New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids
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New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids
New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids
It’s been clear for a long time that the world has to move away from fossil energy sources. Decades ago, this seemed impractical, when renewable energy was hugely expensive, and we were yet to see much impact on the ground from climate change. Meanwhile, prices for solar and wind installations have come down immensely, which helps a lot.
However, there’s a new problem. Power grids across the US simply can’t keep up with the rapid pace of new renewable installations. It’s a frustrating issue, but not an insurmountable one.
Slow Your Rollout
Despite much political furore and handwringing, the marketplace is getting on with business when it comes to renewable energy. The simple fact is that solar and wind power is now as cheap or cheaper than coal, once the benchmark for cost-effective electrical generation. Where there’s money to be made, companies will rush in.
However, new renewable energy installations are running into roadblocks across the nation. In Kentucky and Virginia, a 3,000 acre solar project is facing years of delays. Plans for multiple wind farms in the midwest have been scrapped entirely. In many of these cases, the problem lies at the connection between these projects and the wider energy grid. At the end of 2021, over 8,100 energy projects in the US were stuck waiting for official approvals for their grid connection. Without this, the project simply can’t generate energy and sell it on the market, making the whole exercise moot.
Part of the problem is the sheer number of projects going on in this space. The process, referred to as interconnection, requires careful consideration by engineers and authorities running the power grids. Historically, authorities were easily able to handle the trickle of gas or coal projects that would come along. There are now so many projects ongoing that some grid authorities have had to halt applications so they can work through a backlog they already have built up. On average, it’s now taking new renewable projects four years to get approval for grid hookup. That’s twice as long as it took a decade ago. Even if a project gets a grid hookup approved, it can run into further issues. Many power grids simply weren’t design to handle the influx of power from multiple renewable energy sources. Necessary upgrades to transmission lines and substations can significantly increase costs.
These issues are stopping many projects in their tracks. According to new research from the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, fewer than 20% of solar and wind projects are making it through the queue for grid interconnection. Along with supply chain issues, these hurdles led to a drop in solar, wind, and battery installations in the US, which shrank 16% in 2022.
The issue has led to an incentive to game the system, to an extent. One company may submit a bunch of energy project proposals, while hoping that another developer gets a project off the ground first. When that developer pays the bill for infrastructure upgrades, they’ll go ahead and pursue any projects that can piggyback off that, while cancelling others. The way around this is for grid operators to invest in transmission line upgrades themselves. It’s not common, but Texas has seen a burgeoning wind industry develop thanks to this wise decision.
Other countries have faced unique issues in this area, too. In hot and sunny Australia, for example, solar power has overwhelmed local grids in some cases. Home solar installations have become highly popular, particularly in wealthy areas where homeowners can absorb the initial upfront costs. These systems can feed excess energy back into the grid, netting their owners a payment for their contribution. However, residential suburbs are often served by substations and infrastructure that was never designed for this purpose. They can’t always handle the large outflows of electricity from home solar generation. In the short term, this has necessitated blackouts and shutdowns on hot, sunny days. In the long term, new regulations are mandating remote control of home solar generation to avoid grid operators having to take entire suburbs offline.
Stability is also an issue. Operators have to carefully manage the amount of power flowing into the grid. If too much power is fed into the grid, or too little, the grid frequency shifts too high or too low. This can force big generators offline and cause sudden power cuts that are highly undesirable. Managing power from sources like wind and solar is difficult, as they are highly variable over time.
A bright or windy day can rapidly increase the amount of power flowing into the grid. At the same time, fossil fuel sources like baseload coal stations typically have a minimum power level at which they can run. Authorities need to keep the baseload stations on at all times to maintain stability. Thus, any excess power from renewable sources must be shed. Systems that allow storage of excess power can help, or in extreme cases, solar sources can be remotely shut down.
In the US, at least, the issues for now are primarily administrative. With some streamlining of paperwork, and additional power engineers to run assessments, many of these problems can be solved. However, there’s no getting around the fact that power grids will require investment to handle the large number of renewable projcets waiting in the wings. If a carbon-free future is on the cards, it’s going to cost some money to build the grid to handle it.
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169 thoughts on “New Renewable Energy Projects Are Overwhelming US Grids”
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Artenz says:
Not just a grid problem. You must also have a place for all this energy to go where it can be consumed or stored.
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Ostracus says:
Nationwide grid gives lots of places to go. Main issue is losses.
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Comedicles says:
Loses don’t matter when it is overflow energy.
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Mike Berg says:
…and when there’s a sucking sound – it really sucks.
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Dude says:
Another issue is that renewable generators lack “inertia”. Even wind turbines are now putting out power through an inverter to keep sync with the grid and not drop out constantly.
When conventional generators are replaced with renewable generators on the larger grid, the entire system becomes very unstable, because the conventional generators were also big flywheels that kept the grid stable on a second-to-minutes time scale.
The issue has gone so bad that some countries are now installing literal flywheels on the grid to keep it working.
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
This!
Germany shutting the last of its nuke stations down at the weekend. Replacing their (stable) energy with… fossil fuels. Environment FTW. Proudly claiming they had enough excess energy to supply France over the summer when their nukes were down. They forgot to mention the EU requirement that 70% of your generation must be available for export. Guess what? Germany was importing from Sweden, exporting to France.
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Dude says:
Germany is a curious place – it can be a net exporter while suffering from power shortfalls, because it cycles its power through other countries in the lack of adequate infrastructure within the country.
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
Not just Germany, the whole European energy market is a curious place. It’s good that indeed it works, but you could almost see it as a sticking plaster on top of poorly managed infrastructure.
Take Sweden, in the north with relatively little energy use they have hydro and generally a large excess of energy. The south had 10 (?) reactors online until the last few years so was self sufficient and able to export with no issues. Then somebody decided to force the closure of many of these creating a deficit that was somewhat managed by renewables and a (reserve) oil fired plant. Except the reserve oil fired plant was running at full pelt in the summer to… send energy to Germany for pretty penny (so Germany could support France). Cue southern Swedes then having to pay the same market price. Meanwhile the north was doing just fine, but the transmission line from north-south is woefully underspecced so the north couldn’t offer much support to the south.
The left politicians shout that we have no energy deficit pointing that we are exporting (so no need for nuclear yay), which is in itself true, but we aren’t an energy-island so when another European country has a deficit then so do we… Alternatively if there was no deficit, why were spot prices 10x higher than usual last summer/autumn?
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Andrew Wilson says:
Another issue with the loss of synchronous plant is reactive power / voltage control. The big plants used to look after that pretty well too. There has been talk of using the leftover turbine and generator as a synchronous condenser when the station closes. This would also add inertia. The problem with this however is that the land is too valuable for redevelopment to make it attractive to the developer
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Gunter & Williana Rose says:
No, at all. The solution is decentralization for private people. Go away from Monopol to you own storage. Just a buffer for yourself and you are free.
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Andrew says:
I think someone invented the perfect variable load in 2009, and its getting maligned as a “waste” of energy.
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Dr. Ngyn says:
And it shows promise in moderating the inequalities perpetuated by central banking. But it gets labeled as “dangerous”.
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Drone says:
@Lewin Day said: “It’s been clear for a long time that the world has to move away from fossil energy sources.”
It’s been clear for a long time that the politically-driven additional capacity of unreliable intermittent sources like wind and solar will never be easy to efficiently incorporate in the national grid. But all the unreliable projects went forward anyway, and now we have the mess you describe so well in your article here.
One way to smooth out the adoption of these low quality new sources of energy, is to design-in local energy storage from the beginning. For example, using intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar in California to pump-up water reservoirs during peak-production. The vast amount of stored water has the potential to generate energy when it is most needed, and storing more water in drought-ridden California when it is available, is a very good idea as well.
Energy storage is a simple idea that is relatively quick and cost effective to implement in mountainous California, but you never hear it discussed. This is because solving the problem of never-ending energy and water shortages does not fit the political strategy of the leadership in California. Never let a crisis go to waste.
