Posts Tagged ‘energy’
“People overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years”*…
This is especially true, argue Sam Butler-Sloss and Kingsmill Bond of the Rocky Mountain Institute, when it comes to assessing our progress in addressing the challenges of climate change with renewable energy solutions…
The renewable revolution is advancing at remarkable speed. In fact, the speed of the renewable revolution has defied many leading energy commentators who have continuously underestimated its true trajectory. They have suffered from what statisticians call a systematic bias, that is, an error that consistently skews in one direction. Noise, or a random error, is inherent to forecasting; bias, however, requires a deeper explanation.
So why do so many intelligent people undersell the pace and dynamism of the renewable revolution? Leaving aside the inherent bias of those seeking to prop up the fossil fuel system in order to enjoy the largesse of its annual $2 trillion in rents, we identify eight deadly sins of the energy transition.
Whether intentional or unwitting, these eight general errors of perspective are holding back understanding, wasting time and capital, and fueling unproductive climate pessimism…
The renewable revolution is plainly gaining speed and impact. Read on to learn why are so many analysts so wrong about the pace and scale of innovation: “The Eight Deadly Sins of Analyzing the Energy Transition,” from @SamButl3r and @KingsmillBond at @RockyMtnInst. (TotH to friend MZ)
See also: “When Idiot Savants Do Climate Economics.”
* Bill Gates
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As we contemplate compounding, we might recall that it was on this date in 1896 that Nikola Tesla and Westinghouse Electric achieved the first long-distance transmission of hydroelectricity: from the Niagara Falls Power Company to Buffalo, N.Y., 26 miles away.
“Strange, strange are the dynamics of oil and the ways of oilmen”*…
… and at the same time, all too predictable…
Oil executives love to talk about the energy transition. But for all the platitudes about technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture, most are doubling down on what they know best.
Oil.
Spending on new offshore oil projects over the next two years is projected to soar to levels not seen in a decade.
In Saudi Arabia, the state-owned oil giant is embarking on a series of massive offshore expansion projects designed to boost the kingdom’s crude production. The United Kingdom and Norway are pumping more money into the North Sea in hopes of lifting out more oil. Exxon Mobil Corp., America’s oil giant, is plowing money into projects in waters off Guyana and Brazil.
The offshore revival represents a shift after a decade of focus on onshore shale plays and amounts to a vote of confidence in oil’s long-term future. The move is notable as it follows several years of mounting talk of diversifying oil companies’ business models…
The world is still likely to consume large amounts of oil for decades to come, even if energy transition efforts gain steam and global crude demand begins to decline. That means investment in new or expanded fields is needed to offset declining production from existing wells. The result is something of a race, with oil companies seeking to identify fields that can produce at low oil prices and outlast competitors in a shrinking market…
Rystad Energy, a consulting firm, reckons that offshore spending will eclipse $100 billion in 2023 and 2024. That would mark the first time offshore oil investment eclipses the $100 billion mark in consecutive years since 2012 and 2013, the firm said. Offshore spending will account for 68 percent of spending on newly sanctioned projects over the next two years, compared with 40 percent from 2015 and 2018…
At first glance, offshore projects appear ill-suited for a world moving away from oil. Offshore development is incredibly expensive and time consuming. Exxon’s Payara development off Guyana, for instance, comes with a $9 billion price tag. Hydraulically fracturing and drilling a shale well, by comparison, is relatively cheap and quick.
Yet shale production is increasingly challenged. Output from shale wells tends to fall quickly, meaning new wells have to be quickly drilled to offset production losses. After more than a decade of intense drilling, many of the most productive locations in the United States have been tapped, analysts say.
Rising interest rates also present a challenge for U.S. shale producers. Many shale companies are relatively small by industry standards and rely on debt to fuel their drilling programs.
Offshore, meanwhile, tends to be the domain of large producers, which are flush with cash after a year of record profits and better able to finance projects from their own balance sheets. Offshore platforms also rely on massive economies of scale, producing vast amounts of oil for decades at a time. Exxon’s Payara project, for example, is projected to deliver 224,000 barrels of oil a day…
More at: “Offshore oil is about to surge,” from @EENewsUpdates.
Related: Countries spent a record-breaking $1 trillion on fossil fuel subsidies in 2022– “Want to cut global emissions by 10%? Stop fossil-fuel subsidies.”
* Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
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As we contemplate carbon, we might spare a thought for Harry Coover; he died on this date in 2011. A chemist and inventor (with 460 patents), he is best remembered as the creator of Super Glue.
In 1951, while working at Eastman Kodak, Coover accidentally discovered (then patented) the adhesive properties of cyanoacrylate monomers that needed neither heat nor pressure to permanently bond between a wide variety of surfaces. His creation was initially marketed as “Eastman 910,” largely for industrial purposes. In 1963, Loctite purchased the patent and business from Eastman Kodak, and began marketing (what they trademarked “Super Glue”) more broadly. While it still found industrial use (and then medical application, e.g., repairing arteries, veins, teeth, and as a spray to seal open wounds of soldiers during combat in Vietnam), its big push was into the consumer market. Memorable advertising showed a car lifted by a crane using an attachment bonded with just a few drops.
“Energy is essential for development, and sustainable energy is essential for sustainable development”*…
Adam Tooze on the challenges of a transition to clean energy…
As far as we are currently able to judge, our best chance to halt the further escalation of the climate crisis through decarbonization of the economy depends on electricity and electrification. Given the current horizon of technological expectations, electric power and electric technology offer us the best chance of reconciling the insatiable desire for energy with the stretched and frayed environmental envelope.
