Renewables, the Grid, and Blackouts

[markslawson + 1,057]

12 hours ago, NickW said:

But that is predictable within the time scales needed to get back up plant going. It doesn't go down like that over a 30 minute period. 

Again, Nick, sorry but you're looking at the wrong end of the problem, although I think you're beginning to grasp what I'm saying. The gas plants have to be given time to ramp up, okay, we've gotten that far. The evidence you cite for your statement that the batteries would not be needed in this is totally inadequate. Just one day of normal weather is not even worth mentioning. There was talk of weather forecasting systems some years ago but it seems to have died.. the problem is not so much forecasting in relatively good conditions but all times and when sudden shifts occur.. After all, persistency or status quo forecasts (conditions in half an hour will be the same as now) have a very high success rate but are of no use at all in planning. You need the battery, then when the wind dies, the back-up generators can be ramped up .. the activists have got their renewables projects and consumers have got tolerably reliable power. Poor people still have to pay higher power bills but who cares about them? Anyway, thanks for the discussion. Leave it with you.   

[JoMack + 549]

17 hours ago, nsdp said:

No China never "lies" but reporters misrepresent facts or omit them all together.   I'm no friend of China but I have less use for ignorant or mendacious reporters who  misrepresent facts or omit them all together.  Most of China's new coal capacity is ultrasupercritical designs as a replacement for retiring steam drum designs from the 1970's and 80's.   These units reduce the amount of foreign currency that China needs  to import coal. Steam drums typically use 11,000 btu's to generate 1 kwh. Ultrasupercritical units are between 8200 and 8900 btus/kwh or 75-80% of prior generation.   Net gain of total coal capacity is not 100% of the new construction.  In several prior years the new construction resulted in a net reduction in greenhouse gases from the coal sector just like the US.   Since NG and LNG, almost as bad as coal per mmbtu, are also added, the net greenhouse gases added for the electric sector is a net positive.

I believe China is the biggest threat to the world today.  Appreciate your explanation for the reason CHina's use of coal power being somewhat "carbon neutral" since it is compatible to the U.S., but then why are they getting wide-ranging condemnation.  Here's Wired:

 

Wired quoted Carnegie Mellon University economist Lee Branstetter making the exact opposite argument in November 2019: China is cranking out coal plants because the controls were decentralized in 2014, encouraging faster power plant construction to meet China’s surging energy needs.

“On the surface it sounds great: You’re decentralizing the permit process and making it simpler. But unfortunately for China, this opened the floodgates and resulted in an explosion of coal power plant construction,” Branstetter said, noting that deregulation came on the heels of 1990s energy policies that virtually guaranteed profits for power plants with extensive government subsidies.

All of these explanations stumble around the fact that China is an authoritarian dictatorship, and its absolute rulers are very well aware that coal power plants are under construction at a rampant pace, even as Xi and other top officials sing the praises of globalist climate change agreements. 

Chinese officials have been sharply, even cruelly, restricting the use of coal by rural communities even as they burn gigantic amounts of coal in their power plants. Villagers complain about being forced to switch to unaffordable power sources, or simply being left to freeze without coal to burn. A viral video in December showed Chinese officials pouring cement into the little bedside stoves employed by humble villagers to stay warm in the winter. This level of heartless micromanagement is difficult to square with the notion of a government that cannot stop building huge coal-fired power plants because bureaucrats decided it would be a good idea ten years ago.

China is now well into the second “five-year plan” during which it indisputably knew it had to begin dramatically scaling coal power back to meet its nominal climate goals, but it tripled power plant construction instead. The response from the international climate change community has been little more than a few furrowed brows and awkward mutters about how those carbon-neutral promises from Beijing are beginning to look a tad improbable. The alternative explanation is that Beijing knows exactly what it is doing, and it has industrial ambitions for the future that will require all of the cheap and dirty power capacity it seems determined to build.

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2021/02/03/china-built-three-times-as-much-coal-power-in-2020-as-the-rest-of-the-world-combined

[ronwagn + 6,290]

On 2/3/2021 at 3:37 PM, turbguy said:

The USA can influence China, but how do you expect the USA to dictate and enforce policy in China?

"Wall Street" actions?  Good luck with that!

Their own citizenry must do that.

I'm open for alternatives.

