Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
It’s the two-year anniversary of the Energy Transition Show, so we thought we’d take a break from the deep dives and just have a little fun skiing around on the surface for a change. Dr. Jonathan Koomey returns to the show for a freewheeling discussion about some of the interesting questions and debates swirling around the energy transition today, and hopefully help us glue together many of the themes that have emerged from our first 51 shows.
Is it wise to assume uninterrupted access to critical goods from faraway places? The recent decision by the U.S. International Trade Commission regarding imports of solar panels raises the question.
Global concern about escalating atmospheric carbon is closely connected to the continued dominance of carbon-based energy. According to the International Energy Agency (2015), coal, oil and natural gas account for 82% of the world’s growing energy use, while renewable energy (geothermal, solar, and wind combined) provides only 1%. “100% renewables” is very futuristic.
We should recognize our limits, too. Follow change, don’t try to stop it. Nature is changing all things we see and out of their substance it will make new things in order that the world will be ever new. This is the way Nature works.
Bayou LaFourche also happens to lie along a route of great interest to Energy Transfer Partners, the company behind the controversial Dakota Access Pipeline. The company wants to lay pipe a few feet under the mud as part of the proposed Bayou Bridge Pipeline. Activists call the Bayou Bridge Pipeline the “tail end of the black snake” — the Dakota Access Pipeline is the head. Bayou Bridge would funnel 480,000 barrels of oil per day over the final 162 miles to refineries in St. James. On the way, it would pass through eight watersheds and many fragile wetlands.
Two technical reports on the Site C dam prepared for the BC Utilities Commission by Deloitte LLP confirm critics’ warnings that the dam is not needed and is at high risk of delays and cost overruns. Deloitte also concluded that even if the energy is needed there are more environmentally friendly and less costly ways to generate power with a combination of existing hydro upgrades, conservation and smaller wind and geothermal projects.
And so to The Test. I make the basic case, and repeat the question that frustrates me so much. How can it be that, collectively, we are missing such an open goal? I am sure that the reasons are multi-faceted. But there is one simple over-arching answer. None of us are trying hard enough. Not governments, not companies, not international organisations, not non-governmental organisations.
While the potential of wind and solar energy is more than sufficient to supply the electricity demand of industrial societies, these resources are only available intermittently. To ensure that supply always meets demand, a renewable power grid needs an oversized power generation and transmission capacity of up to ten times the peak demand. It also requires a balancing capacity of fossil fuel power plants, or its equivalent in energy storage.
Modeling the future of our climate is a complex task that not too many people understand. What do we know about how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (or IPCC) modeling actually works? Why has the modeling community decided to model emissions separately from socioeconomic scenarios?
To discuss the ramifications from these storms on the oil markets, geoscientist and oil explorer Jeffrey Brown returns to the podcast. He calculates that Harvey alone will have long-lasting effects such as lingering supply shortages, but his greater focus is attuned to the growing validation of his Export Land Model, which calculates the rate at which oil-producing nations cease to become net exporters as their domestic consumption increases.
Asking if renewable energy can replace fossil energy implies that the only possible civilization is our civilization as it is nowadays, including SUVs parked on every driveway and vacation trips to Hawaii by plane for everyone. But keeping these incredibly expensive wastes of energy will obviously be impossible in the future, even imagining that we were able to stay with fossil fuels for another century or even more.
Abandoned offshore oil and gas wells in the North Sea may be a source of significant methane emissions finds a new study, which claims to be the first to measure the amount of methane leaking from offshore wells. According to the study published recently in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, about one third of the region’s wells could be releasing between 3 and 17 thousand tonnes of methane into the North Sea each year. “
