Current Events > If we were in an environmental crisis

(+) Yeah! (+)

Would there be widespread solar panels and wind mills to power civilization???

Why aren't there mass production of solar panels globally?

Why does the West keep relying on oil and dirty means of generating electrons????

Because the 'relying on oil' people are richer and more powerful than the 'let's make solar panels' people.

They have more influence over the decision makers.

And the decision makers care more about two year electoral cycles than the future.

And everybody else has decided that this is too depressing to think about, and too hard to solve.

So instead we fight culture wars.

Which are important, just not as important.

Because the dirty oil can generate electrons 24/7 if needed.

Part of the problem is that electricity is never perfectly insulated. You lose a little bit transforming from the power source to the line, you lose a little bit more as it travels across low voltage lines, then you lose around 2 to 4% traveling over high voltage lines, then you lose a little bit more back on the low voltage lines, until ultimately the last little bit of loss happens at the transformer that converts it to other currents.

Power generation needs to be within a certain distance of the consumer in order to get it there without too much loss. Windmill farms and solar power plants require significant space to generate the equivalent energy of a traditional power plant and often need to be placed further away.

Yes, people with obscene amounts of money that are heavily invested in oil are hindering the transition to renewable energy, but I also don't think a lot of people understand or appreciate the sheer volume of energy that the world needs generated and exactly how going fully renewable would make that possible when you can only transmit power so far from the source.

Need to create solar arrays in space to generate power for counties.

I hear nuclear power is the actually the route to go for the environment, but many places are afraid and Im guessing it has neither the lobbyists of oil nor the green branding of solar. This being said, when something goes wrong with nuclear power, it can become a drastically bigger problem than other sources immediate problems. In the USA at least, a country whose industries and goals seem to directed towards maximum profits which would forsake safety and quality to see those profits, I could understand the hesitation.

We've had a big surge in green energy, mainly solar panels and batteries.

For example, California has days where 100% of it's energy generation is done by renewables during the day
https://i.imgur.com/H0Van1o.jpg

We're doing good on temp rise compared to where we thought we'd be
https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/6/6e6da1e3.jpg

And there's more in the pipeline, but honestly one of the biggest issues is how hard we make it to increase our transmission capacity. We literally have tons of electricity power lines and upgrades in queue because it takes so long to gain permit approval to build transmission lines!!

Here's all the new US clean power planned for 2024. Few thoughts:

Solar is absolutely booming, with 1/3 of it in TX
Batteries are heavily concentrated in TX/CA45% of new capacity is in TX & 35% is in CA
The Vogtle reactor in GA and Vineyard Wind 1 in MA really stand out

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/ed957f01.jpg

Texas solar output is up 39x in six years:
June 2016: 69.8 gigawatt-hours
June 2022: 2,729 gigawatt-hours

https://twitter.com/NatBullard/status/1549480546656452608?t=O327JCabMPfm38OlESAOog&s=19

CervusCanadensi posted...

Would there be widespread solar panels and wind mills to power civilization???

There are

Why aren't there mass production of solar panels globally?

There is

Why does the West keep relying on oil and dirty means of generating electrons????

You need baseline power. Cant do it all with wind and solar, and people are afraid on nuclear.

s0nicfan posted...

Part of the problem is that electricity is never perfectly insulated. You lose a little bit transforming from the power source to the line, you lose a little bit more as it travels across low voltage lines, then you lose around 2 to 4% traveling over high voltage lines, then you lose a little bit more back on the low voltage lines, until ultimately the last little bit of loss happens at the transformer that converts it to other currents.

Power generation needs to be within a certain distance of the consumer in order to get it there without too much loss. Windmill farms and solar power plants require significant space to generate the equivalent energy of a traditional power plant and often need to be placed further away.

Yes, people with obscene amounts of money that are heavily invested in oil are hindering the transition to renewable energy, but I also don't think a lot of people understand or appreciate the sheer volume of energy that the world needs generated and exactly how going fully renewable would make that possible when you can only transmit power so far from the source.

One thing we need to do is ban most A.I and entirely ban bitcoin farming.

Absurd energy guzzlers.

First recognizing that there is already a massive push for renewables and has been for a few decades now. I think the posts in this topic have already covered that.

