What to do when the Power Goes Out

The Hidden Costs of Renewables

Phuket, Thailand

This is one of the solar power banks for charging the smart phones. It works better than nothing but not that great as it is only 5000 mAup. A full day in the sun gives it enough juice to charge my smartphone to about 20%. I’d have better results if I had a newer smart phone, but I live and learn. Due to the risk of explosions there is a cap on the power of solar celled batteries which you can take on an airplane, which must be in carry on bags only due to air pressure concerns. I wonder where they get that idea from?

• ᗰISᑕᕼIᗴᖴ ™ • @4Mischief

Are electric vehicles safe?

I suspect that if one truly wanted to live comfortably off grid there would need to be a hybrid approach employed of a conscious reduction in energy usage with overlapping and backup systems for the times renewable energy does fail. I am living in the best of circumstances with it as the weather is not a major concern: it’s hot right now and I’d love A/C, but don’t need it per say. I’ve been getting used to off grid living. As we have no power the well pump does not work and we literally draw water from a bucket. There is no air conditioning, no television and no refrigeration. We do have a solar powered light out front that is very bright when it first becomes dark here but which slowly fades out. By about 10 or 11 PM at night all of the reserves are drained on it. We have lots of candles.

It is the hottest, driest and hence sunniest season in Thailand so I’m as good as it is going to get with my solar power cells. My brother in law wired an old car battery so that there is a small light and phone battery charger hooked up to it that is not solar dependent. We cook over a gas flame and sometimes an open fire. There is also a car charger style battery charger for phones hooked up to one of the gasoline powered motorbikes. Unfortunately I do the vast majority of my work on my laptop which needs an old fashioned plug.

It’s very off grid living. I’ve been okay with it because I suspect strongly that the living situation is temporary in nature and I’ve been enjoying my time greatly at the Buddhist temple where I do charge things. I don’t spend anywhere near as much time on the Internet as I did before coming here and am more conscious about what I read and spend time on. I feel good.

But if I had to give a short answer to whether renewable energy sources can replace fossil fuels and the like and that people can maintain the same standard of living in developed countries, it is a definite no. I can’t even imagine the challenges of heavy industry in such a situation. Bad Cattitude recently weighed in on this regarding wind and solar as renewable energy sources:

global warning: the wind and solar question

In it he writes:

“but in amongst all this lies perhaps the biggest question of all that almost always goes unasked:

does any of this stuff even work to reduce CO2 output?

because it sure looks like one can make an argument that it doesn’t.

let’s look:

california has been at the forefront of green dreaming, electric vehicles, and renewable mandates since long before groovy gavin took the reins.

and obviously, these are not the folks whose electrical grid you want to emulate.

it’s been unstable and overwhelmed for years.

it also has among the highest electrical costs in the CONUS. (this is electricity for all sectors, not just residential as it seemed a better metric. data here.)

it had been the highest and likely will be again by summer once new england gets out of the winter squeeze of having to ship in LNG from trinidad because no one can build a pipeline from the prolific gas fields of pennsylvania, cuz, well, green.

and as can be seen, CA power costs have more than doubled since 2001. (2023 figure is only thru jan)

but what’s really striking here was the fracking boom. in the 12 years from 2008, national electricity prices rose only 8.7% vs 44.1% for california as cheap, local natural gas made generation affordable. (and that 8.7% rise for US is overstated as a comparison because it contains california.)

so CA, despite having natural gas of its own and living quite near several states with lots and to spare, managed to miss the whole boom. their costs spike while others were not even keeping up with inflation which was a cumulative 20.1% over the period.

so, in real terms, US power prices fell 13% over 12 years while california’s rose 15%.

there’s your “green dream” price.”

Climate change solutions in the form of renewable energy have used calculations that are very similar to those used to approve “safe and effective” Covid jabs. The people selling the stuff had a predetermined outcome which had to be reached and went to great lengths to fabricate statistics that showed how this transition would be seamless. Nobody ever considered EROI equations, which simply means energy returned on energy invested. If they did consider them, they did their best to underestimate the energy invested by say discounting completely the mining costs of the rare earth materials needed to power the solar or wind cells. They also did everything to overestimate the reliability of unreliable energy sources. They also discounted completely the depreciation of solar and wind assets and disposal costs at the end of the life of these products.

