‘Building back badly’: Global power sector emissions soar | Hacker News Reader

‘Building back badly’: Global power sector emissions soar

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43 pointsdredmorbius50 comments

Meanwhile in CA. I'm building a home and pretty much locked into a specific bank for this stupid deal. Yesterday I called my banker and said: "I'm spending about $9K to get hooked up to PG&E, can I redirect that money to make this a 100% off grid solar house"?

The answer was NO and it's all tied to Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, bla bla bla and I hope in the future it changes.

He was also refusing to allow me to put Solar anywhere that the appraiser sees.

The laws right now are designed to burn California down (and make people homeless but that's a completely separate thing)

Worst case scenario: what would happen if you went ahead anyway?

Better to ask forgiveness than permission.

There are cases where this isn't true, and this is one of those cases.

City or County denies occupancy certificate due to no electric connection and he's on the hook for all the mortgage, plus liable for the bank's losses because the house is un-sellable plus he has to find somewhere else to live until it is corrected.

The county itself is OK with that as long as I would have the power source permitted. It's the bank in my case.

He wouldn’t have a mortgage (at least not though Freddie Mac / Fannie Mae)

While I disagree with the appraisal portion, not hooking up to the grid is understandable. While you may be prepared and willing to live off-grid, future home owners may see that as a downside (perceived/actual unreliability, maintenance costs, requirement of specialized knowledge), so it would make sense that it would effect your home price (hence the conditions of your mortage).

Is this a bank issue? If you were paying out of pocket it sounds like you could do what you want.

I can't afford it. :(

But finance is all but entirely necessary when the government both provides cheap loans and encourages currency debasement.

With inflation it's almost irresponsible to purchase a home outright when a conforming loan will essentially supercharge the growth rate of the home as an asset.

I originally paid extra on my mortgage. A few years later, and my mortgage (which wasn't even conforming) costs less than rent for a three bed apartment. I see now that there are better places to put the extra cash.

All of these programs are nudging strategies that don't really affect the wealthy in society. Meanwhile I pretty much have to get a loan for school and housing.

The laws in California are built on the idea that you can centrally plan a functioning society.

You can’t.

It’s frustrating that we have to KEEP learning this over and over and over.

No? What does some bank construction loan oversight have to do with “central planning”?

The regulations come from Fannie and Freddie as the poster said.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fannie_Mae

The other concern is that a centrally planned regulation about being connected to grid power prevents them from doing solar.

These are both regulations made FAR from where the OP is building their house, and OP is simply caught in the regulations as an edge case. But because these things are centrally planned there is no recourse.

Neither of those is a "regulation" at all. Fannie won't buy mortgages on off-the-grid properties, because they are a weird and frankly pointless niche and a vanishingly small slice of the housing market that nobody cares about. To build one on credit you need a portfolio loan from a cooperative lender. Obviously, if you try to get a construction loan that the lender thinks can be resold as a traditional mortgage, but then try to build a non-traditional building with the money, there's going to get differences between you and your lender.

> centrally planned regulation about being connected to grid power prevents them from doing solar.

This is not correct at all. Solar is not only possible for grid connected new construction in CA, it’s required.

The only restriction here is the federal one that requires his new construction home to be grid tied if Fannie Mae is going to loan him $$ for it.

Given the potential negative impact on home value of a non-grid-tied home, that’s probably reasonable.

Holy crap this is going to be so far from the truth going forward in this area. PG&E will, for the rest of time, have wind based power outages that last multiple days (about 20 days in 2020).

This is truly a terrible restriction based on idiots that can't comprehend we have solutions to the problems in California and Texas.

The other thing PG&E is pushing for is 100% electric appliances - this only benefits the utility, at this point is going to get $600 per month per household in the winter. It's pretty obvious who's writing these grid tie restrictions.

The laws in CA are anything but centrally planned. In my city local councilmembers decide what is de facto law unilaterally in their district. What I would give for sacramento to take the reigns and remove local politicians from zoning and transit decision making.

Huh? I was under the impression that, since 2020, solar is mandatory on new residential buildings under 3 stories in California. Is that not the case?

http://www.calsolarinc.com/solar-requirements-for-commercial...

I've seen a few single family homes go up quick and finish in empty lots in my neighborhood in CA this summer and none have had solar panels. Not sure how much teeth this law has or if other issues preclude it like if these homes I saw were permitted earlier and grandfathered in.

On my block they actually demolished a rooftop solar and rebuilt the house twice as large, all natural gas heating and appliances. This is in Berkeley, and it's possible because all of the energy efficiency requirements at local and state level exempt reconstruction, as long as you keep I guess 1 board from the old structure it works.

