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On the train all day, a good day to get back into posting nerdy energy commentary - now to try and train the algorithm to only show me stuff about energy and the Jays.
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Harris Berton
10.2K posts
Harris Berton
@HarrisBerton
Climate dad, Canadian energy policy nerd. I post about energy technology and policy and how they can stop and eventually reverse climate change. Views my own.
Beigetreten Mayıs 2009
687 Folgt1.1K Follower
@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan You are still assuming it is more expensive. I was surprised when I actually sat down to look at the numbers on this, you might be too if you weren't so committed to your opinion.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan My attacks are specific. That the displacing of wholesale energy by less efficient and more expensive artisan consumer energy represents a net societal cost and is misallocation of money by whomever buys it. The only saving grace is if it remains too small to matter
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Is balcony solar "worth it"? Here's the math:
800 watts solar x 10% capacity factor = 700 kWh/annually
x 15-20 cents/kWh rates = $105-$140/yr savings
Cost: $1500
Payback: 10-15 yrs
Not bad with no tax credits!
canarymedia.com/articles/solar…
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan Yes, they do, please read the research, you are not making innovative points.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan Sure but these types of shifts do exist here
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan And once again, you are over-fixated on the engineering side of the equation. Better numerator, worse denominator. You have to do the math, and you are assuming the result without real analysis. Kind of like the renewabros you spend so much time attacking.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan With the absolute crap capacity factors that is exceptionally unlikely
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@HarrisBerton My post was sarcastic and silly by design, unless you think people put gas in ev's.
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It might not be the cheapest path to net-zero for all these things, but this is certifiably bunk.
It can handily do all these things so long as you have air or water available.
Catherine McBride OBE@CeeMacBee
Renewable electricity does not produce: petrol, diesel, bunker fuel, or jet fuel; it does not produce the feed stock for ammonia used to make fertilisers, or feedstocks for chemicals, pharmaceuticals or plastics; it does not produce bitumen, carbon fibres, armaments or ammunition; it does not produce the industrial heat needed to make cement, glass, aluminium, ceramics or steel. Claiming we shouldn't mine oil and gas in the UK because we won't be self sufficient is like suggesting we shouldn't produce any food because we won't be able to grow enough and would still need to import some. Caroline Lucas is NOT right.
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@HarrisBerton There are some pretty big barriers on getting the heat into the process.
Steel has the convenience that it is conductive, so you can use the process itself as the resistance element.
Much, much harder to heat dusty gas…
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan There are decades of research and debate on this by ACEEE, you should check it out. Look up "rate impact measure test".
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan I would also say that "efficiency is always good" is a bad framing anyways. You want to promote higher utilization especially when costs are cheap. If there was a widespread passivhaus program that would rightly be considered a cost shifting program
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan These are the real debates not the silly broad base attacks you are making. Focus here.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan And for something like a 800watt system the breaker masking problem is indeed pretty real so I'm not sure how they will get away with that. If you go by German safety margins we should actually be halving the allowed power from that perspective to 400w
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan Not if it beats utility scale solar on LCOE, and it can.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan No at least led is providing a good that is clearly superior in terms of lighting to the incandescents. Here the solar is literally providing a kwh. The value over replacement is poor
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@PedroPi05884609 As long as you have water and air available as feedstocks they can be used to produce gas. I specified this in my post. To ignore this for a "technical" point is seriously silly.
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@HarrisBerton It is technically true.
Renewables can't produce gas.
I don't know why one would put gas on an electric vehicle, but it is still true.
You can't.
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@Ember421 @bataille_chris Yeah been looking into this - all this is true, but what's not clear is if the extra batteries and swapping infrastructure is actually cheaper than the electrical capacity.
That's why it all comes back to the # of trucks/MW charger with peak coincidence.
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@HarrisBerton @bataille_chris Class 8 trucks have a nice form factor for batter swapping.
Battery swapping also *greatly* reduces the peak MW and varibailiy of the charging infrastructure, as the held recharging batteries don't need such urgent fast charging, and can be used in grid supportive ways.
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And guess what happens once the Chinese have made enough electric freight trucks for themselves, paying off the cost of the factories? They will export them to the rest of the world at the cost of variable inputs
(materials, energy, labour), i.e., super cheap. h/t @ira_joseph
South China Morning Post@SCMPNews
Chinese trucks could go 100% electric, halving road transport oil use: industry #Echobox=1776431178" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">scmp.com/news/china/sci…
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@Ember421 @bataille_chris I do not think there is a ton of shipping going from Toronto to Winnipeg anyway 😂
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@HarrisBerton @bataille_chris But bolder for x-country would be to focus on mainline rail electrification (probably would all need to be hybrid here, but they are already electric drive) and swap containers to trucks locally.
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan No way it deploys if the cost is that high so that's why it's a silly q.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan I think that is very legitimate and not silly at all. If you at scale replace 3c marginal energy with 15c lcoe energy is that a win. Probably not
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan It shouldn't be promoted, agreed.
But it should be allowed and shouldn't be attacked as a relevant cost shift driver.
(Unless you want to attack energy efficiency too).
That's it.
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There is no such thing as an unsubsidized kwh here. Volumetric recovery is the source of the subsidy in the first place even without an explicit one.
But should the desire for some to put balcony solar really be explicitly promoted and encouraged by policy? This is what I disagree with. In 2018 I could have illicitly done grid tied solar as well too
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan To have an unsubsidized market it needs to beat wholesale solar so this is nonsense.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan The issue is that the investment if done for energy is entirely duplicitous and redundant with the bulk system and less efficient because the capacity factor is far worse even if you streamline install. It's not going to touch wholesale energy so in the aggregate costs increase
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan Diy solar is no market. It is an artifact of cost recovery structures that arguably if encouraged at scale would cause a lot of redundant misinvestment at large. My own diy solar and battery system is an example of this. Even doing diy I haven't had ROI in 8 years
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan It is no time or effort from the public perspective beside to allow it.
V2H and DIY Solar are both market driven, let the market do its thing.
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@HarrisBerton @SimonMahan It is true that diy solar is likely to be less of a scale that causes problems. But it's also a waste of time and effort that could be better spent on things that would work better like v2h
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan I mean the core issue is absolutely that kWh is a silly way to charge for things. So advocate for that, and leave unsubsidized tech alone, and then see how things shake out.
Whether it is cheaper or not than the wholesale unit is not straightforward and silly q anyway given ☝️
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But what it displaces is different which is a unit of wholesale electricity at a cost greater than that unit itself. Only when looking at it narrowly through the lens of kwh consumed is it the same. But kwh consumed was an imperfect way of charging for a system. Thus is less legitimate than led lights
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@skisidjames You don't have a clue what are you talking about. You can debate policy, but please don't pollute the convo with demonstrably untrue statements like this.
x.com/i/status/20455…
Harris Berton@HarrisBerton
It might not be the cheapest path to net-zero for all these things, but this is certifiably bunk. It can handily do all these things so long as you have air or water available.
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Renewable electricity cannot produce fuels, fertiliser feedstocks, chemicals, plastics, key materials. Pretending it can replace oil and gas is fantasy. Saying the UK shouldn’t produce any because it won’t be self-sufficient is like abandoning farming entirely because of imports.
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan The only reason we DO separate them is to CREATE policy since we want to manage externalities.
We can debate about all that, but DIY Solar doesn't need it anyway. So it a silly thing to attack. Stick to net metering.
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan The energy system is just that, a system. It is one big continuous machine, esp for electricity, you can't separate them at a economic analysis level unless you are distorting things with policy.
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