Spend a day and notice everything that you touch/do that depends on electricity "just being there." Imagine how different your life would be if your electricity was sporadic, or not there. My Mom is old enough, and from a rural area, to remember when electricity arrived -- fascinating stories. Since you're staying away from policy, I won't go any farther than that. It's a really interesting experiment.
Anyone (who's sane, at least) says, "Of course policies, including no action at all, can fail. That's why we instrument them, and re-examine them from time to time." That may be biased. Every permanent non-partisan staffer I've known says that; politicians and their partisan staff, not so much.
All the permanent non-partisan staffers I've known are also big believers in the KISS principle.
Salem's Lot is the sort of thing I'm looking for. I first read it in my early 20s, finishing up in bed around 1:00 AM. Faced with the choice of (a) getting up to turn out the lights and having to walk back in the dark, or (b) pulling the covers over my head and sleeping with the lights on, I opted for (b). Wimp.
Off on a tangent, X degrees of separation from famous people. My epee coach fenced sometimes with the man who was the fencing stunt double for Errol Flynn.
These are nice. One of these days I should take a shot at Cain's Laws™, which have been accumulating for a few decades now. They have a much different flavor than yours.
Tangential, but I admit to a personal curiosity about how this Court would rule if the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, asserting perpetual federal authority over lands held by the feds at that point in time, which had radically different impacts on different states, were challenged. Not taking a position, just curious.
I seem to recall Illinois having problems in recent years. Not with the amount of water per se, but that it's too warm to allow them to run the plants at full output. In some cases for thermal pollution reasons, in others that the intake is too warm and the condenser capacity is reduced.
Oh, and Connecticut had a problem when Long Island Sound got too warm.
Short version -- if the Western Interconnect is going the renewable route (see another comment here somewhere), then they need three things: (1) a region-wide transmission system to shunt large amounts of power about; (2) freedom from federal rules about how dispatching is supposed to work; and (3) storage. The obvious answer for storage in the West, where there are lots of narrow deep canyons, would seem to be pumped hydro. It's proven and it's scalable -- there are at least semi-serious thoughts about making Norway the green battery for Europe.
How long Diablo Canyon stays in service probably depends on whose cost estimates are correct for the changes necessary to meet the new thermal discharge standards. If Bechtel's $6.5-11.5B is right, no way. If Tetra Tech's $1.5-4.5B, then maybe it's okay. There's also the geology problem, the nominal reason that PG&E asked the NRC to put the license renewal process on hold.
If you ask me to bet, I'd bet that PG&E eventually (next two years) announces the plants will be retired in 2024. I think they'll decide that they can sign contracts for equivalent generating capacity outside of the state, with the necessary transmission capacity, for less than what the Diablo Canyon retrofits are going to cost.
IIRC, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama -- all part of the Eastern Interconnect -- are squabbling over the water necessary to keep some of their thermal power plants online in the summer.
The trash burners would be more popular in the US if we did district heating and cooling on the scale that Europe and Japan do. The trash burners aren't very efficient (in the thermal sense), so even with a negative cost for the fuel they aren't competitive with a state-of-the-art coal burner or combined-cycle NG plant. If you've got an opportunity to use the "waste" heat from power generation to produce low-temp steam to heat nearby buildings, the economics look a whole lot better. The Hennepin facility in Minneapolis is a case in point. Sited on cheap land (former industrial zone), the waste heat is used for (among other things) radiant heaters and early-season soil heating at Target Field.
I make the argument that the states of the Western Interconnect are in the process of deciding (intentionally or not) to bet the ranch on renewables. There are a number of nuts-and-bolts studies suggesting this is possible, although not cheap. The same is not true for the Eastern Interconnect -- different resources, different distribution of load locations, different problem scale.
I thought the Salton Sea was already considered doomed to dry up over the next couple of decades as more Colorado River water goes to San Diego and less to the Imperial Valley.
A huge difference between western urban areas [1] compared to the areas farther east is the "structure" of the suburbs. To the east, the suburbs generally consist of a bazillion small towns. To the west, far fewer but much larger towns/cities. Abbott makes a big deal about this in The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the American West, asserting that it results in a very different political dynamic. Most of the western suburbs got "big" in the last 50-60 years -- when the "campus" structure for development was dominant, rather than "downtown". Aurora is Denver's largest suburb at 350K. But just recently the mayor there said that when the next light rail line opens next year, it will finally be possible for the city to start creating an actual "downtown" core.
Waste disposal, by and large, is not a technical issue but a political issue.
Yep. And the anti-nuke people won 30 years ago. No reprocessing. Geologic disposal considered so toxic that when the list of possible sites was reduced to just Yucca Mountain, the chair of the Congressional committee that did the deed told reporters publicly "We screwed Nevada." TTBOMK, none of DOE's original ~30 candidate sites was eliminated based on science/engineering -- they were all removed by Congress, usually as part of buying someone's support for a bill on an unrelated topic.
