421–430 of 432 posts
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Depends on whether they live somewhere hot or somewhere cold.
Youre Right! Parent is apparently from Tasmania, which I lumped together with the rest of Australia as "damn hot", while that apparently isn't the case at all.
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Even with the cost of insulation upgrades added to the rent, that's still cheaper total.
Depends on how much the costs of insulation upgrades are blown out of proportion by being mandated.
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I'm assuming that you mean 9.9 × 10⁹ kg of economically-extractable-now reserves and 2.55 × 10¹⁰ kg of potentially economic reserves, not 2575.5 kg, which is what 2.55 × 1010 would work out to. The estimates of lithium abundance in the earth's crust have a low end of 20 ppm. The crust averages about 40 km thick and 3 g/cc in the 29% of the Earth that has continents, which works out to 1.5 × 10¹⁴ m², 5.9 × 10¹⁸ m³, 1.…
But if we need from 8 to 16 weeks of batteries storage for long duration seasonal energy storage, this is not going to work out. https://static.clearpath.org/2018/04/EIRP-Deep-Decarb-Lit-Re...
Maybe we don't need the batteries if the synthetic fuel tech becomes good enough (there are companies working on this such as Prometheus and Carbon Engineering). Could it be possible for California to become a major oil producer state with extremely cheap solar? Cover the Mojave desert with solar and convert the excess power into oil? It seems definitely possible if there was a carbon tax (which should exclude such s…
I hope not. Let the plants remove the CO2 from the air instead. That would be much better than burning it again. How can your process be called neutral if nature has a "more neutral" solution than yours? Let the biomass do its job and just stop burning oil.
Lithium ion batteries have limited lifecycles so they aren't sustainable. We need to be building massive pumped hydro.
In case anybody knows, what will happen to those batteries? Can they be recycled in any way?
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New building standards don't affect existing buildings. And they're not optional, so the tax isn't an option for non-compliance. Forcing existing landlords to retrofit to new building standards isn't even done for safety purposes, so it certainly isn't going to happen for energy efficiency. And calling for this to now be a thing, well, I can't think of a better way to get entrenched interests to suddenly lobby hard a…
> New building standards don't affect existing buildings. No, but habitability standards do (or, technically, in general affect the legal ability to charge rent for units in existing buildings.) So, user those of your concern is recalcitrant landlords. > Forcing existing landlords to retrofit to new building standards isn't even done for safety purposes Yes, this is done (not always, but it does happen), through habi…
And the only example I can think of for the latter was for asbestos. If being as horrible as asbestos is the bar you have to clear, regulation isn't a viable option and we're stuck with market solutions.
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So the thing is the economics of rooftop solar are a lot different than power station solar. The DOE has public data on how much utilities pay for electricity. In a market like mine, Southern California Edison isn’t an electricity generator, they buy power at about $0.02/kWh but then they sell it to the residential consumer for up to $0.32. So clearly it’s a very different calculation. Regardless of that generators a…
> they buy power at about $0.02/kWh but then they sell it to the residential consumer for up to $0.32. This is the most important factor in the whole discussion. The electricity retailers, which consist of a call centre and a two billing systems, accounts payable and accounts receivable, buy electricity for virtually nothing, $1.00 buys them 50kWh, that's about double what my houses uses per day with two adults. edit…
This seems a bit slow to me. 5 years in California time usually ends up being at least 10 years if you are lucky. By then the 7% will probably be closer to 3-5%. I think California is going to have to be a lot more aggressive with Solar and battery if they are going to reach their climate goals...
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Yeah I'm renting a house in central NC and May-September our power bill skyrockets from AC. The windows are not insulated at all and we have a lot of them. Even the floors, walls, and ceilings leak heat like crazy, you can feel it just putting your hand close to the wall or ceiling. We run AC to get it down to 76F and it's still crazy expensive and using a lot of unnecessary power. We need to encourage insulation, es…
> The US needs to heavily encourage these sorts of improvements to buildings, it's good for everyone. Is it though? I imagine your landlord doesn't think it's good for them. It's not bad for them, but why would they spend hundreds or thousands of dollars improving your apartments insulation when it costs them nothing to keep the poor thermal in place. I too lived in rentals that had terrible thermal protection. It wa…
However there are also indirect benefits to improving insulation generally. First of all there is less fossil fuel pollution since much of the US is still mostly on fossil fuel power, so reducing electrical demand has a positive impact on air quality and atmospheric carbon dioxide. Also a lower load on the local power grid reduces operating costs and reduces wear on grid equipment, reducing frequency of part replacements. Also AC units tend to be pretty loud since they're running fairly large compressors, and themselves generate heat outside the house, and though these factors may be small they do contribute to both noise and heat pollution.
I think a subsidy for energy efficiencyizing buildings in various ways should be provided, I know they have been in limited ways before. Regulating new construction to ensure a base level of heat exchange resistance would be another way.