#building electrification

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this story from Nation of Change:

A new report from InfluenceMap reveals the fossil fuel industry has been waging an international lobbying war to prevent cities and towns from requiring newly built homes and businesses to install climate-friendly heating and other appliances.

So far, 26 U.S. states have passed laws designed to prevent towns, cities, and other local governments from crafting new “natural gas bans” or enforcing those laws, according to the report. The analysis shows how utilities and their trade associations have pushed to take away local government��s power to phase out fossil fuel appliances or to limit new buildings’ connections to natural gas pipelines.

“The scale and persistence of the worldwide anti-electrification campaign is alarming,” said InfluenceMap senior analyst Emilia Piziak.

Over a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions come from houses and other buildings, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates—and those emissions have been rising worldwide.

But the rise of heat pumps and other energy-efficient appliances means it’s possible to make big changes. Up to 85 percent of the emissions from buildings in Europe and North America could be “mitigated,” according to the IPCC, as could up to 45 percent of emissions from buildings in Australia, another major consumer of natural gas.

The push for building electrification has become one of the major battles in the energy transition, with building codes and rules for new construction projects representing one of the dominant ways that cities and towns can take local action on climate change.

[landlele]

landlele - social solar community on the map! 🌞😎💡✅👍🚀☀️🕶️🌱🍃

#landlele #sustainability #sustainable #sustainableliving #postyourlocation #photovoltaic #solar #sunshine #love #green #hurryup #netzero #solar #solarplus #heatpump #electrification #solarenergy #renewableenergy #solarpower #solarpanels #HVAC #cleanenergy #heatpump #energy #renewables #community #social #insulation #genai

[reasonsforhope]

"Cody Two Bears, a member of the Sioux tribe in North Dakota, founded Indigenized Energy, a native-led energy company with a unique mission — installing solar farms for tribal nations in the United States.

This initiative arises from the historical reliance of Native Americans on the U.S. government for power, a paradigm that is gradually shifting.

The spark for Two Bears' vision ignited during the Standing Rock protests in 2016, where he witnessed the arrest of a fellow protester during efforts to prevent the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline on sacred tribal land.

Disturbed by the status quo, Two Bears decided to channel his activism into action and create tangible change.

His company, Indigenized Energy, addresses a critical issue faced by many reservations: poverty and lack of access to basic power.

Reservations are among the poorest communities in the country, and in some, like the Navajo Nation, many homes lack electricity.

Even in regions where the land has been exploited for coal and uranium, residents face obstacles to accessing power.

Renewable energy, specifically solar power, is a beacon of hope for tribes seeking to overcome these challenges.

Not only does it present an environmentally sustainable option, but it has become the most cost-effective form of energy globally, thanks in part to incentives like the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022.

Tribal nations can receive tax subsidies of up to 30% for solar and wind farms, along with grants for electrification, climate resiliency, and energy generation.

And Indigenized Energy is not focused solely on installing solar farms — it also emphasizes community empowerment through education and skill development.

In collaboration with organizations like Red Cloud Renewable, efforts are underway to train Indigenous tribal members for jobs in the renewable energy sector.

The program provides free training to individuals, with a focus on solar installation skills.

Graduates, ranging from late teens to late 50s, receive pre-apprenticeship certification, and the organization is planning to launch additional programs to support graduates with career services such as resume building and interview coaching...

The adoption of solar power by Native communities signifies progress toward sustainable development, cultural preservation, and economic self-determination, contributing to a more equitable and environmentally conscious future.

These initiatives are part of a broader movement toward "energy sovereignty," wherein tribes strive to have control over their own power sources.

This movement represents not only an economic opportunity and a source of jobs for these communities but also a means of reclaiming control over their land and resources, signifying a departure from historical exploitation and an embrace of sustainable practices deeply rooted in Indigenous cultures."

-via Good Good Good, December 10, 2023

[dandelionsresilience]

Dandelion News - April 1-7

Like these weekly compilations? Tip me at $kaybarr1735 or check out my Dandelion Doodles! Last month’s Doodles are free to the public, so go take a look :D

1. Galapagos tortoises at Philadelphia Zoo become first-time parents at nearly 100

“Mommy, the female tortoise, is considered one of the most genetically valuable Galapagos tortoises in the Association of Zoos and Aquariums’ species survival plan. [… T]he zoo said it is “overjoyed” at the arrivals of the four hatchlings, a first in its more than 150-year history.”

2. Massachusetts home-electrification pilot could offer a national model

“In total, the program is providing free or heavily subsidized solar panels and heat pumps to 55 participating households, 12 of which also received batteries at no cost. […] It’s a strategy that program planners hope can help address the disproportionate energy burden felt by lower-income residents of the region[….]”

