Skip Navigation

Sonori

@ sonori @beehaw.org

帖子
3
评论
361
加入于
2 yr. ago

  • A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’

    跳过

  • When it comes to comes to climate change, energy and electricity are largely synonymous as outside of semantics like primary energy vs useful work we need to replace fossil energy with electricity, and that is not degrowth.

    Although not as fast as I would like, I also would not call the growth of renewables in the last decade extremely slow, especially when the rate of that growth has been accelerating so quickly.

    Fossil fuel energy is growing because globally energy demand has been growing even faster, and this has been driven first and foremost by more equitable access to energy. While poorer nations still have far lower per capita energy demand, they do have a lot of people who want the energy to protect themselves from the effects of climate change.

    This growth in demand will however will level out as the poors get acess to sufficient energy, aided in no small part by the lower overall cost of green technologies, however I and most of the energy analysis I’ve seen don’t expect the buildout of renewables to stall with it but rather rapidly eat into fossil fuel generation.

    Is this happening as fast as it could be if we all worked together, no. Is it still well on its way to happening, well it arguably already has for an increasing portion of the world. This is all in direct contrast to the articles thesis that green energy cannot ever actually replace fossil fuels.

  • A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’

    跳过

  • Which also means we’re down 17 percent since the peak in 2005, most of which has come from electrical generation despite the article’s insistence that renewables did not and fundamentally could not replace any fossil fueled generation.

    No one is saying that just deploying renewables is going to solve anything, but rather that a massive rollout of green technologies is going to result in a massive increase in electricity demand as everything from heat pumps and EVs to rail electrification and industrial production involves replacing everything we currently do with fossil fuels with electricity.

    As this article in particular is saying over and over again that we cannot generate enough clean electricity to power even our current grid and thusly must shrink our electric demand, it is arguing not for an massive rollout of green technologies but rather that we massively reduce demand for things like heating and cooling our homes or transporting food long distances.

    I am saying that not only is this far harder to achieve than rolling out green technologies, but directly at odds with a world full of lethal heat waves and extreme weather destroying crops and supply chains.

    I am not debating ‘degrowth’ as a whole, but rather the explicit position this author takes that it’s fundamentally impossible to replace fossil fuels so the only approach can be to somehow eliminate demand for food, transport, heating, etc…

  • A Reality Check on Our ‘Energy Transition’

    跳过

  • Obligatory note that if you think moving to renewables is difficult and thusly unlikely, than degrowth is straight up not happening until civilization collapses. Like pure degrowth is a straight up harder, less supported, and less likely to happen option than expanding the renewable build out that has been replacing fossil generation in many countries.

    Both decarbonization by moving things like heating and transport to electricity and the increased occurrences of extreme weather due to climate change inherently result in more electricity demand, and if people are apparently unwilling to cheaper energy than why do you thing they will instead choose to go without?

    Moreover, this argument neglects the fact that over the last ten years overall emissions in both the US and EU have been steadily, if far to slowly, falling, which means that fossil fuels are demonstrably being replaced, and why even among the managers of BP and Shell the discussion is not are they going to be replaced by solar and wind but rather can they drag the process out to fifty years instead of twenty years and how much can they export to the third world before that happens.

    This is also why said companies are moving from ‘climate change isn’t real’ to ‘it is real but there is just nothing you can do about it so please stop replacing us’.

  • USA | High-speed passenger train collides with firetruck in Florida, injuring 15 people

    跳过

  • “High Speed”, as in just about makes the minimum threshold along one section, something standard British intercity services did routinely in the 70s.

    Can we please stop calling every north american passenger line High Speed to make up for the fact that we only have one line that actually meets the standard, and it still has auch a poor right of way that it’s average speed is slower than the highway.

    Like, in most of the world we differentiate between high speed rail lines and snail rail because they behave very differently with high speed lines being significantly faster than driving, meanwhile in the US we don’t have any proper high speed services but try and market all of our trains as high speed.