 

Alternatives:

1. Withdraw from the Paris Accords

2. Demand access for a fair audit of records. 

3. Demand the Chinese minorities are not persecuted and treated as slaves. 

4. Demand fair treatment of our corporations that operate in China.

5. Force Amazon, Walmart, Target and all retailers to clearly mark where products are produced including parts made and only assembled in the U.S.A. That includes all products. 

6. Encourage expansion of production facilities in the U.S.A. with lower taxes and training bonuses for on the job training.

7. Focus college education funding on jobs such as machinests, nursing, mechanics, carpentry, home construction, electrical, plumbing, vehicle repair, etc. Offer all of the above online also in the academic portion. 

8. Provide low cost high school diplomas and courses leading to a full college degree online. Insist that regular colleges accept government accredited coursework. Do not include any political subjects aside from study of the constitution and how government works. 

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

1 hour ago, ronwagn said:

Dan, it was a scheduled shutoff according to my daughter who we were staying with. She knows what goes on. The shutoffs were occuring at various times when workers were away from their homes. There were fires but none nearby as it is a large built up area. 

Congratulations on finding the date of the outage! My grandson was born on September 28th. 

An outage is an outage, I don't recall any outages during the half of my life I lived in several areas of California. That includes many forest fires, one within a few miles in PGE territory. People are very inconvenienced by outages regardless of the cause. We have experienced many outages in Central Illinois. One was for about five days during an ice storm. It motivated us to move closer to our former workplace in Decatur. We live on the cusp. Several squirrels have caused momentary outages but far more outages have been momentary or a few hours. I would say about a hundred outages over 33 years here. We have also lost two TVs that might have died because of lightning related issues. 

Every scheduled outage is an inconvenience and possible a true hardship to many customers, but the solutions vary depending on the cause. We now have three independent types of scheduled outage under discussion: 1) outage due to anticipated capacity constraint, 2) scheduled outage due to fire weather, and 3) outage for inftastructure upgrade or maintenance. Again, no amount of additional capacity can cure 2 or 3, and we have only has two 1-hour periods of #1 in the last twenty years.   The reason you never saw (2) when you were here was that PSPSs did not start until 2017 when the power companies got sued for causing wildfires, which is related to the fact that fires have become considerably larger and more frequent. The reason you did not see much (3) when you were here is that the infrastructure has aged even more since then, and because the investor-owned utilities have skimped on maintenance to many years.

So, back to my main point: our outages have not been caused by renewables.

BUT, this thread started by pointing out a legitimate concern: The grid is not in good shape, and increased use of renewables depends on an robust grid. I agree.

[ronwagn + 6,290]

26 minutes ago, Dan Clemmensen said:

Every scheduled outage is an inconvenience and possible a true hardship to many customers, but the solutions vary depending on the cause. We now have three independent types of scheduled outage under discussion: 1) outage due to anticipated capacity constraint, 2) scheduled outage due to fire weather, and 3) outage for inftastructure upgrade or maintenance. Again, no amount of additional capacity can cure 2 or 3, and we have only has two 1-hour periods of #1 in the last twenty years.   The reason you never saw (2) when you were here was that PSPSs did not start until 2017 when the power companies got sued for causing wildfires, which is related to the fact that fires have become considerably larger and more frequent. The reason you did not see much (3) when you were here is that the infrastructure has aged even more since then, and because the investor-owned utilities have skimped on maintenance to many years.

So, back to my main point: our outages have not been caused by renewables.

BUT, this thread started by pointing out a legitimate concern: The grid is not in good shape, and increased use of renewables depends on an robust grid. I agree.

You ded not mention that two natural gas facilities were shut down before recent problems in Southern California. The intention, and order by the mayor, to shut them all down and replace with renewables was then delayed when reality hit him. I presume Biden would like to avoid such occurrences. Maybe wiser heads will mitigate outages. 

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

3 minutes ago, ronwagn said:

You ded not mention that two natural gas facilities were shut down before recent problems in Southern California. The intention, and order by the mayor, to shut them all down and replace with renewables was then delayed when reality hit him. I presume Biden would like to avoid such occurrences. Maybe wiser heads will mitigate outages. 

