An excellent presentation from über successful dropout from Harvard University and Oxford University, Dr Amory Lovins, at University of California at Berkeley:
Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Amory Lovins, 2008: `Natural Capitalism: The Next Industrial Revolution with Amory Lovins`
Posted in Adam Smith, affordable mass goods, American Association for the Advancement of Science, Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to somewhere, capitalism, climate economics, destructive economic development, ecological services, ecology, Ecology Action, economic trade, economics, environment, ILSR, internal inconsistency, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, population biology, population dynamics, quantitative biology, resource producitivity, solid waste management, stranded assets, supply chains, sustainability, the green century, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, transparency
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Saving the World: Jacobson, Chu, with DiCaprio, at Stanford
(The above video is intended to start at time second 2051 or at 34 minutes. WordPress is sometimes funny about that. Apologies if not.)
Posted in Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, Arnold Schwarzennegger, Bill Nye, BNEF, Buckminster Fuller, clean disruption, climate disruption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, distributed generation, Hyper Anthropocene, Mark Jacobson, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Stanford University, Stephen Chu, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon, ``The tide is risin'/And so are we''
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Carbon Worshipers and Worship
Linking Michael Klare’s piece at Resilience: The Cult of Carbon.
There’s agitation and angst in some circles regarding the proper term to dub individuals who, however technical their training, reject the conclusions of climate science, physics, and even Exxon from the 1970s.
There’s denial, skepticism, and rejection as terms which might be applied to those who reject climate science. These can be preceded by climate or science as one wishes. The angst is over which is the most appropriate. For good reasons, people, apart from the “deniers” themselves, have rejected “skepticism”. Skepticism is a healthy part of all scientific and intellectual inquiry. For this reason, and for example, the Associated Press will no longer, as matter of policy, refer to “climate deniers” as “skeptics”.
For me science rejectionist sounds like the best all ’round description if that groove is worth remaining in. My reasons? As I wrote in a comment to Science Denial Crock of…
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On Hoarding Electrons
I was once scolded by an energy wonk and political progressive at a semi-public forum for suggesting people “hoard electrons”. That is, instead of being grid connected, there seemed to me to be situations where becoming as independent of the electrical grid as possible with solar and storage was the right thing to do.
Now, don’t get me wrong: While, to me, the ideal situation is a highly distributed, decentralized grid, I expect and hope people can and will share with their neighbors, towns, and regions. I just don’t see a centralized, ISO-NE-managed grid as having a future.
However, while I think people should share with their neighbors and the present-day grid, they should not be penalized for doing so. Unfortunately, this is what is being done in some regions in the United States and the recent rate proposal by Massachusetts Eversource does essentially that: It does not return the value of the full benefit to the grid of residential and small commercial PV to the owners of the PV, penalizing them instead. Eversource claims, as all these utilities doing this do, that the PV owners are benefitting from the grid, maintained and paid for by non-PV owners, and, accordingly, should bear a bigger burden of grid costs. This means that rather than one-one net metering, the value returned to owners for generation is less than the cost of consumption. There are plenty of studies indicating the value of solar to the grid is actually more than one-one, and, technically, a PV owner should get compensated more than what they are charged for a kilowatt-hour. (See another, and another, and another.) This benefit varies throughout the day and, so, time-varying rates are the fairest way of assessing costs and assigning benefits. Local utilities whine and complain that such a system is expensive to roll out and they should be compensated and rewarded for doing so. (National Grid appears to be an exception.) Fine, then use some average which can be updated every couple of years.
But, should Eversource or any other utility do this, my answer is that, indeed, people should hoard electrons. If leadership like ISO-NE’s Gordon van Welie can only see a grid-centric zero Carbon electrical system, which is suggested by his claim that such a system is only practical if there is “seasonal storage” available, then the “markets”, which Mr van Welie and others so cherish, should respond in the way markets do, and pursue grid defection at a local level. Perhaps, some day, when ISO-NE or its replacement is kinder to people who have invested capital to create PV sources, subsidized, no doubt by federal and local incentives, they’ll think about reconnecting. Such defection is facilitated and incentivized by a burgeoning set of technical suppliers who are selling to disillusioned grid customers the means whereby they can leave. There are also even turnkey packages available. (See also.) And it’s possible, except in the most extreme cases, to make a sense for defecting most of one’s load off-grid. The extreme cases are rare proposals by utilities to penalize a solar PV residence $20 a month for being grid-tied. (Stupid.) The rationales offered by utilities have been seriously criticized.
Claire Anderson writes in Homepower what it takes to do this. Note that’s a 2015 article, and the price outlook for solar PV and storage batteries has markedly improved since that time.
We store a lot of solar electricity in the form of hot water ourselves.
