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brenthutch

Green new deal equals magical thinking

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“The elimination of fossil fuel products as a major form of energy production and the shift to solar power and other forms of green energy has led to what Newsom called “gaps” in the energy grid’s reliability, the Democratic governor said during a press conference Monday.“

https://dailycaller.com/2020/08/17/california-blackouts-renewable-energy-california-gavin-newsom/

 

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10 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

Happy day before Hurricane Season actually starts. No worries, your prediction is still good.

August 19.png

Tropical disturbances developing off the cost of Africa every few days is typical this time of year.  Most just fizzle out like a bad kava fart - fingers crossed.

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50 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

Hang in there Joe, I know that June and July were busts and August doesn’t look much better, but as I said earlier, you still have September.

Having witnessed the devastation in the Islands first hand, I hope you win.

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(edited)

When the power comes back on in California, Bill can let us know that it’s no big deal and nothing that a dozen gigawatts of battery storage won’t fix. (We won’t mention that that is nearly three times GLOBAL annual production, the tens of billions of dollars and the need to be replaced every several years)

Edited by brenthutch

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7 hours ago, airdvr said:

Image may contain: 4 people, outdoor

Before I moved to California to work in film, we'd tape those offshore races in a helicopter.  I suppose they could use drones now, but that's no fun -  plus the producers like excuses for big budgets.

 

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15 hours ago, brenthutch said:

When the power comes back on in California, Bill can let us know that it’s no big deal and nothing that a dozen gigawatts of battery storage won’t fix. (We won’t mention that that is nearly three times GLOBAL annual production, the tens of billions of dollars and the need to be replaced every several years)

Of course, extreme hot weather and over 11,000 lightning strikes had nothing to do with power outages.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-18/california-heat-wave-brings-extreme-weather-and-a-glimpse-at-our-future-with-climate-change

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15 hours ago, Coreece said:

Before I moved to California to work in film, we'd tape those offshore races in a helicopter.  I suppose they could use drones now, but that's no fun -  plus the producers like excuses for big budgets.

 

 :$I wonder who would have made out better on that.

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1 hour ago, airdvr said:

Well only a glimpse of the past can come close to quantifying the future.

The future is not that hard to predict. Or at least the trend is not that hard. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is easily measurable. What to do about it is debatable and the topic here is the "Green new deal" which is hugely debatable. I would rather debate policy than get into an argument with a denier any day.

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I'm not wanting to debate it either.  I simply pointed out that it's been hotter in CA.  The article wants the reader to buy into the fact that hot is what the future looks like and it's due to AGW.  If that's true then it must have been happening all the way back to the 50's.

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4 hours ago, airdvr said:

Looks like AGW has been happening in Bakersfield since 1950.

It's been happening since 1850.  And since average temperatures are increasing across the US you are going to see longer, more intense heat waves as the climate warms.  We're already up by 2 degrees - which in California is the difference between a heatwave and blackouts.

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6 hours ago, kallend said:

Of course, extreme hot weather and over 11,000 lightning strikes had nothing to do with power outages.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-08-18/california-heat-wave-brings-extreme-weather-and-a-glimpse-at-our-future-with-climate-change

Not as much as 1000 megawatts of missing wind power.

Steve Berberich, the CEO of the state’s Independent Service Operator said, “the wind had been very good, but ran out. If the wind hadn’t run out on us, we would have been ok.”

Did you catch that?  He didn’t blame wildfires, he didn’t blame lightning strikes he didn’t even blame the heatwave....he blamed the wind, or more specifically the lack there of.  California’s green energy debacle should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of us. 

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3 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

 California’s green energy debacle should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of us. 

The debacle isn't green energy. Sounds like green energy is working very well, considering it was producing 1,000 megawatts of power. Seems pretty significant. This sounds more like a system design issue.

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1 minute ago, SkyDekker said:

The debacle isn't green energy. Sounds like green energy is working very well, considering it was producing 1,000 megawatts of power. Seems pretty significant. This sounds more like a system design issue.

They just need to design a system where the sun shines and the wind blows 24/7.  If they had just two or three old fashioned coal burning plants they would have been fine.

On a separate note, wasn’t all of this “green” energy supposed to prevent heatwaves and wildfires?  It would seem obvious that it is not working.

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10 minutes ago, brenthutch said:

They just need to design a system where the sun shines and the wind blows 24/7.  If they had just two or three old fashioned coal burning plants they would have been fine.

On a separate note, wasn’t all of this “green” energy supposed to prevent heatwaves and wildfires?  It would seem obvious that it is not working.

There is such a multitude of either ignorance, bad faith, strawman and bad logic (or a mix of any of these) in there that I don't think it is worth engaging.

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10 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:

There is such a multitude of either ignorance, bad faith, strawman and bad logic (or a mix of any of these) in there that I don't think it is worth engaging.

Announcing your intention to not engage is a form of engagement.

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54 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:
34 minutes ago, SkyDekker said:

There is such a multitude of either ignorance, bad faith, strawman and bad logic (or a mix of any of these) in there that I don't think it is worth engaging.

The point is, that wind and solar only work when the wind blows and the sun shines.  It is unreliable and subject to the whims of Mother Nature.  It doesn’t matter how many wind turbines there are when the wind doesn’t blow.  10,000 X zero is still zero.  It will only get worse when Diablo Canyon gets shut down and they loose nearly 18,000 gigawatt hours of clean reliable nuclear power.

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1 hour ago, brenthutch said:

 California’s green energy debacle should serve as a cautionary tale for the rest of us. 

Indeed!  From Politico: 

===============

Because the Friday outage started around 6:30 p.m., when solar is ramping down and gas-fired plants are ramping up, gas is the likely immediate culprit, Wara said. "The timing of all this strongly suggests problems with gas plants," he said. . ..

CAISO CEO Steve Berberich said Monday that a power plant of unspecified fuel and size on Friday "tripped," which caused the facility to go offline. While the details weren't revealed, certain types of natural gas power plants can struggle under hot conditions, and gas units are typically the only ones with that much capacity.

https://www.politico.com/states/california/story/2020/08/18/california-has-first-rolling-blackouts-in-19-years-and-everyone-faces-blame-1309757

================

The lesson here - gas power plants get unreliable as the weather gets hotter.  And as we all know, the weather is going to get hotter.

Fortunately the blackouts were planned and rolling - they affected at most hundreds of thousands of people for a few hours at a time.  Let's compare that some other blackouts in (historically) coal centric areas of the country:

NY, 1965 - 30 million lost power for 13 hours.

Northeast, 2003 - 45 million lost power for 7 hours.

NYC, 1977 - 7 million people lost power for 12 hours.

You're a lot better off in California if you want to keep the lights on.

 

:

 

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