as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.
Many substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)
Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.
Not just substations, but the conductors themselves. The more current you run through a line on a hot, non-breezy and sunny day, the more it sags. Which leads to more resistance, which leads to hotter lines, more sagging. It’s a positive feedback cycle.
My understanding is that the mean-free-path of conduction electrons in even OFHC copper is quite short -- scattering on impurities is the dominant loss mechanism, not the boundaries of the conductor. Is the theory advanced above that the morphology of the wire matters, or is there another mechanism at work?
The resistance is not constant and is in fact a function of temperature [0]. Line sag is a proxy measurement for line temperature, since things expand as they heat up. From [1], most materials have positive alpha coefficients so the resistance increases with temperature.
The statement referred to heating driving sagging, which increased resistance.
The increase of resistance with temperature is well-known -- I was curious if there is some effect that is directly related to the wire sag (changing morphology, somehow-altered surface area/skin-depth, changing kinks at the connections, some subtlety with increased length (cross-sectional area also increases), etc..).
Theoretically I would thing the sag itself should increase resistance since resistance increases with both length and smaller wire diameter. When the line lengthens the diameter should decrease (similar to stretching a piece of gum or putty).
One of the more impressive things I've seen with electricity is watching a transmission line into a local neighborhood turn orange and stretch to drape itself across a pickup truck parked in the wrong spot. Took a minute to realize what I'd just watched.
Yep, only thing that made sense. There was a heavy storm going through and I was driving by at night, during the day probably wouldn't have been visible at all.
The volume expands as it heats, so it's not a given that the diameter (gauge) goes down. But the length is longer and that does increase the total resistance.
> its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.
Do you think think the demand would be higher? In parallel, while many people are working from home, the businesses are closed, which I would think eat up much more electricity.
Plenty of businesses are still open, and AC still needs to run to drive out building moisture so that they don't develop mold. Maybe not at human comfort levels, but they still need to run them for the whole building.
Building design has changed tremendously since the introduction of AC, the number of usable windows and ceiling overhead has drastically decreased in those regions traditionally needing them.
Older, less insulated buildings, breathe better. The more your home "breathes" the more it transfers heat and humidity to the outside, which defeats most insulation, unless the breathing is done though a heat exchange.
As an update, as I'm getting a bunch of down votes for some reason (please comment!).
Newer homes and buildings have a vapor barrier beneath the outside cladding. This article on the Perfect Wall [0], explains the benefits and options.
Older houses, like the Victorian that I live in, didn't have modern insulation, which can deteriorate if it gets wet, so they were made to breathe, so that any moisture that got into the wall could be removed through air movement. Not to mention that fireplaces required a constant stream of new air to replace that which is pulled up through the chimney.
But old buildings generally aren't even close to air tight. Under those conditions as long as they are heated even a little the humidity is mostly lower than outside. Mean the amount of water in the air as a percent is the same inside and outside. But since it's hotter inside the house the relative humidity is lower. In temperate climates you don't get mold.
It's actually modern air tight houses that have terrible problems with mold. Because they don't breath water vapor builds up inside.
Its not just overall grid usage, substations have capacities as well. So the business park is going to be underutilized, but the residential ones are probably seeing more demand as people are at home and not turning up the thermostat during the day to save energy (since they are at home and want a comfortable environment, vs. letting the house sit at 80 when nobody is home).
The temperature on the AC at my house is set at 80F. At 80F with the air flow from fans and a dressing light, there is no reason most people cannot be comfortable. I think that people cranking the AC down to 72F like they do are selfish and do not understand the impact that everyday actions have on the world as a whole.
I don't run my AC. It regularly gets up to 85-88F. With air flow from fans and dressing light, there's no reason most people cannot be comfortable.
I think that people who run their AC like they do are selfish and do not understand the impact that their everyday actions have on the world.
(I really don't run my AC. I do think people are overly dependent on it. The number of people I know who have their home cooler in the summer than the winter indicates many people really just do it because they can.
But also I'm not a judgey asshole, so I don't moralize about it to people)
For me, 80F is well beyond "sweating even without doing anything", even if wearing nothing (which is, thankfully in this work-from-home era, easier than ever.)
There's a good number of houses and apartments in the SCV with absolutely terrible insulation. The AC is the only thing keeping the interior moderately comfortable in 90°+ heat. If the thermostat is set to 80° The house will be significantly hotter than that.
> Do you think think the demand would be higher? In parallel, while many people are working from home, the businesses are closed, which I would think eat up much more electricity.
At the level of the generation there won't be much change, but the distribution / "last mile" substations have never been planned for the duty cycle and load they have seen over the last months.
We're not in California, but while most people are working from home at my company, there are still 10 or so employees at the office. So as far as electricity usage it's basically business as usual. Most (80%+) of my friends work for similar companies where a small group is at the office so everything is still on, but a lot of people are working from home all day on top of that.
> but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
Can you elaborate? A substation is about to start construction just across the (narrow) street from my child's elementary school.
I used to work in the contact centre for my country's radio spectrum regulators, we'd get numerous phone calls from people who were terrified of or complaining about the "radiation" part of "electromagnetic radiation" from power equipment or celltowers or radio transmitters.
I'd say 1/3 were reassured by my explanation of why non-ionising radiation isn't going to harm your unborn child/give you cancer[1], 1/3 decided I was a lying tool of the Establishment and They Knew The Truth, and the last 1/3 had a genuine mental illness - "No you don't understand, the Prime Minister has authorised the Police to monitor my TV viewing using radio waves and it's giving my family cancer".
[1]Unless you're climbing a transmitter tower and exposing your womb to a focused microwave beam at a very close range for a substantial period, then the heating effect probably isn't going to be doing good things.
> Unless you're climbing a transmitter tower and exposing your womb to a focused microwave beam at a very close range for a substantial period, then the heating effect probably isn't going to be doing good things.
That's exactly what I'd expect from a lying tool of the Establishment.
If I were in your position, I would ask (privately, to avoid unnecessarily freaking everyone out) what their limits on stray voltage and stray current are outside the substation and what they do to control and monitor it. 60 Hz radiation doesn’t seem like a credible risk at all to me. 60 Hz conducted emissions, on the other hand, can very easily kill you — imagine crawling in hands and knees two feet from a downed powerline.
I would like to imagine that regulators and utilities have this under control, but making some effort to verify this could be reasonable.
(49 states permit utilities utilities to ground a current carrying overhead wire at utility poles, resulting in parallel currents in the ground. I’m not aware of this being a documented hazard to people, but it’s a documented problem for cattle. CA is the exception.)
Abstract
This 2019 brochure is intended to explain the issues surrounding EMF. It covers the physical nature of EMF, our everyday exposures to EMF, the health research and its findings, and the conclusions reached by expert scientific panels and government agencies. It provides key updates to the review of the science that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) published in 2002 in a booklet entitled, “EMF: Electric and Magnetic Fields Associated with the Use of Electric Power – Questions & Answers.” The 2002 booklet contains very useful information that remains current, and that the reader of this brochure may find of value.
If you get the chance, watch "Better Call Saul" sometime. Jimmy's brother Chuck feels he is sensitive to electromagnetism and goes to extreme lengths to protect himself from the waves.
Because the representatives with authority will get voted out by these folks. You have to dance around them, or find technical mitigations to the silliness (substation facades, suboptimal siting, more expensive underground transmission, etc).
It's why you're seeing a rapid uptake in battery storage by consumers in California; it's a hack around regulatory and utility failures (and you get a federal tax credit if it charges primarily from your rooftop solar, which is mandatory on new CA residential construction).
It is ridiculous, and people who are ridiculous must be negotiated with (unfortunately!). I don't know what the solution is besides applying constant pressure in the appropriate direction.
Disclosure: This information comes from my own research, as well as first hand accounts from electrical linemen friends in NorCal upgrading infrastructure.
At what point is it ok to throw in the towel and say "this is just a city/state reaping what they sow". Sure there's people who want to do things right but as evidenced by a result they're a small enough minority that their voice doesn't matter. It's not like there's lobbyists from BigWildfire(TM) distorting things. The purpose of a system is what it does.
The US legal system allows a great many delaying tactics if you can afford filing fees and base your case on statements that cannot be proven with certainty. The legal system is often set up to require either certain proof or expensive multi-year reviews to overcome such objections, and they are used with great success by coordinated groups of NIMBY folks.
Laws could be passed to sidestep all of this and support infrastructure growth, but those laws would trigger the same attacks from coordinated groups NIMBY, who happen to often be wealthy single-family homeowners, and thus more often than their competition have captive lawmakers to resist any effort they disapprove of.
Not enough people are willing to spend time at city hall community hearings and make the voice of reason heard whereas these other people will show up to make demands. Same thing happened here when the city wanted to install free wifi in public parks for students, all the nuts flooded the meetings making ridiculous claims and demands but none of the people who would benefit bothered to show up so they canned the idea.
And the council members are so incapable of critical thought that they believe that the loud nutjobs who show up are representative of their constituents?
Turnout can be pretty low in city elections, so the cranks may not represent their constituents, but be overrepresented among voters. For folks reading this: there are probably YIMBY or other pro-housing/infrastructure groups in your area that will tell you when to show up to meetings to fight back against this nonsense.
The concern is more how many of those people will show up to vote against you in races which can have very small numbers of voters, and how much of a hassle they'll make for your office. If someone decides that you're part of the problem, you'll be getting lots of contacts, public records requests, etc. The things which circulate on neighborhood listserves, Facebook groups, etc. can be pretty absurd but they might break down into the 95% who don't care and ignore them and the 5% who care enough to put a lot of energy into obstruction.
None of that precludes doing the right thing, of course, but if it's not an issue you care strongly about you might decide not to fight it. The best countermeasure is for everyone else to tune out local politics less, which is an area people oddly ignore even though it has the most day to day impact on your life.
I think the key value of (our version of) democracy is the peaceful transition of power. For example from Clinton -> Bush -> Obama -> Trump. They all had very different views on what the country needed to do, but they all accepted that elections were how the future was decided and handed off power to someone they did not agree with.
In a monarchy or despotism, there is no transition of power by design. It is supposed to be difficult, because it is not wanted. So if you end up with the wrong choice it is very hard to correct.
The values of democracy are touted in Hong Kong too, but that doesn't make it a democracy. Small groups with a NYMBY position, or large PACs depend operate on our current form of government, which is why I made the precise distinction in my comment. The 2016 election outcome was via the electoral college, and not the popular vote.
This is a red herring, here is the definition of democracy:
"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
The US clearly fits in here. The US is not a direct democracy, but neither is any other country in the world, including Switzerland that perhaps is the one I know of that comes closest.
Given the subtopic I commented on was bringing up NYMBYs and political process and the word democracy, I don't see this as a red herring, or an attempt to divert or smokescreen the argument; I simply stated the US is a constitutional republic, which some would argue further and label it a federal republic. It seems your quote is from lexico.com. How do you respond when someone asks you what type of government does the US have?
Here is what you said:
"To be clear, the US is a constitutional republic and not a democracy, and the constant use of the word democracy dilutes this fact."
Here is what happens when you google democracy:
"a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy:
1a: government by the people
especially : rule of the majority
b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
dictionary.com:
government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system.
a state having such a form of government:
The United States and Canada are democracies.
You said the US is not a democracy, all definitions I can find says it is.
I picked up the "meme" long before the word "meme" entered the vernacular in the sense that I think you are using it. I had the good fortune of attending a Jesuit HS in NYC when grammar was prescriptive rather than descriptive, you took two years of Latin, and studied world religions, and the preciseness of language mattered. Mr. Caruso, my sophomore year History teacher, asked the first day back to school, "Is the United States a democracy?". Like most I said 'Yes'. He then lectured on early U.S., and other types of governments. It was an eye opener for me, and taught me to question my assumptions, and try to be more precise in my language and arguments (logical ones, not emotional ones). My comment about "diluting" comes from people throwing the term about to a point that it becomes meaningless out of context. For a similar commentary, this quote in the Wikipedia entry for a search on "democracy", seems in agreement: " However, the noun "democracy" has, over time, been modified by more than 3,500 adjectives which suggests that it may have types that can elude and elide this duality."
Thanks for the links. I found the first link interesting and then disappointing, since I had worked at a bookstore in NYC in the early 90s that carried a lot of philosophy books, economics books mainly from the Austrian School, and so the mises.org link caught my eye. Ryan McKaken the author of the article basically dismisses the use of "we're a republic and not a democracy" when used as an argument in two cases of what he believes people are thinking. I was pointing out that we are not simply "a democracy", but more precisely constitutional republic, no more, no less.
How do you answer the question, "What type of government does the U.S. have?"
Thank you for that context, even if it mostly relates to your personal experience and back story. I agree that we should be careful how we use words, but I don't think you can easily argue that "democracy" has become meaningless out of context, while also imposing your own idiosyncratic context to claim that the US isn't a democracy.
As to your question, I would say that the U.S. constitution defines (indeed, guarantees) the country as having "a republican form of government" (at the state level, but this is maintained at the federal level), and that the processes and principles that it puts in place, such as representative elections, qualify that system as democratic.
I looked into this recently in order to gather enough facts to educate an aunt who wasn't a 5g conspiracy person, they just asked "how do you know that it's safe?", which is always a fair question. I wrote a post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24103096
But the TLDR is that (in the example of 5G), the power levels were talking about amount to ~300,000x less power than what would be required to irritate your skin in a minor way.
Of course, it's always complex because sure, stick your hand in to a transformer and electromagnetism will do plenty of damage to you. Being against 5G or power stations because EMF "can do damage" is a bit like banning cars because jumping in front of a car "can do damage", except cars are _far_ more lethal and far less helpful than signal-carrying cables.
Great question, and I personally believe it's driven by modern American communities being unable to maintain their own infrastructure at any level. 100 years ago people worked for a living, with their hands, and would often have to build, install, and repair their homes, roads, and other infrastructure themselves. They understood the process, and what it takes to get something done.
These days, most households, especially the wealthy ones like in Marin, are helmed by people who do NOT work with their hands, do not respect people who do, and who have no interest in learning more. Even worse, infrastructure work is so heavily regulated and specialized that gobs of accidental complexity prevent anyone who wanted to from learning more about it, reinforcing the ignorance.
And truly, it's easy to have sympathy. The world is a complex place, and no doubt they have their hands full dealing with the technology revolution and palace intrigues at work; who has time to understand something as boring as infrastructure? And besides, if infrastructure fails, it fails for everyone so there's no real benefit to being informed or prepared (in that sense being informed about city infrastructure would be very similar to being a "prepper", in a weaker sense, which comes with it's own stigma).
So if you say "That's ridiculous, be quiet" you will offend sensibilities to the extent YOU will be banned, banned for having dirty knowledge, for shaming those that don't, and for tacitly asserting the value of having such knowledge! Plus, your views aren't in their news-feeds, so there's no emotional juice to them. Emotionally driven opposition is the inevitable retarding force in the hyper-connected, capitalist info-sphere, and ultimately leads to civic ignorance and paralysis. Good luck overcoming that in your city council meetings! (But you have my respect if you even try.)
My impression is that california uniquely empowers individuals to obstruct projects with myriad legal mechanisms that are easy to initiate but expensive to fight.
Rumblings I heard had to do with too-aggressively retiring traditional power plants in favor of renewables, resulting in a lack of adequate baseload power.
Ever since it was passed, NIMBYs and other types of individualists have found more and more ways to use its provisions to block anything from happening that they don't want to happen.
I am a technician for xfinity in the bay area and NIMBYism a huge part too I would say. Huge portions of Mill Valley especially on and around Mt Tam had such bad poles and vegetation. Only the last 3 fire years did anything. But literally nothing gets approved besides exact replacement. Nothing gets put underground, or rerouted because (as I understand it) mostly NIMBY groups. And I believe ATT ultimately owns most of the poles, PGE maintains them + leases, and the rest (comcast, sonic, etc) just lease. Marin has the reputation in Xfinity as the worst maintained in the 9 bay area locales they work in.
Oh god...Marin NIMBYism is really crazy when it comes to that stuff. And there's a lot of conspiracy theory / 5G type stuff that goes on as well. Strange to think that many of the folks who live there are in charge of a lot of the companies on HN (or are senior execs there).
> We Have No Reason to Believe 5G Is Safe
> The World Health Organization's International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) classified RFR as "possibly carcinogenic to humans" in 2011. Last year, a $30 million study conducted by the U.S. National Toxicology Program (NTP) found “clear evidence” that two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats and damaged DNA in rats and mice of both sexes. The Ramazzini Institute in Italy replicated the key finding of the NTP using a different carrier frequency and much weaker exposure to cell phone radiation over the life of the rats.
> Since 5G is a new technology, there is no research on health effects, so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. However, we have considerable evidence about the harmful effects of 2G and 3G. Little is known the effects of exposure to 4G, a 10-year-old technology, because governments have been remiss in funding this research. Meanwhile, we are seeing increases in certain types of head and neck tumors in tumor registries, which may be at least partially attributable to the proliferation of cell phone radiation. These increases are consistent with results from case-control studies of tumor risk in heavy cell phone users.
