Low-cost Solar Power That Increases the Supply of Fresh Water

Solar panels over 115-foot-wide canal in Hickman, CA (SFGate)

Three years ago we posted about a creative concept for green energy production:

Putting solar panels over California's aqueducts will reduce evaporation and generate green energy.

The California Department of Water Resources is funding the $20 million pilot program with the intention of learning where solar panels might be viable along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals and aqueducts.

In 2025 the program has begun implementation: [bold added]

Near Hickman, California, just outside Modesto, a 110-foot-wide grid of solar panels now tops a section of canal, arching over the gently flowing water. Solar projects have long been a crucial piece of the state’s movement to clean energy, and these panels are part of a new project that’s hoping to do far more than just generate electricity. Dubbed Project Nexus, the $20 million state-funded initiative hopes to better understand whether these installations can be an even more efficient approach to solar energy.

The waterways already irrigate much of the state’s crops, but now they will also cool the solar panels, just by nature of being underneath them, increasing the panels’ efficiency. Meanwhile, the panels will shade the canals, reducing evaporation and suppressing aquatic weeds. Between this installation and a 20-foot-wide section that was completed on another part of the canal in March, the project could generate a total energy output of 1.6 megawatts while producing a host of other benefits.

We seem to have lost the societal vigor to replicate the vast infrastructure projects of the 20th century--the dams, aqueducts, highways, power generation and transportation systems--that elevated the standard of living for every American. However, nothing should stop us from the more modest ambition of improving sections of that infrastructure when opportunities present themselves.

California: Saved from the Disaster of its Own Policies

Gavin Newsom speaks against the Senate vote (WSJ)

It wasn't overlooked, but one action the Senate took this week received less attention than other items in the news--for example the "big, beautiful" tax bill and the White House visit of South African president Cyril Ramaphosa--but it was nevertheless highly important to the future of the auto and energy industries in the United States. [bold added]

The U.S. Senate on Thursday voted to block California’s first-in-the-nation regulations that would ban the sale of new gasoline-powered passenger vehicles statewide in 2035, setting up a certain legal battle over the future of electric cars in the United States.

By a vote of 50-44, the Republican-led chamber voted to revoke permission that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency under the Biden administration had given to California to set the rules.

In 2020 California banned the sale of new, gasoline-powered cars beginning in 2035. Because of California's influence as the wealthiest, most populous state, other states copied California's anti-fossil-fuel rules. Perhaps more importantly, automakers found it too costly to manufacture different models for the U.S. market and began offering only California-compliant models.

The Senate vote directed the Environmental Protection Agency to stop providing California a waiver, thereby negating California's ability to set its own environmental rules regarding gasoline-powered cars.

Your humble blogger has been opposed to California's fossil-fuel ban since 2021:

100% dependence on solar and wind power is nuts. Single sourcing of electricity and transportation systems should not be on notoriously unsteady renewable energy, especially during extreme weather events that knocked out power during the California wildfires and the Texas freeze.

Battery technology is improving rapidly, but it's not at the point where we can pull the plug on the oil and gas that run the vast majority of our cars and power plants. (For an example of how well government predicts construction of technologically advanced infrastructure, see California's high-speed rail fiasco.)

We have already seen the effects of the 2035 ban within California. Refineries that produce California's special blend of gasoline are closing because it is not worthwhile to repair or improve them. Maybe now refiners will reverse course.

California politicians won't admit it, but the Republican Senate may have saved California from the disaster of its own policies.

In the Furtherance of Their Own Goals

(Sarah Stierch via Flickr CC 2.0/SFGate)

The war against CO2 claims another sacrifice: 2,554 acres in the Mojave Desert plus the character of the nearby town of Boron (pop.2000). From SFGate reporter Sam Mauhay-Moore: [bold added]

On a warm October night last fall, I sat near a taxidermied bobcat and a trove of other historical Mojave memorabilia inside Boron’s treasured Twenty Mule Team Museum. A group of locals gathered there to discuss the Aratina Solar Project, which was just starting to make headway less than a mile from the town’s southern boundary.

“They’re just destroying this place,” Jerry Gallegos, longtime Boron resident and co-president of the museum, said at the meeting. “They’re plowing down 3,000 Joshua trees right now, taking chainsaws and cutting them down three at a time.”

