07/07/2019

Coal And Gas On Notice, As US Big Solar And Battery Deal Stuns Market

RenewEconomy - 

 Downtown Los Angeles at night. Source: Flickr
A Californian solar and battery storage power purchase agreement is plumbing new lows for the cost of electricity from solar – a US-dollar price of 1.99c/kWh for 400MW of PV and 1.3c/kWh for stored solar power from a co-located 400MW/800MWh battery storage system.
The record setting deal, struck by a team at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) with renewables developer 8minute, seeks to lock-in a two-stage, 25-year contract to serve 7 per cent of L.A.’s electricity demand from the massive solar and battery project.
The project, called the Eland Solar and Storage Center, would be built in two 200MW stages in Kern County north of Los Angeles, with an option to add a further 50MW/200 MWh of energy storage for 0.665 cents per kWh more.
The project aims not only to help power L.A. during the day with dirt-cheap solar power but to use the stored battery power in the evening peak period to ease the effect of fossil fuel “ramping” as the solar leaves the system.
And while the project’s size is impressive – particularly the size of the battery system, which would be twice the size of the world’s current biggest big battery, Australia’s own Hornsdale Power Reserve – it has been the prices quoted for the PPA that have really caught the market’s attention.


As PV Magazine’s John Weaver noted, the current world record solar power price was set in Mexico at 1.97¢/kWh as part of a batch of projects averaging just over 2¢/kWh. A lower bid submitted in Saudi Arabia at 1.79¢/kWh was not ultimately signed.
“This is the lowest solar-photovoltaic price in the United States, and it is the largest and lowest-cost solar and high-capacity battery-storage project in the U.S., and we believe in the world today,” said the LADWP’s manager for strategic initiatives, said James Barner. “So this is, I believe, truly revolutionary in the industry.”
Barner has also noted that the project has been able to make “full use” of a “substantial” federal solar investment tax credit, which amounted to around 30 per cent “basically knocked off the capital cost of the project.”
According to reports, Barner told a June briefing on the project that net peak load in the evening would be offset by the Eland facility, to keep gas powered generation “not running at the full amount.”
“The battery can be dispatched differently, depending on the system need,” he said. “So you could run that four-hour battery over 16 hours at one-fourth of the output so that you can vary it over time. It’s not just fixed over four hours.
“The battery is able to take a portion of (the) solar from that facility …and then store it into the battery so that the facility can provide a constant output to the grid. It can turn this solar facility, which is not typically dispatchable, into a dispatchable type of facility.”
According to data from the U.S. Energy Information Agency, and quoted in Forbes, a natural-gas plant opening at the same time as the Eland facility would produce power at more than twice the price, or 4-4.3¢/kWh.
Presuming the power off-take contract is approved, the Eland project is expected start construction in 2022, with the first production expected in the first half of 2023, and a guaranteed commercial operation date of the last day of that year, PV Magazine reported.

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Moody’s Analytics Says Climate Change Could Cost US$69 Trillion By 2100

