As solar becomes increasingly widespread and electricity prices plummet in the middle of the day when the sun is brightest, some see a risk that the incentive to deploy solar power also decreases, said Esparrago.
That makes grid improvements and the rapid rollout of storage technologies like batteries crucial, experts argue. But the EU is still lagging behind in that area.
I wonder however how far we are from that? There is probably a lot of incentivising that can be done to get people and industry to use this ‘surplus’ daytime energy up surely. Its weird because its usually the opposite with cheap night rates - I know many people who intentionally consume energy overnight instead of the day because its cheaper. Flip that on its head maybe that isn’t as pressing an issue?
The issue isn’t really comparing high noon to midnight. The issue is comparing prices at either high noon (when supply is large) or midnight (when demand is small) to the space in between, especially dinnertime (when demand peaks just as solar supply finishes tailing off). There are ways to move some of that peak into noon (e.g: if homes are well insulated, they can be cooled or heated while solar is still up and used as a thermal battery to at least bridge over to the nighttime hours), but some of the peak is much harder to shift around. If everybody starts cooking and turns on the television around dinnertime, the only way to distribute that is to stagger dinnertime, which is easier said than done for a lot of people’s schedules. Having power storage to bridge that gap (wouldn’t it be nice if everyone that has an electric car got home and used whatever range they had leftover in their battery to absorb their extra demand and then start charging again at nighttime rather than immediately start charging at the worst time of day. Or having solar plants that store excess daytime power in thermal, hydro, or chemical batteries to discharge and increase supply later) is likely easier than convincing enough people to work odd shifts or delay their after work leisure activities
If that’s the case or becomes the case, isn’t it easily solvable since the batteries only need to store the energy for a few hours? Maybe some spinning wheel thing?
It is a very solvable problem, and mechanical or thermal batteries are likely to be at least part of the solution. Of the three kinds of gaps/shortfalls that grid storage would have to cover, the milliseconds-long and hours-long gaps are probably the easiest to solve. The days-long gaps (stretches of cloudy days, low winds for extended periods) is probably the most expensive to solve, but even those are not really that difficult (hydro storage is a tested technology that works well and HVDC transmission linking regions together can allow local shortfalls to be covered by remote surpluses). It’s all more a matter of building capacity than needing new technology to solve an unsolvable problem, from what I understand
Longevity is the big problem. Every practical method of energy storage I can think of is negatively impacted by frequent charge discharge cycles. Even a flywheel like you suggest would eventually need new bearings, need rebalancing, etc…
It would not be nice to power my house with my car. It’s extra wear on the battery, which is basically half the cost of an electric car. It opens me up to potential issues if I need to leave in the evening, my car now has reduced range.
Powering a couple appliances for a few hours is nothing for a car battery, those things are huge and powerful because cars are so inefficient. That’s not to say that V2G or V2X will work perfectly for everybody, but with the average commute around 25 miles and plenty of EVs out there over 200 mile range (which equates to mutliple days of typical electrical usage), there’s certainly some extra capacity. If you were compensated for the power you sold back at peak times, it could help justify paying for and lugging around the kind of battery capacity that is specced for your weekend/holiday road trips just to make your likely shorter daily commute. I’m using you generically, I don’t know your specific situation, so you certainly could be someone who would not feel a need to engage in that kind of scheme
Low power cycling (and powering a house is miniscule draw for a car) below 80% SOC cannot induce enough wear on a car battery to show up at all before calendar aging makes the battery unusable (which is about 10 years after the rest of the car has worn out on average). And the range it reduces is about 10% for an evening of powering a house, leaving more range than the typical ICE has when it is parked with the tank less than half full.
As to the investment. A tesla 3 is $40k and has an 86kWh battery in it (82kWh usable). Modern LFP batteries are rated for 8000 cycles at 0.1C (8kW or about what you can squeeze through a reasonable-sized wire at 240V ). If you somehow manage to wear it out and got 8c/kWh, you’ve made a profit. At 30c/kWh spread that some people pay, that’s tripling your investment.