One of the points I think the article gets wrong -- or at least is unclear about -- is that the alternative to Diablo Canyon is unlikely to be built in California at all. The model is much more likely to be the Intermountain Power Plant outside Delta, Utah. That 1.9 GW coal-fired plant is largely owned by cities in Southern California, operated by LADWP, and 75% of its output goes straight to the LA area by HVDC. LA is, IIRC, footing the bill to convert the plant to natural gas. Phil Anschutz is leading an effort to build a Wyoming wind farm complex that may eventually total 3.0 GW [1] and the HVDC transmission line to deliver the power to the center of the San Diego/Las Vegas/Phoenix triangle. A company whose name escapes me just now spent some serious money looking for a site where they could build a new nuke plant to deliver power to California. They wanted to use evaporative cooling and the closest place they could find water that they could get the rights to was in eastern Utah. That plan is on indefinite hold pending the availability of enough HVDC capacity to deliver the power.
One of the long-recognized keys to making commercial-scale renewable power work is geographic diversity. That takes a serious long-distance transmission network. I think there's a significant opportunity over the next 25 years for California to become the hub for such a network in the Western Interconnect. This is related to R2; negative power prices are generally a symptom of too little transmission capacity.
[1] The usual knock on wind power is the amount of time that it's not generating because the wind isn't blowing. Anschutz's complex will sit in the outflow from the South Pass break in the Rockies. It's a freak of geography, and instead of the usual 25-30% availability for onshore wind, runs a bit over 60%.
Have I said recently that one of the things I like about this site is that the discussion goes off in radical directions that have nothing to do with the OP, but are still interesting?
Assume no new physics, so 0.1c or so top-end velocity. If you're willing to wait that long for the probe to get wherever it's going, why not just wait a bit longer for it (or a copy, if you like the self-replicating, spreading variety) to return to the home system?
Disclosing my age and (lack of, perhaps) taste, the opening three tracks from Elton John's Madman Across the Water: Tiny Dancer, Levon, and Razor Face.
Forest Service, though. A few years back Rep. Ryan had a small revolt on his hands when the Budget Committee proposed nearly wiping out the FS fire-fighting budget. The Republicans from the western states with huge federal FS holdings marched in and said (in no uncertain terms, from what I read) that they wouldn't vote for a budget that did that. At the time, the Budget Committee included either one or zero Republicans from western states. Interestingly, one of the Freedom Caucus's demands is greater geographical representation on the big, powerful committees.
Shortly after that episode, the Western Governors Association put a more serious discussion of a state-funded regional tanker fleet on its agenda, and Colorado's state government fairly abruptly started setting aside money for a small Colorado fleet. California has had its own modest fleet for years.
Exactly, with respect to Singapore. In the US and Western Europe, the governments collect taxes and pay benefits (medical care, housing support, public pension). In Singapore, the government mandates setting aside money for those things in "savings accounts", the contents of which can only be spent on the corresponding benefit (medical care, housing, retirement). The government guarantees a minimum return on the savings. The government guarantees floors under the outcomes, making up the difference when the account is insufficient.
It's an accounting fiction. In addition to taxes, Singaporeans may have 30% or so of their paycheck withheld in the form of government-mandated savings for medical care, pension, and housing.
Along the lines of this (as a quick-and-dirty first cut)? BEA data for state GDP in the financial services sector (finance, banking, insurance, real estate, etc) for the 48 contiguous states; converted to a per-capita figure as being more meaningful. The hard part's not generating the cartogram; the hard part is pulling together a reasonable data set. That's one of the reasons cartograms tend to come from academic sources -- they have minions graduate students to do the ugly, tedious stuff.
This is a nice example for illustrating one of the shortcomings of the technique. We know that the NYC portion of New York ought to be a huge blob instead of being squeezed to almost invisibility between Connecticut and New Jersey, and the rest of New York shrink correspondingly. County-level data would show a clearer picture, but is much harder to come by. Similar thing probably happens to NH, VT, and PA.
Other people have occasionally put up cartograms in posts or comments. So far as I know, I'm the only one here who builds his own. I've been toying with the idea of setting up a place where people can e-mail a data set and get back a cartogram.
On “Two-Thirds of Idiocy Sabbatical Completed”
Spend a day and notice everything that you touch/do that depends on electricity "just being there." Imagine how different your life would be if your electricity was sporadic, or not there. My Mom is old enough, and from a rural area, to remember when electricity arrived -- fascinating stories. Since you're staying away from policy, I won't go any farther than that. It's a really interesting experiment.
