Sunday, February 16, 2020

BP LOONEY TUNES BEYOND PETROLEUM

 Did BP really just pledge to become a net-zero company? It’s complicated.

By Emily Pontecorvo on Feb 13, 2020

Net-zero promises from companies and governments are popping up as often as new Netflix shows, and just like those algorithmically driven hours of entertainment, not all clean energy commitments are created equal. The language used to describe these targets has become as meaningless as the “natural” label on your package of Perdue chicken: “Clean energy” and “net zero” can signify any number of things, and even “renewable” changes depending on who you ask.

The point is, when a fossil fuel major like BP announces its ambition to become a net-zero company by 2050, as it did on Wednesday, it’s important to read the fine print.

To start, “net-zero emissions” is different from plain old “zero emissions” in that it allows for things like carbon offsets, carbon capture technology, and natural solutions like tree-planting to make up for continued emissions. In this case, BP’s net-zero target does not mean it will stop exploring new reserves, extracting oil and gas, or selling it at the pump. Confusingly, it doesn’t even mean the emissions from all the oil and gas products BP sells will be net-zero in 2050.

But all of that aside, the company’s plan does contain significantly more aggressive goals than its peers.

“Depending on the details, it has the potential to be the most comprehensive climate strategy of any of the major oil companies,” said Andrew Logan, senior director of oil and gas at Ceres, a sustainable business nonprofit. But like Logan said, it depends on the details, because while BP’s dreams are big, the company has disclosed few details on how it will achieve them.

BP


One of BP’s targets is to reduce emissions from all of its company operations, which it says is about 55 million tons of CO2 equivalent, to net zero. That includes emissions from things like gas flaring at the wellhead, company cars, and the electricity it buys to keep the lights on. BP’s goal here is somewhat par for the course these days — most of the major oil and gas companies have some kind of emissions reduction target for their operations (though not all of them are net zero).

What’s noteworthy, said Kathy Mulvey, the fossil fuel accountability campaign director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, is that BP says it will measure and reduce its methane footprint at all of its oil and gas sites. “That points to the reality that BP doesn’t actually know exactly how much methane its operations are emitting,” she said.

Critics of these plans say that operational emissions are small potatoes, and that fossil fuel companies should be responsible for the emissions from the oil and gas products they produce and sell to customers, known as scope 3 emissions. This is where BP’s plan really stands out. The company aspires to zero-out the carbon emissions from the eventual combustion of all of the oil and gas it pulls out of the ground by 2050. Right now that amounts to about 360 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year.

BP

In a speech about the plan on Wednesday, new CEO Bernard Looney tried to anticipate questions about this. He said that yes, this does mean BP’s oil and gas production will probably decline over time. “Does that mean we’ll be producing and refining hydrocarbons” — that’s fossil fuel industry–speak for fossil fuels — “in 2050? Yes, very likely,” he said. “Does that mean we’ll be producing and refining less of them in 2050? Yes, almost certainly. And our aim is that any residual hydrocarbons will be decarbonized.”

To date, only one other fossil fuel company has made this kind of commitment, the small Spanish company Repsol. But unlike Repsol, which has set near-term goals to gradually reduce emissions over time, and hinted at some of the strategies it will use to get there, BP offered no benchmarks or blueprints. Looney said the company would share more information on the “how” of its transition in September.


But there’s one key caveat to BP’s scope 3 target. The oil and gas that the company extracts is only a portion of its business. During a Q&A session after his speech, Looney broke down how they are thinking about scope 3 on a whiteboard.

Final picture. Shows 360 million tons in second bar, which is the added emissions from BP oil and gas. That is what BP is committed to reducing, in absolute terms. pic.twitter.com/zq3Ejxk3fX

— Ben Storrow (@bstorrow) February 12, 2020

BP sells a lot more oil and gas than it digs out of the ground, he said, because it also buys these products from other companies. So while it plans to zero-out emissions from the products BP itself extracts, it’s aiming for a 50 percent reduction in carbon intensity from all the products it sells, including those it’s just a middleman for.

That leaves open the possibility for the total emissions from BP’s sold products to continue to rise, as long as the amount emitted per unit of energy decreases. In his speech, Looney estimated that right now, total emissions from all the products it sells are about 1 gigaton per year.

Ultimately, with a goal of reducing its footprint by 415 million tons of CO2 equivalent by 2050, BP’s new plan is worlds away from companies like Exxon and Chevron, which still claim they are not responsible for the emissions from customers using their products.

BP’s vision also includes a goal to increase the proportion of money it invests into non-oil and gas energy sources, like solar and wind, over time. Right now, that’s only about 3 percent of BP’s investments. But Looney declined to quantify the company’s target in this arena. “We don’t plan to commit to an arbitrary or preset number,” he said.

While critics have already leapt on the vagueness of the plan, Ed Clowes, a business journalist for the Telegraph, described BP’s dilemma aptly on Twitter. On the one hand, BP could stop selling oil and gas and self-destruct. But if it did, another company would step in to fill the gap, because right now, the world still (mostly) runs on oil. “BP has to be in the game to change it,” Clowes wrote.


Burning issue: consumers need to make their money work for the environment ( ANSA/AP )

Last week was a big one for planet Earth, at least if you believe the corporate hype.

BP said it planned to become a net zero carbon company by 2050 and then up popped AXA Investment Managers with its stewardship report, and the suggestion that it would hold the feet of companies in which it invests to the fire. Sort of.

