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Deploying Solar In California's Urban Areas Could Meet Demand Five Times Over
Lucas123 writes: About 8% of terrestrial surfaces in California have been developed, ranging from cities and buildings to park spaces. If photovoltaic panels, along with concentrating solar power, were more effectively deployed in and around those areas, it could meet between three and five times what California currently uses for electricity, according to a new study. The study from the Carnegie Institution for Science, found that using small- and utility-scale solar power in and around developed areas could generate up to 15,000 terawatt-hours of energy a year using photovoltaic technology, and 6,000 TWh of energy a year using concentrating solar power technology. "Integrating solar facilities into the urban and suburban environment causes the least amount of land-cover change and the lowest environmental impact," post-doctoral environmental earth scientist Rebecca Hernandez said.
All that electrical power will only be used to oppress the workers more. Capitalism is at a dead end. Socialist revolution is humanity's last and only hope.
Rather than "last and only hope" I'd say "next stage in the eternal progression of socioeconomic systems".
I'm sure after a few centuries a human being will say "Socialism is at a dead end. Balancianist revolution is humanity's last and only hope."
The main concern for solar hasn't been one of the space necessary for a long time. Partially covering something like half the south-facing side of a roof has been sufficient to cover a home's needs for quite some time. A few more percent in panel efficiency would only decrease the coverage necessary.
Like for most things, the real killer has been cost. Smaller footprints are good, reduces cost and increases flexibility(you don't NEED to take down that one tree...). Today it's getting to the point that we need to work to make installs cheaper, including the inverter, which of the items that can fail, currently have the lowest warranty period as well. If you 'plan' on replacing it once it's out of warranty, you'll go through 3 inverters per replacement of the solar panels. Yes, both actually last longer than that, but it's an expense to be wary of.
Personally, in order to manage cost I like to propose 'dual use' applications - solar panels on a roof can act as a solar barrier and reduce the heat load in the house, reducing electricity needs for HVAC even as it supplies electricity for the very same HVAC. My latest 'idea', which is far from unique, is the 'solar car park'. We know people like parking in the shade, and solar panels are typically* strong enough that you can use them directly for roofing material as long as your roof is either small enough or you don't need it to be absolutely tight(like for a house). A few dribbles won't hurt a car but the shade certainly would be nice.
So you mount the panels up over your parking lot(or driveway), and you come out to a shaded, and therefore not blazing hot, car. You park at the store and again, don't come back to a blazing hot car. As a bonus, it'll even extend the life of your paint job and interior, as well as help protect any sensitive electronics that don't like baking in a hot vehicle.
*Some are, some aren't, but it's easy enough to specify/check.
I don't read AC A human right
There's a good reason why we call it the most progressive state in the U.S. (if not the world).
After all the recent baseless insults, all that is left to say is Everybody line up and suck it.
What is the material, labor and recycling cost of doing so ? Lack of space is likely not the blocking issue with solar. Google probably has the answers.
And meet 0% of the demand at night if they don't have storage which is very expensive.
And on a more serious note, why hasn't California tried getting water from the ocean? I heard they were going to run out of the stuff in less than a year.
Because if it wasn't for the last minute, nothing would ever be done!
And on a more serious note, why hasn't California tried getting water from the ocean?
Profit margins are too low, and you know, politics. It's something only the state can do. And it would pay off extremely well.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
What brand of socialism though? The wunderkind society that resulted from the USSR? Maybe North korean style Kim Il Sung worship is more your style? Maybe the economic wasteland that is cuba? I know, the 'people's republic' of china must be your thing as they've got excellent track records in things like civil rights, quality of life, and relative equity. Oh wait, that's right, none of these societies ever got close to that of the united states, never mind some promise of utopia. In fact, their political policies reenforced inequity, to the point of having two currencies in the case of the USSR. Guess which currency the average worker got paid for his labor? (hint: it wasn't the one that was worth anything on the market)
You'd think the political squabbles of the 20th century would make people realize how dangerous ideologies like this are to sustainable societies, never mind free ones. None of them were meant to help the common man, they were meant to keep the elite in power.
