For an example - Check out Holland, Michigan - they use waste heat from the power plant to heat the streets and sidewalks - so no snow accumulates in the winter.
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Tesla, TSLA & the Investment World: the Perpetual Investors' Roundtable
- Thread starter AudubonB
- Start date
Hey California... welcome to Az Commerce rules. This blows because in Az there's only 5 members who decides this, and all were publicly elected. But if you don't request a ballot from your utility provider, nobody even knows there was a vote. Then again... this is Az. But what's the deal with Cal, same?
California cuts rooftop solar net metering: An industry reacts
Reactions to the passage of NEM 3.0., a rulemaking procedure that reduced rooftop solar export payments by 75%.pv-magazine-usa.com
Maybe now my App will be better tuned to deliver the LEAST amount of energy to the grid so they don't profit further (sell my excess for a few pennies during peak to redirect the same electrons next door that sell for over 20 cents per kWh). Downside is that my battery works harder. If similar to Az, it's likely that the best ROI is a 50% solar demand sizing with a single powerwall, but most will try to sell the full system and that's when the homeowners back out. This is not going to move us to sustainability, it will move us away. Money and greed wins again. IPCC most dire projections are pretty real.
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
This problem won't be solved until the grid (poles and wires) is decoupled from the energy producers.
Right now, the utilities control both, and that incentivizes them to produce huge solar and wind farms, but at the expense of "competing" with rooftop solar.
The correct solution would be to have highly-regulated companies maintain the poles+wires. And then separate and unrelated companies bid in a competitive market for power production. Tesla does this in the UK and AUS with VPP and megapacks, and to a lesser degree in TX with the same. Competition will accelerate solar/wind+battery, because they are the cheapest deployments (even without incentives). Allowing the poles+wires to be part of the company that generates power creates a gov-sponsored regional monopoly . . . and we all know how those work out (hint, not for the customer).
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Ford may be about to show EV business details ( warning CNBS article ) ...
www.cnbc.com
May expose greater losses.
Ford is about to break out big EV losses for the first time
Ford's reporting changes amount to the most detailed look yet by any legacy automaker into the finances behind the EV business.
www.cnbc.com
May expose greater losses.
Anyone have a guess as to the markets reaction today if there's a .25% rate hike (vs 0%, as we can likely rule out .5%)?
1- On one hand, .25% would be a sign of easing with relief on the way. (Long view)
2- OTOH, it could be an opportunity for fear mongering with stories like "The Fed doesn't care..." (Shortz view)
I'll have to admit, I'm wanting to play a little with the "other hand." Maybe 5%? Can I actually time the market?
Somebody help me for I am about to sin!!!
1- On one hand, .25% would be a sign of easing with relief on the way. (Long view)
2- OTOH, it could be an opportunity for fear mongering with stories like "The Fed doesn't care..." (Shortz view)
I'll have to admit, I'm wanting to play a little with the "other hand." Maybe 5%? Can I actually time the market?
Somebody help me for I am about to sin!!!
Combined cycle natural gas plants do exactly that. Brings their efficiency to over 60%.
Now reported by Reuters: Exclusive: BYD reduces shifts at two electric vehicle plants in China - sources
They're also cutting prices: "To spur demand, BYD began offering discounts for its best-selling Yuan Plus and Seal EVs in March."
This makes Charlie Munger look like an idiot:
larmor
Active Member
Yes: typically down on Mondays and Fridays as well as mid mornings every day for tsla. Might be interesting to apply a statistical analysis to compare with other equities. Where is AI when you need it?
2daMoon
Mostly Harmless
bkp_duke
Well-Known Member
I would kill for a hatchback. Basically a mini-Model S.
"No" typically backfires with me. Reminds me of those Nuns in Kindergarten and 1st Grade.
I don't mind egg on my face either - I'm old (quoting Monroe). I'll let you know how this turns out.
Maybe come back in with some DITM Options, or I have cash for the next storm.
Say what?!?
You guys deserve a reward for reading that sort of nonsense.
SunCatcher
Member
The cost of Higher Education is about to go up again?
Go for it; since you've never done this before, right? Right???
Edit; and I'm sure you'll let us know the outcome, so we can learn at someone else's expense. Always the best, although not always the way it's done...
Another way of looking at it is that the largest energy loss is at the moment of conversion from raw material to useful energy. This is fundamentally why hydrogen is a poor choice for the future of green power. It harnesses electricity from the sun, then re-introduces that wasteful conversion state.
Musk is targeting the low hanging fruit of the energy economy and attacking it at the source of the biggest amount of waste.
