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I’m curious too! I just heard about this on Twitter this morning and figured I’d come check HN to see what others thought of it and was surprised to find nothin

I’m curious too! I just heard about this on Twitter this morning and figured I’d come check HN to see what others thought of it and was surprised to find nothing! I’m planning to watch it this morning and will check back.

ornornor 7y ago
FWIW, this prodvides some counter-elements: http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-of-the-humans-is-toxic/ http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-...
- tonyarkles 7y ago
  I'm in the Canadian prairies, and one of the things that jumps out at me about the discussion about energy-vs-electricity is that that's a really big deal here, because we spend a significant portion of the year heating our homes. So far, we don't have a "green" way to heat our homes. Currently my house is heated with natural gas. I did some math to work out how much it would likely cost in electricity at our current rates, using heat pumps with a generous CoP of 2.0 at our coldest point, and my December and January electricity bills would be approximately $750/month. A solar array for the house that would be net-zero over the span of a year would cost about $43,000 to cover just heating, and for a system with enough capacity to handle the peak heat demand in the winter (with the sun low in the sky) would cost about $134,000. Those, compared to NG, have payoff periods of approximately 30 and 91 years, respectively. In the research I was doing, I was surprised to discover that the local (government-owned) power company currently gets 5% of its generation capacity from wind! The overall make-up is 20% hydro, 34% coal, 40% natural gas, 5% wind, and 1% "other". The gas company simply provides natural gas. As far as overall energy goes, the gas company provides approximately 2x the energy that the power company does (we really do need a lot of energy to heat our homes...) For the sake of curiosity, I also looked at biomass, just to see. Cost-wise, burning trees is actually somewhat viable here! Depending on where it's sourced from, I came up with -$656 to +$2,010 annual difference burning trees instead of natural gas here... but that does come with CO2 problems, just like fossil fuels. I didn't look at Agricultural biomass. On the storage front, batteries are terrible still, both in their overall capacity and in the chemistry that goes into making them. And for pumped hydro... we live in the prairies, and hills, let alone mountains, are very hard to come by. The overall conclusion I came to was basically, at the current state of tech: solar doesn't really seem particularly viable here; wind might have potential, although there would need to be some kind of storage if it were a significant fraction of our total generation capacity; biomass is an ugly but maybe selectively useful source of energy here; and the big elephant in the room: there was no mention of nuclear in the documentary at all! I sketched out nuclear for the province using numbers from SMR marketing material, enough nuclear generating capacity to cover the province's entire current load would cost, over 20 years, about $800M/yr. The electric company currently spends about $710M/yr on fuel ($2.5B/yr gross revenue). That seems, by far, the easiest way to get to low-carbon power generation. Expanding that to provide enough energy to also heat our homes would get expensive (not to mention retrofitting the entire province to use heat pumps). The gas company currently purchases $396M of natural gas/yr; nuclear for replacing the gas company would be a pretty hard sell. I don't really like any of these conclusions!

ornornor 7y ago

FWIW, this prodvides some counter-elements: http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-of-the-humans-is-toxic/ http://masspeaceaction.org/skepticism-is-healthy-but-planet-...

tonyarkles 7y ago
I'm in the Canadian prairies, and one of the things that jumps out at me about the discussion about energy-vs-electricity is that that's a really big deal here, because we spend a significant portion of the year heating our homes. So far, we don't have a "green" way to heat our homes. Currently my house is heated with natural gas. I did some math to work out how much it would likely cost in electricity at our current rates, using heat pumps with a generous CoP of 2.0 at our coldest point, and my December and January electricity bills would be approximately $750/month. A solar array for the house that would be net-zero over the span of a year would cost about $43,000 to cover just heating, and for a system with enough capacity to handle the peak heat demand in the winter (with the sun low in the sky) would cost about $134,000. Those, compared to NG, have payoff periods of approximately 30 and 91 years, respectively. In the research I was doing, I was surprised to discover that the local (government-owned) power company currently gets 5% of its generation capacity from wind! The overall make-up is 20% hydro, 34% coal, 40% natural gas, 5% wind, and 1% "other". The gas company simply provides natural gas. As far as overall energy goes, the gas company provides approximately 2x the energy that the power company does (we really do need a lot of energy to heat our homes...) For the sake of curiosity, I also looked at biomass, just to see. Cost-wise, burning trees is actually somewhat viable here! Depending on where it's sourced from, I came up with -$656 to +$2,010 annual difference burning trees instead of natural gas here... but that does come with CO2 problems, just like fossil fuels. I didn't look at Agricultural biomass. On the storage front, batteries are terrible still, both in their overall capacity and in the chemistry that goes into making them. And for pumped hydro... we live in the prairies, and hills, let alone mountains, are very hard to come by. The overall conclusion I came to was basically, at the current state of tech: solar doesn't really seem particularly viable here; wind might have potential, although there would need to be some kind of storage if it were a significant fraction of our total generation capacity; biomass is an ugly but maybe selectively useful source of energy here; and the big elephant in the room: there was no mention of nuclear in the documentary at all! I sketched out nuclear for the province using numbers from SMR marketing material, enough nuclear generating capacity to cover the province's entire current load would cost, over 20 years, about $800M/yr. The electric company currently spends about $710M/yr on fuel ($2.5B/yr gross revenue). That seems, by far, the easiest way to get to low-carbon power generation. Expanding that to provide enough energy to also heat our homes would get expensive (not to mention retrofitting the entire province to use heat pumps). The gas company currently purchases $396M of natural gas/yr; nuclear for replacing the gas company would be a pretty hard sell. I don't really like any of these conclusions!