John Paul Stevens Is Wrong About the Second Amendment, History, and School Violence

John Paul Stevens Is Wrong About the Second Amendment, History, and School Violence

Amy Swearer / @AmySwearer / March 29, 2018 

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens recently argued for repealing the Second Amendment. (Photo: www.Dennis Brack/Black St/Newscom)

Commentary By

Amy Swearer @AmySwearer

 

Amy Swearer is a visiting legal fellow at the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens penned an op-ed in The New York Times on Tuesday, advising that gun control activists at recent demonstrations have not gone far enough in their demands for more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms.
According to Stevens, it isn’t enough to deny millions of young adults the most effective means of self-defense by raising the minimum age of all firearm purchases to 21.
It isn’t enough, even, to ban the civilian possession of all semi-automatic firearms, thereby reducing law-abiding citizens to reliance on bolt-action rifles, revolvers, and pump-action shotguns.
No.
Stevens informs anti-gun advocates that they must demand a repeal of the Second Amendment.
He insists—as he did in his dissenting opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)—that the Second Amendment was centered solely on the Framers’ concerns about the threats posed by a national standing army, a concern he labels “a relic of the 18th century.”
He claims that “[f]or over 200 years after the adoption of the Second Amendment, it was uniformly understood as not placing any limits on either federal or state authority to enact gun control legislation.”
He excoriates the National Rifle Association, who he states concocted the theory of an individual right to keep and bear arms in order to perpetrate a fraud against the American public on behalf of gun manufacturers.
He demands the elimination of the Second Amendment in order to make our schoolchildren safer than they have been since the court’s 2008 Heller decision.
These allegations would be much more bearable if they were simply the result of differing interpretations of an unclear history. But this is not the case: Every single allegation Stevens makes is objectively untrue.
1. The Framers—not the NRA—first articulated the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right.
While it is true that the founding generation mistrusted standing armies, the Federalists and Anti-Federalists maintained basic, implied assumptions throughout their disagreements over the drafting and ratification of the Constitution—including the understanding that the new Constitution gave the federal government no authority to disarm the citizenry.
That individuals had an underlying right to keep and bear arms was simply assumed. In the words of prominent Second Amendment scholar Nelson Lund, the debate “was only over the narrow question of whether an armed populace could adequately assure the preservation of liberty.”
Consider the following:

• James Madison, in Federalist No. 46, distinguished armed individuals from the protections of federalism and the existence of the militia: “Besides the advantage of being armed, which the Americans possess over the people of almost every other nation, the existence of subordinate governments, to which the people are attached and by which the militia officers are appointed, forms a barrier … more insurmountable than any which a simple government of any form can admit of.”
• Noah Webster provided the following summary during the ratification debates: “Before a standing army can rule, the people must be disarmed; as they are in almost every kingdom in Europe. The supreme power in America cannot enforce unjust laws by the sword; because the whole body of the people are armed … .”
• Samuel Adams, at the Massachusetts Ratifying Convention, declared: “The Constitution shall never be construed … to prevent the people of the United States who are peaceable citizens from keeping their own arms.”

Similar understandings can also be found from, among others, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and George Mason. These Founders were not articulating an original idea, either, but building on the foundations laid by such scholars as William Blackstone, Cesare Beccaria, and John Locke.
2. The existence of an individual right to keep and bear arms is apparent throughout the nation’s history.
Even a cursory review of the pre-eminent legal scholars in 18th and 19th century America reveals 200 years of overwhelming adherence to an individual right to keep and bear arms:

• George Tucker, whose 1803 American edition of Blackstone’s “Commentaries” was the standard treatise on common law for an entire generation, annotated Blackstone to reflect American rights this way: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed, and this without any qualification as to their condition or degree, as is the case in the British government.”
• William Rawle, in his 1825 leading constitutional treatise “A View of the Constitution of the United States of America,” wrote regarding the Second Amendment: “No clause in the Constitution could by any rule of construction be conceived to give Congress a power to disarm the people. Such a flagitious attempt could only be made under some general pretense by a state legislature. But if by any blind pursuit of inordinate power, either should attempt it, this amendment may be appealed to as a restraint on both.”

In other words, Rawle describes an amendment that limits the ability of the state and federal governments to disarm individuals, directly contradicting Stevens’ claim of 200 years of unanimous understanding that it does no such thing.

• Joseph Story, the highly regarded Supreme Court justice and author of the 1833 “Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States,” built off of Tucker’s language in his own treatise and wrote: “The right of the citizens to keep and bear arms has justly been considered as the palladium of the liberties of a republic; since it offers a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary powers of rulers; and will generally, even if these are successful in the first instance, enable the people to resist and triumph over them.”
• Jonathan Elliot’s 1836 compilation, “The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution,” places the “right to keep and bear arms” under the index heading “Rights of the Citizen declared to be—” with the other first nine amendments. The 10th Amendment, which clearly addresses the power of the states, is placed elsewhere.

3. The Heller opinion had absolutely no negative effect on the safety of the nation’s students.
This, perhaps, is the most disappointing assertion of Stevens’ op-ed, because it is an objective, quantifiable fact that America’s schoolchildren are safer today than they have been in over three decades, even while the number of legally owned guns per capita has increased.
Since the early 1990s, the number of students killed on school campuses has plummeted by 75 percent. The percentage of high school students carrying weapons to school dropped from 14 percent in 1993 to 4 percent in 2014, and the percentage of students reporting easy access to a loaded firearm at home similarly decreased. The number of shooting incidents involving students has also steadily declined.
While this increase in safety may not be caused by the increase in privately owned firearms and concealed carry permits, there is certainly no increase in danger to attribute to Heller, a case with a relatively narrow holding that individuals have a right to keep operable handguns in their homes for self-defense.
If there is, on any side of the gun control discussion, a fraud being perpetrated, it is by those who portray a false history and promote incorrect facts in order to advocate ineffective policies.
No one fails to mourn the loss of life after tragic shootings. But if we are to honor the victims of gun violence, as Stevens correctly suggests we should, we ought not to manipulate reality in their name.
We should, instead, embrace the facts as we find them, and make our policy decisions based upon knowledge—not emotion and rhetoric.

