| From: S. maltophilia | 3/21/2023 1:38:29 PM | | | | | | The Colorado River Is Running Dry, but Nobody Wants to Talk About the Mud
...For years this mud was hidden beneath Lake Powell’s blue waters. Now, as climate change and overuse of the Colorado have drawn the reservoir down to record lows, the silt is exposed — forming “?mud glaciers??.” And because of a gradient created when the lake level falls, the giant mud blobs are moving at a rate of 100 feet or more per day toward the dam.
These advancing mud blobs pose existential threats to the water supply of the Southwest: One day they could form a constipating plug that blocks Glen Canyon, preventing the water from flowing downriver. They could also someday endanger the structural integrity of the dam.
Asked about the dangers that the sediment posed, Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation in 1963, later quipped, “We will let people in the future worry about it.”
Now the future is here. With Lake Powell just 23 percent full, ......
nytimes.com [no paywall] |
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| From: Wharf Rat | 3/21/2023 1:54:34 PM | | | | | | Do Solar Farms Lower Property Values? A New Study Has Some Answers - Inside Climate News
Researchers looked at sale prices of 1.8 million homes near utility-scale solar plants in six states—the largest analysis ever done on this subject.
By Dan Gearino
March 15, 2023
 Solar tracker panels follow the sun's path on May 17, 2014 on a Champlain Valley dairy farm near West Haven, Vermont. Credit: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
A new study finds that houses within a half-mile of a utility-scale solar farm have resale prices that are, on average, 1.5 percent less than houses that are just a little farther away.
The research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory helps to refute some of the assertions of solar opponents who stoke resistance to projects with talk of huge drops in property values. But it also drives a hole through the argument made by people in the solar industry who say there is no clear connection between solar and a drop in values.
The authors analyzed 1.8 million home sales near solar farms in six states and found diminished property values in Minnesota (4 percent), North Carolina (5.8 percent) and New Jersey (5.6 percent). The three other states—California, Connecticut and Massachusetts—had price changes that were within their margins of error, which means the price effects were too close to zero to be meaningful. The paper was published in the journal Energy Policy.
The authors accounted for differences in property features, inflation and other factors in order to isolate the effect of proximity to solar.
Ben Hoen, a co-author and research scientist at the Lawrence Berkeley lab, said the numbers are clear but additional research is needed to understand what’s happening on the local level to lead to these price effects.
“We have a sense of the ‘what,’ but we don’t know the ‘why,’” he said.
 For example, he doesn’t have a thorough explanation for why the price differences are higher in some states than others.
The researchers chose this group of states because they were, except for Connecticut, the top five in the country for the number of solar installations of at least 1 megawatt as of 2019. They included Connecticut because it is an example of a state with a high population density near solar projects.
Hoen emphasized that the results show a period in time, with transactions that occurred from 2003 to 2020, and may not reflect prices right now.
Also, he noted that the paper’s analysis doesn’t take into account any of the financial benefits of solar for landowners and communities, which may include payments from the developer and a decrease in local taxes.
The study is being released at a time of rapid expansion in the number and size of solar projects, which is a key part of the country’s push to reduce the emissions that contribute to climate change.
The scale of growth in solar development has been met with an intensifying resistance in local communities where some people argue that the projects are ugly and pose a threat to property values and human health. Solar opponents amplify these concerns on social media.
Of all the arguments against solar, the idea that it will hurt property values has been among the most potent, based on prior reporting by Inside Climate News about the local debates. At public hearings and in comments filed with regulators, some residents talk about how they fear reductions of 40 percent or more.
Asked if he saw anything in his data to support these claims, Hoen said there is “no evidence that an effect that large exists.”
Jeffrey Jacquet, an Ohio State University professor who has written about conflicts over renewable energy projects, said the new paper is impressive in its depth and shows the need to ask more questions about the benefits and drawbacks of development for host communities.
“I think the takeaway is that the effect of renewables on property values is small on average, but it is not zero, and we need to correct for that negative impact,” he said.
Before this latest study, the largest one done in the United States was in 2020 by researchers at the University of Rhode Island who looked at about 400,000 real-estate transactions in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. They found that the value of houses within one mile of a solar project decreased by an average of 1.7 percent following construction of the project.
The two studies each show a small decrease in values of properties near solar projects, although Hoen cautioned against comparisons because the two are different in their geographic scope and the number of transactions reviewed.
