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Am I the only one who finds this whole logic upsetting? We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event and with the news that efficient electronics are
by noobermin 9y ago
Am I the only one who finds this whole logic upsetting?
We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event and with the news that efficient electronics are in fact using less energy is somehow bad news.
The profit motive doesn't work for utilities...well it does most of the time, but this is a clear example of when it doesn't.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoNot upsetting. It interesting, really. Finding ways to economically rationalize good climate behavior. You no longer need to ask people to install renewables to save the planet; it just makes plain economic sense [1] [2]. Utilities need electrical usage growth to offset consumption stagnation (and occasionally, structural and energy efficiency declines). That growth will occur moving ground transportation off of oil. If that creates an unexpected coalition, why not roll with it? It'll increase the EV uptake rate, it'll ensure transmission infrastructure still sees necessary upgrades and investment, and because vehicle charging can be structured around time of day metering, they're a perfect mix for more renewables being added to the grid. EDIT: OP I replied to should not be downvoted. The situation really is dire [3]. At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation; we can and must do better, but we're going to have to properly incentivize action and rapidly increase the replacement rate of fossil fuel generation. [1] https://i.imgur.com/FCYT1xa.jpg https://i.imgur.com/FCYT1xa.jpg [2] https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-2017/ https://www.lazard.com/perspective/levelized-cost-of-energy-... [3] https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-going-to-take-nearly-400-years-to-transform-the-energy-system/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/610457/at-this-rate-its-g...
- noobermin 9y agoThe thing that drives climate change is the burning of fossil fuels needed produce electricity in the first place. Keeping the rate of electric production constant will not help us. The fact that electric energy usage is dropping is a good thing and we should keep a negative derivative, not increase it! There needs to be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, keeping it constant (or even worse, increasing it) will not help this. I really think everyone needs to take a step back from the HN ideology and think this through. Here climate change has a chance to essentially kill our grand children or at the very least leave them with a much more barren of a planet and a life. But somehow, the issue of a single institution's profit is somehow more important than actual people, children. The free market is a tool, it shouldn't be more important than human lives.
- durkie 9y agoI think your points are important separately, but the crucial missing part is that electric energy production is rapidly becoming decoupled from greenhouse gas production. It is no longer an either/or situation.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoExactly! Well over 90 percent of new generation coming online is renewables, and the cost decline of renewables shows no signs of stopping [1]. Fancy real time viz: https://www.electricitymap.org/ https://www.electricitymap.org/ [1] https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/16895594/colorado-renewable-energy-future https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/1/16/1689559...
- Koromix 9y agoWorldwide, most of the energy that comes from wind and solar is a tiny fraction of the primary energy supply mix. Where it's growing it's mostly used for additional energy, not to replace the exisiting fossil-fuel consumption. This does not help one bit for climate change. First graph at the top left (which is actually energy consumption, close enough): https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/statistical-review-of-world-energy/primary-energy.html https://www.bp.com/en/global/corporate/energy-economics/stat... The important thing in this grap is the absolute values of each source, not their relative importance. You'll note that despite renewable growth (of which solar and wind is only a fraction, there's also biomass and various other stuff), fossil-fuel consumption is still growing faster. Indeed, historically, new energy sources have never really replaced 'older' ones. Each time, the new sources just provide additional power on top of the old ones. So much for 'decoupling'. Edit : the US energy article on Wikipedia has an interesting graph that shows something similar (except for a partial switch from coal to NG): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/media/File:History_of_energy_consumption_in_the_United_States.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_States#/m...
- marcosdumay 9y ago
- schiffern 9y ago>At our current renewables deployment rate, it will take 400 years to swap out all fossil fuel generation This seemed off to me, so I checked the source. From TFA (in Technology Review): >Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes. >At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries. Can anyone tell me how can this possibly compute? 94% of new electricity generation is renewable,[1] and it's not like power plants have a lifetime of 400 years... edit: Of course, it was staring me in the face the whole time. They're using numbers from 2003! Essentially they're looking at the tail beginning of the logistic adoption curve[2] (the sloooooooow exponential ramp) and extrapolating it in a linear fashion. But logistic curves are "S-shaped," not linear. [1] https://electrek.co/2018/01/12/94-percent-new-electricity-capacity-usa-from-renewables/ https://electrek.co/2018/01/12/94-percent-new-electricity-ca... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Applications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function#Applications
- loeg 9y agoWind and solar need tons and tons of land to power our energy needs, and the developing world will need more and more power to escape poverty. Solar panels on every house might be sufficient, but it's far more expensive and consumes far more area than nuclear. We need cheap and abundant nuclear power to bring our carbon emissions down without wasting tons of acreage (something like an area the size of the US to power the world, per Steven Pinker) on power generation.
- toomuchtodo 9y agoThis comes up in every thread, but it's not realistic. It takes a decade and a billion dollars (at least) to build new nuclear power plants. It's not happening, at least not in the time frame we need to keep global warming below 4C (2C is a pipe dream at this point). [1] It would only take 0.6 percent of total US land mass covered in solar to power the entire country (about 100 miles by 100 miles). The batteries to back that energy production would only be about 1 square mile. That doesn't take into account residential rooftop solar already producing. Nor wind turbine parks in the middle of nowhere that contribute to farmer and rancher incomes. Offshore wind can be sited anywhere along the costs outside of shipping lanes, far enough off in the distance to not be seen but close enough to keep transmission costs reasonable. We are awash in clean, renewable energy. To your point about the developing world, India is aggressively deploying solar, and is 4 years ahead of its solar capacity targets. Solar and wind are ramping on curves somewhere between linear and exponential. They can be turned up in months, not years. They can be sited almost anywhere. They are what is going to win the day. [1] https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/has-us-nuclear-powers-death-spiral-begun https://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/nuclear/has-us-nuclear-powe...