Watch a Man Who Lived as a Woman Tear Apart the Lies of LGBT Activists

Watch a Man Who Lived as a Woman Tear Apart the Lies of LGBT Activists

Rachel del Guidice / @LRacheldG / March 29, 2018 

"I started out as a transgender kid, at least they would say that today, at 4 years old," Walt Heyer says. "The problem is that they're diagnosing kids like I was with gender dysphoria when they don't have gender dysphoria." (Photo courtesy Walt Heyer)

Walt Heyer, who used to live as a transgender woman, now travels the country speaking about his experiences and reaching out to those who regret their own gender change.
The Daily Signal spoke with Heyer on camera about his story, as well as the lies he says society and the media tell young people today about gender. An edited transcript of the interview is below the video.
Rachel del Guidice: I’m joined today by Walt Heyer, a former transgender person. And he’s here today to tell us a little bit about his story. Can you run through the highlights of where you were at years ago, and then why you are here today at a pro-life conference talking about your story?
Walt Heyer:  Yeah, well, I started out as a transgender kid, at least they would say that today, at 4 years old. The problem is that they’re diagnosing kids like I was with gender dysphoria when they don’t have gender dysphoria; they’re just curious about gender, which we all should be, curious about gender.
And so it led me to a point of thinking that I needed a gender change. And then one of these experts in gender dysphoria diagnosed me with gender dysphoria and said I needed hormone therapy and surgery. As you can see from standing here, they were totally wrong because I was born a boy.
And I went through all the surgery and became Laura Jensen and lived eight years as a female to discover that nobody needs to change genders. It’s absolutely a totally bogus procedure, not only from the standpoint of hormone therapy and surgery. The people are suffering from comorbid disorders that need to be addressed and treated; and if they did so, we wouldn’t have any transgenders.
Del Guidice: We see the media highlighting stories all the time of LBGT activists and others.  … Their stories are championed, about them kind of rejecting who they were and becoming a different person, another gender. Would you say that you have a similar experience with media paying attention to your story? 
Heyer: The media doesn’t pay any attention to me at all, because it doesn’t fit their narrative. And so it’s much more fun for them to promote LGBT activist people and put them on the front cover of magazines and make a big to-do about it.
The fact of the matter is, there isn’t one person, not one doctor, not one psychiatrist, not anybody [who] can even prove one transgender even exists beyond the fact that they say they are. Which is why it’s a psychological disorder and it’s not a medical disorder, and it doesn’t require medical surgery to treat. They just need psychotherapy.
Del Guidice: What would be your message to youth today? As a child you were taught that you were a girl, and you were not. And so many youth today are bombarded with this message that they should be a different gender. What is your message to them?
Heyer: Well, I realized that schools have popularized changing genders, and it’s more of a fad today than a reality in terms of people actually having gender dysphoria. So I think the kids need to get sharp.
I mean, kids are really sharp and if they sit down and look and ask for the information on what proof does anybody have that gender dysphoria exists … the youth themselves in our schools could actually end this nonsense in a heartbeat.

Solar Energy and Energy Independence

America's Solar Energy Potential

Every hour, the sun radiates more energy onto the earth than the entire human population uses in one whole year.

The technology required to harness the power of the sun is available now. Solar power alone could provide all of the energy Americans consume — there is no shortage of solar energy. The following paragraphs will give you the information you need to prove this to yourself and others. You do not need advanced math skills to follow and perform the arithmetic examples shown below. Anyone who can balance a checkbook or calculate the total square feet of floor space in his or her home, and understand why an area measuring 10 yards by 10 yards equals 100 square yards, can perform the following arithmetic examples and prove that American energy independence could be achieved with solar energy alone.
Science tells us that every square meter of the earth's surface, when exposed to direct sunlight, receives about 1000 watts (1 kilowatt) of energy from the sun's light. Depending on the angle of sunlight, which changes with the time of day, and the geographical location [see map below], the power of the sun's light will be somewhat more or less than 1 kilowatt-hour per hour for every square meter of the earth's surface exposed to the sun.
On average, and particularly in the Sunbelt regions of the Southwestern United States, every square meter area exposed to direct sunlight will receive about 1 kilowatt-hour per hour of solar energy. However, scientists estimate that sunlight will provide useful solar energy for only about 6 to 7 hours per day because during the early hours and late hours of the day the angle of the sun's light is too low. So, for example, if the sun's light provides 6 productive hours of solar energy per day, then a square meter of land in direct sunlight will receive about 6 kilowatt-hours of solar energy during the course of a day.
Scientists like to measure things using the metric system. However, most Americans are unfamiliar with the metric system. (Europeans use the metric system.) It is easier for Americans to think in square feet and square yards because feet and yards are common lengths in the United States. So, for the sake of clarity and because this is written for an American audience, all measurements will be converted from meters to yards.
A meter is just a little longer than a yard (about 3 and ¼ feet to a meter, compared with 3 feet to a yard). There are 10.8 square feet in a square meter. There are 9 square feet in a square yard (3x3=9). A simple calculation can accomplish the conversion from square meters to square yards. A square yard is 83.33 percent of a square meter. Prove this by multiplying 10.8 (the number of square feet in a square meter) by 83.33%. The answer is nine (the number of square feet in a square yard). If you perform the calculation you will see that the answer is slightly less than the whole number 9 (but close enough for our purpose). Using this conversion, we can say that a square yard of land in direct sunlight receives 1000 x 83.33% = 833 watts of solar energy. This calculation can also be used in reverse to convert yards to meters, simply divide by .8333 (833 divided by .8333 = 1000 rounded).
Every square yard of land, if exposed to direct sunlight, receives about 833 watts of solar energy [NOTE: see the map above, and adjust the estimated amount of solar energy accordingly]. Therefore, a one square yard area exposed to continuous direct sunlight [in an optimal geographical location] for six hours will have received 6 hours x 833 watts = 4,998 watt-hours of solar energy during the course of a day. In round numbers, a one square yard area will receive about 5000 watt-hours (5 kilowatt-hours) per day of solar energy. Another way to obtain this result would be to take the 6 kilowatt-hours per meter (explained above in the third paragraph) and apply the conversion calculation (6 x 83.33% = 5 rounded).
Americans can assume, at least in the Sunbelt regions of the southwestern United States, that every square yard of land exposed to direct sunlight will receive about 5 kilowatt-hours per day of solar energy.
With the above information in mind, perform the following exercise: Measure an area ten yards long and ten yards wide. That would be thirty feet by thirty feet. Take a good look at the size of it. You are looking at an area covering 100 square yards. If that area were in direct sunlight all day it would receive about (5 x 100) 500 kilowatt-hours per day of solar energy. Now go look at your home electric bill. Your electric company calculates your home electric bill based on how many kilowatt-hours of electrical energy you use. Find the total amount of electricity that you have been billed for (given in kilowatt-hours). The amount of kilowatt-hours on your bill is for an entire month. If your home is a typical residential electric customer, you and your family consume between 500 and 1000 kilowatt-hours of electricity per month. Compare the quantity of electric energy your home consumed in one month with the quantity of energy the sun gives freely to a 100 square yard area exposed to direct sunlight. One hundred square yards of sunshine provides as much energy in 1 to 2 days as an average family uses in an entire month!
It would be great if 100% of the sunshine became electricity, but solar energy and electricity are not the same. Technology accomplishes the conversion of solar energy to electricity. Several different technologies are used; perhaps the one that most people have heard of is the solar panel, made from photovoltaic cells called PV.
For a detailed explanation of photovoltaic cells there is a very good article on the Internet located at:
www.howstuffworks.com/solar-cell.htm, it is well written and easy to read.
Conversion of one form of energy to another always causes a loss of energy. In other words, the new form of energy will be less than the original. Efficiency is the word scientists use to describe the difference in power resulting from the conversion of one form of energy to another. The efficiency of commercially available solar panels (PV) is about 15%. This means that when a solar panel converts the sun's light to electricity, only about 15 percent of the energy in the sunlight becomes electricity. The same thing is true of gasoline in your car. Your car's engine can only convert about twenty-five percent of the energy in gasoline to mechanical energy that turns the wheels.
With an average efficiency of 15 percent, a square yard of solar photovoltaic cells (PV) would produce (5 kilowatt-hours of solar energy multiplied by 15% =) .75 kilowatt-hours of electric energy per day. Solar panels (PV) covering an area ten yards by ten yards (100 square yards or 900 square feet) would produce 100 x .75 = 75 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day.
Seventy-five kilowatt-hours per day is a lot of electricity for a single-family home. If part of the electricity is stored in a home battery, or is used to electrolyze water for producing hydrogen gas, and the gas is stored for use by a fuel cell when needed, then 100 square yards covered with solar panels would provide an average family with energy independence. Most detached family homes have more than 100 square yards (900 square feet) of roof, or that much space around their homes where solar panels could be installed.
In the Southwest, if you look at any commercial or industrial park, or any typical mall or supermarket you will see that most of the buildings have flat roofs. Those roofs require insulation to lower the cost of air conditioning on hot days. If those roofs where covered with solar panels the sun would provide electricity for the air conditioning and save businesses millions of dollars per month that would otherwise be paid to the utility companies.

