New Wind and Solar Energy Projects Are Now Overwhelming America's Antiquated Ele...
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New Wind and Solar Energy Projects Are Now Overwhelming America's Antiquated Electrical Grids
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An explosion in proposed clean energy ventures in America "has overwhelmed the system for connecting new power sources to homes and businesses," reports the New York Times:
So many projects are trying to squeeze through the approval process that delays can drag on for years, leaving some developers to throw up their hands and walk away.
More than 8,100 energy projects — the vast majority of them wind, solar and batteries — were waiting for permission to connect to electric grids at the end of 2021, up from 5,600 the year before, jamming the system known as interconnection.... PJM Interconnection, which operates the nation's largest regional grid, stretching from Illinois to New Jersey, has been so inundated by connection requests that last year it announced a freeze on new applications until 2026, so that it can work through a backlog of thousands of proposals, mostly for renewable energy.
It now takes roughly four years, on average, for developers to get approval, double the time it took a decade ago. And when companies finally get their projects reviewed, they often face another hurdle: the local grid is at capacity, and they are required to spend much more than they planned for new transmission lines and other upgrades. Many give up. Fewer than one-fifth of solar and wind proposals actually make it through the so-called interconnection queue, according to research from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. "From our perspective, the interconnection process has become the No. 1 project killer," said Piper Miller, vice president of market development at Pine Gate Renewables, a major solar power and battery developer....
A potentially bigger problem for solar and wind is that, in many places around the country, the local grid is clogged, unable to absorb more power. That means if a developer wants to build a new wind farm, it might have to pay not just for a simple connecting line, but also for deeper grid upgrades elsewhere.... These costs can be unpredictable. In 2018, EDP North America, a renewable energy developer, proposed a 100-megawatt wind farm in southwestern Minnesota, estimating it would have to spend $10 million connecting to the grid. But after the grid operator completed its analysis, EDP learned the upgrades would cost $80 million. It canceled the project.
That creates a new problem: When a proposed energy project drops out of the queue, the grid operator often has to redo studies for other pending projects and shift costs to other developers, which can trigger more cancellations and delays. It also creates perverse incentives, experts said. Some developers will submit multiple proposals for wind and solar farms at different locations without intending to build them all. Instead, they hope that one of their proposals will come after another developer who has to pay for major network upgrades. The rise of this sort of speculative bidding has further jammed up the queue.
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We know what the solution here is, make it easier to build new electric infrastructure. In this context, the permitting reform that Senator Manchin wanted as part of the big compromise but then did not get through would have been a major help here. Luckily, that push may not be completely dead https://www.eenews.net/articles/manchin-westerman-plot-another-push-for-permitting-reform/ [eenews.net].
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We need legislation to sweep away all the NIMBY lawsuits when it comes to building energy infrastructure. Same for opening mines. There of course should be environmental review and safeguards but, to quote Bill Maher, it's impossible to get anything done in this impacted colon of a country thanks to the courts.
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very sudden increase in whale mortality off Jersey that happens to coincide with the installation of a giant off shore wind facility
You have to prove those are connected though and the protests of the farm absolutely reeks of astroturfing, especially when the concept is sonar disturbing the whales but there is a constant amount of sonar in the ocean and not even evidence that the amount of whale beachings happening in the area is out of the norm at all.
https://www.npr.org/2023/02/22... [npr.org]
Also while 18 whales have washed ashore in NJ, from previous years "High stranding rates predate the construction of wind farms after Biden’s election. In 2017, 78 whales died along the Atlantic coast of the US. 59 died per year in 2018, 2019 and 2020. 31 died in 2021, and 32 died in 2022."
So while it might be true you have to take things into context.
Just like with the train derailment in Ohio that is terrible and needs legislation for safety but people are also now taking into account the fact that something like 3 train derailments happen every single day
Everything people do has an impact on the environment. Coal plants, oil drilling and smog from cars is also destructive. There needs to be a case made that these new things are worse. At the moment they are just different. There's no free lunch.