What are you waiting for. This is your opportunity to completely transform your state and become energy independent leading the way for a greener and cleaner America and even a chance to make a buck og two in the process by selling off your excess power production... Talk to people in your neighbourhood pool your resources that way you don't need to wait for incompetent politicians working for the lobbyists or greedy power companies out to take your rightful chance to make an earning from you. Best of luck you don't just have a window of opportunity... you have the barn door open right now!
MS, ALS, Aphasia ? http://globability.org - Me http://einarpetersen.com
A standard solar panel (like http://www.wholesalesolar.com/...) is about $150/m^2.
The size of California: 423 000 km^2. One-fifth of 8% of that, to meet the current need, is about 6768 km^2.
At $150/m^2, that would be approximately $1E12. That's [only] $26 000 per citizen. Start the haggle!
Of course you are correct because there can't possible any corruption in your little utopia of socialism right?
Calling any party/politcian from the US as socialist when they don't even have true single payer universal healthcare is just laughable. Our right wing parties in Europe are more socialist than Obama or the Democratic party of the USA.
"None of them were meant to help the common man, they were meant to keep the elite in power."
And therefore none of them were socialist.
If you want socialist, look at Scandanavian countries. And most of them are doibg far better in average quality of life than the USA.
I was driving through Orlando recently and I was amazed by the amount of disused land - stores which had gone out of business and so on. In front of these stores were very large parking lots which were doing nothing but growing weeds. It struck me that if solar panels were mounted onto trailers that you could simply drive them to such a vacant spot, park them and feed the power straight into the grid.
If the laws were friendly to such use - requiring vacant lots to be used for this purpose etc. then it's not hard to see businesses springing up to make use of it. The biggest issue is what to do with the surplus but there are answers to that too
When housing associations, communities and local government care more that your lawn is green than preserving water because there is a drought, what chance do people have in making serious use of solar energy by putting panels on the roof of their house?
Reference: http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Fernand-Bogman-Upland-Drought-Lawn-Crime-283507091.html
I'm sure that utilities will lobby local governments to try and limit what sort of impact solar panels can have if it becomes clear they will be a threat.
I'd bet the more delusional Space Nutters will still try to convince us (and themselves, mostly) that space-based solar ever made any sense...
Nuh uh! It's the republicans fault! Next democrat won't do anything evil!
Nuh uh! It's the democrats fault! Next republican won't do anything evil!
Your post almost sounds like an advertisement...
Anyways, I dislike the idea of having the solar roofs be on wheels for a couple reasons:
Wind Resistance. If you don't have it anchored down, wind(or thieves) can spirit it away much easier.
Power connection - should be permanent.
Basically, unless the wheels are a lot more robust than what I'm picturing, you'd have to 'roll it inside' for severe weather, which I'd really prefer to avoid.
I don't read AC A human right
This study claims a reduction in carbon emissions from solar power but I've read studies that show increased carbon emissions from solar power. Why is that? Because solar power is very poor at matching when people use power. Sure, people tend to turn stuff off at night when the sun is down and turn them on when the sun shines but the load curve seen by utilities shows a peek power usage at about 6:00PM, when the sun is setting and solar power has already begun to wane.
How does this translate into increased carbon output? When solar power wanes there needs to be a power source that can be brought up to power quickly and still be inexpensive enough that it is economical. That is where natural gas comes in. Instead of using highly efficient combined cycle power, which takes hours to come up to power, the utilities use natural gas turbines. Combined cycle power plants get about 60% efficiency, gas turbine power plants might get 40%. Turning the turbines off and on burns more fuel, reducing the effective efficiency.
So rather than using a highly efficient combined cycle power plant a utility that must accommodate the quickly changing output of solar power must use less efficient gas turbines. The more solar power on the grid means more gas turbines. More gas turbines means less efficient use of natural gas. Therefore there is no net reduction of carbon emissions from use of solar power.
