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MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9300
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 Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:44 pm Post subject: |
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| mac wrote: | Yet another huge storm in Texas. Oh, look over there at the latest Trump tweet. Pay no attention to the scientists—or the kids who will pay for the damage of delay.
250 different events, made worse by climate change. Total cost about $1.7 trillion. https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/billions/events.pdf |
Old blues tune
Well there's floodin' down in Texas
All of the telephone lines are down
Well there's floodin' down in Texas
All of the telephone lines are down… |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2019 8:45 pm Post subject: |
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| But Bard has never gotten anything right! |
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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935
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| Posted: Sun Sep 22, 2019 9:32 pm Post subject: |
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Did you see the kids shaking and fighting back tears as they angrily displayed climate catastrophe signs? That's today's result of their being brainwashed by lying idiots in DC and in the media. The impact of that brainwashing on the kind of people running the world for decades to come will be even more disastrous, thanks to your acceptance of today's whacked-out public school and college teachers. Stand up to your school boards and demand they hire a broader mix of teachers, and vote with your cash only for colleges with rational, open-minded professors.
GOD, but I'm glad I majored in engineering, where my exposure to biased political BS was nill ... probably even zero point zero. |
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coboardhead
Joined: 26 Oct 2009
Posts: 4303
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| Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 6:12 am Post subject: |
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| isobars wrote: | Did you see the kids shaking and fighting back tears as they angrily displayed climate catastrophe signs? That's today's result of their being brainwashed by lying idiots in DC and in the media. The impact of that brainwashing on the kind of people running the world for decades to come will be even more disastrous, thanks to your acceptance of today's whacked-out public school and college teachers. Stand up to your school boards and demand they hire a broader mix of teachers, and vote with your cash only for colleges with rational, open-minded professors.
GOD, but I'm glad I majored in engineering, where my exposure to biased political BS was nill ... probably even zero point zero. |
Sorry Isobars. I had to laugh at this one! 0.0.
My engineering education wouldn't have allowed that sort of an absolute mathematical statement!
I attended engineering school in a red state. The bias wasn't nill. Not even close. But, it wasn't liberal bias... |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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| Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 9:59 am Post subject: |
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Big oil and their stooges will never help publicize this. They continue to claim that sustainability means sackcloth and ashes.
| Quote: | Mallory Moench Sep. 23, 2019 Updated: Sep. 23, 2019 4 a.m.
Over the past decade, California has become a globally acclaimed leader on renewable energy. Fueled by aggressive public policies, plummeting solar prices and evolving technology, the state has cut greenhouse gas emissions from its electric power supply in half since their 2008 peak, according to the California Air Resources Board.
“It’s really astounding how carbon dioxide emissions have been cut,” said Anthony Kovscek, chairman of the energy resources engineering department at Stanford University. “It’s been really remarkable how much renewable and solar we’ve been able to put on the grid and balance it.”
In 2017, California was the nation’s top producer of solar, geothermal and biomass energy, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. It ranks 48th in per capita energy use because of its mild climate and energy efficiency programs.
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Last year, the California grid got 34% of its energy from renewable sources, according to the California Independent System Operator, which oversees the power supply for 80% of the state. That’s halfway to the state’s mandated goal of 60% zero-carbon energy sources by 2030 and on track for reaching 100% by 2045 — and it doesn’t even count rooftop solar or large hydroelectric facilities.
With the state’s expected population growth, rising temperatures and increase in electric vehicles, experts predict electricity demand will increase. So how will the state meet its ambitious goals? Experts said it’s possible to get to zero carbon emissions, but the challenge is economics.
“The question isn’t really whether it’s doable, the question is what’s it going to cost,” said Maximilian Auffhammer, a professor of international sustainable development at UC Berkeley.
Much of California’s success has been driven by top-down policies. The state pioneered energy efficiency after the 1970s energy crisis, noted Sally Benson, co-director at the Precourt Institute for Energy at Stanford University, followed by a slew of aggressive policies in the 2000s.
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A landmark 2006 environmental law established a program for capping and cutting greenhouse gas emissions from utilities and other industrial companies, and the state has also progressively tightened renewable energy requirements for its three big electric utilities, including Pacific Gas and Electric Co.
The result: Coal use has plummeted. In 2008, California depended on coal for 18% of its energy. Today, it’s only 3%, according to the California Energy Commission, and nearly all of that comes from out-of-state power plants.
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Utilities were forced to invest in renewables even before it was cost-effective, said Mark Specht, an Oakland energy analyst with the Union of Concerned Scientists. California hasn’t focused on adding wind or hydropower plants — though there are long-term hopes for offshore wind and a proposed hydro plant in the Sierra Nevada — so it focused on solar.
