houseofleft
@houseofleft@slrpnk.net
- Comment on UK homes install subsidised heat pumps at record level - BBC News 3 days ago:
That’s awesome! There’s a lot of work to do to make renewable heating more of an option though- even with the £7,500 grant, British Gas estimate most of their installations cost an extra £5,000 due mainly to plumbing and radiator reworks. That’s sadly a lot more than installing a new combi-boiler, so most households won’t touch it.
I don’t have any suggestions, but if the UK wants to make really strong progress, we need to tip the balance so that clean heating is a more economic choice than doubling down on gas.
- Comment on U.S. leads countries where golf courses occupy more land than solar, wind plants 1 week ago:
How meaningful is the golf vs renewables comparison? Wind and solar require different ammounts of land, especially factoring in offshore wind? Also, Sweden has one of the cleanest energy make ups, but a comparitively high amount of golf courses, so like, I dunno?
- Comment on China renewables capacity additions soared in 2023, growing more than four times faster than the G7 2 weeks ago:
Sharing this here as it’s exactly what you mention!
ourworldindata.org/…/carbon-intensity-electricity
CO2g per KWh is the standard metric for “how much a countries electricity pollutes”.
Tldr China’s is 580 and improving. USA is 370 and improving at a similar rate (this obviously might change under the current administration).
Others worth pointing too is Sweden (40gCO2) which is a good marker of what’s possible for a wealthy country and India (700gCO2) because as a country with a lot of economic development and recent historic poverty, it shows why China’s improvement is worth noting.
- Comment on ‘Net zero hero’ myth unfairly shifts burden of solving climate crisis on to individuals, study finds 1 month ago:
Agree a gazzillion percent!! On the plastic front, there’s some progress being made towards a UN plastics treaty which would legally bind countries to legal targets for plastic reduction. It’s not perfect at all, and it’s likely the US under Trump will ignore it, but would be a big win for plastic regulation (Green Peace and a bunch of other groups are campaining for its support- worth searching for local petitions if you’re interested)
- Comment on Norway on track to be first to go all-electric 1 month ago:
What are you thinking makes them hypocrites? Doesn’t seem like doing something bad for the planet, then improving things is hypocritcal unless they start claiming they’ve always been perfect. At any rate, veats doubling down on petroleum like the US are currently doing.
- Comment on Vegan drink Oatly can’t call itself ‘milk’, judges rule 2 months ago:
I find this whole “it’s not milk if it’s not dairy” argument really hard ti take in good faith.
I’m not an expert at all, but when I’ve heard people talk about these kind if decisions, it sounds like it’s normally meant to come down to consumer benefits.
Who’s gaining here (aside from dairy lobbies)? I don’t think there’s any reasonable argument that UK citizens are confused by the term “oat milk”, and buying it because they were tricked into thinking it was a dairy product.
- Comment on Solar panels between railway tracks? 4 months ago:
A lot of the comments here are, pretty fairly, sceptical if whether this is a viable idea.
My question is, what’s the advantage meant to be over just having an electrical railway and seperately some solar panels plugged into the grid? Especially since the article mentions the solar railway would be grid connected?
- Comment on Sweden switches on largest battery energy storage system in the Nordics - Energy Storage 4 months ago:
I don’t know specifics on this battery farm, but almost all are essentially fleets of shipping containers filled with smaller batteries, rather than some super-cool-mega-battery, so it’s probably a safe assumption that this is a landmark project in scale, rather than in technology specifics.
- Comment on Tripling renewables globally by 2030 is doable, says new IEA report 5 months ago:
Germany definitely has a tonne of renewables, but then is still like 25% coal which is why it has high energy emmisions. It has much cleaner energy than it did before adopting renewables though, so still seems like a reason to think renewables are a positive?
It’s 100% untrue that Germany’s recent pursuing of renewables is the reason it pollutes so much per KW.
Then France has a similar amount of renewables to the UK but with a much cleaner mix after that (basically more nuclear and less gas).
I’m wondering if I’ve misunderstood your initial point because I’m not seeing any reason to suggest increasing renewables doesn’t reduce emissions? Only that there’s more to CO2 per KW than just categorising stuff as “renewable” vs “non-renewable”, which I don’t think anyone is doubting?
Sorry to go so hard on this, but this stuff really matters. We don’t have a lot of time left to reduce the most extreme impacts of global warming, and nobody benefits from muddying the waters on the clear benefits of renewables.
- Comment on Tripling renewables globally by 2030 is doable, says new IEA report 5 months ago:
I agree with all of what you said, apart from “without storage renewables aren’t that useful”.
UK and USA are good comparatives here, where the USA has better nuclear provision, but on average very little renewables (approx 10%). The UK obviously burns more fossil fuels when renewables aren’t used, but in spite of this still generates less than 1/3 of the co2 per KW overall as the USA (120g vs 390g).
So storage would be drive that down much further, but even without it, more renewables equals less CO2 overall in pretty much every real world case.
Data sources in CO2 per KW: UK: grid.iamkate.com USA: www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=74&t=11
- Comment on Tripling renewables globally by 2030 is doable, says new IEA report 5 months ago:
I work in the UK energy sector, and that’s definitely not true! About 1/3 of our energy comes from wind which is somewhat but mostly not stored.
Fossil fuels end up doing the work of balancing the grid during times when wind and solar are low. That’s not ideal, but a world where fossil fuels are used to balance renewable provision is much better than a world where they’re the primary energy source.
We’re running out of time to prevent the worst effects of global warming, and any increase in renewables provides some mitigation to the impact. Very few, if any, countries are at the point where current battery tech should stop them increasing their renewables.
- Comment on Wind powers a record summer for renewable energy in Britain 5 months ago:
Yeah, but remember that data is live and it’s currently night time in the UK! (I think average solar is pretty liw in the UK though- something like 5%)
- Comment on Wind powers a record summer for renewable energy in Britain 5 months ago:
We need to do a lot more still, but the fact that the UKs energy generation is 20% of the CO2 emmisions per MW that it was just 10 years ago, despite a very conservative government, is pretty awesome.
(20% figure from this page which has sone cool data and visualisations on it:grid.iamkate.com data is all sourced from the UK’s National Energy Operator)
- Comment on Elements of Renewable Energy 5 months ago:
Well yes, but how is that any different from putting batteries in your wind farm?
- Comment on Elements of Renewable Energy 5 months ago:
This is a cool diagram, but I think it makes it look like you can’t combine stuff. Obviously solar and wind in a lot of cases just plugged straight into batteries for storage.
On the flippy floppy, hydropower can do both, but in completely different ways. If you build a dam, you can’t generate electricity, and if you build a turbine, you can’t store it.
I don’t know what my point overall is. I guess just that energy is complicated, and there probably isn’t a “one size fits all” fix.