Then comes the argument for storing the solar energy for use when the sun does not shine. That adds cost. We have nothing that can store electricity that is cheaper than burning natural gas or coal, using nuclear power, or using hydro power. If solar power is to become cheap enough to compete with coal and nuclear then we need a means to store electricity that is cheap.
The problem then comes in that any technology that makes storing electric energy cheap also makes coal and nuclear power cheaper. Then why not just make solar power cheaper? Because that will never solve the problem of the sun going down.
Solar power is a dead end. Solar power would have to be cheap enough to make up for the costs of its manufacture and storage as well as compete with coal and nuclear. While we might run out of coal in 300 years we just cannot run out of nuclear fuel, it is just too common.
Then there is the environment disaster that is caused by the manufacture of photovoltaic panels. Making them requires significant amounts of water, toxic chemicals, and lots of energy.
Solar power is not the answer. Nuclear power is the answer. I know someone is going to point out the nuclear waste that comes from nuclear power now. My answer to that is Waste Annihilating Molten Salt Reactors. These things eat radioactive waste. If it is radioactive then it is fuel. If it's not radioactive then it's not waste any more, right?
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
As soon you join a large enough group of humans, this group automatically morphs into an horrible monster that tries to take advantage of everyone else, and the only way to stop it is to pit it against another monster, thus forcing both to make concessions that benefit the mere mortals to thrive.
The capitalism start to fail as soon you get the right to buy yourself a monopoly, and socialism is basically "everything is a monopoly from the get go", so not good idea at all.
Why do you think they'd need to cover 1/5th of California? Urban area cover (rooftops). 1/5th of THAT would meet demands.
How much of California is rooftop. Not how much ground area is California.
They get power from other states using solar power when they haven't got any sunlight, and get to sell their power to other states when they have sunlight and the other state doesn't.
So of course it helps California.
I quoteth the GP:
423 000 km^2. One-fifth of 8% of that, to meet the current need, is about 6768 km^2
The tip off that you misread was that 6,768 is nowhere near 1/5 of 423,000. This is the *low end* of their estimate.
This was exactly the problem I had with the "solar road" crowdfunding boondoggle. Their end game of covering all the asphalted surfaces with their road panels came out to nearly a quadrillion dollars. And that was assuming they lowered the cost of their system - concrete sub-base, road prep, installation, component manufacture, and infrastructure - to about $125 per module (i.e. about $1/lb, installed).
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
If that has been your experience, then I kindly ask you to not join any further such groups of humans.
How about the anarcho-socialist brand, or council-communism or part-econ - all of which basically do socialism without any state or government at all.
Unlike, say, libertarianism at least one of those HAS actually been tried. Andalusia in Spain was anarcho socialist for about 20 years at the start of the 20th century, they were simultaneously at war with capitalists from the north and communists from the South. The capitalists hated their working socialism, the communists hated their working anarchism.
But despite the costs of those wars they were extremely successful. George Orwell visited Andalusia and described it as "the most egalitarian society I have ever seen -as close to perfection as civilization has gotten".
In many ways, it was Star Trek Next Generation without the science fiction - just done with the technology of a century ago, imagine what we could do with TODAY's technology ?
It wasn't perfect and there were some problems though they were making good progress towards solving them and, had they not ultimately lost the wars after 20 years, they probably would have since their track record strongly suggests it.
A key component was that the only kind of business they had were worker-owned cooperatives, but these cooperatives still competed in an open market. Worker-owned is all you need for the definition of "socialism" to apply, there is nothing that requires a state, or a government, or even the absence of markets.