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Another technology, Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), takes a different approach to harnessing the power of the sun. Unlike photovoltaic cells, CSP uses mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on a focal point, which magnifies the suns heat. Similar to holding a magnifying glass in the sun, focusing the light onto a piece of paper until the paper catches on fire.
CSP technology has more than one form. Troughs, dishes and towers are the different forms available today. A CSP dish or tower looks like a modern glass sculpture and contributes aesthetically to the landscape. CSP systems can achieve 30 percent efficiency, or about twice the efficiency of standard photovoltaic cells (2 x .75 = 1.5 kilowatt-hours per square yard per day).
Large Concentrating Solar Power plants create the thermal energy equivalent to conventional fossil fuel power plants. After the sun sets, CSP plants generate electricity from cost-effective thermal storage, providing 24-hour service to the power grid.
Consider the solar energy potential of one acre of land. There are 43,560 square feet in an acre. Divide the number of square feet in one acre by 9 (the number of square feet in one square yard) and you find that there are 4,840 square yards in one acre of land. A CSP dish, tower, or trough receiving an acre of sunshine would yield about (1.5 kilowatt-hours per square yard times 4,840 square yards per acre) 7,260 kilowatt-hours of electricity per day, at 30% efficiency. One acre has enough solar energy potential to yield 7.26 megawatt-hours of electricity per day, using technology that exists now. (Each thousand kilowatts is one million watts. A million watts is a megawatt.)
Consider the solar energy potential of one square mile of land. A square mile is 640 acres. One square mile of sunshine has the potential of providing (640 acres x 7.26 megawatt-hours) 4,646 megawatt-hours per day of electricity using existing CSP technology at 30% efficiency.
Ten thousand square miles is a plot of land 100 miles long by 100 miles wide. Multiply 640 acres by 10,000 square miles equals 6,400,000 acres. With a yield of 7.26 megawatt-hours of electricity per day per acre, a CSP system receiving 6,400,000 acres of sunshine would produce about 46,464,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per day.
What does this mean?
The entire State of California uses about 50,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per hour at peak time, and much less during off-peak hours: Sweltering California declares power emergency —Cal ISO expects record demand at 52,336 megawatts.
www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/2004-07-08_SUMMER_DEMAND.PDF size: 68 Kb
www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/2003-01-28_OUTLOOK.PDF size: 170 Kb
www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/peak_demand/2002-07-10_CHART.PDF size: 20 Kb
Suppose that California uses an average of 38,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per hour over a 24-hour period, then 24 hours x 38,000 megawatts = 912,000 megawatt-hours per day, multiplied by 365 = 333,880,000 megawatt-hours per year. This supposed average is too high because in 2005, California actually consumed 288,245,000 megawatt-Hours (MWh) for the entire year: www.energy.ca.gov/electricity/gross_system_power.html
A CSP farm large enough to capture the solar energy radiating on an area of land 100 miles long by 100 miles wide can produce about 50 times more electricity in a day than California consumes in a 24-hour period. For example, 50 x 912,000 = 45,600,000 megawatt-hours per day.
Imagine driving your car 100 miles along one side of the CSP farm, then turn 90 degrees right and drive 100 miles along another side, then turn 90 degrees right again and drive another 100 miles, then make another 90 degree right turn and drive another 100 miles to complete driving a 100 mile square. Inside that area is 10,000 square miles or 6,400,000 acres.
A 10,000 square mile solar energy farm that produces 46,464,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per day would produce 365 x 46,464,000 = 16,956,360,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year or about 17 trillion kilowatt-hours, which is 17,000 terawatt-hours or 17 petawatt-hours.
Tera- (symbol: T) is a prefix in the SI system of units denoting 10¹², 1 Trillion or 1,000,000,000,000 (1 million million) therefore, 1 terawatt = 1 Trillion watts.
In physics and mathematics, peta- (symbol: P) is a prefix in the SI (system of units) denoting 10¹⁵, 1 Quadrillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000 (one billion million) therefore, 1 petawatt = 1 Quadrillion watts.

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The CSP examples above assume 30 percent energy conversion efficiency and 100 percent land use. In a practical application, not all of the land area will be used. This is because of unfavorable terrain and the need for service roads and land for plant facilities. And, the solar collectors must be individually positioned for optimal orientation to the angle of sunlight and given enough space between collectors to prevent a collector from casting a shadow on adjacent collectors; the result is unused space between the collectors. For these reasons, actual electricity production will be less than the numbers shown in the examples. However, the desert regions of the southwestern United States will easily produce 7 hours of productive sunlight per day, and often exceed 1 kilowatt of solar energy per square meter, so in that respect the above calculations are conservative.
All of California's electricity can be produced from 200 square miles of sunshine; 128,000 acres of desert land. Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam, covers more than 200 square miles. Given an area the size of Lake Mead, for the production of electricity from solar energy, California would be energy independent.
CSP plants seem to use a lot of land, but in reality, they use less land than hydroelectric dams for generating an equivalent electricity output, if the size of the lake behind the dam is considered. The same is true for coal plants. A CSP plant will not use any more land than a coal power plant if the amount of land required for mining and excavation of the coal is taken into consideration.

