Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
The US is the biggest market in the world.
What the US decides to do will affect prices for both electric products and gas products worldwide, making it more expensive to buy gas products than electric ones.
Looks like the current administration wants to make a push for all electric cooking devices. Imo this is just getting ridiculous at this point. Do you think this will pass?
I respectfully disagree: I see it as being ridiculous that the West is pursing clean technologies, while the rest of the world is severely lagging.
If we weren't interconnected, it wouldn't matter as much, but since most of what Americans consume comes from other countries, it's ridiculous that they're not abiding by the same labor and environmental standards.
What part of it do you disagree with?
On many levels it's not factually true that the rest of the world is severely lagging or at least not all parts of the world and parts of the West meanwhile is still on an emissions per capita are actually currently among the worst polluters. There is a tricky part here where the US needs to argue that it's too abrupt and disruptive for the US to dramatically lower its emissions per capita much faster while also having to convince developing countries with lower living standards that they cannot increase their emissions per capita much faster (or even at all) despite their emissions per capita being much lower. There can be some kind of good faith effort put in because there needs to be as you need the growth of total emissions to at least slow in growth so as to make it less disruptive to everyone (including ourselves).
However, I do agree that there should be roughly equivalent labor and environmental standards as well as an actual functioning mechanism for testing and verifying compliance for any goods sold in the US market though.
On many levels it's not factually true that the rest of the world is severely lagging or at least not all parts of the world and parts of the West meanwhile is still on an emissions per capita are actually currently among the worst polluters.
However, I do agree that there should be roughly equivalent labor and environmental standards as well as an actual functioning mechanism for testing and verifying compliance for any goods sold in the US market though.
It’s a waste of time and brain cells.
In the global picture it’s a pis in the ocean. That is a fact.
It’s a waste of time and brain cells.
In the global picture it’s a pis in the ocean. That is a fact.
I understand this mentality if there's not much time left on one's personal clock, what time left isn't much to look forward to and/or there is no one particularly close who are substantially younger that one cares about. It does make sense in that it's frustrating and potentially costly to deal with whereas the larger repercussions have a high chance of being past expiration. That being said, it's doubtful that for most people this would be a strong enough driver to do anything one way or another. Instead, it'd probably be reliant on the efficiency of these replacements especially as the price of many energy resources trend upwards, and continued lower cost of production from production learning curves and economies of scale that push them towards wider adoption.
It's possible LI or NYS overall by dint of the influence NYC has in various ways can play some role in shifting things here and there a bit, though that'd be very difficult to measure or predict. Overall though, yes, an average single household or person overall doesn't count for much emissions.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 01-10-2023 at 01:41 PM..
No, it's foolish to force people to pay a lot of money to replace systems that are already more efficient than what most of the world uses with newer more efficient ones that need to be powered by some mythical sources like the ones I bolded above that don't exist. When I hear the leftist idealogues who are driving this discourse admit that nuclear power is the only answer to what they want, then we can talk about economics.
As it stands, the entire movement is an ideological, one with its basis in Anti-west, anti American and in some ways fundamentally anti-human ideology. It's also quasi religious with Greta the great as the patron saint of climate anxiety. I get dumb college kids buying into this stuff, but adults? Where is all of this extra power to heat millions of homes in the northeast and midwest going to come from and where are the transmission lines gonig? In your backyard?
You bold'd the part where I said "that electricity can be generated in an economically efficient fashion from a wide variety of sources including ones in and close to Long Island is probably going to be the largest driver for change", but didn't see to ask what these were first which is odd since you're just assuming they are mythical. As stated in another related topic that there is an efficient pathway for coal, natural gas, petroleum, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind turbines, and solar photovoltaic among others to generate electricity. Which ones work best depends highly on the context*. I'm not quite sure why my post was what got you to launch into a diatribe about college kids (or being Anti-West or Anti-American) as it doesn't seem like there was anything about mythical sources I mentioned and you made no effort to clarify. It's a bit nutty.
Transmission capacity doesn't need that much in additions, but hardening and making a more resilient grid with more local storage does make sense. That should be pretty easy to deploy over the likely decades it'd take to shift transportation and heating to electricity. In terms of transportation, it's thus far been pretty easy in other places to juggle demand for EV charging with time-of-use rates as there are large, fairly reliable curves across a 24 hr period in electricity demand. Obviously, you need to build transmission capacity for *peak* usage, and because there are such wide fluctuations between *peak* usage and low usage and most charging for most transit can be shifted over to different periods, then it's been relatively easy to get most people at any single moment to charge outside of those peak hours. In terms of electric heating, there's a similar argument but rather than daily, it's on a seasonal basis. Broad deployment of it as heat pumps (not resistance heaters) would mean that you have the existing transmission capacity right now because of how common it is to have air conditioners in the US. The vast majority of people do not run *both* their A/Cs and heaters at full blast at the same time for obvious reasons. Instead, they often run A/Cs during the summer, and heaters during the winter. As we've for the most part have already installed the transmission capacity for running A/Cs, then we have essentially also already installed the transmission capacity for running electric heat pumps. Now, the winter temperature differential between the ambient outside temperature and what you want from home is generally higher than that of summer, but keep in mind that in the winter, the energy that goes into the heat pump to perform the heat exchange function and becomes waste heat *is* actually useful whereas in the summer, it's actually worse, so that's why even with the greater temperature differential, heat pumps should generally draw about the same power.
