human actions, global climate change, global human solutions by 1kiki

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Financiers, big pharma ... auto mfrs, MIC, transportation, electronics mfrs, ... NONE of the elites REALLY want to slow down climate change. If they really wanted to, they would cut back on THEIR OWN excesses and wasteful products.

Not seeing any real impetus to fix things, just a lot of self-serving virtue signalling.

WEF just wants to depopulate the globe and impoverish the remainder. Others just want more profit.

Please manage your fantasies better.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023 5:58 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Financiers, big pharma ... auto mfrs, MIC, transportation, electronics mfrs, ... NONE of the elites REALLY want to slow down climate change. If they really wanted to, they would cut back on THEIR OWN excesses and wasteful products.

Not seeing any real impetus to fix things, just a lot of self-serving virtue signalling.

WEF just wants to depopulate the globe and impoverish the remainder. Others just want more profit.

Please manage your fantasies better.

You keep repeating your fantasy, over and over. Perhaps because Russia is both a huge fossil fuel seller and a frozen wasteland that Russians would love to turn into the tropics, as Siberia was back in the days of the dinosaurs. And Russians bitch and moan about the Evil Capitalists, the same as Signym does. There's a connection!

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023 7:39 PM

Here you go, idiot...

But keep driving around that fake Ford not-F-150 that can't haul anything and smelling your own farts.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Tuesday, December 12, 2023 10:22 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Financiers, big pharma ... auto mfrs, MIC, transportation, electronics mfrs, ... NONE of the elites REALLY want to slow down climate change. If they really wanted to, they would cut back on THEIR OWN excesses and wasteful products.

Not seeing any real impetus to fix things, just a lot of self-serving virtue signalling.

WEF just wants to depopulate the globe and impoverish the remainder. Others just want more profit.

Please manage your fantasies better.

SECOND: You keep repeating your fantasy, over and over. Perhaps because Russia is both a huge fossil fuel seller and a frozen wasteland that Russians would love to turn into the tropics, as Siberia was back in the days of the dinosaurs. And Russians bitch and moan about the Evil Capitalists, the same as Signym does. There's a connection!

WOW.
Not on topic.
Not even meaningless virtue-sigalling.
Just an attempted smear job.

Way to go, 'tard!

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Friday, December 15, 2023 8:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The U.N. found global emissions need to fall 42 percent by 2030 to put the world on track to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050 or by 28 percent to hold temperature increases to the 2 C targeted by the Paris Agreement. Doing so would require a sudden reversal in global emission trends, which have risen steadily in recent decades. The longer it takes the world to meaningfully cut emissions, the more carbon dioxide removal technology will be needed to stabilize global temperatures, the U.N. said.

https://www.politico.eu/article/world-pace-blow-past-paris-climate-tar
gets-united-nations-says/

Investment in renewable energy ($659 billion) now exceeds money spent on oil and gas production ($508 billion), according to IEA.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/cop28s-climate-rhetoric-is-
in-stark-contrast-to-our-dependence-on-fossil-fuels/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, December 16, 2023 9:58 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

After a short walk from my house, I can see the red blinking light at the top of the Calpine Baytown power plant smokestacks:

Calpine to receive up to $270M from DOE for carbon capture at Baytown power plant

By Claire Hao, Staff writer | Dec 15, 2023

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/calpine-carbo
n-capture-baytown-doe-funding-18554862.php

The U.S. Department of Energy is awarding up to $270 million in a cost-sharing agreement for a new carbon capture and storage project in Baytown to be built by Calpine, a power generation company based in Houston. https://www.energy.gov/oced/carbon-capture-demonstration-projects-sele
ctions-award-negotiations

The project would capture carbon dioxide emissions from Calpine’s 896-megawatt natural gas power plant in Baytown, which provides power to the Texas electric grid as well as steam and power to the adjacent Covestro chemicals facility, according to a company statement. One megawatt can power about 200 Texas homes, according to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the state's grid operator.

Calpine’s Baytown carbon capture project would capture and store approximately 2 million metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, the company said. Carbon capture equipment will reduce the intensity of emissions at two of the plant’s three combustion turbines at a design capture rate of 95%, the statement said. https://calpinecarboncapture.com/calpines-baytown-ccs-project-selected
-by-the-department-of-energy-to-advance-carbon-capture-and-storage-infrastructure/

The captured carbon dioxide is to be transported and stored in saline storage sites on the Gulf Coast, according to the DOE. The project might also use gray water, wastewater from showers, tubs, bathroom sinks and washing machines, for cooling the power plant instead of fresh water, according to the DOE.

“Facilities like Baytown will be part of our energy infrastructure for the foreseeable future, and now with (carbon capture and storage) technology, we can decarbonize them,” Caleb Stephenson, Calpine’s executive vice president of commercial operations, said in the statement.

The Baytown cost-sharing agreement is one of three carbon capture projects receiving up to $890 million from the DOE as part of the agency’s Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program. The others are a Calpine natural gas power plant in California and a coal-fired power plant in North Dakota being developed by Minnkota Power Cooperative.
https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USDOEOCED/bulletins/37dd8ec

As of September, the only utility-scale carbon capture facility affixed to an electricity-generating plant in the country was the Petra Nova project attached to NRG’s WA Parish Plant southwest of Houston.

The Carbon Capture Demonstration Projects Program aims to advance commercial demonstration of advanced carbon capture technologies, which the agency calls “critical to addressing the climate crisis.”

The power sector is the second-largest contributor (after transportation) of greenhouse gases in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emissions

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, December 22, 2023 5:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

By 2030, solar and wind is forecast by RMI to supply over a third of all global electricity, up from around 12% today. Based on the forecasts, this would see solar and wind generate 12,000-14,000TWh by 2030, 3-4 times higher compared with 2022 levels. It would also surpass recent calls running up to COP28 for a tripling of total renewable energy capacity by 2030.

Meanwhile, fossil fuel demand for electricity will be in steep decline, according to the RMI analysis, down as much as 30% from the 2022 peak by 2030, as renewable electricity further outcompetes hydrocarbons on cost.

RMI forecasts that what is already the cheapest form of electricity in history will roughly halve in price again by 2030, falling as low as $20/MWh for solar from over $40MWh currently. That is 2 cents per kilowatt-hour in the unit most common on electric bills. Check your bill to see what you are paying.

https://rmi.org/press-release/renewable-energy-deployment-puts-global-
power-system-on-track-for-ambitious-net-zero-pathway/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, December 22, 2023 10:05 AM

Lies.

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Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, December 29, 2023 8:29 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The largest clean energy project in US history closes on $11 billion in financing and starts full construction

By Michelle Lewis | Dec 28 2023 - 10:38 am PT

SunZia Wind is the largest wind project in the Western Hemisphere. The 3,500-megawatt (MW) wind farm is being built across New Mexico’s counties of Torrance, Lincoln, and San Miguel.

SunZia Transmission is a 550-mile ± 525 kV high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission line between central New Mexico and south-central Arizona. When complete, it will have the capacity to transport 3,000 MW of clean energy.

SunZia Transmission will enable SunZia Wind to supply customers in Arizona and California during early evening hours when demand is high but available renewable energy supply is low. It’s going to use the same corridor as the Western Spirit Transmission Line.

Wind turbine giant Vestas announced yesterday that it’s secured a firm order from Pattern Energy Group to supply 242 4.5-megawatt turbines for SunZia Wind.

The 1.1-gigawatt (GW) order is Vestas’ largest order to date in the US market and its largest single onshore project globally. It’s also the largest order globally for Vestas’ newest high-capacity factor turbine.

More at https://electrek.co/2023/12/28/largest-clean-energy-project-us-sunzia/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, December 29, 2023 11:37 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

This year saw record-breaking solar output | Published on 29/12/2023

Led by new solar power, the world added renewable energy at breakneck speed in 2023.

Clean energy is often now the least expensive option, explaining some of the growth. Nations also adopted policies that support renewables, some citing energy security concerns, according to the International Energy Agency.

The IEA projected that more than 440 gigawatts of renewable energy would be added in 2023, more than the entire installed power capacity of Germany and Spain together.

Solar panel prices fell a whopping 40 to 53 per cent in Europe between December 2022 and November 2023 and are now at record lows.

In the US, solar manufacturing grew as well. “We have seen the impact of the Inflation Reduction Act in terms of fuelling investments... More than 60 solar manufacturing facilities were announced over the past year,” says Abigail Ross Hopper, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association.

Much more at https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/12/29/europe-us-china-where-instal
led-the-most-wind-and-solar-power-in-2023

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 1, 2024 4:39 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Brian Brettschneider @Climatologist49

December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin using Prism Climate Group data. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021.
10:07 AM · Jan 1, 2024
https://twitter.com/Climatologist49/status/1741853667270205936
https://twitter.com/Climatologist49/status/1741853667270205936/photo/1
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCxOSwKaUAAu_XY?format=jpg

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, January 1, 2024 7:58 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Brian Brettschneider @Climatologist49

December 2023 was the warmest December on record for the Contiguous U.S. by a wide margin using Prism Climate Group data. It was 0.67°F (0.37°C) warmer than December 2021.
10:07 AM · Jan 1, 2024
https://twitter.com/Climatologist49/status/1741853667270205936
https://twitter.com/Climatologist49/status/1741853667270205936/photo/1
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GCxOSwKaUAAu_XY?format=jpg

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Dood. You don't need to convince me about climate shift.

Too bad you ruined your credibility on EVERY ISSUE you post about. By lying. Constantly.

If you really cared for any of those "issues", you'd try for SOME semblance of truthiness. But your overwhelming impression is that you only care about virtue signalling and hating everyone who isn't you.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Monday, January 1, 2024 10:24 PM

Disclaimer: This article is written from a very pro-Leftist take on the issue. But this is why I go out of my way to take in news from both sides of the issue instead of just being in an echo chamber all day long.

