In a case similar to that of Century Aluminum, Alcoa’s Intalco smelter in Ferndale, Washington, emitted nearly 50 tons of PFCs in 2020 before curtailing production.

That’s in contrast to Alcoa’s Fjarðaál smelter in Fjarðabyggð, Iceland, which has a PFC emissions intensity less than one fortieth that of the recently shuttered Intalco smelter

-----

Jim Beck, a spokesperson for Alcoa said “we do not disagree” with the assessment. Beck added that emissions from the Intalco facility were high “due to the older technology and operational instability that the facility was experiencing.”

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In some cases, multinational companies have slashed emissions at their overseas facilities while continuing to operate older U.S. plants with some of the highest PFC emissions rates in the world.

Industry analysts say the stark contrast is due to regulatory differences and the relative cost of electricity, the largest expense for the energy-intensive industry. Iceland, which is subject to the European Union’s carbon trading market, places a high price on PFC emissions based on the gas’s outsized climate impact. There is no such fee or regulatory limit for PFC emissions in the U.S.

-----

Barry Welch, a chemical engineering professor at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, who has consulted for many of the world’s leading aluminum production companies, said the aging U.S. smelters are like Model T cars.

“They are out of date,” Welch said of the current fleet of U.S. smelters, which were built between 1902 and 1980. “They should be shut down.”

Yet, security experts say the U.S. must find a way to keep the aluminum plants open. The strong, lightweight metal is used to make everything from more fuel-efficient cars and airplanes to solar panels and satellites.

“Just as we are reliant on the Middle East for oil, we will soon be in position where we will be reliant on China and Russia for aluminum,” said Joe Quinn, vice president of strategic industrial materials at SAFE Commanding Heights, an organization based in Washington, D.C., that advocates for U.S. energy security. “There is a legitimate need to stabilize the aluminum sector for national security reasons.”

-----

In written testimony submitted to the United States International Trade Commission in 2017, company officials said aluminum producers were being “decimated” by “unfair practices of Chinese aluminum producers.”

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Inside the Saudi Strategy to Keep the World Hooked on Oil

 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/21/climate/saudi-arabia-aramco-oil-solar-climate.html

 

 By Hiroko Tabuchi
Tabuchi reported from the Saudi capital, Riyadh, to examine the kingdom’s vision for an oil-rich future.
Nov. 21, 2022

 

Shimmering in the desert is a futuristic research center with an urgent mission: Make Saudi Arabia’s oil-based economy greener, and quickly. The goal is to rapidly build more solar panels and expand electric-car use so the kingdom eventually burns far less oil.

But Saudi Arabia has a far different vision for the rest of the world. A major reason it wants to burn less oil at home is to free up even more to sell abroad. It’s just one aspect of the kingdom’s aggressive long-term strategy to keep the world hooked on oil for decades to come and remain the biggest supplier as rivals slip away.

In recent days, Saudi representatives pushed at the United Nations global climate summit in Egypt to block a call for the world to burn less oil, according to two people present at the meeting, saying that the summit’s final statement “should not mention fossil fuels.” The effort prevailed: After objections from Saudi Arabia and a few other oil producers, the statement failed to include a call for nations to phase out fossil fuels.

-----

The dissonance cuts to the heart of the Saudi kingdom. The government-controlled oil company, Saudi Aramco, already produces one out of every 10 of the world’s barrels of oil and envisions a world where it will be selling even more. Yet climate change and rising temperatures are already threatening life in the desert kingdom like few other places in the world.

Saudi Aramco has become a prolific funder of research into critical energy issues, financing almost 500 studies over the past five years, including research aimed at keeping gasoline cars competitive or casting doubt on electric vehicles, according to the Crossref database, which tracks academic publications.

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How Solar Kept the Lights On After Fiona Left Puerto Rico in the Dark

 

 https://insideclimatenews.org/todaysclimate/were-fine-how-solar-kept-the-lights-on-after-fiona-left-puerto-rico-in-the-dark/

 

September 20, 2022

 

Most of Puerto Rico remained in the dark Tuesday morning as crews rushed to assess and repair the damage caused by Hurricane Fiona, which continues to gather strength on its northwest path toward the Turks and Caicos Islands.

