Tuesday, January 17, 2023
British coal power facility to stay open for extra two years in blow to net zero
One of Britain's last coal-burning power facilities is to be kept open for two years longer than planned as the energy crisis deals a blow to the green agenda.
The German energy giant Uniper is poised to keep the unit, at its Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire, open until 2024 after an appeal from ministers - after initially intending to shut it in 2022.
National Grid on Wednesday also left the door open for extending the life of other coal-fired plants.
The moves risk hurting Britain’s ambitions to cut carbon dioxide emissions little more than a year after it hosted the COP26 climate conference, and highlights strains on the energy system following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
Coal supplied more than 40pc of Britain’s electricity as recently as 2012, but this has fallen to 1.5pc across 2022.
Under efforts to cut carbon emissions, it has largely been replaced by other sources in the generation mix, such as gas, wind and biomass.
Coal-fired power plants have been rapidly closing as their owners move into greener forms of energy.
Under a target set in October 2021, the Government says Britain will stop using coal to generate electricity altogether - an important step on its path to net zero carbon emissions.
However, last year, Kwasi Kwarteng, then business secretary, asked the owners of units that were due to close in September 2022 to keep them open this winter to prevent blackouts.
His successor Jacob Rees-Mogg then asked Uniper to keep its unit open for next winter (2023/24) as well.
There have been major concerns over electricity shortages amid disruption to gas supplies triggered by Russia’s war on Ukraine and outages in the French nuclear fleet.
EDF, Uniper and Drax agreed to keep units open for back-up supply if needed this winter under special winter contingency contracts with National Grid.
Uniper is now also preparing to keep open one of its units next winter (2023/24) as well, under National Grid's normal market for back-up power supply. It was due to close in September 2022.
It is one of four units at its station in Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottingham. The other three were always planned to remain open until September 2024.
Gas supplies are likely to remain extremely tight this year as countries look to refill stocks with much less from Russia, while nuclear power plants in Britain also closed last year.
Meanwhile, more of Britain’s electricity is coming from intermittent wind and solar power, posing challenges for balancing the system.
Uniper said: “As requested by the Government, Uniper is now looking at whether we can make the unit available to run under standard market arrangements until the September 2024 coal phase out date.
“We have prequalified the unit to take part in the capacity market T-1 auction for 2023/24 [an auction for back-up power].
“This means further investment to extend the life of the unit. The power station is set to close at the end of September 2024.”
Separately, National Grid was asked at an industry forum yesterday when it would decide whether to extend its special contingency contracts under which extra coal-fired power is being kept online this winter.
A representative said: “We, like the rest of the industry, have half an eye on next winter... we are continuing to work closely with [the regulator and the government] on what our overall winter response will be for 2023/24”.
Drax and EDF said they had not so far been asked to keep their coal units open longer than this winter. Both are currently planning to shut the units down in March and April this year.
Drax added: “Drax’s strategy is to deliver a coal-free future".
None of the coal-fired power plants asked to stay online this winter have so far been called upon to supply power. Mild weather has helped to lower demand for gas, as well as for heating in France.
A Government spokesman said: “The UK has a secure and diverse energy system, and we remain confident in our security of supply.
“Working closely with Ofgem, National Grid Gas and other key industry organisations, we continuously monitor our energy supply and ensure we are ready for a range of scenarios.
“In line with our net zero target, the Government is planning to phase out unabated coal-fired power generation by the end of 2024.”
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German Village at Center of a Fight Over Coal and Climate Is Cleared Out
The fight for Lützerath was long, but the end, when it finally came, was quick.
In a matter of days this past week, more than 1,000 police officers cleared out the hundreds of climate activists who had sworn to protect the small village, once home to 90 people but no church, which was scheduled to be razed as part of a sprawling open-pit coal mine in western Germany.
The relatively fast demise added to the host of contradictions surrounding Lützerath and how a tiny, now uninhabited, village had taken on an improbable, outsize place in Germany’s debate over how to wean itself off coal.
For years, environmental activists had hoped to forestall the fate of Lützerath — possibly the last of hundreds of villages in Germany to fall to open-pit mining since World War II. For a while, it seemed that the activists would succeed.
But this year the political winds and public sentiment shifted against them. Europe’s energy crisis, ushered in by the war in Ukraine and the end of cheap Russia gas, made coal too hard to quit for now. Even a government that includes the environmentalist-minded Green party turned its back on them.
The activists nonetheless prepared themselves to defend the half dozen houses and farmyards with their bodies. They barricaded themselves in a complex of barns and other structures. They erected and occupied tall watchtowers. They carved out a tunnel network. They nested in the branches of 100-year-old trees.
But the clearing, which started Wednesday, proved to be less dramatic than some had feared. A few firecrackers were heard, and some stones and bits of food were thrown (it turned out that activists had stockpiled too much). But for the most part, the standoff ended peacefully, almost businesslike. By Friday, the bulk of the activists were gone, some leaving of their own accord, some carried out by police officers, with just a few stragglers left in a few hard-to-reach places.
On Saturday, an estimated 15,000 climate activists, including Greta Thunberg, staged a march in the area, with police using water cannons and nightsticks to prevent protesters from charging the site, even though by then the village was virtually empty and many of its trees already felled. Ms. Thunberg had also visited the village on Friday afternoon.
