Sunday, September 05, 2021

Bar owners, event organizers question why Alberta gave rodeos exemptions from liquor curfew

Alberta Health now requires alcohol service to stop at 10 p.m., a move some small businesses say will hurt

Sarah Rieger · CBC News · 
Katy Ingraham, owner of Fleisch bar and delicatessen in Edmonton, says she attempted to obtain an exemption that would allow her establishment to serve liquor past 10 p.m. because it already requires proof of vaccination from patrons dining indoors, but she was told it was outside of jurisdiction. She's questioning why multiple rodeos were granted exemptions this weekend. (Andy Grabia)

At least four rodeos throughout Alberta say the government has granted them exemptions to the public health rule that states alcohol service must end at 10 p.m. — a move that has frustrated bar owners and event organizers subject to the new restriction.

On Friday, the Alberta government announced that restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs and nightclubs, as well as events, will be required to end alcohol service at 10 p.m. in order to slow transmission of COVID-19. Cases have been growing exponentially in Alberta, driven by the more infectious delta variant. 

The Airdrie Pro Rodeo, Benalto Fair and Stampede, Daines Ranch Pro Rodeo and Ponoka Stampede all posted on social media this weekend that they are considered "outdoor special events" by Alberta Health Services and that liquor sales will continue until 2 a.m. local time.

While the Airdrie rodeo suggested patrons bring masks for bar service and said social distancing will apply inside facilities, both the Daines Rodeo and Ponoka Stampede posted that masks will not be required. The events feature either indoor saloons or dance halls. Masks are currently mandatory in all indoor public spaces in the province.

Other events in the province have been rescheduled or changed venues due to the new rules, including some dance parties and drag shows scheduled for Calgary Pride week.

CBC News contacted Alberta Health on Saturday to ask why some rodeos were granted exemptions and not other venues or events — at the time, Calgary Pride said no indoor or outdoor events associated with the festival had been granted exemptions.

On Sunday, Alberta Health responded to say that it had granted exemptions to the Ponoka, Airdrie and Cochrane rodeos — and that it had now granted exemptions to venues hosting Calgary Pride events. It did not say the Daines and Benalto events were granted exemptions, despite posts by those organizations on social media.

Hot Mess, which has hosted LGBTQ+ dance parties in Calgary for nearly a decade, said it received a last-minute exemption late Saturday night, hours after CBC News had asked Alberta Health why it had granted exemptions to some events and not others.

Jordan Sorrenti preps a sandwich at Paddy's Barbecue and Brewery in Calgary. He says he'd rather see the province implement a vaccine passport for bars than a liquor curfew, which he says penalizes the unvaccinated and vaccinated alike. (Terri Trembath/CBC)

Alberta Health said it's not a new decision to grant exemptions from public health rules to select once-a-year events and that those exemptions are granted "due to the event's importance to the local economy and community."

A spokesperson said that the current exemptions apply only to open-air events and that mask requirements continue to apply indoors.

Sean Thomas Stewart, co-founder of Hot Mess, said they had scrambled to move Sunday's event to a new outdoor venue and an hours-earlier start after the new rules were announced.

"Without having any insight into how and why the province made that call for some events and not for others, it's hard not to take it personally," Stewart said before the exemption was granted.

"I, and I think the rest of the LGBTQ+ community in Calgary, would be very eager to have the province take a second look at what they are making exceptions for."

Elliot Rae Cormier, Calgary Pride's development manager, had questioned on Saturday afternoon what led to the province's decision to immediately grant exemptions to rodeo events. Cormier confirmed Pride's exemption came in after 10 p.m. on Saturday.

"I'm just really curious what factors led to that decision," Cormier said. "I am concerned for smaller businesses, smaller venues and local artists … who are now having to shift. There has been a lot of financial uncertainty."

We've done absolutely everything in our power to make our space as safe as possible, and we're still going to be penalized … it's a helpless and demoralizing feeling.- Katy Ingraham, owner of Fleish in Edmonton.

