Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- All about models
- Survey Methodology, Prof Ron Fricker http://faculty.nps.edu/rdfricke/
- What If
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Why It’s So Freaking Hard To Make A Good COVID-19 Model Five Thirty Eight’s take on why pandemic modeling is so difficult
- Label Noise
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Tim Harford's “More or Less'' Tim Harford explains – and sometimes debunks – the numbers and statistics used in political debate, the news and everyday life
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Prediction vs Forecasting: Knaub “Unfortunately, ‘prediction,’ such as used in model-based survey estimation, is a term that is often subsumed under the term ‘forecasting,’ but here we show why it is important not to confuse these two terms.”
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Pat's blog While it is described as “The mathematical (and other) thoughts of a (now retired) math teacher”, this is false humility, as it chronicles the present and past life and times of mathematicians in their context. Recommended.
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- Risk and Well-Being
- Logistic curves in market disruption From DollarsPerBBL, about logistic or S-curves as models of product take-up rather than exponentials, with notes on EVs
- Earle Wilson
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Ted Dunning
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Higgs from AIR describing NAO and EA Stephanie Higgs from AIR Worldwide gives a nice description of NAO and EA in the context of discussing “The Geographic Impact of Climate Signals on European Winter Storms”
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- In Monte Carlo We Trust The statistics blog of Matt Asher, actually called the “Probability and Statistics Blog”, but his subtitle is much more appealing. Asher has a Manifesto at http://www.statisticsblog.com/manifesto/.
- Mertonian norms
- Simon Wood's must-read paper on dynamic modeling of complex systems I highlighted Professor Wood’s paper in https://hypergeometric.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/struggling-with-problems-already-attacked/
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- Busting Myths About Heat Pumps Heat pumps are perhaps the most efficient heating and cooling systems available. Recent literature distributed by utilities hawking natural gas and other sources use performance figures from heat pumps as they were available 15 years ago. See today’s.
- Karl Broman
- Professor David Draper
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
climate change
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Risk and Well-Being
- Sea Change Boston
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- The Keeling Curve The first, and one of the best programs for creating a spatially significant long term time series of atmospheric concentrations of CO2. Started amongst great obstacles by one, smart determined guy, Charles David Keeling.
- The beach boondoggle Prof Rob Young on how owners of beach property are socializing their risks at costs to all of us, not the least being it seems coastal damage is less than it actually is
- Climate change: Evidence and causes A project of the UK Royal Society: (1) Answers to key questions, (2) evidence and causes, and (3) a short guide to climate science
- NOAA Annual Greenhouse Gas Index report The annual assessment by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the radiative forcing from constituent atmospheric greenhouse gases
- The Sunlight Economy
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- An open letter to Steve Levitt
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- MIT's Climate Primer
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Climate model projections versus observations
- Steve Easterbrook's excellent climate blog: See his "The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet?" for example Heavy on data and computation, Easterbrook is a CS prof at UToronto, but is clearly familiar with climate science. I like his “The Internet: Saving Civilization or Trashing the Planet” very much.
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- AIP's history of global warming science: impacts The American Institute of Physics has a fine history of the science of climate change. This link summarizes the history of impacts of climate change.
- World Weather Attribution
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- And Then There's Physics
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Ice and Snow
- "Mighty Microgrids" Webinar This is a Webinar on YouTube about Microgrids from the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), featuring New York State and Minnesota
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- The Carbon Cycle The Carbon Cycle, monitored by The Carbon Project
- CLIMATE ADAM Previously from the Science news staff at the podcast of Nature (“Nature Podcast”), the journal, now on YouTube, encouraging climate action through climate comedy.
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Climate Change Reports By John and Mel Harte
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- "Betting strategies on fluctuations in the transient response of greenhouse warming" By Risbey, Lewandowsky, Hunter, Monselesan: Betting against climate change on durations of 15+ years is no longer a rational proposition.
- Isaac Held's blog In the spirit of Ray Pierrehumbert’s “big ideas come from small models” in his textbook, PRINCIPLES OF PLANETARY CLIMATE, Dr Held presents quantitative essays regarding one feature or another of the Earth’s climate and weather system.
- SolarLove
- The net average effect of a warming climate is increased aridity (Professor Steven Sherwood)
- "When Did Global Warming Stop" Doc Snow’s treatment of the denier claim that there’s been no warming for the most recent N years. (See http://hubpages.com/@doc-snow for more on him.)
- Skeptical Science
- "Impacts of Green New Deal energy plans on grid stability, costs, jobs, health, and climate in 143 countries" (Jacobson, Delucchi, Cameron, et al) Global warming, air pollution, and energy insecurity are three of the greatest problems facing humanity. To address these problems, we develop Green New Deal energy roadmaps for 143 countries.
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
Archives
Jan Galkowski
ecoquant
Also, the potential energy in those forms of energy is very different upon conversion. In layman’s terms, you cannot turn on a lightbulb using natural gas.
Thanks for your comments.
The present post was more in a response to comments which Elon Musk made, having less convincing argument for the general case why solar, in particular, and wind to some extent have to win. That argument is made more convincingly in a different blog post.
The significant element in the graphic above is the Joule losses due to transmission. This is a part of the problem which fossil fuels have, which is that to get a Kilowatt-Hour (“kWh”) of energy to a consumer, energy is lost in extracting, purification (cleaning or refining), transport, burning, and then transmission. These overheads are seldom reflected in a head-to-head energy comparison of solar or wind against something like natural gas, which are generated nearby, at least in the decentralized model.
The point is that the idea of applying “economies of scale” to electricity generation from fossil fuels always was fallacious. It’s just that people thought the loss of energy to support the network was acceptable. Now that there is a cost to doing that extra burning, in the form of greenhouse gas emissions, these “incidental expenditures” now matter a great deal. Demand-side solutions to consumption, whether of energy or of product, always have this great leverage in an economy which has long supply chains.
It doesn’t matter how much energy per pound is in natural gas or petrol. Sunlight and wind are always there. Their marginal cost of production is zero. That’s why, in the limit, fossil fuels have to lose out. From the business case, solar in particular, because it is semiconductor-based, is riding the technology demand curve, and that is something which is very unusual for an energy source. See the above cited blog post, and my podcast on the matter, below
Your statistic sounds like a non sequitur. Without more data, you could use that graphic to argue the other point: in favor of centralization. After all, does decentralization not reduce the economies of scale and increase ineficiencies?