So have I, and nowadays it very much is almost always available situation people expect, even for fully electrified homes. PV paneling cheaper per square m than fencepost plus being able to store a full weeks worth of average amarican home consumption for 20k of new battery have combined to make generatorless off grid a lot more practical.
- Posts
- 3
- Comments
- 361
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
- Posts
- 3
- Comments
- 361
- Joined
- 3 yr. ago
You need less on a social scale if everyone is interconnected obviously, but at the individual level it may well cost more. People were doing household scale off grid with a pile lead acid for decades after all.
Households don’t necessarily need that much power, and while heat pumps change that up north in the winter, when it comes to modern day solar off grid you often use two to three times the inverting capacity worth of panel, precisely because it allows for reliable near full power generation on cloudy or snowy days.
Though while you save some in upfront costs, you loose out on the benefit of eliminating an ongoing cost thanks to still requiring a connection. Given how solar and battery prices continue to drop, it’s likely they will eventually hit the point where it may be cheaper with inflation to buy now and save later when it comes to retirement.
Frequency has to be maintained, and it is trivial to do so when you have excess renewables because inverters are instantly throttle-able. The reason why you’ve never heard about devices failing because frequency is too high is because it is and has always been such a non issue to shutter unneeded generating capacity.
Typically with fossil fuel plants, when the price drops below the cost of fuel for the least efficient plants they drop offline because they are no longer making a profit on fuel and the price holds. Because renewables have upfront cost to build but are free to run on a day to day basis, when there are a lot of renewables the price signal has to drop all the way to nothing before it is no longer profitable to run them.
All this means that all that happened was that for a few hours, solar production was actually enough to satisfy demand for that region. Along term, if low wholesale prices can be counted on midday then people will build industry, storage, or HVDC transfer capacity to take advantage of it.
If these prices are sustained for enough of the day that it is no longer profitable to add more solar farms, then they will stop being built in that area in favor of was to generate power at night such as wind, hydro, and pumped hydro while the panels will instead go to places that still don’t have enough solar to meet demand.
Also as an aside, the wholesale electricity market in north america is by definition about as far from a free market as it is possible for a free market to be without having exact outside price controls. It is a market built solely out of regulation that only exists at all because the government forced it to exist by making it illegal to not use it, either by making contracts off market or by transmission companies in-houseing production, or use it in any way other than as precisely prescribed by the government.
Now we can argue whether or not the wholesale electricity market is well or poorly set up or even if it should exist in the first place, but I don’t think that anyone can argue that it is a free market. At least not without defining the term free market so broad that even most of the markets in the USSR qualify as free markets.
Also, free markets and capitalism are very distinct concepts with no real relation between each other. You might argue that free markets tend to lead towards a capitalist system, but given free markets existed thousands of years before capitalism was invented I don’t think many people would say it was a very strong relationship.
But Amarica bad, hypercapitalist dictator good.
The general reasoning is that while it doesn’t help with ocean acidification or a thousand knock on effects, and most certainly doesn’t ‘solve the problem’ as you put it, such measures would blunt most of the most deadly ones, especially for poorer nations that don’t have the resources to abandon coastlines, flood, and drought prone areas.
Especially since even if all artificial co2, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions snapped out of existence tomorrow we’d still see feedback warming for years to come, and centuries to return to where we are today, killing hundreds of millions of people in the meantime.
If they work effectively, which I am admittedly personally highly skeptical of, any of these geoengineering projects could save tens of millions of people for negligible cost long after we’ve hit net zero.
I am however also skeptical that it would significantly encourage companies to pollute more, as that necessitates you to expect them to pollute less if they think millions of people will die at some point in the distant future because of it, and I think basically any graph of fossil fuel useage after we all agreed that it was killing a shit ton of people and had to be eliminated in the 90s pretty well proves that not to be the case.
I also don’t think that needless death and destruction will modivate significant political action, see Covid, it just makes people suffer.
Ya, I read a lot about disasters so when I first read it added an A and thought it was referring to the International Atomic Energy Agency, (IAEA) which studies and helps clean up after radiation incidents like broken or stolen radioactive medical equipment, reactor excursions, and other such incidents.
After I reread the acronym I was like I could swear the IEA was an energy agency that published a lot of stats on green energy and yet their talking about neoconservative economics?
At least think tanks like The (White) Heritage Foundation have somewhat memorable names and don’t use a legitimate organization’s name.
For the confused, the article is talking about the Institute for Economic Affairs IEA, a neoconservative think thank focusing on free market economics, and not the more well known International Energy Agency.
Um yes, that’s what I said it would take?
Ya, personally i’m in favor of turning all the class 1s into a subdivision of the post office. It is after all a well established government agency used to handling absurdly complex national and international logistics and parcel routing while maintaining buisness friendly reliability.
Maybe that way it would even take longer to reach the inevitable point where after having spent absurd amounts of taxpayer money fixing what private industry broke Congress sells a major railroad off to their friends at a small fraction of its value for the fourth time.
Seriously though, we need electrification and for the railroads to actually take single cars again instead of forcing everything to go by truck if we are serious about decarbonizing north american fright and industry. Some more route realignment, corner shaving, and track speed improvements along our existing Amtrack routes would also be a welcome investment. We’re getting some, but nowhere near as much as we should be.
The problem with electrification however is that while it on average half’s an railroads operating costs, it takes significant upfront investment. Given most of Amtrak runs over fright railroads, and even if it didn’t fright is by far the larger source of carbon, you need to convince said fright railways to make the upfront investment.
Since they are currently in a state of self described ‘managed decline’ as Wall Street and private equity loot the old giants for everything they can, we probably arn’t going to see much progress on that front until Conrail 2, nationalization repairs the US rail system after private companies messed it up round four.
