#hydrogen battery storage

[jcmarchi]

Breaking Through With a Better Battery for Storing Renewable Energy - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/breaking-through-with-a-better-battery-for-storing-renewable-energy-technology-org/

Breaking Through With a Better Battery for Storing Renewable Energy - Technology Org

Renewable power sources like wind and solar need large-scale battery arrays to store the generated energy and supply the electric grid when there is no sun or wind. Researchers at Oregon State University have developed a solution for a better battery—one that’s efficient, safe, sustainable, and economical for both utilities and consumers.

Image credit: Oregon State University

Production of today’s most widely used battery technology — using lithium-ion as the critical metal component — relies on shrinking supplies of two other metals, cobalt and nickel, without which the batteries would not function. Those rare metals, however, are toxic and can contaminate ecosystems and water sources if they leach out of landfills.

Zinc metal batteries are an energy-dense alternative to lithium-ion, made from a safe and abundant metal. Previously, these batteries have been limited, because of their poor recharging efficiency and a chemical reaction producing unwanted hydrogen, which greatly reduced their cycle life. But scientists led by Oregon State researcher Xiulei “David” Ji have resolved those limitations with one big breakthrough.

Ji and collaborators at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Penn State University and the University of California, Riverside have developed a new electrolyte for zinc batteries that raises their charging efficiency to 99.95%, competitive or even better than lithium-ion.

The new hybrid electrolyte uses water and a dissolved mixture of inexpensive chloride salts, eliminating the undesirable hydrogen reaction and extending the battery’s cycle life. Ji says the cost of electricity delivered by a storage facility using zinc batteries needs to support thousands of charge and discharge cycles to compete with fossil fuel electricity. Rigorous testing indicates these batteries will.

“Zinc metal batteries are one of the leading candidate technologies for large-scale energy storage,” Ji says. “Our new hybrid electrolyte is nonflammable, cost effective and has a very low environmental impact.”

In addition to utility-scale solar and wind farm installations, zinc batteries offer a secure and efficient way for homeowners to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. They can also serve as energy storage modules for communities that are vulnerable to natural disasters.

It’s a powerful solution toward a clean energy future.

Source: Oregon State University

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[solarparts]

Join SOLARPARTS at the 2023 SNEC As many customers know whether new or old that SOLARPARTS has been deeply involved in solar energy for decades, our products cover many types of solar panels and solar systems. At the same time, we also provide OEM and ODM services to fully meet customers' individual needs. Switching to solar makes your life greener. SOLARPARTS is waiting for your coming! SNEC PV POWER EXPO - SNEC2023 Solarparts Booth No. : W1-902

[reasonsforhope]

"India’s announcement that it aims to reach net zero emissions by 2070 and to meet fifty percent of its electricity requirements from renewable energy sources by 2030 is a hugely significant moment for the global fight against climate change. India is pioneering a new model of economic development that could avoid the carbon-intensive approaches that many countries have pursued in the past – and provide a blueprint for other developing economies.

The scale of transformation in India is stunning. Its economic growth has been among the highest in the world over the past two decades, lifting of millions of people out of poverty. Every year, India adds a city the size of London to its urban population, involving vast construction of new buildings, factories and transportation networks. Coal and oil have so far served as bedrocks of India’s industrial growth and modernisation, giving a rising number of Indian people access to modern energy services. This includes adding new electricity connections for 50 million citizens each year over the past decade. 

The rapid growth in fossil energy consumption has also meant India’s annual CO2 emissions have risen to become the third highest in the world. However, India’s CO2 emissions per person put it near the bottom of the world’s emitters, and they are lower still if you consider historical emissions per person. The same is true of energy consumption: the average household in India consumes a tenth as much electricity as the average household in the United States.  

India’s sheer size and its huge scope for growth means that its energy demand is set to grow by more than that of any other country in the coming decades. In a pathway to net zero emissions by 2070, we estimate that most of the growth in energy demand this decade would already have to be met with low-carbon energy sources. It therefore makes sense that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has announced more ambitious targets for 2030, including installing 500 gigawatts of renewable energy capacity, reducing the emissions intensity of its economy by 45%, and reducing a billion tonnes of CO2. 

These targets are formidable, but the good news is that the clean energy transition in India is already well underway. It has overachieved its commitment made at COP 21- Paris Summit [a.k.a. 2015, at the same conference that produced the Paris Agreement] by already meeting 40% of its power capacity from non-fossil fuels- almost nine years ahead of its commitment, and the share of solar and wind in India’s energy mix have grown phenomenally. Owing to technological developments, steady policy support, and a vibrant private sector, solar power plants are cheaper to build than coal ones. Renewable electricity is growing at a faster rate in India than any other major economy, with new capacity additions on track to double by 2026...

Subsidies for petrol and diesel were removed in the early 2010s, and subsidies for electric vehicles were introduced in 2019. India’s robust energy efficiency programme has been successful in reducing energy use and emissions from buildings, transport and major industries. Government efforts to provide millions of households with fuel gas for cooking and heating are enabling a steady transition away from the use of traditional biomass such as burning wood. India is also laying the groundwork to scale up important emerging technologies such as hydrogen, battery storage, and low-carbon steel, cement and fertilisers..."

-via IEA (International Energy Agency), January 10, 2022

Note: And since that's a little old, here's an update to show that progress is still going strong:

-via Economic Times: EnergyWorld, March 10, 2023

[batboyblog]

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #12

March 29-April 5 2024

President Biden united with Senator Bernie Sanders at the White House to review Democratic efforts to bring down drug prices. President Biden touted his Administration’s capping the price of insulin for seniors at $35 a month and capping the price of  prescription drugs for seniors at $2,000 a year. Biden hopes to expand both to all Americans through legislation next year with a Democratic congress. The President also praised Senator Sanders' efforts as chair of the Senate Health Committee which has lead to major drug manufacturers capping the price of inhalers at $35 a month. “Bernie, you and I have been fighting this for 25 years,” Biden said “Finally, finally we beat Big Pharma. Finally.”