3. National Park Rangers rebel against queer erasure on Trans Day of Visibility

“[… A] group of over 1,000 off-duty, fired, and retired National Park Service employees launched Rangers Uncensored, an online archive that restores and amplifies LGBTQ+ stories quietly scrubbed from government websites since President Donald Trump’s second inauguration.”

4. World's largest wildlife crossing reaches critical milestone

“Over the next few days they'll be adding 6,000 cubic yards of specially manufactured soil to cover the crossing, a mix of sand, silt and clay inoculated with a bit of compost and hyperlocal mycorrhizal fungi, carefully designed and tested to mimic the biological makeup of native soils around the site.“

5. Bipartisan bill to boost green building materials glides through House

“[B]ipartisan legislation the House of Representatives passed in a 350-73 vote last week would give the Department of Energy a clear mandate to develop a full program to research, develop, and deploy clean versions of the building materials.”

6. Tribal Wildlife Grants Funding Announced

“Tribal Wildlife Grants are intended to help Tribes develop programs for the conservation of habitat and species of traditional or cultural importance[….] Typically funded projects include: conservation planning, fish and wildlife management and research, habitat mapping and restoration, inventory and monitoring, and habitat preservation. […] A total of $6.1 million is available for this round of funding[….]”

7. Germany adds another one million PV arrays to take solar total to 104 gigawatts

“Following a rapid rise in household solar panel installations, Germany’s total number of PV arrays has passed the five million “milestone[.…]” Solar systems already cover almost 15 percent of Germany’s electricity demand, BSW-Solar said. […] The total capacity of all PV systems installed in Germany surpassed 100 GW at the start of the year.”

8. Stronger together: Bilby conservation efforts enhanced by Indigenous knowledge

“Ms. Geyle said the results showed combining [conventional science and traditional tracking methods] more accurately estimated bilby abundance than using either technique individually[….] "[… ensuring] that Indigenous people remain central to decision-making about their lands and species that inhabit them," Ms. Geyle said.”

9. Lennar will build 1,500new Colorado homes with geothermal heat pumps

“The homebuilder is partnering with Dandelion Energy to install the tech, which is efficient but expensive — unless it’s built into new homes from the start. […] And by eliminating the need for new gas pipelines and reducing the peak electricity demands on the power grid, subdivisions built on this model could save a bundle on utilities as well[….]”

10. New strategy launched to protect Tanzanian biodiversity hotspot

“Conservationists have launched a 20-year-long project to protect what is arguably Tanzania’s most biologically rich landscape: the Udzungwa Mountains. The strategy places notable emphasis on communities living here, with more than half of its budget allocated to social and economic projects and managing human-wildlife conflict.”

March 22-28 news here | (all credit for images and written material can be found at the source linked; I don’t claim credit for anything but curating.)

[snowfieldstories]

His scent & love language headcanons 18+ [gender neutral]

Spoilers for Dokja’s backstory and novel stuff

His scent --

Kim Dokja: lightning strikes and an unnamed freshness

This man is hopped up on probability aftermaths and the [‘Electrification’] skill; he smells of an electric current with a hint of char. As a constellation, there is an otherworldly-sense about him. One way this manifests is his scent. No one remains fresh in an apocalypse, but somehow Kim Dokja emits a scent of brightness and clean. He definitely takes pride in smelling nice to impress other constellations and his companions.

Yoo Joonghyuk: manly sweat/musk and exotic spices

HA, you thought this would be good because of his pretty face? Oh please, this man hardly takes a shower. Who has time to bathe when you're constantly fighting to end all the scenarios? His natural scent swings wildly between an unpleasant, stale odor and an intoxicating musk. On the days that smell leans unfavorably, it is his ['Cooking Lv. 10'] skill that tries to save him. He can pull fragrant spices out of thin air to supplement his dishes; the mouthwatering aroma of his cooking clings to his clothes long after the food has been devoured. Uh...best hope for some rain tomorrow. And every day after that.

.

His love language --

Kim Dokja

He loves to receive physical touch and words of affirmation from his partner. Dokja has a complicated relationship with the meaning of a loving touch; he's only known of its harshness or its absence. When he trusts his partner, he craves little intimacies—a supporting hand on his arm, soft kisses along his jawline, or falling asleep nestled firmly at his side. No touch is too much for Kim Dokja, and if he's not receiving enough from his partner then he has no problem going to seek it out from them himself.

As a child, there was no one who lifted him up in affirmation so he is especially susceptible to praise. A few words of encouragement or a compliment on his looks will send a flush of pink across his cheeks. His partner should take caution, however, because sometimes this desire for praise can turn needy when accompanied by more...carnal activities. This man is not above begging for it.

