A Guest Post by Islandboy
The EIA released the latest edition of their Electric Power Monthly on January 24th, with data for November 2017. The table above shows the percentage contribution of the main fuel sources to two decimal places for the last two months and the year 2017 to date.
Nuclear generated 623 Gwh (0.9%) more than it did in October but, the decrease in the total generation meant it’s percentage contribution increased by a little over 1% to 21.71% from 20.66% in October. With the winter solstice approaching the absolute contribution from Solar plunged by about 32% from 6810 to 4651 GWh, with the corresponding percentage contribution decreasing to 1.52% from 2.13% in October. The percentage contribution from solar has again gone below 2% as it was in January and February. With the year to date percentage contribution now being exactly 2% Solar should end the year with a contribution of slightly less than 2%. The gap between the contribution from All Renewables and Nuclear widened slightly as the 0.53% increased contribution from All Renewables was less than the 1.05% increase in the contribution from Nuclear. The amount of electricity generated by Wind decreased by about 6%, (1469 GWh) resulting in the percentage contribution decreasing very slightly by 0.16%. The contribution from Hydro increased 2633 Gwh (15%) in absolute terms with the decrease in total generation resulting in the percentage contribution increasing by 1.08%. The combined contribution from Wind and Solar decreased to 9.12% from 9.89% in October and the contribution from Non-Hydro Renewables also decreased to 10.76% from 11.3%. The contribution of zero emission and carbon neutral sources, that is, nuclear, hydro, wind, solar, geothermal, landfill gas and other biomass increased to 38.94% from 37.34% in October.
The graph below helps to illustrate how the changes in absolute production affect the percentage contribution from the various sources.
The graph below shows the total monthly generation at utility scale facilities by year versus the contribution from solar. The left hand scale is for the total generation, while the right hand scale is for solar output and has been deliberately set to exaggerate the solar output as a means of assessing it’s potential to make a meaningful contribution to the midsummer peak. In November 2017 the output from solar continued to decline heading into the winter solstice.
On January 16th an article was posted on the PV Magazine web site written by Christian Roselund that picks up on the point I have been trying to illustrate with the above graph, He wrote:
“July and August are the hottest months of the year, and as such electricity demand, driven by widespread use of air conditioning, peaks during these months. This means that the output of renewable energy in the United States is following a seasonal pattern that is mismatched with demand. Additionally summer peak demand, which could be served by solar, is in many regions largely being met with costly power from “peaker” gas plants and imports of electricity.”
In 2017 the peak monthly output for solar was estimated at 8796 Gwh in June with output for July and August closer to 8,000 Gwh. The difference in the total amount generated at utility scale facilities between the months of April and July was roughly 106,000 Gwh. If solar output were to double over the next couple of years the mid summer output would climb to somewhere in the region of 17,500 Gwh and a further doubling would take it roughly 35,000 Gwh. This would translate to solar output satisfying roughly 35% of the increase in demand over the summer months as opposed to roughly 7.5% for 2017. One more doubling would take the figure close to 70%. With the doubling time for solar currently standing at roughly two years, it is not hard to imagine solar shouldering most of the additional mid summer demand by 2025.
The graph below shows the monthly capacity additions for 2017 to date. In November only 4.7 percent of capacity additions were Natural Gas. Solar added 33.8 percent and and Wind contributed 61.3 percent of new capacity. Batteries had relatively minor capacity addition of 0.13 percent. In November the total capacity added was 1571.2 MW, marginally more than the amounts added in each of the first three months of 2017 but, less than the amounts added in April Jun and July.
Islandboy
The statement above that peak summer demand can be met by solar, rather than the expensive gas peakers, is somewhat questionable.
The critical time frame – occurring almost every single day of
the year – is the 4:00 PM to 8:00 PM window when electricity consumption is highest.
With the increasing adoption of wind and solar, existing generators, most notably nuclear, cannot compete on an economical footing.
The recent Millstone nuclear controversy in Connecticut sheds some detail in this matter as it appears Millstone needs to sell its juice in the $31/$36 Mwh range to break even.
The highly efficient New England market, for 8 months of the year, at least, sells wholesale electricity in the $20/$35 per Mwh range using CCGT plants and adequate fuel supplies.
The advantages of wind and solar are greatly offset by their intermittent nature, as Gail Tverberg showed in a very detailed analysis a few months back.
For micro applications, especially with the hardware increasingly being introduced, renewables offer a strong arguement for adoption.
For wide, grid scale applications, their vulnerabilities continue to manifest as the South Australia situation shows in their summertime heat.
This is why the emphasis on PV for utility scale solar is a mistake. Storage of sensible heat is much cheaper than storage of electrons. This means that CSP, which operates on heat engines, can provide the smoothed output that the grid needs.
It also should be kept in mind that electricity is less than 20% of energy consumption. There’s a long, long way to go before renewables take over (if they ever do).
Renewables and EV’s don’t suffer from the same rejected energy problem of thermal plants and combustion engines.
60% of your 80% non-electric energy consumption may not be doing any useful work:
https://www.llnl.gov/sites/default/files/media/2017/04/usenergy2016.jpg
Bingo. About 80% of transportation energy, about 50% of non-electric heating energy, and about 50% of thermal energy used for electricity generation, is wasted. It just goes away when we electrify. This is critical to understand.
Look at that Livermore Labs graph. Electricity: 12.6. Energy Services: 30.8. Triple electricity generation and we’re done, we’ve covered all energy services.
This isn’t even quite fair: heating with heat pumps is much better than 100% efficient, so as they’re adopted, total “energy services” will drop. So it’s less than a factor of 3.
Very roughly, we have a 50% increase in electricity use from electrifying all of transportation (including airplanes and ships), a 50% increase from electrifying space heating, and a 100% increase from electrifying industrial processes. But probably slightly less in all three cases.
Remember that solar doubles every two years and wind every three years. So it will take an extra three years or so to make all *energy* renewable vs. making all current *electricity* renewable.
Don’t even need that. One of the causes of late day, summer peaks is air-con. Pre-cool the house and store cold as ice and then you don’t need late day electricity for that. Perhaps education is needed too. I wonder how much of that peak could be cut by people closing doors and windows while air-con is running or by switching to inverter split units instead of window inserts, quieter too. Todays peaker plants that run in the day will switch to night operation as daytime production is taken by solar and base load units shut down.
NAOM
Down south you will see more awnings and light colored houses than up north. Both those things work, but more insulation is a key factor to keeping down air conditioning power use. Shade trees work but tend to blow over on houses and cars.
The ice storage scheme works and can be created during times of abundant power.
Cooking outside helps too.
I recently placed a curtain at the bottom of my stairs called a noren. All of a sudden my upstairs and downstairs heat is balanced perfectly, I don’t wake up overheated at night, the downstairs is much warmer and my heat comes on much less. This $24 curtain is probably saving a ton of energy. I wonder about the pre-cooling idea in the summer, though. During the day when nobody is home, the sun is glaring into the bedroom and for me would mean lots more energy to cool at that time. The best strategy for everyone will be different depending on the layout of the house and usage of different rooms. Maybe some “smart” decision making thermostat/switches would be good.
A huge amount of energy consumption just goes to waste heat. Wind, solar PV, electric cars and other electric systems as well as heat pumps will get rid of a lot of that waste. Insulating buildings properly and shading them in summer would save a lot of energy.
We won’t need nearly as much energy if we go to efficient production and consumption methods.
Yep. This is actually already happening. The LED shift wiped out a lot of waste energy use. Insulation, heat pumps, and so forth are moving more slowly but are having a notable effect.
I should also point out that the estimates say that the ratio of utility-side solar installs to behind-the-meter (residential/commercial/industrial) solar installs is *very roughly* 1:1, so you should always double utility-scale numbers if you’re trying to estimate the total solar production. The behind-the-meter solar shows up as demand reduction in the statistics.
Germany electricity costs are nearly triple the cost of Hungary to pay for the wind and solar.
https://ourfiniteworld.com/2016/08/31/intermittent-renewables-cant-favorably-transform-grid-electricity/
Triple the cost delivers 29% wind and solar.
https://www.energy-charts.de/energy.htm?source=conventional&period=annual&year=2017
This is the situation in Germany now.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/germany-power-grid-pays-customers-christmas-sustainability-renewable-energy-a8141431.html
Then several hours later when the sun goes down and wind does not blow, electricity prices shoot up to pay for coal plants that are being paid a spinning reserve price on top of electricity price.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=all-sources&year=2018&week=6
https://www.strommarkttreffen.org/2016-1-22-Ocker-German-Secondary-Balancing-Power-Market.pdf.pdf
“Germany electricity costs are nearly triple the cost of Hungary to pay for the wind and solar.”
No. They are higher because there’s a ton of taxes and levies imposed on electricity consumption which have nothing to do with wind and solar.
As a matter of fact, I pay less than 6 € for wind and solar; as a residential customer with about 140 kWh per month.
That’s about 13% of my monthly electricity bill.
Now tell me:
How would I pay a third of the current amount if there were no wind or solar power in Germany?
If anyone wants to know the details, I’d happily post them here.
Peter, you’re either horribly gullible or stupid. Your choice…
Gerry
I will say this nice and slow for you, so that you can understand it. Ready?
Companies producing wind and solar are paid massive government subsidies from? Take your time Gerry, nearly there.
No. OK I guess I will have to tell you.
TAX money raised from taxing electricity.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/business/energy-environment/german-renewable-energy.html
These taxes hit the poorest hardest, while those who can afford £10,000 solar panels on their roofs get given their money.
Shall I draw you a money flow chart?
I told you exactly what I pay for wind and solar, based on the published EEG-Umlage, UStG and my power contract.
Now you tell me, how that’s tripling the price of electricity I pay, compared to Hungary.
I’m waiting for your numbers and how you calculated them….
“These taxes hit the poorest hardest, while those who can afford £10,000 solar panels on their roofs get given their money.”
It’s great that power companies running nuclear or coal plants don’t get poor peoples’ money, isn’t it?
The electricity tax goes into the pension fund, not to subsidize renewables. The Umlage goes to the renewables, but it is not a tax — the government doesn’t ever see it.
This is what a German electric bill is made up of: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strompreis#/media/File:Strompreis-zusammensetzung_2017.jpg
16% VAT
7% Electricity tax, which goes into the pension fund
19.3% for energy production and sales — electricity is very cheap
25.6% network costs
5.7% charge by cities for land use — basically another tax.
23.6% Umlage, money used by the utilities to pay for renewables, especially older installations, which have a high priced long term contracts.
Currently the feed in tariff for solar is 12 cents per kWh for small systems, falling to under 9 cents for larger ones.
The point to the tax is to discourage waste, which is rampant throughout the rich world. All this whining about #electricity being “too expensive” misses the point. There is no reason for electricity not to be expensive. You can avoid the costs by cutting waste.
It is touching that you care so much about the poor though. I’m sure you favor Germany’s universal health care coverage, almost free tuition for higher education and heavy investment in public transportation over America’s “fuck you I’ve got mine” system of governance. Trust me, electricity is a much smaller percentage of family budgets than education, transportation and health care.
The fact is that cheap energy is about the dumbest form of welfare you can think of, and anyone who advocates it doesn’t understand basic economics. The Soviets were keen on it, and a lot of poorly run Middle Eastern countries still are. But it doesn’t work, and Americans need to get over the idea.
Also the NYT claims the renewables growth has stalled, but the capacity for solar alone grew by over two gigawatts last year — about 2.5% of maximum output. Total solar energy in America was about 1.3% of total US capacity in 2015.
Germany electricity costs are nearly triple the cost of Hungary to pay for the wind and solar.
So what?!
I have family in both Germany and Hungary and have to say you are comparing apples to oranges. Maybe go spend some time in Germany and Hungary and talk to some people who actually live in those countries.
Hungary’s wholesale costs are 50+% higher than Germany…
PDF: https://ec.europa.eu/energy/sites/ener/files/documents/quarterly_report_on_european_electricity_markets_q3_2017_finalcover.pdf
JN2
Yes you are correct and solar and wind subsidies make Germany the most expensive.
https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/
Hi Peter,
It is up to the people of Germany to decide. They have decided to lead rather than follow.
