Category Archives: Clean energy

350 Bay Area, Bill McKibben, Clean energy, Climate action, Climate activists, Climate change denial

Bill McKibben: “An odd silence…at the end of humanity’s hottest year (yet)”

[BenIndy Contributor Kathy Kerridge: An essay about the biggest story of the year…]

From The Crucial Years, a Substack by Bill McKibben, December 28, 2023

Bill McKibben, Author, educator, and environmental activist; a founder of 350.org and Third Act.

The world—its politics, its economy, and its journalism—has trouble coping with the scale of the climate crisis. We can’t quite wrap our collective head around it, which has never been clearer to me than in these waning days of 2023.

Because the most important thing that happened this year was the heat. By far. It was hotter than it has been in at least 125,000 years on this planet. Every month since May was the hottest ever recorded. Ocean temperatures set a new all-time mark, over 100 degrees. Canada burned, filling the air above our cities with smoke.

And yet you really wouldn’t know it from reading the wrap-ups of the year’s news now appearing on one website after another.

Earlier today, for instance, the Times published an essay by investment banker and Obama consigliere Steven Rattner on “ten charts that mattered in 2023.” That’s the most establishment voice imaginable, in the most establishment spot. And the global temperature curve did make the list—at #10, well behind graphs about the fall in inflation, the president’s approval levels, the number of Trump indictments, the surge in immigrants, and the speed with with the GOP defenestrated Kevin McCarthy.

Indeed, yesterday the Times and the Post both published fine stories about 2023’s record temperatures, but they were odd: in each case, they centered on whether the year was enough to show that the climate crisis was “accelerating.” It’s an interesting question, drawing mainly on a powerful new paper by James Hansen (one that readers of this newsletter found out about last winter), but the premise of the reporting, if you take a step back, is kind of wild. Because the climate crisis is already crashing down on us. It doesn’t require “acceleration” to be the biggest—by orders of magnitude—dilemma facing our species.

In a sense, though, that’s the problem. Those stories in the Times and Post were a way to search for a new angle to a story that doesn’t change quite fast enough to count as news. (In geological terms, we’re warming at hellish pace; but that’s not how the 24/7 news cycle works.) It’s been record-global-hot every day for months now: the first few of those days got some coverage, but at a certain point editors, and then readers, begin to tune out. We’re programmed—by evolution, doubtless, and in the case of journalism by counting clicks—to look for novelty and for conflict. Climate change seems inexorable, which is the opposite of how we think about news.

The war in Gaza, by contrast, fits our defintions perfectly. It is an extraordinary tragedy, it changes day by day, and it is the definition of conflict. And perhaps there’s something we can do about it (which is why many of us have been trying to build support for a ceasefire). So, rightly, it commands our attention. But in a sense, it is the very familiarity of the war that makes it easy for us to focus on it; “mideast conflict,” like “inflation” or “presidential elections,” is an easily-accessed template in our minds. The images of the horror make us, as they should, feel uncomfortable—but it’s a familiar discomfort. The despair, and the resolve, we feel are familiar too; even the subparts of the story fit into familiar grooves (a New York Times reader would be forgiven for thinking the main front of the war is being played out in Harvard Yard, between free speech advocates and cancel culture warriors). Next year seems likely to be another orgy of familiarity: Joe Biden and Donald Trump, yet again.

Climate change has its own familiar grooves—above all the fight with the fossil fuel industry, which played out again at COP 28 in Dubai. But so much of the story is actually brand new: as this year showed, we’re literally in uncharted territory, dealing with temperatures no human society has ever dealt with before. And to head off the worst, we are going to require an industrial transition on a scale we’ve never seen before: there were signs this year that that transition has begun (by midsummer we were installing a gigawatt worth of solar panels a day) but it will have to go much much faster.

These changes—the physical ones, and the political and economic ones—are almost inconceivable to us. That’s my point; they don’t fit our easy templates.

And the point of this newsletter, now and in the years to come, is to try and explain the speed of our crisis, and explain what it dictates about the speed of our response. It’s a story I’ve been trying to put into perspective for 35 years now (the End of Nature was published in 1989, the first book about this crisis) and I’ll keep looking for new ways in. As the climate scientist Andrew Dessler put it in one year-end account, “The only really important question is, ‘How many more years like this we have to have before the reality of how bad climate change is breaks into the public’s consciousness?'”

Thank you for being part of this ongoing effort to break into that consciouness, and—well, happy new year. It’s coming at us, we might as well make it count.

In other energy and climate news:

+The LNG export fight has finally broken through into the big papers. The Times assigned three reporters to the story, and they published a long-awaited account the day after Christmas, under the headline “A Natural Gas Project Is Biden’s Next Big Climate Test.”