“The next decade will be defined by our ability as an investment and corporate community to turn thoughts, ambitions and desires into tangible action to solve global issues,” was what Matt Christensen, global head of impact strategy and responsible investment (now there’s a title), actually said.

BP Wants To Slash Carbon Emissions, But Has No Plan For Doing That

There is an old expression that says, “If you fail to plan, you have a plan to fail.” It’s good to have goals, but plans are what make achieving those goals possible. This week in London, Bernard Looney, the new CEO of BP, announced that his company intends to eliminate or offset 100% of its carbon emissions by 2050. “We are aiming to earn back the trust of society, Looney said according to a report by The New York Times. “We have got to change, and change profoundly. Trillions of dollars will need to be invested in replumbing and rewiring the world’s energy system. It will require nothing short of reimagining energy as we know it,” Looney said in a company statement.
No one can argue with that. BP has been one of the largest polluters of the planet for the past 50 years or more and is singlehandedly responsible for screwing  up the Gulf of Mexico with the disastrous Deep Water Horizon fiasco that was far larger than anyone knew at the time. This is a company that spent $13 million lobbying against a ballot initiative that would have imposed a modest tax on carbon emissions in the state of Washington a few years ago, but now says it supports stricter climate laws that include putting a price on carbon emissions. It’s little wonder people have trouble trusting the company.
There is one fairly bold component of Looney’s Reimagining Energy announcement that deserves attention, however. He says not only does the company intend to slash carbon emissions from its operations, it also intends to significantly reduce the emissions created by burning the oil and gas it produces, which are so-called Scope 3 emissions. Unfortunately, Looney offered no details about how that’s going to happen, promising a full report on the details by next September.
At the present time, BP emits about 55 million tons of greenhouse gases each year directly from its extraction operations and refineries, The New York Times reports. But when its products are used, they generate another 360 million tons of carbon dioxide. And that doesn’t include the damage done by methane emissions from its drilling and pumping operations. Looney also conveniently omits the 77 million tons of emissions attributable to the oil and gas it purchases from other suppliers.
Despite all the happy talk, don’t get the idea that BP is going to stop its fossil fuel extraction operations any time soon. During the question and answer session after Looney’s announcement, he said the company would “very likely” still be producing and refining hydrocarbons by 2050, but that it planned to invest “less and less in oil and gas” over time, according to The Verge.  The New York Times may have some insight into that conundrum. It speculates that BP may be planning on making money from capturing and sequestering carbon from the atmosphere — the real world equivalent to a septic system pumping company emptying the contents of its trucks on your property and then charging you to clean up its mess.

Environmental Groups Respond

The idea of cutting emissions from burning fossil fuels is pretty bold stuff for an oil company, so environmental groups have given the company some tepid praise for timidly going where no fossil fuel company has gone before. “Looney deserves support and credit for starting BP on the journey towards carbon neutrality and policy leadership. The direction is good, and we look forward to hearing more about the specifics. Time will tell if he gets BP where it needs to go. Its real actions and verifiable emissions reductions that will be the measure of success,” said Environmental Defense Fund president Fred Krupp after the announcement. But Ellen Gibson of 350.0rg Britain tells The New York Times, “Unless BP commits clearly to stop searching for more oil and gas, and to keep their existing reserves in the ground, we shouldn’t take a word of their P.R. spin seriously.”

Goals are like lighthouses. They give us something to aim for. A sailboat crossing the ocean is off course 99% of the time but because it has a goal — the white cliffs of Dover, perhaps — it can correct its path regularly and arrive safely at its destination. A plan is what makes all those mid-course corrections possible. We will have to wait until September when BP reveals its plan before we can judge whether it is sound, but until then, the company has established a clear goal and for that it should be congratulated
BEYOND PETROLEUM
BP announces 'ambition' to become a net-zero-emissions company by 2050

New CEO Bernard Looney says the group will invest more in low-carbon businesses and less in oil & gas 'over time'

BP chief executive Bernard Looney.Photo: BP

 Oil giant BP has announced an “ambition” to become a net-zero emissions company by 2050 or sooner, the first of the majors to make such a pledge.

 Unlike other oil & gas companies that have made commitments to become greener, BP says its target will include emissions from its oil & gas products.


Oil supermajor BP backs offshore wind for lift-offRead more


Time for Big Oil to put its money where its mouth is over energy transitionRead more

 How BP plans to achieve its aim is not yet clear, although a statement revealed that a new Gas & Low Carbon Energy business unit will "pursue opportunities in decarbonisation and new value chains such as hydrogen and CCUS [carbon capture, utilisation and storage]".

 Another clue is that last month the company named offshore wind at the top of a list of key technologies ready for commercial lift-off, alongside green hydrogen, solar and electric mobility. Its renewable energy strategy has so far mainly focused on its BP Lightsource PV development joint venture, although it does have a portfolio of US wind farms that add up to more than 1GW.

 New chief executive Bernard Looney, who took on the role last week, stated: “We expect to invest more in low carbon businesses — and less in oil and gas — over time. The goal is to invest wisely, into businesses where we can add value, develop at scale, and deliver competitive returns.”

 The statement makes it clear that BP intends to continue delivering strong returns to investors while making its energy transition.

 Looney explained: “The world’s carbon budget is finite and running out fast; we need a rapid transition to net zero.

