If Tesla Can Run Its Gigafactory On 100% Renewables, Why Can't Others?
Lucas123 writes Tesla CEO Elon Musk has said his company's Gigafactory battery plant, the world's largest, will be "self contained" and run on solar, wind and geothermal energy. The obvious problem with renewable sources is that they're intermittent at any given location, but on a larger scale they're quite predictable and reliable, according to Tom Lombardo, a professor of engineering and technology. Lombardo points out that Tesla isn't necessarily going off-grid, but using a strategy of "net metering" where the factory will produce more renewable energy than it needs, and receive credits in return from its utility when renewables aren't available. So why can't other manufacturing facilities do the same? Is what Tesla is doing not necessarily transferable to other industries? Sam Jaffe, principal research analyst with Navigant Research, believes Tesla's choice of locations — Reno — and its product is optimal for using renewable and not something that can be reproduced by every industry.
Electricity costs consumers three times what it costs in the US:
http://shrinkthatfootprint.com...
German consumers pay a lot of money to subsidize big corporations and manufacturers of solar and energy-intensive manufacturing is being outsourced from Germany. Is that what you want for the US?
I would add (6) Many states have regulations making it impossible to do what Musk is doing. I live in Republican-Controlled Virginia, where I can't buy solar panels from Musk's SolaryCity, which has a location 20 minutes away from me in Washington DC and more locations in Maryland, because my state has pretty much given Dominion Power a monopoly on supplying electricity here, giving them exclusive rights to net-metering--which they have made cost-prohibitive to implement, and the company has actually successfully sued organizations that install solar panels.
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Current version of German environmentalism unfortunately causes mass poverty and functions as a significant wealth transfer mechanism from poor to the rich at the moment. That's why more and more people get disillusioned with it even in Germany, where massive PR effort was used to hide the fact that Energiewende caused Germany to start increasing it's CO2 emissions for first time in over a decade and breach it's Kyoto targets.
Essentially it's a failure when it came to reducing emissions, which increased, it's a failure when it comes to providing affordable energy to people, as there are now people who suffer from "energy poverty", state where they cannot afford electricity and have to go without.
And finally it's a failure upon itself, because Germany has trouble adding more renewables for last couple of years, because subsidies make it really cheap to build renewables, but no one wants to operate coal plants needed to be their spinning reserve because they cannot sell their electricity due to "renewables first" rule at electricity sale exchanges.
It's a clusterfuck. Tyranny, not so much. Just a massive amount of incompetence on political level about real issues with energy production coupled with environmentalist beliefs pushed onto politiicans by people who are straight up scammers. And both people of Germany, as well as people around the world are paying for it. Germans pay for it with massive subsidies that make poorer people being unable to afford electricity at all, while the rest of us are paying for it through the fact that Germany produces more and more CO2 as more and more brown coal plants have to be fired up to provide spinning reserve for more and more renewables.
No its just normal diesel fuel, which by the way is pretty much the same thing as coal oil, just slightly different levels of refinement, most vehicles could use them interchangeably.
What they do typically is put a switch in the o2 sensor lines, and dash mount it. When the sensor is disabled the engine management goes into its limp mode will keep the injectors open. The engine uses much more fuel this way so most only do it when they want to annoy someone. It will also as you might guess clog filters etc if they are not also removed and its done often.
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We can stop 80% of today's CO2 emissions (at least here in the US) in 15 to 20 years with a concerted large scale government subsidized build-out of capacity at existing nuclear power plants. That is the radical action that we need now.
Many of the older coal plants are being closed, to be replaced by 6 fewer new ones: http://energytransition.de/201...
So there is a decrease, and the newer ones are cleaner anyway. Germany is aiming to make the transition around 2024, so is only 1/3rd the way in. It will take time for the grid to adjust to make bigger impacts on coal, but as you can see the energy companies clearly believe it will happen so are already reducing their capacity.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
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