Deep-sea mining controversy: hotspot teems with mystery animals

Seabed mining

There’s already friction between some of the big car firms and the mining concerns, with the car people backing a moratorium but the miners insisting they wouldn’t be able to produce enough for the EV markets without exploiting the sea bed.
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A vast stretch of ocean floor earmarked for deep sea mining is home to thousands of oddball sea creatures, most of them unknown to science, says BBC News.

They include weird worms, brightly coloured sea cucumbers and corals.

Scientists have put together the first full stocktake of species to help weigh up the risks to biodiversity.

They say more than 5,000 different animals have been found in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean.

The area is a prime contender for the mining of precious metals from the sea bed, which could begin as early as this year.

Death Of The EV Dream, Er, Nightmare

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American fuels vs. Chinese batteries. Place bets now!

PA Pundits International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

Now that the American Dream has been turned into a nightmare in part by overspending that has led to the highest interest rates in the 21^st Century, it is high time to admit that, as Melanie Mcdonagh writes in The Telegraph, the electric vehicle dream, too, “has turned into a nightmare.”

Mcdonagh, who admits she does not drive, points out many problems, among them the horrific impact when a heavy, quiet-running electric vehicle hits an unsuspecting pedestrian or a cyclist. She also notes that some of these “vehicles” are collecting data on route history and road speed that governments (and corporations) can use for remote surveillance (and marketing gimmickry). Another problem is that the much heavier EVs could collapse bridges and force lengthy detours.

Mcdonagh, however, has barely scratched the surface of the mess created by the hipster culture that believes everything sacred…

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Fast electric car charger designed in France can send power to grid

Credit: Renault

H/T Tallbloke

Where do we start with the issues this raises? Availability of the car for use by the owner/driver is an obvious one, fire hazards another. Inadequacy and weather-dependency of the future electricity grid is implied.
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A revolutionary charger for electric car batteries has been designed by Renault, which claims it is 30% more efficient than existing ones and allows energy to be put back into the grid at peak demand times, says Connexion France.

The bi-directional charger will be introduced to the company’s electric vehicles over the next decade, with the new electric R5 probably being the first model to be fitted with it.

All systems go for Australian super battery ‘to bolster energy security’

Image credit: energy-storage.news

The old idea of machinery that produces electricity providing security is on the way out, due to climate obsessions. Now it’s expensive devices such as this which merely store power that are supposed to guarantee the lights stay on, with the obvious problem that the power still has to be generated somewhere, sometime.
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Work is starting and completion is expected by mid 2025 to install the biggest energy storage battery in the southern hemisphere –– the 850 megawatt Waratah Super Battery at the former Munmorah coal-fired power station site, says Coast Community News.

NSW Treasurer and Energy Minister, Matt Kean, announced approval of the project when he visited the site last Thursday, along with Transgrid Executive General Manager of Network, Marie Jordan.

“Transgrid is on track to ensure the super battery, the System Integrity Protection Scheme and network upgrades are completed by mid 2025 in advance of Eraring power station’s earliest closure date,” Jordan said.

Merseyside’s ‘mega-battery’ is switched on – and here come the extravagant claims

Big battery fire [image credit: reneweconomy.com.au

The so-called savings come from *not* paying some of the constraint costs of excess wind energy production. The Sky News headline about saving ‘billions’ turns out to mean some unknown time in the future when many more such installations might be online. They ignore the fact that batteries have a limited life span and, being lithium-ion types, can suffer expensive or even disastrous overheating problems.
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It looks like a self-storage park: rows of shipping containers in a patch of Merseyside waste ground, says Sky News.

But appearances can be deceptive as this is the first step in saving billions of pounds off bills and millions of tonnes of carbon.

It’s a mega-battery.

Is the Cloud damaging the planet? – asks BBC TV’s Panorama

Hyperscale data center in Dublin developed by EdgeConneX. (Image credit: EdgeConneX)

The BBC thinks we should agonise over our ‘carbon footprint’ in relation to computer data centres, due to their massive use of electricity (and water). It’s supposed to be a ‘crisis for which we are all to blame’. Another question then: how is this not also a problem for advocates of expanding electric power into transport and other areas of energy usage with lithium batteries, which are produced with huge volumes of water in the mining process and soak up vast amounts of electricity when collectively recharged?
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Today Monday 6 February 2023, there is a new episode of Panorama. Is the Cloud Damaging the Planet?

The Cloud is fantastic, and we all have come to rely on it, says Memorable TV.

It’s where all of our memories and correspondence live, the engine behind all of our web searches, and the conduit for all of our television binges.

Cloud computing, however, requires massive data centres that consume tremendous quantities of both water and electricity behind the scenes.