When fossil fuels peak and prices spike. The world will be thankful that the Germans have lead us in the correct direction.
Fossil fuels have been subsidized for a century or more.
“Triple the cost delivers 29% wind and solar.”
You are stupid or dishonest, combination also works.
Hint: Even in pre-RE times German electricity was very expensive and in addition coal got a lot of subsidaries.
The correct statement would be: 20% higher electricty costs led to 40% wind, solar and biomass.
Ulenschnitzel
The 29% for wind and solar so don’t drag hydro into your argument. Hydro has been around for a long time and actually works when people need it.
https://www.reuters.com/article/germany-electricity-retail/german-household-power-prices-at-record-high-verivox-idUSL8N1MZ30X
Grid fees are higher to pay for upgrades for solar and wind.
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/what-german-households-pay-power
I make 4c to 12c a 300% increase
https://github.com/vertesy/TheCorvinas/wiki/Paks2
Can you work it out yourself or shall i hold your hand?
Hi Peter,
You are EITHER a troll, or one of the sort of people who latch onto a single fact, which often turns out not to be a fact at all, to make up his mind what he thinks about a given issue.
No amount of reasoning will ever convince YOU, or any such person, he is wrong, because he isn’t WILLING to consider ANY information, no matter how solid it may be, no matter how well documented it may be.
Now here are a few additional facts that you are failing to take into account, beyond the ones pointed out by other forum members already, up thread.
German imports a LOT less fossil fuel because Germans get a lot of electricity from their wind and solar farms, fossil fuel that must be PAID for by sending German money out of the country.
The wind and solar industries in Germany pay a hell of a lot of taxes by way of the employment taxes and other taxes, such as property taxes paid to localities, which probably more than offset the additional modest cost of the renewable electricity subsidies.
Germany is less subject to political blackmail and actual cut off of fossil fuel deliveries such as gas and oil in the event of war.
Are you stupid enough to believe that EITHER the Germans OR the Russians have forgotten WWII?
Do you know enough to know that Germany and all of Western Europe would be in one HELL of a fix if the Russians were to shut down oil and gas exports for even one WEEK?
Do you have even the foggiest idea about how much foreign exchange Germans earn by exporting their expertise and their wind and solar technology and equipment?
That money goes in part to pay for IMPORTED fossil fuel, you see, although you DON’T see, because you don’t WANT to see, do you?
And of course the less imported fossil fuel the country uses, the LESS fossil fuel the country has to PAY FOR, ya get it?
I expect you probably do actually understand these things, but won’t admit them because you are a troll, with skin ( money ) coming to you from the fossil fuel industries, by one route or another. Maybe you’re a coal miner, lol. If so, you have my sympathy.
There’s one MORE reason, one big enough and important enough in and of itself, to fully justify Germany keeping the pedal to the metal in terms of supporting the wind and solar industries.
Fossil fuels DEPLETE. You may not know that Germany started WWII in as much to seize natural resources from other countries, or more so, than for any other reason, but every body who knows doo doo from apple butter knows this is true.
The world has less oil and gas and coal left TO BURN each and every day.
Unless you are already old, you have a very good shot at living to see the prices of oil, natural gas, and coal rise to the point that wind and solar generated electricity is a world class bargain.
And I also forgot to mention that while the REAL costs of coal and gas fired electricity continues to go up, historically, as the coal and gas resource depletes, the price of wind and solar electricity is still coming down. As a matter of fact, it’s coming down FAST, and will continue to come down for a good while yet, maybe another decade or two, because every year the wind and solar industries learn how to do it CHEAPER and better than the year before.
The money the German people are spending NOW to subsidize the wind and solar industries will be SAVING them money from now on out……. forever, or for as long as the country survives.
I’m reasonably sure you’re capable of GETTING IT, since I know some people with IQ’s in the lower nineties who get it, so I’m assuming you ‘re a troll, and hoping to confuse any simple minded readers who might visit this site.
You may get away with this sort of simple minded argument in other forums, but not here in this one.
and when there is a 1% fuel shortage, it’s crater time. So Renewables may have more worth since they extend fuel. – meaning things stay up and the US Nuclear spent fuel pools don’t boil over.
“The advantages of wind and solar are greatly offset by their intermittent nature, as Gail Tverberg showed in a very detailed analysis a few months back.
For micro applications, especially with the hardware increasingly being introduced, renewables offer a strong arguement for adoption.
For wide, grid scale applications, their vulnerabilities continue to manifest as the South Australia situation shows in their summertime heat.”
That depends on who you talk (listen) to. Here’s another (Australian) view:
Dispatchable wind and solar: They’ll be the death of coal and gas
A year on from the February 2017 controversy over power supplies in South Australia, and since the Coalition government brandished a lump of coal in parliament, and how things have changed – both in South Australia and across the country. And not in the way most imagined.
Australia is now like it or not (and most people like it), setting a course for a high renewable grid. The CSIRO says it’s both achievable, and cheaper, and so do the networks. The Australian Energy Market Operator seems to agree.
More importantly than that, investors are voting with their feet – the cost of solar and wind continues to fall, storage is making its presence felt, and all of a sudden the path to a grid that is smarter, cheaper, cleaner and more reliable is made clear. And it’s not via fossil fuels.
Because it’s the anniversary, let’s just remember exactly what happened on February 8, when 90,000 customers lost power for around 40 minutes in the midst of an extended heatwave, because there was not enough supply.
Islandboy
No need to to talk or listen to anyone when an individual can glance at the AEMO site for themselves, as I just did.
At midnite, local time, South Australia is consuming 1.861 megawatts of power.
Wind (and solar) are producing 26 megawatts.
671 megawatts are being sent in via the 2 interconnects from Victoria, the bulk of which is generated by the peaker in Tasmania and the coal burners in Queensland.
This info is under the “NEM Dispatch Overview” tab and is updated every 5 minutes, aka realtime.
This displays the crux of the position that renewables are highly dependent upon reliable, dispatchable power.
This displays the crux of the position that renewables are highly dependent upon reliable, dispatchable power.
Actually it is the other way around…
https://interestingengineering.com/tesla-saves-major-coal-plant-by-using-power-of-massive-battery-system
Tesla Saves Major Coal Plant by Using Power of Massive Battery System
A major coal plant shut down this past Thursday without warning. Tesla’s ion battery was able to swoop in and save the day.
And now Tesla will build a massive distributed micro grid power plant by putting solar panels and power walls in 50, ooo homes.
https://electrek.co/2018/02/04/tesla-powerwall-solar-virtual-power-plant/
Tesla is installing Powerwalls and solar power on 50,000 homes to create biggest virtual power plant in the world
Fossil fuels used to generate electricity make less and less sense every day and renewables such as wind and solar coupled with battery storage are proving to be much more reliable when push comes to shove.
Not really, but these articles and discussions may shed some light on the broader issues involved.
That article describing the trip of one of the Loyang units in December does not say for how long the plant was offline.
The Loyang B trip a few weeks later was down about one hour.
The Tesla battery is 100 to 129 Mw capacity with a lower per hour discharge rate.
Thus, it was able to help stabilize the grid without being able to provide the 500 megs the Loyang unit removed.
The aging Aussie coal burners have had over a dozen interruptions these past few months and more are anticipated as their owners have little incentive to put money into an increasingly out of favor mode of electricity generation.
The precariousness of the situation is not insignificant, and the summertime heat will accentuate this.
“The aging Aussie coal burners have had over a dozen interruptions these past few months and more are anticipated as their owners have little incentive to put money into an increasingly out of favor mode of electricity generation.”
Sounds like the coal power barons are sulking selfish bratboys. They have no sense of civic duty to a world that provided them with everything they needed to suck the money to themselves? This purposeful negligence should be met with a purposeful move to replace them ASAP.
Ten fingers may be insufficient to point to all the players, all the factors involved in this global arena of electricity generation.
The owners of many generating units – worldwide, including Australia – are foreign based with varying motivations.
Australia’s specific situation can be highly instructive as the embrace of renewables, the shunning of nuclear and fossil fuels is pretty far along and real world consequences appear.
One big difficulty is wading through all the reporting and trying to objectively evaluate despite the ever present spin.
In Australia, the incumbent coal power barons have been accurately compared to the manipulators who ran Enron and engineered an unnecessary blackout in California.
Is it any wonder that people are installing home solar and batteries as fast as possible in Australia?
Coal and gas power plants have worked very well for a hundred and fifty years without any help from wind.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_Street_Station
One Tesla powerwall at a cost of £5,900. Can power one house, with low consumption, for one day.
https://www.tesla.com/en_GB/powerwall
Then you need the solar panels, that will cost £7,000
That is 21 years of electricity, no wonder they need to take tax payers money to operate.
“Coal and gas power plants have worked very well for a hundred and fifty years without any help from wind.”
And now they become economic basket cases. What do you suggest?
And now they become economic basket cases. What do you suggest?
I don’t know what Peter, who seems to dabble more in myths and pseudoscience, than actual technical solutions, suggests, but here’s a suggestion from a few researchers who probably have better technical credentials than he does…
https://www.ecowatch.com/renewable-energy-stability-2532487339.html
Renewable energy solutions are often hindered by the inconsistencies of power produced by wind, water and sunlight and the continuously fluctuating demand for energy. New research by Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Stanford University, and colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley, and Aalborg University in Denmark finds several solutions to making clean, renewable energy reliable enough to power at least 139 countries.
In their paper, published as a manuscript this week in Renewable Energy, the researchers propose three different methods of providing consistent power among all energy sectors—transportation; heating and cooling; industry; and agriculture, forestry and fishing—in 20 world regions encompassing 139 countries after all sectors have been converted to 100 percent clean, renewable energy. Jacobson and colleagues previously developed roadmaps for transitioning 139 countries to 100 percent clean, renewable energy by 2050 with 80 percent of that transition completed by 2030. The present study examines ways to keep the grid stable with these roadmaps.
“Based on these results, I can more confidently state that there is no technical or economic barrier to transitioning the entire world to 100 percent clean, renewable energy with a stable electric grid at low cost,” said Jacobson, who is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Precourt Institute for Energy and the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment. “This solution would go a long way toward eliminating global warming and the 4 million to 7 million air pollution-related deaths that occur worldwide each year, while also providing energy security.”
The full study is behind a paywall but here is a link to the PDF.
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/CountriesWWS.pdf
100% Clean and Renewable Wind, Water,
and Sunlight All-Sector Energy Roadmaps
for 139 Countries of the World
Coal and gas plants are forced to scale back when wind and solar are producing. IE There is no competition allowed against wind and solar. Wind and solar also get paid money on top of the electricity price.
Yet look at the pathetic production from wind and solar last week. 2,600 Mw out of 60,000 GW was the combined low of wind and solar. What is keeping German people warm and industry running? Horrid horrid gas and coal.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm
and CO2 levels did not fall last year.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/07/business/energy-environment/german-renewable-energy.html
France burns hardly any coal in comparison to Germany and has lower electricity prices.
https://1-stromvergleich.com/electricity-prices-europe/
Coal and gas plants are forced to scale back when wind and solar are producing. IE There is no competition allowed against wind and solar. Wind and solar also get paid money on top of the electricity price.
That is a disingenuous statement at best!
The real question is why you keep insisting that the continued use of fossil fuels is in any way shape or form acceptable in the long term? Furthermore what is it that causes you to mount your campaign against renewables in general and your continued promotion of fossil fuels?
May I suggest you get up to speed and read this paper:
On the Influence of Carbonic Acid
in the Air upon the Temperature of
the Ground
Svante Arrhenius
Philosophical Magazine and Journal of Science
Series 5, Volume 41, April 1896, pages 237-276.
Fred
Read slowly what I have written.
You may grasp that the only technology that is capable of cutting pollution is nuclear.
Fact; France has the lowest emissions in electricity production other than hydro rich Norway.
