Suppose you have a choice in your electrical power...

[hunter]

...100% nuclear, or hybrid natural gas / solar / wind / hydro power where 50% of the power comes from natural gas.

Just curious.

[MutantAndProud]

1. Are you proposing anything with your supposing?

[hunter]

2. About fifty percent of my electric bill is natural gas

Is the cup half full or half empty?

[MutantAndProud]

3. That statement is basically nonsense but

I’ll allow it since it’s vaguely amusing

[hunter]

4. What's your opinion of the natural gas industry?

Mine's not favorable.

[MutantAndProud]

5. Leaky. Like all liquid or gas fuels.

It’s just physics. The industries don’t care and neither do many politicians or government agencies. The nuclear industry is making progress so that’s ’the future’ unless we all die in an avoidable apocalypse first.

[Effete Snob]

7. Paying for AC electricity is a scam

It’s alternating current.

They sell you a bunch of electricity for about 17 milliseconds, and then they take it back and sell it to you again.

I only buy DC electricity.

[MutantAndProud]

12. DC electricity comes primarily in red and blue

God forbid you ask for green or white

[Meadowoak]

6. Option 2 please, it ain't perfect, but it's a start in the right direction.

[LiberaBlueDem]

8. Wind and solar with battery

As far as gas goes it is much cleaner than coal and far more gas just escapes without being made use of. So I am proud you use gas instead of coal.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

9. I had solar panels installed several years ago.

My monthly gas bill is eight dollars, and the only reason it's that high is that the electricity provider insists on charging me to continue to be connected to them.

[hunter]

14. How much battery storage would you have to buy to comfortably disconnect?

Both gas and electricity.

Hint: It would be a lot and you'd still need a stand-by generator to get you comfortably through those days of inadequate sunshine, unless you are like my great grandma. She had her wood stove, candles, and always washed her clothes by hand.

In the winter she hung her clothes out to dry in her kitchen.

There was no internet. Her horses were the most reliable means of transportation.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

15. I honestly have no idea how much battery storage I'd need to disconnect.

Perhaps I should look into that.

The world your great grandma lived in is long since gone. I've never had a wood stove, and I'm 75 years old. I've never used candles as my primary source of illumination. Many years ago I asked my mother, who was born in 1916 on Long Island, NY, when she first got electricity, and it was sometime before she was ten years old. I asked her to describe what life was like without electricity, and she told me. The gas lights. Things being pretty dim at night because of that kind of lighting. I think that once she had electricity, she never looked back. Sort of like me with the internet.

When people got electricity varied tremendously, I know. When we moved from Utica, NY to the rural countryside about ten miles north, there were still some people on some of the nearby farms who'd not gotten electricity yet. This was in 1955, and I'm thinking there were two, maybe three such.

The notion that we can be totally self-sufficient is likewise an outmoded idea. We are all interconnected. It is not realistic to think that we can all raise all of our own food, can build our homes, can mind our livestock, and so on. Honestly, starting several thousand years ago we started specializing, and it's only continued.

I have a friend whose drier is currently broken, and he cannot afford to get it fixed. He hangs his clothes out to dry in his small home. That is not something devoutly to be wished.

Horses. They require a vastly different support system than cars. My mom once told me that when she was in nursing school in the mid 1930s, her classmates thought her parents were rich because they had a car. No, they weren't rich. Her parents were immigrants from Ireland, dad was a gardener and chauffeur for rich people on Long Island, and her mother took in washing for similar people. It's just that they'd already moved into the 20th century and had a car, not a horse.

[Think. Again.]

16. Our excessive use...

...of electricity is just the pendulum swinging too far at first after not having it at all.

We certainly don't need all that we use (there are 5 seperate digital clocks burning 24/7 on the various appliances in my kitchen) and we are only just starting to think about not electrifying everything in our lives.

Also, home battery systems are almost there, it won't be long before a reasonable storage module will just be a standard part of any home generation system.

[PoindexterOglethorpe]

17. I only have two appliances with clocks.

The microwave and the stove. I seriously doubt that the clock feature uses up anything but a minuscule amount of electricity.

[Think. Again.]

18. yeah...

..the point I was making wasn't about only those silly clocks, it was about the fact that we use way more electricity on completely unnessecary things, such as multiple clocks in one room, or that little light that comes on when you turn off your to tell you that your TV is off.

The multiple unnecessary clock anacdote isn't really important on it's own. Sometimes people use 'examples' like that to make a bigger point.

