222 thoughts to “Open Thread Non-Petroleum.”

  1. I believe GF posted something about on the prior thread but, even if so, it deserves more attention.
    Its the kind of measure people will need to consider as a form of adaptation to global warming, since globally nothing has been done about the issue for the past 50 years. Managing the ill-effects is the stage we are entering.
    So build a massive ocean dam, or begin abandoning the lowlands. Great choices.

    https://phys.org/news/2020-02-north-sea.html

    1. It would be more important to build undersea sills before the main glaciers of Amundsen Sea embayment. Indeed, these sills would be there to prevent the circulation of Circumpolar Deep Water under the ice-shelfs of these glaciers. This oceanic mass water erodes the ice-shelfs by melting them and then reduces the buttressing effects in the ice tongues, which has the effect to provoke an acceleration of the ice flows and an increase of the output of icebergs in this area. The result is that this part of the West Antarctic Ice-Sheet is on the way of MISI (Marine Ice-Sheet Instability) and that this part of Antarctic is about to give a growing contribution to sea-level rise (3 m equivalent of sea leavel for the glacier Thwaites). The effects of the presence of submarine sills in the submarine troughs enabling the CDW to access the submarine ice-shelfs cavities would be to reduce the melting of the ice-shelfs and the regrowth of the ice-shelfs which would increase the buttressing effects in the ice tongues, slowing in this way the ice flows. Then sea-level rise would be slowed for everyone on the planet and not only for European countries. https://www.the-cryosphere.net/12/2955/2018/

      1. Nice theoretical engineering project- do you think it would really help in the larger scheme of things, or be feasible?

        1. I think it COULD be done, at least theoretically, but it won’t. There are too many people too interested in the short to medium term to support it politically in my opinion.

          And it would be probably a ten times better use of the resources if they were put into conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy, in terms of the ultimate outcome.

          Western Europe and all the places around the Med, excepting some African countries, are going to be passing their population peak anyway within the next few decades, and they will there fore not suffer nearly as much as it appears at first glance due to the loss of low lying land and infrastructure. Sea walls can be built around major industrial and population centers for a very minor fraction of what an open ocean barrier in deep water would cost.

          The biggest construction jobs in history would look like a little boy’s sand box compared to the amount of material that would have to be moved to build hundreds of kilometers of such seawalls in a hundred feet or more of open water. Cubic meters would be out as a measure, and even cubic kilometers. Thousands of cubic kilometers of stone and soil would be needed, and the entire job would have to be finished for ANY PORTION of it to be of the slightest use.

        2. Feasibility of this is a difficult question. By now, it would rather seem non feasible for a lot of reasons, financial ones mainly but heirs of us would see that as very feasible as they would have very pressing matters in a decaying environment. When you have a gun (the one of the environment) on your head generally you are able to do a lot of things more quickly and willingly. As a matter of facts, about non feasibility, there is the fact that the concerned area (Amundsen sea embayment) is one of the most inaccessible area in the world. Scientists intend to be more present in this area but this is not clearly a touristic destination. Secondly, there is the problem of the volume of materials necessary to build the submarine sill. I listed (from the article) the volume to establish in open bay submarine sill before 4 glaciers in Greenland and two glaciers in Amundsen sea embayment:
          – Helheim : 0,86 km3.
          – Kangerdlugssuaq : 1 km3
          – Petermann : 2,2 km3.
          – Jakobshavn : 0.066 km3.
          – Pine Island : 7,4 km3.
          – Thwaites : 7 km3.
          For comparison, I give also the volume of materials which have been necessary for different public works :
          – Suez canal : 1 km3.
          – Project of south to north diversion (China) : 1,6 km3.
          For the financial scale, the last project cost 80 billion USD. Then, the reflection should be about the balance between the potential costs of the destructions caused by sea level rise and the costs of the different submarine sills above.

          1. Most of the Greenland caused ocean rise will occur south of the equator due to gravitational changes.

      2. Nah, those sills are solid, very solid, maybe granite. Just dump loose material on top and the glacier will just push it off again.

        NAOM

    2. Infrastruktur und Wirtschaft über dem Leben, für die ganze Erde, der Schrei der neuen Klimafaschisten

      1. I think you mean über das Leben. In this sense of the word, über takes the accusative, not the dative.

    3. What now the Netherlands was struck by a catastrophic flood in the Middle Ages creating an inland sea. The Dutch have been reclaiming land ever since.

      1. And the Netherlands now is one of the most densely populated, and agriculturally productive, in Europe.
        This website allows you to see the number of people subject to flooding, by varying the degree of sea level rise. The default is 18 inches [45.7 cm] , and Netherlands has 6.9 M people at risk, and farmland as productive as anywhere in the world.
        Zoom in on the north sea area to see the details-
        http://globalfloodmap.org/Netherlands

        1. And the tallest people on Earth:
          The world’s tallest countries are the Netherlands (1.838 m), Montenegro (1.832 m), Denmark (1.826 m) Norway (1.824 m), Serbia (1.82 m), Germany (1.81 m), Croatia (1.805 m), and Czechia (1.8031 m).

          Hint: Equality of wealth and socialism.

          “The tallest men in the world are Dutch, the tallest women are Latvian — and the Americans, which used to be among the world’s tallest people, are nowhere near the top 10. Or even the top 30: men from the United States are number 37, and women fare even worse, at number 42.”

          1. While the tallest and richest burn a lot more carbon to save some land that will be inundated anyway, the hundreds of millions elsewhere that will be killed or displaced by European profligate carbon burn are sacrificed.
            Poor and brown skinned are of little concern to them. Tulips are more important, as always.

  2. https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-big-battery-hornsdale-australia-cost-savings/

    I think the battery, wind, and solar industries are going to continue to grow, and grow faster, than just about everybody here except Islandboy thinks likely, or even possible.
    Electric cars and trucks will naturally follow.

    Peak oil may not actually turn out to be much of a problem, at least not within the next twenty years or so, if the electric car and truck industries grow to their potential.

    The electric car revolution can work, economically, from the bottom up, just as well as it can from the top down.

    I know at least a dozen people personally who could take care of just about all their personal business with one of these.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/28/cars/citroen-ami-cheap-electric-car/index.html

    Such a car will take you farther than you can readily ride a bicycle or walk, clean and dry. Countless people live in places where they don’t need to go over ten to twenty miles over the course of a normal day, on city streets with low speed limits.

    The safety mommie’s won’t allow it to be sold in the USA unless it comes out as a tricycle model of course.

    But trikes are fine at low speeds, and even fairly high speeds, if well designed.

    Luxury models in the same size class will soon be a reality. Traffic congestion and parking spaces just about guarantee it.

    I’m not saying such mini cars, or wind and solar power, can save industrial civilization as we know it today.

    But the potential to save a portion of it, for some people in some countries, in real.

    If the overall economy collapses, there won’t BE any need to mine iron ore, etc, to build wind turbine towers, etc. There will be hundreds of millions of useless conventional autos that can be ground up and recycled via electric furnaces……. running on some of the coal that will still be there, or on wind and solar power.

    The population IS going to peak and decline……there can be no doubt about this. And once it does, those of us who pull thru will be doing things differently.

    Long distance commutes will be a thing of the past, but there’s no reason to believe there won’t be oil enough, gas enough, to run ESSENTIAL industries, for quite some time. We can still have trucks to service the water, sewer, and electrical grids.

    The oil industry itself was founded on muscle power….. human and mule.

    There’s no reason, at least in theory, that the wind and solar industries can’t bootstrap themselves, with the technology getting to be cheaper and more efficient year after year.

    1. Building on the experience of large scale grid battery work installation in Hornsdale, AU
      Tesla and PGE have been given approval to build the worlds largest grid battery installation.
      It will be on the site of Calif’s largest Nat Gas peaker plant, in Moss Landing on the central coast.
      The peaker plant still operates, and the land area of the complex is very large.

      1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/tesla-pg-e-build-worlds-072718057.html

        This farm will allow the utility to make better use of wind and solar power that otherwise might be curtailed, and also make it possible to react faster to any generation facility going off line unexpectedly. This means less gas will be burnt maintaining a sufficient level of hot spinning reserve.

        It’s likely this giant battery farm will pay for itself within a few years, just as the big one in Australia is paying for itself in short order, turning a profit on a day to day basis.

        But my personal opinion is that the potential for saving money and fuel via a smart grid and smart appliances is several times greater, on a per dollar basis. Most mcmansions have plenty of room to install a double or triple sized water heater for instance, and that would be enough hot water that wind and solar power could be used to heat it probably ninety percent or more of the time, once there’s plenty of wind and solar power available during off peak hours.

        Adding thermal mass means you can use solar and wind power the same way, whenever it’s available, to heat and cool a house for two or three days or even a week without needing any fossil fuel or nuclear juice to stay warm or cool.

        Net zero houses are a real thing already, and getting fairly close to net zero isn’t going to be hard at all in places with plenty of sun and wind within the coming decade or so.

        The solar roof revolution isn’t quite here yet, but it will be, within a few more years.

    2. “I think the battery, wind, and solar industries are going to continue to grow, and grow faster, than just about everybody here except Islandboy thinks likely, or even possible.
      Electric cars and trucks will naturally follow.“

      OFM, and others

      A few days ago there was the following news from Holland on a dutch t.v. station:
      If all the owners of electric cars charge them at about six 0’clock in the evening, that’s when most people come home from work, then the electric grid cannot handle it. Especially in the districts with older houses.
      The grid manager warned that maybe (if charging isn’t spread over more hours in the evening) in the future they prevent charging at the hours that most people with EV cars charge in those districts. That warning will not encourage people to buy EV cars. Until now the number of EV cars in Holland is increasing rapidly, but still small. The districts with newer houses have bigger electricity cables in the ground, the other districts need an expensive operation: change of cables.

      How about this grid overloading issue in other (bigger) countries ?

      1. It’s my impression that here in the USA the for profit electricity industry is salivating at the prospect of selling the juice needed to charge up electric cars by the millions, because there’s plenty of excess generating and distribution capacity nearly every day of the year, excepting during extreme weather events such as major heat waves and cold spells, which seldom last very long.

        But there’s no question that some new transmission capacity will be needed in some older neighborhoods and in rural areas, if we go to electric cars and trucks in a big way.

        There are plenty of places the grid is more or less maxed out, not because of a lack of generating capacity but rather because the transmission lines were built many years ago, while development has continued right along. This puts the grid in about the same situation as the highways… jammed to the limit due to long term increases in traffic.

        More new lines and maybe more generating capacity will be needed in many places such as you mention, Holland being your example.

        But it will be very much to the advantage of the people there to upgrade their electricity grid as necessary rather than importing oil to run cars and trucks.

        Electricity is cheaper by a mile, and with more and more wind and solar power coming on line, the cost advantage over oil over the long term will be even greater.

        Oil depletes, where as the wind and sun will always be free.

        The Dutch are noted not only for being prosperous, but also for being thrifty, which goes hand in hand with their prosperity. They’ll go for wind and solar electricity, because they can pay for it once, up front, and have it thereafter just for the cost of maintenance of their wind farms and solar farms.

