This Google-Funded Project Is Tracking Global Carbon Emissions in Real Time

By Vanessa Bates Ramirez
-Sep 24, 2021

It’s crunch time on climate change. The IPCC’s latest report told the world just how bad it is, and…it’s bad. Companies, NGOs, and governments are scrambling for fixes, both short-term and long-term, from banning sale of combustion-engine vehicles to pouring money into hydrogen to building direct air capture plants. And one initiative, launched last week, is taking an “if you can name it, you can tame it” approach by creating an independent database that measures and tracks emissions all over the world.

Climate TRACE, which stands for tracking real-time atmospheric carbon emissions, is a collaboration between nonprofits, tech companies, and universities, including CarbonPlan, Earthrise Alliance, Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, former US Vice President Al Gore, and others. The organization started thanks to a grant from Google, which funded an effort to measure power plant emissions using satellites. A team of fellows from Google helped build algorithms to monitor the power plants (the Google.org Fellowship was created in 2019 to let Google employees do pro bono technical work for grant recipients).

Climate TRACE uses data from satellites and other remote sensing technologies to “see” emissions. Artificial intelligence algorithms combine this data with verifiable emissions measurements to produce estimates of the total emissions coming from various sources.

These sources are divided into ten sectors—like power, manufacturing, transportation, and agriculture—each with multiple subsectors (i.e., two subsectors of agriculture are rice cultivation and manure management). The total carbon emitted January 2015 to December 2020, by the project’s estimation, was 303.96 billion tons. The biggest offender? Electricity generation. It’s no wonder, then, that states, companies, and countries are rushing to make (occasionally unrealistic) carbon-neutral pledges, and that the renewable energy industry is booming.

The founders of the initiative hope that, by increasing transparency, the database will increase accountability, thereby spurring action. Younger consumers care about climate change, and are likely to push companies and brands to do something about it.

The BBC reported that in a recent survey led by the UK’s Bath University, almost 60 percent of respondents said they were “very worried” or “extremely worried” about climate change, while more than 45 percent said feelings about the climate affected their daily lives. The survey received responses from 10,000 people aged 16 to 25, finding that young people are the most concerned with climate change in the global south, while in the northern hemisphere those most worried are in Portugal, which has grappled with severe wildfires. Many of the survey respondents, independent of location, reportedly feel that “humanity is doomed.”

Once this demographic reaches working age, they’ll be able to throw their weight around, and it seems likely they’ll do so in a way that puts the planet and its future at center stage. For all its sanctimoniousness, “naming and shaming” of emitters not doing their part may end up being both necessary and helpful.

Until now, Climate TRACE’s website points out, emissions inventories have been largely self-reported (I mean, what’s even the point?), and they’ve used outdated information and opaque measurement methods. Besides being independent, which is huge in itself, TRACE is using 59 trillion bytes of data from more than 300 satellites, more than 11,100 sensors, and other sources of emissions information.

“We’ve established a shared, open monitoring system capable of detecting essentially all forms of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions,” said Gavin McCormick, executive director of coalition convening member WattTime. “This is a transformative step forward that puts timely information at the fingertips of all those who seek to drive significant emissions reductions on our path to net zero.”

Given the scale of the project, the parties involved, and how quickly it has all come together—the grant from Google was in May 2019—it seems Climate TRACE is well-positioned to make a difference.

Image Credit: NASA

Bill Gates invests $ 50 million in agricultural robots

Silicon Valley startup Iron Ox recently raised $ 50 million in a round led by the tycoon's Breakthrough Energy Ventures

.
By Entrepreneur en Español 

September 24, 2021

This article was translated from our Spanish edition. Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Bill Gates continues to invest in companies related to the environment. Now the founder Microsoft put his money into a startup that develops robots that can grow plants in a sustainable way.

Chesnot | Getty Images & Iron Ox vía web

According to a report Iron Ox, a Silicon Valley startup, recently managed to raise $ 50 million in a round led by the tycoon's Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

The startup is developing robots, which are integrated into a hydroponic system, which consumes 90% less water than traditional farms.

Hydroponics refers to soilless agriculture, it is a method of growing plants using mineral solutions.

“World-class investors know that humanity's most important quest is to reverse climate change. To get there, we cannot settle for increasingly sustainable crops, and we cannot ask consumers to commit to taste, convenience or value, "Iron Ox CEO and Co-Founder Brandon Alexander said in a statement. .

The robots have sensors that allow them to measure the nitrogen and acidity levels of the water, with the aim of achieving healthy plant growth. The technology company has crops of strawberries, Thai basil, and is developing those of tomatoes, parsley and coriander. Iron Ox operates farms in Northern California and, earlier this year, began construction of a new one measuring approximately 49.7 thousand square feet in Lockhart, Texas.

Bill Gates and renewable energy

Recently, Breakthrough Energy announced that it managed to raise close to $ 1 billion to develop clean energies that will be key to fighting climate change. Among the seven investment corporations are large companies such as American Airlines, Bank of America and General Motors.

'MAYBE' TECH

Climate crisis: do we need millions of machines sucking CO2 from the air?

From turning CO2 into rock to capturing the breath of office workers, a growing number of companies think the answer is yes

 So, right now, Dac is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropper.”

