https://usenergydata.org/ goes a little deeper.
They both source the information from the same place I think.
30,994 karma · joined March 23, 2009
They both source the information from the same place I think.
Like the stuff about Australia exploiting gas. The average Australian is being ripped off royally by that.
From Saul Griffiths:
> Here is the part that should make every taxpayer in the country furious: those gas exports — the ones we are extending the life of, approving new ones for, calling them "strategic" — THEY BARELY EARN AUSTRALIA ANYTHING. Norway used its gas revenues to build vehicle-charging networks and help Norwegians buy electric cars. We don't even seem to try to make revenues. The Petroleum Resource Rent Tax raises less revenue in a year than the federal government collects from the excise on beer. Norway runs a sovereign wealth fund worth US$1.7 trillion off its hydrocarbons. Qatar funds its entire welfare state on LNG. We give it away on legacy contracts negotiated when oil was $30 a barrel and watch the LNG tankers leave Karratha. We are not even getting paid to be a petrostate. We are other people's petrostate, and too stupid to profit from it.
https://energyandstuff.substack.com/p/46bn-per-year-what-aus...
So if it's all about money in a broad "people want to save money" sense, why is a small group of people and corporations ripping off Australians to such a degree? Shouldn't their desire for money drive then to do something?
No, because their media is bought, their politicians are bought, and their idiots are all useful to these interests. So they let themselves be robbed.
And the same is true on the closely linked topic of climate, and across nations from the US to Germany.
If clean energy is being curtailed increasing usage is a better response which negative prices also incentivize but in many jurisdictions they refuse to pass those price signals onto users because they'd rather waste clean energy so they can sell them dirty energy later.
There are various online guides as to the best place to jump in if you start at the very beginning and wonder what all the fuss is about.
> There is this appalling delusion that people have that we can take this thing that is currently producing 1% of our electricity and we can just scale it up and if there is a slight issue of it not adding up, then we can just do energy efficiency,” he said. “Humanity really does needs to pay attention to arithmetic and the laws of physics – we need a plan that adds up.”
> Prof MacKay had previously avoided being drawn into the political debate about energy, but told Lynas: “I have always tried to avoid advocating particular solutions but maybe because time is getting thinner I should call a spade a spade.”
> The key for the UK, he said, was a zero-carbon solution that works in the winter, when energy demand is highest but sunshine is lowest and winds can drop for days at a time. “The sensible thing to do for a country like the UK, I think, is to focus on CCS, which the world needs anyway, and nuclear,” said Prof MacKay.
> The decision on a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point, which the government hopes will be the first of a new generation of plants, has been delayed until September.
> “Then if you ask what is the optimal amount of wind and solar to add in then the answer is going to be almost zero,” he said. “I love wind turbines – they are the cathedrals of the modern age – but they are a waste of money if you have a low carbon solution that gets you through the winter … because when the wind blows you are going to have to either turn them down or something else down that you have already paid for like nuclear or CCS.”
Maybe he would have changed his mind as prices and delivery timelines diverged but many of the people who were most enthusiastic about his work because it reflected their nuclear preference didn't, so who knows.
Though maybe his kind of person that liked nuclear and heat pumps and EVs all just changed their mind based on new evidence and we are left with the people who mysteriously like nuclear but don't want to use the output for heat and transport.
The level of aggressive skepticism in some of these highly voted comments seem really out of proportion. Scary and cult-like even.
I believe it's basically about scoring decode operations on both quality and decode speed impact to optimise both goals at once.
> Let me spell this out. Heat pumps are superior in efficiency to condens- ing boilers, even if the heat pumps are powered by electricity from a power station burning natural gas. If you want to heat lots of buildings using natural gas, you could install condensing boilers, which are “90% ef- ficient,” or you could send the same gas to a new gas power station making electricity and install electricity-powered heat pumps in all the buildings; the second solution’s efficiency would be somewhere between 140% and 185%. It’s not necessary to dig big holes in the garden and install underfloor heating to get the benefits of heat pumps; the best air-source heat pumps (which require just a small external box, like an air-conditioner’s) can deliver hot water to normal radiators with a coefficient of performance above 3.
Ignoring the reality that he let himself be talked into the Iran war by Israel, over strong US military objections. And suggesting instead he's secretly starting a war with China by cutting off oil to the entire far east.
