US can reach 100% clean power by 2035, DOE finds

"‘It’s got nasty’: the battle to build the US’s biggest solar power farm", https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/30/its-got-...

Unfortunately, I don't think people like Connie Ehrlich are rare, especially considering that you typically don't need much money to be as obstructive as she has. Yes, there are corporate-funded "grassroots" lobbying organizations, but when you look at how this stuff plays out across the country, it's not obvious who is using whom. (Also, from what I've seen following disputes over the years, most "grassroots" organizations that fight projects are fronts created by local citizens--or local citizen, singular--at least in California.)

The fundamental problem is that 1) local zoning laws permit too much discretion and 2) are too deferential to public input. These policies were supposed to be empowering to communities, but they're in tension with the principal of rule of law. Rule of law says that a community first makes the rules, then applies them in a principled, arms-length manner to individual cases as they arise. Contemporary zoning policies and procedures permit so much discretion that what we have is a system that effectively makes up the law on a case-by-case basis. It's a system that is fundamentally arbitrary, capricious, and unjust. It's also unconstitutional as a violation of Due Process (even under strict conservative definitions of Due Process), but the Supreme Court is deathly afraid of unleashing a tsunami of constitutional objections to zoning policies so has historically made it very difficult to appeal such cases up to the Federal courts. They usually languish and die in administrative and states courts if they even make it that far, because projects and their developers tend to be time sensitive (you don't spend money, even on lawyers, unless you have a firm time horizon on RoI) and also averse to antagonizing zoning boards.

They're also not the ones funding faux environmental studies that say replacing the coal plume with some solar panels will kill all the frogs, and they're not living in bumfuck nowhere where suddenly 4x the town's population shows up to object to the wind turbine saying it gave them seizures.

The NIMBYism only works if it manufactured and then allowed to work by the people who have actual power over these things (media owners like murdoch and lobbyists). Without that they'd just be tear gassed and told to go around the back alley to the frew speech zones like everyone else.

The commoner has few choices: find other commoners with reasonably similar concerns and use the power of numbers (and perhaps law) to represent their concerns to The Powers That Be (union, HOA, PAC, gang/mafia/mob/activist, some voters); capitulate to Those Who Know Best and hope Things Will Get Better (other voters, slacktivists, Eternally Online people); or, wait for Someone Else to rectify the concern (Enlightened Centrists, anarchists, 9-5ers, mostly everyone else).

Lots of other options and variations are possible, but I can't think of them at this time.

I don't have a point, I just wanted to document a stray thought you inspired.

I think the parent post is referring to the library example. At a certain point you don't get to keep the land around you from being used in any way other than it was exactly when you moved in.

Eminent domain is a different issue that should have a much higher barrier to use, and has likely been abused historically.

Despite a minority that was objecting it would cause these exact issues?

What's that quote? "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." - H.L. Mencken

Germany did not follow the plan and did not deploy enough renewables to cover their energy needs. They barely did anything to shift their energy generation profile.

However, it was still enough to have a big effect on the solar industry, even if it didn't affect Germany that much. They drove down solar costs for everybody else, which we can all now enjoy. And now there's 100s of GW of solar produced annually, and in nearly every area it's the cheapest power you can get.

"For sure more comfortable"? Like you said though, by what measure? I'm visiting my sister in London right now. She lives in a 750 sqft two bedroom apartment. Sure, it's smaller than my 1700 ft house back in the US, but she seems fairly comfortable.

Density plays a large role, but consumer behaviors play a larger one. And American consumes prefer diets with more meat, cars that burn fuel less efficiently, and products that are designed to be disposed more frequently.

Edit: we also prefer larger houses, built more cheaply.

Exactly. During the worst, off the charts weather event ever experienced, with statewide heat never seen before, there were a few hours where people were asked to not use much energy, but they still had plenty of energy to charge cars.

Don't wash you clothes.

Don't dry your clothes.

Don't run your oven, hair dryer, blender. Let the arc furnace lie idle. Practice your metal turning hobby later in the day.

Oh, and if you could, shut down the A/C kthx.

That's what they were saying.

Like saying ‘The UI will be ready in 6 months if the backend is figured out’.

Also not a realistic projection.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s something. But the error bars are larger than the graph.

One challenge I’ve seen though, in the situations where that’s what happened, is that I didn’t see at the time (and still, looking back, don’t see) any alternative that was likely to work either.

But no one likes that answer, especially not the folks paying for it.

Most of the difficulty was just figuring out what needed to be done, not sitting down and actually doing it.

And software is so incredibly picky, it was always in doubt for many projects if it was actually going to work well enough until the hard parts were all almost done anyway.

CRUD apps? Sure, not as hard - but even there it’s common to run across issues like ‘that doesn’t actually make sense to do’ once you go to actually do it. The new checkbox makes everything really confusing, or it tips the whole CRUd page into ‘too many things’ without a rethink, or if the bit of data that logically is associated with everything else is actually stored in a different backend, and the semantics of clicking ‘Save’ get too scary if you combine them all.

Waterfall, while pushing forward some of the planning, can help compared to what Agile has devolved to sometimes - like people literally not trying to figure out what they even want to do this week.

Waterfall was always an issue because the plans just get more unrealistic because the time to discovery of issues gets bigger, and everyone spends tons of time churning in their GANTT charts instead of just trying it, or realizing you can’t plan something accurately if you don’t know if it will work and being honest about it.

And then tighten the screws when the people doing the work are late.

It’s a story about overwhelm, in my experience. Most business problems are always in need of more decision making ability, and process tends to be used as a crutch instead of solving that problem.

That could be close to 1% of energy usage per year...

- Multiple hypothetical approaches to reduce nuclear costs are ongoing. No one knows for sure if any of them will work, or which one will work best

And it didn't address the time scale issue at all.

OTOH, solar power has a 5 decade history of 90% cost reductions per decade.

The plan was to rely on natural gas and nuclear, which are supposed to be reliable, but which were not in Texas.

Therefore, more solar and storage is probably the best way for Texans to gain reliability. Texas had the same problem with frozen gas and nuclear plants a decade earlier, knew it was a problem, and refused to fix it.

Decentralization is the only way for people to protect themselves with grid mismanagement like that, which means home solar and storage.

There are a few countries that have shown positive learning rather than negative learning, but there's questions about how much of that is from corruption and cheating rather than actual process improvements. (I'm thinking of South Korea here)