TBLI Radical Truth Podcast

Are you selling what you dont believe? /w Dr. Giulio Franzinetti

Many in the financial sector are well compensated, but often asked to push product that are not in line with their values. In the latest episode of TBLI Radical Truth Podcast Dr. Giulio Franzinetti will explore these personal challenges and torments.

Dr. Franzinetti is a 30 year financial services veteran. He worked at Banca Intesa, he worked on trying to rationalise the Catholic Church portfolio. In addition, he created the Gum Arabic Fund, to create a fair trade for this essential commodity fund. For the past few years, Dr. Franzinetti is a personal coach for those in the corporate and financial sector.

Listen to the full podcast

Australian fossil fuel exports ranked second only to Russia for climate damage with ‘no plan’ for reduction

Coal and gas exports expected to remain roughly at current level until at least 2035 with 4.5% of emissions linked to Australia, report finds

Australia’s coal and gas exports cause more climate damage than those from any other country bar Russia, according to a new study that argues the country is undermining a global agreement to transition away from fossil fuels.

The analysis, commissioned by the University of New South Wales’ Australian Human Rights Institute, found Australia was the third biggest fossil fuel exporter on an energy basis in 2021, trailing only Russia and the US.

Australia ranked second on an emission basis. It overtook the US due to a majority of Australia’s exports being coal, a particularly emissions-intensive fuel.

It meant that while Australia releases about only 1% of global emissions at home, it was linked to about 4.5% once its exports were counted.

The report, by non-profit science and policy organisation Climate Analytics, said based on government forecasts, Australia’s fossil fuel exports were expected to remain at roughly the current level until at least 2035 as it continued to approve new coal and gas export developments.

Climate Analytics’ chief executive, Bill Hare, said this was incompatible with a range of international commitments Australia had made, including a call backed by nearly 200 countries at the Cop28 climate summit in Dubai in December for the world to transition away from fossil fuels, “accelerating action this decade”.

“Yet here we have the Australian government intent on a deliberate strategy that will see its gas exports soar, exporting billions of tonnes of emissions, inconsistent with achieving net zero, and completely inconsistent with the science of this issue,” he said.

Dr Gillian Moon, the project lead of the Australian Human Rights Institute’s climate accountability project, said it was striking that emissions from Australia’s fossil fuels exports had been about 30bn of CO₂ over the 63 years since 1961 and this was forecast to increase by 50% between now and 2035.

She said the country was continuing on this path despite being more vulnerable to the effects of the climate crisis than most other countries. “We have domestic [emissions reduction] targets, but nothing on our exports. We export 91% of our coal and about three-quarters of gas, and we have no plan to get off this trade,” she said. “The Australian public deserve to know the truth about this and the consequences for us.”

Moon said if Australia was serious about its climate commitments, it should be doing more to encourage countries that bought its fossil fuels – particularly the developed economies Japan, South Korea and Taiwan that take about two-thirds of its exports – to move more rapidly to renewable energy. She said it should be having similar discussions with like-minded fossil fuel exporters, such as Canada and Norway.

She said it was striking that there was no discussion about fossil fuel production at global climate conferences held at the end of each year. “We have to have a conversation about how we’re going to deal with this,” she said.

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Biden’s $1.5 Billion Deal To Resurrect A Nuclear Plant Is Facing Fresh Drama

By: Alexander C. Kaufman - HuffPost

An ex-employee at Michigan's Palisades plant is throwing a wrench in the first-of-a-kind revival plan.

The United States’ effort to reverse the permanent shutdown of a nuclear station for the first time hit a potential snag this week when an ex-employee at the facility went public with safety concerns about reopening the 53-year-old power plant.

Now the company that owns the Palisades Nuclear Generating Station on Michigan’s southwest coast is hitting back at what it called a series of “assumptions” and “inaccurate statements” from Alan Blind, a former engineering director.

Blind’s seven-year tenure overlapped with “a period when the plant performed poorly and required significant improvements” and ended nearly a decade before its closure two years ago, according to Florida-based Holtec International, which bought the station from utility giant Entergy following its shutdown in May 2022.

In an unusually pointed 1,000-word rebuttal, Holtec said “significant investments, upgrades, and modifications were made by the prior owner to dramatically and measurably improve plant reliability” in the nine years after Blind’s departure. The company said the process is “on schedule” and announced at a public meeting this month that the plant is on track to reopen in October 2025.

But Blind cast doubt on Holtec’s proposed budget and timeline for restoring Palisades given that no U.S. reactor has ever come back online after ceasing operations ahead of a planned demolition.

Resurrecting the Palisades plant is among the most closely watched nuclear projects in the nation now that construction is finally finished on the only two new reactors built from scratch in a generation.

