India Hydropower Output Records Steepest Fall In Nearly Four Decades (reuters.com) 69
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: India's hydroelectricity output fell at the steepest pace in at least 38 years during the year ended March 31, a Reuters analysis of government data showed, as erratic rainfall forced further dependence on coal-fired power amid higher demand. The 16.3% drop in generation from the country's biggest clean energy source coincided with the share of renewables in power generation sliding for the first time since Prime Minister Narendra Modi made commitments to boost solar and wind capacity at the United Nations climate talks at Paris in 2015.
Renewables accounted for 11.7% of India's power output in the year that ended in March, down from 11.8% a year earlier, a Reuters analysis of daily load despatch data from the federal grid regulator Grid-India showed. India is the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the government often points to lower per-capita emissions compared to developed nations to defend rising coal use. A five-year low in reservoir levels means hydro output will likely remain low during the hottest months of April-June, experts say, potentially boosting dependence on coal during a period of high demand before the monsoon starts in June. [...]
Globally, hydropower output fell for only the fourth time since 2000 due to lower rainfall and warmer temperature brought about by the El Nino weather pattern, according to energy think tank Ember. Hydro output in India, the sixth-biggest hydropower producer, fell nearly seven times faster than the global average, Ember data showed.
Renewables accounted for 11.7% of India's power output in the year that ended in March, down from 11.8% a year earlier, a Reuters analysis of daily load despatch data from the federal grid regulator Grid-India showed. India is the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, and the government often points to lower per-capita emissions compared to developed nations to defend rising coal use. A five-year low in reservoir levels means hydro output will likely remain low during the hottest months of April-June, experts say, potentially boosting dependence on coal during a period of high demand before the monsoon starts in June. [...]
Globally, hydropower output fell for only the fourth time since 2000 due to lower rainfall and warmer temperature brought about by the El Nino weather pattern, according to energy think tank Ember. Hydro output in India, the sixth-biggest hydropower producer, fell nearly seven times faster than the global average, Ember data showed.
Solar and nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
The only types of energy we should have. Fossil fuel is bad because it makes religious psychos rich. Forget climate change, oil makes uneducated religious crazy people disproportionately rich, that's fucking dangerous. We need to double down on solar manufacturing and nuclear ASAP. Like full speed, Manhattan project level. Make fully automated solar panel factories .. sand and iron ore in one end and solar panels out the other.
Re:Solar and nuclear (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Solar and nuclear (Score:5, Insightful)
You have this backwards. Nuclear can't be a stopgap because it's simply not possible to build in a reasonable timeframe in which it were effective. Nuclear is a *long term* solution, but one that has an incredibly high cost. Gas is a stopgap. Solar and Wind are intermittent, pumped hydro takes forever to build, battery storage lacks manufacturing capacity.
One interesting other one is ammonia cracking. Building out excess green energy, using the excess to generate hydrogen and storing it as ammonia in a tank to be cracked or even fed directly into turbines to provide power while the sun doesn't shine. But honestly the complexity alone here is holding it back, plus the technology isn't proven so it suffers the same problem as nuclear: timing.
Re:Solar and nuclear (Score:5, Interesting)
Nuclear can be built cheaply and safely. You just need to get out of paranoia mode. You build small pebble bed reactors . You dont try to reprocess or refuel. You treat them like batteries. Have a few spread across a large city with local grids. When you are done, dump them in the Mariana trench and replace with a new one. Make them using Thorium so the Uranium they produce is too poisoned to use to build nukes. Thorium is lot more abundant than Uranium.
If you are really serious about fighting climate change you need to make sacrifices somewhere else so the deep sea makes the sacrifice
Regarding Ammonia many companies are working on NH3 based FCEVs. These will have smaller batteries than BEVs requiring less mining, similar refueling speed to gas vehicles and an existing infrastructure for transporting NH3 as well as more efficient than simply burning the NH3 in a combustion engine. NH3 is a good transition fuel as we can make it right now using natural gas but can make it in the future using electricity.
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First thing to do with nuclear, which involves zero technology, is to publicly recognize and excoriate the nonsensical LNT model which is the source of radiation hysteria. (also for the regulators using it.) At modest levels, even sunlight is more of a concern; it takes quite a high rate of exposure to do real harm, which is easily monitored for and protected against. Even with our antiquated technology, nuclear was built cheaply and safely, and MSRs could drop costs much further and essentially eliminate a
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No doubt, nuclear can be built safely and cheaply. Despite so pretty obvious mishaps, it has being doing pretty well on "safely" in recent years. But cheaply, no, no one has ever shown that. It might happen in the future. It might not.
