"green energy" feasibility and investment opportunities

They compare the United States to Europe. The article does not mention that the driving distances here are far longer than in Europe. I think that is a principal reason for low adoption.

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So basically, winter happened. Literally anywhere that experiences extreme weather relative to the extremes Texas experienced would see many of the same results. Persistently freezing temps doesnt affect infrastructure up north because they deal with it normally for 4-6 months every year, it isnt extreme.

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The storm, although severe for Texas, was not unheard of. The problem is that the Texas power authority recklessly introduced windmill power into the grid and reduced the fraction of always on demand natural gas power.

The natural gas power plants, and their infrastructure, were also poorly designed. As you mention, natural gas power plants can be designed to function reliably in cold weather. The Texas plants were not designed to the standards required for the temperatures they encountered and they should have been.

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We have not heard the last of us this. The left will appeal of course. They are determined to take our natural gas stoves and heaters and water heaters from us.

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Good news from Finland

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CA rail project debacle - common Edward, tell us what you really think.

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Well, other than this, California is doing great. The Democrats will probably elect Newsom to be president after Trump goes third-party when he loses the Republican nomination. Then the rest of the country can share in the California way.

Spending $200 million per track mile on high-speed rail and over $500,000 per unit of “permanent supportive housing” has nothing to do with saving the planet or helping the disadvantaged homeless. These insanely overpriced projects endure because spending that money wisely would create a competitive economic environment, threatening the margins and the market share of the special interests that run California.

Wasting billions on projects that will never yield the public benefits they promise but will nonetheless ensure permanent sources of profit and power for California’s public sector bureaucrats, its environmentalist pressure groups, its public utilities, its hedge funds and pension funds, its corporations, and its subsidized land developers is the business of California’s elite now. All of them are determined to keep things just the way they are. Because for all of them, ongoing public failure is ongoing special interest success.

California’s High-Speed Rail project is a failure. It is also a metaphor for a state that has turned its back on the ordinary, hardworking people who live there. The larger problem is that California is exporting this mentality into the rest of America, along with its propaganda, and its corrupt, punitive economic model.

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These fires keep happening.

The video highlights the unique challenges of fighting electric vehicle fires, which are notoriously difficult to put out because of a phenomenon known as “thermal runaway.” When an EV battery goes up in flames, its massive stores of energy essentially keep feeding the fire. Starving the blaze of oxygen with carbon dioxide foam doesn’t work, because it’s not oxygen that’s fueling it. “Lots and lots of water,” as Vox put it in a recent story, is really all firefighters have at their disposal. And even then, a battery can reignite all by itself hours later, due to heat still trapped within the cells.

Workers, authorities, Ford and everyone involved should be relieved that the fire didn’t spread beyond two additional trucks in the holding lot. “Let’s hope it doesn’t blow up,” one officer could be heard saying at 3:40 p.m. local time on the way to the scene. “The smoke is clear as day.”

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Even if they don’t catch fire, electric vehicles are a pain in the ass

  1. Many parts of the state don’t have public fast chargers.

  2. At many charging stations, only a few chargers are operating. In fact, researchers in the San Francisco Bay area recently put the number of functioning charging stations at 75%.

  3. Even with helpful apps, many times a charger is hard to find. This is attributed to a number of problems. Apps only give general locations. Many charging stations can be located in odd sections of parking lots, behind buildings, are only open during business hours, or in some instances available to surrounding businesses’ paying customers.

  4. When chargers are all in use, or cars are parked that aren’t being charged, that means an unknown wait time until one becomes available.

  5. Sometimes you don’t know you’ve plugged into a charger that doesn’t work until you’ve begun charging.

  6. Once you’ve successfully plugged into a charger, it can arbitrarily shut off before you have gotten the amount of charge you want, or need.

  7. Sometimes fast chargers aren’t very fast, increasing the amount of time you need to charge. This becomes especially problematic when you’re waiting in the sun next to a freeway because there is no overhead protection.

  8. Because each charging company requires its own app, you must download and shuffle through several when the charging station you are sitting at has no functioning chargers.