 “We all want energy that is reliable and affordable, but that is no longer enough. It must also be cleaner. To deliver that, trillions of dollars will need to be invested in replumbing and rewiring the world’s energy system. It will require nothing short of reimagining energy as we know it.

 “This will certainly be a challenge, but also a tremendous opportunity. It is clear to me, and to our stakeholders, that for BP to play our part and serve our purpose, we have to change. And we want to change — this is the right thing for the world and for BP.”

 Chairman Helge Lund added: “As we embark on this ambitious agenda, we will maintain a strong focus on safe, reliable and efficient operations and on delivering the promises we have made to our investors.”

 The pledge has already been met with skepticism by climate groups, who point out that BP plans to increase its production of oil & gas by about a fifth between 2018 and 2030, even though such a move would increase the chances of runaway global heating.


Big Oil must pump up clean energy spend to slow climate crisis: IEARead more


Offshore oil industry 'social licence to operate under threat' in UKRead more

 Ellen Gibson, a campaigner for climate group 350.org, said: “It is not possible to keep to a 2°C warming limit — let alone 1.5°C — while continuing to dig up and burn fossil fuels. Unless BP commits clearly to stop searching for more oil and gas, and to keep their existing reserves in the ground, we shouldn’t take a word of their PR spin seriously.”

 Greenpeace oil advisor Charlie Kronick added: “BP’s ‘ambitions’ and ‘aims’ all seem to apply to Looney’s successors, and leave the urgent questions unanswered. How will they reach net zero? Will it be through offsetting? When will they stop wasting billions on drilling for new oil and gas we can’t burn? What is the scale and schedule for the renewables investment they barely mention? And what are they going to do this decade, when the battle to protect our climate will be won or lost?”

 BP says it will "set out more information" on its strategy and short-term plans at a capital markets day in September.(Copyright)



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Tesla Semis Are Cheaper Than Rail Enough Of The Time To Reshape Ground Freight

February 16th, 2020 by Michael Barnard cleantechnica.com 




Ground freight choices will shift with the Tesla Semi, and rail will be one of the losers

Later this year, the first Tesla Semis will be rolling out of a gigafactory. As with many of Musk’s plans, schedule is the least firm thing about them, as the trucks were originally going to be rolling in 2019. But the question that this article deals with is: “What dynamics will shift in the rail vs. road shipping equation?”



Elon Musk unveiling Tesla Semi

To be clear, the Tesla Semi isn’t a “rail killer.” That would be silly. But it will shift the distribution of what mode of transportation gets chosen enough to make a dent. And it’s not alone. Electric freight trucks from other vendors will be coming to Interstates and the Autobahn in the coming years as well, and with many of the same attributes.

Some bona fides: In addition to regularly publishing assessments of the transformation of transportation, including Tesla’s key role, on CleanTechnica and other sites, I did a two-day freight rail operations course for vendors to Canadian National Railway a few years ago, have clambered over a diesel electric freight engine, and have shaken hands with conductors and engineers. I helped build a North American asset mapping and KPI tracking system for them. I even published an article on innovation in freight rail in an industry-oriented publication a few years ago: “Working on the railroad — Inside Logistics.”

For every logistical assessment of shipping, the questions arise: Which is cheaper? Which is faster? Which is more certain to hit delivery dates? The combination means that Tesla Semis will be favored over rail immediately upon availability in many circumstances, and more so in coming years with obvious and known autonomous capabilities.

With modern transshipment of containers, the fewer touch points at transshipment terminals, the lower the cost. It’s about $100 per lift of a container, so if it gets lifted off four fewer times because there’s no train in the middle, then you can save $400 bucks per container delivery. Putting a container on a truck at a port and having that delivered directly to a client saves some money that way, but right now the miles per ton delivered is higher per truck with diesel tractors, so it gets done a bit less often than it will when economics change.

The lower operating costs of Tesla Semis due to less maintenance, the much harder to break glass and the lower cost of fuel means that the marginal costs of operation are lower than for diesels. That means that they will break even more often in the truck vs rail question, which means more loads on roads. Most of those were covered in Musks’ presentation, but now that we’re closer to actual delivery, it’s worth looking at more aspects.

The lower breakage of glass is important, too. In at least North America (I haven’t looked at European or Asian regulations on this), a cracked windscreen means that the truck is on the side of the road and not operating until a replacement windscreen is in place. That can put a big dent in a delivery schedule, something less important with a single container than a fleet of containers moving, but it increases the certainty of delivering on time, which has an economic value.

But that’s just out-of-the-box savings, which will shift the distribution to favor trucks a bit more often. Up to mile-long (1.6 km) trains have only two staff members on board, a conductor and an engineer. That’s a key point, and it’s where autonomous driving and trucks will be making more points in favor of Tesla Semis over freight rail more of the time.

Tesla, along with Daimler and others, have already demonstrated on-road autonomous convoying of freight trucks. Multiple trucks act as a single truck, communicating with each other not with brake lights but via internet-enabled messaging. The same autonomous features that work so well in Tesla’s cars work just as well in Tesla Semis, but with the added capability of convoy mode.

Why is this important? Two ways. You can start to see that with the mesh of roads being much broader than the mesh of rails and with no physical connection between trucks, they can self-assemble into convoys for subsets of the journeys, especially for longer hauls where rail has advantages today. This isn’t dissimilar to patterns of two to five 18-wheelers on highways running grill to bumper today, and convoying creates a couple of cost savings.

