New Forbes & RCE, Reiner Kuhr on electric grids, a bird re-discovered in Papua New Guinea

Forbes piece on offshore wind, Real Clear article on coal, Kuhr on the podcast, & a very rare bird rediscovered

In this “news” letter, I usually focus on my latest travel, speeches, media hits, and writing. This week, I have to give a long shout out to my colleague, Tyson Culver, who has spent the last two weeks traveling in Europe, shooting interviews for a new project we are working on (more news on that soon) and attending the COP27 climate meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh. As I mentioned last week, the International Atomic Energy Agency held a screening on Wednesday of our first documentary, Juice: How Electricity Explains The World, at the IAEA’s pavilion. Tyson did a Q&A after the screening with Craig Jantzen of the IAEA. He also did a Q&A yesterday with Sama Bilbao, the director general of the World Nuclear Association about the contribution that nuclear energy can make to sustainable development. He did a great job. The video of that appearance is here. If you listen to the chat he did with Sama, you will get a preview of our next project. As usual, there are many things happening in the global energy market and I have written about some of them this week. So without further ado, four items today: 

• Forbes: Scuttled Offshore Wind Plans Are Good News For Ratepayers & Whales

• RCE: Not Beyond Coal

• Podcast: Reiner Kuhr on grid economics

• First photos & video of the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon

The image of the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon (Otidiphaps insularis) above was taken by Doka Nason of the American Bird Conservancy.
 

This morning, I published a piece in Forbes about the ongoing troubles in the offshore wind sector, an industry I’ve been following for many years. I began:

• The hype about offshore wind energy keeps getting scuttled by reality. That’s the clear conclusion from last month’s announcement that Spanish utility company, Avangrid, was halting work on the proposed 1,200-megawatt Commonwealth Wind project because it was “no longer viable.” The company also announced it was delaying the start of another offshore project, the 800-megawatt Park City Wind project.

• While Avangrid has since said it would still move forward on the Commonwealth project, here’s the undeniable truth: the fewer offshore wind turbines get built, the better it will be for ratepayers, the commercial fishing industry, and the critically endangered North Atlantic Right Whale. As I reported in these pages last year, the history of the domestic offshore wind industry is chock-full of lofty goals and wrecked plans. Over the past two decades, numerous projects have set sail only to end up stranded on the shoals of despair. The problems today are the same ones that doomed the infamous Cape Wind project: cost and permitting.

I concluded:

• Whether the issue is cost to ratepayers, grid resilience, or the preservation of North Atlantic Right Whales, it’s abundantly obvious that the entire notion of offshore wind is a boondoggle. Rather than industrialize the oceans, policymakers should paddle back to shore with a sober focus on scalable, low- or no-carbon sources of electricity generation, including, of course, natural gas and nuclear energy.

• I have one more conclusion, and it’s one that I’ve earned after watching the development of the renewable-energy sector for more than a decade. It’s this: the only thing dumber than onshore wind is offshore wind.

Again, here’s a link.

On Wednesday, Real Clear Energy published my latest piece on the global coal market. The story is timely given the ongoing negotiations at the COP27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh. I began:

• On Tuesday, the International Energy Agency released a report on coal which it touts as being “the most comprehensive analysis to date” as to what would be required to “bring down global coal emissions rapidly enough to meet international climate goals.” In a press release, IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol said “a major unresolved problem is how to deal with the massive amount of existing coal assets worldwide.” The “Coal in Net Zero Transitions” report is being released during the second week of the COP27 climate meetings in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. And while the report contains a myriad of graphics and charts about how coal use might be reduced, the hard reality is that coal continues to be an indispensable fuel for power generation and industrial production. For proof of that, we need only look at India and China. 

• Before doing so, let me quote again from the IEA’s press release, which says that “far from declining, global coal demand has been stable at near record highs for the past decade. If nothing is done, emissions from existing coal assets would, by themselves, tip the world across the 1.5°C limit.” 

I concluded:

• In short, the latest IEA report on coal shows yet again, that energy transitions do not happen quickly and depend on many factors. As author and polymath Vaclav Smil wrote in 2014, “are inherently protracted affairs. The unfolding shift from fossil fuels” he declared, “will be no exception.” 

• Put another way, King Coal isn’t dead yet. Not by a long shot. As I have been saying for more than a decade, if the countries of the world are serious about reducing emissions, the path forward is clear: N2N, which stands for natural gas to nuclear. 

Again, here’s a link.