The White House gave an update on its actions around the Francis Scott Key Bridge disaster. The federal government working with state and local governments hope to have enough of the remains of the bridge cleared to partially reopen the Port of Baltimore by the end of the month and have the port working normally by May. The Administration has already released $60 million in emergency money toward rebuilding and promises the federal government will cover the cost. The Department of Labor has released $3.5 million for Dislocated Worker Grants and plans up to $25 million to cover lost wages. The Small Business Administration is offering $2 million in emergency loans to affected small businesses. The Administration is working with business and labor unions to keep workers at work and cover lost wages.

Vice-President Harris and EPA Administrator Michael Regan announced $20 billion to help finance tens of thousands of climate and clean energy projects across the country. The kinds of projects that will be financed through this project include distributed clean power generation and storage, net-zero retrofits of homes and small businesses, and zero-emission transportation. 70% of the funds, $14 billion, will be invested in low-income and disadvantaged communities. The project is part of a public private partnership so for every 1 dollar of federal money, private companies have promised 7 dollars of investment, bring the total to $150 billion for ongoing financing of climate and clean energy projects for years to come.

The Department of Transportation announced $20.5 billion in investments in public transportation. This represents the largest single investment in public transit by the federal government in history. The money will go to improving and expanding subways, light rail, buses, and ferry systems across America. The DoT hopes to use the funds to in particular expand and improve options for public transport for people with disabilities and seniors.

The Departments of Energy and The Treasury announced $4 billion in tax credits for businesses investing in clean energy, critical materials recycling, and Industrial decarbonization. The credits till go toward 100 projects across 35 states. 67% of the credits ($2.7 billion) will go to clean energy, wind, solar, nuclear, clean hydrogen, as well as updates to grids, better batter storage, and investments in electric vehicles. 20% ($800 million) will go to to recycling things like lithium-ion batteries, and 13% ($500 million) to decarbonization in industries like automotive manufacturing, and iron and steel.

The Department of Agriculture announced $1.5 Billion in investments in climate-smart agriculture. USDA plans to support over 180,000 farms representing 225 million acres in the next 5 years move toward more climate friendly agriculture. 40% of the project is reserved for disadvantaged communities, in line with the Biden Administrations standard for climate investment. $100 million has been reserved for projects in Tribal Communities.

The Department of the Interior approved the New England Wind offshore wind project. To be located off Martha’s Vineyard the New England project represents the 8th such off shore wind project approved by the Biden administration. Taken together these projects will generate 10 gigawatts of totally clean energy that can power 4 million homes. The Administration's climate goals call for 30 gigawatts of off shore wind power by 2030. The New England Wind project itself is expected to generate 2,600 megawatts of electricity, enough to power more than 900,000 homes in the New England area.

The Department of the Interior announced $320 Million for tribal water infrastructure. Interior also announced $244 million to deal with legacy pollution from mining in the State of Pennsylvania, as well as $25 million to protect wetlands in Arizona and $19 million to put solar panels over irrigation canals in California, Oregon and Utah. While the Department of Energy announced $27 million for 40 projects by state, local and tribal governments to combat climate change

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Electrons, not molecules

I'm on tour with my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me in TUCSON (Mar 9-10), then SAN FRANCISCO (Mar 13), Anaheim, and more!

When hydrocarbon barons do their damndest to torch the Earth with fossil fuels, they call us dreamers. They insist that there's a hard-nosed reality – humanity needs energy – and they're the ones who live in it, while we live in the fairy land where the world can run on sunshine and virtuous thoughts. Without them making the tough decisions, we'd all be starving in the frigid dark.

Here's the thing: they're full of shit.

Mostly.

Humanity does need energy if we're going to avoid starving in the frigid dark, but that energy doesn't have to come from fossil fuels. Indeed, in the long-term, it can't. Even if you're a rootin' tootin, coal-rollin' climate denier, there's a hard-nosed reality you can't deny: if we keep using fossil fuels, they will someday run out. Remember "peak oil" panic? Fossil fuels are finite, and the future of the human race needn't be. We need more.

Thankfully, we have it. Despite what you may have heard, renewables are more than up to the task. Indeed, it's hard to overstate just how much renewable energy is available to us, here at the bottom of our gravity well. I failed to properly appreciate it until I read Deb Chachra's brilliant 2023 book, How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra, an engineering prof and materials scientist, offers a mind-altering reframing of the question of energy: we have a material problem, not an energy problem. If we could capture a mere 0.4% of the sun's rays that strike the Earth, we could give every person on the planet the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, only colder).

Energy isn't just wildly abundant, though: it's also continuously replenished. For most of human history, we've treated energy as scarce, eking out marginal gains in energy efficiency – even as we treated materials as disposable, using them once and consigning them to a midden or a landfill. That's completely backwards. We get a fresh shipment of energy every time the sun (or the moon) comes up over the horizon. By contrast, new consignments of material are almost unheard of – the few odd ounces of meteoric ore that survive entry through Earth's atmosphere.

A soi-dissant adult concerned with the very serious business of ensuring our species isn't doomed to the freezing, starving darkness of an energy-deprived future would think about nothing save for this fact and its implications. They'd be trying to figure out how to humanely and responsibly gather the materials needed for the harvest, storage and distribution of this nearly limitless and absolutely free energy.

