- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
- cross-posted to:
- leftymemes@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Didn’t you hear? That’s the problem! The prices must always go up. For the quarterly growth!
[ cries into green but super expensive Romanian electric bill ]
I was about to say, the economics of this post don’t really add up. And sadly, we have a living example behind your computer screen.
That doesn’t change the way lemmy works. “Someone said something supportive of the thing we like. So it must be true.” Too bad economics doesn’t work that way.
If you want things to be cheap, you pit fossil fuel against green energy in real competition. Then they are both forced to get as cheap as possible at every layer of their supply chains if they want their respective supply chains to continue. That’s what kills profit and greed because they have to give up short-term greed for a shot at long-term survival. When you give either or both a government crutch, the executives involved try to reap as much cash out of that crutch now while the crutch exists.
Whether you give a crutch to either fossil fuel or green energy, at the end of the day you are giving it to an executive. He’s going to take advantage of it and not give you what you want every time.
Do you guys remember the incentives for rural internet rollout? Now they are paying premium cost for crapy internet, which the government already paid to exist. It doesn’t matter how much you agree with the thing you want money to go to, you aren’t going to get a good outcome.
LOL son, that is not how this works at all. It wasn’t true when Reagan made the same argument. It wasn’t true when W Bush made the same argument, and it’s not true now.
HINT: You’re trying to fuck with a global price market by changing things at a local level. It’s like trying to fart south to push a hurricane off the coast.
Presumably Romanian electricity is expensive because non-Russian gas is expensive.
Here’s the breakdown of Romanian Energy:
They still have a long way to go to be considered green.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Romania#/media/File:Energy-consumption-by-source-Romania.png
So, the government. Where does it come from?
Where does it go?
Usually the middle east
Cotton eyed Joe
Not necessarily
However, this misses the point. We need to modernize our aging infrastructure as it is on its last leg. It honestly doesn’t matter what drives it as long as it gets done.
Green energy can’t be scarce, therefore cheap. Solar, wind, water, never happen. They can always slow the generators, can’t slow the sun.
You need a place to store that energy, a way to convert it so it’s usable, transfer it to where it is needed. Etc.
can’t slow the sun.
Take a look at what happened April 28th in Spain.
Considering the only conclusion so far is that there was a surge and final reports are not in yet, do enlighten (pun intended).
There won’t be ever a report that’s how Spain operates.
One of the possible reasons was too much sun power and not enough demand. Solar and wind are unreliable.
Anything cheaper for the consumer means less profit, which means less money for bribes, which means conservative governments are against it
Energy is cheaper where the government has a public alternative. That goes for all utilities and services.
Nuclear Energy because green energy is really expensive too
Wrong
Brother in christ, i work with energy companies that do renewable energy and trust me, that stuff is really expensive to maintain for the amount of power you get out of it, Even the amount of environmental disturbance those wind turbines cause alone, un healthy for people, unhealthy for animals(Look it up). Nuclear power is very safe these days and there are storage places like Onkalo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository Which make storing the waste super easy and viable as well as secure for even post human civilizations.
The only thing green energy is good for is politics
Well turbines kill birds. Just 10000 times less than cats. Good luck aligning budget for 10 - 20 years with this volatile economy. I can sustain myself and my family with solar easily
And i cant remember when was the last time solar panels poisoned the land for 10000 years
https://rewi.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/REWI-Solar-Energy-Wildlife-Interactions-Summary-2023.pdf Interesting read on fatalities in north america though they mention they could not find a root cause yet due to lack of data
https://sistinesolar.com/solar-panels-and-wildlife/
- Depending on the kind of setup, if a central tower is used to concentrate the light to boil water the concentrated light become a death trap to birds and insects
- These plants can appear as lakes due to the reflection and colors(Especially in deserts where these are build confusing wild life
- The floating solar power systems disrupt fish activity and affect water quality
- It also messes up migrations of birds(Wind turbines can do this too)
It is still infidelity better than carbon in the skies but if you put this against nuclear energy and treat the MAN MADE NUCLEAR DISASTERS for what they are MAN MADE then you can see that nuclear power in this day and age is very very safe because we have years of safety development.
People who do not understand this are still stuck in the past or follow a global anti Nuclear rethoric without putting in the time to actually understand the technology.
