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Is Geothermal About to Become the Solar of the 2020s?
Fervo Energy is getting a lot better at drilling holes. According to data presented this week at Stanford University, it took the company 71 days to drill a geothermal well back in 2022. But last year in Utah, Fervo was able to get drilling down to 21 days, despite those wells being over 2,000 feet deeper. That has reduced drilling time by 70%.Fervo is a buzzy, well-funded, and well-connected startup out of Houston that drills wells to produce enhanced geothermal energy, a clean source of power derived from heat beneath the Earth’s surface. But whereas traditional geothermal means tapping...
Has Offshore Wind Finally Hit Rock Bottom?
It has been a catastrophic 12 months for offshore wind in the United States. Several large projects have been canceled along the Mid-Atlantic, and Orsted, the world’s largest offshore wind developer, has laid off hundreds of employees and canceled its dividend. Is the industry dying? Maybe it’s actually about to turn a corner. In this episode, Jesse Jenkins, an energy systems expert and professor at Princeton University, and I discuss the future of the sector, and Jesse tries to convince me that the industry is about to bounce back. Subscribe to “Shift Key” and find this episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify,...
Transcript: Has Offshore Wind Finally Hit Rock Bottom?
This is a transcript of episode two of Shift Key: Has Offshore Wind Finally Hit Rock Bottom?Robinson Meyer: Hi, I’m Rob Meyer. I’m the founding executive editor of Heatmap News, and you are listening to Shift Key, a new podcast about climate change and the shift away from fossil fuels from Heatmap. My co-host, Jenkins: will join us in a second and we’ll get on with the show. But first, a word from our sponsor.[AD BREAK]Meyer: Hello, my name is Robinson Meyer. I’m the founding executive editor of Heatmap News.Jesse Jenkins: And I’m Jesse Jenkins, a professor at Princeton...
A Market for 24/7 Clean Power Might Look Something Like This
There are two kinds of people who work on climate solutions: Those who still believe in the promise of carbon markets, and those who think the whole concept is fundamentally flawed. In the first category, you have people like McGee Young, the CEO of a company called WattCarbon. Young is aware of the ways carbon markets can be a race to the bottom — enabling companies to buy cheap certificates that say they used clean energy or reduced their carbon footprint, when in reality their purchase had little effect on the environment or the energy system. And yet, there’s all...
Health Insurers Fret About Climate Change
Current conditions: Much of the U.S. will see calmer weather over the next few days • A tornado caused “biblical damage” in Cyprus • Mexico is experiencing its worst drought in 12 years. THE TOP FIVE 1. Study: Polar bears head ashore for food as sea ice melts A new study sheds light on how polar bears are changing their diets and behaviors in a warming world. Climate change is shrinking the sea ice on which the bears rely for hunting seals. As the ice melts, the bears are forced onto land, where they can either reduce their physical activity in...
Why EV Makers Had So Little to Say at the Super Bowl
As a young figure skater twirls around the ice rink, we see the seat next to her father is conspicuously empty. She notices, too. But not to worry: After the performance, dad and daughter drive their Kia EV9 up to her grandparents’ house in the mountains. Dad strings Edison bulbs around the adjacent frozen pond and brings out a speaker, both powered by the battery in his electric car, so the girl can recreate her performance for an adoring grandfather who watches from the window.Besides being a tearjerker, Kia’s Super Bowl commercial this year introduced millions of Americans to...
Get a Grip, New York. It’s Just Snow.
It is a time-honored tradition for Americans who live north of the 39th parallel to mock cities like Washington, D.C., and Atlanta when they shut down over a little bit of snow. It is with great regret, then, that I write now to tell you that New York City has fallen. No longer will it be acceptable for us to roll our eyes at Southerners who abandon their cars over a mere inch of snow; no, we in fact deserve to be razzed by New Englanders and Minnesotans, our former partners in razzing. New Yorkers have become, in effect,...
Everybody Is Mad About Biden’s Offshore Lease Plans
Current conditions: New York City is expecting six inches of snow • Intense flooding has been recorded across Oman • Parts of southeastern Australia are facing the worst bushfires in four years. THE TOP FIVE1. Oil industry and environmentalists are mad about Biden’s offshore lease plans The Biden administration’s decision to dramatically reduce the number of offshore drilling lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico is proving to be unpopular with the oil industry and environmentalists. The plan is to hold just three lease sales between 2025 and 2029, a record low and far below the 47 proposed during...
Is Offshore Wind Out of the Woods?
Billion-dollar losses, cancelled contracts, accusations of whale murder — 2023 was not a good year for offshore wind. A variety of companies involved in the business, from developers to turbine manufacturers told analysts and investors about how bad it was when it came time to report their full-year earnings. Orsted, the Danish energy company, told investors last week that it would have been $2 billion in the black if it were not for its U.S. business; instead it was $3 billion in the red. The head of General Electric’s renewables business, meanwhile, told analysts that offshore wind was “challenging”...
Is Nuclear Energy Having a Renaissance?