This graphic ran with my piece in Real Clear Energy

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Reiner Kuhr: You can "go nuclear or go renewable, you can't do both"  

Reiner Kuhr is an energy technology economist and the co-founder of the  Center for Academic Collaboration Initiatives. Kuhr worked in the electric power sector for more than 40 years. In his second appearance on the podcast (his first was on May 27, 2021) Kuhr talks about his recent paper on the problems and costs associated with integrating renewables into electric grids, why batteries are an expensive way to reduce emissions, and why you can “go nuclear, or go renewable, but you can’t do both.”
In this episode of the Power Hungry Podcast (#148) he also provided an excellent explanation of why so few people understand energy and electric grids. He said that assessing the economics of a given project or grid requires a mix of six disciplines: climate science, policy (which is where the advocacy work gets done), economics, grid operations, implantation, and technology. 

This episode was recorded on October 19, 2022. The audio (and soon, the transcript) are on my website. As always, the interview is also on YouTube.   

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First video ever of the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon 

Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon recorded on Fergusson Island     

I don’t belong to any NGOs or political parties. But I’m a big fan of the American Bird Conservancy, which has done very good work on wind turbine siting and other issues. This week, ABC published a remarkable article about the “elusive Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon,” which was seen again for the first time in 140 years. It’s a remarkable story of perseverance and the scientific method. And one that shows, yet again, that the natural world is still full of things that we don’t fully understand. As this entry in DataZone says the species which has a great scientific name (Otidiphaps insularis) is “poorly-known and is known to science only from two specimens, collected in 1882.”
 
Rather than try to explain what happened, here’s an excerpt of the piece published yesterday on ABC’s website:

• A team of scientists and conservationists has rediscovered the elusive Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon, a large, ground-dwelling pigeon that only lives on Fergusson Island, a rugged island in the D'Entrecasteaux Archipelago off of eastern Papua New Guinea. Like other pheasant-pigeons, the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon has a broad and laterally compressed tail, which, along with its size, makes it closely resemble a pheasant. The bird has been observed several times over the years by local hunters, but the newly taken photographs and video are the first time the bird has been documented by scientists since 1882, when it was first described. Ornithologists know very little about the species, but believe that the population on Fergusson is very small and decreasing. The research team photographed the pheasant-pigeon with a remote camera trap at the end of a month-long search of Fergusson. “When we collected the camera traps, I figured there was less than a one-percent chance of getting a photo of the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon,” said Jordan Boersma, postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and co-leader of the expedition team. “Then as I was scrolling through the photos, I was stunned by this photo of this bird walking right past our camera.”

• “After a month of searching, seeing those first photos of the pheasant-pigeon felt like finding a unicorn,” added John C. Mittermeier, Director of the Lost Birds program at ABC and co-leader of the expedition. “It is the kind of moment you dream about your entire life as a conservationist and birdwatcher.”

• The expedition team — which included local Papua New Guineans working with Papua New Guinea National Museum, Cornell Lab of Ornithology, and American Bird Conservancy — arrived on Fergusson in early September 2022. They spent a month traveling around the island, interviewing local communities to identify locations to set up camera traps in hopes of finding the pheasant-pigeon. The steep, mountainous terrain on Fergusson Island made searching for the bird extremely challenging. 

• The expedition was the first-ever camera trapping study conducted on Fergusson Island. The team placed 12 camera traps on the slopes of Mt. Kilkerran, Fergusson's highest mountain, and deployed an additional eight cameras in locations where local hunters had reported seeing the pheasant-pigeon in the past. “When we finally found the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon, it was during the final hours of the expedition,” said Doka Nason, the member of the team who set up the camera trap that eventually photographed the lost bird. “When I saw the photos, I was incredibly excited.” A local hunter named Augustin Gregory in the village of Duda Ununa west of Mt. Kilkerran provided a breakthrough lead on where to find the bird. Gregory reported seeing the pheasant-pigeon on multiple occasions in an area with steep ridges and valleys and described hearing the bird's distinctive calls. Following Gregory's advice, the team set up cameras in an area of dense forest. A camera placed on a ridge at 3,200 feet (1,000 meters) near the Kwama River above Duda Ununa eventually captured the Black-naped Pheasant-Pigeon walking on the forest floor two days before the team was scheduled to leave the island. The expedition was supported by American Bird Conservancy (ABC) and The Search for Lost Birds, a collaboration between BirdLife International, ABC, and Re:wild. The Search for Lost Birds identified the pheasant-pigeon for an expedition after a global review revealed it was one of a few bird species that have been lost to science for more than a century. 

I hope you have a great weekend.

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