About the author:
> Joel M. Moskowitz, PhD, is director of the Center for Family and Community Health in the School of Public Health at the University of California, Berkeley. He has been translating and disseminating the research on wireless radiation health effects since 2009 after he and his colleagues published a review paper that found long-term cell phone users were at greater risk of brain tumors. His Electromagnetic Radiation Safety website has had more than two million page views since 2013. He is an unpaid advisor to the International EMF Scientist Appeal and Physicians for Safe Technology.
Even if Moskowitz has a point, it is difficult to take him seriously when he associates himself with "Physicians for Safe Technology", a group which maintains the belief that Electromagnetic hypersensitivity is a real thing. It is not.
It has no scientific basis and is not a recognized medical condition.
High levels of RF exposure can of course do damage, in the form of burns. Any seasoned amateur radio operator at some point in the progression of their hobby can surely attest to the pain of being "bitten" by an energized RF cable.
But trying to promote the idea that cellphones are dangerous is just scaremongering. You'll absorb more energy in just a few seconds just by standing in a sunbeam.
All is not just about energy absorbed or burns. There are reports of the space between cells becoming larger (less inter-cellular adhesion) because of RF, and this led to the conclusion that the blood-brain barrier was weakened due to some kinds of RF. I've not dig too much in the subject, but I understand that a leaky BBB would increase inflammation in the brain and penetration of many molecules (including carcinogenic).
I don't know why all the rebuttals focus on energy absorption and absence of ionizing frequencies. Seems like the mechanism of toxicity, if any, has nothing to do with that.
A lot of the active RF spectra that people are concerned about don't penetrate deep into your body. They're either absorbed by the skin, the fatty tissue underneath or at the least, by the bone in the skull and ribcage. The reason your phone keeps working when your body blocks the signal is that the signal bounces of other surfaces.
Blocking signals with your body becomes more true as frequency (and bandwidth) goes up. 5G Wifi can't even properly penetrate dry wall, not even mentioning all that water and bone in your body.
Beside that, below the infrared spectrum, it is unlikely that much damage is done by common RF signals; the energy in a quanta from that spectrum is too small to effectively do anything but heat molecules up a tiny bit.
Photochemical effects, ie, things like chemical reactions being induced or cells reacting to the light, require atleast about 1Thz to work (low-end IR).
The heating occurs primarly for frequencies between 30 and 120MHz, which is actively used but not by B2C commercial things, it largely involves ham radio, air traffic radio, sea traffic, weather satellites, etc. Things you're likely to be closer to the receiving end of than the high powered sender.
Which also bring to the other issue; the energies in common RF close to you is too low. If you send with 100mW power, the power your body will capture, even if it's the phone right next to your ear, is likely below 10mW of power. Low enough that your native body heat already overpowers it easily.
Then 4G or Wifi may be worse than 5G. Experiments with inter-cellular adhesion were, among others, at 900MHz and 1800MHz, thus closer to 4G. However I don't know if other frequencies were really investigated (or with the same care, with different effects observed on male and female rodents, etc).
I appreciate that in your brief analysis you are considering several mechanisms of action besides just the heating. There may be many kinds of resonances, at molecular level, supra-molecular, etc. If very little 900/1800MHz suffices to alter BBB, then it is like a trigger to worse things, without the need of much energy. In the animals tested, the amount reaching the brain, at typical GSM levels, had already the observed result. Of course my tone is speculative here, but if the effect was confirmed in humans, it would not need much energy, and just the medium-to-weak signal reaching the brain could be worrisome.
There are not yet any studies on it, but if the effects of 5G on BBB were much stronger than with 900/1800MHz, it may also be the case that much lower signal intensities would still alter noticeably the BBB, even after the attenuation of the body traversal.
I am not a luddite at all, but I do hope that scientists working to certify that 5G is healthy are not hand-waving away the problem only by saying that the energy absorbed is too low or that the body is blocking its intensity. That would mean they did not hear at all about the effect of the mere frequency as a signal on the adhesion between cells.
I really would like to see some study elucidate the mechanism (or the absence thereof, and the flaws of the previous study), maybe some sort of resonance, soon enough to avoid to be in a situation were Wifi/4G/5G would be everywhere yet with dangerous long-term effects on health.
The issue is that the energy absorbed is literally too low to do anything. We're talking about heating your body up by 0.1 of a centigrade, so little that it is only visible when using extremely sensitive equipment in lab controlled conditions.
I'd worry more about standard heat given off by devices like laptops. The radio emissions aren't gonna do much but the 80C hot air out of the exhaust blowing into your lap is definitely going to do something. There is plenty of studies on the effects of overheating genitals in males.
But back to the topic; the energy is too small. If these radio waves had an effect, being out during a cloudy day would. The energy you get from solar radiation over a day is probably about the same.
Things like DNA breaking apart don't generally happen with this low frequency, largely because they require a bunch of energy to happen. Like ionization, even 1000W of 100MHz radio waves aren't going to make it happen. There is no amount of energy you can dump into a 100MHz transceiver that would cause ionization of atoms. It simply won't happen. Well, they will ionize but not because of the radio waves but because they've heated up enough that they're starting to undergo plasma formation. But that semantic difference is still important.
The sender in your cellphone or the energy you get from your wifi router are too small to be measured and by all acounts of physics, their effects are too small to be reasonably measured even in long term studies. We're talking literaly sub-milliwatt over your entire body. The entire body uses atleast 100Watts to stay alive. <0.1% change in thermal energy.
This particular feeling, of having a compulsion to share scary information without a strong knowledge base, and then retreating to this sort of position “I think it’s important to put all the information out there” is well described, specifically on this topic, by a recent post by Troy hunt.
Well, from me it wasn't a strong compulsion. However, for many reasons (especially about privacy) we ought not to implement 5G. And this wasn't an article about some conspiracy--it was from an expert who is advising we tread cautiously about what we do not know, and that is very good advice.
I don't think anyone can confirm or deny that 5G carries health risks. But, we do have evidence there are health risks with other cellular communication technologies, and we ought to use that as a basis for decision making.
2. please try to explain the security issues that 5G presents that aren't present in 4G, 3G, etc.
3. a lack of information is not an excuse to promote doubt and misinformation. part of the reason we haven't been able to measure the long-term effects of cellular radiation is that it takes time to run those studies. please stop promoting lies and undermining trust in the systems that help manage our society
In response to #3, I have not posted any lies, and anything that disagrees with your narrative is not automatically FUD. There are serious doubts of 5G on many fronts by many experts, and these doubts should be discussed. However, as I've noticed here, there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber. Anything that's not in-group is not allowed, as we see here, where an expert has a serious concern about untested technologies. I wish we were able to have an honest conversation about this.
> It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
Let's reverse roles: can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G? How about at the very basic of levels: why do we need poly-gigabit speeds for cell phones, and how could implementing it negatively impact people?
Why not? When we moved from 3G to 4G I felt like it was kind of useless, but now that I have it I definitely enjoy all the things that become possible with it (lower latency everything, mostly). It was the same way moving from ISDN to cable. It's never bad to have better stuff - you'll find a use for it even if you don't have one now.
> can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G
Frankly the only real and reasonable concern to have is that there are very few engineers that roll out 5G networks that aren't Chinese. I'm not opposed to China, but I am opposed to a country's entire infrastructure being built and maintained by another country (that may want to use that to exert political pressure some day).
> there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber
In this case I really don't think it's that, it's mostly that you posted information that's just wrong and then you retreated to a (frankly lazy) defense as to why you're spreading misinformation. It makes you come off as the kind of person that's really unpleasant to talk to, because the lies tend to be so sticky and pervasive. It's exhausting to have to revisit every component of what you know just because someone else couldn't be bothered to figure it out for themselves.
I think your comment is off-base. One, because I posted a link to Scientific American, where an expert in the effects of cellular telecommunication on human health wrote an opinion piece on why we should tread cautiously with the rollout of 5G transmitting equipment. I'm not spreading misinformation, I'm not claiming 5G to cause COVID-19, and I'm not saying anything that should be controversial.
However, I do think there is an echo chamber here, and I think that anything that cautions against the cavalier use of untested technology is not permitted, which I think is very dangerous.
What you think is a 'lazy defense' is really just a guy trying to subdue what he could already recognize as a geyser of vitriolic, and frankly wrong, comments. But, hey, this is apparently a place where everyone's opinion counts as fact, and no criticism at all of 5G is allowed.
"so we are “flying blind” to quote a U.S. senator. "
Quoting a US senator on technology is not exactly a strong argument. Like arguing about email security and quoting a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email.
In many cases senators are the least possible informed people on a topic, and are almost certainly not focused on the pure science of an issue. Quoting one of them pretty much means you are trying to sway me by using their position, not research.
Also, nothing that you quoted about 5G actually says it is unsafe. Saying that 2G and 3G are unsafe and that we don't know what 4G does, and that government doesn't want to investigate 5G, and that tumors of a certain type 'may be at least partially attributable' to cell phone radiation, and all of the other slights, all of that doesn't add up to 5G is unsafe.
This is the direct rebut to the article you linked, even from the same site.
> On the strength of epidemiological evidence, cancer fears are dangerously misguided: While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008, there has been no indication that glioma rates have increased proportionally in the same period—a nonrelationship replicated by numerous other studies.
About the author
> David Robert Grimes is a cancer researcher, physicist, and John Maddox Prize–winning science writer. He is based at Dublin City University and is a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford. He advises, across Europe, on the public understanding of science, particularly on vaccination policy and combatting cancer misinformation. His first book, The Irrational Ape: Why Flawed Logic Puts Us All at Risk, and How Critical Thinking Can Save the World, is now available from Simon & Schuster UK.
> a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email
Senators who don't send emails don't do so because they don't know how to send emails -- they do it because they're doing seriously fucked up stuff and don't want a paper trail. As the fictional drug kingpin Stringer Bell says in The Wire -- "is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"
Hmm, I was selling and installing a lot of Cell Phones in Silicon Valley in 1983 (C-Tell Cellular, Santa Clara), and we had an office in Sacramento that was doing even better than I was sales wise.
To characterize the nearly ten years of cell phone growth as "virtually zero" makes me seriously question the authors fact checking and thought process.
To whit: "While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008"
That's anecdotal evidence. My anecdotal evidence is that I lived in a suburb of a major city on the east coast, and no one I knew had a cellphone until probably the mid-90s.
>two years of exposure to cell phone RFR increased cancer in male rats
If this is the study I'm thinking of, it's suspect for 3 reasons.
1. First off, the study didn't test against 5G. It used 2G and 3G emissions. Even if you believe the study, it doesn't make sense to use it as a reason to stick with 3G instead of 5G.
2. The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested? And only the males of that species? Sidenote- the mice were actually exposed to more energy than the rats
3. Even though the male rats exposed to 2G and 3G were more likely to get cancer, they also lived longer than unexposed rats. Male rats exposed to 3G lived nearly 10% longer than ones that weren't. If this life extending capability also applies to 5G signals, we should be accelerating 5G deployment.
> The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested?
Coulomb barrier - how to overcome it with radiation like that?
Exactly, not at the energy levels a cell phone user is subjected to. Why isn't that the end of the story?
Enough is being invested, it is just being spent extremely poorly. No country gets less per dollar on education than the US. A good start would be supporting school choice so the public school's monopoly and cost structure can be challenged.
Literally every other country in the world has a fully public education that does just fine.
I think the only well known non-US private school system (off the top of my head) are UK commonwealth secondary boarding schools, and those schools are more well known for their abuse than their academic strength.
Pretty much any other country (for example, France, Japan, China, etc) are generally built on a system of publicly funded schools
The funny thing about this whole story is that this whole story has a much simpler explanation that doesn't involve any conspiracies at all:
"We told the California Public Utilities Commission of a 4,700-MW need through 2022 and that gap started in 2020. Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement and none starting until 2021," Berberich said during a special telephone conference the Cal-ISO Board of Governors held Aug. 17, following a weekend during which the grid operator twice conducted rotating blackouts because of high demand and tightening reserves.
It's weird that none of the 'experts' in the news could figure this out and we've gone to blaming random homeowners, electric lines, 5G and everything else in this story without this information even coming up.
There is a lot of mysticism around electromagnetism, but I wouldn't want to live under a high voltage line either.
But that would probably be irrelevant for substations and you could isolate lines from populated areas with not problem. I think the issue is probably because there is little will for investments.
I do think the recent fires have nudged things towards more undergrounding. I'm familiar with some of the dialogue in similarly rural/affluent peninsula towns, and it's mostly a debate about safety versus cost to underground.
There's an effort to underground the utilities near Foothill College by tapping into Santa Clara County Fire's funds for improved fire safety, since they're allowed to use these funds in that specific location.
The justification is that there's a particularly high density and quantity of wiring around that fire station (one of two for LAH, IIRC) and that Moody is a major access route for emergency services and evacuation. A giant bundle of wires coming down across the road would strangle a response.
A simplistic napkin math computation says that the cost delta in electricity between what Santa Clara pays and what PG&E customers pay, times the amount of electricity that LAH residents consume would pay for the entire undergrounding in 5-6 years.
So to my mind, it seems like a simple argument in favor of a municipal power utility that charges PG&E rates until it pays off its infrastructure, and then charges a more reasonable rate thereafter. Of course this assumes that LAH could achieve Santa Clara levels of cost efficiency, but it doesn't seem crazy either.
Makes sense -- Moody Road is a pretty dicey road for access and there's a decent number of homes that could easily be cut off there. Presumably in such a situation the opposite side access from Page Mill Road would be jeopardized as well.
Too bad the deadline has passed for nomination for LAH Town Council. You should run next time ;)
SVP isn't weighed down with debt from {the Erin Brockavitch lawsuit, the San Bruno gas explosion, the Paradise fire} incidents (among other, less infamous ones).
More likely, though, is that smaller and newer utilities are likely to be more nimble than the big behemoth that has lots of tech debt and internal and external bureaucracy.
I also wonder how much of it just comes down to serving a small dense area vs a large varied one. If you can focus on the cheapest customers to serve and avoid the overhead from needing to cover a large area it should be at least a little cheaper.
As far as I can tell it's a cost-plus model. If PG&E wants to grow its revenue, it has to do something that costs more. They have a perverse incentive to make everything as expensive as possible.
Man, I can't imagine anyone NIMBYing new power poles lol. Old poles get scary, especially when they start leaning over. And then when AT&T was mounting giant ass DSL VRADs on poles too lol.
I'd be out there cheering on the linemen for replacing the old junk. :D
I don't think the poles are the issue. They're a proxy. The issue is: what happens when you upgrade such infrastructure? The area become more desirable, there's more development, and more "outsiders" move in.
Because that requires new permits and new permits require impact studies and approval which must go through the public. Which makes it impossible in areas like that.
Just replacement to exactly what was there does not require that approval.
Depends. New poles proposed often carry not just electricity, but also a cellular station, 2 or 3 cameras, 'smart' blazing bright led street lights going on and off at irregular times and 1 or 2 sizable led advertizing displays constatly adapting their messages to perceived passers by.
I can definetly see how replacing a lowly old pole with one of these annoyance towers can lead to strong opposition even for those not having 5G scares.
Burying the cable like every other country on this planet with decent infrastructure does, will not create "a cellular station,2 or 3 cameras, led street light and advertising displays". How would these even work underground?
A lot of power poles have been replaced recently in my town and surrounding area. Most of the newer poles are a bit taller. Some of the A shaped towers were replaced with giant poles. Some giant wooden poles were replaced with towers. For the most part, the changes were aesthetically pretty minimal. Not a single one of the new towers has cameras, a smart LED street light, cellular stations, or sizeable advertising displays.
Most of those other things, I have seen, but on different projects lol. Like the LED street lamps have been phased in on most streets out here over the past few years. They also upgraded the light-up street signs to have LEDs and replaced the yellowed, cracked, faded glass with shiny new glass.
All of those things were super solid improvements though.
Of course, we could just act like the town is evil, defund everything, and then have them sell the rights-of-way to companies that would almost certainly squeeze the blood out of the infrastructure and place advertising on it.
Maybe they'd put cameras and use machine learning to determine which streets are the busiest, and find out more about the demographics of people who walk the street, so they can decide how long to leave the lights on - oh and sell that data to further profit lol.
I have family in Mill Valley in that area. They've seen PG&E helicoptering in new polls in residential neighborhoods. I assume it was because the streets were too narrow but also likely that the community didn't want heavy machinery in their neighborhood.
I would love to see PG&E shame residents by showing PG&E customers how much their bill increases (both individually and in aggregate) because they have to work around NIMBYs.