Posted in American Solar Energy Society, Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, conservation, Debbie Dooley, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, distributed generation, economics, electrical energy storage, electricity, electricity markets, energy efficiency, energy storage, energy utilities, engineering, Green Tea Coalition, green tech, grid defection, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, ILSR, investment in wind and solar energy, Joseph Schumpeter, Michael Osborne, microgrids, public utility commissions, rate of return regulation, RevoluSun, Sankey diagram, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Stanford University, SunPower, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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The South Shore Recycling Cooperative can save you money!
Abington, Cohasset, Duxbury, Hanover, Hanson, Hingham, Hull, Kingston, Middleboro, Norwell, Plymouth, Rockland, Scituate, Weymouth, Whitman
Join ’em. Ask your town governors on the South Shore to check ’em out. It’s your tax dollars wasted if you don’t. What your town gets.
And here’s the problem, from a recent paper in Science:
From Geyer, Jambeck, Law, “Production, use, and fate of all plastics ever made”, Science Advances, 19 Jul 2017: 3(7), e1700782, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1700782
Posted in Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, argoecology, coastal communities, composting, destructive economic development, ecological services, ecology, economics, environment, environmental law, Equiterre, Hyper Anthropocene, John Farrell, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local self reliance, oceanography, Our Children's Trust, pollution, recycling, Sankey diagram, sociology, South Shore Recycling Cooperative, stranded assets, sustainability, the green century, UU Needham
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“Energy is at the core of all these things”
Energy and water.
Update, 2017-07-19: The Solver
Elon Musk at the National Governors Association conference last week:
- It is possible to supply every electron needed to keep America humming by covering just 100 square miles with solar panels.
- “The batteries you need to store the energy, to make sure you have 24/7 power, is 1 mile by 1 mile. One square mile. That’s it.”
- “People talk about fusion and all that, but the sun is a giant fusion reactor in the sky. It’s really reliable. It comes up every day.”
- “We’ll need to be a combination of utility-scale solar and rooftop solar, combined with wind, geothermal, hydro, probably some nuclear for a while, in order to transition to a sustainable situation”
- “People do not like transmission lines going through their neighborhood, they really don’t like that, and I agree”
- “Rooftop solar, utility solar — that’s really going to be a solution from the physics standpoint. I can’t really see another way to really do it.”
You can watch the keynote below:
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, biofuels, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, bridge to nowhere, climate disruption, climate economics, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, distributed generation, ecological services, Ecology Action, environment, environmental law, fossil fuel infrastructure, global warming, green tech, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local self reliance, methane, natural gas, Spaceship Earth, Stanford University, the problem of evil, the right to be and act stupid, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, water as a resource
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Schroders asset management forecasts global warming of more than +4℃
(Updated Thursday, 27 July 2017)
Schroders is a global asset management firm. They very recently issued a warning that current global trends put the planet on track for more than +4℃ warming.
The full news brief, from them, is available here.
They also offer an assessment of the impact of climate change on the global economy.
Andy Howard, Head of Sustainable Research [at Schroders], led the work on the dashboard. Here, he explains why it was developed:
“Climate change will be a defining driver of the global economy, society and financial markets over coming years, decades and beyond. While the issue has moved up investment agendas, the change in strategies has not kept pace.
“The danger is that investors think the problem is being tackled, and that their exposure to climate change risks is reduced, when this is not necessarily the case.
“We developed the Climate Progress Dashboard as part of our efforts to manage the risks and identify the opportunities climate change presents. It provides an objective and transparent view of change to help investors base decisions on the outcomes that are likely, rather than those they would like to see.
“It’s worth noting the dashboard is a snapshot of where we stand, not a forecast of where we will end. We are in the early stages of changes that will play out over several decades. Estimates could change quickly with small changes in direction over coming years.
“As a result, the dashboard conclusions must be seen as measures of the paths we are currently on, rather than conclusions on where we will end up.”
Comments
While the assessment is, I believe, basically sound, I think the Standard and Poors projection on impacts which they quote (see below) is overly optimistic about impacts for the United States and northern Europe. I do not have quantitative evidence right now to back that up. However, to the degree to which U.S. businesses and residents depend upon extended supply chains for their sources, shipments, and intermediate products, as well as delivery, food, fuel, and so on suggests to be a much larger than nominal exposure to inclement weather and other disruptions which could arise in a +3℃ or +4℃ world. That is, and disaster planning backs this up, to the degree to which communities are locally self-sufficient is the degree to which they are resilient, in economics and living conditions.
