More mathematics of electricity

[pcrussell50]

Solar and wind power are quite competitive with natural gas these days for generating electricity. I'd want some back up for a dark still winter night.

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This is an insightful post. Unfortunately, and as you hinted to, LCOE typically does NOT include the other hidden costs of solar and wind, such as the cost of the gas turbines needed to stabilise the grid due to the unreliability/intermittency of solar and wind, or the environmental costs of the enormous amount of land it takes for wind and solar.

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Another quick bit on solar. There is clean solar and dirty solar. Clean solar is what we call, solar-thermal, various ways we collect heat from the sun to boil water and spin a turbine. Dirty solar is what you guys in the vernacular call “solar panels”. In engineering we call it photovoltaics, in which sunlight is converted directly to electricity. The trouble with photovoltaics is that they wear out, and when they are worn out, they present a toxic waste disposal problem. If you landfill them, they will leach out into the local environment and the ground water. You can recycle them, but it is expensive and hazardous. Most forward thinking states like CA, find it cheaper to pay poorer states to landfill them. They get the “free” money from CA and it becomes their problem to deal with the toxicity leaching into their water and lands. We also ship them back to China, and let them deal with it. Either way, it’s the rich, shipping their toxic wast to the poor, paying them for it, and letting them deal with the health consequences and environmental damage from it.

So why not just go with the clean version of solar then? Because it’s more expensive than dirty solar. The groundbreaking tech of the Ivanpah solar thermal plant out in the Mojave Desert in CA near the border with Nevada, is sadly being shut down. They used up their subsidies and it’s too expensive to keep running. The tech is amazing though. If you are a nerd, you should read up on it. When I was a kid in Australia, I read an article in Popular Mechanics about the concept that Ivanpah put into practice. Shame it’s too expensive because it’s neat tech.

-Peter

[NICE PAIR]

I'm from ai, I'm here to help you!

[rjdubiel]

get off the google AI. haha I don't have confidence on anything that comes from the internet on anything. Of course, most Merc things found here are correct!!! Go S&F!

You said:

What is the most subsidized industry in the United States?









ChatGPT said:

As of the most recent data, agriculture is traditionally one of the most heavily subsidized industries in the United States, but it competes closely with fossil fuels and healthcare depending on how subsidies are defined.

[Chaz]

The "village idiot" didn't hear that Trump made a deal with the EU for a trillion dollars before playing a round of golf and then coming home ...

Chaz = enjoying the fact that the gardener needs to look up how much of the trillion is in US energy ..

No .. sheep nutz, you won't find it on CNN ..

Daddyyyyyy .. Chaz called me sheep nutz Whaaaa

[JPEROG]

I think Trump even surprised himself on that E.U. spending commitment. We will see if they are able to tow the line, that is a ton of promise and money. There is no better guy to negotiate on our behalf then D.J.T.. He is clicking thru the world "needs fixed list" like a superhero.

Joe

[David]

I would bet a hundred dollar donation to this site that the EU does not achieve the energy buying commitment. The gas infrastructure does not exist. Remind me of this in three years.

Back to the math of electricity. According to the UN, 74 percent of new electricity generating capacity was green last year. It would be interesting to know what percentage of that was China.

[RiverRat71]

I was talking to a solar "guru" the other day & evidently after years of a solar field being active the land is contaminated from solar panel decay, chemicals being applied to the soil to keep the field clean & compaction that the land is practically no good for shyt for the next 100 years or so. Anyone got any info to dispute that? If not then how in the heck is that "green energy"? Sounds like it totally wrecks the environment. RR

[XstreamVking]

Trump knows that that van der layin woman is lying. She is already walking back her verbal commitment. He just wanted for her to expose herself as a chameleon. Just like the starmer character from England, he had to speak up and defend the horrible mayor of London Khan when Trump was bashing him. He was exposed by Trump also. Our man Trump is calling them all out.
Solar farms....
I went by the expansive solar farms on I-10 in N fla the other day. You could see the temp change on the outside temp gauge in the truck. Was 93 before and after. Went up to 99 right by the farms. Those things put out a lot of heat.

[Chaz]

I saw last night where the "village idiot" wanted Peter banned from the site.

This is Peter's thread : Translation ... Peter is much more intelligent and up to date than the cut and paste gardener. Little Jimmie, even if he were gone, you would still be stupid.

David, the fifty first state could never keep up with exporting energy one litre at a time. Stick to maple sur-ype .. ehh

How many green-tards here have a solar panels and a windmill in there back yard ???
I'll wait for an answer ...

[Chaz]

So it seems that Peter is right , gas turbines are better than windmills or solar panels for producing electricity. I'm amazed that none of the left-wing zealots didn't rush to show pictures of the windmills they have in their back yards.

I reckon it's just something they like to act like they know all about .. with no actual personal experience.

Without gasoline, the country would shut down tomorrow. From what I've seen, many on the left would love for that to happen.

It's the life blood of our economy, it's a great thing that the adults are in charge of the country ... and more of the world every day. That leaves the idiots nothing to do except for cry about subsidy's and cheaper gas prices ...

