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California Poised To Hit 50 Percent Renewable Target a Full Decade Ahead of Schedule (cleantechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CleanTechnica: Every year, the California Energy Commission releases its Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) report, which gives details about the mix of energy experienced by all utilities within the state during the preceding 12 months. The report for this year, released in November, shows that all three of the state's investor-owned utilities -- Pacific Gas & Electric, Southern California Edison, and San Diego Gas & Electric -- are projected to derive 50% of their electricity from renewable sources by 2020. That is a full decade ahead of schedule. PG&E reports it used 32.9% renewable energy in the past year. The figure for SoCal Edison was 28.2%. San Diego Gas & Electric led the pack with 43.2% renewable energy. Now that the 50% goal is within reach, California is looking ahead to its next milestone -- 80% renewables by 2050. "Once we get to about 50 percent, we're going to start to run into new challenges -- the second 50 percent will be trickier than the first 50 percent," Brown notes. Part of the challenge will be balancing the grid using new technologies to avoid the need for fossil fueled "peaker plants" to provide additional electricity when demand is high.
Run nuclear plants as peakers -- yes, it can be done with the right design.
Nuclear isn't renewable, but it's a hell of a lot cleaner than fossil fools.
Renewables get more than the ~$500bil coal gets every year from externalized healthcare costs?
From Forbes: California's Growing Imported Electricity Problem "California now imports 33% of its electricity supply from fast growing neighbors". Looks like a numbers game to me, but what do I know.
California Electricity that is.
There are several plants in the state that do nothing but make electricity for California.
Hydro needs to be used as a "peaker" to balance wind and solar. Using it for baseload let alone 100% is being anti-social.
"Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels, are used to make them appear cost effective."
No, they are used so that people will have an incentive to adopt renewables, thus creating an economy of scale whereas renewables become commonplace. It's not just "for looks"
Renewables are about 20% cheaper in the Middle East than natural gas, with zero subsidies. In certain parts of the USA, they are cheaper than fossil fuel, but most of the USA still needs subsidies, but it's estimated they won't be needed is 3-5 years. The cost per unit of generation for solar and wind is dropping about 10% per year.
Did you know that air pollution costs us up to $1,000 per person per year? Are you factoring that into the economics of renewables versus fossil fuels? (Probably not.)
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
California, the second-largest U.S. hydroelectric producer, set goals for renewable energy sources in 2002 and 2011... But the state set a limit on the inclusion of hydropower. It allows utilities to count only the hydropower produced by smaller hydropower projects—those capable of producing 30 megawatts or less—toward the renewable mandate.
Yep, only tiny hydro installs (typically private, on private land - good luck getting a permit to make your own hydro plant and flood some land deemed valuable to someone) count. The big hydro we have installed in California - about 99% of all of it - is NOT renewable per the State. So yeah - no hydro for us!
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
I call BS. Houston power starts at $0.087 per kWh. And power from PG&E for the Paso Robles area (central coast) start at $0.199 per kWh and go up. That's over twice as much. Using GasBuddy.com, gas in CA averages $3.07 per gallon, and in TX it is around $2.12 per gallon.
Paso Robles, CA is around 1.44 times the national average for cost of living, Houston is at 1.02 - just about average for the US.
Property tax rates in CA are fairly low compared to TX, but the average home in Houston is around $220,000. In Paso Robles, houses are twice that price. Sure, property taxes are a bit lower in CA, but we also have a 13.3% income tax compared to 0% for TX. If you make just about anything more than $10,000 per year, your property tax "savings" in CA are swallowed up by State income tax.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
Keep in mind that medicine in the US is another industry that suffers from extreme price distortion due to various sorts of government intervention (such as excessive regulation, excessive education requirements, an artificially limited supply of practitioners, mandatory insurance that encourages excessive billing, and so on).
So you agree that coal leads to health problems, and you don't have a problem with that, you only have a problem with the way health costs are accounted? A 6 year with asthma is fine as long as the cost to treat him is accounted for properly?
Actually, Statewide, average water use is roughly 50% environmental, 40% agricultural, and 10% urban. It's environmental concerns, like delta smelt and trying to maintain scenic rivers, that suck up half our State's fresh water supply.
Browsing at +1 - no ACs, I ignore their posts. So refreshing!
The State of California does not consider hydro as a renewable resource:
California, the second-largest U.S. hydroelectric producer, set goals for renewable energy sources in 2002 and 2011... But the state set a limit on the inclusion of hydropower. It allows utilities to count only the hydropower produced by smaller hydropower projects—those capable of producing 30 megawatts or less—toward the renewable mandate.
Yep, only tiny hydro installs (typically private, on private land - good luck getting a permit to make your own hydro plant and flood some land deemed valuable to someone) count. The big hydro we have installed in California - about 99% of all of it - is NOT renewable per the State. So yeah - no hydro for us!
Large hydro plants typically come with huge amounts of environmental destruction - while today it would be unthinkable to flood Yosemite valley to use as a source of water and electricity, Hetch Hetchy Valley is said to rival Yosemite in beauty, yet it was flooded 100 years to to build O’Shaughnessy Dam.