Update, 2017-07-27
The Final Report giving recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures was issued in June 2017. Some highlights of the presentation introducing it:
And its members:
Posted in adaptation, Anthropocene, Buckminster Fuller, climate business, climate disruption, climate economics, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporate supply chains, disingenuity, dynamical systems, economics, environmental law, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, global blinding, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investments, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, Schroders, sea level rise, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, temporal myopia, the right to be and act stupid, the show, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon, zero carbon
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The Myth of Baseload Power (Amory Lovins)
Posted in Amory Lovins, Anthropocene, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, Buckminster Fuller, capitalism, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, design science, distributed generation, economics, energy efficiency, energy reduction, environment, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, ILSR, integrative design, John Farrell, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, microgrids, petroleum, reasonableness, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Spaceship Earth, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the right to know, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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A “capacity for sustained muddle-headedness”
Hat tip to Paul Lauenstein, and his physician brother, suggesting the great insights of the late Dr Larry Weed:
Great lines, great quotes, a lot of humor:
- “… a tolerance of ambiguity …”
- “Y’know, Pavlov said you must teach a graduate student gradualness”
- “… a final diagnosis is a myth …”
- “… there were getting more information on what they did than what they had …”
- “If you cannot evaluate what you’re doing, then there is a very serious possibility that you do not know what you are doing.”
- ”… they played `Sherlock Holmes’ too early. They asked the first question, and then the next question would be determined by the first question, because they were brought up in a CPC sort of atmosphere. `What do you think of next, doctor?”’
Unfortunately, it’s not clear medicine — or statistics — has progressed much beyond 1971. Note the 1999 report from the National Academy of Sciences,
To Err is Human.
The last quote reminds me of something I was taught in graduate school (in 1973, noting the above video is from 1971), when I took 6.871, Knowledge-based application systems, and medical decision support was covered as a subject. I distinctly recall that problems of software-physician interaction during the patient interview centered about the comparatively unstructured way which physicians gathered information, that they could not be constrained to using a diagnostic or taxonomic key as is popular in, say, Botany. The thought crossed my mind at the time, that “How do we know if the approach the physicians are using are the most effective?” However, being a student, and knowing next to nothing about diagnostic medicine, I suppressed my doubts and took the advice as definitive. Given Dr Weed’s comments, I should have been more assertive with my doubts. And, unfortunately and apparently, these methods of practice which Dr Weed criticized have gotten ingrained in decision support software for medicine. See E. H. Shortliffe, “Computer programs to support clinical decision making”, Journal of the American Medical Association, 258, 61-66, for their status as of 1986, some 15 years after Weed’s talk.
Incidentally, while I have found two additional references by medical authors to the title phrase of this post attributed by them to Alfred North Whitehead, that is, claims that Whitehead mentioned a “capacity for sustained muddle-headedness”. My online research has failed to turn up that reference. The closest I can find is a mention by Lomax in an article in the Journal of Psychiatric Practice, 17(1), January 2011, on page 46 where he quotes Whitehead from Whitehead’s 1938 book Modes of Thought where Lomax writes
Alfred Whitehead said that the job of the philosopher was “living with sustained muddle-headedness”.
Whitehead liked the term muddle-headed, even applying it to himself. I doubt he ever meant it, however, in exactly the way Dr Weed and colleagues used it.
Posted in American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Statistical Association, anemic data, Bayesian, cardiovascular system, David Spiegelhalter, machine learning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, medicine, Paul Lauenstein, rationality, reason, reasonableness, risk, statistics
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“Explosive methane will create two million jobs!”
The American Petroleum Institute has trotted out a commissioned study claiming an increase of two million jobs in 2040 off a base of four million (in 2015).
First, these are not people working with development or distribution of natural gas. 44% are “end user” workers, that is, someone someplace who works to “… convert natural gas and its associated liquids to electricity, petrochemical and other products and the industries that manufacture, sell, install and maintain gas-fired appliances and equipment used in the residential, commercial, vehicle and industrial sectors”. (API, “Key Observations and Findings”) The implication is that if natural gas went away, so would these 44% of jobs. That is not correct. The report further defines these as
The largest NAICS codes associated with the end-use segment are Chemical Manufacturing, Gas-fired Electric Power Generation, Power Boiler and Heat Exchanger Manufacturing, Household Appliance Repair and Maintenance, and Industrial Process Furnace and Oven Manufacturing. The end-use segment also includes portions of the jobs related to Industrial Equipment and Machinery Repair and Maintenance, Industrial Construction, Freight Trucks, Turbine and Turbine Generator Set Manufacturing, Iron and Steel Pipe and Tube Manufacturing, and Freight Rail.
While it is not clear what “largest” means here, nevertheless there is no notion of substitution or displacement. The natural gas industry is really responsible for jobs in “Household Appliance Repair and Maintenance” and “Chemical Manufacturing”?
