Do you plan to play your computer games if household energy bills will rise even higher?

[Artkin]

57 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

I am one happy customer, $20 for three months was my power bill last time. The climate change debate should be objective and not follow the agenda of politicians. Coal mining I like to get an explanation of how we could manufacture steel without coal. Yes for the household there are better ways to get electricity than fossil fuels. 

But you are retired. IMO it depends if green energy is right for you. If youre still paying your mortgage it probably isn't wise to spend all that money on solar panels. Some people have that expendable income, but I would argue most do not have that kind of money sitting around. 

It's worth it in the long run, maybe. 

If you just invested your $10-25k cash into something that returns active profit you would be better off financially by the time solar panels paid off. So the benefit for Americans is kind of meh. 

[chuckdyke]

42 minutes ago, Artkin said:

If you just invested your $10-25k cash into something that returns active profit you would be better off financially by the time solar panels paid off. So the benefit for Americans is kind of meh. 

The scheme we have in Australia. Say you pay $150 a month on electricity with solar panels it would be $20. Now the plan is you pay the solar company $120 a month for five years the balance is $30 which you pay the Electric company the S120 is money you save anyway. When I worked I salary sacrificed some of my income so I paid for the solar panels before I paid tax, you also can pay your mortgage before you pay tax car, computer etc. All these items were virtually tax free. There is a list of consumer items which you can salary sacrifice. It depends were you live and for whom you work. But this is a forum for CM not how to maximise your income, 

[Artkin]

20 minutes ago, chuckdyke said:

The scheme we have in Australia. Say you pay $150 a month on electricity with solar panels it would be $20. Now the plan is you pay the solar company $120 a month for five years the balance is $30 which you pay the Electric company the S120 is money you save anyway. When I worked I salary sacrificed some of my income so I paid for the solar panels before I paid tax, you also can pay your mortgage before you pay tax car, computer etc. All these items were virtually tax free. There is a list of consumer items which you can salary sacrifice. It depends were you live and for whom you work. But this is a forum for CM not how to maximise your income, 

I don't write anything off quite yet, but I know solar panels have a tax incentive here which is one of the few available to us everyday folk. Otherwise you get a tax incentive for buying houses... so not really much here. Of course if you were to spend your money in any way, Solar would profit for you.

Again, no qualms specifically against solar besides the meh returns.

I had researched this at one point for a school project. I evaluated the idea of a mirror farm as a high output alternative. Well, each location fried hundreds of birds a year (from what I remember).

 

(Mirrors all focusing energy on a central steam tower)

[chuckdyke]

9 minutes ago, Artkin said:

Well, each location fried hundreds of birds a year (from what I remember).

NASA had a tracking station in a place called Carnarvon in West Australia for the Appolo Missions. Someone there had the bright idea to use it to watch some US ball game there. It didn't do the birdlife any good it was before satellites were used for everyday communication. I always say the person who never made a mistake never learned anything. 

[BornGinger]

15 hours ago, Artkin said:

What to do with the expended batteries? This was a problem before electric cars. Now the problem is compounded. 

That is where Amazon and Virgin come into the picture. They could collect all those used batteries and then fill a rocket with them which they send out into the universe. Hopefully an alien sivilisation will find that rocket, understand our problem and send the rocket back with their top-notch non-pollution risk batteries which work for 100 years.

[Erwin]

12 hours ago, Artkin said:

If the issue is purely pollution then maybe electric vehicles should wait until all the power stations are nuclear.

Agreed.  The entire greening movement has unrealistic time frames and objectives.  The problem is that most of the same green enthusiasts hate nuclear power as well.

[Erwin]

1 hour ago, BornGinger said:

They could collect all those used batteries and then fill a rocket with them which they send out into the universe.

LOL  Images of the galactic pollution inspectors coming down on us...

[Thewood1]

Solar won't be a sustainable energy source in most areas until battery technology has gone through a revolution.  Grid-scale batteries are VERY expensive and inefficient per kW stored.  Plus disposal of batteries is a huge problem.  Wind has the same issue.  Both are intermittent sources and you have to have energy for trough generation.  If you shut down nukes, all that's left is NG powered plants as ancillary and peakers, at best.  But in reality, most grid-scale generation has to have a parallel nuke plant capacity or an NG fueled plant has to be built for no-sun peaks.  Its simple grid physics.  Both California and Texas have shown this.  The rapid switch to wind ans solar isn't the only reason for grid issues in those states, but its a large contributing factor.

