I drove from Illinois to Arizona just last week. In west Texas, steady winds were turning hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of energy converters. Below those turbines were enormous fields of corn rivaling anything seen in southern Illinois. Ethanol? When the wind farms ended the feed lots began. Thousands and thousands of head of cattle being fed from hay piles five hundred feet long and two stories tall. Beyond that, a thousand head of black angus free grazing next to man-made water resevoirs a thousand foot wide.
One thing you learn about Texans -- they know how to scale.
A big driver of this is the relatively non-existent zoning laws in most of Texas. It's broadly the case (and accepted and defended by people with lots of guns) that you should be free to do just about anything you want on land you own.
Want to build windmills, run cattle, and operate a strip club in your backyard? Go for it.
So you get all these ranchers who realized "shoot, cows only need space up to about 6 feet. I've got all that air not doing anything, might as well put up some windmills."
this is....false. The "big driver of it" is state and federal subsidy, period. And as far as the zoning goes, that is a much much grayer picture than painted by this comment. For example, in the county I live, you couldn't sell liquor on one side of a highway, a highway which runs dead center through the county and town, because of religious influence on the approval and application of zoning laws. And blue laws are only a tiny part of it.
Doesn't compare to the feedlots in El Paso which are easily 5x the size (or more), somewhat higher up from the river.
The west Texas wind was blowing from the south/southwest at 15-20 mph. There was no detectable odor, even west of Amarillo when we stopped for fuel. Hot too. 103 degrees fahrenheit. Plenty of room to dissipate I guess.
I was surprised however, by the amount of corn being grown. I don't remember seeing it just a few years ago. I could be wrong. It seemed out of place but was very healthy. 5-6 feet tall already.
> There was no detectable odor, even west of Amarillo when we stopped for fuel.
I've driven by the Wildorado feedlot dozens of times, and I always put my A/C on recirc 5 miles before and after. The stench still gets into the car. Conditions must have been very unusual during your trip.
> Texas produces and consumes more electricity overall than any other state.
OK, why? From an article in Texas Monthly:[0]
> More than half of the energy consumed in Texas is for industrial use, according to the EIA, while residential use—which in terms of sheer BTUs is the most in the nation, even as our per capita usage is relatively low—accounts for just over 13 percent. Transportation accounts for nearly a quarter, while commercial comes in slightly lower than residential.
I wonder what the major industrial uses are. Some is used in oil and natural gas production, I guess. And perhaps size accounts for high transportation usage.
Texas resident here. If you have ever driven by a refinery of any type you will see where energy goes. The shear amount of energy to convert oil to usable gas/plastics/etc. is pretty crazy.
Refineries don’t just make gasoline, but plastic, engine oil, industrial lubricant. That being said, wiki will tell you 85% of refinery output goes to gasoline, diesel, home heating oil, and aviation fuel.
Damn, I wasn't thinking this through clearly. And it's damn complicated.
The relevant comparison is arguably greenhouse gas emissions per km. For ICE, you clearly must include emissions during refining. But that could be ~zero, if all the process energy were wind, solar or nuclear electricity. Or it could be an additional 70%, if all the process energy were petroleum. So the range is 1.0-1.7 times nominal fuel emissions.
For BEV, total emissions could be ~zero, if all the electricity were wind, solar or nuclear. But if the electricity were generated from fossil fuels, you'd have nominal fuel emissions plus both refining process energy and generation loss.
Electricity from natural gas could be the clear winner, because you get additional energy from two H2 for C converted to CO2. Unless leakage were too great. And there's ~no conversion loss in the vehicle. So that's maybe 0.4-0.7 relative to gasoline/diesel fuel emissions.
Electricity from coal and petroleum would clearly be worse. For coal, because there's ~no H2, and because generation efficiency is lower than for natural gas. And for petroleum, because you have the 0%-70% process energy, less H2 per C, and somewhat lower generation efficiency. But there's ~no conversion loss in the vehicle for either. So overall that's maybe 0.8-1.4 relative to gasoline/diesel fuel emissions.
Bottom line, relative to nominal ICE fuel emissions:
Sure. But it can be generated on refinery sites, using solids and extremely nonvolatile fractions as fuel.
I suspect that using outside electricity is a purely economic issue. That is, when the value of additional products produced is greater than the cost of extra electricity needed. So in that sense, oil refineries are like aluminum refineries, in that they can store surplus electricity.
This exactly. I lived in Lumberton near Beaumont for a few years and the paper mill made most of the town stink at the time. I moved to Mount Pleasant for another few years and the entire town's industry centers around the pilgrim's pride chicken factory. The entire town, coincidentally, smells like raw chicken.
I recall a tour of a kraft (softwood paper) mill. There was a water spray unit (like you'd see in a car wash) at the parking lot exit. To keep SOx deposits from dissolving employees' vehicles.
Probably also has to do with Texas just being the geographically largest of the lower 48. (Alaska is much bigger but its population is very low so they don't use much power.)
