My point is simple: you always look at everything from your rural (and third world) perspective.
Of course I do. I just grow tired of people telling me that I can live with solar panels on my roof and an electric car in my garage. That's probably fine for a lot of people but those of us that do real work for a living can't live like that.
P.S. an well insulated house is not cold in hours. If you put everyone in 1 or two rooms together, a good insulated house will basically heat itself by body warmth.
That's fine until the pipes freeze. Those with city water, like myself, opening a tap a little will keep the pipes from freezing. Those with a well need to power the pump so water can keep flowing and/or keep the house warm enough. My brothers have well water and they each also have a generator. One has a heat pump for primary heat but the generator can't run that and the well, that's what the propane furnace is for.
What now? Large segments, or 15%?
Large portions. Again, I don't think you fathom how much of the world lives. Large portions of the US live in cities but because of the large distances we travel regularly and the potential for lengthy power outages an electric car is not viable. It takes only one long power outage once every five years or so to remind people for the need to prepare for that possibility.
This isn't third world territory here but a lot of what I say applies. We have nice houses around here and part of the reason they stay nice is because many have a propane fireplace for backup heat. People make them look real nice, and they get used for atmosphere at Christmas parties and such. Everyone knows though that they come in real handy when the lights go out.
You say that there's only 1.1 billion people without electricity in the world but I looked that up and that's if we include people with enough electricity for a single light bulb. You can't charge a car off of that. There's something like 4 billion people with unreliable power. These people might be able to get reliable electricity soon with solar panels and a battery pack but that's not going to charge an electric car too.
Being scared about a 2 hours drive from "civilization" is just nonsense. Sorry, get a life.
I thought this is where we were starting from.
And how many people in the world life at such a shitty place you do that their half full electric car wont bring them to a safe place, or that utilities, military or civilian aid organizations have not set up emergency power in hours?
Traveling 2 hours at 70 miles per hour means 140 miles. What's the range of a fully charged electric car? A Chevy Bolt has an EPA rated range of 238 miles. So with a half full battery it gets... 119 miles. You can check my math but I'm pretty sure 119 is less than 140.
I don't think you can even fathom just how people live in many parts of the world. A quick Google search tells me that 15% of the US population lives in rural areas. I'm not "rural" any more but living on the edge of town with overhead lines I still see power outages often. The work I do requires that I be on-site, so it's not like I can work from home with a laptop, cell phone hotspot, and a flashlight. It gets real cold here so even a well insulated new house is going to get dangerously cold in hours without some sort of back-up heat.
The snow gets deep too. I thought it was funny that all my neighbors, except the retired couple across the street, had 4WD vehicles. I found out in the first winter why. The city will plow the streets but they can't keep up in a lengthy storm. This whole area is "built" to handle the storms on their own. We can't just rely on the city to plow a path. We can't just rely on the utilities to get power back in hours. It's this mentality that made the storms in New Orleans and New Jersey such a mess, large portions of the population didn't bother to keep enough food and fuel on hand to even last a day. We saw the same kind of storms here in the Midwest and people picked up the mess on their own. People got out their own chainsaws to clear the trees in the streets. It's the people out here that work for the utilities, military, and civilian aid organizations. You think that if we're not on the clock that we just wait for someone else to come?
Electric cars are just not compatible with large segments of the US population. i don't care what the latest "study" says.
I thought you claimed solar was simple AND reliable. Your parabolic trough idea is simple but far from reliable. How's that going to work in a Michigan winter?
Navy nukes can rely on an essentially infinite supply of water that doesn't go above a certain temperature, so they wouldn't work in quite a few areas on land.
Since large portions of the population lives near water I'd think that a fleet of powerships (ships built for the purpose of supplying power to shore) would cover large parts of the USA. These could be operated like any other nuclear powered Navy ship as far as training is concerned. These ships don't need to be single purpose either, put the nuclear reactor on a hospital ship or something, those tend to stay in port not doing much until called upon. Leave them hooked to shore power to give power to the facilities on shore, if needed elsewhere then they've got a known working reactor on board for speedy propulsion and ample shore power when it reaches it's destination. The Navy has been working on nuclear powered seawater to jet fuel systems, put that on a supply ship and it can make fuel for aircraft while underway. If needed as emergency shore power then it can stay in port and keep making fuel for generators and ambulances too.
What I propose is not new. In fact the US Navy may be doing something like this now and I just don't know about it. I'm just thinking that such things should be more common.
They also don't have to be particularly economical, since the purpose is to create an effective warship (nowadays a submarine or carrier) rather than supplying cheap power with no other considerations.
Nothing in the military is particularly economical. I've just read some things in the past few years from people with stars on their shoulders that getting energy where it is needed has been a problem for a long time. Hurricanes and other natural disasters can leave a lot of people without power and I'm sure that people in the Navy, National Guard, and so on would love to have assets on hand that can give them power in the vicinity of a seaport.
I know that the technology is still being worked on but nuclear reactors that can fit in a standard 40 foot container is possible. It'd be non-operational while moved, it'd have to be buried in place or something for shielding, and could not be moved for years once powered up, but it could be done with current technology. It could also be air cooled so water is not needed. Build a few dozen of them, or a few hundred, sprinkle some across the USA at National Guard bases. Put a few in operation and train some people on how to use them and keep the rest on a shelf for emergencies and to replace the ones in use as the fuel runs out. If needed then pick one up, carry it to where its needed, power it up, and then keep an eye on it until the fuel runs out and it cools off. After that the situation should be long over then dig it up and recycle it.
With a hammer, wrench, a torch, fuel, and a pile of scrap metal a small team of moderately skilled workers can build a coal fired power plant. Take that and add a couple nuclear engineers and they'll build a nuclear reactor. Solar power requires so much more. There is nothing "simple" about solar power.
We know we can build coal and nuclear power plants with "spanner and hammer" technology because we did it before. We can do it again.
