California Clean Energy Committee

February 11, 2023

Wall Street Journal:  "Nikola Corp. has started work on hydrogen plants, part of a fueling network the company intends to underpin its push to compete in the nascent zero-emissions truck market.

"The seven-year-old manufacturer has also signed up a handful of hydrogen producers that have agreed to supply hydrogen for Nikola vehicles in parts of the U.S. and Canada, as the company seeks to have enough fuel for about 7,500 heavy-duty trucks by 2026."

January 16, 2023

John Lee Pettimore: "As a miner for 40 years I have worked in various mines around the world. Gold, platinum, copper, coal, lead, zinc, oil and salt. I'm going to tell you something, and here it is. We will destroy the earth in the name of 'Green Energy.' Follow along and I will explain."

January 16, 2023

The Hill:  "So convoluted is the proposed rule that a survey of advanced reactor developers last spring found that 75 percent of those who responded reported that they wouldn’t use the new pathway, preferring instead to jury-rig a path to licensing via the old rules, even though they were purpose-built for technologies that bear at best a passing similarity to the new technologies that companies are attempting to commercialize. The resulting licensing framework, if approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, would constitute a huge setback for efforts to commercialize a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors needed to address the nation’s climate and energy security needs."

January 11, 2023

The Guardian:  "The world’s oceans were the hottest ever recorded in 2022, demonstrating the profound and pervasive changes that human-caused emissions have made to the planet’s climate.

"More than 90% of the excess heat trapped by greenhouse gas emissions is absorbed in the oceans. The records, starting in 1958, show an inexorable rise in ocean temperature, with an acceleration in warming after 1990.

"Sea surface temperatures are a major influence on the world’s weather. Hotter oceans help supercharge extreme weather, leading to more intense hurricanes and typhoons and more moisture in the air, which brings more intense rains and flooding. Warmer water also expands, pushing up sea levels and endangering coastal cities."

January 05, 2023

U.S. DOE: "The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) today released a report showing that hundreds of U.S. coal power plant sites could convert to nuclear power plant sites, adding new jobs, increasing economic benefit, and significantly improving environmental conditions. This coal-to-nuclear transition could add a substantial amount of clean electricity to the grid, helping the U.S. reach its net-zero emissions goals by 2050.

"The study investigated the benefits and challenges of converting retiring coal plant sites into nuclear plant sites. After screening recently retired and active coal plant sites, the study team identified 157 retired coal plant sites and 237 operating coal plant sites as potential candidates for a coal-to-nuclear transition. Of these sites, the team found that 80% are good candidates to host advanced reactors smaller than the gigawatt scale."

January 03, 2023

December 26, 2022

Tech Crunch: "Investors and politicians embracing a vision of an all-electric car future believe that path will significantly reduce global carbon dioxide emissions. That’s far from clear.

"A growing body of research points to the likelihood that widespread replacement of conventional cars with EVs would likely have a relatively small impact on global emissions. And it’s even possible that the outcome would increase emissions.

"The issue is not primarily about the emissions resulting from producing electricity. Instead, it’s what we know and don’t know about what happens before an EV is delivered to a customer, namely, the “embodied” emissions arising from the labyrinthine supply chains to obtain and process all the materials needed to fabricate batteries."

December 26, 2022

Issues in Science and Technology: "Today’s plans to decarbonize global energy systems, which center on a massive expansion in the use of solar, wind, and battery technologies, need to better account for the high environmental and economic costs of materials and minerals."

December 19, 2022

Vox:  "HyTech Power, based in Redmond, Washington, intends to introduce three products over the next year or two.

"The first will use hydrogen to clean up existing diesel engines, increasing their fuel efficiency by a third and eliminating over half their air pollution, with an average nine-month payback, the company says. That’s a potentially enormous market with plenty of existing demand, which HyTech hopes will capitalize its second product, a retrofit that will transform any internal combustion vehicle into a zero-emissions vehicle (ZEV) by enabling it to run on pure hydrogen. That will primarily be targeted at large fleets.

"And that will tee up the third product — the one Johnson’s had his eye on from the beginning, the one that could revolutionize and decentralize the energy system — a stationary energy-storage product meant to compete with, and eventually outcompete, big batteries like Tesla’s Powerwall."

December 16, 2022

PV Magazine: "The Public Utilities Commission approved Net Energy Metering 3.0, slashing payments for sending rooftop solar production to the grid. New rooftop solar projects are now considered uneconomical without an attached battery."