In other words, that Very Serious, Hard-Nosed Grown-Up should be concerned with using as few molecules as possible to harvest as many electrons as possible. They'd be working on things like turning disused coal-mines into giant gravity batteries:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Not figuring out how to dig or flush more long-dead corpses out of the Earth's mantle to feed them into a furnace. That is a profoundly unserious response to the human need for energy. It's caveman shit: "Ugh, me burn black sticky gunk, make cave warm, cough cough cough."

Enter Exxon CEO Darren Woods, whose interview with Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram and editor Alan Murray contains this telling quote: "we basically focus our technology on transforming molecules and they happen to be hydrogen and carbon molecules":

https://fortune.com/2024/02/28/leadership-next-exxonmobil-ceo-darren-woods/

As Bill McKibben writes, this is a tell. A company that's in the molecule business is not in the electron business. For all that Woods postures about being a clear-eyed realist beating back the fantasies of solarpunk-addled greenies, Woods does not want a future where we have all our energy needs met:

https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/the-most-epic-and-literal-gaslighting

That's because the only way to get that future is to shift from molecules – whose supply can be owned and therefore sold by Exxon – to electrons, which that commie bastard sun just hands out for free to every person on our planet's surface, despite the obvious moral hazard of all those free lunches. As Woods told Fortune, when it comes to renewables, "we don’t see the ability to generate above-average returns for our shareholders."

Woods dresses this up in high-minded seriousness kabuki, saying that Exxon is continuing to invest in burning rotting corpses because our feckless species "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society." In other words, it's just too late for solar. Keep shoveling those corpses into the furnace, they're all that stands between you and the freezing, starving dark.

Now, this is self-serving nonsense. The problem of renewables isn't that it's too late – it's that they don't "generate above-average returns for our shareholders" (that part, however, is gospel truth).

But let's stipulate that Woods sincerely believes that it is too late. It's pretty goddamned rich of this genocidal, eminently guillotineable monster to just drop that in the conversation without mentioning the role his company played in getting us to this juncture. After all, #ExxonKnew. 40 years ago, Exxon's internal research predicted climate change, connected climate change to its own profits, and predicted how bad it would be today.

Those predictions were spookily accurate and the company took them to heart, leaping into action. For 40 years, the company has been building its offshore drilling platforms higher and higher in anticipation of rising seas and superstorms – and over that same period, Exxon has spent millions lobbying and sowing disinformation to make sure that the rest of us don't take the emergency as seriously as they are, lest we switch from molecules to electrons.

Exxon knew, and Exxon lied. McKibben quotes Woods' predecessor Lee Raymond, speaking in the runup to the Kyoto Treaty negotiations: "It is highly unlikely that the temperature in the middle of the next century will be significantly affected whether policies are enacted now or 20 years from now."

When Woods says we need to keep shoveling corpses into the furnace because we "waited too long to open the aperture on the solution sets terms of what we need as a society," he means that his company lied to us in order to convince us to wait too long.

When Woods – and his fellow enemies of humanity in the C-suites of Chevron and other corpse-torching giants – was sending the arson billions to his shareholders, he held back a healthy share to fund this deceit. He colluded with the likes of Joe Manchin ("[D-POLLUTION]" -McKibben) to fill the Inflation Reduction Act with gifts for molecules. The point of fantasies like "direct air carbon-capture" is to extend the economic life of molecule businesses, by tricking us into thinking that we can keep sending billions to Exxon without suffocating in its waste-product.

These lies aren't up for debate. Back in 2021, Greenpeace tricked Exxon's top DC lobbyist Keith McCoy into thinking that he was on a Zoom call with a corporate recruiter and asked him about his work for Exxon, and McCoy spilled the beans:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/01/basilisk-tamers/#exxonknew

He confessed to everything: funding fake grassroots groups and falsifying the science – he even names the senators who took his bribes. McCoy singled out Manchin for special praise, calling him "a kingmaker" and boasting about the "standing weekly calls" Exxon had with Manchin's office.

Exxon's response to this nine-minute confession was to insist that their most senior American lobbyist "wasn't involved at all in forming policy positions."

McKibben points to the forthcoming book The Price Is Wrong, by Brett Christophers, which explains how the neoclassical economics establishment's beloved "price signals" will continue to lead us into the furnace:

https://www.versobooks.com/products/3069-the-price-is-wrong

The crux of that book is:

We cannot expect markets and the private sector to solve the climate crisis while the profits that are their lifeblood remain unappetizing.

Nearly 100 years ago, Upton Sinclair wrote, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." Today, we can say that it's impossible to get an oil executive to understand that humanity needs electrons, not molecules, because his shareholders' obscene wealth depends on it.

Name your price for 18 of my DRM-free ebooks and support the Electronic Frontier Foundation with the Humble Cory Doctorow Bundle.

[kadextra]

The Eggs

A lore overview & theory longpost :]

Let's start with a recap. The eggs were given by the Federation to the island residents to care for. A backstory was also given by Pato, saying the eggs were left behind by a dragon mother who flew off after the wall explosion. An egg has 2 lives, if it dies you get punished, if it's alive and happy you get a prize. But nobody really cares about a prize anymore, all the parents love their eggs sooo much that just being together with them is a prize. The eggs have developed unique, endearing personalities and have become a central part of the narrative in such a massive way that it'd take hours to describe. Some sadly passed on, and more eggs have joined the cast as new players arrived.

The Code Entity

A strange entity made of binary code began to hunt down the eggs, viciously attacking and bringing them all down to one life. The reason why is still unknown, but it seems to want the residents to leave the island. I'll make a separate lore post about this guy eventually, there's a lot to say theory-wise and a lot we still don't know about it.