Joshua tree in the Mojave (drcooke/Getty/SFGate)

The Aratina Solar Project has a footprint of 2,554 acres, of which 2,317 acres will be covered by solar panels. It "generate(s) up to 530 megawatt-alternating current (MW-AC) of renewable energy, including up to 600 megawatts of energy storage, on privately-owned land in unincorporated Kern County."

Fortunately there is a natural-gas power plant of similar capacity in Kern County that can be used for comparison.

The Elk Hills Power Plant (EHPP) is located on a 12-acre site within the Elk Hills Oil and Gas Field, in western Kern County, near the community of Tupman...EHPP is a nominal 550-megawatt (MW) combined-cycle, natural gas-fired, cogeneration power generating plant.

It's well beyond the scope of this post to rehash the traditional natural-gas vs. solar debate (carbon emissions vs. none, power-as-needed vs. intermittent capability). But we can note a vast difference that has not often been mentioned, namely, solar's 4-sq-mile destruction of the Mojave desert vs. less than 1/2 of one percent of that area for natural-gas power.

It would be wrong to declare that environmentalists are guilty of an apparent double standard when they are silent about natural habitats being destroyed in the furtherance of their own goals. They must have a good explanation.

High Electricity Rates: the Policies Californians Voted For

(Photo from CalMatters)

California's push toward clean energy has resulted in the second highest electricity rates (behind Hawaii) in the nation: [bold added]

“California’s electricity rates are among the highest in the country,” the Legislative Analyst’s Office reported. “On average, residential electricity rates in California are close to double those in the rest of the nation.”

The increase in electricity bills has been nothing short of shocking, especially when compared with the overall inflation rate.

“Average residential electricity rates in California have grown faster than inflation in recent years, rising by about 47% over the four-year period from 2019 through 2023 compared to overall growth in prices of about 18%,” according to the report from the Legislative Analyst, a nonpartisan group that provides the state Legislature with advice and information.

The report blames:

— significant and increasing wildfire-related costs.

— the state’s ambitious greenhouse gas reduction programs and policies.

— differences in utility operational structures and services territories.

These causes are the result of man-made policies, which means that California is getting in the way of its own green ambitions. High electricity prices discourage drivers from turning in their gas-powered cars, and homeowners from switching out their natural-gas furnaces, stoves, and water heaters. (For the record I'm not getting rid of my fossil-fueled cars and appliances unless they can't be fixed.)

They shouldn't be too upset because Californians are getting the policies they voted for.

SF Bay Area: the IncredibleTalent is Still Here

Using 192 laser beams, this Lawrence-Livermore apparatus ignited
a hydrogen fuel pellet the size of a peppercorn in 2022. The experiment
produced more energy than it consumed and showed fusion
energy was possible. (DOE/Chronicle)

In a man-bites-dog story an Austin tech startup is moving to the San Francisco Bay Area. [bold added]

Focused Energy, a startup specializing in laser fusion for clean energy, is relocating its U.S. headquarters from Austin to the Bay Area.

The German company announced plans on Wednesday to establish a state-of-the-art facility in the region, with an investment of $65 million. The facility will house some of the world’s most advanced lasers, crucial for developing commercially viable fusion energy, according to a press release.

Scott Mercer, CEO of Focused Energy, said that the move aims to leverage the “incredible pool of talent” in the Bay Area and benefit from established methodologies developed by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which achieved net energy gain for the first time in December 2022...

With over $175 million in private and public funding, Focused Energy is one of eight fusion companies selected by the U.S. Department of Energy for support under its Milestone-Based Fusion Development Program.

The company has also received significant grants from the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research to further its research and development initiatives.

Although numerous California companies such as Oracle, Tesla and Chevron have relocated their headquarters to Texas in recent years, this case illustrates the opposite trend.

The new Bay Area facility will enhance laser efficiency and establish a global supply chain necessary for scaling commercial fusion operations.

Once fully operational, fusion fuel equivalent to “three soda cans” will be capable of powering a city the size of San Francisco for an entire day, Focused Energy said.

Startups' main objective is to demonstrate their proof-of-concept. Cutting costs and red tape will be prioritized later, and the company can then decide if California is where it wishes to be planted.

Meanwhile, it's nice to know that the Bay Area hasn't yet dissipated its “incredible pool of talent” that attracts tech companies around the world. Your humble blogger still holds out hope that we can undo California's status as the worst-taxed, most woke, and most over-regulated State in the Union.

