What does it take to succesfully transition to a green energy economy?

[EJ3]

Ok then. Humour-challenged, and some sort of retro-survivalist zealot? Rhetorical question of course. Disrupted communications from windmills* but not from ships? But I do like the bison photo. And I think we both live on an island (although you can't drive to mine).

*not actually mills, but the Don Quixote allusion is too tempting

Not any kind of survivalist zealot. Just was raised on deep water from the time I was 4, made 9 tips to Europe, 14 trips through the Panama canal from 2001-2018, lived on an atoll in the Indian Ocean from 2002-2003, then moved to Oceana (Saipan). The Indonesian Tsunami (December 26, 2004) found me on a ship anchored in Peth/Freemantle.
I had rented a Flat above a bar on the waterfront and rented a Honda Civic (see, I can drive ON your island, just not to your Island [not humor challenged])/We had arrived just after the US Thanksgiving for some ship repairs. Suddenly we had to head to Sri Lanka.
But, we had an engine down in a major way & there was not one in Australia. So, it took three days to get one flown in, while we pulled the other one.
Christmas had been very nice, getting invited to a local home that had folks from all over the world visiting. I received a mug for the person that was the second in distance from home (the home in the picture, the property was bought when I was born, in 1957).
So, on the 31st, we were ready. I had straightened out everything with the "rent-a-lemon" (actually just well used) car & the flat.
Ah, but we cannot leave, as the Anchor refused to come up, it was caught on something. So back to shore for New Years Eve, Whoo-hoo!, a wonderful time was had for all.
Back at the ship, they had decided to jettison the anchor at sunup, so off to Sri Lanka. We were supposed to go there and make 30,000 gallons a day of water and deliver it through military HMVEE's pulling 800 & 1200 gallons of water buffalo's each.
But, there were so many people already there by then, that we never set foot on Sri Lanka. We just circled the island for 28 days hoping to be able to do what we had been sent there for.
After that, I got married in Saipan (a first for me, at the age of 48) in July of 2005.
But, I kept traveling (as did she) usually in different directions. Me: Japan, S. Korea (both many times), Singapore, Thailand (together the USA [again, the picture] & China [but her: Hawaii, Las Vegas, Reno, several times.
In 2018 her & I came back to my home to be near my elderly mother (I retired but she kept traveling and working). As of now, we are both here (picture again), retired. My mother (who will be 93 on March 1) lives about 30 minutes away (my father a WWII Vet, passed away about 13 years ago).
Just here learning things (there were many things that I missed because I was busy [in 2007, my wife said: why are we paying for cable and a TV when we are never here, so, since then, we haven't had one]). Lack of computer literacy is another issue that I have (her job involved them, mine did not).
So, a lot of movies (when I do get a TV, I have an oPPo 205 UDC to play the (mostly concert) Blu-ray's & 4K's that I have collected, so that will be a start, in a couple of months.
Got to figure out how to have more electric power out here first, though.

 

[EJ3]

Please everybody note the big smiley, that line was a joke, please.

Sorry, my wife distracted me & I just hit send. There should be a smiley there

 

[Noske]

Such calculations are often biased. I am not convinced that's the case. Sure, the sunlight (yeay it's free) hits your solar panel and you get instant electricity flow. But producing thse panels wasn't cheap at all. On a $/MW scale in production, other stuff beats solar.

I'll take this opportunity to comment on costings. I happen to agree with the point about calculations being biased.

Any costing analysis that does not include the methodology by which it was calculated is useless. I cannot say whether costs are correct or not whenever they are quoted.

And to my dismay they often are. Just plonked there.

The correct method is to calculate the present value of a stream of costs (defined widely) over a reasonably long time. The lifespan of the infrastructure is technically correct. This is very different across different technologies.

To obtain cost reflective tariffs this cost is divided by the present value of the forecast usage stream. Bit tricky this forecasting thing.

That is net present value in summary, so many nuances are excluded for reasons of brevity, like the fixed supply cost.