The Strange Cracks

At one point, all the eggs were kidnapped from their homes in the night. The announcement of their return said they would be given back "unharmed" but they returned with odd cracks in them, as if they were injured. The eggs all acted unusually scared and extra fragile after the incident, and couldn't wear armor without pain. They slowly regained their confidence after a few days and went back to normal, along with a eggstatistics change saying they've "matured."

The Heaven Meetings

When an egg dies, the Federation gives the parents 5-10 minutes to say farewells in a white room. It's always really wholesome and emotional to watch. But lots of questions can be raised about how the Federation seem to have the power to revive an egg from the dead in the first place. If they can do it for 10 minutes, why can't they just... revive them permanently? q!Max asked his egg son Trump why he couldn't just leave during his meeting, and got answers alluding that the egg was trapped there. That "they" are too powerful, so he can't leave. What's really going on here? Are the dead eggs even dead?

Case of Richarlyson

The Brazilians noticed that their egg, Richarlyson had one smaller leg compared to the rest, as if he was underdeveloped. And strangely, he also had a weird substance left on him (visually shown as a slimeball) which they thought could be part of the mother dragon's placenta. q!Cellbit gave the sample to supercomputer SOFIA to analyze, the results being given a few days later. Turns out, the substance's composition had zero traces of DNA, it wasn't even biological. Instead, it was found to be some type of chemical preservation fluid... meaning Richarlyson was in some kind of stasis/storage before being given to the Brazilians, and rushed out at such short notice he couldn't even be cleaned off in time.

The Pomme DNA Test

A sample of the newest & youngest egg's DNA, Pomme, was given to SOFIA to analyze. The genetic results were:

65% Oxygen, 18% Carbon, 10% Hydrogen, 3% Nitrogen, 1.5% Calcium, 1% Phosphorus, Potassium, Sulfur, Sodium, Chlorine, Magnesium. These results are normal for a biological composition of a living creature. However, there were also traces of "unusual elements" in the DNA....

Silicon, Gold, Cobalt, Copper, Palladium, Cadmium, Bismuth, Uranium.

Silicon is used for making alloys.

Gold is a valuable metal.

Copper is a metal used as an electric conductor.

Palladium is a rare metal, also used for electronics.

Cadmium is a heavy metal used to make batteries and it's also toxic.

Bismuth is a crystalline metal again used for electronic appliances.

Uranium is literally radioactive and used for nuclear power.

HUH? These elements and metals are totally unnatural to find traces of in a living creature. edit: this is wrong, these elements and metals are common to find traces of in a living creature. However, SOFIA said they are unusual in the eggs. What does this mean..?

Connections

What if I told you there is a certain type of egg where it's normal to find metals all over?

Fabergé eggs.

Fabergé eggs are valuable decorative eggs made with crystals and rare metals like gold. And it just so happens that as a lead-up to the QSMP, Quackity Studios released a teaser image, with morse code inside leading to a document where many suspicious letters, including this one was found:

This potential connection can't be ignored. Real Fabergé eggs obviously aren't alive like our little eggs, but it's entirely possible that thanks to the traces of metals in their composition, the name is being used as a codeword to refer to them.

All of these things considered, don't forget that the eggs are still living creatures. The "unusual" parts in the genetic makeup are very few compared to oxygen, carbon, calcium, etc. Most of the weird ones do happen to relate to electronics and machines, but if anything, it's likely that the eggs could be cyborgs - a biological organism that's just enhanced with technological parts.

It's becoming more and more evident that the "dragon mother" story is a load of hogwash. The eggs might've been developed in a lab, and transported to the island by the Federation. Whatever intentions or experiment they have running, we don't know... but these poor eggs have no idea about any of this. They are innocent and being used.

They just existed one day, got adopted and began to know love. And no matter what happens, no matter what they really are, dragons or not, we and the parents will continue to love them <3

[materialsscienceandengineering]

As California transitions rapidly to renewable fuels, it needs new technologies that can store power for the electric grid. Solar power drops at night and declines in winter. Wind power ebbs and flows. As a result, the state depends heavily on natural gas to smooth out highs and lows of renewable power. "The electric grid uses energy at the same rate that you generate it, and if you're not using it at that time, and you can't store it, you must throw it away," said Robert Waymouth, the Robert Eckles Swain Professor in Chemistry in the School of Humanities and Sciences. Waymouth is leading a Stanford team to explore an emerging technology for renewable energy storage: liquid organic hydrogen carriers (LOHCs). Hydrogen is already used as fuel or a means for generating electricity, but containing and transporting it is tricky.

Read more.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Anthropocene Magazine:

Nearly ten times as many people in America now work at Starbucks than dig for coal. Coal mining has long been a canary of America’s energy transition—it lost hundreds of thousands of workers in the 20th century, and has shrunk in half again since 2012. 

Losing dirty, dangerous coal jobs is one thing, but the wholesale dismantling of our fossil fuel economy promises to be far more disruptive. True, but there’s a huge caveat. The bright light on the horizon is that most estimates of new clean energy jobs dwarf even the largest oil refineries and auto plants. 

Winners

1. Everyone (on average). 2021 was a big year for energy jobs globally—it was the first time that more people around the world were working in clean energy jobs than fossil fuels, according to the International Energy Authority (IEA). While the US is still lagging behind that curve, clean energy jobs here are growing at twice the rate of the rest of the energy sector, says the Department of Energy (DOE). And the future looks rosy. Researchers at Dartmouth College calculate that a low carbon economy in the US would create two or even three green energy jobs for every fossil fuel job lost. (That fits with an earlier study out of Berkeley, which found that renewable and sustainable power sources inherently require more people per gigawatt hour of electricity generated, compared to fossil fuel plants).

