51–60 of 125 posts
Also, I love how constant that Nuclear line is across the generation graph.
I'm glad most of our energy is from non-carbon sources
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Biosphere carbon is carbon neutral. If you grow a tree, pulp the tree, and burn the tree, the amount of overall carbon available has not changed as the process of growing new trees will reuse the same carbon. Ignoring external energy costs, obvs. It's a little weird to think about but those wood burning plants are mostly taking the production waste of lumber processing and using it for fuel, similar to wood pellet gr…
However, while carbon neutral from trees would have been great in the past and hopefully will be again in the future, right now it’s not our saviour because it takes decades to rebind the carbon in a new tree and we don’t have decades anymore. So it’s like natural gas, a marginally better thing than coal and oil but still not great. Same with carbon offsets from planting trees, it might be fine to require planting tr…
The carbon from the tree burned can be absorbed by all the other, currently growing, trees.
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There is a very nice volunteer made one for ERCOT that popped up during the freeze last year, on datadog no less. https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-393be929c9c55c3b80b557d...
Much nicer than ERCOT's imho.
Ontario also has a dashboard https://www.ieso.ca/power-data I'm glad most of our energy is from non-carbon sources
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Woah Quebec seems to have the lowest (?) Carbon intensity on the map. Hydro power is just amazing, and I'm glad we had very forward looking PMs back in the 60-70s who pushed for massive hydro projects even when the costs were gigantic. There's still so much hydro potential in the province that isn't being used though. Makes me wonder if it would be possible to build up our hydro capacity specifically for export inste…
There is a fair amount of missing / misleading data on that map, e.g. Brazil is the 25th largest consumer of coal[0], but the map claims 95+% of Brazil's energy consumption is renewable and lists their coal percentage as "?" [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-count...
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/brazil-coal/#coal-consump...
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49436 ("Brazil largely relies on hydropower for electricity generation; in 2020, hydropower supplied 66% of its electricity demand. Wind and solar generation have grown quickly in recent years and had a combined 11% share of the country’s electricity generation in 2020. Biomass accounted for an 8% share. Fossil fuel-fired plants made up another 12% of electricity generation, while nuclear power accounted for 2%.")
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I grew up near this NYPA facility, which is a really interesting energy storage idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroe... Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water battery!
Pumped storage - always interesting highly doubt it will be realized in any real meaningful way (might be some interesting one off projectS). We've stopped building dams and its too difficult to site close to markets.
UK is building a huge one too.
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I assume that the UK is like the US in providing separate commercial electricity rates, so I'm not sure that there's a meaningful comparison to be made directly here.
Those are wholesale rates, literally everybody will be paying more than that. Business will be paying less of a premium.
(A regulator on behalf of) the British government sets a six monthly price cap, based on the actual prices from a historical six month period, ordinarily this cap just means that people who are too poor or too lazy to "shop around" for a better deal pay no more than this amount for their electricity, but because the UK uses a lot of natural gas to make electricity and European gas prices are very high now (even though the UK has its own gas fields and doesn't use very much Russian gas) the cap is actually lower than any rational supplier would offer, and so there are no "better deals" out there, the alternatives are fixed rates far higher than the cap for long periods, essentially a bet that prices will go much higher and stay high.
Right now the price cap is 21p per kWh (plus standing charges) and in April it rises to 28p per kWh, it is already anticipated that in October it will be closer to 40p per kWh.
Because metric units are convenient that means right now wholesale energy prices above £210 per MWh mean a loss even before expenses to the suppliers, and from April until October, wholesale prices above £280 per MWh are likewise a loss. Peak prices of typically £300-£400 are literally bankrupting the suppliers.
For small suppliers the consequence is they went bankrupt last year, in huge numbers once these prices began to bite. Some hadn't even been profitable with normal prices, so now asked to eat millions of pounds per month of losses they just folded. Their customers were handed to the other suppliers, on these capped rates, which are of course hurt those suppliers too. The biggest will probably survive this, if necessary with government money (although none of the "suppliers" for consumers actually supply any electricity anywhere, they exist on paper to satisfy a pro-business agenda for government, obviously if you're confident of the principle that capitalism is a good idea then more capitalism is a better idea right?)
Anyway, as a result of the cap, essentially all consumers are not paying what electricity actually costs. British consumers are angry because their bills went up maybe 40-50%. But the wholesale prices more than doubled. They, as you might say, ain't seen nothing yet.
I can afford this, lots of people cannot.
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Solar and wind and hydro and nuclear aren't carbon neutral though, they're zero carbon (again excluding external costs of production, etc). With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes happen. It's not a distinction that is made in public discourse commonly but matters if, for example, it's powering a c…
> With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes happen The net effect is the same. A country running on biofuels and a country running on solar will have the same net production irrespective of carbon capture. One emits and absorbs while the other never emits.