The two one-hour periods of scheduled rolling blackouts (on 14 and 15 August last year) happened when three or four exceptional things happening at the same time: worst-ever hot weather over teh entire southwest, sudden failure of a NG power plant, failure of another NG plant to come back online after maintenance, and (maybe) smoke from wildfires occluding solar. The root cause of this mess was overly optimistic projections used when retiring NG plants. If the planners had insisted on deferring retirement of 2 NG plants,  leaving 4 "extra" NG plants instead of 2 "extra" plants, then no outage would have been needed, but they did not. Now, we are hoping that the two big batteries at Moss Landing will be online before August 2021, or that the next triple "oh shit!" event will not occur before 2022.

[Wombat + 1,028]

This is how you deal with Grid frequency issues:

Australia plans world's biggest battery (again), at 1.2 gigawatts (newatlas.com)

This battery will be in addition to the 700MW battery by Origin Energy in the same location, so that is 1.9 GW in the Hunter Valley alone. But wait, there's more. They are also building a 300 MW battery in Western Sydney, as well as rolling out "virtual power plant" technology for households, ie: those with rooftop solar are being offered batteries to discharge into the grid during the evening peak. There will be no further black-outs in Australia, no matter how fast we close our coal-fired power stations. We are building a couple more gas generators, but investing heavily in batteries, pumped hydro, and to a lesser extent, green H2. And guess what? Electricity prices are starting to fall. The reason they became elevated was because we spent $80 billion upgrading the Grid a decade ago, the most expensive project this country has ever conducted, even more than the Nation Broadband Network ($55 bn). Both projects are now starting to pay dividends. The media accused our politicians of "gold-plating" the grid, but truth is, it will be good for 50 years, even with rapid pop'n growth and EV's.

[Wombat + 1,028]

On 2/4/2021 at 6:06 AM, JoMack said:

As Kerry tells oil and gas workers to transition into solar and wind since they've been fed a fraudulent narrative, Kamala Harris winds up in West Virginia telling coal mining workers to transfer their skills to recovering land mines in West Virginia.  So, you have to wonder how we will survive the stupidity of the people currently in power.

Biden and his merry band of climate warriors are seriously on the warpath to force the U.S. into a zero emissions country and they are working with China to make promises to curtail their fossil fuel use.  Yup, promises made, and China promises, and as we all know, China never lies.

With that:

China’s new coal power plant capacity in 2020 more than three times rest of world’s: study

Reuters | February 3, 2021 | 8:30 am Intelligence China Coal  

 

 

 

On the other hand:

China Set To Add 140 GW Renewable Energy Capacity In 2021 | OilPrice.com

[surrept33 + 609]

Are those Li-Ion batteries? It still seems silly not to using redox batteries up to economies of scale. Such might be the negative effect of Tesla (the company) on a operational level.   

Over a longer time period, I assume hydrogen will be a better "energy vector" (assuming production of hydrogen by electrolysis continues to be lower and lower in cost), in addition to its many uses in chemical processes and reactions (indeed, as our knowledge of genomics gets more reliable, adjoining a co-cycle of hydrogenase-catalyzed hydrogen "production" is also *interesting*).

Edited February 5, 2021 by surrept33

[Dan Clemmensen + 1,011]

9 minutes ago, surrept33 said:

Are those Li-Ion batteries? It still seems silly not to using redox batteries up to economies of scale. Such might be the negative effect of Tesla (the company) on a operational level.   

Over a longer time period, I assume hydrogen will be a better "energy vector" (assuming production of hydrogen by electrolysis continues to be lower and lower in cost), in addition to its many uses in chemical processes and reactions (indeed, as our knowledge of genomics gets more reliable, adjoining a co-cycle of hydrogenase-catalyzed hydrogen "production" is also *interesting*).

It is very hard for a new superior technology to win against an entrenched old technology. The primary reason is that the old technology has economies of scale and a proven track record. In this particular situation , Li-ion is the "old" technology, with lots of factories already in place cranking them out by the GWh.  And yes, The initial "surplus" of Li-ion batteries occurred when the battery plants came online early and the car plants did not. This led to PowerWall and MegaPack.

Hydrogen is superior for very long term (seasonal) storage and for long-range transport, but the tradeoff is round-trip efficiency. For intra-day storage, batteries win unless the electricity is basically free.

[Wombat + 1,028]

34 minutes ago, surrept33 said:

Are those Li-Ion batteries? It still seems silly not to using redox batteries up to economies of scale. Such might be the negative effect of Tesla (the company) on a operational level.   

