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billvon

Global warming solutions (on topic)

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The company Lazard regularly does studies to determine what the actual costs of power are.  Their primary output is the LCOE chart - the levelized cost of energy, taking into account the value of money, build times, interest rates, fuel costs etc etc.  This represents what it costs to get a megawatt-hour of energy from any of the common technologies out there.  They have both subsidized and unsubsidized analyses; the one below is the unsubsidized.

The latest one has some interesting data.  First off, rooftop solar - which is the most expensive form of solar there is, since they are built in sizes of 3-10 kilowatts - is now directly competitive with utility scale gas peakers and nuclear power plants.  This is fairly remarkable.  It means that a rooftop solar power system will, in many cases, cost less per megawatt-hour than those sorts of power plants, even on the small scales of a-house-at-a-time.

Second, they computed the cost of using a fully-depreciated power plant (i.e. a plant that has been completely paid off) to generate power.  At this point the cost of building the plant is ignored, all that is left is opex which means fuel, maintenance and operations.  A fully depreciated coal plant generates a megawatt-hour of power for $42 - a solar power station, INCLUDING construction costs, can generate that same megawatt-hour for between $29 nd $41 a megawatt-hour.

So we are now at the point where pretty much any form of fossil fuel or nuclear generation is more expensive than renewables.  The place they are hanging on is baseload power, since they can, with 90% or so reliability, generate power 24/7.  The delta between the costs of solar/wind and the costs of more conventional sources of power represents the cost available to implement storage - and that available cost is growing all the time.

LCOE-2021-renewable-energy-cost-solar-wind-coal-Lazard.png

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21 minutes ago, winsor said:

Even if we 'solve' 'climate change,' we're still screwed:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-doomed-to-go-extinct/

I suppose it serves as a distraction in the meantime.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

Yes, resistance is futile. We are doomed. So we may as well party on and explore our many sides. It may be time for us all to experiment with our sexuality because we all have nothing to lose!

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1 hour ago, gowlerk said:

Yes, resistance is futile. We are doomed. So we may as well party on and explore our many sides. It may be time for us all to experiment with our sexuality because we all have nothing to lose!

The practice of Medicine is simply the process of postponing the inevitable.  Responsible treatment of the environment is similar.

Given the propensity of our species for self-destructive stupidity, conserving the means of our survival is, indeed, doomed.  Unfortunately, stupidity is our only inexhaustible resource.

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2 hours ago, winsor said:

Even if we 'solve' 'climate change,' we're still screwed:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/humans-are-doomed-to-go-extinct/

I suppose it serves as a distraction in the meantime.

 

BSBD,

Winsor

Well, woop-de-doodle, they moved up the date by 4,499,000,000 years plus or minus. Keep on this one and let me know when I can laugh off a 30 year mortgage.

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It seems like every other word coming out of every ones mouth is climate change, global warming, carbon footprint, going green, renewable energy.

I am not saying that is not an issue but there are other serious issues also. 

We are drowning in out own waste, landfills are getting larger.  Everything you buy, part of it gets thrown away, sometimes more packaging than the original product.     

Plastic pollution, a large mass in the Pacific Ocean.  Walk along a road and look in the ditch or trees, you see plastic.  Well at least California banned plastic straws.

PFAS, perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl compounds, are also commonly called "forever chemicals" because they don't break down in the environment and remain present in the human body for years.

Over population, well fewer people, that would help.

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15 minutes ago, Bigfalls said:

We are drowning in out own waste, landfills are getting larger.  Everything you buy, part of it gets thrown away, sometimes more packaging than the original product.     

Plastic pollution, a large mass in the Pacific Ocean.  Walk along a road and look in the ditch or trees, you see plastic.  Well at least California banned plastic straws.

Yep.  And the reason we do that is because oil (and therefore plastics) is so cheap.  It is much cheaper to make new plastic bags than recycle old ones.  It is much cheaper/easier to make new straws than to use reusable ones.