2050: The never-ending nightmare of Net Zero

Classifying this as humour may not be appropriate, but we live in hope.
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IT IS the year 2050 and Britain, relentlessly driven by the governing Labour-Green coalition, has achieved Net Zero, imagines David Wright @ TCW (The Conservative Woman).

The nation is quite unrecognisable from the comfortable, well-fed country it was in the early part of the 21st century.

Massive wind turbines cover the landscape; the old ones built 25 years ago now knocked down and lying next to the new ones because it was uneconomic to remove them.

The whole country is covered in a dense spider’s web of power lines from the multitude of wind and solar farms miles from where the power is needed.

Rain stopped York council’s £500k electric bin lorries working

Risky business [image credit: safetysource.co.nz]

York is a notoriously flood-prone place and these wagons under-performed in a big way, restricting themselves to cricketing weather. The costly attempt to help save the planet by adopting net-zero climate dogma thus faltered. The ‘wrong type of weather’ excuse used to refer to UK trains, but now it’s moved on.
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Two electric bin lorries bought by City of York Council in a bid to cut carbon emissions were unable to operate when it rained, it has emerged.

Rain caused the wagons to be taken off the city’s roads for up to 26 days a month several times last year, reports BBC News.

The vehicles stopped working for a combined total of 481 days between January 2021 and November 2022.

The council bought the vehicles in 2020 as part of its drive to achieve net zero emissions by 2030.

Where’s The Electricity?

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Electricity: before you can use it you have to generate it, and the worldwide demand only ever goes up.
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PA Pundits International

By Ronald Stein ~

One of the best-known quotes was “where’s the beef?“ from Clara Peller who was a manicurist and American character actress who, at the age of 81, starred in the 1984  advertising campaign for the Wendy’s fast food restaurant chain.

Today, the huge dark cloud over EV projected sales, is the availability of electricity to charge batteries which leads us to the quote for the foreseeable future, Where’s the electricity?

The Elephant in the EV sales room that no one wants to talk about is the limited amount of electricity available to charge the EV batteries.

The global fleet of road vehicles in 2022 numbered about 1.446 billion, that’s with a “B”.

Of this huge global fleet, only 12 million were electric vehicles (EV) in 2021. Thus, less than one percent of the worldwide road vehicle fleet were EVs, and more than 99-percent…

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Britishvolt: UK battery start-up collapses in blow to ‘net zero’ policy

This calls into question the whole economics of the UK’s climate-obsessive push for a ‘net zero’ economy. A general lack of enthusiasm for such a project is apparent, maybe due to weak EV sales. Where was the cash supposed to come from?
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UK battery start-up Britishvolt has collapsed into administration, with the majority of its 300 staff made redundant with immediate effect, reports BBC News.

Employees were told the news at an all-staff meeting on Tuesday morning.

The firm had planned to build a giant factory to make electric car batteries in Northumberland and was part of a long-term vision to boost UK manufacturing.

But its board is believed to have decided on Monday that there were no viable bids to keep the company afloat.

Is the CO2 battery for long-duration energy storage any good?

The makers say: ‘To charge the battery, we take CO2 at near atmospheric temperature and pressure and we compress it. The heat that is generated during compression is stored. When we exchange the thermal energy with the atmosphere, the CO2 gas becomes liquid.

To generate and dispatch electricity, the liquid CO2 is heated up and converted back into a gas that powers a turbine, which generates power. The CO2 gas is always contained and the entire system is sealed. We don’t use any exotic materials.’
— Looks like another net user of power.
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Italian startup Energy Dome, maker of the world’s first CO2 battery, is officially entering the US market, says Electrek.

Energy Dome’s battery uses carbon dioxide to store energy from wind and solar on the grid.

UK start-up battery firm Britishvolt near collapse as it seeks funding

The UK’s supposedly marvellous ‘net zero’ electric future hits a bump in the road.
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UK battery start-up Britishvolt could run out of money and go into administration after the government rejected a £30m advance in funding, reports BBC News.

The firm wants to build a factory in Blyth in Northumberland which would build batteries for electric vehicles.

The government, which had championed the development, had committed a total £100m to Britishvolt for the project.

It is understood the firm wanted to draw down nearly a third of the funding early but the government refused.

Sales of £1,400 batteries surge amid winter blackout fears

In demand

Soothing words about electricity supplies from power bosses and politicians are not fooling the public. If the wind doesn’t blow on a cold winter evening they need to be prepared. Net zero ideology matters more than people’s well-being it seems.
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Britons are snapping up large batteries costing up to £1,400, as concerns grow over winter power cuts, reports The Telegraph.

A large manufacturer of portable batteries, Anker Innovations Technology, has said that sales were up to three times higher in October than in the previous month.

Normally, it sells power station products to the US where power cuts are more common, while UK customers have traditionally only bought them for camping.