That being said...

https://www.motortrend.com/news/ford-f-150-lightning-ev-pickup-truck-p
roduction-reduction-report/

Quote:
You might have seen the news today: Ford is slashing production of its theoretically popular F-150 Lightning EV pickup due to tumbling demand, amid slowing growth—not a downturn!—in EV sales. As Automotive News reports (subscription required), Ford sent a message to suppliers to expect that Lightning production would be cut to 1,600 units a week, half of the line's full capacity of 3,200 units per week. Thing is, Ford's not telling what the line is actually running at now (it could be spitting out fewer than 3,200 trucks), so without that number, the news is either as dramatic as it seems or not. Either way, that Ford's hyped electric truck will be produced in half the numbers it was originally slated to less than two years after its launch is news.

By next year it will be less than that.

The price is far from the only barrier to entry on Electric Vehicles. Add to that the fact that at least half the country knows how much carbon emitted from mining the materials necessary and for feeding the electricity grid since electricity isn't magic and this isn't Hogwarts. Also add the fact that there will be no used car market because nobody will buy a used EV at a discounted price when they know the battery can go out at any moment and cost them $26,000 to replace. Add again to that the average full coverage insurance policy for an EV is north of $5,000 per year. Then just add the factor of the fear of the unknown as well as the unwillingness of many to change the little things in their life let alone something big like switching to an EV.

EVs are a product that might work in the future, but we aren't there yet, and our government forced the product when it wasn't ready and the car companies are all messed up because of that now.

Quote:
The Lightning was supposed to be somewhat affordable, with a starting price of $41,669 when it went on sale in May 2022. That price was a mirage; the truck started at $52,000 when it went on sale (and snagged our 2023 Truck of the Year award).

Right. That's exactly what I told you was going to happen. I see you forgot to mention that immediately after the Biden* Administration announced a $7,500 subsidy on the purchase of a new EV that GM and Ford immediately raised the prices on their new EVs by $7,500. You should probably mention that.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Wednesday, January 3, 2024 9:48 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Dood. You don't need to convince me about climate shift.

Too bad you ruined your credibility on EVERY ISSUE you post about. By lying. Constantly.

If you really cared for any of those "issues", you'd try for SOME semblance of truthiness. But your overwhelming impression is that you only care about virtue signalling and hating everyone who isn't you.

Signym, the only solutions you have forwarded to climate change are to plant one trillion trees, cut back the Pentagon's fuel budget by 90%, stop the rich from owning private aircraft, and install solar panels on your roof in California. If you live in California, solar panels are great, but your other "solutions" won't happen. This can happen:

Airloom Energy, a Wyoming-based wind energy startup backed by Bill Gates, created a revolutionary wind-powered technology that it claims can slash energy costs by nearly 70%.

While wind energy continues to get cheaper as more wind farms come online, the turbines themselves are outrageously expensive — a standard utility-scale 2.5 MW horizontal-axis wind turbine (HAWT) can cost roughly $2.1 million, according to an example cited on the Airloom website.

In comparison, the startup’s unique wind power system — simply called AirLoom — comes in at just under $225,000 for a 2.5 MW system. It estimates an entire 20 MW AirLoom wind farm would cost less than $6 million — only about 25% of what conventional wind farms normally cost.

The cost savings can be attributed mostly to the AirLoom’s vastly smaller size and intuitive design that resembles a racetrack, with several 82-foot poles suspending the track in the air. A number of 33-foot blades, or wings, are placed evenly along the oval-shaped track, propelled by air currents to generate energy.

Standard “pinwheel” turbines reach staggering heights of 500 feet or more, with the average tower now more than 320 feet tall, holding up massive 210-plus-foot blades, per the U.S. Department of Energy.

Though the wings on the AirLoom are much smaller, they still could reportedly generate the same energy as HAWT blades in part due to generators connected to the system that spin at 5,000 RPM, compared to 12 RPM for traditional turbines, according to a video on the Airloom website.

https://www.yahoo.com/tech/bill-gates-backed-startup-develops-07300069
2.html

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 4, 2024 12:28 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Jan 3, 2024 - VW's Solid State Cell Holds Up for 300K Miles

Solid-state batteries promise to significantly speed up EV charging and extend their range by hundreds of miles. Among the companies racing to bring them to market is Volkswagen, which says it found a solid-state formula with better longevity than traditional lithium-ion batteries.

Volkswagen did not create the new battery; it was developed by QuantumScape, a California-based battery technology company. QuantumScape provided a prototype to Volkswagen Group-owned PowerCo, which then tested its performance over several months.

The results far exceeded expectations. PowerCo says the cell retained 95% of its range capacity after 1,000 charging cycles, or the equivalent of roughly 300,000 miles. The current industry standard for EVs targets 20% capacity loss over 700 charging cycles . . .

https://www.pcmag.com/news/no-more-ev-battery-replacements-vws-solid-s
tate-cell-holds-up-for-300k

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 4, 2024 4:25 PM

Bet it doesn't hold up in the cold...

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?tid=65848

EVs are going the way of the dinosaur. And fast.

All the people who wanted one already bought one, and they got fucked on the deal.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Saturday, January 13, 2024 6:48 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

EPA proposes a fee aimed at reducing climate-warming methane emissions

January 12, 2024, 5:09 PM ET

Excess methane produced this year would result in a fee of $900 per ton, with fees rising to $1,500 per ton by 2026.

The fee will encourage early deployment of available technologies to reduce methane emissions. Methane is over 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide. (At least 25% of today's global warming is driven by methane)

https://www.npr.org/2024/01/12/1224508796/methane-emissions-epa-fee

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 18, 2024 9:42 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

How YouTube’s climate deniers turned into climate doomers

A new report documents a sharp rise in arguments that clean energy and climate policies won't work.

By Kate Yoder | Jan 16, 2024

https://grist.org/accountability/youtube-climate-denial-solutions-misi
nformation/

Imagine if you could walk from your house to anywhere you needed to go in less than 15 minutes: the pharmacy, the bakery, the gym, and then back to the bakery. In certain corners of the internet, this urban planning concept of “15-minute cities” gets a shady, sinister gloss. Conspiracy theorists evoke COVID restrictions and tout efforts to create walkable cities as steps toward “climate lockdowns.” They warn of a plot by the World Economic Forum to restrict people’s movements, trapping and surveilling them in their neighborhoods.

“They want to take away your cars,” claims Clayton Morris, a former Fox News host, in a YouTube video that’s been viewed 1.7 million times.

YouTube is riddled with false claims like these, so it’s the place to document the evolution of arguments against taking action on climate change. A new report from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, a nonprofit based in London and Washington, D.C., working to stop the spread of disinformation, analyzed 12,000 videos from channels that promoted lies about climate change on YouTube over the last six years. Over that time, the reality of climate change long predicted by scientists has become increasingly difficult to dismiss. The report, released on Tuesday, found a dramatic shift from “old denial” arguments — that global warming isn’t real and isn’t caused by humans — to new arguments bent on undermining trust in climate solutions.

“The success is that the science has won this debate on anthropogenic climate change,” said Imran Ahmed, the nonprofit’s founder and CEO. “The opponents of action have shifted their attention.”

The report suggests that, rather than doing a victory lap, climate advocates may want to focus on defending climate policies and renewable energy as necessary and effective. As the world was besieged by intense heat, expansive wildfires, and catastrophic floods in recent years, YouTubers promoting disinformation increasingly embraced “new denial” narratives, such as that solar panels will destroy the economy and the environment, or that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a “fraud.”

“What it is doing is creating a cohort of people who believe climate change is happening, but believe there’s no hope,” Ahmed said. People start watching YouTube at a young age — in 2020, more than half of parents in the U.S. with a child 11 years old or younger said their kid watched videos on the platform on a daily basis. New polling from the center, released alongside the study, found that a third of U.S. teens say that climate policies cause more harm than good.

Six years ago, these “new denial” claims made up 35 percent of denier’s arguments on YouTube; now, they make up 70 percent of the total. The fastest-growing assertions were that the climate movement is unreliable and that clean energy won’t work.

More at https://grist.org/accountability/youtube-climate-denial-solutions-misi
nformation/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, January 18, 2024 10:04 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Conservatives hate electric cars

By Kevin Drum | January 17, 2024 – 10:42 pm

Bob Somerby has been watching a lot of Fox News lately:

"We've been surprised by one persistent talking point as we've come to watch more and more of the nation's red tribe cable news:

We've been surprised by the persistence with which red tribe stars pound away at electric vehicles."

Funny thing: I've been meaning to mention that too. Over at National Review, they gleefully highlight anything that can be plausibly considered a knock on electric cars. Every malfunction, every missed sales target, every consumer complaint, every goal to increase EV adoption. Hardly a day goes by without some kind of slam on electric cars.

Why? If you don't want an electric car, don't get one. I'm A-OK with that. But what's the point of bad-mouthing those who do want one?

Now, I'm not an idiot. I know the answer perfectly well: EVs are favored by those who want to do something about climate change, and anything associated with climate change has to be relentlessly attacked. Solar power. Wind farms. LED light bulbs. Efficient houses. You name it.

It's all ridiculous. Even if you think climate change is a big hoax electrification is still good. "Clean" doesn't apply only to CO2, after all. Getting rid of smog and fine particulates is a big win all by itself.

But no matter. Anything that can be interpreted as caring about climate change has to be fought desperately. In no way can climate change ever be acknowledged as a problem, since that would imply the government doing something about it. And that can't be tolerated.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 27, 2024 8:54 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Solid-State EV Batteries Now Face “Production Hell”
Producing battery packs that yield 800+ kilometers remains rough-going

By Charles J. Murray | Jan 26, 2024

https://spectrum.ieee.org/solid-state-battery-production-challenges

Recent solid-state battery announcements by Volkswagen and QuantumScape are raising hopes in the electric-vehicle market, but automotive battery experts are warning that the road to widespread, solid-state success is still a long and arduous one. A single breakthrough, as if from above, is not likely to turn the whole industry on its nose anytime soon.

