Going from renewables to nuclear...

[Marcel Birgelen]

There is just about no way to respond to Marcel without getting into politics, particularly his first part. There are families that politics are their brand and what they do...the same way you may see lawyers and doctors or construction workers. This country started with John Adams (#2) and then John Quincy Adams (#6). Each can stand or fail on their own. I, personally, find that both sides of the political spectrum to be equally reprehensible...differently but neither do I feel safe or good about. That is about as far as I'm going to take that.

I get that there are families which tend to specialize in a certain field of business, but we're not talking about lawyers or some career government functions that are mostly a-political. Getting back to the time of the Roman emperors: There just were some families that were specialized in ruling the rest of the world.

As to science. There has been perversion on just about every side with it. You get pseudoscience whereby one just has to make a claim, which requires near zero effort, and quickly spreads and then there is evidence based science where it takes a great deal more effort to contradict the pseudoscience and for probably little effect since people want to believe whatever they already believe...particularly if it makes their life easier.

My problem with the current situation is that nothing the U.S. government puts forward can be trusted, yet according to the core cult and blind mass that follows them, it's handled as the absolute truth. Any form of criticism is labeled as "fake news". The trick here is that every lie put forward requires a a lot of work to debunk. They're flooding "the zone" with so many lies, debunking them all becomes impossible and many of the sheeple aren't even interested in the truth anymore. This is pure propaganda and fascism 101.

[Steve Guttag]

While I don't dispute that at all, the other side is just as guilty but in an opposite way. They get so captured and profess knowledge that do not have and have no tolerance for descent that I find them equally as dangerous. It has created a complete distrust in "experts." Once a narrative gets made, it is near impossible to let proper "science" to find the best answer.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, it's quite something to be stuck between a rock and a hard place... but I'm certain that right now, the rock is harder and more abrasive than the hard place, so to speak...

[Lyle Romer]

Marcel, it is extremely disingenuous of you to post a video like this, specifically to get around forum rules about no politics. I thought that the politics was going to be around energy policy. instead, the video is just a left wing, anti-Trump rant with a long lead in discussing solar energy that could have been covered (and has been by many people) in under 15 minutes. I give you credit for finding a a way to get this past Brad while at the same time ensuring that nobody can provide any counter points without violating the forum rules.

As to the "bait and switch" topic, utility scale solar with battery backup has potential to generate a lot of the power we use in an economical way. At the same time, fully electric vehicles are not ready to replace vehicles that are at least partially gas powered anytime soon. In rural areas, especially in cold weather, it might actually be impossible to tow a trailer with any significant load between charging opportunities. Fully electric vehicles make a lot of sense if you have the ability to do the vast majority of charging at home and your daily commute and typical driving is well within the 60% of the real-world range of the vehicle (to keep the battery between 20% & 80% for maximum long term battery health).

That said, if you only have one vehicle, having a fully electric one is too much compromise. If your family has more than one vehicle, at least one should at least be a plug-in hybrid. Also, nothing is as utopian as this guy makes it sound. Solar facilities are not completely maintenance free. Things fail sometimes and need to be repaired, especially equipment that operates outdoors exposed to the elements. I see LEDs (which are basically the opposite function but similar technology of a PV cell) that are supposed to have 50k hour operational lives failed in the arrays of parking lot lights within a year or two all the time.

The land area required for solar also needs to be considered. While it probably doesn't matter much in the desert in the southwest, there is going to be some consequence of covering land that currently has vegetation on it with solar panels. I don't know what the consequence is or how severe it is but it is something that needs to be studied so that cost/benefit decisions can be made. Natural gas is still very important because even going full speed ahead with solar rollout, it will take many years to be able to build out enough capacity to replace a significant percentage of current fossil fuel power plants.

Hopefully Brad will remove the video and the political comment from the original post in this thread. I just deleted my concluding sentence because I want to respect the forum rules.

