Are you in favor of the Green New Deal?
user-723121
| Posted in General Questions on
https://www.sunrisemovement.org/gnd/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/feb/07/green-new-deal-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-plan
This is an article about the 9 billion dollar nuclear plant that was never built in SC. It does also talk about the Green New Deal, it’s cost estimates and what is proposed. Real energy transformation has to come, the Green New Deal may be the start.
https://theintercept.com/2019/02/06/south-caroline-green-new-deal-south-carolina-nuclear-energy/
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"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." - Milton Friedman
But there IS such a thing as being billed for a lunch that you never get to eat.
The fact that regulators in GA are still unwilling to pull the plug on the related Vogtle construction project is a travesty. Part of the sales pitch on both SCANA and Vogtle was that it was a cookie cutter design and that building them multiples (SCANA + Vogtle) would lower the cost, streamline the process. With the Westinghouse bankruptcy and SCANA going away even that fig-leaf is gone, exposing the GA ratepayers to an ongoing and increasing financial risk that they have been pre-paying on for the better part of a decade now.
It' a feature of state-granted monopolies. I guess the situation in SC/GA is worse than the current/second bankruptcy of PG&E in Calif.
I guess this means that you strongly disapproved the tax cut signed into law by the current administration where the vast benefit of it went to the very wealthy. Especially so since it created a huge hole in the budget.
Yes, it would be terrible to have instead created a similar budget deficit that gave back to the current generation of all financial means in the form of green jobs, less expensive utility costs, and a better environment for future generations.
Tax cuts in themselves are a net gain for the economy because it returns capital to individuals who want to receive a return on their investment by investing their capital in companies which fulfill consumer demand. The fact that the "wealthy" received most of the tax cuts is just a reflection of the fact that they pay an overwhelming majority of the income tax.
Now as for the deficit. The issue isn't that the cuts created a large deficit, the issue is that the budget is as large as it was. However you and I both know that a deficit was all be guaranteed because of the circumstances surrounding the passage of the tax bill. It is future generations which are on the hook for the decades of deficit spending.
Having the govt instead deploy tax revenue to "create" jobs is in the end unsustainable because demand itself is artificial (i.e. subject to the whims of individuals who are voted into office). The term rent-seeking comes to mind.
While I try to be polite, this is utter nonsense. That is, it's a libertarian system that seeks to change facts to conform to that preexisting belief system. And while it is false, it is also dangerous because people can be gullible. Similar to the nonsense that "market" efficiency and knowledge is always perfect. That is just not correct and is the basis for all these so called facts. It is just a myth. Distortions in market forces can and do exist independently of any government intervention and can do so for long periods of time.
This isn't a libertarian argument but an economic one. Of course there are distortions in the market. The market expands and contracts in one area or another. The market is not perfect but is the best indicator available (although MMT folks would disagree).
Govt is not restricted by profit/loss therefore it cannot determine the most efficient means of deploying resources in order to fulfill consumer demand. The USSR and current day Venezuela are extreme examples of that. Domestic examples could be the US Interstate highway system and the housing industry. Highways encouraged sprawl and the mortgage interest deduction encourages people to acquire the largest house they can afford which may or may not be located in a Flood Zone, Rent Control reduces the supply of housing.
"Having the govt instead deploy tax revenue to "create" jobs is in the end unsustainable because demand itself is artificial (i.e. subject to the whims of individuals who are voted into office)."
Vs the whims of who, for what reason?
"Govt is not restricted by profit/loss therefore it cannot determine the most efficient means of deploying resources in order to fulfill consumer demand. "
A: The public does not do things efficiently
B: Who cares?? Why is consumer demand the basis or primary for anything??
I'm not super familiar with the Green New Deal, but what about it strikes you as someone trying to get a "free lunch"?
Seems to me it's about using tax dollars to fund projects that fight global warming. Which to me sounds more like paying for a very important lunch. Kind of the opposite of trying to get a free lunch, no?
Deleted
"Yes" - me
It is hard to be for or against it at this stage, given that very few concrete details have emerged about what it would consist of. Nevertheless, like the idea of a green new deal, and I think most people in the green building industry who took the time to properly consider it would as well.
First I would like to note that the green building industry are not as left-leaning as one might guess from having the prefix "green", particularly on economic issues. The building trades, on a whole, are slightly right-leaning relative to the general population, and many of the old guard in the green construction movement got their start in the oil crisis years, where saving energy was good economic sense and perhaps even patriotic. So I have little doubt that there is a diverse array of political opinions among those who frequent this site.
However, there is little doubt that the industry is acutely aware of the environment as a whole, and I don't think you'll find many people here that will dispute climate science. The main difference of opinion will likely be in the degree of government intervention that is necessary. I fear some of the more conservative voices in the green building community will dismiss the idea of a green new deal on reflex, partly because of the messengers (the young, progressive wing of the Democratic party). That would be a mistake.
Unfortunately, the current state of affairs necessitates urgent intervention to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and limit the degree of global warming to an acceptable level. There is not a plausible market solution to this problem. Polluting industries do pay an adequate price for the damage they do to the environment, incentivizing a "tragedy of the commons" scenario. Attempts to properly tax these emissions are difficult, and unfortunately the cost is passed directly on to consumers, resulting in a surprisingly regressive tax in spite of the fact that the wealthiest among us use vastly more energy than the average American. Further, without a global treaty on the issue, many polluting industries will move across countries and continue destroying the planet without consequences.
And so, reducing greenhouse gas emissions requires government investment in green energy production and reducing energy usage. The scale of the problem necessitates throwing a lot of money at it, thus a green new deal. How will we pay for it doesn't matter, because we *must* pay for it. The alternative is to learn to live on a warming planet, and all that it brings.
On the positive side, such a bill will likely benefit green builders as a whole. I would be surprised and disappointed if the final bill does not include measures funding and incentivizing weatherizing and energy reduction measures for both existing and new construction, as cutting energy usage is just as important as investing in cleaner energy sources.
"So I have little doubt that there is a diverse array of political opinions among those who frequent this site."
This is what we need. People debating over how to get things done. I fear the debate (on the political center stage) has become about whether anything we know is real or not. Science? nah.
"Polluting industries do pay an adequate price for the damage they do to the environment, incentivizing a "tragedy of the commons" scenario."
I assume you mean 'don't'
I usually try to avoid these types of discussions since they tend to get animated and drift off into political never never land, but I’ll offer this:
Years ago, when hybrid cars were relatively new on the scene, there were tax incentives to their purchasers and attempts by various governement entities to encourage (and more than encourage) their use through increase average fuel economy requirements. There was much debate and argument over what these standards should be and how they should be applied.
Around that time, I was consulting to automotive suppliers a lot more than I do today (the reasons are an exciting tale of the wonders of repeatedly extended payment terms and other supply chain frustrations), so I heard much talk about this from the automotive industry. The automotive industry was concerned with the practicalities of meeting government fuel economy mandates without reducing vehicle safety and and maintaining reasonable selling prices for the cars so that people could afford them.
There was a very interesting article in an engineering magazine at the time. It might have been EE Times, but I don’t remember as it was probably 20 years ago. The article was about some research that had been done that found that optimizing the timing of traffic signals in the country would result in overall fuel savings approaching replacing every car on the road with a hybrid. All that would need to be done would be to carefully optimize the timing to minimize how much cars would unnecessarily stop at red lights. No new engineering would be needed, no new equipment needed to be built or bought. Massive savings and efficiencies could be gained from careful application of existing systems.
