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It was raining hard when I painted this. Hope you guys love it♥️
Canada’s Big Electricity Push
Prime Minister Mark Carney unveiled a new electricity plan focused on expanding Canada’s power grid while aiming to lower energy costs over time. The proposal reportedly includes major investments intended to double electricity capacity as demand grows from electric vehicles, industry, and data centers.
The government is framing the plan as both an economic and infrastructure project. A larger grid would help support cleaner energy goals while also trying to prevent rising power demand from putting extra pressure on prices and reliability in the future.
Building out transmission systems across a country as large as Canada is obviously a massive undertaking, though. Questions around timelines, regional coordination, and the actual cost to taxpayers are likely going to follow the plan closely as details develop.
Final Note:
A lot of countries seem to be reaching the same realization at once: modern economies suddenly need way more electricity than anyone planned for ten years ago.
Energy Department Cancels Loan Commitment to Contested Transmission Project. (New York Times)
Excerpt from this New York Times story:
The Energy Department on Wednesday said it had terminated a commitment to provide a $4.9 billion loan guarantee to a company building a contentious transmission line across the Midwest.
The cancellation may imperil the $11 billion project, known as Grain Belt Express, which would cross 800 miles of farmland and is designed to carry electricity generated by wind farms in Kansas to population centers in Illinois and Indiana.
It is the kind of infrastructure that experts say is necessary to update America’s aging electrical grid at a time of rising energy demand. If built, it would be the largest privately funded transmission line in the country’s history.
But the project, which is being developed by the Chicago-based company, Invenergy, has drawn intense backlash from some landowners and Republican lawmakers.
This month, in a conversation with President Trump in the Oval Office, Senator Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, pressed Mr. Trump to cancel the loan commitment. At Mr. Trump’s urging, Senator Hawley said, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said he would do so.
In a statement, the Energy Department said that it determined “that the conditions necessary to issue the guarantee are unlikely to be met and it is not critical for the federal government to have a role in supporting this project.”
It added that “to ensure more responsible stewardship of taxpayer resources,” the department “has terminated its conditional commitment.”
In a statement, Jamie Geller, vice president of corporate communications for Invenergy, said the company is disappointed in the loan guarantee cancellation. But, she said, “a privately financed Grain Belt Express transmission superhighway will advance President Trump’s agenda of American energy and technology dominance,” save billions of dollars in energy costs, improve the grid and create thousands of American jobs.
The Grain Belt Express project has been in the works for more than a decade. For the past several years, Invenergy worked to secure agreements from regulators in all four states the line would traverse, as well as landowners.
Last year, during the final months of the Biden administration, the Energy Department offered the $4.9 billion loan commitment, a crucial piece of financing that made the long-awaited project appear primed to begin construction.
Chauncey Man San Leandro: Electricity Generation Methods
Electricity can be generated through various processes, each with its own advantages, disadvantages, and applications. Here are some common types of electricity generation processes shared by Chauncey Man San Leandro:
Fossil Fuel-Based Generation:
Coal Power Plants: These plants burn coal to produce steam, which drives turbines connected to generators.
Natural Gas Power Plants: Natural gas is burned to spin turbines and generate electricity.
Oil Power Plants: Similar to natural gas plants, but they use oil as the fuel source.
Nuclear Power Generation:
Nuclear reactors use controlled nuclear fission reactions to heat water and produce steam that drives turbines connected to generators.
Renewable Energy Generation:
Solar Power: Photovoltaic (PV) cells convert sunlight into electricity.
Wind Power: Wind turbines capture kinetic energy from the wind and convert it into electricity.
Hydropower: Water flowing through dams or turbines generates electricity.
Geothermal Power: Heat from the Earth's core is used to produce steam that drives generators.
Biomass Power: Organic materials like wood, crop residues, and waste are burned or converted to biogas to generate electricity.
Hybrid Systems:
Some power generation systems combine renewable sources (e.g., solar and wind) with energy storage systems (e.g., batteries) to provide continuous power.
Tidal and Wave Energy:
Tidal and wave energy generators harness the kinetic and potential energy of ocean tides and waves to generate electricity.
Fuel Cells:
Fuel cells combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, with water as the only byproduct.
Cogeneration (Combined Heat and Power - CHP):
Cogeneration systems produce electricity and useful heat simultaneously, improving overall energy efficiency.
Thermoelectric Generators:
These generators convert heat directly into electricity using temperature differences, often in remote or small-scale applications.
Microgrids:
Microgrids are localized electricity generation and distribution systems that can incorporate various energy sources, including renewables, to provide reliable power to specific areas.
Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC):
OTEC systems use temperature differences between warm surface water and cold deep water to generate electricity.
Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs):
RTGs use the heat generated by the radioactive decay of isotopes to produce electricity, often used in space probes and satellites.
Piezoelectric Generation:
Piezoelectric materials generate electricity when subjected to mechanical stress or vibration, used in some specialized applications.
Chauncey Man San Leandro's final words, The choice of electricity generation method depends on factors such as resource availability, environmental impact, cost, and energy demand. Many regions are transitioning to cleaner and more sustainable energy sources to reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change.
Western Australia’s renewable energy sources, including wind and solar, have surpassed the primary fossil fuel sources of coal and gas generation for the first time in October. Data from the OpenNem online facility shows that wind and solar accounted for around 550GWh of output into Western Australia’s South West Interconnected...