“Solid-state is a great technology,” noted Bob Galyen, owner of Galyen Energy and former chief technology officer for the Chinese battery giant Contemporary Amperex Technology Ltd. (CATL). “But it’s going to be just like lithium-ion was in terms of the length of time it will take to hit the market. And lithium-ion took a long time to get there.”

“I haven’t seen cost numbers that are even close to competing with liquid-state, lithium-ion batteries.“ —Bob Galyen, Galyen Energy

Galyen and other experts consulted by IEEESpectrum noted that recent announcements by Volkswagen, QuantumScape, Toyota, and NIO have resulted in impressive stock market performance. However, these same experts noted a pointed skepticism toward the technical merits of these announcements. None could isolate anything on the horizon indicating that solid-state technology can escape the engineering and “production hell” that lies ahead.

The remaining hurdles will involve validating existing solid-state battery technologies (currently in use for more limited, often medical, applications) for cars and trucks. The adoption curve, experts say, will depend on the product’s ability to be validated in terms of performance, life, and cost characteristics.

Solid-state cells, so-named for their use of a solid electrolyte, are seen as a key to the future of the electric car because they potentially offer greater safety and energy, as well as much faster recharge times. Solid-state cells differ from conventional lithium-ion batteries in their use of a glass or ceramic electrolyte, instead of a liquid composed of lithium salts. Automakers are keen on solid-state batteries’ future, because the technology offers greater thermal stability than liquid-based batteries, thus allowing for substantially faster recharge, among other advantages.

Solid-state has also been the subject of recent announcements from battery manufacturers and mainstream automakers alike. In early January, Volkswagen Group’s PowerCo SE battery company said it tested lithium-metal cells from QuantumScape, achieving 1,000 charging cycles with 95 percent of the cell’s capacity still intact. The company said in a statement that the cell’s life-performance was analogous to “an electric car that could drive more than 500,000 kilometers (300,000 miles) without any noticeable loss of range.”

“What happens when you’re driving down I-75 and you hit a big pit in the road? What kind of damage would be done to the solid-state matrix?” —Bob Galyen, Galyen Energy

Similarly, Toyota announced in October that it plans to incorporate solid-state batteries in an unnamed number of production vehicles by 2027. The automaker said it is targeting a 1,000-km (600-mile) range with 80 percent DC fast-charge in 10 minutes or less. In December, Chinese automaker NIO also got in the game, saying it is introducing a 150-kilowatt-hour “semi-solid-state battery” that would theoretically offer a 1,000-km range as soon as this summer.

Experts were quick to point out, however, that NIO’s battery, made by WeLion New Energy Technology Co., is not solid-state. “This is in fact a fairly conventional NMC (nickel manganese cobalt) cell with a gel electrolyte that has been in production for 15 years and is typically referred to as lithium-polymer,” noted Sam Abuelsamid, principal research analyst for Guidehouse Insights. “Technically the gel is considered a semi-solid because it has properties of both a solid and liquid. But in a cell, it lacks the properties of a true solid-state electrolyte.” Notably, he said, semi-solid-state cells can be punctured on impact, which is closer to the nature of a traditional lithium-ion battery—and in contrast with actual solid-state cells, which would fracture. He also noted that semi-solid-state cells, with a manganese spinel chemistry, were used on a Hyundai Sonata hybrid in 2009.

Engineering challenge

The big challenge facing true solid-state cells, however, is the long climb to engineering validation. Galyen cites five “golden rules” of batteries–safety, performance, life, cost, and environmental–which must be met for solid-state cells to achieve industry-wide adoption.

The process is reminiscent of Elon Musk’s reference to “manufacturing hell” in 2018.

“Most of the solid-state battery companies fall short on at least three of the five golden rules,” he said. “I haven’t seen anyone publish life numbers that make any sense. And I haven’t seen cost numbers that are even close to competing with liquid-state, lithium-ion batteries.” Solid-state costs, he said, are about where conventional lithium-ion batteries were a decade ago.

Automakers also still need to verify the “performance rule” in three key areas–performance at temperature, performance at altitude, and performance under shock and vibration. Of those, Galyen said, shock and vibration are particularly concerning. “What happens when you’re driving down I-75 and you hit a big pit in the road?” he said. “What kind of damage would be done to the solid-state matrix?”

Automakers will not move to broad adoption until they are able to verify the new technology’s abilities in all those key areas, Galyen added. “None of these batteries have been validated yet,” he said. “So how do you plan on putting something into automotive production when it hasn’t been validated?”

Validation will take time, while automakers test factory-built cells in real-world conditions. To do that, manufacturers will first need to build battery factories, which could take two years, and then run a half-year of prototype products and distribute them to customers, who put them through their duty cycles. “Then you put the products into production and find out what your ‘gotchas’ are,” Galyen said of the inevitable problems.

The process is reminiscent of Elon Musk’s reference to “manufacturing hell” in 2018. Back then, Musk declared his company was about enter into six months of the so-called “hell” as it struggled to work out the kinks in its Model 3 production line. He told reporters at the time that a flood, a tornado, or even a ship sinking anywhere on earth could disrupt his company’s plans.

Galyen said that such headaches are commonplace in manufacturing, but particularly so in battery production. “There’s not one battery I’ve ever seen that doesn’t have a ton of ‘gotchas,’” he said.

To do the build-out, production, and validation could easily take seven or more years, Galyen said.

Science nearly ready

Experts expect the science to keep evolving during that period. Today, there are numerous versions of solid-state batteries using everything from traditional graphite to silicon to lithium metal in the anode, and there are cathodes made from traditional NMC and nickel-rich materials.

Most experts assume that more time is needed to run the gauntlet of engineering validation, even for the biggest, most secretive companies.

Battery scientists are optimistic that the new breed of batteries can overcome two key drawbacks of conventional lithium-ion. First, they say, nickel-rich cathodes will enable the battery industry to use less cobalt in the cathode. Second, solid-state chemistries will enable battery makers to use lithium metal in the anode.

The ability to reduce cobalt in the cathode is important because cobalt is scarce, expensive, and often mined in countries with weak labor laws. And the ability to use lithium metal in the anode is important because it would boost energy density while promoting safety. Makers of liquid-based lithium-ion batteries currently don’t use lithium metal anodes due to fear of fires.

“This is why we started this (solid-state) journey in the first place–so we could use lithium metal,” noted Helena Braga, an associate professor of engineering physics at the University of Porto, in Portugal, and a well-known researcher who worked with Nobel Prize winner John Goodenough on solid-state batteries a decade ago. Braga said she is confident that the new chemistries will be ready soon, if they are not already.

What’s unknown is how far along those chemistries may be within some of the big manufacturing companies that make few public pronouncements, such as LG Chem and BYD. Some of those companies may be farther along, but it’s hard to know because there is so little reliable information.

For now, most experts assume that more time is needed to run the gauntlet of engineering validation, even for the biggest, most secretive companies.

“Most of the companies have great hope that they’re going to achieve success with the five golden rules,” Galyen said. “And they expect it to happen in the next decade.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, January 27, 2024 12:45 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

The Holdouts in the Quest for a Better Power Grid

Farmers in Missouri are opposing the Grain Belt Express, a transmission line that will connect wind farms in Kansas with cities in the East.

By Michael Holtz | Jan 26, 2024

https://www.newyorker.com/news/dept-of-energy/the-holdouts-in-the-ques
t-for-a-better-power-grid

The Sprouse family farm covers thousands of acres of fertile glacial till, ??remnants of the last ice age, in northwestern Missouri. Each day, billions of cubic feet of natural gas and hundreds of thousands of barrels’ worth of crude oil pass underneath its fields and cow pastures. The only visible signs of this subterranean activity are three posts—one metal and two plastic—spaced about thirty feet apart along a barbed-wire fence at the edge of a field. Each corresponds to a pipeline, and each has a warning label with a number to call in an emergency. “At least the pipelines are out of sight, even if they aren’t out of mind,” Loren Sprouse, the youngest of three Sprouse brothers, said one morning in May as we were driving around in a utility terrain vehicle. “We’d rather have them than the transmission line.”

The transmission line Sprouse was talking about is the Grain Belt Express, a planned eight-hundred-mile-long power line that will connect wind farms in southwestern Kansas to more densely populated areas farther East. The Grain Belt Express is designed to carry five thousand megawatts of electricity, enough to power approximately 3.2 million homes. The project has been in the works since 2010. It was taken over by Invenergy, a Chicago-based energy company, in 2020. After years of lawsuits and legislative wrangling, regulators in Missouri granted it final approval in October, 2023. If all goes as planned, construction will start in early 2025 and be completed in 2028.

One of the biggest obstacles that the United States faces in its fight against climate change is getting renewable energy to the places that need the most electricity. Many of the best locations for wind and solar farms are, by their very nature, remote. And moving that energy elsewhere requires navigating a byzantine permitting process for transmission lines and winning over landowners—or, if they can’t be won over, then deciding whether and when the need for a given project outweighs their concerns. “The scale of the undertaking and the speed at which it needs to occur are incredibly daunting,” Romany Webb, the deputy director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law, at Columbia Law School, told me. “We’re talking about a massive build-out of new, large-scale infrastructure across the country, and we need to do it, like, yesterday.”

Sprouse and I headed south on a gravel road, past a tumbledown chicken coop and a white farmhouse that his grandparents had moved into in 1911. Across the way, his brother Weldon was servicing a tractor. The brothers had finished planting their corn crop a couple of weeks earlier; soybeans were next. We got out at the top of a hill above the farmhouse. To the east was a machine shed and several rows of hay bales, to the west a green pasture. “I was going to build my retirement home right here,” Sprouse said, leaning against a fence post. “Could you ask for a better view?” He told me that he abandoned his plans for the house after he learned that the Grain Belt Express would be built directly in front of it. As we spoke, a surveying team subcontracted by Invenergy pulled up in two white pickup trucks. They had come to search for archeological remains along the planned route, a step required by the National Historic Preservation Act. Sprouse asked them to come back another day.