[Mike Blakesley]

There hasn’t been much moderation on here of any type in many a month. This thread wouldn’t have gotten past the first post five years ago.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Marcel, it is extremely disingenuous of you to post a video like this, specifically to get around forum rules about no politics. I thought that the politics was going to be around energy policy. instead, the video is just a left wing, anti-Trump rant with a long lead in discussing solar energy that could have been covered (and has been by many people) in under 15 minutes. I give you credit for finding a a way to get this past Brad while at the same time ensuring that nobody can provide any counter points without violating the forum rules.

Just like the guy who made that video, I usually don't diverge into politics too much, because politics is usually extremely boring and the general rule of thumb is that it sucks. If you ask me for my personal point of views, then those usually don't align with either "left" or "right", which I consider to be stupid generalist terms to begin with, especially the way it's used today as "us" v.s. "them". But I guess there comes a point in which politics aren't really just politics anymore and I'm afraid we're either close to that point or already beyond that point. I guess the problem here is that you view this as "anti-Trumpism". I think the problem isn't simply "Trump", it's far broader and it concerns everybody. Trump is merely a phenomenon and probably just a temporary one and the problem will also not be solved by voting "NOT Trump", because that already happened in the past and it only made it worse. The essential problem is the way democracy has been slowly eroded away and it doesn't really matter anymore if it's "us" or "them" who's currently in power, it's only getting worse. Ever since 9/11 it looks like the world has taken a wrong turn somewhere, where our rights are slowly siphoned away, each and every month it becomes harder for every normal person to make ends meet and we're set-up against each other. Political or not, I think we're past the time to keep our eyes shut.

That said, if you only have one vehicle, having a fully electric one is too much compromise. If your family has more than one vehicle, at least one should at least be a plug-in hybrid. Also, nothing is as utopian as this guy makes it sound. Solar facilities are not completely maintenance free. Things fail sometimes and need to be repaired, especially equipment that operates outdoors exposed to the elements. I see LEDs (which are basically the opposite function but similar technology of a PV cell) that are supposed to have 50k hour operational lives failed in the arrays of parking lot lights within a year or two all the time.

There still are too many compromises for electric vehicles, that's why we currently don't see everybody switching. I have a plug-in hybrid, because I cannot charge my vehicle at home. "The guy" himself doesn't have solar panels, for a reason, so I guess he isn't THAT utopian. Things will always require maintenance, stuff will fail, will need replacements. But one thing is true: The gas or oil your burn, is gone. It took billions of years to get where we got it from and it's not going back there. Whether or not you factor in environmental aspects, the simple fact is that it makes more economic sense to use the stuff for more durable products than to simply burn it, especially if there are alternatives. As for LEDs: The reason they fail is because they're built to fail. Google about the "Dubai LED", those are manufactured NOT TO FAIL and it works.

The land area required for solar also needs to be considered. While it probably doesn't matter much in the desert in the southwest, there is going to be some consequence of covering land that currently has vegetation on it with solar panels. I don't know what the consequence is or how severe it is but it is something that needs to be studied so that cost/benefit decisions can be made. Natural gas is still very important because even going full speed ahead with solar rollout, it will take many years to be able to build out enough capacity to replace a significant percentage of current fossil fuel power plants.

On a good summer day, Germany produces sufficient energy from renewable sources, primarily solar, that they can run the entire country on it, so the amount of land needed would be manageable in many parts of the world. The unsolved problem still, is storage.

[Leo Enticknap]

This is an issue over which technology and politics have become poisonously intertwined. One side of the political fence believes that the environmental damage done by the use of fossil fuel energy is so significant that trying to eliminate the practice by taxation and legal force is literally a price worth paying, despite the economic damage and fall in living standards that such a policy has now clearly been shown to impose. The other regards this position as the "green new scam" and believes that any restriction on the use of fossil fuel energy (including the use of the tax system to subsidize and promote renewables) is unacceptable government overreach. Neither absolutist position is helpful, IMHO. At one extreme you have California, where we pay $5 a gallon for gas and 40c for a kilowatt hour, and from where the wealth creating economy is fleeing the state in response. At the other, you have Delhi, where in a recent smog event, the air was so poisonous that several were killed and countless others given long term health problems. There has to be a sensible compromise, but it seems that none of our political leaders are interested in finding it.