Be careful with any new government regulation. Most of those writing the regulations have either no idea what they’re talking about or, worse, they’re either intentionally trying to manipulate things to their own benefit or are being mislead by activists or lobbyists to do so. Markets are certainly not perfect, but well-meaning but ignorant government regulators have shown themselves to be much worse. Remember the issues with solar gain and window ratings? There are many other examples.
Bill
A careful optimization of the timing of all the traffic signals in the country would require a large effort by traffic engineers right? And some sort of mandate or regulation passed by the government? All this work would maybe create some jobs, and be funded by tax dollars?
The traffic signals anecdote seems like exactly the sort of thing that market forces would have a great deal of difficulty accomplishing and would require the (informed) actions of well-meaning government regulators.
Yes, it's hard not to get over-animated in this kind of discussion.
"Be careful with any new government regulation. Most of those writing the regulations have either no idea what they’re talking about or, worse, they’re either intentionally trying to manipulate things to their own benefit or are being mislead by activists or lobbyists to do so. Markets are certainly not perfect, but well-meaning but ignorant government regulators have shown themselves to be much worse. Remember the issues with solar gain and window ratings? There are many other examples. "
I have a counter example. Not to beat this dead pony but it still remains fresh in my mind. I remember all the people scolding Californians when we became suspicious of all the power plant shutdowns in 2000 due to "maintenance." Typically this occurred simultaneously with NG prices skyrocketing. Everyone claimed ignorance. We were accused of being activists and not taking responsibility for our profligate ways. This meme even got our governor thrown out of office. The arguments against us from entities outside the state always came down to the argument in quotes. We were being mislead and that we should trust the market and take responsibilitiy for our own profligate ways. The state government almost went bankrupt from Enron's actions of shutting of pipelines and power plants to create spot shortages of electricity. We were lectured on a never ending basis that we should instead blame ourselves and liberal activists for what happened. Even many Californians believed it.
There is absolutely no reason to believe that it is easier for governments to introduce distorted pricing than it is for corporations. The only difference is that government representatives can ultimately be voted out of office while the shareholders of corporations wouldn't necessarily vote them out if the profits were illegal but terrific. Also the distorted pricing that may come from government intervention ultimately comes from motivations to represent all citizens and not just a few vested interests of shareholders.
The power issues in California were due to a combination of both the state government creating impractical regulations in an industry they did not understand (and they were warned about this but did not listen), and unscrupulous buisness interests taking advantage of the situation (most famously by Enron).
The state of California put in place several regulations that set the stage for the problems. Electric utilities were forced to sell their generation assets, and transmission (the very large “bulk” power grid circuits that feed cities) and be in the buisness of distribution only. The state required that the utilities purchase power on the spot market, placing them at the mercy of daily and hourly price swings. Normally utilities contract for power over longer periods of time which better fits with actual production costs. The state placed a cap on the prices they could charge their customers, but there was no cap on what they might have to pay — and the utilities are legally bound to supply power to their customers. This was a recipe for bankruptcy, which happened to many utilities.
The state allowed transmission line operators to charge a premium for power moved on “congested” transmission lines. California is interesting in that there are relatively few very long transmission corridors that the majority of power used in the state must traverse. Path 15 is a notable weak spot here and was central to many of the power “shortages”.
What Enron did was actually very clever. Enron was able to, and also offered workshops to train others (pretty unscrupulous), setup a “loop” circulating power through California, into neighboring states, and then back into California again. This created artificial transmission congestion allowing transmission operators to charge premiums to utilities. Another famous example of transmission circulation loops is known as the “erie loop” involving multiple transmission paths around Lake Erie that include both US and Canadian utilities. The Erie loop was involved in the cascading blackout of August 2003.
The issues in California were not a lack of generation, or a lack of transmisison, although California does have less of each than needed for a stable system. The issue was a combination of the state dictating operation practices to an industry they did not understand, and the state ignored recommendations from the NERC (a group that makes recommendations to ensure reliability of all North American electric systems). Bad actors in the industry then took advantage of the poorly designed regulatory regime and the problems affected most of the people in the state. I almost wrote a thesis about this event.
Anyway, the point is that trusting government to handle these issues is no better than trusting industry. Sure, you can say you can vote out people you don’t like in government, but you can use different companies for services too. The best results are obtained by careful regulations, with input from those that know what they’re doing. The issues we face with energy supply and distribution are complex involving many different specialized disciplines. I work in one of them, so I see a lot of the results of poor regulations. My dad, who retired from utility legal work, liked to tell people that most people in politics and the legal field chose those fields because they didn’t require science and math classes. Energy is all engineering and physics, and people with no background in those fields are not the ones you want controlling those fields.
Bill
Well, I guess we agree. I'm glad to see you acknowledge that good regulation is the key idea if we're talking about a product that everyone consumes and is not discretionary. We actually voted for deregulation of power utilities (in 1999 I think) before the problems came about. It was a big mistake and was our own fault.
But I still find it gauling to see so much emphasis on the importance of deregulation of all commerce. It certainly isn't the way I see it or have experienced it.
Deregulating everything isn’t the answer either. Someone needs to set standards, otherwise you have chaos. I just argue against trusting government to solve all the problems since in my expierience they tend to cause more problems than they solve, and politicians on all sides generally have very little if any understanding of technical fields.
A lot of the proposals in the supposed “new deal” aren’t practical. I’m all for improving efficiency, but it’s possible to go overboard too. One of the things I’ve always liked about GBA is that the articles are practical, and advise against going to crazy extremes when the money would be better spent somewhere else. Everything is a tradeoff, so the goal always needs to be get the best *overall* benefit and not to overly focus on any one detail in a complex system.
Bill
" optimizing the timing of traffic signals in the country would result in overall fuel savings approaching replacing every car on the road with a hybrid."
Sitting needlessly at traffic lights drives me crazy!
Reminds me of the song 'slave to the traffic light' by Phish...
Similar to other replies to your comment , however, I would ask: where is the market incentive for a large scale traffic light rehabilitation?
While many companies may benefit from improved travel efficiencies, surely no one company would benefit enough to foot the bill. But if they all benefit, then why not pool their money and foot the bill. This, to me, seems like the concept behind taxes. Pooling money to tackle the problems no single component of the system has enough incentive to do. Of course there is the issue of whether tax revenues are well managed.
I think the traffic light example is really neat for another reason: It is all about systems efficiency. You're absolutely right that we need more technical and expert influence when it comes to regulation. Viewing the problem like an engineer (i'm not one by the way, but have been told I think like one) means the entire system is considered.
The efficiency of a system can be made better by upgrading a few components (the ones who can afford to), but it may be made even more efficient for potentially less expense if existing components are rearranged and upgrades are made optimally (not based on if they can pay).
While we can 'sell green' to individuals, or groups of individuals, I am not convinced a free capitalist market can optimize the system as a whole. I think some people view the capitalist market as if it is a natural law, and if left un-tampered would organize in an optimal fashion. I don't know where this notion came from, because the market is a human construct subject to human condition. Many variables are left unaccounted for.
Actually, my example with the traffic lights wasn’t supposed to be a government vs market example. I’d intended it as an example of government regulating something (car fuel economy) when they could accomplish more with less by applying those same regulatory efforts to something else (traffic light timing). Basically it’s an example of government misallocating resources. There really isn’t much of a market incentive to directly address poor traffic light timing, although Verizon lately has been using it as something of a PR campaign in their ads.
Bill
I understand. I completely agree that mis-allocation of resources is a problem.
It was an anecdote ripe for pointing out that the purported place where maximum efficiency gains could have been realized is a place out of reach of conventional market forces. That not being in contradiction to your intended point, but rather an addition.
