🚨 NEW | Counting energy from the perspective of the consumer, rather than the supplier, can help us better understand the dramatic changes sweeping the energy sector today 🔎🌪️⚡️ With this new framework, Ember unpacks 4 key battles for the future of energy 🧵 1/7 👇

SOMETHING BEAUTIFUL IS GOING TO HAPPEN

I love exotic carbon allotropes! I love exotic carbon allotropes!

Uncertainty is not your friend: In a new paper published in One Earth, scientists argue that uncertainties in climate projections mean Earth system components could be at a higher risk than we think of reaching crucial tipping points. 🌊 eos.org/articles/ear...

It is both the case that the RCP8.5 emissions scenario is completely implausible and that we cannot preclude >4C warming by 2100 (though I’d argue SSP5-8.5’s 4.7C by 2100 is rather outlandish at this point). journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Step 1: Insert bacteria ("Wolbachia") into mosquitoes. Step 2: Release mosquitoes. Step 3: Watch Dengue rates plummet. Phenomenal results from Singapore. Link: tinyurl.com/59c9t67u, by Lim et al.

Only six months late but I really enjoyed this preso from @dylanjmcconnell.bsky.social touching on one of my favourite niche energy topics: diesel! Pipeline gas has real challenges meeting seasonal peaking needs - big tanks of liquid fuel are a great complement www.ceem.unsw.edu.au/sites/defaul...

pain is your body's way of saying "ouch!"

The Methane spike in the early 2020’s has been explained in two new studies. A combination of weakened atmospheric removal and increased emissions from warming wetlands, rivers, lakes, and agricultural land are to blame. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...  www.science.org/doi/10.1126/... #methane

i have always found it underdiscussed that almost ~20% of all global silver production is used in solar photovoltaic metallization layers — a figure that's up ~4x in the past decade even as the relative silver loading per panel has *dropped* ~3x in the same period! #energysky

MethaneSAT has released its first analysis of methane emissions from oil and gas basins globally, in the year before the satellite lost contact. @mckennapr.bsky.social and I dug into the findings for @insideclimatenews.org insideclimatenews.org/news/0602202...

seven different countries represented in the weekly high score leaderboard for EnerGIS and not a single american... jmelville.science/energis/lead...

I'm thrilled Xiao is posting on bsky again! We disagree on many things but he's a polite interlocutor and very knowledgeable about power systems. There are a lot of smart energy folks here but without any contrarianism the discussions get pretty boring! 🔌💡

my favorite part of this game might be the silly little script I wrote for pseudonymous leaderboard scoring in the format [synonym for 'unknown'] + [city demonym]

The animation you didn’t know you needed is finally here! 🎈 Now you can explain to students how a regime shift occurs in system behavior. This picture is worth >1k words plus a lot of numbers. From @knmi.nl

god I love a good ternary diagram

Wake up babe, new @ember-energy.org chartistry just dropped ember-energy.org/latest-insig... #energysky

Fun fact: at one point in the 1800s, ice was America’s second largest export, after cotton www.rmpbs.org/blogs/scienc...

learned a new unit today. a "ton of refrigeration" is the heat transfer rate needed to freeze a short ton (2000 lbs) of water at 0 °C in a day, now defined to be 12000 Btu/hr ≈ 3.52 kW. it's a unit of POWER! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ton_of_...

my new pet peeve is when people declare "Chatham House rules" for meetings where it makes no sense to do so and it's incredibly clear that some manager just learned of them and thought they sounded cool

Attention folks in the weather, climate, disaster, wildfire, and Earth science communities: NSF has just published a new "Dear Colleague" letter inviting feedback (by Mar 13) on the proposal to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). www.nsf.gov/funding/...

good post on this phenomenon from the point of view of a very influential software engineer who is also a big LLM user

EnerGIS: identify different kinds of power plants from satellite imagery! good on desktop but should work well on phones now, too. gameplay modes include a global daily challenge and an infinite mode. jmelville.science/energis/ please let me know what you think! 🔌💡

damn, it's almost like the Dec 2024 DOE report on LNG exports predicted this might happen! www.energy.gov/sites/defaul...

Back in 2008, the EIA believed that natural gas production would be flat through 2030. Then came fracking.

this shift is basically 100% attributable to the coal-to-gas transition in the US power sector, driven by the shale/tight gas fracking boom of the mid-aughts... 🔌💡

as we approach the singularity of the remaining 1.5 °C budget reaching zero, this framing will become more and more extreme. "Your lunchtime hamburger could eat up 5% of carbon budget to keep 1.5 °C limit, studies suggest."

You need significantly more generation capacity without heat pumps, this is because heating is a high percentage of many nations energy consumption (along with road transport) and heat pumps are very efficient.

Synthetic chemists breaking into the analytical chemists' labs at night to use their instruments without knowing what they are doing:

toying with a new idea. can you guess the fuel source and nameplate capacity of a power plant, based solely on satellite imagery? jmelville.science/plantle/ this is a hacky pre-alpha prototype, feedback very welcome (: #energysky

time to reissue my SSL certs

in my previous job, I ran out of space on the whiteboard walls so I started scribbling calculations on the window

I'm a broken record on this but we absolutely do not talk enough about the fact that ~20% of injected CO2 for EOR-CCUS can be microbially converted to methane. coupled with lax MVA regimes, EOR "storage" could easily produce a net increase in GHG emissions! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Larger point: 45Q is arguably the most perverse energy subsidy from a climate pespective. Govt paying corporations to capture and store CO2, instead of actually reducing emissions, means incentivizing more extraction and combustion of fossil fuels because more emissions means more public $.

Like Kurt Godel on the way to his citizenship interview intent on explaining the logical flaws of the Constitution to the bureaucrat once he got there, and Albert Einstein having to talk him out of it

🔌💡 I'm big on space-based fusion. I believe that with a sufficient mass of fusible elements at the right altitude (around 93 million miles) we can attain self-sustaining gravitational confinement, producing radiative energy gain we can harness on Earth with cutting-edge optoelectronic PV devices.

citogenesis: no longer limited to Wikipedia

unfun fact: far and away the #1 claim of the 45(Q) tax credit is for CO2-enhanced oil recovery (EOR) — injecting it into a depleting oil well to force out more oil. after the OBBBA updates to the IRA, EOR gets paid the same subsidy as Class VI sequestration (so why would you ever do the latter?)

how did Palmer Luckey get an advance copy of my pitch to the UK government next week

every time the NIF lasers pulse, in that instant they are consuming >95% of all energy being used by all of humanity combined

reupping this to commemorate the WSJ expose on the fabricated "AI for materials discovery" MIT economics paper. QM is an approximation to the furnace. h/t @robertpalgrave.bsky.social www.wsj.com/economy/aida...

Like 70% because of the California Coastal Commission, maybe the best public agency in existence.

ski pass prices are extortionate but have discounts for students, children, and military members. some discounts stack, so you can get a "teen military" or a "child military" pass. I assume this is for servicemembers with kids but it makes it sound like there is a special discount for child soldiers

the math doesn't even pencil out. there are ~10^24 stars in the sky. ~10^11 humans have ever lived. if everyone who ever lived on earth had a pocket universe in which every star was inhabited by earthlike civilization, that would be ~1 trillionth the number of ppl Grok would kill to save Elon Musk.

Many people think about cold in Northern Europe if the Atlantic Ocean current system #AMOC fails. But that wouldn’t be the only problem for Europe by far. This new study shows that severe drought is another one. 🌊

"reading the can, explains the can"