You can prove me wrong, of course. Go ahead and "blow my mind".
It would probably mean demand going up but not "way" up. I'm no expert on this but I'll just think this through for a bit.
CHP is based on the theory that a large portion of the energy of burning fuel in an engine means dumping a lot of that energy as heat to the air. Estimates vary on how much of that energy is wasted but more than 50% is probably safe to start. If that heat is used to warm water or heat a home then this energy is doing "work" that it would not have before. This is a savings over a backup generator that might have to run often if the solar panel is undersized. Oversizeed panels would have a cost in needing expensive panels that are not used often. Undersizing the solar panels might be financially beneficial if the natural gas would be burned anyway for heat and the cost of running the generator is "free".
With homes that already use natural gas to heat the water there is an option for a natural draft or forced vent. A natural draft is cheaper to buy, works when the power is out, but uses more gas for the same heat. A forced vent water heater is more efficient but will not heat water in a power outage. An undersized battery pack and/or solar panel means a risk of no hot water even though natural gas is still available. Initial cost savings and hot water even in a power outage must sell a lot of water heaters. With a CHP unit if you have natural gas then you have electricity. Even if the CHP unit does not heat the water there is a gain in efficiency in pairing a CHP to the forced vent water heater.
If a home is off grid and uses a CHP unit to provide some or all of the electricity for the occupants then this means the utility is not providing that electricity. In the USA a good sized chunk of the electricity produced is from natural gas. The utility will likely have more efficient systems to turn natural gas to electricity than even a top notch residential CHP but the home is now not "wasting" as much of that gas by using the gas it used before more efficiently for things like heating water, or not using as much electricity produced by natural gas by replacing an electric water heater with a gas one. If the home uses some solar or wind power as part of this system then that also means less natural gas burned by the utility to provide electricity.
I didn't use any real numbers here, just some rough concepts on how this might balance out but I think I made a case that the change in natural gas consumption would be quite small because of the efficiency gains. Roughly the same amount of natural gas would be burned, where it would be burned would shift is all. Coal use for electricity would moderate the price of natural gas too. There's still a lot of coal to burn and industrial demands is not likely to shift to CHP, they've likely done that already if they could.
Forget that they are solar panels for a minute. Now imagine you are selling televisions. You can spend the time to package each one and ship them off to a separate address, paying the freight for each, or you can have a hotel that wants new TVs for the rooms come by and pick them up and write you one big check.
Are you telling me that you wouldn't sell those TVs at a discount to the hotel so you can make the sale and not have to work as hard?
I did not say sell at a loss, who would do that? I did say "negotiate" didn't I? Your costs are reduced for not having to do as much work since you sold the whole lot in one sale. You pass those savings on or you risk not making the sale. No sale means no profit. There is money in the risk of selling one at a time, and money in the product sitting in a warehouse not getting sold. Volume discounts should not be alien to anyone with a computer. Order just about anything online and you'll stores offer discounts like $20 off orders over $100, or free shipping for orders over $50, buy 3 widgets and get a 4th for free, and so on.
How old are you? You haven't grasped this concept yet?
I guess you live in America where typical things we consider to describe 'a civilization' don't exist?
I do live in America. Growing up on a farm we had sheds full of what many not familiar with the culture would call "junk". We kept this stuff around because it wasn't junk, it was spare parts. We could not just run to the corner store for something, work had to be done and get done while the sun shined. Even I was amazed at the tools, spare parts, and "junk" in a rancher's shed when on a school trip to South Dakota. I then realized that the stuff we had was what we needed when "civilization" was a half hour drive away. For these people it was two or three times that, and so they had to be prepared for that.
When you are that far from "civilization" and you have to drive an hour to get there in an emergency, can you be sure "civilization" didn't just decide to move another hour away? You can't. So you need something that can get you far enough, and back again, without having to stop for an hour to recharge. People out that far will have a 4WD truck and put spare fuel cans in the back. Also back there will be water, food, a tent, a change of clothes, and a tent. Oh, and a roll of toilet paper and a shovel.
And how many people in the world life at such a shitty place you do that their half full electric car wont bring them to a safe place, or that utilities, military or civilian aid organizations have not set up emergency power in hours?
I don't know for sure but I can imagine answering with "billions" isn't too far from the truth.
For a large portion of the world they lack the technological infrastructure to deploy solar. As someone who's name I cannot recall put it, coal is "spanner and hammer" technology. If you have the know how to turn a wrench and swing a hammer you can build and maintain a coal plant.
Solar power is a luxury for the wealthy and will always remain so. Even nuclear power is low tech by comparison. You can demand that everyone switch to solar power but you will get resistance. People need energy to live and relying on a technology as difficult to maintain as solar will be suicide for many.
I know that there are few that believe that solar is the end and beginning of energy, that energy must be a mix of sources. I must ask though, where does solar energy fit in a "spanner and hammer" world? It simply does not fit anywhere. That lack of fitness still includes large portions of what many consider the "developed" world.
The only reason we are talking about solar power now is because politics forces us to. If left to market forces solar would be left to pocket calculators and communication satellites. These political forces are creating "energy poverty" where it did not exist before. You want to talk about the risks of cancer? Okay, I'll bring up risks of food poisoning from improperly refrigerated and cooked food. Imposing expensive energy for politics is putting lives at risk more than coal could.
I keep hearing how we need solar subsidies to "jumpstart" the solar economy. I pointed this out to a solar power advocate and he said with a straight face that the subsidies should never end. I didn't know how to respond to that.
I can hear it now, "What about all the subsidies for coal?" Those should end too. I do see a need, as a matter of national defense, that we need some form of publicly supported energy. Here's what I propose. For those areas that need electricity in a national emergency put a nuclear power plant nearby and have the US Navy run it. The Navy knows nukes, it should be easy for them.
It might take a few hundred of these small nuclear power plants to cover every military base, major seaport, major airport, and other vital infrastructure so maybe make it a joint effort with the other military branches and with emergency services.