Sprouse said that he wasn’t against renewable energy, but he couldn’t support something that would interfere with his family’s farming operations and, in his words, “be the dominant scar on the landscape.” The transmission towers that Invenergy plans to build are around a hundred and fifty feet tall. One of Sprouse’s main concerns is whether G.P.S.-guided equipment, like tractors and combines, would work near them. (A 2012 study from the University of Calgary suggests that they will.) He’s also worried about how the line could affect aerial spraying and his ability to maintain a pond that he had built last year, to say nothing of what he fears it might do to local property values. “It’s me working around them instead of them working with me,” he said, referring to Invenergy. “That’s the problem.”

For lunch, we drove to a café in the nearby town of Braymer. It was the only restaurant still around. Sprouse, who is seventy-two, wore a striped button-down, work boots, and a John Deere hat. Over pulled-pork sandwiches and potato salad, he told me that Braymer used to have a second restaurant, a Chevy dealership, two hardware stores, four gas stations, a movie theatre, a pool hall, a beer joint, and three grocery stores. “Now we don’t have anywhere to get groceries other than the Dollar General,” he said. “It’s better than nothing.”

Brian Hunt, another local farmer whom Sprouse has known since grade school, joined us, and talk turned to the Grain Belt Express. Both men had reluctantly signed easement agreements with Invenergy which allow the company to use a portion of their respective properties. Had they refused, the company could have used eminent domain, the seizure of private property for public use, to acquire them. “You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t,” Hunt said. “We’re just flyover country for this thing. That’s all there is to it.” Sprouse said that he would be less opposed to the line if it were to run underground. A transmission line between Iowa and Illinois is slated to be built underground alongside a private railroad, but Invenergy has said that that is not feasible here—both economically and from an engineering perspective. Sprouse isn’t convinced. “They didn’t have to do it this way,” he said. “They chose to do what was the easiest way to make money.”

On April 22, 2021—Earth Day—President Joe Biden announced his climate agenda. He pledged that the U.S. would halve carbon emissions from their 2005 levels by 2030 and eliminate them altogether from the power sector by 2035. Experts agree that achieving those goals will require a herculean effort. And while the Inflation Reduction Act contains hundreds of billions of dollars in tax credits for renewable-energy projects, expanding the production of wind and solar power and switching to electric vehicles are only part of the solution. According to a report published in 2022 by Princeton University, the U.S. needs to build transmission lines twice as fast as it has over the past decade to unlock the full emissions-reducing potential of the I.R.A. Thousands of proposed wind and solar farms are waiting for permission to connect to electric grids across the country. Whether those projects survive depends in part on how quickly new transmission lines are built.

Building the lines is, in many ways, the easy part. It’s getting them through the permitting process, from federal environmental reviews to local road-use agreements, that’s difficult. (The Grain Belt Express could require approval from more than twenty federal and state authorities.) In September of last year, Americans for a Clean Energy Grid, a nonprofit advocacy group based in Washington, D.C., published a report from the consulting firm Grid Strategies that identified thirty-six planned high-capacity lines, from the New England Clean Power Link, in Vermont, to the TransWest Express, which will run from Wyoming to cities in the Southwest. All told, the report estimates, these ten thousand miles of “shovel ready” lines could increase wind and solar generation in the U.S. by eighty-seven per cent. Only ten have broken ground. “We really don’t have time to waste,” Christina Hayes, the executive director of A.C.E.G., told me. “We have about a lost decade on this.”

Regulators and policymakers in Washington have expressed a similar sense of urgency. In 2022, the Department of Energy established the Grid Deployment Office to help develop new high-capacity transmission lines and upgrade old ones. With a budget of more than twenty-five billion dollars, the office offers federal financing to projects and economic-development grants to help pay for things like job-training programs. On the permitting side of things, the White House has used existing laws to streamline the process, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, or FERC, has been granted expanded authority over projects deemed to be in the national interest, and a provision included in the debt-ceiling agreement requires environmental reviews be completed within two years.

Meanwhile, in Congress, Democratic lawmakers have introduced a series of transmission-related bills to speed up the permitting process by taking power away from state and local authorities. For landowners like Sprouse, as well as some Republicans in Congress, the idea of giving the federal government more control over those projects is unconscionable. Supporters of the bills are quick to point out that FERC already controls the permitting of oil and natural-gas pipelines.

Sprouse and hundreds of other rural landowners in Missouri have put up a fierce fight against the Grain Belt Express. Between 2015 and 2017, they helped persuade the state’s Public Service Commission to vote against it three separate times. The commission eventually approved the project, in 2019, after the Missouri Supreme Court ruled that it had wrongly rejected it.

Having failed to stop the Grain Belt Express in the courts, the landowners turned to the Missouri legislature, according to the nonprofit news outlet Flatland. In 2021 and 2022, they rallied behind a bill that would have, in its original version, allowed a single county commission to kill the project. But lawmakers scrapped it from the final bill, opting instead to require transmission-line companies to pay landowners a hundred and fifty per cent of fair-market value for land taken through eminent domain and provide a certain amount of power to Missouri. Governor Mike Parson signed the legislation into law on June 12, 2022. A month later, Invenergy announced that the Grain Belt Express would enable the delivery of twenty-five hundred megawatts of electricity to Missourians—five times the amount it had originally pledged—from an extension called the Tiger Connector. On October 12th, the Public Service Commission approved the new plan in a 4–1 vote.

Among the people upset by the decision is Marilyn O’Bannon, a longtime opponent of the Grain Belt Express and, along with Sprouse, one of its most outspoken critics. I met O’Bannon last May, at her home in Monroe County, about a hundred miles northwest of St. Louis. When I arrived, she was packing a lunchbox for her husband, who was out spraying insecticide on one of their cornfields. O’Bannon is sixty-nine, and she was dressed in a gray-and-white T-shirt emblazoned with five-pointed stars, jeans, and running shoes. A trucker hat with the slogan “No Eminent Domain for Private Gain” stitched across the front lay on the kitchen counter. “Every day it’s not here is a good day,” O’Bannon said.

O’Bannon first heard about the Grain Belt Express in 2013, when one of her son’s friends, who was then president of the Monroe County Farm Bureau, had called to tell her about it. The next day, she went to see the county’s three commissioners to voice her concerns. She was disappointed to find out that they already knew about the project and hadn’t told local residents. “It was then that I decided that I had to do something,” she said. “It immediately became a fight for all my family and friends.” One of the first things she did was organize a community meeting, in January of 2014, out of which a group called the Eastern Missouri Landowners Alliance was eventually formed. Six years later, she decided to run for the county commission on a platform that centered on stopping the Grain Belt Express. She won her district with fifty-eight per cent of the vote.

O’Bannon’s family came to Monroe County in 1873, several decades after the federal government forced Native tribes, including the Sac and Fox and Ioway, out of the region and sold the land to white settlers. One of O’Bannon’s great-grandfathers had fought for the Union in the Civil War, and bought a hundred and sixty acres. His children and grandchildren bought up thousands more across the county. If the transmission line gets built, O’Bannon told me, it would cross more than five miles of her family’s farmland. As we drove around in her car, a black Cadillac Escalade with tan leather seats, she shared her concerns with me. “The unknowns are the hardest part,” she said. “How are we going to farm around this? How safe is it going to be?” In a notice of intent to prepare an environmental-impact statement for the Grain Belt Express, the Energy Department notes that the project could create “local safety risks associated with electromagnetic fields, power surges, risk of increased lightning strikes, and line-induced fires.”

Of course, the risks associated with climate change are much more serious. According to a recent National Climate Assessment, Missouri farmers are likely to experience more frequent droughts and floods in the years ahead. But, when I brought up climate change with O’Bannon, she was defiant. “Fossil fuel is as clean as it can be,” she said. “Are we going to have an electric bill we can’t afford all for the sake of being green? I don’t think anyone who supports green energy has really looked at how that is going to affect them. I just don’t think they’re being reasonable.” It’s a sentiment shared by many Republican lawmakers. In September, Senator Eric Schmitt, of Missouri, characterized the Democratic-led push for clean energy as fearmongering. “They’re trying to scare the American people,” he told Fox News. “We have all the energy we’ll ever need directly under our feet.”

Unlike Sprouse, O’Bannon has yet to sign an easement agreement with Invenergy. “There’s no price that would make me be O.K. with this,” she said. “I’m going to keep fighting for as long as I can.” If that’s true, then the only way for Invenergy to get access to her land will be through eminent domain. The company has so far acquired ninety-six per cent of the easements it needs for the first phase of the Grain Belt Express, which runs from southwestern Kansas to a converter station in Monroe County, not far from O’Bannon’s house. Over the past two years, the company has filed twenty-seven eminent-domain lawsuits in Missouri in the process.

Invenergy says that it works to “recognize and respect the interest of landowners.” The company pays landowners eighteen thousand dollars per tower, on top of the money it pays for easements. Patrick Whitty, a senior vice-president for public affairs at Invenergy, said in an e-mail that the company’s compensation package was “among the strongest in the industry.” The company has also devised a set of guidelines to help mitigate the impact of the project on irrigation systems and soil erosion.

The week after I visited O’Bannon, I drove out to southwestern Kansas. My destination was Spearville, a town of eight hundred or so people in the middle of the Great Plains. Spearville is known as the City of Windmills. It’s a nickname that harks back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, when windmills were used to pump water from the Ogallala, an aquifer that lies under much of the region. Today, most of the old windmills have been torn down or left to rust out on the prairie. But the nickname still fits. Spearville sits in one of the windiest parts of the country. The town is surrounded by three hundred and fifty-five turbines. Standing on Main Street, I could see their sleek white blades in every direction.

Spearville, like Braymer, no longer has a grocery store. But it does have two restaurants: Turbine Bar & Grill and the Windmill. It was at the latter that I met Kermit Froetschner, a retired farmer who, by local standards, was an early advocate for the wind-energy industry. In 2006, some of the first turbines in the area were built on land that he owns just north of town. He now holds leases for seventeen of them. “It helps you retire,” he said, as he ate a chicken chimichanga. About ten years ago, he and his wife moved a hundred miles east, to the city of Hutchinson, to be closer to family. He said many of the people who lived there were opposed to wind farms. “I say, ‘Fine, bring them out here,’ ” he told me. “We’ve got more wind here anyway.”

