Energy & the Environment News and Discussions

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Biden administration announces $3.5 billion for projects to strengthen nationwide electric grid stressed by extreme weather

Source: Fortune/AP

October 19, 2023 at 4:41 AM EDT

The Biden administration on Wednesday announced $3.5 billion for 58 projects across the country to strengthen electric grid resilience as extreme weather events such as the deadly Maui and California wildfires continue to strain the nation’s aging transmission systems.

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said it was the largest federal investment ever in grid infrastructure, supporting projects that will harden electric systems and improve energy reliability and affordability. The federal spending, combined with money promised by private partners, could result in up to $8 billion in investments nationally to upgrade the grid, Granholm said.

“The grid, as it currently sits, is not equipped to handle all the new demand” and withstand natural disasters and extreme weather worsened by climate change, Granholm said at a news conference. “We need it to be bigger, we need it to be stronger, we need it to be smarter” to bring a range of renewable energy projects online and meet the Biden administration’s goal of reaching 100% clean electricity by 2035, she said.

Projects funded by the federal Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnerships program will increase the flexibility, efficiency and reliability of electric power systems, with a particular focus on spurring solar, wind and other renewable energy, Granholm said. The projects also are aimed at fixing problems that may contribute to wildfires and other disasters and will improve reliability by deploying innovative approaches to electricity transmission, storage and distribution, she and other officials said.

Read more: https://fortune.com/2023/10/19/biden-ad ... e-weather/

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[Time_Traveller]

Reports: UK meat-eating hits lowest levels since 1970s amid cost-of-living pressures

25 October 2023

Average of 854g of meat purchased by UK households each week last year was lowest since records began, but experts warn shift is largely due to soaring food prices

Average household meat consumption in the UK fell to its lowest level on record last year, as cost-of-living pressures forced consumers to tighten their belts and opt for more affordable food options, the latest government figures suggest.

Data on UK household food purchases released by Defra this week show average meat consumption fell by 12.5 per cent to 854g per week during the year to March 2022, which is the lowest level since records began in the 1970s.

For context, 854g is about the same weight as less than half a medium chicken sold by Waitrose. The supermarket states that on its website that its 1.75kg medium chickens can feed up to four people.

It marks a fall from 976g of meat consumed each week on average by UK households the previous year, which was also in turn down slightly from 949g in the year before the Covid-19 pandemic struck, according to reports this morning. Overall, the data shows household meat consumption has fallen 14 per cent since 2012.

https://www.businessgreen.com/news/4138 ... -pressures

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Supercritical CO2 pilot aims to make steam turbines obsolete
By Loz Blain
October 31, 2023
https://newatlas.com/energy/supercritical-co2-turbines/

Steam turbines still produce most of the world's power, but supercritical carbon dioxide promises to be much cheaper, and 10% more efficient as a medium than water, using 10X smaller turbines. A US$155-million pilot plant is now complete in San Antonio.

Ribbons were cut at the Supercritical Transformational Electric Power (STEP) pilot plant in Texas on October 27 as it was declared "mechanically complete" by project partners Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), GTI Energy, GE Vernova, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

The device in the image above is the world's first supercritical carbon dioxide turbine. Roughly the size of a desk, is a 10-megawatt turbine capable of powering around 10,000 homes. Ten megawatts is pretty small potatoes in the energy business, but to do it with a turbine this tiny? That could prove to be a revolutionary feat.

Carbon dioxide goes supercritical when the temperature and pressure are above about 31 °C (88 °F) and 74 bar (1,070 psi), respectively. At this point, it stops acting like a gas or a liquid, and instead starts acting something like a gas with the density of a liquid. Past this point, relatively small changes in temperature can cause significant changes in density.

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[raklian]

[raklian]

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[firestar464]

We know he's being unserious, given his previous policy positions.

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/p ... share&ei=4

[raklian]

UNITED STATES OPENS FIRST FACILITY TO SUCK CO2 OUT OF THE AIR
byNOOR AL-SIBAI

For the first time, a commercial facility that can suck carbon out of the air and store it underground has opened in the United States.

In a press release, the team behind Heirloom Carbon Technologies said their newly opened direct air capture (DAC) facility near San Francisco will be able to siphon CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it securely underground in concrete for paying customers.

