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A comment on 12% of Americans eat half the nation's beef. Parent comment

Re:12% of Americans eat half the nation's beef by tonyarkles on Friday September 01, 2023 @08:54AM (#37350189)
> I do agree with you, except for the natural gas part.

I’m coming at this from the perspective of a very flat Canadian province (very little hydro potential, the math on even pumped hydro storage is miserably bad). I have not yet found an alternative dispatchable energy source for load following that would work here other than natural gas. If you’ve got something that is economically viable and commercially available in the <5 year time horizon I would love to update my mental model with it. It sucks for sure, I just haven’t found anything better yet that can deployed today.

Edit: > Regarding meat production we could at least start with not subsidising the shit out of it.

Definitely agree with you there! My wife and I are fortunate enough to live near a very small-scale ranch whose only real subsidy is that the wife works as a well-paid nurse. I’m generally a big fan of “let industries work out their own economics and if it doesn’t work out it can go away” :D

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Re:12% of Americans eat half the nation's beef by bjoli on Friday September 01, 2023 @09:45AM (#37350764)
Not anything that would be available in the short term, but geothermal should work well in some parts of Canada, and where it is not enough for power generation it should still work for heating homes in an effective manner using small scale(ish) installations that cover maybe 10-15 houses at the same time. I had it installed in my house recently, and the most expensive part was the drilling. A government program to lower that threshold would probably be a good way to reduce peak energy.

Regarding meat, I am also all for feeding cows grass only, but that means land use balloons like crazy.

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Re:12% of Americans eat half the nation's beef by tonyarkles on Friday September 01, 2023 @11:18AM (#37351941)
Yeah geothermal is amazing here for heating and cooling but not quite hot enough for “standard” geothermal power generation. There is an experimental pilot project happening in the south of the province where they think they may have found a technique that might work for power but it is so far unproven and the first plant is targeting only 5MW.

100% it is the way to go for carbon-free heating and cooling here. For new rural builds it’s even cost competitive. A friend of mine recently built a house and getting a gas line installed was going to cost $40k. Installing geothermal came in below that and with a COP of 4 it ends up coming out marginally cheaper on a monthly basis (1kWh of electricity costs approximately the same as 3kWh of natural gas heating here). He has resistive heating backup but I think it has only kicked in once or twice over 5 years.

And yeah, definitely not scalable for everyone to just split a hobby-grown cow with their whole family. It sure is nice for us though!

[ Parent | on HN ]