Meltdowns are a thing of the past when thorium salt reactors become mainstream because those reactions dont run away they halt the moment you remove the fuel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molten-salt_reactor
MSRs eliminate the nuclear meltdown scenario present in water-cooled reactors because the fuel mixture is kept in a molten state. The fuel mixture is designed to drain without pumping from the core to a containment vessel in emergency scenarios, where the fuel solidifies, quenching the reaction. In addition, hydrogen evolution does not occur. This eliminates the risk of hydrogen explosions (as in the Fukushima nuclear disaster).[2] They operate at or close to atmospheric pressure, rather than the 75–150 times atmospheric pressure of a typical light-water reactor (LWR).
Nuclear power is really cool and i highly suggest you give it a chance at least in researching it, there are tons of awesome videos on YouTube to help with this which gave me a ton of insight and storage facilities like:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onkalo_spent_nuclear_fuel_repository
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Power_Generation's_Deep_Geologic_Repository
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Waste_Management_Organization_(Canada)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Asse_II
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repository_for_radioactive_waste_Morsleben
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salt_dome_Gorleben
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schacht_Konrad
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolseong_Low_and_Intermediate_Level_Radioactive_waste_Disposal_Center
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_repository_for_short-lived_radioactive_waste
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_repository to name a few give me hope that this nuclear waste has plenty of places to go to sit out their long half time by the end of it becomes inert
I see 2 problems First - human error and human greed.
Second - we solve problems only after we face a disaster, we never know if the system is flawless right now.
And Id rather live near solar grid that might malfunction sometimes and requires maintenance every decade.
But I respect your anti ff point of view. I also understand everything you talking about. I wasted too many years learning chemistry, engineering
When the price goes up it’s because the renewables don’t produce power when there is no wind and sun (which pretty much sums up January here). Building more of something that does not produce power is not going to help with the price shocks.
We need to figure out grid scale storage, fusion or build nuclear power to get rid of fossil fuels. Until then utility bills will be occasionally more shocking than jamming a fork in the outlet.
figure out grid scale storage, fusion or build nuclear power
You don’t necessarily need that, actually. Another option is to invest in a larger, wider grid with more interconnects and more long-range transmission capacity.
Maybe the sun isn’t shining and the wind isn’t blowing where you are … but the sun is shining somewhere, and the wind is blowing somewhere. If you can transmit the power from those places to where you are (and vice versa) then you really don’t need nearly as much storage capacity or continuous generation. If you can transmit power from farther away, that can really help even out the random variability in renewable power sources by averaging them out over a much wider area.
Another often-overlooked constant source of renewable energy is geothermal. Geothermal power plants can be extremely green and efficient, and their power capacity basically never changes at all. They’re only viable in certain places that have geothermal hot spots, of course … but once again, you can solve that by increasing long-range transmission capacity. Build massive geothermal plants in the few places where they’re viable, and then transmit that power to all the places where geothermal isn’t viable.
I know storage is almost viable and i read articles about improved battery technology monthly, nuclear we know works, fusion has been a decade away for the last 50 years. But what transmission technology do we have coming that makes it a contender?
Transmission doesn’t really require any new technology that’s not already in use. Just need to build more of what we already use every day. More high tension power lines, over longer distances, more interconnects between grids, more capacity in those interconnects.
If you really want to go full power on this (and especially if you want your solar power to be continuous generation 24/7) you’ll need to develop a bit of new tech. Well, not so much new tech as just scaling existing tech to be massive. A truly gargantuan transmission line across the Bering Strait could link the two hemispheres into a single worldwide grid. (Though Australia and other more isolated islands might still have to have separate grids and couldn’t take advantage of this as ‘easily’.) If you build that, then you can have a global power grid that the sun is shining on 24 hours a day, so even if solar power was your only power source and even if you had no grid storage capacity, the power grid could still operate all day every day, with that big hemisphere interconnect transmitting power from the day side to the night side, switching direction of flow twice a day.
i read articles about improved battery technology monthly
For grid-level energy storage, we don’t really need any new battery technology. Yes, it might be nice to have cheaper, greener, higher-capacity, more durable batteries, but we don’t need that to make grid-scale storage work. Even our lunky old lead-acid batteries that have been around for over 100 years would do just fine. We just need to build MORE of them. Like, a lot more. (Plus chargers and inverters to change the AC grid power to storable DC and back again.)
But lead-acid batteries have limited life cycles!