        If they can’t generate it locally, they will still be able to import electricity for a hell of a lot less than they can import oil, over the long term.

      2. Hans- ‘If all the owners of electric cars charge them at about six 0’clock in the evening, that’s when most people come home from work, then the electric grid cannot handle it. ‘

        Yes, if there was no co-ordination it would be a big problem. But people have already been working on the issue for a long time now.
        Example- in Calif the cheap electrical rates are 11p-7a [when most people are sleeping]. All of the electric vehicles and plug-ins have a scheduling mechanism that allows you to sync the time of charge to your electric rate schedule/ time of day.
        Secondly, you or your your local grid operator, can have energy storage that allows you to charge batteries or run household equipment at any time of day, or supply the grid when the rates are favorable.. I have three days capacity worth, for example.
        Third, many places have Nat Gas electrical plants that can ramp up electrical production immediately to serve peak loads. These are called ‘peaker’ plants, and are in use in most countries currently.

        Many companies that innovate in managing these issues are growing very fast.

      3. The grid will be overloaded by EVs just as it has been overloaded every day for the last 50 or so years by the housewives turning on electric hot plates and ovens in every house to prepare meals at noon (or whenever the preferred time to eat is).

        The grid operator around here recently equipped a garage with 45 charging points and lent 45 EVs to the people living there for a test.
        Every charging point has a maximal power of 11kW with a maximum of 124 kW for the entire garage.
        Guess what, no problems arose.

        Why do people still think everyone car drives 500km every day and needs to charge with at least 100 kW?
        When will people realize that a car is standing around doing nothing most of the day and pretty much all night?
        Are people really stupid enough to think, they need to stand by the cable to charge the car, just as they’re doing right now with the hoses at the gas station?

        And I don’t fucking care what some lobbyist says.
        I’m pretty sure that there’s already regulation in the Netherlands regarding capacity factors in the power grid. That’s a very basic requirement if you want to build a power grid that’s larger than a single generator and a handful of power sinks.

        1. Which is all more-or-less irrelevant while the Netherlands (only) produces roughly 12% of its total energy from renewables.

        1. I come home and plug in my car at 6pm each evening. It takes about 10 seconds. At 9pm the car timer kicks in and it starts charging. At weekends I set the timer to 6pm because I know there will be less demand. This is a standard feature on a 5 year old Nissan Leaf. A would be amazed if you could buy an EV which did not include it. They should be sold pre-configured to use off peak power by default. If I need an immediate charge there is one button to press.

          2. Are you usually the only one in the car when you drive it places?

      5. Han Neumann –
        The way to prevent everybody from charging at the same time is to raise the price when demand goes up. Home solar panel/battery systems already come with software that regulate consumption based on price amount of energy stored in the home already, predicted consumption needs and so on. The owner just comes home and plug in and the system decides when it is a good idea to charge the vehicle. You can keep track or override with an app on your mobile phone.

        This isn’t science fiction, a guy that lives down the street from me demonstrated it to me in his house. It does things like turn on the dishwasher at 2 AM, or in the middle of the day when the sun is shining.

    3. I see the future of plants like Hornsdale as a cross. Left arm batteries, right arm supercapacitors, top solar/wind, bottom grid. A control system in the center to link them together. The capacitors are happy with charge/discharge cycles so provide load/generation leveling, taking care of the sudden changes. The batteries provide the deep reserve and can be provided with the steady conditions that they like.

      NAOM

  3. https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/28/business/musk-vertical-farm/index.html

    There’s no reason this won’t work…… if electricity to run the lights is plentiful and cheap.

    But I don’t see it working for staple foods. Greens and veggies are super foods, but you can’t live on them, and for the foreseeable future, we will continue to live on grains, beans, and meat…… because greens and veggies just don’t get it done in terms of calories and proteins.

    And for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be a lot cheaper to produce staple foods outside and ship them than it will be to grow them indoors locally.

    1. Yep, the US is headed down the slope toward third world country status. That started back in the 1960s and became very evident in the 1980’s. Nothing much has changed since then. A thin layer of very rich, a thicker coating of the well off and middle class debt slaves with the bulk of the people living hand to mouth and many dying off.

      1. A big problem is poor investment decisions.

        For example, Americans bought 17 m new cars last year, spending about $600 bn. New cars lose about 20% of their value in the first year, so they are a terrible investment. That’s about $120 bn in savings up in smoke, or about $1.2 trillion in ten years. That’s a lot of lost savings. No wonder the middle class lives hand to mouth.

        Another example is suburbanization. Poor decisions in infrastructure planning has bankrupted local government, and made things like adequate healthcare, education and public safety seem out of reach. I recommend this Youtube channel.

        https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTeYrzSQ3YCp3RovGH4y8Ew

        At the federal level, people seem obsessed with massive symbolic spending ideas with little practical value. The most obvious is military spending, which is completely out of touch with any realistic goals. A recent one is Trump’s Wall, which is pure vanity and does nothing to fix the country’s broken immigration system.

        Abstract goals tend to lack accountability.

        https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-22/pentagon-racks-up-35-trillion-in-accounting-changes-in-one-year

        All these issues are clouded by public discourse focused on abstractions and non-issues like “Freedom”, “The Constitution”, “Transgender Rights” and “Jesus”, with very little practical content. One of the worst is “American Exceptionalism”, the idea that the country can do no wrong and learn nothing from its neighbors.

        Another example is “Energy Dominance”. WTF is that even supposed to mean? What practical value does it have? Why is so much money being spent on the money losing shale oil industry? Without focus on better investments that actually have a payoff, the country will continue to struggle.

  4. From the EIA
    In 2018, total U.S. electricity generation by the electric power industry of 4.17 trillion kilowatthours (kWh) from all energy sources resulted in the emission of 1.87 billion metric tons—2.06 billion short tons—of carbon dioxide (CO2). This equaled about 0.99 pounds of CO2 emissions per kWh.

    That is generation, with losses (including line, conversion and charging) that would be about 1.20 pounds CO2 emissions (does not include methane) per kWh. That is, on average, 136 gm/mile for EV’s. Which is almost half the average car and similar to the best cars. Not a big change there. Half of 15% is 7.5%, which is the reduction in US emissions by converting private transport to all EV. I know it’s not much, and we are ignoring the methane plus all that infrastructure change to supply the things and their bigger manufacturing footprint. However, that is the way things are going for now.
    We could do that right now just with improved driving, combining trips and some ride sharing. We could get even further, quickly, just by choosing more efficient vehicles.
    Why wait 20 to 40 years for the power sources to be replaced and EV’s to take over (if they ever do). Do something now, with what you have. It’s a much bigger lever right now than later.

      1. oak cut for 101 bypass.
        Ever taken the back road from the north end of Redwood Valley, up over the high ground, and then down into Willits?

          1. Nice. I love that area/Potter Valley/Anderson Valley, and up into Humboldt.

            2. Yep, Crooked River. I once built an outhouse on my friends land as a prank, overlooking that river.

  7. Thank you all for the answers on my question yesterday, regarding the ‘grid overload issue’ in the Netherlands !

    1. I’m still planning on doing a wood gas conversion on an old Ford I set aside for just that purpose, lol.

      It will be a hoot if I ever get around to it. I’ll be sure to make it produce a steady stream of smoke and steam for the Fourth of July parade, lol.

      Unfortunately I won’t be doing an electric conversion, not that it wouldn’t be a fun project, because suitable motors and batteries must be purchased new. I doubt I could get suitable components for less than ten thousand bucks, which is a lot of cash, for old guys like me. Would rather keep the place as it is and live on beans than subdivide part of it.

      The wood gas conversion can be done using things commonly found in scrap yards. Thousands were done in automobile and farm garages back in WWII.

      At one time I was thinking I might live long enough to actually NEED it, but now I’m fairly confident OLD MAN BAU will stagger along longer than I will.

    2. Down here, one of the cases appears to be a restaurant worker in Cuidad and may have exposed over 400 people to the virus. No word on where he caught it from.

      NAOM

      1. Silent, asymptomatic spread is what makes this outbreak so difficult to contain.

          1. Yeah, if you are Mexican. Up here we call it Mexico City. 😉 But I am glad it’s not Cuidad Juarez. That’s too close to home.

    3. I’ve been aware of corona virus since at least as far back as 2009. It’s because if you look at a bottle of Lysol *either the spray or the wipes* the fine print specifically says KILLS CORONAVIRUS along with SARS. Not sure if the spelling on that is totally right, but I remember it because these scares come every few years or so. Ultimately the illness winds up being not much more than the “flu of the year” which of course flu’s do make 100’s of thousands sick, some needing hospitalization, and some will die, but otherwise flu is just another normal fact of life. If you don’t believe me, maybe you will believe the NY Times…https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/29/health/coronavirus-flu.html

      1. Thanks for sharing your expertise. Now, would you consider yourself a professional or amateur epidemiologist?

        As of now, we have USA 6 deaths and 102 confirmed cases. Doing my math, I get a 6% mortality rate.
        But, you are right, it will be found to be lower than that. So then, no worries eh?

        1. Just amateur but I’ve seen a lot in my time to understand how these scares go.

      2. What I am most worried about is the risk of a cratering economy. There is a real possibility too many people stay home out of fear and don’t spend the money they normally would. If that happens, look for massive layoffs in the service sector that would soon cascade to other industries.

        I think the best advice I heard so far is to stay home if you are in a high risk category, but if you’re not, then continue living your life as usual, enjoy yourself; just wash your hands a few extra times a day and if you didn’t already get the flu shot, get it. Me and my wife aren’t in a high risk category, so we are still happily going ahead with our spring vacation to Florida in a few weeks.

        1. “I think the best advice I heard so far is to stay home if you are in a high risk category, but if you’re not, then continue living your life as usual, ”

          That would work well, in an area where the virus has not begun to circulate.
          In this country we have absolutely no idea where those areas are.
          It is now thought that the virus has been circulating silently in the Seattle area, for example, for well over 1 month.
          Check back in two weeks, The map of affected areas will look much more colorful, now that wider scale testing has just begun.

        2. This will get a lot worse for several months

          https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/mar/02/airline-industry-braced-for-major-threat-from-coronavirus-turmoil

          The UK government is prepared for 80% infection rate and for a fifth of workers to be ill at the height of the spread. What experts are saying is pretty much everyone will get it at some point.
          The government simply wants to lower the peak infection rate so as to stop the health care system being overwhelmed.

      3. > if you look at a bottle of Lysol *either the spray or the wipes* the fine print specifically says KILLS CORONAVIRUS along with SARS.

        That why I always spray Lysol on my food before I eat it. And on any surface before I touch it. And on anyone I meet before I talk to them or shake their hand. It’s particularly important to spray Lysol in the mouth and on the face area of anyone you talk to.

      4. Mortality rate of those in the age 70 decade is about 8% (as far as we currently know).
        The virus is far and wide in the USA already.