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John says:
Uh no. Solar and wind are reliable from a engineering perspective. It’s predictable within a range, electricity can be stored, it can be shed or sold to other states if there’s too much to store.
The problem is electrification in general is a big lift. It requires a massive build out of the grid which would typically be public investment. Instead states and power companies have gotten used to avoiding tax increase and letting the utilities pass costs on to retail customers.
Pay as you go makes perfect sense in general, but with a massive need to electrify energy production and consumption in relatively short order you really need the government / taxpayers to make that big lift.
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TRN says:
I’ve worked in the renewables space. The simple fact of the matter is, that while they have a range of outputs that’s somewhat reliable, that range is from negative to positive, about -10 to 80% of the nameplate rated output.
Then you have the fact that the worlds production of lithium could not handle enough storage to store enough energy to shift the seasonal energy demands of new york state. As in, the amount that needs to be rotated out every year as they wear out.
Then add to that the simple fact that solar energy cannot support the population density of the urban world without massive engineering projects to shift massive amounts of power long distances.
Oh, then you have to add the subcycle flicker of solar, which drastically shortens the lifespan of connected equipment, in that grids where solar is a majority have measured central air conditioner having their lifespan decreased to about 8 years, rather than the 12-20 years that would be expected. More delicate equipment, such as computers, refrigerators, microwaves, etc see worse hits to their lifespans.
So yes, solar and wind are reliable, but they’re reliably not good for anything other than a mix in to a viable energy mix
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. says:
… solar energy cannot support the population density of the urban world without massive engineering projects to shift massive amounts of power long distances.
That is exactly the case for the old power system. It was a massive engineering project, driven and substantially funded by governments.
We have simply forgotten, and forgotten how to get on with doing it.
A CO2 neutral future, means generating 3x-5x as much electricity as we do presently. It’s going to be a massive engineering undertaking. Some estimates put it at ~20% of total economic output for 3 decades.
Meanwhile, “hi-tech” is currently meaning Google Ads, Facebook, farting about with ChatGPT. -
Dude says:
> It was a massive engineering project
Yes, and it was developed and built over the span of some 100 years, and now we have it. Whereas the ADDITIONAL infrastructure needed for renewable power, we don’t.
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cb88 says:
Yeah except everything uses an inverter now and it would be silly to by a non inverter AC, refrigerator, microwave etc…
And since you are doing the round trip AC to DC back to AC ….. you’ve mitigated any issues solar inverters may be introducing.
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pelrun says:
“Low quality” is such a bogus subjective claim. You could also call coal power “low quality” when you deliberately choose your metrics. It can’t adapt to quickly changing load conditions! It can’t handle periods of low load and you have to incentivize customers to use more power when industrial users are offline! Then you’ve got all the major environmental criticisms. But hey, renewable energy can be intermittent so it’ll never be a valid replacement.
South Australia’s solar situation is instructive – they keep reaching new peaks of renewable energy generation and every time the same comments come out about how “they’ll never be able to supply all our energy needs, so we shouldn’t bother using it at all”… only for the record to be broken again soon after.
Just because solving the energy transition isn’t “easy” doesn’t mean it is insurmountable or not absolutely necessary. There will be constant setbacks along the way but the only people claiming that it should be abandoned are the ones profiting from the status quo.
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Dude says:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_power_quality
There are standard metrics for electric power quality. EN50160 in the EU, and IEEE-519 in North America. With these standards, you can very much define whether the power output is good or bad, and to what degree it should be improved to qualify as good for e.g. lab equipment.
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Dude says:
>they keep reaching new peaks of renewable energy generation and every time the same comments come out about
The thing is, building more renewable power when you’ve already got too much peak output on the grid won’t magically shift the production to other hours of the day – it just adds to the peaks which you already can’t use. That’s why you can have too much and too little at the same time, and that’s why you’ll break the grid entirely before you can build enough generators to meet all your energy needs.
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Wilbur Andrews says:
But if the power companies were in charge of both the coal and renewable energy systems then they can choose when to throttle back the coal plant, or sell it to another power company in another State or Country, or bring it back online for your own consumers when night time comes or a storm is taking out the renewable stuff.
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Gunter & Williana Rose says:
Yeah, you are right.
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RunnerPack says:
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𐂀 𐂅 says:
Very interesting.
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cs el says:
ugh, really? You can discuss the technological challenges of intermittent energy sources without bringing in freaking prager u.
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cb88 says:
Why… its a valid critical viewpoint of most proponents of “green” initiatives. Does someone discussing things rationally make you uncomfortable??? Pretty much everyone else fails to have any critical aspect to their viewpoint to the point of being propaganda which is ironic since Prager U is basically trying to be anti-propaganda itself. That said its also equally culpable itself for presenting a false dichotomy….since the acutal question is Do we use hydrocarbon fuels or not, and the choices are at least , yes via fossil fuels, no stop ASAP, and yes convert to biofuels ASAP… etc… and any mixture of those 3.
In short if you must be critical of something at least call it out directly rather than just going “oh blah” its Prager U… cause that makes you look closed minded.
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Gravis says:
Are you serious? That’s literally a source of disinformation. OMFG, do not post that bile on this site.
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Observer says:
It helps the discussion when everyone understands the definition of terms being used.
Disinformation: noun. Any knowledge or fact that is inconsistent with government-approved, eco-warrior, or leftist social justice cult narrative.
Fact Check: verb. The process of testing a statement to assure it is compliant with the government-approved, eco-warrior, or leftist social justice cult narrative.
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Foldi-One says:
Not exactly disinformation, as factually it is pushing towards falsehood but never really exaggerating enough to get there and very much cherry picking only the details they want to talk to about.
Really they are just making the arguments
” ‘I like living my life the way it is*’ and ‘we are rich we can manage the climate problems that will be created*’ while ignoring the longer term issues such a stance creates – wave a magic wand we can fix anything**!”
doesn’t make it actively false – technically they are correct enough factually in what they say.But it is all they deliberately leave out that really speaks to their credibility. ‘Humans need energy to flourish’ – true, HOWEVER humans also need a working ecosystem to produce their food, clean their air, cycle their fresh water. This ‘paltry 1 degree average temperature rise’ really does matter to the natural world that does all this. Which is something that can clearly be seen in the data on any measure you can to look at – species that shouldn’t be in the ocean near the UK at all end up here in ever greater numbers, plants that have been a constant part of the ecology here for far far longer than the industrial little hairless apes are in places dying as they just can’t adapt or evolve this fast, glaciers that are supposed to come back to much the same size every year and feed river systems are shrinking away to nothing, more extreme droughts, rainfall and storm events – the list is practically endless.
*add ‘and can keep doing it till I die’
** add ‘or I’ll be dead so I don’t care’ -
cb88 says:
It’s more like counter propaganda… and you reaction to it is the same as I would have to some green barf propaganda typically (even though I have solar, drive a G1 insight most of the time…)
The problem I have with this particular link is not that its viewpoint differs from mine but that it presents a false dichotomy… either or… when that is not the only answer, in fact usually the correct answer is some mixture of solutions not any single one.
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Chris Elz says:
Really? THAT’S the source you link to?
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Chris Maple says:
Can you refute any of that video? You appear to be engaging in an ad hominem attack.
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macsimski says:
Well nuclear energy wil solve all our problems, including grid, co2, nox, hair loss and wars in the world. Bla, bla, bla…
(Just to start the mandatory flame war concerning something with wind or solar energy)
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John says:
Nuclear is fine technically. As a modern society we do all manner of dangerous industrial processes and manage them. But nuclear is a political dead end. No one, including NIMBY cons, want nuclear power plants or waste near them. So it isn’t with the trouble.
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David says:
Good job you still need it for nuclear weapons. Nuclear will always be in certain countries.
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Markko says:
Actually support for nuclear is 85% within 20 miles of a plant which stores its own waste.
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Dude says:
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
No problem with a nuclear plant in my vicinity – in fact where I work we are in the ‘fallout’ zone with specific instructions in case something happens. Doesn’t bother me one bit.
