Princeton’s Net Zero America: Potential Pathways, Infrastructure and Impacts charts five challenging, tortuous, investment-intensive paths to “net-zero” by 2050. A presentation that contains 345 slides of text, colorful graphs and wide area maps provides details about the selected scenarios. The Princeton research team promises peer-reviewed journal articles in the near future.

According to sponsor organization promotional materials, the slide deck was released before the journal articles “in recognition of the urgency to cut greenhouse gas emissions and the need for immediate federal, state, and local policy making efforts.” There’s little doubt that the project sponsors and the authors have a strong policy-influence agenda.

All five chosen scenarios involve technology and infrastructure deployments “at historically unprecedented rates across most sectors.” They represent “expansive impacts on landscapes” that have not yet been planned in communities whose permission has not yet been obtained.
Overlooked path

The NZA study ignores a straight, wide, blazed trail. As documented in Goldstein and Qvist’s 2019 book titled A BRIGHT FUTURE: How Some Countries Have Solved Climate Change and the Rest Can Follow, several major electricity grids have successfully eliminated coal and been nearly completely decarbonized.

In those grids–France, Sweden, and Ontario–a combination of nuclear power and hydroelectricity did the job. In each case, it took about two decades of sustained effort.

None of history’s successful decarbonization efforts required a complete reordering of the economy. The nuclear energy portion of the country- or providence-wide efforts that now provide reliable, abundant electricity from non-combustion sources that do not dump carbon dioxide to the environment did not result in “expansive impacts on landscapes.”
Electricity can do most of the work

Though electricity is only a part of total energy use, the Princeton study makes the reasonable assumption that decarbonized electricity grids can be expanded to supply the energy services needed to decarbonize most of the rest of the energy supply.

That same assumption continues to work if the electricity decarbonization path includes a successful effort to improve nuclear energy products and projects. Unlike wind and solar, atomic energy is a thermal energy source that can directly supply heat energy useful for industrial processes. Some of the electrification expansions that NZA assumes to be necessary to supply all energy demands might be accomplished more affordably with direct heat use.

There is no organization or individual that is responsible for making sure that electricity is generated, transmitted and delivered to customers.

Various organizations, often with competing or conflicting interests, have shared responsibility for different parts of the system that includes generators, transformers, switchyards, transmission lines, distribution lines and billing systems, but “the market” has been assigned the responsibility of supplying wholesale electricity.

And that market is not the free market, but instead is a hybrid that is governed by an ever changing stack of layered rules where many of the important decisions are made by participant groups that do not include customers or even enabled representatives of customers.

A growing portion of the grid’s electricity is dependent on free, but uncontrolled natural flows. Another portion comes from generators whose fuel is delivered by capacity-limited pipes in a “just in time fashion.” When the natural flows are interrupted or something interferes in the pipelines’s capability to deliver fuel, generators stop producing power.

There are processes that can be called into action, but costs can skyrocket in times of scarcity. Some market players thrive in times of crisis and have few incentives to ensure those crises never arise.

A study published Monday shows that solar power developers in California have been using mostly undeveloped desert lands with sensitive wildlife habitat as sites for new solar power installations rather than building on less sensitive, previously developed open lands.

The study, by the Carnegie Institution for Science and Stanford University, shows the ecological footprint of solar power development could grow to more than 27,500 square miles — roughly the land area of South Carolina — if the U.S. were to adopt a more ambitious climate goal. When thousands of solar panels are built in undeveloped natural areas, the panels crowd out wildlife and destroy their habitat.

“Solar takes out a lot of territory, right? It obliterates everything,” University of California-Santa Cruz ecologist Barry Sinervo, who is unaffiliated with the study, said. “There is as much plant biodiversity in the Mojave as there is in a redwood forest. The key part of this is, do we want to tile out the last largest wilderness area that we have, which is the Western desert?”

The Carnegie study found that of the 161 planned or operating utility-scale solar power developments in California, more than half have been or will be built on natural shrub and scrublands totaling about 145 square miles of land, roughly the land area of the city of Bakersfield, Calif. About 28 percent have been built on agricultural land and 15 percent have been built in developed areas.

