A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

August 26th 2012

Stop Subsidising US Wind Power?!: A Rebuttal (Of Sorts) To An Ignorant Anti-Wind Rant

I came across an article today priding itself on the subject of wind energy subsidies in the US and why investing in them any longer would be tantamount to breaking the law, and boy does the author do it with some vigour and confidence. Unfortunately, and I really doubt I will be the only one thinking the same thing, most of what this person writes is founded on ignorance, scientific falsehoods and a basic hatred for wind energy in any of its forms.

The article, titled ‘We Must Stop Subsidising Wind Power’, which you can find in the link at the end of this post, focuses on a myriad of detrimental effects the Federal Production Tax Credit (PTC), a hotly debated topic currently, as it stands to be shelved come the end of 2012, with so far no hope of a successor. While there are many powerful and well-informed societies, associations and individuals lobbying for its extension, its pieces like this which seriously undermine rational thinking.

Supposedly, American wind energy, and by logical assumption, the entire industry, is unreliable, severely expensive, economically damaging and highly dangerous to the environment, seemingly to the same degree that oil and coal are; a real and direct threat to the green side of life. It is simply deemed ‘not environmentally safe’. What an absolute load.

Let’s start with the first point, wind’s unreliability and thus pointlessly impractical employment as an energy source. The crux of the argument here is that due to the natural flux in wind strength and speed, turbines are entirely dependent upon fossil-fuel based sources to prop them up (I know) and therefore the price of this is passed onto consumers like you and me. Aside from this, it isn’t helping us reduce our emissions nearly as much as we hoped.

Yes, wind is unreliable as a quantity, just like market prices for fossil fuels or the accessibility of reserves, but this hasn’t stopped wind becoming THE primary renewable energy source worldwide, demonstrating the biggest growth rates and deployment percentages of any type. Not only this, but some of the leaders of free political-thinking in regards to clean energy sources have proven this is not the issue it is made out to be. Germany for instance powers over 8% of it’s needs through wind, and has demonstrated that the apparent reliance on oil or gas for baseload on the grid is not true; wind and solar alone can power a nation if handled rationally and smartly, something the US is quickly catching onto. Only last year, the US installed almost 7GW of wind, up 31% on 2010, and could meet 10% of energy requirements in six greedy states, a hell of a lot more than most, and installation prices have also dropped, hitting just $2.1 per watt, down 10 cents on 2010.

With smarter systems, demand-response software and upgraded grids, all technology which is not only well established and on the rise but relatively cheap to put in place, the apparent issues with fluctuating wind and lulls in power can be negated almost completely. Combine this with CCGTs and solar, a nation as hungry as America can happily guzzle electricity without so much as a mention of oil, coal or shale ‘something’.

Posted at 2:01pm and tagged with: wind, energy, power, electricity, grid, america, USA, romney, PTC, federal, tax, credit, subsidy, renewable, solar, turbine, birds, bats, Environment, public, money, economy, jobs, news, rebuttal, society, installed, germany, china, trade,.

July 30th 2012

Why Germany Should Show Off It’s Dominant Renewable Economy

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Germany’s renewable share for the first half of 2012 has recently been released, and guess what, they’re thrashing the majority of EU nations comfortably, reaching 26% overall, a staggering increase from 20.5% during the same period last year. That means that over a quarter of the energy filling the German grid was produced purely by renewable means, and that is something they should be seriously proud of, and rubbing in our faces, as I’ll explain below.

What is even more interesting about this event, is the specific mix of renewables used in accomplishing this task. Wind sits in gold medal position with 9.2%, with biomass (surprisingly) taking second with 5.7%, whilst solar PV follows closely behind with 5.3%, expanding by over 40% in comparison to last year. That alone is an impressive stat to contend with, and was no doubt bolstered by Germany’s generous FiT, which although was recently slashed to save on funding, has been highly successful in generating consumer interest in solar as a viable energy alternative.

Hydropower boosted 25%, up to 4% in the overall mix, with all other renewables completing the lineup.

It’s no surprise that wind energy takes pole on the list given how perfectly flat, large and windy Germany as a landscape is, and their heavy involvement with the cheapest of all renewable technologies. Many have attributed the extra-impressive results to the weather this region of Europe has been experiencing over the past 6 months, with abnormally high winds spinning up the turbines country-wide, torrential rains over-powering the hydroelectric dams, and in the later parts of the year, intense solar radiations and clear skies bathing the abundant solar panels in beaming energy.

Then again, attempting to diminish the feats achieved by the German renewable grid by stating it ‘was the weather which made it so damn good’ is a tad cheeky, considering the very point of many clean energy sources is that the sun and weather itself drives the production. If we have optimal weather, then they’re working exactly as planned.