Gigapress
Trying to be less wrong
This is a topic where I think people are still missing the tremendous significance of humankind's shift away from thermal and kinetic power generation. The Industrial Revolution began with water wheels to torque crankshafts and then accelerated with James Watt's development of the first practical steam engine, which instead used heat instead of gravitational potential energy to generate the necessary pressure to torque the crankshaft. Even the most advanced nuclear power plants are ultimately just sophisticated steam engines, and hydroelectric plants are ultimately just sophisticated water wheels. After all this time, we as a species still haven't moved on from the energy technology that started it all.Thanks for the thoughtful response @Bobfitz1 - Several of your comments which I highlighted are a great segue into a broader discussion of the Diablo Canyon vs Renewable argument, and perhaps to help untangle the 'Nuclear is Good for the Climate' concept a bit since the media has gone all-in on nuclear in the last year or so.
For those who don't routinely follow Mark Jacobson, my post of his criticisms of Diablo Canyon unfortunately made it difficult to understand his perspective in the larger context of just where renewable energy capacity could-and-should be already in California. My apologies for that. Diablo Canyon is becoming a great metaphor for the policies and PG&E protectionism that have delayed and deterred renewables in California. Mark's point in arguing Diablo Canyon and Renewables IMO is that we must do better and we must think bigger and we must act more quickly. Diablo Canyon represents a failed approach compounded by failed policy. And by pointing a finger at Diablo Canyon, we are pointing a finger at much more than a single nuke plant.
It is fair to argue the potential merits of continuing to operate an existing nuclear power plant until there is sufficient Renewable sources to fully displace it IMO. However, the bigger point being made in that discussion IMO is that Diablo Canyon's life is being extended because California failed to prepare for this moment.
Batteries don't just come in Tesla Megapacks. And that's a good thing for the Planet. If PG&E was as forward thinking as Vermont's Green Mountian Power, they would be incentivizing the installation of Powerwalls and other storage in every customers home and small business. And those batteries would be charging from roof top solar on each of those buildings. And that solar would be incentivized at the Federal and State level, and would furthermore receive very favorable net metering opportunities for the Distributed Grid stability and reliability it would add to PG&E's current train wreck. But instead, residential and small commercial solar and storage is a perceived threat to the existing paradigm in California, with Grid operators insisting they need to own and control large-scale generation sources to stay relevant. And they are successfully doing so by lobbying for the implementation of net metering policies that are literally slowing California's solar and storage growth so much that this year Texas will install twice as much solar capacity as California while Californians debate whether residential solar projects can even be practical. This is not good for California residents and rate payers. This is not good for future California solar and storage adoption rates. And this is certainly not good in the larger transition away from fossil fuels in the larger Climate fight. And like many of us here on TMC, Mark Jacobson is not pleased about this either.
California cuts rooftop solar net metering: An industry reacts
Reactions to the passage of NEM 3.0., a rulemaking procedure that reduced rooftop solar export payments by 75%.
Washington and Oregon have failed to prepare for this day as well, which means the West Coast Grid has not prepared adequately for this day either. As I have pointed out before, WA Gov Jay Inslee's hydroelectric protectionist position was quite clear in his Op Ed letter in the San Francisco Chronicle where he specifically targeted California solar growth being wheeled on the same grid as Northwest hydro. I should point out that many NW hydro plants are under the microscope in a similar way at a similar time in their planned lifecycle, with deferred maintenance needs and environmental concerns always just below the surface. The NW desires the ability to sell hydropower on the southern end of the West Coast grid while CA has the potential of sending clean solar north on those same lines instead. The West Coast Grid was upgraded at significant cost after the Enron crisis opened a new market for NW hydro in Southern California, and a massive amount of money was spent to upgrade the grid to support continued NW hydropower sales to the neighbors in the south, however it seems nobody ever thought about the ability for energy to flow north on that same grid at the time. And it also seems like the Northwest would prefer California not grow its solar and storage potential too quickly, or it might be displacing more expensive NW hydro and NW natural gas plants. And that wouldn't make Warren Buffett too happy.
