To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity

I went to the Dominican Republic in the 1990s when the power grid was overloaded. They'd have rolling blackouts in the capitol, first the lights would go out, but the generators would kick in and the hotel you are in would light up, and the houses of rich people, everybody else would be in the dark.

The glass factories, the microchip factories, infrastructure that runs aviation, etc. are a different business which cannot start and stop production around supply interruptions.

The good news (e.g. "gospel") is that U238 + n => Pu239 and that we've mined enough uranium that is sitting above ground (so called "waste") that we've got 200 years of carbon-free fuel to run our civilization.

It can't possibly be economically competitive if it is driving a steam turbine, a huge and precision-engineered power conversion device that dwarfs the reactor and often the heat exchangers. With higher temperature materials (liquid metal or salt coolant) and this kind of turbine

https://www.powermag.com/supercritical-co2-pilot-power-plant...

we would never lack for carbon free power.

I don’t understand why people keep proposing these ideas that we must sacrifice and do without electricity. There are 7 billion people on the planet. Even if you organized to have enough Americans self sacrifice (needlessly) why would you ever expect the rest of the world, in particular the developing world who are trying to raise their living standards, to do the same?

This is not a solution. It’s dead on arrival but it keeps getting rolled out. End this distraction. The year is 2020. Forty years ago France decarbonized its grid in a decade using serialized production of nuclear power. We know how to do this. There is a solution that we have done. We know how it works. It doesn’t require some impossible utopia of self sacrificing humans. Everyone can keep turning on the lights and running their heaters.

The article yada-yada's over all the things that require constant electricity.

What about garage startups?

What about people who need some sort of pager charged? (Emergency responders, including troubleshooters for companies)

What about disabled people, plagued by anxiety, PTSD or Alzheimers?

What about the absolutly ridiciously look the country implementing this first would have from the rest of the world?

Who decides whose "usecase" for continous electricity is "important enough"?

I get a feeling that the article wants to stretch the Overton window for attention purposes, but forgoes all sense in the process...

What's the author proposing? That we voluntarily abstain from using electricity during certain times, or the government shut down electricity usage to households during certain times? The former is the equivalent of the government telling people to "turn down your thermostat" or "don't drive SUVs". That's basically useless because most people don't care. The latter wouldn't work because most people place high value on continuous electricity, so such a proposal will be political suicide. In the unlikely event that such a proposal does get implemented, most people will either run their own generators or power storage systems (as evidenced by PaulHoule's comment), which will be much less efficient than a large scale solution and therefore be a net-negative.

This is morally and politically a non-starter. Electricity improves people's lives way too much to be time restricted.

Jimmy Carter requested Americans to turn down their thermostats for the Winter and Americans balked (I was alive at that time - he asked to turn it down from 72F to 68F). I can't imagine Americans balking at turning down their thermostats being happy to give up the constant delivery of electricity to their homes. If you're going to ask people to make significant lifestyle changes then you should ask them to make those changes where it would provide the biggest benefit - and that's not the utility sector, it's the transportation sector. Not only is transportation the 2nd largest producer of CO2 (not too far behind electricity) but it also leads to poor local air quality and tens of thousands of vehicle-related deaths. Moreover, I think more Americans would be amenable to a change in transportation over a change in their electric supply.

I really do not understand why we can't take a glass half full approach.

Why can't we just put resource onto new nuclear and other clean energy. If we could solve the storage problem, wind and solar would be amazing.

It is a source of great anxiety for me that our power will go out on a -40 day and take our furnace with it. I suppose that a battery, problematic as they are, could help some of that, but really for most of winter it's just not an option for the northern areas of the world.

> Hospitals certainly need 100 percent reliable equipment—

Hang on there, are we so sure about that? Our present-day obsession with reliable technology in healthcare is a very recent development, but it's something that has largely been sold to us by industrialists and the oil industry, and we consume it, increasingly, at the cost of the living standards, even the lives, of the poor and those in developing countries. Society has conditioned us to believe that reliable power for safety-critical life-sustaining applications is something that we can't live without, but a measured examination of the evidence of climate change means that we must urgently reimagine a future without the growth or even the maintenance of healthy human lifespans for those in the developed world.

A modest proposal of my own would be for western governments to introduce climate-safeguarding social credit systems that normalise and enforce the migration to a new intermittency economy, while forestalling the dangers of any dissidence or skepticism that would hold out against the new economic model that this would create. It would help to prepare us for a new society and a new economy that wasn't reliant on the old and unsustainable paradigms of food, resource and energy security.

The first step is to have people realize how much power they are consuming. Maybe sell power in blocks that have to be refilled.

I had a shed built on some cheap off grid land as my office. Bought 100ah 12v battery and 300w of solar. It’s surprising how little power use I can manage when I see the power draw and battery level. I’m not in the greatest place for solar.

It’s also given me an appreciation for how much power different devices can draw.

I don't have a link at hand, but I remember a study for Germany that the difference between production at night and at day wasn't the biggest issue, but the production in summer was so much greater than in winter. If you would just produce enough renewable energy for 100% of the yearly energy consumption, you wouldn't only have to store the energy for the night in batteries, but you would need to store several months' energy consumption in batteries to make it through winter.

Go to the 'Supply' tab, the answer the author seems to write off in the 2nd paragraph.

http://www.ieso.ca/power-data

Edited! Sorry, I blasphemed against climate change.