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Derailments don't always result in dangerous chemical releases or fires. This one did, in a populated place and also in proximity to Pittsburgh and the Ohio River. The potential for life-threatening illnesses across a very large area is substantial, and, IMO, does justify the media scrutiny it has received.
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I am certainly not saying it doesn't deserve scrutiny, the whole rail industry is in need of some (and the union fight a couple months back talked about how something like this was bound to happen) but it's a definite case of Frequency Illusion because now I see stories about other derailments happening and the thing is, they've always been happening.
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Oh I get it! Which is why historically these projects get dumped on poor communities who don't have the ability of fight back. Nonetheless we all want a modern life with lots of energy and conveniences. Outsourcing the negative aspects of a resource-hungry civilization is no longer an option. You want copper? You gotta mine it. Want to electrify everything? Gotta run more transmission lines.
There are no good choices.-
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You are a true capitalist American. I got mine, so FU. those transmission lines will slightly affect my view! Waaah!
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The answer is people don't want this shit in the back yards because IT IS destructive to habitat and the environment which they hope to continue to enjoy.
It's funny when NIMBYs virtue-signal about habitat destruction when their single family suburban and rural homes are responsible for far more habitat destruction per capita than multifamily homes! [njfuture.org]
In other words, "If you love nature, stay away from it." (Henry David Thoreau) [boston.com]
So you see, NIMBYs are hypocrites. Like the ones who park on the street for lack o
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Kind of makes sense. They know what the problem is and want it fixed.
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No, they don't want it in their backyards because it looks ugly, and they think it will reduce their property values.
As far as I'm aware, there's only one offshore wind facility in New Jersey, called Ocean Wind 1, and they are expected to start construction in Q1 of this year. So yeah, I'm sure the offshore wind farm caused a bunch of whales to get lost in time and they traveled back to before the wind farm was built to warn us, but didn't survive the time jump.
Besides, even if there were an active offshor
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One of the primary and potentially unsolvable problems with free market capitalism especially in a minarchist, ancap style system is how do you deal ith negative externalities that affect everyone.
How do you deal with a coal plant spewing chemical and radioactive dust over everything that wind can take far from the plant? Does everyone in its path need to sue the coal plant? Who handles that? How do you jusge that? How long does it take and how much does it cost?
Do we really think that is a simpler and bet
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Manchin got pushback from both conservatives and progressives on his proposed legislation. The biggest hurdle appears to be environmental concerns. We will see if Congress is able to reach a compromise this time.
I think the implications of adding 8,000 ad-hoc connections to the grid should be central to the discussion. Adding wind and solar generation without considering the impact on the grid is one of the reasons why renewables have been marketed as cheaper than fossil fuels. All generation additions need to be accompanied by solid engineering demonstrating no negative impact of the grid. It is more than just grid capacity. Most people have no concept of reactive power, protective relaying, power quality, and the like. You cannot just add another line to the transmission infrastructure and expect everything to be fine.-
My mod points just expired, otherwise would mod this up. Historically the grid has been kept stable by the inertia of spinning mass in traditional generators like coal, hydro, nuclear and gas plants. Adding asynchronous sources like solar and wind to the grid and keeping it stable is much more difficult than just stringing some extra wires.
A good primer for some of the considerations is here; https://www.nerc.com/comm/Othe... [nerc.com]
And a look at how they work in practice; https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy20... [nrel.gov]
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This is an argument for smaller self contained grids. And long term planning.
This has nothing to do with wind or solar. If you are asking to move 10% more product every year and you donâ(TM)t build for it, you will fail.
As mentioned in the article from the NYT, 20 years ago Texas began expanding the grid. It is part of the reasons for failures. Growing pains. But the result is that this year there is Brazilian investment for half a gigawatt of wind energy, not to mention novel offshore infrastructu
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You want larger interconnected grids, so you can move energy from where it is available to where it is in demand.
