dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Lots of energy can be produced that are cleaner than fossil fuel; they are also less dependable or reliable when you need them.

John,
The green energy and ecology movement doesn't have smarter people in it; they just have some smart people who haven't figured out a way to produce more energy on-demand at an efficient and cost-efficient manner. In fact, most of what I see in the environmental movement, out protesting climate change, is a bunch of pseudo-intellectuals, sort of like the socialists are. They have grand ideas for a utopia that can't be achieved. We have to do the best we can with what we have.

I believe it is either France or Sweden that gets more than 80% of their electric grid power from nuclear and they made that decision to switch back in the 1960s. They haven't encountered any of the hubristic mistakes that the Japanese, Soviets, or USA have encountered. However, they also don't build nuclear power plants in locations with great geologic activity that poses a substantial danger.

Nuclear power plants don't have to be built where they are subject to great risk of manmade or natural disasters; coastlines, earthquake faults, whatever. An asteroid, really? Do you actually equate that risk with wars and natural disasters? Yeah, I suppose the possibility of an asteroid strike is a power exponent of "10 to the minus 50." Well, it wiped out the dinosaurs (to which there is still some debate). You are using the exact same argument, to convince us the risk is too great, that the lefties use to convince us to give up our liberty by embracing their socialist agenda and embrace their utopian vision of a clean world. It is a naive position to believe all this pie-in-the-sky hogwash. Men are not angels, otherwise, we wouldn't need governments.

Sure, dropping a bomb on a nuclear power plant is a risk. So is dropping a nuclear bomb, a war, or yes, even an asteroid. Actually we have become quite adept at handling and managing nuclear fission when properly regulated. Don't we already have a technologically competent and capable community to manage nuclear power plants? If we don't, then our entire educational system has failed us (it may have).

You probably see global warming as an existential threat to all mankind. Do you see other pollutions of various kinds, starvation, and lack of potable water, and lack of basic medical care as existential threats?
Are they beyond the best efforts of mankind to rectify these problems? Dream all you want about the future but this is now. We lose more energy through transmission lines than is wasted in any other method of use, unnecessary use or overuse. Nuclear is the cleanest, cheapest, and most dependable form of energy we currently have.

Renewable green energy accounts for less than 3 percent of all energy use. People in third world countries live with less than a Kw/day of electricity. They have no reliable source of energy with which to develop industry or business to bring them out of poverty. Fossil fuel is far preferential to the cutting down of trees for their heating and cooking fuel. There are trade-offs to everything. Keeping the rest of the world poor should not justify using only green energy at this time. We have less pollution than we had 50 years and 100 years ago because our affluence can pay for mitigating the direct causes. Or would you prefer to go back to horse and buggy day with manure all around? This is what New york contended with over 100 years ago before that automobile came on the scene. Traffic jams from horses and wagons were worse than cars are today. Suppose you lived in the country and broke a bone or had a heart attack. How would you get to the hospital? For that matter, what hospital would be outfitted with modern technology for your treatment?

You mentioned cancer: "Why do so many people get cancers, and so many people die from cancers, nowadays? Did it used to be that way? I don't think so. And, I think one of the sources of cancer for the next generation is the polluted sources of food affected by the radioactive material spread out over many thousands of miles from Fukishima today. We could instead have a good civilization _without_ that." People get and die from cancer because their life span is so very much longer than 100 years ago. More cancers can be treated, managed, and cured than ever before. Fewer people actually die from cancer than ever. What we call cancer now used to be called consumption. As much if not more cancer existed long before. They just didn't know what it was then. What is the greatest killer of women today? It's not cancer. The answer is heart disease. We have a good civilization now if people would quit trying to, in their own narrow interest ways, tear it apart. Take a look around at what we have. People have so little gratitude for living at the greatest time in history. They hate America, blame western civilization, religion for all the evil they perceive in the world. Rather than doing something to improve it, they protest. They riot, disrupt, destroy, tear down, but what do they do to improve anything? They are spoiled children, immature critics, with no gratitude for the blessings that have been bestowed upon them by living in the greatest country at the greatest time in history.