I believe we passed the need for a solar power "jumpstart" a decade or so ago.
As an American I find it incredible that Europeans think that they are entitled to anything without having to pay for it.
I remember someone commenting on the lack of an enterprising spirit in Europe and how two "world" wars killed it. Europe used to be the center of civilization but for the last century or so it's been in a slow descent into irrelevancy. The wars that killed Europe weren't "world" wars since they were largely centered on Europe, but Europe used to be the center of the world then so it just felt like the world was at war. You think we might be so "uncivilized" to turn off power to the poor but I ask, what has your "charity" bought you lately? Europe is being overrun by some very "uncivil" people right now.
Europe used to have the concept of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. A large part of that charity that the deserving poor got was based on the charity of the individual. Now that "charity" is forced from the wage earners by the government and given to the undeserving the social constructs that created Europe's wealth is being torn apart.
I would ask that when the last civilized person leaves Europe to please turn out the light but the lights will go out on their own.
Then when (not if) there is a power outage then people will not only be lacking heat, refrigeration, light, and communication, they'll be stranded there too.
Of all the reason to NOT get an electric car this ranks pretty high on my list. At a minimum this is a good reason to not rely on your car battery to power your home. My truck is one of the main reasons I don't have a generator. If things get bad I can always leave and drive somewhere else. If for some reason I can't go anywhere at a minimum I can use my truck for heating/cooling, lights, and charging the batteries for the stuff in my house. I'll just camp out in my driveway, in my gas powered truck.
Even solar/renewable nut jobs still have gas stoves. Because they work much better.
So, the Venn diagram that shows good cooks and solar nutjobs has the solar nutjobs entirely within the circle of good cooks? And the use of a gas stove has nothing to do with the volume, weight, and cost of batteries compared to the volume, weight, and cost of propane? This also has nothing to do with the ability of a gas stove to operate without electric power?
I assume they also don't use a microwave oven because it makes poor food, and has nothing to do with the electrical power requirements of running a microwave oven.
Not only that but utilities have the ability to buy solar panels too. They can also do so at a quantity that no individual could and therefore negotiate a reduced price. They won't need batteries because they will still have access to natural gas or oil peak demand generators. If they do need batteries for some reason then they can use industrial scale ones and also negotiate a price lower than any individual could.
Also, market demands raise prices just like they can lower them. If enough people are buying solar panels to go off the grid then demand will drive up prices on those solar panels. Same for the batteries, if people demand more batteries then prices go up. Of course higher prices mean there is a market force to increase supply to lessen the scarcity that drove them up. The market will find a balance of these fores and they will almost always land in favor of the utility, of the big over the small.
In short, I find it difficult to believe a homeowner can do anything at a cost lower than something on an industrial scale. I say difficult but not impossible. It could happen but it would take a perfect storm of events.
Energy density. With that comes a lot of benefits in the cost of storage, transfer, and conversion.
Overhead power lines are cheap but also exposed to lightning, wind/tornadoes/hurricanes, ice, fires, and squirrels. Underground natural gas pipes are cheap to bury and are largely immune to all of those, especially squirrels. I'm only half joking about the squirrels since with a high enough voltage a squirrel will just get evaporated instead of lead to an outage, but it's always amazed me of how often it seems squirrels short out a transformer or something and I hear about it in the news.
Then lobby to make it legal. It seems to me that a lot of people think they are powerless, which when you think about it there is truth to that. If people believe themselves powerless then they see acting as pointless and therefore don't bother.
A government can only rule with the consent of the governed. If you don't like having to feed your own power to the grid then don't do it. I thought that was the point of the article, that the utilities lose their power over people because technology has flattened that economics of scale curve. If enough people produce enough electricity that they utility is effectively doing nothing but collecting a fee for the grid tie, that no one uses, then the utility can do nothing if enough people stop paying the fees.
And, as we'd have to get a permit from the Homeowner's Association to put in the propane (fat chance of that ever happening) even that's effectively impossible.
I have a question. What is easier to change, the laws of your HOA or the laws of physics? I ask because the ability to store propane for heat is a lot easier than storing electricity for heat.
The rest of the association might not like propane now but if electricity prices get high enough they'll change their minds. Is it that propane tanks are "ugly" to the association? Is that why they oppose them? Underground propane tanks are a thing, I hear. They won't even know the tanks are there.
I believe you are correct that people would prefer a generator over having electricity from a utility. Where I think you are wrong is that people will want to run this generator as little as possible.
Natural gas is cheap and there is little evidence to expect the price to rise much. A large number of people in the USA already use natural gas for heating, cooking, and hot water. What is becoming more practical as technology marches on is the concept of residential combined heat and power (CHP). If people are burning this natural gas anyway for heating their homes and/or water then why not use a CHP unit to provide the heat and top off their batteries?
This CHP would need to be fairly large if relied upon for extended periods where there is not enough sun. In places where there is winter a natural gas furnace can run quite often, which if replaced with a CHP unit this can mean an abundance of "free" electricity too.
With this in mind imagine what an off grid electrical system would be made of. You'd have your battery pack, inverters, a CHP unit, and solar panels. When doing the math to size up the solar panels in this system how much area would it need? I guess that in many parts of the USA the size of the solar panels would have to be zero.
For giggles once I thought I'd compute the cost of fuel to run my own natural gas generator as opposed to buying electricity from the utility. The cost difference was very small. I don't run my own natural gas generator because then I'd have to put up with the noise all the time or invest in a battery pack so it runs while I'm not home. The need for batteries to keep the system efficient and (effectively) noise free puts the price well beyond the utility. If batteries get cheap enough to make solar panels on my roof viable then it also means that they'd be cheap enough to make a residential CHP unit viable. The noise problem could also be solved with proper mufflers and/or an unconventional engine design, potentially reducing the costs of the batteries needed as well since I'd have little fear of the noise from running at odd hours.