Katy Ingraham, owner of Fleisch bar and delicatessen in Edmonton and co-founder of the Edmonton Independent Hospitality Community, says her establishment has taken a cautious approach throughout the pandemic by requiring masking. It didn't reopen indoor dining before putting a mandatory vaccination policy in place.

She spent the entire day on Friday on the phone with various provincial health officials and departments, as well as her legislative member, attempting to obtain an exemption to the liquor curfew based on the bar's vaccine requirement. As of Sunday, she still hadn't received a response.

"My thought was that it would also set a precedent that if we were able to get that exemption, more businesses might follow suit and implement vaccine policies," Ingraham said. 

But she was told, over and over, that it was outside of AHS's jurisdiction to grant exemptions.

Ingraham said she was furious when she saw rodeos were able to obtain an exemption from AHS after she was stonewalled.

The bar portion of the establishment opened just three weeks ago and was set to serve alcohol until 1 a.m. each night — now they'll have to cut back on staff.

"We've done absolutely everything in our power to make our space as safe as possible, and we're still going to be penalized for that while events like this can go on and receive exemptions? It's a helpless and demoralizing feeling," she said.

Jordan Sorrenti, owner of Paddy's Barbecue and Brewery in Calgary, said he'd like to see the province require vaccination to dine indoors at restaurants or bars rather than shut them down early.

"What they're doing by closing the bars down at 10 o'clock is they're picking on the young crowd, who they understand are the under-vaccinated, but they're penalizing all of the restaurants for it which is just not fair," he said, noting sales go down as case numbers climb. 

"I'm kind of upset, because all of the staff that we worked so hard to bring back are going to get laid off again."

Premier Jason Kenney said Friday that he recognizes the new measures will be disruptive to the hospitality industry, but said they were necessary to protect the health-care system.

With files from Terri Trembath

Posted by at No comments:
Saskatchewan·History

Whither the bison: What happened to the Prairies' once-mighty herds?

How could so many bison disappear in a few decades?


Bill Waiser · For CBC News · 
Bison bones are loaded into a Canadian Pacific Railway boxcar. (Library and Archives Canada - PA066544)

Historian Bill Waiser's many books include In Search of Almighty Voice: Resistance and Reconciliation (2020).

They are some of the most arresting photographs from Saskatchewan's past: Tens of thousands of dried, bleached bison bones, stacked like cordwood along rail lines, waiting to be loaded into boxcars.

The bones serve as testimony to the near-extinction of the bison, with the popular story being that the animals were wantonly slaughtered by white hunters, madly firing their guns from passing trains.

That story, though, is an American one, simply applied to Canada.

It never happened north of the border because the bison herds were effectively gone from the Saskatchewan territory by 1879. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) was not built across the Canadian Prairies until 1881 and completed four years later.

The first CPR passenger train did not reach Pile of Bones — later renamed Regina in honour of Queen Victoria — until August 1883.

If passengers on that first train were shooting at anything, it was more likely gophers.

It has been estimated that the northern plains of the western interior likely supported from five to six million bison in the early 19th century. By the 1860s two-thirds were gone. (Bill Waiser)

What happened to the bison?

It has been estimated that the northern plains of the western interior likely supported from five to six million bison in the early 19th century. By the 1860s, though, two-thirds of the animals were gone.

As Methodist missionary George McDougall gloomily summed up the situation along the upper North Saskatchewan River: "A time of starvation. No buffalo."

Where did the bison go? How could so many disappear in a few decades?

Bison were once the mainstay of subsistence lifestyle for the First Nations on the northern Prairies. And their demise had a direct bearing on the history of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in Western Canada in the latter half of the 19th century.

Bison decline

The largest consumer of bison meat was the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). The dozens of company posts across the Canadian northwest, along with the incoming and outgoing canoe brigades, ran on pemmican–dried, pounded bison meat, mixed with fat and sometimes berries. Pemmican not only packed a caloric punch, it could be stored for years.