We still live in a capitalist system with regulatory controls and property rights. You can't just decide to build a solar farm anywhere and start breaking ground the next day. The government does provide pretty lucrative subsidies to the renewable industry (though not even remotely to the scale of oil and gas). But to actually build a project you still need 1) a return on investment (companies don't do this for free), 2) regulatory approval from the grid (can't just tap into the power lines), and 3) federal, state, county, and local government approval to build (not everyone wants your project in their backyard). It takes YEARS to go from "lets build a wind farm here" to figuring out how it'll work financially, getting a power purchase agreement, obtaining financing if needed, going through all the interconnection approvals, getting landowners to sell/lease their land, feasibility studies, atmospheric measuring, environmental surveys and agency coordination, permitting applications and public hearings, getting the materials, labor negotiations, designs then changes to design, then mobilization to construct.

There's about 700 steps in the process that can kill the project. I'm on a solar project in California right now where we're supposed to start construction NEXT WEEK and I'm told the project may not start because we don't have some necessary items yet.

theAteam posted...

First recognizing that there is already a massive push for renewables and has been for a few decades now. I think the posts in this topic have already covered that.

We still live in a capitalist system with regulatory controls and property rights. You can't just decide to build a solar farm anywhere and start breaking ground the next day. The government does provide pretty lucrative subsidies to the renewable industry (though not even remotely to the scale of oil and gas). But to actually build a project you still need 1) a return on investment (companies don't do this for free), 2) regulatory approval from the grid (can't just tap into the power lines), and 3) federal, state, county, and local government approval to build (not everyone wants your project in their backyard). It takes YEARS to go from "lets build a wind farm here" to figuring out how it'll work financially, getting a power purchase agreement, obtaining financing if needed, going through all the interconnection approvals, getting landowners to sell/lease their land, feasibility studies, atmospheric measuring, environmental surveys and agency coordination, permitting applications and public hearings, getting the materials, labor negotiations, designs then changes to design, then mobilization to construct.

There's about 700 steps in the process that can kill the project. I'm on a solar project in California right now where we're supposed to start construction NEXT WEEK and I'm told the project may not start because we don't have some necessary items yet.

This.
Many don't realize how long it takes just to build infrastructure. A lot of it is just required hard work, but we do shoot ourselves in the foot due to unnecessary regulatory and political issues.

I'd love if we actually treated it as the crisis it is and use state power to forcefully push through unnecessary barriers though. But politically (both from the left and the right), that'd never happen

*looks at Sweden*
Hydro - 49%
Nuclear - 29%
Wind - 19%
Cogeneration - 10% (at least 90% is biomass)
Sun - 1%

It is all fun and games until they decided to close most nuclear plants and replace them with wind, just to discover one winter that it didnt blow as much as they wanted. I have walking distance to two hydro plants but my electrical price raised 1400% because those fuckers down south closed fully working nuclear powerplants.

Foppe posted...

*looks at Sweden*
Hydro - 49%
Nuclear - 29%
Wind - 19%
Cogeneration - 10% (at least 90% is biomass)
Sun - 1%

It is all fun and games until they decided to close most nuclear plants and replace them with wind, just to discover one winter that it didnt blow as much as they wanted. I have walking distance to two hydro plants but my electrical price raised 1400% because those fuckers down south closed fully working nuclear powerplants.

Germany, Sweden, and other countries that have been closing down nuclear plants are being so weird and stupid

Foppe posted...

*looks at Sweden*
Hydro - 49%
Nuclear - 29%
Wind - 19%
Cogeneration - 10% (at least 90% is biomass)
Sun - 1%

It is all fun and games until they decided to close most nuclear plants and replace them with wind, just to discover one winter that it didnt blow as much as they wanted. I have walking distance to two hydro plants but my electrical price raised 1400% because those fuckers down south closed fully working nuclear powerplants.

Nuclear just makes sense. If something goes wrong its more dramatic but fossil fuels simply spread more damage overtime and it happens even without a disaster.

Climate change is huge but also there is the issue of a massive portion of fossil fuels coming from Hostile/Unstable nations like Saudi Arabia and Russia.

Prices surge because they decide to tighten the screws on us or war breaks out in a notoriously unstable region

And then there is air pollution from it that causes millions of deaths a year from Cancer. Pretty sure fossil fuel pollution alone has caused more deaths in a single year then Nuclear power has ever.

A wind turbine is built to last only 20-30 years

Unsuprised_Pika posted...

And then there is air pollution from it that causes millions of deaths a year from Cancer. Pretty sure fossil fuel pollution alone has caused more deaths in a single year then Nuclear power has ever.

This is a symptom of another problem that goes back to the OP, which is that people respond to acute events so much better than chronic ones. For whatever reason humans identify with the one-time disaster but if something isn't directly threatening them then they don't take action, as in the case with the "environmental crisis". There's still a ton of climate change denial even after presented with skyrocketing sea temperatures, increased extreme weather events, and the extinction of winter staring them right in their faces.