The Canadian firm Carbon Engineering’s pilot plant pellet reactor and associated equipment. Photograph: Carbon Engineering

Damian Carrington 

Environment editor
THE GUARDIAN
Fri 24 Sep 2021

Does the world need millions of machines sucking carbon dioxide directly out of the air to beat the climate crisis? There is a fast-growing number of companies that believe the answer is yes and that are deploying their first devices into the real world.

From turning CO2 into rock in Iceland, to capturing the breath of office workers, to “putting oil back underground”, their aim is to scale up rapidly and some have already sold their CO2 removal services to buyers including Bill Gates, Swiss Re, Shopify and Audi. Prices, however, are sky high – $600 (£440) per tonne and more. Given that humans emit about 36bn tonnes a year, that is problematic. .

Direct air capture (Dac), as the technology is known, is challenging in more ways than just financially. Despite its potent climate heating properties, CO2 makes up just 0.04% of air and so trapping a tonne of the gas means processing a volume of air equivalent to 800 Olympic swimming pools.

“It is not super intuitive,” says Jan Wurzbacher at Climeworks, which just opened the world’s biggest Dac plant in Iceland and recently hosted a conference for the Dac industry. “But that doesn’t mean it is hard. There is no physical reason it can’t be done for $100/tonne in the next 10-20 years.”

The Dac industry is still young and there is a proliferation of technologies and business models, though most use modular machines that should be easier to manufacture and stack.

Gauges, valves and pipes for water, heating and CO2 at the Gebr Meier greenhouse in Hinwil outside Zurich. The heating and the CO2 is sourced from the local waste incinerator, where the CO2 is collected by the Swiss company Climeworks. 

Photograph: Orjan Ellingvag/Alamy

Climeworks’ units use fans to pass air over a solid material that absorbs CO2. When the material is saturated, it is heated to 100C (212F) and releases a stream of pure CO2. Its Orca plant in Iceland uses renewable geothermal energy.

The CO2 is then taken by a partner company, Carbfix, and put underground with water, where it solidifies into rock in two years. About 4,000 tonnes a year will be captured and the company is also working on projects in Oman and Norway.

Canadian firm Carbon Engineering takes a similar approach to CO2 capture but is looking to bury the CO2 in depleted oil and gas reservoirs in the US and the North Sea off Scotland, effectively reversing the flow in existing pipes. “Rather than the transportation of gas in, it’s the transportation of CO2 out,” says Amy Ruddock, the company’s European head.

“Importantly, there is a huge overlap between the skill sets required to do Dac and traditional oil and gas, so it really supports the green transition,” she says. The company aims to bury 1m tonnes a year in the US in 2025, at about $300/tonne. The company also wants to use its technology to provide CO2 as a feedstock for producing low-CO2 jet fuel. “That’s the largest market we’re seeing at the moment,” Ruddock says.

Peter Reinhardt, CEO of Charm Industrial, has an even more striking pitch: “We put oil back underground.” The company takes agricultural and forestry waste that would otherwise rot – emitting CO2 – and heats it to create “bio-oil” that is then pumped back into empty oil reservoirs.

The first injection took place in Oklahoma in January and the equivalent of 1,400 tonnes of CO2 has been buried this year, at a cost of $600/tonne. “Obviously there is a long way to go – it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the scale of the problem,” Reinhardt says. But if 500,000 machines are deployed, he says, a billion tonnes could be buried at $50/tonne.

CarbonCapture Inc, a US firm, is using “molecular sieves” called zeolites to capture the CO2. Handily, zeolites are already produced in huge volumes for use in laundry detergents, oil refineries and sewage plants. In the Netherlands, Carbyon hopes using thin-film technology will make its machines faster at separating the CO2 from the air.

Rendering showing what will be the world’s largest Dac plant, currently being engineered by Carbon Engineering and 1PointFive. 

Photograph: Carbon Engineering Ltd

Energy use is a big concern if Dac is to be deployed at massive scale and Mission Zero Technologies uses electrochemical processes to release the captured CO2, which it says means 3-5 times less power is needed than for heat-based processes.

Another firm, Heirloom, does away with fans and allows heat-treated rocks to passively absorb CO2 over a couple of weeks, before more heating liberates the gas. “We are trying to turn this Dac problem from a chemical engineering problem into an industrial automation problem,” says Shashank Samala. “Imagine white powder on cookie trays in cafeteria tray racks – it’s pretty simple.”

There are also other business models. Soletair Power’s approach is to turn buildings into CO2-capturing machines. The CO2 in exhaled breath makes offices stuffy and can reduce worker productivity, says CEO Petri Laakso. “Basically people are more stupid indoors and that means thousands of dollars of loss for companies in offices,” he says. “We have a different business logic: we sell fresh indoor air as a service.” The company’s current office unit can capture a kilogram of CO2 every 8 hours.

A lack of commercial CO2 supply recently hit the UK, and AirCapture, based in California, is developing onsite machines that suck CO2 from the air to produce streams for businesses such as drinks companies. Most CO2 today is produced from fossil fuels and has to be trucked to sites.

But can these systems really play a significant part in beating the climate crisis?

Pipework inside a pod, operated by Carbfix, containing technology for storing carbon dioxide underground, in Hellisheidi, Iceland. 

Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images

The biggest and most urgent task in beating the climate emergency is to slash the burning of fossil fuels to as close to zero as possible. The problem is that some sectors are very hard to decarbonise, such as farming, aviation and certain industrial processes, and these emissions have to be mopped up to stop global heating.

