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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.
Katılım Mayıs 2009
687 Takip Edilen1.1K Takipçiler
@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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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 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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@timothyjwyant @kentIDGC 🙄 please see first line of original post
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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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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan Because I know Xiao can be a good sport about it, this is great example of why you shouldn't let engineers do too much policy analysis anymore than you should let policy analysts do too much engineering 🤣
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@xiaowang1984 @SimonMahan Yeah you are wrong here Xiao, and I strongly agree with you on net metering cost shifts.
Cost shifts are not inherently bad - that suggests even cost effective energy efficiency is bad, that's downright silly.
Policy ENCOURAGING cost ineffective investment is what is bad.
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@kentIDGC Virgin steel production does not require coal - it requires a reductant which can be biomass, natural gas, hydrogen, or various sources for coke (usually coal).
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@HarrisBerton She did say “make” vs “melt”. Maybe I’m wrong but I thought actual steel production req’d coal.
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@timothyjwyant @kentIDGC I noted the chemistry issue, but even that can be solved with hydrogen. Not all steel plants in Canada use coke to smelt iron ore.
The point was precisely about separating heat constraints from process constraints.
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@kentIDGC @HarrisBerton We use electricity to melt scrap steel. Still use coke to smelt fresh steel from ore.
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@HarrisBerton As a final thought, the neoliberal free trade era took Ricardian competitive advantage & overly-rigidified it into “we have oil sands, therefore we must sell bitumen” from the more creative “we have a very big country, so let’s get good at railroads, aviation and telecoms”.
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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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@bataille_chris Drones are definitely where the energy density by weight checks out as an advantage. Poor energy density by volume is a real challenge for H2 trucking.
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@HarrisBerton One could put the ideas together if the energy density needs merited it. All the trucks would be BEV, but you could rent a trailer with fuel cell and load of hydrogen. I wouldn’t bet my own money on this, but I’m aware the Chinese are commercializing H2 freight/heavy lift drones.
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@bataille_chris Lots of options - battery trailers are interesting since they are modular and might involve less infrastructure than Chinese style swapping. I'm not counting out hydrogen either, but the infrastructure problem is almost as bad as (maybe even worse than) MW charging.
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@HarrisBerton But weird things happen. Electric freight trucks might just add a battery trailer for long haul, trading them as they deplete for recharging.
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@bataille_chris Question for me is what is the average peak demand of the MW charging network, and how much fuel is that displacing/how many trucks is that serving.
That ratio is going to be everything for the economics to shake out for long distance.
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The only real brake on freight truck electrification is the presence of adequate charging networks.
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