I see a lot of that sort of development too. Old rotting 2br bungalow converted to a three story home that consumes almost all available space on the lot and looks like a modern refrigerator. I'm not sure why that is allowed but a three story apartment complex of the same exact dimensions is illegal.

is it time to drone-bomb the coal plants?

All we need is for one totalitarian dictatorship to make green power generation infrastructure a bragging item domestically and internationally. The rest will follow suite more readily. Imagine if China was able to claim they are adding world record amounts of renewables. There would be a race for #2.

China already has more solar than all of Europe.

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-add-55-65-gw-s...

China is also building more coal power plants than the rest of the world.

https://e360.yale.edu/features/despite-pledges-to-cut-emissi...

Yeah, unfortunately, China has worse percapita emissions than a place like the UK, including effects of imports/exports, and it’s getting worse.

China also has more people than all of Europe.

username checks out </reddit-tier-snarky-comment>

I guess no one knows the relationship of Kissinger to China.

By roughly a factor of 3. 444m EU, 1.4 billion, China.

All of Europe is still only half China: 770 million.

https://www.worldometers.info/population/china-eu-usa-japan-...

As the sibling comment mentions, China already is the #1 renewable energy producer by wattage, and even by % they beat a lot of the west, including countries like France and the USA.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_renewable...

The reason China is seen as a big outlier offender in terms of energy production is that remainder of fossil fuel power is pretty much entirely coal.

Renewable != low emission

France is overall a pretty low emission country (regarding electricity production).

> all we need

> green power

There is no such thing as green power. Solar and wind are not renewable. They require heavy industries only possible with fossil fuel to manufacture the appliances. They require physical elements that are not in every country (thus you need to transport things). They require storage that's absolutely not possible at the scales we are talking about (replacing current fossil). Etc etc.

There is no clear path forward where we continue to gorge in energy and objects. There is a clear de-growth path if we want to be reasonable and not toast our planet. But there is no existing magic tech today. Calling wind/solar green is green washing. Look into the lifecycle of these things and you will realize why they are not sustainable at all.

There are literally green power sources, it's called plants. Plants produce all of the chemicals available in petroleum, and pull CO2 out of the air. After converting the plants into methane, syngas or biodiesel you are left with the remaining carbon chain which can be used for soil building, thus "reverse mining" carbon from the air, putting it back into the soil. This can be done without using petroleum, or using land that would be used for growing food crops. It can also be done with food wastes like walnut shells, bigasse, or corn stover.

> Only possible with fossil fuel

Why? Many heavy industrial process that currently require fossil fuels are moving to electric machinery. The first batch of steel made without coal shipped from Sweden last week: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/19/green-steel-...

> Look into the lifecycle

Here’s the summary of a recent NREL study on lifecycle emissions of various renewable energy technologies: https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy13osti/56487.pdf

Solar beats coal (not sure about natural gas, I’d like to see that on the chart), at current efficiencies and with current manufacturing methods.

These lifecycle emissions figures need to be considered on a curve — as more electricity on the grid comes from renewable sources, and more industrial processes are electrified, the lifecycle emissions for solar go down.

The same is obviously not true for coal or gas.

Albeit when the solar panels reach the end of life... Not to mention the batteries.

Many turbine, coal, gas plants lived for more than 50 years with some maintenance. That's longer than nuclear, and both solar and wind are perishable in comparison. That does not excuse the use of fossil fuels, just highlights that we'll have another problem to deal with soon enough.

We'll see how good recycling and refurbishing is on these installations.

That's not how totalitarian dictatorships work... They don't usually care about 'prestige', they care about legitimacy in the eyes of foreign countries, as well as maintaining their grip on domestic power.

The items you list are precisely what I implied they could seek through reinventing renewables as a world industry to compete in.

How many totalitarian dictatorships have you seen prioritizing technological innovation? Keep in mind that a majority of the world's governments are dictatorships.

Legitimacy usually involves meetings with well-respected and powerful world leaders, such as the president of the USA. Maintaining domestic power usually involves forming a secret police force and disposing of internal rivals. Prestige is not a highly sought-after goal for dictators, as evidenced by the fact that most choose to accumulate private wealth rather than invest in domestic start-ups.

For a country that has the industry to make such a pivot what heavily investing in renewables would result in is not simply prestige but a source of national pride. The way the USSR approached this is vastly different from how technological progress was perceived in the US. In the Soviet union domestic industrial capacity was something highly regarded by the people in general even if we know on many levels theft and organizational inefficiency didn't make it an actual shining example.

Technological innovation was a national goal in the USSR. It is what won legitimacy as a world power. A country like China is similarly poised to make such a goal their focus. It can be spun positively in so many ways.