Fortunately the new Swedish government are looking to build new reactors. Re-commissioning the recently de-commissioned reactors would be quicker but financially not sensible due to their limited remaining lifespan. What would have been perfect would to have not decommissioned them early, but then, greens & socialists…
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Clyde says:
I don’t get it. Do the panels get damaged or something if there’s nowhere to send the energy? Just pull a shade down over them if it’s really a problem.
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Artenz says:
If you’re not going to use the panels when they have the highest yields, it doesn’t make sense to invest in them.
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Dude says:
Yep. No power output, no producer subsidies, no return of investment.
The main issue with that is the large difference between peak output and average output for wind and solar power, which commonly ranges from about 5:1 to 8:1. That’s also why renewable tech can overwhelm the grid with over-production while still not producing enough power to matter in the grand scheme of things.
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spaceminions says:
Say you were thinking of investing in a cornucopia. Do you think that you could charge the same for a once-weekly buffet as you could for a week of three daily meals? Of course no-one’s going to pay you as much if your schedule is not good for them. So sell however much people will buy, and eventually the price will stabilize at a more realistic number once the cornucopias are balanced out by investments in refrigerators or hogs. (storage or periodic heavy consumers)
The whole “let me sell my power at noon and get the same amount back at midnight” thing that a bunch of wealthy residential early adopters have enjoyed is only valid if the market hasn’t adjusted, and really shouldn’t be the pass/fail mark for solar. Well, unless it gets so bad that we need to just accept grid failures in order to reduce co2, but I suspect in that case we’ll just burn ourselves to death.
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spaceminions says:
Nope, you can let them sit in the sun disconnected if you like.
Normally for peak efficiency you have a peak power tracking circuit which (put simply) maximizes the power output by not drawing so much current that the voltage sags too low, since the product of both numbers is the power. Sometimes at smaller scales the unit you buy is also set up to output the right voltages to charge a battery or provide a steady standard DC voltage. Either in that device or in the inverter (which may sometimes be a combined unit meant to connect directly to a solar panel) it’d be fairly easy to imagine them changing very little in order to voluntarily reduce power.
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David says:
Nuclear has the opposite problem. They basically want to run it at max all the time. Perhaps there is a happy medium.
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Dude says:
It has the exact same problem: almost all of the money is paid up front to build it, and the returns come in over time, over the limited service life of the generator, so to get the minimum cost of energy you need to run it as much as you can.
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Michael says:
That’s not the real reason. It’s because a nuclear unit cannot raise and lower it’s output in the space of minutes like a gas or coal-fired and some hydroelectric units. If you try to muck around with power output in a nuclear reactor, isotopes of zenon build up and “poison” the reaction ie the nuclear reaction slows down or stops.
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Bartz0rt says:
It’s an investment problem. As an individual putting solar panels on your roof or as a grid-scale investor, you’re basically paying up front for 20-30 years of energy (depending on how you want to amortize). Every time you disconnect or deliberately shade the panels, you’re essentially getting less for your money.
There are several short-term measures to mitigate the issue before thinking about beefing up the grid. In order of increasing cost:
– shorten the cable: generate the energy close to where it’ll be used. Rather than putting panels in an empty field somewhere, put them on roofs.
– demand follows supply: make sure you use the energy *when* it’s being generated. Smart appliances can actually check when the best time to crank will be, but especially with solar you (as an individual) can probably make some educated guesses and set timers for things like the washing machine, charging an electric car, running the airco (best if your house has a lot of thermal mass).
– add storage: you can add a battery (or as mentioned, an electric car is a battery on wheels) to smooth the variability in solar generation throughout the day (though not so much over the entire year, at least not in the temperate zones). There are even places where grid operators pay for batteries in the homes of people with solar panels, because it reduces the peaks of grid load so much.All of these measures are actually useful even without renewables, because demand for electricity fluctuates a lot as well.
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arcdoom says:
it’s really funny because for 30 years we’ve been telling them that hey, renewable energy is rapidly approaching parity with fossil fuel and unlike those it isn’t gonna run out yet they’ve been kicking and screaming and resisting
and now said fossil fuels now cost a small fortune (ask anyone who heats their homes with furnace oil or gas) and oh whoopsie turns out despite having enough time to have a chikd grow up, have a child of their own and have -those- kids also grow up they still don’t have the grid set up to handle the excess energy.
i don’t want to hear diddly squat about peak hours either. the grids all across North America (Canada, Mexico, US) are all in desperate need of upgrading. nova scotia for example was left without power for 5-15 days depending on where you live due to a hurricane. i’m not saying power wouldn’t have gone out either way half of the outages could’ve been prevented with a few upgrades and the places that did wouldn’t have had to wait so long to get it back either.
something something conservative parties in power something.
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NetNed says:
Yeah, except fossil fuel isn’t running out like they claim. They claimed multiple times that it was, even had dates that it was going to run out, supposedly, and yet they keep finding massive reserves.
When the “experts” make claims again and again and again yet they never come true, continuing to believe them is neither rational nor smart.
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Doc Oct says:
There’s not an infinite supply of fossil fuels. The problem isn’t fully running out either, it’s when it becomes cost prohibitive to extract more. Some of that is probably being helped with technology but there are limits to that as well.
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scott_tx says:
and when your fossil fuel comes from some crazed dictators country it can get difficult when they go off their meds too
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John says:
“they” were right given the information available. Oil and gas fracking was a technological change that opened new supply.
Your logical error is thinking that because we found a way to access a little more one time that it will happen again. There’s absolutely no reason to think that.
Ever heard of the point of diminishing returns? Squeeze the last bit of lemon a little harder and you will get a few more drops. But it doesn’t work twice.
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arcdoom says:
there is no logical error to “our system is able to be taken out by a non-hurricane level storm and can barely supply power to a province with 300k people, let alone the 1 mil we’ll have in 20-30 years” even before you take renewables into account.
but please continue to simp for daddy oil.
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Sandro says:
> Yeah, except fossil fuel isn’t running out like they claim
Running out is not the main problem with fossil fuels. They are far more costly in dollars and human lives than the sticker price indicates. They would not be cost competitive if not for massive subsidies.
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Potvinguy says:
The exact end date for FF is not important; the fact that there is an end date is important. Once we have sucked all the FF out of the Earth, we better be ready with replacements for all the products that incorporate FF. And that is damn near everything.
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Dude says:
Why don’t you pay for it, then?
If you want to see what a grid looks like with large amounts of renewable power and a phase-out of conventional generators, including nuclear power, just look at Germany.
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Foldi-One says:
Terrible example as Germany was expecting to use cheap Russian Gas in place of their dirty brown coal and nukes for ages to come – this is a rather more rushed panic fuelled dive towards renewables right now than the plan they had…
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Anonymous says:
Nuclear power isn’t dirty at all, though.
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Dude says:
Don’t ask the Germans what happened to their pebble bed test reactor…
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Foldi-One says:
While I agree nuclear really should be considered clean power the German ‘Greens’ in power wanted them gone, and consider them dirty… In that context it fits.
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Dude says:
They were in deep trouble even before this incident. The Czech Republic and Poland installed phase shifting transformers around 2016 to limit German renewable power from shuttling through their grids to elsewhere, because they were getting overwhelmed with Germany dumping all the power they couldn’t use on the common market.
The power dumping also caused other producers to lose money, which meant that new power plants weren’t developed because they would not be profitable, so they also built up a chronic lack of new capacity.
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Dude says:
To elaborate, Germany solved the “too much power on the grid” problem for renewable power by installing a right-of-way law that says all the renewable power goes on the grid first – so the owners can collect the subsidies for the power they’re “selling” (often at negative prices).
The greenies tried to claim that the power dumping pushes the average price down and therefore saves money, except it doesn’t. It merely shifts the cost into the surcharges and taxes instead of the retail price, while destroying the market and driving away investments.