The work itself requires construction and any additional maintenance work may require construction (eg. digging a trench in the road / sidewalks). There's always some maintenance needed and I suspect vocal NIMBY people just don't want to tolerate any minor inconvenience, not simply any change.
Then again, maybe it's the same demand for power and independence that we are seeing with "Karens", masks, protests, Confederate statues, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, etc. As individuals feel more powerless, they will almost certainly lash out at anything they can, including local utilities disrupting their life/convenience.
Not all locations are amenable to underground cables.
Here is a white paper that lays out all the tradeoffs and includes some costs. New construction costs can differ between overhead and underground by 2-10x. Conversion costs aren't negligible either.
https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/unde...
From the paper it seams that overhead cables are also >10x more frequently failing, so I think that'll balance out easily.
Where I live, 99.9% of power is delivered via underground cables, I get power outages like once every 5 years. Brownouts are more often but usually not related to cable issues. America needs to catch up to the rest of the world there.
You're being too simplistic. If it were that obvious there would be no need for white papers and it would have been done already.
The actual cost of construction and maintenance are going to vary from place to base based on geology, existing infrastructure, weather, labor costs, regulatory oversight,
cost of capitol, etc. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
They under grounded the utilities in my neighborhood. Took them about 3 years total. I'd wake up to the sound of guys jackhammering outside my window. For a couple of months contractors were using the spot in front of my house to stash their metal plates.
I think it was worth it. But there are crankypants types that hate any change because it's change.
That is too bad, I grew up in an desert locale that had all its power lines buried and I only experienced one power outage in fifteen years. Then I moved out to a coastal area where burying the lines wasn’t really feasible and pretty much every time it rained someone would hydroplane into a utility poll and knock out the power for a couple hours, and it rained at least once a week. If the climate permits them to bury, they should go for it.
(I don't have any professional background in this) I believe in general above-ground lines are "less durable", but they're much easier to install and repair. Below-ground cost significantly more for both. They're also susceptible to different things; wind and tress for above-ground, earthquakes? high water-table? rock vs sand/clay? for below grown.
For a few years I lived in a neighborhood that had above-ground lines, but further down the street they were below ground because that neighborhood was significantly richer. Our power went out fairly frequently. The neighbors told me it was because of the transition from below ground to above ground, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if NIMBYism kept older equipment in service.
How does climate interfere with burying power lines? Germany's bad weather is only slightly less of a stereotype than the lack of humour and <you know what>, and all residential power lines are underground. Even the long-distance lines are moving underground lately.
I think more than climate it tends to be 1) what does the current construction look like and is it feasible to move lines underground, 2) what is the soil like, and is it stable enough to bury cables, and 3) are current property owners willing to accommodate the disturbance to trench and replace the old cables.
I grew up in an old (for the US), hilly east coast city and nothing was underground. Because it wasn't very dense and didn't have gridded neighborhoods, it would have been quite expensive to run utilities underground. I subsequently moved to a newer part of a different city and all the new construction had underground utilities. It still doesn't prevent outages at the substation or high voltage transfer line layers.
For the last 30 years I've lived all along the Mendocino coast, and every time one of the towns I lived in had a vote to underground the utilities, the NIMBY's killed it because it would cause much disruption, yet when the power went out due to weather related issues, they complained about the power outages.
Why would even a NIMBY not be in favor of burying power lines? Power lines & poles don't exactly add to property values, and you'd think that underground you would get less electromagnetic 5G corona cancer rays implanting microchip vaccines too. But I guess trying to apply logic here isn't going to work...
Some NIMBYs I've met just don't want any change at all if there's any amount of immediate inconvenience they would face as a direct result regardless of how small. In these worst NIMBY cases there's often no particularly compelling arguments for why because it's all just flimsy justifications to avoiding dealing with any change. Logical argument about costs and benefits tend to go nowhere with these people. Sometimes framing things in terms of reducing future hassles and change can get things moving.
That underground lines are objected to is hillarious by east coast standards where NIMBYs frown upon power lines heavily. Especially the EMF whackjobs since the earth between it would insulate it but those types are so wilfully ignorant they would think it causes earthquakes or "poisons the earth" somehow.
NIMBYs have almost nothing to do with blocking wire undergrounding. Parts of Manhattan Beach, for example, are undergrounding wires. The homeowners opposed to it don't want to pay "an average of $42,423" for the service.
I'm curious about how you became an apprentice then decided it wasn't for you? These are not easy to get into I've heard. What made you consider it and what made you leave?
I can't speak for OP, but one of my coworkers used to be a lineman. He saw the old guys in the job and didn't want to end up like them and also got sick of working outside in extreme weather and became a programmer.
what follows is speculation, so you can grab your pitchforks if you want but it will be a hollow victory.
I've always been suspicious of the claim that EM fields have zero effect on human beings, especially near high-volts lines. It doesnt seem possible. Our bodies function based on electrical signals and many cellular mechanisms are mediated with ions.
do we have a list of all electrically-sensitive bodily processes? could we guess what would happen if their simultaneous activation changed by 5%? what about 45% or more? So much of the human body is not exhaustively understood in the general case, and certainly not in the individual case.
idk, i dont wanna go all tinfoil hat here. it just seems like circumstances are aligned for there to be large holes in our public understanding (accidentally or otherwise).
note: for whatever its worth, ive spent some time around the 8MW generators on Nimitz-class aircraft carriers[0].
observational studies like this would be hard to craft.
we'd have to be doing the studies, first. second, we'd have to know what we're looking for. if the effects were subtle, generational, or multiple and confounding, it would be hard to see even if we were looking. also, im sure the sample size is small. not a lot of people/animals spend years 10 feet from high-volts lines.
also, people are generally pretty change-averse. if there were proof that our current way of life was harmful, not a lot of people would be interested in discovering, spreading, or changing due to this news, least of all the companies with a profit motive. saving the turtles is fine if all you have to do is use a metal straw instead of plastic, but ask people to inconvenience themselves (less TV, less air-conditioning, less hot water, etc) and you've got a different response.
Another useful thing to understand is the energy required to overcome the Coulomb barrier and contrast that with energies 10 cell phones in your pocket would emit.
Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid
You certainly know more about this topic than I do, but according to the article, it wasn't the operators that decided to cut back on power, it was ordered by the Independent System Operator.
From what I read, Edison, PG&E and SDG&E just did what they were told, and for some reason the ISO told them to cut back earlier than was previously necessary. That's why the experts are "stumped."
> its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.
ahh yes, seems like the "looking for toilet paper in all the wrong places" phenomenon where there's no lack of supply, but the existing supply lines head to the wrong places. (all the industrial/office stuff is idled, while rural locations are blasting AC in ways they've never seen before)
> as someone who apprenticed as a lineman briefly, this isnt at all unexpected. Just because you have generating capacity, does not always mean you have capacity in the duty cycle for your transmission infrastructure.
That's a nice story, except as the article notes it wasn't distribution but generation that was the problem. Not a shortage of installed capacity, but shutdown of four (one wind apparently due to conditions, and three natural gas apparently voluntarily by the operators) plants.
I would imagine with the amount of financial exposure these power companies have now regarding wild fires, it's not exactly in their best interests to try to push their infrastructure either.
MW is a funny unit in this context. Apparently Daily Mail meant MWh.
> It provides a total of 129 megawatt-hours (460 GJ) of storage capable of discharge at 100 megawatts (130,000 hp) into the power grid, which is contractually divided into two parts:[20][needs update]
> - 70 MW running for 10 minutes (11.7 MWh) is contracted to the government to provide stability to the grid (grid services)[21] and prevent load-shedding blackouts[13][22] while other generators are started in the event of sudden drops in wind or other network issues. This service has reduced the cost of grid services to the Australian Energy Market Operator by 90%.[23]
> - 30 MW for 3 hours (90 MWh) is used by Neoen for load management to store energy when prices are low and sell it when de
Grid scale battery storage only became practical in the last few years. Now there are a lot of projects under way but they'll take time between approval and completion. One notable example from last week:
"Vistra approved to build a grid battery bigger than all utility-scale battery storage in the US combined"
The past month has been littered with news of exceptionally large battery storage developments, yet none in the world can compare to the news that Vistra’s permit to expand an energy storage system under construction at its natural gas-fired Moss Landing generation station in Monterey County, California to 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh has been approved.
Centralized is cheaper to install and maintain, though. Rather than dispatching an electrician to a home every time its battery has a problem, a farm keeps electricians on-staff and replacement parts in-stock. Installation is cheaper for the same reason.
Up to a point yes. Decentralised is also nice if co-sited with substations because the utility can use it to flatten out spikes/dips and generally make other parts of the infrastructure happier, which reduces maintenance costs on those other parts.
When the article calls this a "landmark plan", they mean it's an experimental new plan. Power technologies need to be well-tested, known to be reliable and efficient, if they're going to be deployed at scale.
I can't seem to find it right now, but someone in another post noted that peak power demand in California is several hours later than peak solar production, so supposing you have storage, it doesn't really matter what the source of the energy is.
> grid battery storage
I'm really curious if this is more or less expensive than adding production capacity.
California is famous for it's duck curve [0] where peak load & peak solar generation are not correlated. There are many possible solutions, some are technical and some are not. I am currently building one of them [1].
That's still a pretty easy situation compared to many places where the storage need is over months and not fractions of days. (Though those places can often do a lot shifting with hydro)
Yes, pumped hydro is a very efficient solution for long-term storage. Plus, it is quickly available when needed (on the order of seconds).
While the solutions seem simple, putting all the pieces together is the real hard part. It's pretty common to have no data available on the distribution grid and the sensors themselves are expensive and then you need all the related infrastructure.
People turn their lights on when the sun goes down, and efficient energy storage is the holy grail.
Also fun back of the napkin math with overestimates, if we have a totally efficient Li+ battery with 0.25 kWh/kg energy density, and converted all the world's 40 billion kg of lithium in the crust and oceans to batteries, we'd get roughly 10 TWh of energy storage capacity. Which is enough to power California for 19 days (we generate around 200TWh annually).
In reality we only have access to a tiny fraction of the world's Lithium reserves, batteries aren't that efficient, they're heavy, dangerous, and all that makes for an expensive technology ill suited for grid energy storage (and alternatives like lead-acid are even worse).
Energy storage on the grid is going to look more like dams and reservoirs in the mountains than battery arrays. Even that's not great, ideally we'd invest more into nuclear energy for generating clean power on demand.
Also fun back of the napkin math with overestimates, if we have a totally efficient Li+ battery with 0.25 kWh/kg energy density, and converted all the world's 40 billion kg of lithium in the crust and oceans to batteries,
You are confusing present estimates of lithium resources (a term of art used in the mining industry) with terrestrial abundance.
Your estimate of 40 billion kilograms roughly corresponds to the USGS estimate of world lithium resources in 2015 (39.9 million tons):
The Earth's mass changes negligibly over a few decades. The reason lithium resource estimates change so much over a short time is that people have put in the effort to identify and quantify specific sources of lithium. That's what converts preexisting geology from not-a-resource into what miners call a resource.
In generic geochemical terms, the Earth's crust is estimated to contain 17-20 parts per million of lithium by mass:
According to [1], a standard 2 Ah 18650 Li-ion cell has something like 0.6 grams of lithium. (2.0 Ah * 4.2 V / 0.0006 kg of lithium) works out to 14 kWh/kg or 560 TWh of capacity.
That one battery chemistry alone would be enough to power the entire world for a week. Once you eliminate nonessential industrial power consumption - aka bring your own power storage or shut down machinery with the sun - the amount of lithium we'd need to store to make a transition to solar/wind feasible would be far smaller than global reserves.
Edit: as noted by phillipkglass, this math is moot
Also, we don't have to limit ourselves to lithium. Li makes sense in vahicular applications, but the grid storage could be perfectly fine with Na or any other technology.
Here is, for example, a sodium ion chemistry based on prussian blue:
Are you saying 19 full days of energy storage? Why do we need 19 days? Isn't it more like N hours per day, which can be recharged overnight and the following day? This seems like a very disingenuous presentation of this information.
I remember seeing academics analysis of various storage methods that showed how none of them could be scaled up to store 7 days worth of energy. And thus solar and wind were infeasible.
There were two problems.
One he was using 7 days worth of storage. It's true that in the fossil fuel industry 7 days of storage is standard. But that's because coal/oil/gas have supply chain issues to deal with. So he was intentionally increasing the required storage 10 fold.
The second. He studiously avoided any mention of thermal storage methods. Or using natural gas as a back up. Both of which can be scaled up to meet his 7 day storage requirement.
Pricing and regulation, we need to get out of pretend flat-rate electricity ASAP. This will probably lead to generously overprosivisioning solar & wind + long distance HVDC transmission lines or energy storage for the overproduction.
I don't see how pricing can really fix this, because the price falls on individuals who aren't in a position to fix the grid. Do you think it would be effective by incentivizing people to buy oversized residential solar arrays and significant dispersed battery storage?
Anti-fossil fuel mandates imposed by the California legislature is part of the reason there is a shortage of power in various areas. Rushing the transition without enough alternative supply in place is a recipe for further problems.
There was no such shortage if you only look at instantaneous figures and ignore the fact that a substantial proportion of the grid's generation capacity was in the process of rapidly disappearing due to a predicable daily process called "sunset", as the article does. See my other comment. I suspect the person you're replying to might be right.
They retired base load power (nuclear) and didn't replace it with other power sources that can provide base load. Instead everyone pushed for renewable only and opposed the natural gas power stations.
Build 5,000 MW of natural gas peakers and this problem immediately goes away.
So California has one-upped Germany: instead of replacing nuclear with coal, they're replacing nuclear with rolling blackouts. Ugh.
And to think, if we just hadn't stopped building nuclear, we would already be rid of CO2-intensive electricity. Instead, we've barely begun, and we've only begin through duck-curve denial. Facepalm.
How many solar panels and grid storage batteries would you need to support a population of 39 million people running their air conditioners constantly during a heat wave for a week?
How much would all that equipment cost to buy and to maintain?
I wonder what would Tesla owners do during fire-induced blackouts. With wrong combination of returning from long drive to homes without power, and fire hazard warnings, people owning only electrical cars could become trapped really bad. Unfortunately, Teslas are a part of a problem for now, being power hogs .
Most Tesla owners I know keep their cars at 80-90% charge every single day since they have a charger at home. That's enough range to get you 4-5 hours away from any would be wildfires.
Most tesla owners have a couple hundred miles of range. I'd be worried about LEAF owners with 65 mile ranges.
The LEAF people at my former company complained that Teslas shouldn't be allowed to plug in in the limited chargnig spots because they need to be able to plug in to get home! Fortunately, the company said "tough. First come first served."
I would expect people who live in wildfire zones to have a getaway plan. If they're relying on a Tesla and aren't keeping the batteries topped up at all times -- or an ICE car with the tank topped up at all times -- that's just irresponsible.
I think I can say that our entire neighborhood is up in arms about what's going on with SCE in general. In the last few months people have received bills that amount to 10 to 20 times their usual bill.
In our case, with a 13 kW solar array, our usual bill is in the order of $15 per month and has been so for years. Last month our bill was $350 and the prior month $184. We have been sending excess energy to SCE for years. I built a larger system than normal in preparation for electric vehicles. Which means that, at times, we send as much as 6 kW or so back. None of that mattered.
What complicates everything is that we were auto-magically signed-up for CPA (Clean Power Alliance). Which is, as far as I am concerned, a government run scam (sorry if this offends anyone). By "we" I mean, most of our neighborhood and town.
What makes this a mess is that SCE can't talk about CPA rates and CPA can't talk about SCE billing. One, in theory, provides the electricity and the other charges you for the transport and some fees. If you have ever tried to make sense out of one of these bills you know exactly what I am talking about. I have spent hours on the phone will SCE billing people and they can't tell me how some of it is actually calculated, even managers don't know.
What makes it even worse is that the rate comparison tools and calculators available before the transition to CPA+SCE evaporated after the transition. The SCE website has been a mess for about two years and not having access to rate comparison tools makes it even worse. Billing and data clarity is obfuscated, to say the least.
Some of us are now in the process of opting out of CPA just to that we can talk to a single point of contact and actually discuss the bill. With CPA in the loop it is impossible because CPA and SCE point fingers at each other and consumers are left in the middle wondering what the heck happened.
Even beyond that, SCE told everyone that they had "grandfathered rates". This are the TOU-D-A and TOU-D-B rates from a few years ago. One of the things that changed radically with respect to that time is that some of the costs per kWh have more than tripled. When inquiring about how this could happen with "grandfathered rates" we were told that the rate schedule was grandfathered not the cost per kWh. In other words, the demarcation times between "On peak", "Off peak" and "Super off peak" remain fixed but your cost per kWh changes.
This is the most dishonest use of the term "grandfathered" I have seen in my life. This might not make sense to readers outside of the US. Here, the term refers to a condition being protected from future changes. Anyone who heard that term pretty much assumed their costs were locked in, not just the times for each rate. From my perspective this was a swindle.
