Month: July 2020

Daily News 27 Jul 2020

Mass EV Charging: Is A Can Of Worms Hiding Under The Bonnet?

The Government’s push to electrify road transport and domestic heating could place major cost burdens on consumers, says a new report

Electric vehicles have become something of a panacea for politicians as they grapple with how to decarbonise the transport sector. But for some engineers, the headlong rush to electrify road transport and domestic heating too is a major cause for concern. LTT reported in May the top-down analysis of Michael Kelly, the former chief scientific adviser to the Department for Communities and Local Government (LTT 29 May & Letters 26 Jun). Now a more bottom-up analysis has been prepared by retired engineer Mike Travers. Both reports have been published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation think tank.

“It is clear that the costs of supporting all the plans the Government has for transport and homes is going to be very high, and it is going to be made worse by the fact that the changeover is not being thought through, let alone planned effectively,” says Travers. “Part of the problem is that there is no institution or organisation in a suitable position to do so. The distribution companies own the transformers and cables, but may or may not be responsible for the smart meters. They therefore have little interest in some form of smart control [of electricity demand]. As profit-making companies, they also have no interest in investing for the future load increases, as they can charge for all the upgrading work as it is required.”

Decarbonisation will place huge new demands on the electricity network, with homeowners installing electric vehicle charging points, heat pumps and electric showers. “The extra demand for electricity will overwhelm most domestic fuses, thus requiring homeowners to install new ones, as well as circuit-breakers and new distribution boards,” says Travers. “Most will also have to rewire between their main fuse and the distribution network. In urban areas, where most electrical cabling is underground, this will involve paying for a trench to be dug between the home and the feeder circuits in the street.”

The Government wants millions of electric vehicles on Britain’s roads within the next decade. Those residents lucky enough to have off-street parking, will have two main choices for charging their EVs, says Travers: slow charging using a standard 13-amp supply, or fast charging using a special 7kW (32-amp) supply.

“For those with time on their hands, the 12 hours needed to fully charge a typical battery car on a 13-amp connection may be acceptable, although there is still the cost of fitting earth fault protection, which will set the homeowner back around £250. Most people will require fast chargers, however, and indeed the Government is considering making their installation mandatory in new homes. Homeowners will therefore need to install a charging pillar.

“These will cost £1,200 to install in new homes, or twice that to retrofit to old ones, because the household distribution board is likely to require upgrading.”

Travers says home chargers will present residents with new social dilemmas as friends and relatives ask to recharge when visiting. “Should you charge visitors for a recharge? You might gift the cost to friends and relatives, but what about the plumber or the carer?”

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July 27, 2020 at 02:07AM

Daily News 27 Jul 2020

Kevon Martis: Common-good Foe of Industrial Solar and Wind

Land and Liberty’s Peter Sinclair openly admits when asked that they are funded by DTE Energy, Invenergy, APEX “Clean” Energy and (from memory) ESA Solar. (Correct me if I am wrong.) Two of those entities have substantial fossil fuel investments. Did Sinclair or Land and Liberty disclose that? Doesn’t that make them truly guilty of what they falsely accuse me? (Martis, below)

Climate activists and renewable-energy apologists cannot fathom their opponents are anything but shills for the fossil-fuel industry. Rather than check their premises, the modern Malthusians pretend and even distort without care. (Welcome to the ‘cancel culture’ when anything goes in the service of an agenda and emotions.)

One target for the intellectually corrupt ‘renewable’ energy side is Kevon Martis, a tireless foe of government-enabled, beauty-and-wildlife desecrating industrial wind turbines and solar arrays. So much infrastructure, so little energy, Martis explains. And these politically correct energies have to rely on natural gas to be grid-reliable, anyway.

Martis has been recognized at MasterResource before. His effective fight against windpower in Ohio was documented in “Citizen Martis Draws Ire from Big Green (countering wind power shoestring by shoestring)” (October 30, 2018). Other Martis activism has been covered in these posts. [1]

New Inaccurate Smear

Recently, this appeared:

To which I told Kevon that the fossil-fuel check was in the mail.

Here is Martis’s rebuttal at Facebook.

So the solar interests in Lenawee County have produced a vicious website falsely tying me to fossil fuel interests, among other claims. A response is in order:

I have not and do not receive any support from any energy interest of any kind. This includes fossil fuel utilities or the Koch family, etc.
My role as a Senior Policy Fellow at E&E Legal is unfunded and I take no direction from them on any matter. This can be confirmed by my colleagues there, Tom Tanton and Craig Richardson.
The bogus claims about my role as zoning administrator [ZA] are laughable. For instance, they claim that I have a conflict of interest regarding proposed solar development. That is impossible on the face. Why? During my tenure as Deerfield Township ZA, there has been no solar application of any kind for me to process. So it is impossible for there to be a conflict of interest. Further, a ZA has no vote on these matters. The ZA is a functionary who simply processes applications and reports relevant language in the zoning ordinance to the planning commission. At most, the ZA makes a staff recommendation. And since I have no financial interest in any such deliberation, I have no conflict. But there can be no such deliberation absent any application.
They claim that the ZA is supposed to support their energy rights. That claim shows their utter ignorance of the Michigan Zoning Enabling Act and the role of the ZA. The ZA can only interpret and apply the local zoning ordinance. Period. Whether that ordinance is friendly to a business development or not is not relevant to the ZA’s job. My personal opinion on the ordinance itself and how it regulates various business enterprises is irrelevant once an application is received.
There is fossil fuel money at play here, however. Local solar developers will seek to either sell their proposed projects in toto to DTE or CMS or sell the energy production to them. In either case, the solar developer will be receiving millions of dollars from these fossil fuel utilities. Furthermore, local renewable boosters “The Land and Liberty Coalition” is an offshoot of the Michigan “Conservative” Energy Forum. Land and Liberty’s Peter Sinclair openly admits when asked that they are funded by DTE Energy, Invenergy, APEX “Clean” Energy and (from memory) ESA Solar. (Correct me if I am wrong.) Two of those entities have substantial fossil fuel investments. Did Sinclair or Land and Liberty disclose that? Doesn’t that make them truly guilty of what they falsely accuse me?

