Changing lives with solar microgrids

Haiti is the poorest the country in the western hemisphere. Only 25 per cent of the 10.3 million people in the country have access to electricity. One nonprofit organization is testing a solution that could not only change the lives of the unelectrified in Haiti, but could be a model of how to bring electricity to the 1.2 billion people in the world still living in the dark.

EarthSpark International has built a 93 kW solar-powered microgrid in the small town of Les Anglais (pop. 3,000 in the “downtown” area), which currently supplies clean reliable power to approximately 2,000 people.

Why a Microgrid?

Haiti has more than 30 existing municipal microgrids, but most of them don’t work. And even when they do function, they run on diesel and operate just a few hours a day, a few days a week. So EarthSpark’s goal was to provide people with 24-hour clean affordable electricity.

EarthSpark began working in Haiti providing people with small solar home systems and solar lanterns, products that are life-changing tools for people without access to grid electricity. But the organization soon realized that those aren’t the solutions to which everyone aspires. “To truly unlock economic opportunity, people need access to higher levels of electricity than what a solar home system can provide,” Allison Archambault, president of EarthSpark International, told RMI.

“With the right conditions minigrids can provide energy services in a low-cost sweet spot between small levels of energy consumption that can be effectively served by small stand-alone solar systems and traditional grid extension,” according to Eric Wanless, a principal in RMI’s international practice leading the Sustainable Energy for Economic Development initiative. EarthSpark isn’t the only group focusing on microgrids.

The cheapest way to scale up wind and solar energy? 

January 27, 2016 9.45pm AEDT

Wind power and solar power are ways to reduce carbon emissions, but these generation sources are dependent on the vagaries of the weather, which means neither wind nor solar can produce electricity on-demand at all hours of the day. This variability has led many to assume that greatly expanding wind and solar to reduce carbon emissions will cause electricity costs to skyrocket and require expensive energy storage.

My colleagues and I have just published a new study to show that this assumption is not correct. In fact, if the U.S. were to move to a national 48-state electric system, rather than the regional one in place now, the country would be able to transport more renewable energy around the country. That change could reduce CO2 by 78 percent at lower costs than today without using any storage technologies.

Using a computer model, we found that this larger electric system would utilize power more efficiently regardless of the generators within it. The cost reduction between the national style system we modeled and the current one, which is divided into about 130 regions, is US$47 billion per year. That translates into an electricity cost of between 8.5 and 10.2¢ per kilowatt-hour (kWh), compared to the current national average of 12.7 cents per kWh.

THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN, A NEW ERA HAS BEEN USHERED IN INDIAN POLTICS

During the last five decades all people (who were sincere and honest to the nation and country and not to any boss, chair or party to fulfill their desires through nondubious and noncorrupt means) talked in their drawing rooms that this country can progress to prosperity only when a revolution takes place, a revolution by the silent hapless billion plus people of this land against all efforts of the ruling polity and bureaucracy to fool them, to loot them.

Even today as I write this a big debate is going on on all media channels wherein all the national spokes persons of all the established parties are attributing Aam Aadmi Party's win and Bhartiya Janta Party's loss to the secular credentials of one and Hindutava agenda of the latter. But let us understand that no revolution in the history of mankind has occurred with religious agenda. In fact all revolutions have taken place as a war between haves and havenots because haves have always thrived and made merry on power, authority, corruption and loots..Still they do not want to take cognizance of the fact that that it is the awareness and recognition of the plain and simple reality of today's India described in words below
 i.e

Sisters and brothers of India, whether from villages or cities, from any religion, caste or creed,rich or poor, don't be taken in by any of the tricks of politicians, for end of corrupt people  and corruption will be the end of your poverty and miseries.Your poverty is a direct result of  corruption  by  those in authority and power.
which is responsible for such a clean sweep in the latest Delhi elections. In fact it is the dawn of a new era, a watershed mandate in the Indian political history where the power of ballot has rejected the hitherto effective and accepted model of Indian politics wherein the vote banks could be purchased/ goaded/fooled by empowering a few henchmen/goons economically much in the same manner as Muslim rulers would make Nawabs and British rulers would make Rai Sahibs at the expense of common man's rights and dues. The new model mooted by Aam Aadmi Party expects the Indian rulers to work for the betterment of each and every individual rather than for a few favoured and chosen ones.

President Obama, Cut Dirty Nuclear Power From Your Climate-Change Talks

By Zoe Loftus-FarrenPhoto: Jeff Fusco/Getty Images

President Barack Obama is getting serious about climate change, a challenge that "poses a greater threat to future generations" than any other, he said in last week's State of the Union. In July, his administration announced an EPA regulation to slash carbon pollution from power plants. In November, he struck a pact with China on long-term emission reductions. And recently the White House unveiled a plan to cut methane emissions nearly in half by 2025.

Addressing climate change means, in large part, stepping away from dirty energy sources like coal and oil and toward cleaner sources. That’s a good thing. But it requires developing more energy elsewhere, including from one alternative source that has gotten scant attention in the mainstream press: nuclear energy, which poses its own serious environmental risks. 