Microsoft Sees the Light

The Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 single-handedly killed the nuclear power industry in the U.S. After Three Mile Island construction on nuclear power plants halted, and existing plants were decommissioned.

Today nuclear energy is undergoing something of a renaissance. Many green-energy advocates are realizing that ambitious carbon-free energy goals cannot be met by wind and solar power, let alone be "on all the time" when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing.

Many tech companies, including the largest and most well-known, joined the alternative energy marching band, IMHO, because it was easy to, since their fortunes weren't tied to fossil fuels like legacy manufacturing and transportation companies.

After 2020, as the race to acquire electricity for artificial-intelligence data centers accelerated, the virtue signalling dampened down.

Big Tech needed power, and ESG (environmental, social, governance) projects did nothing to help and even inhibited that objective.

Three Mile Island will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center (WSJ)

In a sign that the worm has turned, Three Mile Island, the bête noire of fission haters, is being revived to power Microsoft's data centers.

A deal between Constellation Energy and Microsoft will restart Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, the site of the country’s worst nuclear accident, to help power the tech giant’s growing artificial intelligence ambitions.

Under the agreement, Constellation would revive the plant’s undamaged reactor, which was too costly to run and closed in 2019, and sell the power to Microsoft. The plan signals the gargantuan amount of power needed for data centers for AI, along with the tech industry’s thirst for a carbon-free, round-the-clock electricity source needed to meet climate goals.

Constellation expects to spend around $1.6 billion to restart the reactor by early 2028. Microsoft has signed a 20-year power-purchase agreement with Constellation, the companies said Friday. The deal would help Microsoft pair its 24-7 electricity use with a matching source of nearby clean power generation.

It's nice to know that one of our most successful companies is able to discard green-power fantasies when the virtue-signalling impedes basic objectives.

When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.---1 Cor 13:11

(Much) Higher Cost to Repair EVs

Saving the planet is expensive (WSJ illustration)

When weighing the advantages and disadvantages of electric vehicles, one should include the much higher cost of their repair: [bold added]

For EVs, repairs following a collision can cost thousands of dollars more than their gas-powered counterparts, because the fixes tend to require more replacement parts, the vehicles are more complicated and fewer people do such repairs...

Last year, repairing an EV after a crash cost an average $6,587 compared with $4,215 for all vehicles, according to CCC Intelligent Solutions, a company that processes insurance claims for auto repairs in the U.S....

Higher repair costs are also helping to drive up insurance premiums for electric owners, who pay on average $357 a month for coverage compared with $248 for gas vehicle owners, according to insurance comparison website Insurify.

Here are more specifics about why EVs cost more to repair (and insure):

Part of that cost can be the greater work involved: over three mechanical labor hours on average for a repairable EV claim estimate, versus less than two for ICE vehicles, according to Mitchell data. Mechanics sometimes have to de-energize electric vehicles before removing their high-voltage batteries to avoid damaging them during repairs, Mitchell said...

One complication is the trend toward “gigacasting”—using smaller numbers of larger cast parts to make vehicles. Tesla has championed the technology, and others, including Toyota, are now following. But it could make cars even more expensive to repair. If lower production costs mean higher insurance costs, then drivers won’t actually save money.

Higher insurance and repair costs reinforce last year's decision not to be in a hurry to buy an electric vehicle.

We will first need to replace our 20-year-old roof and install a solar panel/battery storage system to defray the EV recharging cost, so at the earliest it's three years away.

Another Sign that Global Warming Alarmism Has Peaked

If an extinction-level asteroid headed towards earth, politics would be set aside. If it meant that the U.S. and China had to share their most advanced technology to save the planet, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and job protecting concerns would vanish, or at least tabled for the future, if the human race were to have a future.

By their behavior we know that no government's leaders truly believe that global warming poses an existential threat to humanity. "Net-zero" emissions by 2050 cannot be fulfilled by anyone in power today, so it's a hollow promise meant to satisfy noisy activists, who call anyone who questions their data and conclusions as "deniers" who do not "follow the science." So let's look at the science. [bold added]

When politicians tell us we must “follow the science” toward extreme climate policies, they are really trying to shut down the discussion of enormous, unsustainable costs. We shouldn’t let them.

