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Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

thetyee.ca

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Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#171

Post by taneq »

xyzzyz wrote: post #152
taneq wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solar panels? Even on the most heavily clouded days mine generate over 50% of nominal. And on that very rare windless, deeply overcast week, maybe we adapt and just don't run the tumble dryer or aircon for a week? Most house energy usage is pretty gratuitous and if you cut it back to lighting, refrigeration and entertainment you could get by on a few kWh a day. If you absolutely must have 100% uptime then $1000 will…

> If you absolutely must have 100% uptime then $1000 will get you a diesel generator which would keep the batteries topped off if you ever need it Ah, great, so every house that has food in a freezer or likes to stay warm in winter now has to buy and maintain a diesel generator. Welcome to the great new renewable world.

"Ha! It's not perfect in every conceivable future! This proves that it is worthless forever!"

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#172

Post by ggm »

xyzzyz wrote: post #146
ggm wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't seem to understand either pumped-hydro, or economics. Using hyperbolic language like "through the roof" when we cannot magically wave a wand to make a 100% renewables world in one go, but are approaching it asymptotically means that the pricing function, the costs, and the outcomes are not 'through the roof' but a function of where we are in a migration. I don't know how to predict the future reliably eithe…

> You don't seem to understand either pumped-hydro, No, you don't seem to understand pumped-hydro. The largest pumped-hydro plant in the US, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station, can store enough energy to satisfy US energy use for 250 milliseconds. Yes, milliseconds . Suppose you want to have enough pumped-hydro to store US energy use for, say, 1 hour. There are 3600 seconds in an hour. You need ~15 000 pumped hyd…

Lets just review. You continue to ignore that there is no single weather system US continent wide, demanding an ability to simultaneously manage electricity supply from storage in one instance.

You insist I "do the math" but your premises has twice to your own admission had fundamental flaws in the source data and in the maths.

You really want me to "put up my numbers" ? I think you're trolling.

There is no compelling "all US from storage" problem. There is no "week long no-wind no-solar" problem. There is no immediate current TWh supply from renewables.

There are undoubtedly problems: They're just not the phantoms you are floating.

Go away please.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#173

Post by basch »

dwd wrote: post #130
jandrewrogers wrote: post #22

The crux of the matter is that we need to drive thermodynamics backward at planetary scale. This is a fancy way of saying that we need to increase electricity generation by an integer factor beyond current global demand without producing net CO2. The list of existing energy sources capable of scaling like this that don't rely on burning carbon is extremely short: nuclear fission. I don't see any possibility of the re…

Unfortunately there are no realists in a position to really affect Government investment. Why is every nation not committing an investment on the scale of the Apollo/Manhattan Projects? Politically it should be sell-able as a near-term investment (jobs) and future prosperity (cheaper renewable energy). Governments should be putting billions into fusion, wave/tidal generation (nothing should be too expensive), upgradi…

Isnt that basically ITER? https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/03/03/a-star-in-a-bo...

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#174

Post by harryh »

rayiner wrote: post #145
dwd wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately there are no realists in a position to really affect Government investment. Why is every nation not committing an investment on the scale of the Apollo/Manhattan Projects? Politically it should be sell-able as a near-term investment (jobs) and future prosperity (cheaper renewable energy). Governments should be putting billions into fusion, wave/tidal generation (nothing should be too expensive), upgradi…

The Manhattan project cost $4 billion per year for 6 years. Apollo cost $15 billion per year for 11 years. (All today’s dollars.) The US currently subsidies renewables at about $7 billion annually.

That's a pretty interesting stat.

Though the renewables subsidy doesn't look as generous if you compare things in % of GDP terms.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#175

Post by harryh »

0xffff2 wrote: post #95
cyrksoft wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know population will decline, but not as a policy. If it happens naturally then it's perfectly ok. The fact that politicians get to decide how many kids or even if you can have kids is a scary thought.

Why? How is it different from any other aspect of government regulation? In the US at least, the government already has its finger on the scale by giving tax breaks based on number of children.

Government restriction of the biologic imperative to reproduce would represent perhaps the most extreme interventions into the private lives of individuals that one could imagine.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#176

Post by flukus »

xyzzyz wrote: post #163
NeedMoreTea wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where are you getting 250 milliseconds and needing 15,000 from? Wikipedia claims US yearly electricity consumption is 4,090 TWh, and Bath County stores 24 TWh, with a generation capacity of 3,003 MW. That comes out as enough storage for a couple of days worth of US electricity use. Obviously you'd need 3 more to cover generation capacity.