Because of harmonics and inverter power issues, private solar going back on the grid is usually a money loser for utilities.  They do it because they are forced to and the equipment and local substation upgrades needed make onboarding private solar very expensive for the utility to market.  PUCs force utilities to buy solar back from private owners at a non-market set rate, regardless of the capex need to upgrade the local equipment and substations.  Its even crazier in the EU.  Even before the pandemic, Germany was increasing its import of coal.  Guess why.  Because they bet too heavily on wind and were having major grid issues and coal was the only source of reliable and consistent fuel to make the needed power growth.  Then they got addicted to Russian NG.

In the end, the best solution for the grid is use less power.  Not many people realize that computers, the internet, and cell phones have contributed to over 50% of the increase in electricity demand over the last 20 years.  I don't listen to anyone complaining about climate change until I see them get rid of their cell phone and PC.

[Thewood1]

Hope you're not using a fancy new high-energy PC in Germany.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/german-gas-rationing-looms-industry-begs-exemptions-2022-08-09/

This is what moving too fast towards solar and wind get you.  Exposure to suppliers outside your control.

[Erwin]

It also occurred to me that the bitcoin miners are using increasingly massive amounts of power and that may make a significant addition to the energy shortage problem.

I am very interested in solar panels as my area has unrestricted sun for most of the year.  However... I talked with an old pal - a surgeon with bags of cash - about his large solar investment.  Cost him $30,000 to install and he bought a Tesla.  But... What I was shocked to hear is that when the grid goes down and stops power, so does his solar energy production! 

Apparently, he must not enable his solar panels to send power into the grid as it could electrocute lineman working on the cables!  So when the grid goes down he has no power.  He tells me that that there is no easy or legal way to temporarily disconnect from the grid.  

Since both both the grid and solar will fail to provide power when the grid goes down he plans to buy a generator running on diesel or propane for about $5,000.  This whole thing seems like a boondoggle to force us to buy more stuff just to keep certain peoples' profits high.

 

 

Edited August 25, 2022 by Erwin

[Thewood1]

There are ways to have your own micro-grid which can automatically switch from grid to non-grid.  But you need PUC approval.  There are some big hoops to jump through.  And yes, it is because of line safety.  Thats why when you install your own panels and tie into the grid, you give up control of the panel's access to the grid.  The solution is never connect to the grid and have your own battery or generator.  But then the payback period starts to get VERY long.

Also keep in mind that the install and maintenance costs of personal solar arrays require a seven to ten year payback period to break even in an average US climate.  You don't just install panels and let er rip.  It requires constant clearing of debris and cleaning of film off the panels.  One big expense many don't consider is clearing trees around the house for LOS access to the array.  The panels themselves start to lost their full generation capability after five years of continuous use.  At ten years, there's a good chance you'll have to dispose of some of them.  Landfills in the US are already declining solar panels and batteries because of the toxicity risk.

 

[Thewood1]

Again, the short-term solution is use less power.  But the crazy push for EVs is pushing it in the other direction.

[Thewood1]

btw, one of the best barometers of the success or drag is in a society driven by capitalism is to look at what large operational companies are doing.  Industrial companies and technology companies aren't building solar fields to power their own operations.  They are building them to sell "clean" energy into the CALISO so companies in California can meet local clean energy regulations.  Its weird and telling.

[Thewood1]

Just to close out, I am not anti-alternative energy.  I am against knee jerk enthusiasm to any alternative energy that isn't tempered by the harsh reality of a cold New England winter on an overloaded grid with scarce NG power plants.

[BornGinger]

When I lived in Russia I was doing my laundry by hand. Now when the energy costs are predicted to get enormous from Autumn it's maybe time to do that again instead of using the washing machine.

Depending on how much enery the fridge is using, it could maybe be a good thing to turn that off during the Winter and colder part of the Autumn and keep the milk, butter, meat and so on inside a box in the garden, on the balcony or anywhere they could stay cold enough without getting frozen stiff.

The power-hungry appliances set to cost you DOUBLE on your annual electricity bill after October

Edited August 28, 2022 by BornGinger

[Erwin]

Another dagger in the heart of anything that requires a lot of electricity.  (Looking at you EV.)  That will of course make solar appear more attractive.  Maybe that's part of the NWO's "big plan"? 