They do. But you don’t throw them away when they reach the end of their life cycle – you recycle them. Even completely worn-out and absolutely useless lead-acid batteries can be recycled, recovering 99% of the materials in them. And you can use those materials to build fresh new batteries, likely on a massive scale, running continuously, always recycling the oldest batteries on the grid and shipping out fresh newly made batteries to replace them. Aside from the energy the recycling (and transportation) processes use, it’s pretty much a closed loop system. Recycling and replacing the batteries just becomes a regular maintenance task.
Lots of US states have legislation that lets you choose your energy provider. People buy from the 100% green energy providers if they wish to pay more, not if they wish to save money.
Source: Several of my friends live in these states; they pay more to buy from 100% green energy providers.
Except you can’t choose where your energy is coming from as the grid is balanced by any means necessary and that tick box to buy only green energy is just free money for energy companies.
Are you getting their specific electrons? No. (Electrons in AC systems don’t actually travel very far, you get the same ones jiggling back and forth!) But they make that much more power and your previous provider makes that much less power. The end result is you buy power from that provider, just as promised.
As you said, the grid must be balanced. Your old provider cannot generate the power, and your new provider must generate the amount if power you now buy. If either of those are not the case, the grid is not balanced.
Yeah because companies in the US exploit everything and everyone until they get stopped (which they don’t)
And probably because fossil energy gets subsidised heavily to compete with renewable energy. So on your electricity bill the fossil is cheaper but your taxes are sent there ten times.
Well currently the US is fucked anyway
In the US, a big part of it is that natural gas is a waste product of oil fracking. If you want the oil, you will get a giant gob of natural gas to go with it. The stuff is really, really fucking cheap because of this.
Us is pathetic. Nothing is planned.
No direction. Every 4 years fuckers change shit.Centrally planned china can run circles around
Yeah, China is great!
All dictatorships are more efficient than democracies, so just give it a little time. Our dictator will catch up. It’s our first try at fascism. Cut us some slack.
I’ve heard a lot of definitions of fascism, but the one that makes the most sense, that explains the most is this:
Fascism is what they call it when an empire takes the murderous and dehumanizing policies it uses on it’s periphery - it colonies invasions territories “frontiers” - and begins using them on the citizens of the “homeland” or imperial core.
Germany had concentration camps in its African colonies well before they started ghettoizing Jewish people. The United States has had “fascist” policies all my life and all your life. Those dehumanizing and murderous actions have just been turned outward. But your means always become your ends.
If you want to know the future of this country, look at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Look at the black-sites and the special rendition treaties. The water tables poisoned by depleted uranium ammunition. The families lost to drone strikes as so-called “collateral”. We have always been fascist. Those of us who just happen to live here, no different from the German citizens who simply didn’t know and did not ask too many questions.
The picture you painted frightens me because I know we’re heading there. I’m trying to remain hopeful that we can still stop this insanity.
Yeah, I’m somewhat paralyzed by it myself. It feels mean to spell it out like this, but fuck… I just cannot just let this rattle around in my head for any longer.
There is some cold comfort to know others see this too, that I’m not just driving myself crazy.
Whoever downvoted is either in denial or a fascist.
Yes but how would the fascists get kickbacks and bribes then? That’s a big chunk of their income. Won’t someone think of the oligarchy???
The UK is spending billions on green energy and has the highest electricity prices in the world.
Yep. Meanwhile the US has some of the cheapest and is mainly Natural Gas.
Maybe Nuclear, given it can actually support the base load power, except they need to fully deregulate it first so Nimbys and lawsuits balloon the cost. It shouldnt cost more nowadays in inflation adjusted terms than France building them in the 70s.
Your talking points are ten years out of date. The cheapest form of baseload power now is batteries plus solar. For seasonal variations? Nuclear is so expensive that it’s far cheaper to just build enough to meet your winter electricity demand and have abundant power the rest of the year.
Fission is a dead end technology that people mostly support now so they can feel a sense of contrarian intellectual superiority. It’s all just vibes at this point.
Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?
As far as I was aware there were none, as it is non-feasible outside of areas with hydro dams for power storage.
Do you have an example of a city that runs on renewables with battery storage with no duplicate backup base load generator?
Thankfully cities don’t build isolated power grids.
Shit sun power won’t make my yacht go burr.
No need, use a sail
That’s just solar with extra steps!