[JPEROG]

Northern IN, OH, Southern Central MI. and Southern IL are absolutely littered with wind Turbines. Its terrible to see those monsters in the middle of what used to be pristine flatlands. We drove thru that area on our way to the Michigan City IN. boat races and it really caught me off guard to see thousands of them lined up and half of them were stationary-its obviously a total kick back scheme.

Joe

[XstreamVking]

There was a real good guy on here named "offshore ginger" who built the blades and structures for the wind turbines. He said they were an environmental disaster since the blades and other parts break often and can't be easily recycled. He mentioned that there were stacks of thousands of carbon fiber and epoxy blades and other carbon parts that had no place to be disposed of. How nature friendly is it to kill millions of migratory birds, waste our scenic countryside for this nonsense? Bad idea from the start, and just another scam. Ran entirely by subsidies. https://cei.org/blog/wind-subsidies-...oduction-isnt/

[pcrussell50]

IMF Fossil Fuel Subsidies Data: 2023 Update

Summary
This paper provides a comprehensive global, regional, and country-level update of: (i) efficient fossil fuel prices to reflect supply and environmental costs; and (ii) subsidies implied by charging below efficient fuel prices. Globally, fossil fuel subsidies were $7 trillion in 2022 or 7.1 percent of GDP. Explicit subsidies (undercharging for supply costs) have more than doubled since 2020 but are still only 18 percent of the total subsidy, while nearly 60 percent is due to undercharging for global warming and local air pollution...

The word, "undercharging" is just fluffy words for, "not penalizing" enough. Which of course is not actually a subsidy. It's a made-up novel application of the word. There is no way you can know how much to "charge" for global warming because it is not universally bad for all life on the planet. To say nothing of the death and suffering there would be if 6 of the 7.5 billion people could no longer access energy, because you force them into unreliable, expensive, rich people's boutique energy like wind and solar, that they have no hope of affording or maintaining.

Also, Things that like it warm, like our species or any other tropical species like us, are helped not harmed by more warmth. The world remains a cold place for Homo sapiens. Man has not ventured far or long out of the tropics, and even then, only when we figured out how to burn things to stay warm, kill things for their skins to stay warm, plow fields to weave fabrics to stay warm, use fossil fuels to engineer fabrics to stay warm, split the atom to stay warm, and even still, Canada, with more land and resources than the USA only has 1/10th population. On a warming planet, cold-loving species will face habitat reduction, and warm-loving species (like our own) face habitat growth. The idea that any warming is universally bad for all customers, is so far beyond absurd as to defy credulity.

Note: Unrelated to the greenhouse effect, we haven't even talked about the greening that has occurred with more plant food (CO2) in the air. We're nowhere near the ideal amount that most plants like, (greenhouse growers still have to add CO2 to their greenhouses to improve their yields), but any small increases in free atmospheric CO2 we can get, puts us a little bit safer from the extinction event that will occur if CO2 gets too low and plants start to die. Hint: even since industrialization, CO2 levels are closer to where plants die from not enough of it, than to where plants like it best, which is about two to three times what it is now.

***

There was a real good guy on here named "offshore ginger" who built the blades and structures for the wind turbines. He said they were an environmental disaster since the blades and other parts break often and can't be easily recycled. He mentioned that there were stacks of thousands of carbon fiber and epoxy blades and other carbon parts that had no place to be disposed of. How nature friendly is it to kill millions of migratory birds, waste our scenic countryside for this nonsense? Bad idea from the start, and just another scam. Ran entirely by subsidies. https://cei.org/blog/wind-subsidies-...oduction-isnt/

Yep. You can't grind them up, because that is an environmental disaster. You can't burn them, because that is even more of an environmental disaster. All you can do is what we are doing now: rich people are exploiting poor people by paying them to take the "problem" off their hands, and the poor people deal with the environmental and health consequences. Same with used solar panels, which are laced with toxic metal. We pay poor people to take them off our hands, and the poor people can deal with environmental and health consequences.

-Peter

[Chaz]

Well Peter, I do have to say .. you knocked it out of the park with that one.

Yes it's a shame what the green-tards did to the blue states. The brain dead sheeple that voted for the idiots that though it was a good idea to put those windmills there and out in the Atlantic off the coast of New Joyzee, would probably do so again and again.

[Lake X Kid]

AI data centers run on GPU processing. Thus, the need for more electrical power to process data and to cool down and dissipate the processing heat.

~~~~~
⚡️ When it comes to electricity usage, GPUs (graphics processing units) are generally far more power-hungry than CPUs (central processing units)—especially in modern high-performance systems.
�� Power Consumption Comparison

Component	Typical Power Range	Peak Power (High-End Models)
CPU	65W – 125W	Up to ~250W
GPU	150W – 350W	Up to ~600W (e.g. RTX 5090)

�� Why the Difference?

• GPUs are designed for parallel processing and handle complex graphical tasks, which require more transistors and higher throughput—leading to greater power draw.
• CPUs focus on general-purpose computing and are more efficient per task, but they don’t scale power usage as dramatically.

�� Heat and Efficiency

• Both components generate heat due to electrical resistance in billions of transistors.
• High-end GPUs often require dedicated cooling systems and robust power supplies to handle spikes in consumption.
• CPUs also get hot, but their thermal design power (TDP) is usually lower and more stable.