2. Solar installers and battery makers. Photovoltaic and energy storage companies have been on a tear, adding tens of thousands of workers last year in the US. When considered along with wind, EVs, heat pumps and critical minerals supply, solar power and batteries accounted for over half of all job growth in global energy production since 2019. And the IEA expects these sectors to add tens of millions more jobs by the end of the decade.

3. Some surprise hires. Don’t count out Big Oil and Big Auto just yet. Both the IEA and the DOE expect the fossil fuel industry (particularly natural gas) to hire more workers in the immediate future, albeit at slower rates than clean energy jobs and tailing off in years to come. The IEA notes that if fossil fuel companies could successfully transition to hydrogen, carbon capture, geothermal and biofuels processing, they could almost offset decreases in core oil and gas employment all the way to 2030. It also expects car makers to pivot to EV production, retraining workers and safeguarding many jobs.

Losers

1. Oil workers. Changing careers means more than just a quick retraining session. Morgan Frank at the University of Pittsburgh went down the rabbit hole of what transferring US fossil fuel employment to green jobs would actually mean, and the answer isn’t pretty. His team’s paper in Nature found that green energy jobs are not co-located with today’s oil and gas workers, leading them to predict that almost 99% of extraction workers would not transition to green jobs. And any workers that do make the change face a financial hit. The IEA notes that workers moving from oil and gas to wind, solar and hydrogen today would see pay cuts of 15 to 30%.

2. Petro-states. The shift to green energy will be difficult for economies that rely heavily on fossil fuel extraction and processing. Consultancy EY has an illuminating, interactive webpage allowing you to compare employment in regions around the world, under different decarbonization scenarios. Spoiler alert—oil producing nations in the Middle East and Australia are likely to see employment slump, and even Africa could experience a destabilizing wobble unless it accelerates production of green hydrogen and EV battery materials. “Due to the transition, socio-economic sustainability risks will likely increase as the employment rate drops,” warns author Catherine Friday.

3. Homer Simpson. Some low-carbon energy sectors aren’t exactly booming. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) expects the employment of nuclear technicians to decline 6% from 2023 to 2033. The US hit peak nuclear power stations in 2012 and has been declining ever since, as facilities age into decommissioning without being replaced. Meanwhile, a planned new generation of safer, cheaper and more efficient fission reactors continues to suffer cost overruns, red tape and delays, and commercial nuclear fusion remains a decades-distant dream. D’oh!

What To Keep An Eye On

1. Labor shortages. Workers skilled in green energy jobs won’t just appear from nowhere. Projects are already facing delays in the EU and the US from labor shortages. Biden’s omnibus Inflation Reduction Act included incentives for partnering with apprentice programs and other funding that could be used to train maintenance workers, and installers for clean energy projects. But millions of workers will be needed, and in short order.

2. Carbon capture. The IPCC estimates that between 350 and 1200 gigatons of CO2 will need to be captured and stored this century. No one really knows yet what the technologies needed to achieve that will look like, but they will likely involve a lot of new workers. Climate research firm Rhodium Group estimated that each gigaton captured could translate to 1.5 million construction and 500,000 operation jobs.

3. Chat (and other) bots for hire. Any predictions about the future workplace should be taken with a large pinch of AI and robotics. The BLS just issued a report that shows dozens of occupations employing hundreds of thousands of Americans are likely to shrink in the years ahead. Top of the list are clerks and supervisors, but there are plenty of manufacturing and production roles at risk, too, that could affect the green energy roll-out.

[hellsingghost1]

Blocks: 1868. Non-armor blocks: 663. Number of Large Industrial Cargo Containers: 4. Capacity: 1.69 ML. Number of Small Cargo Containers: 24. Capacity: 375 KL. PCU: 10,022. Converyors: 237.

Thrusters: 35. Hydrogen Thrusters: 19. Large Hydrogen Thruster: 2. Warfare Ion Thrusters: 14. Jump Drive: 3. Battery's: 47. Large Reactors: 2. Spotlights: 2. Gravity generators: 1. Gyroscopes: 10. Hydrogen Engines: 2. Refinery's: 1. Power Efficiency Modules: 5. Yield Modules: 1. Speed Modules: 2. Lights: 9. Ore Detectors: 2. Simple Laser Multitool. 1. Railgun. 1. KWP-200M Cannon Turret: 4. Phalanx CIWS Mk15-1B: 2. VLS-Mk-41 Missle Pods. 2. O2/H2 Generators: 2. Oxygen Tanks: 2. Max storage: 8KL KL. Small Hydrogen tanks: 21. Max storage: 15.75 KL.

Artifical masses: 0. Triangles: 2,205,159. Grid mass: 1,478,632. Physical shapes: 1580/65536. Weight: 1.48 Gg.

[fenrislorsrai]

