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Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

briangitt.com

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Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#181

Post by ouid »

sct202 wrote: post #158
ShockTohp wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But solar and wind are no where near sustainable, or efficient. They are extremely fragile and have serious detrimental effects on their local environment. Nuclear is the best option and gas is a massive improvement. The whole point of this article is that we are chasing a utopian ideal instead of actually fixing the problems. Once again, perfect is being the enemy of improvement.

Nuclear is an option but it's not a fast option. The newest reactor designs from Westinghouse and EPR have taken 9 years at the fastest to complete in China and much longer everywhere else. You can say the regulations or NIMBYs are slowing down construction, but those aren't an issue in China.

I know that China has a rampant corruption problem, and very poor safety track records, but Westinghouse's reputation is very much on the line here, and not even China can afford to invoke the stigma of a nuclear accident. You can't deny a meltdown the way that you can deny, say, a virus leaked from a lab.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#182

Post by [deleted] »

pfdietz wrote: post #101
scythe wrote: post #71

>Trillions of dollars were spent on wind and solar projects over the last 20 years, yet the world’s dependence on fossil fuels declined only 3 percentage points, from 87% to 84%. A lot of that money was spent on R&D. Tens of billions of [inflation-adjusted] dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project, but the net effect on fossil fuel usage was zero (outside of two cities in Japan). If this is the author's key argume…

> Trillions of [inflation-adjusted] dollars were spent on the Manhattan Project This is a gross overestimate. It's maybe $40B in 2022 dollars.

[deleted]

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#183

Post by anonporridge »

elil17 wrote: post #26

Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true. >I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited…

> Nuclear is the safest way to generate electricity, but that safety comes at a financial cost. Pursuing nuclear is great but solar/wind are much cheaper.

If fossil fuel use was burdened with the level of safety regulations that nuclear fission is, sufficient enough to make it as safe and clean as nuclear, we might suddenly find that nuclear is actually very cheap.

To me it seems like a false dichotomy to suggest that nuclear is competing with solar/wind. At best it's competing with solar/wind + batteries, but in reality it's competing with natural gas and coal. And natural gas & coal have an unfair advantage because society and our governments have drastically more tolerance for it's absurdly greater lethality and pollution compared to nuclear.

Fun fact, since the NRC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, was founded in the US in 1975, they have not approved ANY new nuclear sites, only a few expansions of existing sites. I honestly wonder how many deaths the NRC is responsible for by beating down nuclear development to the benefit of the fossil fuel industry.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#184

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

0x53 wrote: post #159
Analemma_ wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well. Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years, and we have the least sunlight and cheapest grid power of almost any place in the continental US.

$25k / 12months / 9 years = $230. Which seems reasonable.

a $230 monthly electricity bill in Seattle is a lot

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#185

Post by trashtester »

This is how you fix CO2 emissions: Add a $200/MWH tax on coal ($500 for lignite) Add a $100/HWH tax on natural gas and oil.

Make all energy sources comply to the same safety standards (like $X in taxes per 1 million expected lost life-years, from radiation, air polution, floods, etc)

THEN make the free market sort out how to produce energy.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#186

Post by konschubert »

andruby wrote: post #64
tsjackson wrote: post #13

The cost per kWh of solar and wind is a third of natural gas and nuclear. It's not even close. Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage is rapidly decreasing in costs, and will soon be low enough that Solar/Wind/Storage will outcompete Natural Gas or nuclear 95% of the time. There is probably a small role for other sources in filling capacity gaps during uncommon weather events (i.e. natural gas…

> Filling the gaps left by intermittent production with storage That will work for shifting day & night, but I don't see any feasible energy solutions for summer-winter shifting, or even to bridge weeks with limited sunshine (and/or wind). There are large populations living relatively far from the equator, which see huge differences in daylight during summer & winter. We should try to get as much energy from renewabl…

Power to Gas is the answer to that.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#187