Op-Ed: California should collaborate on power grid | Governor Jay Inslee
Op-Ed in San Francisco Chronicle: California should collaborate on power grid As governor of Washington state, I’ve traveled around the country and around the world and have been encouraged at the momentum that’s building for climate action and the recognition of the West Coast states as climate leawww.governor.wa.gov
And then there are the concerns beyond CO2 that don't get too much play in the media anymore, and thus unfortunately result in a view that nuclear is much more climate friendly as a result. Nuclear plants make hot water hotter to power a steam cycle, and they do this by generating less CO2 than fossil fuel plants - which is the appeal on the surface from a Climate perspective. But nuke plants typically only achieve about 33% efficiency in the process. On a bright note, that could mean that 2/3rds of the heat generated could still be available for other uses - i.e. District Heating Systems in northern climates. But that almost never happens. And Diablo Canyon is in Southern California. And it draws 100% of its cooling water directly from the ocean. And it dumps 100% of its waste heat into the ocean. And that means that roughly 67% of the thermal heat generated by the 2.2 Gigawatt facility simply becomes thermal pollution directly into the Pacific Ocean. And in the case of Diablo Canyon, that is not a small amount of heat.
"The power plant draws in seawater from a constructed intake cove to provide cooling for power plant operations. After passing through the plant's cooling-water system, approximately 2.5 billion gallons per day of heated water is discharged back into Diablo Cove. The discharge is approximately 11° C (20'F) warmer than ambient ocean waters under normal operating conditions. Even after significant mixing with the ambient receiving water, the discharge produces localized temperatures that are higher than those normally encountered by marine life in the area."
I would really encourage folks to think about that for a moment. A single power plant is dumping 2.5 billion gallons of water that is 20° F warmer than ambient every day - 365 days a year - directly into an ocean that is already warming at a rate that is of great concern. Nothing wrong with that picture...? A continuous titration of much warmer water into a body of water that we are hoping won't get warmer. Hey, its the ocean and its big and the pipes go way out there <s>. But if someone suggested warming up the entire discharge of the Sacramento River by 20° F for about 3 hours everyday (similar volume), the entire State would come unglued.
But we are already warming up the Sacramento River with the Shasta Dam, and we are thus already titrating warmer water into that ocean out of the Sacramento River because of hydropower. And we are already titrating warmer water into that same ocean as a result of all the hydroelectric projects across Idaho and Oregon and Washington into the Columbia River and also into the Puget Sound. And Diablo Canyon is only 1 of about 439 nuclear power plants around the globe that make hot water hotter. And those hydroelectric dams are just a few of the roughly 62,500 hydroelectric plants around the globe.......many of which can also contribute to increasing water temperatures of the systems they are powered by. And the biggest 'ocean warmers' are probably yet to come - like the Mekong River hydroelectric project that is currently underway.
Just because fossil fuels have been the talking points of the Climate debate, please don't think they are by any means the only major contributors to a warming ocean system that is fueling many undesirable changes. If Diablo Canyon alone is dumping 2.5 billion gallons a day of 20° F warmer water into the ocean, how much does the rest of those other ~63,000 'Climate friendly' energy sources contribute to our ocean warming? The answer is certainly not zero, and the answer will be much larger than almost everyone expected IMO. I have observed that we don't talk as much about Thermal Pollution of our waters as we used to, which I find odd since many of our hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants have a pretty direct connection to the ocean. I think @unk45 could add value to this discussion.
Mark Jacobson has also been understandably critical of the carbon footprint accounting of nuclear plants. While we typically see figures reported that are around the 50 g of CO2/kWh recommendation for power generation by 2030, those estimates may fall far short when the full life cycle from construction to decommissioning of a nuke plant is considered. When we include that full impact, Mark has "calculated a climate cost of 68 to 180 grams of CO2/kWh, depending on the electricity mix used in uranium production and other variables."
Fact check: Is nuclear energy good for the climate? – DW – 11/29/2021
Supporters of nuclear energy say it can help us wean our economies off polluting fossil fuels. No surprise, it's a heated issue. But what about the facts? Can nuclear power really help save the climate?www.dw.com
Renewables and batteries can't get here fast enough. And California has the ability to accelerate that time frame and they are consciously not doing so.
"For the forest to be green, each tree must be green."
In an even broader sense, we've been relying on thermal energy to power our lives since long before the advent of Homo sapiens. In fact, thermal power enabled the advent of Homo sapiens. Approximately one million years ago, our early hominid ancestors first learned how to harness the power of fire. This discovery of how to control combustion and put it to productive use was one of the most profound developments in the timeline of hominid evolution. Most importantly, it enabled cooking food, which dramatically increased the bioavailability of nutrients and calories with less digestion. Fire also provided warmth, light, protection from predators, opportunity for crafting better tools, and maybe even contributed to the development of language and complex social relationships. This was, more than anything else, the first time in the history of life on Earth that a technology developed by a species disrupted its own evolutionary path by triggering a punctuated equilibrium, resulting in rapid changes to hominid physiology and anatomy that changed our mouths, skull shape, digestive tracts, hair, social patterns, hands and brains, ultimately paving the way for the development of the bigger, smarter, energy-hungry brains of modern Homo sapiens.