Really emphasizes the importance of heat pumps and decarbonizing industry. I mean obviously everything needs to go to zero eventually, but while the grid and ground transportation get most of the media attention cutting carbon pollution out from industry and residential are challenges on a similar scale.
I agree. While I am very skeptical that high altitude geoengineering would work, to me at least this massive fear around studying the upper atmosphere in these ways just makes it more likely that a rouge nation will go ahead with it anyway, precisely because these large margins of errors provide a hope that it could save millions of their citizens lives for negligible cost.
Of course, the other possibility is that it might actually work as expected, we did after all see a big change post fuel oil sulfur regulations, in which case we will have killed more people than died in both world wars purely out of unfounded fewrmongering.
Given the number of real people who are dying today because of climate change, I feel that it is negligent to not at least look into every card we have at our disposal to save lives.
These things are by definition light sails that can move around just by tilting by a tenth of a degree, they wouldn’t use fuel for station keeping.
Even then, docking to a dead spacecraft and towing it to a nearby repair facility isn’t exactly a great feat beyond our imagination, even if haveing the cubesats slowly return to the station for repair after one gyro fails but before the other redundant ones do fails. Building such an array in the first place requires the sort of space infrastructure necessary to maintain it.
Moreover I find the appeal to having never tried something before to be a silly argument to bring into a climate discussion. After all, we don’t have any real history of running a large scale grid on renewables like solar and wind, so why bother testing or even researching it? Better to stick to powering things with coal and natural gas.
How would many small ones imply a huge and oncoming launch schedule, especially if you are using an L1 array? It’s much easier to repair and refuel a field of cubesats already on site than to get them there in the first place after all.
Moreover, why would orbital shades and or mirrors mean that we keep buring fossil fuels? We would be near net zero before such an array would being anywhere near complete enough to compensate for anything, and more to the point such an array would not serve as continued permission for fossil fuel companies, as it does nothing to address the majority of ecological effects such as ocean acidification.
The whole point of such an array is to save tens of millions of lives which will otherwise be ended by the damage already done long before they were even born by blunting more violent storms and reversing sea level rise, not exactly a carbon offset.
Probably not, while hydrogen production is simple enough by industrial standards, in practice a small hydrogen plant is still the size of a shipping container thanks to the need to reach cryogenic temperatures for decent density and like nearly all very complex industrial kit requires expert maintenance. It also has to deal with practical limitations on round trip efficiency and such that make it hard to scale down to the size where it would be useful for a home or small business.
By contrast LFP or sodium ion batteries and inverters have no moving parts or seals to lubricate and replace or else the building explodes, no real maintenance needs, are far more energy dense, and offer more burst capacity than a fuel cell can.
While it may be viable for grid scale storage, though given most practical proposals involve combustion turbines and get half the energy out you put in I’m skeptical they can compete with more efficient methods like pumped hydro, batteries, and long distance transmission, at least for home use I can’t see hydrogen being practical anytime soon.
The real value in green hydrogen is for industrial uses like fertilizer production, ship fuel, and such, not in consumer applications.
Especially because in practice the massive cost of compute means that while low cost power is nice, it is always more economically sound from the miners prospective to run 24/7 to get the best return on investment. Indeed if you only ran your expensive data center for the few hours a day where solar production can even meet demand than you would never break even.
All of this means that miners in practice have to demand all that power 24/7, and thusly demand either more storage or more fossil production than would otherwise be necessary for the grid. As such crypto mining is not incentivizing a move to renewables but forestalling it.
If nothing else hydrogen is pitifully easy to produce from power, and current non-fossil hydrogen production is nowhere near enough to fulfill current demand, let alone what we’ll need in the next decades. Better yet, because the machinery needed to make hydrogen is so cheap compared to the electricity necessary, it actually makes financial sense to only run them when there is spare renewable capacity as compared to constantly.
Because as we all know, Natrual Gas has an extremely steady and nonvolatile price, especially now that we’ve spent hundreds of billions tying North America’s previously independent pricing to the gobal price.
Or we could, and this is a very crazy idea, go back to not attaching a tradable minute to minute commodities market and instead give control back to reliable contracts and the operators who actually manage the grid.
What were they actually growing, how often did they do thouse crops, and most importantly, where actually was this? I ask because things like maintaining a firewatch or cesspool don’t sound liek tasks you’d find on a mechanized breadbasket planes or irrigated valley wheat or corn farm that make up the majority of north american food production.
I mean obviously my experience is going to be tailored to the farmland I actually live on, but statistically the US national average somewhere about six to eight farm workers per square mile, and that’s doing things like assuming that companies have multiple times as many completely undocumented workers than they do H-2A visa’s, report on taxes, or who show up in studies on undocumented workers.
Given that’s an average that includes orchards and hand crops which take about an order of magnitude more labor-hours than the heavily mechanized crops we are taking about that’s going to be a significant overestimate.
All of this though is pretty irrelevant to the original question though, which had to do with moving to systems that outside of the rosey picture presented by tech startups looking to make investors horny by promising that all their labor costs can be replaced by stepper motors invariably involve vast increases to the amount of low wage manual labor actually needed to produce a ton of food. Or that such a change to a far more carbon intensive way of producing food is a really bad thing when climate change exists.
Even then, modern heat pumps on average only use in the neighborhood of .5k to 2k kwh during the coldest months in southen Canada/ northern US, that is definitely within the capabilities of an reasonably affordable properly designed off grid solar system. Hence why I suggested it was reasonably doable for a fully electrified home, and will likely be much cheaper by the time your average lemmy user is building or buying their dream home.
Currently such a system is already in the cost range of twice that of a inground pool, by far the two most expensive parts of it, overpanneling and battery storage are plummeting in cost.