I say this as someone who used to calculate cost reflective tariffs for both major "greenfields" capital projects and existing infrastructure facilities.

In this position I saw many attempts by interested parties to deliberately conveniently publish biased analysis. Very easy to do, but difficult to pick up by an untrained observer. And just plain wrong.

 

[Timcognito]

from another post
"Everyone loves using battery powered devices and somehow getting free power from the sky delivered on an existing system to your home to charge them is a big deal."
In the meantime, storage schemes and tech, and efficiencies are going up, cost is going down and tens of thousands of jobs are being created by diversified competing new companies. I don't understand the push back.

 

[EJ3]

Gawd. The climate change ice age myth is an enduring bit of ratbaggery. A old RWNJ neighbour tells me there are websites he swears by that collate these and similar prediction myths and present them as factual.

Well: that ICE age BS is what the high schools in my area taught, certainly while I was in high school 1971-1975. That was all you heard about. That we would be under 20 feet of ice in 20 years.
Later, in college/university, there was not a peep about it either way. So someone convinced the educators that it was The TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH and THE ONLY WAY.Then: it was the same about CLIMATE WARMING. Then they changed it to CLIMATE CHANGE. (So they could not be wrong, no matter what happens?).
Most of us that I know that lived through being educated on the coming ICE AGE and are still alive: TRULLY believe that it all is a WHOLE LOAD of RATBAGGERY.
For that, you can blame the folks that educated generations of the people with whiplash precision different scenarios every 1/2 generation or so.
It's not that they are ignorant.
It's that they were educated that way.
So it has to do with trying to undo years of education at the UNIVERSITY level (and the skepticism of what they were taught, then the whiplash of the new thing about climate and then another. Anyone that has been through the education system since the NEW Ice Age BS was being taught, has a very good chance of being highly skeptical of any of it.
It's not the uneducated people (they don't care about it much, it's an aside to just keeping their family going and making it through life).

 

[levimax]

Well: that ICE age BS is what the high schools in my area taught, certainly while I was in high school 1971-1980. That was all you heard about. That we would be under 20 feet of ice in 20 years.
Later, in college/university, there was not a peep about it either way. So someone convinced the educators that it was The TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH and THE ONLY WAY.Then: it was the same about CLIMATE WARMING. Then they changed it to CLIMATE CHANGE. (So they could not be wrong, no matter what happens?).
Most of us that I know that lived through being educated on the coming ICE AGE and are still alive: TRULLY believe that it all is a WHOLE LOAD of RATBAGGERY.
For that, you can blame the folks that educated generations of the people with whiplash precision different scenarios every 1/2 generation or so.
It's not that they are ignorant.
It's that they were educated that way.
So it has to do with trying to undo years of education at the UNIVERSITY level (and the skepticism of what they were taught, then the whiplash of the new thing about climate and then another. Anyone that has been through the education system since the NEW Ice Age BS was being taught, has a very good chance of being highly skeptical of any of it.
It's not the uneducated people (they don't care about it much, it's an aside to just keeping their family going and making it through life).

I certainly remember the "New Ice Age is Coming" during the 1970's both "on the news" and in the classroom. In college I took a "Meteorology class" (~1980) and I still remember the professor, while pointing to a long term climate chart with a 1,000,000 year scale, saying "As you go through life you will hear some people saying the climate is getting colder and some will say the climate is getting warmer. While one or the other may be right you won't know until 10,000 years after you are dead."

 

[Timcognito]

It was the late 70s that highly sensitive weather satellites were launched in large numbers enabling a lot sea/ground level measurements. Since then all of the trend data and many studies show temperature and sea level rise which corroborates earlier measured data with a constant parabolic upward trend line. If there is any data contradicting those data they sure are not getting any press or debate. The facts are there. We were told a lot of things before computers could really crunch vast data bases to verify or debunk popular notions. Now, as for how quickly or if can be reversed by human endeavor there still is much controversy.