France in less than 20 years almost eliminated coal and gas pollution in electricity production. This was between 40 and 20 years ago.
Germany in the same time frame and at higher cost has reduced coal pollution by only 15%.
Oh, Peter’s an idiot nuclear troll.
Here’s a clue: if you follow the absolutely consistent exponential trajectory of solar panel deployment starting in 1975, all the world’s electricity will be produced by solar power by 2030. Obviously, since we have wind and hydro too, that won’t happen, but the key point is…
…you can’t build a new nuclear plant before 2030. If you start now it won’t be done by 2030.
And nuclear power costs more than *any* other source of power, and with stuff like Hinckley C or Vogtle, costs over ten times as much as solar. Don’t believe me; believe investment bank Lazard.
Let us for a moment assume that CO2 emissions are not a problem, no matter what the eventual concentration in the atmosphere will be. Let us also accept the fact that fossil fuels are finite and our civilization therefore cannot continue to increase it.s use of fossil fuels indefinitely. When would you suggest the transition away from fossil fuels should be attempted and what should be used to substitute for fossil fuels in the areas of electricity generation and transportation?
Let us assume that you do not think that increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere will not lead to acceptable outcomes. Let us then assume that there is a need to reduce CO2 emissions. How do you suggest this reduction in CO2 emissions might be achieved in the areas of electricity generation and transportation?
Regardless of motivations I have my own thoughts on a transition away from the use fossil fuels in electricity generation and transportation and I happen to believe that this transition should be attempted sooner rather than later. What do you think?
edit: While I was composing this post, Peter was composing a response to Fred that provides some insight into his reasoning. Peter obviously thinks nuclear power is the solution to the CO2 and Peak FF problems. In that case my question to Peter becomes, how as a practical matter does the world transition to a nuclear future? How many plants will need to be built and at what cost? Another question is, what is the state of nuclear fuel reserves? How long will reserves of nuclear fuel last if nuclear power is used to replace all the fossil fuel sources of electricity worldwide. The last question is how would the spent fuel from all this be dealt with?
Island
Very sensible questions.
Firstly
https://simonkidd.wordpress.com/2010/08/12/if-i-were-you-i-wouldnt-start-from-here/
We have wasted 40 years failing to research non military nuclear power.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorium-based_nuclear_power
Hardly any money went into non military nuclear power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyr7jZOllI
The limitations of wind and solar are now obvious.
There is no need to guess what the limits are. Germany uses around 70,000MW at peak. It has installed a colossal amount of wind and solar, double peak consumption.
What does all this solar and wind produce?
Often for days at a time it produces 3% – 8%.
https://www.energy-charts.de/power.htm?source=conventional&year=2017&week=5
Only a moron cannot see that wind and solar are a small part of replacing coal and wind. If Germany doubled again what it has done in the last 20 years. There would be many days coal would required to produce 85% of consumption.
https://instituteforenergyresearch.org/analysis/france-germany-turn-coal/
Even if Germany increased wind and solar by 500% in the next 40 years. by the end of that it would still be using more coal than France does now.
Even if Germany increased wind and solar by 500% in the next 40 years. by the end of that it would still be using more coal than France does now.
ROFLMAO!
.
I find it strange that despite all the talk, there has been very little (nothing?) in the way of small, safe, modular nuclear reactors that do not produce spent fuel that contains weapons grade material. How long has this been talked about?
I am confident that it will be entirely possible to power most regions in the tropics with 100% renewables. However, as you point out, regions outside the tropics and this is true the further you move away from the tropics, have very real seasonal challenges that will have to be properly addressed. Maybe I should try and get my hands on the updated study from Jacobson et al and see how they propose to deal with the seasonal issues.
Finally, I must ask that anyone carrying out a discussion with me refrain from citing anything from the Institute for Energy Research. Some time ago, material from their web site was used in a discussion that portrayed a situation with subsidies that was the polar opposite of the situation portrayed by the Solar Energy Industries Association. Any bias on the part of the SEIA should be fairly obvious but, the IER hides behind a veil of “independence” despite having a very specific agenda. For reasons why I have a deep distrust of the IER see any of the following links:
https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Institute_for_Energy_Research
https://www.desmogblog.com/institute-energy-research
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/global-warming/climate-deniers/front-groups/institute-for-energy-research-ier-american-energy-alliance-aea/
http://www.kochvsclean.com/institute-for-energy-research/
I am not aware of any commonality between the interest in the founders of the IER and my own or any benefit from the activities of the Koch brothers or their affiliated companies or think tanks and I am definitely not on their payroll. Can you say the same?
BTW your ridiculous statement is only more hilarious when you read this from the IER website!
https://instituteforenergyresearch.org/legacy
IER Legacy Society – Energy For The Future
Welcome, to your Institute for Energy Research’s Legacy Society.
IER Legacy Society members are investors who have included the Institute for Energy Research in their will or estate plans.
Being a member is a great way to build your legacy for freedom and ensure that your Institute for Energy Research has the resources available to continue the fight for affordable, abundant, and reliable energy now and for future generations to come.
Members of our society are recognized for their loyalty and tremendous generosity, and receive special benefits such as invites to IER sponsored events and a personalized plaque in our Washington, DC office memorializing their commitment to America’s future.
To join, you must include your Institute for Energy Research in your will or estate plans. Below you will find some sample language that can be used…
… Together, we can build a legacy of prosperity fueled by American energy!
Now I understand your bullshit about China’s and Germany’s advances in renewable energy. You are just another MAGA fossil fuel troll. WTF does ‘American Energy’ even mean. Hint fossil fuels are not energy.
Hey Peter, read this article REEEEALLY SLOWLY!
https://www.ecowatch.com/china-ecological-civilization-2532760301.html
What Does China’s ‘Ecological Civilization’ Mean for Humanity’s Future?
By Jeremy Lent
Imagine a newly elected president of the United States calling in his inaugural speech for an “ecological civilization” that ensures “harmony between human and nature.” Now imagine he goes on to declare that “we, as human beings, must respect nature, follow its ways, and protect it” and that his administration will “encourage simple, moderate, green, and low-carbon ways of life, and oppose extravagance and excessive consumption.” Dream on, you might say. Even in the more progressive Western European nations, it’s hard to find a political leader who would make such a stand.
And yet, the leader of the world’s second largest economy, Xi Jinping of China, made these statements and more in his address to the National Congress of the Communist Party in Beijing last October. He went on to specify in more detail his plans to “step up efforts to establish a legal and policy framework … that facilitates green, low-carbon, and circular development,” to “promote afforestation,” “strengthen wetland conservation and restoration” and “take tough steps to stop and punish all activities that damage the environment.” Closing his theme with a flourish, he proclaimed that “what we are doing today” is “to build an ecological civilization that will benefit generations to come.” Transcending parochial boundaries, he declared that his Party’s abiding mission was to “make new and greater contributions to mankind … for both the well-being of the Chinese people and human progress.”
Fred Magyar, Sorry to inform you but massive battery packs are not renewable energy, they are a crutch that the renewable energies tend to rely on, and without it are rendered quite useless. Battery packs are very handy and useful in small tools etc but to power houses and cars; well we will first need to find cheaper and greener batteries.
If folks want to pick the low hanging fruit in stable renewable energy production then I suggest installing hydro turbines in the dams that once had power plants but have been taken out due to high cost of environmental regulations. You could start in my county, we’ve got at least 15 of these dams that are no longer running there hydro plants.
Batteries are energy storage devices, just as fossil fuels are, they store solar energy.
Lithium type batteries for cars and storage can now be produced for under $100/kWh and should soon be below $50/kwh. Hydropower consumes a lot of water through evaporation and destroys large swaths of ecosystems, , so batteries would be ideal for areas with low water availability and environmentally sensitive areas. Also hydropower locations are very limited across much of the globe, making other storage systems the only way to go. Batteries scale quite nicely, from home use to utility use.
Maybe you could tell us more about those dams that lost their hydropower due to regulations.
farmboy,
Before you decide to inform anyone about anything you should first, not jump to conclusions about what they already know and second at least take the trouble to inform yourself about the topic you purport to be informing about.
I see Gone Fishing has already addressed some of the more obvious points.
I am quite aware that battery packs are not a form of renewable energy but rather a temporary storage device for electrical energy, regardless of how that electricity is generated.
You claim:
Battery packs are very handy and useful in small tools etc but to power houses and cars; well we will first need to find cheaper and greener batteries.
Your lack of knowledge and the depth of your ignorance may be too deep to address in a short post.
I suggest you educate yourself a bit more before spouting nonsense. BTW, Lithium batteries are not the only game in town. Here’s another kind just as an example and there are others, try Google. Redflow ZCell batteries | Fully Charged
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OHstY_kKUY
While there is certainly a place for hydro power and pumped storage it is not necessarily always benign as GF has already mentioned. I spend a considerable time in Brazil I could write multiple dissertations on the downsides of large scale Hydro power there. Especially about the negative ecological consequences and things like methane release from thousands of square kilometers of rotting vegetation in the flooded areas!
https://ejatlas.org/conflict/belo-monte-dam-brazil
BTW, batteries in homes and EVs can be configured into microgrids and become virtual power plants when needed. Something like this:
https://electrek.co/2018/02/04/tesla-powerwall-solar-virtual-power-plant/
So thank you for being so informative!
Gonefishing and Fred I’m not finding the article that was in our local paper a couple of years ago. As I remember it pointed out the fact that the Sturgis dam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgis_Dam
(the only one left in our county still producing electricity was the only one of the many dams in my county that had to pay for an expensive environmental impact study every 3 years.
Notice, I didn’t say anything about building dams. I only suggested adding electric generating capacity to existing dams as a very reliable renewable base load. You would be hard pressed to find cheaper energy storage capacity then an already existing reservoir that was vital in creating some of the most expensive real estate in the county.
Here is the from the US Dept of Energy https://energy.gov/articles/energy-department-report-finds-major-potential-increase-clean-hydroelectric-power
Washington, D.C. — As part of President Obama’s all-out, all-of-the-above energy strategy, the Energy Department today released a renewable energy resource assessment detailing the potential to develop electric power generation at existing dams across the United States that aren’t currently equipped to produce power. The report estimates that without building a single new dam, these available hydropower resources, if fully developed, could provide an electrical generating capacity of more than 12 gigawatts (GW), equivalent to roughly 15 percent of current U.S. hydropower capacity.
I just think back to all the money I’ve spent on batteries over the years from screw guns to electric forklifts. None of this had much of anything to do with renewable energy. These days I use a battery to store energy from a small solar panel in a remote location on the farm, since the sun doesn’t shine during the long night and the panel doesn’t do a good job till I clean off the snow. So in my mind the battery is vital but still very expensive. I would hate to have to pay for enough of them to run even my mini farm during the winter off of solar. So when you act like its some great stuff that musk saves the day with his batteries it makes a sane guy feel like puking, All I see is all the money ( representing massive amounts of fossil energy ) being spent to support the grid. Why not just bring in some diesel generators? So long as you want to waste less fossil fuels. But then again if your goal is popularity with the naive masses then sure; bring in the power packs.
At utilty scale… If your goal is saving money, you install batteries. If your goal is wasting money, you install diesel generators.
But don’t believe me. Believe investment bank Lazard.
Take it from another farmer, one probably a lot older than you, Farmboy.
When I saw my first transistor radio, it cost a farm hand over a weeks pay and would only get a couple of AM stations within ten miles. The sound quality was pathetic, and it ATE batteries. It was half the size of a common brick.
Now you can buy a very nice little featherweight radio for an hour’s work at minimum wage, and it sounds great and a battery lasts at least a couple of weeks, using it all day.
The price of batteries will be coming down by half within the next five years, and will probably continue to come down for a long time after that.
But it’s nevertheless true that we will be using quite a lot of coal and gas fired electricity for a long time to come, probably another thirty or forty years in my own personal opinion.
