"The world's largest solar PV farm uses 200,000 litres of water each day to keep the panels clean. Yet some people think that we are soon going to source all our electricity from solar farms in deserts."#cop26 #cop26 #climate #ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis pic.twitter.com/TIhdmFW12k
— Henry K. B. (@HenryK_B_) February 19, 2022
Thread: The Noor solar power plant in Morocco, largest is Africa, uses 2.5-3 million m³ of water/yr.
I have to suggest a new headline: Ottawa seeks first place in race to national bankruptcy.
For the first time, Ottawa is set to subsidize the production costs of large electric vehicle battery producers.
A senior Canadian source — who was not authorized to comment publicly on the topic — confirmed that the goal in Ottawa is to “do like the United States” for “some big projects.”
Sources said the federal government already has delivered a clear message to a handful of multinational firms — that Canada will enhance its existing financing programs with “production support” measures.
Federal Energy Minister Chris Bowen is seeking urgent briefings from his department as the government seeks to limit the fallout from the collapse of engineering contractor Clough, amid a threat to almost $10 billion of projects critical to Australia’s energy transition.
…
Industry observers warned that Clough’s administration, which occurred after a $350 million sale deal with Italy’s Webuild fell through, would delay and could drive up costs of the Perth-based contractor’s projects.
These include some of Australia’s biggest projects, such as the $5.9 billion Snowy 2.0 storage venture and the $3.3 billion Project EnergyConnect electricity interconnector between South Australia and NSW, as well as one of the few gas power plants being built in the National Electricity Market.
If anyone is wondering why GDP was climbing during the pandemic when businesses were shutting down and entire sectors such as the travel industry ground to a halt, here’s your answer. There was a lot of vote buying to be done, and now we can’t even determine whose vote was bought.
Hogan’s team found that $4.6 billion of overpayments were made to ineligible recipients of benefits for individuals. Another $27.4 billion of payments to individuals and employers should be investigated further, the report said, calling it “the minimum amount that should be investigated.”
The post-payment verification process has just started — CRA said it has recouped $2.3 billion — even though the legislation means the agency has just three years after payment was made to verify eligibility…
But the auditor is skeptical about the chances of recovering the bulk of the money owed.
If the green movement is going to continue to push the idea that we can survive without fossil fuels, they have some significant math problems to overcome first. Unless, of course, they eventually dispense with the need for backup power sources entirely.
My Report presents two different calculations of the energy storage requirement for Germany in a world of a wind/solar grid and no fossil fuels allowed (both of which calculations have been previously covered on this blog). One of the calculations, by a guy named Roger Andrews, came to a requirement of approximately 25,000 GWh; and the other, by two authors named Ruhnau and Qvist, came to a higher figure of 56,000 GWh.
…the amount of energy storage that Germany is planning for 2031 is between 0.016% and 0.036% of what it actually would need.
It turns out that you can have battery-powered cars, or you can have renewable energy, but you can’t have both.
The Federal Council of Switzerland has therefore published draft legislation, which outlines four tiers of escalating measures to conserve electricity and avert potential blackouts. The first prescribes a lot of temperature restrictions for things like refrigerators and washing machines. The second includes more unusual rules, such as the demand that heating in clubs and discotheques “be set to the lowest level or switched off completely,” and that “streaming services … limit resolution of their content to standard definition.” The third foresees cutting business hours, banning the use of Blue Ray players and gaming computers, and also limiting the use of electric cars, which should be driven only when absolutely necessary. A fourth and final tier mandates closure of ski facilities, casinos, cinemas, theatre and the opera.
VW warns soaring EU energy costs render battery plants unviable;
Investment in German and EU industrial projects such as battery-cell factories will be unfeasible if the region’s policy makers fail to control ballooning energy prices in the long-term, the head of Volkswagen Group’s namesake brand, Thomas Schäfer, said.