The first is just physics. Drafting saves gas, having the first truck in the convoy push the air out of the way and having the rest in its slipstream saving money on fuel for all of them. Autonomous vehicles will do it better and be able to achieve better savings than human drivers can. With the ability to have individual “cars” in the train pull out of the train and deliver off of an offramp along the way, you get some of the cost savings of freight rail without the rails, which are expensive. This has been projected for years, but at least one major vendor has backed away from it. Daimler has said that its pilots haven’t shown significant enough savings to make it worthwhile. If physics were the only advantage, then this wouldn’t be a strong enough statement, but it’s on top of the out-of-the-box value proposition of electric semi tractors and is followed by other advantages.

And the next advantage is crew costs. Right now trucks all require drivers, and drivers have limits on how many hours that they can drive in a day and week.

“You may be expected to work up to 70 hours over an eight-day period. After you’ve worked for 70 hours, you cannot drive again until you take a full 34 hours off duty. The 70-hour limit could be reached by working 14-hour days, but you cannot drive for more than 11 hours in a day.”

What does this mean in the context of autonomous convoys in short and interim durations? In the short term, not much. Initially, drivers will just be better rested, which in addition to autonomous features will lead to fewer collisions per million miles. But you can see regulations shifting to allow convoys where drivers can book off and get a couple of hours of sleep if they are third in a row of five trucks fairly quickly.

In the medium term, you can see drivers delivering trucks to a point where they can pick up with a convoy, a big parking lot not a freight rail transshipment point, and then head home while the truck convoy drives a thousand kilometers to another big parking lot with additional local drivers.

And when fully autonomous trucks are allowed on the road, you can see individual trucks peeling off of convoys without any drivers, while the convoy might have a conductor and an engineer.

The next point is an interesting one. I couldn’t persuade Canadian National Railway to be interested in an approach to putting air carbon capture on its freight trains using Global Thermostat’s technology. It would have been cheap air carbon capture because it was just adding a car to an existing train, using the movement of the train to funnel air into the sorbents, using waste heat from dynamic braking to power the process of removing the CO2 from the sorbents, then having the captured CO2 being on a low-carbon distribution network right off the bat. Why wasn’t Canadian National Railway interested? Various reasons, but one was that it was already the lowest-CO2-emissions form of land transportation available except for pipelines. But with convoys of Tesla Semis running on renewable electricity and the increasing likelihood of carbon pricing on diesel, the rail majors will have to adapt to being behind freight trucking in that measure, and having additional costs related to their diesel emissions.

The last point is a conceptual one that I use as part of a framework to assess what technologies are likely to win in the long term. The concept I use is loose coupling, something from software systems architecture. Tightly coupled solutions, like wine bottles with corks and corkscrews, or freight rail trains and rail tracks, are less flexible, requiring both components to be in good shape, available, and working well in order to deliver the value. More loosely coupled systems, like wine bottles with screw tops or trucks running on a broad network of big and small roads, have advantages. Tightly coupled solutions have inherent limitations that inhibit their competitiveness in some ways while enhancing it in others, but innovation in loosely coupled systems tends to win in the long run. That’s why the lack of physical connections between conveying trucks over a network of roads, with self-assembling road trains, is such a powerful innovative and competitive force. It plays directly into that premise.

And that loose coupling is inherent to the fundamental innovation of transshipment containers in any event. Standardized containers that can be stacked on ships, trains, or trucks have transformed transportation already.

Imagine a road train of ten independent trucks with only two people on board, no emissions, low maintenance, and low fuel costs. That’s the future of road freight. That’s balanced by still having more staff than trains and limits on load weights, but the distribution will have changed substantially.

In the future, a lot more freight tonnage will end up on roads in Tesla Semis and similar vehicles from Daimler and other vendors. It’s the nature of the beast.

Freight rail has to innovate more to deal with this competitive threat. In Europe, they have already shifted powering freight trains to external power lines, running the electric traction engines not off of electricity from the diesel generators but from remote wind and solar farms. That’s increasingly going to be done in the rest of the world. In China, high-speed rail is all electric with externally supplied electricity. This isn’t hard, it’s just not the freight rail standard yet. The engines are all diesel electric hybrids as it is, so displacing the diesel part is relatively straightforward. And freight rail companies are experimenting with adding batteries as well, not only charging them at terminals to supplement diesel, but also filling them en route with dynamic braking being turned into regenerative braking and with externally supplied electricity when available.

All transportation is electrifying. All transportation is moving to lower labor costs. All transportation is becoming more loosely coupled. All transportation is moving to lower carbon models. But the Tesla Semi is going to have a substantial advantage once it’s on the roads, and for a decade after that. No other manufacturer has anywhere near the experience with electrification, en route provision of high-speed charging and autonomy.


Tesla’s Semi will be very profitable for Tesla. And for the people who buy the electric, high-tech semi trucks. 
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Rain may soon be an effective source of renewable energy

A generator can briefly light up 100 LED bulbs with a single drop.

Jon Fingas, @jonfingas
02.09.20
Cesare Fel / EyeEm via Getty Images

There have been numerous attempt to generate electricity using rain, but this may be one of the more effective solutions yet. Researchers have developed a generator that uses a field-effect transistor-style structure to instantly produce a surprisingly high voltage from water drops -- a single drop can muster 140V, or enough power to briefly light up 100 small LED bulbs. Earlier generators without the structure produced "thousands" of times less instant power density, the scientists said.