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You want firewalls so failures are localized an expansion can happen without having to consider the whole nation.
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That article is about developing energy sources (environmental impact being the major constraint addressed), whereas this story is about the distribution grid, preparing it for those new sources.
Makes ya think about how complex it all is, making different huge investments all come together at hopefully about the same time and place.
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Yes, building new infrastructure and rebuilding things is a thing. And countries do it all the time. That you do not like the President who proposed does not say much about it at all. People have been discussing the poor state of US infrastructure for decades, such as the Infrastructure Report Cards https://infrastructurereportcard.org/infrastructure-categories/ [infrastruc...rtcard.org]. Remember Trump's attempt at "Infrastructure week?" That was because until Biden's bill, the sorry state of US infrastructure was a major *Republican* talking point. But apparently, now that Biden has helped do something that they wanted (and were correct about!), it is no longer ok.
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New stories about the state of the U.S. electrical grid (like this one) never discuss the recent history of grid investment which has been climbing for a couple of decades, year by year. [eia.gov] Grid capital investments is more than half of all the money spent in grid operations now. So yes, the industry is spending big bucks on upgrading grids. This context is entirely lacking in news stories that only report of "problems and difficulties" giving the impression that nothing is being/can be/will be done about it.
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That's dollar figures. They've spent 3.4% more per year during two decades where the price of copper at least doubled. My average electricity bill also doubled, and shareholder dividends are one of the top priorities for virtually all of the utilities now.
Why has my bill doubled?
Capex on new infrastructure should have gone up at least 50% during this period.. it would be more useful to see a comparison of capacity, growth of customer base, or how rates have tracked with that pitiful rate of expenditur
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It's always easier to blame the party in power when you're not in that party. Especially Republicans have spent decades being the party of blaming the other side and when they have been in power they fumble trying to get out of that mode. You can see fumbling right now as there's infighting within the party of power over priorities (which feels odd because normally the Republicans have been much more disciplined than Democrats).
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A semi truck full of batteries is a terrible idea, dumbass. How much energy will it take to move that energy? Kind of defeats the purpose
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I hope your response is deadpan satire. The post to which you replied is obviously not serious itself.
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Whether the utility companies make money seems irrelevant. And yes, Machin is certainly someone who owes a lot to coal. But he still happens to be correct about this.
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The US energy grid is certainly antiquated, but it's not clear from the article how that plays a role. This seems more like an issue of a poor upgrade/modification process. I guess I'm wondering how much of this problem is due to the age of the system vs inefficiency in how to add new energy sources. Or is the issue that the system was designed so long ago that adding new sources is more difficult than if it were a modern design? How are other countries handling this (presumably the US isn't the only place renewables are soaring)?
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How are other countries handling this?
They're getting on with it instead of whining about how much it hurts.
This benefits every single person, unlike the trillions being spent on tax cuts for the rich, 'defense', etc.
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Yep, pretty much this. China & the EU, for example, are investing billions in planned, organised, cohesive ways to ensure that possible bottlenecks are addressed in good time & don't hold up the transition to cheaper, less polluting energy.
It would be easy to have the impression that legislators in the USA are more concerned with individual freedoms, especially of corporations, than with actually getting useful & necessary stuff done.-
Even if you don't take in account the renewables, even if it's a 100% coal grid with Mr.Burns on every plant.
A bad power grid is just money lost. -
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where in europe ? not in my country, i thinks its about 50% more than 10 year ago.
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I don't recall any American bankers or politicians being shot recently.
All that talk about owning guns in America is just that. Talk.
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This is because the overwhelming majority of gun owners are law abiding and genuinely good people.
Even to their detriment.
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In the Netherlands where we have significantly better infrastructure than the US we have the same problem. The grid is not suited for loads of new power generators, or consumers for that matter. This is a problem we have been aware of for about a decade but I don't see much happening here either. I hope other countries are handling it better..