The U.S. territory suffered “catastrophic damage” over the weekend and through Monday, Gov. Pedro Pierluisi said, after the Category 1 storm unleashed violent winds and torrential rain, killing at least three people, forcing hundreds more to evacuate and knocking out power for more than a million homes and businesses.

-----

As of Tuesday morning, less than 150,000 of Puerto Rico’s 1.4 million public utility customers had working electricity, despite tens of billions of dollars in federal aid and a massive five-year effort to overhaul and modernize the island’s poorly maintained and unsound powergrid. But a growing number of Puerto Ricans, who have privately installed solar systems on the roofs of their homes and businesses, say the island-wide blackout caused by Fiona could have been entirely avoided, pointing to themselves as proof of a better way.

“We’re fine,” Arturo Massol-Deyá, who uses solar panels and battery storage to power his house, his office and several other buildings in Adjuntas, a mountainside town in central Puerto Rico, told me in an interview Monday afternoon. “Basically, we’re waiting for the sun to shine again—we don’t have damage, all the infrastructure is in place and it’s running. It was running during the hurricane.”

-----

Since 2017, more than 40,000 Puerto Rican households have installed, or are in the process of installing, rooftop solar panels, according to a report released last week by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a progressive think tank that promotes renewable energy. The vast majority of those systems have been installed with battery storage, the report said, and currently provide 3.7 percent of the territory’s total electricity consumption, outpacing the island’s utility-scale projects.

But the report also criticizes the Puerto Rican government, which it says “continues its misguided push for natural gas” while building “no new renewable energy.”

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For the first time, wind power eclipsed both coal and nuclear in the U.S.

 

https://www.npr.org/2022/04/14/1092806582/wind-power-energy-source

 

April 14, 202211:36 AM ET
Deepa Shivaram
 

 

Wind power in the United States reached a new milestone last month.

On March 29, wind turbines produced more electricity than coal and nuclear, the U.S. Energy Information Administration, an agency that collects energy statistics for the government, says.

In the past, wind-powered electricity has gone beyond coal and nuclear on separate days, but this was the first time wind surpassed both on the same day. Natural gas is still the largest source of electricity generation in the country. 

 ------ 

But wind taking the No. 2 spot may be short-lived.
Environmental laws can be an obstacle in building green energy infrastructure

The agency says electricity generation from wind on a monthly basis has been lower than natural gas, coal and nuclear generation. According to EIA projections, wind is not expected to surpass any other method in any month of 2022 or 2023.

UMD study finds the fuel efficiency of one car may be cancelled by your next car purchase

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2021-03/uom-usf030221.php

 

News Release 2-Mar-2021
University of Maryland

 

In a recent collaborative study led by the University of Maryland (UMD), researchers find that consumers tend to buy something less fuel efficient than they normally would for their second car after springing for an eco-friendly vehicle. While this sounds like an all-too-logical conclusion, the study reports a 57% reduction in the benefits of driving your fuel efficient car for carbon emissions purely based on the purchase of your second vehicle. Since about three-quarters of cars are purchased into multi-car households, these findings could have major implications for carbon emissions, and especially for the design of carbon mitigation programs like Cash-for-Clunkers and Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards that aren't taking into account the decisions of consumers with multiple vehicles.


•••••

The study also found that consumers who buy fuel efficient vehicles tend to end up driving them more and farther distances than they might otherwise, further chipping away at the emissions benefits.

•••••

Electricity needed to mine bitcoin is more than used by 'entire countries'

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/feb/27/bitcoin-mining-electricity-use-environmental-impact

Lauren Aratani
Sat 27 Feb 2021 03.00 EST
Last modified on Sat 27 Feb 2021 03.03 EST


It’s not just the value of bitcoin that has soared in the last year – so has the huge amount of energy it consumes.

The cryptocurrency’s value has dipped recently after passing a high of $50,000 but the energy used to create it has continued to soar during its epic rise, climbing to the equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of Argentina, according to Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index, a tool from researchers at Cambridge University that measures the currency’s energy use.