Lützerath’s fate was sealed last fall, when Robert Habeck, the country’s business, energy and climate minister, and Mona Neubaur, the state minister for the environment and energy, announced a deal to continue mining coal in the region until 2030.
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Polar bear expert: Activist fact-checkers are misleading the public
Canadian zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford warns that some polar bear specialists are attempting to cast a smoke-screen over the growth of global polar bear numbers.
A ‘fact check” by AFP yesterday, picked up by Yahoo News, claims a graph used by statistical analyst Bjorn Lomborg (author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and False Alarm), which shows polar bear populations rising over five decades, “uses unreliable data”.
The critique insists that the message conveyed by the graph – that polar bear numbers are growing “in spite of global warming” – is “misleading”, and that experts say “human-driven climate change poses a threat to polar bears.” However, zoologist Dr. Susan Crockford counters that some polar bear specialists are attempting to cast a smoke-screen over the relevant facts of the matter.
Regarding the assertion that estimates of polar bear population abundance in the 1960s are “pure guesswork”, Crockford points out that sea otter specialists, without shame or apology, routinely use a benchmark figure of “about 2,000” for the pre-protection population size of the species, even though it is based on similar “guesswork”. No one insults these biologists for citing this figure.
In fact, polar bear specialists are unique in the conservation field for refusing to accept a benchmark figure for the 1960s population size, despite eight published estimates made by their peers. Crockford uses an overall average of these, about 10,000 (range 5,000-15,000), as a reasonable compromise, as did polar bear specialist Markus Dyck, who died doing Arctic field work in 2021.
In 2008, the US Fish and Wildlife Service used a figure of about 12,000 in a “frequently asked questions” document: this is the number used by Lomborg in his graph.
As for more recent numbers, PBSG members continue to insist that none of the global population estimates they’ve ever made can be used to assess the conservation health of the species.
Crockford asks:
“How can the public be expected to assess the effectiveness of polar bear conservation measures if there is no way of determining whether numbers have increased or decreased over time – yet are expected to accept without challenge the output of a recent computer model that predicts a catastrophic future, as this ‘fact check’ encourages readers to do?”
Crockford says summer sea ice has declined dramatically since 1979 and especially so in the Svalbard region of the Barents Sea over the last 20 years. However, Svalbard polar bear health and abundance have not been negatively affected, which data from field work and peer-reviewed scientific studies done by polar bear specialists show to be true.
Empirical evidence like this explains why computer models predicting a dire future for polar bears are worthless: much less summer sea ice does not inevitably lead to a decline in polar bear numbers as these models assume.
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Catastrophe postponed
As global temperatures rise, there is mounting concern that warming could trigger so-called tipping points that set off irreversible melting of the world's massive ice sheets and ultimately lift oceans enough to drastically redraw the world map.
New research published Monday suggests a complex interaction of factors affecting the melting of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which is home to the enormous and unstable Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers -- nicknamed the "Doomsday glacier" -- that together could raise global sea levels by more than three metres (10 feet).
Using satellite imagery as well as ocean and climate records between 2003 and 2015, an international team of researchers found that while the West Antarctic Ice Sheet continued to retreat, the pace of ice loss slowed across a vulnerable region of the coastline.
Their study, published in the journal Nature Communications, concluded that this slowdown was caused by changes in ocean temperatures that were caused by offshore winds, with pronounced differences in the impact depending on the region.
Researchers said that this raises questions about how rising temperatures will affect the Antarctic, with ocean and atmospheric conditions playing a key role.
"That means that ice-sheet collapse is not inevitable," said co-author Professor Eric Steig from the University of Washington in Seattle.
"It depends on how climate changes over the next few decades, which we could influence in a positive way by reducing greenhouse gas emissions."
The researchers observed that while in one region, in the Bellingshausen Sea, the pace of ice retreat accelerated after 2003, it slowed in the Amundsen Sea.
They concluded that this was down to changes in the strength and direction of offshore surface winds, which can change the ocean currents and disturb the layer of cold water around Antarctica and flush relatively warmer water towards the ice.
Both the North and South pole regions have warmed by roughly three degrees Celsius compared to late 19th-century levels, nearly three times the global average.
Scientists are increasingly concerned that the Pine Island and Thwaites glaciers have reached a "tipping point" that could see irreversible melting irrespective of cuts to greenhouse gas emissions.
Anders Levermann, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who was not connected to the latest study, welcomed the approach of bringing together multiple observations and records, although the study period was "the blink of an eye in ice terms".
"I think we still have to live and plan and do our sea level projections and coastal planning with a hypothesis that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is destabilised and we will get three and a half meters of sea level rise just from this area of the planet alone," he said, adding however that this would happen "over centuries to millennia".
The United Nation's science advisory panel for climate change, the IPCC, has forecast that oceans will rise up to a metre by the end of the century, and even more after that. Hundreds of millions of people live within a few metres of sea level.
While cutting planet-warming emissions is seen as the first and most important way to halt the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet, scientists have also come up with an array of hi-tech suggestions for saving the gargantuan ice shelf and staving off.
Levermann has researched ideas including using snow cannons to pump trillions of tons of ice back on top of the frozen region.
Other suggestions have included constructing Eiffel Tower-sized columns on the seabed to prop it up from below, and a 100m-tall, 100-kilometre-long berm to block warm water flowing underneath.
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http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
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http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
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