After we left the restaurant, Froetschner took me for a ride in his white GMC pickup truck. We drove past his old house and past fields of drought-stricken wheat. Froetschner turned onto a dirt access road so that we could see one of the turbines up close. The wind was blowing from the south, at twelve miles per hour, according to my phone, strong enough to make the turbine’s blades gently spin. I rolled my window down to hear their low, pulsing swoosh.

To generate all the electricity that the Grain Belt Express is designed to carry, hundreds of new turbines will need to be built near where the line starts, about fifteen miles southwest of Spearville. The boom could create thousands of temporary construction jobs and bring in millions of dollars in direct payments to local governments and school districts. (In Kansas, renewable-energy projects are exempt from property taxes for ten years.) In Spearville, some of that money was used to build a new elementary school that opened in 2021. I got a tour of the school from its then principal, Daina Butler, who eagerly told me about the bigger classrooms and new computers. She said that, at the high school, teachers sometimes encouraged students to consider a career in the wind-energy industry—turbine-service technicians represent one of the fastest-growing occupations in the U.S.

Turbine Bar & Grill is located across the street from the Windmill. On my last night in town, I stopped in for a drink. A Nascar race was playing on a TV behind the bar, and Kristin Sprott, the restaurant’s owner, was chatting with a few regulars. I took a seat next to one of them, a man named Troy Fisher. He had an American flag tattooed on his right forearm and was drinking a Coors Light. I asked him what he thought about the Grain Belt Express. He said he hadn’t heard of it. His eyes lit up when I told him a brief description of the project. He pulled out a yellow legal pad and jotted down some notes. As the regional manager of Croell, an Iowa-based concrete company, he was always on the hunt for new contracts. “I’ll have to check that out,” he said. “Sounds like it could bring us a lot of business.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, February 2, 2024 5:39 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It’s not just solar that’s getting cheaper

Kevin Drum / Feb 1, 2024 at 5:49 PM

https://jabberwocking.com/its-not-just-solar-thats-getting-cheaper/

Dave Roberts recommends that I take a look at Nat Bullard's deck of climate-related charts.
https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

Here's a chart that should be familiar:

The price of solar has plummeted over the past decade. But as conservatives are constantly reminding us, the sun doesn't always shine. Then what? The price of battery storage has plummeted too.

All utility-scale solar plants now include battery storage so they can supply power 24 hours a day, and they can do this because the price of storage is a quarter what it was a decade ago.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, February 2, 2024 8:37 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
It’s not just solar that’s getting cheaper

Kevin Drum / Feb 1, 2024 at 5:49 PM

https://jabberwocking.com/its-not-just-solar-thats-getting-cheaper/

Dave Roberts recommends that I take a look at Nat Bullard's deck of climate-related charts.
https://www.nathanielbullard.com/presentations

Here's a chart that should be familiar:

The price of solar has plummeted over the past decade. But as conservatives are constantly reminding us, the sun doesn't always shine. Then what? The price of battery storage has plummeted too.

Wow! Only .12 cents per watt! What a deal!

What a fucking sucker I am for paying .13 cents per kWh!

Oh... That's right. You and obese, dying Kevin Drum went to public school in America
and you're both idiots. You don't understand the Metric system or the difference between
a single watt being generated vs. sustaining a watt of power for an hour.

Quote:
All utility-scale solar plants now include battery storage so they can supply power 24 hours a day, and they can do this because the price of storage is a quarter what it was a decade ago.

Nice! Only what, about $160 to $175 more to store a kWh? Score!

Let's just forget to mention that it all still costs this much even with all the Government subsidies in place.

FAIL

I don't hear you idiots pushing Coal Burning Cars much anymore. That didn't work out either, did it?

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, February 2, 2024 9:50 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Wow! Only .12 cents per watt! What a deal!

What a fucking sucker I am for paying .13 cents per kWh!

Oh... That's right. You and obese, dying Kevin Drum went to public school in America
and you're both idiots. You don't understand the Metric system or the difference between
a single watt being generated vs. sustaining a watt of power for an hour.

Nice! Only what, about $160 to $175 more to store a kWh? Score!

Let's just forget to mention that it all still costs this much even with all the Government subsidies in place.

FAIL

I don't hear you idiots pushing Coal Burning Cars much anymore. That didn't work out either, did it?

In a five-year contract I am paying Shell Energy 9.3 cents per kilowatt/hour for 100% Green energy. At night, Shell does not turn off the lights because they have batteries. 6ix, you know less than nothing because most of what you know is wrong.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Friday, February 2, 2024 9:58 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Wow! Only .12 cents per watt! What a deal!

What a fucking sucker I am for paying .13 cents per kWh!

Oh... That's right. You and obese, dying Kevin Drum went to public school in America
and you're both idiots. You don't understand the Metric system or the difference between
a single watt being generated vs. sustaining a watt of power for an hour.

Nice! Only what, about $160 to $175 more to store a kWh? Score!

Let's just forget to mention that it all still costs this much even with all the Government subsidies in place.

FAIL

I don't hear you idiots pushing Coal Burning Cars much anymore. That didn't work out either, did it?
In a five-year contract I am paying Shell Energy 9.3 cents per kilowatt/hour for 100% Green energy. At night, Shell does not turn off the lights because they have batteries. 6ix, you know less than nothing because most of what you know is wrong.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Those contracts were all government subsidized and are all going away, dummy. Tell us what you're paying when you're forced to renew it.

I mean, just how fucking stupid are you? Look at the prices on those graphs for solar/battery energy and then explain to everyone how Shell can even afford to keep their doors open if they sell it at such a staggering loss for the long haul, and to the millions upon millions more customers that you incorrectly predicted would be driving coal burning cars in the future.

You were catfished. Your F150 Lightning is worthless and you'll get nothing for it when it comes time to sell so you'd better drive it into the ground. And don't bitch at me when the new contract makes it completely unaffordable to drive. Enjoy whatever is left of those 5 years while you can.

No sympathy for you.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Friday, February 2, 2024 11:09 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Those contracts were all government subsidized and are all going away, dummy. Tell us what you're paying when you're forced to renew it.

I mean, just how fucking stupid are you? Look at the prices on those graphs for solar/battery energy and then explain to everyone how Shell can even afford to keep their doors open if they sell it at such a staggering loss for the long haul, and to the millions upon millions more customers that you incorrectly predicted would be driving coal burning cars in the future.

You were catfished. Your F150 Lightning is worthless and you'll get nothing for it when it comes time to sell so you'd better drive it into the ground. And don't bitch at me when the new contract makes it completely unaffordable to drive. Enjoy whatever is left of those 5 years while you can.

No sympathy for you.

You know already that I am prejudiced against Trumptards because of my long experience with their half-baked ideas about how America works. 6ix, you should start hiding your nonsense and false facts from normal people, assuming you want to eventually expand your life beyond what $7,000 per year can buy.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, February 3, 2024 6:58 AM

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Trump Allies Plan to Gut Climate Research if He Is Reelected

Dozens of conservative organizations have banded together to provide Trump a road map — known as Project 2025 — to boost fossil fuels and limit government climate science

By Scott Waldman & E&E News | February 2, 2024

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-allies-plan-to-gut-cl
imate-research-if-he-is-reelected/
https://www.eenews.net/articles/reversed-and-scrubbed-how-a-second-tru
mp-term-could-gut-climate-research/

CLIMATEWIRE | Former President Donald Trump’s second term could begin with a clear direction on climate policy: Trash it.

Dozens of conservative organizations have banded together to provide Trump a road map — known as Project 2025 — if he prevails in November. It outlines a series of steps that the former president could take to reverse the climate actions taken by the Biden administration.

Trump has already said that boosting fossil fuels would be one of his top priorities. A proposed executive order in Project 2025 offers him a path for that goal, laying out a total restructuring of the U.S. Global Change Research Program to diminish its role across more than a dozen federal agencies.

Project 2025 also calls for replacing the White House climate adviser with an "energy/environment" adviser who would pivot to serving the needs of the fossil fuel industry.

“The Biden Administration’s climate fanaticism will need a whole-of-government unwinding,” the plan states. “As with other federal departments and agencies, the Biden Administration’s leveraging of the federal government’s resources to further the woke agenda should be reversed and scrubbed from all policy manuals, guidance documents, and agendas.”

The Washington-based Heritage Foundation worked with conservative organizations to produce Project 2025, which offers 920 pages of policy prescriptions to ensure the chaos of Trump’s first term is not repeated if he gets a second. The think tank did not respond to a request for comment.

But Tom Pyle, a Project 2025 contributor and president of the American Energy Alliance, said Heritage is now recruiting Trump loyalists ready to implement the agenda on Day One. Installing personnel who can carry out such executive orders will be the key step in determining if they are followed, he said.

“Project 2025 has the potential to be an essential tool for President Trump should he be elected for a second term,” Pyle said. “But a plan is only as good as the people who implement it, so getting competent and committed conservative personnel into the administration will be more critical.”

The Trump campaign declined to provide comment to E&E News but has stated in the past that the former president will determine his own policy priorities, regardless of outside pressure.

Trump’s climate record suggests that the proposed executive order would be in line with his energy agenda.

In recent months, he has repeatedly promised to be a “dictator for a day” to ramp up oil and gas drilling. And allies expect that he will seek to unwind President Joe Biden’s climate policies much faster than he did the policies of President Barack Obama.

'Who knows what will happen'

Project 2025 calls for the president to use an executive order to “reshape the U.S. Global Change Research Program and related climate change research programs.”

The program was established by Congress in 1990 to coordinate federal research and spending to better understand how climate change affects the country. One of its key successes was to reveal how the depleted ozone layer was harming Americans, which led to regulations that successfully addressed the issue.

A top target of Project 2025 is the program’s National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report that is due again in late 2026 or early 2027. The proposed executive order would require a “critical analysis” of the assessment and a rejection of all related climate science work prepared by the Biden administration.