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Gas is looking to be even worse then coal for global warming if you consider the greenhouse effects of leaked methane from gas plants. There was a debate here on /. a few days back and I was schooled by people on how methane is worse than CO2. So if we consider that, its better to keep burning coal than setup natural gas plants.
Yes I was one of the ones who schooled you. Methane doesn't leak from gas plants (at least properly run ones). Think about it, why would you waste your primary product, your main expense in running a facility on useless emissions. The main methane gas problem arises from production, and that is largely in cases where gas isn't a primary product. All those methane hotspots you seen on global maps in stories we've covered, they are *oil* producing plants. Gas plants both production and consumption leak compar
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So Short term keep the existing coal plants going. Dont build new gas plants. Medium term build some nuclear plants to replace when the coal plants reach extended end of life. Long term renewables scal
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Dude, I am a full nuclear kind of person and yet even I had to pause at this claim:
Nuclear can be built cheaply and safely.
An argument loses credibility when such sweeping generalizations are made; especially, when they are very arguable. Choose another tack to argue down.
Re: Solar and nuclear (Score:3, Funny)
Rolling blackouts is the stop gap when nobody takes infrastructure planning seriously.
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More importantly, the number of potential sites are strongly limited, and also strongly concentrated (got less than 100m of relief in your area - you're not going to get any pumped storage ; got more than 500m of relief and you've probably got plenty of sites - but few roads to the sites). Which means even more strain on electrical transmission infrastructure.
"forever to build" - well, we've built a second in Scotland in the last few years, and only a few howls of prote
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And how much of this cost is eaten up by the construction company working its way through a complex, byzantine legal process (I repeat myself here, of course.) just to get the permits and other approvals needed, not to mention the mass of frivolous NIMBY lawsuits by Luddites, Greens and local inhabitants who don't want to live near a nuclear facility no matter how safe it is?
And, in the US at least, every reactor has to be desi
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And how much of this cost is eaten up by the construction company working its way through a complex, byzantine legal process
Very little. Like really very very little. I used to work in the nuclear industry. The regulatory overhead is huge, but it's not legal or NIMBY overhead, it's overhead of the industry's own making. Nuclear has an excellent safety record largely due to the expense of making it safe. But in any case people who think that it's all just paperwork really ignore the incredible complexity of a nuclear plant. The foundational structure is insanely difficult to build. Materials need high level of quality control. Co
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Renewables will NEVER be able to supply the constant and sheer amount of power that nuclear can.
Modern reactor designs don't leave much waste. Much less than alternative energy. Maintenance is massively less expensive than solar, wind, hydroelectric, etc.
Construction cost, agree but energy is simply getting more expensive no matter how you go about it.
Collateral damage? FUD
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Considering these two things: sheer amount of power, well, that is wrong. In the UK as a whole, wind alone now surpasses nuclear and that it is from a standard start 15 or 20 years ago. Constant power is correct, but first renewables do not need to provide constant power, the whole grid does and second, we don't want constant power anyway; we want it when we need it. Nuclear provides that as poorly as renewables, if for the opposite reason.
And, the last point, energy is getting more expensive is clearly wro
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yes
Solar, wind, hydro, batteries and not nuclear (Score:3, Interesting)
Nuclear costs so much in 2024that it makes zero sense to build new nuclear generation.
Each kWh costs about 4x more than any other source. The only valid use cases for nuclear is to build bombs or to maintain some high paid cartel jobs in a very corrupt industry.
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Wind is no good .. the perception is that it alters the weather .. it's not worth fighting that unnecessary battle with the 5G chemtrail anti-vaxxers. Plus wind patterns change so it's unreliable. Hydro .. well we're commenting on an article that shows exactly why that's not good either. Solar is the best, it can be distributed all over. Doesn't need large central power plants .. though that's possible too. Solar is the best and nuclear is second. If nuclear is not second, the wind and hydro are not good ei
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>> Wind is no good ..
The industry does not care your subjective impressions, but scale and economics.
Solar overtakes Nuclear in 2 Years, Wind in 5 Years.
https://cdn.aiidatapro.net/med... [aiidatapro.net]
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I strongly disagree with that statement.
