Posted on 10/25/2023 8:34:56 AM PDT by CFW
It's one thing to try and replace fossil fuels with wind and solar power, but experts are saying the generation of power is only half the battle, and that the problems in getting that power to Americans may be insurmountable.
A new report from the International Energy Agency (IEA) concludes that the size of the global electricity grid will need to double by 2040, in order to reach global emission reductions targets in line with the Paris Agreement.
That means, the IEA says, the world will need to refurbish or add 50 million miles of new transmission lines within 17 years — the equivalent of circling the equator more than 2,000 times.
The IEA estimates that global investments in transmission capacity will need to double to $600 billion per year by 2030 in order to reach that goal.
(Excerpt) Read more at justthenews.com ...
50 million miles of power lines.
That is extension cords for each EV.
Eventually we’ll be driving around Bumper Cars like at the amusement parks where the floor and ceiling are the conductors...............
Repeat after me:
The Greenies are nuts! The Greenies are nuts! The Greenies are nuts!
Then there’s all those transformers we don’t have.
From alancarp: Destroy suburban living and rural America and they'll be able to control much more of the population than today.
I agree 100% with alancarp's summary that the Dims wish to force people into mass transportation, which means more control over the masses. And I agree with rlmorel's summary that destroying suburban and rural America helps them control the population, but I disagree that solar and EV's achieve their goal.
A small but growing number of us in suburban/rural conservative land in the south are doing decentralized solar (making our own power so that we have to buy less energy from over-regulated utility sources) and some of us are buying EV's for that purpose (I can make my own power to charge my EV for local driving, I wish I could make my own gasoline for fueling my ICE pickup, but I can't, so my wife and I do most of our driving in the EV). And usually the more rural the area, the more miles you drive, thus the more sense an EV makes (driving 26K miles per year in our EV saves us enough on gas to make the extra cost of an EV worth it, about 20K of those miles are charged at home for local driving or small trips in which half of the charge came from home).
So yes, "green" energy and EV's as the Dims push it will yield the controlling of the masses that the Dims want. But don't be surprised if more and more of us conservatives specialize in self-reliant "green" energy with home solar, wind, and or water power (pico wind turbines and pico water turbines). In fact, when I did a large solar project for my home, the only places I could find actionable information (without all the buzzwords and eco-hype) were the prepper forums.
This won’t faze the electricity nutcases. They’ll just call for a Marshall Plan or World War Two effort to get it done. They’re crazy evil and stupid. Hard to be those three things but among their number they manage it.
Well, they’re already appearing in branDUHn endorsement ads so.....🖕
If the government wants to limit our energy supply to control us, all they have to do it nationalize the oil industry. They don't need to go to the trouble of ramming EVs down our throats.
The petroleum industry is far more centralized than electricity generation and is actually an easier target for government overreach and tyranny.
That is actually pretty cheap considering number 8-2 romex is over $5.00 a foot.
I hear you, but here is the thing: Solar and Wind are expensive. Very expensive, even if you are factoring in the ROI on it.
The up-front costs are out of the reach of most American. If you can afford the up-front costs to get solar, that is awesome.
And, if you are the type of person who doesn’t go far from home, and don’t have to do a daily long commute, even better. (By the way, just to be clear: I am not “anti-EV” in the same way I am not “anti-vax”. I am simply anti-MANDATED EV and anti-MANDATED vax.)
But no matter how you slice it, forcing people into this without the infrastructure in place, which is exactly what they are trying to do for the reasons I outlined, is a loss of freedom, and they are the ones who have unilaterally decided they are the ones who get to decide what freedoms you are allowed, “for the greater good”.
I am wholly onboard with being self reliant, in all ways possible, so I admire you for that. I was even pricing out building myself a tow-able solar-array, but...well, my wife doesn’t see the need for it.
Yet.
That is all true.
However, in a Constitutional Republic such as ours, nationalizing the oil industry is tantamount to coming out of the shadows and declaring up front what they plan to do.
Doing that without first defanging the 1st and 2nd Amendments would have a most incendiary result. Sure, there are a lot of sheep out there who aren’t paying attention, but...there are a lot of Americans who ARE paying attention, and many of those are advocates of both of those amendments.
It is MUCH safer for them over time, to lull us to sleep, make us believe there is such a thing as a “climate crisis” we need to address by reducing CO2 emissions, and that EVs are cool, the wave of the future, and emergently necessary to keep us from broiling or drowning.
It is always good, when boiling lobsters or chopping off the heads of chickens, not to let them see the boiling lobster pot or the stump and the hatchet!
For what it's worth, I financed my solar (and other things in a larger energy project like other energy improvements to my house, and difference in EV vs ICE when it was time to replace my wife's old ICE car) with a HELOC. But that was when you could get a low interest rate.
Before the energy project (but after Brandon instituted his energy polices) I paid a large power bill + large natural gas bill + bought a lot of gasoline at the pump. Now it's a large HELOC payment + tiny power bill + tiny amounts of gasoline at the pump (for what little we drive the ICE pickup). Because I put most of the cost into the HELOC loan, I had little "up-front" cost as far as my budget goes. To date I have spent $2,700 less from my budget (read: pulled less from our Roth IRA's) than I would have on sky high energy costs had I not done the energy project. That includes the up-front costs I paid out of pocket (what I didn't put into the HELOC loan) setting me back at first 2 and a half years ago when I started the project.