ProPublica and Capital & Main reporters visited dozens of Remnant wells and tank batteries — facilities used for oil storage and early stages of processing — scattered across this rural stretch of New Mexico. Multiple sites emitted explosive levels of methane, with one leak clocked at 10 times the concentration at which the gas can explode. Several wells belched sour hydrogen sulfide at concentrations that maxed out the gas detector, registering levels three times as high as what is “immediately dangerous to life or health,” according to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. Oil Conservation Division inspectors hadn’t visited some of the wells since 2017, according to agency records. - - - Based on the per-well cleanup costs Fuge’s agency submitted to the federal government, the wells belonging to Remnant and a related company could cost the state $67 million if they are orphaned. The companies have only set aside about $1.5 million in bonds across three state and federal agencies. Under current New Mexico rules, companies only need to put up a single bond worth a maximum of $250,000 — no matter how many wells they have — with the Oil Conservation Division. The failed reform bill would’ve increased that cap to $10 million. The division can request additional bonds to cover the increased risk from idle wells, but when it asked Remnant and a related company for about $3 million, the operators put up less than a tenth of that and kept pumping oil. Weak bonding rules and an unwillingness to take on the industry have created similar shortfalls across the nation. The Pennsylvania General Assembly in the 1990s, for example, forced the state’s oil regulators to hand back money that oil companies had set aside to plug wells drilled prior to 1985, which numbered in the tens of thousands of wells. Oklahoma allows oil companies that prove they’re worth at least $50,000 — about the price of one of the ubiquitous pickup trucks cruising the oil fields — to set aside no money to plug their wells. And Kansas gives companies, no matter how many wells they own, the option of paying a flat $100 annual fee instead of setting aside a bond, as long as they have not committed recent infractions. Seven out of eight companies in the state take this route, leaving an average of less than $13 in bonds for each of the state’s 150,000 unplugged wells. The state’s estimated cleanup costs — which experts said may be low — would mean the state faces about a $1 billion shortfall between the bonds and plugging costs. “Regulations that may have worked well enough in the past have left the public and the industry ill-prepared for this last phase of life for millions of old wells,” Purvis, the petroleum reservoir engineer, said. “Left unchanged, current regulations and practices will continue to accrue liabilities that will ultimately fall on taxpayers.” All told, oil drillers have set aside only $2.7 billion in bonds with the 15 states that account for nearly all the country’s oil and gas production and $204 million with the Bureau of Land Management, the main federal oil regulator. The expected cost to plug and clean up wells in those states is $151.3 billion. ProPublica and Capital & Main obtained and analyzed more than a thousand pages of states’ applications for funding to plug orphan wells as part of the Biden administration’s Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. The documents reveal for the first time states’ own estimates of the cleanup costs in a way that allows states to be compared. “You can give us probably the entire infrastructure act funding — $4.7 billion — and we'd probably spend that in Pennsylvania,” Kurt Klapkowski, head of the commonwealth’s Office of Oil and Gas Management, told a national meeting of regulators in October.

You should read the whole article for exactly how companies get out of paying to cap wells. Which is basically bankruptcy... and then sometimes selling the remaining producing wells to themselves to continue producing, but without that pesky cleanup for the ones tapped out. there's also a breakdown of different states and their liabilities.

The main issue with the leaking wells is methane, which aside from being potentially explosive, is also a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2.

[neoatlantiscodex]

We Don't Have Electric Cars (sic)

We have electric drivetrain cars. The reason this is important is that with gasoline, generation, storage, and usage are all combined together in gasoline.

For electric cars, we need to generate the electricity somewhere. It then has to be stored.

In order to replace gasoline/diesel cars with electricity, we'll need to at least double our electricity production, and in some places quadruple local grid capacity.

And no, that's no an exaggeration. The F-150 Lightning can store enough power to power an average US household for 3 days. Which means if you are charging it, you need enough electricity to power the household, and then add triple that capacity for the truck.

The only way we have to produce this much electricity in a reliable way is Nuclear.

As for storage, most cars use chemical storage. Chemical cells produce power through the differing electrical potential between metals. If you put an electrolytic fluid between them, (a fluid that can carry an electrical current), then electricity will flow. You can then put an electrical circuit between both ends.

We've developed rechargeable ones, but they degrade with every - single - charge. We've also reached the limit of this technology, and it requires elements that... are either mainly produced in China, (who doesn't want to share), or are mined by child slaves in Africa.

To be entirely fair, chocolate has a child slavery problem as well. We should maybe fix these issues, this is more focused on the technology.

Other storage mechanisms include supercapacitors. Supercapacitors can only store 5% of an equivalent lithium-ion battery, but can be fully charged in minutes. This means they do not have the range of chemical batteries, often only having a range of a few miles. But, if you take something that stops every few miles, and has a regular route, such as a bus, then this makes sense. There are countries trying it out right now.

Capacitors involve... honestly... tricking electricity. Electrical circuit can involve electrons flowing, or it can have electrons moving enough to get the next electron to move. You can create a circuit that allows the potential to travel along the circuit, while the electrons themselves get trapped.

Other methods involve mechanical storage, which literally means flywheels. This might seem a bit silly, but compulsators, Compensated Pulsed Alternators, use flywheels to store energy, and is the best way to turn a regular current into an extremely strong pulse. This is what they use for railguns, (tl;dr on railguns, materials are the problem).

There are other forms of storage, that don't have the problems of chemical storage, but are difficult to miniaturize. This makes them useful for grid storage.

The best storage we have for an electrical drive train is hydrogen. It never went anywhere, as the governments stopped pretending to care about it. But that's for the next post.

[chaunceymansanleandro]

Chauncey Man San Leandro: Electricity Generation Methods

Electricity can be generated through various processes, each with its own advantages, disadvantages, and applications. Here are some common types of electricity generation processes shared by Chauncey Man San Leandro:

Fossil Fuel-Based Generation:

Coal Power Plants: These plants burn coal to produce steam, which drives turbines connected to generators.

Natural Gas Power Plants: Natural gas is burned to spin turbines and generate electricity.

Oil Power Plants: Similar to natural gas plants, but they use oil as the fuel source.

Nuclear Power Generation:

Nuclear reactors use controlled nuclear fission reactions to heat water and produce steam that drives turbines connected to generators.

Renewable Energy Generation:

Solar Power: Photovoltaic (PV) cells convert sunlight into electricity.

Wind Power: Wind turbines capture kinetic energy from the wind and convert it into electricity.

Hydropower: Water flowing through dams or turbines generates electricity.

Geothermal Power: Heat from the Earth's core is used to produce steam that drives generators.