Smaller hydro projects can be built with less (or no) environmental destruction.
I haven't turned on heat or A/C since I've been here. Tonight's supposed to get chilly though, so I might relent. My utilities for the year project to be less than 20% of that in Houston, where you need A/C 10 months out of the year. Hell, the new houses going up in Houston don't even have windows that open.
The main difference though is that when I woke up in the morning in Houston, and I walked out the door, I was in Houston. When I walk out the door here, I'm in paradise. I do miss two things from Houston though: barbecue and Christmas tamales.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Your entire post represents perhaps the most gigantic misunderstanding an/or willful misrepresentation of facts about health care I have ever read, and I've been discussing the matter for several years with people here and elsewhere as someone who works for the public health care sector of Finland.
Let's get something clear:
1. The US health care system is the most privatized model in advanced economies, you're the only OECD member state that still doesn't have universal coverage
2. The US model is the most expensive model on the planet per capita, The combined tax+private spending is about 2-3 times that of most western economies, and even that's an understatement, because the per capita cost in your case divides the sum of total costs with all Americans, that is, including those who do not in fact have coverage. Therefore the total cost per citizen actually covered is even higher.
You have it entirely backwards. It is the lack of universal public insurance model that's causing the costs to skyrocket. In here, the government has a vested interest in making sure the system is cost-effective, because it ends up being paid for by the tax payer in most cases (well, we do have private clinics and insurances but those are used only by a tiny fraction of the wealthy for mainly non-urgent procedures). For the government, health care is a cost, like the police and the fire department. The government also suffers if people are not treated, because high levels of untreated people lead to increased unemployment, loss of productivity and tax income.
The current center-right government has been trying to open up our model and move it more towards the direction of an american model but maintain the universal nature, so that private hospitals could provide basic healthcare and the cost would be paid by the tax payer as it is now. The claim is that increasing private presence on the production side would increase efficiency and hence decrease cost, but this is blatantly false, which is why the bill has been slammed by every single expert analysis because data from the world, especially the US is clear that such a change will only increase costs as the private chains will start to charge overheads, which the public system obviously does not do, and because health care demand is inelastic. That is, increasing supply will not affect the demand, so building more (private) infrastructure to partially compete with the public one will only raise the costs for both the private and the public side, as each instance now treats only a part of the patients while having equal fixed costs. I wrote more about this and gave an actual example of how the inelasticity makes an entirely private market highly inefficient in keeping costs down for example here.
Healthcare is one of those subjects in which the political discussion is often entirely detached from the scientific data we have on performance and cost-effectiveness. Again, all western nations besides the US have been running universal models - some based on a single payer model like here in the Nordics, others based on a mix of public and private insurance like in Germany - for over half a century and we've been doing so consistently with lower costs and equal or better treatment outcomes to that of the US. People live lon
"It is the business of the future to be dangerous" -Alfred North Whitehead
subsidies worked well for the fossil industry and they are still getting subsidies after 100 years of market development...
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
"Subsidies for renewables, which far exceed those of fossil fuels, are used to make them appear cost effective."
No, they are used so that people will have an incentive to adopt renewables, thus creating an economy of scale whereas renewables become commonplace. It's not just "for looks"
That statement should be in the past tense. Fossil fuel extraction costs are an upward trending proposition because of increasing extraction costs. Once in a while you get dips like you got with the shale bubble but on the whole the trend is upward. The price of renewable energy technology is on on a downward trend due to economy of scale, you don't have do drill through the earth's crust or dig away mountains to get sun and wind. We are now at a place where renewables are getting cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. With battery technology undergoing an economy of scale and engineering revolution things do not look good for fossil fuels. Anybody buying a coal or gas fired power plant these days is being sold a pup.
That's called biomass. But to use it usefully requires logging, something environmentalists hate.
Logging is a big part of how we got into this mess regarding fires in California. First, logging the whole state. Then, treating the whole state as a tree farm, instead of letting some growth get old and fire resistant. The entire california coast from a place south of point sur is meant to be covered in redwoods, for example — they should be a thick, unbroken strip along the coast all the way up into Canada. The fact that we have removed that contiguous forest of old giants has actually altered the weather along the entire coastline. Redwoods actually trap fog on their leaf-like needles (or is that needle-like leaves?) which causes it to effectively rain beneath them. This not only provides water needed by the redwoods, but it has a significant effect on weather patterns in general. And hey, water vapor is a greenhouse gas...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
excessive regulation, excessive education requirements, an artificially limited supply of practitioners, mandatory insurance that encourages excessive billing
This is very misleading and also wrong. The regulations and education requirements do bring up the price of healthcare but account for a very small part of the increase. Do you honestly think regulations are why those general drug makers are increasing prices by 500% in a short time?
As for excessive billing... have you ever been billed for healthcare? Regulations have little to do if it. An uninsured person will get billed 4-5x the rate of an In Network insured patient. This was true before Obamacare. The insurance companies negotiated low rates but the end effect was to just raise prices on those without insurance.... the ones who can not afford the lower rate in the first place.