It matters, in my opinion, because I think a far more fruitful discussion (speaking in general, not about this discussion) could be had over how to spend (or regulate) efficiently, rather than simply how to spend (or regulate) less. 'Spending less' is often accompanied with the notion that all spending is bad; taxes=bad, government=inefficient, etc.
Spending efficiency acknowledges that we can get returns on our investments when done wisely.
First off let me say this up front I’m a control room operator at a nuclear plant. I have worked in the power production industry for the last 15 years. From sweeping floors, to turning wrenches to spliting atoms. I have Worked natural gas, coal, hydro, wind, and nuclear. I’m not on either political side , both parties have some good ideas and bad ones. I just want to give everyone a little back ground first renewable have a small capacity factor compared to other sources. Capacity factor is what a given power production plant can make and what it actually makes. Renewable have this problem because of the lack of feedstock wind doesn’t blow all the time and sun doesn’t shine all the time. Also they are heavily subsidized Obama’s administration really raised the subsidies for renewables. These subsidies are the many reason you have seen so much wind put on in the last few years ( low capacity factor = build double or triple to raise capacity factor) and also the reason so many small nukes have shutdown in the north east. When you can sell power on regulated market because your subsidize are that good. ( think taking a loss on power because the government is making up the difference). All source are recipient of government money take a look for yourself at the dept of energy and you see how the pie is sliced ( nuclear doesn’t get anything close to the others). Obama is also the one that appointed jaczko to nrc commissioner position also the article fails to say that mr jaczko is heavily involved in wind power he owns a wind company. He and mr obama are both anti nuclear hence why he was appointed to the commission. Now a little thing that should be obvious money is changing hands politicians to renewable energy companies now and your green new deal will raise that level. I think coal is terrible for the environment I should know I’ve actually seen how bad it is in a plant. I also know we are not ready to go to 100% renewables. it would be a painful disaster economy, God awful on the American taxpayer, and chance for tax payer money to end up in the hands of greed politicians.
That wind that doesn't blow all the time has a habit of knocking out the transmission feeder to the remaining nuke in Massachusetts at the most inconvenient of times (like winter Nor'Eeasters). Just sayin'...
Dispatchability and high capacity factor aren't necessarily hallmarks of reliability/availability. The ramp rates of the existing nuke fleet in US are also glacially slow, requiring other resources for load following.
The capacity factors of New England offshore wind is conservatively estimated at more than 50%, and highly correlated with cold weather events, making an excellent resource for managing space heating loads.
The aggregate output of wind and solar are highly predictable in the day-ahead markets (even more so in the 5 minute LMP), and due to the geographic and grid distribution it's impossible to suddenly ake a half gigawatt of PV or wind offline in 16 milliseconds.
Major plants usually have multiple transmission interconnections for redundancy. If they don’t, that’s a different kind of problem.
Nuclear, and other conventional power sources, have the advantage of being very predictable and reliable. You can know with near 100% certainty that if you start a plant at a certain time, capacity will be available some number of hours later. Every time. Renewables don’t have this advantage, solar can have cloudy days and storms, wind can have calm days. That’s not to say renewables don’t have their place, solar, for example, is pretty good at lining up with peak air conditioning demand loads in the Southwest.
Wind most certainly can be knocked offline quickly. While the wind farm itself is distributed over a pretty large area, the power cabling is centralized. Most wind farms are all wired back to one substation that “feeds” their output back to the main power grid. If that one substation or connecting circuit goes offline, the entire wind farm goes offline. Distributed solar on residential structures is more of a truely distributed energy source.
Bill
>"Major plants usually have multiple transmission interconnections for redundancy."
The Pilgrim plant in MA has two primary connections to the grid. When one goes down in a storm they take take offline in a more planned fashion as quickly as is prudent to mitigate the risk of a major disturbance of the roughly half-gigawatt going offline suddenly and without warning should the other line fail.
This movie gets played regularly around here:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/pilgrim-nuke-goes-offline-as-northeast-buffeted-by-winter-storm/514135/
No matter how reliable the individual plant is, it's the grid infrastructure that determines the overall reliability/availability under adverse conditions.
>"Wind most certainly can be knocked offline quickly."
Can you point to an instance where that happened (at the half-gigawatt or higher level all at once) ? I can believe a tornado in just the wrong place and time in Texas might be able to do that, but don't know of any instances of it actually happening.
>"Nuclear, and other conventional power sources, have the advantage of being very predictable and reliable. "
The aggregate output of wind and solar within a grid operator's region are more predictable than the load 24 hours in advance, and the wholesale electricity markets have pretty much proven that. Reliability and predictability in the aggregate is high for both wind & PV, if not at the few megawatts turbine / solar farm level.
Conflating dispatchibility with reliability is a distortion- they aren't really on the same axis. The whole notion of "baseload" power as necessary for grid reliability is a cultural myth. Flexibility matters more to grid reliability than 24/7 power from any single source, at any capacity factor.
>Can you point to an instance where that happened (at the half-gigawatt or higher level all at once) ?<
Nope, I have no examples handy. I’m just familiar with the electrical designs to interconnect the wind farms. Usually there are medium voltage ties to individual wind turbines that are bussed together until some design circuit ampacity is met, then another circuit for the next group, etc. multiple circuits are brought into a substation that steps the voltage up to either sub transmission (usually around 42-90kv) voltage level, or sometimes transmission (usually 115+kv) level for really large wind farms.
If you lose any one circuit, you lose only a few individual wind turbines. If you lose a substation, you lose either a big block of wind turbines or maybe the entire wind farm. It’s no different than the loss of any other major transmission element taking a covential power plant offline. Even though wind farms are spread over large areas, they are not generally interconnected with the “regular” power lines in the area. Larger (more than a few turbines) wind farms will usually have their own independent “power grid” until they are connected to a substation that feeds their power back into the main power grid. Think of the wind farm distribution wiring as the wiring within a power plant. The substation is the final transformer at the plant that feeds the outside world.
I’m not so sure about wind/solar being better from a dispatch perspective compared to conventional sources. I’ve heard the opposite from engineers in that field. Maybe things have improved, I’ll have to ask now since you’re making me curious :-)
I agree storage is needed, but I don’t think batteries are going to do it. Electric vehicles are storage like in that they are dispatchable loads, but only when the chargers are “smart”. My charger at home is set to charge during off-peak times, but the utility does not provide a way to communicate with my charger to optimize the charge time. That’s something for the future I suppose. Vehicle batteries are not going to work as grid support though, only loading. I don’t think the Tesla battery is a good option either due to high cost, low capacity, and limited cycles. I’m more of a proponent of pumped storage and was happy to find out the luddington facility in Michigan is getting a big upgrade. The trouble is there aren’t many of these facilities out there.
I suppose the complexity of these issues is what makes them interesting.
Bill
There is a vast difference between the public and private sphere. One of them belongs to you. It's up to the public to hold government accountable. If you are aware of historic blunders the government has made and are concerned that this mistakes could be repeated do something about it. Write to your representatives, write Op-eds, influence others, and make good use of your democratic system. I posted about the Green New Deal a few weeks ago asking for suggestions as to what people on this forum thought would be sensible policy. No takers. My intention was to pass this on the ideas to a friend who works for a senator. Instead of cynically assuming a Green New Deal would be a failure, ask yourself what would make it work. Fatalism is thinking that gives us permission to do nothing. Lisa
technology you need a storage system wether it be some new battery ( it not liquid ion) or storage systen ( hydrogen or other). Right now we don’t have the technology to get off of gas,coal,nuke all together we just don’t.