Even without storage, a very strong solar will huge mean excess solar in the day, shutting everything else down, and influence prices, (and thus consumption) extremely.
When generators previously considered "baseload" are forced to shutdown 8h per day, they get 50% more expensive due to their fixed costs.
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Re: Solar, wind, hydro, batteries and not nuclear (Score:2)
Fighting 5G chemtrail anti-vaxers? They pose less of a threat than a toddler in a fight.
It is generally easy to ignore unhinged people who are typically disorganized in both thoughts and action. What consequences can there really be from a finge group that does little more than moan online?
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... until they exercise their "Second Amendment" rights and start expressing their opinions at 10 rounds/second.
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Wind, especially offshore, is a great option too.
I doubt we can do much to speed up commercial nuclear deployment, at least not without massively compromising safety. And even if we could, we would be setting ourselves up for some severe pain. The next time one melts down, large numbers of them get taken offline, investment dries up... The risk is too great, but fortunately it's not one we need to take.
Climate change is here, like it or not (Score:2)
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This is a fascinating proposal I don't think has ever been mentioned in public before. Do you have a url to your podcast?
Re: Climate change is here, like it or not (Score:2)
I hope it is called: Obvious News for Obvious Trolls.
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Change is not always bad (Score:2)
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Back to shoveling coal. (Score:2)
Actually, we've never stopped in the first place...
Back to phasing out shoveling coal. (Score:4, Insightful)
Many countries are slowly exiting coal.
The USA also.
Re: Back to phasing out shoveling coal. (Score:1)
It will take China and India much longer to end the use of coal.
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Coal is stupid. You see how Dubai, with all its oil money, is building random and useless shit at a crazy pace with cheap African and south asian labor? Why can't we get in on that? We have millions of illegal immigrants .. why can't we tell them to work sub-minimum wage building us solar panel factories for 10 years in exchange for a pathway to citizenship? Think of it like an 10-year long internship. It's more humane than deportation, plus they are free to leave. Dubai pays most of its migrant workers $20
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This isn't slavery you stupid republican. I'm not proposing anything involuntary. Do you really think that deporting them to live in worse conditions is better for them and more humane? Guaranteed you'd have to deport by force to do that .. which tells you everything about what option is better. So what do YOU think is a more humane solution? Free citizenship to everyone in the world that wants it? Well that's dumb you'll have 50 million people move here overnight. .. are they gonna stay in your house? So t
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This isn't slavery you stupid republican.
It *literally* is. The GP was talking about Dubai. What do you think it means when your employer holds on to your passport paying you below minimum wage and tells you you can't leave?
If you don't have a fucking clue about what you're talking about, I wouldn't go calling other people "stupid".
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I didn't suggest we emulate them exactly. I proposed paying $500 with housing and medical taken care of. They are free to leave at anytime, and in fact they could accumulate a gratuity over time such that if they leave before the 10 years they're given a lump sum. I see it as a win-win. They get citizenship and trade-skill work experience, hell we could even given them online access to education and certification tests. We could dramatically reduce our dependency on Chinese imports where you KNOW the worker
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I proposed paying $500 with housing and medical taken care of.
Medical fully paid for? That's probably better than a lot of current legitimate jobs.
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Good plan, and how do you propose that all of these new laborers forced to work at sub minimum wages would not drive down the labor rates for current citizens?
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"Think of it like an 10-year long internship. It's more humane than deportation, plus they are free to leave."
This was explicitly stated. Did you even read the fucking conversation?
Re:Back to shoveling coal. (Score:5, Insightful)
The simple reality is the present systems is highly exploitative.
It exploits the illegal immigrant in many cases. They work without minimum wage protections being mostly paid under the table. They have little legal recourse if they are otherwise harmed via theft, theft of wages, subjected to unsafe conditions etc.
It exploits everyone else, because we are forced to provide more indigent housing, we have to have infrastructure to support seasonal population swells and they employers who cause them dodge their fair share of taxes. We have to provide services like education to the children of people who are not paying taxes. All of us are subject to increase crime rates, higher insurance costs due to uninsured motorists etc.
The ONLY things you get in return are some lower cost berries at the grocery store, and maybe a slightly cheap house build, but increasingly labor isn't the cost driver there either...
However there is one group that benefits immensely from illegal immigration. 1%ers of all political stripes (hence chamber of commerce wing of the GOP has done nothing about it for decades) that reap the benefits for under-market labor directly! We can include the legions of bull dung -H1bs for which we are expected to believe there were no-citizens who could be taught to churn out trivial CRUD-line-of-business apps in .NET in a reasonable span of time...
