Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Even when comparing an electric vehicle getting electricity from a gas power plant to a gas vehicle, electric vehicles are still more carbon friendly because a car’s engine is less efficient at generating power than a gas power plant, and because a lot of carbon is used to transport gasoline. And, as electric grids use more and more low-carbon sources, the electric cars have an even greater carbon advantage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp5KF2IhUtY
As the U.S. backs away from clean energy and limiting global warming on the president’s false belief that climate change is a hoax, China is stepping in as a leader globally, leading on the issue and selling its technologies and products to countries around the world. Despite its leadership and its massive renewable production, it still uses a lot of dirty coal. China’s clean energy partnerships around the world give it influence. The Trump-led U.S. is banking on past fuels and energy, while China is advancing into the future.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENJ6UmECe1Q
“A wind power farm in the mountains of far-Northern California was the first through the door of a new permit streamlining program that came with a lofty promise to renewable energy developers: Once a permit application was complete, the California Energy Commission would make a final ruling on the project within 270 days.
It’s been more than 650 days since Fountain Wind completed its application. But the agency still hasn’t made a final ruling, after fierce local opposition successfully derailed the permit review.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/17/california-promised-wind-and-solar-developers-a-270-day-permitting-process-theyre-still-waiting-00510674
Man-caused climate change is real, but it isn’t an existential crisis. It’s not going to destroy human civilization like a nuclear war would. Climate change will greatly damage economies and kill a lot of people, so it’s a serious issue that needs to be dealt with, but it isn’t existential.
Technologies like solar and windmills are good, but have trade offs. Many rightwing arguments like how inefficient these technologies are or how many birds they kill are based on original versions of these technologies that have been greatly improved upon; so these critiques are no longer valid and people making them either are ignorant on how outdated their information is, haven’t done their due diligence, or are being dishonest.
Cost benefit analyses on the benefits of reducing carbon emissions have already been done, and they overwhelmingly show that reducing emissions is worth it. However, it is only worth it if we cut emissions slowly. Cutting too fast likely makes the costs of cutting greater than the benefits.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbRBtpzjaVs
“That solar power installations are going up as the technology improves and prices come down isn’t too surprising, but the sustained surge is still stunning.
“When you look at the absolute numbers that we’re on track for this year and that we installed last year, it is completely sort of mind-blowing,” said Euan Graham, lead author of the report and an electricity data analyst at Ember.
Several factors have aligned to push solar power installations so high in recent years, like better hardware, economies of scale, and new, ripe, energy-hungry markets. Right now, solar still just provides around 5.5 percent of the world’s electricity, so there’s enormous room to expand. But solar energy still poses some technical challenges to the power grid, and the world’s ravenous appetite for electrons means that countries are looking for energy wherever they can get it.
So if you’re concerned about climate change, it’s not enough that solar wins; greenhouse gasses must lose.”
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“Energy storage technologies like batteries are also getting way better and cheaper. The price of batteries has tanked 97 percent since 1991. Because of better technology, falling costs, and more markets for saving power, the US is on track to double its grid energy storage capacity compared to last year. More than 10 gigawatts of solar and storage came online in 2023 across the country and that’s likely to double this year. “Energy storage is at an earlier stage [than solar] but we are likely to see rapid expansion in that segment, especially in regions where solar and wind penetration are high already such as California and Texas,” said Steve Piper, director of energy research at S&P Global Commodity Insights”
https://www.vox.com/climate/372852/solar-power-energy-growth-record-us-climate-china
“Volatility in natural gas prices, including the huge spikes following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has certainly contributed to some price increases on the supply side. But the transmission and distribution costs have actually been going up at twice the rate of inflation nationwide, the report’s author, Brendan Pierpont, told me.
“That trend of increasing transmission and distribution costs is something that is noticeable all across the country, and so I think it’s an underlying factor in rate increases everywhere,” Pierpont said.
Utility companies have a lot of freedom in setting rates for transmission and distribution — and that directly contributes to how much profit they make. Utilities get to pick what gets upgraded when, and they also have an incentive to spend heavily, thanks to regulations that allow them to collect return on investment, usually around 10 percent, for those expenditures. This is actually built into the price most people pay for electricity.
Here’s how it works: Every year, utility companies ask regulators to approve a “revenue requirement,” which is basically a budget for what the utilities think it will cost to deliver enough electricity to their customers. Those estimates include spending on new equipment but not the cost of repairing old equipment. It also includes that return on investment, or profit, which regulators regularly approve. In Pierpont’s words, “That rate of return has a direct link to the costs that customers pay for electricity.”
What utilities don’t seem to be doing, however, is expanding the grid in a way that would benefit clean energy producers, the Energy Innovation report finds. Investments tend to cover local upgrades, like installing new metering equipment, rather than installing the high-voltage transmission lines that renewable energy sources need to connect to the grid. Meanwhile, consumers are facing more frequent outages that last longer, while utilities keep making more money for installing new, potentially unnecessary equipment.
“It’s like the utilities have a rewards credit card,” said Joel Rosenberg of Rewiring America, a nonprofit focused on electrification. “And they get to keep the rewards for how much they spend, and the [customers] have to pay off the bill, even if that bill takes 80 years to pay off.”