Frankly, this is about as anti-consumer as one can get. The average person isn't equipped to run through even the simplest electrical power calculations, they just don't understand. Add to this the complexities of tiered and time-of-day systems, varying rates and costs of transport, energy vs. power calculations, area under the power curve (which is what you pay for), difficulty in understanding energy utilization, etc. and you have the makings for a public that is powerless against this complexity.
I am quite comfortable with mathematics and complex financial modelling and still had to devote hours to getting enough answers from SCE to attempt to create a model in Excel in order to understand what happened during the last few months, not just for us but also our neighbors. Even with that, the decision had to be made to op...
We benefitted greatly from SCE raising the TOU-D-A peak rates because we generate net power during those times. It sounds like I'm fortunate to not know anything about CPA though...
Legally a CCA is required to send two "opt-out" notices. Being jaded and mistrustful, I did some research, and opted-out.
> Which is, as far as I am concerned, a government run scam
Only a slight exaggeration, by my experience. My city has lost money on the adventure, by extending zero-interest loans, and then forgiving them.
The big winners are the power companies on the other side of the futures contracts, local clean-power advocates who imagine they have somehow "succeeded", and our city manager, who gets a trendy bullet item for his resume.
Meanwhile, local for-profit power has begun offering a 100% renewable supply option for about 3% less than the CCA.
Here's a good one: Each SCE bill includes two added costs that are only added to your bill if you are in CPA, these are:
"CCA Cost Responsibility Surcharge" and "CTC, NDC, PPPC".
These two are calculated based on energy utilization. This amounts to $40 to $60 per month for the bills I have seen. Which, in turn, means it makes CPA bills no different from or more expensive than SCE bills. That's why I called it a scam.
By now opting-out of CPA those two elements of the bill go away. What's just precious is that they place you in a "transitional" rate for six months.
I place this kind of stuff in the category of unnecessary complexity added to people's lives for no reason at all. It provides no benefits at all (or questionable benefits), burns time and financial resources.
Wow. What what a nightmare. I'm sorry to hear it. Thanks for the comprehensive post.
>"area under the power curve (which is what you pay for)..."
What is this billing model exactly> I tried to look it up in the context of utility billing but wasn't able to find anything.
>"My neighbors are absolutely livid, unlike me (I engineered, bought and installed my own system), they ended-up with a range of leasing and other arrangements from a number of different vendors."
Is this where SCE or another Edison has a third party leasing firm they partner with? I think these leases are for 30 years no? What happens when you sell a home with such a lease on it?
You pay for energy, not power. The simple formula for energy is power x time. This is what "kWh" means... 1 kilo-Watt used for one hour.
When calculating total energy utilization for a period of time during which power varies (your TV is turned on and off, air conditioner cycles, etc.) the calculation effectively entails the integral of power plotted against time. Another way to put it is that the energy is the area under that curve.
Yeah, I got a pretty huge power bill last month and was trying to calculate my rate to figure out how much I could save where. Doing this is actually pretty confusing with the bill you get.
Tier 1 from SCE for us is $.106/kwh. Tier 2 is $.165/kwh.
Plus:
1. CCA surcharge (whatever that means) is $.0224/kwh for PCIA (whatever that is)
2. CCA surcharge is $.00580/kwh for DWR bond (whatever DWR is)
3. CCA surcharge is $.00089/kwh for CTC (whatever that is)
4. CPA generation charges is $.089/kwh
So tier 2 rate is actually 0.165 + .0224 + .0058 + .00089 + .089 = $.283/kwh, tier 1 rate comes out to $.224/kwh.
The breakdown is useful, I guess, so you kinda know where the money is going. But it's not useful if you're looking for how much you can save on your bill when looking into energy use habits.
Peak charges here (generation + delivery) are $0.56/kWh. That's insane. When I put in the solar array this number was $0.16. And I was told my rate was grandfathered in.
We have Peninsula Clean Energy which is actually cheaper than PG&E (unless you pay the small upcharge for '100% renewable', which we do).. however, it makes your bill impossible to comprehend. TOU, different tiers, different buckets depending on time of year, generation charges, generation credits.. add solar on top of that... net metering 2.0... good luck!
Having looked at the graphs on the CAISO website, I think they had a supply problem and the New York Times is being a little disingenuous here. You can bring up the renewables graph for the 14th here (change the date): http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx At 6 PM, they had about 5.2 GW of solar still coming in. That rapidly and predictably dropped to zero over the next hour and a half. If my rough maths is correct that alone would be enough to wipe out almost the entire 12 percent operating reserve. There's also a really interesting graph of demand vs net demand minus solar and wind on the other page; you can see that total demand flattens out near the top, but net demand - which is what the grid operator has to find generating capacity to fill - continues to ramp up aggressively right up until the peak.
Every year you hear about horrible heat waves and fires in California but I'm here to tell you from my first-hand experience that This Time It's Different. I've lived on the SF peninsula for 10 years. We bought a brand new spec house. It was built without air conditioning. The developer said we wouldn't need it. We installed it anyway because we came from LA and a house in California without A/C did not fit into our worldview.
For the first few years, we rarely used the A/C. Then one year we had a Horrible Heat Wave that lasted two or three days. The A/C ran more or less continuously during that time, but managed to mostly keep up. And it always cooled off at night.
In subsequent years we had period recurrences of 2-3 day heat events that caused our A/C to run quite a lot but still keep up. This latest heat event has seen the A/C running three days now with no relief forecast until Thursday. Worse, it's not cooling off much at night the way it always used to. For the first time in ten years we are having to run the A/C at night instead of opening windows in order to sleep.
Frankly, the trend scares the living shit out of me. The speed at which these changes are manifesting themselves in our little microclimate is just mind-boggling.
It would be wonderful if we had the ability to directly manipulate weather and a climate on a large scale. Imagine being able to affect weather patterns to cool down or turn the heat up on certain segments of the population.
My anecdote is the opposite. I lived in Santa Clara from 2002-2010, San Carlos 2010-2011, Belmont 2011-2014, Redwood City 2014-present.
Never had AC on the Peninsula. We have heatwaves every year. This summer has been remarkably mild, low 70s most of July and August until now. We got our heatwave. A bit more humid than normal thanks to tropical storm remnants, 70f dewpoint and 95f on Sunday, 65f dewpoint and spiked to 105f Saturday briefly.
It seems fractionally warmer than most heatwaves, and slightly longer, but doesn't 'feel' indicative of a trend.
Still no A/C, and I guess I notice it more now that I'm home 24/7, but still totally do-able.
Been running the house fan overnight to get the rooms down into the mid-high 70s.
That's contrary to my experience. I lived in south bay and the peninsula 2004-2010 and needed a/c every summer, for multiple weeks each year. For two of those years I didn't have a/c and had a lot of sleep loss those summers when daytime temperatures would break 90F, and occasionally 100F. Even when we'd "only" get mid-80F temperatures, I'd still want to run the a/c during the day if I was home. Feeling sticky while sitting on one's couch is no fun.
I've lived in SF since 2010, and there have been multiple weeks in the summer, during the past 5 or 6 years, where I've been unable to sleep due to heat. That sort of thing was rare in the 4 or 5 years prior. Just over this past weekend my inside temperature topped at just below 90F, with the outdoor daytime temperature getting as high as 98F. By the time I went to sleep, the indoor temperature was still in the low 80s, with windows open and fans on full.
If you don't require a/c at those temperatures in order to sleep well, lucky you, but then I wouldn't characterize you as typical.
Sorry, I had A/C when I lived in Santa Clara, that was poorly worded. I remember well the heat wave of 2006 where it peaked at 107 for 3 days in a row (and of course was over 100 for longer than that).
I think one major difference this year with the current heatwave is that everyone's working from home. They're not going to an air conditioned office to work during the day, or they don't have the ability to go to the local library or Starbucks to sit and work. It's much worse having to sit through a heat wave at home with no A/C this year than in previous years.
And being home you heat the place by existing, running things, and opening windows to the heat. If you leave a house locked, it heats up pretty slowly, and if you get back towards dark, it will cool off faster from a lower temperature.
I agree with you. I've lived in the Bay Area over 20 years now. Heat waves are nothing special, it happens every year. OP is completely overexaggerating. Overall, from Peninsula to SF, you can survive most days without AC, except for about one week a year where it sucks. This year sucks worse because everyone is stuck at home, instead of an air conditioned office, if you're lucky to work. It used to be the case that you would just stay at work late until it cooled off but that didn't happen this year.
Yes, it got hot on Friday and Saturday but those were the first two very hot days all year. This year has been overall pretty average, if not a bit cooler than average years.
Just for the record, I'm not actually complaining about the weather. I still would not trade our weather for anyplace else in the world. But the trend over the ten years I've been living here full time (and some shorter-term stints living here in the 80's) seems alarming to me.
Part of the reason for that is because our houses are built for only temperate weather, especially the older ones.
My house was built in the 60s. It had single pane windows and no insulation under the floor in the crawlspace. It also had no attic fan.
We upgraded the windows and put in an attic fan, and that mostly works, but we still need the A/C a lot these last few years.
The house just doesn't hold temperature well. If there is more than a few degrees variance in either direction the temp swings wildly if I turn off the a/c.
This house was designed for the air outside to always be right around 72.
Another related story, I was using a datacenter in San Francisco. When the outside temp hit 85, we had to start shutting down servers. They told us the datacenter was designed with the assumption that the outside temp wouldn't ever get past 80.
No one in California is prepared for anything remotely close to actual weather, with the exception of people who live in the mountains. Thus any deviation from the extremely limited norm seems shocking.
That said, I grew up in southern ontario where discussing the weather is pretty much a widespread hobby, so it's actually kind of nice to have weather to discuss.
I haven't actually had it checked but I'm pretty sure that the A/C is working just fine. While it is running it produces plenty of cold air. And although it is almost ten years old, it hasn't seen a lot of use during that time. Until now, that is.
If your unit is too big it actually makes things worse, because it cycles on and off a lot more which in turn means it pulls less humidity out of the air. I think the rule is you want one ton per 600sq ft that you’re cooling, give or take.
I'm pretty sure that we're underpowered if anything. Our house is three stories, built into a hill. Only the top two floors are even plumbed for A/C and only the top floor has a compressor installed. Like I said earlier, the builder didn't think we'd need A/C at all.
Humidity inside is running about 50% at the moment.
Minisplits upstairs might be a good idea. Also, anything to reduce the stack effect. You might have air leaks pulling heat upwards all day. Our house is old and retrofitted, so the return air upstairs is inadequate but closing the downstairs vents makes a huge difference in the summer, since old air sinks.
for me it's been the opposite, it has been unnervingly moderate as far as North Texas summers go the past 5 summers at least. I really feel for the coastal refugees that have moved to the area once a hot summer shows up. ...3 or 4 consecutive > 100F weeks when the roads start to melt and random fires breaking out in grass everywhere, the wind blows and it just gets hotter etc...
I live in Gilroy, and we've had 3 days of 105+ weather. When the house I live in was built, they put in a 3-ton unit, which was complete fine for the first 20 years my family lived here. I replaced it a few years ago with a 4-ton unit, and added extra blown-in insulation. It has barely kept up with the heatwave. Next is dual-pane windows, I guess. There are a lot of folks with less who are straight-out suffering. They re-opened the local library to function as a cooling center. Difficult to do during covid, but heatstroke is dangerous, too. Rough times.
Fancy insulation, double pane glass, etc are great for the heating season. They reduce conductive heat transfer, which is (roughly) proportional to the indoor-outdoor temperature difference. Even on a 100F day, the indoor-outdoor difference with A/C set to 75F is only 25F, which is equivalent to heating to 70F on a mild 45F winter day.
Try looking for major sources of solar heating instead. Windows and especially skylights are big culprits. So are inadequately insulated roof / ceiling assemblies.
You can put solar film on windows, use indoor or outdoor shades, or replace glass with low SHGC (solar heat gain coefficient) glass to reduce heating.
One unexpectedly strong benefit of the panels we put on our roof was the lower cooling bill, even before we were allowed to switch on the panels and use the power generated. Our roof geometry only allowed for a 65% solution instead of the 80% we were aiming for, and this unaccounted for improvement almost made the difference.
Going from a three to four ton unit was a mistake. One that's easy to make because it's counter-intuitive. And because bigger units are more expensive there's a sales incentive to sell bigger units too. To be effective at cooling people an air conditioner needs to remove latent heat in the form of water vapor. Lowering the air temperature isn't enough.
Oversized units short-cycle, lowering the air temperature significantly faster than they remove latent heat by condensing water vapor. The controlling thermostat turns the unit off quickly because the big unit quickly reduces the air temperature. The latent heat in the water vapor remains in the air. People still feel hot.
Basically, a residential air conditioner should be running most of the time if it's properly sized. Oversized units will come on, run for a few minutes, shut down for a few minutes, run for a few minutes, etc.
Double pane windows and blown insulation will magnify the effect because the air conditioner will reduce the air temperature more quickly and efficiently and leave more latent heat in the air.
Note that latent heat in the air from water vapor increases with temperature. That's why we talk in terms of relative humidity. So oversizing is less of an issue for heating season and double pane windows and extra insulation help.
I know you mean well, but I promise you, it wasn't a mistake. :) It's not rapid cycling, it's barely keeping up. It has literally gotten hotter here over the years. That's what I was trying to get at with my original post- what was appropriately-sized in decades past is no longer enough.
Don't some modern high-end residential HVAC systems have separate air conditioners and dehumidifiers to provide more granularity (and perhaps effectiveness or energy efficiency) between the two effects?
Wait - you don't even have dual-pane glass? That's like leaving a door ajar all day.
You can fake a second pane by putting plastic film over the window frame and taping it securely around the edges so there's no leakage, capturing the air between it and the glass. This will act as an insulating layer. Air leakage = heat transfer.
But you're better off replacing the windows with dual-pane units that have low-e coatings. Maybe the government or your utility has a program to help cover the replacement cost.
Yup. Currently have the plastic film deployed on about half my windows. It's obviously not true double-pane, but it makes a real difference. Well worth the $. For folks who don't know, once you've applied the plastic film, you shrink it with a hairdryer until it is smooth. If you take your time, it doesn't look bad at all, and is optically clear.
3M makes a variety of films for solar reduction and safety; they’re pretty great. Only available through certified installers but we had them done to protect our historic single pane windows, and while we were at it we had some UV film put on our large west-facing windows.
Just to add to this perspective. I live in Austin, TX, in April of this year it is hot enough outside that the A/C has to stay on constantly day and night. It's August and the A/C is never off. I don't expect the A/C to turn off until late October. That's 6 months of non-stop A/C in our apartment. That's insane to me.
That seems normal to me for Texas, though. Most population growth across TX, NM, AZ happened after the invention of air conditioning, precisely because it's uncomfortable there for half the year without it.
That is normal for Texas - but most buildings have central air so it’s not so bad. In NYC I’m in a pre-war building that has no A/C or ducting so I have to put in window units which only have a 3-5 year lifespan and aren’t horribly efficient , I can’t put in ceiling fans because the ceiling can’t support the weight (no cross beam or something), I’m limited in A/C size by the wiring, and until last year I had the old Edison S-type fuses which tend to blow in warm weather so you had to keep a shoe box of them around just in case - last year the super put in a breaker panel and man it has been wonderful, I’ve yet to even have to reset one of them.
I am now in my mid-late 40s and I grew up in the East Bay, in the foothills of Mt. Diablo. We relocated to my childhood home, where my parents had remained until recently. As a 1970s tract home, it still lacks air-conditioning and has relatively poor thermal efficiency, just as it did back then. This past week, we have tried to manage the house thermals as best as we can, venting at night and closing it up through the heat of the day. It has been tough with the humid and warm nights and consecutive hot days.
The temperature profile reminds me more of times in the tropics, though it is still comparatively dry here. We've managed roughly a 10F delta between the indoors and outdoors through the peak afternoon hours. The past few days when it got to 105-107 locally, it was around 95F indoors when the temperatures equalized and it was beneficial to open windows again in the evening. This morning, it only cooled to about 82F inside and has climbed back to 90F in 6 hours.
When I lived far away, I liked to reflect on the dark blue sky and desert-like temperature swings we sometimes had out here, with 100F+ days and nights below 60F. But, I cannot say that we never had hot weeks nor summer thunderstorms. I remember those too, along with other somewhat rare events like hard frosts, accumulating hail, or the occasional dusting of snow on local ridges and peaks.
So, with a longer view, I don't think this single event can be called a clear sign of climate change. Someone with a lot more statistical skills than me would need to model the frequency of events and trends and uncertainties...
This is not consistent with my experience; I've lived in the same peninsula home for 10 years and can recall multiple summers with waves this bad or worse.
Same here. Same place in SF for 10 years. It was pretty predictable to have anywhere from 7 days to 21 days of temperatures in 85-95F range. Some years it's less, others more.
