Articles That Cause One 2 Say..Hmm

https://quillette.com/2022/03/07/washington-post-and-npr-ign…

some of the biggest media entities in the world have no clue about—and apparently no sympathy for—the rural Americans, from Maine to Hawaii, who are fighting to protect their homes and neighborhoods from large wind and solar projects. Nor do the reporters have any sense of the amount of renewable energy—and, therefore, the massive amounts of land—that will be needed to meet America’s voracious appetite for energy and power.

a new report* by the Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has determined that the grid’s market design coupled with excessive subsidies for wind and solar were central to the near-meltdown of the state’s electric grid. An analysis by energy consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that the worst of the Texas blackouts coincided with a days-long wind drought across much of North America.

https://www.noemamag.com/why-we-have-to-give-up-on-endless-e…
Sustainability efforts are scaling and speeding up — but the treadmill of global economic growth is still faster.

there is scant evidence thus far that decoupling economic growth from resource use is both possible and sustainable.

A major study published in 2021 that looked at both production- and consumption-based emissions from 2015 to 2018 in 116 mostly high-carbon national economies found that only 14 of them had been able to decouple GDP growth from both types of carbon emissions growth.

the 2021 study also found that 22 countries that had managed to decouple between 2010 and 2015 had actually recoupled again after 2015. In other words, decoupling requires both pressure and vigilance.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects a 50% increase in world energy use by 2050, which renewables will only be able to partly cover, thus leaving the world in still worse emissions shape than it is today.

Of the three core concerns of liberalism — liberty, private property and industry — the attachment to industry is strongest. Liberalism champions freedom and liberty relentlessly, but it has always quietly tolerated dispossessing and even enslaving some as the cost of enabling others.

Humanity’s desire for more & more will be our end. And going to Mars will not fix things; it just keeps the “ecological Ponzi scheme going more than another few decades” and spreads humanity’s pollution to the universe.
Has the time arrived for a degrowth economic policy? LOL Not likely.

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— the attachment to industry is strongest. Liberalism champions freedom and liberty relentlessly, but it has always quietly tolerated dispossessing and even enslaving some as the cost of enabling others.

The essence of “supply side economics”. Michigan presently has a large budget surplus. The Gov proposed a budget that added money to improve infrastructure and education, which would benefit everyone. The (L&Ses) in the legislature passed a budget that would hand the money to the “JCs” instead.

Steve

“Has the time arrived for a degrowth economic policy?”

I am wondering what a ‘degrowth’ economic policy would look like?

JimA

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Steve. Please remind me what L&Ses means?
I GOOGL’d it, but didn’t find anything that seemed to fit the context.

TIA :grinning:
ralph

“Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has determined that the grid’s market design coupled with excessive subsidies for wind and solar were central to the near-meltdown of the state’s electric grid.”

First, subsidies don’t make things fail.

Second, it’s not surprising that the Texas Society of Civil Engineers came down on the side of one of the state’s most powerful industries (petro) but an independent report by the FERC reached an entirely different conclusion:

“According to the [FERC] report, the biggest cause of outages was due to freezing or lack of winterizing generators for cold weather conditions. The report found the freezing accounted for 44% of the issues, followed by natural gas fuel shortage issues, which accounted for 31% of the unplanned outages.”
https://abc13.com/texas-winter-storm-2021-power-outage-repor…

The FERC report all but screams wide scale incompetence for failure to winterize, failure to run drills simulating outages, grid issues, etc.

ERCOT has still not explained why a planned maintenance outage of ~4 gigawatts was scheduled during winter.

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Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has determined that the grid’s market design coupled with excessive subsidies for wind and solar were central to the near-meltdown of the state’s electric grid.

First, subsidies don’t make things fail.

The relationship is that subsidies increase the rate of introduction of intermittent sources to the grid. Then we find that instability increases.

The effect of renewable energy incorporation on power grid stability and resilience
Smith et al.
www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.abj6734
Abstract:
Contemporary proliferation of renewable power generation is causing an overhaul in the topology, composition, and dynamics of electrical grids. These low-output, intermittent generators are widely distributed throughout the grid, including at the household level. It is critical for the function of modern power infrastructure to understand how this increasingly distributed layout affects network stability and resilience. This paper uses dynamical models, household power consumption, and photovoltaic generation data to show how these characteristics vary with the level of distribution.

It is shown that resilience exhibits daily oscillations as the grid’s effective structure and the power demand fluctuate. This can lead to a substantial decrease in grid resilience, explained by periods of highly clustered generator output. Moreover, the addition of batteries, while enabling consumer self-sufficiency, fails to ameliorate these problems. The methodology identifies a grid’s susceptibility to disruption resulting from its network structure and modes of operation.

DB2

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“Texas Section of the American Society of Civil Engineers has determined that the grid’s market design coupled with excessive subsidies for wind and solar were central to the near-meltdown of the state’s electric grid.”

First, subsidies don’t make things fail.

If somebody preferentially pays for doing stupid things, to the point that it’s significantly cheaper to be stupid than to be smart, then when circumstances change and doing those stupid things (rather than the smart things) actually causes harm isn’t it reasonable to blame those preferential payments and the people responsible for them?

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Second, it’s not surprising that the Texas Society of Civil Engineers came down on the side of one of the state’s most powerful industries (petro) but an independent report by the FERC reached an entirely different conclusion:

Here’s the kicker: That’s NOT what Texas Society of Civil Engineers concluded. ASCE conclusions pretty matched FERC’s. In fact, ASCE explicitly stated that renewables were not the cause grid failures. Which is a slightly different conclusion that than article came to.

Indeed, the majority of the report was about why the natural gas generators failed. Hint: It is cheaper if you don’t take steps to make sure you have an uninterruptable supply. But “corrupt regulators” isn’t nearly as catchy as “Renewables are ruining everything!!!11111!!!11!!!”

ASCE does have a bias, but they are biased towards pro-infrastructure. They are always coming up with reasons to build stuff.

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