This plays right into the misconception that investment in renewables leads to higher rates.
Many of the states leading the way to clean energy are actually seeing lower energy prices than the rest of the country. Data from the US Energy Information Administration shows that 17 states, including California and Massachusetts, have increased their share of renewable energy sources by more than 20 percent since 2010. And with the exception of California, all of those states have seen the price of residential rate increases rise more slowly than inflation. The higher rates in California can be explained, in part, by rate increases to account for wildfire prevention. In Massachusetts, natural gas is the problem.
States where residents are seeing electricity bills that outpace inflation tend to be the ones with the highest reliance on natural gas, as highlighted in the Energy Innovation report. Some states in New England, including Massachusetts, have depended on natural gas for around 60 percent of electricity generation since 2020 and have seen prices increase by around 10 percent in the same period. Volatility in the price of natural gas also means that some of the highest price spikes are spread out over several years, so there could be more high prices in these states’ futures.”
https://www.vox.com/technology/366885/utility-power-bill-price-clean-energy
“In 2021, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act included $7.5 billion to build 500,000 public charging stations for electric vehicles (E.V.s) across the country in an effort to boost a switch to the use of clean energy.
As Reason reported in December, not one charger funded by the program had yet come online. Now, six months later, the number of functional charging stations has ticked up to eight.”
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“Why so little progress? Alexander Laska of the center-left Third Way think tank told Autoweek’s Jim Motavalli that the federal cash “comes with dozens of rules and requirements around everything from reliability to interoperability, to where stations can be located, to what certifications the workers installing the chargers need to have.” Laska says the regulations “are largely a good thing—we want drivers to have a seamless, convenient, reliable charging experience—but navigating all of that does add to the timeline.”
A spokesperson with the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program, which administers $5 billion of the $7.5 billion total, further told Motavalli that the delay is because “we want to get it right.””
https://reason.com/2024/05/30/7-5-billion-in-government-cash-only-built-8-e-v-chargers-in-2-5-years/
“A fourth reactor is also nearing completion at the site, where two earlier reactors have been generating electricity for decades. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission on Friday said radioactive fuel could be loaded into Unit 4, a step expected to take place before the end of September. Unit 4 is scheduled to enter commercial operation by March.
The third and fourth reactors were originally supposed to cost $14 billion, but are now on track to cost their owners $31 billion. That doesn’t include $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid to the owners to walk away from the project. That brings total spending to almost $35 billion.
The third reactor was supposed to start generating power in 2016 when construction began in 2009.
Vogtle is important because government officials and some utilities are again looking to nuclear power to alleviate climate change by generating electricity without burning natural gas, coal and oil.”
“The European researchers behind the new study do an in-depth analysis of how much land and sea area it would take to implement the Net Zero by 2050 roadmap devised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) in 2021. The IEA outlines an energy transition trajectory to cut global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels to zero by 2050. The Net Zero goal is to keep the increase of global average temperature below the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above the late 19th-century baseline. “This calls for nothing less than a complete transformation of how we produce, transport and consume energy,” notes the IEA.
The Scientific Reports study finds that implementing the IEA’s roadmap requires that much of the world’s agricultural and wild lands be sacrificed to produce energy. Biofuels, both liquid and solid, are especially egregious destroyers of the landscape. On the other hand, the energy source that spares the most land is nuclear power. In addition, electricity produced by fission reactors is not intermittent the way that vastly more land-hungry solar and wind power are.”
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“wind and solar projects occupying massive amounts of land increasingly get NIMBY pushback from disgruntled neighbors. Energy analyst Robert Bryce, author of A Question of Power: Electricity and the Wealth of Nations (2020), has compiled a database showing that nearly 500 renewable energy projects have been rejected or restricted over the past decade.
The European researchers calculated that nuclear power plants sited on just 20,800 square km (8,000 square miles) of land could supply all of the carbon-free electricity demanded in 2050. That’s less land than is occupied by the state of Vermont.
Over at Tech Xplore, study co-author and energy conversion researcher at Norwegian University of Science and Technology Jonas Kristiansen Nøland points out that “the spatial extent of nuclear power is 99.7% less than onshore wind power—in other words, 350 times less use of land area.” He adds, “An energy transition based on nuclear power alone would save 99.75% of environmental encroachments in 2050. We could even remove most of the current environmental footprint we have already caused.””
“Greater reliance on green energy also requires a stupendous increase in mineral extraction to provide the needed materials. Even if the world unquestionably possessed the mineral capacity necessary for the global energy transformation envisioned by President Joe Biden, Democrats in practice are enemies of mining. The U.S. Mining Association estimates that the country has $6.2 trillion of recoverable mineral resources like copper and zinc available for mining on millions of acres of federal, state, and private lands. Unfortunately, our labor, health, and climate regulations often make it practically impossible to profitably mine. As a result, these precious resources stay in the ground, which explains why the United States went from being the world’s No. 1 producer of minerals in 1990 to seventh place today.
Democrats committed to a green energy transition should make it a priority to reform counterproductive regulations like the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and to implement other permitting reforms. Yet for the most part they won’t do so, as we saw when they helped strike down the permitting deal cut last year between Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D–N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin (D–W.Va.).”