tht

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. 

hexclock 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.

Cover the waterways with solar panels? That’s insane. 

No, it is the right thing go do and CA should have started doing it 10 years ago. Just like they should have started putting solar PV over parking lots and roofs. They should also require making roofs and roads white or other high albedo color. CA is testing it out:

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.

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.

mayfly said:

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.

You're right. I asked ChatGPT to do my calculations, based on Sept. 2021 metrics.
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

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.

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.

mknelson, I think waterways is the more proper term for CA streams, canals and bayous. They are only big enough for kayaks and small boats. So something like only 50 wide when they are full, and 20 feet wide at best for natural streams. My views are more extreme as every single parking lot, storage facility and roof should be covered in solar PV.

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.

avon b7 said:

tht said:

avon b7 said:

tht said:

designr said:

Out of (genuine) curiosity, does anyone have a source (link) that estimates how much, let's say in total cubic footage, waste there would be if, for example, every single Lightning cable in the world was thrown away?

This is a serious question. There are many claims of waste. I'm curious if there are any estimates of how many cubic feet of waste it might be.

No source, but you can do the math. A Lightning cable is a 1 meter long cord with about 0.003 meter diameter. That’s 7E-6 m3. Over a year, Apple sells about 200m iPhones for about 1413 m3, or a cube that is 11.2 m per side. Or a cube 40 ft per side. 

The claims of reducing e-waste for standardization on USBC obviously didn’t make sense. There is much much bigger waste to deal with.

The best reason to standardize on USBC is to make using rechargeable battery powered devices easy to charge. Over time, you can get a charge anywhere as everyone will use USBC. 

Saving e-waste? Nope. All the standardization is doing replacing Lightning cable “e-waste” with USBC cable e-waste. Only way e-waste is saved is if OEMs stop putting cables in the box. When that happens, yes, e-waste will be saved. Not much, but it will be saved. Whether that happens is an interesting question. 

The best way to save on e-waste is to force OEMs to take back their devices and have them recycled, be audited, otherwise they can’t sell the device. 

The e-waste reduction claims absolutely do make sense.

It's important to remember that the common charger directive is not restricted to phones. It covers an entire swathe of the industry for which no end of propietery chargers currently exist. That will all change. One charger will technically be enough. Of course that is the whole point. To reduce fragmentation. 

The common charger directive itself is simply part of a broader initiative with common goals. That's why designing for repair is also being dealt with. Along with longer warranties and longer parts availability and software support etc. 

You're talking about charging bricks/blocks. I'm talking about charging cables. What's the point about talking about charging bricks when Apple has been using USBC-PD charging bricks for years now and has stopped putting charging bricks in iPhone bricks in boxes for a couple of years now?

Heck, when Apple said that charging bricks and headphones weren't going to be in iPhone boxes anymore, and that it would reduce e-waste, there were articles like this:

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/16/21519466/apple-iphone-12-chargers-airpods-greenhouse-gas-emissions-e-waste

"Apple ditching chargers saves costs but not the planet"

Even when limited to cables, it's a lot of cables. 

It is important to step back and fully understand how we got to this point. The EU had no desire to legislate. Many people still believe that micro-USB was legislated back in the day. It wasn't. There was a huge problem with charging back then and something had to be done.

The EU nudged the industry to find a 'universal' solution. It resulted in a MoU and was quite successful but guess who ended up not getting on board? Fast forward and the situation still wasn't as good as it could be, so this time around, the EU decided to wrap everything up into one broad directive which specifically targeted charging. Once again the upshot will be a huge win on many levels. 

Even Apple realises that USB-C is the best common solution. 
...
Apple shipped a 5W charger with every phone for a decade knowing full well the situation of the user. It shipped them without a consideration for the environment or 'innovation'. Just this weekend I cleared out a drawer full of electrical stuff and found five Apple 5W chargers. Four of them probably unused. 

It's not the ports, the protocols, power adaptor design that causes e-waste. It's that every new device comes with a cable and power adaptor in the box. For many OEMs, the accessories is a feature advantage and will continue to do superset features. The lack of a cables and power adaptors may become a negative feature, which encourages OEMs to put them in the box.

10 years ago, not having them in the box would have been rather off-putting. So, I doubt Apple or any OEM would have shipped without them back then. Therefore, I doubt there would be any less cables in the user base if every one standardized on USBC in say 2015.

Like I've said so many times before, if the EU wants to reduce e-waste, they should require companies recycle the products they sell and audit them. Or perhaps, use a recycling tax, but this is a less dependable option. The single best sign that e-waste is being reduced, at least as far device accessories go, is that they don't come in the box. I'm actually wondering if Apple will include USBC cables in the box for this year's cycle. Probably not. I think they will stop putting the cables in the box in the 2024 to 2025 year models.

You can probably put all those Apple power adaptors in your drawer in a bag and give them to Apple. They should be able to recycle them.