"green energy" feasibility and investment opportunities

Maybe Germany’s current predicaments have something to do with this realization?

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Here are the signers of the pro-nuclear power statement. It is interesting who signed and who did not sign.

Endorsing countries include the United States , Bulgaria , Canada , Czech Republic , Finland , France , Ghana , Hungary , Japan , Republic of Korea , Moldova , Mongolia , Morocco , Netherlands , Poland , Romania , Slovakia , Slovenia , Sweden , Ukraine , United Arab Emirates , and United Kingdom .

Edit. This must be some of the countries because the headlines said dozens, but I haven’t been able to find more

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Big wind is trying to hold up the taxpayers for more subsidies

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Wow! I’m shocked that BP, SHEL, and XOM are not cancelling contracts due to the same excuses of supply chain disruptions and inflation … Wait - Inflation??? What kind of idiot doesn’t like inflation when you own the resource?

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Will be interesting to see which way they go

https://www.wsj.com/business/energy-oil/americas-gas-bonanza-brings-biden-new-political-dilemmas-34404a5

America’s Gas Bonanza Brings Biden New Political Dilemmas

The president is facing pressure from some Democrats and climate groups to rein in exports of liquefied natural gas, or LNG

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As we saw in other threads, left.

I think the change of the regime on nuclear energy is an election year conversion that they will reverse when the Hollywood left put out another scare movie. I hope they prove me wrong. In California, Newsom came under pressure from the Enviro left when he delayed the close of a nuke. He has not backed down so far while he’s still a candidate for president

https://www.cnn.com/2024/02/01/climate/nuclear-small-modular-reactors-us-russia-china-climate-solution-intl/index.html

New-wave reactor technology could kick-start a nuclear renaissance — and the US is banking on it

Russia and China are in front of the US in nuclear energy abroad

Russia is leading in selling its nuclear technology abroad, with 19 reactors — mostly conventional — under construction in seven countries. China is selling two overseas but is building more than any nation at home, and has the only land-based small modular reactor (SMR) operating commercially. The US has no international projects under construction but is courting countries with its SMR technology.

But the US and UK, among others, are investing in their own fuel production at home. That’s essential — two SMR demonstration projects, one by X-energy in Texas and another by Bill Gates’ TerraPower in Wyoming, were awarded government support to get up and running by 2028. They will need fuel to do so.

China isn’t building many nuclear plants abroad but as the only country to have an SMR in operation on land, it’s in a good position to win a large share of the market

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The train has left the station on the stock prices. As they say on Wall Street buy on weakness.

As the AI craze continues to hog the limelight, another asset class has been enjoying a similar boom, albeit under the radar. Over the past couple of years, uranium and shares in companies that mine it have gone on a tear amid a spike in demand and looming shortages. After being ostracized for decades as the black sheep of the alternative energy industry, nuclear energy is back in fashion as the global energy and climate crisis are forcing policymakers to return to the drawing board. Last year’s COP28 held in the United Arab Emirates made history as the first ever climate summit to back nuclear energy among low-emissions technologies.

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Will be interesting to see if this gets anywhere

Non-paywall link
https://archive.is/i2CAa

Giuseppe Bivona, chief investment officer of Bluebell Capital, which has a minority stake in BP, said he had spent the past three weeks talking to many of the company’s top 30 investors.

He said: “With only the exception of one shareholder, I am still to find someone who supports BP in its entirety.”

Bluebell is spearheading a brewing investor revolt after sending a 30-page letter to the FTSE 100 company in January.

In the letter it urged BP to halt investment in renewable energy schemes, prioritise oil and gas production, and rewrite net zero targets to clarify that they will be achieved “in line with society”.

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An environmental catastrophe.

Locals are very worried about water contamination.

Experts said that most of the time, large solar farm panels are made of compound cadmium telluride.

This is something Kaminski is worried about because he uses well water.

“That’s what we take a shower with, we drink with,” Kaminski explained. “It could be in our water now.”

MSN

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Some news on nuclear power

Tokyo electric power company in Japan is restarting the world ‘s largest Kashiwazaki Kariwa nuclear plant in Niigata prefecture.

In Michigan, the Palisades nuclear power plant will reopen with funding in part by the Biden administration

Meanwhile, Germany closed its nuclear power plants and opened dirty brown coal burning power plants

“According to figures from Germany’s Federal Statistical Office, one-third of Germany’s electricity in 2022 was generated from coal. That represents an 8 percent increase compared to 2021. Meanwhile, the country’s use of nuclear-generated electricity fell by almost 50 percent during the same period.”

