I am pretty sure this is terribly taken out of context. The issue is solar is unreliable. By being cheap, it is pushing reliable sources out of business. And if you want to know how bad the consequences can be, just look at how many people died due to the relatively small blackout in Texas.
So the issue is not capitalism disliking solar. The issue is capitalism liking solar too much. Endangering people by choosing cheap over reliable.
The 2020 incident? Texas failed because they didn’t properly winterize their infrastructure. Not because they were using green energy. It was almost entirely gas that failed.
Also there are a number of ways to store and transfer energy.
The real issue in Texas was unregulated capitalism. Energy prices skyrocketed like 6000% at the time, because they could get away with it.
I live in Minnesota and those idiots are charging me for their lack of preparation.
It doesn’t have to be that way. With volatility comes high peak prices, so speaker plants should be doing ok. We should be approaching a stage where fossil fuel plants are evolving into peaker plants, and peaked plants will still have decades of use to generate a profit, as we continue to build out renewables and try to get a handle on storage
The issue is the storage costs. We can’t generate excess electricity from solar and then ‘bank’ it somewhere. It needs to be used within a relatively short amount of time.
If we could figure out a way to store it for longer or allow the grid to deal with more volatile fluctuations then there would not be an issue with it.
Well, yes. But I don’t think wishing for what we don’t have is productive. That is why I am still convinced nuclear is the best source of green energy we currently have.
Agree that nuclear should be the focus if we are serious about clean energy. The main problem with it is that the plants take so long to setup that we need to start them now to see benefits which could help the planet in the medium term.
The best part is that dealing with old mines is a big issue (socially, land use wise, and environmentally). Re-purposing them as cheese caves has me howling.
Cynicism aside, there are genuine engineering and logistical problems with relying too heavily on solar power. Storage and distribution being chief among them.
Hard sell. Also, say through collective action we actually somehow get governments to pay for a $20,000 battery for every home. How will you make that many, who will install them, who will maintain and replace them? You need a very large number of trained electricians and manufacturing capacity to make that a reality. You also need to plan for and earmark funds for replacements to make it not a complete waste. Just throwing out batteries as a solution is way easier said than done. There are a lot of barriers. That is why things take time.
Nuclear is about $6k per KWatt. Solar with battery is about $5k per KWatt.
If it’s cost effective to build and maintain a nuclear reactor for $6k per KWatt, then it can also be done with the cheaper solar.
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine. No one says, “We can’t have coal power, where are all the trained miners going to come from? Someone will need to drive that coal to the powerplant and that power plant will need trained electricians. It’s a huge problem!”
I hate to tell you, very few places are building new nuclear plants as well.
The Fossil industries have lobbyists and money on their side yes, but their infrastructure also already exists. That’s our biggest challenge. And it takes functional governments looking out for the interests of citizens to build and/or subsidize infrastructure. And functional government takes an educated and engaged electorate.
Yes it takes lots of money, people and planning. So does operating a coal mine
I think the problem from the capitalist standpoint is that its not a very profitable business model, well thats fine then the public sector should do it just like we do the roads and other essential services. But no politician in america would even have the balls to propose that.
*Hate to be nitpicky, but a lot of assumptions go into a “$/kW” LCOE. Your effective costs for the solar + battery are going to be very different in different parts of the world depending on factors such as seasons, land value & labour.
Also not a lot of nuclear is being built atm anywhere unfortunately.
Genuine question out of curiosity, do people think it would be more efficient to have some sort of battery substation for a neighborhood that’s funded publicly? I just think it would be really inefficient to have everyone fund their own private batteries. It’ll be way easier to balance a neighborhood than each individual house.
I’m by no means an expert just trying to think things through logically I could absolutely be incorrect in any of my assumptions.
That being said I believe inverters go up in efficiency as their capacity increases, add this the fact that they need to be over provisioned to allow for peak draw times and it makes sense that a substation that averages a neighborhoods demand would be able to cut down on cost by averaging.