What was surprising is the biomass share, which was much more than I thought had been invested in, with this form of energy generally not so high on a country’s energy list. I’m assuming that good recycling programs and clever biomass burning policies mean that Germany’s energy production is relatively high here, although actual year-on-year growth has been the smallest in this sector, just 7.5%.

Posted at 10:11am and tagged with: energy, germany, EU, america, renewable, solar, wind, PV, biomass, clean, technology, hydroelectric, UK, economy, politics, news, electricity, grid, 2012, weather, climate, sun, france, spain, green, jobs, investment, morals, psychology, global,.

July 27th 2012

How Long Will We Continue Denying Climate Change’s Link To Weather?

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There’s no denying the weather has been really quite screwed up of late, and this isn’t just on a local scale but a global one, affecting small and large nations alike.

Currently, large parts of SE Asia such as Beijing and Japan are suffering horrendous flooding after record-breaking precipitation falls for weeks on end, and there have been similar historical rains in many areas of Europe, the UK in particular. Alongside this, intense drought and insolation has been baking most of the entire United States for weeks, severely damaging crops across the agricultural belt of the continent and knocking food prices up globally, stirring fears of yet another food crisis if the weather is to continue.

Storms and hurricanes are of much higher magnitudes, striking with little warning to those in their paths, and regions of the globe so comfortably used to heavy snowfall and consistently cold winters are enduring some of the driest, mildest and frankly oddest seasonal variations seen in decades, perhaps centuries.

One theme slashes through all of these freak events like a warm knife through butter; the frequency and rapidity in which our weather systems are flipping from one extreme to the other is unprecedented in this day and age, and wouldn’t even fit into normal life some centuries past. Torrential rain which may have sat in place for weeks will be abruptly interrupted by beaming sunshine and glass-clear skies for yet more weeks, before thunderstorms and intense winds complete the freaky cycle. The fact these events are occurring within the same month, let alone the same season is reason to worry enough, and in many parts of the world, many are winning gold medals in trumping historical weather readings from as far back as records began.

Only recently NASA has posted studies demonstrating how far this weather screwing has gone. At some point during mid-July, the Greenland ice sheet, one of two major ice bodies on the Earth’s surface, the other being the Antarctic, experienced thawing of up to 97% of the entire ice mass, that’s 97%. For context, normal values read around 50% for the same time of year. This happens due to warming of and melting of the much thinner coastal ice and glaciers as summer comes round, and despite rates increasing steadily over recent decades, this year more than ever data fly through the roof. What makes this event so shocking, is that the normally impregnable central ice, which exceeds two miles thick in many places, melted just like any other part of the sheet, albeit to much shallower depths.

This scared scientists and followers alike as it not only flags up warnings in regards to future sea level rise and glacier loss, but such injections of fresh water can set up yet more complex and potentially devastating feedbacks in the ocean-atmosphere system, making things exponentially worse. Although much of the central meltwater will refreeze before long, it shows clear signs that the extreme weather we’ve been seeing can and potentially is having a direct effect on ice sheets globally, and the results can be incredibly quick and powerful. After further study, it’s suggested some 70% or more, perhaps even 95% of the melting can be attributed to climate warming and it’s associated impacts on weather systems.

However, it is necessary to note that this sort of abnormal melting does seem to occur in 150 year cycles, with the last in 1889, and therefore some of the alarming data can be tempered with this in mind, but this should not take away from a few key points. The fact that this sheet has experienced melt like this in the past, when man-made warming could not have been in effect, is important, but not absolute; if we see this melting occurring more commonly over the next few years, we’re seeing clear signs of breaking the natural flow of things. Even if we don’t, it’s a stark reminder of what could easily happen to the ice sheets globally if we continue to pump GHGs into the atmosphere. To ignore this, natural or not, would surely be foolish?

Posted at 11:31am and tagged with: climate, science, news, greenland, melting, change, warming, global, america, UK, europe, freak, weather, storms, rain, flooding, disaster, nature, humans, emissions, carbon, fossil fuel, denial, NASA, UN, IPCC, data, antarctic, extreme, chaos theory,.

July 15th 2012

It’s Time To Wake Up & Smell The Renewable Revolution, Soon We Won’t Have Any Other Choice

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As a global society, we currently stand on a precipice; the potential catastrophe that awaits us cannot be downplayed in any way. Brought about by fossil fuel greed, mass shortsightedness and a complete and frankly terrifyingly impressive ability to ignore all signs of danger and wrongdoing for decades past, humanity has ravaged the planet to a point where civilisation is at the fork in the road.

Unless we make a change, a global change, we begin the short walk down one road towards an extinction level event, bigger than any nature has wrought upon life before us, that will be impossible to turn back from. Forgive my foreboding and perhaps depressing approach, but I for one see only one route out of this. For centuries before now, humanity has prided itself on its ability to innovate and outsmart our way out of danger, and never more than now is it crucial we do this once again.

