3 ms·

I'm with you on that one. The current patterns of human consumption are too slow to change in the face of the type of climate change we are looking at. Even sim

I'm with you on that one. The current patterns of human consumption are too slow to change in the face of the type of climate change we are looking at. Even simple things like the obscene volume of packaging used for marketing and antitheft measures speak against real reform occurring soon.

wbillingsley 10y ago
I can't help but be reminded of the factoid that in 1898 international planning conferences were flummoxed on how on earth to deal with the ever-increasing problem of the amount of horse manure in cities... by 1912, not so much. Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant... We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon. And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free. And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be. Rash prediction: The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...) The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...

wbillingsley 10y ago

I can't help but be reminded of the factoid that in 1898 international planning conferences were flummoxed on how on earth to deal with the ever-increasing problem of the amount of horse manure in cities... by 1912, not so much. Now solar is cheap, coal seems incredibly unwieldy. Not just the poles and wires, but the mine, the railway to take the coal from the mine to the plant... We are now a year or two past an inflection point -- building new coal plants at this time would seem like a much riskier investment. And that means the rate of construction is going to drop way below the rate of retirement pretty fast & pretty soon. And because solar has high variability, it's going to get overbuilt (nobody wants their battery to go flat much, so it'll spend most of it's time full). ie, there is going to be a bunch of "spare power" lurking around that is effectively free. And since a lot of problems can get turned into energy problems, that's a pretty happy place to be. Rash prediction: The Gold Coast currently has a mothballed desalination plant, and a water line from it to the South-East Queensland dams (built during the "Millenium drought"). I would not be surprised if within 30 years, it is running full-time, and pumping inland, even if the town-water dams are full -- because the marginal cost of running it instead of not-running it is zero, and with a bit more engineering the spill-over can be redirected to top up the Murray-Darling's flow. It'd require about 69kms of additional pipe, to connect Wivenhoe Dam to Cooby Dam. (Cooby Dam is in Toowoomba, which also has a bore into the Great Artesian Basin, so at that point you're inland enough to pump back into the basin. Draws from the basin have been blamed for the reduction in flows of springs that feed the Murray-Darling system...) The quantities of water down a pipe might be small, in river terms, but if the marginal cost of power during periods of excess is zero, and seawater is free, then it might start to seem odd not just to leave it turned on whenever there's spare load...