The Canadian grasslands served as a kind of pantry for HBC operations. Here, hundreds of thousands of pounds of bison meat were processed annually for the trade. Canadian historian George Colpitts has even suggested in his book, Pemmican Empire, that HBC provisioning posts were more like abattoirs.

First Nations bands supplied bison meat to the HBC by working their bison pounds intensively or hunting the herds from horseback. The Métis were also vitally involved. Families from Red River travelled out onto the plains every summer in large cart caravans. Once they located the herds, their hunts were a marvel of co-ordination and skill.

This William Perehudoff piece illistrates hunting bison from horseback in the mid-19th century. (Saskatchewan Archives Board/S-MN-B 3118)

These hunting pressures eventually took a toll on the bison. Herds began to contract southwestward, while the overall number of animals began a steep decline.

The Cree responded to this crisis by travelling southward to the Cypress Hills region and present-day northern Montana, and the Poplar and Milk Rivers, where they often clashed with the Blackfoot over the dwindling bison herds. The Métis also began to winter inland to be closer to the herds.

At its northern posts, the HBC even tried making pemmican from caribou. 

By the time the region became part of the Dominion of Canada in 1870, hunger stalked the northern plains.

After a visit to the region during the 1873 field season, Dr. Alfred R.C. Selwyn, director of the Geological Survey of Canada, reported: "The discontent and uneasiness at present, prevailing amongst the Indians, [is] almost entirely a question of the future supply of food … the extermination of the buffalo means starvation and death."

Bison an issue at treaty

During the Treaty Six negotiations in 1876, First Nation leaders talked about possible famine and the need for government support as they made the transition from hunting to farming. They also wanted something done about the shrinking bison herds.

When Treaty Commissioner Alexander Morris met with the Willow Cree near Duck Lake in late August 1876, much of the discussion dealt with the disappearance of the bison.

"I am alarmed when I look at the buffalo," one councillor told Morris. "It appears to me as if there is only one."

Chief Beardy was equally anxious about the bison and suggested that special steps be taken to preserve and manage the remaining animals.

"I do not want very much more than what has been promised, only a little thing," Beardy pleaded. "On account of the buffalo, I am getting anxious."

Bison numbers were in steep decline by the 1860s. (Adrian Paton)

Senior Cree Chief Sweetgrass also raised concerns about the disappearing bison at the Treaty Six meeting at Fort Pitt in early September 1876. Sweetgrass had first raised the alarm in April 1871, telling the lieutenant governor for the Northwest Territories: "Our country is no longer able to support us." Five years later, he was still waiting for action.

Ultimately, Treaty Six did not contain any specific provisions regarding bison protection; there was only Morris's word during the deliberations that government action would be forthcoming.

The 1877 bison protection ordinance

On March 22, 1877, at the end of the first — and only — meeting of the North-West Territories Council at Fort Livingstone, near present-day Pelly, Sask., Lt.-Gov. David Laird proclaimed 10 ordinances, including No. 5: "An Ordinance for the Protection of the Buffalo."

The bison protection ordinance contained regulations about what animals could be hunted (especially around females and calves), how they were to be hunted (such as pounds and jumps) and when they could be hunted (including closed seasons). Any person "in circumstance of personal necessity" could also kill any bison at any time for "immediate wants." The ordinance also dealt with the reporting and prosecution of anyone in violation of the regulations.

LISTEN | Historian Bill Waiser shares bison history 
Saskatchewan Weekend11:30What happened to the prairie bison? A historian explains.
How did the bison disappear from Saskatchewan? It might not be the story you think it is. Historian Bill Waiser gives host Shauna Powers insight into what really happened and how that shaped relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people in the years that followed. 11:30

From the beginning, there was uncertainty around whether the regulations could be effectively enforced. It was never clear how the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) were going to incorporate the monitoring of the bison herds into their many other duties. All the Mounties could really do was depend on informants — and only after animals had been killed. 

