I, for one, would support a law that requires any new unit over a certain size must be reversible and maybe even a tier where they must have variable speed compressors. But I can already hear the Republicans lying that the feds are coming to steal your window units.
Don’t be too depressed about it. The Texas grid actually isn’t doing too badly in its emissions trends, in spite of their best efforts. It’s so easy to interconnect resources to it that renewables don’t need to stare down awful queues and huge fees to get onboard and selling power.
That’s sort of the other side of the story from what this policy announcement is about – for the rest of the grid, a combination of FERC, state regulators, utilities, and such have created a system where it is very hard to get new generation online because of infrastructure problems.
This is a gross simplification, but the way it kind of works is that in Texas, infrastructure is up to ERCOT and the utility. Generation is a lot more decoupled from its eventual transmission. It doesn’t face the same terrible barriers to come online because of the deregulated market.
Since solar is a fractional cost per unit energy than gas and coal, it out-competes them any time the sun is shining – it can sell way cheaper and so gas/coal will either have to sell hugely below cost to compete or else they’ll have to curtail. Wind is still a bit more expensive on average, but when the wind is going it tends to be able to do the same since it has no marginal cost. And the same situation also means that anyone who can make economically grid storage (which is already getting possible thanks to rapidly declining battery prices) can also out-compete the literal and figurative fossil generators.
Both Texas and the US East and West grids need MASSIVE transmission upgrades to deal with an increasingly-electrified future, though.
Don’t misunderstand, Texas is a total mess. A profound lack of planning and both reliability and resiliency. But there’s lessons to be learned from it – decoupling production from transmission and some degree deregulation of that production can take advantage of very powerful market forces that already favor renewables. A post-transition future isn’t just better for consumers because of eliminated emissions, it should also be cheaper power.
I enjoy how “Climate change is making the problem worse” can basically be tacked onto any regional issue headline.
Batteries have also seen huge price drops.
https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlehtml/2021/ee/d1ee01530c
Even in the past 10 years, the cost per kWh has gone from something like $270 to $180. These prices maybe aren’t quite in the full freefall solar has seen, but they’re declining very rapidly even absent any technological quantum leaps.
Unlike transit busses, school busses only need to be in service a couple hours a day and can basically trickle charge overnight. They require far lower range on top of the declining battery prices. While I don’t know the original NYC study being referenced, it is zero surprise that the school busses are a lot lot lot cheaper.
BEV transit busses are, frankly, a stupid fucking idea. Almost as stupid as battery trains. Put up a pantograph and electrify it properly – it costs a fraction as much over relevant lifecycles.
Most of the water-born microplastics are tire dust. Byproducts of car-dependent modern life.
And, as someone else in the thread quoted, another requirement of the law is a full ban of any policies designed to increase walkability or access to transit, which would be the way to fight back against those microplastics.
The most important rule for conservatives: they do not want to turn over a better world to their children. They want their children to suffer in all the same ways they did. They believe progress is inherently bad and must be resisted. And I mean, of course they do… that’s the definition of “conservative”.
That’s literally and unironically what they want you to do.
They want to destroy walkable cities because somehow, having financially-sustainable small towns featuring outdoor life and engaged communities is partisan. They do not want main streets to exist, only box stores from national brands on the edge of town. They do not want to have to know their neighbors because they believe all other human beings that life near them are potential hostiles, so the best way to live is permanently indoors, getting into your car to protect you from the outside even before opening the garage door to avoid ANY interactions with others.
They want everyone to be forced to only drive cars because being forced to comport with one very specific, expensive, unpleasant way of life that leads to tens of thousands of unnecessary annual deaths and unbelievable isolation and loneliness is “freedom”.
Contrary to “common wisdom” and industry lies, LNG is not significantly better emissions than coal. When exported, especially across the Pacific to e.g., Japan, it’s sometimes within just a couple of percentage points the lifetime emissions as coal.
Solar is already a vastly cheaper form of energy than fossil gas and wind is rapidly going down those learning curves (it’s already comparable in many geographic areas. The issue that US energy utilities simply don’t care. They only really know how to deal with “dispatchable” power generation. They don’t want to change. They don’t want to adapt. They’d rather spend more (ratepayer) money doing things the old way. Even though we already have the technology to deal with nearly all of the “reliability” issues that come with renewable generation.
Your voice can influence this. In many states, the energy utilities are regulated by a regulatory commission – and those commissioners, frankly, aren’t getting a steady stream of feedback. They are often elected officials. I’ve got one of my commissioner’s cell phone number – they can sometimes be THAT accessible – and they’re in charge of holding these monopoly utilities to task.