As my late friend Mike McCann said to me in 2010, “They can only bite you in the ass when you are in the lead”.

I am not running a race and do not care to “beat anyone”. But I am committed to protecting prime agricultural land from encroachment by irresponsible development as the Lenawee County Land Use Plan instructs.

And if I am winning that battle, it is good for the entire county.

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[1] Previous posts by or about Kevon Martis at MasterResource:

Enough! Martis Responds to Sinclair re Industrial Wind (March 5, 2018)
Wind Siting Rules: Kevon Martis Testimony to the Ohio Power Siting Board (June 9, 2016)
Citizen Martis to Ohio Lawmakers: Repeal the Renewable-Energy Mandate (January 27, 2014)
Testimony Against Industrial Wind Power: Martis before the Ohio Senate and House PUCs (January 8, 2014)
Dear Michigan: Why Wind? (natural gas is better all ’round) (March 13, 2013)
Defeating Big-Government Renewables in Michigan (Prop. 3’s “suicide by gluttony”) (December 6, 2012)

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July 27, 2020 at 01:10AM

Daily News 27 Jul 2020

Alaska is getting wetter. That’s bad news for permafrost and the climate

UNIVERSITY OF COLORADO AT BOULDER

**IMAGE:** POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW CATHERINE DIELEMEN ASSOCIATED WITH MERRITT TURETSKY’S RESEARCH GROUP USES A FROST PROBE TO DETERMINE THE LOCATION OF SURFACE PERMAFROST BENEATH THE GROUND SURFACE IN INTERIOR ALASKA. view more CREDIT: MERRITT TURETSKY

Alaska is getting wetter. A new study spells out what that means for the permafrost that underlies about 85% of the state, and the consequences for Earth’s global climate.

The study, published today in Nature Publishing Group journal Climate and Atmospheric Science, is the first to compare how rainfall is affecting permafrost thaw across time, space, and a variety of ecosystems. It shows that increased summer rainfall is degrading permafrost across the state.

As Siberia remains in the headlines for record-setting heat waves and wildfires, Alaska is experiencing the rainiest five years in its century-long meteorological record. Extreme weather on both ends of the spectrum–hot and dry versus cool and wet–are driven by an aspect of climate change called Arctic amplification. As the earth warms, temperatures in the Arctic rise faster than the global average.

While the physical basis of Arctic amplification is well understood, it is less known how it will affect the permafrost that underlies about a quarter of the Northern Hemisphere, including most of Alaska. Permafrost locks about twice the carbon that is currently in the atmosphere into long-term storage and supports Northern infrastructure like roads and buildings; so understanding how a changing climate will affect it is crucial for both people living in the Arctic and those in lower latitudes.

“In our research area the winter has lost almost three weeks to summer,” says study lead author and Fairbanks resident Thomas A. Douglas, who is a scientist with the U.S. Army Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory. “This, along with more rainstorms, means far more wet precipitation is falling every summer.”

Over the course of five years, the research team took 2750 measurements of how far below the land’s surface permafrost had thawed by the end of summer across a wide range of environments near Fairbanks, Alaska. The five-year period included two summers with average precipitation, one that was a little drier than usual, and the top and third wettest summers on record. Differences in annual rainfall were clearly imprinted in the amount of permafrost thaw.

More rainfall led to deeper thaw across all sites. After the wettest summer in 2014, permafrost didn’t freeze back to previous levels even after subsequent summers were drier. Wetlands and disturbed sites, like trail crossings and clearings, showed the most thaw. Tussock tundra, with its deep soils and covering of tufted grasses, has been found to provide the most ecosystem protection of permafrost. While permafrost was frozen closest to the surface in tussock tundra, it experienced the greatest relative increase in the depth of thaw in response to rainfall, possibly because water could pool on the flat surface. Forests, especially spruce forests with thick sphagnum moss layers, were the most resistant to permafrost thaw. Charlie Koven, an Earth system modeler with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, used the field measurements to build a heat balance model that allowed the team to better understand how rain was driving heat down into the permafrost ground.

The study demonstrates how land cover types govern relationships between summer rainfall and permafrost thaw. As Alaska becomes warmer and wetter, vegetation cover is projected to change and wildfires will disturb larger swathes of the landscape. Those conditions may lead to a feedback loop between more permafrost thaw and wetter summers.

In the meantime, rainfall–and the research–continue. Douglas says, “I was just at one of our field sites and you need hip waders to get to areas that used to be dry or only ankle deep with water. It is extremely wet out there. So far this year we have almost double the precipitation of a typical year.”

“This study adds to the growing body of knowledge about how extreme weather–ranging from heat spells to intense summer rains–can disrupt foundational aspects of Arctic ecosystems,” says Merritt Turetsky, Director of the University of Colorado Boulder’s Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and a coauthor of the study. “These changes are not occurring gradually over decades or lifetimes; we are watching them occur over mere months to years.”

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From EurekAlert!