Dokja relishes in giving gifts and physical intimacies. Some may know him as Mr. Moneybags. Richie Rich. A third-generation chaebol. Sugar daddy…with and without the "sugar." [Uh, wait, who said that last one? *coughs*] Whatever his partner wants, it was packaged and delivered yesterday morning. Seeing his partner light up at receiving something they’d only had a mere, passing thought of makes Dokja giddy. It is truly a testament of “to be loved is to be known.”

The more Dokja knows his partner, the more comfortable he becomes with physical touch, too. He begins small with light bumps against the shoulder or sweeping back the hair from his partner’s eyes as they focus. As trust builds, he grows more bold in public—a kiss on the inside of their wrist and touches that border on possessive. In private, he is just as greedy to get his hands on his partner because he wants to make them feel good. Sure, he likes to receive, but this man is first and foremost a giver.

Yoo Joonghyuk

In the dictionary, right next to "service" is a photo of Yoo Joonghyuk. This should come as no surprise. He is devoted to giving acts of service and quality time to his partner. This man is pleased to help with tasks as simple as opening a tough plastic bottle cap, to cooking their favorite foods. But he will also spend 100 years ascending levels of transcendence in order to protect them better. He will dive into the depths of hell, travel the far reaches of the universe, for the chance to give them a happy life. And he will shove their hands away and spread their legs apart to give, because even in bed he wants to service his partner's needs before his own...

Ahem, going back to more serious things. Joonghyuk takes his quality time very seriously. Sure, one might say he has time to spare from a never-ending series of regressions, but he still doesn't want to waste a second when it matters to him. And his partner is someone who matters. Expect many companionable silences where he can derive the greatest joy from the comfort of his partner's presence. Being able to coexist in the same space is a luxury he covets.

As he loves to give, so does he love to receive quality time with his beloved, especially when they initiate it. His time with his partner is limited. No, more than that—it's doomed to end and repeat from ground zero. Every so often, he grows depressed from having to constantly build up the relationship from introductions. But by the next regression, he's more determined than ever to reclaim his partner in his life. Each moment spent, no matter how trivial or domestic, is stored as a precious jewel in his mind. Joonghyuk never wants to forget.

Honestly, there are more ways to give love to Yoo Joonghyuk. But it is up to his partner to figure that out. Joonghyuk has the mysteriousness and volatility of a black cat—luckily, his partner forever remains a fierce cat-lover, despite any other changes that befall each regression round.

____

A/N; This was inspired by my characterization of Dokja in my fic, In Life and Death.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Circular battery self-sufficiency

I'm coming to DEFCON! On FRIDAY (Aug 9), I'm emceeing the EFF POKER TOURNAMENT (noon at the Horseshoe Poker Room), and appearing on the BRICKED AND ABANDONED panel (5PM, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01). On SATURDAY (Aug 10), I'm giving a keynote called "DISENSHITTIFY OR DIE! How hackers can seize the means of computation and build a new, good internet that is hardened against our asshole bosses' insatiable horniness for enshittification" (noon, LVCC - L1 - HW1–11–01).

If we are going to survive the climate emergency, we will have to electrify – that is, transition from burning fossil fuels to collecting, storing, transmitting and using renewable energy generated by e.g. the tides, the wind, and (especially) the Sun.

Electrification is a big project, but it's not an insurmountable one. Planning and executing an electric future is like eating the elephant: we do it one step at a time. This is characteristic of big engineering projects, which explains why so many people find it hard to imagine pulling this off.

As a layperson, you are far more likely to be exposed to a work of popular science than you are a work of popular engineering. Pop science is great, but its role is to familiarize you with theory, not practice. Popular engineering is a minuscule and obscure genre, which is a pity, because it's one of my favorites.

Weathering the climate emergency is going to require a lot of politics, to be sure, but it's also going to require a lot of engineering, which is why I'm grateful for the nascent but vital (and growing) field of popular engineering. Not to mention, the practitioners of popular engineering tend to be a lot of fun, like the hosts of the Well That's Your Problem podcast, a superb long-form leftist podcast about engineering disasters (with slides!):

https://www.youtube.com/@welltheresyourproblempodca1465

If you want to get started on popular engineering and the climate, your first stop should be the "Without the Hot Air" series, which tackles sustainable energy, materials, transportation and food as engineering problems. You'll never think about climate the same way again:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/06/methane-diet/#3kg-per-day

Then there's Saul Griffith's 2021 book Electrify, which is basically a roadmap for carrying out the electrification of America and the world:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/09/practical-visionary/#popular-engineering

Griffith's book is inspiring and visionary, but to really get a sense of how fantastic an electrified world can be, it's gotta be Deb Chachra's How Infrastructure Works:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/17/care-work/#charismatic-megaprojects

Chachra is a material scientist who teaches at Olin College, and her book is a hymn to the historical and philosophical underpinnings of infrastructure, but more than anything, it's a popular engineering book about what is possible. For example, if we want to give every person on Earth the energy budget of a Canadian (like an American, but colder), we would only have to capture 0.4% of the solar energy that reaches the Earth's surface.

