Big changes are afoot for the energy sector in the next 25 years. Coal and gas are headed out and solar and wind are rushing to take their place on a multi-trillion dollar investment bonanza, according to a new report from Bloomberg New Energy Finance that scopes out the power generating landscape.
.. The world will spend a combined $12.2 trillion on new power-generating capacity over the next 25 years. The majority of that—two-thirds to be exact—will go to renewables like wind and solar thanks to falling costs.
.. The road to remaking the world’s power generation will have two major mileposts. The first comes in 2026. That’s the year when Bloomberg analysts project wind will become the cheapest form of power generation in the world.
.. But wind’s reign will be short. By 2030, utility-scale solar photovoltaic cells—big arrays of panels, not the rooftop version—will take the title of cheapest new power source.
Why the rise of green energy makes utility companies nervous.
Currently, utilities plan their operations around the busiest day of the year, making sure they have the capacity to meet peak demand on the hottest August afternoon. But as Green Mountain Power modernizes one home after another—so far it’s enabled a few dozen fully remodelled “E-homes” and more than a hundred partial makeovers—the utility gains the potential ability to briefly turn down water heaters and air-conditioners during high-usage periods. This “demand management” allows the utility to avoid peak charges from the regional power grid and can save it hundreds of dollars per customer each year.
.. Aguably, the era’s most disruptive technology is the solar panel. Its price has dropped ninety-nine per cent in the past four decades, and roughly seventy-five per cent in the past six years; it now produces power nearly as cheaply as coal or gas, a condition that energy experts refer to as “grid parity.”
.. But many utilities see residential solar power as an existential threat. In 2013, an industry trade group called the Edison Electric Institute warned that utilities face what company executives were quick to call “a death spiral.” As customers began to generate more of their own electricity from the solar panels on their roofs, utility revenues would begin to decline, and the remaining customers would have to pay more for the poles and wires that keep the grid alive. That would increase the incentive for the remaining customers to leave.
Since the death-spiral session, utilities around the country have sought to slow the growth of solar: by supporting laws and regulations that would reduce targets for renewable energy; by ending “net metering” laws that force utilities to pay solar customers retail prices for the surplus energy they put back on the grid; by imposing “connection fees” to make up for lost revenues. Much of the campaigning has been spurred by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council and funded by various groups linked to the Koch brothers and their fossil-fuel fortune.
.. “The utilities were always convinced that they could throttle down solar just by tuning down the rebate they were offering,” Rive said. “What caught them off guard was when costs came down to the point where we didn’t need their rebate for solar to make sense.
.. You have to pay your dues, come up through the ranks. You become C.E.O. when you have five years, max, left. Some of them are just not worrying about ten, fifteen years in the future.”
.. But, in the odd world of regulated utilities, a company like Con Ed traditionally makes money by building more stuff: put in a billion-dollar substation and you can “rate base” it, making customers pay the cost, plus a ten-per-cent markup, for decades.
.. “It’s kind of a Hannah Arendt thing,” he said. “There’s not a lot of intentional evil in utilities. But we’ve created a golden cage for them, protected them from enormous trends.”
Nigeria: Big Bad Oil
Nigeria’s national oil company is so corrupted and mismanaged that the country ends up importing most of its fuel — despite being Africa’s leading oil producer. The crude is stolen from the pipelines; refineries are “barely functioning”; revenues are “siphoned off”. What ought to be an oil giant is really “just a slush fund”.
.. As a mark of how much more effective the oil majors have been when liberated from their state partner, offshore production – managed under different contractual arrangements – has risen by 1,287 per cent in the same period.
Frozen Assets: The Newest Front in Global Espianage Is One of The Least Habitable Locales On Earth —Thre Arctic
Like Kristoffersen and Tholfsen, the Orenburg was there to drill into undersea ranges in order to collect geological samples from the Lomonosov Ridge, a little-known underwater mountain chain that rises about 12,000 feet above the seabed and stretches for more than 1,000 miles. Under and around this formation lies nearly a quarter of the Earth’s remaining fossil fuel resources.
.. Worth an estimated $17.2 trillion, an amount roughly equivalent to the entire U.S. economy, these resources have been trapped for eons under a dome of ice and snow. But now, with the Arctic warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, that dome is getting smaller and smaller. According to scientists at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, about 65 percent of the ice layer above the Lomonosov Ridge melted between 1975 and 2012.
.. The response? Three months later, in November, a Russian government spokesman announced that Moscow will build a drone base slightly south of the Arctic Circle and just 420 miles away from mainland Alaska.
.. With 72 subs, the United States has an advantage in numbers over Russia, which has about 60. But Russia is debuting a new generation of vessels that are far quieter and much more difficult for U.S. defense systems to detect.