It’s with these thoughts ringing heavily in my ears, that I turn to what I feel are some of the most frustrating and dismissive problems large majorities of society have with certain renewable technologies, as well as some of those dirtier fossil fuels such as natural gas, which despite being part of the problem, are rapidly taking precedence as the answer to our carbon woes, a fantastic alternative to that old demon oil and coal.

Unfortunately I do not foster the same feelings towards natural gas, and also do not tend to follow suit in regards to issues with solar panels, wind farms or nuclear plants, all of which are the truly awe-inspiring innovations with which we can slow, stop and eventually reverse the once irreversible damage we have wrought upon this beautiful planet. As you will hopefully see in the following summaries, many of the so-called ‘negatives’ with each of these technologies, is in my eyes, and I’m sure the eyes of many others, both ridiculous and detrimental to society as a whole, a statement I do not wish to undervalue in this post.

Let’s get straight to the major players, solar and wind. The one complaint about these two absolutely wonderful technologies is one that angers me greatly - “they’re too ugly, don’t go putting them on my roof/in my garden/anywhere within a 50 miles radius or my house”. Apologies if you’re someone who shares these feelings, but I simply cannot agree with such a weak and destructive view when you consider the grand scheme. As job creators, solar and wind each produce at least 6x the number of jobs that coal and oil do, with a much larger percentage in long term maintenance, a highly secure career. Not only this, but subsidies, feed-in-tariffs and government funding has aided these industries in literally exploding in value and popularity, and lest not forget, solar and wind are entirely clean, completely renewable and have the potential to provide huge proportions of the world’s energy.

June 1st 2012

Department Of Commerce Takes A Hit At Chinese Wind Power Next

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It would seem that the Department of Commerce has chosen its next target to slap some hefty trade tariffs on, that certainly didn’t take too long eh? This time they’ve stayed in China, but gone for another of the potential renewable winners of the world, wind energy, quoting the same old story as last.

Last December, the DoC received complaints from multiple American wind companies complaining that China was yet again unfairly subsidising and trading its domestic wind towers, reducing costs and outcompeting other manufacturers, namely in the US. By reducing their trading costs out of China, in an uncannily similar vein to the recent solar trade war, the US market is being flooded by cheap-as-chips wind towers designed for large-scale generation of 100KW and over.

Of course, the US they again doesn’t agree with this whatsoever, and has chosen to file preliminary reports to determine what value to set the counter-tariffs at, with both China and Vietnam under scrutiny, who has also been seen to be ‘unfairly’ trading its wind capacity. As many of you who have followed the solar mess that is the anti-dumping case, it has not only brought anger and protest from both US and Chinese sides, but has been suggested to be threatening the entire solar industry as a whole, and no doubt this will have the same effect on the wind industry.

What differs between both cases however is the size of each respective nation’s wind industry size. The US has been steadily throwing up wind towers in recent years in bigger and bigger quantities, and now has a formidable wind-generation capacity, whereas China’s influence in the market is much smaller, with solar their chosen renewable path.

So, my question is this…why start yet another trade dispute between China and themselves, when the DoC knows, 1) how much consumers/manufacturers/sellers rallied against the solar tariffs, and 2) when wind energy is in the best interest of everybody to continue growing worldwide, especially in the dirtier Asian countries yet to move on from coal; China’s industry is only small and this response could severely cripple it.

Posted at 9:46am and tagged with: wind energy, electricity, china, us, department of commerce, tariff, trade, market, manufacturing, science, solar, america, anti-dumping,.

May 25th 2012

So Environmentalists Are Satanic, Earth-Worshipping Radicals Now?

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A few stories have caught my eye of late, and both have not failed to make me laugh out loud and bring a swift hand to the forehead, striking it with such force as to try and knock what I’ve just read back out of my brain.

Unfortunately, they also haven’t failed to demonstrate the fundamentally ignorant and foolishly confident views of some big-mouthed American speakers on climate science and global change. No doubt you’ve heard of at least one of the offending characters, a certain Lord Monckton, but maybe not the other.

To start off with, I’m going to drive straight into the recent Heartland Institute stories, of which have made be both happy, and concerned for those who listened to such rubbish until now. In a recent Heartland convention, a ‘yearly’ event held by the foundation at which multiple infamous speakers comically attempt to derail climate science and laugh in the face of the literally millions who believe in it. I would love to attend one of these just to experience the inner bubble that these people cohabit, but alas they appear to be nearing their end.

This convention failed spectacularly at attracting the number of attendees as in past years, a combination of their poorly conceived and downright ludicrous billboard project, the dropping of over 35% of their annual funding and a crash in global public perception, all of which showed them for what they’re really worth. However, Lord Monckton, known as one of the most, if not the most outspoken climate denier in history, did not hesitate to rock up and joke about all things climate.