It is also likely, given that CO2 emissions are actually still rising, that the world will overshoot the carbon budget for the internationally agreed 1.5C target. This also means CO2 is going to have to be pulled from the air. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded in 2018 that billions of tonnes of CO2 a year may need to be captured and buried after 2050.

“Unless affordable and environmentally and socially acceptable CO2 removal becomes feasible and available at scale well before 2050, 1.5C-consistent pathways will be difficult to realise, especially in overshoot scenarios,” the IPCC said. “Roughly, we need to take care of 10 billion tonnes of CO2 each year in mid-century,” says Wurzbacher.

Dac, however, is not the only option. Growing crops, burning them to produce power, and burying the emissions also removes CO2, but scientists worry about the huge land and water requirements. Growing trees – the original CO2 removal machines – is also an option, but also requires a lot of land, takes time and the forests then have to be protected for decades or the CO2 goes up in smoke.

Prof Thomas Crowther, an ecologist at ETH Zurich and prominent backer of reforestation, says: “We cannot simply plant a blanket of trees across the planet and hope to save the world – nature isn’t going to do this alone. We are undoubtedly going to need thousands of solutions.” He says technology for drawing down CO2 has immense potential.

Christoph Gebald at Climeworks is bullish about his company’s technology: “We are very confident we can achieve million-tonne [per year] capacity in the second half of this decade, and billion-tonne capacity by 2050.”

Businesses are increasingly buying offsets to claim carbon neutrality, often via schemes that claim to protect forests, plant trees or install renewable energy. But many offset schemes are criticised as smoke and mirrors. Gebald argues that, by contrast, Dac with underground burial offers immediate, permanent and easily measurable CO2 disposal.
Right now, direct air capture is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropperRobert Rohde, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth

Will the financials add up? For all these companies, scaling up to crush the cost of their technologies is critical. Hans De Neve, founder of Carbyon, says solar panels were originally extremely expensive but have plummeted in price, falling by 80% in the last decade alone: “I see no fundamental reason why this can’t happen for the Dac industry.”

Gebald says Dac will need a subsidy phase. “Solar PV in the 2000s was receiving subsidies well north of $500 per tonne of CO2, and with the support of billions of dollars annually over 10 years, this really helped the industry to scale and drive down costs.” Ruddock highlights the cost of unchecked global heating: “The benchmark I would throw out there is what is the cost of going above 1.5C or 2C?”

The other critical factor for large-scale Dac is the creation of a market for CO2 disposal. Jet fuel and clean office air might raise some funds in the near term, but not enough to get to removing billions of tonnes of CO2 a year.

“If there’s no price on CO2, it’s going to be extremely difficult to establish these technologies,” says Prof Reto Knutti, a climate scientist at ETH Zurich. “So I think that governments have to say, yes, there is a price for CO2, and then the private sector can come up with fancy innovative solutions.” Negotiations over rules for an international CO2 market will be one of the main issues at the Cop26 summit in November, and the backers of Dac will be hoping for success.

Early adopters of Dac, like Microsoft, are already pushing funding into the sector, and both Elon Musk and the UK government have launched technology competitions worth $100m and £100m respectively. There are also some early offset customers, such as insurance giant Swiss Re, which has signed a 10-year deal with Climeworks, and Shopify, both attracted by the certainty of removal.

Jens Burchardt of Boston Consulting Group, another customer, says: “We think it’s something that the world undoubtedly needs to get to net zero and we are one of not-so-many companies in the world who can afford to give this a push at a time when its economics are not yet where they need to be.”

Climate campaigners, such as Greenpeace, have argued that Dac could be a dangerous distraction. “We simply can’t wait until tech like Dac is finally affordable or widely available if we want to avoid catastrophic climate change,” says Charlie Kronick, senior climate adviser at Greenpeace UK. “If overhyping Dac encourages delay and dithering on the necessary action to cut emissions then it will make the situation worse, not better.”

Prof Michael Mann, a climate scientist at Penn State University and author of The New Climate War, says: “Of all of the geoengineering schemes, Dac seems the safest and most efficacious. It could, along with natural reforestation, be an important component of broader efforts to draw down carbon from the atmosphere, a strategy that arguably belongs in any comprehensive climate abatement program. But since we’re only talking about capturing 10%, at most, of current carbon emissions, this obviously cannot be a primary strategy for cutting emissions.”

“Dac would be an amazing weapon in the fight against climate change,” says Robert Rohde, a climate scientist at Berkeley Earth. “However, it remains very small-scale and high cost. Current global capacity for Dac is about 12,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Each year, human activities release 40bn tonnes. So, right now, Dac is like trying to bail out the Titanic using an eyedropper.”

“The industry needs to find a way to rapidly grow many thousands of times larger, and cut costs by about 80%, if they are going to have a real hope of making a tangible impact in the fight against global warming,” says Rohde. “It will be great if they can make it work, but I am not optimistic, and most of the world’s attention should be focused on reducing emissions because we don’t have time to wait.”

Scaling up rapidly will require huge investment, but Adrian Corless, CEO at CarbonCapture, points out that many trillions of dollars have been invested in oil and gas infrastructure, which is the source of much of the climate crisis. “I don’t think it should scare or surprise anyone that to solve the climate problem it will need an industry on the scale of the oil and gas industry,” he says.