Solar power that is available only (maybe) during the day cannot compete well with natural gas available at all hours of the day. Improving battery technology does not just make solar look better it makes natural gas look better too. Nearly half of the households in the USA use natural gas for heat and very very few use solar. The switch to CHP would be nearly trivial for many where rooftop solar would need a roof properly oriented to the sun and free from obstructions from trees, other buildings, windmills, and nuclear power plants.
Taking this one step further we see a large cost of electricity in the summer being for air conditioning. What if instead of an electric motor the A/C compressor was turned with a natural gas engine? An engine that could also provide hot water and/or electricity? Now you are cooking... um, cooling with gas! Also, I get to keep my shade trees, meaning I would not have to run the air conditioning as often.
Please identify the pollution created during power generation by turbines and solar, maybe you misunderstand what i actually mean.
Where is the pollution created by nuclear power during power generation? There is none. With solar, wind, and nuclear all the waste and pollution is in the construction and decommissioning. If we are going to compare them then we need to be consistent and realistic. Wind and solar produce more waste than nuclear and waste that is just as toxic to the environment. With the less waste from nuclear we have a cleaner environment in the end.
someone falling off a roof is a human accident, again nothing to do with power being generated by the panel.
Bullshit. That person would not be on the roof if not for the solar panels. Every accident has a human error component and if that death occurs in the act of maintaining that energy source then it certainly is related, even if they slip and fall off a ladder. If we play that game then nuclear power may even look better since a big concrete and steel building where you'll find the nuclear reactor protects people from "act of god" type accidents like getting blown off a roof, hit by lightning, or attacked by rabid dogs.
panels/batteries are 95% recycleable
So is everything with nuclear power. The difference is in the total mass that needs to be recycled to get the same energy and power. To supply the world with equal amounts of energy there would need to be 250,000 roofs covered with solar panels PER DAY to keep up with replacement of old panels. To do the same with nuclear power would mean one nuclear power plant per week. Even that may be skewed to the benefit of solar since it assumes an operational life of 50 years. Nuclear power tends to last longer and solar tends to last less.
its safe until you have an accident
Already been over that. We can have a Chernobyl or Fukushima once every 30 years or so and still not compare to the deaths from industrial accidents from solar power. Chernobyl and Fukushima were industrial accidents, just on a larger scale. Nuclear power is 10 times safer than solar, claiming otherwise is denying the facts before you.
iits a single point of failure, the fuel is not safe to handle, its a fine target for a missile (or a terrorist) if you end up in a war, nuclear fuel, when expended, needs to be buried somewhere safe and hope it doesn't leak. Its not as good as you think and it costs an absolute fortune to build and just wait until your government (i.e. out of your pocket) is charged for the decommission of an old reactor.
That does not compute. Any energy source is a target. You think solar power is immune? It's a bunch of glass out in a field, how hard would that be for a terrorist to destroy? Nuclear reactors are in a big concrete dome, behind a big fence, protected by people with machine guns. We do the same for other big energy producers, like hydro dams. You can put a fence around your solar panels, you can protect them with armed men. What you cannot do is put them in a shelter.
When it comes to solar waste you have the same problem as nuclear, you dump it in a hole and hope it doesn't leak. If at some point someone figures out to recycle it then don't you think by then someone would also figure out how to recycle nuclear waste too? We're a lot closer to recycling nuclear waste than solar waste, and not near as much mass of waste to deal with in the first place. When it comes to the costs of cleanup the NRC has required all nuclear reactor operators to contribute to a fund for the cleanup upon decommissioning. I don't see a similar fund for solar power. So all you got is bullshit.
There is no such thing as a minimum wage. First is that there are enough exceptions to every minimum wage law that someone will find one if they bother to look hard enough. Second is that a minimum wage law only affects those that report their wages, there is such a thing as black market labor.
One exception to the minimum wage is contract work. If I tell someone I'll pay them $100 to dig a ditch and they grab a shovel and spend a week doing it then this is contract work and not covered by minimum wage laws. If I do the same to someone else and they use a backhoe to dig the ditch and it takes them an hour they still earned the $100 because that's what value I see in having a ditch where there was not one before.
I was once in some sort of on the job training program where I was to build a webpage and I was given a set weekly rate for showing up three days a week. I once sat down to figure out how much I actually got paid per hour and stopped halfway through once I started to realize just how little I got paid. People in a kind of internship don't have to get paid minimum wage, the employer just has to fill out the right kind of paperwork to get away with it. Then there were the people that expressed astonishment that I actually got paid at all for this work. Unpaid internships are still a thing and people volunteer all the time to do work. I guess I should feel blessed I got paid at all.
If the first option to avoid minimum wage is finding an exception in the law, and the second is keeping the job off the books then is there another option to avoid the minimum wage law? Sure, the third option is to hire nobody. This means the job does not get created, it's done by some sort of automation, or generally a lot of people are out of work.
Minimum wage laws are stupid. Why not just declare the minimum wage $1000/hour and then everyone can be a millionaire?
Solar power is expensive, unreliable, toxic, and just generally a bad idea. Nuclear power is ten times safer, ten times cleaner, ten times more reliable, and just generally a better idea ten times over.
You have just demonstrated the ignorance I spoke about. There is pollution in the production of wind and solar power. These waste products are toxic and disposing of it properly is not trivial. Compared to nuclear power wind and solar are terrible for the environment. Even compared to natural gas and low sulfur coal wind and solar really aren't that great.
Everyone wants to talk about the external costs of coal and pretend that there are no external costs to wind and solar. Renewable energy does poison the environment and claiming otherwise is ignorance, willful or not.
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I spend my weekends in my own basement, thankyouverymuch.
My point is simple: you always look at everything from your rural (and third world) perspective.
Of course I do. I just grow tired of people telling me that I can live with solar panels on my roof and an electric car in my garage. That's probably fine for a lot of people but those of us that do real work for a living can't live like that.
