QUICK NEWS, August 29: Water Will Keep Rising; It’s Time To Care; New Energy Moving Past Nuclear In U.S. Power Mix; Grid Study Points To Power Market Redesign

Water Will Keep Rising; It’s Time To Care Harvey Is What Climate Change Looks Like; It’s time to open our eyes and prepare for the world that’s coming.

Eric Holthaus, August 28, 2017 (Politico Magazine)

“In all of U.S. history, there’s never been a storm like Hurricane Harvey…[but we] knew this would happen, decades ago…and we didn’t care. Now is the time to say it as loudly as possible…Harvey is what climate change looks like in a world that has decided, over and over, that it doesn’t want to take climate change seriously…Harvey is the third 500-year flood to hit the Houston area in the past three years, but Harvey is in a class by itself…So much rain has fallen already that the National Weather Service had to add additional colors to its maps to account for the extreme totals…

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Harvey is now the benchmark disaster of record in the United States…[and] gives us an opportunity for an inflection point as a society…[W]hat happens next is critically important for all of us…One recent study showed that by mid-century, up to 450 million people worldwide will be exposed to a doubling of flood frequency. This isn’t just a Houston problem…A warmer atmosphere enhances evaporation rates and increases the carrying capacity of rainstorms. Harvey drew its energy from a warmer-than-usual Gulf of Mexico, which will only grow warmer in the decades to come…Adapting to a future in which a millennium-scale flood can wipe out a major city is much harder than preventing that flood in the first place…

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…[T]he built world we have right now wasn’t constructed with climate change in mind. By continuing to pretend that we can engineer our way out of the worsening flooding problem with bigger dams, more levees and higher-powered pumping equipment, we’re fooling ourselves into a more dangerous future…If we don’t talk about the climate context of Harvey, we won’t be able to prevent future disasters and get to work on that better future…” click here for more

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New Energy Moving Past Nuclear In U.S. Power Mix Electricity From Renewables And Nuclear Power In Statistical Dead Heat; Renewables Grow 16.3% In First Half 2017 As Nuclear Power Falls 3.3%

Ken Bossong and Tim Judson, August 28, 2017 (Sun Day Campaign)

“The latest issue of the U.S. Energy Information's (EIA) "Electric Power Monthly" (with data through June 30, 2017) reveals that renewable energy sources (i.e., biomass, geothermal, hydropower, solar - inc. small-scale PV, and wind) remain in a statistical dead heat with nuclear power vis-à-vis their respective shares of the nation's electrical generation, with each providing roughly 20% of the total…During the six-month period (January - June), renewables surpassed nuclear power in three of those months (March, April, and May) while nuclear power took the lead in the other three. In total, according to EIA's data, utility-scale renewables plus small-scale solar PV provided 20.05% of U.S. net electrical generation compared to 20.07% for nuclear power…[R]enewables may actually hold a small lead because while EIA estimates the contribution from distributed PV, it does not include electrical generation by distributed wind, micro-hydro, or small-scale biomass…” click here for more

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Grid Study Points To Power Market Redesign Breaking: The U.S. Power Market Is Cracking

Liam Denning, August 24, 2017 (Bloomberg News)

“…[The most important point in the just-released DOE grid study is] on the first of 181 pages: ‘The U.S. electricity industry is facing unprecedented changes’…[There was a repeated emphasis on the need to shore up struggling ‘baseload’ coal and nuclear plants] for the sake of resiliency…[But] the mix of U.S. power from different sources is more diverse than ever…The report will no doubt push the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission to at least hold hearings on potential reforms to wholesale power markets…There is a legitimate discussion to have about how to optimize power pricing to send the right signals to the market…[because it was] never designed for job creation, tax preservation, politically popular generation, or anything other than reliable, affordable electricity…More than anything else, the grid study reaffirms that the first era of the U.S. electricity market, lasting roughly a century, is over and that the market mechanisms have fallen way behind the times…In a world of cheap gas, flat demand and falling prices for renewable-power technologies, building large-scale, rather than scaleable, power sources is a massive, multiyear, multi-administration gamble. Price accordingly.” click here for more

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