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Foldi-One says:
That bit isn’t really a German problem – it is rather more an EU wide problem. The EU is and always has been a mess in this sort of fashion, part of what comes from pulling a few wealthy nations that rather get to dictate to all the poorer nations what happens…
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Julian Skidmore says:
Exactly, it’s a classic case of the fossil fuel industry using its own failure to upgrade the grid to continue to slow down the transition to renewable energy. But underneath it all, it’s because hey, the sun and wind are basically freely available to everyone, they’re part of the commons, so they really don’t want to give up what is essentially their monopoly on power.
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Dude says:
The “fossil fuel industry”, aka. the power utilities have to pay for the upgrades out of pocket while the renewable industry gets the money and gets to dump electricity on the grid, which causes the selling price for all the other producers to slump and eats their profits – which would be needed for the upgrades.
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John says:
Home owners are paying for power generation out of pocket? Who has more financial resources, private individuals or giant conglomerates?
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Dude says:
Private individuals, or rather all the end users of the electricity, are collectively much bigger than the power industry itself. The total we pay for energy is on the order of 5% of GDP.
Energy is still pretty cheap – for now – and it has to be or else you couldn’t afford all those nice gadgets. Triple the energy prices and inflation starts running at 10%.
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Oscar says:
No, the fossil fuel industry. If the profits of traditional generators go down, the people will save money on bills, and the government can raise tax rates to invest in the infrastructure. This is the exact reason that taxes exist. Any net savings end up in the hands of the government, not private corporations, which is a win. There is literally no way you can frame maintaining fossil fuel usage as a good thing, and hiding behind psuedo-economic doomsday theories is a cheap tactic.
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paulvdh says:
Here in the Netherlands we have a similar problem.
For some 10+ years energy companies were not even allowed to invest in distribution capacity unless they could prove that the capacity would actually be used on a short term basis. The result was that a lot of extensions of the local electrical distribution net simply did not get built. And now some parts of the net are threatening to get overloaded and solar farms can’t get connected to the net anymore. And on other locations industry that needs a lot of electricity or even residential neighborhoods do not get built because the electrical distribution infrastructure is missing. This became a significant problem a few years ago, and it probably will improve (or it already has) but I don’t follow the news from day to day. It’s much too depressing for me to do so.But overall, the electricity net is quite reliable here in Western Europe. Blackouts are very rare and very local, and they are also short in duration.
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HaHa says:
Based on arcdoom’s comment above, it must be all the Dutch conservatives in power.
That or he doesn’t know what he speaks of, just woke twit.
Disclosure: I’m an EE who has worked extensively with European and American utilities on system planning models/datasets.
Once ‘the boss’ threatened to send a Chinese PhD to Amsterdam if he didn’t fix a bug by the end of the week. I said ‘What can I break to get sent to Amsterdam? Say the word and it’s as good as broken.’ (Even the boss laughed.) They didn’t send me, I had a reputation of occasionally telling the clients the truth.Germany had the highest electric rates in Europe, thanks to solar and wind. Old Pooting might have changed that. Tides went out, we see who was swimming naked now.
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Dude says:
Germany had three times more expensive power even before the war.
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HaHa says:
I have many German relatives. They thought they were paying all that money to buy energy independence. German group think is strong, you don’t want to be the German that breaks the circle jerk.
I’m not absolutely sure they remain the worst managed grid in Europe, so many contenders.
They’re more reliable than all the southern European nations, but that’s just expected…Have you even known a Greek/Italian/Spaniard with a job they can’t get fired from? Hard working bunch that! /s-
Dude says:
The only reason the German grid can function at this point is because they are interconnected to everyone else – to export and buy power. Otherwise they’d be completely f**ked with their wind and solar power.
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Dude says:
Oh, and ask them about the north-south power corridor that never got built because of NIMBY.
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HaHa says:
All of western Europe is as interconnected as the Eastern American interconnnect.
They haven’t had separate ‘grids’ in decades. Engineers gonna optimize.
New transmission is damn near impossible anywhere. All they can do is raise existing lines capacity. NIMBY, BANANNA and EMFphobia (EMF was good punk band).
When Greenies think they’re alone, they will admit they want humans to use less power, not just emit less CO2. They hate the prospect of fusion or truly good solar. We’d just use it to go electric wheeling in the woods (they’re not wrong, just stupid).
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Dude says:
>they will admit they want humans to use less power,
Well, OTHER humans. There are some hippies who retreat into little huts in the woods (while relying on things like modern medicine to survive), but few actually believe the rest of the humanity can follow them. The most common sentiment is of some kind of managed economy where everyone is given equally small rations to reduce the total consumption to something which is sustainable. Of course there’s nothing that can go wrong with that.
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Lee Hart says:
There are bad problems, and good problems. Examples of good problems are too much money, or too much time, or too much power.
The good problems are easier to solve. Renewables are by nature easier to start up and shut down. If the grid is unable to accept power from a renewable source, it is much easier to simply throttle it down or turn it off.
The main consequence is economic. Someone who invested a lot of money in a renewable source will not like having it switched off-line, as it reduces their return on investment. However, this should encourage them to invest more in grid upgrades, or energy storage. These are both good things in the long run.
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Ostracus says:
Actually that would be an interesting development. Solar cells that could be throttled or turned off (not cut-off).
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a_do_z says:
Trained hummingbirds selectively shading the cells. Because I like the visual.
I know next to nothing about it in practice, but with all of the optimization tuning I’ve heard about with regards to solar array power conversion, it doesn’t seem like controlled detuning would be a moon shot.
I recall Dave Jones on EEVBlog once posted a video about his solar system output dipping a detectable amount at certain times and ended up identifying that it was caused by the shadow of a suspended wire/cable that crossed above the array.
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HaHa says:
Why? Solar cells are not damaged by being open circuited. Nothing is lost except the potential value of the power.
Install an on demand crypto miner to use the excess power.
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Dude says:
Any power that isn’t generated by a solar cell raises its LCOE, potentially to the point that it makes no sense to build the panels in the first place, negating the argument that it’s cheaper than coal or gas.
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HaHa says:
Dude: Any circuit or device built to ‘detune’ the panel to match load would make it even worse.
I’ve never seen a credible claim that solar power is cheaper then coal or gas, just solar capacity. See also the classic: ‘How to Lie with Statistics’.
Also massive inflation of ‘fossil fuel subsidies’. Which, according to some hippies, includes taxes on fossil fuels and business expenses, all subsidies. You have to admire their nerve. -
Ostracus says:
Crypto as a low-visibility way towards keeping one’s favorite websites running, instead of sending them free electricity.
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Dude says:
>I’ve never seen a credible claim that solar power is cheaper then coal or gas, just solar capacity.
I’ve seen it, but the people making the argument take solar energy prices form Saudi-Arabia to argue for building solar power in Stockholm.
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HaHa says:
Now we can argue about what ‘credible’ means. Goodo.
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Dude says:
>Renewables are by nature easier to start up and shut down.
Yes, technically, but you have to pay the owners curtailment compensation for power that WASN’T generated, which means you lose the money and you don’t get the energy. UK has this problem due to insufficient export capacity.
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C says:
“The main consequence is economic”
Any damage to the economy will reduce people’s lifespans, quality of life and freedom.
Wealthier countries also have more money to combat real environmental problems.
If you are saying “it is only money” you basically don’t care about people or the environment.
But I guess you consider death or destruction a “good problem”.Governments chose expensive unreliable energy over cheap and reliable energy. And now people are freezing to death and cannot pay their bills. This is why we cannot have nice things in life.
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DerAxeman says:
Grid stability is a big issue. In Australia it got so bad that voltage surges were causing fires. A stable supply is essential. The fluctuations from wind and solar must be backed up with gas plants to take up the slack. (Note grid level storage is still not feasible)
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HaHa says:
It’s feasible, but generally not economic (capable of running without subsidy).
Pumped storage is an obvious exception.
Until night power is more expensive than daytime, solar energy storage solutions _cannot_ be economical. They depend on the price difference.
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Dude says:
>It’s feasible, but generally not economic (capable of running without subsidy).
Aka. not feasible.
Subsidies aren’t sustainable or justifiable in the long run, unless you want to switch over to planned economies.
