Grid Storage Systems for Renewable Energy - Technology and Projects (No Politics)

[MediumRare]

I consider the WSJ rather liberal.

Thanks for that context, it’s useful to know.

By the way, why is Net Metering a subsidy? It merely requires the grid to reward a retail generator the same price as the supplier of that generator’s grid supply. It’s pro-market and neutral, if done correctly. Except individuals can’t depreciate their capital investment or take advantage of other corporate tax breaks, so it’s still a negative subsidy compared to commercial generators.

 

[Timcognito]

Agreed. Plastics, especially single-use plastics, are a big problem, and one that is almost completely ignored in my view. And plastics seem to me to be a problem individual countries could have much impact on than GHG emissions. Controlling plastics has local and global impact. GHG emissions must have a global solution. It'll take more global action to shrink the plastic island in the Pacific Ocean, but unlike GHG emissions the local benefits are also very considerable. When I go in a supermarket I see plastic everywhere, and it's sickening.

And our drinking water.

Almost half of U.S. tap water contains ‘forever chemicals’

In a first-of-its-kind study, the U.S. Geological Survey determined that at least 45 percent of water supplies are polluted with PFAS.

www.eenews.net

 

[Blumlein 88]

And are now degrading rapidly due to over population and over use of fossil fuels and their effect on climate. The same could be said about plastics which, unlike fossil fuels, still have chance of getting more environmentally friendly.

Actually almost every metric for quality of life for the poorest in the world has been steadily improving for the last 50 years. It still is. Not everything is roses, but still mostly upsides. Fewer starving, better income, and lower mortality rates.

It's interesting that climate change catastrophe is mostly a future prediction than one that has happened. I'm not saying there are no real problems from it or that it is not happening. Only that the worry over it thus far has overshadowed what is going on otherwise.

 

[beefkabob]

It's interesting that climate change catastrophe is mostly a future prediction than one that has happened. I'm not saying there are no real problems from it or that it is not happening. Only that the worry over it thus far has overshadowed what is going on otherwise.

I wonder if the people across the US who have faces massive wildfire smoke would agree with you. Or the insurance companies that have lost billions. Or the people who have lost their homes to ocean level rise. Then there's all the record heat days we've just had.

 

[Timcognito]

Only that the worry over it thus far has overshadowed what is going on otherwise.

Fires, floods, droughts, storms and surges, and ground water depletion all on the rise and the highest recorded temperatures at record were in last couple of days. Sure medicine, sanitation and federalizer have kept people healthy and living longer.

 

[blueone]

I wonder if the people across the US who have faces massive wildfire smoke would agree with you. Or the insurance companies that have lost billions. Or the people who have lost their homes to ocean level rise. Then there's all the record heat days we've just had.

How many people have lost their homes to ocean level rise in the US? As far as I can tell, none. The USG thinks ocean levels have risen about 8 inches since 1880, and NASA projects a further rise of 12 inches may be possible by 2050. That's not good, but if homes are only 12 inches above current coastal sea level, that was really stupid construction planning.

Insurance companies have lost billions, but that's due to a combination of factors, and global warming is far from the biggest. For example, California regulates home owners insurance rates, and has not allowed rates to increase sufficiently to cover losses. Then there's the ever-changing California building codes, which often makes reconstruction more expensive than when the homes were originally built. Inflation in building materials and skilled labor. And y'all like to build homes in places prone to brush and forest fires, which having lived there for many years seems to include most of SoCal. And then you wonder why insurance companies are fleeing.

 

[levimax]

I don’t get oil changes at the dealer and you shouldn’t buy electricity from Tesla.

I am not buying electricity from Tesla, I am buying it from SDGE in San Diego. I just showed you a screen shot of the Tesla battery app ( for my solar panels) which shows what the rates are during different times of day. Here is a link to the SDGE web site with all the current rates... they are just much harder to understand than the way Tesla presents it in the app, sorry for the confusion. https://www.sdge.com/residential/pricing-plans/about-our-pricing-plans/whenmatters

 

[levimax]

Thanks for that context, it’s useful to know.

By the way, why is Net Metering a subsidy? It merely requires the grid to reward a retail generator the same price as the supplier of that generator’s grid supply. It’s pro-market and neutral, if done correctly.

Net Metering 2.0, where the power companies pay the same to buy your power as they sell it to you for, is a massive subsidy. When they changed to Net Metering 3.0 (May 2023) they only pay 25% of what they charge. This changes "payback" from 5 years to 11 years. Power companies were forced to do Net Metering 2.0 and they basically pass the costs on to other customers that don't have solar panels. Again this is one of the the problems with these green subsidies, they are making poor people pay for rich people's solar panels. In addition during the "gold rush" switch from Net Metering 2.0 to Net Metering 3.0 solar panels more than doubled in price. They signed up so many people to beat the deadline to NEM 3.0 that it will take them 2 years to finish all the orders they got. How this benefits anyone besides the solar companes (who price gouged like crazy) and well off homeowners (who get an irrational subsidy for 20 years at the expense of other rate payers) is beyond me. You can say "well that is a subsidy not done right" but that is how almost all subsidies end up, without market discipline central planners make up rules to give away money that is not theirs with good intentions but they almost always end up being counter productive.