On “The Toderonemy, Vol. I”
Anyone (who's sane, at least) says, "Of course policies, including no action at all, can fail. That's why we instrument them, and re-examine them from time to time." That may be biased. Every permanent non-partisan staffer I've known says that; politicians and their partisan staff, not so much.
All the permanent non-partisan staffers I've known are also big believers in the KISS principle.
On “Sunday!”
Salem's Lot is the sort of thing I'm looking for. I first read it in my early 20s, finishing up in bed around 1:00 AM. Faced with the choice of (a) getting up to turn out the lights and having to walk back in the dark, or (b) pulling the covers over my head and sleeping with the lights on, I opted for (b). Wimp.
"
Finished reading Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian. I seem to be starting some sort of vampire kick. Do people have suggestions?
On “The Toderonemy, Vol. I”
Off on a tangent, X degrees of separation from famous people. My epee coach fenced sometimes with the man who was the fencing stunt double for Errol Flynn.
"
These are nice. One of these days I should take a shot at Cain's Laws™, which have been accumulating for a few decades now. They have a much different flavor than yours.
On “Wine and Punishment”
Tangential, but I admit to a personal curiosity about how this Court would rule if the 1976 Federal Land Policy and Management Act, asserting perpetual federal authority over lands held by the feds at that point in time, which had radically different impacts on different states, were challenged. Not taking a position, just curious.
On “Linky Friday #135: Katy & Lamar”
I seem to recall Illinois having problems in recent years. Not with the amount of water per se, but that it's too warm to allow them to run the plants at full output. In some cases for thermal pollution reasons, in others that the intake is too warm and the condenser capacity is reduced.
Oh, and Connecticut had a problem when Long Island Sound got too warm.
"
Short version -- if the Western Interconnect is going the renewable route (see another comment here somewhere), then they need three things: (1) a region-wide transmission system to shunt large amounts of power about; (2) freedom from federal rules about how dispatching is supposed to work; and (3) storage. The obvious answer for storage in the West, where there are lots of narrow deep canyons, would seem to be pumped hydro. It's proven and it's scalable -- there are at least semi-serious thoughts about making Norway the green battery for Europe.
"
How long Diablo Canyon stays in service probably depends on whose cost estimates are correct for the changes necessary to meet the new thermal discharge standards. If Bechtel's $6.5-11.5B is right, no way. If Tetra Tech's $1.5-4.5B, then maybe it's okay. There's also the geology problem, the nominal reason that PG&E asked the NRC to put the license renewal process on hold.
If you ask me to bet, I'd bet that PG&E eventually (next two years) announces the plants will be retired in 2024. I think they'll decide that they can sign contracts for equivalent generating capacity outside of the state, with the necessary transmission capacity, for less than what the Diablo Canyon retrofits are going to cost.
"
IIRC, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, and Alabama -- all part of the Eastern Interconnect -- are squabbling over the water necessary to keep some of their thermal power plants online in the summer.
"
The trash burners would be more popular in the US if we did district heating and cooling on the scale that Europe and Japan do. The trash burners aren't very efficient (in the thermal sense), so even with a negative cost for the fuel they aren't competitive with a state-of-the-art coal burner or combined-cycle NG plant. If you've got an opportunity to use the "waste" heat from power generation to produce low-temp steam to heat nearby buildings, the economics look a whole lot better. The Hennepin facility in Minneapolis is a case in point. Sited on cheap land (former industrial zone), the waste heat is used for (among other things) radiant heaters and early-season soil heating at Target Field.
"
I make the argument that the states of the Western Interconnect are in the process of deciding (intentionally or not) to bet the ranch on renewables. There are a number of nuts-and-bolts studies suggesting this is possible, although not cheap. The same is not true for the Eastern Interconnect -- different resources, different distribution of load locations, different problem scale.
"
I thought the Salton Sea was already considered doomed to dry up over the next couple of decades as more Colorado River water goes to San Diego and less to the Imperial Valley.
On “An Infrastructure Divide”
A huge difference between western urban areas [1] compared to the areas farther east is the "structure" of the suburbs. To the east, the suburbs generally consist of a bazillion small towns. To the west, far fewer but much larger towns/cities. Abbott makes a big deal about this in The Metropolitan Frontier: Cities in the American West, asserting that it results in a very different political dynamic. Most of the western suburbs got "big" in the last 50-60 years -- when the "campus" structure for development was dominant, rather than "downtown". Aurora is Denver's largest suburb at 350K. But just recently the mayor there said that when the next light rail line opens next year, it will finally be possible for the city to start creating an actual "downtown" core.
[1] Broadly, cities from Denver west.
On “Linky Friday #135: Katy & Lamar”
Waste disposal, by and large, is not a technical issue but a political issue.
