The Energy Thread

Tesla Powerwall is back-ordered through the summer of 2016 already:

http://www.theverge.com/2015/5/6/8561931/tesla-38000-powerwall-preorders-announced

Forbes is not impressed:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2015/05/01/why-teslas-powerwall-is-just-another-toy-for-rich-green-people/

paging Ed...

somewhere on ILX (I don't think it's in this thread), you discussed the process by which you/your employer were "writing down" oil assets? Can you maybe find that for me?

If anybody else can dig it up, thanks in advance

― sleeve, Wednesday, October 1, 2014 8:41 AM (7 months ago)

Its basic accounting - the assets in question are judged unlikely to be worth the value they're carried on the books, so some or all of the "book value" is removed from the assets column on the balance sheet, and becomes a loss on the income / P & L sheet. Its a paper loss, not representing a current unrecovered cash outflow, but because it reduces income a write down can be used to reduce tax liabilities.

There's a fight going on in Nevada that contains, in microcosm, all the struggles and challenges that face utilities in the 21st century.

It centers on a Las Vegas–based company called Switch, which runs power-hungry data centers in southern Nevada. Like many firms these days, Switch wants electricity that is cheaper and cleaner than what it can get through its local utility, NV Energy. In fact, Switch wants to go 100 percent renewable.

So it asked the Nevada public utility commission (henceforth PUCN) for permission to defect from the utility and procure its own power on the open market. Four big casino companies — Wynn Las Vegas, MGM Resorts International, Caesars, and the Las Vegas Sands Corp. — got in line behind it, requesting to jump ship as well.

Yesterday, the PUCN rejected the application, saying that Switch would have to stay in the fold a bit longer.

What's going on? How can a company defect from a utility at all? And why wasn't Switch allowed to do so? And what does it all mean? Good questions!

http://www.vox.com/2015/6/12/8767927/switch-nevada-utility

tone of that article is really grating

Consumers are quickly coming to view energy not as a utility commodity like tap water but as a differentiated collection of products and services, a bazaar at which they should be allowed to shop.

consumers are fucking stupid then

This is exciting: http://electrek.co/2016/05/02/price-solar-power-fell-50-16-months-dubai-0299kwh/

those are big utility projects, so the cost metric is a bit skewed towards razor-thin margins, but yes it is impressive and encouraging.

ok i watched one of the kirk sorenson thorium videos and i've totally drunk the kool-ade. let's do this

yeah i've been curious about it for a while now, and the cynic in me says (w/o data) that we're not using it because a) there's some fatal flaw that isn't being reported or b) Big Energy interests are actively suppressing it

when they realise all you need to do to acquire it is send out a truck to drive over fields of it they'll love it

admittedly the video i watched is redolent of the sort of conspiracy theory magnum opuses the internet excels in but sorensen says several times that he thought the same thing - "there's some fatal flaw that isn't being reported" - and went to grad school in Knoxville to find out, and everybody was like nope, you're right

the bit of the video that i actually found most interesting i still don't quite understand - about producing jet fuel out of seawater (related vid here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation_id=annotation_3495016107 ). the guy makes a good point about aviation: electric planes don't exist and won't exist. you still need some kind of energy-dense hydrocarbon to make these things fly. but how any of that relates to nuclear i don't quite get

ah i guess the idea is that the electricity required for electrolysis has to come from somewhere? and that's where thorium (or what have you) comes in

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9TR9G5bd7w
I don't know if there has been any talk about DAPL around here, it's something I've been following closely.

kinda wish there was a thread for #NODAPL, we'll see where it goes after today. heavy shit going down.

http://www.democracynow.org/2016/10/27/developing_100_militarized_police_demolishing_nodapl

from yesterday:

https://cldc.org/2016/10/26/update-militarized-police-presence-at-standing-rock/

https://www.tesla.com/solar

this seems Actually Good

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2018/8/31/17799094/california-100-percent-clean-energy-target-brown-de-leon

Energy industry is fucking bonkers right now, so much is happening in CA

see also: new cash rebates for battery storage being offered in CA and HI

everybody wants everything to be electric from clean energy sources (sucks to be you SoCal Gas!)

I want nearly all energy to be electric so I can keep burning natural gas to cook

otmfm

though if the utility figures out how to harvest biogas and pipe it to my house at sufficient scale I'll happily burn that too. Anyway the electricity mix in my state is like 80%+ hydro 😎

where are you... Colorado?

Seattle iirc

here's an overview of the new CA legislation:

https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/on-to-the-governors-desk-what-100-clean-energy-means-for-california#gs.U3FXrJs

It makes more sense to use methane/natural gas for space heating and cooking heating over electricity on efficiency grounds, but in the future the methane will be provided by excess renewable energy.

I fully expect a much worse case scenario for global warming than most, but should society recover, there's a high likelihood it will be with a methane infrastructure providing energy storage/generation/end-user heat production.

I haven't probed deeply into it, but I expect that there are already feasible and demonstrated solutions to every one of the technical problems associated with stopping fossil fuel use completely.

The biggest and most intractable problems are that such solutions would require a massive recapitalization of our energy infrastructure, coupled with removing many trillions of dollars worth of assets from financial markets. I fear that won't happen until the disaster is already so far advanced that the collapse of society is already well underway.

I fear that won't happen until the disaster is already so far advanced that the collapse of society is already well underway.

no need to fear, we're likely already past the tipping point

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609642/the-year-climate-change-began-to-spin-out-of-control/

there are a lot of ways to collapse, though. the task now is to mitigate it as much as possible.