Sometimes pro renewable people tend to forget that the more renewable we build, the MORE VALUABLE the last of the coal and gas fired legacy plants will be, because they will enable us to get along just fine, without OVERBUILDING the wind, solar, battery and other storage industries to such a great extent.
The amount of pollution created by running a few gas plants here and there to supplement the wind and solar out put beyond what can be stored won’t really matter, because we won’t have to run these plants more than a day or two once in a while………twenty years from now.
We can solve at least half the electrical energy storage problem by changing our ways. You’ve made hay all your life when the sun’s out, right?
Within another ten years, it’s going to be common practice to build a new house with two by eight framing instead of two by four. It costs only a tiny bit more, but this one step significantly cuts the cost of heating and air conditioning the house for the life of the house……
If I were building new today, I wouldn’t need more than a quarter of the energy I use now for heating and air conditioning to be just as comfortable.
And if I were just a decade younger, I would buy myself a ratted out Nissan Leaf, and go ahead and put in the solar panels I have delayed buying for the last five or six years to charge it, and cut my use of gasoline by eighty percent.
The reason I have been delaying the purchase of the panels……… the obvious fact that they are getting so much cheaper so fast that I am saving actual cash money by delaying the purchase from one year to the next. I could get five or six hundred dollars worth of juice out of the system I want, annually, at the price I pay my utility. But the price of the system is dropping by MORE than that every year.
And every year I delay the purchase, I can get a bigger and better system that will produce more for the same money.
The whole argument against renewable energy is worse than the Lilliputians arguing over which end of the egg to crack. In this case the argument is over consuming a dirty rotten poisonous egg and one that is clean, fresh and wholesome. To anyone that is not a moron, the answer would be obvious. Consume the fresh one and toss the nasty one in the garbage.
Beside all the other problems with coal and it’s cousins, with both poles getting 50 w/m2 extra energy now and the large oceans in between getting a few watts/m2 increased energy due to coal power and it’s ilk, I would think that people would be gung ho to do just about anything to not put their heads into the guillotine of fossil fuel power generation. Nope, they go willingly, even joyfully to their doom, saying Nay all the way. In fact they even invent new delusional ways to pretend they are solving the problems.
The problem with being negative is it can be a self-fulfilling prophesy. Luckily, the money is flowing in the right direction in many areas. Even the US is making progress, despite the buggy whip leadership.
I suspect the turtles will survive. They always seem to make it. Lots of jellyfish to eat and when the billion hooks, nets and traps are gone, the fish population will grow again. From their point of view the naysayers and anti-progressives are probably the best thing to happen.
The problem with being childishly optimistic is often worse.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ95ffnU4Sw
So what was optimistic about what I just said? Peter you are a shining example to all incandescent bulb users.
As far as being childish, ask a child sometime if he or she wants a wrecked and toxic world to live in. You won’t learn anything, but the answer will irritate you.
As electrically driven robots and machinery steadily take over human jobs, should we be unhappy about that? Should we be sorry that civilization needs robots, whether they be human or machine. The dehumanization of the world is progress, best for humans to get out of the way, stand on their own two feet and find new ways to live outside the meme of mechanized/industrial/military 1 percent making.
Why bother designing robots when you can reduce human beings to machines? Last week, Amazon acquired a patent for a wristband that can track the hand movements of workers. If this technology is developed, it could grant companies almost total control over their workforce.
A fortnight ago the Guardian interviewed a young man called Aaron Callaway, who works nights in an Amazon warehouse. He has to place 250 items an hour into the right carts. His work, he says, is so repetitive, antisocial and alienating that “I feel like I’ve lost who I was … My main interaction is with the robots.” And this is before the wristbands might be deployed.
http://www.monbiot.com/2018/02/09/revolt-of-the-robots/
In this inverted world called civilization the best things we do go unrewarded and the worst that people do often make them rich and powerful. Maybe the machines will free some of the people and we can think of new ways to reward the best in us, the helpful and the kind.
Last week, Amazon acquired a patent for a wristband that can track the hand movements of workers. If this technology is developed, it could grant companies almost total control over their workforce.
Let the wristband track all the middle finger salutes they will get!
There are many jobs that use time tracking on both output of the worker and time spent. It’s been a wage slave world for a while (since leaving the farm) and in many places it got a lot worse. People tend to invent the most hellish and dehumanizing systems and call them progress (mostly progress in the owner’s bank accounts).
Thomas Edison invented the modern machine driven production line in the 1880’s (that is where his buddy Ford got the ideas) with his iron mine. He actually made the work easier for the employees and gave them safety equipment to use. The idea was to reduce the number of workers needed. He got conned for a while but caught on and dumped the extra workers that had been brought on. The whole system was mechanized from mining to transport to crushing, separation, warehousing (one of his employees invented the conveyor belt with automatic location dumping for the operation) and loading on railcars.
There is a certain point where the tools and machines are helpers and then the point is crossed where they are the taskmasters. Now they just eliminate most of the workers completely, like Edison envisioned. Eventually they will eliminate all the workers and people will be free, since there will be no thought of getting a job like that, they won’t exist. Of course in reality it is the business owners and managers who are eliminating the workers to avoid costs and liabilities. The machines are being built because there is a demand for them.
“Coal and gas power plants have worked very well for a hundred and fifty years without any help from wind.”
And now they become economic basket cases. What do you suggest?
Maybe this?
>> New Mark Z. Jacobson Study Draws A Roadmap To 100% Renewable Energy <<
https://cleantechnica.com/2018/02/08/new-jacobson-study-draws-road-map-100-renewable-energy/
You beat me to it. I just posted the same suggestion up thread in a reply to Ulenspiegel, I also included a link to the PDF file 😉
Ya gotta love a praying mantis with 3D glasses!
https://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/blogs/why-praying-mantis-wearing-tiny-glasses
‘Completely new form of 3-D vision’ found in praying mantises
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=V36Dpo9wPLg
Miniature glasses have revealed a new form of 3D vision in praying mantises that could lead to simpler visual processing for robots.
The Newcastle University team have discovered that mantis 3D vision works differently from all previously known forms of biological 3D vision.
Find out more: http://bit.ly/2EvBljm
.
Hi Fred,
I seem to have come across this already, so it may be old news. In any case, it’s certainly intriguing.
Incidentally, if you drive your car less, you’ll likely ‘bug’ mantises less.
Thanks Fred, I always thought dragonflies were somewhat unique also. Maybe they should check dragonfly vision too.
I always thought dragonflies were somewhat unique also
Oh yeah! Lot’s of research on dragonfly eyes and vision. After mantises they rank right up there as among my favorite insects. They are voracious consumers of mosquitoes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knlXTU1R_rE
Sky Hunters, The World of the Dragonfly – The Secrets of Nature
The great dragonfly migration
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WNDWYW4yWEM
“Conservation is already lost when it enters the world of corporate finance, banking, economic trade-offs and commensuration of all values.” ~ Clive Splash
Environmentalism and Democracy in the Age of Nationalism & Corporate Capitalism
The Peace Fallacy
So you write… Any examples?
I’m relatively familiar with them and much of them questionably amount to using the current ‘paradigm’ to change itself.
Anyone doing some research in that regard may find some of my own comments/critiques/criticisms attached or nearby explaining/illustrating as such.
The Lost Art of Lashing
https://www.ziptiedomes.com/
Hi Long’,
I think you would agree that that could be done with more natural and local stuff like hemp/etc. rope and bamboo or wood, so more community-/self-empowering/re-empowering, rather than relying on the corporates/synthetics/patents/etc..
There’re also reciprocal designs and whatnot too of course.
In any case, it’s nevertheless inspiring, because of the leveraging of the status-quo somewhat against itself aspect, so thanks for sharing.
Hi Coffeeguyzz,
(From earlier, hope everyone is ok about the long post)
I think you are right that ten fingers is not enough to point.
I think you are right that Australia’s specific situation can be highly instructive.
I also think you would enjoy reading the 20 page report “A DICTIONARY ON ELECTRICITY. A joint project of CIGRE (The International Conference on Large High Voltage Electrical Systems) and AHEF (The Association for the History of Electricity in France) Contribution on AUSTRALIA
prepared for the Australian National Committee of CIGRE by a Panel under the General Editorship of Frank Brady AM 1996” which gives a great overview of the development of the Australian Grid up to 1996.
You can find it at http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r10/nsw/subpages/history/electricity_in_australia.pdf
From Victoria’s perspecive I found this at the end of the section on Electro-Metallurgical Industries to be interesting –
A section on electricity prices provides a graph of average real electricity prices and comments –
Then in a section on restructuring of the industry we get-
And 20 years later the outcome seems to be the owners decided not to install more capacity and are now the winners, with the large industrial buyers and residential customers the losers.
And to finish off for Old Farmer Mac, I found out in the section “Serving the Outback”, that “Many of Australia’s remote areas are served by Single Wire Earth Return (SWER) lines and their total length of 186,000 km is now (in 1996) four times the combined circuit length of all high voltage lines from 132 kV to 500 kV.” But I’ve still got no idea what the people along these lines pay for their electricity!
Phil
I just downloaded that piece, skimmed through it, and will read it more thoroughly in the coming days.
Thanks for the link.
Couple of observations ..
This whole field of electricity production, transmission, and consumption can be as fascinating as it is crucial to modern life.
Yet, as significant as it all is, most people do not give it a second thought as long as the light turns on after the switch is flipped and the monthly cost not exorbitant.
That such is the status quo throughout most modern societies bespeaks to the fact that the overall industry must have been somewhat effective in “delivering the goods” for a long time now.
Alas, much change is underway that is eroding this state of affairs and a great deal of acrimony is building as to the causes and cures.
Case in point, Australia is one of the world’s largest producers of bauxite, core material for the energy-intensive product of aluminum.
By making available low cost electricity, Oz can capture the downstream process of changing raw bauxite into the far more valuable aluminum.
Theoretically, downstream users (manufacturers) could greatly benefit from being near the feedstock material – aluminum – and also inexpensive electricity to produce finished goods higher up the value chain.
In somewhat of a contrast that shows this point, a tiny island way up in the north Atlantic contains zero bauxite.
Yet, due to its copius abundance of cheap electricity, Iceland is one of the world’s largest producers of aluminum.
This exact dynamic is unfolding at warp speed in the Appalachian Basin area in the US and nearby regions.
Foxconn is hiring 1,000 employees in 2018 in Wisconsin to get a head start for when their multibillion dollar plant comes online in a few years.
The rock bottom cost of ethylene, propylene and other materials with which they use to manufacture high end goods is buttressed by rock bottom (6 to 8 cents per kilowatt hour) cost of electricity which is assured reliable delivery by the massive build out (25 huge CCGT plants and counting) that are being located in this area.
The bottom, bottom line, Phil, is that electricity, fuel, heat, energy, are all inextricably intertwined in our personal and global affairs to an extent many might not recognize.
The more education (sans the ideological, political, personal vitriol) that the general public chooses to obtain, the more a balanced, effective future might be realized.
Skeptic that I am, I fear much collective pain is yet to be had before any corners are turned.
WASTEFUL WEALTHY PUT CAPE TOWN ON BRINK OF WATER CRISIS
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/world/wasteful-wealthy-put-cape-town-on-brink-of-water-crisis-5b6ps23mw (paywall)
And yet somehow we are all going to work together to solve climate change, overpopulation, peak everything etc.???
And yet somehow we are all going to work together to solve climate change, overpopulation, peak everything etc.???
Probably not!
I was in São Paulo, Brazil for 7 months during the worst of the drought in 2015 and witnessed first hand, how the ‘wealthy’ continued to use more than their fair share of the limited water supply, while the underprivileged suffered the consequences leading to civil unrest. It’s one thing to read about this in the news and quite another to stand on the banks of one of the bone dry reservoirs from which a city such as São Paulo gets its water.
But the real problem is the continued lack of political will in Brazil and around the globe to address the root causes such as deforestation for agriculture and ignoring major issues like climate change!
