What Can We Expect From Next Housing Crash? Based on 2009 One?

That’s the problem with cherry picking someone’s talking point. The entirety of the climate science prediction are pretty much quite on the mark. I made this point before, be aware of your sources. I don’t bother check regular media outlet for my line of work, I go to my trade sites, why would climate science be any different.? However, without a graduate degree in it, professional sites are often too difficult for the regular folks. But there are many many good what I called translation sites out there like Scientific American and other science geeks sites.

However, if denier want to play that intellectually dishonest game…

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My sources were much closer than any anti-nuclear groups. My sources were individuals, and they were closer to the epicenter. And to clarify my comment above – I wasn’t in America and was not influenced by anything or anyone who influenced Americans. I have no idea what was happening in America back then.

I don’t need to convince you, and as I said, I still think that it’s preferable to coal/oil/gas. And this is a NIMBY situation for me – I’m OK if you build the nuclear station in your own backyard at least 100 miles away and downwind from my backyard. The one in my backyard is already being decommissioned (but they have yet to figure out what to do with spent fuel).

By the way there’s a new thread for the GW discussion.

That’s not true. We all know and agree that population has an impact too. But with better education, more economic opportunities, and the temporary one-child policy in China, the rate of population growth has been decreasing.

You are completely misinterpreting what I wrote. I only used the one-child policy as one of the reasons for the slowing rate of population growth.

I think the Nuclear Waste Policy Act made utility companies pay for nuclear waste storage in underground repositories as well. So utilities rolled that into their generation costs. Eventually the consumer paid for it on their utility bills. But the fund ran into excess budget so I think they stopped adding a fee to utility companies for it maybe around 2010ish. At least I remember something along those lines. But I think the idea is still to make utilities pay for long-term storage of wastes which makes sense to me.

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Imagine how much more they would have / would be polluting if their population was double what it is now.

I’m not saying they had a plan but I’m sure things would be worse as far as their pollution if they had a higher population.

This is relevant* :

  • of course its not relevant to the thread topic but …

I have to say I cringe a bit every time something like that is mentioned.

Although I don’t dispute the basic fact of the headline. Power generation is much more complex:

The major issue with “green power” is solar and wind doesn’t generate on command. Often time we even see negative pricing (you read that right) during high wind events here in the NW. Often, that coincide with high spring water run off. In order to protect the fish, dams are forced to generate instead of spilling (too much oxygen). This then force the wind farms to idle. In order to supply power all the time, there need to be an almost equal amount of reliable power source available.

In a typical day, the highest peak is the dinner time. One must have enough power to put out enough to the grid to meet this peak.and the power have to come on quick to prevent a brown out. The only source that can do that these days are the natural gas powered turbines (a jet engine, basically).

So, for many many reasons, one can’t just replace all “dirty” power with renewables. There’s hope though, a lot of investment are into energy storage schemes, everything from batteries to railcars on a slope. The next 20 years will be very exciting in this field.

-I currently work in the power industry.

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Yeah. The Indiana utility was investing in " a portfolio of solar, storage, wind and demand management"

" a mix of 1,500 MW of solar and storage, 150 MW of wind, 125 MW of efficiency and demand-side management and 50 MW of market purchases "

They don’t anywhere break down how much storage or how that works.

seems obvious that more research and invstement in affordable storage options is necessary, especially given situations like how we have to idle the wind farms in the gorge.

I’m a Portland general customer and we get 30% of our power from coal. No good reason for that… I blame Enron.

Seems like using existing damns would work well here in the NW

Like this project idea :

It’s simply the cheapest option at the time. Today, a combined cycle gas turbine plant would do the same but they aren’t necessary a lot better in term of carbon emission.

The best way to go green and replace a coal plant today would be a combined solar, wind, and simple cycle gas turbine with the turbine only run when needed. In the future, part of it will be battery. Of course, this means your power bill will go up. I think PGE also offer some kind of voluntary program that you can choose to pay a bit more for renewable.

Concluded that 93% to 123% of observed 1951-2010 warming was due to human activities.

“The likely range of the human contribution to the global mean temperature increase over
the period 1951–2010 is 1.1° to 1.4°F (0.6° to 0.8°C), and the central estimate of the observed
warming of 1.2°F (0.65°C) lies within this range (high confidence). This translates to a likely
human contribution of 92%–123% of the observed 1951–2010 change. The likely contributions
of natural forcing and internal variability to global temperature change over that period are
minor (high confidence). (Ch. 3; Fig. ES.2)”

image

p.s. disclosure : I just google it…

They do. But I didn’t see anything that said that participating in that would actually reduce the coal / dirty power usage for PGE. I suspect it just means they give me wind power and give some other customer the coal power… maybe I’m wrong but unless they say explicitly I don’t trust them not to funge it.

I did have all wind from them for a while because they had a promotional deal where they locked in the price for several years. Ended up saving money overall on that deal.

Utilities is one of the most regulated industry, so no, the # are not made up. Does this mean the electrons are really from “renewable” source? Of course not, it’s simply balanced out on a spreadsheet.

If enough people sign up then they can afford to convert more to renewable. Privately owned public utilities make $ on return on investment and it doesn’t make any sense to fudge the # on it as there’s no benefit. There are no surprises, one reason Buffet like to own this sector.

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So then is it safe to say that if, theoretically, that 100% of PGE customers signed up for and paid the extra $ for 100% renewable power that their power would then switch to a 100% renewable sources?

(I know that it might not work like that since you’d never have 100% sign up but at least in concept)

Yes, but that’s not possible today as they would be a limit on how many they can sell with the asset allocation they have today.

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I don’t think they’re making up their numbers, but if PGE is supplying a neighborhood with 90% coal energy and one house signs up to be 100% green energy, what does PGE do with that extra 90% of coal energy that house isn’t using? Would they just switch it so the 9 neighbors use 100% coal energy? Theoretically, if everyone (or a set number of people beyond some threshold) switches to the clean plan, that would require PGE to increase clean energy, but not until then. Unless they’re specifically prohibited from doing that?

I think this is what jerosen was getting at?

ETA: I’m using clean interchangeably with renewable and coal interchangeably with whatever the standard, non-renewable is, not trying to imply anything with those terms.

Ok, here’s some very basic concept:

Let’s try the water tower analogy, think of the power-grid like a giant water tower… A lot of sources can put water ( energy) into this tower at different time of the day depend on availability. Consumers take water out of this water tower but for all practical purpose, one can’t tell if the water came from originally, it’s all mixed up in the tower. If the tower runs low then customer can get brown out so there have to be reliable available sources to keep up the water level.

In the end of day, the amount of water (energy) can easily be totaled up because there are meters at all the sources measuring their input into the tower. The accountants total the input from renewable to make sure there were enough inputs to satisfy the people who paid extra for it.

That makes sense, but I guess the question is still, does that ending percentage change based on the percentage of people that are paying extra? Or is it a constant and they just sell up to the point of that ending percentage?

Hmm ok so found this detail. PGE’s Green Source is a REC.

"Green Source is a Renewable Energy Certificate (REC) product and does not contain electricity. "

I also see that the Green Future Solar is RECs.

PGE has a contract with One Energy for 7 years of REC from the Steel Bridge solar farm
(https://www.puc.state.or.us/electric_restruc/PGE%20Green%20Future%20Solar%20Product_Draft_POC%20Mtg%202.19.15.pdf)
That project sold out all the available REC already.

So you’re really buying the certificate attached to new renewable energy. That makes the accounting pretty straight forward.