[Marcel Birgelen]

That's why I despise both forms of extremism... both the Greenpeace types and those who flatly deny that, despite scientific evidence, man-made environmental impact is a thing. They're both screwing us over, one party due to lack of pragmatism and the other by simply not wanting to advance the status quo. The stupidity of it all is that we seem to be switching between both extremes all the time, instead of simply working towards pragmatic solutions and that's what the video, the first part, is actually about.

And if it comes down to "climate change", most realistic predictions indicate we've already missed most of the opportunities quite a while go, so we're going to have to deal with the consequences one way or another. Challenging times ahead, but humanity's progress seemingly works that way. No pain, no gain? Or like my math teacher back in high school once told me: Remember, there is just one universal law: The law of conservation of misery.

[Bruce Cloutier]

Okay. This an interesting thread that I just discovered. I watched about 7 minutes of the video before I realized that it is an hour and a half commitment. I've also read through half of the first page. So I'll get back to all of that.

I thought you guys might find it interesting that I have just short of 50KW of solar on my property. That includes a 3xPW2 system. The whole thing is monitored by a SCADA system, might not surprise you, based on the JNIOR. My electric bills are $0.00 and have been since 2011. And this is the second property that I owned and outfitted with solar. So I can give you a perspective based upon real experience.

Um, I also am on my second Prius. Not so much proud of that. But that 50 MPG over a couple of decades adds up. My wife and I drove to Key West in the Prius. The transportation for that trip cost less than $100 I think. That is not to mention that when you bring a Prius in for service, there is almost never much it needs. It is even easy on the brakes given the regenerative braking.

But I don't have an EV. Right now I can't bring myself to buy any new vehicle. Last year I bought an '02 partly because it doesn't have any of the tech. Okay, maybe more that it is a SLP Firehawk Formula TransAM with under 30K on the odometer.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Currently living in an apartment, solar systems are much more complicated to realize, especially if they weren't deployed right from the start. My parent's house does have a solar and storage system. The heating and cooling system has been replaced by a groundwater-loop-backed heat pump. While that's a freestanding house, the energy bill of that property is just 1/4th of my apartments energy bill... Those systems cost a lot to install, need maintenance, but given the current trend of energy prices, they do pay for themselves, eventually.

But I don't have an EV. Right now I can't bring myself to buy any new vehicle. Last year I bought an '02 partly because it doesn't have any of the tech. Okay, maybe more that it is a SLP Firehawk Formula TransAM with under 30K on the odometer.

You should call Knight Industries, maybe they can give your car the talking car upgrade.

[Bruce Cloutier]

You always hear how many people there are but I wonder how many residences/facilities there are and of them, how many are in a position to do some solar? I don't think it makes any sense to expect everyone to go electric. If you are in an apartment or park on the street, you just can't do it. And it is not inexpensive.

But at some level it can be achieved. Someone owns the apartment building. The municipality designs the parking arrangement.

I am not a fan of rooftop installations but a much smaller percentage can do anything ground mounted. The efficiency of these panels is very sensitive to temperature. My record production days come in the Spring when the Sun is high but air temperatures are still cold. By Summer I don't think I hit 80% of peak very often. And I have arrays on the ground. A rooftop gets very toasty. People want to do projects where the panels track the Sun. I tell them that there is a bigger gain if you can find a passive way to cool them. Besides, if you want more power, sometimes the easy thing to do is add more panels.

It also really sucks if your roof leaks. The solar up there creates a huge headache when problems occur. That said, I let them install the Powerwall panels on the roof of my barn. I had just replaced the roof. And, it is the barn. It can leak.

Also, the solar can be a liability in the sale of the house. That is a huge issue if you are leasing the panels or otherwise don't outright own them.