Ah, I rechecked, I actually lost 2 orders of magnitude. It's 25 seconds, not 250 milliseconds. However, you lost 3 orders of magnitude: Bath County is 24 GWh, not TWh. My calculation was done under assumption of 101 quads of annual US energy use, but I'll redo this calculation with assumption more charitable to your argument. US uses only 4090 TWh worth of electricity, which is about 13 quads, but it also uses about…

> So, now we need about 100 pumped hydro plants of the same size as largest one energy storage facility in existence

There are about 70 > 1MW pumped storage stations around the world already, with 40 more planned (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel...), mostly in China. These are just glorified dams and as far as dams go they're tiny, so scaling up (and maybe down too) isn't an issue, there are an estimated 84,000 dams already in the United States. At ~$4 bilion dollars to build 100 of them would come in at the cost of about 1/3 the F-35 program and deliver much more national security.

So it's entirely feasible to have enough pumped hydro storage to cover this mythical scenario of a continent having no wind for an hour.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#177

Post by xyzzyz »

flukus wrote: post #176
xyzzyz wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, I rechecked, I actually lost 2 orders of magnitude. It's 25 seconds, not 250 milliseconds. However, you lost 3 orders of magnitude: Bath County is 24 GWh, not TWh. My calculation was done under assumption of 101 quads of annual US energy use, but I'll redo this calculation with assumption more charitable to your argument. US uses only 4090 TWh worth of electricity, which is about 13 quads, but it also uses about…

> So, now we need about 100 pumped hydro plants of the same size as largest one energy storage facility in existence There are about 70 > 1MW pumped storage stations around the world already, with 40 more planned ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel... ), mostly in China. These are just glorified dams and as far as dams go they're tiny, so scaling up (and maybe down too) isn't an issue, ther…

Your comment doesn’t answer any of my questions. Where are you going to build 100 dams with enough water to store gigawathours worth of electricity?

The problem with massive projects like that is that you simply cannot build them just about anywhere.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#178

Post by flukus »

xyzzyz wrote: post #177
flukus wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So, now we need about 100 pumped hydro plants of the same size as largest one energy storage facility in existence There are about 70 > 1MW pumped storage stations around the world already, with 40 more planned ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroel... ), mostly in China. These are just glorified dams and as far as dams go they're tiny, so scaling up (and maybe down too) isn't an issue, ther…

Your comment doesn’t answer any of my questions. Where are you going to build 100 dams with enough water to store gigawathours worth of electricity? The problem with massive projects like that is that you simply cannot build them just about anywhere.

You can build them just about anywhere, all you need is a tiny amount of land area for the reservoirs enough of a vertical gradient. There are large mountain ranges running down both coasts with more than enough space to accommodate this. Looking at the surrounding geography of the bath county installation alone looks like it could easily be scaled to 10 times it's current size.

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#179

Post by dwd »

harryh wrote: post #174
rayiner wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Manhattan project cost $4 billion per year for 6 years. Apollo cost $15 billion per year for 11 years. (All today’s dollars.) The US currently subsidies renewables at about $7 billion annually.

That's a pretty interesting stat. Though the renewables subsidy doesn't look as generous if you compare things in % of GDP terms.

It would be interesting to see the amount of carbon reduction that 7 billion in annual subsidies generates compared to what you would get investing it in replacing coal plants with the equivalent pumped hydro.

The current US Government investment seems pretty small.

https://www.hydropower.org/country-profiles/usa

Re: Don’t Call Me a Pessimist on Climate Change. I Am a Realist

#180

Post by klyrs »

chrisco255 wrote: post #169
klyrs wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come now. These factors swing by about 1C combined. [1] https://skepticalscience.com/print.php?r=448 [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/earth-and-planetary-sci...

You should be skeptical of skeptical science. It's a pop science blog, and an opinionated one, it's not an arbiter of truth. The second post was better, but it's from 2011...and the PDO did not stay negative for very long, by 2015 it was positive again, so that was not a longer term negative flip in PDO [1]. So we saw warmer temps in 2016, which briefly skirted highs set in 1998...but since then global temps have coo…

> The AMO will go negative sometime in the 2020s and it will coincide with a negative PDO and a grand solar minimum and that is well correlated with global temps dropping based on thousands of years of ice cores and tree rings.

That's not the issue. You attacked my sources but yours don't present significantly different facts. I'll grant that we might get a relatively chill decade. And then those pendula will swing back. And when we're looking at a 3-5C increase by 2100, a decade-long 1C dip won't make that big of a difference for my kid's lifetime.

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