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HaHa says:
That’s not what ‘feasible’ means Dude.
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Dude says:
Yes it is. It’s just a matter of scale.
It’s feasible for me to hop around on one leg for one minute – doesn’t make it a feasible mode of commuting to work though.
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HaHa says:
Feasible: possible to do easily or conveniently.
Says nothing of profitably or sustainably.
Pump storage operators could feasibly run their ponds as described. They don’t, but they could. It’s feasible, but insane, buying high and selling low. Someone else would be running it in a month, unless government owned.
Eventually there could be enough solar to make daytime power cheap and nighttime expensive.
It’s already that way in the tundra during winter (places like Minnesota). Only fools put solar there, winter days are about 15 minutes long dontyano. I digress. -
Dude says:
>They don’t, but they could.
“All the time you’re saying to yourself, “I could do that, but I won’t”–which is just another way of saying that you can’t.”
– Richard Feynman -
HaHa says:
F it, lets just make all words mean ‘long term profitably’. Should reduce confusion.
It’s feasible to slam your tender bits in the car door. It wouldn’t be THAT difficult or inconvenient. Some self discipline would be required.
Feynman wasn’t perfect. ‘Can’t’ is not equal to ‘don’t want to’. He’s still right about Sociology not being a science.
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DerAxeman says:
It is not easily done if there isn’t enough battery probuction to do it. Also cost would be astronomical which also wouldn’t be easily done.
It isn’t feasible. Q.E.D.
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HaHa says:
Axe: Grid storage _exists_. A few battery installations, but mostly pumped hydro. Not a huge %, but there for decades.
But it won’t be used to stabilize solar or wind, rather it’s generating during high price times (peak/daytime) and pumping at night. That might reverse in 50 years.
Battery installations are currently more useful in instantaneous control. Not so much peak shaving as dealing with ugliness of grid control. Fixing power factors, stabilizing frequency on unit failure, load following, that kind of thing. (Used to be/still is) the job of giant combustion turbines. Mostly generating for an hour or two at most, then recharging.
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Dude says:
>‘Can’t’ is not equal to ‘don’t want to’.
Look, you’re saying you could do it, but here’s all the various reasons why you wouldn’t do it, which is saying you can’t do it because of these reasons.
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Foldi-One says:
As it is a public service that is rather essential to all economic activity running to a profit really shouldn’t be the only thing that matters. You get more tax money back if Joe’s garage can actually work every time there is work to do than it costs to provide the basic economic infrastructure…
But in a pure supply demand market that price difference will happen naturally to some extent anyway as more Solar is online. The more market share it has the bigger the day night swing.
Also it isn’t just solar anyway, wind power is a great counterpoint and usually if one of the two is underperforming tis because the weather is making the other peak damn hard (though not always, it is still possible to have no wind and little sun). But that coupled with large grids that can ship the power to where it is needed mean you don’t need nearly as much (if any) storage anyway.
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Tobasco da Gama says:
Yeah, it seems like all the objections are “well, if you use the sane, sensible technical solution, you won’t profit a profit”.
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HaHa says:
Go for it hot sauce: Use the ‘sane sensible technical solution’. Run at a loss. Pay the loss yourself. Nobody stopping you.
If you want someone else to do it, expect a hearty FU. It’s easy to spend other people’s money.
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Dude says:
The problem is, if one unit of energy generates one dollars of economic activity, and you’re forced to pay two dollars for the one unit, then your economy starts winding down.
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Dude says:
Point being, profit is only possible if the energy is worth more than the cost to have it in real terms. If it can’t generate a profit, then it is not worth having. No society can operate at a loss over a fundamental resource like energy.
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Dude says:
>You get more tax money back
Better yet if you weren’t taxed in the first place, because the bureaucracy itself is a waste of resources.
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Foldi-One says:
But without tax that funds your society you don’t have the firemen, police, national armed forces, nurses and doctors (at least for places with an NHS equivalent), etc – the bureaucracy is a rather required waste of resources to provide the wider backbone of society that allows a developed and populous nation to exist.
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DerAxeman says:
Playing an economic shell game on paying for power does not change the fact that it imposes additional costs on the production of goods and services.
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Foldi-One says:
It is a consumable that goes into producing the goods and services… Of course it costs!
The difference is being run not as a business that must make money but as a public service you don’t have to pay all that extra money to please the investors or the 6 figure (or more) salary of the CEO with the massive golden handshake when they get caught doing something they shouldn’t and moved on. It simply takes away a large amount of the cost in producing this required resource, and means you can invest huge sums of money in building the infrastructure properly rather than to make the most short term return on the fiscal investment…
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Comedicles says:
A surplus of energy and a major blight on the landscape. In Washington State we have the big windmills all over the most scenic vistas of the Columbia river and the Eastern Cascades in the exact places where there is surplus hydro (3 cents a kWh). But hydro is not accepted on the list of mandated green sources. Pure genius.
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Dude says:
Surplus of power, not energy.
Renewable power is like a car with a gas pedal that gets stuck on full throttle at times, but most of the time you can’t get up from idle even if you wanted to.
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metalman says:
bigger wire,bigger transformers,lotsa grid leveling
with batteries ,chemical or gravity,water heating
whatever
less hand wringing and greed
either we do it faster than the other guys or we loose-
HaHa says:
^^^This is what greenies actually believe.
Confidence in solution inversely related to knowledge.
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Todd3465 says:
“Confidence in solution inversely related to knowledge.”
I like that! But since they believe they know everything I might dumb it down to “Confidence in solution inversely related to Logic and Experience” when I use it ;)
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Petter says:
“I can’t afford a new lamp, the cord is too expensive.”
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
But but the lamp costs pennies, if you dream enough you’ll get a subsidy for your cord. Subsidised by the taxes on more expensive lamps (more expensive thanks to the taxes).
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Potvinguy says:
The answer to our shaky grid is distributed energy production, namely rooftop solar on houses and businesses. Sized to meet the needs of the property, so there is little energy going to/from the grid. The grid still has critical roles to play in this new world, storing energy and enabling customers to share it. And as EVs become ubiquitous, they can also store energy and provide it as needed for the owner property.
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Dude says:
> Sized to meet the needs of the property
That’s exactly the problem. If you size the system according to how much power you can use at any time, it won’t produce enough energy to meet your needs. If you size the system to produce enough energy, it will make 5-10x as much power that you can use, which means you have to sell it off and buy it back later.
> The grid still has critical roles to play in this new world, storing energy
The grid doesn’t store energy. It has no means – unless you pay extra to build batteries.
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Robin M says:
I was looking for a comment like Potvinguy‘s.
I live on a boat full time in the UK with my partner. We have 540W of solar panels and a (second hand) wind turbine with about the same output. Cost: about £1500 with the batteries and MPPT. Why would I care if my panels make extra energy that I don’t use? Granted, winter can be a bit scarce energy wise but I’ve learnt to save as much as possible and heat comes from a wood burner. I admit to burning coal (which is actually 50% olive stones) in winter because I don’t have enough space to store the amount of wood that would give me the same amount of energy. But this is well offset by our ridiculously low energy usage in all other aspects. We even grow our own vegetables on the roof.
On land it would be even easier. You can grow and store wood for heat. Plenty of ways you can store extra power that you get in summer to use in winter: compressed air, gravity potential, hot water in an underground calorifier…
We don’t need a grid. We need to stop developing cities like there’s no tomorrow, manufacturing products that don’t last, wrapping individual vegetables in plastic and ship them from the other side of the world, or buy clothes that get worn once. Go back to local production of goods and energy and be realistic about what we consume. We can’t have our cake and eat it but we can make our own cake and eat it. The loss in comfort is nothing compared to the gratification of living a sustainable lifestyle and having the know how to provide for our home.
Yes, it’s a lot of changes to make, but I and the many other boaters I’m my community are the living proof that it can be done!
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HaHa says:
Deforestation for heat and cooking in the third world is the living proof that it can’t.