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The Netherlands is slightly larger than the US state of Maryland, one of the smallest states. This is significant because the larger the land area that must be covered, the more expensive it is to build infrastructure. So good for The Netherlands, but it's hardly an example of how things should be done in the US.
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Norway is a good example of what is possible. It's a large country, partly in the Arctic Circle, subject to extreme weather and some difficult terrain. They have a good, reliable grid, and widespread adoption of EVs. Lots of heat pumps for heating too.
The technology is all there, you just need to adopt it.
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Exceptional or not, the size of the US does pose serious challenges. Only two countries in the world have more land area, and they are both sparsely populated by comparison. Only two countries have more people than the US. You can't just brush aside these challenges with a snub.
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You absolutely can (not that they aren't challenges) but too much is made of it.
Things are in fact local, the grid is not actually a national grid but many smaller state grids which are composed of even smaller local grids.
The population isn't as much a concern because per capita the US is wealthier: (70,248.6 USA vs 57,767.9 NL)
So the issue is not a lack of funds, it's a lack of political will to collect and utilize the wealth generated for common good projects like, well, electrical infrastructure.
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While this isn't false, it also oversimplifies the problems of scale. Texas alone is twice the land area of Germany. Most of the wind power is generated in the western portion of the state, more than 1,000 km away from the population centers. Building cross-country transmission lines is expensive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm not gonna sit here and say it's "easy" but it's hardly new, or daunting or even really all that expensive in and of itself.
None of that refutes my point of what makes it expensive in the US are political things, not technology. I cant find the numbers but I would absolutely bet that the cost-per-mile of running high voltage lines in Germany is less than in the US.
We can reduce the price and increase the speed of these things quite a bit with legislation and compromises made by both sides. Liberals ar
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This happened whey they decided (in some places) that the government should "take care of us" instead of getting out of the way (as much as possible) so we can take care of ourselves.
It's no accident that Texas is far and away the leader in green energy, producing more than 6 times more wind power than California. Texas has relatively few regulations, which are criticized by environmentalists, but has ironically made it the leader in environmentally preferable energy options.
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It's hardly so simplistic though because while Texas did have good success with an amount of de-regulation what really drove that push was the 1999 bill by then Governor Bush (and then expanded upon by Governor Perry) that mandated Texas hit a mark of renewable energy by a certain date, so legislation is what pushed the private markets to act, which kinda strengthens my case that for big scale changes like this is has to be some amount of public/private cooperation and political will to make it happen.
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Expensive and a waste. You lose a lot of power transmitting over long distances. You want generation to be as local as possible to reduce lossage.
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Texas's largest cities aren't in locations where there is significant, steady wind that could generate that kind of power. Sometimes, the earth has a say in where you generate power, and it's not always close to cities.
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The USA is always telling us how big and wealthy and amazing they are, but when the chips are down they always start whining and giving excuses about how they're too poor and feeble to get things done.
Maybe it's really just the people who run the country are more interested in mansions and yachts than actually running the country.
(And since when did "USA" get shortened to "US"?)
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Are they though? Can you name a country that is an example of great electrical infrastructure? And do you have a source?
My guess is that no country is truly handling this well. The problem is, upgrading infrastructure is expensive. And high price tags make people, and countries, drag their feet.
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Probably Norway, as AmiMojo mentions above your post. Though I'm pretty sure they export a crap ton of oil to the rest of the world. So if we blame gun manufacturers for killing people, we should blame Norway's Oil exports as killing the planet. Seems fair.
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Can you name a country that is an example of great electrical infrastructure?
Iceland.
The same country that threw all the bankers in jail a few years ago. Maybe we could learn something from them...
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Good choice! Iceland has a population only 5% that of the city of Houston, Texas. Scale matters. It's much easier to make big changes to infrastructure on a small scale, than on a large one. This is true whether it's computer infrastructure, or roads, or power lines.
