King Coal has been dying the death of a thousand cuts, one power plant at a time. Today seems like a tipping point—#RenewableEnergy was trending last night on X as I wrote this, with 1,436 posts. I can’t do justice to that. But it won’t stop me trying. Anyway, it isn’t one coal plant at a time any more. And it isn’t just converting from coal to methane. Wind and solar are just too cheap to ignore.
It’s as if we have broken through to public and government consciousness big time. “Gosh coal power is unreliable! If only we had more alternative sources of energy available on a sunny, windy day like today! 🤔“
And
Bidirectional EV to home charging is the actual Next Big Thing in EVs.
Laughing at the Texas power grid: 🤭🤭Priceless🤭🤭
Bidirectional Charging and EVs: How Does It Work and Which Cars Have It?
A growing number of automakers are adding the feature, which allows your EV to double as a home battery.
The world added 50% more renewable capacity last year than in 2022. It’s the fastest rate of growth in more than 20 years…
For years China promoted coal plants in their Belt and Road project, but they are finally realizing that it needs to be wind and solar.
From Tennessee:
By 2026, the report projects, renewables and nuclear will account for almost half of the world’s power generation. In 2023, by contrast, they were less than 40 percent.
Scientific American and E&E News
Although they tweet sometimes,
their sites are aggressively paywalled. I got through to some more content by the device of Control-a, Select All; Control-c, Copy. I have limited my quotations to Fair Use: titles and ledes, and quotations from public reports.
Image above:
Aerial view of the site where Mexican state-owned electric utility Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) is building the largest solar plant in all Latin America in Puero Peñasco, Sonora state, Mexico on February 2, 2023.
Credit: Raquel Cunha/AFP via Getty Images
- Renewable Energy Capacity Could More Than Double by 2030
Sara Schonhardt & E&E News
CLIMATEWIRE Renewable power capacity is expected to grow by 7,300 gigawatts through 2028 under countries’ current policies and will overtake coal as the leading source of electricity globally by 2025, according to a new analysis by the International Energy Agency. That would mark a 33 percent increase over 2022 projections, led overwhelmingly by surging renewable energy generation in China.
But that pace falls short of reaching the 11,000 GW needed by 2030 to triple renewable capacity, highlighting what analysts say is a need for stronger incentives and increased investment in carbon-free power, particularly in less developed countries that are poised to see major economic and population growth.
Renewable energy capacity grew 50 percent in 2023 to more than 500 gigawatts, the fastest rate of growth in more than 20 years, according to the IEA.
The expansion happened almost exclusively among the world's 20 largest economies, with China far out in front. In fact, China commissioned more renewable power last year than all other countries combined did in 2022, and it's expected to account for around 60 percent of renewable power additions in the next five years, the IEA said.
In much of Southeast Asia, for example, relatively new coal- and gas-fired power plants serve as barriers to the faster build-out of renewables, since shifting away from those plants could leave those countries with stranded assets, the analysis said.
The old fallacy of Sunk Costs again. Every successful poker player knows not to throw good money after bad, but too many corporations and countries still don’t get it.
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Oil and Gaslighting: Fossil Foolishness Watch
The Death of a Thousand Cuts is well launched here too, one country, one state, one province, one city at a time. But there are always those to whom money is more important than life itself, poor paskudnyaks.
A new ad campaign is targeting the cultivated meat industry on TV and online. Industry supporters criticize it as unscientific.
The campaign was launched in 2023 by the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW)—a group led by executive director Jack Hubbard, who is also a partner at public relations firm Berman and Company, which has
a long history of supporting nonprofits that defend the interests of the food and drink industry.
Sorry to harsh the nonstop Maga vibe. We may have just lost Trinidad and Tobago.
Exaggerated, but still truly horrible.
On February 7, 2024, a ship was spotted near the Caribbean islands of Tobago and Trinidad. The ship is visually identified as Gulfstream but can’t be located in international records. No one was found on board, suggesting it was abandoned. A massive oil leak resulted. Oil has contaminated nearby reefs, beaches, and even major island roads.
Carnival was scheduled for today and has not been canceled so far. The vomit-inducing stench from spilled petroleum surrounding the islands will be repugnant.
Tourists will not party today; in the future, tourism will decline if not stopped altogether. These islands will not have local fish to eat, and their economy will collapse. Scuba and snorkeling operators, fishermen, and restaurants can not stay in business in a tourist economy with lasting catastrophic ecological damage.
Don’t get me started on the Conservatives in the UK Parliament.
We can keep nuclear for a while yet, until we start cutting into its contributions, but there is absolutely no excuse for the UK’s plans to build more, including lots of Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) that don’t exist yet outside of Russia and China, and can’t possibly get through licensing in the UK in less than ten years.
Nuclear power in the United Kingdom
In July 2023, Energy Secretary Grant Shapps said he was launching an international competition to select up to four different SMR technologies "to go through to the final design stage", supported by up to £157 million of funding. He said the final investment decision will be taken by the next parliament, and UK SMRs might start operating by the 2030s.
The Conservatives seem to have gone back to pre-Adam Smith Mercantilist economics, where the first imperative is to enrich corporations and Important People, and never mind the Wealth of the actual Nation.