        So does mean that Trump, Biden and Sanders should stay out of public circulation?
        I would recommend it, unless you are keen on looking for a replacement candidate a generation younger.

  10. For those of us interested in politics,

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/02/29/mirandas-rebellion/?arc404=true

    This is a long read, but I can say from personal experience talking to women such as the two in this article that there are quite a few of them out there, women raised on conservative values but educated and leaving the fold.

    There will be enough of them on election day to make the difference in some close races, locally and state level.

    There might even be enough of them to turn a couple of purple states blue.

    It’s a long read, but well worth it.

  11. Why not investing more than it has been done in fusion energy?I know that there is a lot of projects more or less serious. And, personally, I think to the projects of stellarators such as Wendelstein-7x. They are less expensive that classical tokamaks and the plasma in it is more stable. The use of these kind of electricity production means would avoid the extent use of batteries to compensate the drop of production during the night or in the lack of winds.

    2. Keep us posted when progress is made. Its been a very long wait, thus far.
      Thanks

    1. “It’s not going to work Donald, my dog even knows when I am lying to him!”

  13. Germany hits record 61 per cent renewables for month of February

    Renewable energy sources provided a record 61.2% of Germany’s net public electricity generation in February, according to figures provided by the Fraunhofer Institute for Solar Energy Systems (ISE), which also showed that wind energy provided nearly half of the country’s electricity during the month.

    February is still winter in Germany, isn’t it? It seems to me that the arguments that renewables cannot provide power in northern latitudes during winter are looking less like a given. Sure, backup will be needed but, the big question is, what would German CO2 emissions look like without all the renewable energy they now use? Another question is, how long will it be before renewables produce two thirds (66%) of electricity in Germany on a regular basis? How long before that figure reaches 75%, 80% or 90%? How long before two thirds is the minimum contribution from renewable energy over the course of a month?

      1. Panel tech keeps on getting better, year after year.
        Given the political and economic pressure resulting from the need to quit polluting the air, and falling costs, solar farms are soon going to be no brainers for any utility that must purchase large amounts of coal that’s been shipped long distances.
        The last time I checked, western coal costs about six times as much in Georgia as it does in Wyoming, due to the cost of shipping.

        People like Tony Seba will be proven right about the continued fast expansion of the renewable energy industries and the electric car industry.

        As Matt Simmons used to say, rust and depletion never sleep.

        It’s not just the actual price that must be paid for purchased fossil fuels, it’s also the cost of being at the mercy of suppliers.

        Countries that import fuel in times to come may well find themselves in a very tough spot if they can’t come up with the money to pay for imported fossil fuels, not to mention having to pay out more, endlessly, on their armed services to ensure they will have access to that imported fuel.

        At some point the production of wind and solar electricity will reach the point that otherwise surplus juice can be economically used to produce hydrogen, or pump caverns full of air, or operate some other storage scheme, to the point that the need for fossil fuel to generate electricity can be reduced by ninety percent or more.

        And there are plenty of ways to manufacture defacto batteries.
        A fifty dollar subsidy would probably be enough to double insulate refrigerators and put in a chip that will make them run mostly on wind and solar power, once smart meters are available. Adding a couple of cubic feet of space to store ice would result in a refrigerator that would stay cold for a week, or even two weeks, using only a few watts to run an internal fan, etc.

        We can probably get at least another ten to twenty percent of renewable juice onto the grid, overall, just by going to demand management via smart appliances, smart heating and cooling systems, electric cars etc.

        In case anybody wonders, yes this ten to twenty percent is my own personal scientific wild assed guess.

    2. “But grids will collapse at 15% renewables, er, 20% renewables, er, 25%, er, 30% …”

      NAOM

    3. Considering that Germany has to import oil and gas, the economic impact of saving the hard currency necessary to pay for importing fuel is probably enough, long term, to justify what Germany has spent on subsidizing the domestic wind and solar industries.
      The less imports needed, the safer and more prosperous Germany will be.

      Plus the subsidies have enabled domestic German manufacturers to scale up to the size necessary to compete in the world market, meaning more EXPORTS to earn foreign exchange.

      Twenty years from now, Germany will likely be the best positioned country in Western Europe, in terms of having the industries necessary to keep Germans working selling stuff to other countries, while spending the least on imported gas and oil, excepting a couple of small countries that are oil and gas producers.

      1. I never though you’d be more optimistic than I am.

        The domestic pv industry has been killed by red tape regarding pv installations. (1)

        The domestic wind industry is on the verge of death, mostly due to new regulations making it prohibitively difficult to build new wind farms. (1)

        Coal companies get billions in bailouts they don’t need.

        A new gas pipeline was just finished to import even more natural gas from Putin.

        Adding new renewable capacity is far slower than required by both climate and economic reasons.

        Except maybe VW, the car companies are too stupid to build and market anything resembling an electric car. (2)

        Actually, I wonder what we’re going to export in 10 years.
        It will be neither pv stuff, nor wind stuff. New internal combustion cars will no longer be legal in other countries. And we don’t build enough wind or pv stuff made by other countries to export electricity…

        (1)
        More jobs have been lost in the pv and wind industries already than coal and nuclear energy employ in total.

        (2)
        10 years ago they received a billion euros from the taxpayers for “research” and have nothing to show for.

    4. It was an exceptionally windy February.
      This record – as good as it is – is the result of meteorology not of added capacity.

      Very highly recommended: https://energy-charts.de/index.htm

      Remember, that 61 per cent is still only electricity.
      Natural gas and oil are still the most prevalent energy sources for heating or industrial low temperature heat, by far.
      Add to that the 55 million cars (660 cars for every 1,000 people) powered by “dead dinosaurs”.

      We’d have to add about 10 GW of wind and pv every year to make any meaningful progress. Unfortunately we don’t do that.

      1. “We’d have to add about 10 GW of wind and pv every year to make any meaningful progress. Unfortunately we don’t do that.”

        I’ve just read that the official word ( Uncle Sam’s ) is out that solar electricity is now cheaper than any other source, on a levelized basis.

        It will continue to get cheaper, even as depletion and growing demand world wide force up the prices of oil and gas.

        It may be too little too late, in terms of preventing the climate going totally haywire, but I foresee the wind and solar industries continuing to grow at a very fast rate.

        The profit motive is an awesomely powerful motivator, lol, and the utilities themselves are mostly the captive customers of the coal and gas industries, just as the auto and truck industry are the captive customer of the oil industry.

        The times they are a changing, my friends, to paraphrase some hippie singer from my younger days.

        Truly substantial change can take place in a single generation. I live in the heart of tobacco country, and know many people that commuted to tobacco processing plants, and many more that used to grow tobacco. The fight to remove it from public places is over here. You don’t even hear anybody bitching about it anymore, they’ve accepted it.

        People who used to deny that tobacco causes cancer have forgotten their former opinions on the subject, denying that they ever held them, lol.

        Virtually everybody I know has switched to led lights, excepting maybe the odd old set in his ways hillbilly neighbor. I have one relative with a closet full of old incandescent bulbs.

        In ten years I’m thinking new houses are about as likely to have solar roofs as not, all thru the sunny parts of the world, and that at least half of all new cars will be electrics.

        It won’t be about environmentalism and liberal politics,for the most part.

        It’ll be about dollars and cents, employment, taxes, and national security as well, in countries that must import fossil fuels.

        Technology, starting with sticks and stones got us into our current mess.

        Technology may yet enable some of us to survive it, while living a more or less modern life style, with electricity, water and sewer, food in stores, cops on the street. Maybe even a personal car.

        Hard times, poverty in and of itself, can actually help. Poor people who can afford birth control tend to have VERY few kids, excepting the small minority who want lots of kids for cultural or religious reasons ( in western countries at least).

        I’m thinking that within ten more years most modern countries will see the wisdom of providing free birth control meds or devices as a matter of public policy.

        And there’s one more thing I should mention, given that I actually live among and know LOTS of poor people with next to no education at all.

        The women among them WILL BE GLAD to use the meds so long as they are freely available. They don’t WANT to be looking after babies, for the most part, past one or maybe two at the most.

        But when you’re a poor woman and have a horny man in the house, and no bc pills or condoms, well …… you wind up with a kid, or even four or five.

        Kids are like tobacco and alcohol. No matter how hard up you are, you can ALWAYS afford both tobacco and alcohol. Just look around if you doubt my word on this, it’s solid gold take it to the bank reality.

        The man, and as often as not, the woman wants sex, NOW, and the kid comes LATER…. if it comes. Mostly it doesn’t…. any given time, but over a year or two…… it happens.

        When you’re poor, and poorly educated, next year is might as well be twenty or thirty years away. You CAN’T THINK long term, because you are living short term. Life is about tomorrow or next week, or RIGHT NOW.

        You have to really KNOW poor people, or have been long term poor yourself, to really UNDERSTAND why an occasional box of take out fried chicken you can’t afford, or a twelve pack of beer, is the same thing as a really nice meal out in a first class restaurant to somebody who has a decent income.

        Over the years I’ve met at least a couple of dozen social workers. Out of the lot of them, maybe two actually UNDERSTAND the behavior of poor people. Both of them grew up poor, in poor communities, in broken homes.

        Those are the kind of people, if they work with horses, that we call horse whisperers.

        1. “I’ve just read that the official word ( Uncle Sam’s ) is out that solar electricity is now cheaper than any other source, on a levelized basis.”
          Never is the cost of storage or the cost of changing the grid added to these costs. Or the extra costs of variable backup.
          Having variable and intermittent sources of electricity on a grid presents many new challenges to a system that is becoming ever more dependent upon electrical power by the day.
          As in Islandboy’s German example above where wind provided the bulk of power in February. Looking further into that and other months of the year, solar and wind power would have to increase by 10 times to cover the low periods and still need a significant percentage of storage to cover general electric demand (not rare weather anomalies).

          That is a huge investment to make and maintain, to reduce global emissions by one percent.
          If all of the EU stopped all GHG emissions, it would lower global emissions by only 10 percent. Since that might take 50 years, during a time period when we need at a minimum to drop by 7 percent per year to possibly avoid going into very dangerous climate territory, the EU contribution of 0.2 percent per year does not seem very helpful. Nor is it likely to reduce much faster, since the easy parts are already done.
          If one assumes efficiency changes will counter growth, then the EU might eventually reduce emissions to zero.

          See the power consumption scenarios for communications energy, posted below. Increasing demand can put a real kink in the replacement of energy sources. Possibly consume it all.

          1. “Never is the cost of storage or the cost of changing the grid added to these costs. “

            See:

            LCOE for solar-plus-storage already below 2018 spot prices in Europe, study finds

            Study finds solar-plus-storage already cost competitive across Europe

            Europe solar-storage costs fall below markets as learnings kick in

            The investment required to significantly increase the amount of electricity provided by renewable energy might be overblown. At least in the short term , the goal should be to reduce the amount of electricity generated using FF significantly. If Germany is at more than 60% with their existing fleet of renewable energy assets, if they were to just double their renewable capacity instead of increasing by an order of magnitude, they would have periods when they generate significant amounts of excess power (20%) with no fuel costs attached. The challenge would be how to store that excess energy for use during periods of shortfall.