Washington Post - Steven Mufson

Environmental activists demonstrate during a Extinction Rebellion protest April 17 in London. (Henry Nicholls/Reuters)
The consulting firm Moody’s Analytics says climate change could inflict $69 trillion in damage on the global economy by the year 2100, assuming that warming hits the two-degree Celsius threshold widely seen as the limit to stem its most dire effects.
Moody’s says in a new climate change report that warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, increasingly seen by scientists as a climate-stabilizing limit, would still cause $54 trillion in damages by the end of the century.
The firm warns that passing the two-degree threshold “could hit tipping points for even larger and irreversible warming feedback loops such as permanent summer ice melt in the Arctic Ocean.”
The new report predicts that rising temperatures will “universally hurt worker health and productivity” and that more frequent extreme weather events “will increasingly disrupt and damage critical infrastructure and property.”
Moody’s Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi said that the report was “the first stab at trying to quantify what the macroeconomic consequences might be” of climate change, written in response to European commercial banks and central banks.
Climate change, Zandi said, is “not a cliff event. It’s not a shock to the economy. It’s more like a corrosive.” But, he added, it’s one that is “getting weightier with each passing year.”
Moody’s Investors Service, a major credit ratings agency, has already said that it wants to take climate into account when weighing the financial health of companies and municipalities.
The new report highlights the harm done to human health, labor productivity, crop yields and tourism.
It says that “water- and vector-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever will likely be the largest direct effect of changes in human health and the associated productivity loss.”
The report also says that rising temperatures will allow mosquitoes, ticks and fleas to move to new areas, resulting in more sick days. It would also raise public and private spending on health care.
Labor productivity will take a hit, especially among outdoor workers, including those working in agriculture.
The hardest-hit economies will be some of the fastest-growing ones — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, the report says.
The Moody’s Analytics report also forecasts lower oil and natural gas demand, dealing a blow to oil-exporting countries, especially in the Middle East. It forecasts that Saudi GDP will drop more than 10 percent by 2048; the kingdom would be the country harmed the most by climate change, hurting government revenue, Moody’s says.
Although Saudi Arabia has suffered drops in GDP when highly cyclical oil prices sink, Moody’s says that the kingdom would suffer more lasting harm as a result of climate change.
Of the 12 largest economies, India will be the worst hit, the report says, with GDP growing 2.5 percentage points more slowly than it would without the effects of climate change. The country’s service industry will be hit by heat stress, agricultural productivity will fall, and health-care costs will climb.
The firm carried out different scenarios using an international study by the World Bank, taking different locations into account and weighing different economic sectors. It said that rising sea levels would damage coastal real estate, wiping out rental incomes in some areas and thus cutting consumer spending.
But the scenarios only go through 2048. The Moody’s report says “the distress compounds over time and is far more severe in the second half of the century.”
“That’s why it is so hard to get people focused on this issue and get a comprehensive policy response,” Zandi said. “Business is focused on the next year, or five years out.”
He added: “Most of the models go out 30 years, but, really, the damage to the economy is in the next half-century, and we haven’t developed the tools to look out that far.”
Other businesses are peering ahead on climate change, too.
Chubb, one of the biggest insurance firms in the United States, on Monday said it would no longer sell insurance to new coal-fired power plants or sell new policies to companies that derive more than 30 percent of their revenue from the mining of coal used in power plants.
Although more than a dozen leading insurance companies in Europe have already cut off insurance for coal companies, U.S. firms have resisting pressure to take climate change into account.
Chubb’s step was just an initial one. “A major U.S. insurer like Chubb restricting insurance for coal projects and companies is a game-changer,” said Ross Hammond, a senior strategist for the Insure Our Future campaign, which has tried to pressure insurance companies to pull out of the coal market. But Hammond said that the company still needs to stop insuring new coal mines and the oil sands, or tar sands, in northern Alberta.
Lindsey Allen, executive director of Rainforest Action Network, said that “new coal projects cannot be built without insurance, and Chubb just dealt a blow to the dozens of companies that are still betting on the expansion of coal globally.”
Separately, the chief economist of Equinor, the Norwegian oil company previously known as Statoil, has written a report that looks at three scenarios for climate change and its impact on global economies, especially on energy.
Only one of those, the report said, would lead to a sustainable path, but that path comes with enormous challenges. To reach that set of targets by 2050, “almost all use of coal must be eradicated,” oil demand would need to be halved, and natural gas demand trimmed by more than 10 percent. Renewables as well as carbon capture and storage or utilization would have to increase sharply, helped by continuing advances in technology.
“In order to hit 1.5 degrees Celsius, the model to get there is enormously challenging,” said Eirik Waerness, senior vice president and chief economist of Equinor. He said more than half of new cars would have to be electric vehicles by 2030. Electricity demand will double, yet wind and solar would equal the entire current electricity output, a leap from current levels.
The threshold of 1.5 degree Celsius is the target set by most climate scientists for avoiding dire climate change.
Waerness also said that the company currently assumes a carbon price of $55 a ton when considering whether to finance new energy projects. As a result, Equinor has been investing more in projects such as offshore wind, where it can also tap into its experience with offshore platforms and technology.

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Journey To Antarctica: What Scientists Think Of Trump’s Latest Climate Tweet

Rolling Stone - Jeff Goodell*

Photos: Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images; Derek Oyen/Unsplash
To scientists in Antarctica, President Trump is weirder than a sea pig.
On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a quote from Patrick Moore, a well-known climate denier who claims to have been a co-founder of Greenpeace. (He wasn’t, and Greenpeace has disavowed him as a “paid lobbyist.”)
“The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science,” Trump quoted Moore as saying on an episode of Fox & Friends.
A day later, I asked Rob Larter, the chief scientist aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer, where we have spent the past six weeks in Antarctica doing Real Science, what he thought of Trump’s tweet. Larter can talk about the movement of the Earth’s continents 500 million years ago as breezily as other men talk about off-season baseball trades. And of course out here in Antarctica, Larter had been far too busy during the past 24 hours actually contributing to the sum of human knowledge to pay attention to tweets from the conspiracy theorist in the Oval Office.
I showed Trump’s tweet to Larter on my iPhone. As he read it, he smiled slightly and shook his head. “It’s crazy talk,” said Larter, who is British. “Do any Americans really believe that stuff?”