There was also opposition to the regulations. The Métis, who lived by the hunt, saw it as an attack on their livelihood. First Nations were equally alarmed. They had asked that the bison be protected for their benefit — not that their own hunting activities be controlled.

The new rules were a classic example of newcomers thinking they knew what was best. First Nations leaders were not consulted during the framing of the bison protection ordinance. 

Ironically, it was the fugitive Sitting Bull who asked cryptically in response to the new law: "When did the Almighty give the Canadian government the right to keep the Indians from killing the buffalo?"

He might also have asked, given the starving condition of his band at the time: What buffalo?

Starvation summer of 1879

The bison protection ordinance made little difference to the fate of the bison. Except for a few small herds that occasionally wandered north into Canadian territory, they were essentially gone from the northern plains by 1879. 

Many in the West believed that the bison would be lost one day, but it was supposed to be years away. Assistant NWMP Commissioner James Macleod was personally shocked by how suddenly it happened. So too was the new Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney, who claimed in his first annual report that the "disappearance of the buffalo had taken the Government as much by surprise as the Indians."

It was quite an understatement. Dewdney toured the northwest during the summer of 1879, and, according to his diary, was forever encountering First Nations groups anxious about how they were going to survive the coming winter.

Indian Commissioner Edgar Dewdney pursued a 'sheer compulsion' policy. (Saskatchewan Archives Board/G.F. Shepherd Fonds)

Henriette Forget, the wife of Amédée-Emmanuel Forget, clerk for the North-West Territories Council (and Saskatchewan's first lieutenant-governor), also kept a record of how the disappearance of the bison was playing out at the new territorial capital at Battleford. 

"Rumours of starvation, from different parts of the country," Henriette wrote in late April 1879. "The buffalo having disappeared rendered the condition of the Indians most deplorable, what a question to solve."

Dewdney knew the answer. Even though he was not responsible for the disappearance of the bison, Dewdney deliberately used the crisis for his own purposes. He called his policy, "sheer compulsion."

Dewdney withheld rations from First Nation bands who had refused to take treaty or had left their reserves. This hard-hearted policy starved Big Bear and his followers into submission, and after holding out for six years, the chief reluctantly entered treaty at Fort Walsh in December 1882. 

Dewdney also insisted that if treaty bands wanted provisions, then they had to take up their reserves. And once on their reserves, if bands wanted to be fed, then they had to work for rations. Dewdney was prepared to do whatever was necessary to gain the upper hand over First Nation bands, regardless of the treaty agreements.

Bison bone market

By the late 19th century, bison bones were in great demand for the fertilizer industry. There was no shortage of American buyers. The North-West Fertilizing Company, of Chicago, for example, offered $19 per ton in the fall of 1888 — a price that Wisconsin's Janesville Carbon Chemical Works gladly matched.

Supplying bison bones to fertilizer manufacturers was relatively easy money. Millions of skeletal remains littered the Prairie landscape. They had accumulated over hundreds of years. It was a simple matter of collecting and stockpiling the bones at railway sidings along the railway and then loading them in boxcars. 

There was a certain irony to the business. The bones of the once-great bison herds — herds that had fed people for generations — were being cleared away for a new agricultural industry that was to turn the Western Interior into Canada's breadbasket.

Breaking the Prairie sod. (University of Saskatchewan Archives and Special Collections/R. Wall Fonds/MG284)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Bill Waiser

Historian Bill Waiser’s many books include In Search of Almighty Voice: Resistance and Reconciliation (2020).

Posted by at No comments:
How To Raise Revenue Quickly: End Fossil Fuel Handouts


Photo by CleanTechnica

Originally published by NRDC.
By Joshua Axelrod

The House Natural Resources Committee has released a budget proposal that would end a slew of harmful handouts to the fossil fuel industry, protect publicly owned resources, and raise significant new revenues for U.S. taxpayers. This is a fiscally responsible approach to resource development after a century of waste and mismanagement.



