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

[pablolie]

What an asinine position is taken by that publication. Swapping cables? For advanced new ones? Seriously? Such bullshit.

The real reason that transmission lines aren't upgraded in place is that there's often insufficient transmission capacity to reroute the power the old lines carry, and that when you deploy higher voltage transmission lines (the whole point) you need different tower designs, which means an expensive, time-consuming process.

OTOH here in CA we have an infrastructure, courtesy of PG&E, that drops power lines every time there's an even moderate high wind. Hence they announce black-outs for what seems no reason whatsoever, rendering this a power grid less reliable than Honduras or something. Lack of any investment for many years. I'll never forget being on Maui in the early 2000s for one of those company corporate "President Club" appreciation events, in a nice enough place right next to the Ritz Carlton. One evening I decided to walk over to the Ritz to change scenes and treat myself, and PG&E had rented the entire place for a week. Capital allocation clearly isn't the strength of de-facto energy monopolies - neglect investment in your core business infrastructure while partying like it's 1999, sure, that works... :-D They were pounding down the Opus One, too.

 

[Timcognito]

The real reason that transmission lines aren't upgraded in place is that there's often insufficient transmission capacity to reroute the power the old lines carry, and that when you deploy higher voltage transmission lines (the whole point) you need different tower designs, which means an expensive, time-consuming process.

The new lines are much lighter and carry 30-40% more power that will come into play when all the solar systems are dumping power into EVs and heat pumps. I guess those guys in Europe that put up 75000 miles of them aren't that smart.

Edit: It also greatly facilitates around right of way issues by using existing ones at half the cost of withou replacement towers and existing technology. It also can contain embedded fiber optic cables for pinpoint monitoring of trouble spots and circuit overloads.

 

[blueone]

The new lines are much lighter and carry 30-40% more power that will come into play when all the solar systems are dumping power into EVs and heat pumps. I guess those guys in Europe that put up 75000 miles of them aren't that smart.

You're confusing levels of the grid, and I don't think you know what you're talking about.

 

[blueone]

OTOH here in CA we have an infrastructure, courtesy of PG&E, that drops power lines every time there's an even moderate high wind. Hence they announce black-outs for what seems no reason whatsoever, rendering this a power grid less reliable than Honduras or something. Lack of any investment for many years. I'll never forget being on Maui in the early 2000s for one of those company corporate "President Club" appreciation events, in a nice enough place right next to the Ritz Carlton. One evening I decided to walk over to the Ritz to change scenes and treat myself, and PG&E had rented the entire place for a week. Capital allocation clearly isn't the strength of de-facto energy monopolies - neglect investment in your core business infrastructure while partying like it's 1999, sure, that works... :-D They were pounding down the Opus One, too.

What does this have to do with my post? Nothing.

 

[Timcognito]

You're confusing levels of the grid, and I don't think you know what you're talking about.

https://acore.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Advanced_Conductors_to_Accelerate_Grid_Decarbonization.pdf

 

[blueone]

https://acore.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Advanced_Conductors_to_Accelerate_Grid_Decarbonization.pdf

This is marketing material from cable providers. Just because it has footnotes, don't confuse it with a rigorous discussion. Of course any new lines will probably use more modern conductors than steel (which is used in the majority of US high voltage transmission), but simply adding 30% of theoretical capacity doesn't fix or even mitigate the US grid problems. Your original article implied that new cables were a fix for old grid technologies working at relatively low voltages. The marketing material at least mentions the challenge with substations and how they'll probably need to be upgraded to achieve the modest win just from the conductors, but the conductors don't change the fact that moving to higher voltages (like 765KV) are said to require different tower designs. And the US grid doesn't need just 30%, it needs a multiplication factor to accommodate vehicle and residential electrification your favorite politicians want to mandate. I'm all in favor of a major grid overhaul, but recabling isn't the answer. High voltage DC probably is.

 

[Blumlein 88]

A fairly good article on synthetic fuels and why the "math does not work". I might pick a couple of nits with it, but gets the main point across as to why it isn't a good solution on any large scale.