Texas also has its own grid [0]. There are three separate grids in the lower 48: East, West, and Texas. This means the Texas grid doesn't need to stay in phase with the rest of the US. While they do move power to/from the other two grids, it's done with DC interties. Texas shares power with Mexico via high-voltage DC transmission lines [1].
Texas has its own grid too. In the summer it's hot, and air conditioning consumes a lot...
"Power demand is highest in summer, primarily due to air conditioning use in homes and businesses. The region's all-time record peak hour occurred on July 19, 2018, when consumer demand hit 73,259 MW. A megawatt of electricity can power about 200 Texas homes during periods of peak demand."
How difficult is it to build transmission lines in the US? In Germany we have enormous problems building a transmission line from the offshore windparks in the north to the industrial centers in the south. NIMBYs are opposing it fiercly.
It depends on the region, but most of the US doesn't have too much of a problem.
There is always pushback from locals (understandable), but there has been billions in transmission built in the Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, and West Texas regions to name a few areas. A lot of this is to help with the existing (ageing) infrastructure as well as helping make sure the ~22GW of currently built wind capacity can actually serve load and not be curtailed 24/7. In fact, a lot of that wind wouldn't have been built without the necessary transmission. Keep in mind that there is greater than a ~2:1 return on investment from these projects (difference in production cost in a year with the projects there and then not there) if I recall correctly.
The Western Interconnect of the US seems to favor using RAS and phase-shifting transformers in order to avoid as many transmission projects. A Remedial Action Scheme is basically an automated system that keeps certain catastrophic events from happening when a certain triggering event happens. Phase shifting transformers can help push back on certain interregional flows. I think this makes more sense in the Western Interconnect as it isn't as much of a dense network as the Eastern Interconnect. You have dense load centers in Denver, California, and Oregon/Washington with a dessert and mountain range in the middle (forms a donut). It is very rural over the vast majority of the distance, so I imagine transmission is pretty expensive and harder to justify. They do have interregional planning groups in the West though.
Similar in the US.. but will vary greatly depending on where you're going to/from. Of course, the NIMBYs are really against expansion of nuclear power, which by all means should be much more common than coal at this point. Especially in relatively stable locations like inland Texas, for example (and most of the non-coastal southwest us).
It can be the light, it can cause flickering. A wind farm near us is curtailed at certain times. I don't know if it's a health thing (epilepsy), or just annoyance.
Which is a subjective notion, of course. I look at a landscape full of wind turbines and I see the beauty of a species recognising it needed to change.
Arguably, but then arguably a landscape covered in mines and coal fired power stations is also beautiful; mountains being moved in aid of making people's lives better, the foundations of centuries of human progress, etc, etc. A 10km by 10km concrete grid could be a beautiful monument to a species that has recognised it needed to master concrete (fantastic stuff concrete, a miracle substance really).
Windmills are a bit of an eyesore compared to a great natural scene.
Ditto, they make me feel like I’m living in a near-future sci-fi film. And let’s be honest, whatever natural beauty once existed in the UK was largely destroyed over the course of millennia.
Yeah so let's destroy pristine nature landscapes with ugly turbines (which kill a lot of birds and cost an arm to decommission). I've seen wild landscapes in Brittany completely ruined by still wind turbines. It's a disgrace.
I'd rather go nuclear in select ugly places.
What is beautiful is good. He who creates ugliness is evil.
There is no wilderness in Brittany that I am aware of. Very little anywhere in Europe actually. My point being, man have altered the landscape in that part of the world on a continual basis for thousands of years. Heck, people have been building windmills, the very object you object to, on this land for that long. It seems a bit rich to suddenly stand on principle and proclaim No! This should be banned! What is there left to despoil? Virgin Amazon or Boreal forest? Sure. Brittany? C’mon.
Indeed you are not aware as you have not been there.
It's in a border of an old forest.
It's known that it kills bird.
The visual pollution is really important and those who value technology and convenience over beauty have already done disastrous things to my country.
It needs to stop.
I have been. You are referring I suppose to Brocélien. It is an old forest but not in any way wild. (Sa histoire: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forêt_de_Paimpont#Histoire). By "wild" I mean "untouched by man". Those places are worth saving, but there are not very many remaining, and certainly almost none in continental Europe. We should respect our forests and other open spaces, but some windmills is much less of a problem than the alternative.
Indeed and I do not think Anglo Saxon protestants make correct beholders in this regard. Totally subjective I admit. However I stand for my views on aestetics. I think it's an important matter and that it is open for discussion.
That's why inland wind is basically banned in the UK. I totally understand the argument and if it wasn't for the fact that the climate disaster will end us I would agree.
However what 2+ degrees of warming will do will dwarf anything that the turbines will do.
There are also arguments about birds dying and the such. Only that's a BS argument considering that glass buildings kill 10x as many birds and are ubiquitous.