The act of voting legitimizes govt. This is a problem when you have approx 20 percent of the voting population, who also happen to be the most extreme from an ideological perspective, determine the direction of a country via their high participation rate during mid-term elections. Never mind the fact that the House of Representatives has become largely irrelevant due to the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929 which increased the ratio of Constituents-to-Representatives from approx 30,000:1 to approx 500,000:1. The concept of a bottomless purse adds fuel to the fire.
I can only comment with regards to the industry systems I’m most familiar with. If you want to write to your senator about green energy, I would suggest the following:
1- increasing the ability of bulk power transmission systems to handle shifting loads and power flow directions. Usually this is accomplished with phase shifting transformers in key locations, but these are very large, very expensive, and have long manufacturing lead times. The newer and more flexible alternative is HVDC interconnections using “converter stations”. These systems convert the AC of the power grid to DC and back again, which allows rapid changes in phase angle and resulting rapid adjustments to power flow. ABB (asea Brown bovery) is the market leader for this technology, you may want to contact them. These systems would allow for more large scale distributed generation which is something of a first step towards accepting more varied power sources into the grid.
2- decrease regulatory barriers to alternative Energy sources such as landfill gas and other “waste to energy” systems. These systems use an existing waste product to produce useable energy from a free source. Many times these systems make financial sense to their owners so no government money is needed, but getting permit approvals for their construction and interconnection agreements with utilities can be difficult and time consuming. A related system to waste energy is combined cycle plants which can improve the efficiency of large heating and cooling systems.
3- reduce regulatory barriers to the development of large-scale solar installations in the southwest desert areas where they make the most sense, and reduce regulatory barriers to the construction of associated transmission lines to make these remote sites practical to develop. Perhaps government backed loans would be good here since the financial returns are predictable, it’s not a gamble like “investing” in unproven technologies which has been a problem in the past.
4- encourage large hydroelectric projects where they make sense. Current environment barriers make these sites impractical to develop, but hydroelectric power is the most reliable green energy source current in existence if you don’t count nuclear power.
5- encourage/incentivize and generally make people aware of “time of day” electric rates which encourages people to shift load into the off-peak hours for the utilities (nights/weekends). For many people this will actually save them money since they’re probably at work during the day and not at home. The electric kWh rate is higher during on-peak times (11am to 7pm weekdays in my area). I do this myself and save $20-30 every month. The resulting load shift helps “load leveling” for utilities reducing on-peak generation demands, so it’s a win-win for utilities and customers but many people don’t know anything about it.
I’m sure there are many more ideas, but the above are what popped into my head in answer to your question.
Bill
NPR just provided a bit more information on the GND but it is still incredibly vague: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1jxUzp9SZ6-VB-4wSm8sselVMsqWZrSrYpYC9slHKLzo/edit which NPR summarized here: "upgrading all existing buildings" in the country for energy efficiency; working with farmers "to eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions... as much as is technologically feasible" (while supporting family farms and promoting "universal access to healthy food"); "Overhauling transportation systems" to reduce emissions — including expanding electric car manufacturing, building "charging stations everywhere," and expanding high-speed rail to "a scale where air travel stops becoming necessary"; A guaranteed job "with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations and retirement security" for every American; "High-quality health care" for all Americans.
The wise minds of Green Building Advisor might offer ideas as to priorities for "upgrading all existing buildings". Subsidizing energy retrofits for homes? Training programs? Funding for research? Funding for non-profits building homes like Habitat? What would be effective? Lisa
The 9 billion dollar nuclear plant not built would have weatherized 900,000 homes @ $10,000 each. My quick calculations for our own house is as follows;
2005 Energy retrofit
$7,500.00 Upgrade to 95% furnace with ECM fan, 15 Seer AC, 2 ton
furnace was due for replacement, (1978 vintage GE 150k
input, replaced with 66k) AC was a large heat pump,
SEER unknown.
3,000.00 Added 24" attic insulation, R-10 interior foundation
insulation and air sealed, replaced incandescent lighting
with CFL then LED over the years.
$10,500.00 Total cost of upgrades
Energy saved
$4,875.00 6,5oo therms natural gas, 1,080 used per year before retrofit,
580 now ( 13 years, 500 therms @ .75 per year saved annually)
$3,900.00 Electricity saved, 8,200 kWh previous yearly usage, now 5,200
kWh (39,000 kWh saved @ .10)
$8,775.00 Energy savings to date since 12-12-2005
Those with far better math skills than I can make the ROI calculation. This
retrofit and energy savings was during a period of fairly low interest rates.
Wind or solar need tramission Lines to get the power from production to consumer just like any source of power. So what I’m saying if it was a solar plant or wind farm hooked to the tramisson line like the nuke you referred to the power is going out either way. So your statement is miss leading. I will have half agree with you on ramp rate nuclear fuel needs time to expand or contract, also pwr nukes can not change load quick. Bwr which happens to be one I’m experienced on the most can and do change load rather fast seconds to take a 100s of mwe off line. So again a misleading statement. Pwr are used for base load power bwr are too for that matter but do have ability to load flow. Their is always large amount of load on the gird no matter time of day or night. Natural gas and coal fill in the peaks and valleys.i dis agree with you on your point of dispatchablity and reliability for me this is the very reason our grid is reliabile because we have some much dispatchable power. As far as off shore wind capacity of 50% and be conservative number I be interested to see were you got that figure (kindly post it). The numbers I have seen are more like 35% to at the most 45%. Capacity factor at the plant I work at was 92% last year. 1300 mwe of power 92% of time. Also I like to make this point I have yet to make it to the New England area but I have been to the mid west( the don’t call Chicago the Windy City for nothing) point is geography plays a part wind farms. They are not idea for every location or solar for that matter. I’m not saying they don’t have there place but it’s a pipe dream to think your go all in on both and that solve the energy demand of this country. The fuel free so after the machine is up and running why havent power company just built them? Why countine with building gas, coal, and yes a nuke.? The reason they can’t meet demand. Power plant economic are like this hydro is the cheapest then nuclear or gas depending on what figures you look at then coal. Capital cost on nuclear or high but lower o and m fuel cost after the plant is built. Gas and coal are the opposite doesn’t cost as much to build o and m fuel are high. This the important part of the discussion wind and solar can’t solve all our energy demands because this is what is being purposed. To put all your eggs in two baskets is a foolish thing to do in addition to raising my taxes and my electric bill to pay for this fool heart total renewable plan.
>"As far as off shore wind capacity of 50% and be conservative number I be interested to see were you got that figure (kindly post it)."
Gladly!
Four years ago for the 2015 economic study ISO-NE was (conservatively) estimating between 42-46% capacity factors based on the offshore wind technology of the time. See page 6:
https://www.iso-ne.com/static-assets/documents/2016/03/a3_2015_economic_study_off_shore_wind_presentation.pdf
Since that time there has been improvements in capacity factor for all offshore wind due to higher hub heights and better blade design, and in that time frame the costs have also fallen dramatically.
The more recent NYSERDA study assumes a gross capacity factor between 50-55% (from the same patch of ocean, more or less:)
https://tethys.pnnl.gov/sites/default/files/publications/NYSERDA-Report-2017-Market-Characterization.pdf
See page 26:
"Applying annual speed distributions to the power curves of commercial OSW turbines results in gross CFs of 50-55% and net CFs of 40-45% or higher after subtracting estimated losses of 21%."
The net conversion & transmission losses of 21% are also on the conservatively high side.
This is still a rapidly evolving/improving technology. With ANY incremental improvements by 2030 a 50% capacity factor (net or gross) is going to look a bit on the weak side. If one were projecting those now-conservative numbers a decade ago nobody would have believed it. I'm not betting on improvements in the coming decade to be as dramatic, but it's silly to think that we've already reached the pinnacle of this technology (or the nadir of it's lifecycle price of energy.)
