Wind, Solar Surpassed 10 Percent of US Electricity In March, Says EIA (thehill.com) 179
According to the Energy Department's Energy Information Administration, wind and solar produced 10 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. for the first time in March. The Hill reports: The Energy Information Administration's (EIA) monthly power report for March found that wind produced 8 percent of the electricity produced in the U.S. that month, with solar producing 2 percent. The two sources combined to have their best month ever in terms of percentage of overall electricity production, EIA said. The agency expects the two sources topped 10 percent again in April but forecasts that their generation will fall below that mark during the summer months. Due to the way geographic wind patterns affect the generation of electricity, the two sources typically combine for their best months in the spring and fall. Annually, wind and solar made up 7 percent of electric generation in 2016, EIA said.
Trump won't let this stand (Score:4, Interesting)
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Get ready for federal 'tweaking' to prevent further renewable growth.
If by "tweaking", you mean removing subsidies, then that is a good thing. Subsidies are supposed to be a temporary incentive to innovate, not a permanent crutch.
Time to tax renewables so that coal can be competitive again.
Coal is dying. Killed by shale gas, not renewables. The coal companies don't have money to invest in a lost cause political campaign, and the coalminers soon won't have enough votes to matter.
Re:Trump won't let this stand (Score:5, Insightful)
If by "tweaking", you mean removing subsidies, then that is a good thing. Subsidies are supposed to be a temporary incentive to innovate, not a permanent crutch.
Great. Let's take away subsidies from coal and oil, then.
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Great. Let's take away subsidies from coal and oil, then.
Sure. Dumb subsidies don't justify dumber subsidies.
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Well, with respect to dumb, two years ago people were criticizing solar subsidies because solar produced less than 0.5% of electricity in this country.
If by "dumb" you mean "something I don't like", I literally can't argue with you. But if by "dumb" you mean "obviously has no chance of meeting its objectives", the graph of percent of power generated speaks for itself.
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Subsidies for new clean energy tech are not dumb.
Making the subsidies permanent is dumb.
Solar and wind subsidies have worked well.
But it is time to start phasing them out.
First you crawl, then you learn to walk.
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The federal investment and production tax credits for renewables are scheduled to phase out in the next 5 years, so you got your wish.
Re:Trump won't let this stand (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's take away subsidies from coal and oil, then
Let's examine the subsidies of each:
Solar: Free money to pay for basic Research & Development, Secured loans to build factories, Free Training for solar panel installers, Tax breaks for creating "green" solar panel installer jobs, Free money to pay for half of each solar panel installation, and, artificially high rates utilities must pay solar panel owners, regardless of the utility's ability to actually use the electricity when it is generated.
Oil: Ability to deduct research and development costs from income.
The great thing about oil is the ungodly amount of tax dollars the end-user pays per gallon, as we reduce dependence on Oil, tax revenues will drop, and have to be replaced by collecting more money elsewhere, for example, by taxing electric cars to help pay for infrastructure (roads, bridges, etc.), erasing even the illusion that electric cars are "cheaper". (Oil companies earn less than 10 cents a gallon, the federal government collects almost 20 cents a gallon, and states collect up to 40 cents for each gallon of gasoline sold.)
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Anytime you consider subsidies for oil, you must consider the 2 trillion dollars and 4,000 lives spent in the gulf war.
The same will apply to Solar and Wind power when we go to war to protect the mines where their raw materials come from as well.
And I'm ignoring the ongoing cost of stationing troops and ships to protect oil fields.
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America gets a very small amount of it's oil from the Persian Gulf. We are bigtime producers of our own energy these days.
Most M.E. oil goes to Europe and other countries.
Re:Trump won't let this stand (Score:4, Interesting)
Most M.E. oil goes to Europe and other countries.
That's true but oil is traded on the global market. If an area that produces a lot of oil is all of the sudden not producing oil because of war then oil gets expensive even for those that don't buy oil from that area. That oil has to be replaced by those that continue to produce oil, and increasing production costs money.
I'm not saying that this justifies US military involvement in the Middle East. Quite the opposite in fact. I say let them fight it out amongst themselves. I also say we need to make it clear that we will trade with people that can act kindly to their neighbors, treat their citizens and visitors with respect, and generally act with civility. This trade can include weapons if they like. Keeping the peace does mean being prepared to go to war after all.
