Apple officially endorses California's Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act
Apple has announced its official support for California's SB 253, a bill that mandates companies earning over $1 billion annually to disclose detailed information relating to greenhouse gas emissions.
SB 253 would require all large U.S.-based corporations doing business in California that make over $1 billion annually to publicly disclose their full carbon footprint in an easily understandable and available way. Senator Scott Wiener introduced the bill.
Senator Wiener posted a letter from Apple that showed the company's support for the bill to X.
Huge new endorsement -- @Apple -- of our groundbreaking climate bill to require large corporations to disclose their carbon footprint (SB 253).
Thank you, Apple, for making clear that this is doable & a critically important piece of climate action. pic.twitter.com/mntbWzXFDV-- Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener)
The letter was signed by Apple's director for state and local government affairs, D. Michael Foulkes.
"Throughout our environmental journey, we've emphasized the importance of measurement and reporting to help us understand our impact," the letter reads.
"We're strongly supportive of climate disclosures to improve transparency and drive progress in the fight against climate change, and we're grateful for your leadership to drive comprehensive emissions disclosure."
The letter continues to commend SB 253 in a few key areas, most notably in proposing that companies would need to measure and report Scope 3 emissions. Scope 3 emissions are not produced by the company itself but rather from assets owned or controlled by the company. This would require companies like Apple to report emissions from their supply chain partners.
In April, Apple shared its annual Environmental Progress Report, documenting its progress toward becoming carbon neutral by 2030.
Read on AppleInsider
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Even in California, there is a strange hesitancy. They are going to test out this idea of covering a waterway with solar PV for some hundreds of feet. Hundreds of feet? The passivity here is crazy. Hundreds of feet?! It should be hundreds of miles. California, you will need water. Lots and lots of fresh water. The best option is desalination. You will need basically free energy to do it. Just completely overbuild solar PV by 2x, 4x your peak demand needs. Cover every single waterway and river with solar PV. Not completely always in the shade covered, but covered. Then use that "free energy" to power desalination plants, batteries of all kinds, direct air capture to gas or to ground. Put in a serious carbon tax to get everyone to turn over.
Few other companies of this size have been as consistently proactive as Apple in terms of both minimizing their harm to the environment while at the same time vastly increasing their use of renewable (and low-cost, after the initial investment) resources.
The Climate Cult will never be satisfied with the data the businesses HAVE TO PAY FOR. It costs them and adds another State mandate burden to meet just to do business in Cali.
And covering all waterways with solar panels, well, it would be a serious detriment to navigation, and would require shipping to use more electricity for lighting. And ships get electricity from burning diesel fuel. Not to mention that currently, it costs $28,600 to replace 10kWh of electricity with solar panels. Los Angeles County uses an average. 22,000 gigawatt hours (gWh) per year. The math tells us the cost would be $62,920,000,000,000. That's just under $63 quadrillion dollars at current prices. I'm sure economies of scale could bring down the price to a lousy $30 quadrillion or so, but the entire United States GDP in 2022 was $25.46 trillion, or less than a thousandth of the money needed. And that's just for Los Angeles County. Add the cost of shipping, installation, maintenance, repair and replacement over 50 years, it adds up to serious money. Not to mention that one hurricane or earthquake could destroy the entire infrastructure.
We will wind up using less energy per user. How that happens is looking more and more dire for future generations.
Solar installed over canals has shown to reduce evaporation amongst other benefits.
Your solar replacement math is incredibly suspect. $28,600 to replace 10kW of generation not kWh. (10kWh is only about $3.10 worth of electricity at current consumer rates in California.) That 10kW worth of panels produces something over 30mWh over a year.
As for hurricanes - Hillary was the first in a century. Earthquakes aren't likely to destroy a canal mounted solar system as long as a bit of space is left between modules to allow for slosh and sway.
Here's the question I asked: at 2021 rates of consumption, how much would it cost to replace all electric generation in Los Angeles county with solar panels?
If you asked the same question, you'll get an estimate of:
Total Cost = Total Capacity (in MW) * Installation Cost per Watt
As for hurricanes, past performance is not an indicator of future results. 100 year storms are occurring more than once a year in this country, and getting worse by the year. Other countries are experiencing the same. Climate change is the subject of this article.
Conservation, whether by choice or necessity is in our future. It's up to us to make a choice, or it will be made for us. It may already be made for us.
mayfly, California's electricity energy consumption per year is 300,000 GWHr per year. CA has 40 million people and thusly equates to 7.5 MWHr per person per year in CA. Per day, that is 20 kWHr. This is a lot per capita per day for CA and there must be some industrial usage in there.
To compute how much solar PV power capacity is needed to produce that energy, it's energy / (capacity factor x number hours per year):
300,000E+9 WHr / (0.25 x 365x24 Hr) = 137 GW.
The number of panels needed is then computed by power / power per panel. LG Neon 2 panels are 330 W.
137E+9 W / 330 W/panel = 416 million panels.
The cost of installation for utility solar is about $0.9 per W. So, the cost for 137 GW capacity of grid scale solar PV is $123 billion. Per capita, it is $3000. This is about right for solar, actually about 2x as expensive as it should be as grid solar at this scale would be about $0.5 per W.
Each panel is about 1.5 m2. Using a spacing factor of 2, 416m panels needs 416E+6 x 1.5 x 2 = 1.23 billion square meters. That's a square 36 km x 36 km, or 22 miles x 22 miles.