The Solar Industry ReactsClean energy advocates and the solar industry may be pleased that the study finds no large negative effect on property values, but they also are wary of the core finding that there is a measurable, albeit small, effect.
“There is nothing revelatory in this study—the results are not definitive and only cover a narrow data set,” said Jason Ryan, a spokesman for the American Clean Power Association, a trade group, in a statement. “The report, which found no evidence of adverse impacts on property values in half the states studied, is largely consistent with many prior studies finding that solar projects don’t adversely affect property values. Appraisal data from across the country also show similar conclusions.”
One of the larger points is that a 1.5 percent shift in prices is not enough to be meaningful, said Richard Kirkand, a property appraiser in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has spent about 15 years analyzing property values near solar projects. He often works on behalf of solar companies in regulatory cases before state and local regulatory agencies.
“You can’t really measure things that small in real estate from an appraisal standpoint,” he said.
Among the many problems with drawing conclusions from such a small difference is that there are many factors at play, including the desirability of the house and the features of the land, he said. The presence of a solar project is one of those factors, and it’s difficult to say how much weight it has.
In his experience, solar projects do not lead to a pattern of a negative effect on the values of nearby properties.
Kirkland is far from alone in coming to this conclusion. In Chisago County, Minnesota, which has more solar projects than any other county in the state, officials have been monitoring real-estate transactions to try to detect any changes in resale prices as a result of solar development. They haven’t found any negative effects, either in 2017 after the construction of the state’s largest solar array, or as recently as December, according to the county assessor’s office.
Hoen said that a 1.5 percent difference may not be significant for an appraiser looking at a small number of transactions, but it is significant in a statistical analysis like the one in the paper.
And, even if there are many factors at play, he is confident that proximity to solar is a strong factor explaining the price difference.
He is eager to ask follow-up questions in additional studies to get an idea of what solar-related factors are contributing to negative effects of pricing. For example, he wonders if an increase in local controversy surrounding a project leads to larger decreases in property values.
“Unpacking these types of mechanisms will take further study,” he said. |
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| From: Eric | 3/22/2023 9:10:04 AM | | | | | | 
Batteries
The New Normal in Energy Systems
By
David Waterworth
Published 21 seconds ago
5 Comments
In this time of rapid change, that which was new, different, not normal, is now the new normal. Can we drop the title “green” energy and just call it energy? Electric cars are not just greener, they are better technology than internal combustion engine vehicles, just as the Ford Model T was better than a horse in the early 20th century. Horseless carriages just became cars, and the iron horse was normalized.
The major green energy technologies — wind, solar, electric vehicles, batteries, and ancillary technologies — have become the new energy system. Not just green, but better. A recent blog by Carbon Tracker highlights this well.
Wind and solar are already 12% of the global industry and EVs are 15% of global new car sales. We are well past the tipping point of technology disruption. The least developed countries are leapfrogging right over fossil fuels and straight to solar-powered minigrids.
By 2030, Carbon Tracker expects that wind and solar with battery backup will have four times the market share that they do now, and that is ten times the share they had in 2000. You can’t fight the math. Green energy is energy.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) noted this month that investment in new energy technology — mostly wind, solar, EVs, and batteries — reached over a trillion dollars in a single year for the first time, the same amount as was invested in fossil fuels!
Fifty percent (50%) of this growth is investment in electric vehicles, 50% in wind, solar, and batteries. New energy development at this scale pushes it to the centre of global industrial strategy. “Green” no longer means fringe.
Global capital expenditure by type of project, excluding exploration ($bn). Chart courtesy of Carbon Tracker.
In 2022, wind and solar added between 600 and 700 terawatt-hours of new generation globally, about as much as Canada or Brazil generate in a year.
“That is more incremental generation than natural gas has ever added in a year; it is twice as much as nuclear added at its peak in the mid-1980s. It is even more than any year of incremental growth in coal-fired power in the past three decades, with the exception of 2021 when generation increased as part of the post-2020 rebound in economic activity and power consumption,” tech entrepreneur Azeem Azhar notes.
