Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Number Cruncher Politics
- All about Sankey diagrams
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- NCAR AtmosNews
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI)
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Musings on Quantitative Paleoecology Quantitative methods and palaeoenvironments.
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- 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/
- Karl Broman
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- Lenny Smith's CHAOS: A VERY SHORT INTRODUCTION This is a PDF version of Lenny Smith’s book of the same title, also available from Amazon.com
- 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
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- American Statistical Association
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Hermann Scheer Hermann Scheer was a visionary, a major guy, who thought deep thoughts about energy, and its implications for humanity’s relationship with physical reality
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Earth Family Beta MIchael Osborne’s blog on Science and the like
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Mertonian norms
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- ggplot2 and ggfortify Plotting State Space Time Series with ggplot2 and ggfortify
- Rasmus Bååth's Research Blog Bayesian statistics and data analysis
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- All about models
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- OOI Data Nuggets OOI Ocean Data Lab: The Data Nuggets
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Label Noise
- Risk and Well-Being
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Mike Bloomberg, 2020 He can get progress on climate done, has the means and experts to counter the Trump and Republican digital disinformation machine, and has the experience, knowledge, and depth of experience to achieve and unify.
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Gavin Simpson
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- 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.
- Awkward Botany
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- Fear and Loathing in Data Science Cory Lesmeister’s savage journey to the heart of Big Data
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
climate change
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- Tuft's Professor Kenneth Lang on the physical chemistry of the Greenhouse Effect
- David Appell's early climate science
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- 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
- Klaus Lackner (ASU), Silicon Kingdom Holdings (SKH) Capturing CO2 from air at scale
- "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.)
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- Spectra Energy exposed
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 1 of 2) The idea of a global warming slowdown or hiatus is critically examined, emphasizing the literature, the datasets, and means and methods for telling such. In two parts.
- 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.
- MIT's Climate Primer
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- SolarLove
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- James Hansen and granddaughter Sophie on moving forward with progress on climate
- Sir David King David King’s perspective on climate, and the next thousands of years for humanity
- ATTP summarizes all that stuff about Committed Warming from AND THEN THERE’S PHYSICS
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Model state level energy policy for New Englad Bob Massie’s proposed energy policy for Massachusetts, an admirable model for energy policy anywhere in New England
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
- US$165/tonne CO2: Sweden Sweden has a Carbon Dioxide tax of US$165 per tonne at present. CO2 tax was imposed in 1991. GDP has grown 60%.
- And Then There's Physics
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- RealClimate
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- "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.
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- 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
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- Risk and Well-Being
- "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.
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- Simple models of climate change
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- Climate Change: A health emergency … New England Journal of Medicine Caren G. Solomon, M.D., M.P.H., and Regina C. LaRocque, M.D., M.P.H., January 17, 2019 N Engl J Med 2019; 380:209-211 DOI: 10.1056/NEJMp1817067
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
Archives
Jan Galkowski
Why decentralized electrical power has to win, no matter what Elon Musk says, and utilities are doomed
This entry was posted in bridge to nowhere, carbon dioxide, Carbon Tax, citizenship, clean disruption, climate, climate change, climate disruption, climate education, compassion, conservation, consumption, decentralized electric power generation, decentralized energy, demand-side solutions, diffusion processes, dynamical systems, ecology, economics, efficiency, energy, energy reduction, engineering, environment, ethics, exponential growth, forecasting, fossil fuel divestment, geophysics, global warming, investing, investment in wind and solar energy, living shorelines, mass transit, mathematics education, maths, meteorology, microgrids, natural gas, NCAR, NOAA, nor'easters, obfuscating data, oceanography, open data, optimization, physics, politics, population biology, Principles of Planetary Climate, rationality, Ray Pierrehumbert, reasonableness, reproducible research, risk, science, science education, scientific publishing, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, solar power, state-space models, statistics, temporal myopia, testing, the right to know, time series, wind power, zero carbon. Bookmark the permalink.
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?