The new design mates an aluminum electrode with an indium tin oxide electrode layered with PTFE, a material with a "quasi-permanent" electric charge. When a drop hits the PTFE/tin surface, it bridges the two electrodes and creates a closed-loop circuit. That helps fully release any stored charges. The technology could handle sustained rainfall, too. If there are continuous drops, the charge accumulates and eventually hits a saturation point.

There's still work to be done to translate this to a practical product. A brief burst of energy is easy -- accumulating enough of it for continuous power is another matter. Still, the potential uses are easy to see You could apply generators like this to the surface of anything where rain (or other water splashes) is likely to strike. Building rooftops could offset at least some of the electricity use from the people below, while electric boats could extend their range. It could even be used to power connected devices that regularly get wet, like umbrellas and water bottles.

Via: ScienceDaily Source: City University of Hong Kong, Nature



The Next Renewable Energy Source Could Be Rain

By Irina Slav - Feb 16, 2020

The quest for the next source of renewable energy is well under way, with no natural phenomenon overlooked. We have already harnessed the power of flowing water, wind, and sunlight, and the search for the next clean source of energy is far from over.


The latest potential breakthrough in renewable energy comes in the form of rain.

Rain has not been getting a lot of attention in renewable energy circles perhaps because it would be challenging to harness its electricity-producing potential. Yet attempts are being made, and in the latest breakthrough, U.S. and Hong Kong researchers have managed to produce 140 volts of power from one single raindrop. That’s enough to light 100 LED lights for a short while.

The idea itself is not new. Previous attempts to generate electricity from rain drops have been made and they have all utilized the triboelectric effect: this is when certain materials acquire an electric charge after they come in contact with another material and then get separated. Think of it as a type of static, low-charge electricity. Yet all of the previous attempts have suffered the limitations of technology.

The team behind the new raindrop power generator has pushed these limits further. The researchers, from City University in Hong Kong and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, spent two years working on the energy density of what they have called a droplet electricity generator, or DEG.

What they did was use the design of field-effect transistors – three-terminal devices that use an electric field to control the flow of electric current through them. Thanks to this design, the energy density of the DEG shot up to over 50 Watts per square meter, which is thousands of times more than the energy density of comparable devices.

But that wasn’t all. In their quest for a way to harness the power of rain drops, the scientists also used a special material to coat the generator. Called tetrafluoroethylene, or PTFE for short, this is a hydrophobic polymer that doesn’t get wet and can withstand high temperatures. It also has what the scientists call a quasi-permanent electric charge. When a ran drop hits the PTFE surface of the generator, it bridges the two electrodes creating a closed-loop circuit that releases any stored energy charges in the surface material, Engadget explains.

It’s still a long way to go before we all start using PTFE-coated umbrellas with electrodes underneath. But in the future, we may live in buildings with rooftops that double as power generators using the kinetic energy of the water clouds’ release.

Other attempts to use the power of raindrops involve kinetic energy, or the energy of the drops falling from the sky. These attempts have utilized the piezoelectric effect. When an object falls on another object, it applies pressure on it. This pressure, very basically, creates an electric current if the second object is made from a piezoelectric material. So, raindrops falling on a piezoelectric material surface will generate electricity. Unfortunately, what is in science called a conversion rate or conversion efficiency, is extremely low in these designs and, bluntly put, not really worth the effort.

But how about turbines driven by collected raindrops using the same principle as hydropower plants? This is another viable way of utilizing rain. All it takes is building a large reservoir to collect the rainwater above the ground and then use the water to power a turbine. This method could be particularly suited for parts of the world with a monsoon, which would generate ample supplies of rainwater for this alternative hydropower system.

And then there is the microturbine developed by students from the Technological University of Mexico, that uses rainwater to generate electricity. The principle is the same as any that is used in a hydropower plant—the difference being this electricity compensates for power used to purify rainwater. It is a two-in-one solution aimed at providing clean drinking water to poor parts of Mexico City and recovering some of the electricity used in the process by generating it with the remaining unpurified rainwater.

There is even a solar cell that can harness the kinetic energy of rain, which makes for a nice solution of the problem that rain causes for solar panels: they can’t generate electricity in overcast conditions. Yet if you cover the panel with a layer of grapheme, the miracle material turns into a capacitor, and the difference between its electrons and the ions of the raindrops generates electricity on contact.

The world of renewable energy is becoming increasingly fascinating. Everything is fair game in the search for the next infinite, emission-free source of electric energy. With rain, the basic technology is already there. Now, the challenge seems to be to boost the conversion efficiency of this technology to make rainwater a viable alternative to emission-producing power generation systems.

by Irina Slav for Oilprice.com


Creating Electricity From Rain To Light 100 LED Lights


Photo by Aleksandar Pasaric from Pexels
Researchers from City University of Hong Kong (CityU) have created a new type of generator that uses rain to create electricity, and it works.
The generator produces a high voltage from a single drop of rain: more than 140 volts even when falling from 15 cm or higher. This is what it takes to light up 100 small LED bulbs. The generator uses a field-effect transistor (FET) type of structure that enables high energy conversion efficiency. In comparison with its counterparts that do not have FET-like structures, “its instantaneous power density is increased by thousands of times,” according to the university press release.
Three professors led the research team: Professor Wang Zuankai (Department of Mechanical Engineering, CityU), Professor Zeng Xiaocheng (University of Nebraska-Lincoln), and Professor Wang Zhonglin (Founding Director and Chief Scientist at the Beijing Institute of Nanoenergy and Nanosystems of Chinese Academy of Sciences).
Professor Wang mentioned that he hoped harvesting energy from water could help to provide more renewable energy around the world for those in need.

