We need an honest debate about the role of government in a modern society. Anyone who says that government needs to be "small enough to be drowned in a bathtub" must be excluded from that conversation. They are not good faith participants.
In a modern capitalist society, well-functioning government is a necessity. Otherwise we get lead in children's toys, poisoned rivers, salmonella in our chicken, workers hurt in unsafe factories, and an unstable climate. We know this from history and from the present.
Capitalism needs to be well regulated, otherwise it's a race to the bottom, and the corporate actors who try to do right by society are penalized, because the bad actors cut costs, privatizing profits while socializing costs. We know this from history and from the present.
We need a rethink about the role of government in US society. We know this from history and from the present. koomey.com/post/176131400…
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I had some fun digging back into our archives. The existence of a huge offshore wind potential in UK has been known for many years. The recent technology cost improvements are spectacular and impressive, and they've enabled more rapid tapping of that resource than anticipated.
In our technical potential analysis for the EC5 (Germany, France, Italy, Netherlands, and the UK) back in 1995 (!) we found that about 40% of total wind potential for those countries combined was in the UK offshore wind/coastal resource.
That was for 50 M hub height, and obviously the turbines have gotten much bigger, with much higher hub heights, bigger swept area, and higher capacity factors than anticipated back then.
One of my colleagues rightly asked that I lay out my data and calculations, so this thread does that. If you find any issues with the calcs or data, please let me know.
The main claim (ignoring the peripheral questions about jet fuel) is that a carbon dioxide price of comparable size to those we've actually seen in real emissions trading systems is large enough to substantially affect both dispatch and shutdown decisions for existing coal plants
This is a useful thread. I wanted to add a comment about the notion that "small prices don't work", to help people understand why even a modest carbon price will help drive change.
The key for determining what effect a price change will have on demand is the percentage change represented by that price change. This % is a function of the price of fuel and the carbon content of the fuel, to first order.
For industrial and utility applications (and also perhaps jet fuel) the fuel price per unit of energy content is relatively low and the carbon content relatively high (for coal especially) compared to consumer applications.
This is a nice example of how speed of computation is a function of ALGORITHMS. More efficient algorithms make computation faster. It's not just about hardware (e.g. Moore's law) and in fact we will come to rely more on algorithms to speed things up as we approach physical limits
Leiserson, C E., N C. Thompson, J S. Emer, B C. Kuszmaul, B W. Lampson, D Sanchez, and T B. Schardl. 2020. "There’s plenty of room at the Top: What will drive computer performance after Moore’s law?" Science. vol. 368, no. 6495. pp. eaam9744. [science.sciencemag.org/content/368/64…]
There's a field called "codesign", in which software and hardware are optimized together to make certain calculations faster.
For upstream oil emissions, our Science article and associated supplemental information contains data for most global oil fields (98% of 2015 production), though it may not have the precise data on ownership required for your effort.
This is a key insight. Keeping gas plants around for emergencies but ONLY running them for emergencies allows us to run high renewables systems reliably NOW. No new tech breakthroughs needed, but we will need to change incentives and business models.