“Unless we manage to reduce energy prices in Germany and Europe quickly and reliably, investments in energy-intensive production or new battery cell factories in Germany and the EU will be practically unviable,” VW Schaefer wrote Monday on LinkedIn.
“The value creation in this area will take place elsewhere.”
VW plans to have six battery factories in full operation across Europe by 2030 under its battery company PowerCo, which broke ground on its lead plant in Germany in July of this year and signed a 3 billion euro ($3.1 billion) joint venture with Umicore in September for cathode material production.
An outline for industrial-policy cooperation hatched by the French and German economy ministers last week “falls short in crucial areas and does not address the envisaged priorities,” Schaefer said.
The industry’s current circular capacity is woefully unprepared for the deluge of waste that is likely to come.
Economic incentives are rapidly aligning to encourage customers to trade their existing panels for newer, cheaper, more efficient models. In an industry where circularity solutions such as recycling remain woefully inadequate, the sheer volume of discarded panels will soon pose a risk of existentially damaging proportions.
To be sure, this is not the story one gets from official industry and government sources. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)’s official projections assert that “large amounts of annual waste are anticipated by the early 2030s” and could total 78 million tonnes by the year 2050. That’s a staggering amount, undoubtedly. But with so many years to prepare, it describes a billion-dollar opportunity for recapture of valuable materials rather than a dire threat. The threat is hidden by the fact that IRENA’s predictions are premised upon customers keeping their panels in place for the entirety of their 30-year life cycle. They do not account for the possibility of widespread early replacement.
Related: China’s coal production is set to climb for the sixth year in a row, reaching a new record [4.4 billion tons]. If you’re doing anything to reduce your emissions, you’ve just been offset… forever.
These should be great times to be in the wind energy business, especially in Europe. Governments here have long promoted offshore wind projects, and those efforts have accelerated since Russia started cutting natural gas shipments in its war against Ukraine.
“We need clean, we need cheaper and we need homegrown power,” Ursula von der Leyen, the European Union president, said in August.
But Europe’s wind turbine makers, the crown jewels of the region’s green energy industry and a source of manufacturing expertise, are reporting losses and laying off workers. Their problems stem partly from lingering supply chain issues and competition from Chinese manufacturers, and the issues could ultimately hinder Europe’s, and even the world’s, ambitions to quickly develop emission-free energy sources.
This month, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, a Madrid-based company that is the premier maker of offshore wind turbines, reported an annual loss of 940 million euros ($965 million). The company has announced a cost-cutting program that is likely to lead to 2,900 job losses, or nearly 11 percent of its work force.
Vestas Wind Systems, the world’s largest maker of turbines, recently reported a loss of 147 million euros (about $151 million) for the third quarter.
General Electric, a large maker of wind turbines in the United States and Europe, has also struggled in its clean energy businesses. The company said last month that its renewable energy unit was likely to record $2 billion in losses this year.
Several problems are battering the industry, including rising costs for materials and shipping, as well as logistics snags, some of them a legacy of the pandemic. As a result, prices agreed on earlier for turbines, which cost millions of dollars apiece and can add up to hundreds of billions for large offshore wind farms, can result in huge losses for the manufacturers when they are delivered.
“Every time we sell a turbine, we lose 8 percent,” Henrik Andersen, the chief executive of Vestas, said in an interview.
Clearly, this demands more subsidies.
Humans mined 700 million tons of copper over the last 5,000 years.
The same 700 million tons will need to be mined over the next 22 years to meet energy transition targets using wind, solar, & electric vehicles.
And mining runs on diesel.
B.F. Randall – The next time somebody says that wind / solar need backup, show them this chart and ask which power is backing up which power. Then ask what purpose the red serves? Then ask which is more expensive.
Toucan Energy Holdings 1 Ltd., which owns 53 solar farms across the country and was run by the financier Liam Kavanagh, had borrowed £655 million ($773 million) over four years from Thurrock Council to fuel its expansion.
