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Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

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Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

Uhhh...there was definitely fracking a decade ago. My parents milked a big payday out of it, on about 100 acres they held in the northern lower Peninsula of Michigan.

No fracking was done, but boy was that check big. ;)
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

Handyman said:
Whats your point? You have to keep trying.
Click to expand...

My point is simple, its not an easy issue to deal with. It isn't just a question of Solar or Wind etc, its a question of how you integrate it all. I don't doubt they get an answer for it. The question is when?
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

walrus said:
My point is simple, its not an easy issue to deal with. It isn't just a question of Solar or Wind etc, its a question of how you integrate it all. I don't doubt they get an answer for it. The question is when?
Click to expand...

I dont know but just because they havent doesnt mean we have to just slough it off and do nothing.
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

unofan said:
Storage technology is a growing solution. Also, while the sun doesn't shine at night, demand for power is less at night, too. And with wind, it produces so much at night that spot power prices can go negative.
Click to expand...

Better storage is coming. That is the key to get me fully on-board with renewables. 'Distributed storage' is a really interesting concept I've seen.*

And a real goal is adding overnight consumption (think: electric car charging).

Current spot electricity prices in the central US:
Texas (ERCOT)
MISO



*Everyone charges the cars overnight at home. They go to work and plug in during the day. If "the grid" needs energy during the day it actually draws down from the mobile distributed batteries.
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

The Sicatoka said:
"Better storage is coming." -Every energy industry snake-oil salesman of the last 100 years
Click to expand...

If something better were coming any time soon, it would already be out there but it would simply be too expensive for consumer use. iPhones didn't come out of nowhere - PC processors and touch screen displays had been around for 30+ years, but finally got cheap enough and small enough and efficient enough to package in a handheld device. Where is the current Apple II+ of energy storage that will eventually become cheap enough to make a material difference in the consumer market?

For military aircraft systems, I've paid as much as $250K for a battery that stores about 15KWh of energy in a 100-lb lithium-ion battery. A typical household is around 10 KW, so that battery is only enough to run a house for 90 minutes - that's $2777 per minute of capacity! With the defense industry willing to pay that kind of money, if there were something better than lithium ion, you better believe that we'd be using it, and that this "something" would eventually trickle down into consumer applications. But there's not - there's nothing in the pipeline better than lithium ion, which is already in extremely widespread use in the consumer market. Lithium ion isn't nearly cheap or energy-dense enough to make a difference at energy utility scale.
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

LynahFan said:
If something better were coming any time soon, it would already be out there but it would simply be too expensive for consumer use. iPhones didn't come out of nowhere - PC processors and touch screen displays had been around for 30+ years, but finally got cheap enough and small enough and efficient enough to package in a handheld device. Where is the current Apple II+ of energy storage that will eventually become cheap enough to make a material difference in the consumer market?

For military aircraft systems, I've paid as much as $250K for a battery that stores about 15KWh of energy in a 100-lb lithium-ion battery. A typical household is around 10 KW, so that battery is only enough to run a house for 90 minutes - that's $2777 per minute of capacity! With the defense industry willing to pay that kind of money, if there were something better than lithium ion, you better believe that we'd be using it, and that this "something" would eventually trickle down into consumer applications. But there's not - there's nothing in the pipeline better than lithium ion, which is already in extremely widespread use in the consumer market. Lithium ion isn't nearly cheap or energy-dense enough to make a difference at energy utility scale.
Click to expand...

https://www.midamericanenergy.com/news-article.aspx?story=869

Yes, it's a test project, but this is a public utility that's a leader in wind energy, so they have major skin in the game to try to make it feasible.
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

So in other words, it will be at least another 20-30 years before consumer batteries for the middle class are a serious thing (in both cars and homes).

Assuming we were to "do the needful" today, and accounting for continued warming models, what's the estimated sea-rise going to look like by then?
 
FadeToBlack&Gold said:
So in other words, it will be at least another 20-30 years before consumer batteries for the middle class are a serious thing (in both cars and homes).

Assuming we were to "do the needful" today, and accounting for continued warming models, what's the estimated sea-rise going to look like by then?
Click to expand...