Over a longer time period, I assume hydrogen will be a better "energy vector" (assuming production of hydrogen by electrolysis continues to be lower and lower in cost), in addition to its many uses in chemical processes and reactions (indeed, as our knowledge of genomics gets more reliable, adjoining a co-cycle of hydrogenase-catalyzed hydrogen "production" is also *interesting*).

Yes, they are Li batteries. Not only are they a little cheaper and more available that redox, but still work below zero degrees Celsius. 

[Wombat + 1,028]

Some more info: 

What temperature range can lithium batteries withstand before damage? - Quora

[NickW + 2,714]

On 2/4/2021 at 11:18 PM, markslawson said:

Again, Nick, sorry but you're looking at the wrong end of the problem, although I think you're beginning to grasp what I'm saying. The gas plants have to be given time to ramp up, okay, we've gotten that far. The evidence you cite for your statement that the batteries would not be needed in this is totally inadequate. Just one day of normal weather is not even worth mentioning. There was talk of weather forecasting systems some years ago but it seems to have died.. the problem is not so much forecasting in relatively good conditions but all times and when sudden shifts occur.. After all, persistency or status quo forecasts (conditions in half an hour will be the same as now) have a very high success rate but are of no use at all in planning. You need the battery, then when the wind dies, the back-up generators can be ramped up .. the activists have got their renewables projects and consumers have got tolerably reliable power. Poor people still have to pay higher power bills but who cares about them? Anyway, thanks for the discussion. Leave it with you.   

The turbine part of a CCGT can reach full speed in a few minutes. The steam part can go from cold to full output in 90 minutes. 

Lets sat at 5 hours the wind output can be predicted to within 3%. Thats about where the UK is  currently. 

You have 10GW of wind capacity. Then the systems need to be able to cope with a 3% shortfall. Too much is less of an issue because turbines can be feathered if necessary. 

300MW of STOR to support 10GW of wind. You dont need 10GW of STOR that can operate for 30 minutes. 

 

[NickW + 2,714]

This is are archive of Europes wind power output going back to May 2018. 

Looking at 2021 wind on its poorest day supplied 6.4% of Europes  (EU plus UK and Norway) electricity. On some days it exceeds 20%

Daily Wind Power Numbers Archive | WindEurope

 

[NickW + 2,714]

On 2/4/2021 at 11:18 PM, markslawson said:

Again, Nick, sorry but you're looking at the wrong end of the problem, although I think you're beginning to grasp what I'm saying. The gas plants have to be given time to ramp up, okay, we've gotten that far. The evidence you cite for your statement that the batteries would not be needed in this is totally inadequate. Just one day of normal weather is not even worth mentioning. There was talk of weather forecasting systems some years ago but it seems to have died.. the problem is not so much forecasting in relatively good conditions but all times and when sudden shifts occur.. After all, persistency or status quo forecasts (conditions in half an hour will be the same as now) have a very high success rate but are of no use at all in planning. You need the battery, then when the wind dies, the back-up generators can be ramped up .. the activists have got their renewables projects and consumers have got tolerably reliable power. Poor people still have to pay higher power bills but who cares about them? Anyway, thanks for the discussion. Leave it with you.   

New solar and wind is now in most cases cheaper than new coal or gas. 

To not fully utilise wind and solar going foward on the basis that the legacy cost of old wind and solar was more expensive is the economics of the madhouse. 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

On 2/4/2021 at 9:47 PM, Wombat said:

This is how you deal with Grid frequency issues:

Australia plans world's biggest battery (again), at 1.2 gigawatts (newatlas.com)

This battery will be in addition to the 700MW battery by Origin Energy in the same location, so that is 1.9 GW in the Hunter Valley alone. But wait, there's more. They are also building a 300 MW battery in Western Sydney, as well as rolling out "virtual power plant" technology for households, ie: those with rooftop solar are being offered batteries to discharge into the grid during the evening peak. There will be no further black-outs in Australia, no matter how fast we close our coal-fired power stations. We are building a couple more gas generators, but investing heavily in batteries, pumped hydro, and to a lesser extent, green H2. And guess what? Electricity prices are starting to fall. The reason they became elevated was because we spent $80 billion upgrading the Grid a decade ago, the most expensive project this country has ever conducted, even more than the Nation Broadband Network ($55 bn). Both projects are now starting to pay dividends. The media accused our politicians of "gold-plating" the grid, but truth is, it will be good for 50 years, even with rapid pop'n growth and EV's.