In September, Rob Gledhill, the former leader of the council, resigned after the government appointed a commissioner to take over the Conservative-led authority. At the time of his resignation, Gledhill said in a statement: “As Leader of the Council the political buck stops with me and as such it would only be right, and expected, that I resign as Leader of the Council.”
In July, John Kent, the council’s opposition leader, described the investments as “a scandal of huge proportions.”
Last week, Thurrock Council appointed administrators from Interpath Advisory, which has been tasked with selling off the farms to return cash to the council. While Toucan Energy Holdings 1 is in administration, Interpath said in a statement that the underlying parks were not, and would continue to operate as normal.
Mark Coxshall, leader of Thurrock Council, said in a statement that the move would “maximize recovery” for taxpayers.
Related: If Wind-Solar-Batteries were mined and manufactured using only the energy produced by Wind-Solar-Batteries, I would have no objections whatsoever. But I like food.
Hey, can we try this?
Rural voters delivered a crushing blow to plans for a 375 megawatt wind farm in mid-Michigan, where several local renewable energy ordinances were defeated across three townships and multiple officials were thrown from office for supporting the project.
On Tuesday, Nov. 8, midterm voters resoundingly rejected ordinances enabling the Montcalm Wind project by Apex Clean Energy, a developer attempting to erect 75 turbines on farmland in Montcalm County northeast of Grand Rapids.
Reducing our carbon footprint, one smoldering corpse at a time.
Four times a week on average, an e-bike or e-scooter battery catches fire in New York City.
These bikes when they fail, they fail like a blowtorch,” said Dan Flynn, the chief fire marshal at the New York Fire Department. “We’ve seen incidents where people have described them as explosive — incidents where they actually have so much power, they’re actually blowing walls down in between rooms and apartments.”
As of Friday, the FDNY investigated 174 battery fires, putting 2022 on track to double the number of fires that occurred last year (104) and quadruple the number from 2020 (44). So far this year, six people have died in e-bike-related fires and 93 people were injured, up from four deaths and 79 injuries last year.
h/t Raymond
Thirty-eight people were hurt, with two suffering life-threatening injuries, after a fire broke out inside a 37-story building in Manhattan on Saturday.
The FDNY reported that a three-alarm fire erupted from the battery of a micro-mobility device – an e-scooter or an e-bike – at around 10:30am on the 20th floor of an apartment building at 429 East 52nd Street.
Officials said at least two dozen residents rushed to the roof while others hung out of their windows to try and escape the fire.
Video at the link.
Petro-Canada issues huge EV charging fee increase across the country;
Plugging in and charging on Petro-Canada’s Electric Highway just got a lot more expensive for EV owners. Instead of billing owners at differing rates in each province, the oil giant has now instituted a flat rate across the country.
According to the Petro-Canada website, the standard EV charging fee for all of Canada is now $0.50 per minute.
I’m right in this turn lane in Longmont, Colorado and there’s no way to do a hard reboot on this system…
Everything new… is a step backward;
[Henry] Payne, an auto critic for the Detroit News, set out to travel from Detroit to Charlevoix, Michigan. His trip was to be around 280 miles, and he was driving a new 2022 F-250 Lightning EV.
Payne wrote that he charged the truck to a full 100 percent charge ahead of the trip, and that the manufacturer claimed that a full charge should have allowed him to travel the whole distance without another charge.
I won’t spoil the ending.
Oh, nevermind.
But it wasn’t even close.
Payne wrote that as he sat at his third charging station of the day, another driver asked what sort of mileage he was getting on his roughly $93,000 EV truck.
Read the rest, it gets better.
h/t roaddog
It is too beautiful: Germany Is Dismantling A Wind Farm To Make Way For A Coal Mine
Denmark’s under-performing and curtailed wind turbines have lost DKK 2.1bn in asset revenue: “Only 6.63% of operational onshore wind energy assets show that they meet or exceed their P50 performance quotation.”