Are you tired of paying too little for clean-burning energy that reduces carbon emissions? Then has Berkeley got a deal for you!
On Tuesday, the City Council approved a new ordinance forbidding any new low-rise residences from using natural gas: It's all-electric or nothin', baby. Councilwoman Kate Harrison, who sponsored the measure, told the Chronicle that "It’s an enormous issue" and "When we think about pollution and climate-change issues, we tend to think about factories and cars, but all buildings are producing greenhouse gas."
And more than a few local politicians, too.Discerning readers already were aware that gas heat is much more efficient than electric heat, but California now imports 33% of its electricity, so there's less need to think about what has to be burned (Nevada coal) or killed (Oregon salmon) to produce it out there in non-Cali-land.
Decades ago during the first PG&E bankruptcy, you may recall some fantastic spikes in California power prices and widespread brownouts. The spikes were widely attributed to shady Enron behavior but actually resulted, I believe, from California's insistence on squeezing down its paltry collection of interstate transmission corridors, while undermining domestic power production, until it was practically begging for a supply-demand crisis. The California PUC helped things along by refusing PG&E's increasingly urgent requests to be allowed to buy long-term price-hedging contracts to smooth over the confidently predicted price spikes. That would be unfair to consumers, if power prices declined, as the PUC apparently expected in the brave new world.
As you might imagine, California has not in the interim been taken over by bureaucrats with a firmer grasp of market principles. Time to tee the system up for a bigger and better replay!
5 comments:
I swear, I honestly don't think these people understand where electricity comes from. "From a wire, duh! No emissions!" And the sheer fearmongering they employ to keep new power plants from being developed clearly indicates that they think it just magically appears in their power grids.
My wife was an Environmental Engineer who worked out of the former Savannah River Site (which could stand as a monument to how not to handle nuclear waste, given how it was run in the mid-Twentieth Century), and one of her biggest pet peeves is the utter rejection of nuclear power by the environmental lobbies. Because she understands that it is the environmentally cleanest, safest and cheapest way to produce electrical power we have. She's not against wind, hydroelectric, or solar power. She just understands that watt for watt, nuclear is the only power source we currently have that can meet our energy needs (unless you really want to ramp up coal burning).
But these lobbies and politicians seem more determined that it is better for people to live without power until the day finally arrives where solar, wind, etc can meet all our energy needs than to keep up with current demand. And they clearly don't understand that electricity is THE largest contributor to human prosperity in history. And it can clearly be seen by comparing GDP to access to electricity in countries around the world. If you decrease access to electricity, you decrease economic stability.
Electricity comes from the same place as food and new drugs. It would all be free if Big Farm and Big Pharma weren't withholding it. The Sun sends down free power! Only the Man stands in the way of our using it.
Nukes are bad, of course, though the French have been recycling their used nuclear fuel for 30 years safely and produce almost 80% of their power via nukes, with enviable effects on air quality (a real concern) and carbon emissions (a fake one). France exports power in all but the most unusual weather cycles. Obviously activists remain hard at work undermining France's nuclear program, because green. Here in the U.S., we must never recycle nuclear fuel, for fear of eliminating the argument that nuclear wastes can't be safely disposed of. Besides, there could be earthquakes, and we're not smart enough to design adequate backup cooling power systems.
I agree with all you've both said. A number of my younger friends are really excited about electric vehicles because they're 'clean.' Well, they're cleaner if and only iff the electricity is generated in a cleaner way. Even then, much (most, if I understand correctly) of the emissions of a vehicle isn't from the tailpipe anyway. It's from the heated lubricants, fluids, and the slight but constant wearing on the tires. That stuff is pretty much the same whatever kind of vehicle you drive.
That said, electrification does have the potential to produce cleaner cities -- if it is coupled with nuclear power and hydroelectrics where available. Some of the advances in the latter look interesting to me. The ocean's tidal structure is a largely untapped source of energy, if we could just figure out how to do it; and while previous generations of hydroelectricity required a substantial fall to generate the power to turn turbines, there are some current projects that can do it with much less substantial kinetic energy, meaning that many ordinary rivers and creeks could produce enough power for the immediate locality at least. Most cities are close to rivers or oceans, so there might eventually be a lot that can be done there.
I know a university that bragged about its Green wonderfulness because it replaced it coal-burning boiler with an electrode boiler, powered by electricity from the grid.
Most of the electricity in the state is generated by coal, and probably the vast majority of the incremental load. So how, instead of burning coal for heat directly, they are burning coal which gets converted into electricity at maybe 40-50% efficiency, with another 10% or so lost in transmission, and then using that electricity to convert into heat.
Electric cars have been promoted for years, (notably by Amory Lovins) as a solution to power issue -- but about half the discussion gets overlooked.
ANY electric grid has to match supply and demand instant-by-instant. The demand goes up during the day and down at night. The infrastructure to supply that need is sized to the daylight demand. At present, there is "excess" capacity (from coal, gas, oil, and nuclear generators) at night.
There is no effective way to store the excess. Presumably, the typical private car is driven during the day and parked at night. SO, the solution proposes goes, use the "excess" electricity produced at night, when all other demand is low, to tank up the cars. Store power in millions of little batteries instead of one big battery. Great idea, right?
Well, except if the government REQUIRES solar and wind generators. Which don't produce much at night. (Even wind drops off in the dark.) So the cars are "spending" power during the day when they AREN'T connected to the grid, and tanking up overnight from some power source OTHER than green. Amd the more electric cars, the worse the problem gets.
Solar generators arguably could be a good idea. Electric cars may be a good idea. The combination is a bad idea. And a government authority that can't recognize the mis-match should not be re-elected or re-appointed to office.
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