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If the sunshine radiating on the surface of an area 100 miles wide by 100 miles long would provide all of the electricity that America needs, every day, why would Americans hesitate to use it? There are millions of open acres in the deserts of America, where the sun's energy does nothing more than heat rocks and sand.
In 1942, General Patton established a training area in the deserts of the southwestern United States to train and prepare American soldiers to fight in the deserts of North Africa during World War II. Patton's original training area was 18,000 square miles, and then expanded to 87,500 square miles (350 miles x 250 miles), an area stretching from Boulder City, Nevada to the Mexican border and from Phoenix, Arizona to Pomona, California. One million soldiers trained in this area using tanks, artillery and aircraft. The desert is very resilient, there is little evidence today of injury to the desert ecosystem.
www.militarymuseum.org/CAMA.html
The point being, the federal government can “borrow” public land from the National and State desert Parks for the purpose of building a national solar energy system. The system would only be needed until fusion energy, or something like it, is developed, then the land would be returned to nature in the care of the public parks service. Time, sand and the desert wind would gradually remove all evidence of technologies brief occupancy. In the meantime, the lizards, turtles, snakes and scorpions would hide and sleep in the shade under the giant mirrors and troughs.
The reason why solar energy has not been development on a large scale is the cost. Not the cost of sunshine, that is free. Private investors resist putting their money into solar energy projects because of the high upfront capital investment required for plant and equipment. The initial investment is what causes the price per kilowatt-hour for electricity from solar energy to be higher than the price of electricity generated from natural gas or coal. The estimated kilowatt-hour rates assigned to solar energy are not based on the cost of electricity generation, they are based on the cost of the investment capital and the requirement to earn a return on investment, or pay back the loan for the investment. Remember, the solar fuel is free.
Solar energy would not be expensive if the cost of the initial capital investment is not factored into the price per kilowatt-hour.
With the obvious enormous public benefit a national solar energy system would provide, why is the government holding back? Should solar energy be a public works project? We have a good example that may help answer that question. Southern California, as it is seen today, would not exist without Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct, because without the Colorado River water the current population of Southern California would never have happened. Southern California does not have enough natural water to support the demand of a small fraction of its current population. The federal government funded Hoover Dam and the Colorado River Aqueduct. The economy of Southern California, having grown because of that funding and other public investments, has returned more in tax revenue than was spent building the dam and aqueduct, plus the sale of water and electricity has earned enough to pay the federal government back the amount of the original funding, with interest.
The Following is quoted from the Executive Summary of a report by Sargent & Lundy engineering, titled: Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology Cost and Performance Forecasts, delivered to the U.S. DOE National Renewable Energy Laboratory:
Based on this review, it is S&L’s opinion that CSP technology is a proven technology for energy production, there is a potential market for CSP technology, and that significant cost reductions are achievable assuming reasonable deployment of CSP technologies occurs. S&L independently projected capital and O&M costs, from which the levelized energy costs were derived, based on a conservative approach whereby the technology improvements are limited to current demonstrated or tested improvements and with a relatively low rate of deployment.

The projections for electrical power consumption in the United States and worldwide vary depending on the study, but there will be a significant increase in installed capacity due to increased demand through 2020. Trough and tower solar power plants can compete with technologies that provide bulk power to the electric utility transmission and distribution systems if market entry barriers are overcome:

• Market expansion of trough and tower technology will require incentives to reach market acceptance (competitiveness). Both tower and trough technology currently produce electricity that is more expensive than conventional fossil-fueled technology.
  
• Significant cost reductions will be required to reach market acceptance (competitiveness). S&L focused on the potential of cost reductions with the assumption that incentives will occur to support deployment through market expansion.

For the more technically aggressive low-cost case, S&L found the National Laboratories' "SunLab" methodology and analysis to be credible. The projections by SunLab, developed in conjunction with industry, are considered by S&L to represent a "best-case analysis" in which the technology is optimized and a high deployment rate is achieved. The two sets of estimates, by SunLab and S&L, provide a band within which the costs can be expected to fall. The figure and table below highlight these results, with initial electricity costs in the range of 10 to 12.6 ¢/kWh and eventually achieving costs in the range of 3.5 to 6.2 ¢/kWh. The specific values will depend on total capacity of various technologies deployed and the extent of R&D program success. In the technically aggressive cases for troughs / towers, the S&L analysis found that cost reductions were due to volume production (26%/28%), plant scale-up (20%/48%), and technological advance (54%/24%).
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:
www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/35060.pdf size: 589 Kb
Downloads a 47 page Adobe PDF document.