Now, this is a gigantic task, but it's a tractable one. Resolving it will require a very careful – and massive – marshaling of materials, particularly copper, but also a large number of conflict minerals and rare earths. It's gonna be hard.

But it's not impossible, let alone inconceivable. Indeed, Chachra's biggest contribution in this book is to make a compelling case for reconceiving our relationship to energy and materials. As a species, we have always treated energy as scarce, trying to wring every erg and therm that we can out of our energy sources. Meanwhile, we've treated materials as abundant, digging them up or chopping them down, using them briefly, then tossing them on a midden or burying them in a pit.

Chachra argues that this is precisely backwards. Our planet gets a fresh supply of energy twice a day, with sunrise (solar) and moonrise (tides). On the other hand, we've only got one Earth's worth of materials, supplemented very sporadically when a meteor survives entry into our atmosphere. Mining asteroids, the Moon and other planets is a losing proposition for the long foreseeable future:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/09/astrobezzle/#send-robots-instead

The promise of marshaling a very large amount of materials is that it will deliver effectively limitless, clean energy. This project will take a lot of time and its benefits will primarily accrue to people who come after its builders, which is why it is infrastructure. As Chachra says, infrastructure is inherently altruistic, a gift to our neighbors and our descendants. If all you want is a place to stick your own poop, you don't need to build a citywide sanitation system.

What's more, we can trade energy for materials. Manufacturing goods so that they gracefully decompose back into the material stream at the end of their lives is energy intensive. Harvesting materials from badly designed goods is also energy intensive. But if once we build out the renewables grid (which will take a lot of materials), we will have all the energy we need (to preserve and re-use our materials).

Our species' historical approach to materials is not (ahem) carved in stone. It is contingent. It has changed. It can change again. It needs to change, because the way we extract materials today is both unjust and unsustainable.

The horrific nature of material extraction under capitalism – and its geopolitics (e.g. "We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.") – has many made comrades in the climate fight skeptical (or worse, cynical) about a clean energy transition. They do the back-of-the-envelope math about the material budget for electrification, mentally convert that to the number of wildlife preserves, low-income communities, unspoiled habitat and indigenous lands that we would destroy in the process of gathering those materials, and conclude that the whole thing is a farce.

That analysis is important, but it's incomplete. Yes, marshaling all those materials in the way that we do today would be catastrophic. But the point of a climate transition is that we will transition our approach to our planet, our energy, and our materials. That transition can and should challenge all the assumptions underpinning electrification doomerism.

Take the material bill itself: the assumption that a transition will require a linearly scaled quantity of materials includes the assumption that cleantech won't find substantial efficiencies in its material usage. Thankfully, that's a very bad assumption! Cleantech is just getting started. It's at the stage where we're still uncovering massive improvements to production (unlike fossil fuel technology, whose available efficiencies have been discovered and exploited, so that progress is glacial and negligible).

Take copper: electrification requires a lot of copper. But the amount of copper needed for each part of the cleantech revolution is declining faster than the demand for cleantech is rising. Just one example: between the first and second iteration of the Rivian electric vehicle, designers figured out how to remove 1.6 miles of copper wire from each vehicle:

https://insideevs.com/news/722265/rivian-r1s-r1t-wiring/

That's just one iteration and one technology! And yeah, EVs are only peripheral to a cleantech transition; for one thing, geometry hates cars. We're going to have to build a lot of mass transit, and we're going to be realizing these efficiencies with every generation of train, bus, and tram:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/29/geometry-hates-uber/#toronto-the-gullible

We have just lived through a massive surge in electrification, with unimaginable quantities of new renewables coming online and a stunning replacement of conventional vehicles with EVs, and throughout that surge, demand for copper remained flat:

https://www.chemanalyst.com/NewsAndDeals/NewsDetails/copper-wire-price-remains-stable-amidst-surplus-supply-and-expanding-mining-25416#:~:text=Global%20Copper%20wire%20Price%20Remains%20Stable%20Amidst%20Surplus%20Supply%20and%20Expanding%20Mining%20Activities

This isn't to say that cleantech is a solved problem. There are many political aspects to cleantech that remain pernicious, like the fact that so many of the cleantech offerings on the market are built around extractive financial arrangements (like lease-back rooftop solar) and "smart" appliances (like heat pumps and induction tops) that require enshittification-ready apps:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/26/unplanned-obsolescence/#better-micetraps

There's a quiet struggle going on between cleantech efficiencies and the finance sector's predation, from lease-back to apps to the carbon-credit scam, but many of those conflicts are cashing out in favor of a sustainable future and it doesn't help our cause to ignore those: we should be cheering them on!