Oil well on public land in New Mexico. Image courtesy of Bureau of Land Management

For over a century, the federal government has practically given public lands away to oil and gas companies by auctioning them off for small sums. With bids beginning as low as $2/acre and rents starting at just $1.50/year, fossil fuel producers have been able to control millions of acres of public land, even without using them to produce oil and gas. Meanwhile, industry has been let off the hook when it leaks methane or allows it to be vented and flared. This happens without repercussions or costs to companies at fault, despite the value of methane as a resource and its extraordinary harm as a climate pollutant, not to mention the health impacts for those who live in the wake of these industrial operations. Complex wells that cost tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars to cap after they run dry are operated without any assurance—legal or fiscal—that the driller will cap them instead of walking away. Each of these practices, and many more, amount to billions of dollars in hidden subsidies that the oil and gas industry enjoys to produce the very fuels that are driving climate change and causing incalculable damage to the nation’s ecosystems and communities every year.

Now, the House Natural Resources Committee is staring down these irresponsible practices with a suite of fiscal reforms that will transform the federal oil and gas program and make it work to the benefit of taxpayers, instead of fossil fuel CEOs.

Here’s a look at some of the big changes the Committee is proposing:

Higher royalty rates charged on resources produced from federal leases. The new royalty rate more closely harmonizes the federal rate with the rates charged by major oil and gas producing states, would raise billions of dollars of new revenues, and would ensure a more fair return for taxpayer-owned resources.

Increased minimum bids and rental rates on federal leases, shorter lease terms, and an end to non-competitive leasing. These changes will discourage the rampant practice of speculative leasing and help to ensure that companies only nominate and bid on parcels that they truly intend to develop within a reasonable timeframe.

Increased bonding rates and mechanisms for ensuring bond amounts are adequate to cover the costs of capping and remediating idled wells. This increased cost of doing business will help confront the growing problem of orphaned and abandoned wells and ensure that taxpayers are not left on the hook to clean up the industry’s polluting legacy.
Required royalties on all produced methane, including leaked and flared methane. This fee will ensure that taxpayers are compensated for all resources extracted from federal public lands, limit waste, and encourage drillers to identify and remediate the methane leaks that are currently leading to a massive spike in dangerous emissions of this climate super pollutant.

Other proposals include fees to support conservation efforts, discourage speculation, and help resource managers inspect oil and gas operations on public lands. Another key change includes closing sensitive landscapes and areas with little chance of ever being developed like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and offshore areas in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas development. This would save precious government resources and allow these areas to be managed in ways that will protect their value to the public and critical ecosystems instead of subjecting them to the harms of fossil fuel development.

This plan puts taxpayers before polluters. For over a century the oil and gas industry has been able to write the rules for how they are managed. The federal fossil fuel leasing system is broken, and the number of reforms in this single package from House Natural Resources shows just how out of hand the situation has gotten. These common sense proposals rebalance the scales. They’ll allow our land managers to make our public lands and waters work for people, the climate, and the countless species that depend on them for survival.
Posted by at No comments:

'MAYBE' TECH

Carbon Capture Gets Cheaper: Making Methane From CO2

TOPICS:

By PACIFIC NORTHWEST NATIONAL LABORATORY SEPTEMBER 5, 2021

Jotheeswari Kothandaraman

Just as important as understanding how best to capture CO2 is understanding how to use it. A new study details how CO2 can be converted into methane, the primary component of synthetic natural gas. Here, Jotheeswari Kothandaraman, PNNL chemist and author of the new study, holds a sample of methanol, which has an even greater number of applications than methane. Credit: Photo by Andrea Starr | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Methane made from CO2 and renewable hydrogen offers a new path toward cheaper carbon capture.

In their ongoing effort to make carbon capture more affordable, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a method to convert captured carbon dioxide (CO2) into methane, the primary component of natural gas. 