According to Saur Energy, India is another renewables success story. “Solar and wind dominated India’s power generation capacity growth in 2022, accounting for 92% of total capacity additions. Coal accounted for only 5%. … Combined, solar and wind added 15.7 GW of new generation capacity in 2022, 17% more than additions in 2021. Coal added less than 1 GW, showing a 78% decrease in additions in comparison to 2021.” The figures say it all: solar 13.9 GW; wind 1.828 GW; coal 823 MW. India’s additions in 2022 are comparable to the UK’s entire solar capacity in 2021. “Rajasthan and Gujarat, the top two states for total solar deployment, together added 8.6 GW, slightly more than Türkiye’s entire solar fleet as of 2021. Installations in all the other states combined were still sizable at 5.3 GW, larger than Chile’s entire solar fleet.”
China’s latest five-year plan, released June 2022, targets 33% more power from renewable technology by 2025 and a sharp focus on electric vehicles.
Wind and solar grow, coal reacts, gas peaked. Chart courtesy of Carbon Tracker.
Carbon Tracker continues: “The US Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) has placed up to a $1 trillion dollar bet on this new home-grown energy opportunity, the EU has reacted in kind with its own $1 trillion investment plan over the next decade.”
The new technologies are not just greener, “they are cheaper, more local, provide more jobs, provide more energy options for the future and almost as an aside, emit far less carbon.” No longer a woke, tree-hugging sideshow, the new technologies can stand on their own feet as economically and socially viable. You put solar on your roof to save money and be independent, you buy an EV because it is fun to drive. There is no basis for a culture war.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) states that 55% of global energy jobs are in the new technology sector and expects that this will grow at a rate of 1.5 million jobs per year up till 2030, while fossil fuel jobs decline at a rate of half a million per year. More jobs, lower emissions, less net risk, and greater energy security.
Now we need to change the way the market prices energy. At present, electricity is priced at the “highest marginal cost of technology.” If gas is expensive (due to shortages caused by Russia’s war on Ukraine), then all electricity is expensive no matter how it is produced. Eventually, the grids will be fully renewable, though — the best protection against fossil fuel price hikes.
Markets will have to find ways to circumvent the foot dragging of the fossil fuel companies. Perhaps shareholders need to ask the following questions, as suggested by Carbon Tracker:
- What steps are you taking to accelerate your renewables build?
- What are you doing to push for governments and regulators to produce a regulatory framework for the remuneration of biomethane and hydrogen?
- What measures are you taking to reduce scope 3 emissions by 2030?
Company executives and shareholders need to be aware of the risks posed by stranded assets at this time when peak oil and gas demand is so close (there are those who already think it has passed). Certainly, peak ICEV was achieved in 2017. Fossil fuel use in the energy sector is reaching or has passed its peak.
Global energy sector employment by technology. Chart courtesy of Carbon Tracker.
“The energy transition is happening rapidly. Clean technologies are on S-curves of rapid, exponential growth, displacing fossil fuel demand. The two things to look for, and we’ve seen it in coal, is firstly when demand peaks for a core fossil fuel product. The key ones are obviously oil and gas because that’s where the most capital is tied up,” said Mark Campanale.
“When you see millions of barrels of oil demand destruction a day, then you’ll see a very strong negative sentiment in the investment community toward oil and gas. When that happens, the market will punish you by de-rating you. But at this point, with electrification happening all the way through the energy and transportation systems, it will be permanent and structural, not cyclical and temporary,” added Campanale.
It won’t be long before an electric car is a “normal” car and “green” energy is just energy. Language will change as the reality changes.
cleantechnica.com |
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| From: Wharf Rat | 3/22/2023 1:11:45 PM | | | | | | USA Shale Drilling Set for 20 Percent Drop at Current Prices
The US shale patch may lose as much as 20% of its activity over the next year if energy prices hold at current levels, according to one of the biggest private equity players in the industry.
Crude would need to rise by about 15% to $80 a barrel, and gas would have to climb by more than a third to $3 per million British thermal units for drilling and frack work to maintain its current pace, Quantum Energy Partners Chief Executive Officer Wil VanLoh said in an interview Tuesday. Oil and natural gas prices have slid since mid-2022 on fears of a global economic slowdown.
rigzone.com |
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| From: Eric | 3/23/2023 9:45:52 AM | | | | | | Queensland gets ready for a grid without coal
Giles Parkinson 23 March 2023 9
Image: Acciona
Queensland, the Australian state with the biggest dependence on coal – around 72 per cent in the last 12 months – is getting ready to have no coal generation at all in little more than a decade, at least during daytime hours when solar and storage will dominate the grid.
