If you want to conserve water, why flush just urine? That’s awfully wasteful. When I lived on the farm, the mantra was, “If it’s yellow, it’s mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down “
Of course, relying on trucked in water tends to make you conserve a little more, especially when the cistern is getting low and a truck can’t get out for a few days.
Why yes, yes it is . . . and because folks weren’t doing that is no small part of the reason that we now have low-flow toilets.
Talk about moving the goalposts!
I am a conservative and I would be all for hydrogen fueled vehicles just as I am all for electric cars. Meanwhile we still need oil and are addicted to it so why not pump as much oil as we need until we don’t need it anymore! Like I said I am all for alternatives. What ever works, works for me.
We ARE currently pumping more and more oil. 75 million barrels/day in the year 2000. 90 million barrels/day in the year 2021.
THAT IS THE PROBLEM.
I have a specific love for fossil fuels: They are the ONLY thing many states and provinces have right now that can provide baseload power, and you can’t run a grid without baseload power. If you think you can replace oil, coal and gas with only wind and solar, prepare for a lot of blackouts.
Other baseload sources are hydro, which is nearly tapped out and nearly impossible to build without endless lawsuits (ask British Columbia), and nuclear power.
Specific to natural gas, until we get enough battery storage to act as ‘peaking’ power sources, it’s the only fuel we have that is burned in a way that can keep the grid stable under varying loads. Hydro, nuclear and coal cannot ramp up and down fast enough. Ironically, the more wind and solar you add to the grid, the more natural gas peaking power you need because you are replacing baseload power with intermittent power so the peaks and valleys get bigger… Better get more of that fracking going.
In Alberta, 20.01% of our energy capacity is from wind and solar - one of the highest percentages in Canada. But you never get close to capacity with those energy sources. In July, our second best month of the year for solar power, wind and solar together accounted for 7.8% of our energy, well below 50% of capacity. Our best month was a little over 11%.
But more importantly, there were several multi-day stretches last month where wind and solar together provided less than 5% of our power, and a couple of two day stretches where both remained close to zero output. In January we had a three day stretch where wind and solar together didn’t rise above 2%. That coincided with a ‘deep freeze’ (-31 degrees high over those days) and the highest energy consumption of the year. We could build 20X as much wind and solar, and still be very short of energy.
Can anyone give me a serious answer to solve this problem without fossil fuels? Bear in mind that we get about 4X as much solar in the summer than in winter, and these are summer numbers. Also, solar doesn’t work at night, so every time the wind calms down we’d be out of power. We have almost no hudro to develop.
We could try building enough wind and solar to replace the capacity of all our other systems - 5 times as much as we already have… And it doesn’t solve the problem. We would still have multi-day periods where they generate far less than 50% of our power, and some periods where they would generate less than 25% of our power needs.
Alberta consumes roughly 9,000 MW of electricity per hour. We would need the equivalent of 103,000 Tesla batteries to give us one hour of backup power. If we were going to have enough battery storage to cover even two days of no power, we’d need about 5 million Tesla Batteries. For one province in a small country.
The largest battery storage system in the world can supply about 409 MWh. That would power Alberta for 2.7 minutes.
So what are we supposed to do to get off fossil fuels? No handwaving, no pointing to research into exotic new things that may come along in a few decades. We are supposed to be transitioning NOW. So if we are supposed to get rid of the dreaded fossil fuels, what’s the plan? Bear in mind that if we shut down coal and gas and oil without a replacement, a winter ‘deep freeze’ will kill a lot of people.
So what are the solutions available?
[This is a nitpick and not an answer to your question.] I don’t know what kind of Tesla battery you’re using in your calculations, but Tesla makes a large, shipping-container-size battery called the Megapack. It can hold 3 MWh, so you’d need 3000 of those to give one hour of Alberta backup. The Megapack (or similar sized other brand batteries) is what’s used in those huge grid-scale batteries.
We have these things called power lines that can move electricity from places where it’s produced to places that need it. Or we could declare Alberta an uninhabitable wasteland; either one is cool by me.
I thought of this thread immediately when I heard that conservatives were wailing and gnashing their teeth because Cracker Barrel (a country-food restaurant catering to rural whites) has added the option of meatless sausage to their menu. They’re angry about the bare fact that in “their” restaurant, someone can choose not to eat meat. They’re angry at the suggestion that everyone doesn’t universally like meat, they’re angry that the situation is changing without their approval, they’re angry that their voice isn’t the only one in the room that matters.
Their love of gasoline is the same thing. It’s exactly, identically the same, but dressed up with “do you know how many XYZ we’ll need” (as if gas stations naturally sprouted up from the ground when we abruptly decided that society would be built entirely around cars).
So far we have a nitpick, a hand-waving answer and a Republican-bashing non-sequitur.
Given how serious this issue is, and the consequences of crashing our grid are so high, does anyone have a better answer?
Where do we get the power from? Where do the lines go? Who has so much extra power that they can provide Alberta with half of theirs? Our prime electricity importers are Saskatchewan, which is in the same boat we are, Montana (ditto), and BC which can’t get its largest hydro project finished and won’t have excess power anyway. BTW. Alberta is already importing a substantial amount of electricity.
In the meantime, the other states on the Western Grid are all heading for shortfalls, no one is building suitable upgrades, and in fact are shutting down existing power sources without a good plan for replacement.