We don’t need a global socialist revolution to seriously address climate change. Tons of progress is already happening, even under the regimes we’re currently stuck with. Don’t just read articles. Talk to friends and family. Take action. Make calls. Vote. Donate. It’s a still a winnable battle so long as you don’t let the doomsayers suck all the air out of the room, but it gets less so every day that people stand by.
Real answer? Because those tariffs will have barely any meaningful effect one way or the other. They’re pure politics and no one deep in the field really cares that much. The solar tariffs are fairly annoying, but solar is by far the cheapest form of energy production even if material costs blast up a full 50% – especially since those cost increases have no effect on the far more important cost center of trade labor. If Biden has a legacy other than supporting genocide in Gaza, it will be as the climate president.
The Inflation Reduction Act is the biggest suite of climate subsidies the world has ever seen. It’s an industrial policy so huge that it would make Stalin sweat. Except… it’s working. Clean energy industry in the US was doing OK before and is just exploding now. Legitimately hard to overstate how huge it is, and even countries you think of as having intense green energy programs are looking at the US with some envy. And the design of the bill is such that it spins up virtuous cycles. As industries and slow money move in to take advantage of the bill, they become part of the constituency to keep it alive and continue to build up more and more of the same investment. If it can just survive a few more years, it’ll be almost as impossible to repeal as medicare.
And none of that seems to matter. Because no matter what they do it’ll never be good enough for the loud voices on the left. If you aren’t achieving global socialist revolution that means any progress you do achieve is a waste of time and no different than the actual allies of global apocalypse. There’s always some stupid little “just one problem!” nitpick that people on places like the fediverse think reduces an entire policy to ashes even though it just isn’t even particularly important.
Those blades are way, way, way bigger than you think they are. They are moving extremely fast even at normal speeds. That 15ish rpm converts to around 1.5 rads/s. Modern windmill blades are something like 70m long – so we’re talking speeds of 100m/s or north of 350 kph / 220 mph.
Pretty comparable speeds to the windspeeds of the tornadoes in question during routine operation. Of course, there’s a lot more intensity with a tornado, but windmills are actually designed to let most of the air pass them unimpeded because it makes them work more efficiently.
Of course, their energy production will be deliberately curtailed under high winds because the generators and infrastructure hooking them up can only handle so much – they’ll brake the blades, or rely on back-emf from the motors, or some combination of those factors to prevent them from over-generating.
Of course, unlike typical wind being harvested by the windmills, the tornado’s airflow is far from laminar, meaning that even with their highest intensity, they will be losing a lot of efficiency in driving those blades.
…the tornado, of course, will simply knock them down.
They work basically unimpaired into zone 4b, which includes all of northern Michigan. This encompasses something like 95% of the entire human population.
They will need some support on the coldest days in up to zone 2b, at which point their efficiency drops to a mere 100%.
You’re spreading fossil fuel industry FUD. Fuck off.
It’s undeniably better practice. Better for the land, better for the animals, often even better for the farmers. But meat production will always be an ecologically intensive, extractive process. We will always be better off not doing it at all compared to even the best of the best regenerative practice.
…so no, it’s not a climate-friendly solution. If you want climate-friendly meat production, we’re probably talking about meal worms or some such, never beef.
I’d like to see all meat producers held to high standards of regenerative ag because it offers a LOT of benefits. It’s better land utilization, it’s better for drought, it’s better for pollution, it’s a thumb in the eye of the chemical corpos, and more even than that. And when you hear the stories produced by the regenerative ag advocates for the farmers, they aren’t really talking about climate much at all. This is correct. The story of regenerative ag has nothing to do with preventing climate change and anyone claiming otherwise is either deluded or greenwashing.
Yeah, I run into it a lot in my smallish, somewhat historic town – though I am not a developer. SO many places where all the staff constantly bitch about how they’re always popping breakers and all that stuff. Or where they have to go around sharpie-ing faceplates where you must not plug in kitchen equipment.
Line cooks, in my experience, don’t really give that much of a shit about the equipment they need to use. It works or doesn’t. The comfortability of the space matters most, and as you said, electric’s a huge winner for comfortability.
Chefs are sometimes VERY opinionated about the stupidest shit, and egotistical to boot. You can’t really argue with the dude who tells you he KNOWS gas is better (but has never actually used electric). Fortunately, these are a dying breed. Even the NYC pizza joints are switching to electric because it’s just plain better.