By streamlining a longstanding process in which CO2 is converted to methane, the researchers’ new method reduces the materials needed to run the reaction, the energy needed to fuel it and, ultimately, the selling price of the gas. 

A key chemical player known as EEMPA makes the process possible. EEMPA is a PNNL-developed solvent that snatches CO2 from power plant flue gas, binding the greenhouse gas so it can be converted into useful chemicals. 

Earlier this year, PNNL researchers revealed that using EEMPA in power plants could slash the price of carbon capture to 19 percent lower than standard industry costs—the lowest documented price of carbon capture. Now, in a study published on August 21, 2021, in the journal ChemSusChem, the team reveals a new incentive—in cheaper natural gas—to further drive down costs.

When compared to the conventional method of methane conversion, the new process requires an initial investment that costs 32 percent less. Operation and maintenance costs are 35 percent cheaper, bringing the selling price of synthetic natural gas down by 12 percent. 

Methane’s role in carbon capture

Different methods for converting CO2 into methane have long been known. However, most processes rely on high temperatures and are often too expensive for widespread commercial use.

In addition to geologic production, methane can be produced from renewable or recycled CO2 sources, and can be used as fuel itself or as an H2 energy carrier. Though it is a greenhouse gas and requires careful supply chain management, methane has many applications, ranging from household use to industrial processes, said lead author and PNNL chemist Jotheeswari Kothandaraman. 

“Right now a large fraction of the natural gas used in the U.S. has to be pumped out of the ground,” said Kothandaraman, “and demand is expected to increase over time, even under climate change mitigation pathways. The methane produced by this process—made using waste CO2 and renewably sourced hydrogen—could offer an alternative for utilities and consumers looking for natural gas with a renewable component and a lower carbon footprint.”

Calculating costs and capturing carbon

To explore the use of EEMPA in converting CO2 to methane, Kothandaraman and her fellow authors studied the reaction’s molecular underpinnings, then assessed the cost of running the process at scale in a 550-megawatt power plant. 

Conventionally, plant operators can capture CO2 by using special solvents that douse flue gas before it’s emitted from plant chimneys. But these traditional solvents have relatively high water content, making methane conversion difficult.

Using EEMPA instead reduces the energy needed to fuel such a reaction. The savings stem partly from EEMPA’s ability to make CO2 dissolve more easily, which means less pressure is needed to run the conversion. 

The authors’ assessment identified further cost savings, in that CO2 captured by EEMPA can be converted to methane on site. Traditionally, CO2 is stripped from water-rich solvents and sent off site to be converted or stored underground. Under the new method, captured CO2 can be mixed with renewable hydrogen and a catalyst in a simple chamber, then heated to half the pressure used in conventional methods to make methane. 

The reaction is efficient, the authors said, converting over 90 percent of captured CO2 to methane, though the ultimate greenhouse gas footprint depends on what the methane is used to do. And EEMPA captures over 95 percent of CO2 emitted in flue gas. The new process gives off excess heat, too, providing steam for power generation.

Making more from CO2

The chemical process highlighted in the paper represents one path among many, said Kothandaraman, where captured CO2 can be used as a feedstock to produce other valuable chemicals. 


PNNL researchers are developing technologies to capture CO2 from industrial emissions and from the atmosphere. Here, manager of the Carbon Management and Fossil Energy Market Sector, Casie Davidson, explains CO2 mitigation technologies and how they might deploy at scale. Credit: Presentation by Casie Davidson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

“I’ll be glad when I can make this process work for methanol as efficiently as it does for methane now,” she said. “That’s my long-term goal.” Methanol has many more applications than methane, said Kothandaraman, who has sought to uncover the catalytic reactions that could produce methanol from CO2 for roughly a decade. Creating plastics from captured CO2 is another route the team plans to explore. 

“It’s important that we not only capture CO2, but find valuable ways to use it,” said Ron Kent, Advanced Technologies Development Manager at SoCalGas, “and this study offers a cost-effective pathway toward making something valuable out of waste CO2.”