A very simple way to solve both problems (anthropogenic greenhouse gases and plastic waste) is to price products that generate both by their total cost (including disposal/recycling/remediation) rather than just their manufacturing cost.  Doing that would allow market forces to become involved.  Want a plastic straw?  No problem.  But the price you pay will cover disposing of it and/or fishing it out of the ocean later and recycling it.  That way, the more plastic straws people buy, the more money there is available to clean up the resulting mess.

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18 minutes ago, billvon said:

Yep.  And the reason we do that is because oil (and therefore plastics) is so cheap.  It is much cheaper to make new plastic bags than recycle old ones.  It is much cheaper/easier to make new straws than to use reusable ones.

A very simple way to solve both problems (anthropogenic greenhouse gases and plastic waste) is to price products that generate both by their total cost (including disposal/recycling/remediation) rather than just their manufacturing cost.  Doing that would allow market forces to become involved.  Want a plastic straw?  No problem.  But the price you pay will cover disposing of it and/or fishing it out of the ocean later and recycling it.  That way, the more plastic straws people buy, the more money there is available to clean up the resulting mess.

Great idea. Who'll be first to sign up, you reckon? Cambodia or Cameroon?

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27 minutes ago, gowlerk said:

He is a CA engineer. I'll bet he has very soft hands and he probably pays a packer most of the time!

Only when training.  The rest of the time I do it myself.  (Not because I want to do it or anything, but at this point I've got packing down to about six minutes - and it's just plain faster than dealing with a packer.)

But in terms of the topic of this thread - I'm working on it.  We have two EV's now and I generate all my power from solar.  The biggest problem with solar is that it doesn't generate when it's really needed (i.e. around 7pm at night) so I now have a system that will store power during the day and dump it back to the grid when there's a shortage.

But we still have a gas dryer and a gas hot water heater.  Gas hot water heater will be the next to go, replaced by a heat pump.  Gas dryer will get replaced when it breaks (which isn't far off now with how it's been working.)

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9 hours ago, billvon said:

Only when training.  The rest of the time I do it myself.  (Not because I want to do it or anything, but at this point I've got packing down to about six minutes - and it's just plain faster than dealing with a packer.)

It's because that sort of me-ishness that new rigs are like $10 Grand. You need to take some of your disruptor stock profits and. as the new Mod so aptly observed, get prices down the economy going.

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1 hour ago, JoeWeber said:

It's because that sort of me-ishness that new rigs are like $10 Grand. You need to take some of your disruptor stock profits and. as the new Mod so aptly observed, get prices down the economy going.

Except I don't use a packer, either, except when I'm at an event and feeling lazy.

Wendy P.

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On 12/3/2021 at 11:02 AM, Bigfalls said:

 

We are drowning in out own waste, landfills are getting larger.  Everything you buy, part of it gets thrown away, sometimes more packaging than the original product.     

Plastic pollution, a large mass in the Pacific Ocean.  Walk along a road and look in the ditch or trees, you see plastic.  Well at least California banned plastic straws.

 

10 days ago we were on South Georgia, a mostly uninhabited island in the southern ocean (there is a British Antarctic Survey base there - no-one else).  One of our party found an old plastic water bottle on a glacial moraine in a remote area there.

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34 minutes ago, kallend said:

10 days ago we were on South Georgia, a mostly uninhabited island in the southern ocean (there is a British Antarctic Survey base there - no-one else).  One of our party found an old plastic water bottle on a glacial moraine in a remote area there.

We're On the Beach now, seems to me. Hoping for an attenuation of any of the offenses against us, much less a saving reversal, is just wishful thinking. Most definitely we should try hard to understand why things are as they are but that will never change the outcome. In a way we're a very lucky bunch: name another civilization that was able, so clearly, to see the end.

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18 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

We're On the Beach now, seems to me. Hoping for an attenuation of any of the offenses against us, much less a saving reversal, is just wishful thinking. Most definitely we should try hard to understand why things are as they are but that will never change the outcome. In a way we're a very lucky bunch: name another civilization that was able, so clearly, to see the end.

Rapa Nui perhaps 

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10 minutes ago, JoeWeber said:

As far as I know they never saw it coming.  One less bell to answer. One less tree to cut down....

Maybe not until a lot closer to the end. I think the few left who were living in sea caves and cannibalizing each other probably got it figured out.

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