Comment by southern_cross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by southern_cross | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think I've seen the particular study you reference, but if it's like most others that I have seen then it's probably mostly hogwash, based on bogus numbers and wishful thinking.

BTW, the Oklahoma-to-Tennessee transmission line referenced in this article was supposed to terminate in my area, where it would connect to TVA's system. But TVA told them that they didn't need the electricity and didn't want it (see below), so nothing ever got built. Between this and the other difficulties referenced in the article, they finally gave up on the notion and sold out to someone else, and that someone else now finds itself on the wrong side of some bankruptcy issues. To wit, certain customers of theirs are having financial difficulties and are trying to get out from under their contracts, with at least one very large customer now using bankruptcy as a lever.

As far as TVA itself goes, they currently have a good mix of hydro, nuclear, coal, natural gas (some of which has recently replaced coal), a little bit of wind (with no plans to add more AFAIK), and now some solar, which is a growing part of their base. (There's also been some noise lately about maybe finishing up a nuclear station that was halted halfway and mothballed decades ago, but I don't think that's going to happen.) The article mentions a politician who apparently is anti-wind and may have caused some difficulties here. But there is also another politician who is pro-solar and who may be influencing TVA's activities in that regard.

Assuming the "could, using existing technologies" include moderate political will, it's easy to adjust the taxes to make them want to buy wind. I don't think that's wishful thinking, it's just the difference between "could" and "will".

Sure. If you are willing to torpedo the economy you could accomplish a lot.

At least until people start showing up with pitchforks and torches.

And by 'torpedo the economy' I mean raise energy costs up to the point were all this energy pipe dreams becomes viable.

Of course if people were interested in actually solving the problem then we would be building nuclear power plants left and right and wouldn't have to worry about insanely long transmission lines.

Taking 3 cents per kWh from coal and giving it to wind would not torpedo the economy.

Nuclear power plants are fine too.

You know what else will torpedo the economy, with nothing we can do about it at all? Catastrophic climate change.

> Catastrophic climate change.

Which is probably just not going to happen, for the most part. The people pushing this stuff are generally just lying about it (lies of omission in many cases), and they should be ashamed of themselves. And we as a whole should be treating them quite harshly for it, rather than accommodating them.

By way of example, lately they've been talking a lot about how melting permafrost will release lots of CO2 and methane (greenhouse gases), as biological activity kicks in which causes old organic matter to break down. But what they fail to mention (and this is an intentional omission on their part, in my opinion) is that pretty much as soon as that starts happening, other biological activity will kick in which mitigates those emissions, since a lot of things use that stuff for food. So while some extra CO2 and methane might very well be emitted, this will be far more limited in scope than they let on. It's just scare tactics, mostly.

That's just wishful thinking on your part. All the experts disagree with you. Do you really think there is a vast conspiracy going on? With what goal?

No, I think most of the folks spewing this stuff are mostly just functionally incompetent, a position which you might agree with yourself if you'd actually read any of their research and understood the "data" which they try to use to justify it. (Don't get me started!)

But some of them are also clearly dishonest, too, IMO. Michael Mann, for example, who is generally considered an esteemed climate scientist, got caught some years back attempting to commit perjury by claiming in court documents that he was a Nobel Peace Prize winner, which he clearly was not. (The situation with him - and a few others who made similar claims - got so bad that the Nobel folks eventually had to step in and put a stop to it.) And those who looked closely at the tree-ring data which he used to help build his famous "hockey stick" temperature chart found a lot of problems with that data and how he used it, but I don't remember all of the details. I do remember it being stated that tree ring growth responds primarily to changes in precipitation, though, rather than temperature.

I recently read a paper where two of the authors (out of several) are considered to be among the most esteemed climate scientists in the world. And I just shook my head at how bad that paper was, the ridiculous claims that it made, and at how seriously it was being taken, at least at first. One of those esteemed authors has of late taken to making such outrageous claims that even his own acolytes don't really want to talk about it much, so I was a bit surprised to even see his name on that paper to begin with.

Of course, in the press the paper was being hailed as breakthrough research at the time. But I noticed that it kind of fell off the radar pretty quickly, so I guess a lot of other folks had quietly come to the same conclusion as to how bad it was. I have to see any public acknowledgement of that, though.