The decision forces the Biden administration to confront a central contradiction within its energy policies: It wants nations to stop burning the fossil fuels that are dangerously heating the planet and has heralded a global agreement reached in Dubai earlier this month to transition away from fossil fuels. But at the same time, the United States is producing record amounts of crude oil, is the leading exporter of liquefied natural gas and may approve an additional 17 export facilities, including CP2.

Since early September, activists have lit up TikTok and Instagram, delivered petitions to the Biden administration and met directly with senior White House climate officials to urge Mr. Biden to reject CP2. Jane Fonda recorded a video for Greenpeace calling on the public to work against the project.

“We have enough gas and export terminals to supply everything in the world right now,” said Naomi Yoder, a staff scientist at Healthy Gulf, one of many local groups working to stop the construction of new natural gas infrastructure in the area. “There is no need for additional facilities.”

+A favorite video to end the year. The New York City Labor Chorus, with Jeffrey Vogel doing much of the work, has redrafted the Hallelujah Chorus to be about our beautiful if troubled earth. Enjoy.

Subscribe to Bill McKibben’s Substack here. His newsletter is free, and, in his own words, “if you can’t afford the modest and voluntary subscription fee that underwrites it, then don’t worry. If it wouldn’t be a hardship—thank you!”

Clean energy, Energy grid, Energy storage, Keeping Watch on Earth News, Solar energy, Wind energy

Breakthrough for clean energy storage: massive new battery farm coming to California this decade

This Compressed Air Grid ‘Battery’ Is an Energy Storage Game Changer

Pumped hydropower is great. This method might be even better.
Popular Mechanics, by Caroline Delbert, May 3, 2021
hydrostor storage facility
Hydrostor storage facility
  • World-record compressed air energy storage is coming to California this decade.
  • Using air reduces overhead and materials costs compared with hydrogen storage.
  • Compressed air is stored during surplus times and fed back during peak usage.

Two new compressed air storage plants will soon rival the world’s largest non-hydroelectric facilities and hold up to 10 gigawatt hours of energy. But what is advanced compressed air energy storage (A-CAES), exactly, and why is the method about to have a moment?

Compressed air is part of a growingly familiar kind of energy storage: grid-stabilizing batteries. Like Elon Musk’s battery farm in Australia and other energy overflow storage facilities, the goal of a compressed air facility is to take extra energy from times of surplus and feed it back into the grid during peak usage.

Here’s how the A-CAES technology works: Extra energy from the grid runs an air compressor, and the compressed air is stored in the plant. Later, when energy is needed, the compressed air then runs a power-generating turbine. The facility also stores heat from the air to help smooth the turbine process later on.

While the efficiency of similar systems has hovered around 40 to 50 percent, the new system from Hydrostor, a major global leader in building hydroelectric storage, reportedly reaches 60 percent, according to Quartz.

Hydostor will store compressed air in a reservoir that’s partly filled with water to balance out the pressure. The whole system will hold up to 12 hours of energy for the grids where the two plants are planned. (The first plant will be built in Rosamond, California, while the second location is to be determined.)

hydrostor energy storage facility
Hydrostor energy storage facility

Why branch out from hydrogen to compressed air? While hydro storage is a great part of the global energy scene, storing massive amounts of water requires a ton of infrastructure that Hydrostor says uses a lot of energy it’s ultimately trying to save. That makes intuitive sense if you think about the relative force of water compared with even heavily pressurized air.

New Atlas elaborates:

“Pumped hydro accounts for around 95 percent of the world’s grid energy storage and gigawatt-capacity plants have been in operation since the 1980s. The problem is that you need a specific type of location and a staggering amount of concrete to build a pumped hydro plant, which works against the goal of reaching net zero. Rotting vegetation trapped in dams also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, the biggest mega-batteries built so far are only in the 200 MW/MWh range, though installations bigger than 1 GW are planned.

Recharge reports that companies have built smaller existing CAES facilities over naturally occurring salt caverns. In contrast, Hydrostor will be digging new caverns to use for its larger facilities in California, just as engineers are constructing huge salt caves in Utah to store hydrogen.

The first of Hydrostor’s two plants is set to open in 2026, and the company says its system will last for about 50 years—making it a lot longer-lived than almost any energy storage of its kind. The near future of energy is likely made of a dozen different solutions that are all suited to different environments and situations, so adding compressed air to the portfolio simply makes sense.

Clean energy, Electric vehicles, Federal Regulation (U.S.), Keeping Watch on Earth News

Benicia Author Stephen Golub – Norway??