Areas that have already been developed and have little wildlife habitat would be better suited for solar development from an ecological standpoint, said study lead author Rebecca Hernandez, a postdoctoral fellow at University of California, Berkeley, and a former ecologist at the Carnegie Institution. //

“We can’t just throw them (solar installations) across a landscape and say biological diversity be damned,” he said.

“We have to find the right places to put these things,” he said. “If you’re in Washington or Spain or France and you just see this landscape that from a satellite looks like there’s nothing there, it’s hard for them to imagine why anyone would be upset about throwing 10 or 20 square miles of glass across this (desert) to produce solar energy. There are biological riches that are part of our natural heritage that we don’t want to lose.”

Dungeness B nuclear power station, which is in Dungeness nature reserve on the south coast, is home to numerous species and rare habitats. Visitors to this area will find Dungeness Bird Observatory in the shadow of the nuclear power station, and yet this same area is also popular with the Jack Snipe, Sandwich Tern, Peregrine Falcon, Black Redstart, Kittiwake and many more diverse and rare birds. ​Ecologists have found the​ Brown Carder Bee Bombus humilis​,​ a species​ that Buglife and the Bumblebee Conservation Trust get excited about​, ​within 0.5km ​of the power station.​ People also live happily next to the power plant. Despite what the RSPB claims will come to pass if Sizewell C is built, the area around Dungeness power plant is actually teeming with life.

Why is wildlife around nuclear power stations actually thriving?

One reason is that these sites often lead to habitat creation and increased protection, for example reptile mitigation strategies at Sizewell C when it goes ahead. I spoke to independent wildlife consultant Jonathan Cranfield about this. “Nuclear power comes with plenty of room for biodiversity, semi natural habitats and wildlife,” he told me. “The construction of Sizewell C offers significant opportunities for rewilding, habitat creation and management. It’s vital for local biodiversity gains, as it brings with it extensive ecological monitoring, plus clean and reliable power for millions of people. Several power stations around the country are in fact places that rare birds like peregrines call home.” //

On its website the RSPB states that: “our campaigning is underpinned by expert analysis, practical demonstration and conservation delivery — but we campaign as vigorously as we always did to ensure the next generation can enjoy wildlife as we do.” However, their stance on nuclear power shows the opposite to be true.

Just last year the RSPB approved a gas power station on its Saltholme reserve, 100 metres from a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in Stockton. The charity appears to support gas, while opposing 30 energy projects in the UK, including onshore and offshore wind, wave and tidal projects, carbon capture storage (CCS) and nuclear.

As the planet warms, we will lose more and more species, many of them birds, unless we reduce our greenhouse gas emissions rapidly. We cannot do this without new nuclear.

Evidence shows that nuclear is much safer than the alternatives that we currently depend upon. The Sizewell B nuclear plant, which I visited this summer for a swim, is a beautiful place that is surrounded by wildlife. It’s rare that we hear the success stories of nuclear and nature, but consider the story of the manatees in Florida that benefited from the warm water around the Crystal River nuclear plant so significantly that when the plant was decommissioned marine biologists worried that the numbers of manatees would decrease.

I have come to accept that my previous advocating for 100% renewables (something that The Green Party, which I am no longer a member of, still does) is not based on science. Germany has invested heavily in renewable technologies while phasing out its nuclear plants, but research has found that it will have the EU’s fourth most carbon intensive electricity grid by 2030. If their energy experiment had succeeded, I’d be advocating for it.

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Peak output for the Patriot Power Generator increased from 2,000 W (1500 model) to 3,048 W (1800 model). Continuous output is 1,500 W and 1,800 W, respectively. Storage capacity for DC devices increased from 600 Wh (1500 model) to 768 Wh (1800 model).

Today, shortly after giving expert testimony to Congress about energy policy, I had the startling experience of being smeared by sitting members of the United States House of Representatives.

The context was a special House Committee hearing to evaluate a Democratic proposal similar to the one proposed by Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden, which would spend $2 trillion over four years on renewables and other climate programs.

Congressional interest in my testimony stems in part from the fact that I advocated for a Democratic energy proposal very similar to Biden’s between 2002 and 2009. Back then, the Obama administration justified the $90 billion it was spending on renewables as an economic stimulus, just as Biden’s campaign is doing today.

But then, late in the hearing, Representatives Sean Casten of Illinois and Jared Huffman of California, both Democrats, used the whole of their allotted time to claim that I am not a real environmentalist, that I am not a qualified expert, and that I am motivated by money.