I've been here my entire life. This is pretty bad. In my 30 years i've definitely never experienced a hot summer thunderstorm like the other night. It feels very bizarre.
Same. Never before seen a thunderstorm where no precipitation hit the ground.
The heat doesn't feel so new to me. As a kid I was always watching for those 100F+ days with the fascination of hitting triple digits. I have 30+ years of seeing those.
that thunderstorm WAS epic, best I've seen since I lived here. Had the windows open all night, it was wonderful. it rained pretty hard at times here (Redwood City)
Not my experience at all. I've lived in Marin county for 30 years, and this doesn't feel like anything extreme. I can recall many, many similar heat waves in my life. My bet is that the bay area has many micro-climates, and people's experiences can differ wildly. It's hard to extrapolate a trend from this kind of anecdota.
Edit: The summer rain/thunderstorm we had yesterday, now that is rare.
"There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain... And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way."
Whenever Californians talk about whether I'm reminded of this Steinbeck quote.
East of Eden, the most convincing account of what if feels like to have lived in Northern/Central California, even if just for the description of the land. For those who haven't read it, please do. It's a tale that will never really leave you.
> my first-hand experience that This Time It's Different. I've lived on the SF peninsula for 10 years.
Wait, are you saying that your concern is based on a personal experience of 10 years in a place? Besides the fact that your observations might be down to pure chance, there are also strong decade and multi-decade local climate cycles.
I'm on the other side of the planet in Northern Europe, and I feel the same. This summer has been very warm, it feels more like we are in some Mediterranean city (especially with all the outdoor seating due to COVID). We haven't had any record breaking highs, but the number of days when it has been 30c+ has been very unusual. Coupled with last winter which basically never came (usually we get -25c and frozen lakes; that never happened), we'll see what this year brings...
“If there’s really a problem and not just the ISO jumping the gun, it’s going to manifest tomorrow,” Mr. Marcus said. “Tomorrow evening, the wolf arrives.”
Percentage isn't the issue. Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant provides the base power usage, which isn't the issue that's causing the blackouts.
Looking at raw percentage numbers for blackouts is wrong because this is an issue of not having enough capacity during peak, which nuclear doesn't solve.
The issue that is causing the problems is peak demand hits around 5:30 pm....exactly at the same time when solar supply is dropping rapidly. We need natural gas peaker plants that basically fire up to bridge the gap during the night.
Every now and then we might get bailed out if wind is strong that day but that's not something you can build a reliable grid on.
Ercot had this problem last year WRT to over-reliance on wind generation capacity. At one dire point we had 90 minutes of $9/KWh rates and the utility was looking to roll blackouts. I paid $200 for 1 day of electricity and I pulled my breaker about halfway through the worst part. I know people who got hit with nearly 4 figures for a single day of usage.
I don't have problems with renewable energy in principle, but until we have practical storage capabilities or other alternatives, it seems like we need to keep most of the less desirable forms of generation capacity around. I do not think it is acceptable to roll blackouts until we have something like a tesla powerwall in every electricity consumers' premises. We should never compromise on grid quality in pursuit of environmental objectives. The 2nd order consequences of an unreliable grid could have even more grave environmental impact than driving the grid with a coal plant (i.e. every business & homeowner on earth starts buying carbon-intensive generators or lithium batteries due to grid stability problems).
Decommissioning nuclear capacity seems like a massive mistake in general, but I understand the geology is potentially subpar in this specific case. Is it technologically infeasible to produce earthquake-proof nuclear power plants? Or, at least plants that would be guaranteed fail-safe under any seismic condition?
It is politically infeasible to do anything with Nuclear power but the technology potentially exists (eg thorium reactors). In this era where punditry is as good as expertise, however, nuclear power plants that failed safe would be looked as the "unsinkable" Titanic was, in hindsight. On top of that, the Fukushima nuclear disaster set the nuclear industry back decades.
Would love to know what changes day-to-day. According to CAISO dashboard, they are currently delivering 45 GW, while yesterday they were shedding load before they hit 44 GW. So, what aspect of supply changed? We're importing the same amount but we're getting 5 GW more natural gas supply than yesterday. Are there ... are there nat. gas plants that only operate on weekdays?
The issue is time of day. Everything is fine while the sun is still up. Once the sun starts setting and the ~10GW of solar power California has goes away things get challenging.
That is likely natural fluctuations in demand. The grid operator has not announced any load shedding (they have not even announced any imminent need to shed load) and there's still another 5GW of available capacity according to the dashboard.
It doesn't seem very likely that the actual behavior of a large-scale stochastic system and the hour-ahead forecast of that system would part ways to the extent we're seeing, just by coincidence. If it wasn't an intentional curtailment of demand, perhaps there is simply an outage somewhere?
California declared a Stage 2 Emergency at 15:30 PDT today which begins curtailment of interruptible loads, a less drastic form of load shedding. A Stage 3 Emergency begins to affect firm load using rotating outages.
Hence the Pacific DC intertie:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacific_DC_Intertie
"The Pacific Intertie takes advantage of differing power demand patterns between the northwestern and southwestern US. During winter, the northern region operates electrical heating devices while the southern portion uses relatively little electricity. In summer, the north uses little electricity while the south reaches peak demand due to air conditioning usage. Any time the Intertie demand lessens, the excess is distributed elsewhere on the western power grid (states west of the Great Plains, including Colorado and New Mexico).[3]"
(that predates solar, boy do I wish we could store that daylight 12-16 hours)
The electricity might be off but the text message they sent to tell me about it calls it an “outage” and not a “blackout” so at least their priorities are in the right place :v
If the state could magically have enough battery capacity in every county to smooth out this curve, what scale of battery installation would that take?
I don't have a lot of information about the scale required; however, I will note that grid-attached energy storage is a big field that is not limited to batteries. Batteries are generally more energy-efficient, but relatively expensive per unit energy and power. Cheaper options tend to use physical phenomena (pumping water up a gravity gradient, compressing air in caves, &c).
I start to see tweets attributing the CA power outages to increased degree of renewable energies that are "inherently unreliable"(solar, wind), on the supply side of the equation. And of course the tweets are very politically charged, making it hard to judge how true those claims are. Anybody has more insights on these claims?
I read a Forbes article that made a ton of claims like that.
The article was a bunch of statements along the lines of "the renewable push is the reason PGE has neglected maintenance!", without even attempting to explain the connections for any of their claims.
Another claim was that Jerry Brown shut San Onofre Nuclear power station, SONGS, and they wrote that if Brown hadn't shut it then we would have avoided the latest brown outs.
No explanation as to how they believe he'd managed to sabotage Mitsubishi Heavy Industries causing the problems at SONGS that led to billions of dollars and many years of NRC licensing hurdles and required repairs had they decided to do keep it up and running. And not only that, Jerry brown apparently also caused natural gas to be super price efficient, making it impossible for SCE to justify repairing and returning SONGS to full power. Nope, not a peep about those things or how they felt Jerry Brown caused them.
Of course the agenda pusher writing for Forbes didn't explain how Jerry Brown did any of those things, they could just state that Jerry Brown closed it and most people would have to take it at face value. Why care about facts when you can push an agenda!
One way to deal with this is to have variable electric rates - cheaper rates when plenty of power is available, and more expensive when less. This incentivizes consumers to time shift their usage.
For example, evening A/C use can be time shifted to the day, by cooling the house more during the day, so less is needed in the evening. The thermal mass of a house has a lot of inertia (and can be increased by adding, say, a pile of rocks).
The idea of a fixed 24/7 electricity rate is hopelessly obsolete.
If there are rolling blackouts in the evenings, the price differential is not large enough. It has to be large enough to motivate people to change their behavior, invest in variable thermostats, etc.
Making everything hopelessly complicated isn't really great either. Should water rates and gas rates do the same? Tolls already do this. It's a growing cognitive burden.
I don't look forward to surge pricing for data usage. It feels inevitable.
> Take advantage of time-of-use electricity rates in your area. eco+ intelligently precools or preheats the home at times of day when electricity prices are low.
It's crazy to me that it isn't a thing. There's a bunch of stuff (laundry, dishes, RAID snapshots) that I can schedule to run any time, but there's zero incentive not to run them all at peak times.
But it is a thing [1]. Some consumers have just chosen not to opt in, often paying more overall for electricity as a result. That's why the public utilities commission has started mandating them by default, with an opt out policy instead.
People don't voluntarily change their electricity rate plan.
When they do, usually it's when they're existing rate plan expires, and in CA there's been a lot of marketing at that time to get them to switch to time of use rates, usually by trying to explain to them how much they will save by shifting their usage.
But most people don't want to think about when they use electricity - they want to use it when they want to use it.
That's why there is now a California government mandate for variable rate plans.
Going forward, we need truly dynamic rate plans and consumer appliances that support automatic load shifting (i.e an electric clothes dryer that let's you set a deadline for clothes drying and then optimizes when it runs), and along with that, people broadly becoming better educated about how electricity pricing works.
SCE is trying to shift people to time of use rates.
The problem is the time of use rates are terrible, and will be more expensive to anyone who normally stays within tier one rates of the old plan.
I'd end up paying about 30% more for power under any of their time of use rate plans even assuming I only use power in off peak times, despite owning a plug in hybrid. If you stay within their tier one rates on the old plan, the new time-of-use-plans just aren't priced acceptably.
Interesting. I also don't have AC nor do I ever exceed tier 1 pricing. I thought time of use would be much more beneficial for someone who gets into tier 2 pricing if they can shift their use away from peak hours, making all their power at the cheapest rate. Right now my tier 1 cost is $0.21/kwh, the TOU plans are $0.25/kwh off peak, $0.5/kwh peak, but there is a $0.08/kwh credit for within tier 1 usage. Mathed out it's still more expensive.
And, of course, even if TOU was cheaper when I switched, that doesn't mean it doesn't become unfavorable next time rates change.
We're grandfathered into a plan that gives us peak hours of 1-7pm where the new plans are 4-9pm peak. This works great for us with solar, because we make huge generation credits in that 1-4pm range when nobody's home to use power. (or, nobody WAS home before COVID). And we start our evening energy usage after 7pm as we return home from work + outdoor 'after work' activities. The 9pm end for peak hours would definitely hurt us.
OTOH, we have an EV now, so even charging off-peak at, say, 18c is relatively expensive vs the really cheap EV plans that give you good overnight rates. We've got an 11.5kW charger so I'd really love a stupid-cheap rate between, say, 2-4am. But if we switch to an EV plan, the costs go up the rest of the day.
Another perverse thing I've found; your net metering credits under NEM2.0 are on a per-month basis. This is AWESOME in the summer when we generate solar credit at more than 2x the 'value' as we burn them charging the car at off-peak.. but in the winter, when we don't generate much, we get into tier 2 pretty damn quickly.
I remember hearing about rolling blackouts in California as this mysterious problem that occurred after privatization, then after Enron broke, it was revealed that they'd been engineering blackouts in pump & dump schemes. Any chance there's a relationship between these blackouts and the older ones? Or are we sure this is some completely new phenomenon?
Rarely does northern California have heavy A/C loads in the evening. Solar power output and heat load usually match well. But not this week. Usually, peak loads are around 2 PM, at air conditioning peak. This power restriction is for 3 PM to 10 PM, which presumably comes from evening A/C loads while buildings cool down.
Wind is all over the place, up and down by a factor of 4, unrelated to time of day.
So, not saying this is the main driver here, but just wondering: with a lot of people working from home, rather than an office building, it becomes relevant which is more efficient to cool. I have to think that it is more efficient to cool a single, larger building than many smaller ones? Again, not saying it's the primary reason, just mentioning that it could be a contributing factor.
That's a good point, and it's probably worth digging into. It's actually going to depend on a few factors, though. Off the top of my head: are office buildings running HVAC systems at significantly higher temps than they would otherwise have been? How many people working from home actually have A/C? How much more efficient are large A/C systems in comparison to home units?
I have a feeling that offices that are "empty" are still running their A/C systems and lighting at some level, and then you have some portion of WFH people also running those things at home, so overall demand is higher than it was when most office workers were actually in the office.
I think also that, although the lighting may often be on in empty offices, the computers (and body heat) are lower, or missing entirely, so the offices aren't having to work very hard. However, all that load has shifted back to WFH, not gone away, so now the same amount of heat is being handled by less efficient A/Cs, in smaller buildings.
All speculative, though, and probably not the main driver, I admit.
"As California ISO began taking its emergency actions on Saturday, electricity wholesale costs jumped on its energy market. The prices fluctuate based on how much electricity must pass through the wires. The more electricity that must get through a particular line, the higher the price, much like increased toll prices on a highway during traffic congestion. Prices in locations near the Tahoe area across the state line to Reno and Carson City, Nev., spiked into the thousands of dollars per megawatt-hour, far above the typical costs of under $100."
I smell somebody making money off this scheme and likely "kickbacks" involved.
Mr Powers is pushing an interesting conspiracy theory in this article, which I haven't seen discussed yet. I haven't seen anyone else backing it up in other sources, but of course it's still early in the reporting on this issue.
>In particular, California ISO said two natural gas power plants shut down on Friday and, on Saturday, a wind farm and another gas plant stopped producing power.
The state is currently reviewing proposals to extend the operation of old natural gas plants in Southern California. Environmentalists want the plants to remain closed because they use fossil fuels and are cooled using seawater, endangering marine life.
“It makes for a compelling story” if you have blackouts because of a lack of power plants, Mr. Powers said. “We know there is no capacity problem,” he said. “Something odd happened.”
> Environmentalists want the plants to remain closed because they use fossil fuels and are cooled using seawater, endangering marine life.
They're currently running, but scheduled (from about a decade ago) to retire at the end of this calendar year. However recently (and prior to the rolling blackouts), several have had their retirement pushed out a year.
To be fair, we've seen a conspiracy of deliberately pulling perfectly working power plants off the grid in the past, so it's not outside the realm of possibility. In the 2000s, Enron did it to financially manipulate the energy market, and it was directly responsible for California's last crisis [0]. It's probably where the idea of such a conspiracy is coming from.
> These blackouts occurred as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers, as well as from poor state management and regulatory oversight. Subsequently, Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time.
Of course, I'm not saying that the current blackout is a conspiracy, claiming it to be a fossil-fuel conspiracy takes the paranoia to another level, especially when there's no evidence to back it up (yet). I mentioned it just as a historical curiosity.
> “They set it up like this is a historic event,” said Bill Powers, a San Diego engineer who provides expert testimony on utility matters before the state’s regulators. “This should not have triggered blackouts.”
I just searched "Bill Powers", it seems that it's not a pseudonym given by the New York Times, it's real, sounds like a good name to work in the energy industry, haha...
Seriously speaking, apparently this man, Bill Powers, is an activist in consumer protection and energy issues, who often tries to challenge multiple investigations on energy issues before the state’s regulators. I don't think it's wrong, we need people to show up during official investigations to make them more accountable, but it does reduce his credibility if there's no additional evidence to support his latest claim, e.g.
* Energy Experts Question Scale of Blackout (2011)
> Energy experts are baffled at the scale of yesterday’s blackout which left five million people without power.
> The blackout here was caused by a transmission failure in Arizona. But power-industry analyst Bill Powers says the grid is set up so that if there’s a sudden loss of supply, energy companies must immediately lower demand through a strategy of controlled blackouts. Powers said a San Diego Gas & Electric executive’s repeated assertion that the blackout was caused by human error in Arizona yesterday falls short.
> “That doesn’t explain why SDG&E didn’t deploy its emergency procedure which is to selectively brownout and blackout portions of San Diego," Powers said. "It looks like something didn’t go right at SDG&E.”
* Is the Porter Ranch blackout warning overblown? Yes, says one expert (2016)
> But Bill Powers, a frequent expert witness before the California Public Utilities Commission, isn't convinced by officials' claims, calling the blackout warning alarmist. He said that in at least the last decade, SoCal Gas has never hit its firm capacity during the summer peak in the L.A. basin.
I don't think most people realize the nexus of interests that conspired to facilitate those rolling blackouts, while ultimately turning Ken Lay into the Kingmaker of Cali.
Yeah, I was trying to use "conspiracy theory" in the most neutral way possible. It's an interesting theory, I'd like to see more reporting on it.
He's certainly outspoken and active, which doesn't make him wrong by any stretch; in fact, it probably means he's one of the most informed on these matters (which of course doesn't mean unbiased).
The best I can make sense of this article, there may have been, overall, enough generating capacity on the grid, but not enough transmission capacity in particular locations. The closest anything in this article is the bizarre state statement that "no one says it was congestion". But spiking LMP's pretty much exactly indicate either congestion or insufficient generation in particular areas. In fact, in the case that, overall, there is sufficient generation, these conditions are the same. What it might mean is that there is some network condition, e.g. some generation or transmission out on scheduled maintenance, that puts the grid in a less-than secure state, such that higher than expected demand causes transmission in unexpected areas of the network.