In Trump’s first term, his administration worked to bury and then remake the assessment. The report was quietly released the day after Thanksgiving, when the public is less likely to pay attention to news, and Trump said he didn’t “believe” it. In the waning days of the administration, Trump officials attempted to craft the next version of the report but ran out of time.

The Trump administration only “discovered” the Global Change Research Program in its final months and officials immediately tried tampering with it by promoting bad science, said Don Wuebbles, an emeritus professor of atmospheric science at the University of Illinois who worked on all five of the climate assessments.

In a Trump White House, he said, it won’t matter that there is overwhelming scientific consensus that humans are driving climate change and that it’s a crisis that needs to be addressed.

“Those people are irresponsible and have no ethics, and unfortunately who knows what will happen in an unethical White House,” he said, adding, “What peer-reviewed science papers are they going to use as their basis? Because the current assessment is entirely based on established well-known observations and analysis.”

A Trump administration may have a hard time reversing the Inflation Reduction Act’s $370 billion in climate incentives and spending. Biden's signature climate law has already spurred new clean energy projects and jobs across the country — many in Republican-controlled states.

But a flawed National Climate Assessment, produced by partisan researchers loyal to Trump, might help the administration gut public health regulations on the fossil fuel industry, said Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

While such a flawed assessment would be unreliable, he said, it could be enough to shift the opinion of a Trump-appointed judge if the administration challenged Biden’s climate policies in court.

“Environmental regulations rely on a scientific foundation,” Gerrard said. “Efforts to undermine that foundation could have serious negative effects on climate laws.”

Project 2025 also calls for an adviser who would coordinate the administration’s energy and environment policy — which focuses on weakening the federal government’s climate response across multiple federal agencies, revoking regulations that aim to limit planet-warming emissions and cutting back on permitting requirements for the fossil fuel industry.

The new “energy/environment coordinator” would report directly to the chief of staff, the document states, and “help to lead the fight for sound energy and environment policies both domestically and internationally."

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, February 3, 2024 9:22 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Greenhouse Effect
https://xkcd.com/2889/

Once he had the answer, Arrhenius complained to his friends that he'd "wasted over a full year" doing tedious calculations by hand about "so trifling a matter" as hypothetical CO2 concentrations in far-off eras (quoted in Crawford, 1997).

Arrhenius greenhouse effect
https://www.google.com/search?q=Arrhenius+greenhouse+effect

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, February 5, 2024 12:41 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Today, the state gets 47.13% of its electricity from wind and 0.33% from solar.

Yet now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind turbines and 12 block solar farms.

These efforts mirror those in hundreds of counties and townships across the nation, where the merest hint of a potential project quickly brings forth a Facebook group, yard signs, organized protests and – increasingly – zoning rules and laws that make new renewable energy impossible to build.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/02/04/solar-po
wer-in-kansas/71920670007/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, February 5, 2024 2:04 PM

Sources:

https://www.nationalgrid.com/stories/energy-explained/can-wind-turbine
-blades-be-recycled

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-many-turbines-are-contained-us-wind-turb
ine-database

https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/ZyNET.exe/30003WOK.TXT?ZyActionD=ZyDocument&
amp;Client=EPA&Index=1991+Thru+1994&Docs=&Query=&Time=&EndTime=&SearchMethod=1&TocRestrict=n&Toc=&TocEntry=&QField=&QFieldYear=&QFieldMonth=&QFieldDay=&IntQFieldOp=0&ExtQFieldOp=0&XmlQuery=&File=D%3A%5Czyfiles%5CIndex%20Data%5C91thru94%5CTxt%5C00000009%5C30003WOK.txt&User=ANONYMOUS&Password=anonymous&SortMethod=h%7C-&MaximumDocuments=1&FuzzyDegree=0&ImageQuality=r75g8/r75g8/x150y150g16/i425&Display=hpfr&DefSeekPage=x&SearchBack=ZyActionL&Back=ZyActionS&BackDesc=Results%20page&MaximumPages=1&ZyEntry=1&SeekPage=x&ZyPURL

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/how-sustainable-sustainablemodern-const
ruction-materials-okpara

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Today, the state gets 47.13% of its electricity from wind and 0.33% from solar.

Yet now, 14 of the 105 counties in Kansas block wind turbines and 12 block solar farms.

These efforts mirror those in hundreds of counties and townships across the nation, where the merest hint of a potential project quickly brings forth a Facebook group, yard signs, organized protests and – increasingly – zoning rules and laws that make new renewable energy impossible to build.

Here's your "renewable" energy...

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack (September 23rd, 2023):

FUN FACT: Wind Turbine blades are 100% non-recyclable, consisting each of 35 tonnes of plastic and
fiberglass which are either thrown into a landfill to be somebody else's problem another day,
or are incinerated, which not only is bad news for future CO2 emissions, but as a bonus are
going to end up adding to the insane amount of microplastics that you already have coating the
inside of your lungs and are already found littering pretty much every cell in your body.

As of 2022, we have a recorded total of 70,800 wind turbines in the US alone, each consisting
of 3 blades.

So, not including all of the blades that have already been buried or burned, we have a combined total
of 14,868,000,000 lbs of non-recyclable future waste product that's mostly going to end up in your
lungs and contribute to global warming once they reach the end of their life cycle.

Oh... and don't forget that every single tonne of glass fibers produced in the first place results
in a carbon footprint of approximately 1.7-2.2 tonnes. So, not including the blades we've already
buried or burned, the blades on the existing 70,800 wind turbines currently active in America alone
required us to put 12,637,800 to 16,354,800 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere before they
even made their first rotation.

Clean energy indeed!

Well boys...

Smoke if you got 'em!

Get fucked, dummy.

--------------------------------------------------

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Monday, February 5, 2024 5:03 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

So, not including all of the blades that have already been buried or burned, we have a combined total of 14,868,000,000 lbs of non-recyclable future waste product that's mostly going to end up in your lungs and contribute to global warming once they reach the end of their life cycle.

I'm guessing you have no idea how much non-recyclable waste there is from mining coal, drilling for oil and natural gas, and burning them. With 8 billion people on Earth, there are 14.868 billion pounds every hour, 24 hours per day, 365 days per year. Asphalt roads are the most obvious of the wastes. Hopefully, you understand driving on roads made of waste from refineries. Google does asphalt pollute to learn that Asphalt pollutes both the air and the water.

https://www.google.com/search?q=does+asphalt+pollute

6ix, you have thousands of pounds of refinery waste in your driveway. The sealer you purchased to make your driveway look pretty? It, too, pollutes the water and air.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, February 5, 2024 6:27 PM

Look at those goalposts fly.

--------------------------------------------------

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Monday, February 5, 2024 9:47 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at those goalposts fly.

Green energy is all about reducing Greenhouse gases. For some stupid reason, Trumptards think Green energy will fail if it produces waste. They act as if green energy failed because the batteries in electric vehicles have to be replaced. They act as if green energy fails if solar panels have to be replaced. Wind turbine blades get replaced and that, too, is a sign that green energy failed for Trumptards. Trumptards are retards.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Monday, February 5, 2024 10:54 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Look at those goalposts fly.
Green energy is all about reducing Greenhouse gases. For some stupid reason, Trumptards think Green energy will fail if it produces waste. They act as if green energy failed because the batteries in electric vehicles have to be replaced. They act as if green energy fails if solar panels have to be replaced. Wind turbine blades get replaced and that, too, is a sign that green energy failed for Trumptards. Trumptards are retards.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

It's about the money, stupid.

When you add the fact that none of this "green" energy is actually green in the first place on top of the fact that none of it is even remotely affordable or practical is when it becomes an issue.

Your EV dream is dead. It won't be long until your windmill dream is dead too.

--------------------------------------------------

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Tuesday, February 6, 2024 6:27 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

It's about the money, stupid.

When you add the fact that none of this "green" energy is actually green in the first place on top of the fact that none of it is even remotely affordable or practical is when it becomes an issue.

Your EV dream is dead. It won't be long until your windmill dream is dead too.

6ix, you can be perfectly happy with no money but with Trump as your Chieftain:

Study of Indigenous and local communities finds happiness doesn't cost much - February 5, 2024

https://phys.org/news/2024-02-indigenous-local-communities-happiness-d
oesnt.html

The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), consisted of a survey of 2,966 people from Indigenous and local communities in 19 globally distributed sites. Only 64% of surveyed households had any cash income. The results show that "surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in wealthy countries," says Eric Galbraith, researcher at ICTA-UAB and McGill University and lead author of the study.

The average life satisfaction score across the studied small-scale societies was 6.8 on a scale of 0–10. Although not all societies reported being highly satisfied — averages were as low as 5.1 — four of the sites reported average scores higher than 8, typical of wealthy Scandinavian countries in other polls, "and this is so, despite many of these societies having suffered histories of marginalization and oppression."

The results are consistent with the notion that human societies can support very satisfactory lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of material wealth, as measured in monetary terms.

"The strong correlation frequently observed between income and life satisfaction is not universal and proves that wealth — as generated by industrialized economies — is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives," says Victoria Reyes-Garcia, ICREA researcher at ICTA-UAB and senior author of the study.

The findings are good news for sustainability and human happiness, as they provide strong evidence that resource-intensive economic growth is not required to achieve high levels of subjective well-being.

The researchers highlight that, although they now know that people in many Indigenous and local communities report high levels of life satisfaction, they do not know why.

Prior work would suggest that family and social support and relationships, spirituality, and connections to nature are among the important factors on which this happiness is based, "but it is possible that the important factors differ significantly between societies or, conversely, that a small subset of factors dominates everywhere. I would hope that, by learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities, it might help many others to lead more satisfying lives while addressing the sustainability crisis," Galbraith concludes.

More information: High life satisfaction reported among small-scale societies with low incomes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2024)
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2311703121

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Tuesday, February 6, 2024 10:54 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

It's about the money, stupid.

