Ready to Check Your Climate & Energy Vocabulary?

Below is a (non-alphabetized) mind-dump on my definitions for climate and energy terms that I get asked about on my radio show or elsewhere. Your challenge is to look at each term or phrase and then, before reading my definition, see if you can truthfully say to yourself that you know what it means. Don’t cheat if you want it to be fun. (:

My definitions are my words and not something I researched. If you think I have gotten any completely or partially wrong, let me know, and I will include any corrections in my next newsletter.

Also, if you think I should have included terms that I didn’t, please let me know that. I already have additional terms that I think worth defining but I didn’t want to make today’s list too long.

Finally, I don’t want any of you to say that you got every one right, because some of the terms, and their definitions, originate with me. 🙂

Have fun…..

Global Warming vs. Climate Change

      These tend to be used interchangeably these days, with climate change becoming more prevalent. Increased concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are producing global warming. Global warming is producing climate change.

Carbon Budget  

      Scientists discovered that CO2 is a heat trapping gas in the 19th Century. Today they know the precise relationship between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and what kind of average worldwide temperature it will yield. Thus, scientists know how much more CO2 we can emit before a certain temperature is reached (such as 1.5 degrees). The CO2 amounts that relate to specific temperature increases are referred to as carbon budgets.

Climate Attribution

      This refers to the new area of science focused on how climate change may not be causing some extreme events but causing those events to be more extreme. In other words, how much worse is a weather event because of climate change than it otherwise would be.

Climate Denier

      This a tough one because I think it keeps changing. Yes, some people don’t believe that climate change is happening. But most do at this point. What they deny now is how fast it is happening, or what kind of impacts it will cause, or whether we can do anything about it.

Emergency vs. Crisis

      I come down on crisis for this one. I think “emergency” has the connotation of being imminent in damage/danger and immediately fixable. That’s not what we have. We face a long-term crisis with long-term effects.

Air Fryer

      This is apparently a new term that has popped up in Phoenix and other places in the Southwestern U.S. It refers to un-airconditioned home during an excessive heat wave.

Sequestration

      This refers to taking/keeping greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere by somehow securing them in a way that they cannot escape. Most commonly it is used to refer to forest sequestration, where CO2 is locked up in the trees and other vegetation for long periods of time. But gases can also be sequestered in soils, rock formations, etc. and these options are getting attention because of their use for gases captured coming out of the stack or extracted from the air.

CCS

      This stands for Carbon Capture and Storage and refers to capturing CO2 as it would otherwise be emitted from some industrial process and storing (or sequestering it) in some form, so it is “locked up” and unable to be released.

Hydrogen Color

      Hydrogen, with a limited exception (White) does not occur naturally and must be made by electrolysis or some other process that requires energy as an input. If the energy used is renewable, it is called Green Hydrogen. If it made using oil or coal, it is called Black or Grey Hydrogen. Blue Hydrogen is that created using natural gas. Pink Hydrogen is made using nuclear (not green even though it has no carbon emissions). There are other colors but the main thing to know is that Green is the non-carbon color. Also Pink.

Virtual Power Plant

      This concept is simple. It calls for instead of generating large amounts of electricity, deploying large amounts of energy efficiency and demand response to save the same amount that would otherwise have to be generated. There are different variations of a definition that depend on how much of the total reduced is efficiency vs dynamically controlled efficiency (demand response)

Building Performance

      This is an important evolution in energy efficiency. It involves not just installing energy efficiency devices in a building, but instead focusing on how the building dynamically operates. It focuses on more dynamic metrics than just the forecasted kwh savings that come device replacement.

Climate Anxiety

      This is what it sounds like. A growing number of people, especially young ones, are so concerned about what climate change will impact the future that are becoming clinical anxious. Climate anxiety has already become a specialty area within the psychological community.