Okay, so you worry about polluted food sources from Fukushima. What about the use of fertilizers, pesticides, e-coli bacteria. The fact is, we live longer because we have a great variety of food available to us year-round. The benefits of all this good nutrition far outweights the dangers from some small amount of pesticide residue. I don't care if my apples have alar on them. Or, my grapes have some pesticide residue of which would take a barrel full to kill me. Sure, some of this is cumulative, but it doesn't outweigh the benefits of eating diverse foods for a healthy diet.

I would prefer to see more nuclear power until we finally achieve enough sources, efficiency, and economies of scale to use renewables.

JohnCorrespondent

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/farming-the-sun-as-water-goes-scarce-can-solar-farms-prop-up-the-valley/ar-AAHWfXH

'“It’s no longer an infant industry. Fifteen years later, solar is doing very well, thank you very much,” said Paul Smith, vice president for government affairs at Rural County Representatives of California.'

'Farmers in the San Joaquin Valley are finding a lucrative new cash crop: solar electricity.'

You made too much of "believe" which is a turn of phrase I used to avoid claiming more direct knowledge than I have. Your style appears more authoritative but a bit condescending. You didn't cite any sources; what qualifications do you have, or instead are you just "believing"?

JohnCorrespondent

Thanks.

Yes, motivations are among the aspects to consider.

You have a lot more faith in good motivations of big capitalist industry (or at least oil in climate science) than I do.

Parts of the article you cite are informative. Yes "natural gas" comes with pollution problems too. And yes "pricing carbon" is a good thought in the right direction.

Other views about oil industry influence can be found in this article:

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco

"Yet by the 1990s, it was clear that API had opted for a markedly different approach to the threat of climate change. It joined Exxon, other fossil fuel companies and major manufacturers in the Global Climate Coalition (GCC), a lobbying group whose objective was to derail international efforts to curb heat-trapping emissions."

Money is one of the strong motivators of people. It influences the people within an industry. And the industry uses some of its money to influence people outside the industry. Big organizations (e.g., the oil corporations) with lots of money wield powerful influence.

Would you have trusted the tobacco industry to inform people of the dangers of smoking; and why or why not?

JohnCorrespondent

Yes, according to Snopes, a short-term local effect was erroneously generalized as a long-term global effect.

So? This is a short-term local phenomenon (one of many, I'm sure) that was wrongly generalized. Shall we then assume that there is _no_ anthropogenic cause has any significant long-term global effect? It would be a wrong assumption (as Snopes essentially points out at the end: "...it isn’t substantive evidence either for or against the concept of anthropogenic global warming. As documented elsewhere, the warming phenomena observed in 1922 proved to be indicative only of a local event in Spitzbergen..."). Even the oil industry has known since the 1970s that anthropogenic global warming is a problem. ( https://insideclimatenews.org/news/22122015/exxon-mobil-oil-industry-peers-knew-about-climate-change-dangers-1970s-american-petroleum-institute-api-shell-chevron-texaco )

JohnCorrespondent

Source please.

JohnCorrespondent

No, they have found themselves born into and raised in a culture, and some of them are finding their way out of it.

"turds" -- a disrespectul term. It lowers the credibility of the writer.

"inspired by the adults around you" -- dismissive.

What Greta Thunberg says and does makes sense to me. (You can read about her and find out whether adults are influencing her or whether she's influencing adults.) I am trying to be less part of the problem and more part of the solution. I joined one of the climate change street demonstrations. I took a train to get there (that's the step I was able to take toward more ecological travel) rather than drive. Thunberg went to great lengths to avoid polluting on her way across the Atlantic (she went by sailboat) and I followed her example as well as I could.

I still use air conditioning, but after speaking with, reading about, and seeing the Europeans, and finding out how they conserve energy over there, I've turned my thermostat six degrees closer to the outside temperature and have kept it there for many days.