That model works surprisingly well - right now worker owned cooperatives in the USA include one of the biggest industrial bakeries in California, one of the leading manufacturers of robotics in Texas (yes, high-tech companies work well this way too) and the largest carpet-maker on earth.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Sounds great, few problems though. First off is cost, they're talking about placing solar panels across millions of square acres. I could have mistyped but from what I can figure (6.7M acres / 15 sqft solar panels) that would take a mind boggling number of solar panels, almost 20 Billion. At current rates that would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $19 Trillion dollars. Secondly what do you do with all that power, you'll either have to build one heck of a grid storage system or fundamentally rethink how electricity is used, or a little of both. Our energy future will involve a mix of power if we have any sense, Some solar to take up the slack on those hot days, some fossil for peak loads or cloudy days and nuclear/coal/wind for baseload.
Until there is a solution for nuclear waste, it is illegal to build nuclear power plants in California. Notice that when the sun shine, there is no need to use natural gas, so gas use is reduced. Your argument is mistaken.
And you need to read the text again:
About 8% of terrestrial surfaces in California have been developed, ranging from cities and buildings to park spaces. If photovoltaic panels, along with concentrating solar power, were more effectively deployed in and around those areas
It would take about 50,000km^2 to power the entire world. All power use. At less than half the efficiency you get today. With a projected increase up to 2050.
Your figures should have been reworked to view how wrong they are.
They're not going to be able to build that overnight. If they think they might need it next year, they should start building something that big in about 2005.
"And it would pay off extremely well."
If that is true, then private industry could (and should) do it. Adding gov't to something just increases the cost (absolutely) and delay (probably.)
Every single claim in that post is just plain false.
What has been responsibile for humanity's recent improvements in quality of life has been science: a blatantly socialist system.
There is nothing libertarian about contracts, profit-seeking or voluntary trade, these are found in ALL variations of capitalism AND in many variations of socialism as well.
Nowhere in my speech did I once speak in favour of the state, but the reality is that there is a LOT of very wealthy countries with big governments and not a single rich country WITHOUT one. Small governments are only found where poverty is at it's worst. The sole EXCEPTION was Andalusia - no government and high quality of life, but THAT was socialist.
Libertarianism has NEVER been tried - you're just trying to shoehorn a bunch of stuff and claim it's libertarianism while ignoring the most IMPORTANT parts of what DEFINES libertarianism. You don't know what libertarianism actually IS - you just like the sound of the word it seems and apply it to everything you approve of regardless of whether that is a particularly or exclusively libertarian thing, and ignoring that the things that ARE particularly and exclusively libertarian have NOT in fact ever been tried.
Only one variation of socialism has been a failure, there are thousands of others - and at least one has been a remarkable success, I gave you the example right there in my post. The kind of capitalism practiced in the Rhineland countries, and Scandinavian welfare-state concepts are considered socialist by American standards and THEY are MORE successful than America has ever been.
Maybe not in the way America likes to measure (total wealth in the country) but in the way that MATTERS: actual quality of life of most citizens.
They have very few poor people, and the few they have live much better lives than the poor in the USA - now THAT is success.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
One of the reasons Denmark can run on wind (currently 39% of their total) and solar power (500 MW total from 90,000 private installations according to wikipedia) is that we have installed multiple DC transmissions lines between Denmark and Norway, and hydro-electric power is by far the most responsive to changing load.
On the west coast mountains we have storage dams where surplus power can be used to pump up water during periods of surplus production and then let down again when Denmark, Sweden or countries further south need some extra power.
From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... you can see that this is _by far_ the largest grid energy storage form, accounting for more than 99% of the total capacity worldwide.
The total efficiency (70%-87%) is quite good, which means that this is not just a good idea but can pay for itself anywhere the difference between peak and off-peak energy costs are larger than the ~20% that is lost to pump friction.
Terje
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
Okay, current solar concentration clocks in at about 100MW steady output and about 300GWh per annum per square mile of facility.
You're talking about covering up about 20,000 square miles, or roughly 12% of the state, in solar concentrator facilities.
Never mind that Nuclear is many times more energy-dense and could support the state, with a more realistic investment in renewables in just a fraction of that land area.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Yeah for the dictatorship of the proletariat.. Nothing like a central authority telling you what to do. Just look to Mother Russian, Mao's China and the wonderful Kim leadership in Korea and see how socialism leads the way to freedom and person fulfillment.