 

[Alice of Old Vincennes]

Whereabouts in the world do you reside/call home as that may be a feature into your distrust of renewables?

Typical.

 

[Somafunk]

Typical.

As in a "typical" place of home/residence/infrastructure or someplace else?

 

[RandomEar]

I certainly remember the "New Ice Age is Coming" during the 1970's both "on the news" and in the classroom. In college I took a "Meteorology class" (~1980) and I still remember the professor, while pointing to a long term climate chart with a 1,000,000 year scale, saying "As you go through life you will hear some people saying the climate is getting colder and some will say the climate is getting warmer. While one or the other may be right you won't know until 10,000 years after you are dead."

Well, your professor was certainly wrong on that account. You can currently pretty much sit there and watch the thermometer climb. Most of you on here should be old enough to think back 30 or 40 years. Do you not remember how extremely hot summers were more rare and further apart? How the hottest days were multiple degrees cooler than they are now? I certainly remember and I'm not that old, yet.

You can easily check the number of hot days per year for your own city. If you compare the sixties or fifties to the 2000s, it's pretty obvious what's happening for most cities.

Also, this ice age thing seems to be one of those peculiarities of American media culture. Wasn't taught much elsewhere, if at all. If you discredit current science based on the fact that the media miscommunicated something 50 years ago, that doesn't seem like a fair or reasonable reaction.

 

[j_j]

Well, it's kind of interesting that the "gonna freeze" due to aerosols from industry problem went away with the various air quality regulations, but somehow that's regarded as a mistake that it worked, there's less misery, less illness, and cleaner air, but now the decreased albedo creates a different problem due to long-wave IR storage thanks to CO2 that is rejected because people don't understand the reflection and absorption characterists of CO2, CH4, and the like.

Whaaatever - - - solar and wind ARE cheaper, and as manufacturing continues to ramp up for both kinds of energy, the cost / kwh will continue to drop

 

[Axo1989]

Not any kind of survivalist zealot. Just was raised on deep water from the time I was 4, made 9 tips to Europe, 14 trips through the Panama canal from 2001-2018, lived on an atoll in the Indian Ocean from 2002-2003, then moved to Oceana (Saipan). The Indonesian Tsunami (December 26, 2004) found me on a ship anchored in Peth/Freemantle.
I had rented a Flat above a bar on the waterfront and rented a Honda Civic (see, I can drive ON your island, just not to your Island [not humor challenged])/We had arrived just after the US Thanksgiving for some ship repairs. Suddenly we had to head to Sri Lanka.
But, we had an engine down in a major way & there was not one in Australia. So, it took three days to get one flown in, while we pulled the other one.
Christmas had been very nice, getting invited to a local home that had folks from all over the world visiting. I received a mug for the person that was the second in distance from home (the home in the picture, the property was bought when I was born, in 1957).
So, on the 31st, we were ready. I had straightened out everything with the "rent-a-lemon" (actually just well used) car & the flat.
Ah, but we cannot leave, as the Anchor refused to come up, it was caught on something. So back to shore for New Years Eve, Whoo-hoo!, a wonderful time was had for all.
Back at the ship, they had decided to jettison the anchor at sunup, so off to Sri Lanka. We were supposed to go there and make 30,000 gallons a day of water and deliver it through military HMVEE's pulling 800 & 1200 gallons of water buffalo's each.
But, there were so many people already there by then, that we never set foot on Sri Lanka. We just circled the island for 28 days hoping to be able to do what we had been sent there for.
After that, I got married in Saipan (a first for me, at the age of 48) in July of 2005.
But, I kept traveling (as did she) usually in different directions. Me: Japan, S. Korea (both many times), Singapore, Thailand (together the USA [again, the picture] & China [but her: Hawaii, Las Vegas, Reno, several times.
In 2018 her & I came back to my home to be near my elderly mother (I retired but she kept traveling and working). As of now, we are both here (picture again), retired. My mother (who will be 93 on March 1) lives about 30 minutes away (my father a WWII Vet, passed away about 13 years ago).
Just here learning things (there were many things that I missed because I was busy [in 2007, my wife said: why are we paying for cable and a TV when we are never here, so, since then, we haven't had one]). Lack of computer literacy is another issue that I have (her job involved them, mine did not).
So, a lot of movies (when I do get a TV, I have an oPPo 205 UDC to play the (mostly concert) Blu-ray's & 4K's that I have collected, so that will be a start, in a couple of months.
Got to figure out how to have more electric power out here first, though.