 Methane

      This is a different greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is often a by-product of natural gas activities, including in the home. It does not stay in the atmosphere as long as CO2 but while there it is many times more potent in terms of heat-trapping capability.

Range Anxiety

      You probably know this term, even if you have never even thought about owning an EV. The definition to date has been how far an EV can go on a single charge, and it is the metric which I and others have traditionally focused on in EV shopping. But I think this definition is changing as people realize it is not so much what your range is on a charge as much as how many chargers of what type are out there along the roads as one is travelling.

EV Charger Levels

Level 1 Charger: The slowest. Think an extension cord from your house.

 Level 2 Charger: Think the kind you can install in your garage or the side of your house. Higher level of voltage than Level 1, but voltages vary in different devices, and higher voltage means faster charging. Think in terms of overnight charging if you have one at your residence.

 Level 3 Charger: These are the fast ones, with the Tesla Superchargers best known. The latter charger can provide enough charge in a matter of minutes to finish one’s trip. You can’t get one of these at home.

 Anthropogenic

      This is increasingly being used to refer to the earth being in a new era or “age”, which has been created by the impact of human activity on the planet.

Sea Ice and Ice Sheets

      Sea ice is the ice that forms in the ocean in polar regions. Ice sheets are the sometimes miles deep layer of glacial ice that are on top of the land in those regions as well as Greenland. It is the melting of the ice sheets that is among the most feared impacts of global warming because of the rise in sea level it would cause.

V2G

This stands for Vehicle to Grid Charging, and means that an EV is serving as a battery pushing power into the grid, or even into a home or building. It is not as easy as it sounds, but it is something most EVs will be able to do at some point in the future. 

Solar Farm

      While not necessarily large, this term refers to a deployment of solar panels in one location that can effectively serve as a small power plant in its contribution to the grid. It came about as a term to imply “harvesting the sun” and not something that had to be located in a rural area or on a “farm”.

Heat Island

      This refers to an area, usually a city, where the built environment, including tons of streets, sidewalks, plazas, etc. causes the temperature to rise above the average temperature in the area around it. One report estimates that over 60% of U.S. cities are heat islands where the temperature is close to 8 degrees hotter than elsewhere. There can also be specific heat islands within cities in areas devoid of any tree cover.

Scope 1,2 & 3 Emissions

      As national and international policies have evolved, there has been a recognition that there are different categories of emissions, based on different factors. The result has been adoption of a Greenhouse Gas Protocol that defines emissions differently.

Scope 1 Emissions are from those sources owned and controlled by a company. (What you burn)

Scope 2 Emissions are indirect emissions from purchased energy (What you buy)

Scope 3 Emissions are all other emissions associated with a company’s activities and participation in a value chain. (Beyond what you burn or buy)

Greenhouse Gases

      It is not all about CO2 as the “s” on gases implies. You probably know about methane, and its greater potency but shorter life than CO2. But there are other powerful ones such as nitrous oxide and hydrofluorocarbons that are not emitted in large quantities.

Geo Engineering

      This is the term that is being used to refer to ideas, inventions, and actual deployment of technologies that would help reduce earth’s temperature by reflecting some of the solar inundation we receive back into space. Think of blowing tiny particles in the atmosphere that do this. It is very controversial.

Agrivoltaics

      This means deploying some type of farming on the same land as a solar farm is built. It could be crops or it could be grazing animals, particularly sheep. It is successfully being demonstrated across the U.S.

Distributed Resources

      The history of the U.S. electricity system during the second half of the 20th Century consisted of building bigger and bigger centralized power plants that generated electricity sent over long distances. Over the past 20 years, the benefits of smaller generating units around the grid have become evident and technology and policy has evolved to support that. An example of a distributed resource is a solar farm. One of the benefits gained is seen to be a more reliable system in that it is not impacted by one large plant suffering an outage for some reason.