Additionally billing for a overnight stay at a hospital is horrendous. No one can give you an estimate for costs without a 20% margin! They can give you a rough likely price but say you could see additional billings from other providers?!? You will get a heavily discounted bill for the room that you do not need to pay until the insurance partially covers it. Then the rest is on you. And that might be corrected again later ending in a credit or additional billing.
Of course that is just the hospital. You came in through ER, another bill. Did the hospital use an external anesthesiologist, another bill. Did they use an external lab, another bill. Did you use an ambulance, another bill. Did your primary care physician come to check on you, another bill. Did a specialist come to check on you, another bill. Did they order special medication for you, another bill.
Each of these bills go through the back and forth discount, partial payment , review, adjustment, invoice, etc process. Many times people do not know their bill for 3-5 months! None of this is regulations based. Because the system charges those who can not pay more, there is a lot of unpaid bills. No one wants to be the bill collector and aggregate/bundle the costs. So each spends resources billing and negotiating their part of the equation.
Most readers are thinking that they do not see this complexity. You have the standard old plan of paying just the deductible. But this all happens in the background even for you and is handled by a complex network of healthcare payers and payees. People with HSAs will see a little behind the curtain. Those without proper insurance will see more and also deal with debt collectors who might contact them 6-12 months after service!
That horrible inefficient system is further burdened by arcane IT systems. Each provider has different ways to collect. Some only accept bank draft, others mailed/called CC info, others will have a website with disfunctional forms, etc. The reference that they provided you to tie back to the service is the cryptic procedure/medicine, its provider ID code, your name, date of procedure, billing company name, date of bill. That is it, good luck keeping track of all the bills if you visit an ER 2x in one year.
All these costs bundle into the cost of healthcare. And there is no incentive to reduce the complexity because you, the patient, do not get to choose the service nor provider nor know the bill up front. You are a captive customer.
Imagine going into a Kroger (grocery store) and walking out, not getting billed. Then a month later the bill arrives. Then another for each of the non-Kroger brands you bought. And you get a 70% discount if you are a member. No other industry is this absolutely stupid in IT and billing.
The industry has created a massive price distortion all by itself over the last 40 years. Congress knew about it and has been incompetent it addressing it for that long! Regulations have not really helped, but they are hardly a quarter of the pie. Insurance for all partially helps because you do not bill people for what they can not pay and avoid the resource wastage of that whole process!
20 minutes to get in and an hour for a bed - that's the long wait times that are the supposed downfall of the Canadian system? You're lucky to get in within an hour here, and it could be hours before you get a bed - if they don't "stabilize" you and kick you out first, leaving you thousands of dollars in debt for your trouble.
20 minutes is NOTHING compared to the US. My dad, a friend, and I have been to the ER once over the last 5 years.
-Dad: The forms took 30 minutes to fill out. We spent 6 hours going to different rooms getting checked out (4 tests). The nurses didn't know what test was already done and what he was waiting on. The only people who knew the status, was the front RECEPTIONISTS who were already busy accepting walkins. Half the testing stations asked & took down the same damn information over and over again. Everything was put into computers & tablets with complex forms. Every single thing was scanned in followed by scanning his wrist band.
-Friend: Had a bad bike fall & minor cut that wouldn't stop bleeding. They checked him all in within 30 minutes. Bandaged him up and put cold press on it while he was waiting for stitches. After waiting 2 hours on a bed in a cold hallway, he stopped one of the nurses to get an ETA. Another hour later, he just left and went to another ER further away where they fixed him up in 2 hours. He still got a huge bill from the first ER that equated to $250/hour.
-Me: I had a nose bleed that wouldn't stop. Clinic said to go to ER. I knew one a bit further away but was rarely packed. Took 30 minutes to get a bed. There were maybe two other patients. Got pretty good service compared to most places. Released me after IVs and 4 hours of monitoring and a small prescription. Bill was roughly $300/hour. The clinic was $155 for the entire checkup.
ER is very fast if you have a life threatening emergency. But once you are stable (ie: still have that bullet in you), you might as well use your cell to find a doctor who will take care of you and walk out. The ER will just forget about you.
And honestly, it is not the ER's fault. I don't blame them. All the specialists I saw, knew exactly what they were doing. They knew the machines, and got people out very quickly. It was the receiving, discharge, and waiting overhead between tests that was unbearable. They are just busy. Everything in the US gets sent to ER. None of the above would need an ER in other countries. About 1/3 of what clinics do can be done at home via first aid. After the xrays and basic prescription stuff, they pretty much tell you to go to ER unless you can wait 1-2 weeks for a doctor or a referral to go to a specialist in 2-4 weeks.
And all the IT systems seemed geared toward billing. Or more accurately, provide all the reasoning, time, cost, and usage of everything so that the evidence speaks for itself when someone disputes. Its a colossal waste of resources. It hardly seems to help the doctors or nurses. They just tab or scroll over to the memo section and see the comments & actions taken thus far and add their own.