Distributed Solar: The Democratizaton of Energy
Blogroll
- 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.
- Professor David Draper
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION, reviews Reviews of Cathy O’Neil’s new book
- Slice Sampling
- American Statistical Association
- Dominic Cummings blog Chief advisor to the PM, United Kingdom
- Quotes by Nikola Tesla Quotes by Nikola Tesla, including some of others he greatly liked.
- Nadler Strategy, LLC, on sustainability Thinking about business, efficient and effective management, and business value
- 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
- All about Sankey diagrams
- GeoEnergy Math Prof Paul Pukite’s Web site devoted to energy derived from geological and geophysical processes and categorized according to its originating source.
- SASB Sustainability Accounting Standards Board
- Earle Wilson
- 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.”
- Comprehensive Guide to Bayes Rule
- WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION Cathy O’Neil’s WEAPONS OF MATH DESTRUCTION,
- Dollars per BBL: Energy in Transition
- Los Alamos Center for Bayesian Methods
- Beautiful Weeds of New York City
- The Mermaid's Tale A conversation about biological complexity and evolution, and the societal aspects of science
- Dr James Spall's SPSA
- 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
- Mrooijer's Numbers R 4Us
- "Consider a Flat Pond" Invited talk introducing systems thinking, by Jan Galkowski, at First Parish in Needham, UU, via Zoom
- Ives and Dakos techniques for regime changes in series
- BioPython A collection of Python tools for quantitative Biology
- All about ENSO, and lunar tides (Paul Pukite) Historically, ENSO has been explained in terms of winds. But recently — and Dr Paul Pukite has insisted upon this for a long time — the oscillation of ENSO has been explained as a large-scale slosh due to lunar tidal forcing.
- Harvard's Project Implicit
- The Keeling Curve: its history History of the Keeling Curve and Charles David Keeling
- Gabriel's staircase
- What If
- Giant vertical monopolies for energy have stopped making sense
- 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
- 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/.
- 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”
- John Kruschke's "Dong Bayesian data analysis" blog Expanding and enhancing John’s book of same title (now in second edition!)
- James' Empty Blog
- 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.
- Bob Altemeyer on authoritarianism (via Dan Satterfield) The science behind the GOP civil war
- Charlie Kufs' "Stats With Cats" blog “You took Statistics 101. Now what?”
- NCAR AtmosNews
- "Talking Politics" podcast David Runciman, Helen Thompson
- Mertonian norms
- Leadership lessons from Lao Tzu
- Karl Broman
- The Alliance for Securing Democracy dashboard
- Ted Dunning
- Risk and Well-Being
- Tony Seba Solar energy, electric vehicle, energy storage, and business disruption professor and visionary
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
climate change
- Jacobson WWS literature index
- Ricky Rood's “What would happen to climate if we (suddenly) stopped emitting GHGs today?
- HotWhopper: It's excellent. Global warming and climate change. Eavesdropping on the deniosphere, its weird pseudo-science and crazy conspiracy whoppers.
- 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 model projections versus observations
- Wind sled Wind sled: A zero carbon way of exploring ice sheets
- Simple models of climate change
- Rabett Run Incisive analysis of climate science versus deliberate distraction
- "Getting to the Energy Future We Want," Dr Steven Chu
- On Thomas Edison and Solar Electric Power
- Climate at a glance Current state of the climate, from NOAA
- Ellenbogen: There is no Such Thing as Wind Turbine Syndrome
- 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
- 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.
- “The Irrelevance of Saturation: Why Carbon Dioxide Matters'' (Bart Levenson)
- Ice and Snow
- "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.
- “The discovery of global warming'' (American Institute of Physics)
- Skeptical Science
- Grid parity map for Solar PV in United States
- "A field guide to the climate clowns"
- Anti—Anti-#ClimateEmergency Whether to declare a climate emergency is debatable. But some critics have gone way overboard.
- Simple box models and climate forcing IMO one of Tamino’s best posts illustrating climate forcing using simple box models
- Nick Bower's "Scared Scientists"
- "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
- Energy payback period for solar panels Considering everything, how long do solar panels have to operate to offset the energy used to produce them?
- "Climate science is setttled enough"
- `Who to believe on climate change': Simple checks By Bart Verheggen
- Documenting the Climate Deniarati at work
- James Powell on sampling the climate consensus
- Interview with Wally Broecker Interview with Wally Broecker
- Thriving on Low Carbon
- 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%.
- Transitioning to fully renewable energy Professor Saul Griffiths talks to transitioning the customer journey, from a dependency upon fossil fuels to an electrified future
- "Lessons of the Little Ice Age" (Farber) From Dan Farber, at LEGAL PLANET
- The Scientific Case for Modern Human-caused Global Warming
- And Then There's Physics
- Eli on the spectroscopic basis of atmospheric radiation physical chemistry
- Spectra Energy exposed
- Solar Gardens Community Power
- Andy Zucker's "Climate Change and Psychology"
- Reanalyses.org
- Risk and Well-Being
- Climate Change Denying Organizations
- SOLAR PRODUCTION at Westwood Statistical Studios Generation charts for our home in Westwood, MA
- 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.
- Sea Change Boston
- Updating the Climate Science: What path is the real world following? From Professors Makiko Sato & James Hansen of Columbia University
- Earth System Models
- Climate Communication Hassol, Somerville, Melillo, and Hussin site communicating climate to the public
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?