But Britons who worry about blackouts this winter are now stocking up, PR manager Lorna Smith told Bloomberg.

The 757 Powerhouse model, which costs around £1400 and can recharge a portable fridge for 22 hours, is sold out until December “due to overwhelming demand”.

Full article here.
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Meanwhile the UK National Grid informs:
Without the Demand Flexibility Service, we would expect to see a reduction in margins. In this scenario on days when it was cold (therefore likely high demand), with low levels of wind (reduced available generation), there is the potential to need to interrupt supply to some customers for limited periods of time in a managed and controlled manner. [bold added]

You Can’t Make Green Energy Using Only Green Energy

Credit: cleantechnica.com

This article argues it will never be possible. The killer phrase is ‘energy intensive’.
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Not being a dope, you likely realized a long time ago that it was going to take a lot of energy to manufacture the components of the future green energy utopia, says Francis Menton (via Climate Change Dispatch).

Wind turbines, solar panels, electric cars, and so forth — there is lots of steel, other metals, and silica involved that all need to be melted at high temperatures to get formed into the devices.

How are they going to achieve that at a reasonable cost using just the wind and sun as energy sources?

Torches not candles: How to prepare for a blackout – Sky News

Image credit: thecount.com

The appearance in the media of articles like this is a warning sign in itself. The old days of plentiful coal stockpiles next to power stations are almost over, thanks to futile climate obsessions leading to bad energy policy.
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The National Grid’s warning that three-hour planned blackouts may have to be implemented this winter has left many feeling anxious, says Sky News.

People use more energy to keep warm in winter.

And while Britain has a considerable gas supply in the North Sea, we lack space to store it, which means we have to import around 30% from Europe during periods of increased demand.

Electric vehicles are exploding from water damage after Hurricane Ian, top Florida official warns

Typical electric car set-up

Water and electricity don’t mix too well. A headache for owners but also for insurers.
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A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian, reports Fox News.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal.

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

Chile rejects “green” constitution

Chilean lithium deposits [image credit: travelandleisure.com]

By a big majority, the people said no – that’s it. Ideology overload?
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Chile rejected a new constitution on Sunday which, if accepted, would have significantly expanded environmental rights and recognised the urgency of climate action, says Climate Home News.

In a referendum, the South American nation rejected the proposed constitution by 62% to 38% in favour. Voting was mandatory.

As home to the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key component of batteries for electric vehicles, Chile is of strategic importance in the global clean energy transition. This comes with social and environmental tradeoffs.

A Plague Of Green Elephants Is Stampeding Across Australia

Adelaide desalination plant [image credit: Acciona]

Monuments to green stupidity on the rampage.
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Legend says that if you displeased the King of Siam, he would give you a white elephant, writes Viv Forbes (via Climate Change Dispatch).

These rare and protected elephants were incredibly expensive to keep.

So a “White Elephant” came to mean a possession that is useless, troublesome, expensive to maintain, and difficult to dispose of – like a Sacred Cow, but much bigger.

Today, the deluded rulers of the Western world are gifting us and future generations with plagues of Green Elephants – useless, expensive, protected green rubbish.

‘We are not ready’: Divisions deepen over rush to finalise deep sea mining rules

Seabed mining

The ‘energy transition’ is supposed to replace thousands of coal-fired power stations and over a hundred million barrels of oil per year, amongst other fuels like gas and wood, in the name of an invented ‘climate crisis’. Not going to happen on the scale required, even if this new supply of minerals were to become available – with the aid of fossil fuel powered machinery. All that mining will, or would be, waste product one day.
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A growing number of countries are demanding more time to decide on rules that would allow companies to mine the deep seabed for minerals needed to manufacture batteries for the energy transition, says Climate Change News.

Last year, the small island state of Nauru, triggered a never-before-used procedure giving the International Seabed Authority (ISA), the UN body which regulates mining activities in international waters, until July 2023 to fast-track deep sea mining exploitation rules.

Countries have discussed mining the bottom of the oceans for years but no commercial extraction has started in international waters. The ultimatum would allow the nascent industry to apply for mining permits as soon as next year.

Electric cars pull up short of advertised range

Not the latest model

EV drivers must hunt for those elusive working chargers sooner than they were led to believe. And range declines anyway as the battery ages. How shocked are we? Not much.
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Drivers should take advertised electric car ranges with “a pinch of salt”, after research found real-world distances were on average almost a fifth lower than manufacturers’ figures, reports the Telegraph.

Consumer group Which? tested 60 vehicles ranging from large SUVs to smaller cars and found that they had an average range of 192 miles, compared with 238 miles under the official tests used by manufacturers.

With UK drivers facing a ban on sales of new petrol and diesel cars in 2030, there is growing interest in electric models. But worries about running out of charge, known as range anxiety, is a key concern.