I realised after writing that post that of course Australia is an island continent, which left some ambiguity. Which led to your story about seafaring in the broad vicinity, so not a bad result.

I do however reside on a much smaller island (in Australia of course). There's no road to it so I cross paths with neighbours on the local ferry. Despite this I'm not so much a boat person, much less a seafarer, but I've had friends who are and enjoyed time (and sometimes briefer travels) on their craft. One for example build a steel-hulled twin masted yacht. Being an eccentric/purist he managed it without any kind of motor (not even for docking) and traversed the world thus. He also made a great pot of Earl Grey whenever we dropped in (by small boat) and he served it only in bone china. He had other skills and assembled a dual-differential thermostat that managed temp control of our heat-pump and Japanese bath. Lost him to a Christian cult in the end.

You didn't respond re the article I linked about narwhals suffering the increase in arctic boat traffic (due to climate change but you may still enjoy the read regardless).

 

[EJ3]

I realised after writing that post that of course Australia is an island continent, which left some ambiguity. Which led to your story about seafaring in the broad vicinity, so not a bad result.

I do however reside on a much smaller island (in Australia of course). There's no road to it so I cross paths with neighbours on the local ferry. Despite this I'm not so much a boat person, much less a seafarer, but I've had friends who are and enjoyed time (and sometimes briefer travels) on their craft. One for example build a steel-hulled twin masted yacht. Being an eccentric/purist he managed it without any kind of motor (not even for docking) and traversed the world thus. He also made a great pot of Earl Grey whenever we dropped in (by small boat) and he served it only in bone china. He had other skills and assembled a dual-differential thermostat that managed temp control of our heat-pump and Japanese bath. Lost him to a Christian cult in the end.

You didn't respond re the article I linked about narwhals suffering the increase in arctic boat traffic (due to climate change but you may still enjoy the read regardless).

Yep, I presumed that you had meant Australia.
I never got into a cold ocean on my own trips. With my mother I was on a freighter in the Northern Atlantic to Belgium. On one of our 9 trips to Europe when I was younger.
It's unfortunate that the narwhals are suffering. I've watched some really interesting (to me, anyway) videos of the way that they use channels in the ice pack.

 

[Axo1989]

Well, your professor was certainly wrong on that account. You can currently pretty much sit there and watch the thermometer climb. Most of you on here should be old enough to think back 30 or 40 years. Do you not remember how extremely hot summers were more rare and further apart? How the hottest days were multiple degrees cooler than they are now? I certainly remember and I'm not that old, yet.

You can easily check the number of hot days per year for your own city. If you compare the sixties or fifties to the 2000s, it's pretty obvious what's happening for most cities.

Also, this ice age thing seems to be one of those peculiarities of American media culture. Wasn't taught much elsewhere, if at all. If you discredit current science based on the fact that the media miscommunicated something 50 years ago, that doesn't seem like a fair or reasonable reaction.

Had to ask my dad about this as for me it's pre-history. So being in high school starting ~1970 he recalls some media on the new ice age angle but not a focus on it in science classes (he was in the US for a bit, as was I decades later). I think you are correct that it was a media blip. The neighbour I mentioned earlier is fixated on it, which rang a bell when I was reading about Danny Boyle's recent zombie epic:

“The thing about looking back is how selective memory is," writer Garland added. "It cherry picks and it has amnesia, and crucially, it also misremembers. We are living in a time right now which is absolutely dominated by a misremembered past.”

A widely serviceable axiom!