Really? Hinkley Point C, that's why not. In the U.S., Vogtle. These are the only nuclear power plants under construction in the UK and US. They each cost over 20 billion dollars, are heavily subsidized, and are badly behind schedule and over budget. If and when they are ever completed, the energy they produce will be more expensive than unsubsidized wind and solar in their respective regions.
It's too expensive to do now and has been killed in the past by the same NIMBY. Given the impact of failure I actually understand the NIMBY in relation to nuclear.
I'm in favor of both. There are lots of very stable locations in the US. Far from flooding and earthquakes that are suitable. Similar for wind. I think solar should be limited to existing rooftops for now though.
The US has much lower population concentration, for example Texas: 40/km2, Germany: 230/km2. It makes it so much easier to build pipelines and power lines. It also makes it much less profitable to have inter-city ground level public transportation - compare American trains (low quality) with European trains (very nice and popular).
Both American continents still have a lot of land that's completely unutilized, not even by any nature worth preserving.
Texas might be kind of unique in the USA for the way utility and pipeline companies can use eminent domain liberally against homeowners in order to secure property for right of way for power lines or pipelines.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/permian-highway-pipeli...
Funnily enough, Rick “dismantle the DOE” Perry championed the building of interconnectors to allow the development of wind in Western Texas, he even paid for it as a public infrastructure project!
It can be difficult. NIMBYs are expected, but PACs running ads and lobbying against it and complex regulatory maneuvering happens too.
For intriguing stories, read about opposition to the Plains & Eastern Clean Line through Arkansas, the Grain Belt Express Clean Line through Missouri, and the story of the Wind Catcher in Arkansas. Compare and contrast this with otherwise generous laws concerning utility easements in Arkansas.
Natural gas is cheaply transportable for heating which is probably a more efficient use of it than in electricity production (I think for electricity it is mainly used in peaker plants that need to start up quickly)
The United States Wind Turbine Database (USWTDB) provides the locations of land-based and offshore wind turbines in the United States, corresponding wind project information, and turbine technical specifications.
If you're interested in this, you should probably check out some of the reporting over the political battles this very year over wind subsidies and the intraparty disputes among republicans in the state lege.
I don't think this will get you all of the wind power in Texas as the panhandle of Texas has at least one major utility participating in the SPP market as well which is next door.
No.... seriously. Your bill might be going toward green energy, but dirty coal is still fueling your home.
Granted, many understand that and are perfectly fine with it as you're helping to effect change. However, a lot of folks have been really confused by that marketing line, so it deserves clarification. HN users are probably more educated than the general public of course, but I work in this industry and strive for clarity.
The problem is that it's fungible in the other direction. Everyone buying generic electricity can end up with less wind, so your net impact is less or zero.
Not sure why you are getting downvoted. Can someone show that a company that does not install wind turbines at your house can guarantee that you will be receiving power only produced by wind turbines?
I could be misunderstanding something, but it seems that two neighbors(one using “wind”, the other using standard power) that share the same power line simply cannot be getting power from different sources.
Edit: Hmm, now I’m getting downvoted, still without an explaination.
Power companies everywhere sell “green power” and of course they don’t hook me up to a hydro plant even though I’m paying to ensure my electricity is “100% hydro”.
If a company with renewable engergy production produces X kWh then they can sell that to N customers as renewable electricity even if they deliver it through a grid where coal power electrons are also distributed.
If demand for renewable energy increases (more customers get the contracts from these companies that produce renewable) then those companies can expand or more such companies can enter the market.
So it’s about production/consumption balance of various ways of producing energy, nothing else. This isn’t strange or controversial in any way.
If you buy green electricity such as wind power you are paying for that power to be generated. If 10% of people buy wind power, 10% of the grid should be wind. If 100% of the people buy wind power, 100% of the grid should be wind.
The parent is pointing out that absent the grid being 100% wind, the electricity delivered to your house isnt necessarily from wind power. This isn't particularly helpful, or even required. An electron is an electron, where it goes doesn't really matter, just where it came from.
I really think that should say, "If 10% of people buy wind power, at least 10% of the grid should be wind."
Alternatively, if folks suddenly demand wind and the supply is not there, I'd think there should be some sort of way for the companies to earmark money to meet the wind demand. This is especially true if the company is charging an optional premium fee for "green energy".
Well, that element of Real Steelhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real_Steel is on track to be reality. (Set in the year 2020, the movie features lots and lots of windmills in Texas.) :-)
Yes, it is, and the winfarms are an absolute gorgeous addition to our horizon.
It can get a bit grim driving around Texas. It can take up to three days to get out of the state depending on which direction you're going... and to get from the oceans to any mountains in any direction takes about as long as well (start heading towards New Mexico best bet IMO). There are some "hills" over by Austin and Enchanted Rock I guess.
Point is, these windmills are a great way to break the monotony of a long Texas roadtrip. I did one with my little cousins once and their favorite part was seeing the windmills.
Importantly, according to this map [1], it’s one of the better places for high average wind speed over a year at 30m and 100m height.
From the Dakotas/Montana down through Texas is the sweet spot for turbines.