So where are we pulling the power from? Bear in mind that this is something we are being taxed for NOW, to force us to ‘transition’. This is not something that can wait for nation-spanning HFDC power transmission or magical new hand-waving storage solutions. What should we do today to ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels?
B ear in mind that not only do we have to do this, but we have to figure out a way to increase electricity production by at least 15-20% if we want to electrify our cars.
The time for handwaving is over. We need specific, reasonable plans that can get us to Net-Zero without killing people or making them freeze in the dark. So where are the plans? If we want to do this within 10-20 years, we should already have the plan in place, because building new energy systems takes a long time. I’ve seen nothing, other than vague promises to build more wind and solar, which won’t work.
Either they are actually evil or it is piss off the libs and/or they’ve been bribed (even if legally).
The above article is a big reason why no one is doing as you suggest. Who wants to invest $5 billion in an energy project when a large portion of the government is working zealously against your project?
Forget about the opposition. In your perfect world, what SHOULD we be doing, right now? Can you point to a feasible plan? Math isn’t political.
End fossil fuel subsidies.
Okay! We’ve ended fossil fuel subsidies! Everyone pays more for fossil fuel, and we desperately want to get off of it. Your plan to motivate people off of fossil fuel worked. If you want, we can say that all the Republicans have fled the country and you have 100% support for a ‘transition’ away from fossil fuels. Your ideal world has arrived. So…
HOW? What’s the plan? Pretend I am the czar for energy for Alberta, and I am completely with you and have been given carte blanche to de-fossilize our power grid. The only requirement I have been given is that we cannot tolerate blackouts and rationing. WHAT IS THE PLAN?
You guys leep skipping over that little detail. Europe tried doing that, and now they are frantically trying to store enough gas so they don’t have people freezing in the dark this winter. They already have emergency power rationing - and they haven’t made a dent in CO2 emissions and are now going backwards. Let’s not do that.
Everything comes down to feasibility. You can’t force people to transition without knowing what they are supposed to transition TO, and without offering a plan to get there.
I actually have a plan, but your side won’t accept it. So let’s hear yours. Or at least point me to a paper or journal that has a feasible plan.
Otherwise, we’re going to keep doing what we’re doing, which is to come up with marginal plans with maximal costs that waste another decade or two while people get increasingly fed up and wind up voting against anything having to do,with climate change. And if we’re really unlucky we’ll starve and freeze a lot of peoole and trigger another war or two, or the people will rise up and kick the government out as they are doing in some countries in Europe and did in Sri Lanka.
So what’s the plan?
I’m too lazy to look through this thread, so maybe you can point me to it? Or have you delineated it someplace else on the Dope?
Many times. I will be glad to describe it after I hear a feasible plan from the other side. Otherwise it will just derail the discussion.
I thought the conservative mantra was to let the market decide. It will find its own balance. No one needs to hand out a master plan.
So, end subsidies and let the market decide.
But, if you really want renewable energy to succeed then give the fossil fuel subsidies to renewables.
Is such a plan possible? Has such a thing ever been done?
Does someone say we need ten of these and twenty of those and 50 of the other in 30 years and here is the bankroll to pay for it all?
So is it your position that the market can do anything? All we need to do is set the right taxes, and everything will just sort of work out?
If so, that’s a ridiculous position. You could decide that cars cannot burn energy and tax cars heqvily for every joule they consume, and the market still won’t give you energy-free cars, because that would be impossible.
So before you go destroying fossil fuel based energy, I’m assuming that you can at least show that there is some kind of feasible path to a non-fossil energy grid, because it would be highly irresponsible otherwise. People die over this stuff. I don’t need a detailed plan - if it’s feasible, the market can certainly help develop it. But you should be able to at least point to someone’s plan that looks feasible, so we can debate it.
Do you think that if we heavily taxed all forms of non-fusion energy ‘the market’ could just provide fusion energy?
The market helps us sort out options from those that are available or can be feasibly made to be available. So what are the available feasible choices?
I 've already shown that we don’t have anywhere near enough battery storage to handle gaps in renewable power generation, and there is no feasible way we can build that battery storage. I’ve shown that no matter how much wind and solar you build in Alberta and in many other places, you cannot cover the gaps where the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing. I’ve also explained why wind and solar cannot replace natural gas for load following power.
This is not hypothetical - these are the very reasons Germany got itself into trouble by focusing on wind and solar while shutting down fossil,and nuclear.
Let’s do better than that - let’s start a gigantic public works program on the scale of the interstate highway system or Manhattan project. What’s the plan? How do we get from here to a renewable world without destroying countries, ruining economies and starving/freezing peoole to death? Surely there must be SOME plan out there for doing it, Do you even have a link?
Shouldn’t you be asking that before you shut down the system our civilization relies on, or punish people for using it?
Germany forged ahead without a plan, and now Putin owns them, there’s a war next door, their energy is being rationed and their greenhouse gas emissions are rising. That’s what happens when you start destroying infrastructure while assuming that someone will just ‘figure out’ a replacement.
So what’s the plan? I’m told we have to get this done by 2035, only 13 years away. It can take that long to build a single power station. BC’s hydro project is at 17 years and counting. So if we are going to do this that quickly, we need a plan NOW. Where is it?