356 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 372 ms ] threadMany substations are older, and were never designed to handle high duty and load during climate-change driven weather events. These substations suffer from underreporting as they often dont have remote monitoring capability beyond whats detected at the line. Operators tend to baby these stations intentionally as their failure could spark massive outages across the grid (again, due to older design considerations)
Now this part might get a little political, but these substations/transfer depots/etc... arent just old because the outage would hit a lot of customers at once, but because NIMBY groups frequently oppose building or augmenting existing substations. Wild claims related to electromagnetism basically kill the project at every level.
its also worth noting that the nytimes might not be taking into account the number of people working from home. Duty and loadcycles for this year are going to be very hard to predict.
My understanding is that the mean-free-path of conduction electrons in even OFHC copper is quite short -- scattering on impurities is the dominant loss mechanism, not the boundaries of the conductor. Is the theory advanced above that the morphology of the wire matters, or is there another mechanism at work?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_con...
1. https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chp...
The increase of resistance with temperature is well-known -- I was curious if there is some effect that is directly related to the wire sag (changing morphology, somehow-altered surface area/skin-depth, changing kinks at the connections, some subtlety with increased length (cross-sectional area also increases), etc..).
Like bending a piece of metal back and forth, it weakens each time.
See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_expansion and check the coefficient of expansion.
Maybe I’m wrong and this kind of wire stretching doesn’t impact resistance?
https://www.atcllc.com/blog/why-do-power-lines-sag-on-hot-da...
Do you think think the demand would be higher? In parallel, while many people are working from home, the businesses are closed, which I would think eat up much more electricity.
Serious question: How was this handled in pre-AC times?
Is it just an issue because buildings are much better sealed than they used to be, or is there more to it than that?
Newer homes and buildings have a vapor barrier beneath the outside cladding. This article on the Perfect Wall [0], explains the benefits and options.
Older houses, like the Victorian that I live in, didn't have modern insulation, which can deteriorate if it gets wet, so they were made to breathe, so that any moisture that got into the wall could be removed through air movement. Not to mention that fireplaces required a constant stream of new air to replace that which is pulled up through the chimney.
[0][https://www.buildingscience.com/documents/insights/bsi-001-t...]
But old buildings generally aren't even close to air tight. Under those conditions as long as they are heated even a little the humidity is mostly lower than outside. Mean the amount of water in the air as a percent is the same inside and outside. But since it's hotter inside the house the relative humidity is lower. In temperate climates you don't get mold.
It's actually modern air tight houses that have terrible problems with mold. Because they don't breath water vapor builds up inside.
I think that people who run their AC like they do are selfish and do not understand the impact that their everyday actions have on the world.
(I really don't run my AC. I do think people are overly dependent on it. The number of people I know who have their home cooler in the summer than the winter indicates many people really just do it because they can.
But also I'm not a judgey asshole, so I don't moralize about it to people)
That's all.
At the level of the generation there won't be much change, but the distribution / "last mile" substations have never been planned for the duty cycle and load they have seen over the last months.
Can you elaborate? A substation is about to start construction just across the (narrow) street from my child's elementary school.
I'd say 1/3 were reassured by my explanation of why non-ionising radiation isn't going to harm your unborn child/give you cancer[1], 1/3 decided I was a lying tool of the Establishment and They Knew The Truth, and the last 1/3 had a genuine mental illness - "No you don't understand, the Prime Minister has authorised the Police to monitor my TV viewing using radio waves and it's giving my family cancer".
[1]Unless you're climbing a transmitter tower and exposing your womb to a focused microwave beam at a very close range for a substantial period, then the heating effect probably isn't going to be doing good things.
That's exactly what I'd expect from a lying tool of the Establishment.
I would like to imagine that regulators and utilities have this under control, but making some effort to verify this could be reasonable.
(49 states permit utilities utilities to ground a current carrying overhead wire at utility poles, resulting in parallel currents in the ground. I’m not aware of this being a documented hazard to people, but it’s a documented problem for cattle. CA is the exception.)
Abstract This 2019 brochure is intended to explain the issues surrounding EMF. It covers the physical nature of EMF, our everyday exposures to EMF, the health research and its findings, and the conclusions reached by expert scientific panels and government agencies. It provides key updates to the review of the science that the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) published in 2002 in a booklet entitled, “EMF: Electric and Magnetic Fields Associated with the Use of Electric Power – Questions & Answers.” The 2002 booklet contains very useful information that remains current, and that the reader of this brochure may find of value.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTEmqJkCrDQ
Serious question, why is the answer to this not a slightly-but-not-much-more-polite version of "That's ridiculous, be quiet." and moving forward?
It's why you're seeing a rapid uptake in battery storage by consumers in California; it's a hack around regulatory and utility failures (and you get a federal tax credit if it charges primarily from your rooftop solar, which is mandatory on new CA residential construction).
It is ridiculous, and people who are ridiculous must be negotiated with (unfortunately!). I don't know what the solution is besides applying constant pressure in the appropriate direction.
Disclosure: This information comes from my own research, as well as first hand accounts from electrical linemen friends in NorCal upgrading infrastructure.
Laws could be passed to sidestep all of this and support infrastructure growth, but those laws would trigger the same attacks from coordinated groups NIMBY, who happen to often be wealthy single-family homeowners, and thus more often than their competition have captive lawmakers to resist any effort they disapprove of.
None of that precludes doing the right thing, of course, but if it's not an issue you care strongly about you might decide not to fight it. The best countermeasure is for everyone else to tune out local politics less, which is an area people oddly ignore even though it has the most day to day impact on your life.
Yes, stupid people can vote. This is the main vulnerability of democracy.
I think that what you've found is a flaw with humanity, not with democracy.
Well, yeah. BTW, I didn't say I have a better idea, I merely pointed out an issue.
In a monarchy or despotism, there is no transition of power by design. It is supposed to be difficult, because it is not wanted. So if you end up with the wrong choice it is very hard to correct.
Trump is scary. I am not of the US but: I fear if Trump wins. I fear the tantrum/insurrection of Trump if he loses in respect to a peaceful handover.
The US clearly fits in here. The US is not a direct democracy, but neither is any other country in the world, including Switzerland that perhaps is the one I know of that comes closest.
Here is what happens when you google democracy: "a system of government by the whole population or all the eligible members of a state, typically through elected representatives."
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democracy: 1a: government by the people especially : rule of the majority b: a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections
dictionary.com: government by the people; a form of government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised directly by them or by their elected agents under a free electoral system. a state having such a form of government: The United States and Canada are democracies.
You said the US is not a democracy, all definitions I can find says it is.
The end result is that many state and local issues are resolved through direct voter action.
https://mises.org/wire/stop-saying-were-republic-not-democra...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-04-11/is-u-s...
https://thebaffler.com/latest/were-a-republic-not-a-democrac...
Thanks for the links. I found the first link interesting and then disappointing, since I had worked at a bookstore in NYC in the early 90s that carried a lot of philosophy books, economics books mainly from the Austrian School, and so the mises.org link caught my eye. Ryan McKaken the author of the article basically dismisses the use of "we're a republic and not a democracy" when used as an argument in two cases of what he believes people are thinking. I was pointing out that we are not simply "a democracy", but more precisely constitutional republic, no more, no less.
How do you answer the question, "What type of government does the U.S. have?"
As to your question, I would say that the U.S. constitution defines (indeed, guarantees) the country as having "a republican form of government" (at the state level, but this is maintained at the federal level), and that the processes and principles that it puts in place, such as representative elections, qualify that system as democratic.
But the TLDR is that (in the example of 5G), the power levels were talking about amount to ~300,000x less power than what would be required to irritate your skin in a minor way.
Of course, it's always complex because sure, stick your hand in to a transformer and electromagnetism will do plenty of damage to you. Being against 5G or power stations because EMF "can do damage" is a bit like banning cars because jumping in front of a car "can do damage", except cars are _far_ more lethal and far less helpful than signal-carrying cables.
These days, most households, especially the wealthy ones like in Marin, are helmed by people who do NOT work with their hands, do not respect people who do, and who have no interest in learning more. Even worse, infrastructure work is so heavily regulated and specialized that gobs of accidental complexity prevent anyone who wanted to from learning more about it, reinforcing the ignorance.
And truly, it's easy to have sympathy. The world is a complex place, and no doubt they have their hands full dealing with the technology revolution and palace intrigues at work; who has time to understand something as boring as infrastructure? And besides, if infrastructure fails, it fails for everyone so there's no real benefit to being informed or prepared (in that sense being informed about city infrastructure would be very similar to being a "prepper", in a weaker sense, which comes with it's own stigma).
So if you say "That's ridiculous, be quiet" you will offend sensibilities to the extent YOU will be banned, banned for having dirty knowledge, for shaming those that don't, and for tacitly asserting the value of having such knowledge! Plus, your views aren't in their news-feeds, so there's no emotional juice to them. Emotionally driven opposition is the inevitable retarding force in the hyper-connected, capitalist info-sphere, and ultimately leads to civic ignorance and paralysis. Good luck overcoming that in your city council meetings! (But you have my respect if you even try.)
But I have looked into it exactly zero.
Ever since it was passed, NIMBYs and other types of individualists have found more and more ways to use its provisions to block anything from happening that they don't want to happen.
It has no scientific basis and is not a recognized medical condition.
https://www.who.int/peh-emf/publications/facts/fs296/en/
High levels of RF exposure can of course do damage, in the form of burns. Any seasoned amateur radio operator at some point in the progression of their hobby can surely attest to the pain of being "bitten" by an energized RF cable.
But trying to promote the idea that cellphones are dangerous is just scaremongering. You'll absorb more energy in just a few seconds just by standing in a sunbeam.
I don't know why all the rebuttals focus on energy absorption and absence of ionizing frequencies. Seems like the mechanism of toxicity, if any, has nothing to do with that.
Blocking signals with your body becomes more true as frequency (and bandwidth) goes up. 5G Wifi can't even properly penetrate dry wall, not even mentioning all that water and bone in your body.
Beside that, below the infrared spectrum, it is unlikely that much damage is done by common RF signals; the energy in a quanta from that spectrum is too small to effectively do anything but heat molecules up a tiny bit.
Photochemical effects, ie, things like chemical reactions being induced or cells reacting to the light, require atleast about 1Thz to work (low-end IR).
The heating occurs primarly for frequencies between 30 and 120MHz, which is actively used but not by B2C commercial things, it largely involves ham radio, air traffic radio, sea traffic, weather satellites, etc. Things you're likely to be closer to the receiving end of than the high powered sender.
Which also bring to the other issue; the energies in common RF close to you is too low. If you send with 100mW power, the power your body will capture, even if it's the phone right next to your ear, is likely below 10mW of power. Low enough that your native body heat already overpowers it easily.
I appreciate that in your brief analysis you are considering several mechanisms of action besides just the heating. There may be many kinds of resonances, at molecular level, supra-molecular, etc. If very little 900/1800MHz suffices to alter BBB, then it is like a trigger to worse things, without the need of much energy. In the animals tested, the amount reaching the brain, at typical GSM levels, had already the observed result. Of course my tone is speculative here, but if the effect was confirmed in humans, it would not need much energy, and just the medium-to-weak signal reaching the brain could be worrisome.
There are not yet any studies on it, but if the effects of 5G on BBB were much stronger than with 900/1800MHz, it may also be the case that much lower signal intensities would still alter noticeably the BBB, even after the attenuation of the body traversal.
I am not a luddite at all, but I do hope that scientists working to certify that 5G is healthy are not hand-waving away the problem only by saying that the energy absorbed is too low or that the body is blocking its intensity. That would mean they did not hear at all about the effect of the mere frequency as a signal on the adhesion between cells.
I really would like to see some study elucidate the mechanism (or the absence thereof, and the flaws of the previous study), maybe some sort of resonance, soon enough to avoid to be in a situation were Wifi/4G/5G would be everywhere yet with dangerous long-term effects on health.
I'd worry more about standard heat given off by devices like laptops. The radio emissions aren't gonna do much but the 80C hot air out of the exhaust blowing into your lap is definitely going to do something. There is plenty of studies on the effects of overheating genitals in males.
But back to the topic; the energy is too small. If these radio waves had an effect, being out during a cloudy day would. The energy you get from solar radiation over a day is probably about the same.
Things like DNA breaking apart don't generally happen with this low frequency, largely because they require a bunch of energy to happen. Like ionization, even 1000W of 100MHz radio waves aren't going to make it happen. There is no amount of energy you can dump into a 100MHz transceiver that would cause ionization of atoms. It simply won't happen. Well, they will ionize but not because of the radio waves but because they've heated up enough that they're starting to undergo plasma formation. But that semantic difference is still important.
The sender in your cellphone or the energy you get from your wifi router are too small to be measured and by all acounts of physics, their effects are too small to be reasonably measured even in long term studies. We're talking literaly sub-milliwatt over your entire body. The entire body uses atleast 100Watts to stay alive. <0.1% change in thermal energy.
However, I really hope they find what was the flaw(s) that led to the surprising result on the BBB of rodents.
A rebuttal to that article appears in the same publication, and adroitly takes apart it's claims: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
https://www.troyhunt.com/lets-stop-the-5g-hysteria-understan...
I don't think anyone can confirm or deny that 5G carries health risks. But, we do have evidence there are health risks with other cellular communication technologies, and we ought to use that as a basis for decision making.
2. please try to explain the security issues that 5G presents that aren't present in 4G, 3G, etc.
3. a lack of information is not an excuse to promote doubt and misinformation. part of the reason we haven't been able to measure the long-term effects of cellular radiation is that it takes time to run those studies. please stop promoting lies and undermining trust in the systems that help manage our society
In response to #3, I have not posted any lies, and anything that disagrees with your narrative is not automatically FUD. There are serious doubts of 5G on many fronts by many experts, and these doubts should be discussed. However, as I've noticed here, there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber. Anything that's not in-group is not allowed, as we see here, where an expert has a serious concern about untested technologies. I wish we were able to have an honest conversation about this.
Let's reverse roles: can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G? How about at the very basic of levels: why do we need poly-gigabit speeds for cell phones, and how could implementing it negatively impact people?Why not? When we moved from 3G to 4G I felt like it was kind of useless, but now that I have it I definitely enjoy all the things that become possible with it (lower latency everything, mostly). It was the same way moving from ISDN to cable. It's never bad to have better stuff - you'll find a use for it even if you don't have one now.
> can you explain some concerns you might have about 5G
Frankly the only real and reasonable concern to have is that there are very few engineers that roll out 5G networks that aren't Chinese. I'm not opposed to China, but I am opposed to a country's entire infrastructure being built and maintained by another country (that may want to use that to exert political pressure some day).
> there is a tendency by the group to form an echo chamber
In this case I really don't think it's that, it's mostly that you posted information that's just wrong and then you retreated to a (frankly lazy) defense as to why you're spreading misinformation. It makes you come off as the kind of person that's really unpleasant to talk to, because the lies tend to be so sticky and pervasive. It's exhausting to have to revisit every component of what you know just because someone else couldn't be bothered to figure it out for themselves.
However, I do think there is an echo chamber here, and I think that anything that cautions against the cavalier use of untested technology is not permitted, which I think is very dangerous.
What you think is a 'lazy defense' is really just a guy trying to subdue what he could already recognize as a geyser of vitriolic, and frankly wrong, comments. But, hey, this is apparently a place where everyone's opinion counts as fact, and no criticism at all of 5G is allowed.
I'm going to stop commenting now.
You post a bunch of cherry-picked nonfactual stuff about 5G and then complain that HN doesn't have enough fact-based content?
Quoting a US senator on technology is not exactly a strong argument. Like arguing about email security and quoting a senator on the technology committee saying he has never sent an email.
https://www.engadget.com/2015-03-09-lindsey-graham-never-sen...
In many cases senators are the least possible informed people on a topic, and are almost certainly not focused on the pure science of an issue. Quoting one of them pretty much means you are trying to sway me by using their position, not research.
Also, nothing that you quoted about 5G actually says it is unsafe. Saying that 2G and 3G are unsafe and that we don't know what 4G does, and that government doesn't want to investigate 5G, and that tumors of a certain type 'may be at least partially attributable' to cell phone radiation, and all of the other slights, all of that doesn't add up to 5G is unsafe.
This is the direct rebut to the article you linked, even from the same site.
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/dont-fall-...
About the authorSenators who don't send emails don't do so because they don't know how to send emails -- they do it because they're doing seriously fucked up stuff and don't want a paper trail. As the fictional drug kingpin Stringer Bell says in The Wire -- "is you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?"
To characterize the nearly ten years of cell phone growth as "virtually zero" makes me seriously question the authors fact checking and thought process.
To whit: "While American cell-phone usage has grown from virtually zero in 1992 to virtually 100 percent by 2008"
If this is the study I'm thinking of, it's suspect for 3 reasons.
1. First off, the study didn't test against 5G. It used 2G and 3G emissions. Even if you believe the study, it doesn't make sense to use it as a reason to stick with 3G instead of 5G.