Second, 30% of the claimed jobs are in fact directly associated with natural gas mining, production and distribution. These are fully tied to natural gas.
Third, 25% of the claimed jobs consist “…of oil and gas production companies and their suppliers of goods and services…”, or, to quote their NAICS descriptions,
The largest NAICS Codes primarily associated with the production segment include Support Activities for Oil and Gas Operations, Crude Petroleum and Natural Gas Extraction, Drilling Oil and Gas Wells, and Oil and Gas Field Machinery Manufacturing.
Natural gas can be credited with all of these jobs?
Fourth, the study limited itself to 2015-2016 natural gas growth scenarios, and cherry-picked data from the U.S. EIA Annual Energy Outlook for those years. In particular, here are the case studies the report chose:
In contrast, EIA AEO scenarios from 2017 show some projections with flat natural gas consumption, per:
Presumably because there is no increase in use of natural gas, there is also no increase in numbers of jobs.
So, I conclude, in a best case scenario, about 600,000 jobs could be added by 2040 for which the natural gas industry is responsible, and perhaps another 200,000, dependending upon how the other categories are counted. There is no allocation that I can see to jobs fixing existing pipeline infrastructure, which don’t increase as production does. The method used to make these projections, as far as I can tell, is using linear fits based upon historical employment numbers.
Incidentally, the API report contains an interesting Appendix B which compares the jobs intensity for construction of natural gas plants, nuclear, coal, onshore wind, and two types of solar, sourcing modules from the U.S. or China. While there are plenty of examples of unfair comparison in that Appendix, including failing to account for additional decrease in price for solar modules between now and 2040, the study produces the result that for new wind, solar, and natural gas construction, the job creation intensity is about the same. For some reason they excluded offshore wind.
Finally, as I’ve noted before, there is nothing natural about natural gas. It is explosive methane. Natural gas ain’t granola.
Posted in American Petroleum Institute, Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, disingenuity, economics, EIA, emissions, explosive methane, false advertising, fossil fuels, gas pipeline leaks, Hyper Anthropocene, methane, natural gas, petroleum, pipelines, the right to be and act stupid, the show, the tragedy of our present civilization, tragedy of the horizon
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Solar Costs at `Jaw-Dropping Lows`; `No Evidence That Changing Power Mix Endangers Electric System Reliability`
`Solar Moves in a Curious Direction Since Trump Quit Paris Deal: Up‘
There is “[n]o evidence that the changing power mix endangers electric system reliability”. Two reports:
- Advancing past baseload to a flexible grid
- Electricity Markets, Reliability and
the Evolving U.S. Power System
Also see Bigger is Not Better: Grid Modernization and the Antiquated Concept of ‘Baseload’, and in particular the comment by Gene Grindle to that post.
And “Henbest: Energy to 2040 — Faster Shift to Clean, Dynamic, Distributed”:
As some of the coal and nuclear plants face retirement decisions, focusing on their status as “baseload” generation is not a useful perspective for ensuring the cost-effective and reliable supply of electricity. Instead, system planners, market administrators such as regional effectively and efficiently defines and measures system needs and (b) develops planning tools, scheduling processes, and market mechanisms to elicit and compensate broad range of resources
that have become available to meet those needs. Fortunately, planners and operators have been hard at work at such innovations and have moved past the concept of “baseload” to focus on the attributes of resources and the services they provide to the system that help the modernized electricity system operate more reliably, efficiently, and nimbly. While coal and nuclear power plants—as well as a broad range of other resource types—are recognized for providing a wide range of reliability services to the grid, the traditional definition of power supply resource adequacy is being revisited by some system operators and planners. Still, additional work is needed in planning and markets to better recognize and compensate resources for the value they provide to the system, and to incorporate the environmental impacts of electricity generation, including resources’ ability to reduce the system’s greenhouse gas emissions, consistent with public policy goals.Coal and nuclear plants do not provide unique operational services that are specifically identified by or correlated with the term “baseload” generation. The term does not reflect the broader range of services that various resources can provide. As system planning and electricity market design are modernized, it is becoming increasingly clear that the services and attributes most under-recognized by today’s markets are greenhouse gas emissions in some jurisdictions and operational flexibility. A resource is considered flexible when it can react to operational signals to ramp its power generation up and down to help meet the needs of the system over multiple hours and minute-to-minute. Flexible resources can cost-effectively assist with meeting changing system loads and integrating the variable output of renewable resources. These flexibility needs are rapidly expanding as a result of numerous industry trends: (a) recognition by policymakers that renewable energy resources are needed to meet long-term emissions reductions goals; (b) customers’ increasing desire to voluntarily procure renewable energy or generate electricity on-site; and (c) substantial technological improvements that have driven down the cost of renewable resources to the point where, even before accounting for tax incentives, they are the lowest-cost option for new generating plants in some regions of the country.