•••••

Bitcoin mining – the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithms – is a deeply energy-intensive process.
Advertisement

“Mining” bitcoin involves solving complex math problems in order to create new bitcoins. Miners are rewarded in bitcoin.

•••••

The amount of electricity used to mine bitcoin “has historically been more than [electricity used by] entire countries, like Ireland”, said Benjamin Jones, a professor of economics at the University of New Mexico who has researched bitcoin’s environmental impact. “We’re talking about multiple terawatts, dozens of terawatts a year of electricity being used just for bitcoin … That’s a lot of electricity.”

•••••

The energy wasted by plugged-in but inactive home devices in the US alone could power bitcoin mining for 1.8 years, according to the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index.

But environmentalists say that mining is still a cause for concern particularly because miners will go wherever electricity is cheapest and that may mean places that use coal. According to Cambridge, China has the most bitcoin mining of any country by far. While the country has been slowly moving toward renewable energy, about two-thirds of its electricity comes from coal.

•••••

A single transaction of bitcoin has the same carbon footprint as 680,000 Visa transactions or 51,210 hours of watching YouTube, according to the site.

A paper from 2018 from the Oak Ridge Institute in Ohio found that one dollar’s worth of bitcoin took 17 megajoules of energy, more than double the amount of energy it took to mine one dollar’s worth of copper, gold and platinum. Another study from the UK published last year said that computer power required to mine Bitcoin quadrupled in 2019 compared with the year before, and that mining has had an influence in prices in some power and utility markets.

•••••

In Texas, fossil fuels played largest role in leaving millions without power

https://news.yahoo.com/blame-wind-texas-fossil-fuels-013857993.html

Business Insider

Charles Davis
Tue, February 16, 2021, 8:38 PM

•••••

According to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages 75% of the state's deregulated electricity market, the single-day record for demand, set in 2018, was smashed on Valentine's Day. And as the weather has gotten worse, the capacity to generate electricity has diminished: By Tuesday, per ERCOT's CEO, 45,000 megawatts of generating capacity was offline - up from 34,000 megawatts offline the day before, representing more than half of what the state typically uses in a day.'

Most of the generation lost has been from coal and gas, according to ERCOT, with only 13% attributable to wind. "By some estimates," The Texas Tribune reported Tuesday, "nearly half of the state's natural-gas production has screeched to a halt."

"Gathering lines freeze, and the wells get so cold that they can't produce," Parker Fawcett, a natural-gas analyst at S&P Global Platts, told The Tribune. "And, pumps use electricity, so they're not even able to lift that gas and liquid, because there's no power to produce."

•••••

It is also energy-independent, its electricity grid almost entirely disconnected from the rest of the country. That move insulates it from federal regulation but has also left it hanging now, in this moment of need, with so much of its own power generation offline.

•••••

Texas' chief source of electricity is not renewable. Indeed, a majority, 52%, comes from natural gas, according to the US Energy Information Administration, while less than a quarter comes from renewables such as wind and solar.

And fossil fuels have been affected by the weather too.

As of Tuesday morning, the distributor Texas Gas Service warned consumers, "our suppliers of natural gas are experiencing freezing gas wells due to the duration of the extreme cold."

•••••



•••••



•••••

How energy efficiency can help make the electric grid cleaner

https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2020/12/how-energy-efficiency-can-help-make-the-electric-grid-cleaner/

If you improve your home’s energy efficiency by adding insulation or installing a new heating system, it can lower your bills and make your home more comfortable. These changes can also help reduce stress on the electric grid at times of peak energy use.

Natalie Mims Frick of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory analyzed energy-efficiency programs offered by publicly-owned utilities in nine states.

These programs include incentives like rebates for LED lights, efficient heating and cooling systems, or home insulation.

“We found that energy efficiency appears to be a really low-cost way to reduce demand,” Frick says. “We had residential, commercial, industrial, and low-income programs that all produced peak demand savings.”