“He believed that in the long run, the new design could be applied and installed on different surfaces, where liquid is in contact with a solid, to fully utilise the low-frequency kinetic energy in water. This can range from the hull surface of a ferry to the surface of umbrellas or even inside water bottles.” Imagine charging your phone while walking in the rain — from the rain itself. Imagine plugging your phone into your water bottle.
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It doesn’t matter if China hacked Equifax
Hop on the cybersecurity hayride from hell.

Violet Blue, @violetblue 02.14.20
Illustration by Koren Shadmi

On Monday the FBI and AG Barr announced "an indictment last week charging four members of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) with hacking into the computer systems of the credit reporting agency Equifax and stealing Americans' personal data and Equifax's valuable trade secrets." China's military refutes the charges.

It was a message of PR reprieve for the skinsuits at Equifax, who spend their life cycles profiting from tracking and trading our personal and financial information (and we're powerless to stop them). Especially now as we're seeing reports about how four Chinese hackers "took down Equifax."

That sure sounds a lot better (for them) than the fact that Equifax's security failures were so bad for so long that a breach was inevitable. One month after Equifax admitted the breach, press and pundits remarked on the multitude of issues saying it was probable "that more than one group of hackers broke into the company."

Yeah, something makes me think China's hackers are more of the "hoarders" variety, not the 'sing Kumbaya' sharing kind — and our stolen Equifax data was definitely shared. "Katie Van Fleet of Seattle says she's spent months trying to regain her stolen identity, and says it has been stolen more than a dozen times," reported NBC. "I didn't sign up to use Equifax, so I feel all of that stuff has been taken, and now I am left here trying to sweep up the pieces and just trying to protect myself and protect my credit," Van Fleet said.

And that's the thing: None of us signed up for Equifax. Yet here we are.
Stop me if you've heard this one before



In late 2017, the plucky little credit bureau that built its business nonconsensually getting dirt on Americans in order to deny them insurance claims (Equifax) suffered a wholly predictable calamity, endemic to powerful corporations whose engines are fueled by arrogance, hubris, and greed.

In early September 2017, Equifax was forced to reveal a breach it had known about for months. It impacted approximately 143 million U.S. consumers, as well as information on some Canadians and up to 44 million British residents, putting the total just shy of 200 million.

The stolen files were described as "records." But by early 2018 Equifax was forced to admit "records" meant our names, home addresses, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, credit records, drivers licenses, passports, and really, just everything.

By March 2018, the company revealed it found a few more breach victims in its couch cushions. "In September last year Equifax said it had discovered that 145 million US customers may have had their information stolen," BBC cavalierly reported. "Its investigation into the breach has revealed that the details of a further 2.4 million Americans went astray."

The company had been warned by a security researcher to fix its vulnerabilities months before the first attack was alleged to have happened. That researcher shared their findings with press, showing that a public web portal allowed anyone "with no authentication whatsoever ... to access the personal data of every American, including social security numbers, full names, birthdates, and city and state of residence." What's more:

While probing Equifax servers and sites, the researcher said that they were also able to take control—or get shell access as hackers refer to it—on several Equifax servers, and found several others vulnerable to simple bugs such as SQL injection, a common, basic way of attacking sites. Many servers were running outdated software ... Equifax had thousands of servers exposed on the internet...

The researcher reported all of this to the company. "If it took me three hours to find that website, I definitely think I'm not the only one who found it," they told Motherboard. "It wasn't just one breach. It was maybe dozens."

Six months after that first researcher notified the company about the vulnerability, Equifax patched it — but only after the massive breach had already taken place, according to Equifax's own timeline.

When called in on the carpet for a congressional hearing about the privacy and consumer identity apocalypse Equifax ushered into our cursed timeline, WSJ reported that Equifax's temporary chief executive told Congress he wasn't sure whether the company was encrypting consumer data. Equifax was indeed storing unencrypted user data on a public-facing server, and "didn't encrypt its mobile applications either. — and when it did encrypt data, it left the encryption keys on the same public facing servers."

Eventually, one big class-action lawsuit revealed that wasn't all: we found out Equifax used 'admin' as a username and password internally.

But okay. They want us to blame China.



The breach earned Equifax a lot of public humiliation — besides all the bad press, at least 240 lawsuits were filed. Still, it seemed like the company liked that sort of thing. Security company FireEye quietly removed its boasting about protecting Equifax from its website, but was still hired to handle Equifax's incident response.

Equifax's response to everything was a masterclass in how to do everything wrong.

Right after the breach, it came out that Equifax had been rated an "F" in app security; the company responded by silently disappearing its apps from the Apple App Store and Google Play (Android).

Equifax tried to blame the breach on a single vulnerability in Apache Struts; Apache wasted no time releasing a statement showing Equifax was to blame for not patching it. The company had been notified about it six months before the alleged incident occurred.

Within an hour of the breach's public admission, information emerged that three Equifax executives sold stock just before the breach and after the company had internal knowledge of the incident (a month prior to the public acknowledgement).