(From Advancing Past “Baseload” to a Flexible Grid)
Posted in American Solar Energy Society, Anthropocene, Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, clean disruption, climate business, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, destructive economic development, distributed generation, Donald Trump, economics, electricity markets, engineering, force multiplier, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, Green Tech Media, grid defection, Hyper Anthropocene, ILSR, investment in wind and solar energy, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, microgrids, public utility commissions, reasonableness, Sankey diagram, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Spaceship Earth, stranded assets, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the right to be and act stupid, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Defying technology, trends … nay, defying Mathematics!
The creatures from Trumpland are planning an Energy Week in the upcoming, probably to lead up to the Fourth of July celebrations. Our Orange Leader
… will tout surging U.S. exports of oil and natural gas during a week of events aimed at highlighting the country’s growing energy dominance.
[He] also plans to emphasize that after decades of relying on foreign energy supplies, the U.S. is on the brink of becoming a net exporter of oil, gas, coal and other energy resources.
(Brief excerpt from the Bloomberg article on the subject)
Trouble is, this defies trends and the cost curves of wind and especially solar technology, as noted by Bloomberg New Energy Finance and Lazard. Worse, as energy supplies are more constrained in their sources and demand more exotic methods to extract, either the price per unit needs to increase, or there needs to be a greater subsidy from the federal government. Fossil fuels in the USA already receive huge subsidies: Consider the FERC-directed eminent domain takings which pipeline companies receive, rather than having to buy the land their pipes cross and despoil. (In contrast, consider what Amtrak has to do for its rights of way.) As additional supplies of fossil fuel are dumped into the marketplace, prices are depressed, especially explosive methane (“Natural gas ain’t granola”).
Worse, their prices are at best constant, and, over time, increase are the reserves get rarer, whereas renewables — without subsidies — will be cheaper than costs of transmission for electricity in the early 2020s.
This is matching a linear curve with an upslope against exponentially decaying curves. Trumpland wants overseas consumption, but at what price? Cheaper than, say, coal dug in China with fewer health and workplace protections? With lower transportation costs?
What do the markets think? Trumpland is happy to quote, take credit for, and lie about increases in jobs (e.g., increases in numbers of jobs in coal as cited by EPA head Pruitt), but how have energy sources performed since the junta was in office?
(Click figures to see larger images, and use browser Back Button to return to blog.)
Not too well.
In contrast, have a look at wind and solar investment (*):
I daresay that solar via TAN:ETF has perked up recently, after a time of doldrums.
By Trumplands criteria, they aren’t doing too well. The order is tall to provide convincing evidence how the United States is going to defy headwinds, develop markets, avoid having climate damage reparations set against it, let alone financially succeed. It’s possible that Trumpland is trying to set up a protection racket, consistent with organized crime, where if the rest of Earth doesn’t want their planet trashed, then the USA should get paid off. But, if that is the objective, it speaks for itself.
And it won’t work. I’ve detailed many times elsewhere here why.
Update, 2017-07-01
From Kevin Book of the Center for Strategic & International Studies, in his “An energy policy of dominance”, 28th June 2017:
Governments in the United States can position the country for dominance by rationalizing disparate policies that muddy price signals for private industry. For example, the $1/gallon federal biodiesel tax credit implies a CO2 price of ~$196 per metric ton. By contrast, the ¢24.4/gallon federal diesel tax corresponds to a CO2 price of ~$24 per metric ton. Federal wind energy tax credits of $24/megawatt hour imply ~$54 per metric ton, but the nine-state Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative auctioned carbon allowances in June for ~$2.80 per metric ton. Paying green energy producers 10 to 20 times more to abate greenhouse gases than we charge fossil fuel consumers for emitting them is distortion, not dominance.
That, incidentally, shows how silly the claim of government subsidies support renewables and that’s why they’re winning is.
Also, outgoing FERC member Collete Honorable says “I don’t see any problems with reliability, and I say bring on more renewables”.
(*) Statement of interest: Both my wife, Claire, and I have holdings in the FAN and TAN ETFs. Also, this is not intended as any kind of financial advice. You should consult with a professionally licensed advisor before acting on this information.
Posted in American Petroleum Institute, American Solar Energy Society, Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to nowhere, bridge to somewhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Worshipers, clean disruption, climate business, climate economics, corporate litigation on damage from fossil fuel emissions, corporations, destructive economic development, Donald Trump, economics, electricity markets, energy, energy utilities, evidence, explosive methane, exponential growth, extended supply chains, false advertising, FERC, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, fossil fuels, fracking, global blinding, greenhouse gases, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, military inferiority, Minsky moment, pipelines, politics, pollution, rights of the inhabitants of the Commonwealth, risk, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, the energy of the people, the green century, the problem of evil, the right to be and act stupid, the stack of lies, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon, United States, utility company death spiral, wind energy, wind power
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Yea, BOSTON!