Peak demand is when electricity use and strain on the grid is highest. Reducing demand helps utilities avoid the need to use highly polluting backup power plants.

And it helps them add more wind and solar. These power sources are more variable and not reliable enough to meet sudden surges in demand, so reducing peak power use helps utilities transition to renewables.

Frick says most consumers improve efficiency to save money and make their homes more comfortable, not to support the grid. But she says those are still “great benefits to think about as you make yourself more comfortable.”

The curse of 'white oil': electric vehicles' dirty secret

An ever-increasing population demands an ever-increasing amount of stuff, which has to come from somewhere.

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2020/dec/08/the-curse-of-white-oil-electric-vehicles-dirty-secret-lithium

Tue 8 Dec 2020 01.00 EST

•••••

Savannah is just one of several mining companies with an eye on the rich lithium deposits of central and northern Portugal. The sudden excitement surrounding petróleo branco (“white oil”) derives from an invention rarely seen in these parts: the electric car. Lithium is a key active material in the rechargeable batteries that run electric cars. It is found in rock and clay deposits as a solid mineral, as well as dissolved in brine. It is popular with battery manufacturers because, as the least dense metal, it stores a lot of energy for its weight.

Electrifying transport has become a top priority in the move to a lower-carbon future. In Europe, car travel accounts for around 12% of all the continent’s carbon emissions. To keep in line with the Paris agreement, emissions from cars and vans will need to drop by more than a third (37.5%) by 2030. The EU has set an ambitious goal of reducing overall greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by the same date. To that end, Brussels and individual member states are pouring millions of euros into incentivising car owners to switch to electric. Some countries are going even further, proposing to ban sales of diesel and petrol vehicles in the near future (as early as 2025 in the case of Norway). If all goes to plan, European electric vehicle ownership could jump from around 2m today to 40m by 2030.

Lithium is key to this energy transition. Lithium-ion batteries are used to power electric cars, as well as to store grid-scale electricity. (They are also used in smartphones and laptops.) But Europe has a problem. At present, almost every ounce of battery-grade lithium is imported. More than half (55%) of global lithium production last year originated in just one country: Australia. Other principal suppliers, such as Chile (23%), China (10%) and Argentina (8%), are equally far-flung.

•••••

The urgency in getting a lithium supply has unleashed a mining boom, and the race for “white oil” threatens to cause damage to the natural environment wherever it is found. But because they are helping to drive down emissions, the mining companies have EU environmental policy on their side.

“There’s a fundamental question behind all this about the model of consumption and production that we now have, which is simply not sustainable,” said Riofrancos. “Everyone having an electric vehicle means an enormous amount of mining, refining and all the polluting activities that come with it.”

•••••

Objectors say that where there is profit to be made, local environmental impacts are almost always overlooked. The same dilemma has set back international climate talks for decades, said Harjeet Singh, global climate lead for the campaign group ActionAid. The global north wants stricter emissions targets; the global south wants economic development now, and reasonably feels that the burden of tackling the climate crisis should fall on the post-industrial societies primarily responsible for causing it. “Green technologies are essential for the transition to renewable energy,” Singh said, “but they are not without negative impacts [and] we need to ensure these don’t always fall on the poorest and most marginalised communities.”

•••••

Mental accounting is impacting sustainable behavior

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-10/udg-mai101320.php

News Release 13-Oct-2020onsumption and carbon emissions.
Université de Genève

Mental accounting is a concept that describes the mental processes we employ to organise our resource use. Human beings tend to create separate mental budget compartments where specific acts of consumption and payments are linked. This mechanism can be counter-productive when it comes to energy consumption and can have a negative impact on attempts to reduce carbon emissions.


•••••

Mental accounting, a concept known by psychology researchers since the 1980s, describes how the human mind functions when performing acts of consumption. For instance, someone who has bought a cinema ticket in advance but who cannot find it on entering the cinema will typically not buy a second ticket: their film budget has already been spent! This example illustrates our tendency to mentally segment our budgets and link them to specific acts of consumption.

