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IN THIS ISSUE:
- EV Dangers Daily Becoming More Evident
- Video of the Week: The Cold, not the Heat, Is the Big Killer
- Natural Gas Use Up as Wind Power Fails
- Podcast of the Week: ‘Green’ Olympics Make Athletes See Red – The Climate Realism Show #121
- Climate Comedy
- Recommended Sites
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EV Dangers Daily Becoming More Evident
It seems that hardly a week passes by when the world and I are not reminded of the dangers of green technologies relying on large lithium ion (LI) batteries for transportation and electricity.
The mainstream media couldn’t suppress a story out of Baker, California, where a truck transporting LI batteries overturned and caught fire. A Climate Realism story described the situation, thusly:
(A) long-haul truck carrying lithium ion batteries for electric vehicles and for electric power battery back-up facilities overturned on Interstate Highway 15 (I-15) between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The truck caught fire and forced the closure of first one lane, and then eventually the entire highway. As described by various media outlets, such as KVVU-5 Las Vegas and the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the accident caused a massive traffic jam, closing the highway from Friday through Monday.
“I mean, I’ve never seen anything quite like it,” Benjamin Leffel, an associate professor of public policy at UNLV, told KVVU-5 News. “Many have called it the worst traffic jam of their lifetime. I have to agree.”
Because of the unique dangers and nature of the lithium ion battery fire, firefighters were unable to put out the fire, and eventually were forced to push the truck 100 feet off the road and into the surrounding desert, where they then constructed a berm around it. As the Review-Journal pointed out, “[f]ires involving lithium batteries are particularly hazardous because they produce chemicals and toxic gases, which made it essential to handle the situation with extreme caution ….” As a result, the Hazmat team called in said the fire would be allowed to burn itself out, and provided no timeline for when they expected it to be extinguished.
And that’s just one truck in a fairly isolated location. As a follow-up to the story, enterprising KTNV, Channel 13 in Las Vegas spoke on camera to residents in Las Vegas and the Deputy Chief of the Clark County fire department discussing their concerns about the possibility of a similar fire occurring on roads and highways actually in the city itself. The Deputy Chief admitted the department had spent a lot of time discussing how to deal with toxic LI battery fires and that dealing with such fires would be challenging in the city.
Of course, the highway between Los Angeles and Las Vegas is not the only location where LI battery fires have proved to be “challenging.” Electric bus fires have been breaking out all over, from Paris, to London, to all over the United States. As a video details, the dangers the fires have posed have resulted in entire fleets being pulled offline and sent back to the factories.
And electric bus fires are hardly the only or most common and dangerous threat. E-scooters have become the scourge of the New York City fire department (FDNY). The New York Post reported that Chief Fire Marshal Daniel Flynn said fires caused by LI batteries “have gone up nearly nine-fold since the pandemic, with more blazes related to the batteries happening in the last two months than in all of 2019.” Indeed, in 2023, LI batteries were the largest single cause of fires in the city. As Fox News wrote:
Electric bicycles caused a record number of fires, injuries and deaths in New York City last year as Democrats continued to push for greater adoption of the device as a solution to global warming.
Overall, e-bikes sparked 267 fires which caused 18 deaths and 150 injuries in the city, according to New York Fire Department (FDNY) data shared with Fox News Digital. The figures represent the highest levels of each statistic, with e-bike related deaths increasing 200%, fires increasing 21% and injuries increasing 2% in the city year over year.
E-scooter fires have also resulted in deaths in India. Individual incidences of scooters catching fire on the streets are rife, but the largest single, and most deadly incidence of an LI battery fire in India was when the electric scooters in a sales/showroom in Mumbai spontaneously combusted, killing eight people and putting 11 more in the hospital.
Then, there are the electric car fires that have resulted in homes and charging stations burning, resulting in recalls; ships carrying LI battery cars catching fire and sinking with the crews unable to put the fire out—think about that, an entire ship going down due to nothing but an LI battery spontaneously combusting; insurers in the United Kingdom ceasing to insure EVs; and standards being set for the spacing of EVs in repair lots and salvage yards. In Australia, waste management companies say they need a coordinated plan to handle LI battery waste, with the batteries causing more than 10,000 fires a year.