'MAYBE' TECH

How soon could carbon capture technology solve industry CO₂ shortages?

September 24, 2021 

The recent spike in natural gas prices has closed many plants that make fertiliser in the UK – sending a shockwave through lots of other industries.

This is because ammonia fertilisers are made from nitrogen and hydrogen, and the latter comes from breaking down natural gas – a process which gives off carbon dioxide as a byproduct. It is this CO₂ that is then taken up and used in different industries, from carbonating soft drinks to euthanising livestock. In its solid form, known as cardice, CO₂ can even be used to transport and store temperature-sensitive pharmaceuticals – including the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine.

The scarcity of CO₂ has caused havoc in UK supply chains, threatening shortages of meat, alcohol and fizzy drinks. While the government has paid to reopen a fertiliser plant, firms buying CO₂ will have to pay five times more than usual.

It may seem surprising to read that CO₂ – the greenhouse gas heating our world – also keeps certain essential industries functioning. How can there be a shortage of something we’re desperately trying to emit less of? Couldn’t we just pull it down from the atmosphere and pump it into factories where it could be put to use?

Carbon capture technology

The problem is that the CO₂ used in industry comes from sources that are a well-established part of a complex supply chain. This CO₂ generated in the process of making fertiliser is relatively cheap and easy to separate. If that system fails, there is no ready alternative. Meanwhile, CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere are about 420 ppm – 0.0042% of all the gases. Separating CO₂ from the air is difficult, and far more expensive.

Something called “point-source carbon capture technology” is currently the best alternative option, and involves scrubbing CO₂ from exhaust gases in the chimneys of factories and power plants. Here, CO₂ is emitted in the highest volumes and concentrations are thousands of times higher that those found in the atmosphere.

Technologies which can capture carbon from power station chimneys or even directly from the air are being developed, but they aren’t available at the scale needed. Two UK-based competitions to drive innovation in carbon capture and storage technology have been launched and closed by successive governments since 2005, the last one ending in 2015 without much success.

Some initiatives have got off the ground though, including The Acorn Project in St Fergus, Scotland, which separates CO₂ from natural gas – which is used to make hydrogen – and injects it under the North Sea. The Drax C-Capture project, meanwhile, extracts CO₂ from emissions at a biomass energy plant in North Yorkshire, England. This project, it’s claimed, aims to be carbon-neutral in time by transporting the CO₂ via pipeline to an offshore storage site.

Ten years of research and engineering are usually needed before any new carbon capture technology can be deployed at the necessary scale. Industries which use CO₂ must plan for new carbon capture technology being available many years in the future, rather than expect immediate solutions.

And carbon capture units currently operating at selected locations globally, such as at the Boundary Dam coal-fired power station in Canada, are unlikely to offer the solution to CO₂ supply industries need. That’s because they use liquids to absorb and purify the greenhouse gas at high temperatures, which produces over 99% pure CO₂, but requires a lot of energy and so is expensive. Liquid adsorbents decompose at high temperatures too, leaving toxic byproducts.

Solid adsorbents combined with high pressures could be the next generation of carbon capture.

  Yuriy Bartenev/Shutterstock

Solid adsorbents, like those made from silica or cellulose powders, are much more stable. Some new systems use solid absorbents and high pressures rather than high temperatures to adsorb the CO₂. These are likely to be the cheapest to run and the least environmentally damaging, making them a good choice for industries to source sustainable CO₂. There are plans to install a pressure-based capture facility at Tata Steel plant in South Wales that will capture waste CO₂ and convert it into transport fuels.
Preventing future shortages

In the next 30 years, industries will also need to consider direct air capture – technology capable of pulling the greenhouse gas out of the air – as a source of CO₂, but this will come at a cost to the consumer. Products that are made in processes requiring CO₂, such as carbonated drinks and fresh and packaged food, will have to pass on these cost increases.

These direct air capture fans, run by the Swiss company Climeworks, extract CO₂ from the air. EPA/Walter Bieri

Captured CO₂ should be stored in industrial reserves – steel tanks on the same site as the power plant the CO₂ came from or the factory where it might be used, and not underground. Industrial reserves need to be readily accessible as a backup supply.

Given that all these technologies are some way off being rolled out widely, society runs the risk of regular shortages without monitoring committees, similar to the COVID-19 task force, that can provide workable scenarios as soon as a problem occurs, rather than days or weeks into potential supply crises.

Author

Peter Styring
Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry, University of Sheffield
Disclosure statement
Peter Styring receives funding from UKRI, European Union, Global CO₂ Initiative and Unilever. He is affiliated with the Liberal Democrats.
Partners

NOT NUKES, NATURAL GAS INSTEAD

Comment: Facing the inconvenient truth about 

wind and solar power

FILE — In this Aug. 15, 2016, file photo, a lift boat, right, that serves as a work platform, assembles a wind turbine off Block Island, R.I. A group from the island of Nantucket, Mass., called ACK Residents Against Turbines, filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2021, to block the construction of dozens of wind turbines off the coast of Nantucket and nearby Martha’s Vineyard. The group say Vineyard Wind’s proposed project poses a risk to the endangered Northern Atlantic right whale. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

Gwyn Morgan

A commentary by a retired business leader who has been a director of five global corporations. BIG OIL IN CALGARY

In a previous column I pointed out that, since switching coal-fuelled power plants to natural gas cuts CO2 emissions in half, exporting liquified natural gas to displace coal both benefits our economy and reduces global emissions.

