291–300 of 432 posts
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The government should enforce energy efficient building standards and tax those who don’t comply.
They could, but then the costs will just be passed down to the tenants (i.e. increased rent).
I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…
Frankly I don't get why people install solar except in consistently sunny places like Hawaii, Arizona and some parts of California. Financially you're pretty much always better off paying utility rates. If you _really_ care about the environment, there's currently no cleaner tech than nuclear, even after you factor in things like nuclear waste and a couple of major disasters. If you only "woke" care about the environ…
Meanwhile in Iowa, Mid American Energy is well on their way to 100% renewal by 2021 with an endless array of wind farms. Their final phase of the project started in 2018 with a $922M investment. Iowa Public Radio toured one of the windmills back in January. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/post/skyscrapers-fields-wind...
I wonder how people would feel about ethanol plants fired by wind farms. The one built near my family home is coal fired and the idea of growing crops to be turned into car fuel is ... less appealing. But if you had electric or ethanol powered tractors growing biomass to ferment and distill into more ethanol with a plant fired with wind, maybe there are some different environmental considerations there. For one it wo…
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Previous responses about my experience with my 5kW PV generation system in Sunnyvale, CA. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17509166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163235 Based on your question though, you assume that utilities are somehow optimizing to provide energy at the lowest possible price. This is not true. In the US the utility is granted defacto monopoly status in exchange for its ability to ensu…
In what world is the monopoly better off charging the same rates but with higher internal costs?
I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…
Batteries aren't cheap enough yet but when they obtain an affordable range, we might be seeing the situation that you're describing because they'd meet current regulation restrictions.
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Previous responses about my experience with my 5kW PV generation system in Sunnyvale, CA. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17509166 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163235 Based on your question though, you assume that utilities are somehow optimizing to provide energy at the lowest possible price. This is not true. In the US the utility is granted defacto monopoly status in exchange for its ability to ensu…
Okay, but other parties than the energy companies can make the investment of rooftop solar. A simple construct could be that the rent you pay for the solar cells is less than your current energy bill, but higher than the point where the company breaks even.
If you force solar companies to both provide the panels and provide the wires to hook your house up the local substation and maintain those wires, well they can't do that at a competitive rate.
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>We don't need jobs in outdated, polluting industries Man, we don't need jobs at all. I want to live in an all-renewable automated world. But I realize that's not realistic in the short term, and it will take decades - perhaps even another century - until that desire is realized. Hence my reservation.
Well we are definitely in agreement about the long term then. Cheers
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>Localizing our entire energy dependence has got to have some serious national security benefits It would also cause extreme instability by shooting up unemployment, destroying large corporations that offered valuable careers with good benefits, and exacerbate polarization between those who believe in man made climate change and those who don't. Don't get me wrong - I think energy independence is the way to go - but…
I've got some bad news for you about what's going to happen to the economy when we have 3° C of warming because we didn't do this fast enough.
Why lithium ion batteries — are they much cheaper to make than new gravitational potential (i.e. hydroelectric) storage systems?
Hydro can be extremely disruptive to ecosystems, and you also need a suitable site for it. It's very situational, from what I understand.
I’ve always wondered about something, yet have never found anyone discussing it online. So maybe some smart people can help me out: a lot of people install solar on their rooftops. Much of the time this is done with the assumption that it will pay off financially because energy prices are currently at a certain rate and will continue to rise. But here’s my question: If its financially advantageous to install solar on…