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To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

economist.com

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Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#91

Post by bluefirebrand »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #5

Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization (whatever you wish to call it). No matter our technological progress since the Industrial Revolution this failure point appears to persist. As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the…

> Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization

I think this is backwards thinking.

Progress is meant to serve humans, humans are not meant to serve progress

People should not be expected to give up their identities, nations, freedom, or really anything else in service of progress

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#92

Post by StackRanker3000 »

s1artibartfast wrote: post #59
rbanffy wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left. It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate internationally.

Every team thinks they are team humanity.

Some teams clearly think ”go team [our nationality/ethnicity/religion], screw everyone else”.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#93

Post by thecopy »

xkbarkar wrote: post #90

Heh, author of this should try living in south Sweden that allows Germany to suck them dry when the wind turbines stand still over there. Quote: Summary of Thursday’s Electricity Prices: Electricity areas 3 & 4 (Southern Sweden): SEK 2.5-3.6 average price per kWh, peak at SEK 8. Electricity areas 1 & 2 (Northern Sweden): 17 öre and 9 öre per kWh, respectively. [source| https://www.timber.exchange/news/details/in-dept…

Sounds like Germany and its people are getting greener and cheaper electricity

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#94

Post by toast0 »

grizzles wrote: post #73

The sun is always shining somewhere on earth. One day solar energy will be shifted from Portugal to Shanghai & Moscow then across the Bering Strait to Alaska & New York.

The Pacific ocean is quite large. There's several hours a day where it's the only place getting sun.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#95

Post by ryao »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #81
ryao wrote: post #69

I cannot help but wonder what the answers are to these points: > Norwegians are forgetting that domestically produced power is not always cheaper. Whenever the current in the cables flows towards them, it helps reduce high prices. Norway could add some diodes to the cables so that it only imports and does not export. > And even though Norway exports more power than it imports, that is fantastic for domestic energy pr…

The Economist did address these, their basic argument is that trade is a win-win. Usually when these win-wins go wrong they have the gains filtered off by a middleman or monopolist but in this case it seems the government uses the money earned to subsidize household bills which means they do get the benefit of trade. Stopping the trade therefore means higher prices for domestic consumers. This is the basic point the…

It did not seem to directly address how one scenario is better than the other. The article felt like “do it this way; it is better and don’t worry how”.

I should stress that I am only saying this because I find the omission curious. I do not have any opinion either way at this time.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#96

Post by oldpersonintx »

rbanffy wrote: post #29
alluro2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game. If there was team humanity - and we weren't still focused on "us" vs "them" and throwing feces at each other across imaginary geographical, religious and race borders - I'm confident we could solve the climate problem completely in 5-10 years. Not to mention what else (famine, diseases...), with motivation other than short-term profit...

> Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left. It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate internationally.

[dead]

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#97

Post by xkbarkar »

thecopy wrote: post #93
xkbarkar wrote: post #90

Heh, author of this should try living in south Sweden that allows Germany to suck them dry when the wind turbines stand still over there. Quote: Summary of Thursday’s Electricity Prices: Electricity areas 3 & 4 (Southern Sweden): SEK 2.5-3.6 average price per kWh, peak at SEK 8. Electricity areas 1 & 2 (Northern Sweden): 17 öre and 9 öre per kWh, respectively. [source| https://www.timber.exchange/news/details/in-dept…

Sounds like Germany and its people are getting greener and cheaper electricity

I call German and Danish windmills bordering on greenwashing.

For any energy to be truly green, it must also be pragmatic. It's not green energy if it's so expensive ordinary households cannot afford to use it.

Id like to see you rejoice if your electricity bill went from 0.4kr to 8kr per kwH because your neightbour countries' "awesome green energy supply" fails to support its citizens needs.

This is not a constant occurrence fortunately but happens enough to anger the Swedish and Norwegian authorities.

They are already quadrupling the electricity cost with a myriad of taxes ( green, state, maintenance, municipality, what have you ) so this price hike due to failed windmills and lack of daylight at the neighbours' makes them look incompetent.

Sweden and Norway does not want to lower the taxes to leverage energy bills for the average tax payer because Germany and Denmark cannot get ther sh!t together, that's for sure.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#98

Post by danny_codes »

arthurofbabylon wrote: post #5

Time and time again, from one industry to another, the bottleneck in progress remains human, or political, or social organization (whatever you wish to call it). No matter our technological progress since the Industrial Revolution this failure point appears to persist. As my gardening instructor would tell our class: it’s not the features themselves that matter, but the relationships between features that define the…

IMO this is structurally a part of capitalism. Capitalism provides limited avenues for cooperation. If your problem doesn't meet those limits, capitalism can't solve it. This seems to arises because capitalism seeks to maximize a personal reward function, rather than a societal one.

A good example is car-dependency. Designing land use around car-dependency has a lot of rather painful externalities. Capitalism doesn't account for those externalities, and so decisions are made that are a net-negative (suburban sprawl, urban freeways, etc). These degrade everyone's quality of life & degrade the environment, but are optimal from a capitalist perspective (they enrich the individual decision maker).

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#99

Post by danny_codes »

rbanffy wrote: post #29
alluro2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game. If there was team humanity - and we weren't still focused on "us" vs "them" and throwing feces at each other across imaginary geographical, religious and race borders - I'm confident we could solve the climate problem completely in 5-10 years. Not to mention what else (famine, diseases...), with motivation other than short-term profit...

> Unfortunately, there is no "team humanity", except in one losing game Team Humanity is frequently identified as the political left. It shouldn’t be too hard to coordinate internationally.

Even the political left (in the US, IDK about other countries) is pretty committed to the nationalist world order. Unless you mean the Marxist left, which doesn't really exist in the US.

Re: To make electricity cheaper and greener, connect the world's grids

#100

Post by danny_codes »

1over137 wrote: post #48
guax wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem. It's a monopoly issue that would be less of a problem if a single or even a minority of players were not the largest producer. At least electricity can be produced more broadly than gas where you had to win the lottery of location or game of Thrones of imperialism.

>That seems like a problem of a single large provider and not a connectivity problem. No, it sounds like a problem of a belligerent super power next door.

Super power is a bit of a stretch. Regional power being more accurate.
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