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How to make renewable energy less attractive

The chairman of FERC was previously the energy advisor for Moscow Mitch. In other words a rubber stamp for any proposal the fossil fuel industry can come up with.
Renewable energy is cleaner and cheaper and it's just not fair.

https://cleantechnica.com/2019/12/2...-fuels-in-forcing-renewables-to-match-prices/

Renewables cannot save the planet. It's the science and the engineering. All the politics, carbon taxes, hand-wringing, or teenaged screams won't change that. We need nukes or carbon sequestration more than solar panels and wind turbines if we are serious about decreasing atmospheric carbon. The quicker we realize that the better.
 
Renewables cannot save the planet. It's the science and the engineering. All the politics, carbon taxes, hand-wringing, or teenaged screams won't change that. We need nukes or carbon sequestration more than solar panels and wind turbines if we are serious about decreasing atmospheric carbon. The quicker we realize that the better.
We could at least try and it might delay the inevitable. I'll give you credit in that you at least see there is a problem.
 
We could at least try and it might delay the inevitable. I'll give you credit in that you at least see there is a problem.

I don't see the problem in your terms. I don't see the problem in terms of any of the Democratic candidate's terms. I don't see the problem in AOC's terms. I don't see the problem in Greta's terms. I think the Green New Deal is bullshit. I've said for more than a decade now the whole global warming "problem" has been way overstated. I am more convinced of that now than before.

But yeah, I agree we should be developing new forms of, and more efficient, energy. That is why I have always supported spending public resources on things like fusion, superconductivity, and carbon sequestration. Retail subsidies for solar an wind are a waste of money, and as the link shows, not the answer anyway. These subsidies simply make all of us feel better.

Edited and made better.
 
I don't see the problem in your terms. I don't see the problem in terms of any of the Democratic candidate's terms. I don't see the problem in AOC's terms. I don't see the problem in Greta's terms.

and i'm not as concerned as some others are either, but then i'm old.

that said, should the possibility that you're wrong not be taken seriously.

if a giant meteor 15 yrs out was headed toward earth, but with mathematicians estimating an only 1 in 10 chance of it hitting earth and destroying earth in that event, should we not still take desperate measures and spend trillions to be able to destroy it just in case?

or should we not be alarmed, since the odds are only 1 in 10 of the earth being destroyed?

what about only 1 in 20 odds?

where is the probability cut off for you, as to when we should be scared shtless enough to take drastic measures just to protect against the chance?
 
Renewables cannot save the planet. It's the science and the engineering. All the politics, carbon taxes, hand-wringing, or teenaged screams won't change that. We need nukes or carbon sequestration more than solar panels and wind turbines if we are serious about decreasing atmospheric carbon. The quicker we realize that the better.


Sorry for the late response, been away visiting and attending a rather disappointing basketball game.

Anyway, I understand your post about the long term reliability shortcomings of renewable energy sources. The article you posted has a few shortcomings too. A coke can sized chunk of uranium doesn't seem like much and is laughable as an example, as is Switzerland and a basketball court sized chunk of real estate devoted to storing nuclear waste. Currently this nation's (as I understand it) nuclear waste can cover a football field stacked up to almost 30 feet high. And I doubt that includes the concrete and steel containers built around said waste. And all the while it's quite understandable that it won't go in your back yard or mine.

Since 1987 the problem of storage has been discussed and any permanent solution or even storage area has yet to be decided. Yucca mountain? eh.. maybe.

My original post was mostly a whine about cost. Ignoring all the dirty secrets and argument about methods of energy production, currently the cost of turning on your lights had a chance to be lowered but the Feds stepped in and directed those savings to go elsewhere.
 
Sorry for the late response, been away visiting and attending a rather disappointing basketball game.

Anyway, I understand your post about the long term reliability shortcomings of renewable energy sources. The article you posted has a few shortcomings too. A coke can sized chunk of uranium doesn't seem like much and is laughable as an example, as is Switzerland and a basketball court sized chunk of real estate devoted to storing nuclear waste. Currently this nation's (as I understand it) nuclear waste can cover a football field stacked up to almost 30 feet high. And I doubt that includes the concrete and steel containers built around said waste. And all the while it's quite understandable that it won't go in your back yard or mine.

