Curious of the politics that has folks in Idaho talking so warmly about renewable energy. If you believe the national news, all red states want to keep burning coal. Curious about the background here.
The "California arbitrage" has been very profitable for Idaho for many years: This involves selling California renewable hydro, for which they pay a premium, and buying coal from Utah to replace it. (Ever driven north of SLC to Idaho on I-15? Those high voltage transmission lines are there for a reason.)
If I had to bet, I would suspect the lines from the Nevada coal plant also supply California, and Idaho Power will sell the solar production there.
Nobody in Norway will ever consider their Tesla coal powered because someone in Germany had their utility buy the hydro bragging rights off the Norwegian utility, but the German driver will happily believe the illusion that someone in Norway is responsible for the coal use, thanks to a tiny premium he paid on his energy bill. And it's not even quite as bad as it sounds, because that tiny premium does indeed influence the market dynamic in favor of green energy, it's just not quite as clean as the on-paper-swap would make it seem. That Norwegian who benefits from his utility selling off green bragging rights will never be tempted to outbid the German for that certificate, because the facts of energy provenance are on his side no matter what.
But you make it sound like there's some double-spend accounting going on. I thought that RECs had to be tied to the output... if Norway sells some hydro RECs to Germany, the electrons may not technically reach the German driver (it doesn't quite work like that), but they did have to at least leave Norway in a way that the Norwegians can't count them in their own consumption.
I know energy markets are the most complicated beasts out there, but can you explain how this sold-twice accounting works in more detail?
It boils down to the question wether this is true or not:
> but they did have to at least leave Norway in a way that the Norwegians can't count them in their own consumption
This reads as if Norway could only sell certificates for surplus energy they exported (sans certificate), but I think they can sell certificates for as much green energy as they produce, virtually downgrading their own consumption to coal/gas/whatever energy source is greenified with the certificates. Of course it would hurt their on-paper emissions, but who would honestly care about those when you know that in reality you are clean?
I'd certainly love to be proven wrong on this!
You're saying the Germans feel good (and paid a premium) for the Norwegian RECs certifying a few MWh's of clean energy were produced somewhere... the Norwegians can't count the RECs in their accounting (so they're "dirty" in official stats), but they don't care because although you can't point to individual green electrons, they know their grid is green whether the accounting says it or not.
So the "double-spend" is the Germans get the official credits because they paid for them, but the Norwegians don't care about the accounting and self-count themselves as green.
Have we not all learned by now that large media is merely playing for click-bait and sensationalism at this point and can not be trusted?
Aside from 3 years I have lived in various conservative states. The push for coal is not by the populace but by the $$$ being donated by various groups. Please note I have not lived in a coal producing state. I am sure in those states the desire is for coal as it equals jobs. Yet they are a minority.
When are you going to learn that laypeople are not capable of critical thought?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coal_mining_in_the_United_Stat...
As an aside, I believe there's a term nowadays for when the media purposefully misleads in order to promote an agenda.
There is also a term when purposely describing the media as misleading in a misleading way.
Just a guess here, but most people don't realize how pristine and beautiful it really is here. The reason I mention that is, outdoor activities like hunting fishing, camping, boating, etc. are a huge part of people's lives here. We have massive areas of protected wilderness.
My point is, as conservative as it is here, I think even our conservatives care more for the environment than average, because they spend a lot of time enjoying it.
It's a similar thing with wildlife. The avid hunters are often the biggest protectors of habitats. Same with fisherman and rivers and streams.
There is a reason that the big sandy beaches seen around highway 12 around McCall and Riggins are fairly rare in Idaho now.
Negative effects can be mitigated if the plant is designed to take them in to account. Be it not changing flows and levels except very slowly to avoid stranding fish, keeping some water flowing past the intake structure to keep sediment moving, creating fish ladders, fish spawning channels, etc.
Hydro is really one of the least bad energy sources if you have to pick one.
Keep talking like that on the internet and it will rapidly take a turn for the worse.
Colorado used to be a lot like Idaho then it achieved a "brand image" as a vacation spot, after about a generation of people retiring to their vacation spot and people moving there because they can and the state is in a tailspin (being an early adopter on weed probably didn't help but that's beside the point). Now the cost of living is skyrocketing and Denver/Boulder seem to be hell bent on recreating all the bad (bad for people who aren't wealthy, that is) decisions of a certain west coast state.
Economy, people, natural environment, no place can be highly favorable to all three. You can make big bucks and enjoy nature all you want in CA but the rest of your life will be a rat race. You can live a nice life and make good money in some places on the east coast but god help you if you want to get outdoors once in awhile. There are still many highly rural states where you can enjoy nature and have a nice life but you won't be making big bucks there.
This is the net result of asset inflation. The North East and California got rich via big-bank (Federal Reserve and Wall St) driven asset inflation. People are logically cashing out and moving to lower cost of living areas.
Plus a few ideologues who idolize the free market and don't care about externalities. Which also gives people the wrong idea about conservatives.
I’d also like to add from a government perspective a Idaho is a huge state with a small disperse population. It’s cheaper to have local energy generated from solar, than transporting power tens or hundreds of miles to a single house.
A kilowatt hour of electricity that came from the dirtiest coal plant in the universe and a kilowatt hour of electricity that came from whatever the cleanest source is are completely indistinguishable when they come out of my sockets and go into my appliances.
From what I read about West Virginia, those communities were collapsing anyway, and what Obama administration did, is to try and support government programs for the former coal miners to learn new trades and get some financial support.
https://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?stor...
Not that it is possible to retain any of the coal jobs because they've been automated and the remaining ones are being rapidly automated.
At this point there are more jobs in solar than there are in coal industry.
https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2017/2/7/14533618...