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Right, so time to grit teeth and get it done.
It's only the entire future of humanity that's at stake here.
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The problem is that in order to do renewables you need to upgrade the ENTIRE grid at once from the current hub and spoke system where there is one major production facility with HV wires and then the voltages get downgraded until you get to the consumer, for renewables you need the nameplate capacity in HV wiring for the 2 or so days in the summer it can produce that and it needs to be fully distributed as the wind and sun don't work at the same time in the same region.
That means HV wiring EVERYWHERE. As in
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If the peak output is really that expensive to transport you can always just feather your turbines and avoid it entirely.
These days wind farms often have batteries for smoothing and a bit of peaking too, so you can divert excess energy to those when the grid can't take it.
This is all completely doable and the cost isn't all that bad, especially compared to the alternatives: new fossil fuel and nuclear plants, climate change, pollution medical bills etc.
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Antiquated is a reasonable word for it. Many existing lines need to be expanded (increased voltage or migrate to HVDC), and functionally additional capacity is needed between the nation's grids.
Most of the immediate holdups are (as I understand it) local transmission problems though; developers hoped to be able to tie into a line that requires upgrades they don't want to pay for. Longer term you have issues around transmission congestion and paying for that.
There is no quick and easy fix. There are things y
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Australia is adding sustainable Distributed Energy Resources DERs much faster than the U.S.
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It'll be a mix of resistance along cables (due to the use of aluminium to avoid expensive copper), the maximum voltage transformers can take before they go, line lengths, the reaction time in coping with emergencies (such as downed lines causing part of the grid to have vastly too much power vs being able to route around damage), stuff like that.
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by Jarik C-Bol ( 894741 ) on Monday February 27, 2023 @08:50AM (#63326492)
This happened near me. They put in a giant new wind farm, and a new high voltage line right past my house to deliver power from it, and when it all came online, supposedly they could only run like 7 of the windmills at once or it would trip the breakers at the power plant where the line tied in. Big delays in getting the wind farm up and running, and now there is talk that they have to put in an entire second high voltage line to support the wind farm. No one is very happy about that, because the two years the first line were pretty disruptive. Hard to say what actually will happen next, but there are a lot of parked windmills out there. -
Perhaps Texas' lower regulatory thresholds explain why Texas is far and away the leader in wind energy, producing more than four times more than any other state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Yes, Texas also struggles to build enough power infrastructure, but those struggles don't seem to be getting in the way quite as much as those that are managed by FERC.
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If the NIMBY crowd would stop interfering with power generation being closer to where it is consumed, that would simplify shoring up a "national grid." As things stand today, none of the regional operators have any real incentive to do more than the bare minimum to maintain their little corner of the grid....and some of them aren't even good at that.
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I have an electrical coop serving my area and when I installed my system the last "approval" step for them to allow feeding back into their grid was the approval
of an automated/remote control cut-off that my engineer had to factor in at the last minute. The coop mandated it and it added another $800 to the project but still, after that, it took
them six weeks to grant permission. I think it would be easier to just accept the risks that the grid may fail because it wasn't designed to have this
many power gene -
Polite way to say a certain group of people and their policies are wrecking the grid that was already working. Those groups are untouchable and the article cannot basically say that all their activities around green shaming everyone and forcing people to build out new "renewable" sources not only isn't saving anything, but actually wrecking something that we spend considerable manpower and resources to build in the first place.
Let's just say *THAT*.
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Nowhere in this article does it say wind and solar are overwhelming the grid. More like the reverse: antiquated review procedures are blocking a transition to low-cost renewable power.
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How about we just change the headline to:
"New Wind and Solar Energy Projects Are Now Overwhelming America's Antiquated Bureaucracy"
Fixed!
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Instead of government subsidizing individual wind and solar companies, perhaps they should offer a blanket assistance to pay for increased network infrastructure costs to connect to the grid.