If you're scared of your govt then you need to further restrict its powers
Vote 3rd Party in 2016 and beyond
Libertarian principles are what has raised humanity out of the muck and into a quality of life that nobody could have ever envisioned.
Yeah, like this or this.
"could" it could meet between three and five times what California currently uses for electricity.
What we need is a better way to transmit, store or retrieve power (electrical, heat, momentum, pressure, chemical, it doesn't matter - and yes, a room temperature superconductor will count). Do that and pretty instantly several things will happen:
1)Coal plants will all shut down. They are too expensive now, even not accounting for their massively bad ecological issues.
2)New natural gas plants will cease to be created. A few might even shut down.
3) New nuclear plants will suddenly be approved .... in the middle of deserts and other areas safely far away from population centers
4) New geothermal, solar, tidal, and wind power plants will pop up to replace the coal plants.
Also, there is the possibility that cars will switch to the new power source, but no guarantee.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No idea what polit nonsense and ideologies have to do here: ...., they were simultaneously at war with capitalists from the north and communists from the South.
Andalusia in Spain was anarcho socialist
Actually the south of Andalusia is the mediterranean sea.
I doubt they where at war with Poseidon.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Can they turn electricity into water? better get working on that system fast.
No, adding government can decrease the cost by allowing for it to bargain for better deals from private industry through scale. Delays also might not increase. That is unless you are confusing your governments (local, national, whatever) with others...
Translation:
"I, nospam007, don't know what socialism is. I've heard some people on the TV say that Obama is socialist, so I'm going to assume he is. I'm not good at learning, or I simply refuse to."
State sells the excess to neighbors for profit, helping the State's budget?
The US has been a mixed system for many decades. The degree of success of the US corresponds to the degree that we are a socialist system. Capitalism is more like a disease that has reached its end stage and is killing off its host. It is obvious that California can do quite well with solar and wind replacing nuclear and fossil fueled power systems. I'm in Florida and we need a way to turn the sun off a bit here. We have so much intense sun light that half my town vanishes nine months a year as it is an oven here. And the disease called capitalism is all that has kept my state from going to sun and tide to supply all of our power needs. Special interest groups are blocking progress at all turns. Our wretched governor will fire state employees for using the words global warming. And this is despite the fact that a large portion of our state will soon be submerged by rising seas. The Florida Keys as well as the Everglades will be salt water lagoons soon enough. Parts of Miami beach are already in trouble. The first national shock will occur when the vastly expensive beach front properties in south Florida become ineligible for insurance due to rising seas. The financial chaos alone could be severe enough to bankrupt the nation. It will also mean that we will have no fresh water supplies for about six million Floridians unless we build a huge network of desalinization plants to obtain fresh water. It will also mean that one of the few places in America that can grow crops in the winter will no longer be used for farming.
The solar power people should be celebrating right now. Oil is now the cheapest it has been in six years. Why should they be celebrating? Because oil price is a proxy for energy prices. If oil is cheap then all energy is cheap.
If oil is cheap then energy sources like oil shale and tar sands look like a bad idea. If oil is expensive then that makes oil shale and tar sands look profitable.
I hear so many times how we need to make oil expensive to save the whales, or whatever needs saving this week, and that just sounds counter to the basics of economics to me. We need to make oil cheap. Make it so cheap that no one wants it.
I can buy one ton of dirt for $5, I've done it. Why can I buy dirt that cheap? Because no one wants it. If people wanted it then it would not be that cheap. It costs more in the fuel to get it than the dirt itself costs. Make oil the same and no one will go get it. Make energy so cheap that no one will bother to expend the energy to get the oil.
How do we make energy so cheap that no one bothers to drill for oil? Well, I have an idea. My idea does not involve carbon credits, energy taxes, or any of that because all of those raise the price of energy. Raise the price of energy and things like coal and oil shale is profitable. DO NOT TAX CARBON!