Biomass Power: Organic materials like wood, crop residues, and waste are burned or converted to biogas to generate electricity.

Hybrid Systems:

Some power generation systems combine renewable sources (e.g., solar and wind) with energy storage systems (e.g., batteries) to provide continuous power.

Tidal and Wave Energy:

Tidal and wave energy generators harness the kinetic and potential energy of ocean tides and waves to generate electricity.

Fuel Cells:

Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, with water as the only byproduct.

Cogeneration (Combined Heat and Power - CHP):

Cogeneration systems produce electricity and useful heat simultaneously, improving overall energy efficiency.

Thermoelectric Generators:

These generators convert heat directly into electricity using temperature differences, often in remote or small-scale applications.

Microgrids:

Microgrids are localized electricity generation and distribution systems that can incorporate various energy sources, including renewables, to provide reliable power to specific areas.

Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC):

OTEC systems use temperature differences between warm surface water and cold deep water to generate electricity.

Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs):

RTGs use the heat generated by the radioactive decay of isotopes to produce electricity, often used in space probes and satellites.

Piezoelectric Generation:

Piezoelectric materials generate electricity when subjected to mechanical stress or vibration, used in some specialized applications.

Chauncey Man San Leandro's final words, The choice of electricity generation method depends on factors such as resource availability, environmental impact, cost, and energy demand. Many regions are transitioning to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.

[yournightowl]

Your NightOwl #030

Fossil fuels ran out in the 2050’s. There’s none left in the ground, anywhere.

(There’s some left in state storage)

(And there’s some in universities and laboratories around the world)

But for all intents and purposes, we successfully chewed through all the dinosaur juice we could find. Go team! ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

Obviously we’ve had alternate fuels for a long time now, so the lights stayed on for everyone even on the day that the last oil well ran dry. But it’s almost

Embarrassing? To look back through the records and seeing what a mess of a scramble that transitory period was.

Wind, water and sun have always been there, but you can’t put them in a fuel tank, and if everyone was sitting around waiting for every car to charge its battery every 200 km,

Well you could forget about waiting in traffic. You’d spend your whole life waiting in your car in line at the refuel station. ˊ＿>ˋ

Hydrogen fuel’s the answer ofc, and it’s been around for a long time. Why weren’t we using it sooner?

i started some research with this subject in mind, fully expecting to find out that the very existence of h fuel got buried under orders from greedy, mustache twirling fossil fuel barons.

It wasn’t quite that bad. (づ￣ ³￣)づ

Hard for us to remember now, but hydrogen fuel is very flammable. Like spark some static electricity and your city block’s gone flammable.

Even if experts and machines can transport it safely, that’s only because they’re experts, and machines. Fuels need to be safe and simple enough that any slack-jawed consumers can pick them up off the shelf and dump them into the tank.

AGT was the tech that bridged that gap.

Absolute Grounded Territory refers to an environment that is, obviously, completely Grounded. Charge is neutral between all objects to the point where static electrical discharge can’t occur. Establishing AGT around a fueling station means that anyone can safely fuel up without having to worry about their pants fabric re-enacting the Hindenburg just because it’s a little dry out.

It’s a very common, very safe, very widely spread tech.

And yet I couldn’t tell you how it works. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe that’s okay. People in the 20th century drove their cars to the grocery store, to work, and to their neighbors house 50 meters away without ever stopping to think how their engine works. Perhaps that’s another measure of a technology’s success- how little the everyman notices its existence.

Which begs the question

What other technologies are so prevalent that i’ve gone blind to their intrusiveness?

refueled,

your nightowl

[bumblebeeappletree]

What do you do if a satellite runs out of batteries? It’s prohibitively expensive to send a team into orbit and pop in some new AAs, and as a result many satellites use very efficient, reliable and long-lived nickel-hydrogen batteries. We’re talking about batteries that last decades. That sounds like the sort of battery that could revolutionize grid-scale energy storage and really help out renewables back here on Earth, which is why EnerVenue is backing nickel hydrogen batteries as the next step forward! But if batteries rugged and powerful enough for spacecraft already exist, then why haven’t we used it back here on Earth until now?

Fully Charged Live Canada (25% off with code UNDECIDED): https://link.undecidedmf.com/fullycha...

Hydrogen safety demonstration video - AlChE Academy: https://www.aiche.org/ili

Watch How Wave Power Could Be The Future Of Energy • How Wave Power Could B...

Video script and citations:

https://undecidedmf.com/why-this-nasa...

Get my achieve energy security with solar guide:

https://link.undecidedmf.com/solar-guide

Follow-up podcast:

Video version - / @stilltbd

Audio version - http://bit.ly/stilltbdfm

[mariacallous]

One hundred miles west of Johannesburg in South Africa, the Komati Power Station is hard to miss, looming above the flat grassland and farming landscapes like an enormous eruption of concrete, brick, and metal.

When the coal-fired power station first spun up its turbines in 1961, it had twice the capacity of any existing power station in South Africa. It has been operational for more than half a century, but as of October 2022, Komati has been retired—the stacks are cold and the coal deliveries have stopped.

Now a different kind of activity is taking place on the site, transforming it into a beacon of clean energy: 150 MW of solar, 70 MW of wind, and 150 MW of storage batteries. The beating of coal-fired swords into sustainable plowshares has become the new narrative for the Mpumalanga province, home to most of South Africa’s coal-fired power stations, including Komati.

To get here, the South African government has had to think outside the box. Phasing out South Africa’s aging coal-fired power station fleet—which supplies 86 percent of the country’s electricity—is expensive and politically risky, and could come at enormous social and economic cost to a nation already struggling with energy security and socioeconomic inequality. In the past, bits and pieces of energy-transition funding have come in from organizations such as the World Bank, which assisted with the Komati repurposing, but for South Africa to truly leave coal behind, something financially bigger and better was needed.

