Good morning from overcast Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, where all morning the fog horns of ships passing under the Verrazzano have been droning beneath a chorus of birdsong.
The longer I live here, the more I’m struck by this neighborhood’s distinctive soundscape. A pair of woodpeckers regularly hammer away at a dry limb of the Norway maple now bursting with buds outside my window. Starlings rustling the branches of ash, elms and oaks along Shore Road Park. Ragheb Alama songs play in one grocery store, Lou Monte in the other. The doppler yowl of midnight drag racers’ engines ripping down the Belt Parkway.
Right now, every window in the apartment is open and I’m sitting in my pajamas enjoying the breeze blowing away the last pockets of yesterday’s balmy air. It’s at least 20 degrees Fahrenheit cooler today, which is great, because I’d like to put off installing my air conditioner for as long as possible, especially as we brace for a rate hike set to take effect in June.
Over the next three years, New Yorkers could see electric bills spike by 12%. But that’s still probably less than what the Germans are dealing with.
I’m in your inbox to share a bit of news with you, in case you missed it: Germany has finally quit nuclear energy
Europe’s largest economy is the biggest yet to shut down its last reactors, ending a quarter-century struggle that began as a fight against atomic weapons and morphed into a dramatic referendum on whether a hotter world is safer with or without fission power.
To some, this milestone was cause for celebration. A triumphal Greenpeace scheduled “nuclear phaseout fests” with live DJs in Munich and Berlin.
To others, it was a catastrophe. Germany’s wholesale electricity prices soared from about €17 per megawatt-hour in April 2020 to nearly €470 last August before sliding back to €135 at the start of this year. It could rise again: the country’s national energy watchdog recently warned that gas reserves may run out this winter.
The now six reactors taken offline since the end of 2021 produced more carbon-free electricity than all the solar panels on which Germany spent billions of euros over the past decade. But here’s an even more stark illustration, which comes via Johan Christian Sollid, a 25-year-old Danish pro-nuclear advocate.
Denmark may have a reputation for being green, given its world-renowned wind power industry. But the vast majority of the Nordic nation’s overall energy use comes from lighting fossil fuels or wood on fire. Yes, the country generates 50% of its electricity from renewables. But there are no new wind turbines currently under review.
All Denmark’s wind and solar combined pumped out about 21 terawatt-hours (1 terawatt = 1 million megawatts) of electricity in 2022, according to data from the British energy think tank Ember. Germany’s remaining nuclear reactors produced nearly double that last year – and they weren’t even running at maximum capacity.
“These three nuclear reactors in Germany produce more electricity than all Danish windmills and solar panels combined,” Sollid told me as he drove with his best friends down to Berlin to protest against the shutdowns. “In one day they wipe out the whole energy transition of Denmark.”
The reactors could still be brought back online, however, so this may not be the end of German nuclear after all.
You can read the full story here on HuffPost.
It’s more ethical to eat an apple than kale. That’s according to Italian botanist Stefano Mancuso, the so-called “poet-philosopher” of the scientific movement to study plant consciousness who gave a fascinating interview to The Guardian in which he talks about his breakthrough in anesthetizing plants and his work to induce sleep in flora.
“Fusion energy is not nuclear fission.” Fusion power plants may still be a century away, but the nascent Fusion Industry Association cheered U.S. nuclear regulators’ decision to treat technologies to harness the energy of atoms joining together like particle accelerators instead of fission reactors.
It’s expensive not to build power lines. Gird congestion costs surged above $13 billion in 2021, according to a new study by the consultancy Grid Strategies LLC. The regional markets covering 58% of the U.S. saw internal congestion costs double from 2020 to 2021.
New Mexico grapples with “nuclear colonialism.” From Albuquerque Journal’s David Steinberg, quoting the writer Myrriah Gómez: “If Spanish colonialism brought Spanish colonizers and U.S. colonialism brought U.S. colonizers, then nuclear colonialism brought nuclear colonizers – scientists, military personnel, atomic bomb testing and nuclear waste among others.”
SUVs are popular because of U.S. federal policies. A remarkable new Washington Post investigation looked at how the Johnson-era “chicken tax” and Ford-era tailpipe rules encouraged automakers to double down on big gas guzzlers.
Protectionism hits the metals needed for clean energy. Global trade restrictions on so-called critical minerals grew fivefold over the past decade, according to this Reuters summary of an OECD report.
Choo-choo sans CO2. I apologize for that, but this report from the consultancy IDTechEx is very interesting: Worldwide deliveries of zero-emissions trains running either on batteries or hydrogen fuel are set to surge fourfold this year compared to 2022. It’s primarily passenger rail, not freight.
Thanks for reading. Here’s something nice.