Every month when I get a power bill I track how much my true cost per kWh is, how much my solar inverters said I consumed without pulling from the grid (free power I used that month), how many miles we drove on the EV, how much that would have cost in gasoline if I had bought an ICE car instead of an EV, how much we paid for road-side charging if we drove the EV on trips that month, how much power the EV added to our overall power demand by charging at home (and other monthly costs like my insurance being higher by having full coverage on a new vehicle instead of liability only coverage on an old used vehicle, etc.). For example, in the past 12 months from Oct 2022 to Sep 2023 I've saved a total of $8,700 in power + gasoline + natural gas (I converted my two natural gas appliances to electric, which adds some to my power demand, but most of that power is free). With that $8,700 annual energy savings I'm easily making the HELOC payments and paying down the HELOC balance (which lowers the HELOC payments so that future months will cost me even less to save money).
Literally two years after starting the project, my up-front costs paid out of pocket were made up for with the savings I kept from leaving my pocket month after month. Since then it's saved me (read: more money staying in our Roth IRA's) more and more each month. I don't know what future energy costs will be. But I know what my future HELOC payments will be: lower than they are now (as the HELOC balance is paid down and the HELOC payments go down with them).
But you can't replicate this on the fly. This kind of project requires lots of analysis and planning on your particular needs and what would work best for you. In other words, you have to be as committed to making something like this work for you as the bureaucrats are committed to taking away our freedoms and making themselves richer at our expense. Freedom is never easy, and that includes energy self-reliance. As a code jockey, I'm used to solving complex puzzles and optimizing things that already work to make them work better. But at the end of the day, nothing I did for this project was anything dependent on homemade software or any special skill I learned in my numerical modeling course or computer science courses or anything like that. The only skills needed were simple arithmetic and patient analysis of what was consuming the most power from our home, what the best way to meet our driving needs and wants were, how many average daily peak solar hours we get in our area each month, what angle is best in my area for solar panels in the winter vs in the summer, how much of our power consumption is done in the evening (i.e. battery storage), and how much of each component was needed to optimize the build without running into the law of diminishing returns, etc.
So if you live in the south (read: good for solar), own your home, plan to live there at least 10 years, are you going to do the research to make yourself more energy self-reliant? I got tired of just fussing about the Dims and their stupid energy polices and their warmageddon cult. All the fussing wasn't saving my wife's and mine finances. It's past time for each of us to take action to wean ourselves from the things the government overregulates.
Experts say 50 million miles of new power lines needed for green energy.
Cue the song In The Year 2525 twice.
“Then there’s all those transformers we don’t have.”
—
And which have to come from China.
Greenies are nuts! Greenies are nuts! Greenies are nuts!
These people are whacked. They will never realize what they have until it is gone.
I fully appreciate your attitude...this country was once populated with a higher percentage of self-sufficient people, because if they didn’t suffice themselves, nobody else would do it for them.
FDR changed all that forever. A pox on him.
Agree
Links to good home solar tech info?
I'd begin with this tool https://tsi.tyconsystems.com/html/nrel_lookup.htm which was spot on in showing me how many peak solar hours I get in my zip code per day and how that changes per month. At least for me (Birmingham, AL area) the peak solar hours per day were calculated not just to account for hours between sunrise and sunset each month, but also based on sunny days/cloudy days/rainy days.
If you have your past 12 power bills either in paper or online, look at the past 12 statements and compare the # of kWh you pulled from the grid that month with the # of peak solar hours you get per day. What I did was get enough solar panel kilowatts (kW's) so that I'd meet most but not all of my needs (assuming I was able to store enough in battery storage for night). Here's how it works. Last July my house consumed 2,339 kWh (in my case I now get that data from the inverters since the power company now doesn't know most of the power I consume because I don't pull most of my power from the grid). Divide that by 31 days and I need 75kWh per day. The peak solar hours tool says I average 5.6 hours per day. 75kWh / 5.6 hours = 13.4kW <--- that's how much solar capacity I need to bring in (on average) to meet my home's needs (on average). Do that for all 12 months.
Then take a hard look at when you consume power in the day. If you're married and both of you work away from home, then chances are your house consumes little power during the day (unfortunately that's when solar is most plentiful) and then you make up for it in the evening and run all of your appliances to cook and do other chores. That means you'd have to have more battery storage than a retired couple at home half the day doing most of the power consumption in the middle of the day. So figure out how much battery storage you'd need each month to get through most nights.
And figure out how much your highest power demands are (i.e. if the AC is running and consuming 4kW while the wife is cooking and consuming 5kW while the dryer is on high consuming 6kW while the husband is in the hot tub consuming 3kW, that's a total of 20kW at that one point in time that your inverters would have to produce AC power from DC power to keep from having to pull from the grid). If that happens a lot then you have to get inverter capacity to meet those needs most of the time.
Last but not least do a deep dive into what it takes to make your home more energy efficient regardless of if you go solar. For details on how I incorporate it all as one energy project, see https://freerepublic.com/focus/news/4183380/posts?page=138#138.
If you want more I'll see if I can dig up old resources I found two and a half years ago when I got tired of Brandon's dumb energy policies and went solar.
Good stuff, but am really more looking for info on panels, inverters, wiring, interconnects, etc.
House is already pretty energy efficient, I’ve been quite impressed. Prior owner did a studs-up renovation and spray foamed the hell out of it, and did decent Andersen windows.
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