The Issue with going all Electric

Not particularly correct. Less useful than that. Look up externalization.

 

You are gonna need to expound on your 1000mpg boat or people gonna think u r full of something.

 

It appears that electric vehicles are already happening and grid failures to this point have not been proven to come from EVs, at least for their numbers, at the present time. The EV movement appears to be accelerating, so the grid may be affected or not, -it is, what it is!

What can anyone as an individual or business do to protect themselves and others from grid issues? It might come to rationing by price, or by service? There are many third world countries that seem to survive with sporadic and unreliable Electric Service. The members of this forum have proven themselves in the past to be talented, ingenious, and wise! I for one, would like to read more about practical and realistic suggestions! Is it Time to buy a backup generator, and of what kind, or use a survival boat, dual citizenship, what else, haha?

 

In order to better think practical and realistic, I would like to first be sure of understanding what are we aiming at - many sorry if this is a trivial question, I am quick to understand, but one has to explain a lot -

Shall we try to imagine how to replace all "carboned" energy source by electricity, also try to get an idea of the grid size and topology ? If I take US for instance, is the actual grid really overloaded ? What happens when the weather temperature is very hot ? And when the weather temperature is low ? Do you have any usage restrictions sometimes ? And in Canada ? How does it go ?

I've found this site, trying to find numbers. Electricity Mix https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix#carbon-intensity-of-electricity

 

You can find answers to most of these questions in the three studies at the bottom of post #26 of this thread. Which you, to quote your post #32 "Ah ah ah !!! I know you Flotation. I've read all your links before giving my answer" allegedly read already.

 

Do you think the car with 27,000+ MPGe is fake?

In my case I can motor at 2 knots using 120 watts of power. 1 gallon of of diesel contains energy of 40.7kwh. 40.7/.12 = 339 hours at 2 knots, or 678 miles. My drive system is only about 50% efficient. Consider a more efficient setup or slightly slower speeds, and 1000 miles becomes possible. At 3 knots the energy per mile is twice what it is at 2 knots. At any faster speeds would not make any sense as this boat exceeds the wind speed while sailing it makes more sense to do that. As a side note, when the sun is out I can produce much more than 120 watts from solar panels.

Using an actual combustion engine, the efficiency is maybe 1/4th this if you are lucky and most of the energy is turned to heat. Anything below 80% thermal efficiency never should have left the laboratory. Heat engines could well have been deemed "too inefficient for practical use" and simply forgotten about. Imagine the world today without energy shortages or issues with emissions.

 

Great ! Many thanks Flotaison for this very fast answer. As you already know me, and if you have also seen the video in the post #12, you know for sure that I don't take anything that I have myself estimated, and that no one shall take any numbers given in any analysis, without reproducing the results on his own.

Here what I get if I google solution to decarbonization : 9 800 000 results (more or less. )... Why should I focus my attention on the solutions proposed by the study that you bring to front ? Have you got any interest ?


To be honest with you, I am also considering the problem from a geo-political point of view. Even in my country, the idea of allocating areas for solar panels is a great matter of discussion. So, I am very curious - skeptical- to know how more than one hundred countries would be able to accept the overall pack of solutions given in the study you propose, Flotation.

As a matter of fact, the war in Ukraine may give us a clue on, how far, countries would be able to work together to achieve a common goal. If I give you this quote, you may be able to agree that the solutions we seek are not only technical, but also political. And you know very well that politics is not about finding the best solution.

 

I think you are counting hydro power as renewable ?? There are so many problems with it, including increased evaporation. In the long term, hydro power should be done away with becase of so many negative impacts, similarly to fossil fuels.

An obvious fact is there is less water than there used to be. This is already a real issue, consider south china and other areas with droughts. See: Environmental impact of reservoirs - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_reservoirs#Greenhouse_gases

artificial reservoirs can ensure that hydro power has a much higher warming potential than solar, wind or nuclear, in some cases rivaling fossil fuels.

 

Unfortunately the problem is 100% political. Technical solutions to our problems exist and are known. Implementing them requires political will. Just like solving world hunger is 100% a political problem.

If anything Ukraine shows us how dangerous it would be to make countries dependent on nuclear energy if their stability cannot be guaranteed 100%, which is impossible.