A move which has only strengthened Chinas power in the region.
It's recursively stupid all the way down.
As the "non-proliferation" treaty they link to makes clear in it's very name and in the full explanation, they want to first limit unnecessary expansion.
https://www.fossilfueltreaty.org/about#about
> Develop the plan that would allow governments to stop building out the problem by ending the expansion of coal, oil and gas production
The people who've been doing the operations for decades are much less open to this new informstion than newly trained doctors.
>Do you think this is really about climate change? No, these are empty human beings, desperate for their lives to mean something. And their apocalyptic climate change model has done that for them. It has nothing to do with science. They probably don’t realize that the marginal rate of energy cost is fast approaching zero. That technological innovation is exponential and carbon capture can likely be made economical relatively soon. Hell, they probably aren’t even pro-nuclear.
From a BBC explainer of what these protestors want:
"Just Stop Oil (JSO) wants the UK to stop approving new fossil fuel projects, which are a major cause of climate change."
That's a narrow goal and they stopped when they thought they'd achieved it.
So their allegedly "apocalyptic" climate change model doesn't even stretch as far as stopping producing from existing oil fields, just new ones before they become sunk costs. Which makes sense because as this rant says, we have new and better tech to replace it.
They are advocating the reasonsable compromise position. This guy is the "intellectual" who isn't letting facts get in the way of his rant about smart people.
I'm guessing he's also missed the irony of citing Pol Pot killing all the educated folk as the intro to his "smart people are the problem" rant.
https://robbieandrew.github.io/carsales/?lang=en&freq=monthl...
Note the German data goes back further so you can't directly eyeball them without accounting for that.
Currently just trailing France and further behind Sweden, Denmark, Norway.
Electrification generally reduces energy use, while increasing electricity use, due to much higher efficiency.
So if you are correct it will only be because you don't produce the energy used in ICE but instead import it after buying it on the global market.
This is a guy who when Russia invaded Crinea he said that wind and solar didn't work and so we should spend that money instead inventing a totally new kind of low carbon technology.
Absolute jaw dropping stupidity, if he wasn't a shill. But he was and is.
I mean he's a step above the Trump-like "Chinese Hoax" rhetoric but you still have to be a complete idiot to think he is anything other than a shill.
If you waved a magic wand and combined them with infinite transmission for free the price in the expensive area with all the people and energy demand would barely move. (It would disproportionately rise in the cheap zones).
So any sane approach wouldn't spend money shifting the small amount of surplus power from the cheap region but spend the same money on say offshore wind feeding into the expensive zone. This is basically the pitch for zonal pricing, it tells you where demand and supply are needed. Building lots of transmission until the price is the same everywhere defeats the purpose. Building lots of offshore wind was the actual plan but most of those got rejected on bogus national security grounds.
The rejected wind farms would have doubled the entire country's generation.
In fact this nuclear plant was the first use of CfD.
It's a great scheme because it (in theory) prevents cost blowouts being added to energy prices. Good incentives to get things built quickly and cheaply.
The actual price for Hinclkey is roughly a third higher than the CfD and that extra cost should be borne by the French taxpayers via EDF.
In reality they shifted some costs onto the next nuclear plant instead, working around the CfD and foisting the excess costs back onto the British tax/billpayer.
Obviously they refused to use CfD for the next UK nuclear plant because unlike wind power, they have no faith in it being completed anywhere near on budget. And if they bid the real cost it wouldn't get built in the first place.
So now UK taxpayers are paying in advance for a decade to get new nuclear built with no cap on cost.
But, the same is true for solar and wind which starts off much cheaper than fossil fuels in the first place.
Most new build energy is renewables, that's what nuclear needs to compete with.
But at least the cost is factored in from the start. Those costs often double during construction but at least we know the decommissioning costs are factored into the fake numbers they use to get approval to start builds.
It's currently double its original budget and likely to grow further.
The "profits" are from running decades old reactors that were never transparently costed.
Solar and wind each deployed more than double the coal displacing generation in china than nuclear over the last 15 years. And that includes their early years when they were just getting started. It's triple over the last 10 years or about 6x (wind) or 8x (solar) more in the last 5 years.
These scientists are monitoring the impact on a local wildlife and are finding Nickel, Manganese and Cobalt traces:
https://elkhornslough.org/reserve/research/moss-landing-batt...