Speaking of profiting off our pain... One of the engineers who worked on coding Equifax's "equifaxsecurity2017.com" website was found to have abused people's information for insider trading Equifax stock. This was the WordPress site Equifax sent consumers to, to find out whether they were impacted by the breach. It was totally broken: Visitors got different answers with every query. It also told visitors that Equifax's credit monitoring service was not available, and to check back later in the month; many noticed you could enter any gibberish to get the same answers.

It also seemed for a while that those who signed up for credit monitoring waived some legal rights.

Then, the $700 million data breach settlement. This turned into $125 per person. Except Equifax only planned to pay 248,000 of the actual victims — and over four and a half million applied, bringing the payout down to $6.80 per victim.
Stock in golden parachutes is way up



From any angle, we consumers — none of whom consented to being in Equifax's databases — got the worst of it. Equifax was pwned in a completely stupid and avoidable way and are now the biggest plop in the swirling toilet bowl of our modern privacy apocalypse.

Even though officials were mad at Equifax for a minute and consumers want to burn them to the ground and salt the earth, they're doing just fine. NY Post reported that the company's big corporate clients are giving the despicable data dealers a pass. "The embattled credit bureau said Friday it hasn't lost any significant business."

The outlet reminded us, "Equifax largely does business with banks and other financial institutions — not with the people they collect information on." According to GovTech, "A year after the worst data breach in U.S. history to date, Atlanta-based Equifax has been chastened, but its business model is unchanged and the company churns on, virtually undamaged by legislative, regulatory or prosecutorial penalties."

Equifax got a "get out of jail free" card: The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau decided not to do a damn thing about it. Former Director of the CFPB Richard Cordray had authorized an investigation, Reuters wrote, "But Cordray resigned in November and was replaced by [Mick] Mulvaney, President Donald Trump's budget chief."

Mulvaney, head of the CFPB, pulled the agency back from doing a full-scale probe and indefinitely suspended plans for on-the-ground tests on how Equifax protects its data. "The CFPB also recently rebuffed bank regulators at the Federal Reserve, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency when they offered to help with on-site exams of credit bureaus," reported Reuters.

So, I'm sorry Scooby gang. It doesn't matter who hacked the "credit risk assessment" company no one can opt out of. Old Man Equifax is going to get away with it.

Imagine a company with the dated incompetence of Yahoo security circa 2013-14. The arrogance and greed, growth-at-all-costs-to-society hubris of Uber circa 2009-2017. The "hot or not" contempt for human beings and rapey privacy machinations as Facebook circa 2004-present.

Equifax, for being the world's oldest, old-timey, redlining-era, data-plantation owner (circa 1899) that couldn't even set up a WordPress site in 2017 sure knows how to keep up with the techbro Jonses. Loads of money and zero consequences has a way of keeping you nimble like that.

It's quite insane, really.
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UK energy minister says country is ‘now off coal’ – despite still operating four major coal-fired plants


An all-party U.K. parliamentary group for renewable and sustainable energy event in London has again confirmed the view the government remains unmoved by calls for support for the solar sector. However, a window of opportunity may be about to open for rooftop PV thanks to proposed legislation for new homes building standards.

FEBRUARY 13, 2020 


U.K. energy minister Kwasi Kwarteng falsely claimed the nation is ‘now off coal’ at a parliamentary event this week.

Image: Policy Exchange/Flickr

The invitation to the winter reception held in London this week by the U.K. government’s all-party parliamentary group for renewable and sustainable energy (Praseg) stated energy minister Kwasi Kwarteng would give “a keynote address reflecting on U.K. leadership on renewable and sustainable energy and outlining his aspirations for the sector in the future”.

Despite that promise, little of substance was offered at the House of Commons event on Tuesday other than a vague low-carbon aspirations.

Kwarteng began his speech by reflecting on the country retiring its coal-fired power fleet, stating: “In 1913, the U.K. mined 287 million tons of coal and, in 100 years, we are now off coal – a remarkable achievement.”

pv magazine understands the U.K. still operates four major coal-fired power stations, one of which – Fiddler’s Ferry in Cheshire, northwest England – is due to go offline in March. Coal-fired power supplied 5.1% of U.K. electricity in 2018 and that figure is expected to have fallen a further 2% last year after the Cottam plant in Nottinghamshire, in the English east midlands, closed in the autumn and the Aberthaw B power station, near Barry in South Wales, was shuttered in December. The government has committed to ending all “unabated” coal-fired generation by 2025 and this month said it would consult on bringing that deadline forward to October 1, 2024.

With the Conservative government of Theresa May having committed to a net-zero carbon economy by 2050 – in one of the final acts of a Brexit-riven administration – Kwarteng voiced his concern about emissions from the housebuilding sector and the urgency of decarbonizing space heating.

“These are the challenges I think [of] as a minister every day,” he added. “We are on a journey [towards a sustainable energy system] and we try to bring the population together with us.”

It was left to members of the new intake of MPs elected in December to offer encouragement to representatives of the solar sector and wider energy community in the audience.

Window of opportunity?

Lia Nici, Conservative MP for Great Grimsby in the English North East, spoke about new buildings installing renewable energy technologies so “we don’t have to retrofit in 10 years’ time”.

Her remarks came after the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government in October opened a consultation related to its proposed Future Homes Standard. Specifically, the ministry asked for feedback about ‘part L’ of the standard – which concerns the conservation of fuel and power in new dwellings – and the consultation closed on Friday with the government’s preferred option to publish part L in the middle of the year and bring its provisions into force by the end of the year.

