Three weeks before the start of the Paris climate talks, negotiators working to craft an international agreement to curb global greenhouse gas emissions are staring into a wide gulf between what countries are willing to do and what they need to do. Most countries have stepped up with pledges to meaningfully cut carbon emissions or to at least slow the growth of emission totals between 2020 and 2030. However, national commitments fall short of what’s needed to prevent the average global temperature in 2100 from being any more than 2 degrees Celsius warmer than at the start of this century—the international community’s consensus benchmark for climate impact. Worse still, national pledges employ a hodgepodge of accounting methods that include some significant loopholes that ignore important emissions such as leaking methane from U.S. oil and gas production and underreported coal emissions from China. How promised reductions will be verified post-Paris is “a big debate right now and it makes a massive difference in the numbers,” says Jennifer Morgan, global director for the climate program at the World Resources Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based non-governmental organization.
Solar Towers Not Avian Annihilators
Solar power towers have had a reputation as alleged avian vaporizers since preliminary reports of birds being burned in mid-air at California’s Ivanpah solar thermal plant. Their reputation was muddied even more during tests early this year at SolarReserve’s Crescent Dunes power tower, whose intense beams of reflected light recently began generating power in Nevada. California public radio station KCET reported that as many as 150 birds were killed during one six-hour test in January. It is obviously upsetting to imagine birds ignited in the name of renewable energy. But avian mortality is a downside common to many modern human creations—including buildings, highways, and powerlines. Full data on bird mortality at Ivanpah, macabre as it might be, shows the death rate to be small and likely of little ecological significance. “The data does support a low level of avian mortalities and hopefully, through adaptive management and deterrence, it will go even lower,” says Magdalena Rodriguez, a senior environmental scientist with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. Continue reading “Solar Towers Not Avian Annihilators”
Startup Time for Fukushima’s Frozen Wall
Japan’s TEPCO — operator of the stricken Fukushima nuclear power plant — is about to flip the switch on its infamous ‘ice wall’ intended to divert flowing groundwater around its crippled reactors and thus stem groundwater contamination at the site. The widely mischaracterized and maligned installation—which is a barrier of frozen soil rather than a wall of ice—has every chance of delivering the hoped for results, according to radiation cleanup experts at U.S. national laboratories and feedback from initial system tests. “The frozen barrier is going to work,” predicts Brian Looney, senior advisory engineer at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Savannah River National Laboratory in South Carolina and co-author of an independent assessment of TEPCO’s frozen barrier. Continue reading “Startup Time for Fukushima’s Frozen Wall”
First Place Finish for Outstanding Reporting on the Environment
Time to toot my horn. The Society of Environmental Journalists has honoured my work in their 2015 Awards for Reporting on the Environment. I took first place in Outstanding Beat Reporting, Large Market, for “History, Technology, Politics and Impact of Solar Power” — a series of articles published in MIT Technology Review and IEEE Spectrum magazines:
“Can Japan Recapture Its Solar Power?”
“Topaz Turns On 9 Million Solar Panels”
“Hawaii’s Solar Push Strains the Grid”
“How Rooftop Solar Can Stabilize the Grid” Continue reading “First Place Finish for Outstanding Reporting on the Environment”
Might That Emperor of Electricity, the Power Grid, Have No Clothes?
Distributed energy solutions, such as rooftop solar, should be the electrification solution for the 1.1 billion people who are not plugged into a national power grid, not just a stopgap measure. That is the message from a new global industry group, Power for All, that brings together businesses and NGOs that distribute off-grid solar systems. They say bottom-up distributed energy solutions are faster, cleaner, and cheaper than extending power grids to rugged or sparsely-populated regions. Figures released this week by the joint UN-World Bank energy access program—Sustainable Energy for All—lend credence to their argument. Continue reading “Might That Emperor of Electricity, the Power Grid, Have No Clothes?”
Hawaii Says ‘Aloha’ to 100% Renewable Power
Hawaii’s legislature voted yesterday to stake the state’s future on renewable energy. According to House Bill 623, the archipelago’s power grids must deliver 100 percent renewable electricity by the end of 2045. If the compromise bill is signed by the governor as expected, Hawaii will become the first U.S. state to set a date for the total decarbonization of its power supply. Renewable energy has been booming. Between 2008 and 2013, renewable energy jumped from 7.5 percent to 18 percent of the state’s capacity. HB623 seeks to extend and turbo-boost that trend, calling for 30 percent renewables in 2020 and 70 percent by 2030 en route to the final leap to 100 percent. That last jump could be difficult, says Peter Crouch, a power grid simulation expert and dean of engineering at the University of Hawaii’s flagship Manoa campus. “Today I don’t know whether we can do it,” he says. Continue reading “Hawaii Says ‘Aloha’ to 100% Renewable Power”
NRC Resisting Europe’s Nuclear Safety Upgrades
Nuclear power plants’ reactor pressure vessels —the massive steel jars that hold a nuclear plant’s fissioning fuel—face incessant abuse from their radioactive contents. And they must be built with extra toughness to withstand pressure and temperature swings during loss-of-cooling accidents like the one that struck Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011. But nuclear safety authorities have recently discovered weaknesses in several pressure vessels, and their contrasting responses suggest that the ultimate lessons from Fukushima are still sinking into international nuclear power culture. This is especially true in the United States, where the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is resisting calls to mandate tougher inspection of RPVs. Continue reading “NRC Resisting Europe’s Nuclear Safety Upgrades”