            In addition, all electricity grids must have some overcapacity built in, to cope with peak demand periods and maintenance, scheduled and unscheduled. No significant new investment is needed to maintain this “backup” capacity and I question whether increased penetration of renewable energy is going to require more backup capacity than already exists. The long term goal should be to reduce the need for any FF powered backup capacity as much as possible.

            I do not subscribe to the idea that reducing GHG emissions is going to require “huge investment”. Regular readers will have a good idea of where I stand on these issues.

            1. Those articles all cite the same paper. All of them predict parity by 2025. The assumptions are not clear.

              Cost per kWh does not provide power. If one is producing one tenth of the power needed for days or for a week or two, what takes up the gap? Storage? The cost of production does not take into account the variability.

              The study (for solar) is 1 or 2 times the PV production in storage capacity. In other words about overnight and a little more. Assuming at least a doubling of renewable over demand, that would allow for 2 days of storage, which would fall horribly short a number of times a year and cost twice as much.

              So how do you provide power when the sun and wind are low for days or weeks, Increase storage by 10X or more? Have fossil backup with cobwebs on it, equal to 90 percent of the power demand?

              Serious studies show that the cost of storage has to fall by 80 percent to be practical (competitive) for 100 percent renewable energy.

              Or we could just let people sit in the dark and cold for days or weeks. A good lesson to be learned.

              My own analysis for where I live show a minimum of 8 days emergency storage for non-critical systems and 25 to 30 for critical systems. That would get one past everything except the worst weather anomalies. So once or twice a decade, the system crashes or has to go into even deeper emergency measures.

              Of course, reduced power would become a normal thing on a broad basis. Where I live local power losses from 4 days to 4 weeks per year are normal. How that would pan out when it is regional or country-wide would be the price of renewable deployment.
              Or one could just way overbuild the system and dump excess power much of the year.

            2. To me, answer to your good question- “So how do you provide power when the sun and wind are low for days or weeks, “, is indeed to keep capacity to use fossil fuel such as natural gas. As long as it is still available.
              Its pretty straightforward.
              Secondly, developing strong grid ties to other regions is very important.
              For example, your region, GF, could be getting solar from Oklahoma and wind energy from the huge Offshore Wind resource along the coast of Maine. Even if its cloudy and calm in your neighborhood.
              The battle to get solar and wind to equal half of total energy consumption will keep us plenty busy for the next fourty years minimum.

            3. Sounds good if Maine, not too far away, is not affected also and they have way overbuilt their own capacity (why and who pays for it to be shut down much of the time?).
              The weather effects large regions not just local.
              Sure, long range connections are feasible, but that means large overbuild in those areas and a steady export market. Not good for extreme anomolies.
              Shutting down or hobbling the East Coast for weeks or months at a time is probably what would happen.
              In the past I have proposed,several times, that changing to renewables would force manufacturing and other high energy users to be where the sun and wind are available consistently. A different kind of migration.

              Of course North Africa could provide a large portion of European power, but at what cost and at what level of insecurity?

              I think we all should just stop using much power and get used to it. That would probably be better overall.
              The per capita range of energy use on this planet is more than 100 to 1. In some cases more than 200o to 1.
              But that is my approach, the herd is still gathering steam. For now, for a little longer.

            4. Agree about learning to use less energy- that is priceless and most people don’t understand how far over the cliff on energy dependency we have become, both individually and collectively. It is paramount.

              I don’t know why you assert that offshore Maine wind (which is a massive worldclass resource), would be shut down most of the time. I assert that the electricity it can produce will never be curtailed. Chicago is less than 1000 miles away, not to mention closer cities like Toronto, Pittsburgh, Montreal, Baltimore, etc.
              If there is extra electricity from a dense resource like this, it will be used for topping off batteries, charging a million vehicles, and can be used for hydrogen or ammonia production. I wouldn’t worry about too much.
              Portland Maine is going to become valuable industrial/commercial real estate.

              You can become an instant ‘expert’ on here- https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy18osti/70907.pdf

              “Levelized cost of energy and levelized avoided cost of energy were computed to estimate the unsubsidized “economic potential” for Maine in the year 2027 (Beiter et al. 2016, 2017). The studies found that Maine may have 65 gigawatts of economic potential by 2027, the highest of any U.S. state.”

            5. “I think we all should just stop using much power and get used to it. “

              Agreed. Look at the example of incandescent light bulbs. How many people still use them? LED lights are five times more efficient than incandescent bulbs on average and the quality of light can be far superior. For example one can get a 3 W LED that gives very white light equivalent to the light levels from a 25 W incandescent but much “whiter”. With low power incandescent bulbs you are stuck with “warm” colour temperatures (yellow or orange hues).

              In my neck of the woods, if you see an incandescent bulb lit, especially if it is left on all night, chances are that the electricity being used is not being paid for. The amount of them I see in low income areas partly of explains the 10% or so “non technical losses” experienced by the local electrical utility.

              “Non technical losses” are another way of saying electricity theft which has been thorn in the side of the local electric utility for ages. A healthy supply of very poor people guarantees it will continue to be an issue. The fact that poor people vote results in a situation in which the politicians are not anxious to see the utility take a hard line stance on electricity theft. I’m not sure if the politicians are anxious to ban incandescent bulbs either, as “poor people” find LEDs prohibitively expensive.

            6. @Islandboy
              I swapped out 3x22W circular fluorescent tubes with 3x20W LEDs. Got 3x as much light for 10% less electricity!

              NAOM

            7. Hickory, sure if we interconnected a national/international grid, it might work. Cutbacks would be needed across the whole system to prevent serious depletion of long term storage needed to get through winters and shorter term low wind and sun periods.

              Right now a lot of wind power gets shut down because the grid cannot handle it, no place to store or use the excess.
              A public grid and power system could overbuild enough storage and power generation plus force demand cuts where a private producer cannot without ramifications.

    1. And your map is probably an underestimate.

      For example, it shows Western Saudi Arabia as “Low severity”, but that’s probably because it’s been degraded and inhabited by herders for so long people have forgotten you can farm there. People die in flash floods in Jeddah every year, showing that there is enough water, but the land is too degraded to soak it up when the rains come.

      1. Not my map. Do you have any actual evidence beyond some anecdotal story that soil degradation is worse globally?

      2. I too am surprised by some of the maps colors. For example it shows much of the SE USA as being low severity. There is a hell of a lot of degradation in that zone.
        Its a very rough analysis, but the overall message is clear, and very troublesome.

        1. Probably relative to a previous time period. Still, with 52 percent of agricultural land moderately or severely impacted, we are going out of business on a grand scale. No reversal in sight.

  15. On Global Electricity Usage of Communication Technology: Trends to 2030

    Abstract: This work presents an estimation of the global electricity usage that can be ascribed to Communication Technology (CT) between 2010 and 2030. The scope is three scenarios for use and production of consumer devices, communication networks and data centers. Three different scenarios, best, expected, and worst, are set up, which include annual numbers of sold devices, data traffic and electricity intensities/efficiencies. The most significant trend, regardless of scenario, is that the proportion of use-stage electricity by consumer devices will decrease and will be transferred to the networks and data centers.
    Still, it seems like wireless access networks will not be the main driver for electricity use.
    The analysis shows that for the worst-case scenario, CT could use as much as 51% of global electricity in 2030. This will happen if not enough improvement in electricity efficiency of wireless access networks and fixed access networks/data centers is possible. However, until 2030, globally-generated renewable electricity is likely to exceed the electricity demand of all networks and data centers. Nevertheless, the present investigation suggests, for the worstcase scenario, that CT electricity usage could contribute up to 23% of the globally released greenhouse gas emissions in 2030.

    file:///C:/Users/Allan%20Two/Downloads/challenges-06-00117-v3.pdf

    Note that all of these scenarios depend upon steady increases of efficiency.
    The growing internet of things, smart everything, growing communications and computing, all add up to increasing power consumption.

  16. Just saw this via Auke Hoekstra’s Twitter page

    VW chief defies sceptics with ambitious plans to overtake Tesla

    When Volkswagen unveiled its first battery-powered prototype in 2009, chief executive Martin Winterkorn warned about “electro-hype” — the idea that this new technology could be as affordable and ubiquitous as its fleet of petrol and diesel cars.

    A decade later, VW’s incumbent boss Herbert Diess is spending more than €33bn on proving him wrong.

    The German group has launched a wildly ambitious plan to produce 26m emission-free vehicles in the next nine years, leapfrogging Tesla to become the world’s largest electric carmaker.[snip]

    Today, Mr Diess admits the company is the “focus” of EU rules that force carmakers to lower CO2 emissions. “We are happy with it,” he said, “because if society decides, ok, we’ll go for electric cars, actually that’s good for us.”

    Ever since he ascended to the top floors of VW’s Wolfsburg headquarters in 2018, Mr Diess has been insistent: despite concerns about the lack of consumer demand, inadequate charging infrastructure and bottlenecks in battery supply chains, the company’s decision to bet the farm on electric vehicles is more than a high-risk gamble.

    “There is no other alternative to electric cars,” he said, in an office overlooking the sprawling factory halls and railway tracks that criss-cross VW’s historic home.

    Bold mine. It would appear that VW is going all in on EVs. 26m emission-free vehicles in the next nine years works out to an average of almost 3 million per year which is huge, considering that sales of all electric vehicles from the VW group number less six figures (100,000) (see: In 2019, Volkswagen Brand Sold Over 80,000 Plug-In Electric Cars and Volkswagen Group Sold More Than 140,000 Plug-In Cars In 2019). To go from less than 100,000 all electric vehicles in 2019 to an average of 3 million per year in nine years, implies a very significant ramp up.

    1. So Volkswagen will then have produced less than 3 percent of all new cars in that period. Three percent EV versus 97 percent of mostly ICE is a drop in the bucket and is less than one quarter of their own production. So what about the other three quarters? Are they going to stop producing ICE and collapse the company? That would be good news.

      1. The addition of 26 million EV’s to the German grid would soak up about 3 to 6 years of wind power additions.

        1. Yep, but less reliance on imported oil, and less carbon emitted. No easy answer.

          1. True, absolutely a plus. Though with growth in other areas, I am hesitant to say less carbon emitted over the next decade.

        2. See my comment further up. 26 million EV’s might also be very useful for absorbing some amount of excess electricity production if suitable technology solutions can be worked out. As renewable energy penetration on grids increases, dealing with excess production during periods of high wind or sun is going to be increasingly challenging.

          26 million times 5 kW (assuming that as an average charging rate for an EV) works out to 130 GW of available capacity to absorb excess power. Looks like an interesting challenge to me.

          1. See my comment above concerning the growth of communications and smart systems. Looks like growth in other areas will cancel out any gain in renewable energy (if they speed that up). Otherwise more fossil fuel burned.