There is no Cylon head lamp on the front. That car has attitude. So does the OS. And, you don't sit in there and stare at yet another computer screen. It doesn't get unsolicited updates overnight or play commercials in your face.

janos-plate.jpg

[Lyle Romer]

Bruce, I think that the issues you bring up with rooftop solar on houses is a reason that solar installations have quickly shifted to utility scale facilities. Down here in Florida, a very small percentage of houses have rooftop solar (under 5% by my estimate). FPL (the biggest electric company) has gone all in on utility scale solar. From a land use perspective, rooftop makes a lot of sense but it also brings other issues with it that make it less attractive.

Maybe it makes sense to cover parking lots with panels and you get the dual benefit of covering the cars. However, you also add structural expense and complexity vs. just mounting them at ground level. Probably the ideal solution is orbiting solar panels that beam the energy down to earth. However, that has to be very well planned because you certainly wouldn't want to encounter the energy beam, whatever form it is in.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Yeah, solar panels running too hot will loose much of their efficiency. It's not really a big problem in moderate climates though and you see that countries like Germany, even on the few really hot days, still produce more renewable energy than they can consume in peak production hours.

In tropical and desert climates, rooftop installations are far less efficient and therefore less often deployed. In cities, apartment developers and owners of existing apartment blocks could be enticed to build shared facilities. Still, the amount of roof per dwelling/family/person will be greatly reduced, but cities consuming more energy than they produce shouldn't necessarily be a problem.

Building large solar installations over large parking lots isn't a bad idea either. It reduces the amount of concrete/asphalt being warmed up and radiating heat into the neighborhood and it provides a layer of protection against the elements for both cars and people. While you need some construction materials to allow cars to park below it, there is little to nothing you need to do to the actual surface below them. Notably Disney built the biggest solar canopy in Europe over their main visitor and employee parking lot in their Paris resort and I was pleasantly surprised by how it kept me dry on a wet day.

As for beaming this electricity from space... I've heard all kinds of ideas of doing stuff in space, like datacenters in space... Besides the giant beam from space misfiring a few degrees and scorching the neighborhood, the primary issue is getting the stuff into orbit. With current technology, one of those space-datacenter plans would cost more net energy to get it into space than it would use during its expected lifetime...

There is no Cylon head lamp on the front. That car has attitude. So does the OS. And, you don't sit in there and stare at yet another computer screen. It doesn't get unsolicited updates overnight or play commercials in your face.

That's why you used your license plate as commercial space.
But, yeah, I get the appeal of cars that do without screens. There are actually some car makers that are returning to physical buttons and less screens, like Hyundai. While I'm not against progress, I don't consider cars with a single big touch-screen in the center of the car progress. We've had touch screens for decades now, we've kept them out of cars for a reason.

[Bruce Cloutier]

If I had wanted to advertise on my license plate I would have used a different 5 letters. I think Kemeny, who played a role in inventing BASIC, used that on the plate of his huge boat. I think it was a Caddy or Olds or something. I probably should have put something more pointed on there?

Power from space is, I think, what Nikola Tesla was heading towards. Wireless power distribution. There are theories that suggest that is what the pyramids and obelisks were on about in, perhaps, the prior civilization. I don't know. But you can imagine using the Earth and the ionosphere (with the air being a big dialectic) as a huge capacitor for coupling power. Thunderheads short that circuit and cause big flashes of light and loud noises. Just saying.

The solar shelters are kind of ingenious. Instead of those on your roof, build a lean-to in the backyard over your patio and picnic table. I was considering some duct work to draw air from below the ground up across the back of my panels and then up a chimney. The airflow would also just be driven by the sun. The panels I installed at my prior home were (accidentally) placed to take the prevailing winds directly. That was great for cooling. I had wanted to put an anemometer out there so I could do some correlation. Never did. Where my ground mounts are now they catch the breeze but not nearly like the previous site.

Anyway, I am pretty sure that Powerwall Tesla altered my firmware in the past couple of months. I cannot configure my system to completely avoid sourcing power from the grid without actually going off-grid. For a couple of years it worked perfectly but not now. Trust me, I am on that same page as all of you w.r.t. unsolicited software updates!