Nuclear power plants in Ukraine are under threat because of direct damage and because of damage to the infrastructure needed to keep them safe. And potential terrorist groups are fighting in close proximity to nuclear material who's safekeeping cannot be guaranteed because of the war.
Chechen involvement in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chechen_involvement_in_the_2022_Russian_invasion_of_Ukraine

The fall of the soviet union also led to large quantities of nuclear material disappearing into unknown hands:

"There have been no confirmed reports of missing or stolen former-Soviet nuclear weapons, but there is ample evidence of a significant black market in nuclear materials. The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has reported more than a hundred nuclear smuggling incidents since 1993, eighteen of which involved highly enriched uranium, the key ingredient in an atomic bomb and the most dangerous product on the nuclear black market."

Loose Nukes https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/loose-nukes

 

The Stanford studies don't count on increasing the share of hydro power:
https://web.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/I/145Country/22-145Countries.pdf

 

The question of water repartition, abundance and temperature is indeed a very critical parameters. If i were to speak "mathematically", I would say that this parameter's influence is strongly "non linear", regarding to energy production and consumption. On the production's side, in France, we had very serious issues with some of his nuclear plants, due to the heat wave of this summer. The water temperature of the river were too high for the cooling to be optimum.
France tweaks rules to keep nuclear plants running during heatwave https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/frances-asn-nuclear-regulator-adapts-hot-water-discharge-rules-light-heatwave-2022-08-08/

On the other hand, on the consumption's side, the demand of air conditionning, in the same time, obliged our national authority for restrictions on the temperature to be set on the machines.
Heat wave: How to save energy when using air conditioners https://www.lemonde.fr/en/environment/article/2022/07/20/heat-wave-how-to-save-energy-when-using-air-conditioners_5990752_114.html

As a consequence, it appears that, minimizing CO2 footprint is more or less based on cutting the opportunities of consumptions, by regulations or price increases, which is what is awaited during this Winter, in France. Of course, the Ukrainian war is pointed as the main cause for this rise of prices, but I am not very confortable with the fact that this argument could be 100% responsible. Energy prices in Europe is indexed on the price of the gaz. Wouldn't be more realistic for each price to be rightfully calculated ? Should people ,living near power plants, pay less than those at the end of the grid ?

Our demand in energy is growing every year ( this link shows that the annual energy use double every 29years. https://www.researchgate.net/figure...-regression-line-given-by-ln-x_fig2_307655255), which put our power grid in distress, especially during very hot summers and very cold winters. It is thus clear that the actual grid couldn't afford our actual needs, (in France). How could it afford our future use, resulting from decarbonization + demand growths ? In France, without any local consensus on who is gonna "pay the bill" for the decarbonization (spatially speaking), we may be stuck at the introduction of the manual "How to reach decarbonization for our survival", being unable to reach the chapter I.

 

The main influence to energy price of the Ukrainian war is not about the threat on their nuclear installations. It's the war for Gaz control which is de-stabilizing the prizes, at first glanze.
The Ukraine War in data: 170 million cubic meters of Russian gas — gone https://www.grid.news/story/global/2022/09/08/the-ukraine-war-in-data-170-million-cubic-meters-of-russian-gas-gone/

 

If my previous post about the dangers of unsafe nuclear reactors in war zones and the warnings of the International Atomic Energy Agency about the spread of material needed to make nuclear bombs did not make it clear enough: my worries in this regard are not about high energy prices.


High energy prices can of course destabalize societies. The third Stanford study I posted explains how making use of renewable energy sources makes economic sense and, in the end, will reduce energy bills.

 

Modern grids make use of aluminum as their conductor instead of copper:
Aluminium-conductor steel-reinforced cable - Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium-conductor_steel-reinforced_cable

Aluminum ore (bauxite) is quite abundant. Freeing aluminum from its oxygen bonds in the ore requires large amounts of electrical power. In order to reduce grid loads building bauxite processing plants in the neighborhood of areas with periodic overproduction of wind or solar power makes for a logical choice.

As explained in post #26 already:

new generations of lithium batteries reaching the market at this moment have eliminated the need for cobalt:
Tesla is already using cobalt-free LFP batteries in half of its new cars produced https://electrek.co/2022/04/22/tesla-using-cobalt-free-lfp-batteries-in-half-new-cars-produced/

 

I think they should threaten to weld Nord closed.

The same person who uses a geopolitical threat of we are turning off your energy supply deserves to be told, we will never buy from you again.