But if there’s one universal truth above all others with the restaurant industry, it is that it is entirely allergic to ANY kind of capital investment. Rewiring a kitchen to switch from gas to electric is just a non-starter. Having to pay an extra however many thousands during initial build to get the utility to bring in 3 phase? Good fucking luck. They’d always rather MacGyver a sketchy solution than invest the money now to improve profitability and quality of life in the long-term. The flipside is, that means buying a $150 commercial induction hob is WAY cheaper than trying to add an additional gas burner – the latter is usually a flat non-starter, the former means a guy can (lol health code) be sent to poach eggs in the break room.
Irrelevant to commercial. A reasonably big restaurant doesn’t get enough amps in the panel to replace all their gas equipment with induction, especially in grid-strained California. Not unless it’s new construction in an area with quality 3 phase electrical service.
It was a huge, huge, huge mistake that the places that banned new fossil gas installs made it ALL installs instead of just residential.
They made an enemy out of the national restaurant association for no reason and have faced huge setbacks in otherwise-good legislation as a result. It’s all just so stupid and shortsighted. Especially since, as the other guy pointed out, commercial gas cooking is not a major contributor. Even just compared to the leaky, awful, terribly, idiotic residential fossil gas network.
Notable that the common european honeybee is an invasive species that tends to preferentially pollinate invasive flora, at least in North America. The likes of bumblebees and carpenter bees are the ones that really matter for conserving and supporting native ecosystems even if they get less love in public media. They’re the bees that actually need saving.
It’s worth looking up what you can do to support native pollinators – including native bees – in your area. Some of the stuff is surprisingly easy – planting native wildflowers, for example, or setting up an insect hotel.
There’s lots of industrial uses for CO2 – this style of DAC plant can be viewed as a green producer. That said, it’s really easy to outpace industrial demands and we can expect any facility like this will need to be sequestering most of their “production”. It’s hard to overstate how much excess CO2 there is in the atmosphere compared to the sum total of all industrial carbon dioxide needs. Sicne CO2 is thermodynamicly very stable, splitting it up to get pure carbon would be quite inefficient.
It’s part of the business model of every single DAC project pretty much without exception. Any way you can make back a bit of money selling that CO2 rather than sequestering it it an opportunity to reduce costs. And no matter what you think of market economics, they’re very effective at reducing costs.
One of the most interesting uses is with projects like e.g. CarbonCure, where they dope cement production with CO2 which has known effects to strengthen (or at least not weaken) concrete. They don’t produce their own CO2 for their plants and so need to align themselves with renewable CO2 production facilities (which they do Heirloom Carbon).
Big issue is they it’s hard to compete with fossil-based CO2 production. So the next step once tech like this is proven is to start regulating/banning fossil-based CO2 production.
The worst part is, one of the “downsides” of renewables like wind and solar is curtailment. A “problem” that needs to be fixed is that they sometimes produce excess energy that you end up having to simply discard if demand isn’t there. This is often invoked disingenuously by the allies of apocalypse as some major problem with the tech – that building enough renewables to basically cover regular power requirements would entail having hugely excess production that gets curtailed, which is somehow wasteful.
DAC and green hydrogen are ways to eat up excess supply and reap benefit from it and should be categorized in similar veins to other forms of energy storage. They are both undeniably necessary technologies to achieve overall goals. Can either solve the problem on their own? God no. But who’s saying they can?
They are not worse for the environment than ICE vehicles. This is total FUD nonsense that is significantly fueled by right wing and auto astroturf campaigns. Their lifecycle emissions are vastly lower. It’s so mundanely bad a talking point that even low-level sources like factcheck.org publish informers on it. Don’t spread misinformation.
EVs aren’t good for the environment. They’re less bad. Auto-dominant culture remains a non-starter for longterm sustainability, both fiscal and environmental, for most communities around the world.
There are some situations where BEVs are maybe worse overall than ICE counterparts. Rail and busses, for example, where the BEV just makes no sense (put up a pantograph or third rail for a huge LCCA discount and massively lower emissions). Cargo trucking may also fall in this camp; trucks simply cannot be that heavy on modern asphalt design. But for regular passenger vehicles there is no question.
At least for North America, it’s really more a story about the housing crisis and fake-rural suburban sprawl than anything.
Sure, you’ll get those doe-eyed types – usually wealthy folks – that talk about wanting to quietly live out in the countryside with no one and nothing anywhere near to them. But most people don’t want to move somewhere so inconvenient, at least not if they have to actually face the disadvantages of it (like unpaved roads, no municipal sewer/water, unreliable internet/electric, long trips to highway big box stores for even the most basic necessities, etc).