Another thing, who makes the most profit from oil? It's not the oil companies. It's not the refineries. It certainly is not the local filling station. It's the government. Taxes on fossil fuels makes the government piles of money. They aren't going to kill their golden goose. Demanding a raise in carbon taxes only makes the government more dependent on fossil fuels.
Solar panels cost the government money, they subsidize their production. Where does this money come from? Oil taxes. What happens if solar power replaces oil and the tax structure stays in place? The government runs out of money. When the government gets serious about solar power then we will see it taxed. Not only do solar power subsidies take money from the poor and give it to the rich people that can afford solar power it is holding solar power back.
Solar power subsidies is holding it back. The solar power industry exists to maximize government subsidy, not energy output. Remove the subsidy and the industry must either make something that can compete with oil or fade out of existence. Our economy cannot support losers forever.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Honestly the societies you listed had problems that communism was not the cause of
USSR - was in a arms race with the US, that it was never going to win, it pushed so much of it's countries production into making nukes that while it had thousands of more nuclear warheads than the USA at it's peak, it could do nothing else economically.
Those other counties listed - NK, Cuba, China ... the only reason they are behind is because they were locked out economic markets for being communist. Look at a map of the Marshal Plan participants ( European Recovery Program ), these are the most advanced technologically and stable economies in the world next to the US.
China never promised it's people an easy life, China's government promises it's people safety from invaders and internal stability. We have a hard time understanding this as a primary driving mandate in the US because we have a very different value system. We are culturally very different, if the Chinese did not like they're government then if they chose to rise to the occasion there are too many of them ( x billion ) to not topple any government on Earth, just saying ;-)
If you are stating that economic ability is - them getting close to the US - then China passed us a few years ago, and as there next half billion people move into the middle class they will be the only economic powerhouse on the planet... we in the US do not have the number of people to compete, our population is too small and this generation of rule makers do not like immigrants ( every generation has had a problem with this to be fair -- lookup Irish discrimination, Catholic discrimination, Italian discrimination - if your different and moved to the US recently the established blamed everything on you )
"In fact, their political policies reinforced* inequity," == as do ours in the US, where the middle class has been shrunk by half in the last 30 years due to changes in tax policy. Granted I like paying less in taxes, but I realize that as the more affluent pay less as well they get to buy more items for speculation purposes that raises the cost of items higher, like houses, cars, clothing, food, and travel, hotels, rentals and everything else. Their money flooding back into the economy has had good things happen to, like reinvestment, venture capitalism funding large gains in tech.
At the end of the day, if we create a society in which 90% of work is done and can be done by machines or the people that program and maintain machines, how do we evolve our way of thinking about our, humans, place in society. If we can only envision usefulness in terms of economics we are doomed to displacing billions into poverty. And if everyone is poor not because they are unable, but because it make no economic sense to employ them we need to rethink money and the role it plays. People are starting to have this conversation more and more as the US the second biggest economy the former king of the middle class looses it middle class to poverty.
I'm talking about the payoff for society that the government is supposed to represent, not just a few investors. It is the same issue that goes for all essential goods. There are no technical reasons for shortages of any kind.
Todos mis movimientos están friamente calculados
"Payoffs to society" would be providing a good or service at the least cost and greatest availability. Involvement of government generally causes increased costs and less availability. That is a prime reason for private industry to be doing it.
Basically as solar rapidly drops off at sunset conventional is having trouble ramping up to meet demand.
On the other hand, wind power in many of the best sites peaks strongly in exactly the "duck head" period.
The reason is the "lake effect": Land heats and cools far more rapidly than bodies of water (which are nearly a constant temperature on a daily cycle). The difference forms a heat engine, and the cycle lags the solar cycle by several hours. In the afternoon and evening (peaking about sunset) the wind blows strongly from the water to the land. (In the morning it blows from the land to the water though more weakly.)
The wind power available through a given swept cross-section goes up with the CUBE of the wind speed: (The energy per unit mass goes up with the square of the velocity, and the amount of mass flowing goes with the first power, multiplying one more factor of v.) That means a doubling of the wind speed multiplies the availabe power bya factor of 8, a tripling by 27, and so on. So it doesn't take much variation in wind speed to create a large variation in power.
