Energy

NPR

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Key Takeaways From The Climate Meeting Kicking Off Today : NPR

More than 200 of the world's leading climate scientists will begin meeting today to finalize a landmark report summarizing how Earth's climate has already changed, and what humans can expect for the rest of the century.

The report is the sixth edition of an assessment of the latest climate science from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a United Nations body that coordinates research about global warming. The last edition of this report came out in 2013 — an eternity in the world of climate science, where the pace of both warming and research are steadily accelerating.

Onondaga Creek’s future murky as mudboils dump 20 tons of silt, sand every day (video, photos) – syracuse.com

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Onondaga Creek’s future murky as mudboils dump 20 tons of silt, sand every day (video, photos) – syracuse.com

In a single day, these bubbling mudboils spew 20 tons of silt and sand into the creek and all the way down into Onondaga Lake. The sediment causes a number of problems beyond making the stream unsuitable for trout. It builds up to 4 feet near the lake, which could be causing some of the flooding in Syracuse seen in the past few years. It also flows into Onondaga Lake, degrading water quality in a lake that the county and Honeywell have poured at least $1 billion into cleaning up.

Onondaga Creek Mudboil Study – Onondaga Nation

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Onondaga Creek Mudboil Study – Onondaga Nation

The result was the accelerated discharge from increasingly active mudboils. A mudboil is not a common phenomenon in nature. It is quite rare, occurring only where pressurized groundwater penetrates upward through overlying materials with enough velocity to transport sediments along with it. Mudboils are so rare that scientists have been coming to Onondaga Creek to study them for decades, providing ample information over time. ?The first documented mudboil erupted in Tully Valley in the late 1880s, just years after solution mining began.? And since most of this pressured water was passing through the deep salt chambers, the Tully mudboils are particularly unique because over time they came to reflect the brine pressure source and became very salty.

I think it’s absurd to keep closing our eyes about climate change

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I think it’s absurd to keep closing our eyes about climate change. It’s here already, and it’s going to get a lot worse. Flooding and air pollution are big concerns locally, the fires and droughts are the story out west. It doesn’t help that people are pretending that we can slap a few solar panels up, and buy greenie products, and say the problem is fixed.

It’s not fixed and it’s not likely to be fixed. And it’s going to be real bad, regardless of what we do.

Mitigating the risk of fire on utility scale solar facilities

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Mitigating the risk of fire on utility scale solar facilities

The average sized 100MW solar farm hosting around 300,000 to +400,000 solar panels (modules) will generally have over 1,000,000 physical made electrical terminations. Each one of these terminations operates at around 1500 Volts and each termination could fail. 

Electrical equipment failure is well known to be linked to situations where we can observe abnormally high temperatures. Fire, sparking, arching or melting exposes electrical equipment to further damage and degradation exacerbated as moisture ingress occurs. Electrical failure can occur due to various factors and although the commonly seen issue will generally arise due to high resistive joints it is not uncommon to observe how the environment impacts equipment overtime. Electrical termination temperatures can reach over 120° Celsius, under these conditions, equipment will begin to deteriorate, over time plastics will have already begun to deform or melt and visible signs or smells will be present. Mismanagement, poor quality equipment and installation practices or lack of scheduled maintenance is generally what leads to these situations. Thorough and regular maintenance procedures can control these issues including addressing performance degradation, system dropouts, inverter failure/faults and lost yield.