Texas is right now the 5th ring of hell in the summer
Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
251–260 of 278 posts
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it, what's your argument? Yes, at the pace we're building them, PV is not sufficient. Guess what, the exact same fact is true of nuclear. All that establishes is that we must invest more, it doesn't say in what we should invest.
It was an answer to parent's "It's simply a matter of scaling up." comment. I agree with you that the exact same fact is true of nuclear. And wind too, while we're at it. I don't think there's a way out of it: our technological civilization lives WAY WAY beyond its means, and that is made possible only by burning through fossil fuels, among many other non-renewable resources. When that dries up (economically speaking…
It seems to me that people don't stop a behavior just because its unsustainable. They only seem to stop a bad behavior entirely when the market provides a less harmful alternative and its costs approximately the same amount or much less.
Whale oil and ambergris where replaced by Fossil fuels.
Ivory for billiard balls was replaced by plastic.
Cigarettes are being replaced by vaping.
Look at the amount of people skipping out on bike helmets and car safety belts. People don't do it even when there is literally no downside and it could literally save their life.
The pace of the world is here to stay, people will just figure out how to sustain it with new stuff. There might a turbine in every backyard, I don't know what the solution will look like. But the extinction of several whale species wasn't enough to put lamplighters out of business coal and transmission lines did and the world got ever faster.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nuclear is incredibly safe
Of course it is! It comprises two of the safest things in the world, radioactive materials and fission! That's never been a recipe for disaster!
If you are suggesting that a nuclear power plant can detonate like a nuclear bomb, you are wrong, they are a completely different design. Sure they can melt down in rare cases, but that's hardly anything on the scale of a nuke. I would suggest you look at some of the stats for death rates of different power sources. Nuclear is near the bottom, coal kills thousands every year through air pollution. If you want to find a truly dangerous power source, look at hydroelectric, when a dam collapses it is more damaging than a power plant meltdown in some cases.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tell that to Qatar. The UK is one sea blockade away from losing a huge chunk of electricity generation.
The UK is also one sea blockade away from losing a huge chunk of the food its population eats. The merits of renewable energy don't include permitting the UK to endure another World War-style blockade attempt, because either the blockaders are swiftly destroyed at sea or have their land based supply and command chains destroyed, by nuclear means if necessary.
I believe the UK would nuke a blockading fleet in its water starving it of food. I do not believe it would do so to a fleet starving it of oil from the waters of Qatar.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Say the government decided to let Wal-Mart park delivery trucks on your property for free ( i.e. decline to enforce your property right in favor of a business). Economically, it'd be indistinguishable from a subsidy. Shareholders don't care whether the government policy increases Wal-Mart's revenue or decreases its expenses. The same is true for power generation.
But then every negative externality not taxed is subsidized. It dilutes the meaning of subsidy because with this new definition government accounting doesn't make sense - the government is 'paying' trillions to subsidize all kinds of negative externalities (but it never actually does). Also, if the government actually subsidizes a negative externality, you're in a thicket, since some of it is a real subsidy and some…
Let the lexicographers deal with the semantics and meanings words.
Simply put fossil fuels create a lot of problems they doesn't pay for. You are paying with your lungs to line the pockets of Exxon shareholders.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The bottleneck is the grid. Sure the grid is a bottle neck, but it is a bottle neck that can be fixed. Aging infrastructure is the problem, not the grid per-se, it just happens to have older and less well maintained segments. > The Grid has to match the production and demand No, the grid transports power from places where it is generated to places where it is consumed. Whether the consumer is local or remote is not…
Electricity may be more flexible for domestic consumption but it's damn hard to ship electrons to Japan or Europe from the US.
I like Iceland's solution for this. They import bauxite and export aluminum to use their geothermal electricity as a resource. Perhaps there are other electricity-intensive operations that could be used to consume surpluses?
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 51 miles from US to Russia. On both sides there are people who use power. Now if 100,000 houses in Russia get power from the US and zero changes Russia could then supply ~100,000 houses with power outside of Russia. Now sure, you need the right substation setup to get this to work out, but a modern grid can quickly route power in response to both changing demand and internment supply. US already sends and receiv…
Conversion would actually be quite expensive, the United States uses 60 Hz and Russia 50, so you're not just looking at a voltage step-up/down but also a frequency change and that's quite hard.
Long distance power transmission is almost always done using DC power, so the phase of AC power is mostly irrelevant.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 51 miles from US to Russia. On both sides there are people who use power. Now if 100,000 houses in Russia get power from the US and zero changes Russia could then supply ~100,000 houses with power outside of Russia. Now sure, you need the right substation setup to get this to work out, but a modern grid can quickly route power in response to both changing demand and internment supply. US already sends and receiv…
Those areas in Russia/US are sparsely populated and I suspect demand is not that high to justify an undersea cable. Plus there are geopolitical issues like accusing Russia of US election interference and then expecting to sell electricity to the Russians.
Yea, there are very good reasons why we don't do this now.
But, in terms of current technology it's viable even if economically/politically it's not.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's 51 miles from US to Russia. On both sides there are people who use power. Now if 100,000 houses in Russia get power from the US and zero changes Russia could then supply ~100,000 houses with power outside of Russia. Now sure, you need the right substation setup to get this to work out, but a modern grid can quickly route power in response to both changing demand and internment supply. US already sends and receiv…
Conversion would actually be quite expensive, the United States uses 60 Hz and Russia 50, so you're not just looking at a voltage step-up/down but also a frequency change and that's quite hard.
Long-distance transmission is done with DC, and converted near consumers to 50/60 Hz AC at the appropriate voltage.
Re: Texas Is Too Windy and Sunny for Old Energy Companies to Make Money
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Added to which the cheapest solar panels in China are often subjected a tariffs of up to 60%. The "coal/gas/nuclear funded free markets lobby" (ALEC, etc.) who whine incessantly about hairdresser licensing went awfully quiet about that one.
> Added to which the cheapest solar panels in China are often subjected a tariffs of up to 60%. Because they were both substandard and being dumped. And they drove a lot of reliable US manufacturers under. In addition, a LOT of installers went under because the warranty they offered assumed that they wouldn't have to show up again for 10 years. 3 years on they're getting warranty calls because the solar cells were fa…
The market figures this kind of stuff out. Reputable installers won't use the cheap cells and will warn their customers off the cheaper selling stuff that won't break in a few years. If the market couldn't things like double and triple pane windows wouldn't be able to out-compete single pane windows.
We have done it with other goods too. American car companies got away with selling substandard stuff for a long time but revenues kept shrinking as Americans bought more foreign brands. It a major market disruption and a bailout for the car companies to right themselves. Sometimes it takes a while, sometimes a touch of government regulation makes it happen faster but when a business do shady stuff they punish themselves in the long run if there are legitimate options competing with them in the market.