Climate change is a real problem but isn’t the imminent existential crisis of which the media and activist politicians breathlessly warn. They run headlines and give speeches about extreme weather events, though the United Nations’ panel of climate scientists hasn’t been able to document evidence of most of them worsening. The data show that climate-related deaths from droughts, storms, floods and fires have declined by more than 97% over the last century, from nearly 500,000 annually to fewer than 15,000 in the 2020s. That’s a real human cost but far from cataclysmic. More people die in traffic accidents in an average week...

The world still gets four-fifths of its energy from fossil fuels, because renewable sources rarely provide good alternatives. Half the world’s population entirely depends on food grown with synthetic fertilizer produced almost entirely by natural gas. If we rapidly ceased using fossil fuels, four billion people would suddenly be without food. Add the billions of people dependent on fossil-fuel heating in the winter, along with our dependence on fossil fuels for steel, cement, plastics and transportation, and it is no wonder that one recent estimate by economist Neil Record showed an abrupt end to fossil fuel use would cause six billion deaths in less than a year.

Few politicians advocate solutions this extreme, but many use activist paranoia about global extinction to justify proposals with only marginally more sensible timelines. Rather than knocking speed limits down to zero in one blow, they plan to force them to a crawl across several decades. It’s still a destructive idea. Politicians suppress discussion by grandstanding about the existential threat climate change poses. Weigh the actual costs of the proposals, and it becomes obvious that they’re preposterous.

(image from ptc.com)

The latest evidence that President Biden doesn't really believe in the threat posed by fossil fuels is his imposition of a 100% tariff on Chinese electric vehicles earlier today. (For that matter, former President Trump said he would make the tariff 200%, but at least the latter never claimed that global warming was going to destroy the world.)

One of the biggest obstacles to Americans' acceptance of EVs is the sticker price, and Chinese EVs cost less that $15,000 in China. Despite generalized worries about low reliability and shoddy workmanship of Chinese-made products, a report from the Beijing Car Show indicates those fears are unwarranted. President Biden, in order to get re-elected, is pandering to the American Auto industry and its workers by eliminating competitors who could save the world--if he really believed the world was in danger.

California's Self-Inflicted Energy Wounds

Headline: California electricity prices now second-highest in U.S.: ‘Everyone is getting squeezed’ [bold added]

Propelled in large part by PG&E, which hiked residential electricity rates by 20% for about 16 million Californians in January, the state’s high electricity prices are second only to Hawaii, which is always an expensive outlier because of the costs of shipping oil to the far-flung archipelago...

East Coast residents are paying higher prices during cold winter months with Californians paying higher electricity prices for a brief period nearly every summer since 2014, likely when people must cool their homes during heat waves.

It is unusual for Californians to pay higher prices than the East Coast in the depth of winter.

It's a safe bet that the "unusual"-ness of California paying more than East Coasters during winter will become the usual story. As is there wont, pro-regulation activists blame lax Public Utilities Commission oversight--there may be some truth to that--but as we stated in 2019, it's impossible to place all these conflicting demands on an energy provider:

Deliver electricity and natural gas reliably to 16 million Californians;

Charge customers as low a rate as possible;

Earn a profit for investors, including a regular dividend;

Clear trees and brush to reduce the risk of wildfires;

Provide generous salary, medical and pension benefits in accordance with union contracts;

Repair and replace its aging infrastructure with less efficient and more costly carbon-minimizing energy sources (principally windmills and solar, but not nuclear);

Decommission Diablo Canyon, its last nuclear power plant, for an estimated $4.8 billion beginning in 2024;

Meet Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) standards;

Pay $billions in damages for its culpability in the 2017-2019 wildfires.

Transfer hundreds of thousands of acres to tribes and public agencies per agreements dating back to 2001.

After PG&E declared bankruptcy in 2019, Governor Newsom threatened to take over the troubled utility. It was in the end a hollow threat, because he knew that politicians would take the blame for the hard decisions that had to be made (for example, backing off from green energy goals to keep fossil-fuel plants operating). If PG&E had become "Government Gas & Electric", who knows how much larger California's projected $73-billion budget deficit might have become?

Like "Sanctuary" Cities, Easy to Proclaim Your Virtue Until You Have to Step Up

Data centers in northern Virginia (WSJ photo)

The tech giants all profess to be "green," but when the choice is between net-zero carbon emissions and the creation of power-hungry artificial-intelligence data centers, watch what they do, not what they say. [bold added]

An explosion of so-called hyperscale data centers in places such as Northern Virginia has upended plans by electric utilities to cut the use of fossil fuels. In some areas, that means burning coal for longer than planned.