I spend alot of time flying in west Texas for our startup, and I can tell you that looking at every square mile west of Abilene is alot like the game Civilization. Few actually inhabit the land outside of metro city centers, and every square inch outside of it is producing something. Oil wells, oil pipelines, water pipelines, wind, sand, solar, salt - it has to be some of the most economically active land in the US - and barely has any cellular coverage.
One thing I'm amused (not in a good way) by, is that there's so much FUD and marketing around the use of Coal etc. for energy and alternatives (Nuclear, wind, solar) ... I'm not necessarily knowledge enough to favor some over others. But I always felt, "because pollution," should be enough reason alone to look at alternatives, and considering the impact of building/supplying/disposing of the materials in the alternatives as well.
I tend not to travel to/through some locations in the US simply because of the pollution. I remember the taste, smell and my eyes burning when I drove through eastern tx, la, etc to florida a few years ago... I don't get how people can just put up with it. Last two times I've been in LA, the air was just nasty.
I mean it really shouldn't even be a D vs R or LP issue... it should be an issue of sanity. And nobody seems to be willing to budge from a fringe position in any case.
I'm an ex-smoker. Generators of fossil fuels have managed to generate some very impressive narratives and all on a par with the tobacco industry. As a long term consumer of fags (30 years), I managed some pretty impressive feats of woolly thinking.
When I gave up fags, that was for me and my immediate family - I smell better now and might live longer and my lung capacity is still improving. Giving up on fossil fuels is for humanity as a whole. Do they (all of humanity) actually give a shit enough to make you want to change?
However, we should do this and I will start with a hybrid and then move to a full 'leccy only car when the charging time and range suits me. I won't save the world and it might still get a bit hot around here but I'll have a very quiet car.
Baton Rouge, Lake Charles and Beaumont as well as St James, St Charles, Laplace are where all the refineries and chemical plants got plunked. NOLA is somewhat better
LA native....not to mention that a good bit of the central and northern part of the state is heavily forested with pine trees. During pollen season I once sweeped my porch and filled a five-gallon ziplock bag with the yellow pollen. It makes life miserable for those of us with allergies.
Baton Rouge does have some refineries and chemical plants (Dow) on the river. The only good smelling plant is the Community Coffee facility.
How should climate change or air pollution or any of it be partisan? When Republican voters are polled, many say they love the environment and the outdoors too. The truth is fossil fuel has bought and sold most R politicians and many D politicians too. Until we get money out of politics or make the energy companies go bankrupt, they will continue to pay politicians to prevent the cleaning of our environment and energy system.
> How should climate change or air pollution or any of it be partisan?
The question is 'who should give something up to deal with [X]'. It is likely that the situation will become unresolvably partisan in any democracy.
If the conversation were about clean air and making energy efficient decisions then it would not be a partisan issue. However, I've had conversations with people who seriously proposing 'solutions' like deindustrialising civilisation. I don't want that sort of people to be in charge of anything.
It is a partisan issue because the choices presented are 'take actions that do not impact our standard of living' and 'take actions that reduce our standard of living'.
I think many energy companies would love (or at least not be opposed) to get a large amount of renewables and energy storage...etc. The problem is that doing so costs money (a lot of it) which means raising customer rates which are highly regulated. Many of those companies are still paying off coal assets and aren't allowed by regulators to retire those units until they're paid off even though they aren't economic anymore due to falling gas prices and the prevalence of renewables. I'm not saying that the system is perfect, rather there are so many many factors at play here and it isn't nearly as simple as people think. Make no mistake that transitioning to 100% renewables is a monumental task, but we're getting closer all the time.
With that being said, we're starting to see coal being retired at a very fast pace Nationwide and no new ones are really expected to be built. Change is happening every day in this industry which has traditionally moved at a glacial pace. Please do keep up the interest and spirit.
One of the key industry drivers here are the production tax credits (wind and now solar + storage) that come from government and make wind so crazy economical right now to where they can have extremely negative offers (think corn and ethanol). This is why it is painful to me to hear about politicians being bought out (ok, I'm sure some have fallen to for lobbyists) as the production tax credits have done so much for clean energy. Public opinion is also important in this space as many utilities are making green investments because it is good for PR.
In deregulated power markets, which AFAIK covers a fairly large fraction of US electricity supply (including Texas) power generators are businesses like in any random industry. The transmission grid, otoh, is a natural monopoly and is tightly regulated (or outright publicly owned).
In such markets, uneconomical units tend to be shut down fairly quickly. Which in the absence of a some type of price on carbon (be it a carbon tax, cap and trade, clean portfolio standards or whatever) unfortunately can mean replacing clean energy with dirtier but cheaper.
You're correct that most of the US is in a power market. I'd still call it regulated though. There are some regions like TVA, Colorado area, and BPA that do their own thing, but BPA is joining CAISO's secondary market (energy imbalance) which is a step towards a full day ahead market which does commitment and dispatch instead of just dispatch (commitment and the sharing of reserves is where the majority of cost savings occur).