As to the issue of 'refuges' and 'asylum seekers' I think we do have a Christian duty to them. However like in the good Samaritan story what we owe them is three squares, a cot, with relative safety until such time as they are able to return home. We are not under any obligation to turn them loose among our population, especially when we cannot be sure they are not other than what they claim to be.
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I'd think THAT message would spread quite rapidly....
Hell it would serve as free training for our military snipers, and just good target practice for civilians....
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I might even think about adding a stick to your carrot. Go a step further and put any illegal immigrant working at a non-sanctioned job in prison for five years, right next to whoever hired them. Give the employer an extra year or two for cheating taxpayers and competitors.
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Fully enforcing I9 violations with jail time for employers would end 99% of illegal immigration.
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Fully enforcing I9 violations with jail time for employers would end 99% of illegal immigration.
But Texas will never do that. Their economy would collapse if their businesses stopped using illegal immigrants. This is why you don't hear Abbott crowing about raids on businesses which knowingly hire illegals.
Hans Kristian Graebener = StoneToss
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No one would do that. I9 is a federal program anyway. Texas has nothing to do with it.
The IRS is perfectly aware of SSNs being shared by as many as (in some extreme cases) thousands of people and no one cares.
We have programs to allow seasonal worker visas that have been in place forever. Farm workers is not the issue.
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Texas has no problem ignoring federal law when it feels like it, or thinking it has superiority over federal law. There is no reason they couldn't use the I9 program as a bludgeon against businesses.
Further, it's not just farm workers. Hotels, golf courses, restaurants, construction, landscaping, meat packing, and house cleaning are regular users of illegal immigrants. This is why construction sites in Florida were abandoned last year [newsweek.com] when DeSantis upped the ante. His state, like Texas, would collapse [usatoday.com] if
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Yeah great there; America needs more unproductive mouths to feed...
illegal immigrants should be deported, people who employ them should be assessed for the cost of that repatriation, and imprisoned for a period of not less than then the period they had illegal immigrants in their employ.
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If they work for ten years that's proof they’re not unproductive. It's not likely that they would work for ten years and then decide they want to go on welfare. Also productivity is not zero-sum, so they won't be added mouths to feed because larger and more productive farms will be possible. More workers means more goods and services available for everyone.
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Great idea! We can make really good use of a powerless underclass, using them for cheap labor on an official government mandated basis. All we have to do is change all that silly shit in the constitution about rights and slavery and we're good!
Brilliant idea, bro. Tell us more!
Maybe we can directly import people from Africa in the holds of ships to weed out the weaklings.
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Huh? This isn't slavery, no constitutional change is needed. Go get yourself a dictionary. I'm not proposing anything involuntary. You think that deporting them to live in worse conditions is better for them and more humane? This is offering them a path to earn citizenship. A person is starving, and I'm offering them bread and you're saying if I don't give them cake I shouldn't give them anything at all and let them starve instead? That seems humanitarian in your mind?
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Did you even read what you wrote?
Apparently not. Put down the bong.
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If you're way smarter than me, I must be extremely stupid because you're an idiot.
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You very much didn't read what was written, or if you did, your reading comprehension sucks so much dick that the hookers off the Vegas strip are getting jealous.
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He wants to take away jus soli as a way to harass opponents and because he is bitter about Obama. If a person with immigrant parents runs for office, opponents can use lack of jus soli to find issues with their parents immigration paperwork, and falsely (or correctly) claim that some t wasn't crossed or an I not dotted. If we are going to take away jus soli we have to allow people who substantially grew up here and got no felony before age 21 citizenship. I mean, the vast majority who would grow up here are
Re: Back to shoveling coal. (Score:2)
A work visa program would be even easier to do and you wouldn't even have to offer green cards, let alone citizenship.
But labor cost isn't the barrier to turning things around here. It is a lack of will. Nobody can agree to how to handle our nations problems. From climate change, to infrastructure, to society. We are tied up in knots arguing over petty partisan scorekeeping rather than the legitimate issues of the day.
Indian rivers 'clean'? (Score:5, Informative)
What stoned environmentalist wrote that blather? There aren't any waterways in India that are clean. They may not catch fire as the Cuyahoga river has, but to claim they are clean is ridiculous.