      2. According to the last link I provided “the group’s total result globally was 10,974,600 vehicles”. Three million would be 27%, or more than a quarter of their own production. This assumes that, when BEVs reach cost parity with ICE powered vehicles, it will be possible to sell vehicles with ICEs across broad segments of the markets. I doubt. The collapse of ICE sales by 2025 is more or less exactly what Seba predicts in his “Clean Disruption” presentations. The key word in the last sentence is “disruption”.

        1. Yes, I have seen just about all of Seba’s talks, and Amory Lovins talks and papers. Seba is basing his estimates on autonomous vehicles being fully developed and accepted. Might happen by 2025. He could be mostly right but 5 to 10 years early.
          Disruptions happen, sometimes. Electric vehicles were invented back in 1892, now over a century later they are poised to disrupt the ICE that disrupted them. But just remember that most EV’s run on steam and fire. So not much has changed yet.

          The photovoltaic effect was discovered back around 1835, now PV is finally a challenger for power production as we near the two hundred year mark. Though without cheap and plentiful storage it will stay as a fossil fuel extender.

          1. “Though without cheap and plentiful storage it (solar) will stay as a fossil fuel extender.”
            Not after fossil fuel becomes relatively scarce.
            It will shift to become the opposite scenario.

            1. I was hoping that people would bring up other forms of storage than batteries. The battery fetish is an expensive high tech storage system with short term storage capability. The north or south (below equator) have a huge summer advantage in solar energy. Long term storage of summer solar energy could bridge the winter gap and mitigate weather extremes. Systems that can store energy for 6 months to one year are necessary for a smooth running electrical system. The penchant to design systems that operate on the edge of failure makes renewable energy appear less costly. A fully realized system will be more expensive but that only matters to a profit system. We might want to look at the grid and energy as a public project and stop depending on a market driven system.

            2. A tank the size of an oil storage tank could hold enough flow battery juice to provide 4-5 GWh of power.

              NAOM

            3. So what does that flow battery cost? I have heard from $100 per kWh to $250.

            4. Irrelevant, if installing at that scale the costs will totally change, disruption. For example a laptop battery in 2000 compared to the cost of LiON now

              NAOM

            6. Hint:
              Lithium ion was first commercialized by the Japanese in the Early 1990’s.

              It has been a while comrades.

              Anything getting 10% market share in the near future?

            9. GF is in the habit of talking about physical realities, from the technical pov, and he absolutely does know what he’s talking about, technically speaking.

              But most of the time he doesn’t say a whole lot about POLITICALLY workable solutions to our environmental problems.

              But this time he’s flat out nailed it.

              ” We might want to look at the grid and energy as a public project and stop depending on a market driven system.”

              It may be too little too late, but the better informed people of this country, and the world, are moving fast towards dealing with health care issues as a ” public project”.

              I see the USA having a Western European type system within the next ten years, maybe fifteen. It will take about that long for the public to come to understand that otherwise…… the current system takes care of itself, rather than THEM.

              If Sky Daddy acts in mysterious ways to save his favorite children( sarc) maybe we will manage our energy and environmental problems the same way, as public policy matters, within the life time of most of the regulars here.

              It CAN happen. What’s needed to MAKE it happen, or at least possible, is that Sky Daddy send us my oft mentioned series of Pearl Harbor Wake Up Bricks upside our collective head.

              They’ll have to nice big sharp pieces, not pebbles. It’s too easy to overlook a couple of hurricanes and a flood or two.

              Unless it kills ten thousand people, minimum, here in the USA, we’ll have pretty much forgotten Corona virus within a year or two.

              Now if a Horseman rides in the form of a virus that wipes out the corn crop, and we have to give up our fast food hamburgers and steak for a year or two, THAT would get our attention.

              Sarc light is NOT on.

            11. 4C plus. 12C plus for NYC. No worries about energy if we use up the carbon.

        2. Islandboy, there are times you come across as insular and unconcerned about real-world problems. Well, here’s a dose of reality for you: In a study published in the American Geophysical Union journal EARTH’S FUTURE, researchers argue that meeting Paris Agreement 2 C climate targets is currently far, far out-of-reach. Even if the four biggest carbon-emitters — the U.S., China, the EU, and India — succeeded in dramatically ramping down their emissions over the next few decades, the rest of the world would need to radically cut their carbon emissions to nearly zero by 2030, AND STAY THERE! Something that’s nearly impossible.

          1. Sure, but it would much worse if no one made a strong effort of it.

          2. “Islandboy, there are times you come across as insular and unconcerned about real-world problems.”

            I am sorry I come across that way but, I am more concerned about real-world problems than you think. Peak Oil and Global Warming are two real-world problems that I am obviously concerned about and see renewable energy and EVs as potential tools to mitigate the collapse of our current civilization. For those who are tempted to cheer on the collapse of BAU as a means of protecting the natural environment, be careful what you wish for. The collapse of our current civilization will not be pretty. If anyone thinks that masses of hungry, desperate people will not be an extremely unpleasant scenario, think again.

            I live close enough to significant numbers of people who are very close to the edge and to be honest, I’m not that far from the edge myself. If oil or food prices were to increase significantly and economic activity were to contract at the same time, young, strong, able bodied men and women are not going to go quietly into the night. They are ging to do whatever they see as necessary to survive. I’m not sure I want to witness any such scenario.

            On a lighter note, there is a hummingbird that feeds on flowering plants near my apartment. They are such tiny, delicate looking creatures but, they seem to be surviving just fine around here, for now.

          3. That note has been declared by some climate scientists for over a decade. Hardly anyone talks about the minimum amount of emissions to halt climate change. The secret lies in the use of negative emissions in the RCP 4.5 and 2.6.

  17. I guess what the renewable energy industries and energy efficiency and conservation industries,meaning electric vehicles, etc , really need is a nice hot little oil and gas war that lasts about a year or so, without killing very many people.

    Preacher sez,”God acts in mysterious ways.”

    Countries with good wind and solar resources that are dependent on imported oil and gas would find the money to build renewable infrastructure at a war time pace after squeaking by for that year.

    Maybe the orangutan will start the war because God tells him too, via Pence, or the Devil tells him too, via his pollsters and advisors, same difference.

    The irony would be that the man that puts the most effort into preserving and protecting the fossil fuel industries would do more to destroy them by starting such a war than any fifty scientists combined.

    Sarc light is ON.

    1. He better act quick. His window of opportunity is closing. I voted for his successor today.
      They have a straight jacket with his name on it, if he refuses the voluntarily escort off the property.

      1. I’m relieved to see Biden making it big last night.
        Bernie is my guy, in terms of what I would like to see happen, but the D’s are going to need at least two or three big purple states that might go for the orangutan, if he’s the nominee. Sanders is not very likely to win any southern state, and there are a hell of a lot of electoral votes at stake in the south.

        I think Biden is more likely to win the actual election than anybody else, if he gets the nomination.

        Virginia is not really a southern state anymore. Northern VA is now so heavily populated we’re blue.

        1. The focus needs to be on winning NOT on the particular ideologies. A centrist approach can bring in a wider range of voters rather than a leftist one that excludes centrist and slightly right voters.

          As for CJ leaving the White House, I see one possibility, if the republicans lose, is a last minute abdication to Pence who will then give an absolute pardon, Ford style.

          NAOM

          1. As for CJ leaving the White House, ….

            Who the hell is CJ? Perhaps you meant Donald Trump? Anyway, there can be no pardon for someone who has not been convicted of a crime. A person cannot be “pre-pardoned” for something he may be charged with later.

            However, there will be no need for any of that. Biden is not a vindictive little dictator like Trump. Going after political rivals with the law is something a Banana Republic Dictator would do. Or a wanna-be dictator like Trump. That is not something Biden, or any other Democrat worth his salt would do.

            2. Trump is fair game for the NY state district attorney, and the IRS for tax evasion.
              But no need for the next Pres to be involved.
              More important matters (like the future) to attend to.

              btw Ron- thanks for recommending peak prosperity, it is good for for thought on this virus escapade.

            3. @Ron
              Sorry, Cheeto Jesus, you were right. Thanks for that on the pre-pardon but wasn’t that what happened to Nixon?

              @Paul
              +1

              NAOM

            4. Yeah, I never thought of that.

              By it, Ford granted to Richard Nixon, his predecessor, a full and unconditional pardon for any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as president. In particular, the pardon covered Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal.

              But Trump was acquitted by the Senate for trying to bribe the president of the Ukraine. He couldn’t be ever charged with that again. Then what would they charge him with? After all, being a narcissist moron is not a crime. 😉

              But Hickory is correct. He could be charged for tax evasion by the state of New York. That would have nothing to do with politics. Also the president cannot issue a pardon for state crimes.

            5. Thanks for that, that was what I was thinking with an abdication. Hmm, wasn’t it tax evasion that nailed Al Capone, sounds like he may have company.

              NAOM

              PS “After all, being a narcissist moron is not a crime.” what a shame.

            6. “He couldn’t be ever charged with that again. ”
              Not so sure of that Ron, after all this was not a criminal or civil trial- it was congressional proceeding. Double jeopardy does not apply. Additionally, obstruction and abuse of power can be brought for all other matters that have not yet been brought publically against trump. There are likely many other episodes of lawbreaking that are swept under the rug.

            7. Hickory is dead on. If the D’s capture the Senate and hold the House, and the orangutan wins again, he will be swiftly charged with other offenses, and he WILL be convicted in the Senate, lol.

  19. https://www.market-ticker.org/akcs-www?post=238349

    Karl, who is in the inner circles of politics or has some contacts (he was founder of Tea Party).

    Says he heard rumor that CDC will reccomend people not to attend work on Friday in USA and work from home if possible.

    Skip to the last 10 minutes if you aren’t interested in his politics, which I suspect many here won’t be.

    Let the games begin!

    1. It looks like the markets have figured out Corona virus is going to be an overhyped version of the flu.

      1. If that is what the market thinks then the market is dumb as hell.

        Oil consumption just fell off a cliff. OPEC is facing a huge test Bold mine.

        Oil producers are facing the biggest drop in demand for their product ever as the coronavirus spreads around the world, forcing OPEC and its allies to consider emergency measures.

        Research firm IHS Markit said Wednesday that oil demand will suffer its steepest decline on record in the first quarter — worse even than during the 2008 global financial crisis — as schools and offices close, airlines cancel flights worldwide and a growing number of people hunker down at home.

        Most of the reduction in demand can be traced to China, where the coronavirus has caused what IHS Markit describes as an “unprecedented stoppage” of economic activity.

        But reduced consumption will be widespread, and IHS Markit expects global demand to drop by 3.8 million barrels per day in the first quarter compared to 2019. Demand in the first three months of 2019 was 99.8 million barrels per day.

        “This is a sudden, instant demand shock — and the scale of the decline is unprecedented,” said Jim Burkhard, vice president and head of oil markets at IHS Markit.

    1. GF, we all know you hate electricity ( and solar, wind, the grid, anodes, EV’s).
      You have made it abundantly clear with a hundred postings you have carefully selected to share.
      Atleast you are consistent with your crusade against.
      Cheers to consistency.