  • ‘We’re gobsmacked’: climate groups angered by Labor’s ‘no new coalmines’ claim

    跳过

  • Don’t forget also being the number one lithium producer in the world, but completely unwilling to do anything with it but export it.

  • Climate change is making plants less nutritious − that could already be hurting animals that are grazers

    跳过

  • Well i’m glad to see that locusts and aphids are on the list of insects that benefit, since otherwise our efforts to inflict biblical plagues on ourselves might have struggled for the full set.

  • 'Mystery Drones' Flying Over New Jersey? Here's What We Know

    跳过

  • I do love a good old fashioned media panic where we extensively report on what people are saying without doing even the slightest research and hey look, now even more people are saying it so it must be true. Sure we could geolocate the footage and see that the grainy video of the drone with aircraft lights nearby is right where you would expect to see the passenger jet far away that’s flying towards you for landing, but some random blogger said it was a drone on social media so it must be a secret drone doing unspecified evil, while lit up with a bunch more lights than the FAA requires.

    Even better when it comes up on Fox News right before congress pushes though a bill they were already working on to make it even harder for anyone but cooperations and the police to do aerial photography because it might be a problem someday.

    I mean i’m sure that some of them are real drones statistically, you are in one of the densest areas on the continent at a time where everyone from wedding photographers to Amazon is flying, but could we please get some solid evidence about the situation before reporting instead of calling paraphrasing a few TikTok videos breaking news.

  • New compact SUVs now create less pollution, on average, than sedans, thanks to the rapid rise of small electric SUVs.

    跳过

  • I don’t have a problem, I’m just explaining why when you start talking about the far future in reply to a problem in the here and now without any mention that’s what your doing you shouldn’t be surprised someone might think you were talking about a reasonable solution to that problem and explain some of the barriers to that solution.

    Still it’s getting late, and we are off topic from off topic and dominating the comments on something completely unrelated to the conversation, so we should probably leave things here.

    I apologize if I was to snarky in response to the rhetorical questions, and I do hope you have a lovely day/night.

  • 已锁定

    Car tires shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment. Urgent action is needed

    跳过

  • It would be funny though if some environmentalist managed to make the tax properly technology agnostic though. Mostly if you can keep them from being exempted anything that hurts EVs goes double for pickups.

    Of course we both know gas cars get exempted whenever this sort of thing passes because it’s never actually about vehicle weight and road wear so much as how can we slow the decline in gasoline demand for a few years, but it’s nice to imagine that silver lining.

  • New compact SUVs now create less pollution, on average, than sedans, thanks to the rapid rise of small electric SUVs.

    跳过

  • I mean you are pretty explicitly expecting people to buy a car just to go to work and groceries.

    More to the point NEVs in NA and quadracycles in Europe are already available, and indeed represented the majority of the EV market about fifteen to twenty years ago.

    They didn’t really find a market in the US and most of the companies that made them failed, but have remained semi-successful in Europe where their low cost and less strict licensing requirements made them popular with teenagers and seniors.

    Nevertheless, it was only with 250mi plus ranges that EVs actually stated to push gas cars off the road in any number.

    Generally, on the internet, it is helpful to at least lampshade when you are proposing an idea that is very far off and/or disconnected from both the context of the conversation and the way you think the world actually does work, especially when in a community that regularly discusses legislative and technical details and changes of the clean energy transition.

    When the conversation started from a news story about how a ok method of reducing emissions in the US is achieving more than technically better method because it’s seen slower adoption, passerby’s are going to assume given that context that you are talking about changes to be made in the few short years and decades we have to stop the destruction of civilization as we know it into account.

  • New compact SUVs now create less pollution, on average, than sedans, thanks to the rapid rise of small electric SUVs.

    跳过

  • And I live in a country which As a Society just decided, by popular vote, to elect someone with the explicit goal of devolving what little remains of our sorry little public transport, and which promises a fight for our communities to hold one to what little we can, so yes, I gave an individual answer, because as a Society the answer is demonstrably“Drill baby, Drill” and “climate change is a hoax”.