Companies have improved technology and cut costs. Average installation prices for large-scale solar projects dropped by two-thirds from 2008 to 2017, according to a report last year by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
Solar rooftop installation multiplied from 28 megawatts in 2007 to 1,891 in 2018, according to data from the California Energy Commission and the California Public Utilities Commission. The state now leads the nation in rooftop solar installation, with nearly 1 million projects.
Starting next year, every new home built in California must have rooftop solar panels. Experts, especially economists, have challenged whether this is the best market to tackle, arguing that large-scale utility solar is more cost-effective.
Some experts say California has overbuilt solar — and depends too much on it for the future.
“Solar is not the silver bullet that’s going to save us all,” Specht said. “Reliability is becoming more and more of a concern. I think that to maintain reliability, we do need to be looking at other options than just chucking more and more solar onto the grid.”
The big issues facing solar are stability and storage.
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“While we’ve made a lot of technological progress in renewable energy, we haven’t figured out how to make the sun shine at night,” said James Bushnell, a UC Davis economics professor focused on energy. “We’ve gone all in on solar rather than other energy resources that have potential for more diversity when they produce.”
Benson said California produces about 11 gigawatts from solar daily — nearly half of the state’s demand on an average spring day — which is more than it can store. Storing is the solution to the problem of high demand periods, like when the sun goes down and energy usage goes up.
The state has required a modest amount of storage, but batteries remain expensive.
Auffhammer said battery prices are trending down like solar panels did, but not significantly enough yet.
“The tipping point is where renewables are competitive at any point of the day, and you can’t do that without cost-effective storage,” he said.
Kovscek said the state should consider storage alternatives like batteries made of materials other than lithium-ions, pumped hydroelectricity — in which water is pumped uphill during times of excess electricity supply and released to generate electricity when demand is high — or turn to other renewables such as hydro and wind.
“If we take away those options and want to go to 100% renewables, electricity according to some estimates would be 30 times more expensive than it is today,” Kovscek said. “How do you deliver that carbon-free electricity in a way that people will accept and is economic?”
California still relies on natural gas for a third of its energy supply, which accounts for the largest proportion of emissions from the state’s electric sector.
“If California continues on its current trajectory of natural gas emissions, it’s not going to meet the targets,” said Geeta Persad, senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
Most experts encouraged moving away from natural gas but keeping it as a backup. Benson said her research shows that the cheapest overall system is renewable-dominated — around 80% — with the remaining 20% natural gas offset by new, albeit expensive, technology to capture the carbon emissions and store them in the ground. There are no projects in California yet, she said.
Benson said she doesn’t see any “enormous stumbling block” to get to California’s 2030 goals of 60% renewables — but getting to 100% will require innovation, diversification and incentives.
“At the end of the day, it’s important that someone has a holistic view,” she said.
Mallory Moench is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mallory.moench@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @mallorymoench |
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isobars
Joined: 12 Dec 1999
Posts: 20935
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| Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 10:31 am Post subject: |
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| How does either side bias courses in thermodynamics, nonlinear partial differential equations, stochastic processes, control theory, lasers, etc.? My 4 or 5 mandatory freshman and sophomore "fuzzy studies" courses (e.g., history, sociology) were just apolitical square-fillers that (very slightly) got in the way of the 100 or so technical courses that actually mattered to me. That's too bad, as all but one of my fuzzy studies professors were excellent. My objective in college was to learn all I could about the sciences of engineering. Even my mandatory philosophy course was straight Boolean logic, which I used heavily in my Saturn V design stint at Boeing. |
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swchandler
Joined: 08 Nov 1993
Posts: 10588
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| Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 12:27 pm Post subject: |
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| mac, you need to be more attentive and weed out the unrelated nonsense when you copy and post articles. Ignoring doing that just makes what you post look sloppy and unorganized. |
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techno900
Joined: 28 Mar 2001
Posts: 4161
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| Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 2:41 pm Post subject: |
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Why what happens in the US is of little consequence.
1600 new coal plants!
Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries. Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal.
Forget Paris: 1600 New Coal Power Plants Built Around The World
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/03/forget-paris-1600-new-coal-power-plants-built-around-the-world/ |
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mac
Joined: 07 Mar 1999
Posts: 17747
Location: Berkeley, California
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MalibuGuru
Joined: 11 Nov 1993
Posts: 9300
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| Posted: Mon Sep 23, 2019 11:03 pm Post subject: |
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And just like Mac, this poor girl is reportedly mentally ill....
Greta Thunberg is a 16-year-old with Asperger’s, global warming activist from Sweden who also suffers from depression and anxiety disorder.
Her parents, and all the adults using her are abusing her. |
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