The EPA’s proposed power-plant regulation provides a carbon credit to states for maintaining nuclear energy production at current levels: in other words, a carbon subsidy for maintaining the nuclear status quo. Following the release of the draft rules, EPA administrator Gina McCarthy made clear that the credit is meant, in part, to help the struggling nuclear industry. “There are a handful of nuclear facilities that, because they are having trouble remaining competitive, they haven’t yet looked at re-licensing,” she said at a roundtable discussion with business leaders in Chicago. If nuclear energy plants begin closing, she warned, “It’s a lot of carbon reduction that needs to be made up for a long period of time.”

Why Nuclear Power is Not “Low Carbon” » CounterPunch: Tells the Facts, Names the Names

A False Promise
Why Nuclear Power is Not “Low Carbon”

by KEITH BARNAM

The UK government is committed to massively subsidising new nuclear reactors, based on the claim that they generate ‘low carbon’ electricity.

But what is the carbon footprint of nuclear power? I have trawled the literature and found that there is no scientific consensus on the lifetime carbon emissions of nuclear electricity.

Remarkably, half of the most rigorous published analyses have a carbon footprint for nuclear power above the limit recommended by the UK government’s official climate change advisor, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC).

According to the CCC, if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change, by 2030 all electricity should be generated with less than 50 grams of carbon dioxide emitted for each kilowatt-hour (50 gCO₂/kWh).

Since all new generators have lifetimes well over 20 years, I believe this limit should be imposed on all new electricity supply systems here and now – and all the more so for those with lifetimes spanning many decades.

Note that thanks to long construction times for the EPR design and a forthcoming legal challenge, it’s entirely possible that the planned Hinkley C reactor will not be completed until 2030 or beyond. It will then be subsidised for the first 35 years of its projected 60 year lifetime – taking us through until 2090.

What is the carbon footprint of renewable electricity?

When comparing the carbon footprints of electricity-generating technologies, we need to take into account carbon dioxide emitted in all stages in the life of the generator and its fuel. Such a study is called a life cycle analysis (LCA).

There are other gases such as methane that are more dangerous greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide. The most reliable LCAs take all greenhouse gases into account and present equivalent carbon dioxide emissions.

In a recent paper in Energy Policy, Daniel Nugent and Benjamin Sovacool critically reviewed the published LCAs of renewable electricity generators. All the renewable technologies came in below the 50 gCO₂/kWh limit.

The lowest was large-scale hydropower with a carbon footprint one fifth of the CCC limit (10 gCO₂/kWh). A close second was biogas electricity from anaerobic digestion (11 gCO₂/kWh). The mean figure for wind energy is 34 gCO₂/kWh, and solar PV comes in a shade under the 50g limit, at 49.9 gCO₂/kWh. Bear in mind that rapidly evolving PV technology means that this last figure is contantly falling.

What’s the carbon footprint of nuclear power?

The Big Six On The Run

How renewables are disrupting big energy firms everywhere

The biggest story you’ve never been told An energy revolution is underway across the globe,and the old order is running scared. Big energy firms, once the greatest beneficiaries of liberalised electricity markets, are suddenly seeing their profit margins slump, their very futures imperilled. The traditional privatised utility model that has reigned supreme for twenty-five years is being rapidly undermined. The effects are being felt most

strongly in Germany and the US – but increasingly Britain’s Big Six energy firms are also under threat.

In short, the Big Six are on the run. What’s causing them to take fright is the disruptive power of renewable energy – particularly small-scale renewables owned by lots of people. The reasons for this are actually quite simple, but seldom explained.

The first reason is that the Big Six are facing a growing army of competitors. When the utilities were first privatised in the 1980s, they portrayed themselves as the face of a new popular capitalism.The famous ‘Tell Sid’ adverts of the Thatcher years caught the mood as thousands of people bought up shares in the new energy companies. But as the electricity market developed the number of shareholders and firms dwindled and ossified into the small oligopoly of suppliers that exist today.

NUCLEAR POWER'S DARK FUTURE

BY BRAHMA CHELLANEYE

Nuclear power constitutes the world’s most subsidy-fattened energy industry, yet it faces an increasingly uncertain future. The global nuclear power industry has enjoyed growing state subsidies over the years, even as it generates the most dangerous wastes whose safe disposal saddles future generations.

Despite the fat subsidies, new developments are highlighting the nuclear power industry’s growing travails. For example, France — the “poster child” of atomic power — is rethinking its love affair with nuclear energy. Its parliament voted last month to cut the country’s nuclear-generating capacity by a third by 2025 and focus instead on renewable sources by emulating neighboring countries like Germany and Spain.

As nuclear power becomes increasingly uneconomical at home because of skyrocketing costs, the U.S. and France are aggressively pushing exports, not just to India and China, but also to “nuclear newcomers,” such as the cash-laden oil sheikhdoms in the Persian Gulf. Such exports raise new challenges related to freshwater resources, nuclear safety and nuclear-weapons proliferation.

Still, the bulk of the reactors under construction or planned worldwide are in just four countries — China, Russia, South Korea and India.

Six decades after Lewis Strauss, the chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, claimed that nuclear energy would become “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power confronts an increasingly uncertain future, largely because of unfavorable economics. The just-released International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook 2014 report states: “Uncertainties continue to cloud the future for nuclear — government policy, public confidence, financing in liberalized markets, competitiveness versus other sources of generation, and the looming retirement of a large fleet of older plants.”