By driving smarter, autonomous cars have the potential to move people in and around cities with far greater efficiency. Their projected energy performance, however, has largely ignored their energy inputs, such as the electricity consumed by brawny on-board computers. First-of-a-kind modeling shows that autonomy’s energy pricetag could be high enough to turn some into net energy losers.
Cyclone Exposes Trump’s Grid Fallacy
Extreme weather events have knocked both nuclear and coal-fired power plants offline recently, undercutting the Trump Administration argument that subsidizing aging generators is crucial to prevent blackouts. The latest failure came late last week when Winter Storm Gregory forced a nuclear plant in New England offline, ratcheting up the challenge facing grid operators amidst the “bomb” cyclone’s high winds and freezing temperatures. Continue reading “Cyclone Exposes Trump’s Grid Fallacy”
Grid Tech Sparks Wildfires
Wind-swept fires that killed more than 40 people in California have jolted the state’s biggest utilities, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) and Southern California Edison (SCE). State regulators and trial lawyers are probing the utilities’ tree trimming and line maintenance — common culprits in prior California fires. But they also examining a utility device that produces sparks by design: automatic circuit reclosers.
Power Vaults a Contentious Border
Relations between the United States and Mexico are strained as President Donald Trump pushes his promised border control wall and demands a U.S.-favored rewrite of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). But Mexico and the southwestern states that border it continue building an international agenda for electricity. The region’s power players plan to complete a first set of projects before Trump’s term is up that will make the border far more electrically-porous.
Scientists Get Political on Climate
It’s moving day at the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia on a sunny summer morning in Victoria, Canada, and climate scientist-turned politician Andrew Weaver is battling to retain an expansive leather sofa for his new basement office. Just a few weeks earlier, in May 2017, thousands of people in and around Victoria cast their votes for the British Columbia Green Party, which Weaver leads, growing the caucus from his one lonely seat to three. The wide sofa, he explains, will be crucial during long nights of debate and voting. “This is the one you can sleep on. And we need that.” Three seats in an 87-seat legislature might sound modest, but it’s enough to make Weaver — a professor at the University of Victoria — into a political kingmaker. The incumbent Liberal Party and the opposition New Democratic Party each garnered fewer than half of the seats, giving Weaver’s Green Party the balance of power. Weaver exercised his new-found influence in the weeks after the election to remove Christy Clark, the Liberal premier of British Columbia, who had championed fossil fuels, and to install a new government under climate-friendly terms. Now US researchers are daring to dream that they too can follow in Weaver’s footsteps, and tilt the political balance. … READ ON AT NATURE.COM
Floating Turbines on the High Seas
The world’s first wind farm employing floating turbines is taking shape 25 kilometers off the Scottish coast and expected to begin operating by the end of this year. Atmospheric scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science argue that the ultimate destination for such floating power farms could be hundreds of kilometers out in the open ocean. Their simulations, published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, show that winds over the open ocean have far greater staying power than those over land.
Electrification Finance Is Failing
For all of the excitement about using solar power to bring electricity to the more than 1 billion rural poor worldwide living without it, big picture trends provide a sobering reality check. In spite of innovative off-grid technology and business plans and high profile initiatives aiming to power remote villages in subsaharan Africa, for example, electrification there is still falling behind population growth. In 2009 there were 585 million people in sub-Saharan Africa without power, and five years later that figure had risen to 632 million, according to the latest International Energy Agency (IEA) statistics. A deep-dive analysis of capital flows, released today by the UN’s Sustainable Energy for All program, shows that off-grid systems simply are not getting the support they deserve. “This research shows that only 1 percent of financing for electrification is going into this very promising and dynamic energy solution,” says SEforALL CEO Rachel Kyte, who calls the findings “a wake up call” for the international community. Continue reading “Electrification Finance Is Failing”
Peter Fairley 