      Regardless, here you go-
      “A new analysis from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL) concludes additional natural gas pipeline capacity and baseload generation units, such as coal and nuclear, are “critical” to maintaining grid reliability and affordable electricity in the Eastern Interconnection during extreme weather events.
      https://www.utilitydive.com/news/additional-gas-capacity-baseload-generation-critical-to-maintaining-reli/573423/

      Enjoy your carbon black.

      1. Your false adolescent personal accusations against me merely reveal your character. The subject is energy and attempts to correct our destructive behavior. If pointing out the need to correct the path of a major energy endeavor to optimize its effect causes you to act like a spoiled brat, then just go to your room and no supper for you. The few remaining adults need to discuss important topics.

        1. Good morning Hickory, you spoiled brat. Did you wake up this morning to a view of the bay ? I respect your effort to lower your carbon footprint, knowledge and understanding of real world carbon alternatives.

          Biden 2020

          1. Yes indeed. Top of Morning to you, HB.

            I’m not at pleased with the state of the world (or humanity), but bitching and moaning only gets you so far. When you have done with that, and said what needs to be said (please try to keep it succinct and short), it is then time to get to work.
            Working on innovation, cleaning up your act, adapting to reality.
            And trying to encourage/vote for leadership that has eyes wide open and good intentions.
            There is more, but in the spirit of being conservative with words, best day to you.
            Biden 2020

            I do feel sorry for the other guy

            3. We’re all going to die. That doesn’t justify joining a gang and carrying a gun. I prefer water and non fat milk.

              Make the best of life. Remember others have made your life easier and more enjoyable.

  24. I don’t have any warm spot in my heart for Guv’mint Motors, but I have RESPECT for the abilities of the engineers that work therc in R and D.

    And GM has generally been fairly honest in delivering on promised new technologies, models, styles, etc.

    They may have a real battery breakthru that will be ready for full scale production within the next couple of years, but I haven’t yet heard very much about who or where GM will be getting enough batteries to go pedal to the metal on electric cars and trucks.

    https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/04/business/gm-electric-car-battery-400-miles-of-range/index.html

    I am with people like Islandboy and Tony Seba when it comes to the fast adoption of electric cars. Once you can actually see and test drive a dozen or so electric models and makes at local dealerships, and you know somebody who actually has an electric car or truck, and you have the new car itch…… there’s plenty of reason you will go electric……. especially if for instance you are a well paid young professional and can easily afford a nice car.

    I can easily remember when only maybe one person out of ten in my neighborhood had a cell phone, and that was years after they first became available. Now almost everybody who has one, with two thirds of my local acquaintances giving up their land lines, unless they have cable or DSL internet.

    2. Sounds good.

      For enhanced battery technic, there is something in the pipeline.

      https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/batteries-storage/john-goodenough-glass-battery-news-hydroquebec

      The glas battery from Goodenough (inventor of the original lithium ion battery!) finally will be produced. A few years until then, but it solves all problems of current electric cars:

      – Inflammable, so less cooling and securing stuff (less weight, more space for batteries)
      – More energy dens, factor 3 to current batteries (with above more like factor 4)
      – Really fast load possible – in the range of minutes
      – Much less temperature sensible, working until -20 degree Celsius, partially until -40. And more though against high temperatures. So less sophisticated battery temperature management

      It’s build from glas and Lithium, a second version with less capacity could be build with natrium for really cheap materials.

      So there is much in the pipeline.

      1. That is certainly interesting especially with the source it is coming from, if it plays out then the game is completely changed. A switch from lithium to sodium would be good for stationary storage as quantity is more important than weight. A development to watch.

        Not wanting to be picky but 2 minor corrections: Inflamable > Non-flamable; glas > glass.

        NAOM

        1. natanoilman,

          Not picky at all and misreading could cause a great deal of damage.

          When I was a kid, long ago, gasoline trucks were labeled Inflammable but they haven’t been for a long time. I’ve wondered if there had been accidents caused by thinking that Inflammable means “Won’t burn.” It doesn’t.

          Inflammable: Will catch fire. (Think of “inflame.”)
          Flammable: Will burn.

      2. Thanks for the news- I’ve been wondering how the sold state battery projects are coming along. Bring it fast.

    3. GM is transforming their closed car plant into a battery plant so it looks like they plan to do this in-house rather than relying on an outside supplier, as others have and who are running into supply issues.

      NAOM

  25. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-03-05/farmers-fight-john-deere-over-who-gets-to-fix-an-800-000-tractor?srnd=premium

    Deere is not a farmer’s friend anymore……. unless he happens to be a one percenter farmer, able to pay whatever the dealer wants to charge…….

    Which works out ok for the biggest guys… because it gradually forces the little guys out, making it easy for the big guys to buy up their property, and then pass along the extra costs of dealing exclusively with the dealer service department.

    This will NOT appreciably affect the price of food at retail, because there will still be thousands and thousands of independent sellers of grain and other crops produced with this new generation of machinery…… but it’s not good that we have ever more concentration of economic power in ever fewer hands.

  26. March 5, 2020 at 07:53
    Your comment is awaiting moderation.

    “When people play games like this, gauntlets need to be thrown down and if they aren’t, then these kinds of games just persist until people die off along with nature.

    Where are all the anarchists by the way? Have a talk to some real ones and see what they say about government.

    We are all being ‘gamed’ and so it’s no real suprise about Assange’s case because it speaks about a fundamental against all people in all or most places around the planet.

    When we have fundamentals like that, like seeds of chaos, they ‘butterfly-effect’ over time and produce ‘hurricanes’ that bring everything down. That’s in part– perhaps large part– how civilizations collapse/decline.

    So the game will likely continue to be played as we continue to blow our time with it until which time as we’re all dead and gone, never mind Julian.” ~ Borbolactic

  27. WHY DON’T WE TREAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS WITH THE SAME URGENCY AS CORONAVIRUS?

    “More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year. There have been no Cobra meetings for the climate crisis, no sombre prime ministerial statements detailing the emergency action being taken to reassure the public. In time, we’ll overcome any coronavirus pandemic. With the climate crisis, we are already out of time, and are now left mitigating the inevitably disastrous consequences hurtling towards us.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/05/governments-coronavirus-urgent-climate-crisis

    1. Doug links to an article that asks:
      “WHY DON’T WE TREAT THE CLIMATE CRISIS WITH THE SAME URGENCY AS CORONAVIRUS?”

      I don’t know why that is but have some other thoughts. Climate scientists much like all earth scientists are very conservative in adopting new ideas. Right now they are stuck in a rut in that while their model for AGW is largely correct, they have no skill at all in being able to predict natural variability, such as when the next El Nino will hit. So unless they start doing a better job at predicting a complete picture, including being able to project FF usage — which they are also terrible at, the job is only half done.

      1. Paul —
        All I know is that, as Greta reminds us, insisting on the rightful authority of science as the guide to action has failed. If anything, it’s governments who are being excessively conservative, but perhaps they have no choice. And to be fair, national governments are embedded in market economies that constrain what they can do, and the social realm too is limited in its own ways.

        1. And to be fair, national governments are embedded in market economies

          Yep, kinda like the Spanish Inquisition.

        2. Doug,
          That’s true. What I am trying to do is engage the climate scientists to try to use better scientific models. I figure that if they can make better predictions and become wizards at the process then the citizenry would accept their advice more. But so far, they seem to be very reluctant to acknowledge new findings in climate science, and seem to say “trust us in terms of AGW” but “chaos theory prevents us from making actual predictions”.

          There is plenty of evidence that chaos theory is not correct for many observations. Yet as the famed physicist Murray Gell-Mann said about geologists: “The more the evidence was there, the less they believed it.”

      2. To start things off with, you need to look at the types of people go for a career in climate science in the first place. For the most part it’s people like Miss Greta who are on the autism spectrum somehow. These are the types who are very rigid in their thinking, overly emotional, and obsessed about minutiae the average person cares little about.

    2. When the “little people” start to realize how far into overshoot things really are, most will stick their heads back into the dirt and keep on keeping on. Of course by now, or then, one would need a time machine to escape.
      As one paleontologist said, once you are in a major extinction event, there is no stopping it. In other words, the changes would have to be made centuries ago. Not now.

      1. Hi GF,

        You’re right about it being too late to avoid the current extinction event of course.

        It remains to be seen how much of the biosphere will survive it in a form recognizable to a layman, and if enough of the right parts of it survive for us naked apes to survive in large numbers.

        I’m not willing to predict myself how many people will die from Corona, other than to say between maybe a few hundred thousand and tens of millions, lol.

        Most of the people that die in poor countries such won’t be included in the total. Old people without much if any access to medical care will simply be forgotten, in terms of the statistics. Old people, after all, are EXPECTED to die.

        But the public after a couple of generations has eventually come to understand that smoking kills. It’s gradually coming to understand that we have a climate crisis, that we have an obesity crisis, a water crisis, etc, but it will be some years, maybe another decade or two, until we collectively GET IT, if we ever get it.

        Most people simply aren’t paying much attention to anything other than their day to day lives.

        I don’t WANT to sound callous or Machiavellian but in the end, it will be a VERY good thing for humanity if Corona 19 kills a LOT of people in countries such as the USA.

        That’s the sort of Pearl Harbor WAKE UP Brick I often talk about. Such events start small in determining the course society takes, but over time they have a way of sinking into the public consciousness, the way smoking bans have sunk in.

        Many people who used to pay little or no attention to the risk of second hand smoke to their own health are now quite insistent that their guests not smoke when visiting or riding with them for instance.

        Younger people who fall for the orangutan’s “climate hoax” and dismissal of Corona as unimportant have longer memories than you might think.

        Years ago, I firmly believed that if you aren’t a liberal when you are young, you have no heart, and that if you aren’t a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. There’s still a great deal of truth in this observation, if you understand that today’s conservatism (real conservatism,not current R wing fascist conservatism) is in some respects yesterday’s liberalism. Consider social security and public schools for instance.

        It may well be too little too late, but the general public is moving in the right direction, if you take into account the way we vote these days, with the right wing owning the old folks, and the left owning the younger ones, ESPECIALLY younger women.

        The orangutan’s male chauvinist pig predilections and politics are doing more to destroy the hard core R right wing than a million liberal pundits and journalists COMBINED, because women are coming to dominate our society, both demographically and economically.

        College educated men used to marry hot secretaries, waitresses, bookkeepers, and nurses, if the men happened to be physicians.

        Now these days, the women are marrying down in more cases than you would ever believe, unless you take a look personally, if they marry at all. Image result for what year did more women graduate than men from college usa
        Since the 1800s women’s positions and opportunities in the educational sphere have increased. In 1980, women surpassed men in number of bachelor’s degrees conferred annually in the United States, and more bachelor’s degrees have been conferred on women each year since.

        Women’s education in the United States – Wikipedia

        It’s getting hard for women to find men who are their intellectual and economic equals these days.

        They may not yet be aroused to the point they vote the orangutan out of office this fall, but by twenty thirty two, they’re going to pretty much determine where the USA IS and is GOING, because the older women who currently support the R’s are going to be dying off or in nursing homes.