Post by boringg »

fasteo wrote: post #163
elil17 wrote: post #26

Clever writing can let you argue for any viewpoint. That doesn’t make it true. >I used to think solar and wind power were the best ways to reduce CO2 emissions. But the biggest reduction in CO2 emissionsduring the past 15 years (over 60%) has come from switching from coal to natural gas. Upgrading coal to gas is a great intermediate step. However, it’s not a long term solution because natural gas reserves are limited…

His credentials seem phenomenal: I went to work in construction to build energy-efficient homes, and I started a company that built composting systems for cities and businesses. I became executive director of an organization that championed green building policies and became CEO of a consulting firm that commercialized clean energy technologies and ran energy-efficiency programs. I then founded a software startup to…

No those credentials are not phenomenal credentials in the climate tech space.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#188

Post by jamie_ca »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #154
Analemma_ wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very well. Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years, and we have the least sunlight and cheapest grid power of almost any place in the continental US.

> Rooftop solar in Seattle pays for itself in 7-9 years Can you show me the arithmetic for that? I understand rooftop solar to cost $20,000 - $25,000. Is your non-solar electric bill over 7-9 years really more expensive than that? Seems impossible.

Victoria BC area here (practically next door), it wouldn't work for us.

My annual hydro bill was $2400 in 2018 with baseboard heating, and $2050 for 16,500kWh in 2021 after we put in a heat pump. 3 bedroom detached.

A recent article suggested a typical 4 kW system around here would cost $10k for 3261 kWh a year, or about $405 in credit at a blended rate. Another suggests an 11 kW system at $27,500, which could maybe hit 9000 kWh - about $1100 in credit. We do have net metering with BC Hydro so it'll just wash through, but that's still a 25 year payback horizon.

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#189

Post by dav_Oz »

Let's kid not ourselves.

There are lot of very powerful interests behind the "energy industry", roughly divided into four large sectors: fossil fuels, nuclear power, renewables and electrical generation itself.

At this point in time there exists a multitude of cross-investments and interdependencies, so it becomes increasingly difficult to clearly seperate the interests as it is quite lucrative to just play all sides, a convergence. There is actually a lot to gain from this stragetic move.

The technocracy movement in the 30s[0] as a third way (to capitalism and communism) had in its heart the replacement of the "fiat system" through "energy certificates" literally denoted in energy units of kWh. In some way or another these ideas are slowly creeping up to the surface in a transformed landscape as a way of allocating resources, governing, controlling.

It worries me that this kind of top-down-single-linear-metrics social engineering isn't openly and broadly question anymore (except in "conspiratorial" niches) , quite to the contrary it is embraced by a lot of ordinary people (who have nothing to gain from it but a lot to lose) to fight climate change. In a sense arguing over possible "clean" energy sources in the future and carefully weighing the pros and cons only touches the surface level without the actual governance model for its implementation. It is quietly and skillfully circumvented. Democracy Dies in Darkness.

[0]https://archive.org/details/TechnocracyHowardScott-ScienceVs...

Re: Chasing utopian energy: How I wasted 20 years of my life

#190

Post by dmcclurg »

Never confuse effort with results. Brian is confusing 20 years of professional effort with global results. According to Brian, decades of his professional effort were driven by a staunch belief that this effort was "protecting the environment", but now Brian no longer holds this belief, citing a supposedly "utterly failed" government contract with his company and three bullet points that highlight lackluster progress on the whole of the market and the supposed missed opportunity of nuclear power.

None of these results are materially affected by Brian's effort over the last 20 years. Federal and local government regulation and investment as well as corporate business decisions are responsible for reducing coal plants, constructing nuclear plants, and incentivizing "utopian energy". Brian's effort mostly falls into the corporate business decision category, but all we see of this in his article is a statement that his company failed to fulfill a $60M government contract. This experience really stands out as Brian's real inflection point, but the results of this effort are not only NOT discussed, they are--by his own admission--completely opposite of the government's perception of the results.

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