The Sunshine State is emerging as a fascinating case of how to rapidly transform an elongated grid with significant amounts of major industry into what could potentially become a renewable energy powerhouse, delivering excess wind and solar to states to the south, and also to the green hydrogen industry.
It’s had a 50 per cent renewables target in place for some years now, but to date has only been able to advance that to around 23 per cent; although that share will jump when a couple of big projects under construction – including the country’s biggest wind project at MacIntyre (1GW), Clarke Creek (400MW) and Western Downs (400MW) – come on line.
It also has the youngest coal fleet in the country, so while South Australia has also dumped coal, and Victoria and NSW are expected to do so by the mid 2030s at the latest, if not in the next 10 years, Queensland will still have some plants operating – although their role will be vastly different to what they are today.
Paul Simshauser, the CEO of Powerlink, the state company which operates the main transmission backbone to the state grid, says the state currently has capacity for than 10GW of new renewable energy generation additions without the need for significant new investment. He says the state has been inundated with connection inquires since the government announced late last year it will up its renewables target to 70 per cent by 2032, and 80 per cent by 2035.
“It was like a giant starter gun went off. And we noticed an immediate rise in you know, in project, inquiries and applications,” Simshauser said in an interview with RenewEconomy’s weekly Energy Insiders podcast.
The size of the projects has also increased. “We’ve noticed … a real shift in the size of projects. So I can’t tell you how many projects sort of turned up saying 200 (megawatts) and are now, you know, sort of three, four, even five times that. That is what their starting point has become.”
Simshauser says that – despite the relatively slow increase in renewables to date – that he is confident the 50 per cent renewable energy target can be met well before 2030, likely even before 2028, given the scale of the projects he has seen in the pipeline.
And he says there is no doubt that the continuing influx of renewables, helped by the creation of several new renewable energy zones, will mean a dramatic change in the way the grid operates.
“Just to give you a snapshot of somewhere in the …early to mid 2030s, in the height of summer, if you can imagine this, you’ve got no coal plant operating whatsoever. It’s just all … solar, wind, batteries, both household and utility, and pumped hydro,” he says.
“When you sit back and look at what actually is flying around the power system …. (the modelling shows) just huge amounts. … (It’s becoming) an exercise of moving solar and wind through time and space, and in particular storing huge amounts of solar during the daytime, and unleashing it at night.
“So it’s a different way of thinking about the grid, you now need the grid, to be able to move solar and wind through time and space, rather than just focusing on how we meet peak demand.
“With a transmission network, we’re going to think about all the resources on the system and how, collectively, like a symphony orchestra, they’re going hit those high notes of optimisation that means they need to work a bit harder during the day to meet the nighttime peaks.”
Queensland, Simshauser says, will also play a critical role in the transition in other parts of the grid because of its rich wind resources, particularly in the north of the state, that are not correlated with NSW, which means the resource is strongest when the resource in NSW is not. That will require additional capacity to transport that power to where it is needed.
He says the current coal generation centres will become energy hubs of a different type. That transition is already evident with the announcement of a suite of big batteries to be built at the sites of current coal generators, and Simshauser envisages some old steam turbines being reduced to running in “synchronous mode” rather than burning coal for power.
“The government (which owns most of the state’s existing thermal assets and the network operators) has to be really thoughtful about how to manage that transition. And also with the incentive of an Olympics coming in 2032, the government’s pretty motivated to see renewables hit the ground.”
You can listen to the full interview with Powerlink’s Paul Simshauser in the latest episode of the Energy Insiders podcast. Please click here.
reneweconomy.com.au |
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| From: Eric | 3/24/2023 12:15:39 PM | | | | | | Assessing the area intensity of PV
Solar is wrongly perceived by some people to be an area-intensive energy generation technology requiring much more space than conventional fossil-fuel power plants.
March 24, 2023 INTERNATIONAL SOLAR ENERGY SOCIETY (ISES)
Guest Post
Opinion & analysis
Research
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Image: Sungrow
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From pv magazine global
The area of solar panel per person needed to provide all required energy is simply estimated. Typically, developed countries such as the United States, Australia and Singapore consume about 10 MWh of electricity per person per annum. This will need to double to accommodate the electrification of transport, heating, and industry. Assuming 22% efficient panels and a DC capacity factor of 17% (averaged across rooftop solar and solar farms), we arrive at a figure of 13 kW per person occupying 60 m2.
