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Energy

Shortage of cables means grid delays and rising costs

Every major economy is fighting for supplies needed to expand their electricity grids. Over 80 MILLION kilometers of cable will have to be replaced by 2040 under current decarbonisation plans, says the International Energy Authority.

In the UK alone that is 100 km of heavy-duty overhead cable per DAY from now until 2040.  the rate of cable laying is unprecedented – approximately 16 TIMES the rate over the past 30 years.  The manpower and the resources do not currently exist.

Demand is pushing up prices, and queues for energy are growing longer.   New housing developments in West London are being quoted 10 YEARS, before they can get a grid connection, and  the same is happening everywhere.

Britain’s first electricity networks commissioner, Nick Winser, warned in a landmark report earlier this year that the UK would need to connect about four times as much new transmission capacity to the network in the next seven years as has been built since 1990.

To meet this challenge, Britain will need to halve the time it takes to build and install pylons and cables for a new transmission project from 12-14 years to just seven.

He also said existing energy policies were “badly out of date”, and the UK needed a new strategy to shore up its manufacturing supply chain, which would involve training skilled workers.

High-voltage cables and equipment looked set to be in short supply for years or even decades, said Winser, because already producers were struggling to meet demand. As happened with vaccines during the pandemic, companies and even governments will find themselves competing to snap up available stocks.

And skills gaps threatened to “haunt” the UK’s green agenda, he added, unless there was heavy investment to create a new reservoir of trained staff.

Already energy companies have been “scrambling” to secure manufacturing slots, according to Alistair Phillips-Davies, chief executive of SSE. He told the Observer that his company, which has this year committed to investing more than £40bn in green energy and grid upgrades over the coming decade, had secured “around 80%” of the materials it would need for its grid upgrades.

British-owned cable manufacturer XLCC is planning to build the UK’s first factory making high-voltage undersea cables in Ayrshire to help meet demand. Production could begin as early as 2026.

Ian Douglas, XLCC’s chief executive, believes demand for high-voltage cables will increase sixfold over the next seven years, as global use of renewable energy expands. Its first order is from its parent XLinks, for four 3,800km cables to connect solar and windfarms in the Moroccan Sahara to the UK.

“The whole impetus and momentum of net zero risks being hamstrung by a lack of cable,” said Douglas. “The requirement to upgrade the grids is global, and it’s treble what we’re investing globally today.”

The government has accepted the recommendations of Winser’s report, and has already announced steps to …

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People

ChatCGT Founder Has Massive Bugout Ranch

Is it a bad sign or a good sign that the boss of ChatCGT has made preparations for a serious collapse of the US economy? Sam Altman, 38, has already declared that Artificial Intelligence is likely to “break capitalism” if it becomes successful and widespread.

Chat CGT is a new search tool that is taking the internet by storm because of the way it replies to questions by combining the entire contents of the WWW and everything else out there.

Altman obviously believes in the potential for things in the US to go very badly. He has amassed a store of guns, gold, antibiotics, batteries, water and gas masks, and bought a patch of land on the California coast to which he can retreat. Preumably, this is in case OpenAI misses the mark and in the pursuit of profit, accidentally creates machines that enslave us all.

“Successfully transitioning to a world with superintelligence is perhaps the most important — and hopeful, and scary project in human history,” Altman wrote in a blog post.

At the heart of the transformation is Altman, 37, a billionaire university dropout. Before OpenAI, he ran Y Combinator, the start-up accelerator that has invested in hundreds of companies working on everything from 3D-printed rockets to reversing ageing and included Airbnb, Dropbox and Reddit.

The breadth and ambition of Y Combinator’s companies could be seen as the expression of Altman’s belief in the power of technology to dramatically alter, and improve, the human condition. Paul Graham, the Y Combinator founder who chose Altman as his successor, said in a 2016 New Yorker profile: “I think his goal is to make the whole future.”

Graham, a revered figure in Silicon Valley, in 2009 named the 24-year-old Altman as one the most interesting start-up founders alongside Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

Short and wiry, Altman is known for his intellect, deep connections among the tech elite and extreme work ethic. He once became so engrossed in a start-up he came down with scurvy. He admitted that he has, “no patience for things I’m not interested in: parties, most people”.

A month after Musk stepped down, Altman quit Y Combinator to take over as OpenAI’s chief. It had become clear to him that to make the impact he wanted, OpenAI could not remain a charity.

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Weather forecast on local TV
Community

Heating bills UP in SoCal storms

Residents of Southern California have endured months of droughts, followed by floods, and now face brutal increases in the cost of home heating. That is if they are lucky enough to still have a power supply.

Close to 100,000 customers were without power in California Wednesday, according to PowerOutage.Us, as parts of the state contended with strong winds.