Building out infrastructure would be helpful for everyone, and the government being responsible for the funding of it would mean the government could steamroll efforts to try and stop any electrical network expansion.
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Fossil fuels get subsidies, and that's despite being an old technology that is about as good as it's going to get. Wind and solar should receive equal subsidies to balance the equation. Now, if you remove ALL of those subsidies from fossil fuels, direct and indirect, equal would be zero to wind and solar. I'm fine with that, the playing field is level and the market isn't distorted.
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No one saw this coming. This just came out of nowhere.
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The greenest state in the union has the highest utility prices in the union. What does that tell you? That being green costs more of the green stuff out of your wallet. In other words, greenification is economically destructive -- costing more to do less. The monomania about CO_2 is the problem. Yeah, I don't want to breathe toxic truck exhaust, but the CO_2 is not the problem, glow ball warming or not.
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Utility companies, being monopolies want to remain monopolies.
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Most of these reviews are likely wastes of time and money and it wouldnâ(TM)t surprise me that someone is incentivized to slow renewables
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So the grid operators, the ones who have an entrenched interest in not adding what is effectively competition to their monopoly on power, are saying there's not enough manpower to add what is effectively competition to their business model? Fuck the grid operators.
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by ScienceBard ( 4995157 ) on Monday February 27, 2023 @05:12PM (#63328377)
So the grid operators, the ones who have an entrenched interest in not adding what is effectively competition to their monopoly on power, are saying there's not enough manpower to add what is effectively competition to their business model? Fuck the grid operators.
In most of the US the grid operators are independent not for profits that preside over wholesale markets. This really isn't a problem of entrenched interests. Modifying the power grid to accommodate a generator of any significant size is just a very complex process, and the upgrades to make it happen are extremely expensive.
Ironically monopoly utilities used to have a huge interest in building transmission infrastructure because they got a % of the total cost, but in areas covered by RTOs those utilities usually aren't allowed to just build that infrastructure anymore. The privilege of doing the work gets bid out as a cost saving measure to independent companies, who shoulder most of the risk (unlike utilities, who typically were allowed to pass that risk onto ratepayers). Over the last decade or so that has proven to be a disaster. The margins simply aren't there to justify the timelines and risk for the projects, and operators like MISO have had a really difficult time getting any major transmission built. It's to the point that there has been serious consideration for letting the utilities have the right to build in their territories and pass off costs again, because the marginal increase in cost for doing so is outweighed by the benefits for the grid in getting the infrastructure upgraded.
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"NWO" ?!? The "professional" wrestling association (according to wikepedia)? I wasn't aware they were planning on taking over. The thought is horrifying. Imagine mobs of 'roid abusers rampaging around our streets bellowing about...well...nothing in particular, but doing it in a manly way.
The green projects represent the liberation of America from Big Oil, Big Coal, and the politicians in their pocket like Sen. Manchin.
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The 370 billion is over the next ten years https://www.nature.org/en-us/newsroom/us-house-passes-landmark-climate-bill/ [nature.org]. And yes, it is a lot. But most of it will pay for itself, either in improved infrastructure, or reductions in pollution, by stopping about 1 to 2 trillion dollars worth of climate related damage at a minimum https://www.cnbc.com/2022/08/24/inflation-reduction-act-could-cut-climate-damages-by-1point9-trillion.html [cnbc.com], and reducing pollution of other sorts such as particulate from coal which c
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Since you didn't know whether that figure was annually or over a 10 year period, why did you feel confident to compare it to our annual defense budget? The figure is actually over a 10 year period, which puts it at closer to 5% of the annual defense budget. It also makes it about the same as direct subsidies to fossil fuels.
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Are you purposely we stop being world police and let China do it? That's what that budget goes to after all. World police. I'm not saying I disagree but without us pushing back against Russia, do you really think the EU was going to step up and stop them alone? Seems doubtful.