The way to allow the USA to not concern itself with what goes on there is to produce enough energy on our own that whatever happens in the Middle East will have minimal effect on prices we pay here. We can do this by drilling for more oil, digging for more coal, putting up more windmills, and building more nuclear power plants.
I've had people tell me that building nuclear power plants will do nothing for the price of oil because oil is primarily for vehicle fuel while nuclear power is primarily used for electricity. I've seen the opposite though. Energy is energy. People will use whatever is cheapest.
I grew up on a farm and I've seen gasoline driven augers and electric driven augers used to move corn. There's advantages to both but in the end it comes down to cost on which the farmer will choose to use. Go to Sears, or wherever you might see lawn mowers and such, and you will see electric mowers next to the gasoline powered ones. This happens on the small scale with suburban yards to mow. On the medium scale with the family farm. Why would this not happen on an industrial scale?
Oil is oil and energy is energy. An economy needs energy. To decouple the USA from the Middle East militarily means that the Middle East needs to be decoupled from the world economically.
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If you're going to blame somebody Oil wars in the middle east, that should be British Petroleum and their 1953 Iranian coup d'état [wikipedia.org] also called Operation Boot.
Re:Trump won't let this stand (Score:5, Insightful)
Oil: Ability to deduct research and development costs from income.
You forgot ability to hand-wave away externalities like carbon release.
And then there's coal, ability to hand-wave away externalities like release of fissile nuclear elements into the air..
Meanwhile, solar panels made in/for the first world are required to be recycled (or at least you're paying for it), and to not leach if landfilled in spite of recycling requirements. And solar panels have paid back the energy cost of their production well within their lifetime since the 1970s. And wind power predates human production of electricity.
Since solar is required to account for its mess, it's only fair to count fossil fuels' being permitted to ignore their respective messes as a subsidy. Since we have no technology which can reasonably clean up what coal in particular has done to our environment, the subsidy for that particular fuel effectively amounts to an infinite amount of money.
Re:Trump won't let this stand (Score:5, Interesting)
And then there's coal, ability to hand-wave away externalities like release of fissile nuclear elements into the air..
People are (rightfully, to some extent) caught up with the radioactive shit that is released by the coal energy industry, but they forget the much worse stuff, mercury, lead, cadmium and other neurotoxic stuff. Especially mercury.
Also: Radioactives are temporary. (Score:2)
... they forget the much worse stuff, mercury, lead, cadmium and other neurotoxic stuff. Especially mercury.
Also: Radioactives are temporary (on geologic, and mostly on historic or shorter, timescales.) Heavy metals are forever.
(Or at least until the planet falls into a sun or black hole, or perhaps near the heat-death if it turns out protons DO decay. By which point, of course, it won't matter that it wasn't really forever.)
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Also: Radioactives are temporary (on geologic, and mostly on historic or shorter, timescales.) Heavy metals are forever.
I was under the impression that radioactives were heavy metals. They're heavy and metallic, do they not qualify?
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Some are, some aren't. (Elemental tritium, for instance, is a VERY light gas.)
They nearly always change what atom they are when they decay. (Exception being those, such as tecnetium-99m, where the nucleus is in an excited state and decays to a non-excited state by emitting a gamma - though it then becomes tecnetium-99 which eventually decays further.)
Some decay processes make heavy atoms lighter - e.g. by emitting alpha particles or by spontaneous fission.
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Geothermal is also allowed to release a lot of radioactivity, because it is "natural".
In some cases, the radioactivity is released whether you put a geothermal plant there or not. But yes, that is a problem. It's been a problem here at The Geysers, in fact.
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It clearly violates the fifth law of thermodynamics, which is why windmills and waterwheels were invented 700 years after the steam engine.
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yep, everyone knows that the Romans use huge refineries and steam engines to build windmills and watermills to produce bread... they where testing nuclear energy, but the barbarians attacked and they never finish it! :D
when people do not want to understand, they simply shutdown their brain and say things like that
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And once again you're a fucking dumbass
[citation needed]
since the meaning is you need spinning generation from fossil fuels and nuclear to maintain system voltage.
No, really, [citation needed]
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because wind and turbines are "static" generation systems, right?
and lets lower the scale... a UPS, using battery, can keep the voltage just fine... and it have no moving parts
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We don't get our oil delivered through the energy lanes of Europe. In fact, the US share of Middle Eastern oil has shrunken dramatically. North America now produces a dramatic amount of it's own oil and gas.