These giant data centers will provide computing power needed for artificial intelligence. They are setting off a four-way battle among electric utilities trying to keep the lights on, tech companies that like to tout their climate credentials, consumers angry at rising electricity prices and regulators overseeing investments in the grid and trying to turn it green...

Many new data centers coming to Northern Virginia are known as hyperscale, or facilities that are far larger than previous generations of data centers. The big ones use as much power as the city of Seattle...

Wind and solar can’t serve data-center demand around the clock, so growth will need to be supplemented by natural-gas-fired power generation, said Arshad Mansoor, chief executive of the nonprofit Electric Power Research Institute.

“You can be an idealist,” Mansoor said. “But if you’re a realist, you’ll add a ton of solar and you can balance that with gas.” The only other option to new gas plants is delaying coal and nuclear-plant retirements, he said.

The moguls who run the mega-cap tech giants know very well that the artificial-intelligence gold rush will delay national decarbonisation for years. By talking a good environmental game (and deflecting blame onto the utilities) they hope to retain their ESG credentials and keep consumers and regulators off their backs.

A Valuable Hole in the Ground

Long before I joined it, my former employer did a leasing deal with an energy company at the height of the early-80's energy bust. At the end of the long-term lease my employer, as owner, made a few bucks selling the heavily used equipment (aka "residual value"). It also retained ownership of an underground salt dome used for the storage of natural gas. The people who did that deal were mocked incessantly for years as buying a "hole in the ground."

Underground salt domes are valuable commodities in the energy industry for their ability to store large quantities and varieties of substances. The latest application is hydrogen storage. [bold added]

Salt caverns like these are emerging as one possible solution to the question of how to store solar and wind energy for later use.

It’s a three-step process. First, electricity from solar and wind farms is used to produce hydrogen. Then the hydrogen is stored in caverns like those scheduled to be completed next year at the Advanced Clean Energy Storage project in Delta, Utah. Finally, the hydrogen can be used as a green substitute for climate-warming fossil fuels in uses ranging from power generation to steel manufacture and shipping...

The problem is that renewable power generation can fluctuate a lot depending on the time of day or year. Solar-panel output, for instance, stops when the sun sets, and in California can roughly halve in winter versus summer.

Utilities are building big battery installations that can suck up some of that renewable electricity when it’s plentiful during the day, and release it for a few hours in the evening. But the lithium-ion batteries most commonly used today are too small and expensive to absorb the massive amounts of power needed to balance out grids over months or seasons, energy-industry executives say...

Capturing that renewable power by making hydrogen with it and storing the gas underground isn’t cheap. Industry executives say the cost to make a salt cavern could easily exceed $100 million, on top of expenses for the equipment needed to produce the hydrogen. But trying to provide similar storage with batteries is much pricier.

Green Hydrogen International, a company planning a cavern project in South Texas, estimates it would take around 38,500 Tesla Megapacks—a type of battery popular for large-scale utility installations—at an estimated cost of $59 billion to store the amount of energy it is hoping to keep in its caverns, which it estimates will cost $150 million to make...

Salt caverns have been used since at least the 1940s to store fossil fuels. The U.S. keeps a good portion of its natural gas underground, as well as its emergency crude-oil reserves, which reside in four huge salt caverns in Texas and Louisiana.

The caverns are typically hollowed out of deposits of rock salt, formed from the remnants of ancient seas that have hardened into layers or been squeezed into pillars or mushroom-shaped domes of salt underground.

Salt deposits have advantages for storing hydrogen, a notoriously tough gas to trap. They are more leakproof than other types of rocks used for storage sites—a feature especially important for hydrogen, which is the smallest molecule in existence. And the rock salt doesn’t react with hydrogen, which can be corrosive to tanks when it is stored above ground.

To create a cavern, engineers drill deep down into a salt deposit, then flush it with massive amounts of water, which slowly erodes the salt and forms a long, tubelike hole, a process that can take two or three years.

As for my employer's hole in the ground, it was sold for a multiple of the original cost of the entire project (it helped that the dome was required to be filled with increasingly expensive natural gas when it was turned over to us). And the men who did that deal became CEO's and Executive Vice Presidents.

