Energy
The harvest moon is such an eerie orange color this year. 🌕
Every year I get a bit creeped out by the dull skies and the bright orange moon that sometimes happens when smoke from the Western Wildfires drifts east.
The harvest moon is such an eerie orange color this year. 🌕
While all the activist types are pontificating about their electronic cars and solar panels, the planet continues to bake as more and more carbon becomes part of the atmosphere. Denialism is as popular on the left as on the right. We’re told we should be scared for the future but not today, yet it’s tossed around more and more just about virtue signaling and green consumerism and patronage then any real solution.
Myself I’m increasingly alarmed as I see where this is going. I wish I could find ways to be more resilient and protective of my own life by owning land and equipment to protect it. Because I’m not at all convinced government is going to protect us from climate change and waiting on government for a hand out after a disaster is a very risky proposition. Sometimes the politicians help but often they dodge responsibility with red tape.
NPR
Driving through the Wyoming sagebrush west of Cheyenne, the clouds of dust rising from the road give way to giant plumes of steam shooting into the warming sky.
This is the Jim Bridger power plant, one of the largest coal-fired power sources in the nation and an enormous emitter of carbon dioxide pollution. At the plant's edge there's a reservoir, lined with rocks and clumps of drying grass. The plant sucks up about 16 million barrels of water each day, using it to power more than million homes across six western states, all the way to Oregon.
But there's a problem that looms for the coal plant operator and the customers that rely on it for electricity. This water is piped here from the Green River, a tributary of the rapidly shrinking Colorado River. Now, amidst a decades-long drought and a shortage of water downstream across the Southwest, future conservation in the basin could mean industrial users like Jim Bridger see their water shut off, says Wyoming State Engineer Brandon Gebhart.
Community Solar
Community solar – its the new trendy thing – and I don’t like it ☀
There are some that say these massive industrial solar facilities are necessary to battle climate change but I’m skeptical not about climate change but their impact on reducing climate emissions. Sure, they make power plants that burn coal and gas work somewhat less hard to produce electricity, therefore burning less fuel and producing less carbon but the plants are still running.
Community solar is in many ways similar to turning off the air conditioning or headlights on your car to save fuel. The gas engine is still running, it’s still burning fuel at idle. Community solar shutdowns no actual fossil power plants, they’re still running but at a slightly lower load. Despite the marketing, community solar is not carbon free electricity.
Community solar is in many ways a method for people to sell off their guilt and pay their indulgences. It outsources the environmental impact of energy production to rural areas with land intensive, industrial solar facilities. It also makes people believe they are getting clean energy when they are not.
Community solar doesn’t even lead to new solar facilities being built – they’re being built by renewable energy mandates that require large utilities to get an increasing percentage of their power from solar. Your paying money earmarked for solar but electrons are not segregated in the grid.
I do support building solar on the roofs of homes, commercial and industrial buildings. Solar there can legitimately be eliminating load on the grid, and reducing waste throughout. While solar on roofs doesn’t eliminate the spinning reserve requirements at least its paired closely with the users load and saves consumers money. Brownfield generation on toxic waste sites and landfills is worthwhile considering but it’s really just too inconsequential to make a difference.
And to be sure I’m not against solar. I use solar energy on my truck to power my campsite and when I own my own land I will have solar for my off grid home. But I’m not going to be covering hundreds of acres with solar panels – just a few kilowatts of panels to create deminis electric power. That’s a little different than powering a city with off site solar.
Action on climate change is important but the real path forward is higher prices and taxes on fossil energy, not government subsidized community solar facilities that make electricity cheap. Fossil fuel energy on the grid can be and should be expensive to encourage people to put solar panels on their home and business and buy fossil energy from the grid as a last resort. Everybody needs to learn electricity is and should be expensive so people use less, especially when they are not able to generate their own power from solar.
With an appropriate price on fossil electricity, even renters and business owners will insist on solar being on their business to save money – and there will be an aggressive effort to conserve expensive fossil energy.
It’s not trendy and nice to talk about higher energy prices but its what’s necessary to save our planet.
NPR
A Detailed Picture of What’s in the Democrats’ Climate and Health Bill – The New York Times
When Coal First Arrived, Americans Said ‘No Thanks’ | Innovation| Smithsonian Magazine
Until the early 1800s, Americans burned very little coal. The country was thickly forested, and wood was cheap. Most houses had one or more wood fireplaces. The country didn’t have many factories that required serious energy, and coal was a niche fuel used, for example, by blacksmiths who needed high heat for their work. Report an ad
But as cities grew rapidly and demanded ever more fuel, choppers quickly deforested surrounding areas. Firewood became scarce and expensive. By 1744, Benjamin Franklin was bemoaning the plight of his fellow Philadelphians: “Wood, our common Fewel, which within these 100 Years might be had at every Man’s Door, must now be fetch’d near 100 Miles to some towns, and makes a very considerable Article in the Expence of Families,” he wrote. Johann David Schoepf, a German physician and botanist who traveled through America during and after the Revolutionary War, fretted that all this wood-burning would not “leave for [American] grandchildren a bit of wood over which to hang the tea-kettle.