The global population is 8 billion, and thus 0.5 million square kilometers of solar panels are required for an affluent, energy-intensive world that is fully decarbonized using only photovoltaics. For perspective, this is 1% of the area devoted to agriculture (50 million km2). Regions with lower per capita energy consumption, and those with substantial wind or hydro resources, will need much smaller areas of solar panel per person.
Solar panels can be mounted on rooftops, at solar farms in conjunction with agriculture (agrivoltaics), in arid areas, on inland lakes (floating PV), and on calm maritime waters. Agrivoltaics and floating PV are growing rapidly, but from a much smaller base than more traditional rooftop or ground-mounted PV.
Agrivoltaics in combination with pasturing costs nearly the same as conventional ground-mounted PV, except that the panel rows might be more widely spaced. The farmer benefits from lease fees and the livestock benefit from shade from the panels. The solar farm company benefits from free grass control. Agrivoltaics in conjunction with cropping usually requires taller panel supports and other adaptations, which add to the cost.
The cost of floating PV is around 20% higher than that of rooftop solar, but can be similar to that of tracking, ground-mounted PV with bifacial modules. This augurs well for rapid future growth. Although the cost of floating PV is currently higher than roof and ground mounted PV, it has large potential in countries with high population density. Many countries have substantial inland reservoirs that can host large solar farms.
The potential for maritime floating PV is enormous. Indonesia’s calm, tropical inland sea has 0.7 million km2 of seascape that never has wind and waves larger than 15 m/sec and 4 m height respectively, which is sufficient for all the solar energy an affluent and fully decarbonized world will need.
The world has 1.3 TW of hydroelectricity capacity, which will be passed by global solar capacity during 2023. This comprises a mixture of run-of-river systems with small reservoirs and large storage reservoirs. Covering 100% of a hydroelectric storage lake with solar panels will typically yield much larger power capacity and annual energy than the hydroelectric system.
One of the largest hydropower plants in the world is Itaipu in Brazil, with a flooded area of 1350 km2 and an installed capacity of 14 GW. The 50-years old plant was part of the country’s foreign debt for many decades (US$63 billion – last instalment paid recently!). Due to water constraints and eutrophication, only 66 TWh of electricity was generated in 2021 (compared to a record 103 TWh in 2016). If the Itaipu lake were completely covered with PV modules, the installed capacity of this giant PV power plant would be 270 GW (nearly 20 times Itaipu’s installed capacity), and it would generate some 350 TWh of electricity per year (more than five times Itaipu’s 2021 production), accounting for over 70% of the Brazilian annual electricity consumption.
It took 10 years to build Itaipu, and another 10 years to bring it to full capacity. Fifty years after the Treaty of Itaipu was initially signed, it is the country’s largest “battery,” and solar PV on rooftops and on the ground benefit tremendously from this large baseload modulator. Brazil allowed solar PV to be connected to the grid only in 2012, and 10 years later reached an installed capacity nearly twice that of Itaipu (18 GW of rooftop PV and 8 GW of large-scale, ground-mounted PV as of February 2023).
Rooftop solar
Rooftop PV is the fastest growing segment of the global energy market. Rooftop PV is behind the energy meter and competes with retail electricity tariffs, which are typically much higher than wholesale tariffs. Households and companies provide the funding and assume the risk, which avoids the need for public debt.
In Australia, about one third of residential dwellings have rooftop PV. Continued rapid growth in rooftop PV is expected because most houses and commercial buildings will eventually install PV systems. An important trend is the repowering of earlier systems: houses upgrading PV systems from 2 kW to 4 kW to 8 kW to 15 kW each. Large-scale home storage to increase self-consumption is available in the form of electric vehicle batteries, home batteries and hot water storage tanks. Australia’s electricity grid remains highly stable despite dire predictions from a decade ago.
High photovoltaic conversion efficiency is key both to reducing prices and reducing land use. Efficiency has improved around fourfold since the 1950s. The first practical Si solar cell was presented in 1954, with an area of about 3 cm2. It was around 6% efficient (60 Wp/m2 at STC) and cost US$286/Wp, more than a thousand times the current price of large-area Si solar modules.
