As the grid decarbonizes and everything electrifies over the coming decades, a key part of the end game is electricity storage. However, it’s not a prerequisite to getting started, otherwise we wouldn’t have been building as much wind, solar and, in the case of China, hydroelectric generation as we have been for the past decade or two.

At present, there’s a lot more grid storage than most people realize, over 170 GW of deliverable power. Almost the entirety of it is pumped hydro storage, built mostly to give nuclear and coal plants something to do at night and the vast…

Volkswagen (not Voltswagen after all, sadly) is creating some hype recently with its announcement that its Modularer E-Antriebs-Baukasten (MEB) platform will include vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capabilities starting in 2022. There’s only one problem with that: the company is probably 15 years early.

It’s not that I don’t think the rolling stock of batteries won’t be useful and used for vehicle to grid applications, I just think that V2G specifically is a late-stage decarbonization lever and requires very significant numbers before utilities will be interested. Other opportunities provided by vehicle batteries will be exploited and of value much earlier.

I see the…

There are four paths out of climate change denial, and only two of them are likely to be taken by more than the tiniest fraction of deniers.

Death

Deniers skew old, much older than the rest of the populace. So many of them will die denying, but still, they’ll be dead and their science denial will die with them.

Imagine if the architecture of buildings was designed from the beginning to aid occupants to get to know one another, to become acquaintances and possibly friends, to look out for one another. The benefits can be remarkable. In public health and social sciences, the evidence is clear that mental and physical health are improved by social interaction. Simply saying “Hello” to someone can improve their day and their health.

If you are an architect or a developer focused on architectural solutions, you have an opportunity to help shape this.

As we move out of our isolation due to COVID-19 and…

Conversations about death now start with Facebook.

That was possibly the oddest insight I’ve gained from a couple of conversations in the past year. Sharon Hartung, one of my former bosses at the global tech giant we used to work for, is now the founder of Your Digital Undertaker. Her firm deals with the messy reality that passing in the digital age includes a lot of passwords, accounts, and odd legal conditions that require attention in the way that property and pets used to.

Sharon probably extended the strategic side of my brain more than anyone I’ve ever dealt with…

The nuclear industry requires, but doesn’t pay much of the price of, several overlapping layers of security on its international and national supply chains, generation sites, and waste management. It’s spread across a hard to fathom number of budget lines, and there doesn’t appear to have been any attempt to consolidate the costs prior to this article. This was covered recently in a CleanTech Talk with Paul Werbos, formerly with the US National Science Foundation, and he agreed that the costs were large and mostly under the radar.[1]

Per reactor annual costs appear to be in the range of $50…

For the past few months, I’ve been digging into the implications of Canada’s recently announced $170 CAD per ton of CO2 carbon price cap, something the country will move toward annually in $10 and $15 increments before reaching it in 2030. One focus has been Alberta’s electrical grid, where the higher carbon price will radically change the economics of natural gas vs renewables. …

A tremendous amount of attention in governmental and traditional media circles is being given to the promise of a “hydrogen economy”. In general, traditional media and its journalists are non-technical, so coverage tends to follow along with the press releases from the fossil fuel industry and major automotive players who are continuing to try to push the rope of fuel cell, light vehicles up hill.

Governments are putting billions into the promise of the hydrogen economy, prodded by oil and gas lobbyists, as pointed out in CleanTechnica and other sites in different pieces recently. Germany is committing $10.76 billion. Canada…