And that since converting gasoline and diesel-fuelled vehicles and ships to natural gas cuts emissions by 25 per cent, providing incentives to achieve that could substantially decrease domestic emissions, as well.

It’s not unusual for my columns to draw criticism, but presenting a practical and achievable way of substantially reducing global greenhouse gas emissions seemed to me the least likely to do so. I was wrong!

Criticisms of my columns typically fall into two categories. Those incapable of disputing the facts often resort to personal attacks. In this case, I was accused of writing a “propaganda piece for the fossil-fuel industry.”

I retired from the industry and disposed of all my investments in it 15 years ago. But if being an engineer with 30 years of experience in the energy industry is a sin, I plead guilty.

The second category of critics dispute the validity on my analysis.

In this case, criticism focused on so-called “fracked gas.” Much of our natural gas is locked in solid rock requiring the creation of cracks (fractures, hence “fracking”) to allow it to flow to the well.

Those fractures are created by injecting fluid, mostly water along with small amounts of vegetable oil, household cleansers and automotive antifreeze, under high pressure.

Anti-fossil-fuel zealots have coined the derogatory term “fracked gas,” falsely claiming it constitutes a health hazard to those who burn it. In fact, it’s made of the same methane molecule (CH4) as all other natural gas.

A more valid criticism is that leaks in production and transportation release methane, a potent greenhouse gas. But those emissions are minuscule compared with the environmental benefits of displacing higher emissions from coal and liquid fuels.

Raising issues about the environmental impact of gas production and transportation is certainly fair game. But what about the environmental impact of producing wind and solar energy?

A study by the Manhattan Institute, an independent New York-based think-tank, found that replacing the energy output of a single 100-megawatt natural gas-fuelled power plant requires 20 170-metre tall windmills occupying 10 square miles of land.

Building that wind farm requires 30,000 tons of iron ore, 50,000 tons of concrete and 900 tons of non-recyclable plastics (for the mammoth blades). Moreover, the wind farm can only replace the natural gas plant power when the wind is blowing sufficiently.

Making the wind power reliable would require the storage capacity of 10,000 tons of Tesla-class batteries. Mining the minerals to produce those batteries would consume huge amounts of fossil fuel to power the heavy equipment, not to mention the environmental and social impact of the mining.

Meanwhile, building that natural gas-fuelled power plant requires less than 10 per cent of those wind farm raw materials and occupies just a couple of acres of land. And it saves large numbers of eagles and other birds from being killed by windmill blades.

What about solar panels? The Manhattan Institute report includes U.S. Department of Energy data showing the material requirements to produce a given amount of solar energy are some 60 per cent higher than for wind turbines. And solar farms also need all those batteries to be reliable.

Clearly, building wind and solar farms that could replace the 84 per cent of global energy currently supplied by fossil fuels is technically impossible and would be very damaging to the environment. Moreover, the colossal costs of trying to do it would drive electricity prices to what for most people would be ruinous levels.

But there’s yet another compelling reason why wind and solar are not the answer to reducing global emissions.

Just 1.3 billion of the Earth’s 7.9 billion inhabitants live in advanced economies where those costly investments might even be possible. Most of the other 6.6 billion are striving to lift themselves out of “energy poverty” by increasing their access to fossil fuels.

That’s why almost all of the current increase in oil and coal demand is in non-OECD countries. For example, the International Energy Agency estimates that OECD demand will increase by just 1.5 million barrels per day over the next five years while non-OECD oil demand increases from 51.7 to 58.3 million barrels per day. Shifting that increasing energy consumption from coal and diesel to natural gas is the only way of arresting emissions growth in those countries.

In the end, what sparked the most strident criticism of my column is the inconvenient truth that a “net-zero” emissions utopia cannot be reached unless all fossil fuels are eliminated.

The day might come when breakthroughs such as nuclear fission make that possible. In the meantime, the world is blessed with natural gas — an energy source that’s safe, plentiful and effective at substantially reducing emissions, if only our political leaders would understand that.

Congress needs to gird the country for climate crisis

BY CURTIS TONGUE, OPINION CONTRIBUTOR — 09/25/21 

THE VIEWS EXPRESSED BY CONTRIBUTORS ARE THEIR OWN AND NOT THE VIEW OF THE HILL

© iStock


With Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) calling for a “pause” in negotiations on President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending bill and the future of the package unclear, climate advocates are worried that its provisions for fighting climate change could be in trouble. Climate and clean energy groups held a virtual rally this week to demand action on the “Biden Climate Plan,” including a $150 billion "clean electricity performance program.”

That spending would be cost-effective. In 2020 the U.S. set a record for the highest number of billion-dollar weather-related disasters in a single year. There were 21 of them, costing a total of $95 billion. And that’s only the beginning — the billion-dollar disaster trend line is clearly pointing upwards.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that to stave off the worst effects of climate change, we must get to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. According to International Energy Agency, this will require “total transformation” of the global energy system, including increasing use of wind and solar almost twenty-fold by 2050.

While wind and solar capacity are ramping up, we must quicken the pace. And it’s not only a matter of building renewable capacity; the electric grid must also be equipped to handle the surge in renewable generation. Currently, the U.S. electric grid is not.