 

[Colonel7]

Name one example of a fossil fuel subsidy.

Tax deductible intangible drilling costs have been around for more than 100 years!

 

[blueone]

Tax deductible intangible drilling costs have been around for more than 100 years!

What are intangible drilling costs? Tax code reference?

 

[Colonel7]

What are intangible drilling costs? Tax code reference?

https://www.dwenergygroup.com/what-is-intangible-drilling-cost/

26 CFR § 1.263(c)-1 - Intangible drilling and development costs in the case of oil and gas wells.

www.law.cornell.edu

 

[beefkabob]

How many people have lost their homes to ocean level rise in the US? As far as I can tell, none. The USG thinks ocean levels have risen about 8 inches since 1880, and NASA projects a further rise of 12 inches may be possible by 2050. That's not good, but if homes are only 12 inches above current coastal sea level, that was really stupid construction planning.

Insurance companies have lost billions, but that's due to a combination of factors, and global warming is far from the biggest. For example, California regulates home owners insurance rates, and has not allowed rates to increase sufficiently to cover losses. Then there's the ever-changing California building codes, which often makes reconstruction more expensive than when the homes were originally built. Inflation in building materials and skilled labor. And y'all like to build homes in places prone to brush and forest fires, which having lived there for many years seems to include most of SoCal. And then you wonder why insurance companies are fleeing.

The effects of global warming are real, they are here right now, they are human-caused, and they are going to get a lot worse.

You can find insurance industry advocates who will claim that it's the regulations at fault for their losses. They want to see uncapped prices I'm sure. They have wanted regulation since forever. Truth be told, they just didn't factor in the costs of global warming when they set their rates. https://www.ft.com/content/a5027391-41a4-4e21-a72d-f8189d6a7b71

So the losses all piled up recently with the huge fires in California and elsewhere. Of course these same companies took massive profits for decades, so screw them. People have lived in relatively fire-prone areas for decades without huge losses, but now the fire prone areas are everywhere. My fire prone house has been there since the 1960s, and it's far from the oldest in the neighborhood. Then there's the huge hurricanes devastating Florida. And you just ignore this all? Scoff all you want. It's cherry picking at its very best. People weren't choking on high insurance rates, they were choking on smoke from forest fires. Houses weren't washed away by regulation. They were washed away in storms.

Here's another example of your cherry picking. You chose averages for sea level rise, but sea level rise doesn't happen equally. You also don't have any sense whatsoever of what a couple of inches let alone a foot of sea rise can mean for flooding and eroding coastal areas. The Gulf Coast has had 5 inches since 2010. They're all building houses on stilts. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/...ng-at-unprecedented-rate-recent-studies-find/

 

[blueone]

The effects of global warming are real, they are here right now, they are human-caused, and they are going to get a lot worse.

Agreed. That's why spending trillions on cutting our 10% of GHG emissions is dumb. We're going to need trillions to protect critical infrastructure.

You can find insurance industry advocates who will claim that it's the regulations at fault for their losses. They want to see uncapped prices I'm sure. They have wanted regulation since forever. Truth be told, they just didn't factor in the costs of global warming when they set their rates. https://www.ft.com/content/a5027391-41a4-4e21-a72d-f8189d6a7b71

Baloney. The recent losses are caused by fires, which have been going on in CA for thousands of years, increased cost of reconstruction, and inflation. You're obsessed with global warming that isn't that significant yet, and droughts have happened in the western states for thousands of years too.

So the losses all piled up recently with the huge fires in California and elsewhere. Of course these same companies took massive profits for decades, so screw them. People have lived in relatively fire-prone areas for decades without huge losses, but now the fire prone areas are everywhere. My fire prone house has been there since the 1960s, and it's far from the oldest in the neighborhood.

That's not my experience. I lived in California for about 20 years or so. I was evacuated twice from two different homes. Another home was singed pretty badly in a large San Diego County fire, and other homes on the street were burned to the point of needing to be rebuilt. You just seem to really want to believe that GHG are responsible for all of California's ills. The facts about insurance costs are different.

Then there's the huge hurricanes devastating Florida. And you just ignore this all? Scoff all you want. It's cherry picking at its very best. People weren't choking on high insurance rates, they were choking on smoke from forest fires. Houses weren't washed away by regulation. They were washed away in storms.

I'm ignoring your unsupported hypotheses about causation.