Very good. I hear that more natural gas is being relied on for some areas lately including for transportation.

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp9899/99rp05

Off subject, how can I find Australian and New Zealand movies? I am subscribing to Britbox but they are not on it. 

Edited February 6, 2021 by ronwagn
reference

[Wombat + 1,028]

1 hour ago, ronwagn said:

Very good. I hear that more natural gas is being relied on for some areas lately including for transportation.

https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp9899/99rp05

Off subject, how can I find Australian and New Zealand movies? I am subscribing to Britbox but they are not on it. 

What Australian and New Zealand movies? We only produce maybe 1 movie per year  Tbh, I wouldn't even know where to find them. We do have one local streaming service called Stan (our equivalent of Netflix), but I believe most of the content is American. Indeed, Netflix is by far the most popular content provider in Australia. We have a few free-to-air channels, but again, very rare to see them play an Aussie or NZ movie  

Getting back to our use of NG, I should let you know that the current govt is heavily biased towards the stuff (like u Ron), because they think there is lots of jobs and investment in it. Indeed, the Federal govt has talked about a "gas-led economic recovery", in much the same way that Trump was fixated on the O&G industry. All the state-level govt's (whether conservative or not), have already committed to net-zero by 2050 however. 

Australia has similar amounts of onshore shale gas as the USA, but the costs to extract make it un-economic. In other words, the govt is just dreaming. It is no longer economically viable for Australia to even develop our remaining traditional offshore gas deposits. Cheaper than shale, but still too expensive. We would need to be sure that the price of oil would stay above $65 for a very long time, and that is highly unlikely given the pace at which EV's are entering the market. 

Keep in mind that our Prime Minister once brought a lump of coal into Parliament and said "this will not hurt you"  He is every bit the climate skeptic that Trump was and it will probably cost him his job, just as it cost Trump his job. Whilst Australia exports approx $100bn of iron ore each year, we also export a combined total of $100bn worth of coal and LNG (approx $50bn each). So the govt is desperate to replace falling exports of coal with extra exports of LNG. As for domestic use in industry, again the govt is dreaming. At $4.50/mmbtu, NG is the most expensive form of energy here, the opposite to the USA, however you may also find the same problem in a few years time when u replace Australia as world's largest LNG exporter and also discover the cost of "world parity pricing". 

My best guess is that u will only have to build another 8-10 LNG trains before your domestic NG supply has to compete with your exports and there goes the case for building CCGT for ur electricity supply or transport for that matter. At just $4/mmbtu, not even CCGT can compete with wind/solar plus storage. This is "the last gasp" for the O&G industry Ron, Oil demand peaked in November 2019, and NG demand should peak around 2030. Already has in Europe. Only Asia wants more NG, because they cannot afford battery-backup for their renewables. LNG-powered ships will help demand, but I don't think the outlook is quite as rosy as what the oil industry would have you believe. The USA has the potential to become a renewable-energy super-power in the coming H2 economy, so I would not be too concerned about Biden's or Newsom's climate policy if I were you. The costs are insignificant and short-term compared to the real threat to the US economy (and ours), which is globalisation and the decimating of our manufacturing industries. I hope for your sake that Biden takes a tough line on trade, although that is more difficult than it appears these days.

[ronwagn + 6,290]

29 minutes ago, Wombat said:

What Australian and New Zealand movies? We only produce maybe 1 movie per year  Tbh, I wouldn't even know where to find them. We do have one local streaming service called Stan (our equivalent of Netflix), but I believe most of the content is American. Indeed, Netflix is by far the most popular content provider in Australia. We have a few free-to-air channels, but again, very rare to see them play an Aussie or NZ movie  

Getting back to our use of NG, I should let you know that the current govt is heavily biased towards the stuff (like u Ron), because they think there is lots of jobs and investment in it. Indeed, the Federal govt has talked about a "gas-led economic recovery", in much the same way that Trump was fixated on the O&G industry. All the state-level govt's (whether conservative or not), have already committed to net-zero by 2050 however. 

Australia has similar amounts of onshore shale gas as the USA, but the costs to extract make it un-economic. In other words, the govt is just dreaming. It is no longer economically viable for Australia to even develop our remaining traditional offshore gas deposits. Cheaper than shale, but still too expensive. We would need to be sure that the price of oil would stay above $65 for a very long time, and that is highly unlikely given the pace at which EV's are entering the market. 

