All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

[Pittsburgh Pete]

"Pansy butt........?"

 

[Carnivore]

California is hurting for water!! What? Who really needs pecans in the diet.

http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities...tions/documents/HowMuchWaterDoPecansNeed1.pdf

 

[Carnivore]

California is hurting for water!! What? Who really needs pecans in the diet.

http://www.caes.uga.edu/commodities...tions/documents/HowMuchWaterDoPecansNeed1.pdf

"Pansy butt........?"

Its there to run the AC when the car sits in your driveway or anywhere out side. Does it run the system when you drive it? I honestly don't know.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

The research, peer-reviewed by the University of Reading’s Professor Rowan Sutton

That's like having your mother peer review your work. Meaningless. The El Nino may be stronger or weaker than predicted and is always associated with higher temperatures in certain areas. They predicted a much stronger El Nino for several years in a row until this year actually developed a somewhat stronger one so far.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Ever heard of storage batteries?! That concept of cleaner air is a conundrum--who wants to breathe what you can see?

Yes, I have heard of storage batteries. Unfortunately, that will not be a solution for excess power generation for the foreseeable future. But of course, you being the science genius that you are, you believe battery storage is a commercial reality today.

NICE, France, July 5 (Reuters) - A major pilot project by Europe's largest power network operator to integrate power from rooftop solar panels into the grid has shown that battery storage of renewable energy is not yet economically viable in Europe.

The conclusion is a sobering one for proponents of sun and wind energy because as more of it comes on tap, better storage will be needed to keep the power produced when it is sunny and windy so it can be used at other times.

The 30 million euro "Nice Grid" pilot is one of the biggest in a European Union-backed "Grid4EU" scheme in which France's EDF, Italy's Enel, Spain's Iberdrola Czech Republic's CEZ, Sweden's Vattenfall and Germany's RWE are testing the power grids of tomorrow.

In the Mediterranean village of Carros on the outskirts of Nice, EDF's power grid unit ERDF has connected compact batteries to solar panels on rooftops and utility-size batteries to its local power distribution network.

The technology works perfectly but the pilot has shown it is still too expensive for wider rollout.

"The economic model of the batteries is not mature yet," Philippe Monloubou, chief executive of French grid operator ERDF utility told Reuters.

A quarter of Europe's power already comes from renewables. This may rise to 50 percent by 2030. But the intermittent nature of solar and wind power requires flexible grids, the ability to respond to the ups and downs of demand and, crucially, cheaper power storage.

French company Saft, which sold the batteries for the Nice pilot, has already installed 80 MW of battery storage around the world, mainly in remote areas in Canada, South America and Africa, or on islands where they compete with expensive diesel generators as a back-up source of power.

But in Europe, they come up against cheaper back-up power from gas-fired power plants and large, efficient grids.

In Carros, which has total solar capacity of 2.5 megawatt/hour, ERDF has connected 20 lithium-ion batteries to rooftop solar panels. Residents themselves have no control over the 4 KWh batteries - which are similar to Tesla's 7 KWh Powerwall batteries - which are run by ERDF.

ERDF has also hooked up two 100 KWh batteries to soak up solar power of several dozen residences, two 600 KWh batteries linked to the low-voltage grid and one linked to the high-voltage grid, for a total cost of under 2 million euros.

But the cost of batteries is the project's Achilles Heel.

From the Nice pilot, ERDF has learned that battery storage in Europe costs 500 to 1,000 euros per kilowatt/hour (KWh), with an extra 30 percent for installation and the inverters that turn direct current solar power into the alternate current used on the grid, an ERDF official said.

At that level, battery storage would already be economically viable in certain parts of Germany and Denmark, where renewable energy use is most advanced and where retail power rates, at around 30 eurocents per kilowatt/hour (KWh), are among the highest in Europe, according to Eurostat data.

But that is not the case for France, where residential power rates are around 17 cents per KWh, and most of Europe, where power averages about 21 cents.

Some analysts expect the tipping point for batteries in Europe could come around 2020. The ERDF official said it is hard to forecast by how much more the cost of batteries would have to fall to become viable for grid storage.

Compared to the cost of solar panels, the cost of batteries has been slow to fall, but as renewables become a greater part of Europe's energy mix, the need for technologies to overcome the intermittency problem will also increase, which is why Saft has set up a division for utility-scale power storage.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/07/05/utilities-grids-france-idUSL8N0ZH36320150705

San Diego's peak electricity tier cost is $0.40 per kilowatt-hour now and rising. The only way solar battery storage makes economical sense is to drive the price of electricity even higher. Gee, there are negative consequences that comes with that. As more solar power is added, the grid becomes less reliable and the electricity cost is driven higher.

 

[Terrel L. Shields]

Burning fossil fuels places thousands of gallons of water in the air...