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/28/sao-paulo-water-amazon-deforestation
Cities São Paulo live
The Amazon effect: how deforestation is starving São Paulo of water
A drought two years ago triggered fighting, looting and official ‘states of calamity’ across the metropolis, with the army preparing to send in troops. Now, new warnings suggest it could happen again – and point to a surprising culprit
São Paulo could face more devastating water shortages if farmers continue to clear the Amazon forest, warns the utility chief who recently steered the biggest city in the Americas from the edge of drought catastrophe.
Jerson Kelman, president of water company Sabesp, told Guardian Cities he felt a duty to speak out because he was a citizen as well as the head of a company who had seen firsthand how close this metropolis of 21 million people had come to a breakdown.
“We should not transform the Amazon into pastureland,” he said in an interview. “The Amazon creates a movement of water. If you could follow a molecule of water you would see that most of the clouds that are over São Paulo have passed across the Amazon. If the forest is cut, we’ll be in trouble.”
What gets me is the politicians and economists who continue to glibly talk about providing basic sustenance for an additional 3.5 billion people in the next 30 years or so…
‘Pau que nasce torto, morre torto’
I found this translation on line but find it lacking in many ways.
‘As the twig is bent, so is the tree inclined’
My own would be: ‘A sapling born crooked, dies crooked’ with the implication that it lived a normal life span as a crooked tree spreading its bad seed all over.
No, we’re not all going to work together. Communities which do the right thing will be better off than communities like Cape Town, where the rich will probably be hanged with their own entrails.
SEA ICE TRACKING LOW IN BOTH HEMISPHERES
January of 2018 began and ended with satellite-era record lows in Arctic sea ice extent, resulting in a new record low for the month. Combined with low ice extent in the Antarctic, global sea ice extent is also at a record lows.
http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
Funny you should bring that up just as I posted my NH snow cover graphs and analysis. Great minds ….
Snow is just so sensitive or soon no snow in the Arctic summer on a planet near you
Snow cover in the northern hemisphere (NH) peaks in January at near 50 million km2 and starts falling within that month. Snow at the lowest latitude range is always at the edge of melting and snow at higher latitudes sublimates if it doesn’t turn to ice. Decrease in snow cover quickly reached 10 to 12 million km2/month so that the April average is already down to 30 km2.
The graph (data sourced from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab) shows monthly averages across almost 6 decades (right through 2017). The uppermost graph is April. All months show a negative slope with time, there is less snow cover as the years pass. Linear trend lines have been added to give an approximation of the negative slope, though as one can see yoy variations are large.
Of particular interest is that lately (from 2007 onward) both July and August have flatlined. Their values are not zero mostly due to Greenland refusing to melt on an annual basis and probably some high mountain areas in the NH. Basically, there is no snow cover for two months of the year in the NH, all the way to the Arctic Ocean.
June snow cover does not look far behind in heading toward flatlining for the month’s average.
The significance of this is that the only thing keeping Greenland from melting away quickly is it’s altitude. If Greenland ice cap was removed, it would not regrow but would become an annual winter snow cover just like the rest of the Arctic land . Considering that the region and the globe is on a warming trajectory, even the altitude of the ice cap will not save it. The altitude is merely slowing the process by chilling the top of the ice cap by more than 20C. The Greenland Ice sheet resisted the peak Holocene temperature 10,000 years ago, though it was probably slightly smaller in size. Now it has to resist another temperature rise. As far as albedo change goes, it is fairly insignificant compared to Arctic Ocean and snow cover changes, probably the altitude is more important to cooling the planet. The caveat is that the Arctic is predicted to get much warmer than during peak Holocene times and we do not know how stable the ice sheet actually is meaning it might add a few meters to sea level. Since it mostly disappeared in the Eemian, let that be your guide.
Snow Cover Extent Declines in the Arctic
In the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, snow typically covers the land surface for nine months each year. The snow serves as a reservoir of water, and a reflector of the Sun’s energy, but recent decades have witnessed significant changes in snow cover extent. Studies of snow cover published in Geophysical Research Letters and the Arctic Report Card: Update for 2012 found that, between 1979 and 2012, June snow cover extent decreased by 17.6 percent per decade compared to the 1979–2000 average.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=80102
Since water is becoming an issue, here’s a look at water and agriculture in California.
https://story.californiasunday.com/resnick-a-kingdom-from-dust
That was a great story. Organized food forests growing in the deserts and the people that make them work, an amazing yet strange tale. They have abundant sunlight, but only occasionally abundant rain (about once every five to seven years if I recall correctly). We all know the region is running on borrowed time and definitely on life support. Salt buildup in the soil, extended “droughts” (drought in a desert is an oxymoron). It just does not seem an appropriate place to do extensive agriculture. Yet it is done and the water resources keep falling.
As I read the story, mental pictures of ghost towns with dust blowing and shutters clacking in the wind went through my head. How long until this region turns back to nature? It appears very dry and desolate now.
Here’s the solution to their problem! Of course they need the industrial drums of it…
.
Nope, we need to shrink all the people to an inch or two high. That would cure most of the problems right away.
No worries!
Aquifers are practically infinite! We have lot’s of coal to power irrigation pumps and climate change is a hoax!
And last but not least…
.
You are absolutely correct.
No problema! 10 billion starving humans will have solar panels and electric cars!
Anyway, allowing the benefit of doubt that you’re feigning ignorance for the sake of humor, ri-i-ight?, I’ll nevertheless mention that permaculture in part leverages swales, land contouring and specific kinds of plantings for natural rainwater capture, retention and management.
See also their project, ‘Greening The Desert‘.
If there are any peak oil people left out there or just about anyone who doesn’t like battery storage, here is adiabatic hydrostor terra, a more efficient and scalable way to use compressed air as an energy storage system.
The system, called Hydrostor Terra, uses electricity when it’s plentiful to compress air and send it underneath the ground into a specially constructed tank. While the system is compressing the air, it also takes the heat generated by the compressors and stores it in a thermal management system. Then, when electricity is in short supply, the Terra system sends that compressed air back up from underground and heats the surfacing air stream using the heat that was captured in the compressing process. The heated air moves a turbo-expander connected to a generator, which creates electricity.
https://hydrostor.ca/
Since air is generally available at low cost, if we don’t mind putting holes in the ground and adding some water, it looks like a way to provide local power from solar and wind overage periods. The other advantage is if there are ever any leaks, it’s just air which is mostly harmless (except to fish). Air can burn but usually needs some kind of fuel and water does not provide that, so safer than lithium batteries.
(lithium fire study of toxic gases produced beside the intense heat or explosion; https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-017-09784-z)
Of course far into the future the holes we make could collapse causing an occasional problem if one is standing on top of the cavity and plunks down into the water filled tanks. Humans are great at setting traps for the future, like nuclear power waste, CO2 production, chemicals, dams and tall buildings.
When you can’t trust the ground under your feet or under your house.
http://www.hiddenglasgow.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=15&t=12837
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/mans-house-falls-into-old-mine-shaft-1092897.html
Still the cheapest energy is the watt or BTU we avoid. So avoid the void by avoiding waste.
ROTFLMAO
From time to time there are some really harebrained schemes proposed on this list. I usually ignore them with nothing more than a chuckle. But this one takes the cake. It is the funniest damn thing I have read in many months.
Thanks, Fish, for the comic relief.
Thanks, any time Patt. 🙂
More laughs for you.
Adiabatic Method
A much higher efficiency of up to 70% can be achieved if the heat of compression is recovered and used to reheat the compressed air during turbine operations because there is no longer any need to burn extra natural gas to warm up the decompressed air. An international consortium headed by the German energy company RWE is currently working on the development of the necessary components and the heat storage. The pilot plant is scheduled to start operations in 2018. Thermal oil and molten salt storage is being investigated in the US.
http://energystorage.org/compressed-air-energy-storage-caes
In periods with surplus of electrical power, an electrically-driven compression
train compresses ambient air from atmospheric pressure up to 70 bars. The
compressor discharge temperature can exceed 600 °C. Downstream, the
compression train the hot air is sent to a TES which is designed for the applied
internal pressure and which is sufficiently insulated to minimise heat energy
losses. In the regenerator type TES hot air passes ceramic, concrete or natural
rock materials, while its heat is transferred to the storage inventory. Alternatively,
TES systems (based on thermo-oil, molten salt, etc.) can be applied as well. The
cooled air is then injected under pressure into the cavern.
In discharge operation, the air will leave the cavern and pass through the TES
before being applied to an expansion turbine coupled to a generator, without the
need for co-firing any fuel.
Projected units will have a storage capacity of one billion watt-hours (GWh) and
generate electrical power of about 200 megawatt. Generally, the size of the
heat storage requires a multi-train system design; so as a first step, smallerscale
demonstrators will be built. However, given the fact that the performance
of A-CAES is achieved applying economies of scale, the smallest possible
demonstrator will still be in the range close to 100 MW of power.
http://ease-storage.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/EASE_TD_ACAES.pdf
You forgot to add a couple of these to the mix…
https://zeropollutionmotors.us/
AIRPod 2.0 Compressed Air-Powered Car
They ain’t kidding! That is one seriously compressed car 😉
.
I always liked bumper cars at the amusement parks when I was a kid. This one seriously looks like it would flip easily and get blown over in high cross winds.
There have been a number of compressed air cars built. They have a huge advantage in regenerative braking efficiency over electric vehicles making them ideal for stop and go traffic such as city or delivery modes.
From back in 2004, these would have been our peak oil vehicles.
https://newatlas.com/go/3523/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSkQFMifmPo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztFDqcu8oJ4
Now we have EV’s that cost twice as much or more. Good choice, eh?
We all know that the snow in the northern hemisphere is mostly in the winter but how much is it really and at what times of year? I plotted weekly snow cover values from the Rutgers Global Snow Lab for four different years from their data list. I chose the first at random and then went decadal from there. Mostly I was looking for the shape and timing of snow cover curve, not an intensive study of the changes over time. I marked the solstices and equinoxes for reference.
Found a few interesting characteristics. Notice that the slope of the melt (spring) is -2.3 and the slope of the snow build up in autumn is much steeper at 4, which makes physical sense. Also, the snow build-up appears to have oscillations every 3-4 weeks. Winter peak is about 6 to 7 weeks long (time above 46 million km2) and summer minimum is about 10 weeks long (time below 4 million km2).
Minimum snow value is about 2 million km2 due to Greenland and some high mountains.
Snow/ice where I live is melting again (new snow cover for less than a week) with lots of rain and highs in the mid-forties (F). If the pattern stays, highs might get below freezing again next week.
The cost of solar PV. For home installations the $0.35/watt for the panel turns into $2.80/watt by the time it is installed.
Utility scale can get down near $1 per watt installed.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy17osti/68925.pdf
Thanks for the update. There’s a lot of room to cut “sales & marketing”, “overhead”, and “supply chain costs”. I believe Tesla is working on knocking out all three, through:
— cross-marketing for solar at their car stores;
— economies of scale for the overhead;
— vertical integration for the supply chain costs.
They shouold be able to knock a solid 50 cents off the cost per watt, though I’d bet they’ll put it right into net profit.
I think we are being taken for a ride here in the US.
It would make a very interesting case study in microeconomics, actually.
There are hundreds of companies at every level of the solar industry, competing ruthlessly… and the result is that prices are *much higher* than they should be. What’s going on?
The companies are all blowing so much on marketing costs to steal market share from their competitors that *they’re raising the prices*. This is probably happening right down the entire supply chain.
This is a “bad equilibrium”. The first company to stop advertising will be able to cut its prices, but it’s afraid that if it stops advertising, the other guys will get more business…
Advertising is the culprit here. If they formed a cartel and agreed to advertise solar jointly and distribute the customers between themselves, prices would actually go *down*.
Although the following is far afield from the normal discourse on these threads (and I am well aware of Mr. Patterson’s antipathy towards ‘conspiracy’ labelled data), there is a 3+ month long internet phenomena swirling around a mysterious character known as Q, or Qanon.
The past few days postings on the internet message board 8chan – alongside verifiable contemporary events, might lead one to conclude the coming days/weeks may be amongst the most disruptive in our times.
