Bill Bogstad <[email protected]> writes: > So lets say that I accept everything you say about both the > inefficiency and unclean > characteristics of solar PV + battery storage. Are the current > incumbent solutions (Oil, Coal, Natural > Gas) any better on either characteristic? When doing your efficiency > calculations, > please don't cheat. i.e. Do total life cycle back to when the > material was first buried > underground. I suspect that even turning corn into ethanol is more energy > efficient then the process that created fossil fuels.
This book is helpful on this topic: http://withouthotair.com/ It's a little old, but the way he calculates makes me think his numbers should hold up pretty well over time. He avoid economics, so I'm thinking the recent advancements in solar (mostly concerning price per unit energy?) don't change things. He does concentrate on the picture from a U.K. perspective, though. It's kind of like a Doctor Who episode, where the aliens somehow always come to England, but with renewables instead. Still, people on this list probably can take his calculations and apply them to Massachusetts easily enough. I'm wondering maybe for MA if the answer shouldn't be buying lots of Quebec and Labrador hydro (my old country is not paying me to say this, honest) to fill in the power troughs left by solar and wind. I mean, what, you can turn on gas power quickly too, I think, but that's a greenhouse gas, and, jesus, if we ever leave this era of low natural gas prices anyone with a few panels up will quickly find a way to appreciate every last kwh they generate even if it's not coming quite at the right time. What's NE ISO's mix at now, like 60% natural gas? And the next proposed major step (with the first being largely taking advantage of gas prices dropping to be less than coal as I understand it? or perhaps that's unfair) for MA's climate change policy is to switch to electric cars. Yikes. Nuclear still sounds like a needed thing, but I have a hard time imagining a new plant around here anytime soon, and the ones we have are winding down. More reason to fear a gas hike, not to mention the difficulty of building sufficient renewables quickly enough, their disappointingly low power generation per unit land area numbers, or their intermittency. And then there's stuff like this: http://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2017/07/20/dakota-access-developer-new-pipeline-rankling-regulators/LpMzzvtTpFT3KJH6wb7WJO/story.html -- Mike Small [email protected] _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