That arrived at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2021, in the form of a partnership between South Africa, European countries, and the US. Together, they made a deal to deliver $8.5 billion in loans and grants to help speed up South Africa’s transition to renewables, and to do so in a socially and economically just way.

This agreement was the first of what’s being called Just Energy Transition Partnerships, or JETPs, an attempt to catalyze global finance for emerging economies looking to shift energy reliance away from fossil fuels in a way that doesn’t leave certain people and communities behind.

Since South Africa’s pioneering deal, Indonesia has signed an agreement worth $20 billion, Vietnam one worth $15.5 billion, and Senegal one worth $2.75 billion. Discussions are taking place for a possible agreement for India. Altogether, around $100 billion is on the table.

There’s significant enthusiasm for JETPs in the climate finance arena, particularly given the stagnancy of global climate finance in general. At COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, developed countries signed up to a goal of mobilizing $100 billion of climate finance for developing countries per year by 2020. None have met that target, and the agreement lapses in 2025. The hope is that more funding for clear-cut strategies and commitments will lead to quicker moves toward renewables.

South Africa came into the JETP agreement with a reasonably mature plan for a just energy transition, focusing on three sectors: electricity, new energy vehicles, and green hydrogen. Late last year, it fleshed that out with a detailed Just Energy Transition investment plan. Specifically, the plan centers on decommissioning coal plants, providing alternative employment for those working in coal mining, and accelerating the development of renewable energy and the green economy. It is a clearly defined but big task.

South Africa’s coal mining and power sector employs around 200,000 people, many in regions with poor infrastructure and high levels of poverty. So the “just” part of the “just energy transition” is critical, says climate finance expert Malango Mughogho, who is managing director of ZeniZeni Sustainable Finance Limited in South Africa and a member of the United Nations High-Level Expert Group on net-zero emissions commitments.

“People are going to lose their jobs. Industries do need to shift so, on a net basis, the average person living there needs to not be worse off from before,” she says. This is why the project focuses not only on the energy plants themselves, but also on reskilling, retraining, and redeployment of coal workers.

In a country where coal is also a major export, there are economic and political sensitivities around transitioning to renewables, and that poses a challenge in terms of how the project is framed. “Given the high unemployment rate in South Africa as well … you cannot sell it as a climate change intervention,” says Deborah Ramalope, head of climate policy analysis at the policy institute Climate Analytics in Berlin. “You really need to sell it as a socioeconomic intervention.”

That would be a hard sell if the only investment coming in were $8.5 billion—an amount far below what’s needed to completely overhaul a country’s energy sector. But JETPs aren’t intended to completely or even substantially bankroll these transitions. The idea is that this initial financial boost signals to private financiers both within and outside South Africa that things are changing.

Using public finance to leverage private investment is a common and often successful practice, Mughogho says. The challenge is to make the investment prospects as attractive as possible. “Typically private finance will move away from something if they consider it to be too risky and they’re not getting the return that they need,” she says. “So as long as those risks have been clearly identified and then managed in some way, then the private sector should come through.” This is good news, as South Africa has forecast it will need nearly $100 billion to fully realize the just transition away from coal and toward clean vehicles and green hydrogen as outlined in its plan.

Will all of that investment arrive? It’s such early days with the South African JETP that there’s not yet any concrete indication of whether the approach will work.

But the simple fact that such high-profile, high-dollar agreements are being signed around just transitions is cause for hope, says Haley St. Dennis, head of just transitions at the Institute for Human Rights and Business in Salt Lake City, Utah. “What we have seen so far, particularly from South Africa, which is the furthest along, is very promising,” she says. These projects demonstrate exactly the sort of international cooperation needed for successful climate action, St. Dennis adds.

The agreements aren’t perfect. For example, they may not rule out oil and gas as bridging fuels between coal and renewables, says St. Dennis. “The rub is that, especially for many of the JETP countries—which are heavily coal-dependent, low- and middle-income economies—decarbonization can’t come at any cost,” she says. “That especially means that it can’t threaten what is often already tenuous energy security and energy access for their people, and that's where oil and gas comes in in a big way.”

Ramalope says they also don’t go far enough. “I think the weakness of JETPs is that they’re not encouraging 1.5 [degrees] Celsius,” she says, referring to the limit on global warming set as a target by the Paris Agreement in 2015. In Senegal, which is not coal-dependent, the partnership agreement is to achieve 40 percent renewables in Senegal’s electricity mix. But Ramalope says analysis suggests the country could achieve double this amount. “I think that’s a missed opportunity.”

Another concern is that these emerging economies could be simply trapping themselves in more debt with these agreements. While there’s not much detail about the relative proportions of grants and loans in South Africa’s agreement, St. Dennis says most of the funding is concessional, or low-interest loans. “Why add more debt when the intention is to dramatically catalyze decarbonization in a very short timescale?” she asks. Grants themselves are estimated to be a very small component of the overall funding—around 5 percent.

But provided they generate the funding needed to bring emissions down as desired, the view of JETPs is largely positive, says Sierd Hadley, an economist with the Overseas Development Institute in London. For Hadley, the concern is whether JETPs can be sustained once the novelty has worn off, and once they aren’t being featured as part of a COP or G20 leadup. But he notes that the fact that the international community has managed to deliver at least four of the five JETP deals so far—with India yet to be locked in—shows there is pressure to make good on the promises.

“On the whole, the fact that there has been a plan, and that that plan is broadly in progress, suggests that on balance this has been fairly successful,” he says. “It’s a very significant moment for climate finance.”