I’ll not go into lengthy explanations/justifications for my above statement, but rather leave it to individuals to do their own research and draw their own conclusions.
I will say, that as a voracious speed reader with an eidetic memory, most of this cryptic individual’s (group’s?) references are valid, leaving me to conclude that this source is the ‘real deal’.
Accept the possibilities or dismiss as entirely farcial as you so choose, but – and it is a huge ‘but’ – should this be a valid presentation of an ongoing, unreported series of events, we are in for one heck of a ride.
a mysterious character known as Q,
Really? Seriously? I was hoping it was someone’s idea of a parody of Q from Star Trek…
Q is a fictional character in Star Trek appearing in the Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager series, as well as in related media. In all of these programs, he is portrayed by John de Lancie. He is an extra-dimensional being of unknown origin who is unconstrained by, and possesses immeasurable power over, normal human notions of time, space, the laws of physics, and even reality itself, being capable of violating or altering any or all of them in unpredictable ways with a casual thought or hand gesture, limited only by his imagination.
Oh Yeah, Alex Jones of InfoWars fame says it’s all true so I guess that settles it.
Nothing more to see here folks, move along now! No offense, but Jesus Fucking Christ!!! has everyone lost all touch with reality? What the fuck happened to critical thinking skills? No, I’m not ranting at coffeeguyzz, personally. This is just a general What The Fuck?! is wrong with everybody?
I guess since I’m under the impression that everyone in the world has lost their minds it must mean that the problem is me, right?
For balance, I went for a walk this afternoon, down to a park where I sometimes launch my kayak. I watched the invasive Monitor lizards sunning themselves by the dock. Then observed a medium sized Needlenose hunting minnows and then this bright orange patch on the side of a floating dock caught my eye. I knelt down and enjoyed a few moments of sanity watching a micro ecosystem in 3 inches of water. Here’s a part of the view. Enjoy a moment of sanity without conspiracy theories. I don’t know the species but I think it is a bryozoan colony.
.
Fred, there is a lot more mental illness out there than most people know about and there are also a lot of predators willing to take advantage of delusional people and people having psychotic episodes. So be kind to them if you can, many cannot help themselves. Others realize too late that they have embarrassed themselves or done harm to relationships.
Otherwise just avoid them once signs of delusion become visible.
Otherwise just avoid them once signs of delusion become visible.
Yeah, that works OK when you are dealing with an individual or two here and there. Not so much when you are dealing with large segments of society collectively.
QAnon Post Alleges Treason By Adam Schiff
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a2TzSccf6PQ
This is almost worth watching till the end just to see the sales pitch for the 60 day supply of ‘BODEASE’!
INFOWARS LIFE BodEase. … Hundreds of peer reviewed scientific articles are published every year on the chemistry and therapeutic potential of Turmeric and its active constituents. … Our super powerful extract used in BodEase contains over 95% of the active ingredients in Turmeric!
It’s curry powder for Christ’s sake! Just go to an Indian restaurant!
Enjoy!
Fred said “Not so much when you are dealing with large segments of society collectively. ”
Who are we to point the finger of madness at others when we ourselves belong to the only species that deems itself outside of nature and does so much to prove it with acts of utter destruction and chaos?
And the horrible habits we have, too disgusting to put down here.
sarc
Which is precisely why I enjoy my quite time with colonies of Bryozoans… I also like our Ascidian cousins, sessile organism when adults, they jettison their notochords (precursors to spinal columns) after transitioning from their free swimming larval stage to settle down as literally mindless filtering organisms that concentrate vanadium in their tissues. Much more pleasant company than most humans 😉
Humans are quite trying theses days.
I do my best, but need some down time.
And I thought it was just that we developed a high degree of imagination that led to all those beliefs. We need to believe in what does not exist in order to create something that never existed before. Or maybe it was the other way around, supernatural beliefs then invention, the order does not matter much, the result was us. It must have had some survival advantage, certainly slowed us down so we had to compensate with weapons and traps.
https://aeon.co/ideas/belief-in-supernatural-beings-is-totally-natural-and-false
have never ordered that bodese or other kind of stuff from alex.. but wifey an me watch infowars all the time for news.. joyce’s power hour is a better one for you to get health info from tho..
Uh, yeah. OK, so, to be clear, anyone (such as “QAnon”) making the quoted allegation is just a Republican operative spreading lies for profit. That’s nothing new, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has been spreading lies for profit since at least the 1960s, and Fox News is devoted to spreading lies for profit, and so is Breitbart.
It’s also worth noting how psychological projection operates. When a Republican starts talking about their fear of people having sex with animals… he’s having sex with animals. When a Republican starts accusing someone of lying… it means the Republican is lying. When a Republican starts accusing someone of treason… it means the Republican has committed treason. It’s surprisingly consistent.
” … lost all touch with reality. … critical thinking skills.”
Just so …
Over a multi year period in the early 2000s, 2 Pennsylvania judges – Mark Ciavarella and Michael Conahan – routinely sent troubled teens to incarceration facilities in which they had a financial interest, despite – in numerous instances – probation officials strongly recommending against incarceration.
Included amongst the several damaged young lives was first time teen offender Ed Kenzakoski who committed suicide.
I’ve often pondered the entrapped anguish that must have surrounded so many of these families as they protested that “Something is not right here”, while years elapsed before the Official Narrative validated their “conspiratorial” claims.
This should not be construed that I believe the Q presentations are legitimate.
In fact, I am uncertain if this is an appropriate forum to relay this info.
But the tempo and content these past several days portend something large and immanent may be afoot.
And, as a PS to those who choose to view historical events with an open mind, elderly naval Captain Ward Boston provided a succinct affidavit in 2004 regarding an earlier report that has significant impact this very day.
To discover one has been deceived is extraordinarily disorienting, enough to – literally – cause one to lose their mind.
I’ve often pondered the entrapped anguish that must have surrounded so many of these families as they protested that “Something is not right here”, while years elapsed before the Official Narrative validated their “conspiratorial” claims.
Right!
Case in point, not many people took the complaints from young women gymnasts, of abuse by Dr. Larry Nasser, seriously either. Yet they have been vindicated recently. In many cases not even the parents of the girls believed them at the time. But it is easy to understand in retrospect why a medical doctor might have been given the benefit of the doubt over any impressionable young woman without the power to or means to prove that what they were saying was true. A bit of critical thinking and a general understanding as to how our society functions and how it has treated women goes a long way in helping to understand why a male doctor was able to pull the wool over they eyes of so many adults more than willing to believe him.
Now that is quite a ways from anyone taking someone like Alex Jones seriously as a legitimate source about a conspiracy that supposedly involves multiple US administrations. Just a simple application of Occam’s razor should raise numerous red flags considering the total number of people that would have to be in on such a conspiracy.
The premise is simply not even remotely credible given even minimal knowledge about human nature and group dynamics.
Is it possible to conceive of a couple of bad apple judges with financial interests being greedy or a single pedophile doctor acting pretty much alone behind the scenes, yes, it might happen and it obviously did.Is it possible there were some who even suspected something was wrong, very probably.
That’s still a scenario that is a million light years from believing in a deep state conspiracy spanning multiple US administrations from both parties.
To put it another way, Adolf Hitler did not rise to power because of some secret society putting him there. He was duly elected with the full support of the German people. Bad things happen in the course of history and democracies are fragile and often fail. The US is not special nor immune to the vagaries of history.
Trump is a despicable person with authoritarian tendencies and he is a very big threat to the institutions of this country because he is so narcissitic, dishonest, gullible, greedy for personal gain and easily manipulated. He believes the crap spewed by Fox News and the likes of Alex Jones.
Qanon’s Storm is a about as idiotic a conspiracy story as I have ever heard. Which is not much of a consolation if there are large numbers of people who believe the story!
Snap out of it already!
Elon Musk’s offer of a one way trip to Mars is starting to sound more and more like a reasonable option…
Mars? Antarctica would be cheaper and more habitable. And BTW way way greener than a massive cloud of rocket smoke.
Methinks your sarcasm recognition gene is defective!
Hint, one way ticket is a good option…
Anyways Antarctica is still not far enough away from most humans.
It’s good you brought up Alex Jones, we discussed him already in the last blog thread. Since Alex’s contract for his TV network ended on the big communications dish we have thought maybe he’ll take Info Wars to the small dish’s soon, because more people can watch there. Also then he can be closer to the Christian TV channel’s and bible based university classes you get on the small dish.
Here’s something OFM might find interesting:
Looking For A Deal? Buy A Used EV
Cars like the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt aren’t as expensive as you think.
If you’re in the market for an EV, you know that some of them can pricey with options. We’re looking at you, Tesla. But the reality of its is, not all electric cars garner premium price tags over their gasoline counterparts. There are more than a few options that will still give you the efficiency you’re looking for without breaking the bank.
According to Autolist, most buyers think that a quality EV will cost on average about $5,000 more than a standard gas-powered vehicle – but that’s just not true. In a survey of 1,249 vehicle owners, with listing data derived from a live market analysis of over 17,738 vehicles, the website found that most EVs aren’t nearly as expensive as you think.
It is my considered opinion that we (worldwide) are in a period with regard to EVs that I can only describe as Cinderella like or a Twilight Zone. Let me explain.
Right now the current crop of EVs, those produced since the Nissan Leaf and Chevy Volt were launched in December 2010, are mostly quite capable and useful cars for many people. If an EV is part of a two (or more) car family there are tons of journeys where the EV is fine leaving longer distance jaunts for the ICE. In other words, for most two car households, an EV would be a no brainer.
On the other hand EVs are still somewhat hobbled by a dearth of public charging stations. While the number of stations is growing at a brisk rate and will, I suspect vastly outnumber the number of gas stations, particularly in developed countrty markets, we are not there yet. The number of private charging points already vastly outnumbers gas stations if one counts every electrical outlet in a garage as a potential charging point. An often overlooked fact by most people is that a 240V outlet, such as those used by dryers or electric stoves is usually good enough to charge most EVs overnight. A standard 120V, 15 A outlet is only good for about 1800 W but, in countries with a 220-240 V single phase grid voltage, a standard 15 Amp outlet is good enough for 3 kW overnight charging of a Nissan Leaf for example. 30A 240V circuits can charge an EV at rates of about 6 kW with no issues. This means that most EVs, Teslas excepted, should be fine for partial or complete overnight charging in garages. The thing is that these facts are not widely understood, or accepted.
The end result is that we have a situation where EVs are still being viewed as oddities, not “real” cars. This will not last. As EVs continue to increase market share (50% in Norway for December 2017, ~ 1% most other markets) and people get more used to the idea of driving an idea of driving an EV the value proposition of an EV will improve. As people start to see more charging points in the places that park their cars while out on the road, places like stores, restaurants, offices and malls, the reluctance to buy EVs will fade. Workplace charging will also help and making charging available a “Park and Ride” locations might help as well.
The end result is that used EVs are currently quite a good deal, with the exception of early Nissan Leafs with the battery that degrade rapidly in hot climates. Older Nissan Leafs with degraded batteries will need a battery replacement sooner rather than later and the Nissan replacement scheme in that case will cost about $5k.
The wild card is fuel prices. If fuel prices rise EVs will be acceptable to a lot more people a lot faster. In my neck of the woods, I hope to acquire a used EV courtesy of the Japanese domestic market by late March or thereabouts. At the rate fuel prices have been moving around here, I may well be able to sell it for more than I paid for it after a few months.
Great analysis, islandboy.
I should point out that an electric stove outlet (50 amp, 240 volt) is good enough to recharge a Tesla overnight (and is in fact what Tesla recommends). So really there are a gazillion places to charge. It is odd that people still worry about this.
Who created Bitcoin? Hint: It’s not who you think
One third. 1/3rd.
Thats what I am hoping for and think will be a game changer.
1/3rd improvement in the cost or performance of batteries for vehicles.
And perhaps solid state technology will be the ticket.
I eagerly await the production and sale of such stuff.
How would you deploy a 1/3rd improvement? Lower cost? Smaller size or weight?
