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There are already MILLIONS of job in energy efficiency and renewables.
There are almost no jobs in coal. This was before Trump.
After Trump it will be the same.
Sure, some coal miner somewhere will keep his job. One. Or Two. Or two thousand. But this is not relevant to any degree to the MILLIONS who voted for him thinking that Appalachia will "come back".
The coal jobs are now few and mostly strip mining out west.
The real question behind all of this is what are we going to do about the opiate and welfare addicted masses in "God's Country. If you want just a taste of what is going on, try this article. Generations and generations of people who take every pill under the sun all day every day, paid for by you and I.
1. Wow - we should take away all these benefits and let them die, starve or survive...and give tax cuts to billionaires (this is Trumps idea).
2. Wow - I can't believe we live in a country where millions live like this. What can we do to improve our society, health care and education to avoid this or break the cycle?
(this is how liberals think).
So, that is a quick political test. If you pick #1 you are libertarian or republican. If you pick #2, you are a Democrat or Independent who votes mostly Democratic.
Well you know what time of day the sun is shining.... pretty easy to have a base load of natural gas/nuclear supplemented by solar and wind. Then you have to assume battery storage is a go- nowhere technology.
As you supplement with wind and solar you are idling fossil fuel generation, a very large part of the cost of what you pay for electric is capital investments. Since you can't eliminate those capital costs the cost of generating electric from those plants necessarily rises. If you build a power plant and only need it for one day of the year you still need to pay for the entire capital investment.
If you want an analogy suppose you have a requirement for a vehicle that can be driven 24 hours. This requirement dictates you buy a fossil fuel powered car. You can go out buy a battery operated car to use for 3 hours of that 24 hours but you just doubled your capital investment when the initial capital investment in the gasoline powered car can already meet your requirements.
As far as the battery storage goes it gets much more complicated than that. Let's suppose you have requirement to meet a peak demand of 1 GW. If you have 1 GW of solar capacity and have perfect conditions you might meet those demands for 8 hours. You still have 16 hours left, your capacity requirements just doubled or tripled and you need the means to store it
Here is plausible threshold you need to meet. It's 0 degrees out in the northeast, cloudy, no wind, utilities are hitting record demand at 7AM and it's going to be like that for the next two weeks.
The capacity and storage requirements balloon out of control.
Haha. PHP? preg_split? Seriously, you young whippersnappers don't know what programming is. About all you know how to do is pass arguments to functions already written for you. Back in the day....
Actually it's part of much larger function I originally stole off PHP's page but it looks nothing like the one I stole. Think it's up to about 100 lines now, might be 5 original ones. I was about to pull the trigger on it to change 45K records in a live database when I found the error.
As you supplement with wind and solar you are idling fossil fuel generation, a very large part of the cost of what you pay for electric is capital investments. Since you can't eliminate those capital costs the cost of generating electric from those plants necessarily rises. If you build a power plant and only need it for one day of the year you still need to pay for the entire capital investment.
If you want an analogy suppose you have a requirement for a vehicle that can be driven 24 hours. This requirement dictates you buy a fossil fuel powered car. You can go out buy a battery operated car to use for 3 hours of that 24 hours but you just doubled your capital investment when the initial capital investment in the gasoline powered car can already meet your requirements.
As far as the battery storage goes it gets much more complicated than that. Let's suppose you have requirement to meet a peak demand of 1 GW. If you have 1 GW of solar capacity and have perfect conditions you might meet those demands for 8 hours. You still have 16 hours left, your capacity requirements just doubled or tripled and you need the means to store it
Here is plausible threshold you need to meet. It's 0 degrees out in the northeast, cloudy, no wind, utilities are hitting record demand at 7AM and it's going to be like that for the next two weeks.
The capacity and storage requirements balloon out of control.
You just made the case. We will never not need fossil fuels, and the so-called "new technology" is largely impractical.
My former neighbor installed solar panels in his house, and bragged on FB that he generates more than they use; hence, he gets some money back from the electric company. When I asked him how much it cost him to buy and install the equipment (capital investment), it was an outrageous sum (I don't remember the figure he gave me), and he wouldn't get a return on his investment for many, many years (again, I don't remember what he told me). I laughed to myself.
The big lie we're told by people like Barack Obama and other Leftists is that fossil fuels are obsolete and we need to rely more on new technology ...but at what cost? Who's footing the bill? The consumer, of course!
Our country needs cheap energy. Coal, nuclear, gas, and hydro provide it. And it's plentiful. There really is no such thing as "renewable energy." It cannot provide our needs, and if it ever can, it's far, far in the future. And you'd have to be willing to live with the eyesore of windmills and solar farms and all the real estate they require.
As you supplement with wind and solar you are idling fossil fuel generation, a very large part of the cost of what you pay for electric is capital investments. Since you can't eliminate those capital costs the cost of generating electric from those plants necessarily rises. If you build a power plant and only need it for one day of the year you still need to pay for the entire capital investment.
If you want an analogy suppose you have a requirement for a vehicle that can be driven 24 hours. This requirement dictates you buy a fossil fuel powered car. You can go out buy a battery operated car to use for 3 hours of that 24 hours but you just doubled your capital investment when the initial capital investment in the gasoline powered car can already meet your requirements.
As far as the battery storage goes it gets much more complicated than that. Let's suppose you have requirement to meet a peak demand of 1 GW. If you have 1 GW of solar capacity and have perfect conditions you might meet those demands for 8 hours. You still have 16 hours left, your capacity requirements just doubled or tripled and you need the means to store it
Here is plausible threshold you need to meet. It's 0 degrees out in the northeast, cloudy, no wind, utilities are hitting record demand at 7AM and it's going to be like that for the next two weeks.
The capacity and storage requirements balloon out of control.
We already have that spare capacity waiting. lots of gas runs about 5% of the time
You just made the case. We will never not need fossil fuels, and the so-called "new technology" is largely impractical.
My former neighbor installed solar panels in his house, and bragged on FB that he generates more than they use; hence, he gets some money back from the electric company. When I asked him how much it cost him to buy and install the equipment (capital investment), it was an outrageous sum (I don't remember the figure he gave me), and he wouldn't get a return on his investment for many, many years (again, I don't remember what he told me). I laughed to myself.
The big lie we're told by people like Barack Obama and other Leftists is that fossil fuels are obsolete and we need to rely more on new technology ...but at what cost? Who's footing the bill? The consumer, of course!
Our country needs cheap energy. Coal, nuclear, gas, and hydro provide it. And it's plentiful. There really is no such thing as "renewable energy." It cannot provide our needs, and if it ever can, it's far, far in the future. And you'd have to be willing to live with the eyesore of windmills and solar farms and all the real estate they require.
Simple payback on my son's house in DC was 5 years.
If they are cheaper then why was the solar industry crying over the possibility of the tax credit not getting extended? Dire warnings about massive job losses from the industry, were they lying?
Even if the watt per watt cost is lower they still cannot replace coal, natural gas, hydro or nuclear. You can only supplement those sources of power, you cannot replace.
Very true. And there really is no need to supplement those sources. For what purpose? There is no gain. But there is a lot of pain!
Another job factor in addition to the diminishing demand for coal is the increased automation used to mine coal. Automation is replacing workers. It is more productive and free from most all safety concerns. It is a HUGE reason why there are far fewer coal jobs. Getting rid of regulations and environmental safeguards will not bring these jobs back.
The "diminishing demand for coal" was manufactured by regulation! Period.
Simple payback on my son's house in DC was 5 years.
On the backs of the taxpayer and the ratepayer.
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