My favorite strategy was changing spending to subsidize rail over roads, subsidize and market bicycles, and push for electric cars. Not directly applicable necessarily, but the number of things that have lower co2 production as a side effect is pretty large.
Instead there should be a tax on taking carbon out of the ground or importing it into the country. A tax so high that it becomes economically unviable to do it. Anything else is political games.
Doesn't that have the same problem? Anything energy intensive just shifts outside of the borders of that country where the tax is enforced.
IMO, carbons taxes need to be built into the trade deals. You need to say "we're creating a level playing field between our countries, but we do that on the basis that we are both going to do our bit to solve common problems".
The major reason tackling climate change is difficult is because it is a tragedy of the commons.
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2014/february/kolstad-carbon-t...
So? Consumption (of fossil fuels) is the problem. Any policy measure that cuts fossil fuel consumption will thus necessarily be regressive to the extent that it precisely targets the problem. It's not like cap-and-trade or efficiency mandates somehow avoid that.
But whatever anti-fossil-fuel measure you impose can be mitigated with orthogonal welfare policies.
Also, it's not policy options can ever lack downsides.
[1] I saw "considered" because the traditional result only gets that by a confused accounting basis. Yes, a consumption tax hits less of a rich person's income, but it hits the same amount of their later consumption. Don't compare income apples to consumption oranges.
Personally I think poor people tend to be in this sort of budgetary Malthusian squeeze. If you raise the price of one thing then something else will have to give. Tax their gasoline more the end result is they'll buy 'less car' and have less money left over for rent. Since rents are likely the only other fungible cost that's where the money will ultimately come from.
When father came home, his son announced that vodka would cost 50% more and said:
- Father, does it mean that you are going to drink less?
- No son, it means that you are going to eat less.
So in reality, about 30% are in a fairly serious pinch nearly all the time and 50% are probably doing OK, but still having to watch their budgets pretty closely. Only 30% of the population has the kind of earnings that people on HN generally consider acceptable.
Let's say that energy which doesn't liberate much carbon is 20% more expensive than carbon intensive energy (who knows). Really, only 30% of the population can easily swallow that cost increase. And even then, if we are talking about replacing cars, etc, etc the capital costs are actually outside the reach of a large percentage of those people (imagine being told that you have to replace your car today... could you afford it?)
In reality, if only the people who could afford it switched, it would not actually represent a large reduction in carbon usage. You have to disproportionately affect lower income brackets because that's were the vast majority of people live.
So if you tax carbon to make it attractive to switch, it's really not any more expensive. The main issue is making sure that people are able to deal with the capital expenses. Otherwise they won't switch. So IMHO, you are correct that carbon tax alone won't be enough. But there isn't really a downside to such a tax as long as you find a way to deal with capital expenses. In order to be successful, the poor must switch to the more expensive option.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/power-plant...
If the idea is to just give it back to the people that paid into it, that completelt defeats the entire purpose.
The question is why are you giving rebates to people who are mostly using green energy?
And it's not "giving rebate" it's returning tax revenues to those that can least afford them.
But there are many other sources of carbon than poorly planned electrical systems. Driving, flying, and industry.
Are you rewarding people for using less carbon or is the rebate to help offset the cost past through from companies passing on the extra tax onto consumers? Two different claims are being made.
That is, putting a price on carbon will result in businesses either putting up prices, or choosing lower emission production options. All other things being equal, this should result in having lower emission companies having a pricing edge, and then consumers picking those products.
On good days the plants would compress air into man made caves. After the cave reached a certain pressure, the generator would distribute energy as a pass through. If there were bad generation days out SW, the compressed gas would spin turbines at the plant. I believe that each plant was to have 3-5 days worth of common load production. After that, I think there were fallback generators like gas.
The reason I bring this up, is that battery/storage can be more than what we normally think about. In the case of the caves, there are several states that have natural formations. Investment in this idea, or others could reap great returns for the future.
Looks like there are at least 3 operating CAES plants: Huntorf, Germany [2], McIntosh, Alabama [3], and Gaines, Texas [4].
[1] http://www.duke-energy.com/news/releases/2014092301.asp
[2] https://www.eon.com/en/about-us/structure/asset-finder/hunto...
Pumped storage is vastly better than batteries. Also the variance between median days and calm days for wind is far less extreme than generally assumed. PV solar also provides power in cloudy weather.
Anyway the US can get to ~99.99% from ~30% oversupply and ~6 hours of grid storage which is vastly less than many people assume.
