Renewable meet worldwide needs of energy?

[slownsteady]

so much to respond to here.......maybe later.

Good discussion, BTW.

 

[bud16415]

As I understand it, the difference between driving a Tesla and driving a normal car is, yes, Tesla gets its power from (mostly) the same place--burning fossil fuels--but at a power plant where it can be done much more efficiently and less expensively, per unit of power delivered, than in a car's engine.

So, making stuff "greener n cleaner" might not be a matter of eliminating fossil fuel (not yet) but rather centralizing its conversion into power.

This, by the way, is not me cheerleading for Teslas. I hate the idea of a car where you need an electrical engineering PhD to change the brakes, and I think driving those cars unfortunately but inevitably also comes with a tribal message, which I'm not down with. But that irrational nuance might explain a lot about the energy/sustainability issue right there...

Factor in transmission loss (resistance) in shipping power from where they don’t mind burning fuel to make electricity to where they want to feel green and you get a totally different picture. All the NIMBY’s in Ca feel good about not polluting because the pollution is on the other side of the mountains. Also factor in an electric grid that is undersized and over worked and now dump on it the extra load of millions of car charging and the equation changes again. The solution is get rid of the cars and use mass transit like they did 100 years ago before the interstate highway system. Add in the strange concept of living close to where you work like they did 100 years ago.

The little town I live in is slowly dying because it is in the middle of nowhere. 100 years ago it had 22 hotels and something like 20,000 visitors per month. Back then it was located exactly half way between NYC and Chicago and had a train stopping every hour on the hour. Today it is located half way still but 30,000 feet below the travelers. I like your name by the way wish I would have thought of it.

 

[bud16415]

NPR had a piece the other day on their Earthwise segment on the latest invention the microgrid this new idea says put small power plants where people use power. I thought how crazy is that the plant I have worked in for the last 44 had its own power house burned coal cleanly or at least state of the art clean and made power for the plant and the waste heat heated all the buildings and was used for process heat. The power house had been running 24 – 7 for over 100 years. We closed it up over “carbon credits” and the fact that a smoke stack industry was a visual sign of old thinking. Now we buy power and have a $80,000 gas bill each month. Thank God for balanced billing.

But we look Green!

 

[oldognewtrick]

You should of suggested buying wood chips chips from North Carolina, the extra chips could be used to smoke some bbq in the cafeteria...

 

[Sparky617]

Mining lithium to make batteries is pretty green too.