  • New compact SUVs now create less pollution, on average, than sedans, thanks to the rapid rise of small electric SUVs.

    跳过

  • Firstly, you are the one who started from the premise you need to own a car to commute, and indeed that one should own a car capable only of commuting and other very short often bikeable trips.

    Secondly, while I do heavily support urban density, in the english speaking world we are generally woefully short of having enough urban housing for even the people who live there right now, much less relocate everyone who doesn’t.

    Because these places are so desirable, people can and demonstrably do pay a large premium to live in these areas, pricing out a large number of people from the start.

    Moreover, in a country where a solidly blue city in a solidly blue state can spend a decade and an obscene amount of money to try and so far fail to put in a bus lane, mass transit, as much as I love be it and want more of it, simply isn’t going to be built out to the point where it serves every house and farm in anything like the next ten years, which is already a painfully long time from a climate prospective.

    It is also completely disconnected from a country where some large cities have gone so far as to outright ban rasing taxes to fund mass transit, and a continent where Doug Ford is literally ripping out well used bike lanes to signal how much he loves cars. The people and places who elected him still need to decarbonize, and an easy drop in change like electrifying the the current system while expanding transit.

    To note the obvious, back before cars, trains, planes etc… when we walked, people still had horses and ships. It just meant that unless you were rich most people lived and died in the same small village as their family lived and died in, and is a rather silly goal for a world in which people talk and make friends with others on the far side of the planet, and where a day trip with nearby friends means less than 500mi and people regularly travel hundreds for work.

    We live in a vastly more connected world where inter-city travel is a routine thing, and a country where we have spent the lasr half century desolving and selling off every intercity rail line we could, a network which took nearly a century to build.

    Even in places like Swisserland or the Netherlands, places built before cars and with extremely prolific bike and rail infrastructure, about half the population own cars, they just don’t get used for short trips as often.

    This is a great achievement that represents a hopeful vision of the future that is worth working for, and one that took entire generations of advocacy. To suggest we are going to go so much further beyond it in a few short years in a far larger and more spread out nation with a hostile federal government is outright absurd.

  • New compact SUVs now create less pollution, on average, than sedans, thanks to the rapid rise of small electric SUVs.

    跳过

  • Because you can’t fly everywhere, renting for a routine trip is an expensive, time consuming, and logistically difficult process, and if you’re going to spend so much to own a car it might as well be useful for all your trips instead of just some of them?

    Moreover, someone’s commute is often nowhere near the longest trip they make on a regular basis, as often one might need to drive several places, go into town multiple times in a day, travel to a neighboring city to meet with friends, etc… all of which can require several times the (hopefully short) work and back distance.

    This is ignoring that battery degradation is a direct consequence of the charge and discharge current, and as such a larger battery will degrade at a significantly slower rate.

    All this means you’re going to face an uphill battle trying to get people to sacrifice a bunch of capability for a few percent reduction in weight and cost.

    Their is almost certainly a market for short range city cars, but that’s likely to be eventually more than filled by the used market, where a decades old 200mi range car is still going to be more capable than a 50 to 100mi range car.

  • New compact SUVs now create less pollution, on average, than sedans, thanks to the rapid rise of small electric SUVs.

    跳过

  • To answer the question, because a lot of people don’t want to or can’t afford to buy a second car just for when they need to drive longer than their daily commute.

    I agree that you could go smaller than the average of 300mi, but the minimum necessary range for say interstate travel around here is 150 to 200mi.

    The answer is to focus on the smaller sedans and such we lived with for generations instead of just the largest and highest markup suv or pickup out there. While EVs are heavier on average, it’s worth noting this difference is a lot smaller than the difference in weight between say a sedan and a crossover, or a crossover and a SUV.

  • Desks

    跳过

  • It also helps against what tends to be modeled and seen as the largest cause of injury during a nuclear scale explosion like that seen in Beirut, namely shards of glass, though it definitely helps survive falling beams in timber framed buildings.