PS: Cloudy calm days over large areas are fairly rare. Heavy clouds are generally associated with weather and increased wind. EX: Hurricane incoming, solar down wind UP.
Purpose-built pumped storage plants, such as Helms near Fresno, tend to have much smaller reservoirs, about enough for a daily cycle, and they go from full to empty and back each day. This annoys some people. They're not recreational lakes. Efficiency is 60% - 80% round trip from electricity in to electricity out.
Actually, the variance is worse than assumed by enthusiasts. Here's today's output from wind, hour by hour, for the entire CAISO area, which is about 400 miles across and covers most of California.[1] Today was a bad day; about 10x variation between peak wind and minimum wind. 5:1 is typical; a good day is 2:1.
You can also see similar data for PJM, which covers the Northeastern US.[2] Today's wind variation is about 2:1.
There's a myth that, with enough transmission distance, fluctuations in wind will average out. The two largest power grids in the US aren't seeing that. Maybe for the whole planet, but not for any area one can reasonably interconnect.
[1] http://content.caiso.com/green/renewrpt/DailyRenewablesWatch... [2] https://dataviewer.pjm.com/dataviewer/pages/public/windpower...
Also of note you can smooth out or shift solar by shifting power east-west without involving storage.
And the actual numbers are considerably less optimistic than you report, and that paper was rather optimistic to begin with.
But I agree with the gist of it: storage worries are quite a bit overrated,and oversupply and transmission capacities are underrated. We can fix those easily enough, though
Yes, except for those who live next to the reservoir (or actually, in the would-be reservoir). That could be people, or nature.
Or in the extreme case, consider Lake Erie is next to Lake Ontario. Pumping extra water back up for a few hours a day would have minimal issues as boat bilge water has already cross contaminated them.
PS: The water feature is even down for matinee. http://www.refinery29.com/2016/02/102431/new-york-niagara-fa...
But isn't that what it does? Unless you start to limit (more than before) the waterflow to the falls themselves, which probably would meet resistance from conservationists.
(I understand the Lewiston power plant already does have capability to pump water up.)
And, many places don't have such reservoir capacity at hand. Over here any new reservoir project meets fierece resistance, and it's rather the other way round: nature conservationists want to shut down existing hydroelectric capacity.
It's complex there are few environmental effects from blocking the falls as they are already one way and tend to kill fish that make the trip. However, there is a treaty that set's minimum flow levels and more water is diverted at night to a holding area which is then used for hydro in the day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niagara_Falls_hydroelectric_ge...
Anyway, the area already has plenty of pumped storage it's only by importing a lot of power that you would need to expand. But, at that point you can scale really far with few environmental costs.
TIL
For example, all those people working in the power plant. They're about to be "disrupted" because they have not been willing to evaluate new technology honestly.
Last time I talked to someone still working there, they were making enough per-megawatt on green energy credits that they can run full-bore even if the hourly price for electricity production is negative and make a profit. Not to mention that in the past year, there have been a handful of paper mill closings in the area, so the logging contractors have been scrambling to find anybody that will take their pulpwood production, at any price, and the state government has been mulling legislation to add further subsidies to make sure they take all the wood they can, to keep everyone else in the logging, trucking and other subsidiary industries open.
https://www.iisd.org/gsi/news/us-renewable-energy-tax-credit...
It seems that in order to get the credit, they have to add small amount of diesel? I'll look into that a bit later.
Thanks for sharing this interesting niche of the energy market.
Black Liquor is interesting. Just down the road from my old plant, there is an International Paper mill that has been relying on that loophole for years to keep themselves afloat. All the mill's internal machinery is either steam-driven or runs on the electricity produced by their on-site plant. Lately they've been over-producing power and selling it back on the grid due to these credits, to the point that they have kept paper machines running at paper prices that would otherwise be unsustainable, just to keep a steady supply of black liquor for their power plant.
Even without any breakthroughs, high voltage DC interconnects between between electrical grids would allow us to use wind, solar, and a small amount of natural gas (certainly not megawatt for megawatt!)
And the end result is a system that pays for itself and has cheaper electricity. If we could ever get the stakes holders aligned...
http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/01/making-a-single-us-el...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvCIhn7_FXI&feature=youtu.be...
There are going to be quite a few electric cars on the road over the next decade, all acting as sinks and sources of power when necessary.
Or by rescheduling load on the grid.