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Comment by Tuxer | Hacker News Reader

Once again, making me proud to pay CA taxes.

If they do not take large hydro into account when calculating this 100%, I wonder what we'll do with the dams. Destroy them to let the rivers free-flow again? Dams would have been a great store of energy for this project by pumping the water up during the day using solar/wind.

Tesla Energy must be salivating at all those batteries that will need to be constructed.

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Meanwhile, NYC's plan is a measly 80% reduction in carbon emissions in city run operations alone by 2050. We'll be going backwards once Indian Point is decommissioned.

Though to be fair the state of new york has lower per capita carbon emission than California, though I think that mostly has to do with the density of new york city.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_carbon_...

To be really fair, policy choices influence population density, and vice versa. California is fairly sprawling and favours sprawl over dense settlement.

I think you misread. Hydro will be allowed under this bill.

oh I must have, I read this sentence "The state currently gets about 44 percent of its power from renewables and hydropower." as continuing with the current thought that hydro wasn't 100% clean.

Pump it up then.

Will hydro be viable if the rainfall gets worse? Lake Mead is about 40% capacity, I can't imagine other dams are doing much better.

There is a proposal to convert the Hoover Damn and Lake Mead into pumped storage.

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/los-angeles-considers-3b-pu...

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/07/24/business/ener...

I thought they were already used as pumped storage? I know the grand coullee has the ability to pump water up into its reaovoir, at least they talked about this in a high school class I took 25 years ago.

THey can build transmission lines into WA and OR and get hydrop from there.

Assuming those states want to sell power to CA. I suppose they would if CA is willing to pay for it.

A ton of pacific northwest hydropower is already flowing into California through the BPA's intertie system:

https://www.bpa.gov/news/pubs/FactSheets/fs-20170726-BPA-set...

As a fly fisherman, I sure hope we can eliminate some of those dams.

They can be useful, but we've also overdone it a bit.

>As a fly fisherman, I sure hope we can eliminate some of those dams.

They're not all bad. Some of the best gold medal sections in the country are tailwaters. It's some of the most challenging, technical fishing you'll ever do as well. Landing a 10lb trout on size 24-28 nymphs and 8X tippet is an art itself.

I agree, they're not all bad. It's the salmon run ones that bother me the most.

Maybe not as many batteries as we think.

Local generation (Photovoltaics or turbines) set up nearby the channel where water will move uphill could run the pumps directly, without much voltage drop because of close proximity. On cloudless days it "charges" the reservoir.

Batteries still necessary to smooth things out, but not to run pumps 24\7

Unfortunately, dams really don't represent that big of an energy store in practice.

If you ever see the level in the reservoir behind the dam go up then energy is being stored. If the level goes down then stored energy is being released.

The level of your favourite reservoir over time is probably available on line. Is there a massive annual pattern of high levels in spring and lowering level in fall and winter?

Are metal/chemical batteries “clean” though?

In the atmospheric climate context, possibly. But if we optimize only for that, is there not a potentially serious trade off in the likelihood of irresponsible disposal?

You can greatly reduce the danger of improper disposal by implementing a https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deposit-refund_system

That is an honor system. Hope. Promises, promises.

Honor? No, it's based on cold, hard cash; you charge upfront a fee (as if the person had dumped it illegally), then refund that fee if they properly dispose of it.

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