Yep. And the anti-nuke people won 30 years ago. No reprocessing. Geologic disposal considered so toxic that when the list of possible sites was reduced to just Yucca Mountain, the chair of the Congressional committee that did the deed told reporters publicly "We screwed Nevada." TTBOMK, none of DOE's original ~30 candidate sites was eliminated based on science/engineering -- they were all removed by Congress, usually as part of buying someone's support for a bill on an unrelated topic.
"
One of the points I think the article gets wrong -- or at least is unclear about -- is that the alternative to Diablo Canyon is unlikely to be built in California at all. The model is much more likely to be the Intermountain Power Plant outside Delta, Utah. That 1.9 GW coal-fired plant is largely owned by cities in Southern California, operated by LADWP, and 75% of its output goes straight to the LA area by HVDC. LA is, IIRC, footing the bill to convert the plant to natural gas. Phil Anschutz is leading an effort to build a Wyoming wind farm complex that may eventually total 3.0 GW [1] and the HVDC transmission line to deliver the power to the center of the San Diego/Las Vegas/Phoenix triangle. A company whose name escapes me just now spent some serious money looking for a site where they could build a new nuke plant to deliver power to California. They wanted to use evaporative cooling and the closest place they could find water that they could get the rights to was in eastern Utah. That plan is on indefinite hold pending the availability of enough HVDC capacity to deliver the power.
One of the long-recognized keys to making commercial-scale renewable power work is geographic diversity. That takes a serious long-distance transmission network. I think there's a significant opportunity over the next 25 years for California to become the hub for such a network in the Western Interconnect. This is related to R2; negative power prices are generally a symptom of too little transmission capacity.
[1] The usual knock on wind power is the amount of time that it's not generating because the wind isn't blowing. Anschutz's complex will sit in the outflow from the South Pass break in the Rockies. It's a freak of geography, and instead of the usual 25-30% availability for onshore wind, runs a bit over 60%.
On “An Infrastructure Divide”
Have I said recently that one of the things I like about this site is that the discussion goes off in radical directions that have nothing to do with the OP, but are still interesting?
On “UFOs: The Atlantis Hypothetical”
Assume no new physics, so 0.1c or so top-end velocity. If you're willing to wait that long for the probe to get wherever it's going, why not just wait a bit longer for it (or a copy, if you like the self-replicating, spreading variety) to return to the home system?
On “3elieve”
Disclosing my age and (lack of, perhaps) taste, the opening three tracks from Elton John's Madman Across the Water: Tiny Dancer, Levon, and Razor Face.
On “Demo Thread”
National Parks Service?
Forest Service, though. A few years back Rep. Ryan had a small revolt on his hands when the Budget Committee proposed nearly wiping out the FS fire-fighting budget. The Republicans from the western states with huge federal FS holdings marched in and said (in no uncertain terms, from what I read) that they wouldn't vote for a budget that did that. At the time, the Budget Committee included either one or zero Republicans from western states. Interestingly, one of the Freedom Caucus's demands is greater geographical representation on the big, powerful committees.
Shortly after that episode, the Western Governors Association put a more serious discussion of a state-funded regional tanker fleet on its agenda, and Colorado's state government fairly abruptly started setting aside money for a small Colorado fleet. California has had its own modest fleet for years.
"
Exactly, with respect to Singapore. In the US and Western Europe, the governments collect taxes and pay benefits (medical care, housing support, public pension). In Singapore, the government mandates setting aside money for those things in "savings accounts", the contents of which can only be spent on the corresponding benefit (medical care, housing, retirement). The government guarantees a minimum return on the savings. The government guarantees floors under the outcomes, making up the difference when the account is insufficient.
It's an accounting fiction. In addition to taxes, Singaporeans may have 30% or so of their paycheck withheld in the form of government-mandated savings for medical care, pension, and housing.
"
Along the lines of this (as a quick-and-dirty first cut)? BEA data for state GDP in the financial services sector (finance, banking, insurance, real estate, etc) for the 48 contiguous states; converted to a per-capita figure as being more meaningful. The hard part's not generating the cartogram; the hard part is pulling together a reasonable data set. That's one of the reasons cartograms tend to come from academic sources -- they have
minionsgraduate students to do the ugly, tedious stuff.This is a nice example for illustrating one of the shortcomings of the technique. We know that the NYC portion of New York ought to be a huge blob instead of being squeezed to almost invisibility between Connecticut and New Jersey, and the rest of New York shrink correspondingly. County-level data would show a clearer picture, but is much harder to come by. Similar thing probably happens to NH, VT, and PA.
"
Other people have occasionally put up cartograms in posts or comments. So far as I know, I'm the only one here who builds his own. I've been toying with the idea of setting up a place where people can e-mail a data set and get back a cartogram.
On “You Can’t Carry That On Campus!”
I believe the quote says "foolish consistency". Which opens it up for all sorts of interpretation.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.