When you add the fact that none of this "green" energy is actually green in the first place on top of the fact that none of it is even remotely affordable or practical is when it becomes an issue.

Your EV dream is dead. It won't be long until your windmill dream is dead too.
6ix, you can be perfectly happy with no money

I have more money than I need.

And if I ever decide I want to restock the reserves because Joe Biden*'s inflation sucks, I get to go out and do part time menial work for double what I made in the average of my last two jobs. I'd be hard pressed to find anything that wasn't $3 more per hour than my last job, and it would be impossible to find a job making the national minimum wage like my job before that.

I'm good dude. You worry about you.

ETA: This was actually a rare good article from you.

Quote:
The research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), consisted of a survey of 2,966 people from Indigenous and local communities in 19 globally distributed sites. Only 64% of surveyed households had any cash income. The results show that "surprisingly, many populations with very low monetary incomes report very high average levels of life satisfaction, with scores similar to those in wealthy countries," says Eric Galbraith, researcher at ICTA-UAB and McGill University and lead author of the study.

The average life satisfaction score across the studied small-scale societies was 6.8 on a scale of 0–10. Although not all societies reported being highly satisfied — averages were as low as 5.1 — four of the sites reported average scores higher than 8, typical of wealthy Scandinavian countries in other polls, "and this is so, despite many of these societies having suffered histories of marginalization and oppression."

The results are consistent with the notion that human societies can support very satisfactory lives for their members without necessarily requiring high degrees of material wealth, as measured in monetary terms.

"The strong correlation frequently observed between income and life satisfaction is not universal and proves that wealth — as generated by industrialized economies — is not fundamentally required for humans to lead happy lives," says Victoria Reyes-Garcia, ICREA researcher at ICTA-UAB and senior author of the study.

The findings are good news for sustainability and human happiness, as they provide strong evidence that resource-intensive economic growth is not required to achieve high levels of subjective well-being.

The researchers highlight that, although they now know that people in many Indigenous and local communities report high levels of life satisfaction, they do not know why.

Prior work would suggest that family and social support and relationships, spirituality, and connections to nature are among the important factors on which this happiness is based, "but it is possible that the important factors differ significantly between societies or, conversely, that a small subset of factors dominates everywhere. I would hope that, by learning more about what makes life satisfying in these diverse communities, it might help many others to lead more satisfying lives while addressing the sustainability crisis," Galbraith concludes.

Certainly puts a human spin on the phenomena rather than saying that I live like a squirrel or a raccoon.

Material things and keeping up with the joneses doesn't mean shit to me.

Would I like to have a brand new pickup truck? Sure! It sounds great on paper. But it's a huge sinkhole for wealth, as is any brand new vehicle. I will likely be buying a newer used car this year because I'm being forced to for emissions reasons, but really... it's time. It will be nice to be in a vehicle that I can be confident will get me from point A to point B when I need it to after going years without having that feeling in the current ride. I bought that car 16 years ago for $2,000 and I've put less than $1,000 into it to keep it running all these years. I think I can afford to finally move on.

I've never had problems acquiring tools I need to do any of the jobs that I want to do either. Sure... they may not be the top of the line power tools, or I might find myself occasionally needing to come up with innovative ways to do the job with the wrong tool because the right tool is prohibitively expensive and wouldn't get used much after the job was done, and I might not have a 3,000sq/ft shop to work in like my mom and step-dad did, but I also don't have a $3,000 per month rent bill, and crippling debt forcing me to constantly be working for other people either.

As long as you fill your life with tasks that are meaningful to you, you don't actually need to work for somebody else if you can afford not to. I get immense satisfaction out of working on my house and helping out friends, family and even neighbors when they need help with something I'm capable of doing but they are not capable of doing.

I'll never be rich. But I'll never be poor and out on the street either. I might not be able to buy the finer things in life but I made peace with that notion a long time ago.

My mom used to ask me "Don't you want to have luxuries in your life"?

I said to her, "Mom. I watched you and Dad commute 3 to 5 hours to and from jobs you both hated every single day growing up. I had to listen to you bitch about how much your job sucked and the shitty people you worked for. That dominated dinner conversations every night of my life. And despite all of that, I got to watch you never get ahead because you didn't know how to manage your money. My luxury in life is going to work whenever I feel like it and not going to work when I don't feel like it. My luxury is a stress free life. I don't need to be surrounded by a bunch of shit to make me feel good."

--------------------------------------------------

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Tuesday, February 6, 2024 10:55 AM

Major Auto Company Shuts Down Funding to EV Subsidiary, Immediately Sees Stock Price Boom

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/major-auto-company-shuts-dow
n-funding-to-ev-subsidiary-immediately-sees-stock-price-boom/ar-BB1hL4PU

Quote:
Volvo’s stock surged 26% after announcing it would cease funding its electric vehicle subsidiary, Polestar Automotive.

This decision reflects a broader trend in the electric vehicle industry, with Renault canceling its electric-car unit IPO and Ford reducing production of its electric F-150 Lightning.

...

While Polestar’s CEO remains optimistic about the company’s future, its shares declined by 84% in 2023 due to the EV market slowdown.

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Tuesday, February 6, 2024 5:59 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Texas' Lt. Gov. knows "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax" and will spend $10 billion of state government money based on that belief:

Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick says Texas will build new natural gas power plants itself if private sector doesn't

By Claire Hao, Feb 6, 2024

Texas politicians and energy executives courted a ballroom of around 100 investors representing approximately $2 trillion of capital on Tuesday in Houston, seeking to inspire some of them to build more natural gas fueled power plants in the state.

If the effort fails to encourage the private sector to build these electricity generation plants, the state would seek to build them itself and contract private operators to run them, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick said in a press conference following his opening remarks at the conference hosted by BlackRock, one of the world’s largest asset management firms.

“If we can’t get an incentive program to attract investors to build, then the state would have to build (more gas-fueled power infrastructure) ourselves and then subcontract out for someone else to run it,” Patrick said. “We can’t sit and do nothing.”

The goal is to attract 10 more gigawatts of natural gas power plants, Patrick said, producing enough electricity to power 2 million homes in Texas during times of peak demand. State officials believe the Texas Energy Fund, a $10 billion package mostly for low-interest loans to developers of natural gas power plants, will deliver the results they seek.

And if it doesn’t, state-built power plants could be on the table.

“There’ll be pushback on that. That’s the last card you want to play, because we are a free market. But in many ways, the current system isn’t a free market,” Patrick said.

That’s because federal policy offering incentives to developers of renewable energy has caused renewable development to outpace fossil fuel development in Texas, Patrick said. One such initiative, the Biden administration’s 2021 Inflation Reduction Act, has spurred a spate of new solar and battery projects in the state.

Market forces are also a part of renewable energy’s growth. Texas is an energy-only electricity market, which means power generators are paid only for the electricity that is delivered, rather than what they are capable of producing. Generators bid into the wholesale market to offer their power at the cheapest price.

Fossil fuel power plants still provide the majority of electricity to the grid managed by the Electric Reliability Council of Texas. But in recent years, renewable energy has made massive gains in part because the cost of building and operating these resources have dropped, allowing them to regularly offer their electricity at low prices.

Texas Republicans are not opposed to the growth of renewable energy altogether, Patrick said. But he echoed the oft-repeated concern among state leaders that Texas needs more “dispatchable” fossil fuel power plants that can turn on at the flip of a switch when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.

Texas blacklist

BlackRock was placed on a Texas “blacklist” of financial companies that supposedly boycott the fossil fuel industry in 2022, an accusation the firm has consistently denied. After it was limited from doing business in Texas, its CEO Larry Fink met twice with Patrick. The second meeting catalyzed Tuesday’s conference to attract fossil fuel investment in the state, Patrick said in his opening remarks.

“We had a conversation where we both thought there were many differences,” Fink said in his remarks. “Throughout the conversation … we saw that those differences can be minimized quite quickly, and that there was a lot of commonality and a lot of the same interests.”

Patrick refused to answer reporters' questions on whether BlackRock had been removed from Texas’s blacklist.

The summit featured speakers including ERCOT CEO Pablo Vegas, CenterPoint CEO Jason Wells, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub and state Sen. Charles Schwertner, who authored the bill creating the Texas Energy Fund. Media was only allowed to attend opening remarks by Patrick, Fink and Houston Mayor John Whitmire.

At least three commissioners from the Public Utility Commission of Texas, the state’s utility regulator — Thomas Gleeson, Jimmy Glotfelty and Kathleen Jackson — were also in attendance.

The office of Dade Phelan, speaker of the Texas House of Representatives, declined to comment on Patrick’s remarks at the summit. Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and Texas’s three major power generation companies — Vistra, NRG Energy and Calpine — didn’t reply to a request for comment.

Beth Garza, an energy fellow at the R Street Institute who served as the ERCOT market’s state-contracted watchdog from 2014 to 2019, said having the state build power plants would discourage any future private investment.

“If he goes through with the idea of the state building power plants, he better be prepared for the state to build all of the state’s future generation,” Garza said.

Alison Silverstein, an energy consultant who served as a senior adviser to the PUCT and to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, said Patrick’s comments that the state would build natural gas power plants could be intended to create an “or else” threat to persuade developers to invest.

“Because if they don’t do it, the outcome for their profits and future business prospects will be worse because the state would act to meet the need,” she said.

https://www.houstonchronicle.com/business/energy/article/texas-natural
-gas-electricity-patrick-18639857.php

Free link http://tinyurl.com/yz5cw7uf

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 12:35 AM

How about nuclear?

Windmills and Solar Farms are snake oil.

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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 1:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How about nuclear?

Windmills and Solar Farms are snake oil.