Keep in mind that our Prime Minister once brought a lump of coal into Parliament and said "this will not hurt you"  He is every bit the climate skeptic that Trump was and it will probably cost him his job, just as it cost Trump his job. Whilst Australia exports approx $100bn of iron ore each year, we also export a combined total of $100bn worth of coal and LNG (approx $50bn each). So the govt is desperate to replace falling exports of coal with extra exports of LNG. As for domestic use in industry, again the govt is dreaming. At $4.50/mmbtu, NG is the most expensive form of energy here, the opposite to the USA, however you may also find the same problem in a few years time when u replace Australia as world's largest LNG exporter and also discover the cost of "world parity pricing". 

My best guess is that u will only have to build another 8-10 LNG trains before your domestic NG supply has to compete with your exports and there goes the case for building CCGT for ur electricity supply or transport for that matter. At just $4/mmbtu, not even CCGT can compete with wind/solar plus storage. This is "the last gasp" for the O&G industry Ron, Oil demand peaked in November 2019, and NG demand should peak around 2030. Already has in Europe. Only Asia wants more NG, because they cannot afford battery-backup for their renewables. LNG-powered ships will help demand, but I don't think the outlook is quite as rosy as what the oil industry would have you believe. The USA has the potential to become a renewable-energy super-power in the coming H2 economy, so I would not be too concerned about Biden's or Newsom's climate policy if I were you. The costs are insignificant and short-term compared to the real threat to the US economy (and ours), which is globalisation and the decimating of our manufacturing industries. I hope for your sake that Biden takes a tough line on trade, although that is more difficult than it appears these days.

My favorite Aussie movies were Muriel's Wedding, the Mel Gibson movies, and Gallipoli. I researched the rest and none were calling me to watch them. I did like the New Zealand movie Whale Rider and they or you had an interesting detective series or two. There were a couple of good American movies that were filmed in Australia too, "The dingo ate my baby" one and another war movie methinks. My Britbox subscription is going to be an easy choice though. 

My main issue on energy is to make sure that the most logical decisions are made. I am sure that a lot of money will be wasted trying to rush to renewables rather than using our abundant natural gas along the way. I would much rather see the money spent on rehabilitating homes, providing economical low priced homes that are not giant ghettos, insulating homes, rebuilding bridges, roads etc. Let private industry do what it thinks is best, let the investors make profits or not based on their decisions. Calfiornia has shown how stupid government decisions can be. They have wasted tens of billions on the moderate speed train to nowhere. Have people defecating and tent camping all over the cities. Frequent electrical blackouts, forest fires due to bad forestry practices, rising crime, illegal immigration, etc. etc. 

 

[Wombat + 1,028]

3 minutes ago, ronwagn said:

My favorite Aussie movies were Muriel's Wedding, the Mel Gibson movies, and Gallipoli. I researched the rest and none were calling me to watch them. I did like the New Zealand movie Whale Rider and they or you had an interesting detective series or two. There were a couple of good American movies that were filmed in Australia too, "The dingo ate my baby" one and another war movie methinks. My Britbox subscription is going to be an easy choice though. 

My main issue on energy is to make sure that the most logical decisions are made. I am sure that a lot of money will be wasted trying to rush to renewables rather than using our abundant natural gas along the way. I would much rather see the money spent on rehabilitating homes, providing economical low priced homes that are not giant ghettos, insulating homes, rebuilding bridges, roads etc. Let private industry do what it thinks is best, let the investors make profits or not based on their decisions. Calfiornia has shown how stupid government decisions can be. They have wasted tens of billions on the moderate speed train to nowhere. Have people defecating and tent camping all over the cities. Frequent electrical blackouts, forest fires due to bad forestry practices, rising crime, illegal immigration, etc. etc. 