When push comes to shove, most want to live in an actual town. Maybe not a huge metropolis, but a place where you have knowable neighbors, convenient shops, basic city services, restaurants and bars, and all those things. A place where you don’t have to fight through a 30 minute highway commute just to get a loaf of bread.
But they can’t. We have vanishingly few functional towns. Instead, we mostly have massive cities with tons of amenities but which you can’t afford to live in, vast sprawling “suburbs” and “exurbs” of said cities that are completely parasitically dependent on their host city to function and aren’t places in their own right, “small towns” which are just weird little growths off of an interstate offramp with no meaningful local industry of their own.
When your choice is an unaffordable metropolis, a “small town” which is nothing but national chains huddled around a place a major road crosses a highway, or the inconvenient but affordable “exurbs”/countryside, the comparison gets bad. It’s all just a byproduct of our incredibly bad housing policy – policies that favor national builders spawning whole subdevelopments out of thin air over local infill, policies that make it nearly impossible to build modest density/mixed used places, policies that care more about the financial products the housing underwrites than actually homes. Policies that rob people of choice and instead push them to all live a weird, unnatural way that violates thousands, tens of thousands of years of human development.
These advantages you see in office commutes… aren’t advantages of office commutes. They’re advantages of good urban living. And the idea that you wouldn’t live in a city if not for a job forcing you has such intense American energy I bet it drives a lifted Ford F150 covered in bad eagle decals.
~60% efficiency, I believe? Not far off from pumped hydro in terms of overall efficiency.
The extraordinary cheapness of solar energy has actually made some real green hydrogen commercially viable in the US, especially in conjunction with IRA subsidies. It’s hard to overstate how huge the inflation reduction act has been at promoting transition and renewable technology. The hopeful new tech developments in the field of green hydrogen would be “peaker” electrolyzers – current economics make it pretty hard to have a viable electrolysis plant without having it operate at very high utilization rates. Truthfully, the issue is more one of financing than technology, though tech developments could change that picture. Far better to run electrolyzers than curtail a renewable generation source and I have no doubt this will be a major transition industry.
The bigger issue is that there are no remotely viable hydrogen aircraft. Theoretically, maybe one day, but maintaining liquid hydrogen tanks is impractical even for automobiles. It makes even less sense in the goddamn sky. Revolutionary new tech would need to happen before this was a viable option for airlines. So this kind of plant is probably smarter to be producing e.g., ammonia, especially since some major shipping companies have already signed contracts to build ammonia-fuel cargo ships so the demand will definitely exist.
Unfortunately, there’s no carbon-free alternative to flying in the near future. Which is why the best approach is to minimize flying. The EU way is the right way; pick busy flight corridors and focus on them for high speed rail.
Now look at the top 3 US flight corridors. Last I looked, it was LA-Las Vegas, Hawai’i-Ohahu, and Atlanta-Orlando. Brightline is currently deploying high speed rail service for that first route. Flawed as hell service, but service nevertheless. The second is probably always going to be stuck to flight (but also, less tourism to the islands would benefit them tremendously either way). The third has huge potential to be built out into a rail corridor (Brightline Florida already has plans to expand to Jacksonville and an Atlanta-Savannah Amtrak route is already in development – would not be hard to close that gap).
Georgia has every reason to be a solar powerhouse. They have sunlight to spare and every reason to want to build it. Batteries are finally getting cheap enough to outcompete fossil generation, too.
And they ARE building it, so they even are achieving learning curves on it. There are even Republicans on the PSC (Tim Echols) that are highly, highly pro-solar.
Meanwhile Georgia Power is currently planning more fossil gas plants and extending the life of a handful of coal plants because they think they have a shortfall in energy forecasts for future demands. Because, among other things, so many huge tech datacenters are moving to the state (which of course many were doing on the promise of the quite green grid Georgia has to offer, which was the bait that is now being switched on them).
Why? Because they’re lazy, super conservative, and they get guaranteed profits off of capital investments. The Southern Company is one of the most powerful forces of great evil in the country and goes largely unnoticed. They are actively incentivized to fuck their own ratepayers in order to increase their profitability by the agreements and statutes that allow them to be the utility.
The reality is that Vogtle was built and we should be glad for it and use it. It’s spun up and producing gobs of power, and will continue to do so for a damn long time. Great. But in a state where fossil production is still being actively expanded, putting money towards ultra-expensive nuclear over incredibly cheap solar and storage, betraying your own potential “customers” in the process, is just idiotic.