The real solution will come from leadership. It will be something like a Green New Deal (by which I mean, it will be radically fast and it will be based on a vision of future decades, different from corporations' and politicians' more usual shorter-term visions). This depends somewhat on whether you are able to stop it. Meanwhile I vote and write and act one step at a time in the ecological direction.

The climate change street demonstration (people taking turns speaking, and then all of us marching with signs, with some of us chanting), like most street demonstrations, was limited in what it could express, and a lot of the words sounded shallow to me (I'm more than three times the age of most of those people). I was there because a church minister whom I respect asked us to support the young people in their protest. As usual I made a good sign and carried it. I can always hope a photo of it will show up in a newspaper. That did happen once, years ago.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

John,
Don't get me wrong. You are probably a likeable fellow that I would enjoy sharing a beer with. But we disagree on so much more.

Turd is an accurate term. It was meant to be disrespectful. Would you prefer they be called "little shits" instead? And so is the reference to the patronizing adults who fill the heads of these young people with all kinds of nonsense! You may be three times older than most of the protesters, chronologically that is. But your response says Greta's words make sense to you, therefore, you are as easily manipulated and naive as most 15 year-olds. You go right on protesting Climate Change like a 1960s spoiled radical if that is what you enjoy, or need. Hoping that a photo of you with your sign at a protest will show up in a newspaper sounds a bit narcissistic. In America, the real solution to most everything or importance always starts and comes from the bottom up. The leadership you talk of and prefer is totalitarian. We may as well have selected a monarch in 1789, or a dictator.

P.S. Greta may have sailed across the Atlantic, but she had to fly home to Sweden (or was it Finland or Norway, I forget) and then back to America along with her cadre of minions on one of those big polluting aeroplanes that put more carbon in the air than my car will in my lifetime.

Good for you that you "vote and write and act one step at a time in the ecological direction." You make it sound like most other people act against their own self-interest. They don't, except for maybe those who are democrat/socialist/communinst/progressive/statist/elitist/ big government loving/fascist on the Left. Do you think people purposely want the world to warm up with greater weather disasters, sea levels rising and more drought? I know of no person who wants that. The left is always complaining about something. They are never happy unless they have something to protest against and they will go to great lengths to find anything about which they can protest. Now, go back and reread my post, skipping the two items you found dismissive and disrespectful since you dismissed everything else that was said in it.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Where did you read about Iceland and Greenland?

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

In 2018 a whopping 1.6% of the total electricity generated in the US came from solar. That tells me it is, indeed, an infant industry. Further, without government subsidies, it is economically unfeasible.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3

I'm a retired electronics engineer, so yes, I have a bit more knowledge of the subject than the average layperson. Sorry if that seems condescending to you.

Here's an interesting article about the Ivanpah Solar Power Facility. The last I heard it's generating about 1/4 the amount of power that was claimed. Stop and think about that. It means that, if the claimants forgot that the sun doesn't shine every night, that would only account for half the error in the power output.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/ivanpah-solar-power-facility

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

It also fries a lot of birds and that upsets the Greenies/PETA. That entire project on the CA-NV border has been a boondoggle. The one just east of Barstow has had better results. What ever happened to the wind farm that was proposed for off the coast on Martha's Vineyard? All the elites and NIMBYs didn't want it.

Since you were an Electronics Engineer you might know the answer to this, but if you don't, that's okay. How much energy is lost through transmission lines per distance traveled? Is it a function of resistance versus conductivity? I have read that nearly half of all the electricity carried by transmission lines is lost. The greater the distance the less energy there is at the end of the line.