Solar Energy R&D:   Solar cost decreases 10% per year

Solar Energy News:
•   Solar at the cost of Coal — Welcome to the Revolution — “How can solar energy–with its reputation for high cost–compete with baseload coal, still the dominant fuel for U.S. electric power generation? ... I truly believe it’s doable, ... I believe it’s even doable without assigning a cost to carbon. .. Seen in that light, solar at the cost of coal may not be so far-fetched after all.”
•   Artificial Photosynthesis - U.S. Department of Energy — “After nearly 3 billion years of evolution, nature can effectively convert sunlight into energy-rich chemical fuels using the abundant feedstocks of water and carbon dioxide. All fuels used today to power vehicles and create electricity, whether from fossil or biomass resources, are ultimately derived from photosynthesis... plants and photosynthetic microbes were not designed to meet human energy needs - much of the energy captured from the sun is necessarily devoted to the life processes of the plants. Imagine the potential energy benefits if we could generate fuels directly from sunlight, carbon dioxide, and water in a manner analogous to the natural system, but without the need to maintain life processes. The impact of replacing fossil fuels with fuels generated directly by sunlight would be immediate and revolutionary.”
•   Turning sunlight into liquid fuels — Using the energy of sunlight to produce pure hydrogen and oxygen from water molecules without electrolysis
•   Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants —MIT Scientists mimic essence of plants' energy storage system
•   Harnessing sunlight on the cheap —MIT student project aims to develop cost-efficient solar power
•   Solar farm to rise over 3 square miles in Arizona —Spanish company to build, operate $1 billion plant based on mirrors, turbine
•   Solar farms to rise on California rooftops
    —Southern California Edison Co. plans to build the nation's largest solar energy installation—an array of collector cells covering two square miles of rooftops that could power about 162,000 homes.
•   The Solar America Initiative
•   Silicon Nanocrystals for Superefficient Solar Cells
•   Storing Solar Power Efficiently —Thermal-power plants that store heat for cloudy days could solve some of the problems with solar power
•   Sunlight used to smelt zinc
•   High-schoolers finish solar car race
•   One man's castle runs on hydrogen
•   Solar power boom comes with pains
•   Honda Entering Solar Cell Market for Homes and Vehicles
•   BP, Caltech team up on solar power —Silicon in nanorods could open door to radical breakthrough
•   New World Record Achieved in Solar Cell Technology  •December 2006
    —New Solar Cell Breaks the 40 Percent Efficient Sunlight-to-Electricity Barrier: Boeing [NYSE: BA] today announced that Spectrolab, Inc., a wholly-owned subsidiary, has achieved a new world record in terrestrial concentrator solar cell efficiency. Using concentrated sunlight, Spectrolab demonstrated the ability of a photovoltaic cell to convert 40.7 percent of the sun's energy into electricity. The U.S. Department of Energy's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colo., verified the milestone.
“This solar cell performance is the highest efficiency level any photovoltaic device has ever achieved,” said Dr. David Lillington, president of Spectrolab. “The terrestrial cell we have developed uses the same technology base as our space-based cells. So, once qualified, they can be manufactured in very high volumes with minimal impact to production flow.”
High efficiency multijunction cells have a significant advantage over conventional silicon cells in concentrator systems because fewer solar cells are required to achieve the same power output. This technology will continue to dramatically reduce the cost of generating electricity from solar energy as well as the cost of materials used in high-power space satellites and terrestrial applications.
“These results are particularly encouraging since they were achieved using a new class of metamorphic semiconductor materials, allowing much greater freedom in multijunction cell design for optimal conversion of the solar spectrum,” said Dr. Richard R. King, principal investigator of the high efficiency solar cell research and development effort. “The excellent performance of these materials hints at still higher efficiency in future solar cells.”
 Spectrolab high-efficiency multijunction solar concentrator cells
    —Boeing Spectrolab

•   Cheap, Superefficient Solar  —Solar-power modules that concentrate the power of the sun are becoming more viable.
•   Cheaper, More Efficient photonic crystals  —A new type of material could allow solar cells to harvest far more light.
•   Solar Power at Half the Cost  —A new roof-mounted system that concentrates sunlight could cut the price of photovoltaics.
•   Supplying the World's Energy Needs with Light and Water  —A new roof-mounted system that concentrates sunlight could cut the price of photovoltaics. A leading chemist says that a better understanding of photosynthesis could lead to cheap ways to store solar energy as chemical fuel.
Solar Energy Storage:
Nanowire battery can hold 10 times the charge of existing lithium-ion battery December 18, 2007 “Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries. The new technology, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours.”
Interview with Dr. Cui, Inventor of Silicon Nanowire Lithium-ion Battery Breakthrough
High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) Transmission:
GE HVDC technology
ABB HVDC technology
High-Voltage Transmission Lines
Superconducting Transmission Lines
Nanotechnology leads to discovery of super superconductors
High-Voltage Composite Electricity Transmission Lines:
Composite Technology Corporation
Composite-Reinforced Aluminum Conductor (CRAC)
CRAC-TelePower: Electricity and Data over the same line
Produced by the California Energy Commission
The 44 page report is a 238 KB Adobe PDF document.
Reference links:
Power from the sun
CSP - How it Works
Concentrating Solar Power
Frequently Asked Questions
Boeing Spectrolab Solar Cells
The Solar Tres power tower plant
Solar Tres Project - solarpaces.org
Thermal solar power tower - history
Solar Radiation Resource Information
The National Solar Thermal Test Facility
TroughNet - Parabolic Trough Solar Power
Thermal Storage Research and Development
The El Paso Salinity Gradient Solar Pond (SGSP)
Parabolic Trough Power Plant System Technology
Solar Two Demonstrates Clean Power for the Future
Advantages of Using Molten Salt for thermal storage
Frequently Asked Questions about Photovoltaics (PV)
Download SunLab Solar Energy Technology White Papers
Report to Congress: 1,000 megawatts of Solar power by 2006 size: 956 Kb
U.S. Department of Energy's Solar Energy Technologies program
NREL and Research Partners Work to Trim Solar Electricity Costs
Research and Development Advances in Concentrating Solar Power
Lunar Solar Power System by Professor of Physics David Criswell
Assessment of Parabolic Trough and Power Tower Solar Technology Cost and Performance size: 589 Kb
The Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems (CSES) at the Australian National University (ANU)

FRESNEL LENS:
Green Power Science
When placed in the sun, a fresnel lens will act as a giant magnifying glass and concentrate light to a very small point. Most large fresnel lenses will concentrate several square feet of sunlight to less than an inch resulting in a hot spot over 2000 degrees Fahrenheit. This will cause wood to instantly catch on fire or zinc and copper metal to melt in a few seconds or even burn and vaporize. We have boiled 12 oz. of water in a dark glass bottle in 90 seconds and burned a hole in a stainless steel bowl.. One gallon of water was boiled in 30 minutes.

Why It Shouldn’t Matter If We Repeal The Second Amendment

Why It Shouldn’t Matter If We Repeal The Second Amendment

In a properly functioning America like the Founders envisioned, a repeal of the Second Amendment would be virtually meaningless.

By Benjamin R. Dierker

March 30, 2018

There is no legal right to own a firearm in the United States. The Constitution does not give citizens the right to own weapons, and no legal or historical arguments support the idea that it does. Instead, a much deeper and more important philosophy provides for gun ownership: natural rights. These rights are not given, but protected. Not to expand citizens’ rights, but to limit government’s power.
Gun ownership is so integral to the United States’ DNA because armed Americans overthrew the world’s most powerful military empire using guns. The freest, most prosperous nation in human history, and a good deal of prosperity around the globe, owes its origin to guns. But the issue is far deeper than guns; it is about rights.
In a properly functioning America like the Founders envisioned, a repeal of the Second Amendment would be virtually meaningless. The right existed already; the Constitution merely secures it. Unfortunately, our society has loosened its grasp on natural rights philosophy and devolved into dependency on government-sanctioned rules. Today, however, even unambiguous text is under scrutiny by Democrats as prominent as former Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens.

