perpetuallunch

Geothermal works in enough areas (geographies) for it to be an entertaining talking point in niche forums like this one.

But not much else.

Earth is an incredibly poor heat conductor, as evidenced by the fact that you don’t have to dig very far, maybe a foot or four, and it’s a fairly constant 14 degrees C, and yet the core is molten lava (rock) and has been that way for billions of years predominantly from latent heat from the planets formation.

So you have to be very careful with heat exchange, lest you exceed the ability of the earth to conduct heat through the rock surrounding the boreholes.

Drilling deep boreholes is difficult as the rock becomes more like plasticine as it approaches temperatures where usefully higher temperatures occur.

The people who need heat pumps the most don’t have $6000+ to blow on heat pumps.

So now we’re back to government subsidies, which routinely prove to drive up the price of whatever is being subsidised, especially at the scale of residential homes.

And your solution still results in the living room / dining room and other shared spaces being inhospitable in winter / summer, so you’ve underestimated the cost at least significantly.

And you’d still need five or six split systems to properly heat a home.

Kitchen, dining, bathroom, three or four bedrooms.

I’ve never seen a split system in a bathroom, but I’ve definitely seen freezing cold bathrooms, or bathrooms with a radiant heater on the wall or heat lamps on the ceiling, which occasionally get left on all day and destroy electricity bills.

Ducted systems almost always extend to the bathroom, and almost always cost AU$15,000 or more to install.

> and we definitely need to be careful that we handle the transition without screwing people over.

Well we’re certifiably not going that.

No need to wait decades to look at the recent data.

London can’t even work out how to properly ventilate their underground rail network.

The solution is obvious: built nuclear power and refrigeration (heat pumps).

Where it’s too cold either nuclear and heat pumps and / or district heating, or burn gas.

Or people can melt in the summers and freeze in the winters. Because that is exactly what “renewables” have been delivering.

At what cost?

Doesn’t Germany now have some of the most costly electricity in the OECD?

For a while there we kept hearing about plug in balcony solar in Germany.

Electricity generation used to be a solved problem, now it’s so bad people want to connect solar on their apartment balcony.

And we’re supposed to believe this is progress?

Sure.

But at the scale of a city or state one home uses close enough to zero power that it being a net user or net producer of electricity is irrelevant.

Scale up to tens of thousands of homes and suddenly you need an organising body approximating government to manage those homes being net users or net producers from moment to moment.

Additionally most cities tend to want to have commercial and industrial users of electricity, and energy more broadly. Your home solar & battery does approximately nothing to help them, and if any of the data is to be believed has resulted in electricity prices increasing for everyone.

Modern medicine is dominated by very new ideas and technologies.

Gene therapies, targeted cancer treatments, blood pressure medication, antibiotics, surgery, joint replacements, sterile practices, vaccines, hormone replacement therapies.

Dams are subject to silt buildup up, which requires maintenance.

They’re so destructive to local ecosystems that environmental groups have blocked any new hydroelectric dams being built in Australia for over 40 years.

All modern concrete eventually fails, and dams are notoriously difficult to remove and replace.

Fortunately they last long enough that if you paint them pink and plug a torch battery in to them they can remain somebody else’s problem for quite some time.

But it’s not $1.2 billion people to do the thing.

It’s only $1.2 billion to not do the thing.

To do the thing would require paying the original contracted amount.

Whatever that might have been.

Melbourne, well Victoria the whole state, is looking at a similar scenario for rail tunnels many believe serve little purpose.

Around $1.2 billion to stop the work now and pay the early termination penalty. Plus maybe another billion (estimated, who really knows) to bury the tunnel boring machines and remediation work.

Or something like $200 billion to complete the work and operate the rail network over some number of probably too many decades. Although this number seems to increase at a regular cadence.

A new road tunnel was recently completed and people who use it often report they are the only vehicle in the tunnel.

Meanwhile our roads haven’t been maintained in a decade and are literally falling apart. It’s not uncommon to hear reports of multiple cars being recovered after suspension and wheel damage from the same section of poorly maintained road in one day.

All of this in a political and economic setting so corrupt the now former state Labor Premier came out and admitted knowledge of a criminal element having infiltrated the union that represents the workers on the projects. She was recently replaced with her deputy. As if that helps.

Electricity prices have also increased by something like 150 to 200 percent more than inflation over the past 20 years but mostly the past 6 years (so this decade) because state and federal governments seem to want to insist on ramming Net Zero down our power lines, yet we export around the same amount of gas as Qatar. And we have the worlds largest know uranium deposit and yet we have a ban on nuclear power reactors.

Please explain?

Day time.

And what of the night?

Freeze in the dark.

Provide one example where solar and / or wind generation have penetrated a market to a level worth mentioning and electricity prices have come down or remained stable adjusted for inflation.