Since 1987 the problem of storage has been discussed and any permanent solution or even storage area has yet to be decided. Yucca mountain? eh.. maybe.

My original post was mostly a whine about cost. Ignoring all the dirty secrets and argument about methods of energy production, currently the cost of turning on your lights had a chance to be lowered but the Feds stepped in and directed those savings to go elsewhere.

It seems to me that the best and only way to provide reliable and sufficient base load capacity is with steam turbines. Because nukes seem to be off the table, at least temporarily, the only alternative is NG or coal. Renewables + batteries have inherent limits and will not be the future of significant base load capacity, Moreover, some of the early wind and solar farms are reaching the end of their useful lives. Renewing the renewables will be a demolition and construction issue. State subsidies of renewables are more about politics than engineering and science. We need to maintain a healthy economic environment for steam power.
 
It seems to me that the best and only way to provide reliable and sufficient base load capacity is with steam turbines. Because nukes seem to be off the table, at least temporarily, the only alternative is NG or coal. Renewables + batteries have inherent limits and will not be the future of significant base load capacity, Moreover, some of the early wind and solar farms are reaching the end of their useful lives. Renewing the renewables will be a demolition and construction issue. State subsidies of renewables are more about politics than engineering and science. We need to maintain a healthy economic environment for steam power.


Nothing wrong with steam power.

 
But googling here and there looking around to agree or disagree with your post about the demolition of renewable energy source I found that the nuke industry (your bill and mine) has already absorbed 10 billion dollar loss due to outages for component replacement. Ongoing and aged research into the effect of radiation on concrete and steel still has no real verifiable answers.
The one bright spot was France is designing a new reactor with the claim of being able to use what we consider to be waste or spent uranium.

EDIT: forgot the link
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-power-plant-aging-reactor-replacement-/
 
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I don't see the problem in your terms. I don't see the problem in terms of any of the Democratic candidate's terms. I don't see the problem in AOC's terms. I don't see the problem in Greta's terms. I think the Green New Deal is bullshit.
Retail subsidies for solar an wind are a waste of money, and as the link shows, not the answer anyway. These subsidies simply make all of us feel better.

Edited and made better.

Its clear you have never been involved in building new or disruptive technologies based on your ignorant prognostication. Your challenge is that your prism is very narrow and skewed and as a result, it narrows down your world view into a dogma. In addition, you aren't aware of it and certainly naive.

This very platform called the Interwebz has had a massive dollop of gov't subsidies before it was even commercially viable to us mere mortals.
 
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It seems to me that the best and only way to provide reliable and sufficient base load capacity is with steam turbines. Because nukes seem to be off the table, at least temporarily, the only alternative is NG or coal. Renewables + batteries have inherent limits and will not be the future of significant base load capacity, Moreover, some of the early wind and solar farms are reaching the end of their useful lives. Renewing the renewables will be a demolition and construction issue. State subsidies of renewables are more about politics than engineering and science. We need to maintain a healthy economic environment for steam power.
I think we also need to invest more in highly scalable negative emissions technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to help buy time to develop alternative energy sources. There are promising technologies out there.
 
I think we also need to invest more in highly scalable negative emissions technologies to remove CO2 from the atmosphere to help buy time to develop alternative energy sources. There are promising technologies out there.

Carbon sequestration hasn’t received the attention or funding it should. The wind and solar lobbies are strongly against it. And those lobbies are media darlings. There is a lot of promise with sequestration techniques. The problem is what to do with the carbon. There are only so many carbon fiber gizmos we can use.
 
Its clear you have never been involved in building new or disruptive technologies based on your ignorant prognostication. Your challenge is that your prism is very narrow and skewed and as a result, it narrows down your world view into a dogma. In addition, you aren't aware of it and certainly naive.

This very platform called the Interwebz has had a massive dollop of gov't subsidies before it was even commercially viable to us mere mortals.

Do you have anything useful to say about future energy production besides banal platitudes about me? This whole subject is interesting. But it’s made un-interesting by those who can’t see beyond wind turbines and solar panels.
 
Carbon sequestration hasn’t received the attention or funding it should. The wind and solar lobbies are strongly against it. And those lobbies are media darlings. There is a lot of promise with sequestration techniques. The problem is what to do with the carbon. There are only so many carbon fiber gizmos we can use.
Concrete production is a huge contributor to greenhouse gasses. How about turning reclaimed carbon into a new concrete-like building material? Interesting potential closed-loop idea.
 
