Electrek green energy brief: Mattis for microgrids, Carbon Tax at $220/ton and $2/gallon, 93% approval in Germany and more!

New Secretary of Defense James Mattis supports microgrids – US Military officials have made strong statements concerning climate change, strategic safety and fuel transport. In the US they’ve stated inter-connected microgrids based upon solar power, wind, batteries and fuel cells are most intelligent. In the field, General Mattis has expressed multiple times that solar power microgrids are exactly what is needed to ‘power up batteries’ in the field. And on a global scale – we know the thought is that ‘climate change poses a significant risk.’ The reason I post General Mattis is because we need every pathway forward to better our energy position and military investment in technology always seems to pull things quickly.

$220/ton is proper cost of carbon tax – If we’re going to have an adult conversation about what that means: adding $.13/kWh gas, $.22/kWh coal & $2/gallon for gasoline. These numbers are based upon the $220/ton number multiplied against the values on these two pages (A and B). In my mind we have two choices – either accept this ultra aggressive $/ton of CO2 number or make our carbon tax a LOT LOWER however, force the money into energy, transportation, manufacturing and agriculture upgrades. We cannot have everything – we live in reality folks.

Tiny house moving off the grid – A couple of things here: 1. What do you think of the tiny house movement? Being a relatively light on the land person myself, I love it. Course my brother has the four kids under the age of ten, not I. 2. The Solar Decathlon designs some of the cutting edge solar and energy efficiency houses globally. Watch them (if Trump doesn’t cut them from the Department of Energy Budget).

Germany’s Energiewende had a challenging 2016, emissions up and solar + wind production low – still 93% approval – First off, society now supports the program at its highest margin since the program was started. The people are in it for the long run – thank you Germany. Secondly, Germany has become our global example to learn how to roll out an intermittent based energy system. We’ve learned that our grids can handle large amounts of intermittent power, but also that to get to the highest amounts we need to better structure transmission lines and get moving on distributing storage.

This reporter from the Wall Street Journal decided to climb a Wind Turbine – join him! Short read, kinda cool.

Tweet of the day – These are models, on the left that measure total emissions and on the right the temperature we will hit at those levels. The article associated with the tweet pushes one thing strong: Can our technology alone save us? Many say no, it will take both individual change and technology – and that individual change will mostly need to come from wealthy westerners – people like me.

About 40 billion MT of CO2 is emitted into the atmosphere yearly. Are new technologies enough to slow climate change?https://t.co/6886ZeeTRb pic.twitter.com/9f0t5AWJoJ

— Yale Environment 360 (@YaleE360) January 22, 2017

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