Dikes have worked in Europe for centuries :D
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

Maga.

“Breaking News: The EPA proposed new rules for assessing pollution that would make it easier for power plants to release mercury and other toxic substances.”
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

Xcel Energy is looking to go 100% carbon-free by 2050. The first major US utility to do so.

https://www.xcelenergy.com/carbon_free_2050

They say they're going to do this by:
Implementing the country's largest multi-state wind plan with 12 new, low-cost wind farms across seven states.
Moving forward with our transformative Colorado Energy Plan that will retire 660 megawatts of coal by 2026 and add 1,800 megawattts of wind and solar resources, as well as 380 megawatts of existing natural gas resources and 275 megawatts of large-scale battery storage.
Continuing to carry out our approved Upper Midwest resource plan that is transitioning the region's energy grid away from coal and is adding more wind, solar and cleaner natural gas generation. We will propose our 2019 resource plan that will take this transformation even further.
Reducing coal generation. Under current, approved plans, we are retiring 22 coal units from 2005 to 2027 — about 50 percent of the coal-fueled capacity we own.
Click to expand...
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

As a thought experiment, what would happen if we simply outlawed fossil fuels, right now? For every kind of energy generation.

About where would that send us back to, in terms of energy density / productivity? 1950? 1920? Let's further imagine there's no way around the law -- the Eschaton enforces it from afar with 100% efficiency, so there's zero black market.

I know we can't predict technological innovation with any degree of certainty, but how soon would we return to current net energy generation and productivity? 20 years? 50? never (i.e., is it literally impossible to ever generate that amount of energy using nuclear and renewable given what we know about physics)?
 
Re: Climate Change 2: Thank God for Global Warming

Kepler said:
As a thought experiment, what would happen if we simply outlawed fossil fuels, right now? For every kind of energy generation.

About where would that send us back to, in terms of energy density / productivity? 1950? 1920? Let's further imagine there's no way around the law -- the Eschaton enforces it from afar with 100% efficiency, so there's zero black market.

I know we can't predict technological innovation with any degree of certainty, but how soon would we return to current net energy generation and productivity? 20 years? 50? never (i.e., is it literally impossible to ever generate that amount of energy using nuclear and renewable given what we know about physics)?
Click to expand...

The following states are F-cked with a capital F even if we just ban coal:
West Virginia
Kentucky
Wyoming

These states are pretty seriously boned if we just banned coal:
Utah
Missouri
Ohio
Indiana
Tennessee
Wisconsin
North Dakota
Nebraska

If we toss in natural gas and petroleum:
Alaska
Arizona
Texas
Iowa
Arkansas
Louisiana
Oklahoma
Kansas
Alabama
Mississippi
Georgia
Florida
South Carolina
Colorado
North Carolina
Michigan
Pennsylvania
Virginia
Hawaii
California
Nevada
New Mexico
Minnesota
Illinois
New York
Maryland
All of New England except Vermont

These states would limp by:
South Dakota
Montana
Idaho

These states would be mostly ok:
Oregon
Idaho

These states wouldn't sneeze:
Washington
Vermont

Based entirely on generation capacity. Not a perfect measure, but it works. I also created a Kepler's Proposal F-cked Factor by taking the green energy% minus the fossil fuel% and only six states were above 0%.

WA 58%
VT 54%
ID 48%
OR 40%
SD 17%
MT 5%
ND -14%
IA -20%
Maine -22%
CA -23%
DC -30%
KS -33%
NV -38%
NH -38%
MN -39%
OK -47%
NM -47%
CO -52%
NC -53%
NE -53%
NY -54%
AZ -55%
TN -56%
SC -57%
IL -58%
TX -59%
AL -60%
WY -62%
AK -63%
HI -64%
PA -67%
UT -67%
CT -68%
AR -70%
NJ -70%
MI -70%
GA -71%
MD -74%
VA -76%
MA -77%
WI -77%
MO -82%
IN -83%
WV -86%
LA -87%
OH -88%
MS -88%
FL -90%
KY -90%
RI -91%
Delaware -98%
 
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