For a while there, nuclear energy looked like it was on its way out. After taking off post-World War II, it lost momentum toward the dawn of the 21st century, when sagging public support and mounting costs led to dozens of cancellations in the U.S. and drove the rate of new proposals off a cliff. Only a few reactors have been built in the U.S. this century; the most recent, Georgia Power’s Plant Vogtle units 3 and 4, were years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget. Vogtle-3 came online last summer, with Vogtle-4 — which was delayed...
Humans Are Pushing Migratory Species to Extinction
Current conditions: A freak hail storm hit Abu Dhabi • Beaches in Trinidad and Tobago are black after a massive oil spill • It will be another wet week in California. THE TOP FIVE 1. Study: Many migratory species face extinction One in five migratory species are at risk of extinction, and humans are mostly to blame, according to a grim new United Nations report. The State of the World’s MIgratory Species report from the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (CMS) is the first to study the many creatures – from elephants to butterflies to birds – that travel thousands...
Heat Pumps Outsold Furnaces for the Second Year in a Row
It’s official: In 2023, for the second year in a row, heat pumps — highly efficient, electric space heaters — were more popular than natural gas furnaces. That’s according to the most recent data from the Air-Conditioning, Heating, and Refrigeration Institute, a trade association for appliance manufacturers that publishes shipment data for heating and cooling equipment every month. Though the number of shipments in the data is technically defined as “when a unit transfers ownership,” it is a rough analog for sales. AHRI’s count for 2023, published Friday, showed that even as overall shipments were down in 2023, 21% more heat...
The New Hydrogen Rules Risk Opening the Door to Methane Offsets
In late December, the Treasury Department proposed draft regulations to implement the Inflation Reduction Act’s generous hydrogen production tax credit. Under Section 45V of the tax code, eligible projects must show that their life cycle greenhouse gas emissions fall below exacting benchmarks. Treasury’s final rules will determine how hydrogen projects are allowed to calculate their emissions and direct the flow of tens of billions of tax dollars — or more. Most of the discussion that followed focused on the draft rule’s proposed guardrails for green hydrogen, which is produced from water using clean electricity. The climate policy community in particular...
What to Expect From La Niña
Current conditions: California is getting a brief respite from the rain • Barcelona’s soccer club is reducing its water use as drought grips Spain • It will be chilly and windy in Las Vegas this weekend for Super Bowl LVIII. THE TOP FIVE1. Looming La Niña could make for more extreme weather El Niño may be on the way out. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) yesterday issued a La Niña watch, saying there’s a 55% chance the weather pattern could emerge this summer. El Niño has contributed to above-average ocean temperatures and an intensification of extreme weather. La...
Today’s Senate Hearing Was a Pretty Great Example of Climate Policy-Making
In the sort of happy coincidence that is only possible in Washington, D.C., two consequential linguistic debates unfolded on Thursday morning within half a mile of each other. The first, in the Supreme Court of the United States, commanded the attention of major TV networks and political pundits, warranted a live blog from The New York Times, and aimed, in part, to differentiate between what constitutes an “insurrection” versus a mere “riot.” A five-minute walk away, in room 366 of the Dirksen Senate Office Building, a similar debate was unfolding — albeit after some live-stream technical difficulties and a...
We Breached 1.5 Degrees Celsius of Warming — Sort Of
Somewhat fittingly, Heatmap’s first year in existence coincided with the planet’s first 12-month period with an average temperature more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, according to a new report from the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. This might not come as a surprise if you’ve been reading us for any amount of time. But still, the number is striking — it’s the target we’ve long heard about, the threshold that the Paris Agreement is trying to keep us under. It might be easy, then, to look at this report with a bit of despair. I am here to...
Earth Spent 12 Months Above the 1.5C Warming Limit
Current conditions: Forest fires are under control in Chile’s Viña del Mar, but continue to burn in other parts of the country • Los Angeles recorded at least 475 mudslides due to the atmospheric river • It’s 75 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny in Naples, Florida, where a 9-acre beachfront retreat just hit the housing market for a record-breaking $295 million. THE TOP FIVE1. World exceeds 1.5C in warming for a full year Temperatures on Earth have been more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels for a year, according to the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). New data...
Why You May Soon Be Getting More Air Quality Alerts
The Environmental Protection Agency finalized new air pollution rules on Wednesday, strengthening standards that had not been updated in over a decade. Somewhat counterintuitively, the change could mean that even as the air gets cleaner, you might get more air quality alerts.As part of the rule change, the EPA updated its Air Quality Index, that colorful scale that many Americans grew intimately familiar with last summer, as wildfire smoke went from being a West Coast problem to a hazard for almost the entire country, seemingly overnight. The AQI is both easy to interpret, with a color code that goes...
The World’s Biggest Offshore Wind Developer Had a Horrible 2023, and It’s America’s Fault
The Danish energy developer Orsted delivered a withering verdict on its experiment trying to build wind farms in the United States: Bad. It’s lost a ton of money, the company said Wednesday, so it’s going to do less of that going forward, and take on way less risk. That Orsted had struggled in the U.S. offshore wind market was no secret — late last year, it cancelled two projects in New Jersey — but its earnings report put some grim figures on it. The company said that it had 9.6 billion Danish kroner worth of fees (about $1.4 billion) related to...
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