EROI equations should get more attention, as they are really simple science and useful across so many disciplines. If I have some jackfruit trees which produce fruit, which God waters in the right season and which require no fertilizer, my investment is low and my return on the jackfruit is thus higher. If I decide to plow all of those jackfruit trees into the ground and plant soybeans there instead, which require intensive fertilizer and insecticide, my equation is going to be different. I will have to take into account the cost of tilling the land, the cost of planting the seeds, the cost of the fertilizer and the cost of the insecticide before I see a penny in return. If you bought an electric car, the energy cost of plugging it into the power grid is going to be really important. Perhaps that is why the EU finally reversed course on forcing everybody into electric cars:

Europe Abandons All-Electric Car Mandate

Igor Chudov writes:

Prodded by climate activists, the EU was pressured to ban fossil fuel vehicles and replace them with battery-powered vehicles. The problem is that such a transition is impossible:

• Transitioning to electric passenger vehicles will increase electricity demand by 25%.

• Transitioning to electric trucks will further raise electricity demand to a total of 40% increase.

• EU is phasing out fossil fuel generation and replacing it with unreliable solar and wind generation - thus decreasing power availability instead of increasing it to meet greater demand.

• As cars and especially trucks are charged at night, solar and wind power cannot contribute to charging.

Are electric cars more efficient?

Running a gasoline car involves:

• Burning gas in the internal combustion engine and converting thermal energy to mechanical energy. That’s it.

Charging an electric car’s battery from the grid and driving the car involves:

• Burning gas at the power station and converting thermal energy of gas to mechanical energy of the gas turbine. This is only moderately more efficient in a power station than gasoline cars.

• Then, losses begin:

• Converting the mechanical energy of the turbine into electrical energy in the generator involves generator losses

• Converting medium voltage from the generator into high transmission voltage involves transformer losses

• Transmitting the power along the high voltage lines involves transmission losses

• Stepping down the voltage in several substations involves transformer losses again

• In a home charging station, converting 220v power into DC for car charging again involves conversion losses

• A chemical process in the battery being charged heats the battery, involving charging losses

• Running the car’s electrical motors from the battery requires inverter losses to generate electricity for traction motors and motor losses.

Take a look at what happens when a driver needs heat in the cab:

• Heating a gasoline car in winter involves redirecting waste heat (hot antifreeze) from the engine into the cab heater, thus not requiring additional fuel.

• Heating an electric car requires a resistance heater or a heat pump, needing to eventually consume more energy from the grid - with all the above conversion losses included.

Which process (gasoline car vs. electric) is more efficient at converting fuel, burnt directly in the car engine or at distant power stations, into usable energy to propel a car traveling on a highway? The gas engines win outright.

The situation would be different if we had a clean, weather-independent, and inexpensive electrical power source. But, alas, we do not have that yet.

Simple weather and geographic issues will make a huge difference when using energy sources that are ultimately highly dependent on the weather. Our solar panels in Las Vegas, for example, which is the driest and sunniest city in the Northern hemisphere and hence actually a very good place to put solar, do just fine in the summer months. All of our energy needs at the Las Vegas house have been met thus far. But in the winter, especially this last one with both less hours of daylight and a surprising amount of rain, the solar panels did terrible. The grid converted back and electric bills for December and January were about the same as they were before we even had solar panels. My guess is that solar power is probably okay in say, Finland, during the summertime. When you’re getting four hours of sunlight per day at best around the winter solstice I wouldn’t expect it to power even one string of Christmas lights.

I haven’t even begun on the very high and growing computing needs of all of these AI data supercomputers that are taking over the world. At the end of the day this is unlikely to work for the simple reason that they humans those systems are supposed to be tracking may not have reliable enough electricity to assure that they can be adequately traced down. Imagine having an AI powered smart door that will not open because the power is out.

I have heard about it happening in a Tesla with no battery whatsoever. The more things that are dependent on electricity to work, the more unstable the system is. That’s an issue for another day I suppose.

Buy me a ko-fi