Had I been given a chance to respond, I would have noted that: I have been a climate activist for 20 years; my new book, Apocalypse Never, has received strong praise from leading environmental scientists and scholars; the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently invited me to serve as an expert reviewer; and that I have always been financially independent of industry interests.

But I wasn’t given the chance to say any of that. After Casten and Huffman lied about me, Rep. Garret Graves asked the committee’s chairperson, Rep. Kathy Castor of Florida, to let me respond. She refused and abruptly ended the hearing.

What, exactly, had I said that was so dangerous as to lead Democrats to engage in character assassination and undermine liberal democratic norms? Nothing I hadn’t already said last January when I testified before Congress about climate change and energy.

Back then, I testified that climate change is real but isn’t the end of the world nor even our most important environmental problem. I pointed to the inherent physical reasons renewables can’t power a high energy industrial civilization. And I noted that cheap and abundant natural gas and nuclear, not industrial solar and wind, have been the big drivers of emissions reductions.

I further made the case that climate change was distracting us from a far greater and more urgent threat, which is the global domination of nuclear energy by China and Russia, which could be disastrous for US interests and the future of liberalism and democracy around the world.

Nations that partner with Russia or China to build nuclear plants are effectively absorbed into their sphere of influence. The line between soft power and hard power runs through nuclear energy. On the one side is cheap and clean electricity. On the other, a stepping stone to a weapons program.

During today’s hearing, several Democratic members claimed that renewables today are cheaper than existing grid electricity. But if that were true, I replied, why do solar and wind developers require hundreds of billions of dollars from American taxpayers in the form of subsidies?

The Democrats are basing their climate agenda on what California did. But California’s electricity rates since 2011 rose six times more than they did in the rest of the US, thanks mainly to the deployment of renewables and the infrastructure they require, such as transmission lines.

Wind and solar are intermittent resources, so they also unlock the energy storage and transportation value in hydrogen. As an energy carrier, hydrogen can store renewable energy in bulk, for long periods of time. Hydrogen can also be transported by pipeline, truck, ship, or rail, which means that it can be deployed to overcome gaps or transmission bottlenecks in electricity infrastructure. ///

Hydrogen is a beast to store and transport. Seals are difficult because the molecule is so small. It is very bulky, even in liquid form, and liquid has to be super chilled to stay liquid.

Scientists: Nuclear Energy is a Waste of Time
Dan Robitzski in Earth & Energy
According to new research, investing in nuclear power doesn't tend to lead to a drop in greenhouse gas emissions like using renewables does.

Status Quo
It turns out that nuclear energy, which advocates say is a more feasible means of transitioning away from fossil fuels than solar or wind, might not actually be up to the task.

That’s according to research published Monday in the journal Nature Energy, which shows that countries that adopted nuclear energy didn’t actually reduce their carbon emissions a significant amount — but that countries with renewable energy investments did. It’s a compelling case that clean energy initiatives ought to focus on solar and wind, and perhaps skip nuclear as a stepping stone on the road to decarbonization. //

“This paper exposes the irrationality of arguing for nuclear investment based on a ‘do everything’ argument,” study coauthor Andy Stirling said in a press release.

Mini nuclear plants are almost here. Is the U.S. ready?

David MacKay's Map of the World

Showing countries' power consumptions, population densities, and areas;
and comparing power consumptions per unit area with the power production per unit area of various renewables

This eco-documentary takes a harsh look at how the environmental movement has lost the battle through well-meaning but disastrous choices. //

Planet of the Humans’ faced a coordinated suppression campaign led by professional climate activists backed by the same ‘green’ billionaires, Wall Street investors, industry insiders & big foundations skewered in the film.

Nuclear energy is crisis. The world could lose twice as much nuclear as it gains, between now and 2030. Can radical innovation save nuclear? Yes, but it must be more radical than anyone imagines, argues EP's Michael Shellenberger in a major keynote address to the American Nuclear Society. //

What is atomic humanism? I would like to offer three first principles that are meant as the beginning, not the end of the discussion of what atomic humanism should be.

First, nuclear is special. Only nuclear can lift all humans out of poverty while saving the natural environment. Nothing else — not coal, not solar, not geo-engineering — can do that.