Most renewable generation isn’t steady, but ebbs and flows with the wind and the cloud cover. As renewable capacity grows, the peaks and valleys of renewable output will get higher and deeper. In order for the grid to handle the extremes, we’ll need to smooth out the peaks and valleys of energy demand. That means the coming boom of solar and wind power must be paired with a boom in flexible energy use.

In simple terms, flexible energy means using more energy when it’s clean and plentiful and less when it’s dirty and scarce. For example, controllable thermostat programs let users automatically dial back their air conditioning use when outside temperatures soar and stress the grid, driving up wholesale and environmental costs. These programs are a tool for moderating peak energy demand and matching demand to supply matches when the grid is stressed. But they’re still evolving, and they have a lot more potential to benefit the grid than they currently do.

For example, energy flexibility programs could also encourage consumers to make more use of peak solar output when the midday sun is shining and reduce their energy demand later in the afternoon when less renewable energy is available. This can be done without losing convenience or comfort by pre-cooling homes, heating water in the late morning and storing it for later use, charging electric vehicles when demand is lower and renewable output is higher, and by installing solar panels with battery storage.

To realize the full potential of energy flexibility programs, we need to electrify everything. That means replacing gasoline-powered cars with EVs, replacing natural gas water heaters with heat pumps, and fueling everything else in our homes with electrons instead of fossil fuels. This not only lowers fossil fuel consumption and carbon emissions, it connects all the things we use energy for to the grid, which can be managed to match supply and demand more efficiently. That will lay the foundation for a more sustainable energy system.

It will also deliver other co-benefits to consumers. Homes with gas appliances often have higher rates of indoor air pollution than the outside air. Because of harmful emissions from burning natural gas, children living in homes with electric-powered stoves are 42 percent less likely to suffer from asthma than those with gas stoves. Electrified homes are not only healthier, they’re also cheaper to operate: It costs about $500 per year less to power a fully electrified home than a home with a mix of electricity and fossil fuels.

The upfront cost of going all-electric is still too high for most homeowners, and that remains a challenge. When a family’s hot water heater breaks, they aren’t likely to think strategically about flexible energy while standing in the middle of a Home Depot aisle. They’ll be in a rush to get their hot water back as fast and inexpensively as possible, so they’re more likely to buy the cheapest appliance than the most sustainable one. Few will see it as an opportunity to convert from gas to electric. So we need more incentive programs to encourage more homeowners to make the switch.

When more homes are all-electric and flexible energy programs are able to scale up fully, they could have a combined total of 200 gigawatts of flexible electrical load. For comparison, that’s about 30 times the capacity of the Grand Coulee Dam, or 40 percent of the combined capacity of all U.S. natural gas-fired electrical plants. The more homes are all-electric and equipped with smart devices, smart appliances, and EVs, the more the residential sector will become the functional equivalent of a fleet of clean power plants sprinkled across the U.S.

That’s an underrecognized but gigantic resource for a sustainable energy system. Quietly emerging from the tangled wires of our aging energy infrastructure is a vast, decentralized network of virtual power plants that can deliver the kind of “total transformation” of energy systems we need to fight climate change.

Curtis Tongue is Chief Strategy Officer of OhmConnect, California’s leading clean energy program, which helps California residents reduce their energy use when the electrical grid is under stress, and recently won FastCo's World Changing Ideas award."

​GOSH WE NEED NUCLEAR

'That can keep you up at night': Lessons for Canada from Europe's power crisis


Jameson Berkow
Anchor, Reporter

Sep 24, 2021

Europe is currently suffering the consequences of an uncoordinated rush to carbon-free electricity that experts warn could hit Canada as well unless urgent action is taken.

Power prices in Germany, for example, hit a record 91 euros ($135 CAD) per megawatt-hour earlier this month. That is more than triple what electricity costs in Ontario, even during periods of peak demand.

Experts blame the price spikes in large part on a chaotic transition to a specific set of renewable electricity sources - wind and solar - at the expense of other carbon-free supplies such as nuclear power. Germany, Europe’s largest economy, plans to close its last remaining nuclear power plant next year despite warnings that renewables are not being added to the German grid quickly enough to replace that lost supply.

As Canada prepares to transition its own electricity grid to 100 per cent net-zero supplies by 2035, experts say the European power crisis offers lessons this country must heed in order to avoid a similar fate.

A processing unit is shown at Suncor Fort Hills facility in Fort McMurray, Alta. Canadian Press

'A CAUTIONARY TALE'

“Some countries have rushed their transition without thinking about what people need and when they need it,” said Chris Bentley, managing director of Ryerson University’s Legal Innovation Zone who also served as Ontario’s Minister of Energy from 2011 to 2013, in an interview. “Germany has experienced a little bit of this issue recently when the wind wasn’t blowing.”

Wind power usually provides between 20 and 30 per cent of Germany’s electricity needs, but the below-average breeze across much of continental Europe in recent months has pushed that figure down.

“There is a cautionary tale from the experience in Europe,” said Francis Bradley, chief executive officer of the Canadian Electricity Association, in an interview. “There was also a cautionary tale from what took place this past winter in Texas,” he added, referring to widespread power failures in Texas spawned by a lack of backup power supplies during an unusually cold winter that led to many deaths.

The first lesson Canada must learn from those cautionary tales, Bradley said, “is the need to pursue an all-of-the-above approach.”