The other parts of the US participate in either ERCOT, CAISO, MISO, SPP, ISO-NE, PJM, or NYISO which all do commitment and dispatch. ERCOT is a little unusual as they don't co-optimize reserves in their real-time 5-minute market. Each of these markets has an independent market monitor that looks for participant gaming and other market anomalies. FERC mandated this after some heavy abuse in the north east from a utility where the fine was divided up and went to funding the market monitoring groups. Either this group or sometimes the market software itself looks for instances of market power being demonstrated. For example, if you're unit is sitting right on top of a congested area and your offer jumps up a certain percent, the software pushes you back to the approved offer that the market monitor verified is your true marginal cost. So the market is deregulated, but there is still plenty of regulation of a sort.
In a perfect market, yes you would have uneconomical units shut down quickly, but this isn't the stock market and there are many reasons why this doesn't happen all the time. Maybe you need it for capacity reasons (markets have rules on how much you need to reliably serve load or they even have capacity markets) as wind and solar aren't as reliable as thermal generation.
In this case with regulated vs deregulated I meant whether there is some kind of open access scheme for generators, or whether there is a utility with both power generation and transmission in a monopoly position. Of course, even in such a deregulated market there are laws and regulations that apply to generators.
> ERCOT is a little unusual as they don't co-optimize reserves in their real-time 5-minute market.
ERCOT has their ORDC which IIUC they are happy with.
The Democrats are demonstrably better on climate change issues right now than the Republicans are. The "both sides are bad" argument doesn't hold water here.
The only difference between a therapeutic drug and poison is the dose. Oxygen can be a pollutant at high concentration... But I don't see any industry releasing tons of it in the atmosphere every day.
People tend to miss obvious things when their mortgages depend on them doing so.
Places dominated by extractive industries tend to be run by he money behind those industries. That transcends party traditionally, but has become a pillar of the right wing of the GOP since Nixon. Unfortunately, that means that people who run those industries basically control the Senate and soon the Supreme Court.
It's kind of nuts that there's a lobby in favor of more car exhaust. Car manufacturers had to negotiate directly with California after Trump rolled back Obama's CAFE standard. Corporate interests are now to the left of America's federal government.
The ICE auto industry is well aware that it’s game over for all but maybe one or two of them who can survive the transition to electric+autonomy.
It behooves the others to try to minimize expenses and ride the company into the ground. Basically, revenue is going to zero so they want to maximize profits in what’s left of this little corner of the curve.
Lowering emissions standards, even for 5 years, let’s them squeeze out a few more millions.
What sort of bleeds through the electronic industry trade magazines is the auto industry despite what they might say publicly knows electrification is coming. You can tell that because what their suppliers are doing.
1) The strategy I outlined requires them to maintain an internal culture of ignorance about electrification. Which makes it impossible to design a great electric car.
2) The supply chain is non-trivial to negotiate, particularly batteries, which will give their long time competitors an opportunity to eat them.
3) Autonomy is hard and it’s not clear there will be cheap good software that’s available to license
4) Car dealers don’t want to cannibalize their ICE inventory by marketing electrics. ICE makers are legally tied to the dealers.
All of these are solvable, but I don’t expect more than 1 or 2 will be able to solve all 4.
For coal, maybe the focus on climate change and CO2 is the wrong way to fight this. Tell people to reduce coal to reduce CO2 for climate change and you will get a strong split along D and R lines. Tell people we need to reduce coal to reduce NOX, SO2, particulates, smog, things that people can see, breathe, and has universal agreement that it hurts lungs and health and suddenly D and R doesn't matter. Everyone can get behind that, who can argue against pollution you can see in the sky? Especially if there's a clean alternative that's cheaper. Why not focus on this point more? By winning the fight on these grounds, you also indirectly win the CO2 fight for climate change.
I think you overestimate the sanity of the current political climate on the right in the US. There is absolutely not going to be anything close to everyone getting behind cutting back on coal or any pollutant, regardless of how you sell it. There's morons out there specifically making their trucks spew black sludge into the air and bragging about it. The current president won with a large part of his message being bringing back coal. I don't think the details of the message are the problem, rationality is leagues away.
Democrats are just as irrational. By giving tax breaks to renewable energy, letting Priuses use the diamond lane, the whole solyndra scandal. They talk a good game, but strangely their utopian plans never quite work out, but their big government and tax hikes always stay. Both parties are the same.
> Democrats are just as irrational. By giving tax breaks to renewable energy, letting Priuses use the diamond lane, the whole solyndra scandal.
Sorry, how exactly do you balance that? On one side, you have government encouragement of renewable energy, low emmission vehicles, and solar power (though on that one they got scammed). I can see arguments that the first two are bad policy, and the third is a straight up mistake (and fraud on the part of a few individuals). None seem "irrational".
On the other, you have a whole political party that has simply "decided" to reject long-settled consensus science on the basis of what they "want" to be true philosophically.