MAKING CLIMATE CHANGE DATA ACCESSIBLE
Today, the City of Boston released ClimateChangeData.Boston.gov. The City website features scrubbed information from the U.S. EPA Climate Change website.
Causation and the Tenuous Relevance of Philosophy to Modern Science
I was asked by ATTP at their blog:
hypergeometric,
Which bit of what Dikran said do you disagree with? It certainly seems reasonable to me; if you want to explain how something could cause something else, you need to use more than just statistics.
After consideration, I posted a long explanation, worthy of a blog post on its own. But I’m leaving it there, and just putting a link to it here.
Posted in causation, john d norton, philosophy of science, science
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Deloitte: The drumbeats for the extinction of utilities have begun
Deloitte Resources 2017 Study — Energy management: Sustainability and progress.
From The Economist, 25th February 2017:
FROM his office window, Philipp Schröder points out over the Bavarian countryside and issues a Bond villain’s laugh: “In front of you, you can see the death of the conventional utility, all financed by Mr and Mrs Schmidt. It’s a beautiful sight.”
Posted in Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, disruption, distributed generation, economics, EIA, electrical energy storage, energy utilities, engineering, finance, fossil fuel divestment, green tech, grid defection, investment in wind and solar energy, John Farrell, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local generation, local self reliance, Mark Jacobson, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, microgrids, public utility commissions, PUCs, rate of return regulation, reason, reasonableness, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Techno Utopias, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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Installed Non-Utility Solar, Massachusetts, 12/2016
(Click on image to see a larger figure, and use browser Back Button to return to blog.)
Posted in Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, distributed generation, electricity markets, energy utilities, engineering, feed-in tariff, green tech, grid defection, ILSR, investment in wind and solar energy, ISO-NE, John Farrell, local generation, local self reliance, making money, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, microgrids, New England, regime shifts, RevoluSun, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, stranded assets, SunPower, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, utility company death spiral, zero carbon
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Prayer Vigil for the Earth, Needham Common, Massachusetts, 4 June 2017
“Avoiding [in excess of] 2 degrees [Celsius] warming `is now totally unrealistic.”’
Led by our own UU Needham Reverand Catie Scudera, with Reverand Daryn Bunce Stylianopoulos of the First Baptist Church of Needham, and Reverend Jim Mitulski of the Congregational Church of Needham, Sunday, 4th June 2017 saw a vigil of members of their combined congregations, singing songs of reflection and protest in response to Thursday’s announcement by President 45, that he would withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate agreement.
In response …
Why? Oh, why not try something from an episode on Tyson’s excellent Cosmos:
(free) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3a8x20
(properly, for pay) https://www.amazon.com/The-Lost-Worlds-Planet-Earth/dp/B00K5M962G
(YouTube, for pay) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vcz_NYRQWEw
And, for background to this, read Ogden and Sleep.
In the world in excess of 
And, while solemn, the songs, the sun, and the moment were memorable.
And there is some good news, even if it is partial.
Disney’s Robert Iger resigns from Trump advisory panel over the Trumpistas’ decision to quit COP
“Protecting our planet and driving economic growth are critical to our future, and they aren’t mutually exclusive,” he said in a statement. “I deeply disagree with the decision to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and, as a matter of principle, I’ve resigned from the President’s advisory council.”
— Disney’s CEO, Robert Iger
Story from Variety.
Posted in Anthropocene, Buckminster Fuller, carbon dioxide, citizenship, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, COP21, destructive economic development, Disney, Donald Trump, environment, Florida, global warming, Hyper Anthropocene, Robert Iger, Walt Disney Company
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GForce Waste Sorters!
Waste management at the Boston Red Sox.
Check out their Wide World of Waste.
`Exxon Shareholders Approve Climate Resolution: 62% Vote for Disclosure’
Flash from InsideClimate News:
ExxonMobil shareholders voted Wednesday to require the world’s largest oil and gas company to report on the impacts of climate change to its business—defying management, and marking a milestone in a 28-year effort by activist investors.
Sixty-two percent of shareholders voted for Exxon to begin producing an annual report that explains how the company will be affected by global efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Paris climate agreement. The analysis should address the financial risks the company faces as nations slash fossil fuel use in an effort to prevent worldwide temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius.