People Will Do What's Best for Themselves

From January: EVs pile up in China (Globe and Mail)

5½ years ago we bought the Toyota RAV4 hybrid. We're very happy with its reliability and fuel economy, as well as its 400-mile range on a full tank. The car's emissions are not zero as they are with EV's (this is not the time to get into the debate about lifetime pollution, which includes manufacturing and disposal); let's just say that the hybrid trade-offs were optimal for this consumer.

Apparently many other consumers feel the same way. The production of electric vehicles has far outstripped demand. EVs are piling up on dealers' lots.

As recently as a year ago, automakers were struggling to meet the hot demand for electric vehicles. In a span of months, though, the dynamic flipped, leaving them hitting the brakes on what for many had been an all-out push toward an electric transformation.

A confluence of factors had led many auto executives to see the potential for a dramatic societal shift to electric cars: government regulations, corporate climate goals, the rise of Chinese EV makers, and Tesla’s stock valuation, which, at roughly $600 billion, still towers over the legacy car companies.

But the push overlooked an important constituency: the consumer.

The last laugh goes to Toyota chairman Akio Toyoda, who has repeatedly said that hybrids are superior to EVs.

“People are finally seeing reality,” said Toyota Motor Chairman Akio Toyoda. For years, Toyota and other EV-cautious carmakers had been touting hybrids as a consumer-friendly way to reduce carbon emissions.

Fortunately, America is not yet a command economy like the late lamentable Soviet Union, which produced a glut of low-quality shoes and cars. Eventually consumer preferences win out.

The fEVer has broken

New EVs in Liuzhou, China (Globe and Mail)

Our suburban cul-de-sac has six homes, and three have Teslas. In the Bay Area Teslas are everywhere and have long ceased to be status symbols.

As we mentioned four months ago, we're having second thoughts about joining the parade, and millions of potential EV-buyers are apparently feeling the same way. [bold added]

Ford Motor said Friday it is slashing production of its F-150 Lightning, the electric pickup that has generated major buzz since its launch nearly two years ago. Tesla in recent days cut vehicle prices in Europe and China, and its stock has fallen sharply this month. Hertz last week said it was dumping 20,000 EVs from its rental fleet, replacing them with gas-engine cars.

Meanwhile, the Arctic blast affecting much of the northern U.S. offered a visceral reminder of one inconvenience of EV ownership: Reduced battery performance in cold weather. That phenomenon has left some EV owners out of juice—and the industry with a jolt of bad publicity for electric cars.

EV sales in the U.S. and globally continue to climb, but the pace of that growth—and the fervent enthusiasm around the EV story—has faded. The long wait lists and accelerated factory schedules that characterized the budding EV market in recent years have given way to a backlog of inventory and downsized ambitions.

Carmakers say they remain committed to going electric while calibrating their plans amid multiplying signs that not as many consumers as anticipated are ready to rush into EVs.

Surveys show many car buyers are interested in the technology, but are hesitant to make the switch because of concerns over charger availability and higher prices.

It's very early, but California's mandate to restrict purchases only to "zero emission" vehicles beginning in 2035 looks like it will be extended, cancelled, or riddled with so many exceptions as to be toothless.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

2020: in front of four EV's Gavin Newsom bans the sale of gas-powered cars by 2035.

Gavin Newsom's war against fossil fuels has been waged across several fronts, including

Banning the sale of new gasoline-powered vehicles starting in 2035;

Imposing "price gouging" penalties on the oil and gas industry;

Prohibiting improvements to and retrofitting of pre-existing wells around which communities have sprung.

Yesterday the Governor withdrew the price-gouging legislation in favor of setting up an Executive Branch "watchdog": [bold added]

On Wednesday, the governor’s office said it is proposing legislation to create a watchdog body, backed by subpoena powers, within the California Energy Commission to investigate the state’s oil refinery market and gas prices. Based on findings from the watchdog entity, the commission could issue penalties at its discretion on the state’s oil refiners, according to advisers in the governor’s office.

IMHO, the new proposal is worse than the one it replaced. "Penalties at its discretion" is an invitation to corruption, i.e., payments to the right people will get fines waived since there don't seem to be objective criteria about where the penalty lines are.