•••••

The spillover effect refers to the fact that we tend to justify one behaviour by another of our behaviours. «Someone who makes the effort to cycle to work every day will use this argument to justify, to himself or others, buying a plane ticket to go on holiday to the Seychelles

•••••

The rebound effect explains how actions can induce a negative energy balance when people fail to adapt their budgets to a new situation. For example, people who buy an energy-efficient car may feel inclined to use it more often, cancelling out potential energy savings. To tackle this phenomenon, the psychologists suggest informing people about the real energy costs of their new car so they can update their consumption budget.

•••••

How affluent people can end their mindless overconsumption

https://www.vox.com/21450911/climate-change-coronavirus-greta-thunberg-flying-degrowth

By Jag Bhalla and Eliza Barclay Updated Oct 12, 2020, 8:47am EDT 

Every energy reduction we can make is a gift to future humans, and all life on Earth.

If 2020 teaches us anything, it’s that the next crisis we could have prevented is probably right around the corner, and it will be painful. A pandemic that scientists warned was very likely to occur arrived and has already killed well over 214,000 people in the US. Dozens of predicted, large wildfires — the latest evidence of the climate emergency — are torching the American West, their smoke more damaging to health than almost any fire season on record.

But it’s not too late to intervene and limit climate chaos.

A recent paper in Nature Communications clarifies whose actions in this moment are “central to any future prospect of retreating to safer environmental conditions.” Yes, government and industry leaders are on the hook to decarbonize operations and infrastructure. But it’s also the affluent who use far more resources than the poor — more energy and more material goods per capita than the planet can sustain.

“Highly affluent consumers drive biophysical resource use (a) directly through high consumption, (b) as members of powerful factions of the capitalist class and (c) through driving consumption norms across the population,” the authors write.

The rich or merely affluent, it turns out, are actually the ones blowing through the world’s carbon budget — the maximum amount of cumulative emissions that can be added to the atmosphere to hit the Paris agreement’s 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming goal.

According to a September report from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute, the richest 10 percent of the world’s population — those who earned $38,000 per year or more as of 2015 — were responsible for 52 percent of cumulative carbon emissions and ate up 31 percent of the world’s carbon budget from 1990 to 2015.

Meanwhile, the richest 1 percent of people — who made $109,000 or more per year in 2015 — alone were responsible for 15 percent of cumulative emissions, and used 9 percent of the carbon budget. The rapidly accelerating growth in total emissions worldwide isn’t mainly about an improvement in quality of life for the poorer half of the world’s population, either. Instead, the report finds, “nearly half the growth has merely allowed the already wealthy top 10 percent to augment their consumption and enlarge their carbon footprints.”

In sum, as the report’s lead author Tim Gore, head of climate policy at Oxfam, said in a statement, “The over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fueling the climate crisis yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price.”

•••••

Permanently reducing air travel, driving, home energy use, food waste, and shopping to protect our kids and grandkids from climate chaos need not lead to any reduction in quality of life. In fact, it may even go a long way toward improving it (for ourselves and others). As Vox’s Sigal Samuel reported in June, the top change readers she surveyed said they wanted to maintain after quarantine was “reducing consumerism.” “A long period of being shut in and not spending as much has led to the realization that so much of our consumer behavior is about instant gratification, not lasting happiness,” she writes.

•••••

We usually have options where we can choose to have more or less climate impact. Every time we choose more and not less, we’re imposing compounding burdens on others and on our descendants. Our choices will determine whether the future is “merely grim, rather than apocalyptic,” as New York’s David Wallace-Wells writes in his book The Uninhabitable Earth.

Restrained consumption is also a way to prevent the deepening of racial and economic injustice and inequality — low-income people and people of color are among the first to lose the most in climate disasters. Working toward justice means being a resource-responsible consumer.

•••••

With all this in mind, here are five potential resource-responsible actions to commit to, in no particular order:

1.     Drive and fly less, since the top 10 percent uses around 45 percent of land transport energy and 75 percent of air transport energy, per a 2020 paper by Steinberger in Nature Energy.
   
