mayfly

tht said:

mayfly said:

tht said:

mayfly said:

tht said:

mayfly said:

If you asked the same question, you'll get an estimate of:
Total Cost = Total Capacity (in MW) * Installation Cost per Watt

Total Cost = 800,000 MW * 1,000,000 W/MW * $2/W = $1.6 trillion to $2.4 trillion, once again ignoring the ongoing costs of operation.

So it's really only about $168,421,052.63 per resident in Los Angeles county. Figure a home has 4 residents, and you're talking some real money.

There is definitely something wrong with your numbers. 800,000 MW is 800 GW of power. CA peak power usage is 30 GW or so. TX peak power usage is 85 GW. For the whole state! LA county isn't going to be using that much.

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.

Everyone should. But we shoud do it for our descendants, not for anything else.

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.

Don't limit the options and don't think we can't do it. We are technological society and we can do this. We're late, but the time to start is always today.

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. 

Those are big dreams, there, podner! And that's just what they are. No one with the power to enact them has the will or the political and economic capital to pull it off. We'll just keep on using more and moare fossil fuels, until they're gone, do to war to steal them from other countries until that's gone, and then build more nukes. That's our destiny. That's our legacy to our children and their children.

But I admire your optimism.

Nah. It's optimism. Even in Texas, the utility grid here is on its way to being over 50% renewable in the next 10 years or so. There were days in the spring this year where the grid was about 70% renewable. Sometime in the next 5 years, there will be hours during spring days where the grid is 100% renewable. The trajectory is there.

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.

mknelson said:

mayfly said:

tht said:

This bill speaks to how reticent people are to change. This bill is only about reporting, not actually doing something. We need bills to do something! Every and all things must tried. Write the bill to enforce >1b companies to be carbon neutral.

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.

No such thing as free energy. You've made good points, but marginalized the best solution to your last sentence: conservation.

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.

I suspect tht was meaning canals rather than waterways. California has a fair number of canals in the central valley - not used for navigation. In fact, I don't think there are many rivers in California capable of navigation for significant distances.

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.

hexclock said:

mayfly said:

I want to see Apple develop an AI powered music generator. It would be great to see it write better songs than 99% of the crap being performed by Disney "Pop Tarts" and Boy Bands using auto-tune. And who or what couldn't write better tune than a revenge song about ex-boyfriends like Taylor Swift? (Who are these tools willing to hook up with her, anyway?)

Remember Microsoft Songsmith? That was good for laugh. 

Unfortunately, the vast majority of music listeners are perfectly fine with simplistic melodies,  repetitive  hooks, and third grade lyrics in 4/4 time signature. Still, there’s plenty of well thought out music out there to find.