BTW, I read somewhere that there are something like 200x as many climate papers being published today as there were a generation or so ago. So if there is a research bandwagon that someone might want to jump on in order to get funding and get their papers published, that's probably a good one to go for. But it turns out that an awful lot of so-called "climate experts" publishing such papers actually have little to no formal training in matters of climate, which I find very telling. Some of them have little to no STEM training at all, in fact.

These are exactly the same arguments that creationists offer against evolution. I find it extremely unlikely that the entire climate science community is less competent in climate science than you. If it were that easy to refute, don't you think that the billions of dollars that the fossil fuel industry spends on lobbying would be more effectively used for publishing refutations?

> These are exactly the same arguments that creationists offer against evolution.

That's a rather bizarre association to make! I suggest that you refrain from making any further comments on the matter until you've done a little digging for yourself - looked at the backgrounds of the so-called "experts"; read some of the history of the matter, going back decades to centuries; and read some of the papers and critiques of those papers - instead of just depending on whatever the headlines tell you.

Bogus numbers: Wind and solar are always portrayed using "nameplate" capacity; their full theoretical capacity under ideal conditions, which rarely happens. (They generally have no control over this, either.) On the other hand, something like a natural gas plant can usually produce at its full capacity pretty much on demand, although it probably only does this on relatively rare occasions, too.

To use a local example, I have a solar plant nearby which is rated at one megawatt "nameplate". But for whatever reasons it is currently maxing out at only 60% of that, even under ideal conditions. And it looks like its average output may be as low as 17%, depending on how you count things. (I generally use 25% as a round, ballpark figure for wind and solar, although it looks like off-shore wind power at least is generally running much higher than that.)

Wishful thinking: The wind and solar folks like to pretend that with enough storage (battery, pumped hydro, and so on ) then these can be as reliable and productive as more traditional power sources. Except that the storage stuff only has limited capacity, and is remarkably limited in many cases (to hours of capacity if not just minutes), so they're going to need something much more robust for backup. And that's generally means that the traditional sources will still be needed to fulfill this role. Which may be mostly fine technologically, but economically it will be quite expensive, and you need to include that added expense in the overall costs for wind and solar. It is wishful thinking to just ignore these factors.

Google, which was quite into renewals themselves a while back, long ago stated that it was obvious that these were never really going to work out for them. Given that Google has pretty much unlimited intellectual and financial resources (or at least it did at the time), if there was anybody who could make this work it would probably be them. But apparently not so much.

Who are you talking to? The subject here was a study about reducing CO2 emissions by a certain amount. The "capacity" numbers weren't mentioned at all.

The study's focus on how to reduce storage needs is the opposite of ignoring storage cost. Backup power isn't ignored either.

The NOAA study being referenced is the one linked to below, from what I can tell. I mentioned that it was probably full of bogus numbers and wishful thinking, like many other similar studies I've seen, and you responded to that, and I responded to you with more details. Sorry if there was any confusion here.

http://www.tresamigasllc.com/docs/nclimate2921.pdf

A quick read of it suggests the following limitations, among others; take the time to read it for yourself if you like:

1. It seems predicated on the notion that we can have a system where any shortfall in one part of the country can be easily made up for just by using the excess generation in other parts of the country. This appears to be a rather "blue sky" assumption to make, and one that I personally wouldn't be willing to make.

2. For the numbers quoted, it makes no mention of "nameplate" capacity vs. actual average capacity, which of course makes a huge difference as to the item above.

3. It makes the rather bizarre statement that HVAC lines can't transmit power over long distances, which clearly isn't true. (They can stretch for thousands of miles if need be, although most aren't anywhere near that long.) It may be true, though, that with current technology HVDC lines can transmit power more efficiently and for longer distances than HVAC lines can.

4. If I'm reading it correctly, it admits to not taking short term variability (an hour or less) into account, when such variability can be substantial. I may be reading it wrong, though.

And so on.

So at best this study can be taken as an example of out-of-the-box, non-traditional thinking, and perhaps as an encouragement for doing more of the same. But it hardly qualifies as any kind of proof that what they describe is technologically or economically feasible.

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