[Blues Heron]

19. 2 to 7 watts per clock

basically it would take about half a nuclear power plant just to run the microwave oven clocks in the USA.

115 million households have microwaves, times an average of 4.5 watts per clock equals about 500 million watts. 1/2 a gigawatt just to run the digital clocks!

[Think. Again.]

21. Thank you.

[OKIsItJustMe]

20. I don't care for "home batteries"

Put them in your local substation where they belong.

If you want to deploy new energy technology in a timely manner to combat “climate change," the answer is not to put solar panels on individual rooftops or batteries in individual garages. Commercial scale "solar farms” with on-site batteries are quicker and (therefore) cheaper to install and maintain.

[Think. Again.]

22. To move away from fossil fuels...

...quickly, we will need to take full advantage of everything that is available to us.

[OKIsItJustMe]

23. Economies of scale

NREL: 100% Clean Electricity by 2035 Study

…

Key Findings

Technology Deployment Must Rapidly Scale Up

In all modeled scenarios, new clean energy technologies are deployed at an unprecedented scale and rate to achieve 100% clean electricity by 2035. As modeled, wind and solar energy provide 60%–80% of generation in the least-cost electricity mix in 2035, and the overall generation capacity grows to roughly three times the 2020 level by 2035—including a combined 2 terawatts of wind and solar.

To achieve those levels would require rapid and sustained growth in installations of solar and wind generation capacity. If there are challenges with siting and land use to be able to deploy this new generation capacity and associated transmission, nuclear capacity helps make up the difference and more than doubles today’s installed capacity by 2035.

…

Necessary Actions To Achieve 100% Clean Electricity

The transition to a 100% clean electricity U.S. power system will require more than reduced technology costs. Several key actions will need to take place in the coming decade:

• Dramatic acceleration of electrification and increased efficiency in demand
• New energy infrastructure installed rapidly throughout the country
• Expanded clean technology manufacturing and the supply chain
• Continued research, development, demonstration, and deployment to bring emerging technologies to the market.

Failing to achieve any of the key actions could increase the difficulty of realizing the scenarios outlined in the study.

…

We are limited in the hours that people can spend, installing a limited amount of hardware, being manufactured by a limited number of companies. It is cheaper and faster to take advantage of “economies of scale.” Utility scale solar installations are about ⅓ the cost of residential installations, in large part due to lower “soft costs.” (i.e. it's not just hardware costs that matter.)


NREL: Solar Installed System Cost Analysis

NREL analyzes the total costs associated with installing photovoltaic (PV) systems for residential rooftop, commercial rooftop, and utility-scale ground-mount systems. This work has grown to include cost models for solar-plus-storage systems.


Since 2010, NREL has benchmarked the full cost of PV systems—including installation—for residential and utility projects. The results track the ongoing reduction of these costs over time

…

[Think. Again.]

10. Obviously....

...we actually have much more choice than just all nuclear or only 50% non-CO2.

So, I'll go with 100% non-CO2 sourced from whatever mix of nuclear, wind, solar, or hydro is best suited to the area it will be serving.

[RainCaster]

11. The electrons in my wiring don't care where they came from

But I sleep better knowing it's a mix of hydro, nuclear, and wind.

[OKIsItJustMe]

13. It's a false choice of course

Given my choice of just these two, assuming a pre-existing nuclear plant, I would have to go with Choice #1.

At this point, natural gas is roughly equivalent to coal in its climate impact.

https://www.eia.gov/state/?sid=NY

QUICK FACTS

• New York revised its Clean Energy Standard in 2019 to require 100% carbon-free electricity from both renewable sources and nuclear energy by 2040. In 2021, renewable sources and nuclear power, together, supplied 54% of New York's total in-state generation from utility-scale and small-scale facilities.
• Nuclear power accounted for 25% of New York's utility-scale net generation in 2021, down from 34% in 2019 because of the closure of Indian Point nuclear power plant, one of the state's four nuclear power plants. The last two reactors at the plant shutdown in 2020 and 2021.
• In 2021, New York accounted for 11% of U.S. hydroelectricity net generation, and the state was the third-largest producer of hydropower in the nation, after Washington and Oregon.
• New York consumes less total energy per capita than the residents in all but two other states, and per capita energy consumption in New York’s transportation sector is lower than in all other states.
• In 2020, New York’s per capita energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were lower than those of any other state in the nation.

Last Updated: November 17, 2022