https://pluralistic.net/2024/06/12/s-curve/#anything-that-cant-go-on-forever-eventually-stops

Take "innovation." Silicon Valley's string of pump-and-dump nonsense – cryptocurrency, NFTs, metaverse, web3, and now AI – have made "innovation" into a dirty word. As the AI bubble bursts, the very idea of innovation is turning into a punchline:

https://www.wheresyoured.at/burst-damage/

But cleantech is excitingly, wonderfully innovative. The contrast between the fake innovation of Silicon Valley and the real – and vital – innovation of cleantech couldn't be starker, or more inspiring:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/30/posiwid/#social-cost-of-carbon

Like the "battery problem." Whenever the renewables future is raised, there's always a doomer insisting that batteries are an unsolved – and unsolvable – problem, and without massive batteries, there's no sense in trying, because the public won't accept brownouts when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing.

Sometimes, these people are shilling boondoggles like nuclear power (reminder: this is Hiroshima Day):

https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584

Other times, they're just trying to foreclose on the conversation about a renewables transition altogether. But sometimes, these doubts are raised by comrades who really do want a transition and have serious questions about power storage.

If you're one of those people, I have some very good news: battery tech is taking off. Some of that takes the form of wild and cool new approaches. In Finland, a Scottish company is converting a disused copper mine into a gravity battery. During the day, excess renewables hoist a platform piled with tons of rock up a 530m shaft. At night, the platform lowers slowly, driving a turbine and releasing its potential energy. This is incredibly efficient, has a tiny (and sustainable) bill of materials, and it's highly replicable. The world has sufficient abandoned mine-shafts to store 70TWh of power – that's the daily energy budget for the entire planet. What's more, every mine shaft has a beefy connection to the power grid, because you can't run a mine without a lot of power:

https://www.euronews.com/green/2024/02/06/this-disused-mine-in-finland-is-being-turned-into-a-gravity-battery-to-store-renewable-ene

Gravity batteries are great for utility-scale storage, but we also need a lot of batteries for things that we can't keep plugged into the wall, like vehicles, personal electronics, etc. There's great news on that score, too! "The Battery Mineral Loop" is a new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute that describes the path to "circular battery self-sufficiency":

https://rmi.org/wp-content/uploads/dlm_uploads/2024/07/the_battery_mineral_loop_report_July.pdf

The big idea: rather than digging up new minerals to make batteries, we can recycle minerals from dead batteries to make new ones. Remember, energy can be traded for materials: we can expend more energy on designs that are optimized to decompose back into their component materials, or we can expend more energy extracting materials from designs that aren't optimized for recycling.

Both things are already happening. From the executive summary:

The chemistry of batteries is rapidly improving: over the past decade, we've reduced per-using demand for lithium, nickle and cobalt by 60-140%, and most lithium batteries are being recycled, not landfilled.

Within a decade, we'll hit peak mineral demand for batteries. By the mid-2030s, the amount of new "virgin minerals" needed to meet our battery demand will stop growing and start declining.

By 2050, we could attain net zero mineral demand for batteries: that is, we could meet all our energy storage needs without digging up any more minerals.

We are on a path to a "one-off" extraction effort. We can already build batteries that work for 10-15 years and whose materials can be recycled with 90-94% efficiency.

The total quantity of minerals we need to extract to permanently satisfy the world's energy storage needs is about 125m tons.

This last point is the one that caught my eye. Extracting 125m tons of anything is a tall order, and depending on how it's done, it could wreak a terrible toll on people and the places they live.

But one question I learned to ask from Tim Harford and BBC More Or Less is "is that a big number?" 125m tons sure feels like a large number, but it is one seventeenth of the amount of fossil fuels we dig up every year just for road transport. In other words, we're talking about spending the next thirty years carefully, sustainably, humanely extracting about 5.8% of the materials we currently pump and dig every year for our cars. Do that, and we satisfy our battery needs more-or-less forever.

This is a big engineering project. We've done those before. Crisscrossing the world with roads, supplying billions of fossil-fuel vehicles, building the infrastructure for refueling them, pumping billions of gallons of oil – all of that was done in living memory. As Robin Sloan wrote:

Did people say, at the dawn of the automobile: are you kidding me? This technology will require a ubiquitous network of refueling stations, one or two at every major intersection … even if there WAS that much gas in the world, how would you move it around at that scale? If everybody buys a car, you’ll need to build highways, HUGE ones — you’ll need to dig up cities! Madness!

https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletters/room-for-everybody/

That big project cost trillions and required bending the productive capacity of many nations to its completion. It produced a ghastly geopolitics that elevated petrostates – a hole in the ground, surrounded by guns – to kingmakers whose autocrats can knock the world on its ass at will.

