March 27, 2023 - Your Scoop in CDR!
Inside Climate News- CA Central Valley In California’s Central Valley, the Plan to Build More Solar Faces a Familiar Constraint: The Need for More Power Lines
The state could embrace “policy synergy” to deploy solar in areas transitioning out of agriculture, but the transmission lines must come first. In the next two decades, the Valley could accommodate the majority of the state’s estimated buildout of solar energy under a state plan forecasting transmission needs, adding enough capacity to power 10 million homes as California strives to reach 100 percent clean electricity by 2045. The influx of solar development would come at a time when the historically agriculture-rich valley is coping with new restrictions on groundwater pumping. Growers may need to fallow land. And some clean energy boosters see solar as an ideal alternative land use. But a significant technological hurdle stands in the way: California needs to plan and build more long-distance power lines to carry all the electricity produced there to different parts of the state, and development can take nearly a decade. Transmission has become a significant tension point for clean energy developers across the U.S., as the number of project proposals balloons and lines to connect to the grid grow ever longer. All of this is important for everyone else to monitor since California signifies possible problems for others when they reach that point in developing electrification.
Steel to decarbonize using hydrogen? New federal incentives for producing hydrogen are an opportunity to build steel plants that have much lower emissions.
New federal incentives for producing hydrogen are an opportunity to build steel plants that have much lower emissions. This super-size dump truck was the first construction machine sold in North America to be made with low-emissions steel, according to the manufacturer, Volvo Group of Sweden.
European companies have a head start in producing low-emissions steel and finding customers to buy it. But U.S. officials are working to close that gap, and the Inflation Reduction Act contains incentives that provide a strong nudge to use cleaner methods.
The tough part is matching up the companies that want to make cleaner steel with the manufacturers that want to use it in their products, and doing so on a scale large enough to make sense financially. (See Clean Steel Truck)
Boston Globe EV Charging articleThis article discussed very specific points about charging in Boston but there is a relevant point in this following sentence- government owned pricing is not as erratic or fluctuating. This is the source of many big discussions taking place around EV charging on the road. “At ChargePoint terminals owned by MassDOT, such as along I-95 and Route 24, prices have remained steady at 35 cents per kilowatt-hour. Andprices have been steady at 70 cents — the highest in the survey — at the Nouria network. That new entrant is owned by convenience store chain Nouria Energy and has installed a few DC fast chargers so far in the southeastern region of the state. The calculations include fees and taxes tacked on by the operators.”