It's also clear that a persistent price premium must have an explanation other than capitalist greed, which, if that were the case, would exist peculiarly only in California. My hypothesis: gasoline producers have only 12 years to recover their investment in California plant and equipment, after which the market for gasoline will dry up. In the rest of the country refiners can count on a useful life of 20 years or longer, thereby lowering the prices they require to turn a profit.

Come summer hellfires or winter high waters, the Progressives in charge of the one-party State are marching California to their utopian destination, while making sure that they're getting their cut along the way.

My Carbon Emitting Activities are Worthwhile But Not Yours

At Burning Man there's a lot of carbon emitting going on.

The Burning Man festival organizers are suing to stop a geothermal exploratory project.

In a lawsuit filed this week in federal court in Reno, the Burning Man Project and affiliated groups accused the U.S. Bureau of Land Management of flouting environmental laws by approving a five-year “exploration” plan by Ormat Nevada Inc. for a future geothermal project in lands surrounding the festival site...

According to the suit, Ormat has leased more than 5,700 acres of land around Gerlach, with sites for 19 proposed drilling wells. The wells would be located alongside current hot springs and use the same geothermal fluid that now heats the springs, the suit said.

There's the usual obligatory statement by the liberal organizers that alternative energy is important:

“No one I know is against green power,” [advisory board member Andy] Moore said in a statement released by the organizers. “What we are against is a company coming in, disregarding our public input, ignoring our questions, giving false statements, and damaging a community in order to fill their shareholders pockets while destroying our quiet nights, our property values, and our peace.”

Environmentalists want to ban fossil fuels, but they also don't want alternative energy projects to disrupt their lifestyle. Offshore windmills disturb ocean views. Solar panels harm tortoises. These are all very good project-stopping reasons that would be roundly derided if uttered by opponents.

Progressives call anthropogenic global warming an "existential threat" but they do not behave as if their lives are really in danger. If they led by example--for instance, not flying private jets to climate change conferences--more people might go along with them.

Below is a video of last year's Burning Man festival. All those mostly young, mostly white people look like they're having a good time in a beautiful place, and I can understand why they want to keep it going.

Solar Canals: A Great Idea with a Health Caveat

"Solar canals" in India

The benefits sound compelling. Putting solar panels over California's aqueducts will reduce evaporation and generate green energy.

The California Department of Water Resources is funding the $20 million pilot program with the intention of learning where solar panels might be viable along the state’s 4,000 miles of canals and aqueducts...

The [UC Merced / UC Santa Cruz] study detailed other benefits, too. Vast tracts of pricey new land wouldn’t be needed to generate solar energy, minimizing debate over the conversion of farmland or pristine desert for throngs of arrays. The solar panels on the canals also would operate more efficiently because the water would keep them cool.

A caveat from history: to help the environment California tends to go all-in on solutions that are not only costly but end up creating environmental damage worse than the original problem.

Case in point: MTBE. California imposed stricter requirements for oxygenated gasoline than set forth in the 1990 Federal Clean Air Act. Refiners added MTBE (methyl tertiary-butyl ether) to gasoline, which was found to be highly toxic when it leaked from tanks into the water supply. IMHO, most people would rather take their chances with smog than drink water that may have been poisoned.

Now back to the subject at hand. Solar panels contain toxic materials, e.g., lead and cadmium, that make them difficult to dispose of properly. If California covers its 4,000 miles of canals with solar arrays, surely there will be some leakage, if not breakage that could jeopardize the water supply.

I just hope that California tests the concept thoroughly before it goes big.

Sounding Off

Swedish offshore wind farm (tos)

Two weeks ago we noted that environmentalists claim that lobster fishing is killing North Atlantic right whales (it's speculative because no whale carcasses have been found entangled in lobster-fishing lines.)

But environmentalists have ignored the danger that cacophonous offshore wind farms pose to the whale population.

The harmful effect of noise on whales is well documented:

Anthropogenic noise can change a whale's behaviour, such as causing the marine mammals to feed less or to produce fewer calls. Shipping noise also cause whales to become stressed, with the build-up of stress related chemicals linked to growth suppression, lower fertility and poor immune system function.

To environmentalists wind farms are more important than whales, which are more important than the lobster industry.

Your humble blogger likes both whales and lobsters and hopes technology will provide a solution to whale entanglement, if indeed it's proven to be a problem.