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… [I]nstitutional investors argue that climate risk is a long-term financial risk that should be integrated into financial reporting.BlackRock, the world’s largest investment firm, with $5.1 trillion in assets under management, and several major global investors—including State Street, Aviva, and Legal & General—have signaled that they want more transparency on climate change risk. BlackRock’s first vote against corporate management on climate came this year against Occidental, where it was the largest institutional investor.
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Patrick Doherty, director of corporate governance for the New York State Office of the State Comptroller, which spearheaded the Exxon resolution along with the Church of England, said that climate is a very real financial concern for the employees paying into state pension funds and looking to payouts decades into the future. The New York State Common Retirement Fund, one of the world’s largest public employees investment funds, holds more than $1 billion in Exxon stock.“We have a very, very strong financial interest in the long-term health of the company,” Doherty said.
“The average CEO has a tenure of five years, and hedge funds are looking to maybe the next quarter,” he said. “Only institutional investors have this longer view. And one of the reasons that support for climate disclosure has been increasing over the years is more and more institutional shareholders are saying, hey, there can be large long-term risk and long-term damage.”
(The above is the Carbon Tracker 2014 Unburnable Carbon report.)
And regarding the claim that
Oil companies cannot predict the long-term impact of climate and climate policy with enough precision to provide the kind of risk analysis that shareholders are seeking, IHS Markit said. Financial disclosure under securities regulation looks ahead over a much shorter time frame.
what Markit is saying is that the management of fossil fuel companies does not know how to do their job. If that is correct, which I doubt, they should step aside and allow someone who knows how to do it, do it.
See the following links for additional news on this development:
- https://www.reuters.com/article/us-exxonmobil-climate-idUSKBN18R0DC
- http://money.cnn.com/2017/05/31/investing/exxon-climate-change-paris-agreement/
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/05/31/exxonmobil-is-trying-to-fend-off-a-shareholder-rebellion-over-climate-change/
- http://www.philly.com/philly/columnists/erin_arvedlund/exxonmobil-shareholders-vote-yes-on-climate-change-analysis-did-vanguard-help-sway-result-20170531.html
Posted in Anthropocene, Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to nowhere, business, capitalism, Carbon Worshipers, clean disruption, climate, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, corporations, destructive economic development, environmental law, extended supply chains, Exxon, fossil fuel divestment, fossil fuel infrastructure, fossil fuels, Global Carbon Project, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investments, Joseph Schumpeter, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, making money, Our Children's Trust, petroleum, pollution, rationality, reason, reasonableness, statistics, stranded assets, sustainability, the right to know, the tragedy of our present civilization, the value of financial assets, tragedy of the horizon, zero carbon
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Dikran Marsupial’s excellent bit on hypothesis testing applied to climate, or how it should be applied, if at all
Frankly, I wish some geophysicists and climate scientists wrote more as if they thoroughly understood this, let alone deniers to try to discredit climate disruption. See “What does statistically significant actually mean?”.
Of course, while statistical power of a test is important to keep in mind, as well as the effects of arbitrary alterations or recodings of data upon it (see also Andrew Gelman’s comment on this), people should really look at this from a purely Bayesian perspective, and there’s no longer a computational excuse to ignore that approach.
The Rule of 135
From SingingBanana.
Massachusetts Senate, Climate and Clean Energy Tour (Senator Marc Pacheco, and others), testimony
I testified at the Weymouth, Massachusetts hearing for the MA Senate Climate and Clean Energy Tour.
Here’s Senator Marc R Pacheco introducing the Tour:
The Weymouth hearing was recorded and is available on YouTube in three parts:
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3EHAp9Hjf8
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OP5buad0nFQ
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy5TNyx5Vdw
My written testimony is attached below:
20170524TestimonyToCleanEnergyTour-Weymouth–JGalkowski20170522
A better version having hyperlinks intact is available here, but be sure to download before reading in order to get access to the links.
Posted in adaptation, American Association for the Advancement of Science, American Meteorological Association, American Solar Energy Society, Anthropocene, being carbon dioxide, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, citizenship, clean disruption, climate disruption, climate economics, climate justice, Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, decentralized electric power generation, destructive economic development, Ecology Action, global blinding, Global Carbon Project, global warming, greenhouse gases, Hermann Scheer, Hyper Anthropocene, investment in wind and solar energy, investments, John Farrell, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Carney, Mark Jacobson, Massachusetts, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, Massachusetts Interfaith Coalition for Climate Action, science, solar democracy, solar domination, solar energy, solar power, Spaceship Earth, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, tragedy of the horizon, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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“Bigger Isn’t Always Better When It Comes to Data”: Barry Nussbaum
The President’s Corner in the May 2017 issue of Amstat News, the monthly newsletter of the American Statistical Association (“ASA”), features the interesting exposition by environmental statistician and President of the ASA, Barry Nussbaum, called “Bigger isn’t always better when it comes to data.” Key paragraph:
Notice a subtle nuance here. Normally, you have a population and you sample elements from the population. Here, we really didn’t know if the vehicle’s emissions belonged to the population, due to the maintenance and use restrictions, until we administered the questionnaire after the vehicle had been randomly selected.