You start running into major issues with regulation and ownership of equipment that there isn’t a vested interest in solving. If a local battery isn’t owned by the utility company, who owns it? How do you track power input and use? Can one house use another house’s power?
It is a lot less complicated to keep things separated.
The benefit of everyone having their own batteries is resiliency. If I have batteries I have power in an outage whether the downed wire is in my front yard or miles away.
There’s probably also some free market benefit in purchasing decisions - some people will choose to spend for more capacity while others have an incentive to save money/power usage
Redundancy could be achieved by multiple power stations run municipally, moreover buying in bulk gives the city more leverage to negotiate price than individuals.
Also supposing that the cost of the battery was fielded by individuals it’s just not feasible for the 65% of Americans living paycheck to paycheck to have an additional $20,000 expense and this is something that needs to happen now not down the road.
If the municipal government is going to foot some of that cost it’d be really inefficient to do so in each individual’s home as apposed to a centralized site and project
In addition to other comments here, I think that there’s added risk to having such a starkly segmented way of running things. Having neighborhood stations (publically owned/owned by the utility service provider) reduces a lot of redundancy and hedges some risk for families. If a battery fails and gets spicy it’s less likely to put a family out of their home, when a substation could be highly specialized for managing that kind of risk so that even if a battery or several batteries fail, it doesn’t impact the whole. There’s also some specialization that goes into handling them at end of life, and trusting normal every day laypeople to both maintain and manage them is a tall ask when most people find themselves in a position to be unable to do larger maintenance on their homes already (it cost me 20k to put in a sump pump and encapsulate my crawl space to treat and protect it from mold and pinhole beetles, which I could only do by taking out a loan that I’m still paying for).
I don’t give a shit, and neither should anybody else (except power company engineers). Not only are those problems incredibly minor and surmountable compared to climate change, bringing it up is almost exclusively done in bad faith. And even if your intentions aren’t nefarious, it still doesn’t add anything of value to the conversation.
In other words, stop being a ‘devil’s advocate’ for the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists. They don’t need your help!
Manufacturing and installation manpower are very real problems that take many years to solve. We needed to start working on them a long time ago. And they should be the first step in moving forward.
They are both problems. They both can and do exist. Decentralizing like you suggested reduces the problems from my first comment, but it brings a whole new set of problems that are arguably bigger. Either way the capacity needed to attempt it will take huge leaps in manufacturing and installation capacity. And we need to get started on that yesterday if we want this to happen in a decade.
Problem here is that the engineers are saying “this problem is hard for these reasons” and people like you are screaming that you don’t care, fix it. And when they say it’ll take X years, your scream that it isn’t good enough. Or that the goal posts are moving (problems are complex and involve more than one thing). There standard you’re setting is unreasonable.
Calm down (helpful I know). Stop yelling at people when they are trying to work the problem. It isn’t going to get done the way you like but it can get done if you stop asking for impossible.
Really? I’m an electrical engineer and your understanding of the problem indicates you aren’t an engineer or you suck at your job (or did you not just positively assert production capacity and storage are minor problems?). Any decent engineer wouldn’t call out moving goal posts on a complex problem. Public awareness of difficulties is a way to get support for decidedly unsexy problems (nothing gets people hard like utilities). And layman screaming about shit they don’t understand is also a problem.
your understanding of the problem indicates you aren’t an engineer or you suck at your job (or did you not just positively assert production capacity and storage are minor problems?)
I said that they’re minor compared to climate change.
Failing to understand context is a way bigger indication of an engineer sucking at their job than anything I did.
And that comparison is worthless. Fucking everything is minor compared to the destruction of the planet, but that doesn’t help. It’s dismissive of real issues and only makes things harder.
Thus I hold that you suck at your job if you aren’t lying on the Internet. I also note that you neglected my other points.
Let me air out two unrelated but similar things that annoyed the shit out of me back in the day.
Your parents then: “That floor mat thingy (referring to the Power Pad) doesn’t count as exercise because it’s still Nintendo. You need to go outside!!!”