You burn _coal_ in a _stove_ for heat you pig. If the rest of England was like you, you’d still be getting deadly fogs. How black is your boat near the flue?
Credit for self righteous Chutzpa. Impressive gonads. To burn biomass you’d have to pay someone to reload your hopper a couple of extra times per winter. You’d still be pigs, but your soot wouldn’t be fossil soot.
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Dude says:
Whenever I talk with people who claim to “run their home on solar”, there’s inevitably cords and cords of wood stored in a shed on their property, or big honking propane tanks.
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Robin M says:
Let’s talk about soot. What vehicle do you drive? Mine is a bicycle.
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Foldi-One says:
As much of the deforestation is to turn a quick buck slash’n’burn farming whatever the developed world will pay well for… Plus the third world has the other problem that the developed world meddles just enough to be problematic – Save all the children, it is an emotive and sad thing for them to suffer and we can fix it! But think not on what that does to the population and available resources locally when you have just unbalanced their societies established norms (that were probably entirely sustainable if rather more brutal) and all the kids now survive…
If the concept of something that looks even vaguely like colonisation wasn’t so unpalatable and unworkable the third world could be developed in a much more if not entirely sustainable way – the old world has already made many of the mistakes and found the solutions, but can’t easily rebuild all of its old bones into those solutions. Where starting from a more blank slate and with smaller initial populations it is much easier to skip the 1800’s and 1900’s flaws. Though no doubt find there are some in the new millennium too.
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Comedicles says:
Wood is solar.
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Dude says:
>Why would I care if my panels make extra energy that I don’t use?
May I ask what sort of money you make in a month?
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Robin M says:
£18.75/h, as a freelance handyman. I can chose to work more or less depending on my needs because I don’t pay rent or have energy bills (we don’t pay for mooring as we cruise continuously and there is a legal framework for that in the uk, we just pay a yearly license).
But we’re talking about a £1,500 energetic install here, not a 50 grand setup, how much is your electricity bill per year???
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
@Robin M
You asked above what vehicle one uses, and state that you use a bicycle.
Here you claim to cruise continually – how does a boat cruise on a bicycle exactly? Do you pedal-power the propeller or…
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
As (in the USA) most houses sit empty during the day, rooftop solar would easily meet the daytime requirements, but when the kids get home from school/daycare and parent(s) come home from work, appliances/entertainment get turned on, the rooftop is no longer receiving maximum solar, or meeting the power requirements. (I.e. duck curve)
So, locally sourced solar would only reduce transmission costs .-
Dude says:
How is it locally sourced if you’d have to import it from a whole other time zone to meet your time of use?
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Foldi-One says:
If you know all your use is afternoon-evening point the solar panels in the general direction of the sun at that peak use – you get less overall perhaps, but you get the best performance out of your panels at the time you actually need the energy. However with the scale of most US housing you probably don’t need to worry about that at all, on the tiny European home size roof we usually get enough into the late afternoon to run the house, so on a US roof that is probably 4-5x the area you might as well just fit more panels – they are pretty cheap it is the electrician and fitting that tends to be costly, and that cost won’t change much for an extra 5, 10, 20 panels.
Though that said just because your home is empty doesn’t mean the daytime power isn’t needed somewhere locally anyway – your local all electric foundry can probably suck back as much as is available at all times with all the cyclic loads that can easily be ramped up when the sun is shining. Might not be doing you the most good, but the local area full of energy consuming business would probably be rather happy (as long as it actually cuts their bills and isn’t just padding the pockets of their energy supplier).
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Foldi-One says:
Oh I should note our panels are pretty much dead south facing.
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DerAxeman says:
How is an EV going to store energy when you typically use it in the day and charge it at night. Not to mention your solar cells don’t work at night.
The scenario you propose would be to discarge your EV’s batteries at night snd have no charge in them when you need to use your car.
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Dude says:
Well, of course it would for someone in the upper middle class who’s working in the tech industry and sits in their home office all day.
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Foldi-One says:
As lots of employers are putting in charging points as well it probably is plugged in at work too!
Also you don’t have to have full charge in your EV every morning – most folks daily commute might be needing 10% charge to have enough safety margin to get around the road works etc. So allowing your EV to dump perhaps as little as 5% of its charge potential back to the grid even when it is ‘on charge’ when distributed across thousands or even millions of vehicles is a pretty substantial store of energy. Also likely means the battery lasts longer as keeping it nearly forever topped up to 100% won’t be good for longevity. It is not enough to power a nation overnight entirely in its own right of course, but enough to make a difference.
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Rob Ward says:
Once people lose sight of using renewables to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, then all sorts of phony economic analysis breaks out. Just keep this idea (rough quote) in mind “mankind will be the only animal to cause it’s own self destruction because the alternatives were not economically viable” to help keep our mass stupidity in check. Using Caveman Capitalism will destroy us, we need a new system.
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Dude says:
If the economics won’t work out, then no reduction in greehouse gas emissions are possible either.
Or, you can try. It’s like holding your breath to save on oxygen.
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HaHa says:
‘Can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs.’
We need to be working or realigning our economy to run on ponies, whale oil and zombie power!
Like Rob said, a new system.
Vote Pony party!
Vote Vermin Supreme!
Ponies for everyone! (Vermin has promised, absolutely no genocide to make the numbers match, pentagon budget diverted to pony breeding. Some light genocide might occur…also ‘zombie apocalypse’ expected but poorly defined.)
Mandatory tooth brushing.
Secret dental police.The Pony parties eventual victory is assured. It’s cultural evolution. Just read Vermin’s great work, ‘I Pony’, if you have doubts.
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mayhem says:
+100 for Vermin supreme! I look forward> to the pony parties!
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C says:
More like: “mankind will be the only animal to cause it’s own self destruction because it chose alternatives which were not economically viable”
Any damage to the economy will reduce people’s lifespans, quality of life and freedom.
Wealthier countries also have more money to combat real environmental problems.
Using Caveman Communism will destroy us, we need a new system. -
Cogidubnus Rex says:
If it’s not economically viable then somebody goes bankrupt and/or somebody’s without power. Somebody being a nation/nations. That’s when war starts, resulting in depopulation thus less power needed and the economy is reset till the next population explosion/energy/financial crisis.
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Robin M says:
@Cogibus Rex
Sorry, this is not the right place to reply but there is not “reply” link on your comment to my comment. Not sure I understand the system…Anyway, you got me there. I do not pedal to propel my boat. I am guilty of the heinous crime of cruising 2 to 4 miles on fossil fuel every 2 weeks as required by my continuous cruiser license.
My goal when I started commenting was initially to highlight that it was possible to generate most of your own energy locally, even on a boat, which provides very little real estate for solar panels and the like. That it is rewarding and that fake problems hinder our ability to be a more sustainable civilisation. It seems to have upset people which is sad. What upsets me is that despite the issue of global warming being raised as early as the first half of the 20th century we are still headed for doom. I am sorry my actions are not perfect. Be assured that most of the life choices I make revolve around being the change I want to see in the world. I buy mostly second hand stuff, turn my fridge off in winter, source local veg, help friends fix broken electronics rather purchase new ones, drag a bike trailer full of tools and materials to work, and everything else that I can think of. I wish I could do more, if anyone has recommendations I will take them but I am done with splitting hair on the topic.
Over and out.
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spaceminions says:
Nope, you can let them sit in the sun disconnected if you like.
Normally for peak efficiency you have a peak power tracking circuit which (put simply) maximizes the power output by not drawing so much current that the voltage sags too low, since the product of both numbers is the power. Sometimes at smaller scales the unit you buy is also set up to output the right voltages to charge a battery or provide a steady standard DC voltage. Either in that device or in the inverter (which may sometimes be a combined unit meant to connect directly to a solar panel) it’d be fairly easy to imagine them changing very little in order to voluntarily reduce power.
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spaceminions says:
Glitched, was meant to be a comment reply.
