Climate Change

[Infini]

Bah doubleposted by accident.

[BerenTebogo]

Shocking evidence that no rational person could have ever predicted suggests that pushing the blame onto the personal level while the corporate level goes unregulated doesn’t work!

[Cail]

Greenhouse gas emissions down 17% due to Covid-related shutdowns, in March+April. More than 1 billion tons of CO2 emissions.

[arus2001]

New Conspiracy: Greta Thunberg created Covid.

[Byrthnoth]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...on-not-so-much

Turns out most air pollution is actually from trucks, power plants, etc.

[archibaldcrane]

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-...on-not-so-much

Turns out most air pollution is actually from trucks, power plants, etc.

California also has an ambitious target for putting 5 million electric cars on the road by 2030. That could help lower emissions because instead of burning gasoline, those cars would run on electricity, largely generated by solar, wind and hydropower in the state.

Lol

Kinda missing a big one in that list...

[6souls]

[archibaldcrane]

So yesterday in California we produced 31.4% of our electricity from wind+solar, pretty neat right?

Unfortunately it was being generated at the wrong time vs. demand so over a third of that electricity was "curtailed" - i.e. wasted

https://twitter.com/karenstreet/stat...32727161499648

151 GWh generated from wind+solar, 56.3 GWh curtailed. The higher the penetration of wind+solar gets, the more you waste because you can't control when the supply occurs. Storing this massive amount of otherwise wasted electricity is expensive and simply doesn't exist right now.

Daily electricity demand peaks at like 8 p.m., when there's essentially no solar on the grid. Solar is dependent on massive natural gas ramping up to hit peak demand because solar simply doesn't supply when electricity is needed most.

[Roranora]

So we'll either reinvent and rebuild our world in this decade or we will ensure the collapse of civilization, if we haven't already.

https://voiceofaction.org/collapse-o...te-scientists/

[Byrthnoth]

Daily electricity demand peaks at like 8 p.m., when there's essentially no solar on the grid. Solar is dependent on massive natural gas ramping up to hit peak demand because solar simply doesn't supply when electricity is needed most.

This is actually one of the better arguments for electric cars imop. Make some kind of econo-setting where the car owner sets the range they need and the cars fill their batteries up to that point, then when we would otherwise have GWhs going to ground it can instead fill them to 100%. It would both help you spend some of that noon supply and avoid some of that 8PM demand. Each 100KWh Tesla X owner willing to take a 30% range cut for the environment gets us up to 35 KWh of battery capacity (30KWh stored at 85% efficiency.) Assuming some inefficiency on the demand side, lets say we'd need 3mil Tesla Xs on the road (not everyone opts in, etc.) to smooth out the surplus. Tesla is over 1mil cars produced (not all in CA), so we're at least in the ballpark.

If we're basically going to steal the world's Lithium Ion battery supply, we might as well use it.


Other ideas involve things like:
* electrolysis of water during the day (store hydrogen somehow) and then burning it at night in lieu of natural gas to make water and energy
* build extra capacity at hydroelectric dams, so you can choke them during the day and open them up as you need more power
* various mechanical energy storage ideas like pumping water uphill, pumping air underground, etc.

[BerenTebogo]

The fact that we've like completely skipped over hydrogen fuel cells still pisses me off. There's like 2 cars currently in production that use hydrogen and they're both around $60k and you have to go looking for them.

[Jaybar]

Dont know why we cant divert that energy to always-on industries? Water treatment plants, desalination, data servers, etc. There are some interesting mechanical batteries out there such as pumps that fill large reservoirs during the day and release the water through turbines when supplemental power is needed.

[archibaldcrane]

Because always on industries want always on power, not just excess power during peak sunshine. Using excess electricity for processes like desalination, mining bitcoin, coverting water into hydrogren, etc means the infrastructure for those processes is idle otherwise, it doesn't pencil out.

[Zealot]

What if we build a giant machine that just shoots lightning into the sky every time it has enough excess power to do so, just really challenge God, get a few new languages.

Sent from my SM-N960U using Tapatalk

[Cantih]

Really taking that #attackanddethronegod thing to heart I see.

[Eurell]

agab

[guartz]

This is actually one of the better arguments for electric cars imop. Make some kind of econo-setting where the car owner sets the range they need and the cars fill their batteries up to that point, then when we would otherwise have GWhs going to ground it can instead fill them to 100%. It would both help you spend some of that noon supply and avoid some of that 8PM demand. Each 100KWh Tesla X owner willing to take a 30% range cut for the environment gets us up to 35 KWh of battery capacity (30KWh stored at 85% efficiency.) Assuming some inefficiency on the demand side, lets say we'd need 3mil Tesla Xs on the road (not everyone opts in, etc.) to smooth out the surplus. Tesla is over 1mil cars produced (not all in CA), so we're at least in the ballpark.

If we're basically going to steal the world's Lithium Ion battery supply, we might as well use it.


Other ideas involve things like:
* electrolysis of water during the day (store hydrogen somehow) and then burning it at night in lieu of natural gas to make water and energy
* build extra capacity at hydroelectric dams, so you can choke them during the day and open them up as you need more power
* various mechanical energy storage ideas like pumping water uphill, pumping air underground, etc.

I dont think you understand humans. Most people would set the range to maximum, just cause, even if they drive 3 miles a day.

[Jaybar]

I'm with guartz on this. Excuse me while I swallow bleach.

Also thank you Archie for that perspective. Makes sense.

[archibaldcrane]

I dont think you understand humans. Most people would set the range to maximum, just cause, even if they drive 3 miles a day.

You'd have to pay people for the use of their idle auto batteries (and rightfully so, cycling batteries degrades them). I also don't know what extra electrical equipment would need to be installed at the charge point to facilitate sending power back to the grid, likely prohibitively expensive for this use case.

[archibaldcrane]

Also EVs make the 8pm peak even more severe as people get home from work and all plug into their garages (and crank their AC and start their washer/dryers and cook with their electric stoves).

We really kinda need TOU (time of use) electricity rates to discourage early evening use and also "time of generation" payment for power generation so extra solar dumped into a glut isn't as valuable (as opposed to the current situation where utilities are forced to buy rooftop solar power at retail rates) which is a huge subsidy to solar from the rest of ratepayers.