You would not do it this way as you would split the power production between wind and solar to optimize hour by hour coverage where you use wind at night and solar during the day and storage to time-shift when needed. You'd also have hydro, geo, nuclear, what have you. So, it's going to be something like 60 GW capacity of solar, 30 GW capacity for wind, and 200 GWHr capacity for storage for CA. 200 GWHr of storage is 20 GW of power for 10 hrs, which should be enough to cover all of CA during night times. Wind is about $1 to $2 per W installation cost depending on location.
Storage is where it is really expensive. It's about $200/kWHr for an EV, OEM cost. Using that, that's $200,000,000/GWHr. That translates to $1000 per person in CA. Triple it to $3000 per capita for profits for everyone.
So, about $6000 per person for a system that would pay itself back in about 5 to 10 years and be at very little cost for another 10 to 20 years.
The "free" energy I'm talking about is really excess capacity. Any fully renewable, carbon free utility grid will have excess capacity, and probably by a factor of 2. Any utility grid with thermal plant energy generation is at least 20% to 50% excess capacity, but fossil fuels and nuclear aren't "free", and they really want to keep them running as efficient as possible with minimum fuel usage.
Not the case with renewables. Instead of turning off the capacity, use it. It doesn't cost "anything". Use it to make fresh water, to make gas, to extract CO2 out of the air. CA knows that it will need fresh water. Start now. Should have started at least 2 decades ago, but today is always the correct day to start on these types of things. Not sure what AZ is going to do. Perhaps desalinate water sourced from the Gulf of Califronia, but they will need Mexico's help with that. At least that Gulf is getting is getting ever closer. San Diego coast is only 2x farther away, so perhaps they will go that way.
Los Angeles county used 65,000 GWHr in 2021. On average, that means 65,000E+9/(365x24) = 7.4 GW power, every hour of the day and night. Using $1/W for grid utility installation costs, that's $7.4 billion dollars. LA Co has 10m people. So $740. You really should multiply by 4 for capacity factor and use about that amount for storage. So, $7400 per person in LA Co. That is pretty conservative, cost more than it should, ballpark cost for a solar+storage system to cover a persons electricity consumption.
Not bad really, as the ROI is less that 5 years. Power in CA is like $0.3/kWHr! Per capita in LA Co, people are paying $2000 per year for their electricity consumption. Everyone should be adding solar PV to their house.
But at this point, sustainables and desalination are pipe dreams, and will remain so as long as there are lawmakers with vested interests in maintaining the status quo (lobbyist money, or as in West Virginia, where Gov. Jim Justice owns a coal company, and his Senator Joe Manchin was CEO of Enersystems coal brokerage, and enriched himself to the tune of $5 million and his son is now running it).
The future is either nuclear & conservation or extinction. Probably both. All the other ideas I've seen here are commendable, and are sadly politically and economically impossible.
https://sustainability.google/progress/energy/
You sometimes appear to make up claims on the fly without any basis for 'em.
https://www.tid.org/about-tid/current-projects/project-nexus/
CA, just like every other southwestern state in the USA is under continuous water supply stress. Long term, decades, they are drying out with hotter climates and less rain. Aquifers are nearing empty. Reservoirs are below normal. Increasingly hotter climates means there will be more evaporation from waterways, reducing the amount of water. The water is also hotter, driving down fish populations. There is a 240 mile long aqueduct from the Colorado river at Lake Havasu to LA county. At some future date, the Colorado river isn't even going to make it to Lake Havasu as this water source goes away.
Solar PV over these canals, bayous, streams and such will reduce evaporation, keeps the water cooler so that there is more oxygen in the water for fish and the ecosystem; all while providing power. So, this course of action is a win, win, win. This also works for agriculture and even some types of livestock/ranching.
Apple getting their worldwide supply chain to be carbon neutral will be a monumental task, and they have said they have to buy carbon credits to get there. Currently, that's reforestation, but they will have no choice but to invest in direct-air-capture and pumping it into the ground. Really, I think they should abandon the reforestation efforts. Wasting their money. They will need to invest in direct-to-gas and green gas for cargo flights and ships.
Everything will and must be developed, funded, and be put into mass production. The future isn't an either-or. It's all of the above. Like I said earlier, the time to start is always today, at every single level, from the easiest action of weather stripping, to buying renewable energy plans, to voting, to electrifying everything.
Solar+wind+storage are inevitable as they are riding economies of scale, are the cheapest forms of energy, and is in the early adopter phase of the market penetration cycle. Homeowners are about 5 to 10 years away from being able to disconnect from the grid and only relying on solar+storage. This is true for every single "flat" building as well. They will be able to participate in virtual power plants. This is going to do strange things to economics of utility scale generation and the grid itself. There's going to be a lot of stranded assets and bankruptcies.
But I admire your optimism.
Not only that, EV trucks will probably end up having V2G/V2H as a standard feature. That basically means solar+storage will be an easy reality for select few who can afford it today. It's just takes time for these new truck EVs to penetrate the used markets for low income folks.
The pathways are all there. It will be out of politicians' hands pretty soon.
No, you shouldn't completely cover the water ways with solar PV. I don't think it is possible, and you wouldn't do it that way anyway. There would be some spacing in-between panels and larger areas of the stream free of panels. In order to preserve salmon runs, basically the ecosystem of most west coast rivers, it has to be done. The fish will not survive increasingly hotter water in the streams as the years go by.
At an absolute minimum, floating solar PV needs to cover large tracts of reservoirs to keep that water cooler, and to decrease evaporation. It's already a problem. After that, proper farm fertilization practices or a way to prevent fertilizer runoff into streams and rivers.