Chameleons change colors to fit landscapes.
via CFACT
August 22, 2024 at 04:14AM
Month: August 2024
By Kennedy Maize
This post updates the financial troubles of Denmark’s Ørsted, recent BOEM auctions, and pushback against Maryland governor Wes Moore. Today, operational offshore wind capacity is less than 50 megawatts versus the Biden-Harris Administration goal of 30,000 MW by 2030.
Ørsted
Denmark’s Ørsted, the worldwide leading offshore wind developer, recorded a $575 million loss in the second quarter. In part, the loss is the result of disappointing developments in the U.S.
The company has delayed commercial operation of its 704-MW Revolution Wind project off the coast of Rhode Island and Connecticut from 2025 to 2026. Ørsted’s ambitious U.S. offshore wind program has been lagging, despite solid support (subsidies, permits) from the Biden administration.
A year after an Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) auction for Gulf of Mexico leases failed to attract significant interest, BOEM continues to delay another attempt to find adequate bidders off the east coast.
Reuter’s summarized Ørsted’s issues:
Ørsted’s impairment losses also related to its Ocean Wind project in the United States whose development it halted last year, an increase in U.S. interest rates, and its decision to cease development of its green e-methanol FlagshipOne project, which was due to open in Sweden next year. Shares in Ørsted, once a green investor favourite, ended down 7.2%, having fallen as much as 9.3% earlier. They remain at less than one-third of their value since peaking in early 2021.
BOEM Auctions
In March, BOEM solicited interest in another Gulf of Mexico auction, which resulted in industry yawns. The agency stated on July 26th that it
received 25 comments in response to the March 2024 [Proposed Sale Notice], with one company expressing interest in participating. As a result, BOEM is cancelling this sale due to a lack of competitive interest. BOEM may decide to move forward with a lease sale at a future time, based on industry interest.
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BOEM last week (Aug. 14) held a lease sale for the Mid-Atlantic region, off Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia with takers.
Norway’s Equinor Wind won a provisional lease for 101,443 acres some 26 nautical miles off Delaware for $75 million. Dominion Energy’s Virginia Electric and Power subsidiary won a provisional lease for 176,505 acres 35 miles off the entrance to the Chesapeake Bay for $18 million. Six companies participated in the auction.
The Equinor lease is not far from where Baltimore-based US Wind has a federal lease for a proposed two-phase, 2-GW project off Maryland’s Ocean City. BOEM last month (July 29) issued a final Environmental Impact Statement for the Maryland project. Maryland has also issued renewable energy certificates for the US Wind project.
US Wind, reports BOEM,
proposes to install up to 114 turbines, up to four offshore substation platforms, one meteorological tower, and up to four corridors for offshore export cables, which would make landfall in Delaware Seashore State Park. The lease area is approximately 8.7 nautical miles offshore Maryland and approximately 9 nautical miles offshore Sussex County, Delaware, at its closest points to shore.
US Wind, in partnership with Spain’s Haizea Windgroup, is also developing a plant to make monopile foundations for wind projects at Baltimore’s Sparrows Point, once the home of Bethlehem Steel when it was the world’s largest steel mill. According to the company
“Sparrows Point Steel is poised to become the best offshore wind heavy logistics and fabrication yard on the East Coast. Haizea’s depth of knowledge and expertise will cement Maryland’s role as a hub of offshore wind manufacturing in the U.S.”
MD Gov. Wes Moore vs. Critics
Maryland Democratic Gov. Wes Moore last week (Aug. 16) faced opponents of his aggressive push for offshore wind in Ocean City. Local TV station WBOC spoke to Moore about growing local opposition on the eastern shore of Maryland, Delaware, and Virginia. Earlier in the month, Moore signed a memorandum of understanding with BOEM to open up more offshore federal land to wind development. Last year, Maryland passed a new law expanding the state’s goal for offshore wind development to 8.5 GW.
Moore told WBOC, “You’re talking about being able to power three million homes in the state of Maryland and turn us into a net exporter of clean energy. That’s exciting, it’s new jobs, it’s new opportunities.”
Many people on the Eastern Shore, particularly those who depend on the Chesapeake Bay for a living, see burgeoning wind farms as a potential disruption to their ways of life. Jimmy Hahn, an Ocean City area commercial fisherman, told the TV station, “They’re trying to steal our grounds, they’ve stolen our bottom, they’ve stolen the area that we fish in, their last resort is to buy the place where we sell our fish at and once they accomplish that we have nowhere else to work.”
Moore responded, “All those conversations have to happen with local leaders, it has to happen with local communities. There has to be measures of both transparency and accountability as to what we’re hoping for and what we’re going to achieve.”
Vineyard Wind: Yellow Flag
The Interior Department’s Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement (BSEE) has given Avangrid a yellow flag to continue limited work on its Vineyard Wind project off the Massachusetts coast.
BSEE shut down the 804-MW project last month following the failure of a 351-foot blade on one of its turbines, spreading debris widely to beaches on nearby Nantucket Island and as far as mainland beaches on Cape Cod. Reuters reported that the Interior Department agency last week (Aug. 13) confirmed the updated shutdown order, while Avangrid and blade maker G Vernova continue to investigate the cause of the massive blade failure.
“The updated suspension order still does not allow further blade installation or power production at this time, the companies said,” according to Reuters. Vineyard Wind and GE Vernova said they are removing portions of the damaged blade that remained on the wind turbine to remove risks of further ocean debris.
via Watts Up With That?
August 22, 2024 at 04:03AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Far too much like common sense!