Well: that ICE age BS is what the high schools in my area taught, certainly while I was in high school 1971-1980. That was all you heard about. That we would be under 20 feet of ice in 20 years.
Later, in college/university, there was not a peep about it either way. So someone convinced the educators that it was The TRUTH, THE WHOLE TRUTH and THE ONLY WAY.Then: it was the same about CLIMATE WARMING. Then they changed it to CLIMATE CHANGE. (So they could not be wrong, no matter what happens?).
Most of us that I know that lived through being educated on the coming ICE AGE and are still alive: TRULLY believe that it all is a WHOLE LOAD of RATBAGGERY.
For that, you can blame the folks that educated generations of the people with whiplash precision different scenarios every 1/2 generation or so.
It's not that they are ignorant.
It's that they were educated that way.
So it has to do with trying to undo years of education at the UNIVERSITY level (and the skepticism of what they were taught, then the whiplash of the new thing about climate and then another. Anyone that has been through the education system since the NEW Ice Age BS was being taught, has a very good chance of being highly skeptical of any of it.
It's not the uneducated people (they don't care about it much, it's an aside to just keeping their family going and making it through life).

Let's assume you were subject to that moment in regional media/education history (for argument's sake). Why would you hold onto that, or let it colour your perception of physics/chemistry/biology writ large?

I mean I find it mildly annoying that The Guardian suddenly started calling it 'global heating' when 'global warming' was no longer de rigueur but that doesn't mean I'll entirely reject their commentary. That would be churlish.

We know CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere retain heat from the sun—since Fourier circa 1824 (and as you're here on ASR you are acquainted with his legacy via the ubiquitous FFT). A basic understanding (and mine is pretty basic) tells us that increasing energy retained in that system will increase average temperatures and increase dynamic behaviour. People can be confused by the dynamic behaviour for sure, but there isn't really room for systemic scepticism without throwing out basic science and decades (or more) of observational data. Even if you were taught some spurious stuff back at the beginning of popular expression of climate science in the 70s, there hasn't been any real 'whiplash' for decades.

 

[EJ3]

Had to ask my dad about this as for me it's pre-history. So being in high school starting ~1970 he recalls some media on the new ice age angle but not a focus on it in science classes (he was in the US for a bit, as was I decades later). I think you are correct that it was a media blip. The neighbour I mentioned earlier is fixated on it, which rang a bell when I was reading about Danny Boyle's recent zombie epic:



A widely serviceable axiom!



Let's assume you were subject to that moment in regional media/education history (for argument's sake). Why would you hold onto that, or let it colour your perception of physics/chemistry/biology writ large?

I mean I find it mildly annoying that The Guardian suddenly started calling it 'global heating' when 'global warming' was no longer de rigueur but that doesn't mean I'll entirely reject their commentary. That would be churlish.

We know CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere retain heat from the sun—since Fourier circa 1824 (and as you're here on ASR you are acquainted with his legacy via the ubiquitous FFT). A basic understanding (and mine is pretty basic) tells us that increasing energy retained in that system will increase average temperatures and increase dynamic behaviour. People can be confused by the dynamic behaviour for sure, but there isn't really room for systemic scepticism without throwing out basic science and decades (or more) of observational data. Even if you were taught some spurious stuff back at the beginning of popular expression of climate science in the 70s, there hasn't been any real 'whiplash' for decades

 

[pablolie]

Well, your professor was certainly wrong on that account. You can currently pretty much sit there and watch the thermometer climb. Most of you on here should be old enough to think back 30 or 40 years. Do you not remember how extremely hot summers were more rare and further apart? How the hottest days were multiple degrees cooler than they are now? I certainly remember and I'm not that old, yet.

You can easily check the number of hot days per year for your own city. If you compare the sixties or fifties to the 2000s, it's pretty obvious what's happening for most cities.

Also, this ice age thing seems to be one of those peculiarities of American media culture. Wasn't taught much elsewhere, if at all. If you discredit current science based on the fact that the media miscommunicated something 50 years ago, that doesn't seem like a fair or reasonable reaction.