- matt_wulfeck 9y agoWhen have we not been on the verge of a “mass species extinction” event on our blue dot? Also, I believe it was a mass extinction that allowed us homo erectus to thrive.
- noobermin 9y agoI am referring to climate change and I don't know how you think we can thrive through it.
- akvadrako 9y agoI don't know how you think we can't. A few degrees C over a hundred years? If humanity can't adapt to that we're the least adaptable species ever. Humanity is thriving during a period which started about 20k years ago where the global temperature is 10°C higher than for most of the past 2 million years.
- schiffern 9y ago>When have we not been on the verge of a “mass species extinction” event on our blue dot? Try 90+% of Earth's history? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extinction_event Though all living humans are alive during the current (anthropocene) extinction event, so in that sense "we" have never known anything else.
- jakecopp 9y agoIt's sad how anything but continuous growth is "bad".
- Qwertious 9y agoIt's bad for the companies. This is bad for us because companies can become political lobbying parasites. Assuming they aren't parasites already.
- JumpCrisscross 9y agoRising living standards are bad? Growth doesn’t have to consume more material resources. (Computation and thus energy, on the other hand, it probably does.)
- opencl 9y agoThis is literally an article about how improvements in energy efficiency are preventing growth of utility company profits.
- ThomPete 9y agoI don't think you want to live in a society that doesn't grow.
- croon 9y agoThere's a finite need for ovens, or lamps, or whatever. In some countries, I'm sure that need isn't met, maybe everywhere, who knows. But at some point you can't sell more product than what breaks down and needs replacing, which I would call maintenance mode, not growth. At that point, you either start designing obsolescence into the products (arguably already done in both lamps and other various electric appliances), or you need to disrupt the industry to supply something worth replacing to, or you (or at least a majority of the workers) move to another industry where growth can happen. I absolutely don't want to live in a society where electricity needs grow in perpetuity, or every house gets more and more lamps "just cuz". The end goal for any company should be monopoly in their market, at which point they slash their workforce to just keep the market, and divest into another market (where they can then employ the workers again).
- loeg 9y ago> We're on the verge of a mass species extinction event No, we're really not. Climate change due to carbon emission is real, but we'll reduce our carbon emission "in time" to avoid extinction level increases and/or adapt to the environment more drastically if we miss that target.
- 3131s 9y agoActually, we are in the middle of a mass extinction event: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction
- loeg 9y agoI assumed the comment was about human extinction -- apologies if that was mistaken.
- 3131s 9y agoI assumed that's what you meant and the grandparent poster may have meant the same too. But, it's worth remembering that humanity as a species may not be especially immune to the same conditions that are decimating other animal populations and reducing biodiversity in the last 100 years.
- telchar 9y agoIMHO utilities need to realize that their business model of the future is to provide load balancing services and backup power to customers as much as it is to sell electricity. If they wait too long to start acting and keep fighting decentralized generation, they risk losing their value proposition as more people install batteries at home. If that happens I could see them setting themselves up for a big political fight against their customers as they try to maintain their business by force/law.
- AFNobody 9y agoThe problem is what you suggest would destroy them as businesses. You have just described them doing "just" the parts of their business where they operate at a loss with massive multi-decade debt loads. Generation is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business.
- dsr_ 9y agoWe used to have this concept that utilities were regulated monopolies. On the one hand, they were told exactly how much they were allowed to charge, and what services they had to provide (and where, and to whom). On the other hand, they were assured that they had no competition and that they would always be slightly profitable. It was good for the stock market, too -- a utility would have exceptionally low volatility and pay regular dividends, being nearly as safe as anything can be. Then we decided to deregulate.
- ianai 9y agoI sincerely hope “we” soon develop and master decentralization technology and techniques.
- PhantomGremlin 9y agoGeneration is the only part of the business that produces the money to fund the infrastructure and the generation is the cheapest part of the business. To a large extent, that business model is obsolete in many places. For example Consolidated Edison in NYC used to generate most of its own power. Here is a link to a generating station they used to own but were forced to divest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenswood_Generating_Station https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravenswood_Generating_Station Due to deregulation of the energy markets in New York State, Con Edison was required to sell all of its "in-city" generating stations in New York City including Ravenswood. In 1999, Con Edison transferred ownership of Ravenswood to KeySpan Energy (KeySpan) for $597 million. I think it's stupid, but nobody asked me before they forced this on Con Ed.
- maliker 9y agoYou're right, the article makes a simplistic and greedy-sounding point. A better way to put it would be: electric vehicles are a good way to shift the roughly 30% of our energy consumption that is transportation from fossil fuels to renewable energy. We can do this by taking advantage of the electric grid infrastructure that's already there, which saves us some money (vs. for example building out a giant hydrogen supply network).
- tootie 9y agoThe profit motive keeps the grid healthy. If utilities suddenly become strapped for cash, the grid suffers. And transitioning from internal combustion to pulling power from the grid will decrease resources needed for creating energy and upend the gasoline distribution economy.