Synthetic gasoline promises neutral emissions—but the math doesn’t work

E-fuels sound like a panacea, but there's not enough spare electricity to make them.

arstechnica.com

 

[blueone]

I am so glad we moved out of California. So, the state government imposes mandates for the electrification of basically everything, and they're switching to income-based electricity pricing. Unbelievable.

California Senate Republicans blast income-based fixed charge on utility bills

Legislation passed last year institutes a fixed charge based on household income on electric bills.

www.sandiegouniontribune.com

 

[blueone]

A fairly good article on synthetic fuels and why the "math does not work". I might pick a couple of nits with it, but gets the main point across as to why it isn't a good solution on any large scale.

Synthetic gasoline promises neutral emissions—but the math doesn’t work

E-fuels sound like a panacea, but there's not enough spare electricity to make them.

arstechnica.com

Smells like ethanol to me...

 

[JeffS7444]

This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the magic ingredient in the move towards sustainability is: Time. Time for human population to shrink as it's already on track to do globally. This might not happen quickly enough to prevent some parts of the world from ending up underwater, but I can't think of any way to quickly and humanely reduce the human population.

Why do places like PRC increase their use of coal? A non-cynical view is that it's a cheap (they got an awful lot of coal), short-term way to grow their economy to a level that can afford to be green.

 

[Doodski]

Why do places like PRC increase their use of coal? A non-cynical view is that it's a cheap (they got an awful lot of coal)

China buys trainloads of Canadian metallurgical coal each day. There is a major coal shipping terminal at Tsawwassen in Canada and the USA uses this coal port for exporting it's coal too. I don't know if China buys coal from Australia and such but if they are then they might not have enough for themselves or not enough high grade metallurgical coal for making coke.

 

[Keith_W]

I don't know if China buys coal from Australia and such but if they are then they might not have enough for themselves or not enough high grade metallurgical coal for making coke.

They do buy coal from Australia. Most of our coal exports went there before the Chinese decided to punish us for criticizing them and put a trade embargo on Australia.

 

[Ron Texas]

https://www.realclearenergy.org/art...has_a_climate_record_to_live_down_897662.html

Unfortunately for the people for Sri Lanka, Shiva also convinced the Sri Lankan government to ban GM crops and chemical fertilizers and switch to organic farming. The results were worse than remarkable; they were disastrous. According to Matt Ridley, within months of Sri Lanka going organic, “the volume of tea exports had halved, cutting foreign exchange earnings. Rice yields plummeted leading to an unprecedented requirement to import rice. With the government unable to service its debt, the currency collapsed.” Soon after, the government collapsed, too. Street protests forced President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee to the Maldives in an air force jet.

A 2021 paper on extreme climate forecasts tabulates 79 predictions of climate-caused catastrophe dating back to the first Earth Day in 1970. Charles has the distinction of being the only individual to be featured three times, with separate predictions of climate apocalypse. As the paper’s co-author David Rode of Carnegie Mellon University comments, alongside Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich, Prince Charles has “warned repeatedly of ‘irretrievable ecosystem collapse’ if actions were not taken, repeated the prediction with a new definitive end date. Their predictions have repeatedly been apocalyptic and highly certain . . . and so far, they’ve also been wrong.”

 

[Marc v E]

A factory tour of a battery production facility from Amprius. Their battery contains 375 Wh per kg and can be charged to 80% in 6 minutes.

 

[monkeyboy]

I used to think the Simpsons was parody...

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1655496126726897665

 

[Marc v E]

A post by Herbert Diess, the former CEO of vw about the surprising number of electric buses in Nigeria:

Herbert Diess on LinkedIn: Yutong to provide 12,000 e-buses in Lagos, Nigeria, in cooperation with… | 133 comments

So geht das! Afrika wird voraussichtlich das fossile Zeitalter direkt überspringen. Es gibt keinen wirschaftlicheren öffentlichen Nahverkehr als E-Busse… | 133 comments on LinkedIn

www.linkedin.com

He thinks Afrika will jump straight into the electrification of vehicles.