You can only 50% drain your battery during peak 5-9pm consumption though so this will take 22 years of going full-tilt every day. The other 1.5 cars in each average household won’t get a turn, nor will several of your neighbors because peak electricity consumption is under 8kW per capita pretty much everywhere.
If you are lucky enough to wear out your battery this way, it will pay somewhere between 50% and 300% of the TCO of your car depending on where you live. 5% isn’t a great investment, but it also comes with a free car (and currently up to $8k ofnsubsidies not counted above).
A long way away I would guess. People will need more air conditioning during the day. Pretty much need solar on every rooftop to even begin to cover that. By making rates cheaper during the day it means demand will also go up as people run their appliances and charge their cars when rates are cheap.
Pumped hydro takes really specific geography and destroys an ecosystem to build. You really need a lake, as a river is going to have significant changes in flow from the operation. If you want a green solution pumped hydro isn’t really in the mix.
You don’t need a lake, just a hill or a hole. And the only places without a vast excess of pumped hydro resources have amazing solar and wind resource so don’t need it.
A renewable system with PHES for storage is both viable pretty much everywhere, and significantly cheaper than thermal generation. They likely won’t get built because it’s not really competitive vs batteries for short duration storage, takes a lot of time/coordination, and storage requirements are about an order of magnitude less than the fossil fuel shills are claiming.
Batteries will hit break-even with the split on peak vs off-peak electricity starting in a year or two.
Current retail consumer batteries (installation consisting of screw it to a wall and plug in three wires if you have a compatible inverter) are at around $280/kWh or 75c per kWh if you use it daily to load shift for one year. About 15c over 5 years. Halve that and anyone buying on peak electricity in a high-price area is going to be very interested in a battery rather than paying the next two quarters’ electricity bills. Quarter it (which is conceivable once sodium ion scales enough to meet utility demand) and average-price areas are looking at it real hard
EVs are hitting $1000/kWh pre-subsidy in the west or $300/kWh in china for the entire car. V2L or V2G becomes very appealing for anyone not using their car during the day.
Are you trying to tell me that easily manipulated mindless clowns flock to fringe conspiracies and bullshit pseudo-science filled snake-oil wellness programs?
I don't think she meant to mention you. OP is a mastodon user, and it automatically mentions the OP plus the person you are replying to when creating a response.
The article threw out a lot of potential reasons but the unsaid part about all of them was that they wouldn't be an issue if so many people weren't so goddamn stupid.
Isolation?
Mistrust of the government?
Poor treatment of women's health?
In all cases, it takes two parts to drive someone to conspiracy theories. A catalyst like one of the above, plus fuel of pure goddamn stupidity.
It is probably best addressed by strictly enforcing immigration laws in red states so we can see what happens. Red states rely on undocumented workers even more than blue states.
I’m sure they’re hoping it cleans the air of people telling them to “do something” about “climate change” and let them get back to giving huge giveaways to oil companies.
Seriously, I might be wrong but last I knew carbon capture tech wasn’t anywhere near good enough. How long would this thing have to run to do much as break even on the emissions building it caused?
Except that’s not what the article actually says. It says the carbon either goes to make concrete or gets pumped and stored underground. It does not get burned for energy.
There’s a lot of corporate shills in the comments, geez. I sincerely hope half of you are at least trolling in a half-assed matter, but if you’re seriously backing corporate interests, then you’ve not been in the shoes of people who’ve provided you the shit you’ve taken advantage of them over through their work. And here you are, demonizing and lecturing them over it.
they are not shill or bootlicker. they’re not backing up anybody but themselves. “if i was paid one time for my job why would they get more” the same mentality with “homeless people should just get a job” and “why would i pay for others Healthcare”. typical selfish american.
Well duh, the lower your incomr is compared to others the less of life’s pleasures their able to afford. If everyone else starts doing better then costs increase as demand rises and now I can’t afford shit.