 

Edited August 28, 2022 by Erwin

[Erwin]

Interesting article today in WSJ about EC's:

"We constantly hear that electric cars are the future—cleaner, cheaper and better. But if they’re so good, why does California need to ban gasoline-powered cars? Why does the world spend $30 billion a year subsidizing electric ones?

In reality, electric cars are only sometimes and somewhat better than the alternatives, they’re often much costlier, and they aren’t necessarily all that much cleaner. Over its lifetime, an electric car does emit less CO2 than a gasoline car, but the difference can range considerably depending on how the electricity is generated. Making batteries for electric cars also requires a massive amount of energy, mostly from burning coal in China. Add it all up and the International Energy Agency estimates that an electric car emits a little less than half as much CO2 as a gasoline-powered one.

The climate effect of our electric-car efforts in the 2020s will be trivial. If every country achieved its stated ambitious electric-vehicle targets by 2030, the world would save 231 million tons of CO2 emissions. Plugging these savings into the standard United Nations Climate Panel model, that comes to a reduction of 0.0002 degree Fahrenheit by the end of the century.

Electric cars’ impact on air pollution isn’t as straightforward as you might think. The vehicles themselves pollute only slightly less than a gasoline car because their massive batteries and consequent weight leads to more particulate pollution from greater wear on brakes, tires and roads. On top of that, the additional electricity they require can throw up large amounts of air pollution depending on how it’s generated. One recent study found that electric cars put out more of the most dangerous particulate air pollution than gasoline-powered cars in 70% of U.S. states. An American Economic Association study found that rather than lowering air pollution, on average each additional electric car in the U.S. causes additional air-pollution damage worth $1,100 over its lifetime.

The minerals required for those batteries also present an ethical problem, as many are mined in areas with dismal human-rights records. Most cobalt, for instance, is dug out in Congo, where child labor is not uncommon, specifically in mining. There are security risks too, given that mineral processing is concentrated in China.

Increased demand for already-prized minerals is likely to drive up the price of electric cars significantly. The International Energy Agency projects that if electric cars became as prevalent as they would have to be for the world to reach net zero by 2050, the annual total demand for lithium for auto mobile batteries alone that year would be almost 28 times as much as current annual global lithium production . The material prices for batteries this year are more than three times what they were in 2021, and electricity isn’t getting cheaper either.

Even if rising costs weren’t an issue, electric cars wouldn’t be much of a bargain. Proponents argue that though they’re more expensive to purchase, electric cars are cheaper to drive. But a new report from a U.S. Energy Department laboratory found that even in 2025 the agency’s default electric car’s total lifetime cost will be 9% higher than a gasoline car’s, and the study relied on the very generous assumption that electric cars are driven as much as regular ones. In reality, electric cars are driven less than half as much, which means they’re much costlier per mile.

In part this is because electric cars are often a luxury item. Two-thirds of the households in the U.S. that own one have incomes exceeding $100,000 a year. For 9 in 10 of electric-vehicle-owning households, it’s only a second car. They also have a gasoline-powered car—usually a bigger one, such as an SUV, pickup truck or minivan—that they use for long trips, given its longer range. And it takes additional costs to make electric cars convenient—such as installing a charger in your garage. Those who can’t afford it, or who don’t have a garage, will have to spend a lot more time at commercial chargers than it takes to fill up a car with gasoline.

This is all why electric cars still require such massive subsidies to sell. Norway is the only country where most new cars are electric, and that took wiping the sales and registration tax on these vehicles—worth $25,160 a car—on top of other tax breaks such as reduced tolls. Even so, only 12.6% of all Norwegian cars on the road are electric. The country has the wealth to pay for them partly because of its oil revenue, and the trade is dubious: To cut one ton of CO2 emissions through the subsidization of electric cars, Norway has to sell 100 barrels of oil, which emit 40 tons of CO2.

Needless to say, other countries’ car stocks aren’t likely to be anywhere close to 100% electric anytime soon. The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates that barring new legislation only about 17% of all new U.S. cars will be electric by 2050, which translates to 13% of the total American car stock. As consumers continue to vote with their wallets against electric cars, it is hard to imagine places like California continuing to demand that they can purchase only electric ones.

