Now MAGAs will blame the cold winters on renewables because solar panels stole all the sunlight and warmth.
Please don't give the idiots something new to complain about.
Woke liberal nonsense! How do you get electricity from the sun?!
One of my friend's fathers keeps telling everyone about how solar panels do more damage to the environment than coal because of how they are made. I asked him how they're made. No clue, he said.
On another note, Florida was attempting to pass a bill to start using solar energy. The opposition mounted a campaign that claimed that solar panels would block out the Florida sun, chase away tourists, and be twice as expensive as other power sources. I cant remember if the bill passed or not.
Unfortunately, we have a long way to go when it comes to breaking people's programming on renewable energy.
They can't stop it, it's hilarious. Good news.
They can’t stop it, it’s hilarious.
It is utterly sad that they want to stop it, to burn more coal.
As someone who has never been to Texas, I associate Texas with unrelenting sun and vast tracts of uninhabitable land with little or no environmental value (ok that bit is hyperbole, I know deserts are in fact a delicate ecosystem but you get the idea).
Or in other words, perfect solar panel real estate.
So what's stopping them taking advantage of all the almost free energy!
Hail.
uninhabitable land with little or no environmental value
As I understand it, the partial shade created by solar panels will often be a plus for the ecology of the land below solar panels. Especially in a sun scorched place like Texas.
So what’s stopping them taking advantage of all the almost free energy!
It's woke.
No one has ideology, morality or conscience, the millisecond renewables are cheaper, they will take over.
the millisecond renewables are cheaper
Not true. Trump is actively sabotaging wind as we speak. Trump is doing vice signaling, not economics.
Lawmakers from both parties are raising concerns about the Trump administration's spending decisions. In the latest example, the administration said it will pay nearly $1 billion to energy companies to abandon plans to build two wind farms off the U.S. coast. Liz Landers joins Amna Nawaz to discuss.
Renewables are already cheaper*, wind and solar.
*depending on where you are in the world.
Did you know that during the 18th and 19th century industrial revolution in Britain, coal never became cheaper than water power? All those new steam engines were used to make deeper mines more viable and to increase production. But water power remained cheaper throughout. But water power came with a downside. Available water power tended to be located in rural areas. The smaller population in these small towns consequently had a lot of labor bargaining power. Industrialists instead wanted access to the labor markets of the major cities, cities brimming over with new urban poor desperate for any scrap of work they could get. Cheaper labor overcame cheaper power. A coal plant could be put anywhere, while a water mill could only be positioned on high-flowing streams.
Renewables are cheaper, but we've been here before. There's more to this than just energy cost.
Do you have any source for that? I find it difficult to believe that the only reason for using steam over water mills was the dastardly exploitation by capitalists.
This actually is the case. See Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming by Andreas Malm. I saw this argument featured in a video by "Our Changing Climate" that I can't seem to locate now. But I believe this book was the main source for the video. Coal never actually dropped in price during the industrial revolution. The new tech was just used to expand production. And it makes sense when you consider that for these industrialists, labor and equipment costs were probably a much bigger part of their budget than the bill from their coal supplier. Even today, with all our automation, labor remains the biggest expense of most businesses. And it's not like they just ran out of water mill capacity. They were still building dams in the UK well into the twentieth century. And ultimately, cheap urban labor combined with expensive coal power beat out expensive rural labor combined with cheap water power.
I have no reason to doubt that it was an element, but it seems to me that density of power and being able to place that power wherever it is needed (mines being a good example as you said) were likely a bigger consideration that just wanting to skimp on labour costs. If not why did steam power set off such an explosion of industrialisation?.
Water mills only produced a set amount of power that could be increased orders of magnitude by coal and steam.
yeah, IIRC, in 2000, renewable oil from rape seed was still cheaper than fossil oil. however renewable oil was banned politically sothat there's no food vs fuel debate tearing society apart. the question really is more complicated than simply the cost.
that being said, solar panels can be put anywhere, including near big cities, and transporting electricity over distances has also gotten easier in the last 200 years, so that's not an argument for coal anymore.
well said
that being said, china subsidized solar panel production heavily for 20 years until they became economically self-sustaining. so there was a large amount of ideology involved i'd say.
so this mostly applies to the buyers of solar panels.