No, it’s just ridiculous that these well-off Hollywood writers are demanding special treatment. Practically every other profession works on a salaried basis, in practically every corner of the world.
They aren’t demanding that their colleagues who work behind the scenes like the set crews, editors and support staff get residuals.
No, their motive is entirely selfish and they come off extremely entitled when they place themselves above the rest of the people who are responsible for creating a product.
Linus O’Tech Tips said TMC wanted to bring over Taiwanese work culture, i.e., wageslave 24/7 until you die for low pay but Americans balk at such demands. That’s what is meant by shortage of “skilled” workers.
Another awful law 6 years in the making, all thanks to people being too lazy to go out and vote.
We are going to be feeling the repercussions of that laziness for decades to come.
In today’s world, we can still see the results of Reaganomics and the terrible Reagan administration and what it did to this country some 4 decades later. Allowing Trump to enter the White House 6 years ago has, and will, continue to have a similar profound negative effect on the trajectory of this country for a long, long time.
Riiiight, always with the excuses. Most of those fall flat when you consider HALF the registered voters can’t be bothered to go vote on election day on most elections. Even in heavily trafficked ones, turnout rarely breaks 60 or 70%. Not saying voter suppression or gerrymandering doesn’t exist, but neither of those would swing an election if we had enough people voting. The excuses have long since gotten old.
Gerrymandering is half the reason people don’t vote. If an election isn’t competitive and there’s significant roadblocks put in your way, you might not vote either. Imagine having two jobs and kids and a long ass line at a voting precinct that isn’t within walking distance.
Lazy idiots like you rather come up with excuses than actually go do what you should be doing. You’re the typical “lazy American” stereotype that fascists count on to get into power. Congrats asswipe.
Lazy idiots like you rather come up with excuses than actually go do what you should be doing. You’re the typical “lazy American” stereotype that fascists count on to get into power. Congrats asswipe.
So I guess your voter outreach is nil then.
Keep it up, I'm sure it'll work out great for you and the causes you champion.
And yes, suppression IS a big enough reason to. Who the fuck on an hourly wage has the luxury of driving/transiting to a distant poll station and wait in line for 9+ hours to vote?
But hey, if it makes you feel better to dunk on them as "Lazy", keep at it, that's sure to convince them /s
Edit: Forgot to mention that you assume all these non-voters would vote for your party. Based on research, a very sizable portion would not.
That site didn’t give much info. It says they are hard working people who are underexposed to political info and don’t feel they can decide. Besides that making them fucking morons (sorry), that still doesn’t excuse their inaction.
It says they are hard working people who are underexposed to political info and don’t feel they can decide.
That's not what it said.
Besides that making them fucking morons (sorry), that still doesn’t excuse their inaction.
There's plenty of data there that explains their inaction. Your refusal to read it doesn't make you right.
It all comes down to giving people a reason they can understand to take the time to vote.
Again, asking an hourly wage worker that can barely make ends meet already to travel/transit and then wait 9+ hours in line to vote is completely unrealistic and not something they should be blamed for.
But hey, like the other guy, keep calling them fucking morons, I'm sure it'll work out great. /s
This is a result of a SCOTUS decision. SCOTUS membership is determined by the president and control of the senate at the time of vacancies. Neither of those are influenced by gerrymandering.
At the core of it this comes down to 2016 when a larger than typical number of people on the left lied to themselves and said “eh, they’re all teh same” and tossed their vote at a third party or just didn’t vote at all. Following that, SCOTUS went from a 4-4 tie (with 1 vacancy) to 6-3 conservative advantange.
I wouldn’t blame laziness, but instead a combination of apathy and people who are more interested in ideological purity than in accepting the available-better such that they would rather complain about the unavailable-best.
RBG refusing to retire in 2012-2014 also shares blame. She could have retired then and the court would be 5-4 instead.