As the New York Times acknowledges in its reporting on the new plant, Heirloom's first facility in Tracy, California is pretty small and only able to capture 1,000 tons of CO2 from the air per year — though as CEO and co-founder Shashank Samala points out in the press release, that number "has gone from [one] kilogram of CO2 to up to one million, or 1000 metric tons, in just over two years."

"We want to get to millions of tons per year," Samala told the NYT. "That means copying and pasting this basic design over and over."

https://futurism.com/the-byte/us-direct ... e-facility

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[firestar464]

Mother Jones on this:

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... tmer-pass/

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U.S. Oil and Gas Production Set to Break Record in 2023 Despite UN Climate Goals
by Oliver Milman
November 27, 2023

Introduction:

(The Guardian) The United States is poised to extract more oil and gas than ever before in 2023, a year that is certain to be the hottest ever recorded, providing a daunting backdrop to crucial United Nations climate talks that hold the hope of an agreement to end the era of fossil fuels.

The US’s status as the world’s leading oil and gas behemoth has only strengthened this year, even amid warnings from Joe Biden himself over the unfolding climate crisis, with the latest federal government forecast showing a record 12.9m barrels of crude oil, more than double what was produced a decade ago, will be extracted in 2023.

Records will also be broken this year for gas production, with a glut of new export terminals on the Gulf of Mexico coast facilitating a boom that will see US exports of liquified natural gas (or LNG) double in the next four years.

Conclusion:

Under Biden, the US has passed its first major climate legislation, called the Inflation Reduction Act, which has spurred record investment in clean energy such as solar and wind, as well as propel sales of electric vehicles.

The US president’s administration has fashioned new pollution rules to slash emissions from cars, trucks and power plants and recently struck a renewed agreement with China, the only country that emits more carbon than the US, to do more to stem the climate crisis. US energy emissions, meanwhile, have been edging downwards and are expected to drop 3% this year, albeit at a slower rate than needed to meet its own climate goals.

Read more here: https://www.theguardian.com/environmen ... d-nations

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Google switches on first-of-its-kind advanced geothermal project
By Loz Blain
November 28, 2023

https://newatlas.com/energy/google-fervo-geothermal/
Google has announced that its innovative advanced geothermal plant in Nevada is now operational and connected to the grid, pioneering an approach that promises to unlock clean, always-on geothermal energy across a much larger range of locations.

Where most geothermal projects need to seek out areas where highly-fractured, highly-permeable hot rocks are easy to get to, the Nevada plant, built in partnership with Fervo, is a pilot to prove a technique borrowed from the oil and gas industry.

As we wrote when Fervo announced its test results in July, the idea is to do for geothermal what fracking did for oil and gas, opening up resources that would otherwise be inaccessible. The company does this by drilling horizontally into deep rock, then injecting pressurized fluid to fracture the rock, creating the kind of fractured, permeable rock you need to harvest geothermal heat energy.

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Electricity Demand Is Surging — “Virtual” Power Plants Might Be the Forgotten Answer
BY The Conversation and Daniel Cohan
November 25, 2023

Introduction:

(Inverse) After nearly two decades of stagnation, U.S. electricity demand is surging, driven by growing numbers of electric cars, data centers, and air conditioners in a warming climate. But traditional power plants that generate electricity from coal, natural gas, or nuclear energy are retiring faster than new ones are being built in this country. Most new supply is coming from wind and solar farms, whose output varies with the weather.

That’s left power companies seeking new ways to balance supply and demand. One option they’re turning to is virtual power plants.

These aren’t massive facilities generating electricity at a single site. Rather, they are aggregations of electricity producers, consumers, and storers — collectively known as distributed energy resources — that grid managers can call on as needed.

Some of these sources, such as batteries, may deliver stored electric power. Others may be big electricity consumers, such as factories, whose owners have agreed to cut back their power use when demand is high, freeing up energy for other customers. Virtual power sources typically are quicker to site and build and can be cleaner and cheaper to operate than new power plants.

A GROWING RESOURCE

Virtual power plants aren’t new. The U.S. Department of Energy estimates that there are already 30 to 60 gigawatts of them in operation today. A gigawatt is 1 billion watts — roughly the output of 2.5 million solar photovoltaic panels or one large nuclear reactor.

Read more here: https://www.inverse.com/science/electr ... n-answer

[raklian]