For a few hours on December 31, South Australia’s entire electricity consumption was supplied via rooftop solar alone. @microbet
3 Likes
Net metering rules in California changed last Spring. Solar in general is more difficult, but storage is relatively more encouraged.
1 Like
I’m glad to know that California ducks use solar power. There’s a flock of Canada geese and a handful of teals in my neighborhood, but they use conventional energy.
2 Likes
Ya I am doing a bunch of different types of storage projects right now and regulators across North America are modifying rules to allow for them.
The biggest issue we are going to run into now is the organized opposition to traditional oil and gas pipelines is now opposing transmission and storage.
Are SMRs coming to Alberta?
There is tons of talk of it in the oil sands but to date no. As you may know, nuclear is regulated by the feds not the provinces and right now there is a death match between the two in terms of environmental regulation.
Eventually they have to be part of the energy transition but it may be a little time before they do.
The main issue is the strong resistance from the public.
I’m skeptical. Public resistance seems so ineffective in so many other cases. I think no one wants to build nuclear reactors because they don’t expect to make money. Maybe if ff was shut down first and energy prices increased, there would be demand. Generally there’s not strong demand for new power plants period as things stand. Why have they built nuclear AND renewables in China? It’s not about public resistance or regulations. It’s about demand.
1 Like
It is all about regulations. Building a power plant in the US right now almost cost as much in legal fees as it does in construction.
Solar/Wind in the US is going through the roof right now because of how easy it is to get permits compared to actual power plants using nuclear or fossil fuels.
And they have built both in China because of building material supplies, not demand.
Can you say more on this? There seems to be real progress happening on transmission siting reform (ferc nopr) and energy storage seems about to boom. BOA says 2024 is the year storage reaches critical mass as an asset class, whatever that means
1 Like
I am actually in the middle of writing a paper on this exact topic so I can say too much lol.
In short, the NGO environmental lobby made a decision in the mid oughts to change their focus from lobbying to control emissions and GHG to opposing oil and gas distribution, mostly pipelines. To do so they formed an alliance between the NGOs, indigenous communities, and landowners to oppose traditional oil and gas pipelines. Here the focus was mostly on local impacts (spills, emergencies, property rights, self-governance) and less on the larger issue of climate change.
This was very effective and led to many major pipelines being canceled due to opposition.
However. an unexpected outcome has been that the well-developed social infrastructure has now turned their focus on energy transition technologies, most of which have the same or similar local effects, even when they are are trying to solve the larger climate change problem. For example, a carbon capture or hydrogen pipeline or a new power transmission right of way has the same land ownership, emergency response, self-governance issues as a traditional oil and gas pipeline so activists have shifted their focus to opposing them. This has resulted in stopping or delaying several carbon capture pipelines and new power transmission lines in the past 6 months.
Essentially, the alliance was originally meant to target pipelines to slow climate change but is now more focussed on the local effects than the global.
Every model of energy transmission known requires significant carbon, hydrogen, and biofuel pipeline infrastructure and the main limiting factor to green power (wind and solar) is the need for expansion of the long distance transmission network.
We need to find a way to work with the opposition that was built during the anti-pipeline movement but who have now turned their attention to these other types of projects.
3 Likes
It seems like I got a regular bill in December and January. Quite an annoyance.
It’s not really about demand in the sense you mean I don’t think. There is plenty of power available. The move to nuclear in the oil sands is due to regulatory and social pressure to decarbonize.
1 Like
It was a decade ago when California became the first state in the nation to ban single-use plastic bags, ushering in a wave of anti-plastic legislation from coast to coast.
But in the years after California seemingly kicked its plastic grocery sack habit, material recovery facilities and environmental activists noticed a peculiar trend: Plastic bag waste by weight was increasing to unprecedented levels.
According to a report by the consumer advocacy group CALPIRG, 157,385 tons of plastic bag waste was discarded in California the year the law was passed. By 2022, however, the tonnage of discarded plastic bags had skyrocketed to 231,072 — a 47% jump. Even accounting for an increase in population, the number rose from 4.08 tons per 1,000 people in 2014 to 5.89 tons per 1,000 people in 2022.
The problem, it turns out, was a section of the law that allowed grocery stores and large retailers to provide thicker, heavier-weight plastic bags to customers for the price of a dime.
I’m ashamed to say I’m guilty of this. I forget to bring in my reusable bag most of the time, and a dime means nothing to me. I save the bags and try to give them away. My ex used to use them for cat litter, but even she doesn’t need plastic bags anymore. So once a year or so, when the space between my fridge and cabinet that I stuff them into gets full, I stuff a bunch of them into one of themselves and throw them into recycling.
Just make them illegal and make me remember my reusable bag. Or something.
They did come in incredibly handy on my big road trip, but I don’t need that many of them.
I have a very similar storage system. I do have a friend who Marie Kondos the shit out of everything and folds every single bag into these neat little triangles for storage. It’s kind of cool but also I’d never do it in a million years. I think she does method 1 in the link below.
Yeah my ex does the same thing. Might be a Chinese thing.
It is not a hard thing to bring a reusable bag, even if you still use a couple of plastic bags for meat or whatever.
Can you not bring them back to your grocery store for recycling? Also, there are many other bags that can be recycled with the grocery bags.
He is recycling them.
1 Like
I really just wanted an excuse to point out that there are other plastic bags that can go in with the grocery bags.
Trying to learn how to conveniently bake my own potato chips since the bags are an abomination.