Perhaps, as you imply, we should stop subsidizing the shipping lanes for oil delivered to Europe. That has nothing to do with said 'subsidies' imbalancing the cost of oil in the US.
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We don't get our oil delivered through the energy lanes of Europe. In fact, the US share of Middle Eastern oil has shrunken dramatically. North America now produces a dramatic amount of it's own oil and gas.
True, but oil is a global market -- so unless we decided to ban all exports exports of domestic oil (which is unlikely, even under Trump), disruptions in Europe and the Middle East would increase the price of oil here in the USA about the same as it would anywhere else. Being able to produce oil cheaply in Montana doesn't help Americans much if the oil producers prefer to sell it for more abroad than they can get at home.
To avoid that, we're left policing the world's seas, and picking up most of the tab.
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Banning oil exports/imports will cripple parts of industry.
There are different types of crude. Different refineries process them specifically for their customers. Stopping that import of a type of crude that is essential to say the plastics industry won't fly.
If any restrictions are imposed make the nett sum === Zero at the very least.
Oil pumped in Texas is very different chemically from oil from Saudi and if different to North Sea. etc
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For 40 years, it was illegal to export US-sourced crude oil. It was the Obama Administration that lifted the ban in 2016 [cnn.com]. Prior to that, all US pumped oil had to be used in the US. Would be trivial to go back to that...
We are involved in the Middle East to essentially guarantee the oil flows for our "friends" in the EU who knock us for using our own oil and for military aggression in protecting their own oil supplies...
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It peaked, for the YEAR, at 10% (the rest of the year it is less) - that isn't "seriously cutting into market share", that's "peaking at a noticeable level before sinking back into irrelevence."
That's hell of an asumption. As the rest of the year is still another 6 and a half month, and we haven't even seen the numbers for April and May yet, I would put your claim into the "wishful thinking" category.
A Red is Wind Blowing (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:A Red is Wind Blowing (Score:4, Interesting)
In mid Georgia we've got cotton being replaced by solar panels. My last trip to Columbus I drove through Taylor county, a lot of red clay that used to grow cotton. Those areas are covered by mile upon mile of solar panels as far as the eye can see. It's a brilliant thing considering that when they produce the best is the same time when A/C units are working hardest. The green revolution is here and it's paying it's own way. It continues just fine without subsidies because it makes money. Money talks.
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Re:A Red is Wind Blowing (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me know when Kansas can supply 100% of it's electrical needs through renewables when the electricity is actually needed - producing a surplus of electricity during the day does nothing to power lights at night.
Why is that relevant? The power grid is a large collection of power generation units that have different characteristics and are useful at different times for different needs based on the load at that moment. Having more options is a good thing.
You seem to be laboring under the illusion that one power source has to do it all. There is in fact no such rule.
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Let me know when Kansas can supply 100% of it's electrical needs through renewables when the electricity is actually needed - producing a surplus of electricity during the day does nothing to power lights at night.
That will happen when Americans stop thinking in absolutes and stop making everything all or nothing / black or white, or the current flavour red or blue.
If this ever were to be the case then they'd look back at all the ridiculous things they said and realise how stupid they were for saying them making you hope that we never actually come back to let you know.
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100% can take many, many years... but you can reach the 30-50% within a few years, other country with less money have done it.
Again, to reach the 100%, you need to start with a few % and slowly increase it... It is just like saying "wake me up when 100% of the state have cheap broadband access"... every step is a right step, but things change slowly
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Kansas peaks twice a year and produces about 10% of it's needed electricity from renewables - it's laudable, but not really noteworthy, it's like claiming that your SUV gets over 50 miles per gallon when you go down hill.
Kansas generates about 7-8% of it's needs through renewables every day, that's a good start, but is it really *that* big an accomplishment?
Re:A Red is Wind Blowing (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, battery storage technology is on a rapid downward trend. I was reading about India, which has severe coal-related pollution problems, and just recently the price of solar has dropped there has dropped to be less than coal. Within five years the cost of solar plus battery will be less on a per kwh basis than coal. It doesn't mean they'll be able to conjure the change overnight, but it'll start things going that way.
You didn't think Elon Musk just wanted to be this century's Henry Ford did you? He wants to be this century's John D. Rockefeller (Standard Oil) too. That's why pulling out of Paris pissed him off.