Since you actually seem to be asking… There is no gerrymandering at the federal level in the presidential election. You could argue that the electoral voting system is somehow a form of this, but it isn’t the same as intentionally drawing districts to mathematically skew the advantage to the party drawing the map. That said, because electoral votes are based upon congressional representation, they do weigh smaller, emptier states more heavily. US senators are entirely free from gerrymandering as they are directly elected by popular vote. Small, empty states do have more power as a result and by design, for better or worse.
And they have 0 say in the Supreme Court. They have a minor say in creating other courts, but it’s been a long time since anything has meaningfully changed there either.
It doesn’t really matter if a state is “empty”, what matters is the population not the density.
And for what it’s worth: of the ten states with the least population, half generally vote for Democrats (HI, VT, DE, RI, ME). They are often overlooked in these discussions because they are mostly small in area too.
Population density absolutely matters, because when an ignorant person looks at an electoral map, by county, it looks like a couple small blue dots in a sea of red. If the wrong person shows them that map, it can become pretty simple to convince them that Democrats are cheating them because, “just look at all that red!”
It is also about how districts in larger, more empty states, use that mostly empty area to gerrymander their blue population centers. You can’t do that in smaller, highly dense, states.
I was responding to someone who said that “empty” states have disproportionate power in the electoral college and Senate. Their emptiness does not give them undue power, regardless of what ignorant people think.
Hawaii isn’t in the ten least populous states and Maine isn’t a blue state. It’s not a straight sort, but Republicans far and away benefit from the unequal representation of the Senate and Electoral College.
Maine has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election in the past 30 years. It’s true that it has a Republican Senator, but if that means it’s a battleground state then by the same logic so are Montana and West Virginia. Those incumbents are popular despite their party, but when they finally leave the Senate they will be replaced by someone in the opposite party.
But you’re right that Hawaii is not one of the ten smallest. It’s eleventh. However, I left out New Hampshire, which voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election in the past 30 years except one. So of the eleven smallest states, six consistently send Democrats to the electoral college.
While it’s still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC, the issue is more complicated than simply blaming the small states. Or for that matter the big states: the top ten include three red (FL, TX, OH), three blue (CA, NY, IL) and four battlegrounds (GA, NC, MI, PA).
it’s still arguable that Republicans have unfair representation in the Senate and EC
LOL, wut? There’s nothing arguable about that. Republicans very definitely have an unfair senate and electoral advantage entirely related to being more popular in less populated states (which, with the notable exceptions you’ve highlighted, tend to also be more rural).
You’re cherry picking top ten and bottom ten like the whole swath of states in between don’t also have unfair allocation and thus don’t matter, while being pretty inconsistent with your battleground state definitions to suit your sorting needs (NH is blue because it only voted R once in 30 years, while every battleground you listed has the same history, and red Florida and Ohio have been 50/50).
While your point about population vs. density is correct, everything else seems to be trying to muddy the waters about the EC rather than just point out an interesting factoid or offer a pedantic correction. There’s no serious argument that the EC isn’t unfair from an individual voter perspective and biased toward one side from a national perspective.
First, I’m using the common definition of battleground states, which is states that are currently considered winnable by both sides. That doesn’t include New Hampshire, or any of the smallest states.
Second, arguable means you can make a good argument for something, so I think you just proved that it’s arguable. It is not a slam dunk.
The only advantage of less populated states is that they get two “free” electors regardless of their population. This effect is strongest in small states, where it helps both parties equally.
Looking at all the states, the maximum advantage to a presidential candidate is the difference between the number of states they won times two. For example, if both candidates win 25 states, then the two “free” electors per state will cancel out and the electoral college will be determined solely by the number of representatives in the states that each side wins. Or to put it differently, if the Constitution were “fixed” so that electors were strictly awarded by population, then the winner would never change in a 25 to 25 split.
Of course, if one candidates wins 26 states and the other wins 24 states, then the first candidate could potentially get four “unfair” electors by winning more small states. But historically, the electoral college is won by much larger margins. The only modern candidate who might have won if the Constitution were “fixed” would have been Gore, and that was a highly unusual election. Otherwise, the small state advantage hasn’t made a significant difference in our lifetime.
