@AC Re: Cloudy climate change
> given the marginal fuel of choice in most countries is gas; any demand you add to the system that wasn't there before is by definition, gas powered. This includes electric cars!
Yep, and along with heat pumps, the distribution network is going to need a serious injection of Copper in order to support them.
Your electric meter doesn't show you how much energy is wasted in the "low"-voltage wiring that runs under (or over) your street, but it is significant, and it goes up with the square of current. If you've ever noticed your lights dimming slightly when you turn the electric cooker/shower/kettle on, then please DO NOT get an electric car. Your local distribution network is overloaded and an electric car would waste a huge chunk of the juice it consumes (and any DC load like an electric car will typically draw MORE current as the voltage drops). In the worst case, electric cars in Australia will cause overhead lines to catch fire, with all the consequences that entails.. The distribution network was never designed for them.
> "ahhhh, no, windmills don't work all the time" yada.
Well, sorry but they don't. And batteries will never fix that, not even if we poured all the world's resources into making more batteries.
What could actually save us would be to de-regulate nuclear power. Nuclear power is actually pretty simple and easy, and it would be extremely cheap if people weren't so bloody scared of it. Well what is more scary, slowly starving/freezing/burning to death, or ionising radiation that has been part of the background of this planet since it first became a planet?
As for nuclear weapons proliferation, there are modern reactor designs (Thorium, etc.) that can actually burn nuclear waste and ageing weapons stockpiles as fuel - no need to mine any more uranium, we have enough nuclear fuel to last us centuries. But there are big vested interests (oil companies) who are dead set against that, and they love to frighten and manipulate the hippie types.
Wind power is indeed not good for grid stability, and it benefits the oil and gas industry enormously because of that fact. As soon as the wind stops blowing, the gas power stations start printing money, because every country needs to keep the lights on, and since we shunned nuclear, gas is all we have to do that.
> WIth enough of them, backed up by storage; you cut gas demand entirely outside of chemical feedstock.
No, really you won't. A country the size of the UK needs about 30-40GW to power its grid. When the wind stops blowing, we need 20GW of gas, because we only have 5GW of nuclear (and don't even get me started on the folly of Biomass)
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
For the last week of April and the first week of May, the UK had almost no wind, and used a horrendous 6TWh of gas-fired electricity over those two weeks.
For scale, a factory that produces 1GWh/year of battery capacity is apparently called a Gigafactory. The entire world has around 1 TWh of batteries IN TOTAL, and that includes all cars and grid-storage banks. We would need the world's entire stock of batteries three times over just to replace gas in the UK for one week of calm weather.
And when you factor in the energy cost of producing those batteries in the first place, you can see it's a mug's game.
(I'm not saying that batteries don't help at all - they DO help in frequency regulation, providing a replacement for mechanical inertia, to stabilise the grid against sudden load changes so that you have the extra few minutes required to spin up a big GAS turbine - but they do NOT provide bulk energy storage on anywhere near the order of magnitude that we need, and they never will)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