    Remember, thanks to the wonders of the inverse square law you are statistically far more likely to be in the area that gets light to moderate blast damage from the pressure wave rather than core of the blast.

  • For a Thing That Will Supposedly Fix the Climate, AI Sure Needs a Lot of Fossil Fuels

    跳过

  • Plants that take ten years to build don’t seem like a very good response to a boom that measures dataceneter build time in months and will probably collapse in a year or two as hype is replaced by the reality of the technology. Battery backed solar and wind on the other hand are both cheaper, and can be built faster than the ‘AI’ datacenters they are ment to power.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think nuclear power is important to the energy transition, and will find its use in certain use cases like large scale marine transport or places near the artic circle, but the window to build it was 1970 to 2010. At a point when the biggest thing slowing down green energy if finding financing for it, it makes sense to go with the lowest cost option available, which is battery backed solar.

  • Is China striding past Europe, America and Japan on nuclear fusion?

    跳过

  • I mean either way, Fusion is such a long way off that it doesn’t really have much of an impact on climate seeing as we need to reach net zero decades before any significant number of plants could come online. While worthwhile from a scientific and long term perspective looking 50 to a 100 years into the future, but we built the first fission reactor in a spare room under some sports arena in Chicago and it’s still to complex and expensive to be cost effective compared to battery backed solar and wind, so a process that’s so much more expensive and difficult that we haven’t even done it yet probably isn’t going to change anything in the next few decades.

    Honestly, the place where I can see nuclear fission making the strongest case is when it comes to large ocean crossing cargo ships. The extra crew and tech make it more expensive than fuel oil, but not massively so, and as such it could work out as being cheaper for very large ships than any other method of decarbonization.

    Of course that only matters if we’re actually serious about forcing decarbonization in all sectors and not just the current method of just where it is cheaper than massively subsidized oil, so maybe we’ll see more pressure to do so in a decade or so. For now, when we’re limited principally from the amount of money we are willing to invest in building clean energy, the long wait times and low return on investment make it seem increasingly like a way to slow solar and wind’s growth, and thusly buy oil and gas a few more years of market share, which is probably why said oil and gas companies went from fighting nuclear with every add campaign they could muster in the 90s and 2000s to their current support for it.

  • Midwest wins funding for a new hydrogen hub. Not everyone is convinced it's 'clean.'

    跳过

  • The hard part is that there are places where hydrogen really is the best path forward for decarbonization, especially when it comes to making fertilizers or various other industrial processes, and even maybe for marine applications, but the conversation keeps getting pushed towards cars, buses, trains, and other small vehicles where it just isn’t practical.

    Given how involved oil companies have been in marketing it in those segments, and the willingness of certain car, bus, and train companies to be perpetually ‘trialing’ hydrogen instead of just using batteries or centenary, it is rightly often seen as just a way to greenwash and delay from electrification, but there are still things where hydrogen really is the better option for decarbonization and we should be pushing for more green hydrogen production and infrastructure there while calling out the organizations acting in bad faith.

    I’m admittedly uncertain that investing in new battery technology is really likely to help though. We just don’t have the decade or two required for said tech to be discovered, refined, put into production, and then scaled up.

    Between LFP for mass vehicles, Li-ion for space and mass critical applications, and Sodium ion for bulk storage, centenary and marine nuclear for bulk transport, along with solar, wind, and hydro for generation and long term energy storage, I think we already have all the tech necessary to scale up and decarbonize both the grid and overland transport. At this point the focus and funding should instead be put towards applying said technology as quickly and at as large a scale as possible as fast as possible.

    We know what we need to do, we know how to do it, now we just need to actually do it.

  • Tradition rule

    跳过

  • Personally, I prefer ‘Tradition is the rotting corpse of wisdom’, but that works too.

  • Sol-Ark manufacturer reportedly disables all Deye inverters in the US

    跳过

  • I just installed a sol ark system, and can confirm that they work just as well with a pi and Solar Assistant. Not open source, but integrates well with homeassistant and no need for network connecting the actual electrical equipment, just usb.