Anyhow, until battery backup of renewables is economically feasible, which will happen soon, there's plenty of fossil fuel generated kwhs that can be replaced with renewables. This is not only good for the enviroment, it'll mean lower local energy prices. That in turn will mean jobs and industry returning to some of those pockets of America that never saw any recovery from the Great Recession.
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I was reading about India, which has severe coal-related pollution problems, and just recently the price of solar has dropped there has dropped to be less than coal.
The price of any commodity gets lower as demand decreases. If fewer people burn coal, reducing competition on price, then coal gets cheaper. This is not a static price so any claims that do not take this into account is suspect.
Within five years the cost of solar plus battery will be less on a per kwh basis than coal.
What keeps people from charging these batteries with coal power? One reason that coal is so cheap is because it cannot follow changes in load. For that we primarily use natural gas turbines, likely true in India too. Maybe they use fuel oil generators, I don't know and I really
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Let me know when Kansas can supply 100% of it's electrical needs through renewables when the electricity is actually needed...
That really doesn't matter. Both home and industrial scale energy storage with days of full-load capacity are already here and affordable. They're also improving rapidly, both in capability and cost. Solar generation, even with old-school energy storage, has already crossed price break-even for much of the continental US.
Also: Solar + wind does a very good job of tracking the va
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Both home and industrial scale energy storage with days of full-load capacity are already here and affordable.
Define "affordable".
My "demand" about 100% energy from renewables includes energy storage, which is to say it doesn't exclude them specifically - it simply means that currently Kansas consumes about 40 thousand megawatts of electricity a year (aprox.) [ku.edu], let me know when renewables (solar, wind, hydro, etc.) can produce those 40 thousand megawatts over the course of 365 days (1 year). You can use any storage mechanism you want to store renewable energy until it is used.
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If it reaches 100% to convince you of the efficacy, then you will be woefully behind the times. Battery banks already live through most data centers, normalizing power prices and effectively making the internet more resilient. They are now being implemented for municipal power storage, alleviating the temporal shifts for generation/consumption.
One of many articles describing these batteries: https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]
Generalizing this concept, here are a few alternatives to electro-chemical st
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Feel free to point out errors in the analysis.
Re: A Red is Wind Blowing (Score:2)
I didn't click your link. You told me the problem already. It ignores everything else.
I feel inclined to make a joke about spherical cows, but I am feeling lazy. But, if it ignores stuff like political feasibility, it's just a pointless but of math. I do love me some math, but usually I prefer it to have a point.
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In an analysis [withouthotair.com] done by the English physicist David McKay, he goes into some detail about how the US is one of a very few countries where solar and wind could provide 100% it its energy needs keeping the current standard of living. This is based purely on available energy in the environment and ignores everything else.
Feel free to point out errors in the analysis.
Does he mean ignoring things like chopping up endangered species of birds and bats, destroying delicate desert habitats and such?
bah! only 10% (Score:2)
USA really needs to improve that... Here in Portugal, annual wind power supply is already above 50%, with some months reaching 80-90%. Solar should be a little less than 10%
In the beginning, green energy was more expensive (so i needed subsidies to startup the market), but now its the same price as fossil energy and we do not any subsidies anymore.
Only because of subsidies (Score:2)
Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Solar and wind sound great until you eliminate the subsidies. Take away those subsidies and they become far more expensive. Once that happens, nobody will want to pay the extra costs and renewables will decline again. Like everything with the climate change agenda, it's a house of cards built on deception and lies.
Fresh meat! Give me a list of the energy sources that do not get subsidized.
Oil - yes, Gas yes, Nuclear? Bitch, please.
Come back and make your argument when the only energy source left that is getting any form of subsidy is alternative.
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subsidies are everywhere, in I.T. and textiles and food and vehicles
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The subsidies nonhydro renewable energy receives account for about 2 of the 10 cents per kWh while all other forms account for fractions of a penny. That's the problem, renewable subsidies are significantly higher then the profits, they would literally be loosing money if not for subsidies.
So anyhow, here is the question. Actually a couple. Are the non renewable energy sources going to last forever? Or if they aren't, we just fold up the tents and kill ourselves?
As well, should the US go to the concept of - if it doesn't work from the very beginning, doesn't spring like Venus from the ocean, fully formed, it must not be done? Not everything works right from the beginning, and susidies have allways been used, either through regular or th eultimate technology driver, total war.