Some of the best sites to take advantage of this are on the western temperate-zone coasts of continents (which happen to contain a lot of the urban load.) There the lake effect is extreme, combining with the prevailig winds.
One of the most extreme examples is California's Altamont Pass, where a break in the mountains funnels the prevailing, westerlies combined with the lake effect winds - with the Pacific Ocean as the "lake" and CA's Central Valley as the "land". The area is practically paved with windmills.
But you don't need something that extreme. My NV place, in the eastern Sierra foothills, gets strong afternoon winds from the Nevada Desert working against the damp forests of the Sierras.
Even without a strong lake effect to "chop off the duck's head", wind and solar power complement each other and reasonably match demand in several other ways in areas where both are available. For a lot of sites with intermittent sun-blocking weather, the climate is such that the cloudy times are windy and the calm times sunny. (Wind may be more prevalent in winter, as well.) Sun power closely tracks the solar input component of air-conditioning load, while wind goes up (though more steeply) with heat gain/loss across insulation and via air infiltration. So with a combo of wind and solar energy harvesting, when the weather hands you more load it also hands you more power to handle it.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Hmm, let's contrast your examples with the Holocaust, Gulags, pogroms, the Great Leap Forward etc. All wonderful undertakings performed by governments.
Right. So it's either four penny coffin or gulag, and there's no ground in between, none at all.
Right, because individualism absolutely means everyone has to starve to death and lose their homes. Wait a minute. Why do those things happen overwhelmingly in collectivist countries?
Unregulated capitalism (which you seem to be substituting arbitrarily for individualism) absolutely means just that, as the 19th century history of any Western country shows. There's a reason why the same period in US was named the Gilded Age, you know.
Totalitarianism also generally means that, as early-to-mid 20th century history of the same countries has shown.
A middle ground where individualism thrives, but government intervention ensures that it doesn't result in sociopathic policies on a large scale causing extreme suffering, is experimentally proven to produce the best results, as the second part of 20th century in, again, the same countries shows even today.
Grid scale sodium sulphur batteries are already deployed at multiple sites around the world, especially in Japan and Hawaii. The only rare elements are in the control electronics, they last much longer than lithium and are easy to recycle.
Vanadium Redox, too. (Mainly "down under" - because the patents are still in force and the little company with them has all the business it can handle and doesn't seem interested in licensing it to potential competition.) Marvelous technology.
New Lithium (and related) batteries with much more stable (and thus long-lasting) electrode designs and hysterically low losses and fast charging/discharging are also starting to hit the market. It will be interesting to see what happens in three or four years when Tesla's new Nevada battery "Gigafactory" comes online and starts ramping up.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It would also require more rare earth elements than exist in the earth's crust.
Wrong. You couldn't be more wrong. The oceans alone contain more than enough of every element we care about. If the demand is there, the supply is easy. The only limit is ramp-up time for extracting.
Lithium: The total lithium content of seawater is very large and is estimated as 230 billion tonnes
Neodymium: 0.1ppt in the oceans still means >1.2 million tonnes.
Freakin' Uranium: over 1 BILLION TONNES just hanging out in the water.
I hope you've learned something today, and that you stop spouting nonsense.
That's why I specified the water heater, of course. They don't give a hoot about losing power one way or another,
And there's a reason why I mentioned saving power for the fridge/stove. If you're going 'extreme', yes, you could get a fridge that allows for power interruption, but most of that would be going with a 'sunfrost' type model which can go for like a day, if unopened, without turning on it's compressor anyways.
It sounds like your house's 'only' high power system that I would hook into a relay system would be the AC system. IE if you turn on every light in the house, every electric appliance, while in a reduced power availability situation, it'd kill the HVAC until you shut some things off.
I don't read AC A human right
You can easily have democratic socialism in fact they would be mutually beneficial.