>"...the don’t call Chicago the Windy City for nothing)..."
That refers to the wind-bag characteristics of Chicago politicians of yore, not the weather.
Yes, the wind blows in the upper midwest, but Chicago doesn't get hurricane force winds accompanied by multiple feet of wet snow all in one go, and doesn't have the large trees breaking off and flying into transmission lines the way it happens in New England at times. (Ocean bottom transmission lines don't have that issue either.) The coastal location of New England nuclear fleet (for cooling water purposes), leaves it more vulnerable to transmission line faults than in the upper midwest, not that a well-placed tornado can't have it's way with any midwestern powerplant.
Transmission & distribution grid faults, not capacity factors are by far the largest reliability problem for the US grids writ large.
>"...point is geography plays a part wind farms."
True, and even some of the lousiest offshore wind resources match or exceed capacity factors for the upper midwest. (It's hard to get any flatter than the ocean.) New England is fortunate enough to have
VERY favorable offshore wind resources (better wind than any European offshore wind parks to date), despite having a fairly lousy onshore wind resource.
>".i dis agree with you on your point of dispatchablity and reliability for me this is the very reason our grid is reliabile because we have some much dispatchable power."
Responsiveness is more important to grid reliability than mere dispatchability. Demand response on the load end (dispatchable load, not dispatchable power) is what's been keeping the PJM and NY-ISO grids from going down for the past half decade or more, and that has been barely tapped by other other grid operators in the few years since the Supremes blessed FERC Order 745. The ISO-New England demand response market is still less than a year old, and already proving it's worth.
There are no technical reasons why Columbia River dam projects and the northwestern region load can't serve as dispatchable load and dispachable source for balancing outhern California sunshine via the WECC grid. The primary impediments are legislative and regulatory. The bigger the geographical area, the more readily (or inherently) balanced variable output renewables grid can become. Canadian hydro is slated to become the regional equivalent to the a western BPA for New England offshore wind under the Massachusetts plan, which will require modest transmission line build outs, but this isn't a pipe dream- it's the current plan supported by state & regional policy makers.
>"Capital cost on nuclear or high but lower o and m fuel cost after the plant is built."
Which is why even existing nuclear plants are seeking legislative and regulatory relief in order to stay economically viable?
You can't even fuel a nuke, let alone operate and maintain it at some of the recent utility scale PV price contracts in the southwest. Yes, 30% subsidy on the capital cost buys a lot, but it doesn't buy enough. PV + batteries are beating fast ramping gas peakers in technology-neutral contracts, and even after the subsidy goes away it will still be able to beat fast ramping gas.
Pleased don't take this as an anti-nuclear stance. I make at least part of my living in the nuclear power business (spent fuel rod management technology development). I'm absolutely NOT in favor of replacing existing nuclear with combined cycle gas, but I'm trying to keep it real here- the tools for grid management are light years further along than when the current PWR reactor designs went to market, and the whole hub and spoke model of large generators has much less economy of scale in the age of distributed renewables than it used to.
BTW: Paragraph breaks make for easier reading.
Interesting info there Dana. Utilities used to use a capacity factor for most large wind farms of about 33% on average. If the new wind farms were to be built far enough offshore to be over the horizon and thus not visible from shore, the NIMBY resistance from landowners would probably be much reduced too. HVDC would probably be needed to send the power back to shore via undersea cables, but that’s a well developed technology these days so it shouldn’t be a problem. HVDC interconnection would also increase the ability of the wind farm to handle rapid load changes.
Much of the costs with nuclear plants is do overboard regulations that are the result of activism starting way back in the 70s. I grew up hearing about this as my dad was involved in the federal permitting of two nuclear plants, only one of which was built. Much of the technology used is very old (incandescent indicator lamps with dual redundant filaments, for example) because of the difficulty getting newer technologies approved for use. Modernizing and streamlining the approval process would probably help significantly.
Right now, much of the new grid capacity has been coming from natural gas turbines primarily to the ease of permitting. I’d rather see more new nuclear projects and less use of natural gas for utility scale electric generation. Why burn things for fuel when there is a better option available?
Your comments about hydroelectric facilities being able to rapidly respond to load changes is right on the money too. Unfortunately there aren’t that many hydroelectric plants out there and it’s very difficult to get approval for new ones (and limited numbers of building sites that will work too). If we had more hydroelectric plants that would be a boon to grid reliability and the ability of the grid to accept more energy from variable sources like wind and solar. Hydroelectric plants can also provide black start capability which is useful for emergencies.
Bill
There are no single-solution silver bullets that fit every grid region. But clearing the regulatory and legislative impediments to achieving better throughput on the existing grids would be a HUGE improvement to grid reliability and for higher variable output renewable penetration.
Existing hydro is just one of about five less expensive tools for managing grid capacity before coming down to the "just build more storage" answer. With the anticipated rollout of electric vehicles a good chunk of the storage & dispatchable load is going to build itself (from a capex point of view) without power generator intervention/investment.
FWIW: Diablo Canyon could not have been built without the co-construction of the Helms Pumped Hydro project to give the nukes a dispatchable load during low gridload hours. Large fixed-output generators need the flexibilbity and storage at LEAST as much as variable output renewables do. Why is burning German lignite the answer keeping the lights & heat on in heavily (subsidized) nuclear France almost every winter?
I lived in the PNW during the ramp up of the WPPS nuclear development push, and later saw the fallout of the bond failure indelibly pointing to the folly building large assets in anticipation of fanciful electrical markets that never came to pass. Both SCANA and Vogtle are singing the same tune as WPPS, though perhaps in a different key.
The cost of nuclear is still largely in the financing, not the regulations, and the US history of nuclear investment is pretty much keeping the private market out of it. The lack of scalability and the long buildout horizons make it a very risky investment, requiring government guarantees to get any amount of financing. Managing big construction projects is hard, with many ways other than mere graft & greed (which also plays a role) to end up costing multiples of what it "should" cost.
A primary difference between renewables and nuclear more important that the dispatchibilty issue is that nuclear is infrastructure, requiring large investment with much longer time horizons and development cycles. PV and wind are technology, with very rapid development cycles, and scalable to fill the immediate bill, requiring much less crystal ball gazing as to where the market will be in 30 years. Rapid technology improvement cycles give it an edge on ever-falling lifecycle cost of energy, which has long since left new-nuclear in the dust, and is even rendering existing nuclear uncompetitive without piling on to the already substantial subsidies that have fed that industry.
Vogtle and SCANA weren't' done-in by permitting issues, and at the rate of improvements in other technology any similar scale nuclear that gets permitted today will all but certainly become stranded assets. The most expensive thing they could do to the Vogtle plants currently under construction is to load the fuel and start them up, only to have to decommission them in a very few decades (best case) time. There is a economic and carbon case for keeping some of the existing nuclear plants going, but not for building new gigawatt PWRs.
Talllark's Illinois plant most likely couldn't make it without the additional no-carbon state subsidy:
https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/another-court-win-for-state-nuclear-subsidies-this-time-in-illinois#gs.NHdO0fPI
This may be warranted in the near term, but nuclear doesn't deserve endless support (which it has pretty much enjoyed), any more than renewables do (and clearly won't get.)
But in the intermediate and longer term both wind & PV are getting cheaper every day, even putting combined cycle gas (at near record low gas contract prices) out of business in some instances:
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/panda-temple-bankruptcy-could-chill-new-gas-plant-buildout-in-ercot-market/442582/
Are you in favor of replicating Venezuela?
Yes in Lego at 1:2000 scale. Do you have a spare room I could use?