In other wo
please not this again (Score:3)
Solar and wind sound great until you eliminate the subsidies. Take away those subsidies and they become far more expensive. Once that happens, nobody will want to pay the extra costs and renewables will decline again. Like everything with the climate change agenda, it's a house of cards built on deception and lies.
Fresh meat! Give me a list of the energy sources that do not get subsidized.
Oil - yes, Gas yes, Nuclear? Bitch, please.
Come back and make your argument when the only energy source left that is getting any form of subsidy is alternative.
So tired of this ignorant argument. Check the EIA website. In their latest report (2013) Coal, gas, and nuclear combined received less than $200 million in direct expenditures, Renewables received $8,363 million in direct expenditures. Pretty big difference.
You're probably looking at the tax expenditures column, which means tax breaks for asset depreciation, not spending. In any case, the tally for tax expenditures reaches $5,453 million for renewables and $4,128 for everything else combined (the everythin
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Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:4, Informative)
Oil is the reason we war in the Middle East, sacrificing lives and tax payer money; it's another form of subsidy. War a racket, as the great Major General Smedley Butler pointed out. We have reached peak oil, and future dependency on oil projects a bleak future, with more war, scarce resources and dire prices. Raytheon, Academi/Xe/Black Water, Lockheed Martin and others would love such a Dystopia. Not me.
Subsidizing alternate energies is a good idea. Wind, solar, water and yes, even other energy sources like fusion should be subsidized, encouraged and exploited.
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The US government, in it's ever diligent attempt to grab every cent, declares that you cannot depreciate the full value of an item on purchase so they estimate the life of the object and have you depreciate it over that time. The rational way would be full depreciation on purchase and then pay taxes on the sale. But, that's not the way it works.
This is especially horrible on capital intensive pr
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So Big Oil isn't just
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I don't usually consider foreign tax credit as a subsidy and I need to look into the others you mentioned such as the definition of non-conventional fuels. (Is that a subsidy for non-carbon based fuels?)
We were talking about tax breaks for energy types (carbon v non-carbon) not companies. (If Exxon gets one of the tax breaks for developing a wind farm it's still a subsidy for alt-energy even though it's going to Exxon.)
As far as 3rd Part
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Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wind and solar have already become cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. Renewables have already won.
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Wind and solar have already become cheaper than coal and gas without subsidies. Renewables have already won.
Then why are we seeing things like this?
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Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:4, Interesting)
There's some variation there depending on how you measure, you can see there are multiple charts, but in none of those are solar or wind dependent on subsidies to be more cost effective than most of their competition.
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simply... fox news and oil lobbies
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Storage solutions would benefit the entire provider market, and the cost of any program to boost that sector should be attributed fairly. They and other grid improvements aren't as sexy as panels and windmills, so they don't attract as much serious investment.
Also, where is this vaunted "invisible hand of the free market" that's supposed to make companies that schedule their industrial power consumption to match when electricity is cheaper do better and thus grow to dominate the market?
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Well, do you eliminate all the various ways the governments of the world subsidize fossil fuels? I'm not just talking about allowing oil companies to externalize their environmental costs, I'm talking cash, like the 21 billion dollars in tax breaks the US gives oil companies to encourage domestic exploration and production.
Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:5, Insightful)
Gasohol/Ethanol is among the dumber ideas for reducing our dependence on crude oil - the more ethanol you add to gasoline, the lower the MPG the car gets compared to 100% gasoline. Then there is the energy burned growing and harvesting the corn, processing the corn, transporting the additive, and then blending in the additive to create Ethanol.
The ONLY reason ethanol is a thing is because politicians forced it on the American consumer - it serves no other purpose than to further the goals of the politicians that keep it in place.
Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:5, Funny)
It's true. Round here there was an error once and they added too much alcohol. It made the cars go backwards.
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I tested in my car (we have pure gasoline stations in Texas) and I got 12 more mileage from pure gasoline than I did from "up to 10%" ethanol. That would indicate that in some cars, the ethanol is worse than a neutral filler.
Government sites estimate it should have been a 6-7% loss of mileage.
Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:4, Informative)
The problem is largely one of engine design. Most cars sold in the US are fairly low compression. Under those conditions, the burning ethanol just adds heat, no real power.