Why do you say that tax breaks to renewable energy or letting greener vehicles use the diamond lane is irrational?
I'll note two things, by the way
1. O&G companies also get tax subsidies.
2. The Republican led government of Texas approved giving electric cars the right to use the HOV lane with one person in the car, so you must thus acknowledge that they are at least as irrational
H ybrids "sort of" appear to be ahead in lower lifetime CO2. They key thing is that they higher GHG emmisions from the eletric grid, regionally, the less good hybrids look. But considering the trend of how fast wind, solar are lowering in cost, where coal isn't, I think the picture is getting better re: GHG emmisions for hybrids and electric, where gas IC engines are not, at least not as fast.
In the conclusion:
"The primary conclusion is that electrification of transportation significantly reduces petroleum energy
use, but GHG emissions strongly depend on the electricity generation mix for battery recharging. "
If you place more load on a grid that's purposefully transitioning away from fossil fuels, the entirety of the extra load should properly be accounted under the carbon emissions of the dirty plants you're shutting down, because that will be delayed.
In other words, the marginal emissions caused by the extra load is the actual consequence, not the emissions proportional to that load.
But PHEVs in my opinion have an overlooked utility for demand dispatch and battery to grid transfers, even when compared to BEVs.
The entirety of a PHEVs battery can be used for either task.
A long range BEV that you use to commute may be put in a mode where the power company is free to decide when to charge the battery once it's above a user set minimum. This allows off demand to be shifted to follow renewable production.
But for a PHEV, that minimum is zero. While the battery isn't as big as a BEV, the portion set aside for this purpose may be as large. During a heat wave, they don't have to pull anything from the grid, and can in fact contribute. Dirty power, but much less impactful than building power stations for a few days a year.
The net result is a vehicle that acts as a BEV for commuting, is able to travel long distances without a supercharger, and allows the grid to tolerate higher renewable mixes.
I think it makes a ton of sense today. But the market is shifting so quickly, it may only for a short window.
>Hybrids "sort of" appear to be ahead in lower lifetime CO2...
I think that this is unnecessarily cautious, to the point of being misleading.
The right answer is "Hybrids ARE lower than ICEs when it comes to GHG emissions" - this is true in general and of all hybrids collectively. It may not be true in some rare individual cases, where the hybrid is not particularly efficient and the electricity is generated from coal (see figure ES1 in the Argonne paper you linked above).
I can get a tax rebate for purchasing an Oil-powered vehicle, or are you deliberately misreading what I posted?
Tax rebates for "going green" is irrational because it defies its own purpose! If EV's are great, they're great because they emit less NOx, and that should be the impetus to switch. If Democrats are the Superior party, and they know best, they won't need financial incentives (read: bribery) to promote the Superior Choice. But really by "incentivizing" various things, they are proving what they're actually about: pay-for-play.
People do not make choices based on all global facts. If everyone in the country bought a car that pollutes less, we're all better off. If only I buy a car that pollutes less, and everyone else does whatever, I am poorer but not healthier. Thus it makes sense to incentivize individual choices that benefit society.
Additionally, entrenched markets can be difficult to enter. If solar would win a fair race against petroleum, but it's starting centuries later, it may have no chance without initial subsidies.
> Tax rebates for "going green" is irrational because it defies its own purpose! If EV's are great, they're great because they emit less NOx, and that should be the impetus to switch.
"Impetus" is an issue of opinion, not rationality. Some people are incentivized by different things. But if the government as a whole wants less gas used, it can use money as a carrot.
I mean, if you want to call that "irrational" then basically all government spending or credits are irrational. Sales tax is irrational. Farm subsidies are irrational. The mortgage interest rate deduction is irrational. Military spending is irrational. Parks are irrational. Sports stadiums are irrational. Public universities are irrational. The term loses its meaning.
Everything is "pay for play" (as you put it) in a real economy. We, as represented by our elected government, pool our resources to get things that we can't get by individual action. This is like government 101, dude.
For coal, maybe the focus on climate change and CO2 is the wrong way to fight this.
If an ideology forces people to deny established facts, that ideology is pernicious and pathological. I don't think such problems can be sidestepped. If it's come to "don't mention CO2 pollution or you'll offend" when it's literally threatening the planet, well, offending becomes necessary.
> Tell people to reduce coal to reduce CO2 for climate change and you will get a strong split along D and R lines.
Why? Seriously, for someone outside the US, why in the name of anything that is holy to anyone, would people actively try to destroy the planet and justify it with their ideology?
I mean, I get that you can have shares in a fossil fuel company, and you don't care if your children and grandchildren will have a place to live on. But I honestly do not understand why the split is "along D and R lines" — how does this have anything to do with political affiliation?
I think a lot of it comes down to the fact that a long time ago Al Gore being a major advocate for legislative change, and of course, if the other side of the aisle says something, it has to be wrong and bad. Simple partisanship.
The father of a friend of mine lived in texas in a refinery area. He was a reasonably healthy guy, but died quite young (~50) of a brain tumor. I couldn't help but wonder.