For me, I would choose to keep the same performance and cost (as, say, a Chevy Bolt) but increase the vehicle size by 1/3rd. Sign me up.
Perhaps this company from Mass. will be the one. Ionic Materials.
http://ionicmaterials.com/news/
Or Panasonic.
https://insideevs.com/panasonic-teslas-battery-partner-upcoming-ev-battery-breakthroughs/
Or Honda-
https://cleantechnica.com/2017/12/21/honda-mulling-solid-state-ev-battery-development/
Bring it on!
So once you get that dream of a battery How do you expect to charge it once a couple more neighbors get theirs and take out the grid?
Shouldn’t we first build out the renewable energy production before finding more demand? looks to me like you’re getting the cart before the horse.
More demand? The coal, natural gas and electricity used to produce gasoline can be used to make/provide the electricity for the EV’s until the renewables are built out. Right now every gallon of gasoline has had the equivalent of 0.6 gallons of energy used to make it.
Or a few solar panels will do the job.
Hi Farmboy. Where I live roof solar could give me an average of over 80 miles a day (averaged over the year), for a system that costs about 14,000$ , and will last probably well more than 30 yrs, maybe 50.
Over the 30 yrs that is cheap.
The more people that move in that direction, the more slowly we will deplete oil.
This means the longer you will be able to purchase the oil at a reasonable price.
Good all around.
Or we could forgo the move towards renewables and better electric vehicles, and just burn up all the oil even quicker.
Choices.
Yours, mine, and the ‘people’ we elect.
Some of my neighbors and myself charge our EV’s off the grid now. The grid seems to be handling it fine. In fact, since much of the charging is off peak, the power company probably appreciates the business. But ultimately I, as many others here, will put up enough solar panels to handle charging the EV’s.
Looks great now, but like many things, the problem is when billions of people attempt it, assuming anywhere near that number even have the opportunities.
Billions of us doing anything probably will not work. There are just too many of us. We can though do what positive things we can. I am working at converting my small farm to permaculture, I am a renewables/EV fanatic and I am trying to reduce my resource usage, but in the end it may be like shooting an attacking grizzly bear with a BB gun….it doesn’t have much effect on the bear, but it gives me something to do while I am alive.
Understood
Likewise. Plus I’m promoting birth control, so maybe there will be fewer of us if it catches on. 🙂
I would buy an EV pickup with reasonable capacity, say a half ton with some towing ability, in a New York second. Mileage would need to be in the 250-300 mile range. I have close to the EV range now in an automobile. With my driving needs, I haven’t even gotten below 100 miles remaining.
You might like something like this then.
Bollinger B1 Fully Charged
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dav55oUJ-w
Bet I would! 100kwh battery pack, 4 wheel drive, priced starting at 60K (more for 100kwh), and will tow 6100 pounds. I have always liked trucks that were not so stylish that I felt like I was driving around in my living room. Trucks were always for off-road, hunting, or working. I never wanted to feel like I cared if it got a scratch or many.
I saw where they said they had 12K reservations, but I also saw where they were still trying to source batteries. They are saying it will be available in 2019. but who knows. It is hard for me to believe these are the only guys doing this. It seems so obvious that an EV pickup/jeep would be a no-brainer to take the heart out of conventional demand.
Or this:
http://workhorse.com/pickup/
While both this and the one Fred linked to are not available for purchase at the moment, they are a bit past the vaporware stage and I sense that a race is on to replace the F-150/Silverado class pickup trucks. Transitioning from one off concept or prototype vehicles to mass production, with all the supply chain, logistics, manufacturing and financing issues is going to be the challenge. From the looks of it, GM and Ford had better have EV versions of their cash cows in an advanced stage of development or one or more of these guys will be eating their lunch by 2020.
Ford is moving along on trucks and SUV’s as hybrids not full EV’s.
https://www.greencarreports.com/news/1108110_ford-plans-300-mile-electric-suv-hybrid-f-150-and-mustang-more-u-s-production-breaking
There is little news about the budget caps evaporating. Also some energy candy
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/02/10/0958218/budget-deal-has-tax-credit-extensions-for-nuclear-fuel-cells-carbon-capture
2017 was second-worst year for U.S. wildfires – Top ten years are all after 2000
http://www.desdemonadespair.net/2018/02/2017-was-second-worst-year-for-us.html
The Wind And Sun Are Not Free
The Deep Green State
Want to go off-grid? You might need hundreds of Tesla batteries
Automated vehicles will lead to more driving and congestion
A Race For Time?
Further to Caelan’s comment:
DECREASING ORE GRADES IN GLOBAL METALLIC MINING
“Mining industry requires high amounts of energy to extract and process resources, including a variety of concentration and refining processes. Using energy consumption information, different sustainability issues can be addressed, such as the relationship with ore grade over the years, energy variations in electricity or fossil fuel use. A rigorous analysis and understanding of the energy intensity use in mining is the first step towards a more sustainable mining industry and, globally, better resource management. Numerous studies have focused on the energy consumption of mining projects, with analysis carried out primarily in one single country or one single region. This paper quantifies, on a global level, the relationship between ore grade and energy intensity. With the case of copper, the study has shown that the average copper ore grade is decreasing over time, while the energy consumption and the total material production in the mine increases. Analyzing only copper mines, the average ore grade has decreased approximately by 25% in just ten years. In that same period, the total energy consumption has increased at a higher rate than production (46% energy increase over 30% production increase).”
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0fb2/3ed97e4675abcf94f6b3debc8a49acc60e50.pdf
Analyzing only copper mines, the average ore grade has decreased approximately by 25% in just ten years. In that same period, the total energy consumption has increased at a higher rate than production (46% energy increase over 30% production increase).”
I think that Cu is an especially poor example when talking about energy used and degrading quality of raw ores. Among the many hats I have worn in life one was helping a Hungarian metals recycling business set up their affiliate in Florida.
Copper can be extracted at much lower energy use and cost in what is euphemistically known as urban mining.
http://mawaste.com/blog/why-is-recycling-copper-better-than-extracting-it/
Why Is Recycling Copper Better Than Extracting It?
Post on December 19, 2016 by Mawaste
Copper, because of its beauty, versatility, and durability, has been used for thousands of years in many different ways. This metal maintains its beauty and conductivity and has a higher recycling rate than all other metals. Recyclers have been able to achieve a 99.9% purity rating for copper, virtually removing any differences between newly mined and recycled copper are negligible. The principal reasons for using recycled copper is preferred fall into two categories: economics and environmental sustainability.
Next metal on the list, please!
I haven’t intentionally thrown away a piece of copper in 20 years.
Now if we could only recycle people and their waste products.
We can!
My mushroom burial suit
https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee
My electric meter’s earth line went to recycling 🙁 . Pinchi ratacobres!
NAOM
It helps to actually take a look at such things as scale, usage over time and recycling in general and what’s involved, such as the energies required, how things are made, their ease-of-recyclability, supply-chains and disruptions, and how much can be recycled and vis-a-vis how much is needed, etcetera…
Exactly.
Ostensibly, copper is the subject of much theft.
But of course a ‘piece of copper or other metal’ in one’s hand may be different than one in some sort of higher-end product and from a higher-end manufacturing plant that has just closed down permanently due to an economic downturn.
Exactly again.
Yes, by all means, let’s go through all the metals, since copper is not the only one required.
Caelan, my guess is that your response to someone who has told you they have been diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer and that they have only six months left to live is to suggest that they commit suicide immediately! The difference between you and me is that I would tell them to keep living to the best of their ability for as long as they can and to do everything within their power to make it as enjoyable an experience as possible! And while it is highly unlikely, you never know, within the next six months someone may even find a cure… Dwelling on the fact that they are doomed is kind of a waste of time…
Actually, your association by analogy, so to speak, seems to be insinuating to keep running or running faster toward death by maintaining the cancerous lifestyle:
Keep smoking– burning more fossil fuels– mining, sometimes via ‘undeveloped’ country land-community-and-labor-grabs and poisonings; tax-pimping the wage-slaves; and supporting assorted disparities like that, etc., to get those pseudorenewable systems and electric cars, and whatever the corporatocracy deem necessary for themselves, etc., out the door, pronto, irrespective of how many problems there appear to be with that.
My interest is also in prevention, where we don’t get cancer in the first place.
By the way, permaculture (link is to ‘In Grave Danger of Falling Food’ video) isn’t just a book. It is a relatively successful and replicated (peer reviewed) working model that’s been around, and around for awhile. That doesn’t mean we can’t improve upon it, but its basic premises– Care of Earth and Care of People (and their surpluses recursively fed back in their support)– seem to suggest that we can and should.
Lunging Leaping killer avalanches in Tibet solved! .
Researchers were initially baffled about how it had happened. The glacier was on a nearly flat slope that was too shallow to cause avalanches, especially fast-moving ones. What’s more, the collapse happened at an elevation where permafrost was widespread; it should have securely anchored the glacier to the surface.
Two months later, it happened again —
https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/2679/what-caused-twin-mega-avalanches-in-tibet/
3 square miles and 90 miles an hour over fairly flat ground. The airborne part was different.
What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic.
New Studies Tie Extreme Haze in China to Climate Change
In the winter of 2013, thick haze enveloped northern China for several weeks. On January 12, 2013, the peak of that bad-air episode, the air quality index (AQI) rose to a staggering 775—off the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency scale—according to a U.S. air quality sensor in Beijing.
Extra pollution from cars, homes, and factories in the winter often sets the stage for outbreaks of air pollution in China. But a March 2017 study in Science Advances suggests that a loss of Arctic sea ice in 2012 and increased Eurasian snowfall the winter before may have helped fuel the extreme event.
https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/blogs/earthmatters/2017/05/19/in-case-you-missed-it-new-studies-tie-extreme-haze-in-china-to-climate-change/
New Studies Tie Extreme Haze in China to Climate Change
Now I’m completely confused! I thought climate change was a hoax perpetrated by China… /sarc
It’s just smog. Or in the case of China, Smaug.
On the more serious side, it seems as if no one has noticed the persistent high level diffuse cloud increase over eastern US. It’s like moisture is being injected into the upper troposphere where it used to be dry.
Actually it has been noticed, I wonder why the paper says it is difficult to detect when I can see it. Of course I have been observing the skies in detail since the 1960’s so may be more apt to see changes in sky transparency and the transparency at high altitude has degraded in the last two decades.
The line in the report “If water vapor concentrations do increase in a warmer world, the added absorption will act to further amplify the initial warming. Models of Earth’s climate suggest that this serves as a powerful positive feedback, more than doubling the sensitivity of the surface temperature to an anthropogenic forcing (8–11).” should send shudders through anyone with an understanding of feedbacks.
The Radiative Signature of Upper Tropospheric Moistening
The importance of water vapor in regulating climate is undisputed. It is the dominant greenhouse gas, trapping more of Earth’s heat than any other gaseous constituent (1). As the climate warms in response to increases in other greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide, the concentrations of water vapor are expected to increase (2–7). If water vapor concentrations do increase in a warmer world, the added absorption will act to further amplify the initial warming. Models of Earth’s climate suggest that this serves as a powerful positive feedback, more than doubling the sensitivity of the surface temperature to an anthropogenic forcing (8–11).
All climate models predict that the concentration of water vapor in the upper troposphere will increase markedly in the future (9, 12). However, the validity of such projections has been debated for more than a decade (13, 14). Some argue that the concentrations in the upper troposphere might actually decrease in a warmer climate, given the simplified treatment of convection and cloud-related processes in current models and the important role that they play in governing the distribution of moisture (15–17).
Here, we use climate model simulations and satellite measurements to demonstrate the presence of a distinct radiative signature of upper tropospheric moistening on interannual to decadal time scales. The observed moistening is consistent with model simulations and corresponds approximately to a constant relative humidity increase in upper tropospheric moisture (18). We further demonstrate that without such an increase, the model would be unable to reproduce the satellite-observed radiance record.
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/310/5749/841.full?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&fulltext=soden&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT
Known unknowns, unknown unknowns.