Solar farms, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams are getting close to surpassing nuclear power plants contribution to the U.S. electrical grid, according to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
"Solar farms, wind turbines and hydroelectric dams are getting close to surpassing nuclear power plants contribution to the U.S. electrical grid, according to a new report by Bloomberg New Energy Finance. Last year 18 percent of electrical generation came from renewable energy sources - more than double what they did a decade ago - the report said. Nuclear power plants represent 19.7 percent of the generation on the grid, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, surpassed only by coal and natural gas plants."
How a simple fix could double the size of the U.S. electricity grid. (Washington Post)
There is one big thing holding the United States back from a pollution-free electricity grid running on wind, solar and battery power: not enough power lines.
As developers rush to install wind farms and solar plants to power data centers, artificial intelligence systems and electric vehicles, the nation’s sagging, out-of-date power lines are being overwhelmed — slowing the transition to clean energy and the fight against climate change.
But experts say that there is a remarkably simple fix: installing new wires on the high-voltage lines that alreadycarry power hundreds of miles across the United States. Just upgrading those wires, new reports show, could double the amount of power that can flow through America’s electricity grid.
“This is something that could be a triple win,” said Brian Deese, an innovation fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who headed the White House National Economic Council under President Biden until early last year. “A win for the electricity system, a win for utilities and a win for consumers.”
Since Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022 — pouring hundreds of billions of dollars toward the build-out of clean energy — experts have warned that without a dramatic increase in the size of the electricity grid, most of those new wind and solar farms won’t be able to plug in.
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Many renewables are stuck in the “interconnection queue,” a long line of projects waiting to get connected to the grid. According to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, more than 1,500 gigawatts of power, mostly renewables, are waiting for approval to connect. (That’s more than one-third of all the power produced in the United States.)
One of the main reasons for that long wait is that the nation builds transmission lines — those giant, high-voltage wires that carry power across large distances — extremely slowly. The average transmission line takes about 10 years to complete, and the country has been building even fewer lines recently than it did a decade ago.
Without enough power lines, there is nowhere for new solar, wind and battery power to go.
“We have to be able to integrate all this low-cost, renewable energy fast,” said Amol Phadke, a scientist at the University of California at Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
That’s where replacing the country’s power lines — or “reconductoring,” as engineers call it — comes in.
Most of America’s lines are wired with a technology that has been around since the early 1900s — a core steel wire surrounded by strands of aluminum. When those old wires heat up — whether from power passing through them or warm outdoor temperatures — they sag. Too much sag in a transmission line can be dangerous, causing fires or outages. As a result, grid operators have to be careful not to allow too much power through the lines.
But a couple of decades ago, engineers designed a new type of wire: a core made of carbon fiber, surrounded by trapezoidal pieces of aluminum. Those new, carbon-fiber wires don’t sag as much in the heat. That means that they can take up to double the amount of power as the old lines.
According to the recent study from researchers at UC-Berkeley and GridLab, replacing these older steel wires could provide up to 80 percent of the new transmission needed on the electricity grid — without building anything new. It could also cost half as much as building an entirely new line and avoid the headaches of trying to get every state, city and even landowner along the route to agree to a new project.
“You’re not acquiring a new right of way; you’re not building new towers,” Phadke said. “So it can be done much faster.”
Texas has always had politicians with superlative bullshit capacity, but recently, under this governor abbott, that bullshit capacity has become Academy Award material. And Texas voters buy into this shit?
Excerpt from this story from Inside Climate News:
Twice during the last week, Texans were asked to cut back their energy use, including turning up the thermostats on their air conditioners during a scorching three-digit heat wave to avoid blackouts as the state’s power grid operator struggled to to satisfy a surging demand for electricity. On both occasions, officials claimed clean energy was a reason for the shortfall, prompting criticism from some energy experts who say the state is once again unfairly blaming renewables for its longstanding power problems.
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas—or ERCOT—which operates the Lone Star State’s power grid, urged residents and businesses to scale back their energy use on Monday and Wednesday, citing “record-high electric demand” and attributing its inability to meet those needs in part to renewables underperforming due to slow winds and cloudy skies. It was the third time this year that ERCOT has asked its customers to cut back on electricity to avoid a grid collapse.
But some energy experts say the description ERCOT painted for the public in its reports this week is misleading, and that solar energy and battery storage in particular have played a major role in keeping air conditioning units running and the state’s power grid afloat this summer.
“All through June, renewables performed particularly well,” said Doug Lewin, an energy consultant and president of Stoic Energy based in Austin, Texas. “And I just think this whole narrative that some are pushing that renewables are reducing the reliability of the grid, it’s just not accurate.”
In fact, Lewin, who has worked on energy and climate issues in Texas for over 17 years, said wind and solar combined are now providing Texas upwards of 20 percent of its total electricity during times of peak demand.
Texas has a history of issues with its grid, and public scrutiny of those problems has only grown in recent years as extreme weather, made worse by climate change, has increasingly highlighted the state’s vulnerabilities. In May, a blistering heat wave led to six power plant outages. And a massive winter storm in 2021 led to widespread blackouts across the state that contributed to about 250 deaths.
Yet, despite evidence showing the 2021 winter blackouts were largely caused by freezing gas pipelines and a general failure of the state’s natural gas systems, ERCOT officials blamed wind energy for the incident—an argument state Republicans, including Gov. Greg Abbot, have continued to echo.
