6 ms·

This map provides an interesting overview over the electricity sources used in Europe: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

This map provides an interesting overview over the electricity sources used in Europe: https://app.electricitymaps.com/map https://app.electricitymaps.com/map I found it very interesting that pumped hydro is contributing a small but not insignificant portion of energy in a lot of countries, including Germany and France.

swarnie 2y ago
Can anyone explain what's going on in America's western regions? My very naïve understanding is these places have giant deserts the size of some countries, shouldn't they be tripping over solar farms and have much lower carbon intensity?
- happosai 2y ago
  They went full retard on politics and decided climate change isn't a thing. Or if it is, it is someone else's problem. "Look at the huge emissions of China and India - nevermind the CO2/Capita numbers that makes us the bad guy".
  - htthbjk 2y ago
    [dead]
  - api 2y ago
    CO2/capita numbers matter from an assigning blame point of view, but physics doesn't care if a ton of CO2 is emitted by one person or ten people. It's a bad argument to do nothing, but it's also not completely wrong. At this point we could turn off Europe and the USA and would still blow past 800ppm CO2 by 2100.
    - TremendousJudge 2y ago
      Would it work that way? A non-trivial portion of the emissions of those countries are caused by manufacturing products that are exported to the US and Europe
      - api 2y ago
        It would have some follow-on effect for a while due to shrinking the global economy but over time domestic demand in these countries and other places would pick up the slack.
        heavensent 2y ago
        But they can't pickup the slack if they are turned off. The east should not take the blame for emissions, when the majority of it is the proxy emission for the western consumption.
        api 2y ago
        I meant the East would scale up consumption. The Chinese want cars and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners too, and I’m pretty bullish on air conditioning in India. I think we overestimate how much is proxy emissions even now. Those are whole modern growing societies not just factories for us. Our view of climate change and carbon emission tends to be, like other things, very Euro-and-US centric and provincial. What I’m saying is that if you turned us off you’d only delay the oncoming train, not stop it.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  I think the chart doesn't show progress. California carbon fuel is mostly natural gas and those other states still burn a lot of coal. But much less than they used to 10 years ago. California started with a lower carbon intensity and pushed early on to move to renewables. But the other states are also moving that direction, just later and starting with high carbon footprint. Probably helps California politically that 90% of it's natural gas is imported. vs locally produced coal. But Texas as reactionary conservative as it is isn't dragging it's feet either. (We hate that woke solar and wind. Enough to not make some money? Now you shut your mouth) Worth noting inland western states are small population wise.
  - giarc 2y ago
    The right seems fairly interested in "space lasers" so perhaps if we just reframe solar to "space laser power" it'll help with acceptance? Very much tongue in cheek, however this has worked before. There's a company that collects old refrigerant that people have stored (mostly on farms and at mechanic shops). They specifically don't advertise it as recycling or a "green" initiative and instead promote it as a way to make some extra cash. There was a podcast about it a few years ago. I think it was this one https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/kwhnz8b https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/kwhnz8b
    - api 2y ago
      Call it "large scale gravitationally confined fusion power," which is 100% accurate.
- maxerickson 2y ago
  It's somewhat live, change it to monthly. Also, cheap gas.
masklinn 2y ago
> I found it very interesting that pumped hydro is contributing a small but not insignificant portion of energy in a lot of countries, including Germany and France. Is it really surprising? Pumped hydro is essentially massive batteries with fairly high rates of in and out flow, so they're really good both to smooth out production variability from renewables and to match / lead rates of consumption to relatively slow-following nukes. The problem of pumped hydro is having suitable sites, I believe the US is still the only country to have built a completely artificial PHS facility with Taum Sauk.
- rapjr9 2y ago
  A distributed approach to pumped hydro might make sense. Massive reservoirs are useful, but smaller systems could also offset fossil fuel use. There are already millions of water tanks across the world that store water for households and towns. Convert them to solar and add more for other small energy uses; build enough of them and the amount of power in aggregate will be significant. While these small storage tanks could only supply small amounts of electricity, they could be enough to power many applications, and perhaps using hydraulic actuators would increase the efficiency. For example, automatic doors could all be powered by stored water pumped by solar. Add a second storage tank below so the water is re-used instead of continually consuming fresh water. Windmills could do the pumping also. There are probably millions of applications for small energy storage systems like this. Divide and conquer is another approach to scaling, and small systems are not at all tied to having suitable sites for large reservoirs.
  - masklinn 2y ago
    > A distributed approach to pumped hydro might make sense. [...] There are already millions of water tanks across the world that store water for households and towns. It really doesn't. Let's ignore that most of those tanks are in active use and can't just be filled and emptied at will so you'd need a lot of additional hardware to do anything. The fundamental issue of gravity energy storage is that it needs a lot of height or a lot of mass (ideally both): 1kg lifted 1 meter is a bit under 10j, which is nothing (it's 2-3 seconds of a led bulb). If you have a 5000L water tank on the ground an an other on the roof of a two-story house, let's say 7 meters between the two, that's a bit under 350000J, or 97Wh, which is a laptop's battery. And that's before accounting for inefficiencies in the pumps and generators, and friction losses in the ducts. A good PHS site has an upper reservoir capacity of millions (usually tens thereof) of cubic meters, and at least 100m hydraulic head (some are close to 1000). You'd need absolutely humongous water towers (we're talking taller than the tallest and larger than the largest) to get decent storage in distributed completely artificial contexts: the tala tank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tala_tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tala_tank) has 1.5MWh capacity. That's a dozen electric SUVs (à la Rivian), about 20 sedans if their batteries are not too large. Moving, lifting, and storing water are things we're pretty good at, humanity has been doing that for literally thousands of years, if it was an easy way to store energy we'd have been doing it, a lot, for a longtime.