If you already have a nuclear power plant built, why not keep it running? But to build a new one? Those damn things produce the world's most expensive electricity:

Estimated capital costs of energy generation in the United States in 2023, by energy source (in U.S. dollars per kilowatt)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/654401/estimated-capital-cost-of-e
nergy-generation-in-the-us-by-technology/

Nuclear energy has the highest estimated capital costs of any energy technology used in the United States. As of 2023, capital costs for nuclear power plants ranged between 8,475 and 13,925 U.S. dollars per kilowatt. As the radioactive materials used and the waste created require careful handling, nuclear stations are among the most expensive to build. The number of U.S. nuclear power plants fell to 92 in 2022, from 112 plants in 1990.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 5:51 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

An increasingly common argument for curtailing solar projects is to preserve farmland. Some counties now set limits on the amount of agricultural land that can be turned into a solar farm.

Opponents argue that too much farmland being turned into solar farms will affect the country’s ability to feed itself.

The answer: No, solar will not use up all the farmland we need.

The National Renewable Energy Laboratory estimates that for the U.S. to move completely to carbon-neutral power, it will require about 10,000 square miles of land.
https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy22osti/81644.pdf

The Department of Agriculture already pays farmers to take about 24.8 million acres of less productive and environmentally sensitive land out of production. That’s 38,750 square miles – more than the entire amount of land that would be needed for green energy.

And in 2023, about 40% of the U.S. corn crop was used to produce ethanol. By some measures, an acre of solar power can make 70 times as much energy as an acre’s worth of corn turned into ethanol.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/investigations/2024/02/04/green-en
ergy-fact-checked/72390472007/

94,640,000 acres for 2023 were planted with corn in the USA.
40% of those acres are for corn to make ethanol to fuel cars.
40% is 37,856,000 acres or 59,150 square miles, which is huge compared to 10,000 square miles for solar projects.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_corn_acres_planted

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Wednesday, February 7, 2024 9:58 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
How about nuclear?

Windmills and Solar Farms are snake oil.
If you already have a nuclear power plant built, why not keep it running? But to build a new one? Those damn things produce the world's most expensive electricity:

Untrue.

Solar power is the most expensive.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-
cost/

Quote:
Among the three options shown, nuclear power is right in the middle, with total costs in 2012 of about $96 per megawatt hour (MWh), most of which involves capital construction costs.

On the high end is solar power at $130 per MWh, and gas at the low end at $64 per MWh.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Thursday, February 8, 2024 5:29 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

PACCAR (owner of Peterbilt, Kenworth, and other commercial truck brands) and Toyota are joint-developing a hydrogen fuel cell semi truck.

The two companies have already built and tested a concept vehicle by putting two Toyota Mirai powertrains into a Kenworth truck body. (Mirai is a Toyota Sports Car.)

Fuel cells are easier than internal combustion engines to link together.

Under the name Project Portal, Toyota and PACCAR have already made prototype trucks. Essentially, the diesel engine and all its accouterments were removed from a Kenworth T680 truck. Two Toyota Mirai powertrains were installed in its place. This resulted in a truck with 675 horsepower and 1,325 pound-feet of torque. The prototype version only had about 200 miles of driving range, but it should be understood that this was meant more as a proof-of-concept than a final design. As with diesel trucks, the range is determined by the size of the fuel tank (or tanks).

Honda and GM Have Also Proven The Modularity Of Fuel Cell Systems

Toyota is not the only company exploring the possibilities of parallel fuel cells. Honda and General Motors are joint-manufacturing fuel cell systems in a factory just outside of Detroit. Although the two companies' cells only put out a relatively paltry 77 kilowatts (103 horsepower), they can be linked together to get practically any power output desired. In a decisive move to prove the technology, Honda is using hydrogen fuel cells instead of the customary diesel to power the emergency backup generators at its data center in Torrance, California.

Fuel cells are more inherently modular than internal combustion engines. While some amount of design finesse is required to make multiple modular fuel cell systems work as one unit, this is a far easier task than linking internal combustion engines. Fuel cells have no crankshafts that must be mechanically synchronized. Like batteries, fuel cells only put out electricity and nothing else.

More at https://www.topspeed.com/toyota-hydrogen-fuel-cells-trucks-plans/

Mirai Fuel Cell System

2023 Toyota Mirai Overview | Toyota

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 8, 2024 5:38 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Untrue.

Solar power is the most expensive.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-
cost/

There is a huge difference between the price per kilowatt-hour of electricity and the price to build a kilowatt of electric power plant capacity, but that is for you to understand. Your statement: "Untrue" is nonsense, but you're too stupid to know what you did wrong. Don't go into engineering, 6ix. Stay with what you think you know: "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax." You and Trump beautifully work together to misunderstand every concept about Climate Change and electric generation. Don't stop being jackasses together.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 8, 2024 10:39 PM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

New ironmaking method could slash carbon emissions

By extracting metallic iron without producing carbon dioxide, the new process could even be carbon negative

By Robert F. Service | 5 FEB 2024, 12:00 PM ET

https://www.science.org/content/article/electrifying-new-ironmaking-me
thod-could-slash-carbon-emissions

The world mines 2.5 billion tons of iron every year, and reducing it to iron emits as much CO2 as the tailpipes of all passenger vehicles combined. So, scientists are looking for economically viable ways to produce metallic iron that don’t generate greenhouse gases.

Making iron, the main ingredient of steel, takes a toll on Earth’s delicate atmosphere, producing 8% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. Now, a team of chemists has come up with a way to make the business much more eco-friendly. By using electricity to convert iron ore and salt water into metallic iron and other industrially useful chemicals, researchers report today in Joule that their approach is cost effective, works well with electricity provided by wind and solar farms, and could even be carbon negative, consuming more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it produces. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joule.2024.01.001

“It’s a very clever approach,” says Karthish Manthiram, a chemical engineer at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved with the study. He notes that the process has other advantages, including working at a low temperature, and being amenable to working with intermittent renewable electricity. “It checks all the boxes.”

To that end, Paul Kempler, a chemical engineer at the University of Oregon, and colleagues wondered whether an industrial process for making chlorine from saltwater could be repurposed for ironmaking. In this “chlor-alkali” process, water containing sodium-chloride is placed in an electrochemical cell resembling a battery that contains two electrodes submerged in a liquid electrolyte. The positively charged electrode, the anode, pulls electrons from chloride ions, causing chlorine atoms to pair up into chlorine gas. At the same time, electrons flowing in from the cathode split water molecules into pieces that pair with the sodium ions and one another to make sodium hydroxide and hydrogen gas.

To tweak the setup to purify iron, Kempler’s team added iron oxide particles to its cathode. Now, the electrons sent to it would also release the oxygen atoms from iron oxide and again form sodium hydroxide—as well as leave behind solid metallic iron. The process is highly efficient, the researchers claim. In fact, they estimate that selling the chlorine and some of the sodium hydroxide at current market prices should enable the overall process to produce iron at roughly the same price as making it in blast furnaces. And because sodium hydroxide can bind CO2 and convert it into carbon-based minerals, the process could be used to help capture CO2, making it carbon negative.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Thursday, February 8, 2024 10:41 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Biden's climate policies are as bad as his foreign policies and should be ended. The whole focus on "zero carbon" instead of conservation and rehabilitation is just a big wet kiss to some companies, and a way to throw money at speculators.

Unfortunately, it sounds like Trump's policies ... drill more oil and gas... are also whacked. Eventually oil and gas will run out. We need to find a sustainable energy source, and a way of living on this planet without wrecking it.

Solar makes sense... for California, Nevada, Arizona, and Utah. But battery storage STILL costs $15,000, and that's just to limp along overnight to run a few lights, the frig and freezer, keep the modem going, and maybe run a couple of fans of the weather is really hot. I don't know where battery prices are coming down bc it's not reflected in household battery storage. It's far cheaper to get a trifuel generator and just crank it up when needed.

And I have nothing against fuel cells - they are remarkably efficient at extracting energy from fuel- but so far the idea of running mobile applications on hydrogen is impractical. Hydrogen has a lower BTU per CF content and it's ridiculously hard to trundle around enough hydrogen to get any kind of range.

"But because hydrogen is so much lighter, or less dense, you need approximately 3 times the volume of hydrogen as compared to natural gas to get the same amount of energy. So, to get the same “bang for your buck” out of hydrogen as compared to natural gas, you would either need to increase the pressure of the fuel supply or increase the volumetric flow"

All of the difficulties of hydrogen v methane.
https://www.powereng.com/library/6-things-to-remember-about-hydrogen-v
s-natural-gas

I guess I'll believe it when I see it.

-----------
"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." - Henry Kissinger

Loving America is like loving an addicted spouse - SIGNYM

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Thursday, February 8, 2024 11:00 PM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Untrue.

Solar power is the most expensive.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/05/what-does-nuclear-power-really-
cost/
There is a huge difference between the price per kilowatt-hour of electricity and the price to build a kilowatt of electric power plant capacity, but that is for you to understand. Your statement: "Untrue" is nonsense, but you're too stupid to know what you did wrong.

That's not what the WEF says.

Apparently you didn't read their article I linked, because you have the mind of a 5 year old.

But I don't believe shit the WEF says either, so who knows.

--------------------------------------------------

Political correctness is just tyranny, with a smiley face.

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Sunday, February 11, 2024 7:05 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's not what the WEF says.

Apparently you didn't read their article I linked, because you have the mind of a 5 year old.

But I don't believe shit the WEF says either, so who knows.

6ix, you confirmed for the one trillionth time that the kind of people who vote for Trump are assholes, which I knew long before you were born. Have you wondered why you have difficulty thriving in America, 6ix? Since you can't accept that you are a stupid asshole, you immediately were attracted to Trump's explanation that your struggles are not your fault. For example, Trump tells you that your CO2 emissions are not changing the climate because "Climate Change Is A Chinese Hoax". Trump absolves you of all responsibility. Nothing is your fault, 6ix.

For the first time, global warming has exceeded 1.5C across an entire year, according to the EU's climate service.

World leaders promised in 2015 to try to limit the long-term temperature rise to 1.5C, which is seen as crucial to help avoid the most damaging impacts.

This first year-long breach doesn't break that landmark "Paris agreement", but it does bring the world closer to doing so in the long-term.

Urgent action to cut carbon emissions can still slow warming, scientists said.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at
https://www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Sunday, February 11, 2024 7:06 AM