The Distinction Between Natural and Legal Rights

The Constitution mentions both natural and legal rights, and the distinction is critical. Within the Bill of Rights, some activities, like speech, are innate human rights protected against government interference. Other rights, like a speedy trial, are legal rights, which are products of the structure the Constitution created.
This distinction is crucial, because natural rights are articulated as endowed by God, while legal rights are endowed by government. The Founding Fathers understood natural rights to exist independent of—or in spite of—government. They simply exist for free people walking the earth. Legal rights are granted by men, and can be altered or destroyed by changes to law or the structure of government. The natural and legal rights in the Constitution are so fundamental that the Bill of Rights was added as an explicit bar to encroachment from the federal government.
The right to keep and bear arms is a natural right. It can be derived and is protected in multiple ways. Inherently, humans have natural grounds for self-preservation and defense. This right is beyond the reach of any person or government. Individuals can protect themselves using any necessary tools or actions.
Individuals also have a natural right to own property. Far be it for the federal government to regulate the personal items a free citizen enjoys in her home. To regulate personal property in private use on the grounds of its danger would be to inspect every knife, lighter, hammer, gardening tool, and gas-powered stove.
Owning a gun is well within the canon of natural rights that any free people should enjoy. Natural rights are so critical because they are innate in us. If the government dissolved or a new one took its place, it should have no effect on the basic entitlements of man to life, liberty, and the pursuit of his own happiness. The righteous task of the founding, therefore, was to craft a government impotent to crush these rights.

Constitutions Don’t Establish Rights, But Secure Them

Many state constitutions included a list of natural rights, not to provide for these rights, but to promise the people that the government would not tread on them. The federal Bill of Rights comes as a series of amendments, not because they were afterthoughts, but because the U.S. Constitution was written to limit the power of the federal government such that it would be powerless to act where it was not authorized.
Debate persisted for years over whether the people’s natural rights should be enumerated at all. Some argued natural rights were so obvious that an enumeration was unnecessary, not to mention the government’s limited reach and small scope at the time. In a 1787 letter to James Madison, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no government should refuse, or rest on inference.”
Jefferson and others believed that leaving natural rights to “inference” put far too much trust in government and future generations in power. Still others believed that enumerating certain rights would create a presumption against other rights. If the government only mentioned a few natural rights, the government could encroach on every other right a free citizen ought to enjoy, citing no bar against its encroachment.

That’s Why We Have the Ninth Amendment

The solution was the Ninth Amendment, which preserves “other rights retained by the people.” Combined with the rest of the Bill of Rights, the federal government is clearly prohibited from trampling on free citizens’ natural or legal rights. According to the Ninth Amendment, a free citizen retains the right to self-protection and property, among a vast reservoir of other rights, and the government cannot interfere.
At its most basic level, a gun is a tool and item of personal property, which any person has a natural right to acquire independent of, and especially in spite of, government. A repeal of the Second Amendment should not truly harm gun ownership. Nevertheless, there is a reason it was explicitly included in the Bill of Rights, and listed so prominently. The reason is that human nature cannot be trusted, and both time and power destroy the protections created for free people.
Today, it is all too clear that if the Second Amendment were not so explicit, the tyranny of the majority would have suppressed the right long ago. The government did not create the right to own a gun, it secured that right, and thank God the Founding Fathers had the foresight to unambiguously prohibit the government from infringing on that right.
The calls to repeal the Second Amendment are voiced by radicals. Despite their high level of education, these radicals have not internalized the philosophy of natural rights or the significance of the Ninth Amendment. Yet the people retain their God-given rights, no matter how tyrannical protestors become.

Benjamin Dierker is a law student at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University. He holds a master's degree in public administration and a bachelor's degree in economics, both from Texas A&M University. He is a Christian and a Texan and loves to talk about both.

Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar | bLAGI

Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar 

Total Surface Area Required to Fuel the World With Solar

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download high resolution PDF

Note in 2015: this post is from 2009. Some of the links below may be broken. The IEA has updated estimates since 2009, but the overall trends are the same. We hope that with the implementation of demand-side efficiency measures worldwide, long-range estimates will prove to be overestimated.
According to the US Department of Energy (Energy Information Administration), the world consumption of energy in all of its forms (barrels of petroleum, cubic meters of natural gas, watts of hydro power, etc.) is projected to reach 678 quadrillion Btu (or 715 exajoules) by 2030 – a 44% increase over 2008 levels (levels for 1980 were 283 quadrillion Btu and we stand at around 500 quadrillion Btu today in 2009).
I wonder what surface area would be required and what type of infrastructural investment would be required to supply that amount of power by using only solar panels. To create fuel that can be used in vehicles and equipment I am assuming that some of the electricity generated would be used to create hydrogen. We should all start wondering about these things since we will have really no other choice* by the turn of the next century.
So to find this out we start with the big number 678,000,000,000,000,000 Btu.
Converting this to KW•h [1 Btu = .0002931 kW•h (kilowatt hours)] makes 198,721,800,000,000 kW•h (199,721 TW•h). This is for an entire year. As a comparison, the average household uses approximately 18,000 kW•h per year (1/11 billion of the total world usage).
We can figure a capacity of .2KW per SM of land (an efficiency of 20% of the 1000 watts that strikes the surface in each SM of land).
So now we know the capacity of each square meter and what our goal is. We have our capacity in KW so in order to figure out how much area we’ll need, we have to multiply it by the number of hours that we can expect each of those square meters of photovoltaic panel to be outputting the .2KW capacity (kilowatts x hours = kW•h).
Using 70% as the average sunshine days per year (large parts of the world like upper Africa and the Arabian peninsula see 90-95% - so this number is more than fair), we can say that there will be 250 sun days per year at 8 hours of daylight on average. That's 2,000 hours per year of direct sunlight.
Therefore, we can multiply each square meter by 2,000 to arrive at a yearly kW•h capacity per square meter of 400 kW•h.
Dividing the global yearly demand by 400 kW•h per square meter (198,721,800,000,000 / 400) and we arrive at 496,804,500,000 square meters or 496,805 square kilometers (191,817 square miles) as the area required to power the world with solar panels. This is roughly equal to the area of Spain. At first that sounds like a lot and it is. But we should put this in perspective.
If divided into 5,000 super-site installations around the world (average of 25 per country), it would measure less than 10km a side for each. The UAE has plans to construct 1,500MW of capacity by 2020 which will require a space of 3 km per side. If the UAE constructed the other 7 km per side of that area, it would be able to power itself as a nation completely with solar energy. The USA would require a much larger area and approximately 1,000 of these super-sites.
According to the United Nations 170,000 square kilometers of forest is destroyed each year. If we constructed solar farms at the same rate, we would be finished in 3 years.
There are 1.2 million square kilometers of farmland in China. This is 2 1/2 times the area of solar farm required to power the world in 2030.
Compare it to the Saharan Desert:

The Saharan Desert is 9,064,958 square kilometers, or 18 times the total required area to fuel the world.
By another measure, "the unpopulated area of the Sahara desert is over 9 million km², which if covered with solar panels would provide 630 terawatts total power. The Earth's current energy consumption rate is around 13.5 TW at any given moment (including oil, gas, coal, nuclear, and hydroelectric)." This measure arrives at a multiplier of 46 times the area needed and shows that my numbers are very conservative.