In just the past week, two electric car fires broke out in parking garages in South Korea. One car was charging when it burst into flames. Firefighters were able to put the fire out with no damage to surrounding vehicles and without compromising the integrity of the facility itself, dragging the car out of the garage to ensure it caused no further damage. The other incident had more than 100 innocent casualties. As The Wall Street Journal described the incident in which an electric Mercedez spontaneously combusted, acting like a bomb, taking out the surrounding vehicles:
It took just seconds for an underground South Korean residential parking lot to be engulfed in flames. The culprit: a Mercedes-Benz EQE electric vehicle that hadn’t been charging.
The blaze incinerated dozens of cars nearby, scorched another 100 vehicles and forced hundreds of residents to emergency shelters as the buildings above the parking lot lost power and electricity. Nobody died, but the fire took eight hours to extinguish.
Those are just the “small” fires. Time and time again, battery warehouses, manufacturing facilities, and back-up power plants consisting of aisle after aisle of LI batteries constructed to deliver power to the grid for relatively short periods of time when wind and solar facilities stop working, have erupted in flames, unextinguishable for days, taking lives of firefighters, on occasion, and spewing toxic emissions into the air, resulting in evacuations.
One fire at a battery plant in South Korea in early June resulted in the deaths of 22 workers and the hospitalization of eight others. This amounted to nearly a third of the entire work force at the time the battery cells began exploding. The fire burned so hot the building’s roof collapsed before the blaze could be extinguished.
Fire official Kim Jin-young reportedly told Agence France-Presse that “Most of the bodies are badly burned so it will take some time to identify each one.”
Just two weeks earlier, on May 15, 2024, a fire erupted at a large backup LI battery energy storage facility in a suburb of San Diego. The batteries began exploding in a cascading fashion. The fire, which burned for six days and smoldered for five more, spewed toxins into the air for the duration. Roads were closed to and around the plant, evacuations of local businesses and residences were ordered, and a “shelter-in-place” order was given for a nearby prison.
Prior to the fire, New York-based LS Power bragged the Gateway project, which opened in August 2020, was “the largest battery energy storage project in the world.” Unless and until the project is rebuilt, all that back-up power is offline, meaning California residents better hope the sun shines and the wind blows steadily.
In fact, the threat of large factory/storage facility fires has been recognized and yet ignored by authorities pushing green tech for some time. As I detailed in a previous CCW post, in late July of 2021, a fire erupted at one of the largest battery factories in the world, a partnership with Tesla in Australia. The factory caught fire during testing and burned for days, with firefighters initially unable to fight the blaze because they lacked respirator equipment to protect them from the toxic fumes. Authorities told nearby residents to stay indoors and close windows and other air vents.
At the time of that fire, CNBC had already detailed more than 40 such spontaneous combustion incidents at battery factories or battery storage facilities over the previous decade, most of which have occurred since 2019. A fire at a battery factory in Arizona in 2019 seriously injured two emergency responders, and two firefighters in China were killed when a battery module connected to rooftop solar panels at a shopping mall burst into flames.
And, by August of 2021, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) reported the battery modules of approximately 12,000 residential energy solar-panel systems had been recalled by their manufacturers, in 2020 and to that point in 2021, because of the threat of combustion.
In 1965, Ralph Nader’s book, Unsafe at Any Speed, was published as an indictment of the purported dangers of the Chevrolet Corvair. Within a few years, the car ceased production and has been touted as an example of advocacy keeping consumers safe in the decades since. This despite the fact that there is no evidence the Corvair resulted in any injuries or deaths that might not have occurred in an accident in any other car built during the period. Subsequent testing by both the U.S. Department of Transportation and independent automobile testing labs indicated that the Corvair was not especially dangerous by the standards of the day.
When I was a kid, we had a toy/game called lawn darts. They were banned for sale by the CPSC long after I had stopped tossing them. The reason: in the preceding decade, 6,100 Americans had visited emergency rooms due to lawn dart accidents, with more than half of the injured being 10 years old or younger.