Nearly 70 years later, individual best-of-kind Si solar cells approach 27% efficiency, and commercially available Si solar photovoltaic modules are close to 24% efficient (240 Watts per m2). Commercial Si modules might reach 26% in 2030. Tandem cells have higher efficiency potential than Si cells. However, there are formidable technical and commercial obstacles, including unstable device efficiency. If these can be overcome, then 30% efficient tandem cells may become available. The required area of solar panel for a fully decarbonized energy intensive economy would drop from 60 m2 to 45 m2 per person.
Electricity demand in developing countries is much lower than in developed countries (Bolivia, Brazil, and Chile respectively 1.6, 2.5 and 4.1 MWh per capita per year). For many reasons, it is debatable whether and when energy consumption will reach the level of more affluent countries. Important drivers of future clean energy consumption include private vehicles, electrification of industrial heating, production of hydrogen atoms for the metals and chemical industry, and production of synthetic aviation fuels. Solar PV can be the energy source for all of this, and there are no area constraints in most countries.
Authors: Professor Andrew Blakers (ANU) and Professor Ricardo Rüther (UFSC). ISES, the International Solar Energy Society is an UN-accredited membership NGO founded in 1954 working towards a world with 100% renewable energy for all, used efficiently and wisely.
pv-magazine-usa.com |
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| From: Wharf Rat | 3/27/2023 10:57:30 PM | | | | | | EIA Short Term Energy Outlook and Annual Energy Outlook 2023
03/27/2023 D Coyne
The EIA updated the Short Term Energy Outlook (STEO) in March and also released the 2023 version of the Annual Energy Outlook in March. This post will take a brief look at both of these reports with a focus on Crude plus Condensate (C+C) Output for the World, OPEC and Non-OPEC in the case of the STEO through the fourth quarter of 2024 and US C+C output for three oil price cases from 2022 to 2050, reference (medium oil price), high and low oil price cases.
 Figure 1
Figure 1 above shows World C+C output from 2015Q1 to 2024Q4. The red line shows quarterly output using International data from the EIA. The yellow line is the Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) trend before the pandemic from 2015Q1 to 2019Q4, the annual rate of increase was about 478 kb/d over that period. The blue line is a projection based on the OPEC, non-OPEC liquids projection in the STEO and US C+C projection in the STEO from 2022Q4 to 2024Q4. The OLS trend for this EIA projection is an annual rate of increase of 970 kb/d. The quarterly peak in World C+C output was 84.36 Mb/d in 2018Q4, which was 1.2 Mb/d higher than the next highest quarter over the 2015 to 2019 period one quarter earlier, the highest 4 quarter average was 83 Mb/d from 1870 to 2023. The EIA projection has World C+C output rising from 81.53 Mb/d in 2022Q4 to 83.13 Mb/d for 2024Q4....
comment
In the chart below at the bottom is the latest C + C data from the EIA. The Q3 average is 81.1 Mb/d. The Q4 average is 81.9 Mb/d, using the December estimate in the attached chart, posted at the end here, peakoilbarrel.com.
The production increase in the attached chart from December 2022 to December 2024 is 930 kb/d. Using a simple average, that would be 465 kb/d/yr. I am using a simple average because the drop from December to April is due the Russian production drop, which may not have started till March. Regardless the average is less than 1/2 of the posted estimate of 970 kb/d/yr in the chart.
peakoilbarrel.com |
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| From: Wharf Rat | 3/28/2023 2:21:50 PM | | | | | | The World Is Burning, but Fossil Fuel Companies Are Meeting Behind Closed Doors to ‘Future-Proof Gas’. This Should Be Criminal.
“I want the fossil fuel industry to stop breaking the law and pay for their crimes against people and the planet.”
By Guest
onMar 28, 2023 @ 04:00 PDT
Olive trees burn during a wildfire in Greece. As drought and heat continue with rising greenhouse gas emissions, more wildfires are expected in years ahead. Credit: milos bicanski / Climate Visuals Countdown
By Lisa Göldner, Lead Campaigner from Greenpeace Germany for the Fossil Free Revolution campaign
France, Nigeria, Finland, South Sudan, Italy, Peru, Romania. What do all of these places have in common? They are just some of the countries in which Europe-headquartered fossil fuel companies stand convicted or credibly accused of criminal, civil, or administrative offences.