Resiliency

      This is an interesting term to try to define in that there appear to be two somewhat firmly established camps on what it means. One refers to it as meaning preventative measures to avoid climate impacts. Another refers to the ability to bounce back from a climate impact (like extreme weather). For my two cents, they are siblings, if not twins.

COP

      This is UN-speak and it stands for Conference of the Parties, and it is the annual UN Climate Change Conference, normally held in November. The “parties” are the nations that belong to the UN. Coming up this November is COP29, meaning the 29th such annual event held since the first COP.

El Nino & El Nina

      El Niño and La Niña are opposite phases of a natural climate pattern across the tropical Pacific Ocean based on ocean current oscillation of cold and warmer currents. The two swing back and forth every 3-7 years on average. Depending on which phase is operative, there are different effects on trade winds, jet stream and other climate factors.

Think of El Nino as the “warm” phase and La Nina as the “cool” one. These phases are said to combine with global warming and climate impacts from it to create more unpredictable climate patterns.

 Loss & Damage

      This is a UN term that refers to the adverse impact that global warming and climate change have had, are having, and will have on vulnerable nations around the world (who are acknowledged as not having released the emissions that caused the impacts). A major development at the 2022 UN Climate Conference was agreement to create a fund to transfer funds (if and when raised) to impacted nations.

NDCs

      This stands for Nationally Determined Contributions. It refers to the emissions reduction commitments that nations made pursuant to the Paris Climate Accord. There was no requirement as to the amount a nation pledged, and nation’s individually and collectively pledged less than necessary to stay at the target average temperature of 1.5 degrees. Even given that, no country is on track to meet its pledge last time I looked. This term comes up every year around the time of the annual UN Climate Change Conference.

Net Zero

      This is an emissions term which describes the point at which new emissions are offset by a reduction in existing greenhouse gas concentrations. It does not mean reduction of emission concentrations

Tipping Point

      There is no tipping point when it comes to global warming, i.e. that 1.6 average global increase instead of 1.6 means that we have fallen off a cliff, climate-speaking. But there are specific tipping points caused by global warming, like melting ice sheets, species and habitat destruction, etc.

 Non-Wires Solutions

      Instead of building a new transmission line, deploy energy efficiency, demand response, and distributed energy to reduce the amount of electricity demand that was requiring the new line to be built. The concept now is also being used to refer to avoiding a new generating facility.

 Heat Pump

      Despite its name this device not only heats a building but can cool it when ambient temps are high. It operates by using a heat exchange substance like what is used in refrigerators and air conditioners. A heat pump is both a heater and air conditioner, and technology developments have successfully led to the deployment of cold-weather heat pumps in northern climes.

Community Solar

      I am seeing some confusion on this term lately. What it originally meant was a solar deployment that served a specific community and/or one that individual customers could subscribe to and receive power from. But I have seen it being used to refer to simply a local solar facility.

Time-Based Electricity Pricing

      Costs to produce electricity vary over the course of a 24-hour day based on how much is demanded by customers and which resources (all with different cost profiles) are used. Yet most customers in the U.S. are on flat, levelized pricing. Versions of time-based pricing include Time-of-Use or TOU pricing where the day is divided into several “price” buckets, and “real-time” pricing which refers to pricing that changes much more dynamically as the name implies.

Long Duration Energy Storage

      This refers to technologies and processes that can store energy for lengths of at least 8 hours but also for days, weeks, or seasons. It includes many technologies other than lithium-ion batteries

Keeling Curve

      Global warming has been caused by the release of greenhouse gases which has raised the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere to the highest levels in over 4 million years. In the 1950’s Dr Charles Keeling began to plot the daily readings that are taken at Mauna Loa in Hawaii, and the result is the Keeling Curve. The latest reading is at about 421 parts per million. The safe level according to climate scientists is 350 parts per million.

DAC

This stands for Direct Air Capture, whereby CO2 is extracted directly from the atmosphere, usually via fans, and then separating the CO2 and adhering to a substance for long-term storage.