   
2.     Retrofit your house and purchase clean energy, since roughly 20 percent of US energy-related greenhouse gas emissions come from heating, cooling, and powering households.
   
   
3.     Buy food mindfully (less meat and dairy, don’t waste what you buy), since meat and dairy account for around 14.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization.
   
   
4.     Shop less, since the fashion industry generates at least 5 percent of global emissions.
   
   
5.     Ditch status-signaling SUVs, since SUVs were the second-largest source of the global rise in emissions over the past decade, eclipsing all shipping, aviation, heavy industry, and even trucks.

•••••

one of the most robust findings in social science, according to economist Robert Frank at Cornell, is the research on how emotional well-being doesn’t improve above an annual (individual) income of $75,000.

•••••

As Hickel wrote in June in Foreign Policy:

    Ecologists say that the planet can handle maximum annual resource use of about 50 billion metric tons per year. We crossed that planetary boundary in the late 1990s, and today we’re overshooting it by more than 90 percent. This is what’s driving ecological breakdown: Every additional ton of material extraction has an impact on the planet’s ecosystems.

The outer limit works out to be about 6 metric tons per human per year. The current US average is 35 metric tons, with those toward the top of the income scale consuming vastly more. This means there is no avoiding the urgent need for deep cuts in energy and material use in rich nations, especially among those countries’ richest citizens. 

•••••

Plug-in hybrids are a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'Plug-in hybrids are a 'wolf in sheep's clothing'

https://news.yahoo.com/plug-hybrids-wolf-sheeps-clothing-094954396.html

BBC•September 16, 2020

Carbon dioxide emissions from plug-in hybrid cars are as much as two-and-a-half times higher than official tests suggest, according to new research.

Plug-in hybrid vehicles are powered by an electric motor using a battery that is recharged by being plugged in or via an on-board petrol or diesel engine.

They account for 3% of new car sales.

•••••

According to this data-set the lifetime emissions of a plug-in hybrid average around 28 tonnes of CO2.

By comparison, the average petrol or diesel car is estimated to emit between 39 and 41 tonnes of CO2 from fuel during its lifetime, a conventional hybrid would typically emit more like 33 tonnes.

•••••

Trump seeks to fast-track dozens of fossil fuel projects during pandemic

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/sep/03/trump-fast-track-fossil-fuel-projects-during-pandemic

 Emily Holden in Washington

Thu 3 Sep 2020 13.24 EDT

The Trump administration has identified dozens of major fossil fuel, energy and water projects that could be fast-tracked by expediting environmental reviews amid the pandemic, according to internal government documents.

At least 19 of the projects are from companies that have spent a total of $16m lobbying the interior department since early 2017, according to an analysis by the conservation group the Center for Western Priorities. ConocoPhillips spent $11.2m of that amount lobbying the department, including on plans to drill for oil and gas within the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska, the group said.

•••••

Alternative cooling strategies could mitigate COVID-19 and climate change

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-08/pues-acs081820.php

 

News Release 18-Aug-2020
Princeton University, Engineering School

 

When most people think of cooling, they automatically imagine air conditioning (AC), or cooling the air in a room. But, there is a much more efficient way to cool people, using your body's radiation.

To demonstrate the effect of radiant cooling, Forrest Meggers, assistant professor of architecture and the Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, and a team of researchers built a "Cold Tube," in Singapore last year. It was an outdoor pavilion lined with novel insulated radiant panels that held cold water pipes inside. Because your body is constantly exchanging radiation with objects around you, and radiation flows from hot to cool surfaces, the participants who walked through the exhibit shed their radiation toward the panels, similar to what would happen if you stood near a freezer. The participants reported feeling cool, despite the air itself having temperature and humidity levels that would ordinarily feel sweltering. The new research showed that people could feel comfortable in hot and humid outdoor environments using only radiant cooling, which could use far less energy than cooling large volumes of air.


•••••

This system uses at least 50% less energy than a comparably-sized air conditioner. Letting the air warm up by five degrees while cooling surfaces, can lower energy demand by up to 40% and maintain occupant comfort. Allowing even hotter air temperatures would result in higher energy savings.