By contrast, this giant engineering project is relatively modest, and it will upend that global order, yielding energy sovereignty (and its handmaiden, national resliency) to every country on Earth. Doing it well will be hard, and require that we rethink our relationship to energy and materials, but that's a bonus, not a cost. Changing how we use materials and energy will make all our lives better, it will improve the lives of the living things we share the planet with, and it will strip the monsters who currently control our energy supply of their political, economic, and electric power.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/06/with-great-power/#comes-great-responsibility

[mbta-unofficial]

I might be asking the wrong person here, but why is the Acela so expensive? I need to travel from Boston to DC for a week for work so I compared costs and convenience of driving, flying, and taking the Acela and was surprised to find that the Acela costs more than flying (I was able to find round trip flights BOS-DCA for about $170, the Acela starts at about $140 each way) despite being significantly slower. Why does it cost so much?

I will concede that the Northeast Regional is cheaper than flying (about $60 each way), but it's also even slower than the Acela.

The Acela has several problems compared to analogous systems in other countries, and as a business problems mean costs and costs means prices.

Making a direct comparison to air travel also requires talking a little bit about the economics of air travel, since there are surprising number of weird things about that business compared to rail.

Part 1. Amtrak doesn’t own most of its own tracks. While it does own most of the North East Corridor, it leases track rights for the boston-providence leg from ME MOTHERFUCKER I’M THE PROBLEM and also the states of NY and CT own a section between NYC and New Haven. Now, when you are trying to have trains at up to 160mph, you need maintenance to be done within extremely tight tolerances, you need signaling to be extremely precise and consistent, and small mistakes can be deadly. Signaling and Maintenance on rented tracks are not literally impossible but they are a huge pain in the ass. These sections are slower and make the whole network much more expensive.

Part Two! Electification: this is one of the oldest rail corridors in the world and that means there’s a lot of old DNA in the network that it would not have if there was a full rebuild. One of these design “features” is that when the line was built, electricity wasn’t standardized and different plants would churn out different voltages and AC frequencies.

Between NYC and Washington there is a catenary system that operates at 11kv, 25hz that was built in 1905. This is insane. The modern grid runs at 60hz, and transforming power from a modern plant into 11kv, 25hz is a huge project in and of itself. But of course, the Boston to Providence section, electrified in 1990, has only the most cutting edge technology. It’s electrified with 60hz, 12.5kv, 10 years ahead of its time which was 35 years ago. And, when the Acela was first planned and operated in 2000, it was planned and operated with the now modern standard of 60hz, 25kv. So there are three different electrification systems and, to not have to switch trains, each train needs to be able to run with all 3 of them.

This is deeply stupid and only something you would have to deal with if you were hacking together increasingly expensive short term repairs onto a system that would be cheaper in 20-50 years to completely overhaul but in the present would cost 10s of billions to meaningfully bring up to 20th century operating standards. It’s a good thing we did the smart thing in the 1970s when Amtrak nationalized the collapsing private passenger rail companies and Conrail nationalized the collapsing freight rail companies and we recognized that running these crucial services with public money could generate huge amounts of economic activity and benefit society even if they ran at a fiscal loss, and properly funded the systems to build reliable and interoperable infrastructure for the next generation. Hold on I have to take this phone call.

………….

Yep.

…………..

Yeah ok.

…………..

They did WHAT?

Part Three: Ronald reagan is not dead enough

So yeah the main reason that none of this shit got fixed in the last 50 years is that for 4 successive administrations between Reagan and Bush 2 electric boogaloo the government has been slobbing on that Neoliberal knob like its subsidized corn on a subsidized cob. Private operators immediately saw the potential for infinitely lucrative federal contracts when the US seized the assets of Erie Lackawanna and Penn Central during their bankruptcy and formed Conrail. This was mainly Norfolk southern and CSX, former competitors who pushed hard for the reagan, bush, and clinton organizations to refurbish the lines at taxpayer expense before selling them to absolute corporate bottomfeeders so they could snap up lines that had been the main sources of revenue for these defunct companies at kleptocratic rates. But we’re not done. Freight companies hate two things more than even paying taxes, and these are OSHA and Passenger rail.

You see, it’s actually very hard to run freight and passenger on the same tracks. Freight is slow with long trains, long sidings, and loose schedules. Freight is optimized to get there, you know, sometime as cheap as possible. However, if you have passenger rail, those people have places to be. They need things like advanced signaling to move faster than 15 miles an hour, sidings long enough to pass at speed, and even, gasp, rails that don’t have holes in them so they don’t derail on corners. It’s not hard for a freight train to move along a track that is 85% rust, they just go slow and if they derail you’re only looking at maybe 2 superfund sites. But passenger rail, there will be bumps and passengers will complain. Customers are so unreasonable.