While atomic energy is considered by far the most reliable source of carbon-free electricity ever harnessed, the steep cost and decade-long timelines for constructing new plants limit the potential for nuclear power to meet Americans’ surging electricity demand, stem rising blackouts and slash planet-heating pollution from fossil fuels.

New laws Congress passed over the past three years made billions of dollars available to the nuclear energy industry to extend the operating lives of existing plants, build new reactors and catch up with Russia and China on next-generation nuclear power technologies.

The money is going out. In January, the Biden administration put up $1.1 billion to keep California’s last nuclear power station from closing. Two months later, the Department of Energy offered Holtec a loan worth $1.5 billion to make Palisades the first U.S. nuclear plant to ever come back online after shutting down in preparation for decommissioning.

At least two other utilities are now considering restarting shuttered nuclear reactors, including the unit at the Three Mile Island facility in Pennsylvania that did not melt down in 1979.

On Monday, Reuters cited Blind saying the Palisades plant received waivers from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission that exempted the facility from modern safety standards that prevent insulation on pipes from breaking down and clogging cooling systems, guard against earthquakes and curb risks from fires.

“I’m worried that the NRC will not insist that the generic safety issues be … fixed before they allow Palisades to restart,” Blind said in the newswire report published Monday.

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Carbon credits are supposed to funnel money to poor countries. Do they?

Researchers say there is "no evidence" that they bring economic benefits to communities where projects are based.

Proponents of the voluntary carbon market say it’s a mechanism not only to advance sustainability goals, but also to funnel much-needed cash to some of the world’s poorest countries. 

The idea is that companies seeking to “offset” their climate footprint will help pay for the development of projects that sequester or prevent greenhouse gas emissions — endeavors like planting trees to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, or protecting forests that were ostensibly in danger of being chopped down. These projects, which generate exchangeable “credits” representing 1 metric ton of greenhouse gas emissions each, come with the promise of jobs for local residents, and project developers often pledge to devote part of their revenue to public infrastructure like schools.

In Africa, the voluntary carbon market is “a powerful means to address climate change and uplift communities,” according to one nonprofit that writes nonbinding standards for the sector.

It’s increasingly unclear, however, whether that narrative holds up to scrutiny. A series of reports published since last November by the nonprofit Carbon Market Watch, or CMW, has highlighted a near-total lack of published research on how much money flowing into the carbon market actually winds up supporting climate mitigation projects or reaching local communities. One report called attention to a lack of fair and transparent benefit-sharing agreements, clauses in projects’ design documents that detail how they will distribute revenue and nonmonetary benefits to people they affect. 

Most recently, an analysis published by the group last week found that, while most carbon credit projects are located in poor countries, they are largely controlled by companies based in wealthier North American and European countries. The authors said there is “no evidence” that the voluntary carbon market, or VCM, brings economic benefits to communities where projects are based, a point that human rights and environmental groups have long been making.

“When it comes to knowing if the VCM is actually working as a tool to channel finance from the Global North to the Global South, there’s no information there,” said Inigo Wyburd, a policy expert for Carbon Market Watch and the author of the newest report. “It raises serious questions as to, well, are these communities really benefiting?”

The most recent report looks at two samples of carbon credit projects: one composed of 30 from around the world, and another of 39 projects just in Africa. Only 13 percent of the projects in the global sample are located in countries with the highest level of “human development,” based on a U.N. metric encompassing education, health, and living standards. But nearly 60 percent of the companies that own, develop, monitor, and vet the projects are based in the world’s most developed countries.

The numbers are even more pronounced for the African sample, which shows that 0 percent of projects are based in countries with the highest U.N. development index. Sixty-two percent of all the projects’ developers and 63 percent of their owners are located in the most highly developed countries outside of Africa. 

According to Wyburd, this doesn’t necessarily mean that companies based in rich countries aren’t directing revenue to local communities. In a way, it makes sense that there would be more companies from wealthy countries participating in carbon credit projects, since they have better access to capital and technology. But paired with the lack of transparency on financial flows, the geographical disparity is concerning.

“As many companies are not based in the same region where their project is carried out, any money that is not directly assigned to project implementation is potentially diverted to become profit for actors located in the Global North,” the report says. Notably, the analysis found that at least 10 projects across both samples were missing documentation on things like monitoring and verification.

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Most energy storage tech is new. Do we know how reliable it is?

By: Sean Wolfe - Renewable Energy World

A good portion of energy storage technology is still relatively new as the energy industry adapts to the energy transition. While the industry should be lauded for adopting resiliency measures like energy storage, there are still gaps and little to no firm understanding of long-term reliability.