In a high compression engine, especially with a turbo is where ethanol works well. Australia sells a fuel mix that's 85% ethanol which is really popular with performance car owners as you get a lot more power from the same engine.
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Depends on the ECU. The vehicle I have senses how much booze is in the gas tank, and adjusts mixture accordingly. It is happy up to E-85, and with E-85, it will add a few (5-10) horsepower... but the overall MPG loss (because alcohol doesn't have the energy density per gallon as gasoline) makes it not worth the bother.
I find it funny watching the soccer moms fight over the E-85 pump when their vehicles are not Flex-Fuel rated, though.
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That should have said 12% more mileage.
I average 265 miles long term with a max of 268. I tested twice and got 300 and 305 miles.
Re:What happens when you eliminate subsidies? (Score:4, Informative)
More to the point, it aids the farm lobby, which, in a rarely photographed mating ritual, causes three-way co-recursive "backscratching" between farmers, lobbyists, and congress people. The bastard sproggs of this unholy activity include higher food prices, higher energy prices, bad land management, never dis-elected congress people, and extra congressional aids to keep track on ledgers of who is doing what to whom and how good it feels.
Corn vs sugar cane (Score:5, Informative)
It depends. Corn ethanol is dumb. Sugar cane ethanol make sense, but that wouldn't help US farmers.
Or if corn was produced without GHG input (Score:3)
So for example, if corn farmers exclusively used solar and wind powered electric tractors, and didn't dump fertilizers on that have a fossil-fuel intensive production process, then maybe corn ethanol would also make sense. But that doesn't happen, so it doesn't make sense.
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ethanol taken from corn is stupid, i agree... but cars tuned for ethanol works just fine... just look to Brazil
even if in ethanol you may get less "MPG", it have a lower cost... you need to compare $PG and CO2PG
looking only to the MPG, nuclear have a much higher MPG!! :D
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They already have. You only have to take a look at the price of oil and gas now.
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That's right, everyone that has a brain has converted their gas-burning SUV to wind power!
I've upped my use of wind power! Up yours!
Re:But how much did this electricity cost? (Score:4, Informative)
How often do people ask why solar is so unpopular?
Almost never since about 2005, because solar has actually become extremely popular [cleantechnica.com].
After being subsidized heavily in the USA for decades this is all we have to show for it. Perhaps we need to stop and think if this is in fact a good use of our tax money.
The price per watt of solar power drops every year and shows no sign of leveling out any time soon. If you don't like the price this year, wait until next year. If you don't like solar power period, at any price, that's fine too -- the world will continue to adopt solar power at an ever-increasing pace, with or without your support.
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The price per watt of solar power drops every year and shows no sign of leveling out any time soon.
That's nice but I asked about the price per watt-hour. That claim on the dropping cost per watt means nothing since so many things can affect the price of solar energy other than the price of the panels alone.
I suspect that solar power advocates don't like to talk about the cost of the solar watt-hour because if they did that then the charts would not look so great.
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> (tracking panels will produce more, but the cost is higher than the extra energy they will yield
That's no longer true for utility installations, where a single tracker moves a whole row of panels. The daily power output goes up 30%, while the installed cost only goes up 10%, so it is a net win.
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Re:But how much did this electricity cost? (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect that solar power advocates don't like to talk about the cost of the solar watt-hour because if they did that then the charts would not look so great.
Utility-scale solar power is now selling for less than three cents per kWh [cleantechnica.com]. So that would be less than $.00003 per watt-hour.
This compares favorably [cleantechnica.com] to coal and other forms of traditional power generation.
My suspicion is that when you think about solar power, you are thinking only about residential rooftop solar power, which is indeed more expensive to due lack of economies of scale. That would be an error, since utility-scale solar power is where the advances in cost-effectiveness are occurring.
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My suspicion is that when you think about solar power, you are thinking only about residential rooftop solar power, which is indeed more expensive to due lack of economies of scale. That would be an error, since utility-scale solar power is where the advances in cost-effectiveness are occurring.
No, I'm thinking of issues with reliability and transmission. Your citations even point out that the costs of storage and transmission was not part of the cost computations. If solar is going to grow beyond irrelevancy then it needs to have storage to deal with night time. That costs money.