Off the cuff:

"Saveguarding our ancestor's land by building renewables"

"Using the intellectual might of our nation's engineers and scientists to stand above other nations"

etc

For all its baggage let patriotism be used to help the Earth which knows not of nations' borders.

I think you're putting too much stock in Soviet propaganda. Science and technology were not very high priorities in the Soviet Union, compared with military spending and domestic control.

>"Since the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union devoted between 15 and 17 percent of its annual gross national product to military spending, according to United States government sources." https://nuke.fas.org/guide/russia/agency/mo-budget.htm

US defense spending was <6% of GDP throughout the 1980s.

The Soviets also spent massive amounts of money on maintaining control (KGB & domestic police) and protecting their borders (maintaining satellite states & controlling Afghanistan). They also defunded their space program when it became decoupled from their military rocket program.

I am relaying my direct experiences with the Soviet system for whose propaganda I have a near-lethal dose of skepticism.

The mid-80s military spending figures represent a state that knows it is in a struggle and may soon start to destabilize. The US never had to use military presence to keep the states together - the USSR did do so for its constituent republics.

I am referring to the mid-50s to late 70s. Certainly where a technology had a military application it received greater funding, the technological milestones were not made in personal home creature comforts. But Soviet mathematical and scientific prowess was world-renown. The educational system greatly succeeded in that regard, as I can attest.

A few examples are having achieved the only unmanned landing of Venus, and the only unmanned traversal of the Lunar surface whose distance record still stands. These engineering breakthroughs were done in the name of science, yes, but they were milked for all their propaganda value. I am proposing that such a directive with something like renewables should be tantalizing to a country like China.

Well, Venera 4 was the first successful landing on Venus, but not the only one, being followed by NASA's Pioneer Venus 2. Leaving that aside, The Soviets failed in their main objective of landing on the moon, at least partially due to resource constraints, which forced them to use unconventional approaches in their development program. In addition to that, their Mars program was a total failure.

Regardless of those details, Soviet state funding of science and technology failed to give them a technological edge in the cold war, or greater scientific prestige than the USA. Both the USA and USSR spent a lot of money on satellite states and allies, but the Soviets put a larger proportion of their money into these sorts of power plays than the Americans did, largely because the US government does not command as large a share of the economy.

Granted, I was incorrect about Venus.

I'm not sure you're fully seeing what I'm trying to get across, because the discussion turned into a compare and contrast against the US. All of the USSR's failings notwithstanding, I am using them as an example of effectively garnering national pride in technological progress.

I propose that China values that outcome greatly, and perhaps to increase adoption of renewables is one way of achieving it.

We're running out of time to wait for the established political class to do something about this.

We need people power - shutting down coal plants by blockading entry of personnel and deliveries, and disabling equipment.

It took just 5 people to shut down this power plant in Germany: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/dec/04/no-regre...

Saving 26,000 tonnes of CO2.

There are about 300 coal power plants in Europe, so with just 1,500 people they could all be shut down at least temporarily. Meanwhile we get some 'climate marches' with hundreds of thousands of people in attendance.

You are basically advocating for acts of terrorism that will kill people. There are plenty of places like hospitals that need reliable power or people will die.

Climate change kills people. Each kilotonne of CO2 is calculated to lead to one extra death from climate change:

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.0232...

So these protestors saved 26 lives.

Of course, the potential death toll from climate change is infinite, since we will never be able to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere in any meaningful way (we would need to recreate the Carboniferous period or the Azolla event).

And a blockade on manufactured products from China / shut the Suez, make half of it uneconomic. So there must be no exported / offshored pollution. What we can't make economically in Europe with green energy, we don't need / can't have. And EU countries with political majorities who disagree are free to have the ECB uninsure their banks. The time for half measures and excuses is long past.

If Germany's eco-protesters are serious, maybe they should protest the Nord Stream 2 pipeline.

From Wikipedia:

> Nord Stream has a total annual capacity of 55 billion m3 (1.9 trillion cu ft) of gas, and the addition of Nord Stream 2 is expected to double this capacity to a total of 110 billion m3 (3.9 trillion cu ft).

CO2 emission of natural gas is 53.12 kg per thousand cubic feet [1], so the additional 2.0 trillion cubic feet of Nord Stream 2 translates to ~106,000,000 tons of CO2 per year. Germany emitted 775,752,190 tons of CO2 in 2016, so it's a significant fraction of Germany's whole emission.

...Alternatively, they could go back twenty years and tell those anti-nuclear activists to shove it, but since time travel is impossible, I'll settle for not building more pipelines in 2021.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php

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