Recent content by Jeff Miller

The paper I linked to above claims (Figure 5, Panel A) that marginal emissions in New England are about twice as high as average emissions. This sort of makes sense given that the NPCC baseload is very low carbon - firing up gas plants to supply marginal demand, somewhat unusually for the US...

Agreed. There is an interesting recent paper which attempts to estimate the marginal carbon emissions from the current electrical generation mix by time of day (see the tables at the end of the paper) for each of the nine electricity markets. The data is from 2007-2009 so is a bit dated, but I...

If you look at the outliers on the plot of phx182flyer's data above, they are mostly observations that include more than one day of data. For example, the pink point at 110 miles and energy 65 kwh is an observation that covers six days of driving. It makes sense that this point is above most of...

I assume biofuel is mostly corn ethanol which, given that almost as much fossil energy is required to make it as you get out of it, shouldn't be counted as renewable. Total primary: http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec1_7.pdf Just renewables...

That's interesting. Just as another data point, phx182flyer was kind enough to let me look at his charging data. As expected, I get the basically the same regression coefficients that he got when I repeated his single variable regression, total_wh_wall ~ a * miles +b with the same very high...

It would be much more than 20x as much, wouldn't it? Assuming a low cost of $200 per kWh, a 1500 kWh battery would cost $300k. With depreciation, renting it would surely cost at least 15% per year, or almost 4k per month, so 600x as much as the grid.

There are ways to save money - on the margins - as your photos indicate. It's when we move beyond the margins, and consider the problem of 100% decarboniztion of the energy system across the entire world within the next few decades, that things become more complicated and more expensive. Lunch...

We as a society - or an an international community - are going to have to answer that question. I suggested one way - using some of the proceeds of a carbon tax; I'm sure there are other ideas. Eliminating carbon emissions quickly won't be free and won't be painless. On the other hand it need...

Do you have a source for that? I wouldn't doubt that it's true, but I haven't seen this correlation pointed out before. I was fairly clear that the reforms would be rolled back as soon as the higher insurance bills started to hit...

I understand you are making an economic argument and not arguing against nuclear power in itself and your prognosis may well be right. I'm just trying to get a handle on the numbers. As a first approximation, it seems reasonable to consider the total societal cost of a proposed carbon solution...

Can we afford to wait 15 years for PV to be only 20% of the total electrical grid, with presumably most of the grid still dominated by fossil fuels? Assuming that storage costs do come down at 4% per year like you hope (far from certain), what will those storage costs be? What will the total...

A portion of the revenues from a carbon tax. (There is an interesting recent paper by Brookings that shows that a revenue neutral carbon tax, coupled with tax reform - lowering the tax on capital income, though for example lowering corporate tax rates - would increase economic growth...

This is indeed a big part of the problem. The nuclear industry or whatever you want to call it, is not particularly interested in moving beyond the old LWR designs toward Gen IV reactors. They are like GM in some ways - large, inefficient, unresponsive, and arguably in some ways corrupt - rather...

PV is not displacing nuclear - cheap gas is. For example, most of the 2.2Gw capacity lost from shutting down the San Onofre plant will come from gas: Californias Plan to Replace San Onofre Nuclear: Green Success or Natural Gas Giveaway? : Greentech Media Burning gas emits CO2. Lots of CO2. And...

Do you mean energy in general or the source of energy to power the electrical grid (which is only a fraction of the total)?