Climate Interactive has a mode l they use to assess the impact of various climate change proposals. They're analysis is quite sobering, indicating that the 'agreement' reached at the recent Climate Change conference, the earth's temperature would increase 7 degrees F (4 degrees C) by the year 2100. This is substantially higher than the goal for temperature rise this century is 2.7 degrees F (1.5 degrees C). This link will take you to Climate Interactive's blog. That blog provides some additional background to the agreed goals for temperature rise, and current efforts to limit it. The New York Times had a fairly good overview article on the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference agreement. A CBS news report contains the following chilling news: " Reducing carbon dioxide levels to 350 would mean reversing the trend of the past couple of centuries. Carbon dioxide stays in the atmosphere for as long as 100 years. And the emissions cuts currently being ple...
A bill (SB1547) signed into law in March '16 does not contain language banning coal-fired electricity from delivery to Oregon's retail customers. Even so, the Oregon Global Warming Commission’s 2017 Biennial Report to the Oregon legislature (Report) erroneously reports the existence of such a ban after 2030. It also erroneously reports that both Portland General Electric (PGE) and PacifiCorp (PAC) are prohibited from allocating to Oregon retail customers any cost or benefit from coal-fired plants. Figures 7-9 in the Report illustrate past and future CO2 emissions by these two utilities (Fig. 7 for PAC and Fig. 8 for PGE) and the statewide CO2 emission levels (Fig. 9) assume that Oregon takes credit for lowered CO2 emissions, even though SB1547 did not address coal plant operation in any way. Furthermore, the statute in question expressly permits PGE to continue to include costs of its portion of Coalstrip in Oregon retail rates after 2030. The law als...
The party who owns the Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) gets to claim the environmental benefit. This can lead to some counter-intuitive outcomes from renewables development. For example, if Portland General Electric (PGE) builds a utility-scale wind farm in its balancing area, it could argue that it uses the electricity it produces to meet its needs. However, unless PGE keeps and retires the RECs associated with that electricity, PGE cannot claim the environmental benefits of that wind farm. It could sell the RECs to some other party and use the proceeds of that sale however it choses. Alternatively, if PGE purchased RECs from any one of a number of entities that have them, then PGE could claim the environmental benefit of those RECs even if it didn’t build the PV solar or utility-scale wind farm. image courtesy of renewablechoice.com
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