Our personal expriences are one thing that may or may not align on a day to day basis. But the evidence that shows a trend towards global warming is pretty overwhelming. We may or may not agree on the immediacy and impact of the consequences. But ignoring it and not preparing ourselves seems very unwise. Scenario planning is a basic element of smart strategic thinking.

 

[Harryharryharry]

Recently had a 16kwh home batter installed which I'm very excited about! Currently halfing my winter energy costs and should be zero or negative for the year when my solar generation payments are factored in. Heatpump + PV + battery + EV is a killer system!

 

[levimax]

Well, your professor was certainly wrong on that account. You can currently pretty much sit there and watch the thermometer climb. Most of you on here should be old enough to think back 30 or 40 years. Do you not remember how extremely hot summers were more rare and further apart? How the hottest days were multiple degrees cooler than they are now? I certainly remember and I'm not that old, yet.

You can easily check the number of hot days per year for your own city. If you compare the sixties or fifties to the 2000s, it's pretty obvious what's happening for most cities.

Also, this ice age thing seems to be one of those peculiarities of American media culture. Wasn't taught much elsewhere, if at all. If you discredit current science based on the fact that the media miscommunicated something 50 years ago, that doesn't seem like a fair or reasonable reaction.

I really don't know one way or another but are you sure the professor was wrong? If you look at climate on a long term basis our entire lifetime is not even visible. Doing some rough measurements, the thickness of the line on the chart below equals ~2,700,000 years. The professor's' point was that "climate change time scale" is orders of magnitude longer than the "human life span time scale" and that you can't draw any conclusions about the climate based on 100 years or even a 1,000 years of data.

 

[pablolie]

Well, it's kind of interesting that the "gonna freeze" due to aerosols from industry problem went away with the various air quality regulations, but somehow that's regarded as a mistake that it worked, there's less misery, less illness, and cleaner air, but now the decreased albedo creates a different problem due to long-wave IR storage thanks to CO2 that is rejected because people don't understand the reflection and absorption characterists of CO2, CH4, and the like.

Whaaatever - - - solar and wind ARE cheaper, and as manufacturing continues to ramp up for both kinds of energy, the cost / kwh will continue to drop

I passionately agree with the overall sentiment that continued research and investment in renewable energies is a no-brainer for a myriad of reasons that have already been discussed.

That said, as someone that has very often worked on TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) stidues in my industry, the models always ave to resort to certain simplification and abstraction. Modeling the *real* world in utterly accurate form is extremely complex in advanced technologies. The LCOE models used for different tech to generate electricity is no different.

With solar -which I love and have studied and personally use- we often assume space is there... but in many applications space is utterly premium. AI inferencing close to where it brings business value is one such case, hence the many discussions about nuclear for it. You cant be *both* close to the inference edge action and have solar right nearby. And transporting lots of power to the edge isn't cheap either, since you have to add a lot of expensive infrastructure to an exisiting grid that's already bursting at the seams.

That's the only reason why I said LCOE models can be mildly misleading given the complexities of energy transport. I am in no way ever attacking/disputing the merits of renewable, in fact I regard them as a mandatory no-brainer going forward. But they are not suitable for every application. And for those into space tech - it's basicaly all nuclear (RTG stuff and such).

 

[Timcognito]

I really don't know one way or another but are you sure the professor was wrong? If you look at climate on a long term basis our entire lifetime is not even visible. Doing some rough measurements, the thickness of the line on the chart below equals ~2,700,000 years. The professor's' point was that "climate change time scale" is orders of magnitude longer than the "human life span time scale" and that you can't draw any conclusions about the climate based on 100 years or even a 1,000 years of data.

View attachment 509201

Yes and every one of those peeks and valleys have cause. The current rise in temperature has been linked to a rise in CO2 and other gases in our atmosphere over the last 100 years in numerous per reviewed studies with almost no other contrary data. That scale is in millions of years it in not comparable to recent data.