      2. I’m not willing to predict myself how many people will die from it, other than to say between maybe a few hundred thousand and tens of millions, lol.

        Most of the people that die in poor countries such won’t be included in the total. Old people without much if any access to medical care will simply be forgotten, in terms of the statistics. Old people, after all, are EXPECTED to die.

        But the public after a couple of generations has eventually come to understand that smoking kills. It’s gradually coming to understand that we have a climate crisis, that we have an obesity crisis, a water crisis, etc, but it will be some years, maybe another decade or two, until we collectively GET IT.

        Most people simply aren’t paying much attention to anything other than their day to day lives.

        I don’t WANT to sound callous or Machiavellian but in the end, it will be a VERY good thing for humanity if Corona 19 kills a LOT of people in countries such as the USA.

        That’s the sort of Pearl Harbor WAKE UP Brick I often talk about. Such events start small in determining the course society takes, but over time they have a way of sinking into the public consciousness, the way smoking bans have sunk in.

        Many people who used to pay little or no attention to the risk of second hand smoke to their own health are now quite insistent that their guests not smoke when visiting or riding with them for instance.

        1. oldfarmer

          Perhaps you don’t understand the death rate from coronavirus.
          The likelihood of dying if you are of breeding age or younger is tiny. 0.2%.

          https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-age-sex-demographics/

          The people this virus is killing have all had their children, so the impact on the global population will be practically nothing. Global population grows by 80 million per year. So even if this virus hits the worst predictions the global population will not decline even in the worst year.

        2. OFM said “It remains to be seen how much of the biosphere will survive it in a form recognizable to a layman, and if enough of the right parts of it survive for us naked apes to survive in large numbers.”

          If a species continuously spreads poisons and toxic chemicals over much of the planet, destroys much of the land and soil, causes dead zones in the water, changes the chemistry of the atmosphere, soil, rivers, lakes and oceans plus screws up the temperature change 10X faster than a natural extinction event, it’s a no brainer what the planet will be like. The reaction of the natural system is to add to most of that on a bigger scale over a longer period of time. Speed kills, so does long term.

          What kind of a stupid maniac animal wants and forces a major extinction event?
          Why would one want to even be on the same planet as that species?

          man
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfGMYdalClU&t=5s

          the turning point
          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7LDk4D3Q3U

          1. He said

            “I don’t WANT to sound callous or Machiavellian but in the end, it will be a VERY good thing for humanity if Corona 19 kills a LOT of people in countries such as the USA. ”

            Personally I do not think Covid19 will teach anything about over fishing, deforestation, burning coal, ploughing the soil until it turns to dust.

            All it will teach people is that other human being can kill them.

            https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/feb/18/chinese-people-uk-targeted-racist-abuse-over-coronavirus-southampton

            2. Hi Wayne,

              I’m thinking you’re reading a line or two literally, without keeping interpreting those lines in CONTEXT with the rest of my comment.

              When a few people, or a lot of people, die unnecessarily due to some preventable cause, it often leads to the public authorities doing something to fix the problem, as the result of public pressure to fix it.

              For instance if somebody gets killed every year or two at a dangerous curve on a public highway, the usual result is that public pressure results in the government doing the right thing, and regrading and repaving the road, so that nobody else gets killed at that particular spot.

              We all know somebody by now that’s either all crippled up or used to know somebody, now deceased, because they smoked.

              This knowledge leads to public support for higher taxes on tobacco, no smoking in public places laws, laws restricting the advertising of tobacco, etc.

              So the fact that some people DIE in the present from smoking results in changes in public policy that will result in far FEWER people dying from smoking in the future.

              I hope I’ve gotten it across. A number of people dying NOW as the result of a killer epidemic, namely C V 19 may well result in our having FAR BETTER resources in place to combat the NEXT and the next after that pandemic disease.

            3. oldfarmer

              You are so sweet thinking people are nice, thoughtful and wise enough to learn lessons from the past.

              What lessons have been learnt from all the wars in history?
              The fact is governments can potentially gain vast wealth if the win a war. So they manipulate the situation and people in order to create wars, and people fall for it every single time. The American government sent troupes 10,000 miles to die in Vietnam, what threat was Vietnam to the United States?

              There has been technology available for the last 50 years to fit cars with speed limiters. Every area could have a transmitter sending signal to limit speed according to weather conditions, ice, snow fog etc.

              https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8083651/Boy-racers-excellent-upbringings-jailed-youngest-caused-death-17-year-old-girl.html

              The death of this girl and hundreds of thousands like her need never happen. People do not like laws, they want to do what they want and are fooled by manipulating governments to kill people.

    3. Climate cooties aren’t as contagious or deadly, that’s why noone cares about the climate except for a small number of crazies.

      1. Too true Fab M, the real crazies think that more crap and tech will save them or at least make them look good. Instead of changing themselves and taking responsibility, they grab onto machine crutches and think how great they are/ Meanwhile the machines keep killing the life on the planet.
        Until people start taking responsibility for their actions, it’s all headed toward a cliff. The slide over has started, yet few are grabbing on.

        As long as people are honest about not giving a shit what happens as long as they get what they want it’s a start. At least they are being honest with themselves and others. Not pretending or delusional.

    1. With 210,023,289 registered vehicles in India in 2015 and the number of vehicles per person growin, let’s check back in ten years and see if they got off fossil fueled power.

      The ICE powered versions get about 90 mpg. Maybe the US could learn a thing or two.

      1. My guess is that in ten years, their coal consumption will be higher than now, but their coal/capita use will still be much less than that of the utility in your region right now. Don’t be satisfied with what they are selling you.

        In India, they are growing faster than they can deploy new generation capacity, of all kinds.
        You don’t want to breathe the air in most of that country for even a minute.

        1. SS Hickory has more navigational problems and has gone aground again.
          Los Angeles 1960, the worst polluted city in the world.
          Easy to take potshots at developing countries as they work their way through the Euro-American development paradigm.

          Clean California:
          California imports coal power to the tune of 13 coal power plants.
          California burns enough forest each year to be equivalent to 30 coal plant CO2 emissions.
          Natural gas (worse GHG than coal) to the tune of over 2 trillion cubic feet per year.
          Uses 20 percent of to the jet fuel in the US.
          Burns 2200 trillion BTU of oil products each year ( a gallon of gasoline is about 120,000 BTU, so 18 billion gallons equivalent)
          Methane landfill emissions (no. 1 in US) to the tune of 160 billion cubic feet per year
          Huge enabler and profiteer from ocean shipping, rail shipping and truck shipping (while complaining about the pollution they bring).

          The constant BS about “clean” and efficient California energy is just more propaganda. They may have installed a small amount of PV and some wind, but not enough to come anywhere near the energy consumption.
          Total state usage: 8000 trillion BTU
          India with 32.5 times as many people uses about 30,000 trillion BtU

          It will be a long time before California comes clean. At least Texas is honest.

          1. Poor little man. I can’t help you.
            In fact, I am at the point where I suggest once again that you put me in your ‘ignore’ category, as I will now do with you.
            Enough bitching and moaning, without anything redeeming, proactive or otherwise useful to share.
            Adios. May you find some peace of mind.

            1. You can use those numbers as an anchor. To see the changes as time unfolds. Or just keep drifting on the winds of unreality.

    2. “And you wonder why GM is trying to lead with the Hummer??? They know damn well the Bolt is a non-starter.

      You have to appeal to the erectile-dysfunction crowd.”

      1. Guess they are not keeping up with the latest. Big push to electric vehicles in GM, 1 million per year by 2025. New battery system with denser packing at $100/kWh. Lots of news on that out today.
        Maybe in 10 years the EV and PV will counteract the growth of the internet of things. (Nahhh, pure hopium).

        1. When I lived in Marin and Sonoma I rode with friends in several EV’s frequently.
          Bend Oregon?
          If you don’t have a Subaru, the F150 is a compact.

    3. Isn’t it immediately obvious yet that the two wheels go in front and the drive wheel goes in back so weight transfer leads to better braking instead of roll-over? Oh, this is an aid to population control? Carry on.

    1. We live in a four dimensional world. Ice has thickness and age. Losing both.
      Due for annual ice in a decade near you.

  31. If any of you were thinking about storing PV energy using gravitational potential and then regenerating it at night, think again.

    Lets say you have a 100 m hill behind your house. Take that old ICE car that no one uses anymore, throw some rocks in it, attach a steel cable to it. Run the cable uphill to a gearbox and motor-generator. OK, now you have 2000 kg lifted up a 100m hill during the day. If you gear it right and have a variable brake system on it to control speed, it can slowly descend the hill overnight as you need power for your TV, computer, lights, heat pump, refrigerator etc. Total energy would be (neglecting friction losses) 1,960,000 joules which is 0.54 kWh.
    Wait, that’s barely enough to run the refrigerator overnight but not anything else!
    So it’s out to the neighbors to grab several more cars, find lots more steel cable, build a bigger cable drum, etc. .
    You figure 10 cars might get you through the night or a day without much PV output.
    Then you are good to go. At least most of the stuff was scavanged. Everything will be fine until the cables break.

    I guess that is why hydroelectric dams and impoundments are so big. So next you dig a big pit on top of the hill, get lots of pipe and some big pumps. You use your old swimming pool at the bottom, volume of 400 cubic meters. Now you just need an automatic valve and turbine plus generator.
    OK, now you can generate 5 kW all night (16 hours) for a total of 72 kWh (90 percent efficiency). You are now good for days of storage. Only need about 1/10 of that pool or 40,000 kg of water. Or a ten meter hill for the whole pool. Either way, you can now watch TV all night, keep that food cold, and be cool or warm and cozy all year. EZ if you have a hill, plus you can swim a bit each day when it’s warm out.

    Gravity is omnipresent but weak. Still it is a limiting force for space travel. If it was stronger, our rockets would not reach space. If it was weaker, humans could fly on their own power but the atmosphere would leave, so no humans to make gadgets.
    The moon does not help much either (o,5 g per 100 kg when overhead).
    Amazing, we do live on a Goldilocks planet, in a Goldilocks orbit near a Goldilocks sun.

    So why are you screwing it up with all those gadgets and chemicals?

    1. Good morning Fish, most of us are non as scientifically gifted as yourself. Could you be a bud and recalculate your figures for my Cadillac Escalade, 82 inch flat screen, Subzero and incandescent lights?

      BTW, I’m a flatlander. How do you work that into your calculation?

      If all this seems like to much, I could change my life style and go to bed at sunset and get up at sunrise. Or better yet, maybe I could find a used Tesla Powerwall on Craigslist and get my do it yourself neighbor to install it for cash.

      Have you thought about a vacation? I’ll bet you can get some hot pricing on cruises right now.

      Thanks

      1. Sorry to hear about your lack of potential. Not to worry old boy, there is always California Dreamin’ and wishing upon a star.

  33. I’ve occasionally remarked that in the future, people will find it acceptable to drive smaller cars, even though they have plenty of money, if a small car is the only size car available. I know people who have ten or twenty times my annual income that live in apartments no more than a third the size of my old farmhouse, which has a superb view and a couple of acres of grounds with outbuildings, lol.

