Climate Letter #1316

Posted on December 6, 2018 by Carl Campbell
Carbon Brief provides a thorough analysis of carbon emissions in 2018.  It starts by showing this to be a record high year and growing at the fastest rate in seven years, with China leading the parade.  There are many more details, including some updated estimates for land and ocean sinks which together collected and stored away 57% of the amount of CO2 emitted—which does us a big favor that we can only hope will continue.  The main takeaway from the report is that “it is becoming crystal clear the world is so far failing in its duty to steer onto a course consistent with the goals set out in the Paris Agreement in 2015.”

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https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-fossil-fuel-emissions-in-2018-increasing-at-fastest-rate-for-seven-years?
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A thorough new study has been completed of the way Greenland’s ice sheet has been melting (Inside Climate News).  The main point is that no change in the flat trend of indicators could be found between 1650 and the late 1990s, after which melting took off in a hockey-stick pattern, or like turning on a switch.  According to a co-author of the study, “Once the ice sheets get kicked into motion, they just keep going. This is a wake-up call that shows how fast Greenland is changing…..We think there’s a tipping point around 1.5 Celsius of [global] warming to 2 degrees Celsius of warming that would commit the ice sheet to melting for centuries or millennia, based on paleoclimate records.”
–The full study does not have open access, but you can open this link to it and look at the set of Figures, which clearly tell the basic story:
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Xcel Energy, a big electric utility, has committed to becoming carbon-free by 2050 (Vox).  It is the first major US utility to make such a move, but won’t be the last because there are plenty of incentives in place for doing so, as explained very well by David Roberts.
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MIT engineers have designed a new renewable energy storage system for electric utilities.  It would operate on the same principal as molten salt storage does currently, but could tolerate much higher temperatures by employing white-hot molten silicon.  “The researchers estimate that such a system would be vastly more affordable than lithium-ion batteries, which have been proposed as a viable, though expensive, method to store renewable energy. They also estimate that the system would cost about half as much as pumped hydroelectric storage—the cheapest form of grid-scale energy storage to date.”  There are engineering challenges, but none that appear to be out of reach for solutions.
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Another research group, located in Australia, has completed the development of a “next generation” type of solar cell.  A China-based manufacturer of advanced solar cell machinery has agreed to maximize the processes required for low-cost mass production, allowing finished products to be on the market as early as 2020.  The cells are aiming for a conversion efficiency of better than 27% of incoming sunlight.  The developers have set goal of bringing the cost of generating electricity down to just one cent per kWh.
Carl

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