“It is absolutely essential that every opportunity and every potential technology for low-carbon or no-carbon electricity needs to be pursued and needs to be pursued to the fullest,” he said.

The more important lesson for Canada, according to Binnu Jeyakumar, is about the need for a more holistic, nuanced approach to our own net-zero transition.

“It is very easy to have runaway narratives that just pinpoint the blame on one or two issues, but the lesson here isn’t really about the reliability of renewables as there are failures that occur across all sources of electricity supply,” said Jeyakumar, director of clean energy for the Pembina Institute, in an interview.

“The takeaway for us is that we need to get better at learning how to integrate an increasingly diverse electricity grid,” she said. “It is not necessarily the technologies themselves, it is about how we do grid planning, how are our markets structured and are we adapting them to the trends that are evolving in the electricity and energy sectors.”

'ABSOLUTELY ENORMOUS' CHALLENGE IS 'ALMOST MIND-BENDING'

Canada already gets the vast majority of its electricity from emission-free sources. Hydro provides roughly 60 per cent of our power, nuclear contributes another 15 per cent and renewables such as wind and solar contribute roughly seven per cent more, according to federal government data.

Tempting as it might be to view the remaining 18 per cent of Canadian electricity that is supplied by oil, natural gas and coal as a small enough proportion that it should be relatively easy to replace, the reality is much more difficult.

“It is the law of diminishing returns or the 80-20 rule where the first 80 per cent is easy but the last 20 per cent is hard,” Bradley explained. “We already have an electricity sector that is 80 per cent GHG-free, so getting rid of that last 20 per cent is the really difficult part because the low-hanging fruit has already been picked.”

Key to successfully decarbonizing Canada’s power grid will be the recognition that electricity demand is constantly growing. That means Canada needs to build out enough emission-free power sources to replace existing fossil fuel-based supplies while also ensuring adequate supplies for future demand.

“It is one thing to say that by 2035 we are going to have a decarbonized electricity system, but the challenge really is the amount of additional electricity that we are going to need between now and 2035,” said John Gorman, chief executive officer of the Canadian Nuclear Association and former CEO of the Canadian Solar Industries Association, in an interview. “It is absolutely enormous, I mean, it is almost mind-bending.”

Canada will need to triple the amount of electricity produced nationwide by 2050, according to a report from SNC-Lavalin published earlier this year. Gorman said that will require adding between five and seven gigawatts of new installed capacity to Canada’s electricity grid every year from 2021 through 2050 or more than twice the amount of new power supply Canada brings online annually right now.

For perspective, consider Ontario’s Bruce Power nuclear facility. It took 27 years to bring that plant to its current 6.4 gigawatt (GW) capacity, but meeting Canada’s decarbonization goals will require adding roughly the equivalent capacity of Bruce Power every year for the next three decades.

“The task of creating enough electricity in the coming years is truly enormous and governments have not really wrapped their heads around that yet,” Gorman said. “For those of us in the energy sector, it is the type of thing that can keep you up at night.”

Solar panels stand at the Enbridge Inc. Sarnia Solar Farm in Sarnia, Ontario. Canadian Press.

GOVERNMENT POLICY 'HELD HOSTAGE' BY 'DINOSAURS'

The Pembina Institute’s Jeyakumar agreed “the last mile is often the most difficult” and will require “a concerted effort both at the federal level and the provincial level.”

Governments will “need to be able to support innovation and solutions such as non-wires alternatives,” she said. “Instead of building a massive new transmission line or beefing up an old one, you could put a storage facility at the end of an existing line. Distributed energy resources provide those kinds of non-wires alternatives and they are already cost-effective and competitive with oil and gas.”

For Glen Murray, who served as Ontario’s minister of infrastructure and transportation from early 2013 to mid-2014 before assuming the environment and climate change portfolio until his resignation in mid-2017, that is a key lesson governments have yet to learn.

“We are moving away from a centralized distribution model to distributed systems where individual buildings and homes and communities will supply their own electricity needs,” said Murray, who currently works for an urban planning software company in Winnipeg, in an interview. “Yet both the federal and provincial governments are assuming that we are going to continue to have large, centralized generation of power, but that is simply not going to be the case.”

“Government policy is not focused on driving that because they are held hostage by their own hydro utilities and the big gas companies,” Murray said. “They are controlling the agenda even though they are the dinosaurs.”

Referencing the SNC-Lavalin report, Gorman noted as many as 45 small, modular nuclear reactors as well as 20 conventional nuclear power plants will be required in the coming decades: “And that is in the context of also maximizing all the other emission-free electricity sources we have available as well from wind to solar to hydro and marine renewables,” Gorman said, echoing the “all-of-the-above” mindset of the Canadian Electricity Association.

There are, however, “fundamental rules of the market and the regulatory system that make it an uneven playing field for these new technologies to compete,” said Jeyakumar, agreeing with Murray’s concerns. “These are all solvable problems but we need to work on them now.”

'2035 IS TOMORROW'

According to Bentley, the former Ontario energy minister-turned academic, “the government's role is to match the aspiration with the means to achieve that aspiration.”

“We have spent far more time as governments talking about the goals and the high-level promises [of a net-zero electricity grid by 2035] without spending as much time as we need to in order to recognize what a massive transformation this will mean,” Bentley said. “It is easy to talk about the end-goal, but how do you get there?”