Dana I don’t work in the mid west. I have in the past on several outages at nukes and gas plants. I work at browns ferry which is owned by the Tennessee valley authority part of the original new deal. So I believe I have a little insight to what happens when government gets involved in something that should be left to private industry.
I have worked for public trade power companies in the past they are ran a lot more efficiently period. The problem with the state of nuclear in the Midwest and New England for that matter is two fold. Really small units like pilgrim at 600mwe have the same over head as a large plant like the one I work at and 2 when a renewable can under cut your market competition due to getting that great government money. Nuclear is not on a level playing field because of this in place like Illinois the state has step in to help.
I didn’t read about the new deal in a book my grandparents got live it. Neither side were huge fans. The government did some good things they also did some pretty god awful things.
One of the things I like about this forum is that we can get along with so well without a long list of rules and heavy enforcement. I think it works because we generally avoid politic. This question is purely political.
The “new green deal” is not all that new. It contains all the communist/socialist dreams of the last 100 years (The government shall take from the well off and give to the less well off until we are all equitably miserable) with some green washing to make it seem new and distract everyone from the fine print.
The fact is this green deal is going nowhere for at least 2 years!
My guess is that the house will never vote on the green deal.
If it did less than 40% would support it in the house.
Given who controls the senate leadership will never allow a vote. You are insane if you think there are 60 votes in the senate for this kind of plan.
The only way Trump would sign this involves body snatching.
In short the green deal is a big wet dream for now anyway.
My guess on nuclear the plant is the utility and its investors budgeted and designed a plant for one set of rules. Once it became clear to the plants opponents it could meet that set of rules they made new rules that made it financially if not technologically impossible to meet.
Walta
A unifying theme of what I've seen in this discussion is that any solution in a GND will be very complex. I don't disagree. Some people here want to throw up their hands and say it's impossible to do something like this in the public sphere. It's not. There have been many large historical projects done in the public sphere that were "mostly" successful. Some have been less successful. Like anything, if you say something will not be successful ahead of time then you've committed yourself to a position that will make it more psychologically difficult to accept a successful outcome. You will work to make your prediction come true and to make the outcome a failure. That's where I think a lot of the naysayers are doing everyone a disservice.
It is agreed that the biggest problem for success of a GND is the complexity. That doesn't go away. So the first goal should be to eliminate the biggest bottleneck in the chain that contributes to the overall complexity. That bottleneck is the intermittency of wind and solar and the lack of a successful battery system that is as cheap and reliable as stored hydro to store that energy. The fact that there is (currently) no cheap reliable way to store that energy is what contributes to at least 50% of the complexity and also would require the huge redundancy in solar and wind energy sources to make the grid 100 percent green.
I recently have been looking at this youtube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDxegcZqx_8
Dr. Sadoway claims that his liquid metal battery stores electricity as cheaply and reliably as stored hydro. It is very interesting and so far after doing extensive reading I haven't found a good reason to doubt it. Rather than recycle his arguments I would advise readers to check it out and decide for themselves. I've even been watching his online course at MIT, Solid State Chemistry, also available on youtube. He's a very entertaining teacher which makes it easier to watch for those of us who've been out of school for decades.
It seems to me that once you have a cheap, reliable battery made from cheap materials that lasts practically forever, (so far indications are that they will last longer than 20 years with no degradation) you've significantly decreased the complexity of any GND solution. The reason you still need a public sphere solution is that there are entrenched commercial interests that would fight a good solution of having a liquid metal battery installed at neighborhood locations. They are too heavy and big for individual households. But they seem to be economical at neighborhood and larger aggragated scales.
I would argue that it is poor planning to mandate timelines based on unproven technologies that may never be viable. I’ve seen this happen before. Unfortunately, much of the green new deal is “we can do this yay!”, but they have no idea how. What this would ensure is that while we might have a solution, we can’t be sure, but we can be sure we’ll have major problems if we don’t. “Major problems” in this case would mean much reduced standards of living and in extreme cases, inability to maintain urban population densities. This is serious, potentially catastrophically bad stuff. You can’t make plans based on wishful thinking with downsides this serious, you have to be absolutely certain you know it will work. The people pushing this “new deal” are politicians and activists, neither of which know anything about the realities of the systems they’re talking about. That is the problem I see.
I am an engineer by profession, and much of my work is consulting on solving unsual power problems in large critical facilities. Earlier today, I was working with a manufacturers product design rep about working towards encouraging the use of fuses in these facilities for increased safety. There are very valid resons for doing that based on the far, far better fault clearing characteristics of fuses and their ability to limit fault current seen by downstream devices. Do you think any of the people pushing massive redesigns of the power grid would even understand what I just said? Could they explain why it is desirable to use higher voltages for power transmission? Why we use AC power and not DC for electrical distribution? I doubt it, yet they want to mandate the electric utility industry do things a certain way in a certain time period. This is a recipe for disaster.
The primary issues with using batteries for bulk power storage is their poor energy density and their typically limited number of lifetime charge/discharge cycles. Pumped hydro storage doesn’t have these issues, and it’s a proven technology that we have available now. Pumped hydro doesn’t work everywhere though since it requires certain topography to be effective.
I don’t think you have an entrenched corporate interest resisting battery-based power storage. The utilities would love to have more storage in their systems, but they need to be able to manage and store it. This isn’t because they want to up their profit margins, it’s just a reality of the way power grids operate. There are the same issues with distributed generation and a lot of it is for safety and to make sure that a fault with the small generator won’t effect the large power grid. Sometimes an industry response of “we can’t do this, it’s not practical” is based on physical realities of the system and not corporate greediness.
I do agree, however, that it would be beneficial to encourage the development of some system enhancements I’ve previously mentioned that would provide a better foundation for future changes. Giving up and doing nothing is no better than doing random impractical things.
Bill
"The people pushing this “new deal” are politicians and activists, neither of which know anything about the realities of the systems they’re talking about. That is the problem I see."
This may be the deep end here but...
When the U.S.A decided we should go to the moon, NASA, a government agency, contracted countless private sector companies to use their expertise in a way that coalesced in a massive technological achievement.
Is there not an even remotely similar situation now concerning energy use overhaul, in the sense that expertise could and would (should!) be drawn upon before politicians start buffing live wires with their shoe wax?
To be clear, I'm not suggesting a moon shot type effort or level of spending. Or trying to make apples to apples comparisons. I'm genuinely interested in ways the government can work effectively... or in the ways it simply does not.
I would support DARPA challenge style design competitions. The space program developed a lot of new technologies. That is true. I have no problem with that are programs like that. What is a problem is trying to mandate changes to well-understood systems where there isn’t much room left to improve. Transformer efficiency is very high already (high 90s as a percentage for large transformers). Very little room for improvement, so lots of R and D there wouldn’t be well spent. More R and D in battery technologies makes a lot more sense.
Politicians have a habit of trying to direct resources to their own let projects and friends and not necassarily to the most promising projects.
Bill
Batteries are still the most expensive solution for storing large amounts of power over days/weeks. More optimal use of the existing grid, and dispatchable load management (aka "demand response"), even curtailment of renewables output is cheaper than large amounts of battery storage.
The amount of battery needed to run the 100% renewables grid is a lot less than most people imagine, if the regulatory/legislative obstacles to better utilization of the transmission grid were resolved, allowing power to be readily distributed over much broader areas. Several lstudies performed in the past decade looking at hour by hour weather data spanning more than a decade have demostrated that locking it up within state or ISO regional boundaries too tightly increases the storage requirements by up to an order of magnitude.