California imports 90 percent of its gas, so it’s reliant on pipelines. and many of those were closed for unplanned maintenance in November and December, limiting supply flowing to California and other Western states, said Aleecia Gutierrez, director of the California Energy Commission’s Energy Assessments Division. A pipeline explosion in 2021 had already reduced capacity to move gas from Texas and neighboring states, where much of California’s supply comes from.

Additionally, the past few months in California have seen an unusually high demand for heating. That came after a historically hot summer strained the state’s electricity grid, which is largely powered by natural gas, said Sung Won Sohn, an economics professor at Loyola Marymount University.

California also has less natural gas storage than it once had, in part because Aliso Canyon in Los Angeles, one of the biggest natural gas storage sites in the Western United States, reduced its capacity after a major leak there in 2015. That means the state has fewer reserves when demands are high.

Taken alone, each of these issues may not have been enough to lead to such a big spike in gas prices, said Severin Borenstein, an energy economist at the University of California, Berkeley. But, “it has been a near-perfect storm of factors to boost the price of natural gas,” he said.

The relationship between demand and price takes time to appear, said Chris Higginbotham, a spokesman for the U.S. Energy Information Administration. “If a given storm comes and drives up the price of natural gas,” he said, “it typically takes time for that effect to show up at a retail level.”

Demand, however, is “one of the primary drivers of natural gas wholesale prices,” Higginbotham said, and if a storm like the current one were to increase demand, it “could affect the price utilities are paying.” Those costs would ultimately be passed on to consumers.

Data from the USEIA show that stored gas in the Pacific region is well below five-year average levels, whereas all other regions in the country are close to or above average. This potential supply shortage could further raise prices, Higginbotham said.

Donna Biroczky, a social media marketer, has struggled to keep her Fontana home warm. “Our bill was probably triple this year from last January,” she said.

She has shut off her gas fireplaces and opted for electric heaters, stocking her house with “more blankets for people to use.”
She said skyrocketing prices for things that once felt affordable were forcing people to make trade-offs. “People are having to …

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A Husk micro-grid plant in Nasarawa, central Nigeria. Photo supplied.
Energy

Nigeria grows off-grid power

Nigeria announced in 2017 that it would no longer be pursuing a national grid strategy, but instead would develop island power in specific areas across the nation of 231m people. For example, Husk’s six new microgrids have been developed simultaneously in Nigeria as part of a rural electrification program backed by the World Bank. The projects show the considerable possibilities available from the scaling up of microgrid rollout programs.

Located in Nasarawa State, the solar hybrid microgrid projects provides clean, reliable and affordable electricity to about 5,000 households and 500 businesses. Six communities in the Doma and Lafia local government areas will gain access to electricity for the first time. Communities benefiting are Rukubi, Idadu and Igbabo in Doma and Kiguna, Akura and Gidan Buba in Lafia. Developed by Husk Power Systems, the projects will also support local agricultural activities. Manoj Sinha, founder and CEO of Husk Power Systems said: “We have made great progress in rolling out new minigrids and we’re seeing high rvenue per customer at our first 6 sites. We see a potential to add another 500 minigrids in Nigeria over the next 4-5 years.”

Husk is an Indian company that set up in Nigeria after the African country adopted India’s 2016 minigrid policy verbatim in 2017. However, Nigeria proceeded to add minigrids to their national electrification plan and created policies for DISCOMs to integrate with minigrids.

In Juanary 2023 Husk Power Systems secured funding from Germany’s development finance institution DEG to build 8 new community solar microgrids in Nigeria.

DEG allocated the funds from its Up-Scaling Program, which is co-financed by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development. The 5-year loan in the amount of $749,000 follows Husk successfully closing debt totalling $10.3 million from EDFI-ElectriFI and IREDA in 2022 to build over 200 microgrids in India.

Sinha, of Husk added: ”Access to affordable debt is critical to scaling solar microgrids in Nigeria, home to 90 million people living without access to electricity. This financing provides Husk with a solid foundation for unlocking additional debt, including local currency debt, this year and beyond.”

The DEG financing is the first debt raised by Husk for its business in Nigeria, where the company currently has 12 operational microgrids, and a target of building 500 by 2026. The 8 microgrids in Nigeria will connect more than 500 residential and commercial customers, reduce the number of diesel generators in use by 400, while creating about 40 new direct local jobs.

Petra Kotte, Head of Banking and German Business Division, DEG: ”Husk is exactly the type of company we’re looking for at the Up-Scaling Program, which supports innovative greentech business models in emerging markets that demonstrate high development impact and a significant reduction of carbon emissions.”

www.huskpowersystems.com

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Energy

A solution to California’s disasters – Microgrids

After years of deteriorating power lines owned by PG&E, California’s biggest utility, plus months of windy wildfires, warming California is wondering how to keep the lights on. Small communities all over the state have been pioneering the answer for decades

Take back control – Build your own utility

The Blue Lake Rancheria tribe in Mad River, Northern California has built a microgrid on its 100-acre reservation, a stitching-together of technologies including wind turbines, solar panels, storage batteries and its own power lines that integrates with the outside utility network or can stand alone from it. It is a state-of-the-art system — and an indicator of what might be the future for every American.