Adults now: Middle school phys-ed classes consisting of playing Dance Dance Revolution apparently somehow now “counts” as real exercise.
And,
Your parents then: “The problem with you kids is you spend all day in front of that tube, watching those stupid movies and playing video games all day instead of reading books. It’s stunting your ability to differentiate fantasy from reality!!!”
Your parents now: Instantly believe every damn fool thing they see on Facebook, even and especially when it is clearly horseshit.
So yeah. I can totally believe that some moron would unironically believe that staring at a screen containing an office application is somehow automatically more “wholesome” than staring at a screen displaying any other content for the same amount of time.
To me it depends on how hard you work and game, and by that I just mean how you posture yourself over a keyboard and how actively/frantically you interface with a computer.
My posture is shit despite spending up to 14 hours a day in front of a computer. It’s still ways better than that of someone who hunches over their keyboard staring dead at their big ass monitor with their fingers locked in over the QE+WASD button group as they zone in to get that “flick” response time.
Meanwhile, my shitty posture is just lounging or reclining in my ergo chair as I swivel my neck to look at any of my three eye-level monitors. I shift around a lot and my hands aren’t near the keyboard unless I’m actively typing. I crack my neck and roll my shoulders often, sometimes stretch or go take a 15-minute walk. I only use dark themes and always have proper ambient lighting to prevent concentrated light exposure fucking up my eyesight.
I have been keeping this technophiliac routine going for about 5 years now. Depression, Severe General Anxiety/Paranoia, Alcoholism, Substance Abuse (weed), Over-eating, Serial Dating and unexplained bouts of mania were all problems I had to deal with during those five years. Some of them may have been amplified by this routine computer use but certainly not caused by it, I’ve identified the true causes for almost all of them and, aside from depression, they have nothing to do with sitting in front of screens all day.
There are much bigger issues associated with computer use and the media’s failure to report on them speaks volumes. Stop attacking the video games that aren’t predatory (keep going after the ones that are) and start really really taking a look at the effects of social media. Social media will destroy society long before video games get a chance to.
I stand by this statement, to the grave: Death to Social Media.
Well, my shit TV was the problem. I meant no offence, buddy. The only way to solve the issue for me was to throw money at it. Show me an affordable smart TV that can stream 4k out of the box, day or night, with no buffering, I’m your guy. Or am I reading too much into this, and do you really just want me to photograph my TV while it streams that video in 4k?
I apologize unreservedly if I misread your tone. No, I wanted to see what resolutions you showed available for the video. This could just be a weird YouTube issue. Maybe an error happened on their end when they were generating the various files. I checked this morning and it showed the same two pitiful resolutions when I tried to play on my phone. The real mystery is how it got 14k views in this state. I watch HDR content to enjoy my TV, but HDR on a postage stamp ain’t it.
Edit: I think I found an explanation that fits the available facts. See latest edit in main post.
Alright mate, all good, I will run it when I get home and report back. For what it’s worth, the video is showing the 4k option on my Android phone using Grayjay app.
Reminds me of seeing completely rubbish resolution real player videos embedded in websites back in the late 90s and me thinking, “Well that isn’t ever going to take off”.
Tbf the combination can be worst. During COVID lockdowns I’d spend all waking hours either coding or hand writing for uni, hand writing to teach online, or gaming. Sometimes I’d crochet. I have chronic painful tendinitis now.
People specialized in hand/arm/rotator cuff bodywork can help you with that. You might have to try a few different therapists before you find one that’s good, but it’s worth it to get relief.
First time it’s happened to me but I’ll take your word for it. As of tonight, it’s been up for two days and has 14k views. I figured it was either something transient or YT was applying some traffic management during peak demand.
Ok if it’s up for two days and still not showing better quality than something different is going on. YouTube is typically pretty fast with encoding videos and most of the time all resolutions are finished between 15min and 1h after uploading the video, so it’s maybe not that in your case.
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