The more electric vehicles on the road, the more dispatchable load (and supply) there can be, and as the supply of "second life" EV batteries increases, battery grid storage is going to be pretty cheap in 20 years, maybe 10, but not 5. Sadoway has a very limited time frame in which to lower the cost of the liquid metal grid battery once EVs take off. (I've been a fan of Ambrii for several years now, but it's having a tough time competing against the huge amount of capital that has gone into lithium ion technology, even in the grid-battery space.)
I see you couldn't have watched the video, much less thought about it. I would love to know if that technology wouldn't work. That's partly why I posted it. But you are writing from an ego driven position that accentuates credentials and previous experience rather than thought. It is a fact that anything that is new will not be in the previous parameters of experience. You are giving lip service to an "open mind" but have not even looked at the video. If you watch it attentively and give me concrete details why he is wrong then I will give that consideration. Until then, not so much.
Actually, I didn’t watch the video before because my battery was almost dead so I watched it when I got home a bit over an hour ago. I can tell you I would have liked to have that guy as one of my professors. I like that he says what volta really demonstrated was that professors can be useful :-)
Regarding experience, credentials, and ego, I do care about experience because it’s valuable. Credentials I value less than experience in most cases and I don’t care about ego because it gets in the way. Expierience does make me take a “prove it before I use it” view to most of these things because I’ve seen so many hyped technologies that never pan out. I did not mean to imply in any way that battery technology was a no-go, only that it was not commercially viable in a utility scale and a reasonable timeframe for deployment. Some of the things the professor in the video mentions towards the ends as being needed to enable his battery to work in the power grid are things I advocated for earlier in this discussion.
Regarding his battery technology, I think he may be on to something. I do notice he talks about the size of the batteries in two dimensions only, which makes it difficult to get a capacity per unit volume which is an important consideration. He talks about 8 inches square but no height. The height appears less than the width in those pics he shows, and he says the cells are square, so it looks like they’re maybe 8x8x 3ish inches high. The amphour capacities he shows for those cell sizes are impressive, and the life in cycles appears VERY impressive when compared to lead acid and lead calcium cells which are the type most commonly used in large scale systems (like the telcom facilities I work with). I usually spec lead calcium batteries that are rated for about 10-15 years and are expected to actually last about 7-10 years. The actual life of those cells depends a lot on how they’re used in terms of frequency of cycles and especially depth of discharge. The professors cells don’t appear to have those limitations which is a really big deal in terms of cyclic longevity. I’m curious about how these batteries operate with temperature cycles and if they can “self start” or if they need some amount of minimum cycling to maintain a minimum operating temperature to work.
I like that he is realistic about practical concerns towards the end of his presentation. I agree with him that these probably aren’t a “put’em in your basement” type system. I’d put them in substations, so that is every few square miles would have a battery bank. They could be sold as a way to increase peak capacity of existing infrastructure in this way and installed as a substation component since substations already do voltage regulation and a few other things for system stability.
I don’t think he’s wrong. I will actually probably reach out to him as part of my consulting work. I’m involved in specifying hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of batteries every year. If his batteries could eliminate even one replacement cycle for one facility I oversee, that could potentially save several hundred thousand dollars of lifecycle cost. I need to play match maker with the professors company and one of my power system vendors. His development is very interesting and I enjoyed his presentation.
One last thing to think about too. I always say not to ever blow off any research because so many important things have been discovered by accident. Penicillin is a great example. Vulcanized rubber is another. The first working transistor model looks like a high school science project (it was developed at bell labs, google it for a pic, it’s neat to see). The guy who invented liquid crystal display technology that is ubiquitous these days was almost fired for wasting his time. Be careful when assuming someone with expierience in an industry sounds dismissive. There really are a lot of green energy ideas that aren’t practical. The battery design the professor in the video has I do think shows promise.
Bill
I'm glad you seem to be getting interested in this. It's hard to convince people that even the (so called) perfect market has players that can create inertia and also can lock in inefficiencies. Government money can play it's most useful role in breaking up that commercial player inertia and setting a new more productive direction. Then once that more productive direction is set then government money can move to the sidelines and let commercial interests take over again in the new direction.
The art is having experts in the field that can see the big perspective and who can see when things have become stagnant and are only serving a few big players. I really hope you can get in touch with them and add your expertise to the direction Ambri is going.
I make my living Mostly as a consulting engineer, which means I sell my knowledge. It’s good for me to know as much as I can. Remember though that engineers are skeptical by nature because we’re expected to design things so that they are reliable. There is a reluctance to be first to try any new and unproven technology because if it fails, the design engineer gets blamed. If the failure takes down something critical, that’s even worse. No one wants to try out a new gizmo on a 911 dispatch center, for example. Look at all the bad press Boeing got when they had problems with their new lithium ion battery packs.
I’m always interested in new things, I just have to be very careful deploying things. I think the ambri battery may be useful in some telecom projects I’m working on where the longer life of the battery will save a lot of money over the life of the facility, and a lot less lead acid batteries going to the recycler. That’s a win-win!
Bill
One thing about the 600 degree liquid metal batteries is that my understanding is that they must have a minimum current draw to keep the metal liquid. That's another reason besides size and weight that they aren't suitable for single residences - there isn't enough current into and out of them to keep them from becoming solid again. I don't know if your telecom projects have that draw or not.
From that video it sounds like the professor is working on a 250 degree battery that would require a much smaller electrical draw than the older type. It sounds like it isn't at same level of refinement as the older type. I assume that the lower temperature batteries might require less total mass and size to stay molten. That's just my intuition speaking which has been known to be wrong sometimes.
The telecom sites usually run very large battery plants so I’m not too worried about minimum current levels. These are big sites with $100,000+ monthly electric bills. One facility I work it’s is two neighboring buildings, about 65,000 square feet between them and about $300,000 per month in electricity, and they’re only at about 50% capacity and growing. There are many much larger facilities out there. The largest project I personally was ever involved with was a 770,000 square foot facility. There were 42” diameter chilled water lines in the cooling plant. That was a fun project.
Bill
Some things must be publicly financed because they are necessary but do not provide the incentive for private investment. Our roads are an example. They are public, but attempts are made to shift the cost to users by supporting them with fuel taxes. First, these taxes are highly regressive, taking a large portion of the poorest folks' income. Cars get much better mileage now, so there are more cars beating up the roads but paying less to fix them. Electric cars pay no fuel tax at all. The lowered demand has reduced the price of fuel, spurring the demand for large SUV's and pickups. Their drivers scream the loudest when anyone suggests raising fuel taxes. Their argument is that they can't afford higher gas taxes because then their trucks are too expensive to drive.
The grid suffers from the same problem. To support renewable energy, a massive investment is necessary. It is especially necessary to build a high voltage DC network that can efficiently move power long distances. Solar's great, but here in Michigan we go weeks without seeing the sun. The grid is now financed by electricity rate payers. Each person who installs solar on their roof complicates the electric utility's job but stops paying to support the grid. Yes, we should pay for each KWH, but the electric infrastructure should be publicly financed.
We need to get beyond the libertarian fever dream of supply side economics. The economy does not grow if investors have more money to invest. It grows when businesses have more customers. If you have customers, it's easy to get money. It's been shown over and over that the best way to grow the economy is to give poor people money. The only time this technique is used is when the supply side system collapses in a recession, but it is snatched away as soon as it achieves its goal of restoring investor confidence. We've been on the supply side pipe for forty years with the result that we now have the greatest income inequality since the nineteenth century.
Douglas Higden
There's nothing libertarian or even Austrian about supply side economics but you do bring up an excellent point about subsidies.