So when the federal government acquired all the tracks that became conrail, what did they do? Cut sidings, cut double tracks down to single tracks, cut maintenance, sold land. None of these bothered their future freight owner-operators. But they did undermine American passenger rail, on purpose, for 50 years. As soon as the work was done, the tracks were unfit for anything other than 400 box trucks of nitroglycerin pulled by two locomotives with one operator. How do you run passenger rail on that? Well, you play by CSX and Norfolk Bastard’s rules. Fuck your schedule. Fuck it slow. Fuck it for so long that it hurts. And, when you’ve bled enough revenue, complain to the federal government that you can’t possibly keep going and need to be sold off to private equity for parts.

So yeah. Freight rail in the 70s, the ruthless march of neoliberal capitalism, a frankenstein’s monster of a network, and a complete lack of revenue from either public subsidy or ridership to fix either problem.

Oh and there’s the fact that every single Major airline operates their flights at a loss and use credit cards as their primary source of income. The scheme is you take out a credit card, they run like a normal credit card company, except whereas most banks give you cash back they give you “miles” or ��points” the vast majority of which will never get spent. It’s almost a license to print money as long as you have enough people you can convince will someday be able to afford to go on vacation with that fancy credit card they paid for. Budget Airlines who don’t run this scheme are folding both in the sense that they are going under financially and also in the sense that you better hope that your spine lets you compress into the overhead compartment if you want to get to your destination.

[elbiotipo]

I actually think Workers and Resources Soviet Republic needs a co-op mode. It's actually impossible to take care of everything in that game, you need a soviet. I'll take charge of steel and coal production, my comrade over there will oversee electrification, now this comrade, she's in charge of the bureau of urban planning and road building, and this other comrade places the tree props so that everything looks nice

[deusvervewrites]

Reconstructed AU, please?

“��do you think? Asui’s pretty cute, right? She’s got the pose and everything!” says Mineta.

“Well, yeah, but, like, you’ve seen our class.” Denki shrugs. “I was thinking of trying my shot with Uraraka after this.”

“Good luck, man!” Mineta says, bumping his side with a fist. “So. What do we know about ‘em? Asui’s got that frog-thing, so probably a Mutation, but Midoriya’s… well.”

“Super jacked and never runs out of steam?” Even during the Quirk test the other day, he’d never so much as broken a sweat. He’d only given up the endurance run when Mr. Aizawa had told him to, and all his physical scores blew almost everyone else out of the water.”

“I can probably bind him,” Mineta says, “But if that doesn’t work, we’re fucked.”

“Maybe. My Electrification’s a pretty good insta-win, you know? Just gotta zap ‘em once and we’re done!”

“Time is up!” calls All Might over the coms. “The Villain Team wins!”

Denki stands there, slack-jawed, while Mineta blinks at him.

“Wha—what!? The timer hasn’t even started yet!” He freezes. “It—it didn’t, right?”

“No, man,” Mineta says, “I’d have heard it!”

Distantly, someone calls, “Sorry about that!” and they both look up at Midoriya, who jogs sheepishly out of the building towards them. “That was me.”

“You jammed our comms?!”

“Oh, uh, eh, I…”

“He warped you to the entrance and made you think it was ten minutes ago, kero,” says Asui behind him.

[friedmentalityyouth]

.@POTUS' Investing in America agenda makes long-sought electrification projects a reality for Indian Tribes. Today, I visited Gun Lake Tribe's recently completed solar project in Michigan and announced new funding to help more Tribes build climate resilience.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1810796673607815247

[deepestdreamlandphilosopher]

.@POTUS' Investing in America agenda makes long-sought electrification projects a reality for Indian Tribes. Today, I visited Gun Lake Tribe's recently completed solar project in Michigan and announced new funding to help more Tribes build climate resilience.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1810796673607815247

[landlele]

landlele - social solar community on the map! 🌞😎💡✅👍🚀☀️🕶️🌱🍃

#landlele #sustainability #sustainable #sustainableliving #postyourlocation #photovoltaic #solar #sunshine #love #green #hurryup #netzero #solar #solarplus #heatpump #electrification #solarenergy #renewableenergy #solarpower #solarpanels #HVAC #cleanenergy #heatpump #energy #renewables #community #social #insulation #genai

[jcmarchi]

Why is electrification necessary to prevent global warming? - Technology Org

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/why-is-electrification-necessary-to-prevent-global-warming-technology-org/

Why is electrification necessary to prevent global warming? - Technology Org

Expanding renewable energy is the best way to reduce CO2 emissions

In Japan, more than 90% of CO2, which is the main greenhouse gas, comes from the energy consumption process of combustion engines or thermal power generation. The most effective way to reduce CO2 emissions is to replace fossil fuels with fossil-free energy sources by energy transformation. Among the fossil-free energy sources, solar and wind power generation systems have been pushed forward in the world, and it is thought that it will be possible to generate all electricity with renewable energy from these and other fossil-free energies. Accordingly, the worldwide implementation of restrictions on gasoline-fueled vehicles and the growing utilization of electric vehicles (EV) are based on the assumption that all electricity generation will eventually use alternatives to fossil fuels.