The U.K. Solar Trade Association (STA) welcomed the part L proposals which consider two alternative legislative options to improve energy efficiency in building standards.

The ‘Future Homes Fabric’ standard would deliver a 20% reduction in carbon emissions by mandating “very high fabric standards” and the ‘Fabric plus technology’ option would deliver a 31% emissions reduction “through a more minor increase to fabric standards alongside use of low-carbon heating and/or renewables, such as photovoltaic panels,” said the consultation document. The latter is the government’s preferred option because it “would deliver more carbon savings and result in lower bills for the householder,” added the document. Shifting some of the burden onto clean energy installations would also placate the U.K.’s powerful housebuilding lobby, which can be expected to resist any move towards more stringent building standards.

Newly-elected Labour MP for Sheffield Hallam, Olivia Blake, told the Praseg gathering community energy is a key issue which needs support. Her Labour colleague for Leicester East, Claudia Webbe, added solar rooftops should also be part of the U.K.’s future energy system.

Given the Conservative government’s apparent lack of enthusiasm for solar, however, any Future Homes Standards decision to use solar panels to help make new homes more energy efficient appears the more likely source of relief for the beleaguered sector.
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Solar and wind generation outpaced coal in Europe last year

Renewables generated more electricity than coal in the EU for the first time ever in 2019, driving the sharpest reduction in the European power sector’s carbon emissions in three decades, according to a new report.

FEBRUARY 7, 2020 




Eastern European nations have been slower to kick the coal habit, the report noted.

Image: LWBogdanka/Wikimedia Common

Solar and wind generated more electricity than coal across Europe last year, according to The European Power Sector in 2019 report published by London-based non-profit group Sandbag and German thinktank Agora Energiewende.

Coal-fired generation plunged 24% across the EU in 2019, driving a 12% reduction in the power sector’s CO2 emissions – the biggest decline seen since 1990.

Dave Jones, an electricity analyst for Sandbag, highlighted the “urgent” push across Europe away from coal. Given thermal power still accounts for 30% of global fossil fuel emissions, said Jones, Europe is a “test bed” for the replacement of coal with solar and wind power capacity.

“Europe is leading the world on rapidly replacing coal generation with wind and solar,” said Jones. “As a result, power sector CO2 emissions have never fallen so quickly.”

Solar capacity doubled

The EU member states that added the most new solar and wind generation capacity also recorded the biggest declines in coal use. Solar arrays and wind farms accounted for 18% of electricity generation across the European Union in 2019, at 569 TWh, while coal-fired capacity fell to just 15%, for 469 TWh, the thinktanks said, noting coal generated twice as much electricity as solar and wind on the continent as recently as five years ago.

Around 16.7 GW of solar was installed across the bloc last year, up sharply from the 8.2 GW deployed in 2018 according to statistics from industry body SolarPower Europe. Wind capacity is expected to have expanded around 14 GW, Sandbag and Agora Energiewende said.

Around half of the European Union’s lost coal capacity has been replaced by solar and wind facilities with gas accounting for the rest, partly because low prices have made gas more competitive than coal. The authors of the report noted Eastern European nations have reduced their reliance on coal at a slower rate than their Western European neighbors.

Coal-free

With Greece last year pledging to eliminate coal by 2028 and Hungary setting a 2030 deadline, 20 of the EU’s 27 member states are on course to be coal-free by the end of the decade.

Sandbag and Agora Energiewende said the economics of energy production increasingly favor renewables over fossil fuels and pointed to record-low auction prices for solar electricity in Portugal as an example. Between 2010 and last year, coal’s share of the continent’s electricity mix fell around 10 percentage points while solar and wind together rose by 13.

Varying capital costs appear to favor wind over solar in Europe, according to a recently published study by Germany’s DLR Institute of Networked Energy Systems. That said, a report published this week by research institute the Fraunhofer ISE predicted lignite open-cast ponds at shuttered coal mines in Germany could host up to 56 GW of floating PV capacity.
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Here’s How Scientists Think Coronavirus Spreads From Bats to Humans



Bats carry tons of viruses, but they don't usually get sick from them.

By Emma Fidel
Feb 13 2020, 1:51pm
Bats carry tons of viruses. But scientists think one in particular has recently infected the human population and killed nearly 1,400 people: China’s new coronavirus.
Scientists don’t really know why, but bats usually don’t get sick from the viruses inside them. A recent genetic study, however, found that the coronavirus in bats and the one making humans sick are a 96% match.

In the past, other animals have passed viruses between bats and humans. For example, humans contracted the SARS coronavirus from civet cats, which caught it from bats. And the MERS coronavirus traveled from bats to camels to humans.
This time, Chinese scientists think pangolins could be the middlemen, but their research hasn’t been made public yet. The scaley, armadillo-like creatures are the most trafficked animals in the world and are used in traditional Chinese medicine. It’s possible that pangolins came into contact with bats in markets or other human enclosures, virologists said.
Scientists don’t need to know where the virus came from to develop a vaccine. But identifying the origin can help contain the current outbreak and prevent future ones.
“After the SARS outbreak, the government banned the sale of civet cats because we have now determined that civet cats could lead to more coronavirus exposures,” Arinjay Banerjee, a virologist at McMaster University, said. “So something similar could happen if with 100% confidence we can identify that it was this animal.”
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