Thank god Obama set us on the right track. The current administration is doing everything to hamper this great progress in terms of converting to renewable energies.
Lets get some real leadership back in the White House in 2020!
The majority of the US electorate is underinformed and/or misinformed.
The most popular cable news network is Fox News, which pushes straight-up falsehoods as propaganda for the right. That's not to say the left-wing networks are innocent, just that the most popular one is also the most dishonest. It has a wide reach and many voters get all of their news from only this network.
The right-wing party is completely bought out by the fossil fuel lobby, which has peddled the "global-warming-is-a-myth" narrative since the early 80's. Both the party and this lobby push that narrative through the right-wing media, which uninformed voters eat up, as the left-wing party has been completely demonized to them via that same media.
Those who trust these right-wing media outlets often do so on principle since these outlets are not "leftist" and the "left-wing media" is "out to get them". As a result, they often do not trust other media sources.
There is also the poisoning of the well that is filter bubbles on social media platforms (particularly Facebook) but I won't get into that as this comment is quite long already.
Hopefully this explains our problems to an extent. (I love explaining/ranting to non-Americans as they can empathize with my incredulity.)
Please don't take HN threads further into political flamewar. All such discussions just circulate the same generic material, and it's exceedingly tedious.
What you're saying is not very far from what I've observed as a person who moved to the states ~2 years ago.
But it seems that current situation is not Fox New' fault. Read this quote from Isaac Asimov from decades ago:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
To me it seems that Fox News is riding on the wave of this ignorance and fueling it.
Edit: I feel like I need to add another opinion. This phenomenon exists in, probably all countries.
It's just that in the U.S. the stakes are so high, that anything that could be exploited, is going to be. And exploiting under educated voters is not exactly new.
> The majority of the US electorate is underinformed and/or misinformed.
It starts long before that.
Most of the US is poorly educated and lacks critical thinking capability. That is the fault of a broken education system focused on the lowest common denominator instead of helping the top or even just supporting the middle.
It is because of the love of modern mythology[1] in US culture. Starting from the religion, ending in the love of superheroes. You cannot change current generations, they are too ignorant for that. But you can start work with schoolchildren, promoting critical thinking instead, in the style of Less Wrong[2] or Rational Wiki[3] projects. THAT will change people, at least most of them.
P.S. Yes, I am aware there a lot of biases and illogical elements[4] in the Less Wrong community as well, but it is still a step forward from the current state of affairs.
I think most Americans receive a quality education that covers a lot of really valuable material. The US population isn't the most well educated, but it's unfair to our teachers to say that most Americans are poorly educated.
I disagree as a product of the southern education system. Worth noting that some schools can't even afford to stay open five days a week.
Gems from my public schooling in South Carolina:
1. A teacher telling me to put my Harry Potter book away as it was written by Satan. Not that it was satanic or written by a Satanist. No, written literally by the hand of Lucifer himself.
2. The moon landing might not have happened. I got sent to the principal's office for refusing to back down over this.
3. Dinosaurs might not have been real.
4. Evolution probably isn't real.
5. Having sex before marriage will give me herpes.
I had a very similar experience in middle school and high school in rural Florida, almost point-by-point. Yet I thought I had rather decent education.
So what if my 11th grade American History teacher gave a week-long seminar on the Civil War as "states rights", and explained to the class (nearly 1/3 of which was black) the lexicon of racial classifications--"now a _blue_ black was somebody who was really dark and because of the sun reflected on their skin...". I still learned 99% of the same American History as everybody else. Most of us were rolling our eyes in class, anyhow, and while these types of teachers are not uncommon, they're not exactly common, either. It's more like that they're tolerated because it's understood that they represent a persistent aspect of the local culture that isn't going anywhere. And for the most part for any particular subject you're learning from multiple different teachers at different times, so it's not like you don't learn the legitimate subject material. It's more like you're taught what today we call "alternative facts", and in practice they're really only taken in by the same segment of the population that's creating those facts. If a kid grows up steeped in this culture at home, the presence or absence of it at school is almost irrelevant. The important point is that they're at least exposed to the real facts--which they are, perhaps with the exception of sex education.
Combined with the fact that most people aren't particularly intellectually curious and don't retain much of the detail, it's sufficient that they're taught the proper material in broad strokes. And they are.
Plus, after having traveled the world some as an adult, most places around the world--even in places Americans look up to as more "civilized"--have similar issues where local biases and mythologies are taught as fact when they're glaringly, painfully wrong-headed to more objective observers. While most of the kids in my class were rolling their eyes, there are kids in similar classes in Asia, Africa, Latin America, the Middle East, and even Europe eagerly taking notes on some ridiculous and patently prejudiced narrative.