swarnie 2y ago

Can anyone explain what's going on in America's western regions? My very naïve understanding is these places have giant deserts the size of some countries, shouldn't they be tripping over solar farms and have much lower carbon intensity?

happosai 2y ago
They went full retard on politics and decided climate change isn't a thing. Or if it is, it is someone else's problem. "Look at the huge emissions of China and India - nevermind the CO2/Capita numbers that makes us the bad guy".
- htthbjk 2y ago
  [dead]
- api 2y ago
  CO2/capita numbers matter from an assigning blame point of view, but physics doesn't care if a ton of CO2 is emitted by one person or ten people. It's a bad argument to do nothing, but it's also not completely wrong. At this point we could turn off Europe and the USA and would still blow past 800ppm CO2 by 2100.
  - TremendousJudge 2y ago
    Would it work that way? A non-trivial portion of the emissions of those countries are caused by manufacturing products that are exported to the US and Europe
    - api 2y ago
      It would have some follow-on effect for a while due to shrinking the global economy but over time domestic demand in these countries and other places would pick up the slack.
      - heavensent 2y ago
        But they can't pickup the slack if they are turned off. The east should not take the blame for emissions, when the majority of it is the proxy emission for the western consumption.
        api 2y ago
        I meant the East would scale up consumption. The Chinese want cars and dishwashers and vacuum cleaners too, and I’m pretty bullish on air conditioning in India. I think we overestimate how much is proxy emissions even now. Those are whole modern growing societies not just factories for us. Our view of climate change and carbon emission tends to be, like other things, very Euro-and-US centric and provincial. What I’m saying is that if you turned us off you’d only delay the oncoming train, not stop it.
Gibbon1 2y ago
I think the chart doesn't show progress. California carbon fuel is mostly natural gas and those other states still burn a lot of coal. But much less than they used to 10 years ago. California started with a lower carbon intensity and pushed early on to move to renewables. But the other states are also moving that direction, just later and starting with high carbon footprint. Probably helps California politically that 90% of it's natural gas is imported. vs locally produced coal. But Texas as reactionary conservative as it is isn't dragging it's feet either. (We hate that woke solar and wind. Enough to not make some money? Now you shut your mouth) Worth noting inland western states are small population wise.
- giarc 2y ago
  The right seems fairly interested in "space lasers" so perhaps if we just reframe solar to "space laser power" it'll help with acceptance? Very much tongue in cheek, however this has worked before. There's a company that collects old refrigerant that people have stored (mostly on farms and at mechanic shops). They specifically don't advertise it as recycling or a "green" initiative and instead promote it as a way to make some extra cash. There was a podcast about it a few years ago. I think it was this one https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/kwhnz8b https://gimletmedia.com/shows/howtosaveaplanet/kwhnz8b
  - api 2y ago
    Call it "large scale gravitationally confined fusion power," which is 100% accurate.
maxerickson 2y ago
It's somewhat live, change it to monthly. Also, cheap gas.

masklinn 2y ago

> I found it very interesting that pumped hydro is contributing a small but not insignificant portion of energy in a lot of countries, including Germany and France. Is it really surprising? Pumped hydro is essentially massive batteries with fairly high rates of in and out flow, so they're really good both to smooth out production variability from renewables and to match / lead rates of consumption to relatively slow-following nukes. The problem of pumped hydro is having suitable sites, I believe the US is still the only country to have built a completely artificial PHS facility with Taum Sauk.

rapjr9 2y ago
A distributed approach to pumped hydro might make sense. Massive reservoirs are useful, but smaller systems could also offset fossil fuel use. There are already millions of water tanks across the world that store water for households and towns. Convert them to solar and add more for other small energy uses; build enough of them and the amount of power in aggregate will be significant. While these small storage tanks could only supply small amounts of electricity, they could be enough to power many applications, and perhaps using hydraulic actuators would increase the efficiency. For example, automatic doors could all be powered by stored water pumped by solar. Add a second storage tank below so the water is re-used instead of continually consuming fresh water. Windmills could do the pumping also. There are probably millions of applications for small energy storage systems like this. Divide and conquer is another approach to scaling, and small systems are not at all tied to having suitable sites for large reservoirs.
- masklinn 2y ago
  > A distributed approach to pumped hydro might make sense. [...] There are already millions of water tanks across the world that store water for households and towns. It really doesn't. Let's ignore that most of those tanks are in active use and can't just be filled and emptied at will so you'd need a lot of additional hardware to do anything. The fundamental issue of gravity energy storage is that it needs a lot of height or a lot of mass (ideally both): 1kg lifted 1 meter is a bit under 10j, which is nothing (it's 2-3 seconds of a led bulb). If you have a 5000L water tank on the ground an an other on the roof of a two-story house, let's say 7 meters between the two, that's a bit under 350000J, or 97Wh, which is a laptop's battery. And that's before accounting for inefficiencies in the pumps and generators, and friction losses in the ducts. A good PHS site has an upper reservoir capacity of millions (usually tens thereof) of cubic meters, and at least 100m hydraulic head (some are close to 1000). You'd need absolutely humongous water towers (we're talking taller than the tallest and larger than the largest) to get decent storage in distributed completely artificial contexts: the tala tank (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tala_tank https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tala_tank) has 1.5MWh capacity. That's a dozen electric SUVs (à la Rivian), about 20 sedans if their batteries are not too large. Moving, lifting, and storing water are things we're pretty good at, humanity has been doing that for literally thousands of years, if it was an easy way to store energy we'd have been doing it, a lot, for a longtime.