P.S. an well insulated house is not cold in hours. If you put everyone in 1 or two rooms together, a good insulated house will basically heat itself by body warmth.
That's fine until the pipes freeze. Those with city water, like myself, opening a tap a little will keep the pipes from freezing. Those with a well need to power the pump so water can keep flowing and/or keep the house warm enough. My brothers have well water and they each also have a generator. One has a heat pump for primary heat but the generator can't run that and the well, that's what the propane furnace is for.
What now? Large segments, or 15%?
Large portions. Again, I don't think you fathom how much of the world lives. Large portions of the US live in cities but because of the large distances we travel regularly and the potential for lengthy power outages an electric car is not viable. It takes only one long power outage once every five years or so to remind people for the need to prepare for that possibility.
This isn't third world territory here but a lot of what I say applies. We have nice houses around here and part of the reason they stay nice is because many have a propane fireplace for backup heat. People make them look real nice, and they get used for atmosphere at Christmas parties and such. Everyone knows though that they come in real handy when the lights go out.
You say that there's only 1.1 billion people without electricity in the world but I looked that up and that's if we include people with enough electricity for a single light bulb. You can't charge a car off of that. There's something like 4 billion people with unreliable power. These people might be able to get reliable electricity soon with solar panels and a battery pack but that's not going to charge an electric car too.
Being scared about a 2 hours drive from "civilization" is just nonsense.
Sorry, get a life.
I thought this is where we were starting from.
And how many people in the world life at such a shitty place you do that their half full electric car wont bring them to a safe place, or that utilities, military or civilian aid organizations have not set up emergency power in hours?
Traveling 2 hours at 70 miles per hour means 140 miles. What's the range of a fully charged electric car? A Chevy Bolt has an EPA rated range of 238 miles. So with a half full battery it gets... 119 miles. You can check my math but I'm pretty sure 119 is less than 140.
I don't think you can even fathom just how people live in many parts of the world. A quick Google search tells me that 15% of the US population lives in rural areas. I'm not "rural" any more but living on the edge of town with overhead lines I still see power outages often. The work I do requires that I be on-site, so it's not like I can work from home with a laptop, cell phone hotspot, and a flashlight. It gets real cold here so even a well insulated new house is going to get dangerously cold in hours without some sort of back-up heat.
The snow gets deep too. I thought it was funny that all my neighbors, except the retired couple across the street, had 4WD vehicles. I found out in the first winter why. The city will plow the streets but they can't keep up in a lengthy storm. This whole area is "built" to handle the storms on their own. We can't just rely on the city to plow a path. We can't just rely on the utilities to get power back in hours. It's this mentality that made the storms in New Orleans and New Jersey such a mess, large portions of the population didn't bother to keep enough food and fuel on hand to even last a day. We saw the same kind of storms here in the Midwest and people picked up the mess on their own. People got out their own chainsaws to clear the trees in the streets. It's the people out here that work for the utilities, military, and civilian aid organizations. You think that if we're not on the clock that we just wait for someone else to come?
Electric cars are just not compatible with large segments of the US population. i don't care what the latest "study" says.
I thought you claimed solar was simple AND reliable. Your parabolic trough idea is simple but far from reliable. How's that going to work in a Michigan winter?
Navy nukes can rely on an essentially infinite supply of water that doesn't go above a certain temperature, so they wouldn't work in quite a few areas on land.
Since large portions of the population lives near water I'd think that a fleet of powerships (ships built for the purpose of supplying power to shore) would cover large parts of the USA. These could be operated like any other nuclear powered Navy ship as far as training is concerned. These ships don't need to be single purpose either, put the nuclear reactor on a hospital ship or something, those tend to stay in port not doing much until called upon. Leave them hooked to shore power to give power to the facilities on shore, if needed elsewhere then they've got a known working reactor on board for speedy propulsion and ample shore power when it reaches it's destination. The Navy has been working on nuclear powered seawater to jet fuel systems, put that on a supply ship and it can make fuel for aircraft while underway. If needed as emergency shore power then it can stay in port and keep making fuel for generators and ambulances too.
What I propose is not new. In fact the US Navy may be doing something like this now and I just don't know about it. I'm just thinking that such things should be more common.
They also don't have to be particularly economical, since the purpose is to create an effective warship (nowadays a submarine or carrier) rather than supplying cheap power with no other considerations.
Nothing in the military is particularly economical. I've just read some things in the past few years from people with stars on their shoulders that getting energy where it is needed has been a problem for a long time. Hurricanes and other natural disasters can leave a lot of people without power and I'm sure that people in the Navy, National Guard, and so on would love to have assets on hand that can give them power in the vicinity of a seaport.
I know that the technology is still being worked on but nuclear reactors that can fit in a standard 40 foot container is possible. It'd be non-operational while moved, it'd have to be buried in place or something for shielding, and could not be moved for years once powered up, but it could be done with current technology. It could also be air cooled so water is not needed. Build a few dozen of them, or a few hundred, sprinkle some across the USA at National Guard bases. Put a few in operation and train some people on how to use them and keep the rest on a shelf for emergencies and to replace the ones in use as the fuel runs out. If needed then pick one up, carry it to where its needed, power it up, and then keep an eye on it until the fuel runs out and it cools off. After that the situation should be long over then dig it up and recycle it.
Must be that global cooling!
Okay, I got that out of my system. Move along, nothing to see here.
how much more simple and reliable solar is
With a hammer, wrench, a torch, fuel, and a pile of scrap metal a small team of moderately skilled workers can build a coal fired power plant. Take that and add a couple nuclear engineers and they'll build a nuclear reactor. Solar power requires so much more. There is nothing "simple" about solar power.
We know we can build coal and nuclear power plants with "spanner and hammer" technology because we did it before. We can do it again.
You can prove me wrong, of course. Go ahead and "blow my mind".
It would probably mean demand going up but not "way" up. I'm no expert on this but I'll just think this through for a bit.