In early October, Pacific Gas & Electric cut power to more than 2 million people across Northern California, including all those who live in rural Humboldt County, where redwood forests fringe the wild edge of the continent. The shut-off aimed to reduce the risk of wildfire, and as the region sat in darkness, the tribe’s multimillion-dollar investment in its power system glowed.

Responding to public needs, the tribe transformed a hotel conference room into a newsroom so the local paper could publish. The reservation’s gas station and mini mart were among the only ones open, drawing a nearly mile-long line of cars.

The Blue Lake Rancheria served more than 10,000 people during the day-long outage, by some estimates, roughly 8 percent of Humboldt’s population. And the tribe suddenly became a vital part of its emergency response.

“The irony was not lost on us,” said Jason Ramos, a member of the tribal council who ran emergency operations during the blackout. “When these power cuts started, we looked like geniuses for what we had done. But in truth, we didn’t really see them coming when we made our decision.”

California, a hive of rapid private-sector innovation, is adjusting slowly to the accelerating changes in its climate. The sharp transition between heavy rains and hot, windy weather has primed the landscape for wildfires, which have burned larger and deadlier in recent years than at any time in history.

After an autumn of power cuts and economic losses, the reliability of California’s electricity grid and of its three largest investor-owned utilities is among the most pressing public policy issues facing Gov. Gavin Newsom (D). The state lags behind some on the East Coast, where Tropical Storm Irene swamped towns in 2011, causing blackouts and a rethinking of how to strengthen a vulnerable electrical grid.

The ideas under consideration here are complicated by the bankruptcy of PG&E, the state’s largest investor-owned utility. All would require a measure of public money — such as a state takeover of the grid or breaking up utilities into municipal agencies — and changes to a regulatory system yet to adapt to California’s new climate-driven threats.

“It’s like we have a high schooler stuck in the sixth …

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Infograph showing EU prefers business lobbyists to pressure groups
Energy

EU tries to stamp out off-grid living

The European Union (EU) devotes huge resources to delivering the power grid to every nook and cranny of Europe. Brussels is on a mission to stamp out off-grid living which it wrongly equates with poverty and deprivation.

Despite the promise of off-grid solar, 99 percent of EU energy funding still goes to grid projects. The EU has always served the interests of the big energy producers, including state-owned Nuclear power companies and the global oil giants.

The same is true in EU foreign policy towards the world’s most underdeveloped countries, where EU and other central government aid is focused on huge infrastructure projects rather than simple practical steps towards providing off-grid energy.

Despite innovative off-grid technology and high-profile initiatives, electrification in sub-Saharan Africa still trails population growth. In 2009 there were 585 million people in the region without power. Five years later, that figure had risen to 632 million, according to the latest International Energy Agency statistics.

United Nations analysis of the flow of capital, released in September by the United Nations’ Sustainable Energy for All program, shows that off-grid systems simply are not getting the support they deserve.

“This research shows that only 1 percent of financing for electrification is going into this very promising and dynamic energy solution,” says program CEO Rachel Kyte, who calls the findings “a wake-up call” to the international community.

The 20 countries targeted in the U.N. report account for 80 percent of the estimated 1.06 billion people around the globe living without electricity. The report found that total investment in electricity infrastructure averaged US $19.4 billion a year in 2013 and 2014 (the latest year with full statistics). Of that, only $200 million per year was dedicated to off-grid systems.

This is “alarming,” the authors write, considering off-grid solar’s “enormous promise” to rapidly and cheaply deliver basic electrical services compared with the ability of traditional grids. The International Energy Agency estimates that 70 percent of rural electrification is best achieved by off-grid systems, including solar.

The report does note a few hopeful developments: The World Bank this year committed $150 million to rural off-grid renewable projects in Kenya, and companies installing pay-as-you-go off-grid solar systems raised $223 million last year.

Even those solar enterprises, however, face an enduring “grid is best” mentality. “Most of the political actors in this sphere still believe that the ‘real’ power is the national grid,” says Daniel Becker, founder of Rafiki Power, a company that has built minigrids in Tanzania and wants to invest throughout East Africa.

Becker says vague plans for extending national power grids also create a barrier to off-grid developers. “No one wants to give you money to build a minigrid where the government says the grid will be there in five years,” he says.

Other financing hang-ups relate to project scale and revenue expectations. Lenders and governments are only willing to …

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