After opening with the a sentence along the lines of “it is hard for us people without any scientific qualifications to tackle these issues, but I thank you for trying”, addressing his loyal fans, before continuing to crack wise about Obama’s birth, and subsequently handing over to a speaker, who for all intents and purposes, stated that global warming is good for people; those old people who are killed by it, “are moribund anyway”. Classy stuff.

As I hope you are doing right now, both these quotes made me laugh aloud, but deeply worried at the same time. Their effective idol in Monckton had just applauded them for tackling something, so deeply rooted in scientific understanding and data, with no such science background whatsoever, it was as though they were the kings of a new age, and the crowd simply chuckled along, comfortable in their own little world. That is highly disturbing.

Posted at 10:31am and tagged with: earth, gaia, climate, science, global warming, lord monckton, james dobson, america, US, Environment, satan, religion, worship, god, extremist, radical, HEartland, Obama, birther,.

May 23rd 2012

NREL's Renewable Energy Map Takes Mapping To A New Level

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The National Renewable Energy Laboratory’s fantastic customisable map, demonstrating every conceivable form of green energy you can think of, really sets the bar high for future mapping of this kind.

Head on over to the link above and you’ll find yourself presented by a US-wide map with a multitude of drop-down settings to choose from, ranging from solar (PV & concentrated) to biomass, with a ton of information buried further in the tool. Each selection layers the map with the chosen resource/s with a neat coloured scale, gradated in an easy way to understand.

It’s the ease of use that really shines with this beast, as in a matter of minutes you can select wind or solar, see the data sources in detail, before bringing up a beautiful list of features, such as estimated solar radiation figures or wind class, all of which can be done at a localised scale; there is even a ‘find location’ button to type in a specific address.

With such user-friendly tools like this available to both the public and professionals, it is maddeningly easy to see that the world has plenty of renewable power for us greedy humans, and hopefully more global maps will follow suit soon.

For the moment, check it out and enjoy, it’s well worth it.

Posted at 5:35pm and tagged with: renewable, mapping, map, energy, NERL, US, america, wind, solar, PV, biomass, geospatial, GIS,.

May 19th 2012

Is The US Handling A Double-Edged Sword With Their Hefty Import Tariffs On Chinese Solar?

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So the other day I posted a blog surrounding this whole mess we’re calling the ‘solar trade war’, of which the US and China are the key players, and of which I finished by saying would benefit nobody and, if anything, seriously hurt the solar industry at a crucial (this can’t be understated) moment in its growth.

At this point in time, solar as a form of energy, a very nice one at that, is rapidly approaching grid parity with fossil fuels, and in many instances is able to compete on par for energy prices to both consumer and producer, with the big coal and oil lobbies. That is one impressive feat considering relatively little government subsidies have been involved (that’s relative to fossil fuels) and massive growth has occurred in just 5-10 years, not decades.

However, this lack of comparative funding and phenomenal growth clearly doesn’t sit very well with the US and the Department of Commerce, who severely oppose the Chinese solar market and it’s doings, which have undeniably been a key driving force in this event.

Very briefly, the Chinese government has been found ‘illegally’ subsidising their solar industry and key companies, such as SunTech, by selling them for below-market prices, effectively flooding the global solar market with cheap panels. The US has branded this anticompetitive and blamed it for the crash in US-solar sales and Solyndra’s collapse, responding by slapping a small, but nonetheless important 2-4% trade import tariff on Chinese solar. That was then.

Now it seems they’ve upped the ante, with the Department of Commerce raising tariffs to 31% for the major Chinese solar companies, and as high as 250% (!!) on smaller firms, effectively forcing the Chinese to raise their prices to meet ‘market’ levels, i.e. the US’, despite their ability to produce at such cheap and effective prices. I find this to be sheer madness (some may say blatant protectionism) by the Department, who could easily be accused of crippling the solar industry at a time when just one more nudge in the right way could lead to an explosion in sunlight-derived energy.

It may be true that the Chinese have been unfairly aiding their solar markets, but the fact of the matter is this; the US is doing exactly the same, and as I say in my earlier post, SolarWorld reaps rewards far beyond those of SunTech, and yet we leave them alone entirely. Not only this, but why should cheap solar panels, in abundance around the world, which are no doubt forcing prices down hugely and cleaning up the atmosphere, be subject to these crazy tariffs just because the US feels its own domestic manufacturers are at risk?

Posted at 12:07pm and tagged with: solar, china, trade war, US, america, energy, technology, tariffs, suntech, solarworld, fossil fuels, solar panels, market, economy, canada, mexico, commerce,.