12icer Loc: alatennamissippi

I have been around for 68 years and in those years I have seen may seasons that were cooler and many hotter and drier than the past on in Southern USA. If people could actually read a REAL history book now they would find direct evidence of climate cycles that were much hotter, and much cooler than any we have had in the last 20 years. The populous is the problem, not the Climate cycle. We used to drive black cars in the summer when it was 100+ actual degrees with no air conditioning. In some of the 20s Temps were hotter all across the USA. There is GEOLOGICAL evidence of many cycles in the climate before and since the beginning of the industrial revolution. Government has a vested interest in the MANMADE global warming lie. To separate the taxpayer from billions of his earned compensation for a slush fund as in the 98 million assal gorebore took out of Solyndra when it rolled belly up. Only those with NO REAL education in HISTORY, and EARTH SCIENCE believe the man made climate change BS. Facts are available but well hidden by the thieves. Its like the Billion Trillion Million talk, over 99.99999% of peoples heads. But assume the total emission of all gasses by the inhabitants of the earth was 1 quadrillionth of the amount of total gaseous content. Make any difference you think? how about 1 trillion times less. Actually many times less than the difference of co2 released by the deep ocean trenches when the sun cycle reaches the most direct angle and depth penetration is maximum. OH well just some WILD ideas from one person. Go ahead labelers don't impress me, WASIS somekindafobe, DINNAHER somekindasupwimacis. What jokes.

Navigator

Look it up pal, you have an internet connection, a mouse and a keyboard.

Navigator

https://www.cfact.org/2019/05/19/growing-iceland-greenland-glaciers-makes-scientists-gasp/ Read the whole thing and also check the references.

dtucker300 Loc: Vista, CA

Thanks for the link. I wonder how I missed seeing this. Very interesting.

It may be as I have been saying. It's getting warmer in some places while at the same time it is getting cooler in others. The IPCC and scientist have to rely on temperature readings from select locations and it is difficult to extrapolate a world-wide mean temperature that is accurate.

Montana already has heavy snowfall and it's still September. Winter storm warnings throughout the Northwest while the Southeast swelters So, what does this prove? Absolutely nothing! But climate scientists see what the want to see and hear what they want to hear, and the kids in the streets protesting believe what they want to believe.

The problem with most climate scientists is that they are not well-learned in astrophysics. They are earth studies scientists. Very few of them do research on solar activity and have to rely on what the other minions report, whether it is accurate or not. In this way, mistakes just keep getting passed along as factual when it isn't at all (this is a problem in all branches of science. However, the other branches of science are better at peer review to catch these types of mistakes early and correct them before they enter the general public's lexicon.)

Voice of Reason Loc: Earth

I don't know if it's the same one, but a wind farm was supposed to be installed off the coast of Hyannis Port, MA. got cancelled because the Kennedy's didn't want to 'spoil the view' from their compound. Elitist NIMBY's to a tee.



Good question! According to the EIA, the total loss in the US due to transmission and distribution is about 5%.

https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=105&t=3

The specific answer to your question, concerning loss per distance, depends upon several factors, including wire size and material and the amount of electrical current.

It is a function of resistance vs current. Resistance and conductivity are just opposite ways of measuring the same thing. If a material has high resistance, then it has low conductivity and vice-versa. Sort of like heat vs cold. Wire size is specified in AWG (American Wire Gauge) in which the smaller the number, the bigger the wire (for reasons that escape me). There are tables out there showing the resistance per foot for different gauges of copper wire. So, obviously, the longer the wire, the greater the resistance.

Two basic electrical formulas are E=IR and P=IE.
E = voltage (in volts)
I = current (in amps)
R = resistance (in ohms)
P = power (in watts)

So, for example, a 12GA copper wire has .001588 ohms/foot of resistance. To determine power loss for 1000 feet, we first must determine the voltage drop from one end to the other. For that we use the formula E=IR, or voltage (drop) = current * resistance. So if the current is 2 amps, the voltage is 2 * 1.588 or 3.176 volts. Now we can calculate power using P=IE. Again, the current is 2A, so 2*3.176 = 6.35 Watts. So, if we ran 2A through 1000' of copper wire for 1 hour, we'd lose 6.35 watt-hours of power. That would be dissipated by the wire as heat.

As you can see, due to P=IE, as the voltage rises, the current drops. That is why utilities use high voltage in transmission lines. That reduces the current which reduces the losses.

So, basically, you're right in that the longer the line, the greater the loss. But your estimate of total losses was off by about a factor of 10 (or one order of magnitude).