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A negative view of the small modular reactor company NuScale Power.

https://seekingalpha.com/article/4682242-nuscale-power-shows-too-many-red-flags

NuScale Power (NYSE:SMR) is working on what appears to be an exciting product that will probably be in great demand in the future: small-scale nuclear reactors. The story is good, but a closer analysis reveals several red flags, such as an unclear timeline, a lot of competition, soon-to-be-depleted cash, and a CEO who recently sold 100% of his shares.

As usual, the nuclear regulatory commission NRC is doing their best to slow down progress. The NRC are going to take over two years to approve a small change to the design.

According to this article from MIT Technology Review, the NuScale design for a reactor module that generates 50 MW of electricity has already been certified by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). But during the certification process, NuScale´s engineers changed the design again so that in the future a module will produce 77 MW instead of 50 MW. I added the bold text below.
Still, it means that the company needed to resubmit updated plans to the NRC, which it did last month. It could take up to two years before the altered plans are approved by the agency and the company can move on to site approval, Reyes says.

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SPWR went bankrupt today, leaving customer deposits for their solar panels with unsecured and likely worthless claims.

“if only we had subsided it even more, maybe it would have worked” — Biden’s Green New Deal

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Speaking of solar, too much of a good thing in CA

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/rooftop-solar-panels-are-flooding-california-s-grid-that-s-a-problem/ar-AA1nr34N

There is so much solar on the grid that, on sunny spring days when there’s not as much demand, electricity prices go negative. Gigawatts of solar are “curtailed” — essentially, thrown away.

solar power is going unused. In 2022, the state wasted 2.4 million megawatt-hours of electricity, 95 percent of which was solar. (That’s roughly 1 percent of the state’s overall power generation in a year, or 5 percent of its solar generation.) Last year, the state did that in just the first eight months.

So they started paying people market rates, which is to say basically nothing, and that wasn’t great for broke solar retail installers like SPWR or their customers who imagined getting paid for their power.

a year ago, the state changed this system, known as “net-metering,” and now only compensates new solar panel owners for how much their power is worth to the grid. In the spring, when the duck curve is deepest, that number can dip close to zero. Customers can get more money back if they install batteries and provide power to the grid in the early evening or morning.

The change has sparked a huge backlash from Californians and rooftop solar companies, which say that their businesses are flagging. Indeed, Wood Mackenzie predicts that California residential solar installations in 2024 will fall by around 40 percent.

Even in CA, the free market says “you’ve got too much solar, stop subsidizing it”. Maybe they’ll listen.

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They did listen and you just quoted it – the new net-metering pricing went into effect in 2022 or 2023, and since then installing solar panels makes less sense without batteries (but it still makes sense if you use A LOT of electricity, because at high usage home solar becomes cheaper than utility). But also there are massive battery arrays being installed, probably to gobble up all this less-than-free solar energy, so maybe demand and prices during the duck curve hours will increase again.

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Well, they’ve proven to be such great prognosticators regarding rain runoff, that solar runoff is a no-brainer. :frowning:

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From the Wall Street Journal

Clean Fuel Startups Were Supposed to Be the Next Big Thing. Now They Are Collapsing.

Hydrogen and biofuel projects have become money pits, threatening climate progress

Startups promising to power planes, ships and trucks with clean fuel are sputtering before they get off the ground, showing how hard it will be to wean many industries off oil and gas.

A company backed by United Airlines that raised hundreds of millions of dollars to turn trash into jet fuel appears to have shut down. Another, backed by Airbus, JetBlue and GE Aerospace, that was working on using hydrogen to power planes went bust. Chevron, BPand Shell, meanwhile, are scaling back projects to make biofuels from cooking fats, oils, greases and plant material.

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Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder looks at hydrogen energy storage. She started out enthusiastic, but ended up highly skeptical of its practicality.

So much for Fords electric SUV

Ford Motor ( F ) said Wednesday it is canceling its plans to produce an all-electric, three-row SUV, a move that will result in a special non-cash charge of about $400 million and could cost an additional $1.50 billion in expenses and cash expenditures. Ford is opting instead to “leverage hybrid technologies” for its next three-row SUVs, the company said, adding that it is also “retiming” the launch of its electric truck to H2 2027.

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And not so much for their Mach E and Lighting …
https://electrek.co/2024/08/02/fords-ev-sales-climbed-july-but-suvs-dampened-us-growth/

Ford sold 8,242 fully electric vehicles in the US last month, up 31% (6,280) from July 2023. The Mustang Mach-E and F-150 Lightning both had double-digit sales growth.

I see significant price drops in the Lightning and Mach Es.

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