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Mark Medonis says:
This article is a bit misleading, and a bit alarmist. Some blame must go to the New York Times article, the first reference cited. In particular, it doesn’t make sense to mix residential and utility projects together, as balancing is a different problem in each case. Also, yes, substations and transmission systems need upgrades. However, here in the US, that is true no matter the power source. The main issue I have, though, is that here in the US renewable power is still a small percentage of power generated. Residential power is also a tiny percentage. My home state of Florida is ranked 3rd in the US for installed solar generation, for example. Solar makes up 5% of our electricity for the state, but that’s including utility solar. Just barely 1% of Florida homes have solar panels on their rooftops, 90,000 homes with solar out of 9.5million houses total in the state. Not exactly mountains of electricity with nowhere to go, as the article seems to imply.
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The Commenter Formerly Known As Ren says:
“This article is a […] and a bit alarmist.
Welcome to Lewin Day’s raison ‘d etre.
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John Hoke says:
Interesting article and many of the issues have been outlined in the comments. I’m 3rd generation (pun intended) in the utility business and have over thirty years experience. One issue not discussed much is siting and building new transmission lines. There is a major line in Nebraska that they have been trying to build for over 15 years, and that is not uncommon. The second is cost – new transmission lines, and distribution grid upgrades required ffor the new electric future are estimated to cost several trillion dollars. That will all be paid for by the consumer so expect you energy costs to go up. Investor owned utilites won’t fight it becuase they get a 5% to 6% built in return on thier investment – this is the same reason they build wind farms, that and the subsidy.
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HaHa says:
Ratebase? Where?
‘We can make a profit remodeling the executive offices’ is a thing of the past. Power pools are almost everywhere.
Regulated ROI? Like I said, where is it that backwards? I know Southern Company intended to keep their rate base at home while competing in everybody else’s space. Guess I assumed that was gone by now. Corrupt politics can last longer than expected, see also TVA.As to transmission. You’re of course right. Can’t get one approved if you’re buying drinks. Lots of cases the Utility likes it though. PG&E has the SF bay area by the transmission lines. If they didn’t SF would PUD up in second. No point though, the financial sodomy would just move to the transmission. Serves them right, they could build generation in the bay area, as they won’t, they deserve to pay.
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Raukk says:
Couldn’t they just require that any large wind or solar facilities also install battery banks that can provide a certain level of stability?
You’d also think they would already have a system in place for controlling which power sources are online and which are offline.
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HaHa says:
They could, but it would mean no new large wind or solar facilities.
It’s currently a deal breaker, but it’s also currently a non-issue.Capacity payments will be increased to keep the standby units online. Because it has to be done. Market necessity. If any area/pool/etc doesn’t, they will ‘serve as an example to others.’
Any money going to capacity payment will likely come out of power payment. Size of pie (home rates) being largely fixed and regulated.
Most units get both, unreliable units just get power, standby units get capacity and power when called on, hydro complicated.
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JohnU says:
If ever a comments section was going to bring out thoughtful and rational debate…
About time HaD implemented some sort of upvote/downvote system like everyone else so the good ones can rise up, the bad ones can fall off the bottom, and just being first to post doesn’t get you top spot.
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Dude says:
Those systems will just get abused by sockpuppeteers.
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Bj says:
So are all of these supposed energy projects getting scrapped and put on hold the reason why I can’t go more than five minutes on the internet without an ad popping up trying to convince me to install solar onto my house? Cuz some startup got red lighted and now they’re trying to sell off all the unneeded panels to try to save as much investment capital from being wasted as they possibly can?
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robomonkey says:
If the costs I saw to put solar on my roof are any indication they can stuff it. I’m not paying $40K plus out of pocket (AFTER INCENTIVES) to put solar on my roof with the promise of a payback in 10 years then savings of another $40K over the life of the panels.
I know systems better than that, I know there will never be that amount of payback. Not even close.
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robomonkey says:
So, let me get this straight….
At times the “inexpensive solar and wind” (only inexpensive because of tax breaks BTW) produce more power than the grid can handle. Making their impact on the Carbon Free generation of electricity useless.
And the powers that be, in their infinite wisdom are pushing us beyond reason to rush to electrify EVERYTHING.
They didn’t think this out. Their experts didn’t think this out. And in short order we’re all going to be screwed!
Slow and steady wins the race. We should not be rushing to fix this, we should formulate a plan and execute over time. As long as tax breaks drive this movement the only thing the corporations are looking to do is get those monies. To quote Dick Jones in Robocop “Who cares if it worked?”
Solar panel farms and wind farms should be using gravity storage or pond storage to store power when the excess is generated. And that needs to be a cost that is factored into the price of the carbon neutral system. We need buffers to make those technologies viable and we need to understand that those buffers are part of the SYSTEM of power generation.
What’s worked with fossil fuels and even nuclear generation is that we can control the output without worrying about the need for a buffer for that output. Hydroelectric plants are essentially gravity batteries that with a simple turn of a valve can control the output. Wind and solar have no such throttling capability and even if they did it would not be nearly as reliable as the others.
We can use excess energy to pump water, desalinate water, produce synthetic (and carbon neutral) petroleum products to allow our existing combustion engines to continue to run.
It’s a force of will that will take decades to complete. But as long as we’re gung ho for jumping to green energy and move forward at breakneck speed we’re going to suffer.
Build the green projects with local storage so they can provide a known amount of energy at all times they’re available (gravity or water storage, batteries wear out and the amount of carbon generated by mining and creating them offset ANY advantage to their use as a buffering technology).
Utilize excess power to create the things needed for society (clean water being the easiest thing to do).
Stop with the BATTERY ELECTRIC VEHICLES ONLY baloney that’s got the headlines lately. How about Plug in Hybrid vehicles as a step in the right direction (you get me 30 to 50 miles of battery storage AND an engine and I’ll visit the pump 4 to 5 times a year. And I won’t have emptied out my retirement to buy the damned car.
If you tell a consumer that a car with 30-50 miles of electric only power is backed up by a gas engine and will net them about 60 MPG when it’s in hybrid mode they will buy it. And when they figure out that if they plug it in at home or charge it at work they won’t need to buy gas for weeks at a time watch how quickly the demand for gasoline drops! And when the grid is suffering an issue and using grid power to charge vehicles is unavailable, use gas. Best of both worlds!
Plug In Hybrids are the equivalent of methadone. It will help us kick the habit!
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Foldi-One says:
>They didn’t think this out. Their experts didn’t think this out.
Oh no the experts have thought this out and for decades be wanting investment in the ancient creaking infrastructure long before renewables started to become reliable, durable and cheap enough to actually really work. And the Politicians, lobbyist and Suits at the top of the energy business generally do know this, but one needs the bribes to stay in power, one takes home a fat pay check for marketing whatever suits and the other is offering the bribe/paycheck because they don’t care about the future just their quarterly profits…
Also across Europe there really isn’t a huge need to store energy – it is so densely populated and spans time zones that you can share and transmit power across its entirety from where the sun and wind are to where the current demand is relatively easily – it is how the EU grid works already! Though it does need much more work and some extra redundancy would be good. Which along with adding some pumped hydro where you have good geology for it would go a long way.
So I don’t disagree with you as such, but I don’t think ‘Slow and steady’ can win this race – the green movement has finally gained attention and in doing so snapped to having so much inertia trying to slow it down is not going to work, and Putin’s war has shown just how fast energy dependence on a less than allied power turns sour for you.
I also don’t think Plug In Hybrids are quite as glorious as you paint them, but they are definitely very valid as an option.
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robomonkey says:
From the standpoint of adoption of technology Plug in Hybrids will get more support than Battery Electric. I drive a hybrid and REALLY wanted a Plug in, but at the time even getting a the hybrid that I needed for my purposes (I tow it behind my motorhome so it had to be a specific type) was exceptionally difficult.
This is my second hybrid. I get 600 miles between fill ups (13 gallons or less). About 46 MPG for a Ford Escape. My Prius got slightly better, but I can’t tow it 4 wheels down. I would have purchased a Prius prime no question if the car could be towed without a dolly.