A 45cm2 flexible perovskite solar cell monolithic mini-module developed at Professor Segawa’s laboratory

In recent years, the RE100 (Renewable Energy 100%) global initiative, in which members commit to operating their businesses using only renewable electricity, has expanded to more than 400 companies. The use of renewable energy has become a social responsibility, so any companies that fail to use it will end up being ostracized from the supply chain.

In the case of the U.S. state of Hawaii, where legislation was introduced decreeing that 100% renewable electric energy must be used by 2045, the state government decided to offer tax incentives to consumers as well as businesses that promoted the use of solar power. Now, when solar panels and storage batteries are installed on many offices and houses, the owners receive a tax credit. Since electricity prices in Hawaii are higher than in Japan, the tax credits for solar panel and storage battery packages are proving to be a huge benefit for normal households, and it seems likely that the 100% renewable energy target will be met before the 2045 deadline.

In contrast, Japan’s Sixth Strategic Energy Plan aims to achieve just 36% to 38% renewable energy-based electricity usage by 2030. However, at the current pace, it is unlikely that even this target will be reached as the current Feed-in Tariff (FIT) and Feed-in Premium (FIP) systems hardly work as an incentive to introduce renewables. Perhaps the Japanese government should also start offering tax credits to get companies to utilize their internal reserves. Likewise, they should also encourage Power Purchase Agreements (PPA) — direct agreements between providers of renewable energy and commercial users of electricity whereby the user receives a stable supply of solar power without having to pay up-front costs.

It is also important to consider where renewable energy facilities should be installed — a particularly important issue in a country like Japan where space is limited. With regard to wind power, prospects for offshore wind farms are promising, as that is where the wind is at its strongest and environmental issues can best be avoided. In the field of solar power generation systems, research and development has been proceeding on lightweight, high-efficiency solar cells that can be installed anywhere, such as on the roofs of factories or building walls. One such type is “perovskite solar cells” using organometal iodide. Since Japan is the world’s No. 2 producer of the iodine used in these cells, we can avoid some of the resource-related problems associated with conventional solar cells. Maybe it will be possible in the future to even develop high-performance cells that can be used in things such as EV roofs and electric aircraft. Japan must invest in the development of these types of new technology for renewable energy.

Source: University of Tokyo

You can offer your link to a page which is relevant to the topic of this post.

[reasonsforhope]

"Renewables accounted for 50.4% of the European Union’s electricity generation in the first six months of 2024, data from industry association Eurelectric shows.

That’s a sharp increase from calendar year 2023, when renewables comprised 44.7% of the bloc’s mix, according to Eurostat.

“The pace of change is impressive,” Eurelectric secretary general Kristian Ruby said in a statement.

When including nuclear, 74% of the EU’s power came from low-carbon sources in the first half — up from 68% in 2023...

Eurelectric wants the new European Commission to propose an Electrification Action Plan that seeks to boost the share of electricity in final energy consumption to 35% by 2030. This would entail a faster shift to electric vehicles, heat pumps, and industrial decarbonisation technologies, among other things...

Meanwhile, a separate data release showed that renewables accounted for 58% of electricity consumption in Germany in the first half of the year.

That’s up from 52% in the same period a year before, according to the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) and the Center for Solar Energy and Hydrogen Research Baden-Württemberg (ZSW).

“This is the reward for the persistent expansion of wind energy and photovoltaics in recent years,” said Kerstin Andreae, chair of BDEW.

Andreae said Germany needed to expand its electricity grid and storage capacity to maintain the momentum. It should also build hydrogen-capable gas-fired power plants.

“This new record underlines that an efficient, reliable, secure and greenhouse gas-neutral power supply based on almost 100% renewable energies, including hydrogen, is not only achievable in Germany by 2035, but also offers a stable foundation for industry on its way to climate-neutral production,” said Frithjof Staiß, managing director of ZSW."

-via The Progress Playbook, July 3, 2024

[almostwingedwasteland]

.@POTUS' Investing in America agenda makes long-sought electrification projects a reality for Indian Tribes. Today, I visited Gun Lake Tribe's recently completed solar project in Michigan and announced new funding to help more Tribes build climate resilience.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1810796673607815247

[mysticlovetidalwave]

.@POTUS' Investing in America agenda makes long-sought electrification projects a reality for Indian Tribes. Today, I visited Gun Lake Tribe's recently completed solar project in Michigan and announced new funding to help more Tribes build climate resilience.

https://x.com/SecDebHaaland/status/1810796673607815247