The Equation is the blog of the Union of Concerned Scientists, covering climate, energy, electric vehicles and nuclear weapons policy.
HN commenters cite it for electric vehicle emissions comparisons, grid CO2 data and nuclear policy, including a favorite post on the moon and nuclear war.
This article and blog series appears to primarily focus on fossil fuel plants failing in extreme weather events (which are growing more frequent). This is an important dimension to track, but isn't directly comparable to "normal" reliability - ie, how much storage do you need to keep your 100% wind+solar+hydro mix providing all your typical energy needs through a typical night (for example).
Also, I don't particularly think these articles make great arguments. For example, "Similarly, 56% of the generating capacity knocked offline came from gas plants during Winter Storm Uri". Texas' overall energy capacity mix is ~40% gas. So while yes, it is disproportionate, I don't think it's hugely so, especially without taking into account other factors - for example, typical solar capacity in winter.
The blog post that actually starts digging at some numbers (https://blog.ucsusa.org/mark-specht/how-reliable-are-gas-power-plants-what-icap-ucap-and-elcc-tell-us/) indicates that we might expect gas plants to have a reliability of ~70-80%.
From another blogpost from them, we can find a very rough estimate of solar/onland wind reliability of ~30-40% (measured in ELCC, same as the 70-80% figure above) https://blog.ucsusa.org/mark-specht/elcc-explained-the-critical-renewable-energy-concept-youve-never-heard-of/
So it's important to take into account the reliability derating of gas plants, but it doesn't really change the fact that solar/wind are in a significantly different class of…
> He tells me that in the corn belt many farmers are turning to PV because it pencils out much better than corn for ethanol, but neighbors sure as hell don't want to see solar panels when they drive by so there is a lot of effort into beauty strips.
Some states have implemented laws that preempt local planning from blocking renewables development. In states that don't, I recommend to developers to offer to buy properties from people who say it's going to impact their property values at fair market value and then flip the house after the project is done (because there is always someone who will pay at least what it was acquired for).
https://apnews.com/article/wind-solar-energy-projects-local-opposition-eb300574867f53f8abba85127574adc3
> Out west in CA it is a matter of time before people realize they want to build a solar field in some place that is habitat for an endangered species so I think sometimes the paperwork is going to approach AP1000 hassle as well.
CA has plenty of room for solar remaining to develop that is unlikely to receive pushback, which will add to the 21.5GW of existing solar utility generation (does not include behind the meter distributed…
> 1: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/green-living-blog/20...
That article compares the footprint of building a new car vs keeping and existing already built car, not ICE vs EV lifetime carbon footprint. The actual reduction in lifetime carbon footprint for an EV is around 50% vs and ICE, as described here:
https://blog.ucsusa.org/rachael-nealer/gasoline-vs-electric-global-warming-emissions-953
Not sure if you'd call that night and day, but it's pretty huge.
> . But there's no doubt that the EV is a huge improvement in use, and switching a large portion of the trucks in our cities to EV would be giant win for air quality.
Indeed, and by consequence, it should reduce the rate of respiratory illnesses in cities caused by particular air pollution today.
Starlink has a little over 5,000 satellites in orbit currently, with expansion planned up to 42,000 in the future.
At the end of 2022, there was only 6,718 active satellites[1] in space - total.
The amount of government objects (from any country, of any kind, station, spy satellite, probe, rover, etc) is dwarfed by commercial interests. This just illustrates the sheer volume of commercial objects in space...
In fact, here's a list of all publicly acknowledged satellites launched by the USAF since 1984[2]. It shows 331 in total, counting inactive satellites.
[1] https://blog.ucsusa.org/syoung/how-many-satellites-are-in-space-the-spike-in-numbers-continues/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_USA_satellites
Even more recently, Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, West Virginia all passed laws within the last year or two that deny state contracts to any company who divests from oil/gas. Just insanely unconstitutional and vague, and a good reminder of why there's so much astroturfing around ESG, but those laws were adopted largely verbatim from "sample" text written by oil & gas lobbyists and energy companies;
https://blog.ucsusa.org/elliott-negin/how-the-american-legislative-exchange-council-turns-disinformation-into-law/
Center for Public Integrity did a whole series on the phenomenon they called "Copy, Paste, Legislate": https://publicintegrity.org/topics/federal-politics/state-politics/copy-paste-legislate/
I agree with the "class warfare" quote. But aren't "the rich" pretty much the ones pushing these anti-regulatory sentiments?
I agree, these regulations you're pointing out aren't sufficient. But I maintain, I think the finger-pointing crap is a distraction. Nobody's going to do anything when they can point their finger at the bigger-offender, and feel vindicated in their own inaction. And since numbers are so easily fudgable, everyone feels this way (see: leading U.S. politicians blaming Africa for climate change [1], about as ridiculous a claim as is imaginable)
[1] https://blog.ucsusa.org/derrick-jackson/house-speaker-mike-johnsons-climate-change-playbook-deny-the-science-take-the-funding/