Compare it to highways:

At a density ratio of 800km per 1000 square kilometers and a total length of 75,440km, the overall area of the US interstate highway system (constructed entirely between 1956 and 1991 – 35 years) is 94,000 square kilometers, or 20% of the overall required area for the world. The US also consumes about 20% of the world’s energy. (if the efficiency of conversion from solar to electricity was 100%, the area of USA highway would be equal to exactly that required to run the world). Indeed if every nation were to embark on a state program of the scale of the US highway system we could be finished with the required infrastructure in 20-40 years.

Compare it to golf courses:

The typical golf course covers about a square kilometer. We have 40,000 of them around the world being meticulously maintained. If the same could be said for solar farms we would be almost 10% of the way there.

Also remember that we are working here with a worst case scenario based on projections for the year 2030 that assume a lot about growth. What could we do to lower the overall Btu load? And what other sources of clean energy could contribute to lower the area needed for solar panels?
Wave:

World wave energy potential = 2,100,000,000,000 KW•h (2,100 TW•h) or 1% of the required load.

Wind:

A 5 MW turbine can be expected to produce 17 GWh per year (they are 40% effective from their peak rated capacity - 5 MW x 365 x 24 = 43.8 GWh). Therefore, it would require 11,748,294 of the 5 MW capacity turbines to create the same yearly output. There are 500 million cars in the world so it's not like that's an unattainable goal from a manufacturing standpoint. And each 5 MW turbine is a 30 year lifespan money making machine for whoever buys it. The same can not be said for my car. But if we can build 90,000 Cape Wind size installations, we would be there on wind alone. Based on that installation, each turbine requires 1/2 square mile of area for offshore sites. This would require 5.85 million square kilometers for 2030 world energy needs.

Here is a graphic for wind based on the notes above. The area in the North Sea is taken directly from the OMA proposal by Rem Koolhaas the pdf of which can be seen here.


click for larger image
Existing Hydroelectric:

I say existing hydroelectric because it would be damaging to the environment to construct more dams on rivers. It is difficult to design new large-scale hydro without having a deleterious effect on the ecosystems of the watersheds that are fed by the existing river (wel-planned run-of-the-river projects could be an exception).
As of 2004, hydroelectric power accounted for 6% of the energy production in the world. A conversion of this percentage into energy capacity makes 28 quadrillion Btu (492 quadrillion Btu x 6%). As a percentage of 2030 levels and accounting, this would be more like 4% and accounting for a hopeful decommissioning of existing dams, let’s assume 2%.

So these other sources together have the potential to reduce the area required by 5% - 25% based on the amount of wind power we tap into. Solar panels are really going to have to do the vast majority of the work but a sustainable solution is going to require a great mix of solutions that are diversified as much as possible.
The technologies are improving and the efficiencies are getting greater. We must make it our goal to by the end of this century construct the area required by at the same time reducing our demand and by starting the necessary infrastructure projects today everywhere around the world. Otherwise the consequences are unthinkable.
*As for nuclear power, it currently produces 2.5% of the world's energy or 10 quadrillion Btu per year. In 2008, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) predicted that nuclear power capacity could double by 2030, though that would not be enough to increase nuclear's share of electricity generation. As for the non-renewable resource of uranium, according to the nuclear industry's own estimation:

Current usage is about 65,000 tU/yr. Thus the world's present measured resources of uranium (5.5 Mt) in the cost category somewhat below present spot prices and used only in conventional reactors, are enough to last for over 80 years.

80 years does not equal sustainable. And this is only assuming current use rates (the 5% of world energy needs).
An average plant puts out 3 cubic meters of spent fuel each year. Assuming 1000 plants operating around the world (there are 500 today), that would makes 3,000 cubic meters per year. Over those 80 years this would create a volume of 240,000 cubic meters or a cube of 60 meters on each side (bigger than the Pantheon and roughly equivalent to the volume of the Gol Gumbaz Mausoleum. What do we do with that amount of dangerous radioactive material that has a half life of 2 million years?
Update 1: some comments being posted here:
reddit
digg
Update 2: Many comments have to do with the distribution of energy. I reiterate that I am in favor of a maximizing of diversity of clean energy technologies and of points of generation. For example, if we use the figure of 6 billion people in the world, and if over the course of each person's lifetime they would be responsible for creating a panel to use their equal share of the worldwide demand (never mind the non-equal distribution) then we would each be in for a 9m x 9m square, or something that gives off 33,000 kW•h per year. With a typical home roof installation that assumes 15 kW capacity. Obviously this extreme localization is also not ideal -- what is needed is a plan that captures the best balance of centralized/localized and best mix of renewable and clean resources.
Update 3: SES technology would bring down the solar area required to 315,000 square kilometers (based on the 629 kW•h per square meter listed on the site sourced as from Southern California Edison and Sandia National Laboratories). This is a 40% reduction just on efficiency of the capturing device. The technology will continue to get better and better...

Wind Turbines & Power Density

Wind Turbines & Power Density

Wind Turbines & Power Density

How many windmills?   How much land area?     Compare with solar power density   Compare with serious power plant

Wind turbines can't be spaced tip-to-tip, nor can they be closely lined up one behind the other.  Windmills slow down the air, and there's no point in putting windmills up where the air is guaranteed to be slow.  Therefore, wind turbines need to be spread out.  When you do so, how much power can you get out of how much land area? "Contemporary wind projects are typically rated at 25 to 100 MW.  A 25 MW project might have 60 to 70 turbines covering 1500 acres," says  The EPA .  Really, that's a little over 4 MW of *average* power from a total of about 65 windmills. (This was typical of early California wind turbines.) The 4 MW divided by 1500 acres is about 2.67 kW per acre.  But an acre is 4047 square meters, so the power density works out to be about 0.7 watts per square meter.  By comparison, direct sunlight averages 200 watts per square meter around the clock, around the year, around the US. Scale that up to 1000 MW (more or less standard for a serious power plant) by multiplying the number of windmills by 250.  That's over 16,000 windmills on about 375,000 acres (585 square miles). UPDATE 8/16/01  Murray County, WI. Navitas Energy, L.L.C. will erect 87 Enron 1.5-MW (nameplate) wind turbines on a 10,000 acre site.  This amounts to 13 kW (peak)/acre, or 3.2 watts per square meter of land area.  The wind turbines' diameter will be 70 meters.  Given an estimated 50% efficiency, the 1.5-MW output should be achieved at any speed over 10.7 meters per second (24 miles per hour), up to the wind spped where the windmill must be turned off. Assuming a  capacity factor  of 30%, the average power density will be 3.9 kW per acre (0.95 watts per square meter). Scale that up to 1000 MW around-the-clock power and the land area occupied would be 256,000 acres, which is 400 square miles. If the capacity factor were 40%, then the 1000-MW goal could be met with only 300 square miles of wind turbines.