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It’s been said over and over, unless electric charging stations can be as ubiquitous and efficient and fast as a gas pump, they simply are not going to gain mass adoption.

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So it’s pretty obvious to anyone in the ONE religion - it was caused by weather climate change. :rofl:

Uh, the propane is sent to processing plants. The methane is sent to cattle, which are then blamed for climate change for their flatulence. :upside_down_face:

The obvious solution is either batteries (which do so well in cold weather), or solar (which does so well in the extreme cold temps of night). Sometimes, these things write themselves. :slight_smile:

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Your article explains something that many Americans don’t understand - Why are utility companies so gung-ho for greed green projects.

For example, public utilities collect regulated profits, fixed at a percent of revenue. If renewable electricity costs several times more than conventionally generated power—and it does and always will if you do honest cost accounting and factor out the punitive permitting costs—then utilities make more profit. Ten percent of $0.40 per kilowatt-hour of renewable electricity at peak is a much bigger number than 10 percent of $0.04 per kilowatt-hour for clean natural gas-generated electricity.

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Oh no! You’ve given Joseph Robinette Biden a campaign slogan - a charger in every pot. :))

And you know that, given the opportunity, it will come out of his mouth. :rofl:

Patrick Lawson, who owns Wild West EV, told the outlet that he has driven a Rivian through that same path several times, but that winds, steep terrain, and cold weather can quickly drain the battery.

“On the way back, though, it’s the opposite. I actually gained 20 miles,” Lawson said, adding that he would charge up to 200 miles of range before the trip.

Lawson also noted that speed factors into how far an EV can go on a single charge.

Does it really need to be detailed as if it’s something novel to EVs? Those are the exact same variables that determine how far you actually get on a tank of gas, too.

Running out of charge isnt any bigger of a deal than running out of gas - it happens, even to the best of us. The only difference here is the guy needed to be towed, rather than have a couple gallons of gas brought to him. When people object to the shortcomings of driving a EV, it isnt the actual shortcomings, which are pretty universal to all vehicles, it’s the lack of [non-intrusive] remedies to those shortcomings. An expensive tow is not an acceptible solution to running out of fuel in any vehicle.

Good results from the real green energy, fossil fuels.

https://www.investors.com/research/ibd-industry-themes/chevron-stock-a-better-bet-than-exxon-mobil-wall-street-sees-profit-down-20-percent-in-2023/

Chevron And Exxon Mobil Beat Earnings Estimates Even As Revenue Slips From 2022 Levels

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Good news from the other green energy, nuclear power.

The AP300 SMR is an ultra-compact, modular-constructed unit that leverages the innovation and operational knowledge of the global AP1000 fleet. It will utilize identical AP1000 technology, to include major equipment, structural components, passive safety, proven fuel, and I&C systems. The AP300 will bring to bear a mature supply chain, constructability lessons learned, fast load-follow capabilities and proven O&M procedures and best practices from 18 reactor years of safe AP1000 operations.

The Westinghouse-pioneered advanced passive safety system automatically achieves safe shutdown without operator action and eliminates the need for backup power and cooling supply. This also directly translates into a simplified design, lower CAPEX and smaller footprint. Like the AP1000, the AP300 is designed to operate for an 80+ year life cycle.

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They lose on each car, but make it up in volume. /sarcasm

"The company for the first time broke out financial results. . . Ford lost more than $60,000 per electric vehicle sold in the first quarter. Its combustion-vehicle business, Ford Blue, averaged pretax profit of $3,715 a vehicle

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“The United States is heading for a reliability crisis,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) Commissioner Mark Christie warned on May 4 in a hearing before the Senate Energy & Natural Resources Committee.

“I do not use the term ‘crisis’ for melodrama, but because it is an accurate description of what we are facing,” Christie said. “I think anyone would regard an increasing threat of system-wide, extensive power outages as a crisis.”

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I doubt that is as sarcastic as you think. I’m sure a healthy chunk of those losses are due to investment and overhead, costs that will dilute with higher production volume. They’re most certainly losing money per car, but I suspect that $60k per vehicle is pretty misleading.

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