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After Rising For 100 Years, Electricity Demand is Flat (vox.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The US electricity sector is in a period of unprecedented change and turmoil. Renewable energy prices are falling like crazy. Natural gas production continues its extraordinary surge. Coal, the golden child of the current administration, is headed down the tubes. In all that bedlam, it's easy to lose sight of an equally important (if less sexy) trend: Demand for electricity is stagnant. Thanks to a combination of greater energy efficiency, outsourcing of heavy industry, and customers generating their own power on site, demand for utility power has been flat for 10 years, and most forecasts expect it to stay that way. The die was cast around 1998, when GDP growth and electricity demand growth became "decoupled." This historic shift has wreaked havoc in the utility industry in ways large and small, visible and obscure. Some of that havoc is high-profile and headline-making, as in the recent requests from utilities (and attempts by the Trump administration) to bail out large coal and nuclear plants.
...but in developing countries.
While TFA did point out, "US", it seems rather pointless because the demand, and thus the generation, and thus the pollution is occurring overseas.Just because it's not here doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
It's like you cleaned up your back yard by throwing all the trash over the fence. Coming soon, we will be bitching at our neighbors about all the trash in their yard.
So before the Enviro's celebrate, they should consider that they have successfully pushed the pollution into countries that are ill equipped to handle it from regulatory and societal standpoints, yet the US and other western countries are still benefiting from it.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Low MPC (I assume "miles per charge") driver here. I charge almost exclusively during low demand times: typically at night.
Remember that most journeys are less than 15 miles (30 miles round trip), so that most use of any electric vehicle allows overnight charging.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
The charging time problem is one of charging cable size.
You can get around that by upping the voltage. Tesla Superchargers use 400 volts.
Supercapacitors do shit for that issue.
The biggest problem with super-caps is energy density, currently less than a tenth that of lithium batteries.
Which, of course, will cause the price of gasoline to crash because of the resulting glut.
What glut? EV's driving down petrol sales will be a gradual process, and vehicle fuel plants shift production on a monthly basis. Gasoline production will be adjusted (as is true now) so that there is a razor thin margin of excess supply.
Liquid fossil fuels is a world-wide industry in every respect (production, refining, consumption) and prices are set at the global level and on a world-wide scale U.S. shifts to EVs will have a small effect. And any drop in primary resource prices suppresses high cost fuel production (fracking, tar sands) which compensates significantly.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
On the other hand, I would love to have my own starship.
Which implies another laptop, doesn't it? I mean, you can't run a starship with just one laptop..
The only reason Trump won is because Democrats underestimated the raw hatred people have of Hillary. I am a liberal and I can't stand her. She stands for nothing but power for herself.
Democratic leadership is just as corrupt and incompetent as Republican.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
She stands for nothing but power for herself. So let's just let the other candidate roll in, who is even worse in that regard. Not only does he want power for himself, he only wants power for the sake of enriching himself. Yeah. Very clever of you to let the worser person win. That'll teach 'em.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.