DOE: If it weren’t for coal-fired electricity plants, the Northeast would have blacked-out during recent bomb-cyclone

Anthony Watts

 

 

March 29, 2018

From the “when the going gets tough, renewables can’t cut it” department. Wind power generation actually dropped 5% during this period

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration GOES-16 satellite caught a dramatic view of the bomb cyclone moving up the East Coast on Jan. 4, 2017. NOAA Photo

From the Daily Caller: Coal-fired power plants kept the lights on for millions of Americans during January’s bomb cyclone, according to an Energy Department report warning future plant retirements could imperil grid security.
Energy analysts at DOE’s National Energy Technology Laboratory found that coal power kept the lights on for millions of Americans during the bomb cyclone that pummeled the eastern U.S. from late December to early January.

NETL analysts found that coal plants made up most of the incremental power utilities relied on to keep electricity flowing during the cold snap. Nuclear and oil power plants played a big role, NETL found, but coal provided 55 percent of extra power across six grid operators.

“During the worst of the storm from January 5-6, 2018, actual U.S. electricity market experience demonstrated that without the resilience of coal- and fuel oil/dual-firing plants … the eastern United States would have suffered severe electricity shortages, likely leading to widespread blackouts,” NETL researchers reported.

NETL found that “without available capacity from partially utilized coal units, PJM would have experienced shortfalls leading to interconnect-wide blackouts.” PJM Interconnection is the largest independent system operator in the U.S., serving 65 million customers.
“In PJM, the value of fuel-based power generation resilience during this event was estimated at $3.5 billion,” NETL reported. Coal power capacity retirements could mean baseload power plants that kept the lights on this winter won’t be around during a future coal snap.
Coal plants have been prematurely retired en mass since 2012, due to a combination of federal and state policies and low-priced natural gas. Republicans and the coal industry blamed Environmental Protection Agency regulations for contributing to coal plant closures, which President Donald Trump seized upon during the 2016 campaign.

“The 30 GW of coal that ramped up to meet the surge in PJM load clearly includes the units most likely to retire due to insufficient market support, given those units were not running at baseload levels before the event,” NETL reported. As more of these units retire, the ability of the system to respond to extreme events with reliance, let alone economically, deteriorates.”

…
NETL’s study is only the latest to highlight risks of continued power plant closures. ISO New England warned in January that continued coal, oil and nuclear plant retirements increased the risks of rolling blackouts during extreme weather.
New England has become increasingly reliant on natural gas and renewable energy, stemming from state and federal policies to shutter coal and oil power plants. However, pipeline capacity has not kept up with demand, causing supply issues and high prices.

ISO New England president Gordan van Welie said “coal and oil power plants rarely run most of the year, but they are still needed during extreme weather events. Nuclear power is also a key contributor.”
Two of the region’s four nuclear plants are set to retire in the coming years, along with coal and oil plants. More wind and solar power won’t be enough to support the grid during cold snaps, van Welie warned.
New England was so desperate for natural gas to keep the heat on it took two shipments containing liquefied natural gas from Russia.
More here
Full DOE report here: https://www.netl.doe.gov/energy-analyses/temp/Power%20System%20Reliability_Report_Published.pdf

#ParisAgreement climate accord fails – CO2 emissions growing worldwide- Trump vindicated for pulling out | Watts Up With That?

#ParisAgreement climate accord fails – CO2 emissions growing worldwide- Trump vindicated for pulling out | Watts Up With That?

#ParisAgreement climate accord fails – CO2 emissions growing worldwide- Trump vindicated for pulling out

Anthony Watts

   

March 26, 2018

The Paris Climate Accords Are Looking More and More Like Fantasy

By David Wallace-Wells

Remember Paris? It was not even two years ago that the celebrated climate accords were signed — defining two degrees of global warming as a must-meet target and rallying all the world’s nations to meet it — and the returns are already dispiritingly grim.

This week, the International Energy Agency announced that carbon emissions grew 1.7 percent in 2017, after an ambiguous couple of years optimists hoped represented a leveling off, or peak; instead, we’re climbing again.

Even before the new spike, not a single major industrial nation was on track to fulfill the commitments it made in the Paris treaty. To keep the planet under two degrees of warming — a level that was, not all that long ago, defined as the threshold of climate catastrophe — all signatory nations have to match or better those commitments. There are 195 signatories, of which only the following are considered even “in range” of their Paris targets: Morocco, Gambia, Bhutan, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, India, and the Philippines.

This puts Donald Trump’s commitment to withdraw from the treaty in a useful perspective; in fact, his spite may ultimately prove perversely productive, since the evacuation of American leadership on climate seems to have mobilized China, eager to claim the mantle and far more consequential to the future of the planet because of its size and relative poverty, to adopt a much more aggressive posture toward climate. Of course those renewed Chinese commitments are, at this point, just rhetorical, too.

More here

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From the recently released IEA report:
Global energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 1.4% in 2017, an increase of 460 million tonnes (Mt), and reached a historic high of 32.5 Gt. Last year’s growth came after three years of flat emissions and contrasts with the sharp reduction needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change.
The increase in carbon emissions, equivalent to the emissions of 170 million additional cars, was the result of robust global economic growth of 3.7%, lower fossil-fuel prices and weaker energy efficiency efforts. These three factors contributed to pushing up global energy demand by 2.1% in 2017.

The trend of growing emissions, however, was not universal. While most major economies saw a rise in carbon emissions, some others experienced declines, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Mexico and Japan.
The biggest decline came from the United States, where emissions dropped by 0.5%, or 25 Mt, to 4 810 Mt of CO2, marking the third consecutive year of decline. While coal-to-gas switching played a major role in reducing emissions in previous years, last year the drop was the result of higher renewables-based electricity generation and a decline in electricity demand. The share of renewables in electricity generation reached a record level of 17%, while the share of nuclear power held steady at 20%.
…

The growth in energy-related carbon dioxide emissions in 2017 is a strong warning for global efforts to combat climate change, and demonstrates that current efforts are insufficient to meet the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

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It seems President Trump was right. The U.S. isn’t even a part of the Paris accord anymore since president Trump pulled out of the accord last year, and yet it is the leader in CO2 emission reductions by country.
Predictably, warmists will not be amused.