2. The study tested male rats, female rats, male mice, and female mice. Only male rats were allegedly impacted by radio signals. If 3G is so universally dangerous to living tissue, why did it only impact one of the species tested? And only the males of that species? Sidenote- the mice were actually exposed to more energy than the rats
3. Even though the male rats exposed to 2G and 3G were more likely to get cancer, they also lived longer than unexposed rats. Male rats exposed to 3G lived nearly 10% longer than ones that weren't. If this life extending capability also applies to 5G signals, we should be accelerating 5G deployment.
That's explained pretty well by this -
https://xkcd.com/882/
Or maybe these people shouldn't be in control of such companies.
I think the only well known non-US private school system (off the top of my head) are UK commonwealth secondary boarding schools, and those schools are more well known for their abuse than their academic strength.
Pretty much any other country (for example, France, Japan, China, etc) are generally built on a system of publicly funded schools
Private for-profit schools can use their money to get political influence and reduce public school funding in order to further its economic advantage.
As someone who lives in Marin I’m not sure where you got this idea. Most people who live in Marin have been there for 20-30+ years and are retired.
They probably paid less than 300k for their home.
64.1% of those in the county 16 or older are in the labor force. Most people living in Marin County are not retired.
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/marincountycali...
Which is related, but not totally, to who lives there.
"We told the California Public Utilities Commission of a 4,700-MW need through 2022 and that gap started in 2020. Despite all that, only 3,300 MW was authorized for procurement and none starting until 2021," Berberich said during a special telephone conference the Cal-ISO Board of Governors held Aug. 17, following a weekend during which the grid operator twice conducted rotating blackouts because of high demand and tightening reserves.
https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
It's weird that none of the 'experts' in the news could figure this out and we've gone to blaming random homeowners, electric lines, 5G and everything else in this story without this information even coming up.
But that would probably be irrelevant for substations and you could isolate lines from populated areas with not problem. I think the issue is probably because there is little will for investments.
There's an effort to underground the utilities near Foothill College by tapping into Santa Clara County Fire's funds for improved fire safety, since they're allowed to use these funds in that specific location.
A simplistic napkin math computation says that the cost delta in electricity between what Santa Clara pays and what PG&E customers pay, times the amount of electricity that LAH residents consume would pay for the entire undergrounding in 5-6 years.
So to my mind, it seems like a simple argument in favor of a municipal power utility that charges PG&E rates until it pays off its infrastructure, and then charges a more reasonable rate thereafter. Of course this assumes that LAH could achieve Santa Clara levels of cost efficiency, but it doesn't seem crazy either.
Too bad the deadline has passed for nomination for LAH Town Council. You should run next time ;)
More likely, though, is that smaller and newer utilities are likely to be more nimble than the big behemoth that has lots of tech debt and internal and external bureaucracy.
https://www.pge.com/en_US/residential/rate-plans/how-rates-w...
I'd be out there cheering on the linemen for replacing the old junk. :D
Just replacement to exactly what was there does not require that approval.
I can definetly see how replacing a lowly old pole with one of these annoyance towers can lead to strong opposition even for those not having 5G scares.
I take it you've never been to Japan
Most of those other things, I have seen, but on different projects lol. Like the LED street lamps have been phased in on most streets out here over the past few years. They also upgraded the light-up street signs to have LEDs and replaced the yellowed, cracked, faded glass with shiny new glass.
All of those things were super solid improvements though.
Of course, we could just act like the town is evil, defund everything, and then have them sell the rights-of-way to companies that would almost certainly squeeze the blood out of the infrastructure and place advertising on it.
Maybe they'd put cameras and use machine learning to determine which streets are the busiest, and find out more about the demographics of people who walk the street, so they can decide how long to leave the lights on - oh and sell that data to further profit lol.
Then again, maybe it's the same demand for power and independence that we are seeing with "Karens", masks, protests, Confederate statues, anti-intellectualism, conspiracy theories, etc. As individuals feel more powerless, they will almost certainly lash out at anything they can, including local utilities disrupting their life/convenience.
Not all locations are amenable to underground cables.
Here is a white paper that lays out all the tradeoffs and includes some costs. New construction costs can differ between overhead and underground by 2-10x. Conversion costs aren't negligible either. https://www.eei.org/issuesandpolicy/electricreliability/unde...
Where I live, 99.9% of power is delivered via underground cables, I get power outages like once every 5 years. Brownouts are more often but usually not related to cable issues. America needs to catch up to the rest of the world there.
It is complicated, as are most things.
The actual cost of construction and maintenance are going to vary from place to base based on geology, existing infrastructure, weather, labor costs, regulatory oversight, cost of capitol, etc. So there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
I think it was worth it. But there are crankypants types that hate any change because it's change.
That is too bad, I grew up in an desert locale that had all its power lines buried and I only experienced one power outage in fifteen years. Then I moved out to a coastal area where burying the lines wasn’t really feasible and pretty much every time it rained someone would hydroplane into a utility poll and knock out the power for a couple hours, and it rained at least once a week. If the climate permits them to bury, they should go for it.
For a few years I lived in a neighborhood that had above-ground lines, but further down the street they were below ground because that neighborhood was significantly richer. Our power went out fairly frequently. The neighbors told me it was because of the transition from below ground to above ground, but I also wouldn't have been surprised if NIMBYism kept older equipment in service.
I grew up in an old (for the US), hilly east coast city and nothing was underground. Because it wasn't very dense and didn't have gridded neighborhoods, it would have been quite expensive to run utilities underground. I subsequently moved to a newer part of a different city and all the new construction had underground utilities. It still doesn't prevent outages at the substation or high voltage transfer line layers.
Power outages are a once ever few years or more thing.
I have worked as an executive in a risk department at a telco and can say definitively say that NIMBYs don’t influence these decisions.
I worked with our government relations, legal and comms teams and was in charge of risk management.
There’s no profits to be gained in fixing most infrastructure issues and most times NIMBYs provided us cover for service issues.
“Yes congressmen we’d love to upgrade our infrastructure and provide better service but those damn NIMBYs”
That's incomprehensible to me... and then these same people complain about outages? Wow.
https://www.dailybreeze.com/2020/01/08/a-third-manhattan-bea...
what follows is speculation, so you can grab your pitchforks if you want but it will be a hollow victory.
I've always been suspicious of the claim that EM fields have zero effect on human beings, especially near high-volts lines. It doesnt seem possible. Our bodies function based on electrical signals and many cellular mechanisms are mediated with ions.
do we have a list of all electrically-sensitive bodily processes? could we guess what would happen if their simultaneous activation changed by 5%? what about 45% or more? So much of the human body is not exhaustively understood in the general case, and certainly not in the individual case.
idk, i dont wanna go all tinfoil hat here. it just seems like circumstances are aligned for there to be large holes in our public understanding (accidentally or otherwise).
note: for whatever its worth, ive spent some time around the 8MW generators on Nimitz-class aircraft carriers[0].
[0]: https://fas.org/man/dod-101/sys/ship/cvn-68.htm
we'd have to be doing the studies, first. second, we'd have to know what we're looking for. if the effects were subtle, generational, or multiple and confounding, it would be hard to see even if we were looking. also, im sure the sample size is small. not a lot of people/animals spend years 10 feet from high-volts lines.
also, people are generally pretty change-averse. if there were proof that our current way of life was harmful, not a lot of people would be interested in discovering, spreading, or changing due to this news, least of all the companies with a profit motive. saving the turtles is fine if all you have to do is use a metal straw instead of plastic, but ask people to inconvenience themselves (less TV, less air-conditioning, less hot water, etc) and you've got a different response.
Sorry no link found right now.
While you read this, over 100 billion neutrinos went through your thumb.
You certainly know more about this topic than I do, but according to the article, it wasn't the operators that decided to cut back on power, it was ordered by the Independent System Operator.
From what I read, Edison, PG&E and SDG&E just did what they were told, and for some reason the ISO told them to cut back earlier than was previously necessary. That's why the experts are "stumped."
If I'm missing something, please let me know.
ahh yes, seems like the "looking for toilet paper in all the wrong places" phenomenon where there's no lack of supply, but the existing supply lines head to the wrong places. (all the industrial/office stuff is idled, while rural locations are blasting AC in ways they've never seen before)
That's a nice story, except as the article notes it wasn't distribution but generation that was the problem. Not a shortage of installed capacity, but shutdown of four (one wind apparently due to conditions, and three natural gas apparently voluntarily by the operators) plants.
What reasoning is holding us up?
There must be another reason.
[0] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-8082841/Elon...
> It provides a total of 129 megawatt-hours (460 GJ) of storage capable of discharge at 100 megawatts (130,000 hp) into the power grid, which is contractually divided into two parts:[20][needs update]
> - 70 MW running for 10 minutes (11.7 MWh) is contracted to the government to provide stability to the grid (grid services)[21] and prevent load-shedding blackouts[13][22] while other generators are started in the event of sudden drops in wind or other network issues. This service has reduced the cost of grid services to the Australian Energy Market Operator by 90%.[23]
> - 30 MW for 3 hours (90 MWh) is used by Neoen for load management to store energy when prices are low and sell it when de
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hornsdale_Power_Reserve
"Vistra approved to build a grid battery bigger than all utility-scale battery storage in the US combined"
The past month has been littered with news of exceptionally large battery storage developments, yet none in the world can compare to the news that Vistra’s permit to expand an energy storage system under construction at its natural gas-fired Moss Landing generation station in Monterey County, California to 1,500 MW/6,000 MWh has been approved.
https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/08/13/vistra-approved-to-bu...
[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-02-tesla-australia-homes-power.ht...
I can't seem to find it right now, but someone in another post noted that peak power demand in California is several hours later than peak solar production, so supposing you have storage, it doesn't really matter what the source of the energy is.
> grid battery storage
I'm really curious if this is more or less expensive than adding production capacity.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve
1. https://www.greentechmedia.com/articles/read/opus-one-tests-...
While the solutions seem simple, putting all the pieces together is the real hard part. It's pretty common to have no data available on the distribution grid and the sensors themselves are expensive and then you need all the related infrastructure.
People turn their lights on when the sun goes down, and efficient energy storage is the holy grail.
Also fun back of the napkin math with overestimates, if we have a totally efficient Li+ battery with 0.25 kWh/kg energy density, and converted all the world's 40 billion kg of lithium in the crust and oceans to batteries, we'd get roughly 10 TWh of energy storage capacity. Which is enough to power California for 19 days (we generate around 200TWh annually).
In reality we only have access to a tiny fraction of the world's Lithium reserves, batteries aren't that efficient, they're heavy, dangerous, and all that makes for an expensive technology ill suited for grid energy storage (and alternatives like lead-acid are even worse).
Energy storage on the grid is going to look more like dams and reservoirs in the mountains than battery arrays. Even that's not great, ideally we'd invest more into nuclear energy for generating clean power on demand.
You are confusing present estimates of lithium resources (a term of art used in the mining industry) with terrestrial abundance.
Your estimate of 40 billion kilograms roughly corresponds to the USGS estimate of world lithium resources in 2015 (39.9 million tons):
Mineral Commodity Summary, Lithium, 2015 [1]:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...
Note that this year it has risen to 80 million tons:
Mineral Commodity Summary, Lithium, 2020:
Owing to continuing exploration, identified lithium resources have increased substantially worldwide and total about 80 million tons.
https://pubs.usgs.gov/periodicals/mcs2020/mcs2020-lithium.pd...
And at the turn of the millennium identified resources were about 13 million tons:
Mineral Commodity Summary, Lithium, 2001:
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/prd-wret/assets/palladium...
The Earth's mass changes negligibly over a few decades. The reason lithium resource estimates change so much over a short time is that people have put in the effort to identify and quantify specific sources of lithium. That's what converts preexisting geology from not-a-resource into what miners call a resource.
In generic geochemical terms, the Earth's crust is estimated to contain 17-20 parts per million of lithium by mass:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
If the mass of Earth's continental crust is 2.1 * 10^22 kg, as given in [2], then lithium in continental crust masses about
(2.1 * 10^22) * (17 / 10^6) = 357,000,000,000,000,000
kilograms, or 357 trillion tons. There's another couple hundred billion tons of lithium dissolved in the oceans.
[1] USGS lithium statistics and annual reports from https://www.usgs.gov/centers/nmic/lithium-statistics-and-inf...
[2] https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007AGUFM.V33A1161P%2F/abs...
That one battery chemistry alone would be enough to power the entire world for a week. Once you eliminate nonessential industrial power consumption - aka bring your own power storage or shut down machinery with the sun - the amount of lithium we'd need to store to make a transition to solar/wind feasible would be far smaller than global reserves.
Edit: as noted by phillipkglass, this math is moot
[1] https://batteryuniversity.com/learn/archive/is_lithium_ion_t...
Here is, for example, a sodium ion chemistry based on prussian blue:
[0] https://natron.energy/technology/
There were two problems.
One he was using 7 days worth of storage. It's true that in the fossil fuel industry 7 days of storage is standard. But that's because coal/oil/gas have supply chain issues to deal with. So he was intentionally increasing the required storage 10 fold.
The second. He studiously avoided any mention of thermal storage methods. Or using natural gas as a back up. Both of which can be scaled up to meet his 7 day storage requirement.
https://www.pv-magazine.com/2020/05/22/borehole-thermal-ener...
https://qz.com/1355672/stacking-concrete-blocks-is-a-surpris...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/californias-blackout-warning-11...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2020/08/15...
Build 5,000 MW of natural gas peakers and this problem immediately goes away.
And to think, if we just hadn't stopped building nuclear, we would already be rid of CO2-intensive electricity. Instead, we've barely begun, and we've only begin through duck-curve denial. Facepalm.
How much would all that equipment cost to buy and to maintain?
That's what's holding us up.
The traffic jams at Camp (twice) and Berkeley were silly, yet fatal.
The LEAF people at my former company complained that Teslas shouldn't be allowed to plug in in the limited chargnig spots because they need to be able to plug in to get home! Fortunately, the company said "tough. First come first served."
In our case, with a 13 kW solar array, our usual bill is in the order of $15 per month and has been so for years. Last month our bill was $350 and the prior month $184. We have been sending excess energy to SCE for years. I built a larger system than normal in preparation for electric vehicles. Which means that, at times, we send as much as 6 kW or so back. None of that mattered.
What complicates everything is that we were auto-magically signed-up for CPA (Clean Power Alliance). Which is, as far as I am concerned, a government run scam (sorry if this offends anyone). By "we" I mean, most of our neighborhood and town.
What makes this a mess is that SCE can't talk about CPA rates and CPA can't talk about SCE billing. One, in theory, provides the electricity and the other charges you for the transport and some fees. If you have ever tried to make sense out of one of these bills you know exactly what I am talking about. I have spent hours on the phone will SCE billing people and they can't tell me how some of it is actually calculated, even managers don't know.
https://cleanpoweralliance.org/
What makes it even worse is that the rate comparison tools and calculators available before the transition to CPA+SCE evaporated after the transition. The SCE website has been a mess for about two years and not having access to rate comparison tools makes it even worse. Billing and data clarity is obfuscated, to say the least.
Some of us are now in the process of opting out of CPA just to that we can talk to a single point of contact and actually discuss the bill. With CPA in the loop it is impossible because CPA and SCE point fingers at each other and consumers are left in the middle wondering what the heck happened.
Even beyond that, SCE told everyone that they had "grandfathered rates". This are the TOU-D-A and TOU-D-B rates from a few years ago. One of the things that changed radically with respect to that time is that some of the costs per kWh have more than tripled. When inquiring about how this could happen with "grandfathered rates" we were told that the rate schedule was grandfathered not the cost per kWh. In other words, the demarcation times between "On peak", "Off peak" and "Super off peak" remain fixed but your cost per kWh changes.
This is the most dishonest use of the term "grandfathered" I have seen in my life. This might not make sense to readers outside of the US. Here, the term refers to a condition being protected from future changes. Anyone who heard that term pretty much assumed their costs were locked in, not just the times for each rate. From my perspective this was a swindle.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandfather_clause
Frankly, this is about as anti-consumer as one can get. The average person isn't equipped to run through even the simplest electrical power calculations, they just don't understand. Add to this the complexities of tiered and time-of-day systems, varying rates and costs of transport, energy vs. power calculations, area under the power curve (which is what you pay for), difficulty in understanding energy utilization, etc. and you have the makings for a public that is powerless against this complexity.
I am quite comfortable with mathematics and complex financial modelling and still had to devote hours to getting enough answers from SCE to attempt to create a model in Excel in order to understand what happened during the last few months, not just for us but also our neighbors. Even with that, the decision had to be made to op...
This is a state-governed "CCA":
https://cal-cca.org/about/members/
Legally a CCA is required to send two "opt-out" notices. Being jaded and mistrustful, I did some research, and opted-out.