Reference: “Integrated Capture and Conversion of CO2 Using a Water-lean, Post-Combustion CO2 Capture Solvent” by David Heldebrant, Jotheeswari Kothandaraman, Johnny Saavedra Lopez, Yuan Jiang, Eric D. Walter, Sarah D. Burton and Robert A. Dagle, 21 August 2021, ChemSusChem.
DOI: 10.1002/cssc.202101590

This study was supported by SoCalGas and the Department of Energy’s Technology Commercialization Fund and Office of Science.

In addition to Kothandaraman, authors include PNNL scientists Johnny Saavedra Lopez, Yuan Jiang, Eric D. Walter, Sarah D. Burton, Robert A. Dagle and David J. Heldebrant, who holds a joint appointment at Washington State University.

Posted by at No comments:

A Decade Of Wind, Solar, & Nuclear In China Shows Clear Scalability Winners

China’s natural experiment in deploying low-carbon energy generation shows that wind and solar are the clear winners.


China's largest solar-plus-storage project 
(PRNewsfoto/Sungrow Power Supply Co., Ltd)

ByMichael Barnard
Published5 hours ago


2010–2020 Showed Strong Wins For Wind & Solar In China, Nuclear Lagging

In 2014, I made the strong assertion that China’s track record on wind and nuclear generation deployments showed clearly that wind energy was more scalable. In 2019, I returned to the subject, and assessed wind, solar and nuclear total TWh of generation, asserting that wind and solar were outperforming nuclear substantially in total annual generation, and projected that the two renewable forms of generation would be producing 4 times the total TWh of nuclear by 2030 each year between them. Mea culpa: in the 2019 assessment, I overstated the experienced capacity factor for wind generation in China, which still lags US experiences, but has improved substantially in the past few years.

My thesis on scalability of deployment has remained unchanged: the massive numerical economies of scale for manufacturing and distributing wind and solar components, combined with the massive parallelization of construction that is possible with those technologies, will always make them faster and easier to scale in capacity and generation than the megaprojects of GW-scale nuclear plants. This was obvious in 2014, it was obviously true in 2019, and it remains clearly demonstrable today. Further, my point was that China was the perfect natural experiment for this assessment, as it was treating both deployments as national strategies (an absolute condition of success for nuclear) and had the ability and will to override local regulations and any NIMBYism. No other country could be used to easily assess which technologies could be deployed more quickly.

In March of this year I was giving the WWEA USA+Canada wind energy update as part of WWEA’s regular round-the-world presentation by industry analysts in the different geographies. My report was unsurprising. In 2020’s update, the focus had been on what the impact of COVID-19 would be on wind deployments around the world. My update focused on the much greater focus on the force majeure portions of wind construction contracts, and I expected that Canada and the USA would miss expectations substantially. The story was much the same in other geographies. And that was true for Canada, the USA and most of the rest of the geographies.

But China surprised the world in 2020, deploying not only 72 GW of wind energy, vastly more than expected, but also 48 GW of solar capacity. The wind deployment was a Chinese and global record for a single country, and the solar deployment was over 50% more than the previous year. Meanwhile, exactly zero nuclear reactors were commissioned in 2020.

And so, I return to my analysis of Chinese low-carbon energy deployment, looking at installed capacity and annual added extra generation.


Grid-connections of nameplate capacity of wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020 chart by author

I’ve aggregated this added additional capacity from multiple sources, including the World Nuclear Association, the Global Wind Energy Council, and the International Energy Agency’s photovoltaic material. In three of the 11 years from 2010 to 2020, China attached no nuclear generation to the grid at all. It’s adding more this year, but the year is not complete.

The solar and wind programs had been started in the mid-2000s, and wind energy initially saw much greater deployments. Having paid much more attention to wind energy than solar for the past decade, I was surprised that solar capacity deployments exceeded wind energy in 2017 and 2018, undoubtedly part of why solar was on track to double China’s 2020 target for the technology, while wind energy was only expected to reach 125% of targets. Nuclear was lagging targets substantially, and there was no expectation of achieving them. In 2019, the clear indication was that China would make substantially higher targets for wind and solar, and downgrade their expectations for nuclear, which has been borne out.