The good, the bad and the ugly of GM’s Super Bowl ad.

By Stephen Golub, A Promised Land, February 8, 2021

Benicia Author Stephen Golub, A Promised Land

If you watched the Super Bowl, or even if you didn’t, you might well have seen the General Motors ad that features Will Ferrell pitching GM’s electric vehicles. It opens with Ferrell explaining that “Norway sells way more electric cars per capita than the U.S.” He then declares, “Well, I won’t stand for it,” before punching a globe and claiming that, with GM’s new electric battery, “we’re going to crush those lugers. CRUSH THEM! Let’s go, America.”

Ferrell, aka America’s loveable oaf, goes on to recruit Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson and actress/comedian/celebrity Awkwafina to meet him in Norway, with him driving an electric Cadillac and them an electric Hummer to somehow get there. He actually ends up in Sweden and his two pals in Finland. But that’s beside the point.

Because the point’s been made: America will lead the world in EV use.

The Good

The ad doubles down on GM’s recent commitment to stop manufacturing gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2035. As this Atlantic article explains, that’s quite the about-face for the car company, given how it advocated for two regressive Trump administration positions: a rollback of anti-pollution rules and an attempt to block California’s regulation of vehicle emissions. Indeed, GM has been quite the laggard in this regard, as Ford and other automobile manufacturers opposed the administration on both issues.

Given how two-faced GM has been, we can’t be certain it will deliver on its promise until it’s further down the line. Still, the change itself couples with the company’s very public declaration of the move – you can’t get more public than a Super Bowl commercial – to reflect a decisive shift in the right direction for GM and the automotive industry more generally.

And it makes so much sense, even above and beyond environmental repercussions. According to the Atlantic piece:

In the future, Americans’ mass adoption of electric vehicles will seem inevitable. After all, EVs cost less to run than gas-powered cars (because electricity is cheaper than gas); they require cheaper maintenance; they break less; they are quieter. For many types of drivers—daily commuters, for instance, or errands-around-towners—they are already preferable to gas-powered cars.

The Bad

GM’s good news comes with a message that should curb our enthusiasm: Note that the vehicles it uses in the Super Bowl commercial are a Caddy and a Hummer. As environmental/energy expert Philip Warburg notes, “GM’s soon-to-be released electric vehicle flagship, the three-ton, 1,000-horsepower all-electric Hummer, stands as a warning that American auto manufacturers will not be abandoning their energy-wasteful giants, even as they move from internal combustion engines to electric power.”

Warburg goes on to caution that, even as the Biden Administration thankfully steers the United States toward an EV future, it must still focus on exhaust emissions from fossil fuel vehicles and on restraining vehicle size:

First, while the prospect of an all-electric vehicle fleet is alluring, we are decades away from achieving that goal. We therefore can’t afford to shrug our shoulders while most of our cars and trucks continue to rely on gasoline and diesel fuel.

Second, an electrified U.S. fleet dominated by oversized SUVs and pickups will consume substantially more energy than a leaner line of electric vehicles, making it much harder for clean electricity sources to edge out the gas and coal plants that still supply most of our electricity.

However affable a face Ferrell puts on GM’s shift, then, the government and public still need to force and pressure car companies to head in the right direction.

The Ugly

Though this ad will never win any awards for subtlety, it nevertheless plays up the unwittingly Ugly American in a creative and positive way. Ferrell’s taking umbrage at the idea that Norway (!!!) is beating America in EV usage is really a knock at the notion of any country besting us in this regard.

What’s significant here is that GM is making EV progress a matter of pride and patriotism. The commercial plays a bit on our national ignorance by bringing together the mindless “We’re Number One!” notion with Ferrell’s globe-piercing display and his little group arriving not in Norway but neighboring nations.

But hey, if a good-natured but cluelessly competitive American stereotype serves a good cause by highlighting how we must catch up with other countries, I’m all for it. At least in this instance, the Ugly American is a beautiful thing to behold.

[Hat tip: MS]
Stephen Golub, Benicia – A Promised Land: Politics. Policy. America as a Developing Country.

Benicia resident Stephen Golub offers excellent perspective on his blog, A Promised Land: Politics. Policy. America as a Developing Country.

To access his other posts or subscribe, please go to his blog site, A Promised Land.

Benicia Open Space, Clean energy, Keeping Watch on Earth News, Solar energy

BENICIA – Solar Energy versus Open Space – pros and cons…

By Roger Straw, July 6, 2020

BENICIA CA – The arguments for and against a proposed Lake Herman Road Solar Project are persuasive.  The good and the bad have caused an unusual divide, if not an ugly one.