CHP is based on the theory that a large portion of the energy of burning fuel in an engine means dumping a lot of that energy as heat to the air. Estimates vary on how much of that energy is wasted but more than 50% is probably safe to start. If that heat is used to warm water or heat a home then this energy is doing "work" that it would not have before. This is a savings over a backup generator that might have to run often if the solar panel is undersized. Oversizeed panels would have a cost in needing expensive panels that are not used often. Undersizing the solar panels might be financially beneficial if the natural gas would be burned anyway for heat and the cost of running the generator is "free".
With homes that already use natural gas to heat the water there is an option for a natural draft or forced vent. A natural draft is cheaper to buy, works when the power is out, but uses more gas for the same heat. A forced vent water heater is more efficient but will not heat water in a power outage. An undersized battery pack and/or solar panel means a risk of no hot water even though natural gas is still available. Initial cost savings and hot water even in a power outage must sell a lot of water heaters. With a CHP unit if you have natural gas then you have electricity. Even if the CHP unit does not heat the water there is a gain in efficiency in pairing a CHP to the forced vent water heater.
If a home is off grid and uses a CHP unit to provide some or all of the electricity for the occupants then this means the utility is not providing that electricity. In the USA a good sized chunk of the electricity produced is from natural gas. The utility will likely have more efficient systems to turn natural gas to electricity than even a top notch residential CHP but the home is now not "wasting" as much of that gas by using the gas it used before more efficiently for things like heating water, or not using as much electricity produced by natural gas by replacing an electric water heater with a gas one. If the home uses some solar or wind power as part of this system then that also means less natural gas burned by the utility to provide electricity.
I didn't use any real numbers here, just some rough concepts on how this might balance out but I think I made a case that the change in natural gas consumption would be quite small because of the efficiency gains. Roughly the same amount of natural gas would be burned, where it would be burned would shift is all. Coal use for electricity would moderate the price of natural gas too. There's still a lot of coal to burn and industrial demands is not likely to shift to CHP, they've likely done that already if they could.
Forget that they are solar panels for a minute. Now imagine you are selling televisions. You can spend the time to package each one and ship them off to a separate address, paying the freight for each, or you can have a hotel that wants new TVs for the rooms come by and pick them up and write you one big check.
Are you telling me that you wouldn't sell those TVs at a discount to the hotel so you can make the sale and not have to work as hard?
I did not say sell at a loss, who would do that? I did say "negotiate" didn't I? Your costs are reduced for not having to do as much work since you sold the whole lot in one sale. You pass those savings on or you risk not making the sale. No sale means no profit. There is money in the risk of selling one at a time, and money in the product sitting in a warehouse not getting sold. Volume discounts should not be alien to anyone with a computer. Order just about anything online and you'll stores offer discounts like $20 off orders over $100, or free shipping for orders over $50, buy 3 widgets and get a 4th for free, and so on.
How old are you? You haven't grasped this concept yet?
I guess you live in America where typical things we consider to describe 'a civilization' don't exist?
I do live in America. Growing up on a farm we had sheds full of what many not familiar with the culture would call "junk". We kept this stuff around because it wasn't junk, it was spare parts. We could not just run to the corner store for something, work had to be done and get done while the sun shined. Even I was amazed at the tools, spare parts, and "junk" in a rancher's shed when on a school trip to South Dakota. I then realized that the stuff we had was what we needed when "civilization" was a half hour drive away. For these people it was two or three times that, and so they had to be prepared for that.
When you are that far from "civilization" and you have to drive an hour to get there in an emergency, can you be sure "civilization" didn't just decide to move another hour away? You can't. So you need something that can get you far enough, and back again, without having to stop for an hour to recharge. People out that far will have a 4WD truck and put spare fuel cans in the back. Also back there will be water, food, a tent, a change of clothes, and a tent. Oh, and a roll of toilet paper and a shovel.
And how many people in the world life at such a shitty place you do that their half full electric car wont bring them to a safe place, or that utilities, military or civilian aid organizations have not set up emergency power in hours?
I don't know for sure but I can imagine answering with "billions" isn't too far from the truth.
For a large portion of the world they lack the technological infrastructure to deploy solar. As someone who's name I cannot recall put it, coal is "spanner and hammer" technology. If you have the know how to turn a wrench and swing a hammer you can build and maintain a coal plant.
Solar power is a luxury for the wealthy and will always remain so. Even nuclear power is low tech by comparison. You can demand that everyone switch to solar power but you will get resistance. People need energy to live and relying on a technology as difficult to maintain as solar will be suicide for many.
I know that there are few that believe that solar is the end and beginning of energy, that energy must be a mix of sources. I must ask though, where does solar energy fit in a "spanner and hammer" world? It simply does not fit anywhere. That lack of fitness still includes large portions of what many consider the "developed" world.
The only reason we are talking about solar power now is because politics forces us to. If left to market forces solar would be left to pocket calculators and communication satellites. These political forces are creating "energy poverty" where it did not exist before. You want to talk about the risks of cancer? Okay, I'll bring up risks of food poisoning from improperly refrigerated and cooked food. Imposing expensive energy for politics is putting lives at risk more than coal could.
I keep hearing how we need solar subsidies to "jumpstart" the solar economy. I pointed this out to a solar power advocate and he said with a straight face that the subsidies should never end. I didn't know how to respond to that.
I can hear it now, "What about all the subsidies for coal?" Those should end too. I do see a need, as a matter of national defense, that we need some form of publicly supported energy. Here's what I propose. For those areas that need electricity in a national emergency put a nuclear power plant nearby and have the US Navy run it. The Navy knows nukes, it should be easy for them.
It might take a few hundred of these small nuclear power plants to cover every military base, major seaport, major airport, and other vital infrastructure so maybe make it a joint effort with the other military branches and with emergency services.
I believe we passed the need for a solar power "jumpstart" a decade or so ago.