I'm all for an isolationist approach for USA. We have more then enough land and resources to do whatever we want, EPA be damned. We could always let more people come here if we need workers. We seem to be good at allowing that anyway.
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The IMF estimate fossil fuels get $11 million in subsidies every minute. That works out to $5.781600 trillion per year. Divert a large chunk of that to renewables and revamping power grids worldwide, and after 10 years or so, renewables will make the bulk of global power. In the meantime, the extra expense of fossil fuels will deter their use. Which will allow even more of the subsidies to be moved over.
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It's not lying, you two are just talking about different metrics. You are referring to direct subsidies, while the AC is referring to direct and indirect subsidies. The G20 includes local air pollution costs, road accidents / congestion, global warming costs, and foregone consumption taxes. I'm not quite sure why road accidents and congestion are considered implicit subsidies (which is 20% of the global implicit subsidy total), but the rest make sense. They also don't include other indirect subsidies for so
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As you allude to, it's unreasonable to attribute all of those costs directly to fossil fuel companies. If you want to bundle all those things together as "subsidies", then you need to carve up the responsible parties better.
- fossil fuel extraction, refining, and delivery companies
- fuel users (commercial, non-commercial, individual)
- chemical producers and consumers (plastics, industrial, etc.)
- basically every person and every company ever-
No, not really. A certain percentage of air pollution and global warming comes from burning fossil fuels. In the absence of fossil fuels, the energy would have to come from some other source that didn't have those harmful side effects. So regardless of who uses the fossil fuels, the damage is caused by those fossil fuels.
This is not to say that they are the only ones to blame, of course. After all, any of those companies or individuals could have moved to an electric car, moved to wind instead of coal/o
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The same is true of cement. And mining and refining of metals. And lumber. And food production. Pretty much your entire civilized life is indirectly subsidized. Would be funny to watch you complain in your hut if that all went away.
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No, it isn't. You missed the part where there was an alternative that folks could switch to, and would switch to, were it not for the externalities. There is no alternative to food production other than mass murder. There is no alternative to lumber, realistically, except for metal, and that's one of the things on your list. There is no alternative to metal, realistically, except in some situations, larger amounts of lumber, and again, that's on your list. There is no alternative to cement in a large n
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Sorry, clicked submit too early.
And concrete usually doesn't have any viable alternatives other than, in some cases, asphalt, which has its own problems, so we pretty much have to live with it.
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https://www.imf.org/en/Publica... [imf.org]
And those are 2020 numbers.
I.e. A year that saw rather large dips in fossil fuel use, around 9% in the US, [eia.gov] thanks to the whole sitting at home and going nowhere thing in order to avoid dying.
But don't you worry, more poison will be subsidized this year then ever before. [eia.gov] -
Globally, fossil fuels get $11 million every minute. (source: IMF)
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No. That would be dumb. Privatization usually sucks more than having it publicly administered. Utilities that everyone needs to use should be public entities, or at least heavily regulated. Natural gas, water, electricity, phone, etc, all make sense to be public or well regulated. I would argue that cellphones and Internet are also at that level now, but we haven't quite gotten the regulations up and running yet. Give it time
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Show me a place where a private energy company does worse than a government-managed company. California? New York?
I get power from a truly private energy coop company (not a big conglomerate under the government jackboot like PG&E or NYSEG) where I live, I pay 4c/kWh from a reservation on nuclear and hydroelectric, we have a guy named Mike and his men that deal with outages and problems. During severe winter storms, we may have 1h of disconnected service.
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Southern Companies. Mississippi in particular
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Having solar panels on your roof and selling excess electricity into the grid is the ultimate form of small stakeholder capitalism.
Do you think home solar should belong to, and be managed by the government?
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Home solar shouldn't be even a thing because gridscale makes much more sense
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When they turn off netmetering, or drastically reduce it, you will see new solar installations dry up over night. They will grandfather in the existing people for a certain amount of years but ultimately the best way to take advantage of solar will be to pair it with an onsite battery that can run your home. It's doable, but the batteries required will be about the same cost as the panels, if we're lucky.