Known feedbacks, unknown feedbacks.
When one remembers that models only take in known knowns and ignore when the data is sparse, this gets worrying.
NAOM
What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic. – I thought the recent California drought due to a warming Arctic, and predicted well before it happened, would convince a few more people of that. Maybe the new one that seems to be starting now will.
US spending on Transmission Infrastructure has increased ~ 10 fold in last decade.
I want my kWh’s Gluten-free.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=34892
Makes sense. Beyond the need to replace aging transmission infrastructure, the money to be made will be in storage and transmission in the coming decades. Getting the transmission system capable of handling future loads is a good business investment.
SEA LEVEL RISE ACCELERATING: ACCELERATION IN 25-YEAR SATELLITE SEA LEVEL RECORD
“This acceleration, driven mainly by accelerated melting in Greenland and Antarctica, has the potential to double the total sea level rise by 2100 as compared to projections that assume a constant rate — to more than 60 cm instead of about 30.” said Nerem, who is also a professor of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. “And this is almost certainly a conservative estimate,” he added. “Our extrapolation assumes that sea level continues to change in the future as it has over the last 25 years. Given the large changes we are seeing in the ice sheets today, that’s not likely.”
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180212150739.htm
Looking at sea level data from the past at the website of retired Virginia Tech professor David Roper it is now quite apparent we’re below sea levels achieved during previous interglacial periods, while also having still further sea level rise set to occur during the current interglacial period.
With a timeline of centuries, of course humanity will easily adapt to sea level changes and land subsidence, just as has happened through human history.
“With a timeline of centuries, of course humanity will easily adapt to sea level changes and land subsidence, just as has happened through human history.”
Not really. The world population at the end of the last Ice Age stood at between 1 to 10 million people, after two million years of development. In the previous Ice Age, the human population collapsed to near extinction. Then it took 10,000 years to create the high-levels of agriculture that can support 7,000 million people. We now face the task to relocate all of that into protected regions and onto infrastructures that do not yet exist, and face completing this in essentially 30 years. If we fail, we’ll fall back to the 1-10 million population that the natural world can support.
Appart from all the built areas that have to be abandoned salt inundation into the big food growing river deltas – Mekong, Ganges, Nile, (Congo?) – might be the earliest, and maybe biggest, impact. There aren’t areas with that sort of soil quantity and quality available anywhere else that can just be moved to, and the effect can be much further inland than where the sea level rises to if the seawater can find and move up through porous rock.
Yep
Yup,
CLIMATE CHANGE IS DRIVING MIGRATION FROM VIETNAM’S MEKONG DELTA
“Saltwater intrusion and drought are destroying crops in one of the most fertile places on earth, prompting an exodus of farmers.”
http://www.climatechangenews.com/2018/01/11/climate-change-driving-migration-vietnams-mekong-delta/
I am finding more and more clamoring across the net for geo-engineering. I think that more people (scientists, engineers, government agencies) are starting to get frightened. We are in for it when this spreads to more of the population. Turmoil over migration, food, water and money is going to be a large factor especially as the food and water supply shrinks.
If there is one thing we can be sure of, it will be that people act in unpredictable ways when stressed or threatened.
I am finding more and more clamoring across the net for geo-engineering. I think that more people (scientists, <?engineers, government agencies) are starting to get frightened. We are in for it when this spreads to more of the population.
The real fun will start when a couple of idiots in power start implementing half baked geo-engineering schemes and the unintended consequences are even worse than the problems they purported to cure. Then the various tribes in the general population will be out in force looking for scapegoats.
There is little logic to what humanity pursues.
What is the logic of destroying the natural world to have lots of gadgets and grow populations beyond any hope of sustaining them?
What is the logic of nuclear deterrence, once the nukes start falling the deterrent is just revenge with no hope of either side winning or even surviving? Do they think they will never be used?
What is the logic behind half-baked schemes to slow global warming? Do they think that delaying things will prevent the natural forcings from coming into play? Or maybe it all does not matter if it’s a few years further in the future?
What is the logic of pouring drugs into the general population that have little effectiveness in saving lives, other than profit? While many people suffer great harm from them.
Reasonable logic is often a very narrow and self-serving ladder with humanity. If we do all that and much more when things are going well, what will it be like when our backs are against the wall with death,fear, anger and madness riding the land?
My worry on geoengineering is that it may seem to work for a while giving confidence to BAU. Then it fails catastrophically. EG long sea walls are built to hold back salt inundation then a storm/earthquake/tsunami (pick one or more) breaches the wall causing massive inundation with sudden crop loss causing a knock on disaster. I am sure that this is not the only scenario that can be thought of but my thinking is that the geoengineering will only create a pause that will end with a sudden step change, that cannot be coped with, instead of gradually adapting to a slow change.
NAOM
I’m sure if they would only practice permaculture everything will be fine /sarc
Alas, permaculturists, among others, understand that not everyone’s going to do what’s always good for them, even if it is staring them right in the face.
That’s perhaps in part where the inspiration for the expressions, ‘looking a gifted horse in the mouth’ or ‘fiddling while Rome burns’ might come from.
Why would we even be aware of, or at least bothered by, such things as collapse, peak oil or slavery and have blogs like these otherwise?
Abusive-power relationships are what we know.
With a timeline of centuries, of course humanity will easily adapt to sea level changes and land subsidence, just as has happened through human history.
What makes you so sure about that? Given that I have lived in the Greater Miami Area for almost the last quarter of a century I am not quite as sanguine about that as you seem to be.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/natural-climate-patterns-create-hot-spots-of-rapid-sea-level-rise/
Natural Climate Patterns Create Hot Spots of Rapid Sea Level Rise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJYs8L84L4s
NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Streamed live on Feb 9, 2017
Earth scientist Alex Gardner reveals a world of rapid change as seen through the eyes of a NASA glaciologist. Glaciers and ice sheets hold massive amounts of freshwater locked up as ice.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WE9Gqy8Yy9w
“Sea-Level Rise: Inconvenient, or Unmanageable?” Richard B. Alley
YaleUniversity
Published on Nov 8, 2017
The warming climate is causing sea level to rise at an accelerating rate, and this is expected to continue, depending on human decisions about our energy system
Just wanted to throw a little more lithium on the already raging debate regarding solar and battery storage 😉
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-02-12/a-powerful-mix-of-solar-and-batteries-is-beating-natural-gas
A Powerful Mix of Solar and Batteries Is Beating Natural Gas
My apologies, just realized you need to register to read it. I find that annoying so If I find another link I’ll post that.
Determining what works and what doesn’t is critical to effective action and prevents a huge waste of time, money and lives. We are also often duped by research studies not being clear on actual outcomes.
The Four Most Dangerous Words? A New Study Shows
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2y7BzjbSNo
The Four Most Dangerous Words?
Having critical thinking skills? 😉
Yes, a “new study shows” “critical thinking skills” can lead to the present situations. 🙂
Reading this history of Pennsylvania forests, I could not help but get the picture that humans were and are a completely invasive species. Although much of the forest area has recovered in modern times, if one reads closely the conservation movement was started out of fear for loss of wood resource in the US.
In my journeys, hidden deep within steep ravines, I found a few of the giants that had not been cut or burned. These pines had a circumference that my arms could not go half way round. Very rare now, one can only dream of the magnificence of those early forests. But at least there is forest, though the fracking frenzy has taken large swaths of land lately. Part of northern Pa was 90 percent forested in the 1990’s.
On the barren landscapes the loggers left behind, rains washed soil into the streams, and forest fires roared through the dead stumps, dry branches, scrub brush and saplings, devastating some 350,000 acres each year. Traveling through what the first state forest commissioner Joseph Rothrock called the “Pennsylvania Desert,” a U.S. Geological surveyor reported “there are few places in the East where the natural beauties of mountain scenery and the natural resources of timber lands have been destroyed to the extent that has taken place in northern Pennsylvania.”
http://explorepahistory.com/story.php?storyId=1-9-E&chapter=1
Yes, when you find small bits of the Pennsylvania lands that haven’t been disturbed for awhile- just magnificent. Found a sycamore in Bucks county 18 ft in circumference at chest height in 1978.
Imagine the place before metal came to be in the hands of men.
Incredible wildlife diversity and density.
All the way down to the Smokies and up to the Seaway!
Imagine the flyways, with birds streaming from horizon to horizon.
That was our heritage but people now dead took it from us, just as we steal the future from the children yet to be.
Choose your state to see the effect of climate change will be like for a 2C rise in global temperature.
https://www.geo.umass.edu/climate/stateclimatereports.html?_ga=2.119670667.286333835.1518577478-1364889477.1518577478
Here is where to keep track of Trump’s approval and disapproval ratings according to state. He is above 40% approval in most states so that is pretty good news for elections this year and maybe for 2020 also. Note the states with lowest approval didn’t vote for him anyway in 2016. But then note how many Dem senators are up for election this year and will be voted out if the big Trump approval continues in those states.
https://morningconsult.com/tracking-trump/
Jan. 2018 Trump Approval %
DC 16%
HI 30%
VT 30%
MA 32%
CA 36%
MD 36%
WA 36%
IL 37%
OR 37%
RI 37%
NM 38%
CT 39%
NY 39%
ME 40%
NJ 40%
CO 41%
DE 41%
MN 41%
MI 42%
WI 42%
IA 43%
NH 43%
VA 45%
AZ 46%
OH 46%
PA 46%
UT 46%
NC 47%
NV 47%
AK 48%
IN 48%
MT 48%
MO 49%
FL 50%
KS 50%
GA 51%
NE 51%
SC 51%
TX 51%
AR 53%
ID 53%
ND 53%
SD 53%
KY 55%
OK 55%
MS 56%
TN 56%
LA 57%
WV 59%
WY 60%
AL 63%
Total Bullshit! That site must be run by Fox News.
TRUMP’S NET APPROVAL RATING IS POSITIVE IN JUST 19 STATES, HALF AS MANY AS AT THE START OF HIS PRESIDENCY
BY GREG PRICE ON 2/13/18 AT 2:42 PM
After one year in office, President Donald Trump has a positive net approval rating in only 19 U.S. states, half as many as when he first took office in January 2017, according to the latest polling data.
But while Trump’s overall numbers may have improved recently, over the past year he’s lost suppor When he first entered office in January 2017, Trump had a positive net approval rating in 38 U.S. states. West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, Tennessee and Wyoming led the pack, all with a net approval rating of at least 34 percent.
Trump managed to maintain those strongholds but has since seen his net approval drop across the country. Even in West Virginia, Trump went from a 37 percent net approval to 22 percent over 12 months. Similarly, Kentucky and Tennessee both went from 34 percent to 16 percent, while Alabama dropped from 36 percent to 29 percent.
On top of this, “state” approval is only relevant for the malapportioned Senate. For the House and the Presidency, Trump’s extreme levels of disapproval in high-population California, Texas (yep), and New York matter a lot more than Trump’s high approval rating in zero-population Wyoming.
The neglected Southern Ocean gets some attention.
Deep Dive in the Southern Ocean
The vast Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, plays a starring role in the future of climate change. The global oceans together absorb over 90 percent of the excess heat in the climate system and roughly three-quarters of that heat uptake occurs in the Southern Ocean. In addition, the global oceans absorb around 25 percent of anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions and the Southern Ocean alone accounts for about half of the uptake of CO2.
http://www.climatecentral.org/what-we-do/our-programs/soccom
Videos
https://vimeo.com/album/4980463/video/254569407
https://vimeo.com/album/4980463/video/254523847
Thought for the day. CO2 rose from 180 to 270 ppm as the last glaciation ended. That was a 6-8C rise in global temperature which formed a new equilibrium with CO2 and water vapor in the atmosphere forming our modern period of warmth. We now are headed for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 (as well as an increase in water vapor and other GHG’s).
Islandboy: I want to thank you for these. They’re the reason I keep coming back to this website at this point.
(I’m bored with oil production numbers, as they are irrelevant without production costs, which are apparently an unreported trade secret.)