You can live off the grid. I was born in a house without electricity. So we slept outdoors in the summer and cut fire wood every weekend from October until March. Lowered a long narrow bucket on rope down the well and drew about 3 gallons at a time. Fun about January in a snow storm. We milked a cow by hand regardless the weather. And to cool a watermelon, we had a wooden barrel buried half way in the ground and filled with water. You dunked them there when the 10 gallon milk can wasn't taking that spot.

I woke many a morning with the window frosted over on the inside 2' from my head. And made the trip to the outhouse come rain, snow, or whatever. You can do that. If you think it is fun, try it for a few weeks - say 2 weeks in late July and 2 weeks in mid- January.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Burning fossil fuels places thousands of gallons of water in the air...

You can live off the grid. I was born in a house without electricity. So we slept outdoors in the summer and cut fire wood every weekend from October until March. Lowered a long narrow bucket on rope down the well and drew about 3 gallons at a time. Fun about January in a snow storm. We milked a cow by hand regardless the weather. And to cool a watermelon, we had a wooden barrel buried half way in the ground and filled with water. You dunked them there when the 10 gallon milk can wasn't taking that spot.

I woke many a morning with the window frosted over on the inside 2' from my head. And made the trip to the outhouse come rain, snow, or whatever. You can do that. If you think it is fun, try it for a few weeks - say 2 weeks in late July and 2 weeks in mid- January.

Those days are coming back. On Sunday, power outage at 1:30 PM at 92 F with 65% RH. Lasted for an hour. SDG&E said excessive power demand was the cause. Shutting down areas to protect the grid is the common way of dealing with too much demand and not enough supply.

 

[Meandering]

SDG&E?
Where was all the solar power produced by homeowners?

While you can turn back the standard of living clock 100 years, there are laws that prevent that in many places.

Try and build and use a working outhouse in suburbia these days.

Try and BUY a manual water pump for your well

We have old, old houses here, were the cattle were kept in the lower level, the upper (living level) had plank floors with spaces between which let the animal's body heat rise to help warm the house. Nobody lives in them, and the ones I know about are either in someone's back yard, or in a "living museum" tourist attraction.

People survived thousands of years without electricity. Doesn't mean many will survive going back to living that way. When city folks realize they need a fireplace to cook dinner and the trees are being felled by the thousands, it's going to be really ugly, like a zombie movie.


.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Detroit is future for California

Among all the evidence that Detroit continues to suffer from both the effects of a smaller car industry and the Great Recession, the median home price in the city is $35,000. On balance, prices have fallen recently, while throughout much of the United States home prices are rising.

According to real estate website Trulia:

The median sales price for homes in Detroit MI for Jun 15 to Sep 15 was $35,000. This represents a decline of 7.9%, or $3,000, compared to the prior quarter and a decrease of 0.7% compared to the prior year. Sales prices have appreciated 9.9% over the last 5 years in Detroit. The average listing price for Detroit homes for sale on Trulia was $33,527 for the week ending Sep 09, which represents an increase of 0.8%, or $270, compared to the prior week and a decline of 1.3%, or $434, compared to the week ending Aug 19. Average price per square foot for Detroit MI was $29, a decrease of 9.4% compared to the same period last year.

The primary reason for the lack of improvement is likely both the drop in population and demographics. The city’s population is more than half below its peak of over 1.5 million in 1960. And most of the people who could afford to leave Detroit have, leaving a poor population, which keeps tax yields for the city low, which means city services cannot rebound.

According to data from The American Community Survey, the median household income in Detroit is about half the national average of just over $50,000. The poverty rate is about three times higher. The city is in the midst of bulldozing thousands of houses. An intended symbol of the progress in rebuilding is that many of the broken or burned out street lights have or are being replaced. However, Detroit is still “under-policed” and crime remarkably high.

The life blood of the city was slowly sucked out, beginning as the U.S. car business began to lose market share to the Japanese in the 1970s. As that trend accelerated, car companies moved factories outside the city or closed them. Car quality perception and union costs made matters worse.

The city does still have a program to sell blighted homes for $1,000 from the Building Detroit website to people who pledge to refurbish them. But only a few such houses are being sold each day, and the program likely does little to help boost the median home price across the city.

Read more: Detroit Home Price Average Lingers Below $40,000 - 24/7 Wall St. http://247wallst.com/housing/2015/09/22/detroit-home-price-average-lingers-below-0000/#ixzz3mU6N24nh

California has been built on the quality of life and the high tech industry. Just like Detroit with the auto industry, high tech has been moving out of California or not starting up in California.

As the cost of energy increasing with mandated regulations, there comes a point where half the population can't afford to live there and eventually moves out.

In 2000, Intel Corp sold off its land in San Diego bought for expansion of chip making and built that plant in Arizona because of the rolling blackouts here back then. Intel has no manufacturing in California.

List of Intel manufacturing sites

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_manufacturing_sites

 

[Meandering]

But Hollywood is still there.

The sun will still shine.

The ocean will still have waves.

Rich people will still want to be there.

Detroit?

Not so.