How does the special child, who is bullied for her specialness, survive? By pretending she’s ordinary. As good as — but no better than! — coal, natural gas or renewables.

Like other atomic humanists of his time, Weinberg knew nuclear was special. But he could not fully appreciate how special nuclear was given the low levels of deployment of solar and wind.

Now that these two technologies have been scaled up, we can see that nuclear’s specialness is due due an easy-to-understand physical reason: the energy density of the fuel. //

Second, nuclear is human. Nuclear is people using tools to make electrons through fission. And yet the picture in our minds when we think of nuclear has no people. Where are the people? What about when we think of a nuclear plant’s control room? Now picture in your mind the cockpit of an airplane. You walk on board and you see two men. If we didn’t trust these men, we wouldn’t get on the plane. The airlines ask us to trust them, the air traffic system, and the pilots, and we do. Why then are we asking the public to trust our machines?

In the movie “Sully,” the pilot loses both his engines to bird strikes shortly after taking off. The entire drama of the film is whether Sully made the right decision. Should he have returned to La Guardia airport, or was he right to make a water landing in the Hudson? At no point did anyone suggest we should ban jet planes because they could crash. Nor did anyone demand meltdown-proof jet turbines.

A federal lab found a way to modernize the grid, reduce reliance on coal, and save consumers billions. Then Trump appointees blocked it. //

experts say power plants across the U.S. could be helping power California avoid heat wave-induced blackouts right now, if the U.S. power system was more interconnected. But Perry prioritized securing resilience by protecting coal and nuclear power plants, which store months of fuel on-site.

After Michael Shellenberger, leading environmental and climate change expert, presented his evidence-based testimony concerning energy policy in America in a congressional hearing Tuesday, Democratic house members mocked his findings.

Shellenberger was invited to speak at the special House Committee hearing to evaluate the Democrats’ proposal allocating $2 trillion to renewable resources and other climate programs.

Democrats were likely interested in including his testimony, Shellenberger said, because of his history advocating for a similar proposal between 2002 and 2009. After years of supporting climate change reform and other environmental legislation, Shellenberger is now an outspoken opponent of such policies for their unproductive and often ignored negative impacts.

Recently, Shellenberger published several articles and a book explaining his change in sentiment. Seeing the corruption surrounding climate alarmism and other environmental issues, he said he feels compelled to stand in opposition to what people expect in support of the truth. Serving as a climate change activist for 20 years and an environmentalist for 30, the majority of Shellenberger’s life has been fully dedicated to the pursuit of positive environmental change.

Despite his work, however, Reps. Sean Casten (D-IL) and Jared Huffman (D-CA) criticized Shellenberger for his testimony, discounting his qualifications as a well-known environmental expert.

“Mr. Shellenberger, I am not going to ask you questions because it would be a waste of time,” Caston said.

Rather than give him time to ask questions, the two congressmen used their time to criticize Shellenberger without giving him a chance to respond. Once Shellenberger referred to his book, which contains much of his energy research, during the hearing, Huffman accused him of using the testimony for his own promotion. //

Shellenberger argued during his testimony that nuclear energy is far more favorable to renewable energy due its cheap and ready supply as a clean source of electricity. There’s a more pressing facet of the nuclear argument as well, he said. Russia and China have proven to be leaders in this type of energy and the United States is falling behind.

“We do not have a National Nuclear strategy to compete with the Russians and Chinese. Every time a nation does a nuclear power project. It’s an extension of soft power…” he said. “I think the United States needs to step up its game and be competitive with the Russians and Chinese in building new power plants abroad, and that’s going to require building more nuclear power plants at home.” //

Several members claimed renewables are cheaper than existing grid electricity, so Shellenberger inquired about the billions of taxpayer dollars they supposedly require to operate.

“Instead of answering that question, Democrats claimed that solar and wind projects were somehow part of the battle for environmental justice. In reality, I noted, solar and wind projects are imposed on poorer communities and successfully resisted by wealthier ones.”

He also listed numerous human rights abuses imposed by renewable energy resources in contrast to the jobs and opportunities that nuclear energy is guaranteed to provide for generations to come. He pointed to corruption among Democrats’ largest donors, including Rep. Casten, who depend on this bill to make a lot of money as renewable energy and natural gas investors.