As an American I find it incredible that Europeans think that they are entitled to anything without having to pay for it.
I remember someone commenting on the lack of an enterprising spirit in Europe and how two "world" wars killed it. Europe used to be the center of civilization but for the last century or so it's been in a slow descent into irrelevancy. The wars that killed Europe weren't "world" wars since they were largely centered on Europe, but Europe used to be the center of the world then so it just felt like the world was at war. You think we might be so "uncivilized" to turn off power to the poor but I ask, what has your "charity" bought you lately? Europe is being overrun by some very "uncivil" people right now.
Europe used to have the concept of the deserving poor and the undeserving poor. A large part of that charity that the deserving poor got was based on the charity of the individual. Now that "charity" is forced from the wage earners by the government and given to the undeserving the social constructs that created Europe's wealth is being torn apart.
I would ask that when the last civilized person leaves Europe to please turn out the light but the lights will go out on their own.
Then when (not if) there is a power outage then people will not only be lacking heat, refrigeration, light, and communication, they'll be stranded there too.
Of all the reason to NOT get an electric car this ranks pretty high on my list. At a minimum this is a good reason to not rely on your car battery to power your home. My truck is one of the main reasons I don't have a generator. If things get bad I can always leave and drive somewhere else. If for some reason I can't go anywhere at a minimum I can use my truck for heating/cooling, lights, and charging the batteries for the stuff in my house. I'll just camp out in my driveway, in my gas powered truck.
Even solar/renewable nut jobs still have gas stoves. Because they work much better.
So, the Venn diagram that shows good cooks and solar nutjobs has the solar nutjobs entirely within the circle of good cooks? And the use of a gas stove has nothing to do with the volume, weight, and cost of batteries compared to the volume, weight, and cost of propane? This also has nothing to do with the ability of a gas stove to operate without electric power?
I assume they also don't use a microwave oven because it makes poor food, and has nothing to do with the electrical power requirements of running a microwave oven.
Not only that but utilities have the ability to buy solar panels too. They can also do so at a quantity that no individual could and therefore negotiate a reduced price. They won't need batteries because they will still have access to natural gas or oil peak demand generators. If they do need batteries for some reason then they can use industrial scale ones and also negotiate a price lower than any individual could.
Also, market demands raise prices just like they can lower them. If enough people are buying solar panels to go off the grid then demand will drive up prices on those solar panels. Same for the batteries, if people demand more batteries then prices go up. Of course higher prices mean there is a market force to increase supply to lessen the scarcity that drove them up. The market will find a balance of these fores and they will almost always land in favor of the utility, of the big over the small.
In short, I find it difficult to believe a homeowner can do anything at a cost lower than something on an industrial scale. I say difficult but not impossible. It could happen but it would take a perfect storm of events.
Energy density. With that comes a lot of benefits in the cost of storage, transfer, and conversion.
Overhead power lines are cheap but also exposed to lightning, wind/tornadoes/hurricanes, ice, fires, and squirrels. Underground natural gas pipes are cheap to bury and are largely immune to all of those, especially squirrels. I'm only half joking about the squirrels since with a high enough voltage a squirrel will just get evaporated instead of lead to an outage, but it's always amazed me of how often it seems squirrels short out a transformer or something and I hear about it in the news.
Will it go "FOOOM!" if you put enough volts through it?
Then lobby to make it legal. It seems to me that a lot of people think they are powerless, which when you think about it there is truth to that. If people believe themselves powerless then they see acting as pointless and therefore don't bother.
A government can only rule with the consent of the governed. If you don't like having to feed your own power to the grid then don't do it. I thought that was the point of the article, that the utilities lose their power over people because technology has flattened that economics of scale curve. If enough people produce enough electricity that they utility is effectively doing nothing but collecting a fee for the grid tie, that no one uses, then the utility can do nothing if enough people stop paying the fees.
Perhaps you can explain what I'm missing here?
And, as we'd have to get a permit from the Homeowner's Association to put in the propane (fat chance of that ever happening) even that's effectively impossible.
I have a question. What is easier to change, the laws of your HOA or the laws of physics? I ask because the ability to store propane for heat is a lot easier than storing electricity for heat.
The rest of the association might not like propane now but if electricity prices get high enough they'll change their minds. Is it that propane tanks are "ugly" to the association? Is that why they oppose them? Underground propane tanks are a thing, I hear. They won't even know the tanks are there.
I believe you are correct that people would prefer a generator over having electricity from a utility. Where I think you are wrong is that people will want to run this generator as little as possible.
Natural gas is cheap and there is little evidence to expect the price to rise much. A large number of people in the USA already use natural gas for heating, cooking, and hot water. What is becoming more practical as technology marches on is the concept of residential combined heat and power (CHP). If people are burning this natural gas anyway for heating their homes and/or water then why not use a CHP unit to provide the heat and top off their batteries?
This CHP would need to be fairly large if relied upon for extended periods where there is not enough sun. In places where there is winter a natural gas furnace can run quite often, which if replaced with a CHP unit this can mean an abundance of "free" electricity too.
With this in mind imagine what an off grid electrical system would be made of. You'd have your battery pack, inverters, a CHP unit, and solar panels. When doing the math to size up the solar panels in this system how much area would it need? I guess that in many parts of the USA the size of the solar panels would have to be zero.
For giggles once I thought I'd compute the cost of fuel to run my own natural gas generator as opposed to buying electricity from the utility. The cost difference was very small. I don't run my own natural gas generator because then I'd have to put up with the noise all the time or invest in a battery pack so it runs while I'm not home. The need for batteries to keep the system efficient and (effectively) noise free puts the price well beyond the utility. If batteries get cheap enough to make solar panels on my roof viable then it also means that they'd be cheap enough to make a residential CHP unit viable. The noise problem could also be solved with proper mufflers and/or an unconventional engine design, potentially reducing the costs of the batteries needed as well since I'd have little fear of the noise from running at odd hours.
