[MCN] Is Northwestern Energy going to be hoisted on its own petard?

[Lance Olsen]

Excerpt: The next market where the disruptive potential is highest may be natural-gas fired power generation. If the past decade was about natural gas displacing coal in the utility sector, the next decade will be a competition between natural gas and renewables including wind and solar, say analysts.

“We are just now shifting our focus to the competition between natural gas and renewable energy,” said Travis Miller, utilities analyst at Morningstar. “Renewables were the sideshow as natural gas competed with coal, but we see natural gas and renewables increasingly competing with each other. Increasingly, there are a number of cases where it is more advantageous for customers and utilities to invest in solar and wind versus natural gas. Rewind to a decade ago and all the utilities were talking about natural gas.”

The CEO of the Northern Indiana Public Service Company said recently, “The surprise was how dramatically the renewables and storage proposals beat natural gas <https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/09/09/climate-change-threatens-earth-us-open-nearly-200-power-plants/2155631001/>. I couldn’t have predicted this five years ago.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/22/climate-change-did-we-just-witness-beginning-of-end-of-big-oil.html <https://www.cnbc.com/2019/09/22/climate-change-did-we-just-witness-beginning-of-end-of-big-oil.html>

-----------------------------------------------------

A study led by Susan Solomon found that the CO2 we add to the atmosphere every day remains there for centuries, “so that atmospheric temperatures do not drop significantly for at least 1,000 years.”

<<https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/106/6/1704.full.pdf>> 

————————————————————————————————
"What would happen to the climate if we were to stop emitting carbon dioxide today, right now? Would we return to the climate of our elders?

"The simple answer is no.”

https://theconversation.com/if-we-stopped-emitting-greenhouse-gases-right-now-would-we-stop-climate-change-78882




-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://bigskynet.org/pipermail/missoula-community-news_bigskynet.org/attachments/20190922/fe20ac02/attachment.html>