The 55 scientists and crew members from around the world who are aboard the Palmer with me have been living in a Trump-free paradise for weeks. We get very little news, as we are bandwidth-starved and have only intermittent connection to the outside world via internet and satellite phone.
But I’ll admit Trump’s tweet woke me up to a curious point: During this entire six-week cruise, I have lived in close quarters with my shipmates. I know what kind of cake was served at their kid’s birthday party and their views about the afterlife and why they believe that physicists who research the existence of other dimensions are likely to be crackpots. But there has been very little talk of climate politics or climate policy. The subject of Trump’s re-election comes up, and the Brits talk a lot about the disaster known as Brexit. There is much debate about internal politics at various universities, and within the National Science Foundation and the UK’s National Environment Research Council, both of which are funding this trip, which is part of a five-year-long collaboration to better understand the risks of collapse of Thwaites glacier in West Antarctica.
But as far as I can tell, the words “Green New Deal” have not been uttered on the ship by a scientist, nor have the words “carbon footprint” or “Paris climate accords.” I overheard one scientist engaged in a not-particularly-well-informed debate with the captain about the pros and cons of wind power, but that has been about it.
It’s not entirely surprising. “You don’t bring up climate politics because you have to live with people on the ship in very close quarters for seven weeks,” says Lars Boehme, an oceanographer from University of St. Andrews who has successfully tagged 11 seals on the trip. “It’s divisive.” Bastien Queste, a researcher from the University of East Anglia in the UK, has a different view: “Why talk about climate politics? We all have similar views on the ship. We all are big supporters of clean energy. We all know we have to get off fossil fuels. What is there to discuss?”
But even off the ship, the reluctance to get involved in politics persists. So far as I can tell, none of the scientists on this trip are engaged in climate-related political activism in their daily lives. Few are even comfortable talking about it. Several started squirming as soon as I brought it up. Two of the youngest researchers on the trip, one from the U.S. and one from Sweden, told me they have actually quit climate activism in recent years simply because they have no time.
Building a career in science is a brutally competitive endeavor, sucking up all your time and energy. But for many, the real problem with climate activism is that it requires dealing with the media. And if there is one thing that spooks climate scientists more than collapsing glaciers, it’s a person with a microphone. It’s not hard to see why. Scientists deal with facts, not characters or emotions.
They often see journalists as ignorant about science and all too eager to transform scientific debates into a new front in the culture wars. And they are not always wrong about that. “To be good at communicating about science, you have to spend a lot of time at it,” explains Queste. “If you try to analyze data and communicate with the public, it’s nearly impossible to find the time to do both very well.”
There is also the fear that if they are outspoken, they might be seen as too “political” and not do as well with research grants or other funding. That’s not a trivial question these days, when science budgets are slashed and tenured positions at universities are increasingly difficult to secure. It’s much easier just to keep your head down and do the work. “I am paid to do science,” one U.S. scientist on the trip told me. “So I do science.”
Others worry about offending family and friends by speaking out too bluntly. One scientist talked about a friend who published a paper on climate change in Nature, a top scientific journal, then received threats online. “This is a dangerous time to be a climate scientist,” the scientist said. And if the reaction of researchers on the Palmer is any indication, American scientists feel that danger more viscerally than most (and, not surprisingly, were more reluctant to talk on the record for this dispatch).
But to some U.S. scientists, it’s also a dangerous time to keep silent. From the Palmer, I emailed Andrea Dutton, a highly-regarded geologist at the University of Florida, about her reaction to Trump’s tweet. “This is no longer a matter of simple misrepresentation,” she wrote. “It is dangerous and reckless for our leaders to mislead the American people about the impacts of global warming. As a scientist, and perhaps more importantly, as a citizen of the U.S., I do feel that I have a moral obligation to speak out against misinformation. The American people deserve the truth about their future.”
One thing that has become very clear on this journey to Antarctica is that climate science is risky in all kinds of ways — including risks to life and limb. On the ship, instruments are dropped into the sea in the middle of the night while the deck of the ship pitches wildly in rough seas; winches spin with cables attached to 700-pound coring devices; marine technicians launch Zodiac boats in rough seas. On the Palmer, science goes on 24/7, no matter how bad the weather, no matter how exhausted you are.
Queste has been in the middle of most of it. When I sat down with him in the mess hall yesterday, he looked more tired than most. I asked him if he had seen Trump’s tweet. He hadn’t. So I showed it to him. “I can’t handle this much crap,” he moaned, his face drained from long hours in the lab. “It depresses me. Such blatant pandering and shit-stirring.”
A few minutes later, I showed Trump’s tweet to Lars Boehme, who seized onto a line in the tweet about carbon dioxide being “one of the main building blocks of life.” It’s a well-worn talking point for climate deniers. “You like carbon dioxide so much?” Boehme mused. “Try putting a plastic bag over your head and see how that works out.”
But perhaps the best response to Trump’s tweet came from Anna Wåhlin, a professor of physical oceanography at the University of Gothenburg and leader of the team that sent the Hugin, a semi-intelligent underwater research device, 1,500 feet beneath Thwaites glacier.
It was one of the most remarkable scientific achievements of the trip, and the data the Hugin collected has already helped scientists understand how ocean currents circulate in West Antarctica, pushing warm water beneath Thwaites and melting it from below. This is what science is supposed to do — go underneath our everyday world and make the unknown known.
Late Wednesday night, the lab on the Palmer boomed with the sound of the ship’s hull busting through thick sea ice. I asked Wåhlin if she’d seen Trump’s tweet. “No, I have not,” she replied.
She read it on my iPhone, then looked at me with something beyond anger or disgust. “I’m sorry,” she said.

* This is the latest dispatch in a series from Jeff Goodell, who is aboard the Nathaniel B. Palmer in Antarctica, investigating the effect of climate change on Thwaites glacier.

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