Good read.
Akamai Technologies invests in Texas wind farm
Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM) said it is making a 20-year investment in the planned Seymour Hills Wind Farm, which will be based outside of Dallas and is expected to begin operating next year. The project is being developed by Infinity Renewables, and the plan is to construct 38 wind turbines across about 8,000 acres, Akamai said in a news release. Akamai said it intends to pull enough energy from the wind farm to offset its aggregate data center operations based in Texas, which account for about 7 percent of Akamai’s global power load.
This is part of Akamai’s commitment to reduce Carbon emissions and cover 50% of its operating requirements for electrical energy by 2020. See the details in Akamai’s press release.
See more about Akamai’s sustainability initiative, and its long range plans.
Posted in Akamai Technologies, American Solar Energy Society, Anthropocene, Bloomberg, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, business, clean disruption, climate business, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, coastal communities, corporations, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, ecology, economics, efficiency, electricity, electricity markets, global warming, green tech, Hyper Anthropocene, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, the energy of the people, the green century, wind energy, wind power, zero carbon
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“The [transport-as-a-service] disruption will crater the value chain of the oil industry” (RethinkX)
… By 2030, the report predicts that oil demand will drop to 70 million barrels per day. The resulting collapse in prices will be catastrophic for the industry, and these effects are likely to be felt as early as 2021.
The report suggests that oil demand from passenger road transport will drop by 90 percent by 2030; demand from the trucking industry will drop by 7 million barrels per day globally. This is, as the report says, an existential crisis for the industry. Current share prices and projections are based on the presumption of a system of individually owned vehicles.
See the news report for an overview, and the detailed report written by James Arbib and Tony Seba of RethinkX.
As far as I’m concerned, it couldn’t happen to a “nicer” bunch of people, this economic catastrophe. And it can’t happen soon enough!
Elsewhere, Why fossil fuel giants underestimate electric cards and renewable energy?
Posted in American Petroleum Institute, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, Buckminster Fuller, capitalism, clean disruption, CleanTechnica, climate business, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, economics, efficiency, fossil fuel divestment, green tech, ILSR, investments, John Farrell, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, local self reliance, making money, Mark Jacobson, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, public transport, public utility commissions, rationality, reason, stranded assets, sustainability, the energy of the people, the green century, the value of financial assets, Tony Seba, zero carbon
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`Evidence of a decline in electricity use by U.S. households’ (Prof Lucas Davis, U.C. Berkeley)
This is from a blog post by Professor Lucas Davis at his blog. In addition to the subject, that’s an interesting way of presenting a change over time I’ll need to think about: It seems the model could be used in other, more comprehensive ways. Note it’s really a matched pairs test, where each state is a candidate and its electricity use in 2010 is match with that in 2015. Even though the amount of electricity used by any individual state over time is a dependent quantity, electricity use of one state is more or less independent of that in another state. They might be dependent if, say, the United States economy crashed, or if it underwent a sudden boom.
Posted in American Solar Energy Society, American Statistical Association, anomaly detection, Bloomberg New Energy Finance, BNEF, bridge to somewhere, convergent cross-mapping, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, dependent data, efficiency, EIA, electricity, electricity markets, energy, energy reduction, energy utilities, engineering, evidence, green tech, local self reliance, Lucas Davis, marginal energy sources, Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, model-free forecasting, multivariate statistics, public utility commissions, rate of return regulation, statistics, Takens embedding theorem
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I’m afraid, dear progressive friends, Mr Maher is 110% correct
I see nearly every week in the comedy called progressive plans for energy sources in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Progressives, it seems, eschew cooperation with business and attorneys and, as a result, never get anything respectable done. They are, as I’ve sometimes remarked, in practice, liberal climate deniers, because they rate the survival of their collective political power more important than that of civilization.
(Hat tip to Climate Denial Crock of the Week)
Posted in Anthropocene, atheism, Bill Maher, Buckminster Fuller, Canettes Blues Band, citizenship, civilization, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate economics, Daniel Kahneman, decentralized energy, destructive economic development, electricity markets, engineering, environmental law, fossil fuel divestment, free flow of labor, global warming, green tech, greenwashing, Hermann Scheer, Humans have a lot to answer for, Hyper Anthropocene, Kevin Anderson, leaving fossil fuels in the ground, liberal climate deniers, local self reliance, Michael Osborne, politics, rationality, the right to be and act stupid, the tragedy of our present civilization, zero carbon
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