•••••

Most of my coauthors and I have traveled around Southeast Asia and have seen firsthand how quickly AC units have been deployed at scale. Adding AC window or split units to buildings is done with little contemplation of the effects on surface temperatures, and the climate and heat in a city. The units work by rejecting the heat from the air in a room to the outside. Rejecting heat outside the buildings, along the façade, leads to sidewalks and areas around buildings becoming very hot, and many spaces becoming unusable. Our technology does exactly the opposite; it provides opportunities to regain thermal acceptability in various parts of the city without having to build a huge park. You can install these cooling panels outside in hot and humid environments, and build "cool havens" where people can gather, eat, and play.

•••••

Giant oil company is building world's largest facility to turn vegetable oil and grease into cleaner gasoline

https://thehill.com/changing-america/sustainability/energy/511733-phillips-66-to-convert-crude-oil-refinery-into-worlds?fbclid=IwAR3lvIKQRvwFLUfB3XFs4DwiKMAOLY96ya35r0QPAomBClODJTjy6UjR48k

By Joseph Guzman | August 12, 2020

Fuel maker Phillips 66 is moving to convert a San Francisco-area crude oil refinery into the world’s largest renewable fuels plant by early 2024, the company announced Wednesday.

The facility located in Rodeo, Calif., will be reconfigured to no longer produce fuels from crude oil and instead produce renewable fuel from used cooking oil, fats, greases and soybean oils.

The company said it expects to produce 680 million gallons a year of renewable diesel and gasoline and sustainable jet fuel. When combined with production from an existing smaller sustainable fuels project, the facility could produce more than 800 million gallons of renewable fuels each year by 2024, pending regulatory approval.

The conversion is expected to cut the plant’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent.

•••••

Rich Americans’ homes generate 25% more greenhouse gasses than those less affluent

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/21/rich-americans-homes-greenhouse-gasses-energy


Oliver Milman
Tue 21 Jul 2020 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Tue 21 Jul 2020 06.01 EDT

The homes of wealthy Americans are major engines of the climate crisis, research has found, with the United States’ most affluent suburbs generating as much as 15 times the greenhouse gas emissions as nearby, poorer districts.

An analysis of 93m homes in the contiguous US found that the most energy intensive dwellings, per square foot, are found in Maine, Vermont and Wisconsin, while the least energy intensive are located in Florida, Arizona and California.

Mainly due to the larger size of homes owned by the wealthy, richer Americans are generating roughly 25% more greenhouse gasses through lighting, heating and cooling their residences than poorer people.

This disparity has significant implications for the climate crisis: about a fifth of US emissions comes from residential power use. Americans are particularly voracious users of energy, with the typical person in the US using more than 30 times the amount of electricity at home than the average person in India.

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Congress Investigates How Marathon Petroleum and Koch Network Influenced Clean Cars Rollbacks

https://www.desmogblog.com/2020/05/29/congress-investigation-marathon-koch-oil-clean-car-rollbacks?fbclid=IwAR3wS9C8WIXpT-8WezsNKUGfu2xt_8B1LJr-5VOvPj2D5YLTUqhvLBnaxas

By Dana Drugmand • Friday, May 29, 2020 - 12:45

On Thursday, May 28, several Democratic members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, along with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), sent a letter to Marathon Petroleum seeking information on the oil company’s involvement in the Trump administration’s rollback of clean car standards. The Congressmembers are also investigating Marathon’s coordination with, and financial ties to, various free-market groups and whether those relationships are compatible with the groups’ tax-exempt status.

The letter follows an October 29, 2019 House Oversight Environment Subcommittee hearing on oil industry influence in the vehicle fuel economy rollback, and comes one day after 23 states and the District of Columbia filed a lawsuit challenging the rollback.

The Trump administration’s Safer Affordable Fuel Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, finalized on March 31, weakens greenhouse gas emission regulations and corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards from a 5 percent annual increase to 1.5 percent yearly increase. Under the new rule, fuel efficiency for new cars and light trucks would decrease from 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025 to 40 miles per gallon. Laxer fuel economy standards means vehicles will consume more gasoline, which explicitly benefits the oil industry. According to Senator Whitehouse’s testimony during the House Oversight hearing last fall, the Obama-era clean car standards were expected to save Americans $1.7 trillion dollars in fuel savings, which is lost revenue for oil companies like Marathon.