But nameplate capacity doesn’t matter as much as actual generation. As stated in the mea culpa, wind energy in China has underperformed. This was assessed in a Letter in the journal Environmental Research by European and North American researchers in 2018.

“Our findings underscore that the larger gap between actual performance and technical potential in China compared to the United States is significantly driven by delays in grid connection (14% of the gap) and curtailment due to constraints in grid management (10% of the gap), two challenges of China’s wind power expansion covered extensively in the literature. However, our findings show that China’s underperformance is also driven by suboptimal turbine model selection (31% of the gap), wind farm siting (23% of the gap), and turbine hub heights (6% of the gap)—factors that have received less attention in the literature and, crucially, are locked-in for the lifetime of wind farms.”

Some of the capacity factor issues are locked in, and some aren’t, but overall wind energy in China’s capacity is well below that of the US fleet still. I’ve adjusted capacity factors for wind energy to be 21% at the beginning of the decade, and up to 26% for 2020 deployments, still well below US experience. Solar, on the other hand, is less susceptible to some of the challenges of that impede wind energy’s generation, and the Chinese experienced median of 20% is used throughout the decade. China’s nuclear fleet has had much better ability to connect to the grid, and as the reactors are new, they aren’t being taken offline for substantial maintenance yet. The average capacity factor for the fleet of 91.1% for the decade is used.


Generation in TWh added each year by wind, solar and nuclear in China 2010-2020

And this tells the tale. Even adjusted for the poor capacity factor’s wind experienced and the above global average capacity factor for nuclear, in no year did the nuclear fleet add more actual generation than wind energy. The story is more mixed in the solar vs nuclear story, but only once in the past five years was more annual generation in TWh added by the nuclear program than by solar. And as a reminder, the Chinese wind and solar deployment programs started well over a decade after the nuclear program which saw its first grid connections in 1994.

What is also interesting to see is that the reversal in wind and solar deployments in China in the past two years. 2019 and 2020 saw double or more than double the actual generation in TWh added by wind than solar. To be clear, some of this is uptick is due to an expected and subsequently announced elimination of federal subsidies for utility-scale solar, commercial solar and onshore wind projects in 2021.


“The new rule, effective from Aug. 1, follows a drastic fall in manufacturing costs for solar and wind devices amid booming renewable capacity in China.”

This appears to have driven Chinese 2020 wind energy deployments to ensure that they would receive the compensation, just as US deployments have seen significant surges and lulls due to changes in the production tax credit. As a result, there is speculation that the announced wind generation capacity is not as fully completed as announced. However, that should not change the expected capacity factors for the coming years, and so I’ve left the 120 TWh projected delivery from the wind farms deployed in 2020 as is.

It’s worth noting that as of today, 7 of the 10 largest wind turbine manufacturers, and 9 of the 10 largest solar component manufacturers are Chinese companies. China remains, as I pointed out a couple of years ago, the only scaled manufacturer of many of the technologies necessary for decarbonization. Further, it’s expanding its market share in those technologies rapidly.

My 2014 thesis continues to be supported by the natural experiment being played out in China. In my recent published assessment of small modular nuclear reactors (tl’dr: bad idea, not going to work), it became clear to me that China has fallen into one of the many failure conditions of rapid deployment of nuclear, which is to say an expanding set of technologies instead of a standardized single technology, something that is one of the many reasons why SMRs won’t be deployed in any great numbers.

Wind and solar are going to be the primary providers of low-carbon energy for the coming century, and as we electrify everything, the electrons will be coming mostly from the wind and sun, in an efficient, effective and low-cost energy model that doesn’t pollute or cause global warming. Good news indeed that these technologies are so clearly delivering on their promise to help us deal with the climate crisis.
Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)