As for offshore wind power, not only does it kill whales, it's not keeping anyone warm on freezing, breezeless nights. I'll take always-on natural-gas or nuclear power plants. And so will our friends, the whales.

San Francisco: Where Bureaucracy Reigns Supreme

Tesla's Powerwall battery.

When we visited the Tesla dealership in 2017, I saw our path to going green.

During the day rooftop solar panels would produce excess power. The power would not be sold to PG&E (and repurchased that evening) but would be stored in batteries in our garage, where our Tesla EV would be charging at night time. An added benefit is that we would be independent of unreliable brown-out prone PG&E.

The dream would wait, as solar and battery technologies were improving rapidly. Besides we had a fairly new natural-gas water heater and furnace that were reliable and inexpensive to operate. Their useful lives would expire in the mid-2020's, which would be a good time to execute the solar panel==>battery==>EV vision.

But if we lived in San Francisco, one of the greenest cities in America, the dream would be impossible. [bold added]

San Francisco needs power when the fog comes out and after the sun sets. Meeting that demand without fossil fuels will be impossible if we don’t start storing our solar energy for off-hours use.

And yet for the past three years in San Francisco, it has been illegal to install a battery storage system over 20-kilowatt hours on a one- or two-family home. For context, that’s not even enough to power a 2013 Nissan Leaf, one of the smallest electric cars on the market.

San Francisco's fire-safety concerns over battery storage are "unproven" and not subscribed to by any other Bay Area city. They're emblematic of a City bureaucracy that prevents its own citizens from doing the very things that City leadership advocates.

Meanwhile, San Francisco faces a budget deficit of $200 million in the next fiscal year and is looking for places to cut.

Hydrogen Power: Not As Clean As You Thought

(Diagram from Cummins)

At first blush hydrogen fuel is one of the obvious solutions to global warming. Per the Department of Energy

Hydrogen is a clean fuel that, when consumed in a fuel cell, produces only water [bold added]. Hydrogen can be produced from a variety of domestic resources, such as natural gas, nuclear power, biomass, and renewable power like solar and wind.

These qualities make it an attractive fuel option for transportation and electricity generation applications. It can be used in cars, in houses, for portable power, and in many more applications.

Nothing to worry about, say the experts.

There are two major issues with hydrogen (no, a Hindenburg-like disaster isn't considered to be one of them): [bold added]

Hydrogen itself contributes to climate change when it leaks into the atmosphere. Scientists have long known that hydrogen triggers indirect warming effects in the atmosphere. As the smallest possible molecule, it is difficult to contain.

More, the latest research reveals that—depending on time frame—hydrogen’s warming power is two to six times as great as previously recognized.

The other issue is that the most widespread and cheapest method of making hydrogen fuel is the steam-methane process, which burns natural gas and produces CO2. The other method, electrolysis, can't yet operate at scale.

A business colleague with expertise in the area first told me about hydrogen power 25 years ago. (He now works in the sector.)

The problems of leakage throughout the delivery system and "dirty" production using fossil fuels seem to make hydrogen less promising than other alternative energy technologies. I don't like saying this, but it looks like my colleague is backing the wrong horse.

Pray for Rain

The Foster City lagoon, fed from rainwater, shows the effects of drought.

As if the coronavirus and wildfires aren't enough, California is experiencing a record drought.

California drought: Bay Area, state hit 126-year lows for rainfall this year

The Bay Area got only 9.88 inches of rain this season, 39% of its normal amount of 25.28 inches, Golden Gate Weather Services said. That’s the least ever, going back to 1895.

California got 11.46 inches, or 49% of its normal 23.61 inches. That’s also the least ever...

The years of low rainfall were similar to what California went through in the mid-1970s, [meteorologist Jan] Null said.

The dearth of water will have its greatest effect on agriculture, which accounts for 80% of water use in the state. Household use makes up only 10% of water usage, he said.

One of the wealthiest and most technologically advanced regions in the world cannot provide basic services like water and electricity to its residents.

The methodology already exists--building hydroelectric dams and desalination plants--to alleviate the shortages. The finances can be mustered, as demonstrated by the $billions that have been raised for homelessness and high-speed rail. Even the usual environmental show-stoppers can be over-ridden, as in the case of building high-rises in dense urban centers.

The necessity is there; all that's missing is the desire and the will.

Meanwhile, we do what people have done for thousands of years and pray for rain.