The dangers of technologies dependent upon LI batteries are evident for all to see and grow daily as the tech enters more common use, largely driven by government climate policies. EV cars and factories are paradigmatic of a product that is “unsafe at any speed,” and would have been pulled from the market a decade ago for redesign or replacement if the government weren’t so obsessed with fighting climate change. EV tech is destroying lives and property and endangering health today, on the off chance that its use will modestly reduce impacts of a warmer world decades from now. That is an irrational and immoral trade-off, in my considered opinion.
Sources: Climate Realism; Climate Change Weekly; Climate Change Weekly; BBC; Energy Central; Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Climate Change Weekly
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Video of the Week
The Heartland Institute’s Linnea Lueken explains how climate activism rather than climate change poses a significant threat to U.S. national security.
Natural Gas Use Up as Wind Power Fails
It’s been a hard summer for the nation’s utilities, which have had to scramble to secure electric power supplies amid falling industrial wind output. Natural gas has made up the difference.
Multiple industry and news outlets are reporting on the problem. Indeed, on July 9, industrial wind supplies dropped to just 0.3 million MWh of electricity, a fraction of the rated capacity nationwide, and just 23 percent of the amount of the average amount of power it provided daily in June.
To make up for the shortfall, Zero Hedge reports, “U.S. power plant operators in the Lower 48 states generated 6.9 million MWh of electricity from natural gas, marking a record high since the collection of hourly data began on January 1, 2019.”
July 9th’s power supply characteristics were not unique in the month, as a steep decline in wind power, accompanied by sustained high summer temperatures, ratcheted up the demand for natural gas again, on July 22. The United States experienced its lowest wind output in 33 months on July 22, according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. This is despite the huge expansion in the number of wind turbines over the decade, adding new capacity—which, as July of 2024 clearly demonstrated, doesn’t necessarily mean additional reliable power. Once again, U.S. natural-gas-fueled generation made up the power supply difference to keep large portions of the electric power grid from failing during the peak summer heat.
Wind power has showed poorly in July 2024, but it is not just July, Oil Price reports; despite growing rated capacity, wind power fell as a portion of power supply delivered in 2023:
So far this year, six of the 10 lowest days for wind power have occurred in July, according to Reuters’ estimates. Last year, just two of the 10 lowest wind power output days were in the month of July.
Last year, slower wind speeds than normal led to the first annual drop in U.S. electricity generation from wind turbines since the mid-1990s, despite the addition of 6.2 gigawatts (GW) of new wind capacity in 2023, the EIA said earlier this year. U.S. wind generation in 2023 totaled 425,235 gigawatthours (GWh), down by 2.1% compared to the 434,297 GWh generated in 2022.
Natural gas-fired electricity generation in the United States has jumped year-to-date compared to the same period last year, as total power demand rose with warmer temperatures and demand from data centers.
For years, natural gas has accounted for the largest share of U.S. power generation, at around 40% of all electricity-generating sources.
Texas has the most industrial wind power rated capacity and a largely self-contained power grid. It has also suffered this summer from wind (power) doldrums, resulting in repeated power conservation warnings from the state’s power regulator, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), despite July not being particularly warm for Texas in July. For July, ERCOT data showed industrial wind power supplied less than 10 percent of the source’s total generating capacity.
“Power demand is surging as people crank up air conditioners,” Al Jazeera wrote, reporting on Texas’ power woes. “But meanwhile, wind speeds have fallen to extremely low levels, and that means the state’s fleet of turbines is at just 8% of their potential output.”
Fortunately for Texas, it is a major source of natural gas, and gas makes up the largest percentage of its power supply and peaking plants, when an unusual spike in demand arises.
The experience of Texas and the nation demonstrate the dangers of the government-forced transition to Net Zero, with ever more electricity generated by intermittent wind and solar sources, large-scale, and when battery backup is expensive, in its infancy, and, thus, in short supply.
Sources: Al Jazeera; Zero Hedge; Oil Price
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Podcast of the Week
The Paris Olympics are underway, and it pledged to be the “greenest” games ever. No air-conditioned dorms. Bed frames made of recycled cardboard. An emphasis on plant-based protein instead of meats and eggs. Well, those moves are going over with the athletes about as well as its opening ceremonies did with normal people. This is yet another case of climate virtue signaling crashing into reality. South Korean swimming stars decided to ditch the Olympic Village and check into the nice, air-conditioned hotels that the organizers enjoy.
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