The weird thing about being American is that we've been having an intense, rancorous, open argument about ourselves and our prejudices for at least 50, if not 100, or even 200 years. Everybody else gets to watch it, too. You'd think Americans are the most racist, bigoted, backward people on the face of the earth. In reality, it's just that we were one of the first--and still one of the few--to recognize our bigotry and prejudices systematically. Not just by an intellectual, bourgeois elite. Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy. In most parts of the world people will treat claims that group A is worse than group B no more worthy of suspicion than claims that the sun rises in the East and sets in the West. Except for Americans--everybody knows how racist Americans are. Racism is an American problem. It's why they're talking about it so much.
To be clear, we are racist and we are biased. I don't want to say that we're any more or less these things than somewhere else; I'm not sure what value there is in that comparison.[1] But there's a level of self-reflection here that is absent or at least lesser in most of the rest of the world.
[1] I mean, we had slavery here. That's crucial. But so did most of the Americas. Slavery was at least as formative to Brazil as it was to the U.S., and any curious traveler to Venezuela, Columbia, and even Ecuador can see shadows of the same anti-black prejudices and ostracism we're familiar with in the U.S., entirely home grown and stemming from their native histories of slavery. It's just these shadows are often simply considered as the way things are supposed to be, though I think Brazil is more like the U.S. than other countries in how they've internalized a more sophisticated ability to reflect on these things.
> Even the most bigoted American won't take at face value a narrative that group A is intellectually, genetically, or morally inferior from group B. Every coal rolling white nationalist (not that these things always come together) have shockingly modern and sophisticated ideas about race and culture, even if cringe worthy.
I acknowledge your experience, but I'm not sure how to take this. Can you help me understand what kind of modern ideals about race and culture an avowed racist would have?
So, for example, where once people might say that blacks are X, Germans are Y, or Jews Z because of intrinsic qualities--godly design, genetics, or whatever mechanism du jure--today such people might instead admit, at least to some extent, the historical accidents and cultural forces that assigned the supposed group traits.
So where once upon a time people claimed that blacks were more prone to criminal behavior by their nature, today they might say that rap culture teaches and perpetuates violence. They might admit that slavery and Jim Crow is at the root of black poverty, but then they'll say something like, "but now they have equality of opportunity", implying that any failures to advance are personal failures.
Jews are good with money not because they're greedy, baby eating Jesus killers but because they were relegated to that role by limitations on the types of work they were permitted it perform in Medieval Europe. (Even many liberals believe this, and while I suppose it's infinitely more true than Jews being baby eaters I think that narrative is much more self-serving and misleading than people realize.)
Such thinking often starts and ends in the same places in terms reinforcing hierarchies, but it's circuitous. These are narratives that people engage with more critically, as opposed to passively receiving and internalizing ideas about intrinsic traits. They tweak them to incorporate their own lived experiences, and the narratives are generally more dynamic. Crucially, they recognize the role of extrinsic factors.
Or take the narrative about how women's bodies can prevent pregnancy after a rape: it's obvious people who espouse this narrative are attempting to resolve some serious cognitive dissonance about a woman's autonomy. But that means they've already internalized the legitimacy of a woman's autonomy, it's just that they're not prepared to let it displace other deeply held ideas about women's role in society.
Even the most progressive Americans and Europeans struggle with the "problem" of the hijab. It's less of a problem for Southern conservatives--the hijab is clearly a symbol of male religious domination that should be opposed. It's just so weird. You would think Southern evangelicals would better understand how a women could legitimately and voluntarily take up such a strict cultural discipline. Where I lived many evangelical women, especially the Pentecostals, wore ankle length skirts, plain clothing, and kept long, straight hair.
This is all progress, I think. In many, perhaps most places in the world these aren't questions you ask. People will literally say that racism doesn't exist one moment and the next moment they'll explain how group A are the garbage collectors and group B the shop keepers as if their society was a carefully and perfectly constructed utopia. They tell you the sexes are coequal while finding the notion of a woman CEO preposterous. And I suppose in some way they're right. Can there be racism or sexism when people can't even conceive of an alternative world, or at least conceive of it as being anything other than farcical?
I'd wager those are exceptional cases, but even if they're the norm, being able to read is above and beyond many.
In Chicago, my peers were promoted to the point of graduation still being functionally illiterate. In Northern Virginia, my 4th grader was barely a 1st grader by ability - math, reading, and general knowledge - but kept getting promoted.
After observing some neighbors, I tend to think that Fox news and the likes are not really misinforming but mostly a reflection of these people. Echo chambers etc etc
During periods of transition, it can help to take the meta perspective. Fox began its remake first. It began during the Obama administration. Hollywood is being tested now. Some have been late to get the memo.
I drove from Illinois to Arizona just last week. In west Texas, steady winds were turning hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of energy converters. Below those turbines were enormous fields of corn rivaling anything seen in southern Illinois. Ethanol? When the wind farms ended the feed lots began. Thousands and thousands of head of cattle being fed from hay piles five hundred feet long and two stories tall. Beyond that, a thousand head of black angus free grazing next to man-made water resevoirs a thousand foot wide.
One thing you learn about Texans -- they know how to scale.