QUICK NEWS, February 26: Panic Before It’s Too Late; Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Right Now

Panic Before It’s Too Late It is absolutely time to panic about climate change; Author David Wallace-Wells on the dystopian hellscape that awaits us.

Sean Illing, February 24, 2019 (VOX)

Editor’s note: Consider this post a tease for a long and informative read. Click through.

“…[We could potentially avoid 150 million excess premature deaths by the end of century from air pollution (the equivalent of 25 Holocausts or twice the number of deaths from World War II) if we could limit average global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius or hold warming at 2 degrees without relying on negative emissions…[and] we’ve done more damage to the environment since the United Nations established its climate change framework in 1992 than we did in all the millennia that preceded it…[according to David Wallace-Wells’s just-released The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming…

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…[The author told VOX that if] we continue on the track we’re on now,] we could be seeing roughly 64 times as much land burned every year as we saw in 2018, a year that felt completely unprecedented and inflicted unimaginable damage in California…And we see trajectories like this in basically every area of potential climate impact — from impact on agricultural yields, to public health issues, to the relationship between climate change and economic growth, climate change and conflict…And if we don’t change course rapidly, they’re going to get catastrophically worse…[There are experts who believe we’ll get to 2 degrees of warming] as soon as 2030…[but] 2050 is probably a safer assumption…[We’re all beginning to relearn the fact that we live within nature…None of us, no matter where we live, will be able to escape the consequences of this…” click here for more

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Distributed Energy Resources (DER) Right Now Decentralized Renewable Energy Systems: A Status-Quo Analysis

February 22, 2019 (Advanced Science News)

“The increasing share of decentralized intermittent renewable energy generation reinforces the necessity of balancing local production and energy consumption. Decentralized renewable energy systems are promising options to cope with this challenge. They are systems of interconnected buildings, which i) are powered by renewable energy sources (e.g., solar, wind), ii) combine multiple energy carriers (e.g., electricity, heat, hydrogen), and iii) integrate both storage (e.g., batteries, thermal tanks) and conversion (e.g., heat pump, electrolyzer) technologies. At the system level, they can range from single buildings, such as multi-family homes, to groups of buildings within neighborhoods, communities or city quarters.

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Despite high up-front investment costs, these systems can provide numerous benefits: by increasing self-consumption of renewable electricity produced on-site, they can substantially reduce overall energy costs. They demonstrate large synergy potential and high operational flexibility, thereby improving input resource utilization, alleviating stress from the local grid, reducing transmission and distribution losses, and creating a more reliable energy supply…The trend toward decentralized energy systems is likely to be enforced in the future due to widespread reductions in technology costs, further technological learning, and the coupling of [the energy, mobility and industry sectors]…” click here for more

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