With the Conservative leadership race now swinging, we are hearing a lot about unity and the expected tough talk on immigration, defence, benefits and the tax burden. If only many of the candidates had been around the Cabinet table recently, to advance the Conservative policies our membership wishes to hear.
But there has been less discussion of net zero. Previous prime ministers, from Blair onwards, dithered on energy policy. But all committed by varying degrees to international Climate accords, even going as far as legislation.
Tony Blair oversaw the Climate Change Act (CCA) 2008, Theresa May the 2050 target amendment. We are one of just a handful of nations to have bound ourselves legislatively. But Parliament is sovereign and can repeal and adapt any legislation it wishes. I recommend, on energy policy, that it does.
The results of this target are now becoming clear, with British consumers paying some of the highest prices for electricity in the world. We pay 2.5 times that paid by US consumers, and four times the amount paid in China. We then wonder why high energy businesses, from steel to ceramics, are preferring to invest overseas.
What all previous administrations agreed on, no matter how misguidedly, was a reduction in fossil fuel use with little to no plan on how to replace the gigawatts of power lost through detonating perfectly serviceable power stations, and all the while planning for massive increases in electricity demand — electric cars, heat pumps and the substitution of gas or coal power from high energy industrial processes.
As we destroyed our traditional fossil fuel-provisioned power stations, our international competitors, notably China and India, have turbocharged the building of new ones. The power stations we haven’t knocked down have been repurposed to burn pelletised wood, largely from virgin North American forests.
The CO2 output per KWh of energy is roughly 1.5 that of coal burning and three times that of using natural gas. This form of biomass energy accounts for 15pc of UK electricity production and yet we call this a “zero carbon” form of energy. Net zero has indeed sunk this low.
Beyond burning North American forests, substitution, where planned at all, consists of wind turbines and solar power. Far from being “cheap”, a claim dependent on ideal conditions of generation in the right place, meeting demand through existing distribution networks, the true cost is yet to be seen.
Disparate wind or solar farms need to be connected to the grid through copper, aluminium and concrete-hungry pylons and cabling, and the reserve power needed to cope with generation irregularity has yet to be considered.
The choices include storage batteries at an unimaginable scale. Californian studies suggest a cost of $15 trillion (£11.5 trillion) for that state alone, with replacement every 10-12 years.
The plundering of Africa and South America to yield up the minerals required has not been calculated.
Other energy storage methods include: water being raised uphill to reservoirs, geography-permitting, using the stored gravitational energy for release later; the electrolysis of water into hydrogen; or the production of liquid e-fuels, but using current liquid fuel infrastructure and transportation via the reliable internal combustion engine.
In order to cope with often long periods of anticyclones of low wind, freezing conditions and low light which can sit upon an entire continent for days, the cost of wind and solar with back-up is significantly amplified. That’s a lot of copper, steel and concrete, and a lot of despoiled land taken out of productive agricultural use.
The other “grand plan” is for massive interconnectors between countries to share generation and match demand. How this is supposed to equate to energy independence and security is never explained. France’s threat to the energy supply of the Channel Islands in the face of a mini “fishing war” three years ago should be instructive that reliance on others, however benign, is not a good idea.
The final piece of the current thinking involves maintaining and building new gas-powered plants to provide reserve power when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine. The wasted capital in building underused gas plants (the owners of which will demand super-high prices as their fixed cost, capital intensive plants are only partially used) is obvious.
Labour’s latest plan to stop further North Sea gas exploration guarantees imported gas, with a far higher carbon footprint, will be needed to burn in these plants. There will be little of GB plc left for Qatar to buy over future decades.
Whereas the last decade has been the battle for Brexit, the next decade will be the battle for energy. Labour’s plan to decarbonise the grid by 2030 is not only impossible, it will be astronomically expensive in its futility and potentially dangerous. Electricity blackouts are likely. This will be a factor that will bring this Labour Government down.
Our energy policy needs to be entirely different. I propose the following.
First, we must amend the Climate Change Act 2008 to put Britain back on track with most of the world. Not only does the CCA result in warped energy policy, it is now being used regularly to oppose most infrastructure developments by well-funded activist groups. More worryingly, some Supreme Court judgments have supported this view. If we want growth, we must regain the right to build necessary infrastructure.
Second, we must move towards a nuclear future. We are still considering Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), but the Conservatives wasted our final years in government with more indecision. The large EDF reactors in progress or on the drawing board are complex, overpriced and beset with delays.
We need scalable Model-T Fords, not Bentleys. If nuclear fusion ever becomes a reality, a whole new chapter in human energy production opens up with sufficient cheap electricity to produce hydrogen and e-fuels at scale. Traditional fission reactors can still deliver this.
Third, we need a “dash for domestic gas”. Gas is the bridging fuel as we scale up nuclear. Domestic is key and we need to open up, as Norway continues to do, all and every extractable field in the North Sea basin.
We should look favourably at fracking to ensure domestic gas consumption, diminishing as is likely over coming decades, is at least matched by domestic production. Exports would be a bonus. The benefits are obvious: investment, high paying jobs, big tax receipts and balance of payment savings.
Lastly, we need an end to taxpayer support for wasteful wind and solar projects. Energy auctions need to be a price for 24/7, 365 energy provision. If wind and solar owners can provide this, then the economics should be a commercial decision for them, not an additional burden for the taxpayer.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2024/08/22/net-zero-is-sinking-to-new-lows/
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
August 22, 2024 at 03:58AM
Related links: Washington Post article
via JunkScience.com
August 22, 2024 at 03:02AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 