Based on this information, in my opinion this is not even realpolitik, its lying -- as in, knowing facts and then misrepresenting and misleading people; because of any number of reasons -- be that coal lobby, or what 'feels right' for the average voter rather then what happens in reality, and I don't know how to deal with that myself because this realization makes me feel anger.
Tonally: the conservative US President (supported, again, by almost all self-described conservatives) has said that "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive." He has called for an end to the "war" on "beautiful, clean coal".
This kind of anti-environment, pro-fossil fuel bombast isn't restricted to the clownish Trump. "Drill, baby, drill" is from the 2008 election cycle. Republicans have projected an attitude for decades in which dirty, polluting, environmentally destructive activities are seen as manly, powerful, patriotic, American; whereas environmental concerns are played down as trivial, wasteful, overblown, anti-American, effeminate.
Policy-wise, the GOP has supported drilling in ANWR, supported the Keystone XL pipeline, supported coal subsidies, opposed carbon caps, on and on and on. There's no nuance. The GOP has been on the wrong side of every environmental issue for years and years. We are one of the only countries in the world not part of the Paris climate accord.
Here is a long quotation from the RNC's 2016 platform. It barely even pays lip service to environmental concerns, instead harping constantly on the importance of extractive industries, the virtues of coal, etc. US conservatism is not nuanced about environmentalism, it's for the extractive industries and against the environmental concerns that sometimes get in their way.
""" The Democratic Party does not understand that coal is an abundant, clean, affordable, reliable domestic energy resource. Those who mine it and their families should be protected from the Democratic Party’s radical anti-coal agenda.The Democratic Party’s campaign to smother the U.S. energy industry takes many forms, but the permitting process may be its most damaging weapon. It takes an average of 30 days for states to permit an oil or gas well. It takes the federal government longer than seven months. Three decades ago, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) leased 12.2 million acres. In 2014, it leased only one-tenth of that number. Our nuclear industry, cleanly generating almost 20 percent of our electricity from its 99 plants, has a remarkable safety record, but only a handful of plants have been permitted in over three decades. Permitting for a safe, non-polluting hydroelectric facility, even one that is being relicensed, can take many years because of the current President’s hostility to dams. The Keystone Pipeline has become a symbol of everything wrong with the current Administration’s ideological approach. After years of delay, the President killed it to satisfy environmental extremists. We intend to finish that pipeline and others as part of our commitment to North American energy security. Government should not play favorites among energy producers. The taxpayers will not soon forget the current Administration’s subsidies to companies that went bankrupt without producing a kilowatt of energy. The same Administration now requires the Department of Defense, operating with slashed budgets during a time of expanding conflict, to use its scarce resources to generate 25 percent of its electricity from renewables by 2025. Climate change is far from this nation’s most pressing national security issue. This is the triumph of extremism over common sense, and Congress must stop it. We support the development of all forms of energy that are marketable in a free economy without subsidies, including coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear power, and hydropower. A federal judge has struck down the BLM’s rule on hydraulic fracturing and we support upholding this decision. """
Pretty tired of "conservatives" who are either not aware of or not willing to stand behind the policies of actually existing conservatism, or intentionally gaslighting.
I don't completely buy into the notion that conservatives here are conservationists. I think there definitely are some that are, but I think larger contributing factors are that we have an abundance of renewable energy (hydro, wind, and sun), low population, and a ton of federally-owned land.
We have so much hydro power that some of our dams aren't even owned by Idaho Power. For example, Lucky Peak Dam, which provides flood control for the Boise River and Boise, has a power plant there that is actually owned by Seattle City Light that provides 4% of Seattle's power (1).
Also, Idaho doesn't have a lot of fossil fuels to harvest (2), so this likely plays into lack of desire for coal. Mining in the north and agriculture in the south are our primary economic drivers.
In terms of the politics, our legislature this year just barely formed a committee to discuss climate change, but our governor did say it exists and is a problem, so who knows? I suppose I tend to think that our population's demand for electricity is no where near greater than our supply, which is why demand for coal isn't really there.
However, if someone from the outside wanted to install a coal power plant, I think conservatives here would easily support it. That may be my cynicism coming through, but I could easily see Trump advocating for it and then the freedom trucks with their freedom flags and freedom coal rolling exhausts would rally to support this.
Yeah, I'm a tad cynical.
1. http://www.seattle.gov/light/history/brief.asp 2. https://www.eia.gov/state/analysis.php?sid=ID
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying conservatives here are actually conservationists, I just mean that many of them tend to be more interested in the outdoors. I'm just basing that on people I know and encounter, so the sample size isn't huge.
Also, the weird thing about Idaho is that there are at least two, maybe three Idaho's. There is Eastern Idaho, who are largely extremely conservative farmers, then there is the Boise area, which relative to Eastern Idaho is less conservative. Then there is Northern Idaho, which I don't really know how to describe, but they don't fit either category.
I mean, we have Texas oil barons that are blocking access to public land in the McCall area that has really great hunting, but the Idaho legislators here opted not to pass legislation to help regular Idahoans have access. Why? Private property and individual rights were the big reasons I read, which clearly affects most Idahoans, but for some reason they didn't support them.
I am completely for solar and glad that solar is getting cheaper, it's a more environmentally friendly way of generating power and now it's also getting even cheaper, what's not to like, good for enviornment and the finances as well.. no real reason then for anyone not to support it
How about if "no republican" is replaced with "no Republican who needs the support of the President or national party organization to win election"?
If you believed the national news for the last two years, you were presented with an unfounded conspiracy theory.
The U.S. is not the caricature. Republicans are human too. Nobody wants to rely on coal, but if you have a lot of it, you have a huge incentive to try to make it work.