“Now, if the Democrats’ $2 trillion climate proposal passes into law, a lot of very powerful people stand to make a lot of money, from winning tender for industrial projects such as building wind turbines and transmission lines all the way to the outright cash payments that we saw during Obama’s green stimulus.”

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- With billions of workers at home and factories idle, early April saw daily carbon emissions fall 17% compared to 2019 averages, according to a study by a team of international scientists published this month. That’s great. Unfortunately, it only takes us back to 2006 levels, and

A rapid-charging and non-flammable battery developed in part by 2019 Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough has been licensed for development by the Canadian electric utility Hydro-Québec. The utility says it hopes to have the technology ready for one or more commercial partners in two years.

Hydro-Québec, according to Karim Zaghib, general director of the utility’s Center of Excellence in Transportation Electrification and Energy Storage, has been commercializing patents with Goodenough’s parent institution, the University of Texas at Austin, for the past 25 years. //

The utility’s first-generation lithium battery dates back, Zaghib said, to more than 40 years ago. “Hydro-Québec was the first company to work on true lithium batteries in 1979,” he said.

If such claims came from almost any other lab, they might be ignored and shunned by the broader community of battery researchers, the same way physicists turn their noses up at anything that smacks of a perpetual motion machine.

But this lab belongs to one of the most celebrated battery pioneers today—and one of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery itself. John Goodenough, who at 96 continues to research and publish like scientists one-third his age, last year joined with three co-authors in publishing a paper that grabbed headlines. (Spectrum had profiled him and his battery technology the year before, following an initial announcement about his group’s new glass battery.) //

Goodenough and collaborators claimed they’d developed a non-flammable lithium battery (whose electrolyte was based on a glass powder) that had twice the energy density of traditional lithium-ion batteries. They also published a graph that showed an increase in capacity over more than 300 charge-discharge cycles. (This increase, however, pales in comparison to the cell's at least 23,000-cycle lifespan.) //

She says their glass electrolyte is a ferroelectric material—a material whose polarization switches back and forth in the presence of an outside field. So charge-discharge cycles are effectively jiggling the electrolyte back and forth and perhaps, over time, finding the ideal configuration of each electromagnetic dipole.

“This is what happens as you are charging and discharging,” Braga says. “You are aligning the ferroelectric dipoles.”

The CryoHub project will use extra wind and solar electricity to freeze air to cryogenic temperatures, where it becomes liquid and in the process shrinks by 700 times in volume. The liquid air is stored in insulated low-pressure tanks similar to ones used for liquid nitrogen and natural gas.

When the grid needs electricity, the subzero liquid is pumped into an evaporator where it expands back into a gas that can spin a turbine for electricity. As it expands, the liquid also sucks heat from surrounding air. “So you can basically provide free cooling for food storage,” says Judith Evans, a professor of air-conditioning and refrigeration engineering at London South Bank University who is coordinating the CryoHub project. //

The U.K. is already a leader in liquefied air energy storage (LAES) technology. London-based Highview Power put the first-ever LAES system online last summer. The 5-MW demonstration plant near Manchester is designed to power 5,000 homes for about 3 hours.

It is no secret that Tesla is pursuing a million-mile battery. This battery will be so advanced, it would be able to stand the most stressful conditions for electric vehicles without compromising its quality and longevity; and when used for energy storage devices, it could last decades with regular use. If recent reports are any …

America is in the midst of an energy revolution. Over the last decade, the United States has slashed net petroleum imports, dramatically increased shale gas production, scaled up wind and solar power, and cut the growth in electricity consumption to nearly zero through widespread efficiency measures. Emerging advanced energy technologies provide a rich set of options to address our energy challenges, but their largescale deployment requires continued improvements in cost and performance. Technology is helping to drive this revolution, enabled by years to decades of research and development (R&D) that underpin these advances in the energy system. //

The 2015 Quadrennial Technology Review (QTR) examines the status of the science and technology that are the foundation of our energy system, together with the research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) opportunities to advance them. It focuses primarily on technologies with commercialization potential in the midterm and beyond. It frames various trade-offs that all energy technologies must balance across such dimensions as cost, security and reliability of supply, diversity, environmental impacts, land use, and materials use. Additionally, it provides data and analysis on RDD&D pathways to assist decision makers as they set priorities, within budget constraints, to develop more secure, affordable, and sustainable energy services.