Economies grow when people have accumulated enough savings (i.e. capital) to invest in businesses which can fulfill customer demand. The economy beginning around 1917 is largely build upon issuance of debt rather than capital and those who have access to this debt first benefit the most. Creating cheap money (i.e. low interest) causes malinvestment in the economy because people chase yield and a return which beats the rate of inflation. This is called the boom period. Consequently all sorts of unsustainable ventures get started which invariably go bust. Since the boom/bust cycles operate on credit rather than savings Central Banks/Govt have to pump ever more $$ into the system after every bust. So giving money to the poor just hurts them in the end because prices adjust and they find themselves in the same situation. It's almost as bad as minimum wage which encourages unemployment of low skilled workers.
Giving money or anything else to a person who has no skin in the game is a proven failure, humans are incredibly wasteful by nature.
Currently 45% of the population pays no federal income tax at all.
The top 1% are responsible for 39% of all federal taxes taken in (more than the bottom 90% of the population combined)
The top 5% are responsible for 60% of all federal taxes taken in.
This is not sustainable. As Margaret Thatcher said, "eventually run out of other people's money."
"humans are incredibly wasteful by nature"
I can see how it'd be easy to assume that looking at the current state of things, but saying it is human nature is a bold statement fraught with assumption and ambiguity. (granted I don't know the extent of the evidence you may have backing up that thesis; perhaps it is compelling).
-------------------
The top 1%, despite the taxation, has still somehow managed to accumulate and retain more wealth than the bottom 90%.
This is not to merely suggest 'tax more, tax more, tax more,' but to offer how the numbers can illuminate many angles of the multi-faceted issue. We have a plutocracy issue.
simply go anywhere that something is "free" and watch for a while. An all you can eat buffet, or "free refills" on soda and keep track of how many people get more only to leave it behind or throw it away.
You can rent someone a house/apartment with utilities included, and watch them open the windows in the middle of the winter because the heat is set on 85 and its too warm inside.
Check out an ER and watch how many ambulances come in with patients looking for a pregnancy or std test, because they don't personally have to pay for it.
Unfortunately, the examples are almost endless.
I am a social worker not a scientist or an engineer. I care about my children's future which is why I am part of this community. Social workers are good at getting people to commit--to have skin in the game, to change, to feel more hopeful. We also know that we all can't invest the same amount--not all of us have access to the same time, money, energy, mobility etc. We do what we can and it's enough. I am so happy all of you have contributed to this conversation. You are all making a difference. Lisa
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I am pleased to see the vigorous discussion on the Green New Deal. Those opposing seem to be arguing this would be forced upon everyone, without choice. I do not see it this way as the Green New Deal is currently a concept, a sharing of ideas.
What I think is missing so far is defining the value of "energy not used". Make existing buildings and other energy consuming enterprises more energy efficient, doing so cost effectively. Keep the fossil energy not needed in the ground and the CO2 produced from it's burning out of the atmosphere.
Our consumptive based economy does not align with the Green New Deal. There was mention earlier that economic growth was a result of Federal debt taken on. To me the very frightening aspect to it all is what progress has been made so far with all of the very cheap fossil energy used. Worldwide debt is incalculable, never going to be repaid, all this with very abundant and cheap fossil energy. Currencies devalued to the point of worthlessness, there has to be a better way.
It is looking like I may have been wrong when I sad “Given who controls the senate leadership will never allow a vote.”
It seem the Republicans think the deal is so bad for the Dems politically they want to hold a vote and get them on record for banning air travel and internal combustion autos.
Walta
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Simply "Yes!" No time to do nothing or very little. Very bold actions are needed. Simple enough. Anyone who thinks unbridled free-enterprise is reasonably controlled by consumer demands just needs to look at the rivers that burned and the f...ing mess in the ocean.
Seems you've never heard of "The Tragedy of the Commons". Waterways become polluted due to the lack of private property rights. Governments consider this their domain and they have no problems polluting it. "Water Socialism" at its best.
Good Lordy you certainly have an expansive mind. You believe your own narrative and ignore the real whole truth. Remind you of anyone?
So the local Paper Mill polluted the rivers for years because the government owned it, and if the mill owned it they wouldn’t? I would it be ok because the pollution would go to the government owned next river, and then the ocean. Oh the government doesn’t own the ocean. Damn.
Well, I guess it’s a good thing the government, meaning all of us collectively, made the bad actor stop, and clean up their mess.
Now what’s your explanation for all of the privately owned brown fields “we” now have to clean up?
Yes.
Under a private property system the Paper Mill could not willingly pollute the water without the consent of downstream property owners. Doing it without their consent would be a violation of their property rights and the owners, not the govt, would be entitled to compensation. Under this system the risk industries would have to insure against could be so high and/or uncertain and they would have to develop cleaner alternative methods to manufacture their products. The concept of "Brown Fields" would essentially disappear. Remember that industry much prefers the current environment of regulatory capture where they can continue to pollute "a little" and/or determine their risk in terms of potential fines for violating the rules.
Imagine if Greenpeace owned 2,000 square miles in the middle of the Pacific. Do you think there would be a huge swirling pile of plastic trash on their property?
Yes, of course. There are too many paths to pollute. We “own” the ocean and if we knew who to sue, we would, whether we own it or not.
It's not the 1800s anymore. "Burning rivers" and the "f..ing mess in the ocean" are coming from places outside the jurisdiction of the green new deal proponents. Modern industry in developed countries is much, much better than it was 100 years ago in terms of emissions controls and the like. As I've posted previously, it is often impossible to tell if even a coal-fired power plant is operating by looking at the stack. There is no black smoke anymore.
I imagine you've never actually been in any modern industrial facility. Imposing impossibly massive costs for little if any tangible benefit is not going to improve anything. Little of the green new deal has anything to do with environment anyway.
Bill
The point is left to their own devices, private ownership often does nothing. “Modern” plants are driven to cleanup by way of govt (our collective) actions and regulations, along with lawsuits.
@PierrreMarteau,
You are exactly right. It is very difficult to tolerate the cognitive dissonance generated by some commenters. I don't remember who said it and I'm paraphrasing here: "It's very difficult to see (or speak) the truth when your salary depends on you not seeing it." I'm certainly not saying we don't all make compromises but I personally feel some shame when I do it and am not proud of myself for making them. What's different today is that there seems to be a whole segment of the population who embrace their compromises and deny they are doing something that indicates weakness. They don't vow to do better in the future but instead try to turn the bug into a feature. I think they actually have convinced themselves that what they are doing is a good thing. The rest just follows. In doing so they reduce their own cognitive dissonance while simultaneously increasing it for the rest of us who see the world and ourselves in a way that is closer to reality. It is well known that people will invent facts to match their emotional needs. (Sorry, but it's true.)
Indeed. Such as those who constantly conflates pollution and GHG emissions.
“ Indeed. Such as those who constantly conflates pollution and GHG emissions.”
Like who does that, and what difference does it make? Both are problems regardless the subtlety of the differences, that need to be addressed
Yes, yes, and yes. First of all, in my opinion the "cost" is irrelevant unless we are talking about the cost of not addressing the climate crisis now in our (global) collective backyard, especially the cost to the generations of people too young to own a business or hold elected office (yet). I also think that the comprehensive nature of such a plan allows for deep and effective exercises in creating cost-effective and cost-beneficial strategies, policies, laws, and incentives. For those looking for "details," consider reading Naomi Klein's new book On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal. And spend a little time here: https://www.gndforeurope.com/
The Green New Deal isn't a "plan," just as FDR's New Deal wasn't a plan. It will be an approach to address the compounding and intersecting social, governmental, economic and environmental crises now affecting every nation on earth. And like FDR's New Deal, the Green New Deal will unfold over time, differently for various places and nations, but must include legislation, regulation, government programs, and structural and systemic reform of the institutions that created these crises.