I really don’t know what to think about the push for electrification of everything. 🔌
In many ways, electricity is a very elegant way of delivering and managing energy. For one, you can generate electricity a long distance away, ship it down an electrical wire at high voltage and relatively low amperages, and have relatively low losses. Electricity is easily controlled by electronics that drive IGBT transistors to deliver a perfect sine wave for powering virtually anything you would want with relatively low losses. Sounds great.
The question becomes where does all this electricity come from? God doesn’t send electrons bouncing down the wires, instead most power comes from fossil fuels, with a relatively smaller portion coming from nuclear and hydroelectric. Renewables barely make a dent. It’s hard to generate a lot of electricity from renewables when urban demand is so high and renewable energy is not dense or easy to harvest on demand.
Most of the big solar facilities being built these days are for show, they aren’t that big of contributions to the grid. Maybe they’ll scale up – wind is now a noticeable part of the electricity grid at times in New York State but it’s still a pretty minor player.
Despite optimistic predictions, I just don’t see how in a few years the majority of our electricity will come from renewables especially with demand surging as people replace fossil fuel heating with electric heat pumps and gasoline cars with electric vehicles. Existing plants along with additional renewables and natural gas capacity might allow these technologies to be integrated relatively seamlessly into the grid but it’s not going to decarbonize electricity at the same time.
That said, going electric has big advantages. For one it moves pollution out of our homes and our sense urban neighborhoods. Most large power plants are located in remote, rural areas where there high stacks carry pollution away. It’s also vastly more flexible and efficient, at least to motors compared to internal combustion engines. But also it is no guarantee that electrons will be generated from renewable sources.
More than 2,000 reports of waterway pollution, including oil and chemical spills, and a segment of broken pipeline have been found in the Gulf of Mexico in the wake of Hurricane Ida. Experts say this is a sign of the growing untenability of the miles of offshore oil and gas infrastructure that the US operates.
In the two weeks since Ida ravaged Louisiana, leaving more than one million residents without power, divers have located large volumes of oil leaked underwater from infrastructure destroyed in the Category 4 hurricane’s wake. Nearly 90 percent of the region’s oil and gas production shuttered following the storm, and, as of Tuesday, more than 100 production platforms were decommissioned, in what some predict might be the worst-ever recorded damage to the region’s fossil fuel sector by a natural disaster
I hate when people say, “that’s bad for the environment”. The environment doesn’t give a rats ass about you, or anything else, because it doesn’t have feelings, emotions or any ability to think.
The Tennessee Valley Authority could likely rightfully claim a place in the Guinness Book of World Records, but it’s not an achievement for which the federally-owned electric utility corporation would welcome notoriety.
After taking a whopping 42 years to build and finally bring on line its Watts Bar Unit 2 nuclear power reactor in Tennessee, TVA just broke its own record for longest nuclear plant construction time. However, this time, the company failed to deliver a completed nuclear plant.
Watts Bar 2 achieved criticality in May 2016, then promptly came off line due to a transformer fire three months later. It finally achieved full operational status on October 19, 2016, making it the first United States reactor to enter commercial operation since 1996.
In 1989, this story about an underground electrical transmission line spread across the early internet like wildfire. It had a big impact on me as a kid, and I wanted to share it with you! I think the Scattergood-Olympic transmission line is probably LA's most famous power line, although it has now been replaced with a more modern line since 2018.