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I await our idiotic governments taxing it heavily to support dying petroleum industries next.
by qz2 6y ago
I await our idiotic governments taxing it heavily to support dying petroleum industries next.
- konjin 6y agoPeople don't want to hear it but saying 'solar is cheap when the sun shines' is like saying 'coal is cheap at the mine'. You need to send it to where it is needed and when it is needed. Storage methods need tens of trillions of investment to reach that capacity and power prices would have to increase 10 to 100 fold to cover those investments. Solar is not a solution for an industrial civilization.
- pjc50 6y agoYou should look at what prices solar and storage are actually being deployed at. Your comment is very much saying things can't be done while people are actually doing it.
- konjin 6y agoI work as a quant for a power company. I have very much looked at what the prices are doing and the answer is "making my employer filthy rich and making the grid unsustainable over the next decade". Solar and batteries are eating the profit from base load and peak generators. Yet are unable to provide the sustained power requirements to keep the grid going on a day that gets over 35C. If you like having power in hospitals at all hours you can't let solar and battery storage invade the grid without regulating it such that the grid survives. Nationalization of the grid assets and a massive nuclear building spree is the only solution if we want children to grow up in a world where brownouts are the exception.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoSeems like an American problem. You got more renewable usage in Europe and more stable grids than the US. Problem is more likely due to poor management and low investment and maintenance of grids in the US. When I travel around the US I notice infrastructure in general is in very poor condition . While people drive big cars and live in McMansions. Public poverty and private opulence.
- Gibbon1 6y agoYeah he tells you the answer why it's an American problem in the first sentence.
- ZeroGravitas 6y agoAnd bizarrely tells you what the non-American answer is in the second last paragraph (sensible regulation of the grid), and then dismisses this out of hand and supports a weird socialist planned-economy solution that only seems popular with American libertarians.
- konjin 6y agoRegulation on electricity works no where. Germany being the best "European" example of how a government has managed to destroy a market to the point that the only reason Germany has power for half the year because France is next door.
- ben_w 6y agoIsn’t French electricity dominated by Electricité de France, which is 85% state-owned?
- konjin 6y agoYes, and look, France has the only working energy market in Europe. Turns out telling businesses what they can and can't do just means they hire smarter people to do what they want in more convoluted ways.
- ben_w 6y agoYou aren’t giving me (software nerd, not quant) enough to latch onto to either agree, to disagree, or even to learn something new. If you have time, I’d suggest reading the following, and — if you feel like it — rephrasing your argument: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Inferential_distance
- qz2 6y agoCompletely. Not just storage but we need to work on energy efficiency as well. We just smoke a huge amount of our generated energy.
- cbmuser 6y agoI‘m not sure why you are being downvoted but you are 100% correct as I have explained in detail in my top comment.
- konjin 6y agoBecause people want easy solutions. Being told that "we have locked in enough climate change already that by 2100 industrial civilization will be impossible anywhere and by 2200 so will agriculture." is not something anyone wants to hear. If we were serious about climate change we would be spending the next 20 years under martial law building nothing but nuclear powered CO2 scrubbers and producing enough food to keep us alive. Anything else is superfluous. Or you can vote for Biden and get a vague promise that by 2050 we will be emitting as much CO2 as we were in 2000. And the less said about Trump the better. The difference in policy options in the US is like the difference between jumping out of a plane and jumping out of a plane tied to an anvil.
- ben_w 6y agoEven from the outside American politics gives every impression of being closer to a reality show than to reality — but there is an outside.
- socialdemocrat 6y agoDo you think building solar farms causes existing gas plants to collapse or something? No, that capacity is still there and you can run it when the sun doesn’t shine. It still saves you money, because the fuel costs more than the solar power. It also reduces CO2 emissions in the period the sun shines. I guess your counter argument is “but it doesn’t remove ALL the CO2!!” But why should it? That is a long term goal. First we remove all CO2 emitted when the sun shines. We still got plenty of work to do there. Only when that has been done all do we need to think about storage. By that time storage solutions will be cheap.
- konjin 6y ago>Do you think building solar farms causes existing gas plants to collapse or something? Yes it literally does. My employer has shuttered three out of their fleet of nine gas power stations because they are no longer peak competitive with batteries. And base load designs aren't competitive with solar since they are more expensive and will only be turned on during extreme events, like a snow storm, or an extremely hot night. Sucks to be us when we need electricity during an extreme event though.
- ben_w 6y ago> My employer has shuttered three out of their fleet of nine gas power stations because they are no longer peak competitive with batteries > Storage methods need tens of trillions of investment to reach that capacity and power prices would have to increase 10 to 100 fold to cover those investments. This sounds like you’re claiming your employer made electricity 10 to 100 times more expensive.
- konjin 6y agoIt's like saying that ice is cheap in the winter then complaining when the refrigeration companies have gone out of business by the summer. Yes, producing electricity when it's needed is more expensive to producing it when it's easy.
- 6y ago
- ben_w 6y agoReports estimate Tesla’s batteries cost them about ~$150/kWh; assuming they last ~1000 cycles, that’s a lifetime cost of $150/MWh. That’s adding x7 over the “cheapest electricity in history” solar and x2.5 for the relatively expensive solar in Europe and the USA, definitely not x100. And even that’s assuming you have to store all the energy before it gets used. Before I left the U.K., I had two different rates for energy depending on the time of day — cheaper at night because demand was lower.