Here's another example of your cherry picking. You chose averages for sea level rise, but sea level rise doesn't happen equally. You also don't have any sense whatsoever of what a couple of inches let alone a foot of sea rise can mean for flooding and eroding coastal areas. The Gulf Coast has had 5 inches since 2010. They're all building houses on stilts. https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/...ng-at-unprecedented-rate-recent-studies-find/

Yeah, the NASA article I read which postulated the possibility of an additional 12 inch rise by 2050 discussed uneven rises.

Building on a waterfront is dumb. Whether it's a river, a lake, or an ocean, you might get flooded. I'm not going to get myself in a bundle about people who do that.

 

[blueone]

https://www.dwenergygroup.com/what-is-intangible-drilling-cost/

26 CFR § 1.263(c)-1 - Intangible drilling and development costs in the case of oil and gas wells.

www.law.cornell.edu

The second link doesn't work, but the first one was educational. (I am so glad I ignored my father's wishes and did not become a CPA. I hate US tax law. Ugh.)

So as far as I can tell the "subsidy" regarding intangible drilling costs is the ability to write off expenses faster than basic tax allows. There doesn't seem to be anything listed that is additionally deductible that wouldn't be under normal business activity expenses. I'm not discounting the advantage of earlier write-offs, but this doesn't strike me as a huge deal like the depletion allowances, which are a giveaway.

Do you have a different perspective?

 

[Travis]

and for people married filing jointly their taxable income can be up to $300K.

I don't qualify and I'm not rich.

 

[Travis]

Ignore historical numbers; they're meaningless. These are the 2019 estimates from the Union of Concerned Scientists, and it puts the annual estimate at 14%, and the US has dropped (by comparison) considerably since then.

I think the number that is really relevant is per capita, and then behind that is year to year change - US spiked up last year, China was flat, for example. Most EU countries are, per capita, 4 to 5T, Japan is 8.5T. We can be doing better.

 

[j_j]

What are intangible drilling costs? Tax code reference?

Seriously? Would you like to explain how various water wells in Ohio emit methane?

 

[j_j]

Agreed. That's why spending trillions on cutting our 10% of GHG emissions is dumb. We're going to need trillions to protect critical infrastructure.

So, because it's real we should just let it happen. Yeah. Ok.

Obviously both are necessary.

 

[beefkabob]

As the saying goes, an ounce of cure is worth a pound of prevention.

 

[Travis]

There are three engineers in your discussion about the government "creating" the internet.

Not me, the discussion about the "internet" preceded my post, I was just pointing out the folks who were being tossed about in connection with the "internet" and "WWW" were all subsidized. If it were me, I would have had Vinton Cerf from Stanford in there, as I think I think he was the real bridge between the backbone and the public internet.

I'm not aware of any direct subsidy for the physical creation of the public internet. Are you?

Well I guess it depends. If you want to define it in such a way that is supports your assertion to someone (not me) that "the internet" was built solely by private ISPs without subsidies, I'm sure you could come up with a definition so narrow that you could make that fit. Would it be the reality of how the internet evolved, probably not. (All of this is detailed in the Computer History Museum in the Bay Area). The "backbone" of the early internet was all paid for by government funding, through an agency. along with the four network access points, one of which was in Palo Alto, another was University of Michigan. The government contracted with IBM, MCI and a couple of others to lay the network and connect the 4 access points. We had T-1 to our house, in the late 80s because of my dad's work. When I came back during a school break he showed it to me, IBM ran it, and they were paid by the government agency. Later when the internet was privatized, MCI, IBM and a couple of the others took over all of that infrastructure, they didn't pay a dime for any of it. Were they subsidized? Of course, they were, that's why they got into it, they had a way to get around the monopoly of AT&T (who initially had no interest whatsoever in the internet and wouldn't let anyone connect to their system). They were given the backbone and told to build from that. From there you had the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which created the Universal Service Fund. That multibillion fFCC und can be used by phone companies to lay more landlines to underserviced, low-income, areas, or to expand internet access, and now, to expand broadband. Did IBM (now AT&T), MCI and the couple of others also lay fibreoptic and install infrastructure with their money they sure did. (Does anyone remember MCI Mail? That was the start of the bridge to the public internet and eventually the WWW. But did you ever read your bills from your ISP back then? They all had tariffs, that were part of the $x.xx per month you paid, that were approved by the FCC, that essentially were to pay for the cost of expanding the internet. All utilities work that way, including the internet. What's the breakdown between user fees, company investment, etc., other subsidies, I couldn't tell you, but they are there. Why is that? Simple, we have a system that allows you to connect with another computer, or send an email, to anyone connected to the internet regardless of who their ISP is. We don't have multiple internets where I can only send an email to another AOL user, or ATT user. That, in and of itself, regulation, and approvals, administered by the FCC is a direct subsidy by creating and regulating the marketplace.