Electric vehicles will take over the market only if innovation makes them actually better and cheaper than gasoline-powered cars. Politicians are spending hundreds of billions of dollars and keeping consumers from the cars they want for virtually no climate benefit."

Mr. Lomborg is president of the Copenhagen Consensus, a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and author of “False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet.”

[womble]

Digging stuff out the ground to make electric cars isn't going to broil us. Continuing to burn oil at the rate we are will. If we priced the environmental cost of fossil fuels (y'know, lives in coastal third world areas; protecting coastal cities from rising waters; the cost of proofing the agricultural and transport systems of the world against extreme environmental occurrences on a regular basis and all the rest of the peta-dollar engineering required to "adapt" to a world noticeably warmer) into the "price at the pump", the cost-benefit balance between electro-puny and gass-guzzler would shift. Radically.

Electric cars are only part of the answer; generation means have to shift as well. And petrochem is still going to be needed for some purposes anyway.

The argument that "Norway has to sell oil to subsidise their e-car aspirations" holds zero relevance. They'd sell the oil anyway and spend the money on hookers and blow (or something else productive, given that Norwegians seem to be fairly sensible).

And in general that whole article is a point-missing piece of misdirection and disinformation that looks like it was financed by Aramco.

[chuckdyke]

10 minutes ago, womble said:

Electric cars

Cars may overall be abolished and a more efficient electric public transport system the answer. Seoul for example could represent the city of the future. That is my impression. In the US I had to hire a car, but in Korea I didn't. 

[womble]

6 hours ago, chuckdyke said:

Cars may overall be abolished and a more efficient electric public transport system the answer. Seoul for example could represent the city of the future. That is my impression. In the US I had to hire a car, but in Korea I didn't. 

It might be worth considering the scale of different countries. Public transport systems make sense for a certain population density. Outside of metropolitan districts of the US, they're never going to work. Still, shifting from a few million daily single-occupancy car journeys in every major conurbation to an integrated, efficient, clean public transport system would be a great improvement. Maybe the pressures of global meltdown will be enough to overcome societal inertia without Government intervention...

Edited September 12, 2022 by womble

[landser]

Yes, South Korea is about the size of Indiana.

[Thewood1]

Most alternative energy solutions fail at scale.  The most efficient and transportable energy medium today is still fossil fuel.  Maybe that will change.  But it won't change with current solar and wind technology along with batteries.  Plugging more EVs into the grid is a failed proposition without new grid-level battery technology.  Current bsttery technology completely unsustainable.  Its unsustainable both for the availability of resources and how those resources are retrieved.  There are serious socio-economic issues in the mining and reclaiming of solar and battery materials.  Until thats fixed, EVs will remain a limited urban solution.

Again, the solution is using less energy.  If anyone is that incredibly worried about climate change due to fossil fuel dependency, shut your computer and cell phone off right now.  Google searches consumes the equivalent energy of continuously powering 200,000 homes in the US annually.  And thats just the search engine.  Every time you search, you spin up a server somewhere.  It adds up.  Stop doing that.  Everyone's worried about the environment until they have to do something real about it.

Edited September 13, 2022 by Thewood1

[Anxel Torrente]

4 hours ago, Thewood1 said:

Again, the solution is using less energy.

Exactly. It's time to buy loads of candles to get the house bright enough and preferably a bit warmer during the winter too. Then it's possible to use the electricity to be able to play those video games without having to worry too much about the cost.

And having loads of candles in the house will make the wife/girlfriend feel romantic too. So it's a win in the relationship with both the computer and the partner.

[Erwin]

Start buying cardboard wargames.    Once the power cuts become normal, at least you can play those with candles.  Altho' wouldn't billions of candles pollute? 

 

 

[Artkin]

On 9/12/2022 at 5:34 AM, chuckdyke said:

Cars may overall be abolished and a more efficient electric public transport system the answer. Seoul for example could represent the city of the future. That is my impression. In the US I had to hire a car, but in Korea I didn't. 

I've always thought this would be a perfect solution for a place like Manhattan. You guys want to live on top of each other like rats? Then take the bus together. If buses ran every 10 minutes or so just going back and fourth through Manhattan, traffic would be killed off. They could even invest in some overhead power, like how a tram works. You could have electric buses, and they could recharge using the grid as they travel.

I'm not sure about the practicality of the second part.