Actually, the debate has been civil and constructive.

It all comes to a head tomorrow.  Benicia City Council will hear the case and take a vote at it’s virtual meeting Tuesday, July 7.  Our Planning Commission denied the project in May, but that decision was appealed to the City Council by the project sponsor, Renewable Properties.

Here are two well reasoned opinions.  You decide, and let the City Council know what you think.

Support, by Larnie Fox

Proposed Lake Herman Road Solar Project

Council Members ~

I’m writing to ask you to vote to approve the proposed 35 acre solar array on Lake Herman Road.

As you all know, climate change is a serious and growing threat to all people, so we all have a responsibility to help counter it. When people say “think globally, act locally” this is exactly the sort of action they are talking about. While no one wants to lose open space, obtaining enough clean energy for 1,700 Benicia households is a big step in the right direction.

My wife and I walked to the area in question. It is not useful for recreation. The livestock currently grazing there will still have access to 54 acres of the 89 acre parcel after the solar panels are installed. We were glad to see that the plans call for planting native trees and plants that will mostly screen the site from view. They also call for creating a pollinator plant meadow which will increase local biodiversity. Personally, I like seeing solar panels because I know the good they are doing.

It would be preferable to install solar panels on homes and businesses, over parking lots and even over roads. However – we are clearly not there yet, and we need to take action now. Waiting a year or two is not acceptable.

There is a concern that approval of this project will create an open door for other, less desirable, development in our designated open space areas ~ so I hope Council will take care to ensure that no such loopholes are created as you approve this important project.

I’d like the City to take a more proactive and visionary leadership approach to opportunities like this. For example, could the City identify asphalt-covered terrain, roofs in the Industrial Park, or other possible mixed-use sites where responsible companies like Renewable Properties could install solar arrays? Could the City actively facilitate partnerships between solar or wind energy providers and local businesses to encourage clean energy development?

For now, I feel that the imperative to address the climate crisis and lower our carbon footprint needs to take precedence over protecting this small parcel of open space.

Let’s not make the perfect be the enemy of the good.

Larnie Fox
Benicia resident

Opposition, by Don Dean

I see that the Lake Herman solar project is on the agenda for next week’s City Council meeting.  I haven’t changed my stance on the project; I still think it’s a good project in the wrong location, and that the Planning Commission did the right thing in denying it.  I’m all for solar power and fighting climate change, and so is everybody I know. But that doesn’t mean that every solar project is a good one.  There are three issues here.

The first issue is designated Open Space and how we value it–or we don’t.  Notice I capitalized Open Space.  This is an official City designation.  The solar project is proposed on City-designated Open Space land.  So it’s not just undeveloped land waiting for an acceptable use to come along; in this case it’s specifically designated in Benicia’s General Plan to remain open for agricultural or recreational uses. The State of California considers Open Space important enough that it mandates an Open Space element be included in each city’s General Plan. With the pandemic we’re all involved in, open space has become more important than ever for our exercise, recreation, and sanity.   With options for travel limited now, I find I drive Lake Herman Road more than ever and appreciate the vistas more than ever.

Second, this is about more than just one project on Lake Herman Road. The proposed zoning change necessary for the project would apply to about 159 parcels (2,000+acres) spread throughout Benicia.  There has been no real analysis of how many other solar facilities could be constructed or where those might occur.  The City has relied on a study by the applicant that asserts the number of solar-developable parcels would be very small. But that analysis doesn’t seem to have been independently verified.  If the City is serious about solar development in Open Space areas, let’s have a community discussion about how and where solar is appropriate rather than make the decision based on approving one project.

Third, this is an industrial-scale solar project. It will blanket 35 acres with wall-to-wall panels.  It belongs in an industrial area.  The Benicia Climate Action Plan calls for solar development at large parking lot sites belonging to Amports, Valero, and the City.  As far as I know, no one has approached Amports or Valero about adding solar arrays to their property. Not only would this generate power, but it would reduce the heat island effect from acres of asphalt.  Shouldn’t we be looking for solar in these already developed areas rather than converting our Open Space to industrial uses and building outside the Urban Growth Boundary? Isn’t planning about being proactive for the future and protecting our existing resources?

I understand the urgency some people feel about getting a major solar facility to combat climate change, but this issue of solar development versus Open Space is a false choice.  I don’t see why we need to sacrifice one to gain the other. Bottom line—I think this is a good project in the wrong place. I don’t think the project should be approved.

You already have my letter to the Planning Commission that lays out some of the more technical points of the discussion. Feel free to share this email.

Thanks,

Don Dean
Benicia resident