If some unit of nuclear energy costs $5 and that same unit of solar energy costs $4 then nuclear still wins because no where are you going to find storage through the night for $1. For solar to compete we'd have to se
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The infrastructure for gen/load time gaps is indeed real. However, you may want to compare that infrastructure to oil, gas and nuclear infrastructure for storage and waste disposal / containment. When a municipality builds a battery bank, it is hooked to the general market. Thus, they can buy off -peak power and begin to normalize the competition.
This cascades into prices for renewable power going up, increasing the investment returns per field. Some companies will spend more for "exploration" in wi
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Your mistake is in not thinking the grid already has lots of storage, in the form of water behind hydroelectric dams and stockpiles of biomass fuels. These currently supply about 10% of US electricity, and nuclear supplies about 20%. There is no reason for them to stop. Electric cars will supply additional storage once they exist in larger numbers.
The US consumes about 4,000 GWh per night in total. That would be 60 million Tesla automobile's worth of capacity. Since we have other sources of night-time
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Your mistake is in not thinking the grid already has lots of storage, in the form of water behind hydroelectric dams and stockpiles of biomass fuels.
I know that the grid has lots of storage, it's called nuclear, coal, and natural gas. The energy is stored in the fuel they use.
Since we have other sources of night-time power, millions of electric cars would make a significant contribution.
Are you saying that the grid would be so unreliable that people would have to run their houses off the batteries in their cars? Or, are you saying that the grid would be so unreliable that people would have to buy a battery pack for their house in addition to the one in their car? If people have a choice between an electric car and a non-electric car in this world then why would
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The real cost of solar is in storage. But for peak usage during the day to prevent having to fire up more generators it's perfect. I saw one installation where they used excess solar electricity to pump water uphill to a reservoir. At night they used the water to run through a dynamo to recover the electricity. An interesting concept, using gravity to store power.
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I want to see the economics of this so I can judge the validity of this as a future energy source.
Renewable adoption of the world at large is not actually up to you, so your demand seems more than a bit empty. But if you really want to know the answer, Google is your friend.
Sadly, I expect you'll use your findings like a drunk uses a lamp post -- for support, rather than illumination.
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So, we see wind and solar combined to reach an arbitrary goal of 10% so that it is worthy of a headline apparently. One question that I'd like answered is how much this electricity cost. Not how much the consumers were charged for it, because that would include the government subsidies. I want to see the economics of this so I can judge the validity of this as a future energy source.
...In reality, it’s not a good thing at all, and certainly not a positive trend. In fact, as Climate Depot and the Washington Examiner point out — citing an American Enterprise Institute study — the job numbers actually underscore how wasteful, inefficient and unproductive solar power actually is.
That is glaringly obvious when you look at the amounts of energy produced per sector. (This tally does not include electricity generated by nuclear, hydroelectric and geothermal power plants.)
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yep, it is easy to compare the already establish coal and fuel industry, with all the required equipment, jobs and know-how against the wind and solar, where you do not have anything or weak industry... that is why you get subsidies for green energy, you need to create the basic market, industry and known-how... to reduce the CO2 emissions, we all can not wait for years for the market to slowly emerge
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Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal even without subsidies. (its called technology) Yes solar plants produce energy 24/7. Wind is very reliable. Guess what ignorant one? The wind is always blowing. That's how weather works.
We get more electricity from Solar than from Oil. We get more electricity from Natural Gas than from Coal.
Solar capacity is doubling every few years. Wind capacity is doubling every 4-5 years.
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Solar and wind are already cheaper than coal even without subsidies.
[citation needed]
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Also look up the growth curve in solar installs.
Whatever. It's easy to double the installs year over year when it can't make even 2% of total output. Also, how long can this last? It's easy to cover up for solar power shortfalls when it can't make even 2% of total output. If all that solar power capacity disappeared tonight would anyone care? I'm pretty sure they don't because it disappears every night.
Solar thermal.
But how much does that cost? Not only does it have to be available 24 hours a day but it has to be cheaper than what we already use. I don't mean c
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what? Here in Portugal we already have a annual 50% wind based energy and increasing each year ... i would say it scales.
We do store energy during the night by pumping water in dams... even if you lose 50% of energy doing that, it is 50% more energy to be used later. What you need is a good energy distribution system, that is what needs to scale.
Also, (for now) you still need fallback to coal, gas or fuel, do not try to imagine a 100% green energy right now, that will take many years.. but to reach the end
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No that Wind and Solar is 10% generated, so solar is 2% * 15% = 0.3% of the Total US energy Consumption