Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- Carl Safina's blog One of the wisest on Earth
- Risk and Well-Being
- distributed solar and matching location to need
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- Karl Broman
- John Cook's reasons to use Bayesian inference
- NCAR AtmosNews
- 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
- American Statistical Association
- 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”
- "Perpetual Ocean" from NASA GSFC
- 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/
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- Thaddeus Stevens quotes As I get older, I admire this guy more and more
- 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/.
- AP Statistics: Sampling, by Michael Porinchak Twin City Schools
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- All about models
- "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.
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Gabriel's staircase
- Number Cruncher Politics
- Earth Family Alpha Michael Osborne’s blog (former Executive at Austin Energy, now Chairman of the Electric Utility Commission for Austin, Texas)
- Team Andrew Weinberg Walking September 8th for the Jimmy Fund!
- What If
- Brendon Brewer on Overfitting Important and insightful presentation by Brendon Brewer on overfitting
- Why "naive Bayes" is not Bayesian Explains why the so-called “naive Bayes” classifier is not Bayesian. The setup is okay, but estimating probabilities by doing relative frequencies instead of using Dirichlet conjugate priors or integration strays from The Path.
- Mark Berliner's video lecture "Bayesian mechanistic-statistical modeling with examples in geophysical settings"
- Subsidies for wind and solar versus subsidies for fossil fuels
- Awkward Botany
- Flettner Rotor Bruce Yeany introduces the Flettner Rotor and related science
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- Gavin Simpson
- Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard on how businesses can help our collective environmental mess Patagonia’s Yvon Chouinard set the standard for how a business can mitigate the ravages of capitalism on earth’s environment. At 81 years old, he’s just getting started.
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- 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.
- Healthy Home Healthy Planet
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- Brian McGill's Dynamic Ecology blog Quantitative biology with pithy insights regarding applications of statistical methods
- "The Expert"
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
climate change
- 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%.
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- "Warming Slowdown?" (part 2 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. The second part.
- World Weather Attribution
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- Reanalyses.org
- The Green Plate Effect Eli Rabett’s “The Green Plate Effect”
- Earth System Models
- 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.
- Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature
- Dessler's 6 minute Greenhouse Effect video
- Warming slowdown discussion
- The HUMAN-caused greenhouse effect, in under 5 minutes, by Bill Nye
- Non-linear feedbacks in climate (discussion of Bloch-Johnson, Pierrehumbert, Abbot paper) Discussion of http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1002/2015GL064240/abstract
- 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
- Paul Beckwith Professor Beckwith is, in my book, one of the most insightful and analytical observers on climate I know. I highly recommend his blog, and his other informational products.
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Climate impacts on retail and supply chains
- Simple models of climate change
- Équiterre Equiterre helps build a social movement by encouraging individuals, organizations and governments to make ecological and equitable choices, in a spirit of solidarity.
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- Spectra Energy exposed
- “Ways to [try to] slow the Solar Century''
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- MIT's Climate Primer
- `The unchained goddess' 1958 Bell Telephone Science Hour broadcast regarding, among other things, climate change.
- "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.
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- 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.
- All Models Are Wrong Dr Tamsin Edwards blog about uncertainty in science, and climate science
- 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.
- Ray Pierrehumbert's site related to "Principles of Planetary Climate" THE book on climate science
- Social Cost of Carbon
- 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.
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- weather blocking patterns
- The Sunlight Economy
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- "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.)
- Exxon-Mobil statement on UNFCCC COP21
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- Skeptical Science
- History of discovering Global Warming From the American Institute of Physics.
- 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.
- David Appell's early climate science
- Climate model projections versus observations
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- 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
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
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?