by Jeff Ihnen | Aug 21, 2023 | Energy Rant
Last week Michaels Energy delivered a webinar, Achieving Grid Resiliency with Thermal Energy Storage. There are about 70 gigawatts of refrigeration load in the United States frozen storage and chilled-water HVAC systems alone. That 70 GW does not include distributors...
by Jeff Ihnen | Jun 20, 2023 | Energy Rant
The origin of this post is a spicy Zerohedge article, The Phony Climate Change Catastrophe, specifically, carbon capture from ambient air. That reminded me of an April article in The Wall Street Journal that referenced the same redonkulous effort by Occidental...
by Jeff Ihnen | Jun 6, 2023 | Energy Rant
East of the Mississippi, we haven’t had a heat-induced stress test of the electric grid for a long time. I don’t remember names, but I remember weather events, places, and numbers well. The hottest summer of my life was 1988, with many days over 100F throughout the...
by Jeff Ihnen | Jan 11, 2022 | Energy Rant
A reader last week asked, “What kind of home can withstand fire, hurricanes, floods, heat domes, and polar vortex?” This is a great question. I love the challenge, so here we go[1]. Flooding and Landslides Think ahead and ask yourself, “what if” before or even after...
by Jeff Ihnen | Mar 10, 2020 | Energy Rant
I’m not in the electricity storage business, but I can recognize lousy ideas when I see them. Grid-scale battery storage is a bad idea. It will never be anything more than a frequency and voltage regulation technology, although I have to say these are critical...