Pegasus installed via zero click 0 day exploit.

Completely owned.

One would have to literally have one’s head in the sand to not know what’s going wrong in London. Or Melbourne. Or Los Angeles or New York.

Our nearest star, Sol, will grow cold well before then.

But even that is estimated to take trillions of years after it runs out of hydrogen for fusion.

Why would the sun’s energy be taken away?

> The subject has been very qualitative

What does this mean?

I don’t understand why entry of a large consumer of electric in to an area should result in higher residential electricity prices.

The new large-consumer can pay for the electricity it uses all by itself. If new generating capacity is required to meet the new, higher, demand, that should be factored in to the supply contract with the new large-consumer.

What is the rationale for jacking up residential retail prices? And what is it supposed to achieve?

If the argument is the whole sale price increases because there’s more demand, none of that new demand is coming from the pre-existing residential users, what does it have to do with them?

Seen what a tree can do to a sidewalk?

You can step over or walk around cracked and buckled concrete.

Trains don’t appreciate having their rail ballast disturbed.

They were certainly a novel way of causing a reasonable amount of death and destruction.

Fortunately the novelty wore off fair swiftly.

We’ve gone from proof-of-work to proof-of-no-work.

Sure.

70,000 dying in a flash certainly puts an end to their suffering.

Well it appears to be the cheapest method known to produce at least some metal alloys.

> but they pay income tax for their employee

That’s definitely not what I said, nor how it works.

If you’re going to mischaracterise something as simple as that, what faith should one place in any part of your comment being an accurate representation of the facts?

Women, the world over, are, on average, shorter than men.

Therefore women will, on average, select mates who are taller than them.

Cultural relativism has fallen out of fashion, universal truths are back in.

There is nowhere in the known universe where the average woman is taller than the average man.

Therefore, women will tend to select mates who are taller than themselves.

It’s not a cultural phenomenon, it’s universal.

You don’t instantly notice how tall someone is?

> Everything I've been able to find suggests that renewables, since they have a ~zero marginal energy cost, displace the most expensive dispatchable alternatives

Renewables aren’t dispatchable, so the two aren’t comparable.

Any increase in renewables in a grid, beyond a small and insignificant fraction, requires a significant increase in dispatchable electricity generation to match.

Coal can load follow to a limited extent because steam can be vented and base load is very predictable.

Gas turbines are very dispatchable, and combined cycle gas turbine can load follow well.

The argument against renewables being cheaper than the other options is that there isn’t any example anywhere to date where renewables have gone and electricity has become cheaper.

It’s a fact that anywhere renewables have penetrated the market to any extent worth mentioning, electricity has become much more expensive.

Countries that haven’t conducted the renewables experiment haven’t experienced anywhere near the same rise in electricity prices.

Wind and solar, especially in a place like Australia which is extremely geographically dispersed, requires massive infrastructure investment to get the electricity to the grid.

Complete with the destruction of vast swaths of land through national parks, parks environmental types would have previously nailed themselves to trees to defend.

There are counties that have zero percent corporate profits tax.

Be like them and the corporations won’t have a need to offshore their profit.

The alternative is One World Government, which, in its lesser form, empire, has a nasty habit rapidly turning quite sour.

This is increasingly, and worryingly, becoming an ideology people are being swept up by.

It doesn’t help that there are Card Carrying Socialist activists in our public school system in Australia, indoctrinating kids in to a politically and economically bent out of shape ideology.

I don’t believe many Australians are aware of just how dangerously few steps away from the mouldy bread and rotting fish head soup lines version of “equality” we really are.

Since when has government, of any sort, been a reliable arbiter of truth or wisdom?

P.J. O’Rourke would be turning in his grave.

Giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.

Socialists in Schools: https://www.victoriansocialists.org.au/campaigns/socialists-...

The only sane argument to be made against this practice is that governments should make their tax systems more favourable to companies operating in their jurisdiction so they have no reason to move their profits to a more favourable jurisdiction.

Australia has, if I understand correctly, the highest corporate profit tax rate in the OECD. Higher than New Zealand, the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, Japan, Turkey, China, Greece, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Iran, Zimbabwe, Iceland, Finland, Ukraine, Hungary, Qatar, Iceland, anyway…

Why wouldn’t you expatriate your profits and retain your loses as a multinational operating in Australia?

Australia is increasingly and rapidly driving itself toward a future where higher taxes result in lower tax revenues as individuals, business, and corporations pick up their capital and leave for jurisdictions with more favourable regulations and taxation.

Governments shouldn’t aim to maximise taxation, that always kills innovation and the entrepreneurial spirit. They should aim to optimise taxation to a point where businesses flourish and infrastructure is built and maintained, and otherwise generally not be heard from much at all.