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Nearly 50 percent of new electricity generation added in 2012 was renewable

by Myrna Posted on December 5, 2012

Nearly 50 percent of new electricity generation added in 2012 was renewable

By Philip Bump

Every month, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission puts out a report called the “Energy Infrastructure Update” [PDF]. It is done in Microsoft Word by someone whose first priority isn’t aesthetics.

But it does contain interesting information! Among which, this time: From January through October, 46.2 percent of new electricity-generating capacity added in the U.S. was renewable.

From Renewable Energy World:

During the first ten months of 2012, 92 wind projects (5,403 MW), 167 solar projects (1,032 MW), 79 biomass projects (409 MW), seven geothermal projects (123 MW), and 9 water power projects (12 MW) have come on-line. Collectively, these total 6,979 MW or 46.22% of all new generating capacity added since the beginning of the year.

By comparison, new natural gas capacity additions since January 1, 2012 totaled 67 projects (5,702 MW) or 37.8% while three new coal projects added 2,276 MW (15.1%). Nuclear and oil represented just 0.8% and 0.1% of new capacity additions respectively.

For the first 10 months of 2011, renewable energy constituted just under 30 percent of new generation.

The story here is wind, which accounted for 77 percent of all new renewable production capacity.

Earlier this week, we noted that consumption of renewably generated power continues to increase. For that to happen, production must increase too, of course. In that sense, it’s bad news that so much of the new renewable capacity is wind, since wind is also the most at risk as Congress drags its feet on a key tax credit that allows wind to compete with fossil fuels. If it’s not renewed, the pie chart next year might look like this:

And that, Microsoft Word or not, is ugly.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Nearly 50 percent of new electricity generation added in 2012 was renewable

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Australian coal mining company resigned to the death of coal

by Myrna Posted on December 5, 2012

Australian coal mining company resigned to the death of coal

By Philip Bump

You know who else thinks the coal industry is doomed? The coal industry.

ThinkProgress’ Stephen Lacey yesterday shared the story of BHP Billiton, an Australian mining firm that extracts, among other things, coal. But BHP doesn’t see a great future in the stuff.

A coal mine in Queensland.

Lacey quotes from the Australian Financial Review, which spoke with BHP exec Marcus Randolph about an export terminal on the coast of the country.

“As we see more cyclone-related events … the vulnerability of one of these facilities to a cyclone is quite high,” [Randolph] said. “So we built a model saying this is how we see this impacting what the economics would be and used that with our board of directors to rebuild the facility to be more durable to climate change.”

Cyclone is to hurricane as Foster’s is to beer — Australian version of the same, but not really.

“In a carbon constrained world where energy coal is the biggest contributor to a carbon problem, how do you think this is going to evolve over a 30- to 40-year time horizon? You’d have to look at that and say on balance, I suspect, the usage of thermal coal is going to decline. And frankly it should.” …

“We’ve been cautious in our energy coal investments,” Mr Randolph said. “There are a couple of reasons for that: the cloudy future, the general return on investment that is available in the industry and there are some structural reasons why it is the way it is. And it is also the availability of better returns on other projects that exist in the broader [BHP] portfolio.”

Can you imagine? Can you imagine Murray Energy’s Robert Murray or Massey’s Don Blankenship saying anything even remotely like this? While BHP’s Randolph recognizes the realities and constraints imposed on the coal industry by environment and economics, American coal CEOs are weaving the same old webs.

Of course, BHP faces a different economic scenario than do companies in the U.S.  Australia recently instituted a carbon tax that increases the cost of high carbon-producing energy systems like coal, though only modestly for now. While not an easy political move, a carbon tax is much easier to implement in a country that insists on responsible reporting when it comes to climate science.

A free market should naturally result in admissions like BHP’s. The costs of coal consumption are higher than the value in burning it. In America, the market has a heavy, coal-dusted thumb holding it down.

Source

World’s Largest Mining Firm: ‘In A Carbon Constrained World, Coal Is Going To Decline. And Frankly It Should’, ThinkProgress

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Polar ice sheets are melting three times faster than during the ’90s

by Myrna Posted on November 29, 2012

Polar ice sheets are melting three times faster than during the ’90s

By Philip Bump

It’s worse than we thought.

From U.S. News and World Report:

All of Earth’s major polar ice sheets except one have been rapidly losing mass — several gigatonnes per year — since 1992, accounting for about 20 percent of global sea level rise, according to a new report by multiple experts.

Scientists say this is the “clearest evidence yet” of polar ice losses, with nearly two thirds of all ice loss coming from Greenland. The only region with an increasing ice mass is Eastern Antarctica; ice sheets in west Antarctica, Greenland, and the Antarctic peninsula are melting and have caused about a half inch global sea level rise since 1992. …

Between 1992 and 2011, Greenland lost 152 gigatonnes of ice, West Antarctica lost 65 gigatonnes, and the Antarctic Peninsula lost 20 gigatonnes. East Antarctica gained about 14 gigatonnes of ice. A gigatonne is 1 billion metric tons.

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The Antarctic peninsula.

That’s a combined mass equal to about three times all biomass on the Earth. The half inch of ocean rise might also help explain the recent discovery that sea levels are increasing 60 percent faster than expected.

It gets a little worse still. From CNN:

Previous estimates of how much the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets contributed to the current 3 millimeter-per-year rise in sea levels have varied widely, and the 2007 report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change left the question open.

While the 19-year average worked out to about 20% of the rise of the oceans, “for recent years it goes up to about 30 or 40%,” said Michiel van den Broeke, a professor of polar meteorology at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. The rest comes from thermal expansion — warmer water takes up more space.

