QUICK NEWS, March 13: Big Oil Reacts To Climate Change; Energy Giant Oklahoma Turns To Wind Power; Landmark Kauai Solar Plus Storage Power Plant Goes Online

Big Oil Reacts To Climate Change For big oil, climate change looms large even in Trump era

James Osborne, David Hunn and Ryan Handy, March 10, 2017 (Houston Chronicle)

“…[President Donald Trump’s advisers Scott Pruitt and Peter Thiel may have lost the audience at a just-completed CERA international oil and gas industry-led conference by emphasizing the administration’s climate change skepticism because] energy ministers, CEOs, and other top executives showed that the industry is running ahead of policymakers on climate change, no longer treating it as an inconvenient theory, but rather as a hard reality to which it must adapt and change…Khalid al-Falih, the Saudi Arabian energy minister, called on his colleagues to find ways to ‘minimize the carbon footprint of fossil fuels.’ Exxon Mobil CEO Darren Woods said energy development can only move forward by protecting the environment and climate. Ben van Beurden, CEO of Royal Dutch Shell, said the industry needed to produce more energy with fewer carbon emissions…

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Paying lip service to climate change has been a standard feature of a CERAWeek appearance for years…But in 2017, even with a brutal oil bust still weighing on profits, the issue was front and center, with numerous panel discussions devoted to everything from carbon taxes to renewable energy. Daniel Yergin, host of the event and vice chairman of IHS Markit, endlessly put the topic to CEOs and ministers from foreign petro-states…It became increasingly clear that days of denial or even skepticism around climate change is now out of bounds for executives of publicly traded oil and gas companies. Instead, they backed carbon taxes as an efficient, market-based way to control carbon dioxide emissions. They discussed increasing investments in wind and solar. They talked about unleashing the industry's innovative capacity to find technological solutions, such as carbon capture, to keep fossil fuels viable…” click here for more

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Energy Giant Oklahoma Turns To Wind Power Oklahoma is kicking butt with wind power

Simon Mahan, March 13, 2017 (CleanEnergy.org)

“Just over 6,600 megawatts of installed wind power capacity exists in the Sooner State – enough to meet about 25% of the state’s annual electricity needs - more than what coal provides. Oklahoma installed nearly 2,000 megawatts in 2016 alone. By the end of the year, Oklahoma became third in the nation for the most wind power installed. Just a couple weeks ago, Oklahoma’s regional grid operator (the Southwest Power Pool, or SPP) reached a record wind power penetration level: at one point, the entire region generated 52% of its electricity from wind power. SPP is eyeing perhaps 75% wind energy penetration levels in the long-term, in part because [Plains states] wind is…at or below two cents per kilowatt-hour ($0.02/kWh)…” click here for more

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Landmark Kauai Solar Plus Storage Power Plant Goes Online Tesla's new solar energy station will power Hawaii at night; Energy generated during the day will power Kauai when the sun goes down.

Roberto Baldwin, March 8, 2017 (EndGadget)

“…The Kapaia project is a combination 13MW SolarCity solar farm and 53MWh Tesla Powerpack station on the island of Kauai…[The Kauai Island Utility Cooperative project] will store the sun's energy during the day and release it at night. The station (along with Kauai's other renewable resource solutions including wind and biomass) won't completely keep the island from using fossil fuels but it will temper the need. In addition to using Tesla's station to battle the island's incredibly high electric bills, it's also part of a long-term Hawaii-state plan to be completely powered by renewable energy sources by 2045. Kauai has its own goal of using 70 percent renewable energy by 2030…and can now produce 100 percent of the energy it needs during high usage mid days and low loads via renewables during a brief period of time…This is the first big project from Tesla [since its acquisition of SolarCity]…Both companies believe this station is the biggest combination solar panel and storage facility in the world…” click here for more

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