That one probably isn’t really ideology so much as strategic necessity. To my understanding, China is a major energy importer, with a dependence on fossil fuels coming in via the South China Sea. They’re in an exceptionally vulnerable position because a blockade wouldn’t be particularly difficult to implement there (at least, if their opponent is the US), so any degree of energy independence they can give themselves is imperative.
economists were calling for the US to do that the whole time, too, for exactly the reason that eventually something becomes the cheaper way to do something and then everyone does it. every era of innovation has been kicked off by public investment into technology that hasn't a profit right now but someday will.
the government is supposed to take a 10-30 outlook on things and act accordingly because corporations never will. they only ever look 4 months into the future.
but then, if you've been alive long enough, you probably recognize that if the government can't, or doesn't, take that long term view then the government is useless at protecting you from business and that business is just fucking you over for blood money
Happened recently in conservative Romania
Electricity doesn't fertilize crops or generate plastics or chemical feedstocks or fly you across the Atlantic in six hours.
Having free renewable electricity in a world of 8+ billion people and dwindling fossil fuels is like running your fridge for free, but it's empty.
ehh, the actual technology where liquid oil / fuels are required are like 3% of all total energy consumption. the rest 97% can be electrified, and actually, using electricity is in many cases even simpler than using coal. for example in steel production. it's easier to do with electricity than coal because coal contains sulfur and that introduces impurities into your chemical process. meanwhile electrolysis is simple and clean.
Uh...electricity makes fertilizers, runs water pumps for sprinklers and refines all the fuel.
Business friendly energy hungry state with enormous plots of undeveloped real estate does the logical thing.
News At Eleven
Incidentally, NGL plants are being built out rapidly in Texas for a tangential reason. Unlike with coal, an NGL plant can turn itself off and on quickly and easily. Consequently, when the sun is shining, NGLs can turn off rather than selling electricity into a cheap market. And when it is night/overcast, they turn on to make up the difference
NGL is yet another TLA (three letter acronym)
tell us what it means at least once!
Sorry. Natural Gas Liquids. Some combination of methane, ethane, isobutane, and propane, which are compressed/chilled to a liquid state for transportation and used to power electric generators.
Natural Gas Liquids. I remember seeing Liquid Natural Gas quite a bit, but I guess we can just shuffle the letters around however we want.
Edit: If you want to know the difference (more details here)
What Is Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG)?
Liquefied Natural Gas is natural gas that has been cooled to approximately -162 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, methane—the primary component of natural gas—transforms into a liquid. The process reduces the volume of the gas by about 600 times, making it easier to store and transport over long distances.
What Are Natural Gas Liquids (NGLs)?
Natural Gas Liquids are a group of hydrocarbons found in natural gas and crude oil. They are extracted as part of natural gas processing or crude oil refining. NGLs include ethane, propane, butane, isobutane, and natural gasoline. Unlike LNG, which is predominantly methane, NGLs are heavier hydrocarbons with distinct chemical and physical properties.
Natural gas can also use efficient modern turbines. Coal plants are a nonstarter in the modern era because they run so dirty with impurities that you have to use shitty turbines that are down for maintenance cleaning all the time.
Natural gas turbines can bypass the need to boil water and drive steam turbines, because the actual combustion of the gas creates the rotational energy directly.
Steam turbines are pretty great, though. Not sure how the rest of a coal plant operates, but the turbines themselves shouldn't be touching any combustion byproduct.
I believe they also recover the heat to boil water to run steam turbines. Double the turbines.
Texas lines up with the Sahara desert. Cheap land. The economics are insane.
Oil has not been kind to Texas. Greed took control.
It will eventually take over everywhere because unlike every other form of energy each year it gets better and cheaper.
Given the major blackouts the state had recently, I'm not surprised.
Texas Gov actually tried to blame the winter blackouts on solar & wind rather than ngl power plants in the region not being properly winterized thus freezing up in their biggest time of need.
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