According to the Associated Press, the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets lost three times as much ice annually between 2005 and 2010 as during the 1990s.

The findings, released today, use the hot new tool in data analysis: averaging. Well, sort of. From The Washington Post:

The study by an international group of 47 experts who study satellite mapping data — led by Erik Ivins, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and Andrew Shepherd, a professor of earth observation at the University of Leeds — is the first to pull together 50 different ice-sheet-loss estimates over two decades and reconcile the research methods and findings into a single report.

As a result, the new findings “are now two to three times more reliable” than ice-melt and sea-level-rise estimates in studies used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to compile its most recent report in 2007, Shepherd said.

So in case you were hoping that the calculations were iffy: nope. They’re better.

We now present this new information, as acted out by Rachel Dratch.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Polar ice sheets are melting three times faster than during the ’90s

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Modern-day Robin Hoods: Stealing construction supplies from the rich to give to the Sandy-hit poor

by Myrna Posted on November 21, 2012

Modern-day Robin Hoods: Stealing construction supplies from the rich to give to the Sandy-hit poor

By Susie Cagle

Superstorm Sandy not only revealed the massive class divisions in New York City, but also made them worse. As wealthier areas in Manhattan recover, poor and working-class communities in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island are still struggling.

Some New Yorkers have taken a decidedly illegal tack to solving this problem. From their press release:

Over the past two weeks, a group of concerned New Yorkers has been expropriating thousands of dollars worth of tools and materials from luxury residential developments across Manhattan and delivering them to neighborhoods devastated by Superstorm Sandy.

The confiscated materials, some of them never even used, include: shovels, wheelbarrows, hand trucks, pry bars, tarps, buckets, hard bristle brooms, industrial rope, contractor trash bags, particulate masks, work lights, work gloves, flashlights, heat lamps, and gasoline.

Liberated from their role in building multimillion-dollar pieds-à-terre for wealthy CEOs and Hollywood celebrities, these tools are now in the collective hands of some of the hardest-hit communities in the city where they are now being allocated and shared among the people who need them most. These expropriations will continue as long as the demand for them exists.

The project — can I call it a project? — has far bigger ambitions than just wheelbarrows.

Here is New York: a city in which people write rent checks by candlelight, huddle around gas ovens for warmth, and are housed in shelters that are literally prisons — this is a city in which the darkness and misery are indeed all too literal. Luxury up front, desolation behind: this New York is but a cruel Dickensian reboot of a city.

A cold winter is nearly upon us. In the coming days, Bloomberg will doubtless be seen doling out turkeys and vague promises at any variety of overflowing city shelters while the shutters snap away. As the rich and powerful ladle out their meager scraps and twist their faces into caring regard, those of us who envision a better world will be out in the streets, maneuvering in the dark, trying.

Another world is possible, but capital’s scraps won’t get us through this holiday season, let alone the long, hot future ahead.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Modern-day Robin Hoods: Stealing construction supplies from the rich to give to the Sandy-hit poor

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Please don’t be thankful for America’s unsustainable love affair with big-box retail

by Myrna Posted on November 21, 2012

Please don’t be thankful for America’s unsustainable love affair with big-box retail

By Susie Cagle

If you’re reading this on your phone from a line outside an electronics store, congratulations — you’re a real American! And you’re probably way more excited about the 50th anniversary of big-box retail in this country than the rest of us are.

Fred Watkins

In 1962, when gas cost about 28 cents a gallon and the suburbs were growing faster than you can say “sports utility vehicle,” Walmart, Target, and Kmart were all born.

NPR’s Morning Edition talked to retail historian Marc Levinson about their rise to prominence and dominance.

One of the prerequisites for the big-box was the car. Everybody had to have a car because the big-box was sitting out in a parking lot somewhere. The big-box made shopping into a family experience. Mom and dad and the kids all piled into the car, they went out to this big store, and they could spend several hours there because there was, by the standards of the day, an enormous amount of merchandise.

Today’s stores are about four times the size, but hey, so are our cars!

Since ’62, the big boxes, especially Walmart, have grown like an infectious pox upon our nation. Even Friday’s planned worker strikes at upwards of 1,000 Walmarts across the country may do nothing to slow the monster’s growth. From The Daily Beast:

The company is huge enough, as the world’s largest private employer, to weather this storm of protests, whether it’s a trickle of malcontents or a hurricane of workers all over the country. With 200 million customers visiting 10,300 stores in 27 countries every week, even if 10 percent of its customers decided they’d never shop there again, the company would survive.

The only way to strike big retail where it hurts is to just stop shopping. But that’s hardly the American way, even in financially fraught times. When big boxes cry “sustainability” and try to up their green cred, our response tends to be to buy more crap from them.

At stores that sponsor battery and gadget recycling programs, more than half of would-be recyclers end up buying more than just replacement gadgets, according to a study commissioned by Call2Recycle, “a product stewardship organization.”

Of those surveyed, 54% in the U.S. and 45% in Canada consider retailers a key source for learning about recycling programs where 18% of the U.S. population and 24% of the Canadian population participates in retail “take back” programs for the collection and recycling of batteries and cellphones.

Does it seem counterintuitive and kind of gross that we’d be learning how to recycle from the very same people who are selling us all this junk that we need to recycle? Does it make you want to soothe your conflicted feelings with some retail therapy? Well resist, damnit, resist!

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

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Please don’t be thankful for America’s unsustainable love affair with big-box retail

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