Nuclear power is very promising. They aren't always the lowest levelized cost of electricity available though when adding new capacity and they've unfortunately had track records of broadly underestimating time and cost of construction as well as cost of storage and cleanup after decommissioning. This does not always have to be the case though, and I'm optimistic that some of the novel 4th generation designs greatly bring down the cost and speed of deployment.
*Yes, even petroleum! Hawaii has for a while generated a lot of electricity via petroleum despite the high cost of petroleum because of its high energy density as the high cost of shipping to a place as remote as Hawaii makes it more economical than coal or natural gas. In recent years though, solar, especially consumer residential and office solar, alongside battery electric stationary storage has taken a massive part of the pie since there is a heavy, but one-time shipping since as a renewable resource, the "fuel" essentially gets delivered every day for decades with the same system
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 01-10-2023 at 03:04 PM..
You bold'd the part where I said "that electricity can be generated in an economically efficient fashion from a wide variety of sources including ones in and close to Long Island is probably going to be the largest driver for change", but didn't see to ask what these were first which is odd since you're just assuming they are mythical. As stated in another related topic that there is an efficient pathway for coal, natural gas, petroleum, nuclear, hydroelectric, wind turbines, and solar photovoltaic among others to generate electricity. Which ones work best depends highly on the context*. I'm not quite sure why my post was what got you to launch into a diatribe about college kids (or being Anti-West or Anti-American) as it doesn't seem like there was anything about mythical sources I mentioned and you made no effort to clarify. It's a bit nutty.
Nuclear power is very promising. They aren't always the lowest levelized cost of electricity available though when adding new capacity and they've unfortunately had track records of broadly underestimating time and cost of construction as well as cost of storage and cleanup after decommissioning. This does not always have to be the case though, and I'm optimistic that some of the novel 4th generation designs greatly bring down the cost and speed of deployment.
*Yes, even petroleum! Hawaii has for a while generated a lot of electricity via petroleum despite the high cost of petroleum because of its high energy density as the high cost of shipping to a place as remote as Hawaii makes it more economical than coal or natural gas. In recent years though, solar, especially consumer residential and office solar, alongside battery electric stationary storage has taken a massive part of the pie since there is a heavy, but one-time shipping since as a renewable resource, the "fuel" essentially gets delivered every day for decades with the same system
Do you really believe following the closure of Indian point that there will be another nuclear plant built to service downstate customers?
Do you really believe following the closure of Indian point that there will be another nuclear plant built to service downstate customers?
I think it depends on how the 4th generation and beyond nuclear reactors do in actual markets. I don't think NYS, and maybe even the US, will be the first to pilot them, but if there is broad market adoption elsewhere with a good track record, then yes. That's a big if though as there is a lot of competition now that are also rapidly lowering their levelized cost of electricity which are already at an advantage over nuclear power in most situations currently.
The other part of this is that HVDC lines have gotten a lot more efficient and so effectively much cheaper and economical over the last couple of decades as there's been a kind of mini-revolution in the electronics they require. This means transmission lines can be built far further out with minimal loss and relatively little cost. Indian Point *was* a pretty insane siting given how close it was to a major city, upriver from it, and within a 5 mile radius had a large portion of that metropolitan area's water supply. It was sort of an oddly optimistic place to site it originally and would today in just about any country be considered an insane place to have placed a nuclear reactor. The current era of HVDC lines means that kind of siting would almost certainly never take place again, and there's some reason to suspect that even more advances in power transmission will come.
I do hope for some rapid advancements in nuclear power and there's been some very exciting recent breakthroughs. If there does seem to be a strong chance that *is* where the future of energy is headed though, and in the near future, that it's probably pretty silly to not go all electric given that even with natural gas heating versus electric heat pumps, the latter even with natural gas as the source of generation generally still works out in the heat pump's favor in efficiency. Now think about how radically inefficient using nuclear reactors to power a process of forming hydrocarbons with the electricity it produces in a gaseous form to send over pipelines in order to then be burned at a COP of less than 1 for heating? That's even more ludicrous. It's always odd to me when I hear people be in favor of nuclear power, but are not in favor of electric mobility or heating. It doesn't make much of any sense since the main target source of nuclear power is generation of electricity. Though I am in heavy disagreement with this sentiment, it at least can still make sense to be against nuclear but be for electrification since there are many established and promising pathways for generating electricity aside from nuclear reactors. Being for nuclear, but against electrification. Woof, that's just weird.
When we lived in NY we had a gas stove. When we lost power, we could still cook. After Hurricane Sandy we heated pots of water to wash up and made spaghetti etc. The next day it was so cold that the steam in the kitchen caused condensation and then the water was running down the kitchen wall.
We were heating water up by the pots for neighbors who were all electric so they could eat too.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.
Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
