Keeping the lights on

By
Dr. Luis Contreras
-
532

Providing carbon-free electricity around the clock

Last week, “The end of fracking” described a clear choice: carbon-free electricity including solar, nuclear, and off-shore wind power, or death by coal and natural gas. Fracking killed fracking. A glut of high-cost crude oil and billions of dollars in debt subsidized by taxpayers are the cost of ignorance and greed.

Let’s discuss what is blocking the path to clean electricity, and how to make it happen. Otherwise, we are wasting our time.

Precise terms are important to understand electric energy. Clean, carbon-free, or green energy describe electricity generated without burning the forests or fossil fuels. Net-zero, renewable, carbon-neutral, biomass, and other invalid notions are used to deceive.

Sometimes you need to read behind the lines. When #45 says “he digs coal” he is not lying, what he means is he needs West Virginia votes. WV coal miners don’t love coal, but they need jobs. Coal is all they know but they hate working and dying in coal mines.

Nuclear plant safety

A friend said I should mention the 200,000 Fukushima deaths. I immediately looked for a reference and found a video where George Monbiot explains “Fukushima convinced him to support nuclear power plants.” More than 1,000 deaths in the first 3 years after the accident were due to the stress of forced evacuation and fear. Monbiot says, “no one has died from a lethal dose of radiation from a nuclear plant.” Air pollution from over one billion gasoline cars has killed millions of people.

So why do smart people say nuclear plants are high-risk? False memories are common, known as the “Mandela effect” named after hundreds of people who remembered Nelson Mandela dying in prison. Repetition is used to create false memories.

Nuclear and hydroelectric plants provide electric inertia and keep the grid stable. The U.S. grid runs at 60 cycles per second. Turbines keep the frequency constant, but with peak demand, the flow of electrons can get out of whack. Solar and wind energy alone can’t provide power inertia.

Big oil is looking like electrical utilities

British Petroleum, after the Deepwater Horizon disaster and the 2020 price drop of oil, has stopped drilling and is now investing in offshore wind and solar energy. Shell Oil is aligned with BP and others will follow. Fossil fuels will be left in the ground.

Who killed electric vehicles?

You may be thinking of EV1 and General Motors. Big oil, the American Petroleum Institute, and Koch Industries have tried and failed. In Arkansas, car dealerships are owned by a handful of people who love to sell big trucks at a discount and make a profit with service and repairs. EVs have a simple design and easy maintenance. In 2017, you had to go out of state to buy an EV. This has to change.

The UK National Grid blocking solar and wind

The National Grid sells natural gas and electricity to 20 million customers in New York and New England. They have been actively lobbying to stop solar and wind, paying the Boston lobbying firm Joyce & LeBretton more than $200,000 per year.

Arkansas utilities love solar farms

Entergy Arkansas and the Arkansas Electric Cooperatives have solar plants over 2-megawatts, but they don’t want to share the sunshine. Solar farms are of course better than natural gas-fired power plants, but they pale in comparison to distributed solar with electric vehicles. New EVs have large capacity batteries with a driving range over 300 miles. Vehicle to Grid is a great way to provide grid storage.

Rolling blackouts

California is dealing with heatwaves and increased electric demand for air conditioning. New grid-scale batteries can charge 230 megawatts per hour during off-peak hours and deliver energy to the grid during peak demand to avoid rolling blackouts. Heatwaves are deadly!

Frack the frackers

Rep. Rick Crawford knows you may be calling about:

  1. Environmental regulations on methane.
  2. Coal-fired power plants, fracking for oil and gas.
  3. Plug the abandoned Fayetteville shale wells to stop methane emissions.

Text (870) 292-6747, phone (870) 203-0540 or (202) 225-4076.

5 COMMENTS

  1. Nothing is 100 percent safe and you never know what will happen

    California was said to be in grave danger of earthquakes – and movies about the San Andreas fault imagined the devastation … heatwaves, COVID-19, rolling blackouts and wildfires were out of the radar

    Fukushima disaster has convinced him to support nuclear power- George Monbiot

    The main damage was caused by coal-fired power plants built in China and other nations stopping the use of safe nuclear plants

    No one has ever died from radiation from a nuclear site … explains Monbiot

    https://youtu.be/SsjzyIszUHI

  3. Trump wants to blame Democrats for the California rolling blackouts – he is wrong, but what else can he say when he dismisses the climate emergency?

    Heatwaves, droughts, wind and other severe weather events, not the use of solar panels, are the root cause of wildfires
    ================

    When blackouts rolled across California on August 14 and 15, briefly cutting off power to several hundred thousand households and their air conditioners, fridges, and medical devices during a pandemic and a record-breaking heat wave, some critics blamed the state’s heavy reliance on solar and wind energy. As the state pursues its ambitious renewable energy goals, they asked, will electric power become unreliable?

    Many experts and leaders, including Steve Berberich, the president of the organization in charge of the state’s power grid, have firmly countered that claim. The troubling situation last week was not because of a fundamental problem with renewable energy. With appropriate planning, California can continue to expand its use of renewables and decrease its carbon emissions, the root cause of the heat wave that triggered the blackouts in the first place.

    “This heat wave all across the West is a signal of climate change,” says Leah Stokes, a climate and energy policy expert at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “And this situation tells us we need to take some serious steps to get on track toward a zero-emissions future.”

    https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/08/why-renewables-arent-reason-california-blackouts/

  4. Big Oil going electric!

    BP recently sold its petrochemicals business for $5 billion to Ineos, a move which suggests that “big oil” companies are trying to become “big electric” suppliers.

    The Wall Street Journal says the sale was the “largest deal by an oil major since the coronavirus outbreak gripped the global economy”.

    WSJ says the transaction would enable BP to different itself from its rivals, many of which are forecasting significant growth for the segment and don’t look like they want to sell or leave the petrochemicals sector.

    For BP, the sale to Ineos signifies its exit from the petrochemicals business entirely. Why it would do this while other oil majors are so bullish about petrochemicals business is not perfectly clear, although BP has hinted at an entirely new direction.

    https://roboticsandautomationnews.com/2020/08/17/bps-sale-of-its-petrochemicals-business-suggests-big-oil-is-trying-to-become-big-electric/35272/

  5. Entergy Arkansas wants to kill distributed solar, opposing the Net Energy Metering rules.

    Entergy has solar farms, but does not want to share the sunshine

    Entergy Arkansas announced plans to purchase a 900-acre, 100-megawatt solar farm near Brinkley. Pending approval by the Arkansas Public Service Commission, Walnut Bend Solar will be among the largest solar generating facilities in the state.

    Other resources include 81-megawatt Stuttgart Solar, in operation since 2017; 100-megawatt Chicot Solar at Lake Village, which will go online this fall; and a 100-megawatt Searcy Solar facility, currently under development. The four resources combined will generate 381-megawatts of power for Entergy Arkansas customers, enough to power about 61,000 homes.

    https://talkbusiness.net/2020/07/entergy-arkansas-requests-rehearing-of-psc-net-metering-order/

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