“The solar excess contributes to electricity rates in California that are the highest in the continental United States. Only Hawaii has higher electricity rates, a function of its isolation and need to import fuels for power generation.”
Has California’s enthusiasm for solar power gone too far? That question is being asked as the state is curtailing large amounts of solar generation and paying other states to take the Golden State’s solar excess.
The Los Angeles Times (November 24, 2024) reported:
In the last 12 months, California’s solar farms have curtailed production of more than 3 million megawatt hours of solar energy, either on the orders of the state’s grid operator or because prices had plummeted because of the glut, according to an analysis of data by The Times.
Data from the state’s grid operator, the California Independent System Operator (CAISO), shows that curtailments of solar generation, because the conventional market for power in the state was less than was being generated and electric storage capacity was full, have doubled compared to 2021.…
“What to expect from COP 29 in Baku come November? In the words of the great American philosopher Lawrence “Yogi” Berra: ‘It’s like déjà vu all over again’.”
Remember COP28? Forget about it. Most everybody else has. This is COP29, Nov. 11-24, 2024, the 29th annual international greenwashing gabfest about the world’s promised actions to deal with a climate being changed by man-made global warming. Most of those meetings have had little real impact, generating more heat, rancor, posturing, and light — and sometimes state-sponsored repression — than measurable movement toward significant reductions in emissions of greenhouse gasses, primarily carbon dioxide (CO2).
The formal title of these highly-hyped, frequently ignored, sometimes entertaining gatherings is the “United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change,” with the inevitable acronym of UNFCC. The selection of Azerbaijan to host the meeting is significant.…
“What has come to be known as ‘weather attribution,’ research assigning causation to observed weather events, is fraught with methodological problems. Veteran climate scientist Roger A. Pielke Jr. in his Substack publication The Honest Broker calls it ‘weather attribution alchemy’.”
Last year was hot, unusually so. The global temperature was almost 0.3°C above 2022 levels, so much higher that even conventional analyses of global warming didn’t appear to explain it. As a recent article in Science magazine notes, iconic climate scientist James Hansen was suggesting that a new, air-pollution-driven warming mechanism might be at work. NASA’s Gavin Schmidt posited that a novel, unknown force could be involved.
Wrong, says a team of six climate scientists led by Shiv Priyam Raghuraman (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana). The culprit is more likely the familiar climate confounder, El Niño (technically, the El Niño-Southern Oscillation or ENSO).…