Will be interesting to see how this plays out over the next few years.
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You putting solar panels on your roof to provide power to your home? No, outside of building and safety standards, it's your home you can put up panels.
Once you connect that power into the public grid? Yes. There is no universe where that concept works without a central body to enforce the electrical standards for input, safety and someone to define rates for everyone as well as install and maintain all teh pieces needed to accomodate a grid of that nature.
I would much prefer that body to be publically own
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Home solar is probably the most difficult source to integrate in to the grid while maintaining necessary control over frequency, voltage, VARs, etc. Much, much moreso than the equivalent output from fewer large PV plants. Utilities are not making money off home solar. Accepting it while keeping the grid stable is probably costing them more in the end.
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It is controlled by the government so that everyone has access at a reasonable price. Unlike the current health care situation which is all private and $300 pills actually cost $.90 to develop plus $.10 to manufacture.
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I'll answer you with another question: the grid has been mostly in the hands of the private sector so far: why has the system become antiquated and unsuitable then, if the private sector is so good at what it does?
Hint: the grid is one of those thing called commons, that typically becomes a tragedy when left to the care of private concerns.
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Absolutely FALSE.
The commons are things everyone can use because they are just there. Think federal grazing lands. Without rules I have every incentive to put out one more sheep even if the land can't support it because if I don't someone else would - that is the tragedy of the commons.
The GRID is the opposite. Its something owners constructed themselves AT GREAT COST. Then government came a long and told them how much they could charge to let people use it and made them accept universal access. Wanna kn
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When you can explain why "lefty" European countries do 10x better than the US to maintain their electrical infrastructure with public utility companies - not to mention roads, railway, water, sanitation and a whole range of other infrastructures - your misguided Randian rant might sound more convincing.
The state of infrastructure in the US is a screaming advertisement for the European way of doing things.
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My brother in christ, the person asked "why do things costs so much more here than other countries" and your anwwer was "costs" as in "we spend too much"
Think about how that doesn't make any sense, especially when the entire point is the EU countries spend less.
Don't knee jerk to partisanship so quickly
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Obvious troll is obvious. But let’s get rid of some pesky regulations like fire codes and building occupancy limits. It’s only hampering the struggling corporations. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
The train disaster in Ohio is a direct result of regulations that were supposed to implement ECP brakes. But Trump canceled that because the railroad companies found lobbying him cheaper than preventing catastrophes. https://www.yahoo.com/news/tru... [yahoo.com]
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I am not going to defend Trump's regulatory changes but so far nobody who actually knows what they are talking about, as apposed to the South Bend Sexual Diversity Hire, has found a causative relationship there.
Funny conservatives say truthful things about covid you get modded into oblivion, lefties get spread disinformation all day long as long as its anti-Trump.
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Check the final tab for building Watts Barr and tell me what is cheaper.
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Cheaper than building the electrical infrastructure required for heavy solar and wind grid. Significantly cheaper than the storage required for solar and wind.
2/3 of the cost of the recent Vogtle 3 and 4 was interest on loans. 2/3!!! That's a problem we can fix. Even with the bankers taking so much it is still cheaper than electrical infrastructure and storage.
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Honestly even liberals should admit the suppresor regulations are ridiculous. People really think they work like the movies and video games where a gun is just softly going "pew pew" when its just taking it from "ear splittingly loud" to "just really loud"
If they were smarter on guns they would use that as a bargaining chip for other reasonable gun reform but it falls into the trap of "looks scary so it must actually be scary"
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Funny part is that in many parts of Europe and elsewhere guns are highly regulated but suppressors are not. If you are a typical hunter less noise is better for you, your neighbors, and the environment. Same people who insist people run mufflers on their cars want the local shooting range to be noisy.
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