> Which is, as far as I am concerned, a government run scam
Only a slight exaggeration, by my experience. My city has lost money on the adventure, by extending zero-interest loans, and then forgiving them.
The big winners are the power companies on the other side of the futures contracts, local clean-power advocates who imagine they have somehow "succeeded", and our city manager, who gets a trendy bullet item for his resume.
Meanwhile, local for-profit power has begun offering a 100% renewable supply option for about 3% less than the CCA.
Here's a good one: Each SCE bill includes two added costs that are only added to your bill if you are in CPA, these are:
"CCA Cost Responsibility Surcharge" and "CTC, NDC, PPPC".
These two are calculated based on energy utilization. This amounts to $40 to $60 per month for the bills I have seen. Which, in turn, means it makes CPA bills no different from or more expensive than SCE bills. That's why I called it a scam.
By now opting-out of CPA those two elements of the bill go away. What's just precious is that they place you in a "transitional" rate for six months.
I place this kind of stuff in the category of unnecessary complexity added to people's lives for no reason at all. It provides no benefits at all (or questionable benefits), burns time and financial resources.
>"area under the power curve (which is what you pay for)..." What is this billing model exactly> I tried to look it up in the context of utility billing but wasn't able to find anything.
>"My neighbors are absolutely livid, unlike me (I engineered, bought and installed my own system), they ended-up with a range of leasing and other arrangements from a number of different vendors."
Is this where SCE or another Edison has a third party leasing firm they partner with? I think these leases are for 30 years no? What happens when you sell a home with such a lease on it?
When calculating total energy utilization for a period of time during which power varies (your TV is turned on and off, air conditioner cycles, etc.) the calculation effectively entails the integral of power plotted against time. Another way to put it is that the energy is the area under that curve.
Tier 1 from SCE for us is $.106/kwh. Tier 2 is $.165/kwh.
Plus:
1. CCA surcharge (whatever that means) is $.0224/kwh for PCIA (whatever that is)
2. CCA surcharge is $.00580/kwh for DWR bond (whatever DWR is)
3. CCA surcharge is $.00089/kwh for CTC (whatever that is)
4. CPA generation charges is $.089/kwh
So tier 2 rate is actually 0.165 + .0224 + .0058 + .00089 + .089 = $.283/kwh, tier 1 rate comes out to $.224/kwh.
The breakdown is useful, I guess, so you kinda know where the money is going. But it's not useful if you're looking for how much you can save on your bill when looking into energy use habits.
For the first few years, we rarely used the A/C. Then one year we had a Horrible Heat Wave that lasted two or three days. The A/C ran more or less continuously during that time, but managed to mostly keep up. And it always cooled off at night.
In subsequent years we had period recurrences of 2-3 day heat events that caused our A/C to run quite a lot but still keep up. This latest heat event has seen the A/C running three days now with no relief forecast until Thursday. Worse, it's not cooling off much at night the way it always used to. For the first time in ten years we are having to run the A/C at night instead of opening windows in order to sleep.
Frankly, the trend scares the living shit out of me. The speed at which these changes are manifesting themselves in our little microclimate is just mind-boggling.
Never had AC on the Peninsula. We have heatwaves every year. This summer has been remarkably mild, low 70s most of July and August until now. We got our heatwave. A bit more humid than normal thanks to tropical storm remnants, 70f dewpoint and 95f on Sunday, 65f dewpoint and spiked to 105f Saturday briefly.
It seems fractionally warmer than most heatwaves, and slightly longer, but doesn't 'feel' indicative of a trend.
Still no A/C, and I guess I notice it more now that I'm home 24/7, but still totally do-able.
Been running the house fan overnight to get the rooms down into the mid-high 70s.
I've lived in SF since 2010, and there have been multiple weeks in the summer, during the past 5 or 6 years, where I've been unable to sleep due to heat. That sort of thing was rare in the 4 or 5 years prior. Just over this past weekend my inside temperature topped at just below 90F, with the outdoor daytime temperature getting as high as 98F. By the time I went to sleep, the indoor temperature was still in the low 80s, with windows open and fans on full.
If you don't require a/c at those temperatures in order to sleep well, lucky you, but then I wouldn't characterize you as typical.
It's just a really weird year all around.
Yes, it got hot on Friday and Saturday but those were the first two very hot days all year. This year has been overall pretty average, if not a bit cooler than average years.
My house was built in the 60s. It had single pane windows and no insulation under the floor in the crawlspace. It also had no attic fan.
We upgraded the windows and put in an attic fan, and that mostly works, but we still need the A/C a lot these last few years.
The house just doesn't hold temperature well. If there is more than a few degrees variance in either direction the temp swings wildly if I turn off the a/c.
This house was designed for the air outside to always be right around 72.
Another related story, I was using a datacenter in San Francisco. When the outside temp hit 85, we had to start shutting down servers. They told us the datacenter was designed with the assumption that the outside temp wouldn't ever get past 80.
That said, I grew up in southern ontario where discussing the weather is pretty much a widespread hobby, so it's actually kind of nice to have weather to discuss.
Had your coolant pressure checked lately? Heat exchanger fins clean, clear, and straight?
Humidity inside is running about 50% at the moment.
Drop that by 10-15% with a dehumidifier and you’ll feel a heck of a lot cooler despite temperature being the same.
Try looking for major sources of solar heating instead. Windows and especially skylights are big culprits. So are inadequately insulated roof / ceiling assemblies.
You can put solar film on windows, use indoor or outdoor shades, or replace glass with low SHGC (solar heat gain coefficient) glass to reduce heating.
Oversized units short-cycle, lowering the air temperature significantly faster than they remove latent heat by condensing water vapor. The controlling thermostat turns the unit off quickly because the big unit quickly reduces the air temperature. The latent heat in the water vapor remains in the air. People still feel hot.
Basically, a residential air conditioner should be running most of the time if it's properly sized. Oversized units will come on, run for a few minutes, shut down for a few minutes, run for a few minutes, etc.
Double pane windows and blown insulation will magnify the effect because the air conditioner will reduce the air temperature more quickly and efficiently and leave more latent heat in the air.
Note that latent heat in the air from water vapor increases with temperature. That's why we talk in terms of relative humidity. So oversizing is less of an issue for heating season and double pane windows and extra insulation help.
You can fake a second pane by putting plastic film over the window frame and taping it securely around the edges so there's no leakage, capturing the air between it and the glass. This will act as an insulating layer. Air leakage = heat transfer.
But you're better off replacing the windows with dual-pane units that have low-e coatings. Maybe the government or your utility has a program to help cover the replacement cost.
The temperature profile reminds me more of times in the tropics, though it is still comparatively dry here. We've managed roughly a 10F delta between the indoors and outdoors through the peak afternoon hours. The past few days when it got to 105-107 locally, it was around 95F indoors when the temperatures equalized and it was beneficial to open windows again in the evening. This morning, it only cooled to about 82F inside and has climbed back to 90F in 6 hours.
When I lived far away, I liked to reflect on the dark blue sky and desert-like temperature swings we sometimes had out here, with 100F+ days and nights below 60F. But, I cannot say that we never had hot weeks nor summer thunderstorms. I remember those too, along with other somewhat rare events like hard frosts, accumulating hail, or the occasional dusting of snow on local ridges and peaks.
So, with a longer view, I don't think this single event can be called a clear sign of climate change. Someone with a lot more statistical skills than me would need to model the frequency of events and trends and uncertainties...
This heatwave doesn't seem out of the norm.
The heat doesn't feel so new to me. As a kid I was always watching for those 100F+ days with the fascination of hitting triple digits. I have 30+ years of seeing those.
The thunderstorm was crazy tho.
Edit: The summer rain/thunderstorm we had yesterday, now that is rare.
Whenever Californians talk about whether I'm reminded of this Steinbeck quote.
Wait, are you saying that your concern is based on a personal experience of 10 years in a place? Besides the fact that your observations might be down to pure chance, there are also strong decade and multi-decade local climate cycles.
I'm on the other side of the planet in Northern Europe, and I feel the same. This summer has been very warm, it feels more like we are in some Mediterranean city (especially with all the outdoor seating due to COVID). We haven't had any record breaking highs, but the number of days when it has been 30c+ has been very unusual. Coupled with last winter which basically never came (usually we get -25c and frozen lakes; that never happened), we'll see what this year brings...
“If there’s really a problem and not just the ISO jumping the gun, it’s going to manifest tomorrow,” Mr. Marcus said. “Tomorrow evening, the wolf arrives.”
What is that referencing?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diablo_Canyon_Power_Plant
Looking at raw percentage numbers for blackouts is wrong because this is an issue of not having enough capacity during peak, which nuclear doesn't solve.
Every now and then we might get bailed out if wind is strong that day but that's not something you can build a reliable grid on.
I don't have problems with renewable energy in principle, but until we have practical storage capabilities or other alternatives, it seems like we need to keep most of the less desirable forms of generation capacity around. I do not think it is acceptable to roll blackouts until we have something like a tesla powerwall in every electricity consumers' premises. We should never compromise on grid quality in pursuit of environmental objectives. The 2nd order consequences of an unreliable grid could have even more grave environmental impact than driving the grid with a coal plant (i.e. every business & homeowner on earth starts buying carbon-intensive generators or lithium batteries due to grid stability problems).
Decommissioning nuclear capacity seems like a massive mistake in general, but I understand the geology is potentially subpar in this specific case. Is it technologically infeasible to produce earthquake-proof nuclear power plants? Or, at least plants that would be guaranteed fail-safe under any seismic condition?
Please expand. How does France handle peaks, having almost 3/4 of their electricity coming from nuclear?
[1]: https://www.electricitymap.org/zone/FR
Q. What did socialists light their homes with before candles?
A. Electricity
(that predates solar, boy do I wish we could store that daylight 12-16 hours)
Just check to make sure they arent holding California’s power for ransom pending payment to a random Bitcoin address
The article was a bunch of statements along the lines of "the renewable push is the reason PGE has neglected maintenance!", without even attempting to explain the connections for any of their claims.
Another claim was that Jerry Brown shut San Onofre Nuclear power station, SONGS, and they wrote that if Brown hadn't shut it then we would have avoided the latest brown outs.
No explanation as to how they believe he'd managed to sabotage Mitsubishi Heavy Industries causing the problems at SONGS that led to billions of dollars and many years of NRC licensing hurdles and required repairs had they decided to do keep it up and running. And not only that, Jerry brown apparently also caused natural gas to be super price efficient, making it impossible for SCE to justify repairing and returning SONGS to full power. Nope, not a peep about those things or how they felt Jerry Brown caused them.
Of course the agenda pusher writing for Forbes didn't explain how Jerry Brown did any of those things, they could just state that Jerry Brown closed it and most people would have to take it at face value. Why care about facts when you can push an agenda!
For example, evening A/C use can be time shifted to the day, by cooling the house more during the day, so less is needed in the evening. The thermal mass of a house has a lot of inertia (and can be increased by adding, say, a pile of rocks).
The idea of a fixed 24/7 electricity rate is hopelessly obsolete.
I don't look forward to surge pricing for data usage. It feels inevitable.
> Take advantage of time-of-use electricity rates in your area. eco+ intelligently precools or preheats the home at times of day when electricity prices are low.
People don't voluntarily change their electricity rate plan.
When they do, usually it's when they're existing rate plan expires, and in CA there's been a lot of marketing at that time to get them to switch to time of use rates, usually by trying to explain to them how much they will save by shifting their usage.
But most people don't want to think about when they use electricity - they want to use it when they want to use it.
That's why there is now a California government mandate for variable rate plans.
Going forward, we need truly dynamic rate plans and consumer appliances that support automatic load shifting (i.e an electric clothes dryer that let's you set a deadline for clothes drying and then optimizes when it runs), and along with that, people broadly becoming better educated about how electricity pricing works.
1. https://www.utilitydive.com/news/california-utilities-prep-n...
The problem is the time of use rates are terrible, and will be more expensive to anyone who normally stays within tier one rates of the old plan.
I'd end up paying about 30% more for power under any of their time of use rate plans even assuming I only use power in off peak times, despite owning a plug in hybrid. If you stay within their tier one rates on the old plan, the new time-of-use-plans just aren't priced acceptably.
And, of course, even if TOU was cheaper when I switched, that doesn't mean it doesn't become unfavorable next time rates change.
We're grandfathered into a plan that gives us peak hours of 1-7pm where the new plans are 4-9pm peak. This works great for us with solar, because we make huge generation credits in that 1-4pm range when nobody's home to use power. (or, nobody WAS home before COVID). And we start our evening energy usage after 7pm as we return home from work + outdoor 'after work' activities. The 9pm end for peak hours would definitely hurt us.
OTOH, we have an EV now, so even charging off-peak at, say, 18c is relatively expensive vs the really cheap EV plans that give you good overnight rates. We've got an 11.5kW charger so I'd really love a stupid-cheap rate between, say, 2-4am. But if we switch to an EV plan, the costs go up the rest of the day.
Another perverse thing I've found; your net metering credits under NEM2.0 are on a per-month basis. This is AWESOME in the summer when we generate solar credit at more than 2x the 'value' as we burn them charging the car at off-peak.. but in the winter, when we don't generate much, we get into tier 2 pretty damn quickly.
Rarely does northern California have heavy A/C loads in the evening. Solar power output and heat load usually match well. But not this week. Usually, peak loads are around 2 PM, at air conditioning peak. This power restriction is for 3 PM to 10 PM, which presumably comes from evening A/C loads while buildings cool down.
Wind is all over the place, up and down by a factor of 4, unrelated to time of day.
I have a feeling that offices that are "empty" are still running their A/C systems and lighting at some level, and then you have some portion of WFH people also running those things at home, so overall demand is higher than it was when most office workers were actually in the office.
All speculative, though, and probably not the main driver, I admit.
I smell somebody making money off this scheme and likely "kickbacks" involved.
>In particular, California ISO said two natural gas power plants shut down on Friday and, on Saturday, a wind farm and another gas plant stopped producing power.
The state is currently reviewing proposals to extend the operation of old natural gas plants in Southern California. Environmentalists want the plants to remain closed because they use fossil fuels and are cooled using seawater, endangering marine life.
“It makes for a compelling story” if you have blackouts because of a lack of power plants, Mr. Powers said. “We know there is no capacity problem,” he said. “Something odd happened.”
They're currently running, but scheduled (from about a decade ago) to retire at the end of this calendar year. However recently (and prior to the rolling blackouts), several have had their retirement pushed out a year.
> These blackouts occurred as a result of a poorly designed market system that was manipulated by traders and marketers, as well as from poor state management and regulatory oversight. Subsequently, Enron traders were revealed as intentionally encouraging the removal of power from the market during California's energy crisis by encouraging suppliers to shut down plants to perform unnecessary maintenance, as documented in recordings made at the time.
Of course, I'm not saying that the current blackout is a conspiracy, claiming it to be a fossil-fuel conspiracy takes the paranoia to another level, especially when there's no evidence to back it up (yet). I mentioned it just as a historical curiosity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron#California's_deregulatio...
---
> “They set it up like this is a historic event,” said Bill Powers, a San Diego engineer who provides expert testimony on utility matters before the state’s regulators. “This should not have triggered blackouts.”
I just searched "Bill Powers", it seems that it's not a pseudonym given by the New York Times, it's real, sounds like a good name to work in the energy industry, haha...
Seriously speaking, apparently this man, Bill Powers, is an activist in consumer protection and energy issues, who often tries to challenge multiple investigations on energy issues before the state’s regulators. I don't think it's wrong, we need people to show up during official investigations to make them more accountable, but it does reduce his credibility if there's no additional evidence to support his latest claim, e.g.
* Energy Experts Question Scale of Blackout (2011)
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2011/sep/09/energy-experts-questio...
> Energy experts are baffled at the scale of yesterday’s blackout which left five million people without power.
> The blackout here was caused by a transmission failure in Arizona. But power-industry analyst Bill Powers says the grid is set up so that if there’s a sudden loss of supply, energy companies must immediately lower demand through a strategy of controlled blackouts. Powers said a San Diego Gas & Electric executive’s repeated assertion that the blackout was caused by human error in Arizona yesterday falls short.
> “That doesn’t explain why SDG&E didn’t deploy its emergency procedure which is to selectively brownout and blackout portions of San Diego," Powers said. "It looks like something didn’t go right at SDG&E.”
* Is the Porter Ranch blackout warning overblown? Yes, says one expert (2016)
https://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2016/04/06/47787/energ...
> But Bill Powers, a frequent expert witness before the California Public Utilities Commission, isn't convinced by officials' claims, calling the blackout warning alarmist. He said that in at least the last decade, SoCal Gas has never hit its firm capacity during the summer peak in the L.A. basin.
* State Senate To Hold Hea...
He's certainly outspoken and active, which doesn't make him wrong by any stretch; in fact, it probably means he's one of the most informed on these matters (which of course doesn't mean unbiased).
Thanks for the links!