And rushing into what might be a better option will not make it work. Take 20 to 30 years to move us in the right direction and we will get there. Force us to adopt it and like anything in nature you will meet resistance.
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Foldi-One says:
Really depends on the who and where, I have nothing against the Plug-in’s, for some they are ideal. Heck I have nothing against the eco-focused pure ICE, as again for some it is the current best option to do their work and be relatively clean. But across the EU (especially the wealthier parts) where chargers are now getting very common and very fast should you need them and the longest travel anybody might routinely need to do is easily in round trip distance for the pure EV (even in many cases the cheaper low range models) the hybrids don’t look like the best option for many folk – carting an expensive and heavy lump of useless iron around and paying extra to do so vs putting in a slightly larger battery and only need domestic electric rates. Also it is quite possible the ICE just sits there so unused it might not even work when you do finally need it, as some of these plug-ins do a pretty large range on battery.
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spaceminions says:
Hybrids often have all the parts of both kinds of car, which makes costs and failure risks higher. A big battery is expensive, but current cars really don’t get the most range per battery capacity, so there’s room for range improvement without capacity increases. A comfortably sized two-seat economy hatchback ev should need around $8k worth of battery at current prices to go 600 miles, but they’re not optimized to that degree – they’re heavy with a fair amount of drag.
Maybe if your imagined plug in hybrid were more of a short range EV with a cheap range extender it would be okay, especially if it could act as a generator when parked. And later on, maybe it could use a fuel cell (whether hydrogen or otherwise) for the range extender – or even just an add-on battery pack if prices allow. Of course, for suvs/pickups I can easily see using a hybrid system of whatever sort just to allow them to consume a bit less fuel, because their original purpose prevents reasonably sized batteries from being enough. On the other hand, if we could stop with the mall crawlers that’d be great.
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robomonkey says:
And please tell me that you know that the green energy movement and the companies that are building that technology are as guilty of donations and lobbying. Too much of what has come out as green has been Vaporware. See Solar Roadways.
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spaceminions says:
Solar roadways was a terrible idea from the start but people don’t seem to think it’s possible to tell the difference between a doomed idea and a good one ahead of time, so they wrongly figure the other ideas are just as poorly planned as the scams.
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robomonkey says:
Seperating Vaporware from good ideas is needed. The fact that the president at the time touted that technology as “a great idea” shows that they don’t bother with science. They bother with appearances.
When you consider that good ideas get thrown out because it’s not popular it’s maddening. See Plasma Gasification incinerators on that one. Great idea, NIMBY is killing it because they don’t want incinerators in their area…but trucking trash to former coal mines…GREAT IDEA.
I get that the economy drives much of that, but being able to turn trash into useable materials should be part of the solution.
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Foldi-One says:
Now ‘green’ has become profitable there is lobbying and will no doubt be similar levels of bovine effluent going forward, which is kinda what I meant when I said ‘trying to slow it down is not going to work’. But when talking about the 30+ years ago the infrastructure SHOULD have been being upgraded, which everyone knew it had nothing to do with ‘green’. It just wasn’t done because it is not short term profitable. Even not counting the looming prospect of a renewable future requiring them the better infrastructure was being called for – from what I’ve seen the EU didn’t suck quite as badly as the USA on keeping the electric infrastructure mostly fit for purpose, but still…
Yes vapourware exists, though the much maligned solar roadways is a concept that on paper actually makes some sense, way better than the real vapourware – its a huge surface area that is largely unused and in the sun all day. The challenge with that concept is in the engineering (especially to survive the HGV) and rather high cost compared to tarmac, which I agree makes it at least for now not really viable in general, and it never really looked it. But that doesn’t meant it shouldn’t have been trailed – can do all the simulations you like but you can’t KNOW how badly the brake dust and rubber will cover the surface, or how much the reinforcement required to take the load will tank the cells efficiency, or how reportedly awful it will be to drive on in wet weather without test – It might have turned out to be way way better than you expect and just need a fleet of street sweepers to keep the surface clean – and you can’t actually know that until it get tried. Unlike the real vapourware this one the mathematics actually check out in basic theory.
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Cogidubnus Rex says:
“Also across Europe there really isn’t a huge need to store energy – it is so densely populated and spans time zones that you can share and transmit power across its entirety from where the sun ”
Spans all of 3 time zones UTC to UTC+2. The US has more time zones.
“So I don’t disagree with you as such, but I don’t think ‘Slow and steady’ can win this race – the green movement has finally gained attention and in doing so snapped to having so much inertia trying to slow it down is not going to work, and Putin’s war has shown just how fast energy dependence on a less than allied power turns sour for you.”
Thankfully the ‘greens’ in Sweden who never really had much inertia but wielded an unfortunate amount of power in the previous government have been slapped down now. Indeed putting all your gas-eggs in one not-so-stable basket is hardly the best idea. When Mr Trump quite rightly pointed this out he was laughed at…
I mean a genuine green party based on science and facts could work. Currently they seem to be based on opinions and emotions and fear, but as they are the ‘green’ party then people with good meaning intentions are fooled into supporting them.
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Foldi-One says:
The US isn’t densely populated between the timezones though, most of the population is on the two coastlines with a whole lot of not much inbetween – you would have lots of very long east to west coast connections with practically nothing inbetween – it just isn’t as practical to connect it up that way in the US… Europe is very dense so you rarely have to go more than a few hundred miles to hit another pretty big population centre from the last across the timezone span.
Any political party based on science and facts alone doesn’t get anywhere – too much of the population is not educated/interested enough to actually pick that party based on such dry and logical mission goals alone. It always takes a degree of emotive response that pure science doesn’t impart. And if the party ever existed in a real sense and still lacked that in their sales pitch I’m sure the media would end up putting words in their mouth enough to make up for it and rather force some stupid…
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C says:
Stop being so rational. How dare you.
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A Texan says:
Wind and solar are junk technologies. Maybe okay for small scale, but the amount of pollution created and disposal issues with the panels and blades are a problem. Money should have been invested in small scale nuclear. Natural gas is a great option since America has a lot of that. But no, we have to pretend these garbage systems are environmentally sensitive.
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C says:
If only people warned us about this! oh wait…
Wind may be cheaper than coal when it’s windy, but its price is infinite when there is no wind.
Same with solar. When the sun is shining it’s cheap, but when there is no sun its price is infinite.
Grid level storage at a large enough scale to power a country doesn’t exist as it is too expensive and impractical.
And the price of making the grid handle significant portions of intermittent energy is also great.
So overall it’s not cheap. It also takes up a lot of land and kills a lot of birds and other animals.
So we need reliable base-load energy such as coal, gas or nuclear.
Gas plants are better at turning up and down then coal and can work together with intermittent sources such as wind and solar.
But if you want to stop using fossil fuels the only option is nuclear WITHOUT wind and solar. -
aerbil313 says:
I’m laughing over all the people here hoping new technology will come and save us. Look up, there’s not even enough rare metals in the world for the world to transition to EVs and renewables.
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Foldi-One says:
>there’s not even enough rare metals in the world for the world to transition to EVs and renewables.
As so very much of this planet has never really been prospected for mineral wealth just how much of it all there is in forms we can practically extract we have no idea – though we already know there is a really substantial amount, and it isn’t actually consumed once you use it once.You can however say with a fair degree of accuracy how much oil is likely to be left – that has been actively searched for across most of the globe, but the Rare Earths until very very recently were waste material from the extraction of bulk metals rather than a valued product in their own right.
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David says:
Rooftop producers have just been screwed this week where I live by the mega-utility who owns most of the state legislators. Decentralization is the best answer and ultimately many of us will end up with local storage, and it needn’t be by batteries (before you whine about lithium, which is only really necessary for EVs). But a big obstacle to efficient decentralized systems is again the utility-bought law that says individuals can’t sell power to each other; that is, no one’s allowed to compete with the monopoly utility as a provider to anyone else. So each of us in detached housing will have to have our own storage system, which is a lot less cost-effective than having one for the immediate neighborhood. So yeah, we’re back to the biggest challenge being corruption and misaligned priorities.
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