Solar power that is available only (maybe) during the day cannot compete well with natural gas available at all hours of the day. Improving battery technology does not just make solar look better it makes natural gas look better too. Nearly half of the households in the USA use natural gas for heat and very very few use solar. The switch to CHP would be nearly trivial for many where rooftop solar would need a roof properly oriented to the sun and free from obstructions from trees, other buildings, windmills, and nuclear power plants.
Taking this one step further we see a large cost of electricity in the summer being for air conditioning. What if instead of an electric motor the A/C compressor was turned with a natural gas engine? An engine that could also provide hot water and/or electricity? Now you are cooking... um, cooling with gas! Also, I get to keep my shade trees, meaning I would not have to run the air conditioning as often.
Please identify the pollution created during power generation by turbines and solar, maybe you misunderstand what i actually mean.
Where is the pollution created by nuclear power during power generation? There is none. With solar, wind, and nuclear all the waste and pollution is in the construction and decommissioning. If we are going to compare them then we need to be consistent and realistic. Wind and solar produce more waste than nuclear and waste that is just as toxic to the environment. With the less waste from nuclear we have a cleaner environment in the end.
someone falling off a roof is a human accident, again nothing to do with power being generated by the panel.
Bullshit. That person would not be on the roof if not for the solar panels. Every accident has a human error component and if that death occurs in the act of maintaining that energy source then it certainly is related, even if they slip and fall off a ladder. If we play that game then nuclear power may even look better since a big concrete and steel building where you'll find the nuclear reactor protects people from "act of god" type accidents like getting blown off a roof, hit by lightning, or attacked by rabid dogs.
panels/batteries are 95% recycleable
So is everything with nuclear power. The difference is in the total mass that needs to be recycled to get the same energy and power. To supply the world with equal amounts of energy there would need to be 250,000 roofs covered with solar panels PER DAY to keep up with replacement of old panels. To do the same with nuclear power would mean one nuclear power plant per week. Even that may be skewed to the benefit of solar since it assumes an operational life of 50 years. Nuclear power tends to last longer and solar tends to last less.
its safe until you have an accident
Already been over that. We can have a Chernobyl or Fukushima once every 30 years or so and still not compare to the deaths from industrial accidents from solar power. Chernobyl and Fukushima were industrial accidents, just on a larger scale. Nuclear power is 10 times safer than solar, claiming otherwise is denying the facts before you.
iits a single point of failure, the fuel is not safe to handle, its a fine target for a missile (or a terrorist) if you end up in a war, nuclear fuel, when expended, needs to be buried somewhere safe and hope it doesn't leak. Its not as good as you think and it costs an absolute fortune to build and just wait until your government (i.e. out of your pocket) is charged for the decommission of an old reactor.
That does not compute. Any energy source is a target. You think solar power is immune? It's a bunch of glass out in a field, how hard would that be for a terrorist to destroy? Nuclear reactors are in a big concrete dome, behind a big fence, protected by people with machine guns. We do the same for other big energy producers, like hydro dams. You can put a fence around your solar panels, you can protect them with armed men. What you cannot do is put them in a shelter.
When it comes to solar waste you have the same problem as nuclear, you dump it in a hole and hope it doesn't leak. If at some point someone figures out to recycle it then don't you think by then someone would also figure out how to recycle nuclear waste too? We're a lot closer to recycling nuclear waste than solar waste, and not near as much mass of waste to deal with in the first place. When it comes to the costs of cleanup the NRC has required all nuclear reactor operators to contribute to a fund for the cleanup upon decommissioning. I don't see a similar fund for solar power. So all you got is bullshit.
There is no such thing as a minimum wage. First is that there are enough exceptions to every minimum wage law that someone will find one if they bother to look hard enough. Second is that a minimum wage law only affects those that report their wages, there is such a thing as black market labor.
One exception to the minimum wage is contract work. If I tell someone I'll pay them $100 to dig a ditch and they grab a shovel and spend a week doing it then this is contract work and not covered by minimum wage laws. If I do the same to someone else and they use a backhoe to dig the ditch and it takes them an hour they still earned the $100 because that's what value I see in having a ditch where there was not one before.
I was once in some sort of on the job training program where I was to build a webpage and I was given a set weekly rate for showing up three days a week. I once sat down to figure out how much I actually got paid per hour and stopped halfway through once I started to realize just how little I got paid. People in a kind of internship don't have to get paid minimum wage, the employer just has to fill out the right kind of paperwork to get away with it. Then there were the people that expressed astonishment that I actually got paid at all for this work. Unpaid internships are still a thing and people volunteer all the time to do work. I guess I should feel blessed I got paid at all.
If the first option to avoid minimum wage is finding an exception in the law, and the second is keeping the job off the books then is there another option to avoid the minimum wage law? Sure, the third option is to hire nobody. This means the job does not get created, it's done by some sort of automation, or generally a lot of people are out of work.
Minimum wage laws are stupid. Why not just declare the minimum wage $1000/hour and then everyone can be a millionaire?
Explain how a wind turbine or a solar panel generating electrical energy is creating pollution.
http://www.nationalreview.com/...
http://cyprus-mail.com/2017/06...
Nuclear is fine until your have an accident.
Solar power is fine until someone falls off a roof. Nuclear power is the safest energy source we have today.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/...
Solar power is expensive, unreliable, toxic, and just generally a bad idea. Nuclear power is ten times safer, ten times cleaner, ten times more reliable, and just generally a better idea ten times over.
You have just demonstrated the ignorance I spoke about. There is pollution in the production of wind and solar power. These waste products are toxic and disposing of it properly is not trivial. Compared to nuclear power wind and solar are terrible for the environment. Even compared to natural gas and low sulfur coal wind and solar really aren't that great.
Everyone wants to talk about the external costs of coal and pretend that there are no external costs to wind and solar. Renewable energy does poison the environment and claiming otherwise is ignorance, willful or not.