Over time, humans invented new crucial applications for concentrated heat, especially starting a few thousand years ago when the Sumerians began to develop the world’s first civilization. The Sumerians were the first to exploit fire for metalworking, pottery, and clay tablets for writing, technologies which were instrumental in the growth of their city-states. Meanwhile, humans also discovered that some species of animals could be domesticated and their muscles, powered by their own metabolism of chemical energy from foods like grass, could be harnessed for mechanical work like transporting loads and plowing fields. Humans continued to rely almost entirely upon combustion of biomass fuel, such as wood, and domesticated animals, such as horses, for energy until the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, Europe and the United States in the late 1700s. The world has never been the same since. With the invention of steam engines, better water wheels, factories and modern engineering, a whole new world of possibility opened up. In the ~250 years since, human technology, science, population, lifespan, economic productivity, and quality of life in general has exponentially exploded. We collectively make more technological progress in one week now than in a decade prior to the First Industrial Revolution. This could never have happened without coal, followed by additions of petroleum and natural gas. We also added geothermal, hydroelectric, and nuclear power, but the fossil fuels have been indispensable and demand has continually increased with brief interruptions only for major global economic recessions.
So, hominids have been using heat to perform work (in the physics sense of the term) since time immemorial and added crankshafts driven by fluid pressure a couple thousand years ago with civilizations such as those in China and the Roman empire, and we're still doing this today. Crazy to think about.
The solar & batteries model is completely different because it works directly with the electromagnetic force without any intermediate steps and associated inefficiencies. Photons from the Sun bombard Earth, semiconductor wafers that are placed outside in the sunshine intercept the photons, and electrons in the valence band of the semiconductor atoms absorb the energy of the photons and are thus excited into the conduction band and are whisked away by a built-in voltage. This is elegantly simple, beautiful, efficient, cheap, safe and has zero moving parts. It makes no noise and emits no harmful pollution. The materials are recyclable. It doesn't necessarily require large, centralized power plants or long-distance, high-voltage, expensive power transmission. It comes with almost no ongoing operation and maintenance costs other than occasional cleaning. The panels can even perform double duty as roof shingles on buildings we were going to construct anyway. This is extremely awesome in my opinion. The holdup this entire time has been learning about:
- The existence of the photovoltaic effect, discovered by Edmond Becquerel in 1839
- Semiconductor physics and manufacturing techniques to mass-produce cheap, high-quality silicon wafers for the photovoltaic cells and the microelectronics to control all of this
- How to make good electrochemical batteries that are cheap
- How to make installation cheap
Energy and toolmaking have been fundamental drivers of human progress for the last million years, and I would argue that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is now underway with AI-driven manufacturing and a transition to abundant energy production and consumption with solar photovoltaics, batteries, and advanced electric motors. Tesla sits at the epicenter of this earthshaking revolution and most people have no idea what's happening. Consuming fuel to make stuff hot literally made us who we are, and now we're finally moving on.
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Dreadnought
Member
If the question was why not more of the heat energy is converted to electrical energy:
There is a theoretical limit, the Carnot efficiency for the amount of work that can be extracted from heat energy. It solely depends on process temperature, which is limited by materials (i.e. cost) and ambient temperature, which is given and it's always less than 100%.
Residual heat can be used for remote heating as others mentioned. A second (low pressure) turbine to extract residual work after the first (high pressure) turbine, heat exchangers to pre-heat fresh water and similar measures can only get the process closer to the theoretical limit but not beyond.
Who's education we talking about?The cost of Higher Education is about to go up again?
Go for it; since you've never done this before, right? Right???
Edit; and I'm sure you'll let us know the outcome, so we can learn at someone else's expense. Always the best, although not always the way it's done...
There are other reasons here - I don't think the economy in general is looking very alive. That lesson was learned last year... my reserve was too low. Meanwhile, Ford's gonna show how you can't make money in EVs, BYD throttles back some, and so MSM will attack Tesla Margins next. Fully aware Tesla is rocking! That's the crazy part.
SunCatcher
Member
"Somebody help me for I am about to sin!!!"
Sorry bro; I guess you didn't get that I was kidding... sounded like you were going for a small option call. Something I've done so many times before it's not even funny. Over all it simply hasn't worked for me, thus my version of "The Cost of Higher Education". Which for me, never seems to truly end.
Tesla is indeed rocking. And will surely be rocketing again at some point as well. What the hell is taking so long; that's what we'd all like to know.
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