 

I respect ur point of view Ron, but I am a moderate who appreciates the perspectives of both progressives and conservatives, depending on the issue. In Australia, we seem to have struck a happy balance between the two, and the average Australian doesn't want small govt OR big govt. We turf them them out if they go too far either way, and it helps that we have proportional representation (and hence quite a few independents) in the Senate. In general, we support action on climate change, but do not want it to cost "an arm and a leg". Whether it be the cost of electricity, or jobs and income from the coal or LNG sector, we have rejected Euro-style carbon pricing due to the cost. Now, however, the costs of tackling climate change are far lower than not acting, and actually will create more jobs and income than we will lose by shutting down our thermal coal industry. We do not have to do it overnight, but you will see an extraordinary transformation in the electricity sector here this decade, and the beginnings of a shift in our export base. In the 2030's we will likely be exporting more green H2 than thermal coal and LNG combined. Not due to govt policy Ron, but in spite of it  The people have spoken, and they want change. We are not silly and neither are some of our largest corporations. Australia is very dependent on foreign oil these days, and China will soon dominate our sea-routes, so switching to EV's and H2 powered vehicles is our single-most important national security priority. Even my dopey PM is beginning to figure that out  

[ronwagn + 6,290]

2 minutes ago, Wombat said:

I respect ur point of view Ron, but I am a moderate who appreciates the perspectives of both progressives and conservatives, depending on the issue. In Australia, we seem to have struck a happy balance between the two, and the average Australian doesn't want small govt OR big govt. We turf them them out if they go too far either way, and it helps that we have proportional representation (and hence quite a few independents) in the Senate. In general, we support action on climate change, but do not want it to cost "an arm and a leg". Whether it be the cost of electricity, or jobs and income from the coal or LNG sector, we have rejected Euro-style carbon pricing due to the cost. Now, however, the costs of tackling climate change are far lower than not acting, and actually will create more jobs and income than we will lose by shutting down our thermal coal industry. We do not have to do it overnight, but you will see an extraordinary transformation in the electricity sector here this decade, and the beginnings of a shift in our export base. In the 2030's we will likely be exporting more green H2 than thermal coal and LNG combined. Not due to govt policy Ron, but in spite of it  The people have spoken, and they want change. We are not silly and neither are some of our largest corporations. Australia is very dependent on foreign oil these days, and China will soon dominate our sea-routes, so switching to EV's and H2 powered vehicles is our single-most important national security priority. Even my dopey PM is beginning to figure that out  

I see that you use natural gas in buses and, I presume, some trucks and autos. I would not support using natural gas to make higher priced hydrogen but if you can make it from wind turbine excess energy or solar panels fine. I do not buy into the manmade global warming theory. Ocean levels have always risen and fallen. A look around earth's geology easily proves that. I have spent a long time studying both sides of the argument. I will ask you a question, whose predictions have proven false?

[Wombat + 1,028]

2 minutes ago, ronwagn said:

I see that you use natural gas in buses and, I presume, some trucks and autos. I would not support using natural gas to make higher priced hydrogen but if you can make it from wind turbine excess energy or solar panels fine. I do not buy into the manmade global warming theory. Ocean levels have always risen and fallen. A look around earth's geology easily proves that. I have spent a long time studying both sides of the argument. I will ask you a question, whose predictions have proven false?

Ha Ha, let's not waste each other's breath on that one! We will have to agree to disagree

 

[ronwagn + 6,290]

A liberal article recognizing that renewables need natural gas to move forward. Forget about pumping CO2 underground though. Use it or let it go. Real pollution is the real worry, not CO2. 

https://www.politico.com/news/agenda/2020/10/19/could-fracking-help-the-climate-429929

[NickW + 2,714]

One for Ron😁

Solar is now ‘cheapest electricity in history’, confirms IEA (carbonbrief.org)

[NickW + 2,714]

This is interesting. Its a real time map of electricity production and interconnectors. Its most complete for Europe but does cover some parts of the rest of the World. 

Amazing how interconnected Europe is now with links to Africa, West Asia and Russia. 

electricityMap | Live CO₂ emissions of electricity consumption

 

[Dan Warnick + 6,100]

21 hours ago, ronwagn said:

My favorite Aussie movies were Muriel's Wedding, the Mel Gibson movies, and Gallipoli. I researched the rest and none were calling me to watch them. I did like the New Zealand movie Whale Rider and they or you had an interesting detective series or two. There were a couple of good American movies that were filmed in Australia too, "The dingo ate my baby" one and another war movie methinks. My Britbox subscription is going to be an easy choice though. 

Hi @ronwagn

Do you have a VPN?

I just clicked over to a Sydney server and signed into my Netflix account.  Instant access to the Australia Netflix library.  Works for other services, public broadcasting, etc. too.  I can click on a New Zealand server, or just about anywhere else in the world for that matter.  2 clicks and you're there.