You’re arguing that the EC’s unfairness is unimportant, not that it’s fair. And ignoring the senate imbalance where just a couple extra votes is a massive change.
So since it’s unimportant, let’s change it to be fair. Except I don’t think you really feel it’s unimportant and actually care very much about those two extra votes.
You seem to be implying that I don’t want Democrats to win, but I can assure you that’s not the case. I still do think that the extra votes in the EC are unimportant, and we should focus our efforts on things like voter suppression that have an actual impact.
I am especially concerned when Democrats are defeatist about elections (ie “The Constitution is hopelessly stacked against us in the EC”). Fair or not, the presidency is very winnable. So is the Senate: when was the last the time the GOP held a supermajority? They may have a rural advantage, but we have other advantages, including educated voters and women.
And I can think of two or three amendments that I would work towards (cough, Second Amendment!) before worrying about the EC.
I think they have a good point though. Sure, at a basic level, you can’t gerrymander a senate election. But you start with the state, draw the district lines. Now the state is gerrymandered, often packing dense districts with democrats. Now your state legislature (gerrymandered as hell) passes a law that says 2 voting machines per district. You bet your ass that affects national elections. Ol’ Jim-Bob has to share his two voting machines with 150 other people, whereas a city dwelling Democrat has to share theirs with a few thousand.
That 1 vacancy should have been Obama’s pick. It was fucking stolen from him, and now we’re paying the price of “decorum”.
Of course, Republican hypocrites shoved another conservative justice on the bench before RBG’s body was even cold, even after Trump lost the election (not to mention impeached).
It wasn’t just 4 years of Trump that we had to endure, it’s now three lifetime conservative appointments to the supreme court. So progressive legislation is stalled for another 30+ years. Our generation will be as old as the fucking Boomers are now before we get another chance at kicking out the conservatives, whose ideology is literally killing the planet. Gen Z and the generation that follows them will rightfully blame us for our inaction.
Or instead of giving up we could make court expansion and reform a litmus test in future Democratic primaries. And/or normalize the idea that judicial rulings need to be enforced by someone else and they too have agency.
Because allowing this to continue for much of our remaining lives is also decorum. We live in an unjust system, but it’s not just how life has to be for the next 30 years.
I don’t entirely disagree, but I’d like to see an actual roadmap for how such changes would be implemented. Voting for somebody who promises court expansion and reform, but doesn’t have the support of either the legislative or judicial branches and doesn’t have a concrete method of implementing it, seems like they are set up to fail.
I want to see more ruthless politicians on the left as well, but not if they can’t actually follow through with their promises.
Pass law changing the number of justices on the court
Support from the legislature is all that’s important. If the justices say “you can’t do it”, then ignore them because clearly they can. The constitution says very little about the supreme court and its size has been changed multiple times before. This is just doing history again.
ML? I don’t know what that stands for, but I did see the absurdity of Bernie and so-called progressive subs that were trying to convince people that a vote for Trump would further Bernie’s agenda more than a vote for Hillary. They also were trying to convince people to “stick it to the DNC” and simply sit out the vote.
So the foreign agents running those subs were trying to flip some votes and push voter apathy onto others. Doesn’t take much to change an election and the stuff I saw was clearly just a teeny, tiny part of their larger misinformation campaign. A few key votes here or there and that would easily explain Trump’s victory.
There is no way this stuff isn’t happening on Lemmy now. In fact, I guarantee it is.
China cannot win against Taiwan. (win = gaining control of the nation with its chip fabs still operational)
But that will not stop them from trying.
China is falling off a demographic cliff thanks to two generations of the one child policy. In a decade it will not have enough fighting age citizens to even attempt it.
But Xi wants to be remembered as the great re-unifier of China and he turned 70 this year, so time is running out to do so.
The 21st National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party will be held in 2027.
I expect China and Xi to force the issue before then.
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