Electricity today is still a major driver of environmental disaster. This is because it is overwhelmingly generated by burning fossil fuels and coal in particular. It is in fact, the largest single source of pollution, more than fossil-fueled powered transport or agriculture. Not only do they contribute to climate change, emissions from coal-fired power stations around the world are so toxic that they kill millions of people annually. But electricity is one form of energy that we do know how to generate without CO2 emissions, most obviously by solar, wind, hydro or nuclear generation. So, the path to a low-carbon future depends on greening the electricity generation system and at the same time expanding the total volume of electric power generated so that we can apply clean electric power to more purposes than we currently do.
This will involve accelerating and redirecting the process of electrification that has proceeded unevenly across the globe for one hundred and forty years…
“Repowering the world- the challenge of electrification,” from @adam_tooze in his newsletter Chartbook.
See also Electrify- An Optimist’s Playbook for Our Clean Energy Future, by Saul Griffith (@GriffithSaul) and “Mapped: Asia’s Biggest Sources of Electricity by Country.”
* Tim Wirth
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As we plug in, we might spare a thought for Hans Christian Ørsted; he died on this date in 1851. A physicist and chemist, he discovered that electric currents create magnetic fields– the first connection found between electricity and magnetism… the foundation on which electric motors operate. Considered the “father of electromagnetism,” Oersted’s law and the oersted unit (Oe) are named after him.
“To create something from nothing is one of the greatest feelings”*…
Something from nothing? Not exactly. As Charlie Wood explains, it’s even weirder…
For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense.
“You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking.
But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, proposed that perhaps the vacuum could, in fact, be coaxed into giving something up.
At first, many researchers ignored this work, suspicious that pulling energy from the vacuum was implausible, at best. Those who took a closer look, however, realized that Hotta was suggesting a subtly different quantum stunt. The energy wasn’t free; it had to be unlocked using knowledge purchased with energy in a far-off location. From this perspective, Hotta’s procedure looked less like creation and more like teleportation of energy from one place to another — a strange but less offensive idea.
“That was a real surprise,” said Unruh, who has collaborated with Hotta but has not been involved in energy teleportation research. “It’s a really neat result that he discovered.”
Now in the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon.
“This really does test it,” said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.”…
“Physicists Use Quantum Mechanics to Pull Energy out of Nothing,” from @walkingthedot in @QuantaMagazine.
Vaguely related (and fascinating): “The particle physics of you.”
* Prince
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As we demolish distance, we might send insightful birthday greetings to Brain Cox; he was born on this date in 1968. A physicist and former musician (he was keyboardist for Dare and D:Ream), he is a professor of particle physics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester, and a fellow at CERN (where he works on the ATLAS experiment, studying the forward proton detectors for the Large Hadron Collider there).
But Cox is most widely known as the host/presenter of science programs, perhaps especially the BBC’s Wonders of the Universe series, and for popular science books, such as Why Does E=mc²? and The Quantum Universe— which (he avers) were inspired by Carl Sagan and for which Cox has earned recognition as the natural successor to David Attenborough and Patrick Moore.
Science is too important not to be a part of a popular culture.
“Seek truth from facts”*…
China’s property sector is enormous, under tremendous financial strain– and, as Jeremy Wallace explains, a very big contributor to climate issues (e.g., construction on China accounts for 5% of global energy consumption)…
China has ended zero-Covid. The resultant viral tsunami is crashing through China’s cities and countryside, causing hundreds of millions of infections and untold numbers of deaths. The reversal followed widespread protests against lockdown measures. But the protests were not the only cause—the country’s sagging economy also required attention. Outside of a few strong sectors, including EVs and renewable energy technologies, China’s economic dynamo was beginning to stutter in ways it had not in decades.
Whenever global demand or internal growth faltered in the recent past, China’s government would unleash pro-investment stimulus with impressive results. Vast expanses of highways, shiny airports, an enviable high-speed rail network, and especially apartments. In 2016, one estimate of planned new construction in Chinese cities could have housed 3.4 billion people. Those plans have been reined in, but what has been completed is still prodigious. Hundreds of millions of urbanizing Chinese have found shelter, and old buildings have been replaced with upgrades.
The scale of construction has been so prodigious, in fact, that it has far exceeded demand for housing. Tens of millions of apartments sit empty—almost as many homes as the US has constructed this century. Whole complexes of unfinished concrete shells sixteen stories tall surround most cities. Real estate, which constitutes a quarter of China’s GDP, has become a $52 trillion bubble that fundamentally rests on the foundational belief that it is too big to fail. The reality is that it has become too big to sustain, either economically or environmentally….
The “Chinese real estate bubble” is the world’s problem: “The Carbon Triangle,” from @jerometenk in @phenomenalworld. Eminently worth reading in full.
Analogically related (and at the risk of piling on): “China must stop its coal industry“
* Chinese maxim, popularized by Mao, then Deng Xiaoping
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As we get real about real estate, we might spare a thought for Deng Xiaoping; he died on this date in 1997. A Chinese revolutionary leader, military commander, and statesman, he served as the paramount leader of the People’s Republic of China from December, 1978 to November, 1989. Deng led China through a series of far-reaching market-economy reforms, earning him the reputation as the “Architect of Modern China”.
The reforms carried out by Deng and his allies gradually led China away from a planned economy and Maoist ideologies, opened it up to foreign investments and technology, and introduced its vast labor force to the global market, thus turning China into one of the world’s fastest-growing economies.
But China’s real estate bubble is a reminder that every solution can all-too-easily turn into the next problem.
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