The history of fossil fuels is a litany of criminal accusations, from corruption and bribery to human rights violations and even complicity in war crimes. Most of us only hear about fossil fuel crimes in the news. But for many, the industry’s law-breaking is a cold and hard lived reality, especially for people in climate-vulnerable communities and in the Global South.
The proof? Greenpeace Netherlands has compiled The Fossil Fuel Crime File: Proven Crimes and Credible Allegations, a sample of 26 proven or credibly alleged criminal and civil offences committed by 10 of the most powerful European fossil fuel majors, from 1989 to the present day. The file shows the extent to which unlawful activity is baked into the fossil fuel industry’s DNA and finds that, of the offences compiled, corruption was the most common in the industry.
But these 26 cases are just a drop in the ocean when it comes to fossil fuel pollution. For every unlawful act, there is more destructive and brutal fossil fuel behaviour which is entirely “legal”. For instance, despite the overwhelming evidence that we’re in the throes of a devastating fossil-fueled climate crisis, the fossil fuel industry is recklessly digging its heels in and meeting behind closed doors this week at the 2023 European Gas Conference in Vienna to — in their own words — “ future-proof gas”. A desperate attempt by big polluters to delay the transition to renewable energy.
Hundreds of concerned citizens and climate activists gathered outside the conference centre in protest against the industry’s heinous plotting to extend the life of fossil fuel projects and force global warming beyond dangerous limits. Activists from Greenpeace Central and Eastern Europe climbed the conference venue, the Marriott Hotel in Vienna, with a huge banner reading ‘End Fossil Crimes’ on Tuesday morning.
The fossil fuel industry considers itself above the law, has lied about climate change for decades, and humanity is now paying the price. Hundreds have died in Malawi from unprecedented flooding, and we have all just left behind 2022, which was peppered with extreme and record-breaking weather events.
Enough is enough — we have to solve this now. Last week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that the world’s current fossil fuel infrastructure alone would exceed the remaining carbon budget for 1.5°C. Their recommendation: all new fossil fuel projects need to be stopped immediately and existing infrastructure rapidly phased out.
There is hope, and people are standing up and calling for an end to fossil fuels across the globe. A paper published in the Harvard Environmental Law Review last week argued that fossil fuel companies “have not simply been lying to the public, they have been killing members of the public at an accelerating rate” and should be prosecuted for homicide. I’m joining that call.
I want new fossil fuel projects to be banned now. I want the fossil fuel industry to stop breaking the law and pay for their crimes against people and the planet. European governments must urgently begin a rapid phase-out of all fossil fuels, and stop subsidising this industry.
Ending the fossil fuel era and making a just transition to renewable energy is the only way to stop the climate crisis and to serve justice. As the IPCC says, “if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all”.
desmog.com |
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| To: Wharf Rat who wrote (23340) | 3/29/2023 10:29:55 AM | | From: Eric | | | | India surpasses 64 GW of installed solar capacity
The Indian states of Rajasthan, Gujarat and Karnataka now account for more than 50% of the nation’s cumulative installed solar capacity.
March 29, 2023 Uma Gupta
Commercial & Industrial PV
Markets
Residential PV
Utility Scale PV
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From pv magazine India
India's cumulative PV installations hit 64.38 GW at the end of February, according to the latest figures from the Ministry of New and Renewable Energy (MNRE). The total includes ground-mount, rooftop, hybrid solar component, and off-grid installations.
The state of Rajasthan led in terms of PV capacity additions, accounting for 16.4 GW of the cumulative installations, or 26% of the total. Gujarat ranks second with 8.9 GW of PV, followed by Karnataka with 8.1 GW. The three states together account for more than 50% of India's cumulative installed solar capacity.
The MNRE is implementing a range of schemes to promote solar energy in the country, including the Rooftop Solar Programme Phase-II, PM-KUSUM scheme for farmers, and the Central Public Sector Undertaking (CPSU) Scheme Phase-II for grid-connected solar power projects by the government producers. It is also promoting the Solar Park Scheme, Green Energy Corridor Scheme (for development of intra-state transmission system for RE projects), and the production-linked incentive scheme for high-efficiency solar modules.
The PM-KUSUM scheme is demand-driven and open for all farmers for implementation, in line with guidelines issued for the scheme. The nation had installed 1,140 MW of cumulative solar capacity under this scheme by Feb. 28.
pv-magazine.com |
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