The Canadian Electricity Assocation’s Bradley agreed “there are still a lot of outstanding questions about how we are going to turn those aspirations into actual policies. The 2035 goal is going to be very difficult to achieve in the absence of seeing exactly what the policies are that are going to move us in that direction.”

“It can take a decade to go through the processes of consultations and planning and then building and getting online,” Bradley said. “Particularly when you’re talking about big electricity projects, 2035 is tomorrow.”

Jeyakumar said “we cannot afford to wait any longer” for policies to be put in place as the decisions governments make today “will then lock us in for the next 30 or 40 years into specific technologies.”

“We need to consider it like saving for retirement,” said Gorman of the Canadian Nuclear Association. “Every year that you don’t contribute to your retirement savings just pushes your retirement one more year into the future.”

Angry over bonus for nurses, Quebec health-care union suspends contract vote and talks strike

The Canadian PressStaff
 Friday, September 24, 2021

MONTREAL -- The offer of bonuses to Quebec nurses has just halted what could have become a ratified agreement for 60,000 union members working in Quebec’s health and social services sector.

The Alliance du personnel professionnel et technique de la santé et des services sociaux (APTS) has decided to stop a consultation with its members. They were in the process of voting on Quebec's latest offer to renew their collective agreement.

“Everything has changed” with these bonuses for nurses only, said Robert Comeau, interim president of the APTS, in an interview on Friday.

The APTS represents 60,000 medical imaging and laboratory technologists, as well as workers in youth centres.

Comeau said the APTS was told in June that there was no money left for the public sector, even for the health network. That's why it had resigned itself to consulting its 60,000 members to take the latest offer.

The bonuses offered Thursday by the Legault government to bring nurses back into the public network angered APTS members, who do related work, Comeau said. He warns they are now ready to strike again.

- This report by The Canadian Press was first published in French on Sept. 24, 2021.

 Montreal

'It's not about the money': Quebec's bonus pay for nurses won't solve staffing crisis, groups say

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Some criticize plan for not addressing dismal working conditions and forced overtime

Sabrina Jonas · CBC News · Posted: Sep 24, 2021 5:52 PM ET | Last Updated: September 24

The vice-president of the Quebec Nurses' Association says throwing money at a problem that requires real change to working conditions is 'ridiculous.' (Getty Images)

Quebec nurses are criticizing the government's proposed plan to curb the critical staffing shortage in the province, saying it won't work because it doesn't address dismal working conditions in the public sector, which they say is a key reason nurses are leaving.

Yesterday, Quebec announced it will provide bonuses of up to $18,000 to full-time nurses, part-time nurses willing to work full-time and nurses that return to the public sector as part of its emergency response to the personnel crisis. 

But the vice-president of the Quebec Nurses' Association, which represents over 4,000 nurses and nursing students in the province, says throwing money at a problem that requires real change to working conditions is "ridiculous." 

WATCH | Why one nurse quit the public system, and another is on the brink:

Two nurses, one just entering the field, and the other who left due to harsh conditions, weigh in on why the public system is losing employees so rapidly. 3:57

"It's not about the money," said Alex Magdzinski, the association's vice-president who has now left the public sector for the private one. "Nurses have been seeing these types of initiatives put in place for decades now."

Magdzinski says the Health Ministry's plan lacks real, sustainable, long-term solutions, and would like the government to look at options such as a ban on mandatory overtime, self-scheduling for nurses, a limit on hours nurses can work in a day, rigid nurse-to-patient ratios and proper work-life balance initiatives. 

"Unless you're ready to pay nurses double, maybe triple what they're paying right now, I don't really see that these financial incentives are going to work," he said. 

Naveed Hussain, a nurse at the McGill University Health Centre, says the government's announcement is a good first step, but he, too, has some reservations. 

"The fact [Premier François Legault] said he will prioritize caring for us after all we have been through is reassuring," he said, commending the government for recognizing the plight that nurses have long endured in the public system. 

"It's a great idea, but is this a tax-free initiative? Or will the bonuses go back into taxes we pay?" 

• Quebec promises 'mammoth' changes to public health-care system

• Quebec to offer nurses bonuses of up to $18K to end staffing crisis

The president of Quebec's largest nurses' union, Nancy Bédard, says the plans don't pointedly address the gruelling work conditions that have been driving staff out of the public sector in droves — leaving the province short 4,300 nurses. 

She says members of the Fédération interprofessionnelle de la santé du Québec (FIQ), which represents some 76,000 nurses, say they doubt the bonuses will entice them to stay in the public network, noting their main reason for their shift to private agencies is compulsory overtime. 

Chicken-and-egg situation

"We did not hear about nurse-patient ratios, clinical support, overload," said Sophie Savoie, a former nurse at Pierre-Boucher hospital in Longueuil, of Thursday's announcement.

Compulsory overtime and deteriorating working conditions led her to resign last January. The salary, she said, had nothing to do with her decision.

Legault said yesterday the overall goal is to offer nurses a better work-life balance with improved conditions, but said in order to do so, the province must first increase staffing numbers. 

Magdzinski says this leaves the province in a chicken-and-egg situation. 

"The public sector wants nurses … and then [the government] says the conditions will improve," she said. 

"Well, nurses want to see conditions improve first before they have confidence to return."

With files from Radio-Canada and CBC's Daybreak