A new report from the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), Pathways to Improved Energy Storage Reliability, explores the challenges of assessing reliability for the large swath of storage technologies and delves into current indications from reliability data. The report also provides a framework meant to allow for more clarity in storage reliability, in addition to results from EPRI members that highlight member needs in terms of reliability and emerging policy impacts.

Challenges in energy storage

The U.S. alone has installed more than 15 GW of energy storage, the report said, but it’s still difficult to determine how reliably those systems operate. EPRI said there appear to be indications that some storage systems face issues and lower reliability when compared to legacy electric utility assets.

Historic data for “commercially oriented” storage systems typically spans less than five years, the report said, and there is not much uniformity to the structure or extent of the data. However, there is plenty of reliability assessment data on legacy utility assets, as they have more than 30 years of operational data from a “wide variety” of equipment and manufacturers, the report said.

This data provides tangibility to equipment failure rates, failure mechanisms, maintenance procedures, and a firm understanding of asset life, the report said – all of which are lacking for energy storage. Additionally, energy storage systems are deployed across multiple ownership models, including power purchase agreements (PPAs) and third-party-owned and -operated models, which often leaves operational data inaccessible to operators or offtakers.

Besides the lack of data, additional obstacles are preventing an accurate assessment of energy storage reliability. One such obstacle is the “rapid technology growth” and continued introduction of a wide variety of technology solutions and products, according to EPRI’s report. Lithium-ion is the most common storage technology today, but it alone has multiple chemistries and configurations that alter the operational characteristics and supporting systems. Alternative battery technologies have begun to emerge, such as sodium ion, but they have a virtually non-existent track record of grid operations at scale.

A new framework

To address these challenges, EPRI created an overall framework for its research that links performance analysis to reliability analysis, which is meant to inform maintenance leading practices and asset management practices, it said — a “continuous, circular effort” informed by field data and experiences.

To create the framework, EPRI relied on its own research and experience in assessing the reliability of legacy assets like generating units, transformers, and other equipment; in addition to reliability research on similar inverter-based resource (IBR) data. EPRI said the ultimate focus is on the individual components of storage systems, and their contribution to suboptimal system performance.

An early look at reliability

There’s still plenty of work to be done, but EPRI has conducted investigations of daily outage and curtained and non-operational data produced by independent system operators (ISOs). It calculates unavailability from the data collected on a daily basis, which is meant to provide more visibility into why a system is not participating in the market.

EPRI has been collecting data for more than a year from the California Independent System Operator (CAISO) and recently started collecting data from the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT).

Read the full report here.

Thousands of Serbians protest in Belgrade against lithium mine

By: Agence France-Presse in Belgrade

Controversial mining project is a political fault line in Balkan country over fears about environmental impacts

Thousands hit the streets in Serbia’s capital Belgrade Saturday to protest against the rebooting of a controversial lithium mine set to serve as a vital source to power Europe’s green energy transition.

Before the rally, two leading protest figures said they were briefly detained by security officials who warned that any moves to block roads during the protest would be viewed as illegal.

Thousands chanted “Rio Tinto get out of Serbia” and “You won’t dig” as they rallied in downtown Belgrade before setting off on a march through the city.

Protesters later entered Belgrade’s main railway station where demonstrators blocked tracks, halting traffic.

Serbia has vast lithium deposits near the western city of Loznica, where a mining project being developed by the Anglo-Australian mining company Rio Tinto has been a perennial political fault line in the Balkan country in recent years over its potential environmental impacts.

The deposits were discovered in 2004, but weeks of mass protests forced the government to halt the project in 2022.

The government revived the project after a court decision last month that said the order to revoke the permits awarded to Rio Tinto was “not in line with the constitution and the law”.

The Serbian government signed a memorandum of understanding with the EU that is considered the first step in developing Serbia’s lithium resources.

Lithium is a strategically valuable metal needed for electric vehicle batteries, making it key for helping the automotive industry shift to greener production.

The project, however, has continued to be unpopular with many in Serbia due to concerns the mine would pollute water sources and endanger public health.

“I am in Belgrade because the survival of life in Serbia is being defended here,” said Slobodan Stanimirovic, 58, from western Serbia’s Radjevina near the site of the future mine.

The protest in Belgrade was the latest in a series of demonstrations held across the Balkan country after the mine’s licences were reinstated.

Activists and demonstrators have called on legislators to pass a law permanently banning the mining of lithium and boron in Serbia.

Environmental groups said they were prepared to block major traffic arteries across Serbia and engage in civil disobedience if the government refused to act before a 10 August deadline set by activists.

Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić has repeatedly vowed that no mining operations will begin until guarantees over environmental safety protocols are established.

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