So, the more I read the more I am convinced that the production of electricity is largely dependent on geographic location. Water, wind and solar is abundant in some areas not so much in others. The Federal blanket mandate to do away with subsidies for renewable energy takes away a major advantage of that source of power which is cost. It even goes a bit further perhaps by dictating the price must be the same as the competition. Capitalism fans take note.
Remember the R mayor in small town Texas? that signed a contract for utilities to provide 100% wind power for his town because of the savings, those savings just disappeared. Wind power in Texas was just beginning to make a difference.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterd...stimated-to-exceed-3-3-annually/#303e89037d18
 
There is another guy at Forbes that has different opinion. I ran into this article while trying to pin down the amount of money the U.S. spends on fossil fuel subsidies. The actual number is dependent on which factors are included and who is doing the talking, of course.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ucener...el-subsidy-youve-never-heard-of/#2c1c7278652b

I have a little trouble with the social cost of carbon, so here is an article that avoids that argument and goes into the social and real dollar cost of delaying and doing nothing.
https://www.datadriveninvestor.com/2019/10/07/fossil-fuel-subsidies/
 
We could at least try and it might delay the inevitable. I'll give you credit in that you at least see there is a problem.
I would be happy to use alternate fuels. Fuel cells, bio diesel, higher alcohol content in our gasoline. The nation wold never have to import a gallon of oil again and slowly be weaned from resources that will become scarce.

Nuclear power is okay for aircraft carriers and submarines moving in our oceans, but not okay to power our cities? That is bizarre to me. We are going to need something if more people want to charge an electric vehicle overnight to get to work in the morning.

I don't agree with AOC that we will be dead in 10-11 years. I also don't blame the US for causing a worldwide problem. I have spent time in the ugly industrial cities in China. These are the places tourists don't visit. Residents wear masks when they go outside. There were ashes sticking to my hotel window on the 15th floor and I couldn't see the mountains in the distance until the early afternoon. There is not a city in the US that has this issue today.

We have converted too many acres of farmlands into large structures like new Walmarts only to leave the old buildings vacant. We build a new strip mall on green fields while the one nearby is only 50% occupied. We build holding ponds (instead of preserving a grass or wooded field) to control flooding after paving land that once absorbed rain water.

We have pushed farmers out for new subdivisions and forced them to feed the world and grow crops for fuel on less land. Farmers have cleared wooded areas to increase their acreage with a loss of natures best machines (trees) to convert CO2 to O2. Look at the cities we live in and how many fields with grass and trees have been lost in the last 40-50 years. Those fields absorbed ground water and aided the trees in converting CO2 to O2.

Cities in England cities are crowded and they build up instead of out. The countryside is more untouched and not littered with billboards. There is something to learn from this.

While our cars are cleaner and more efficient than ever, we have been destroying natures best defenses. Ask someone that has lived in your city for 50 years. Ask them where the city ended and the rural area began 50 years ago. Nature has cleaned up worse environments over the last millions of years than we have now. It isn't just what we are putting into the environment, it is what we have done that makes it more challenging for nature to clean itself up. Without understanding this, everything else is like putting a band aid on a shotgun wound.
 
I'll also note that this guy is a climate "guru" based in Berkeley, CA.

http://environmentalprogress.org/founder-president/


Yeah, he's a nuke guy. The obvious slant was apparent in the first sentence of his article when he compares German cost of energy production to France. Energy production in France is 70% nuclear, closer to 80% a few years ago. Germany shut down several reactors after Fukushima. Apples to oranges.
My slant is more from an individual usage standpoint.I want to store/produce enough energy to tell the power companies to FO. Expand that and demand for power could drop significantly. There are encouraging articles that appear almost monthly about battery advances or hydrogen production, encouraging until the last paragraph reads that any usefulness won't materialize for another 5-10 years into the future, if at all.

I don't mean to inject intense stupid or pie in the sky dreams about the realities of current energy production but it seems to me that subsidies for battery improvement and research serves us far better than fossil fuel subsidies, not to mention Fed protectionist policies for carbon production. Oops.
 
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