    I see dozens of comments here, there, everywhere, any time I got on the net and look at environmental news, to the effect that we will never manage a transition to a renewable energy based and sustainable economy…….

    Because the people that make such comments and write such articles virtually always assume that today’s bau conspicious consumption lifestyle MUST continue forever, or that life itself will come to a halt.

    It just ain’t so folks. I have acquaintances who could easily afford the biggest Suburban on the road, but they drive compact to midsize cars…… because they can get around in town in traffic better in a smaller vehicle.

    We WILL adapt as it becomes profitable to do so, in terms of becoming less wasteful, in terms of keeping a better eye on our consumption. Nobody I know has bought a new oil furnace recently……. but I know at least three or four people who have REPLACED old oil furnaces with heat pumps within the last three or four years.

    Almost everybody I know has switched to led lights, because they save money.
    The building codes no longer allow single pane windows, it’s all double glazed at least these days. A few tons of gravel or concrete secreted within the envelope of a new house can keep the temperature within a comfortable range for a few days, if it’s a well insulated house, running that heat pump only when cheap wind and solar juice is available.

    Half the world or so pays very high taxes on gasoline and diesel fuel, the intent being to hold down consumption of imported oil, for the most part.

    Favorable tax policies ( from the electric vehicle industry pov) will result in our moving away from oil to renewable electricity, if such policies are enacted, far faster than most of us would ever guess.

    What I’m getting at is that we can probably get close to double the amount of wind and solar electricity onto the grid as we have now WITHOUT doing much if anything in the way of building new storage capacity. We can do it simply by changing our consumption habits, and we can do that without giving up much of anything in terms of our day to day lives.

    Every electric car, every hot water heater, every heat pump, most appliances such as washing machines, etc, can run on off peak or surplus wind and solar electricity.

    Businesses that use huge amounts of electricity can adapt to running, some of them at least, mostly when cheap otherwise surplus wind and solar power are available.

    I’ve tried hard to find out if there’s any reason a desalination plant can’t be run intermittently, in order to save on electricity. They can, so far as I have found out.
    So…. if you build one twice as big, you tie up twice as much capital……but if you can run it twelve hours on average on wind and solar power……. that might well be cheaper, over the years, than buying the juice at regular rates.

    Clean water is VERY easily stored in unlimited amounts, for practical purposes, in city reservoirs. No batteries are needed to go all the way with wind and solar power in terms of desalinization of sea water, if we can afford the extra up front capital investment.

    Ditto no need for ff electricity if you can build pipelines and pumping stations with enough capacity to run the same way, to distribute water over many miles, even hundreds of miles, from where it is to where it’s needed, when surplus wind and solar juice is available.

    I’m not saying such strategies will save Old Man BAU, but they can soften the hard crash ahead, at least for some of us in some places.

    1. In fact high taxes on gas at the pump would do the American economy a world of good, by decreasing oil imports and allowing the country to pay off some of its vast foreign debt.

      1. Yep, they would cancel cable tv to pay ther fuel taxes. That might improve their minds.

  36. Here’s a good article, a bit of a long read, for insight into CV19 and similar scenarios.
    The info in it is from real professionals.

  38. From the NYT today

    View in browser | nytimes.com
    The New York Times

    BREAKING NEWS
    Italy is weighing a plan to restrict the movement of a fourth of its population in the most extreme effort to contain the coronavirus outside China.

    1. Latest numbers for Mexico, as told in our local rag
      163 negative
      36 suspected
      6 confirmed
      Local port is checking everyone coming off the cruise liners and are not allowing anyone off if there are suspicions.

      NAOM

    2. MILAN—The Italian government is locking down 17 million people—more than a quarter of its population—including in Milan, the surrounding Lombardy region and 14 neighboring provinces, in the most sweeping steps any European country has prepared to take against the coronavirus epidemic.

      1. In retrospect, it will be seen as far to little (weak measures) and certainly too late. That area of Italy is their industrial heartland, and the wealthiest zone.
        The USA will be in their position later this month I suspect, in certain areas.

        I will re-post the link to a daily video series that Ron had recently recommended. I don’t vouch for everything Chris M. concludes on this, but much of it straight on. The episode here is from today and is a good one to digest-
        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3etuaYTDwFI

  41. I keep hearing about the amount of energy consumed by the internet itself, but damned little about how much energy it would take to run the world WITHOUT the net.

    I for instance spend many evenings reading various web sites that I would formerly have spent watching tv, if I were into tv. Or I might have gotten into my car and gone to a bar, or driven around an hour or two looking for something specific at a store, rather than just ordering it to be picked up later, or delivered.

    Even out in the boonies, I see a Fed Ex and or UPS truck virtually every day, and that truck typically stops at ten or more houses in my community over the course of the day, according to the driver. I can’t say how many trips these deliveries save to town to pick up the packages he delivers, but it’s for sure more than enough it’s a bargain for everybody in terms of traffic, oil,pollution, time and so forth.

    The net saves me at least fifty to a hundred bucks a month because I need the internet to search for information, to run an occasional ad on craigslist or other sites, to buy stuff for a bargain in the used market, etc.

    My cell phone alone, which seems to depend on the net to work, saves me at least twenty bucks a month in gasoline alone plus driving time, plus wear and tear on my vehicles.

    Some of my acquaintances rent movies via the net. I’m damned sure that takes less energy than driving to a store to pick one up, although they may go out anyway for beer or food.

    SO…… what’s the real bottom line?

    1. Computerization, fast computer long distance communications (internet), and cell phone technology has had one major effect on global civilization. That effect is to increase the rate of production and consumption. When one increases the rate, the energy goes upward. Also the spawning of the internet of things (increased control and remote control of many functions, along with data gathering) is a side effect causing a large increase in products, energy and waste. All of these things need power for communications, wires, fiber optics, transmission points and satellites.
      Now up to 5G, new things all the time. New things use more energy, then later some increased efficiency is worked out, but always more power through the system itself and it’s intent to be globally distributed through much of the population.

      Operators Starting to Face Up to 5G Power Cost
      Experts believe that a 5G network will consume three and half times as much electricity as 4G, thanks to a combination of massive MIMO antennas, legacy networks in multiple bands and the massive proliferation of small cells.

      Jake Saunders, the managing director at ABI Research, says a typical LTE cellsite today might draw about 6 kilowatts (kW) in power, rising to perhaps 8-9kW at peak traffic periods.

      In five years, a 3.5GHz site deploying massive MIMO with four transmitters and four receivers (so-called 4T4R) might draw 14kW on average and up to 19kW under peak load, he said.

      https://www.lightreading.com/asia-pacific/operators-starting-to-face-up-to-5g-power-cost-/d/d-id/755255#:~:text=Experts%20believe%20that%20a%205G,massive%20proliferation%20of%20small%20cells.

    2. +1
      Spot on. We also have to remember that the internet is not just being powered by coal. Google was having a hard time locating one of its server barns as the power utility was blocking out renewables and Google has a renewables only policy. As these facilities spread then there is less power used in the distribution of data as you will connect via the closest.

      There are big reductions in power consumption too. One company, I think it was Amazon, is moving to in house designed Arm servers to make use of their lower power consumption and a 64 core Arm processor has been announced for servers. Power use is coming down as IT spreads, take the computer I am using right now, it is many times more capable than my previous (that I used for 10 years not cycled every 18-24 months) but uses the same or less power. A big power saving was made as Strowger exchanges moved to digital, not only from the equipment but the savings on facilities. Yet again the move from wire to fibre cut power consumption. How much power did the old phone kiosks consume, not just the device but all the connecting to them plus maintenance, all those power costs gone with cellular. My monitor, again, uses much less than my previous big valve. My cellphone was changed after about 6 years, not because I wanted the latest but because the old one was getting cranky, again the new one is much more capable but using 1/4-1/2 the power of the previous. Oh, and it will be put on solar charging after I finish online. I am looking at how to power my modem from solar rather than its vampire drain of 120W per day 7/365, another saving.

      Tech is aware of power use and is cutting consumption as it grows. It is no use predicting next years power us with last years figures. As you say, this is merely moving power from one usage to another.

      NAOM

      1. Spec Equipment that’s designed to work independent of the Grid. ie.Multiple 8-57V inputs/Outputs. We have deployed dozens of these off Grid to power downstream equipment and lighting. Gigabit Routing, Power Monitoring on many ports, Bulletproof, survives harsh environments like Towers, Hardware encryption for VPN’s, Fiber Optic input for EMP protection, etc. Way less than 100 Wh/day. Lithium motocycle battery/tiny SCC/PV Panel and your set. Battery dies it still works in daytime. https://mikrotik.com/product/RB960PGS-PB

      2. Doesn’t much matter what powers the internet of things and communications, if it siphons off much of the growth of renewable energy. Plus there are other large devices that will use a lot of power to manufacture and implement. If we are intent on carbon reduction, the more we immediately reduce energy use and superfluous production the sooner that reduction can start.

        1. Fish old boy, please immediately lead by example reducing your superfluous comments and energy use. The sooner the reduction of carbon can start.

          Thank you for understanding of being part of the problem

  42. Coming to a neighborhood near you?

    N. Italy, centered on Milan, is the most prosperous and industrial area of Italy [8th biggest economy in the world]. From the BBC, here is exerts from an article describing restrictions being initiated this weekend-

    Italy has placed up to 16 million people under quarantine as it battles to contain the spread of coronavirus.

    “There will be no movement in or out of these areas, or within them, unless for proven work-related reasons, emergencies or health reasons,” Mr Conte told reporters.
    “We are facing an emergency, a national emergency. We have to limit the spread of the virus and prevent our hospitals from being overwhelmed.
    The health system is under immense strain in Lombardy, a northern region of 10 million people, where people are being treated in hospital corridors.
    Weddings and funerals have been suspended, as well as religious and cultural events. Cinemas, nightclubs, gyms, swimming pools, museums and ski resorts have been closed.
    Restaurants and cafes in the quarantined zones can open between 06:00 and 18:00 but customers must sit at least 1m (3ft) apart.
    People have been told to stay at home as much as possible, and those who break the quarantine could face three months in jail.
    With cases still surging, the government has moved to the next stage – and it’s a dramatic step up. It’s not quite a complete lockdown – planes and trains are still running and access will be permitted for emergency or essential work reasons. But police will be able to stop people and ask why they’re trying to enter or leave the areas covered.
    The question is whether this is all too late. It’s believed the virus was circulating in Italy for weeks before it was detected

  43. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, electric use has risen by 15X since 1950.
    In the US it grew by 9X per capita.

  44. Looking for a way to be connected and involved in a greater project related to energy and climate adaptation/ innovation/ and action, well here is an excellent conduit and global community effort. Lets get to it.

    https://worldwarzero.com/
    The war for net global carbon emissions…

  45. New Electric Power Monthly and Open Petroleum Threads have been posted.

  46. There is your black swan. If there is a severe recession due to coronavirus, no industry will be investing in any CO2 mitigating technology any time soon….

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