As the members of Congress write in their letter to Marathon President and CEO Michael J. Hennigan, the weakening of the clean car standards “raises serious questions about whether the Trump Administration is endangering the health and safety of the American people for the sake of higher profits for oil companies.”

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“Given the large number of tax exempt, non-profit organizations that appear to have been activated in support of the oil industry’s campaign to weaken emissions standards, we have questions about the relationship between industry and these organizations, as well as whether their operations are consistent with their tax exempt status,” Sen. Whitehouse and Reps. Harley Rouda, Carolyn B. Maloney, and Rashida Tlaib wrote in their letter to Marathon. Maloney is chair of the House Oversight Committee, while Rouda is chair, and Tlaib vice chair, of the Environment subcommittee.

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America's Renewable Energy Sources Have Produced More Electricity Than Coal Every Day for 40 Days Straight

https://www.newsweek.com/america-renewable-energy-electricity-generation-tops-coal-plants-april-2020-40-days-1501967?fbclid=IwAR1ehXfwrcVQwBGKaZxh9KhDf9-PqSlLB-1jyWgR8wrDeWOQs7I2TqQPZ18

By Jason Murdock On 5/5/20 at 6:39 AM EDT

Renewable sources including solar, wind and hydropower generated more electricity than coal-based plants every single day in April, a new report says.

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The move away from coal for electricity generation in the U.S. accelerated in 2020 due to lower gas prices, warmer weather and a "significant amount" of new renewable capacity being connected to the grid late last year, the report suggested.

It acknowledged that lower power demands resulting from economic slowdown sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic has also played a role in coal's decline.

Preliminary data from the EIA's Hourly Electric Grid Monitor found that utility-scale solar, wind and hydro had collectively produced more electricity than coal-based plants for roughly 40 days straight, based on statistics between March 25 and May 3.

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Fossil fuel firms linked to Trump get millions in coronavirus small business aid

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/01/fossil-fuel-firms-coronavirus-package-aid

Emily Holden in Washington
Fri 1 May 2020 08.16 EDT

US fossil fuel companies have taken at least $50m in taxpayer money they probably won’t have to pay back, according to a review of coronavirus aid meant for struggling small businesses by the investigative research group Documented and the Guardian.

A total of $28m is going to three coal mining companies, all with ties to Trump officials, bolstering a dying American industry and a fuel that scientists insist world leaders must shift away from to avoid the worst of the climate crisis.

The other $22m is being paid out to oil and gas services and equipment providers and other firms that work with drillers and coal miners.

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More than 40 Democratic lawmakers have argued that fossil fuel companies should not get any assistance under the coronavirus aid package.

Some Democrats have also warned the forgivable loans being made under Congress’ Paycheck Protection Program could be a transparency disaster.

Banks and lending institutions are distributing the money, so the government says it cannot track recipients in real time. The loans revealed have been made public only through news reports and securities filings by publicly-traded companies, although the Federal Reserve has committed to issuing monthly reports.

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The industry aid comes as the Trump administration is reportedly considering a broader bailout for oil and gas corporations, which were already under pressure before the coronavirus and have watched oil prices nosedive because of a global price war and low demand for gasoline. The US government could make loans to oil and gas companies, essentially making taxpayers investors in the industry.

The Federal Reserve on Thursday also announced changes to its lending rules that could help indebted petroleum firms.

“The idea that oil workers are getting a paycheck is great,” said Jamie Henn, a spokesman for the Stop the Money Pipeline campaign who co-founded the environment group 350.org. “The worry is that the money’s going to the top and not going to filter down.”

The $50m already paid to fossil fuel companies is a small fraction of the the $2.1tn Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act, known as the Cares Act. But the total assistance to the industry is likely much larger than can currently be tallied and will continue to grow.

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