Energy News for week ending August 10, 2018

Catching Up and Closing In | Nuclear Triathlon: A Wasp Hitting a Wall

Good Friday afternoon. At the moment I’m writing this, the current fuel mix in New England, according to the ISO to Go app, is 64 percent natural gas, 22 percent nuclear and 7 percent renewables. The balance is mostly hydro (5 percent). While the current disparity here between natural gas fueled electricity and renewables is, ah let’s say huge, and the difference between nuclear production and renewables is also large, we have two stories this week that tell us that overall, the trend is moving toward renewables.

From Vox.com, Clean energy is catching up to natural gas, “In its role as a bridge, natural gas seems to have a comfortable future. First, it will replace coal and nuclear “baseload” plants, and then, as renewables grow to supply the bulk of power, it will provide flexibility, filling in the gaps where variable renewables (wind and solar) fall short. By playing these multiple roles, natural gas will long outlive coal and prove useful well into the latter half of the 21st century. It will enjoy a long, slow exit. Or so the story goes. Around 2015, though, just five years into gas’s rise to power, complications for this narrative began to appear. First, wind and solar costs fell so far, so fast that they are now undercutting the cost of new gas in a growing number of regions. And then batteries — which can “firm up” variable renewables, diminishing the need for natural gas’s flexibility — also started getting cheap faster than anyone expected. It happened so fast that, in certain limited circumstances, solar+storage or wind+storage is already cheaper than new natural gas plants and able to play all the same roles (and more).”

And from Greentech Media, US Renewables Are Closing In on Nuclear Generation. “Nuclear power’s tenure as the leading source of zero-carbon electricity may be coming to an end. After decades of stalled nuclear plant development and the recent surge of increasingly cheap wind and solar deployments, the newcomers are pulling ahead. In the first five months of 2018, renewables produced 20.17 percent of U.S. electricity and nuclear produced 20.14 percent, according to Energy Information Administration data compiled by Ken Bossong of the Sun Day Campaign. A similar record was hit in the first three months of 2017. In the two most recent months included in the data set, April and May, renewables outproduced nuclear by more than 10 percent.”

Speaking of nuclear, no one wants a national nuclear spent fuel repository more than nuclear generators and their host communities. But often concerns are raised about how safely the spent fuel can be transported. With that in mind, we bring you a story from The Verge, Scientists put a nuclear waste container through a demanding trip to see if the fuel would break, “Researchers sent a nuclear waste container on a 14,500-mile odyssey by truck, barge, cargo ship, and train in an effort to understand how well radioactive fuel would stand up to travel.” The results according to one of the scientists involved in the experiment, “‘…though we’re still analyzing the data, is that we have a huge margin of safety…they said the largest shock they saw was the equivalent of a wasp hitting a wall. It is very, very, very small. These rods are all contained in an assembly that holds them all together, and they are just not moving. And so even though the truck or the train jiggles quite a bit, the basket and the cask and the canister really hold it all together very well and actually absorb a lot of those little vibrations and bumps and shocks that the rail car experiences. Those energies don’t make it all the way up through the whole system to the fuel. So the fuel has a very smooth ride.””

That’s the recap for this week. Have a wonderful weekend.

Natural Gas/Oil/Pipeline/Drilling

New deed finalizes sale of land on which gas company wants to build compressor, Patriot Ledger

BIA endorses Granite Bridge pipeline project, Seacoastonline.com

US fossil fuels target global energy poverty, climate change in new PR push, S and P Global

Clean energy is catching up to natural gas, Vox.com

NY regulators leave 680 MW gas plant without an air permit, Utility Dive

FERC denies rehearing on Northern Pass pipeline, overruling New York decision, Utility Dive

Renewables/Climate Change/RGGI

N.Y. grid operator moves toward landmark carbon price, National Wind Watch

Massachusetts Clean Energy Bill 2018: Continuing the Journey, Union of Concerned Scientists (blog)

Advocates share renewable energy agenda at CTEi, Leominster Champion