California weather ! (aug 2020)

[Bala]

Off Mikes original topic and far from a critical issue but a side effect of Large Scale Solar farms for me.

A hobby of mine is white water kayaking and a local river has hydro and a great river for paddling. For ever? until recently the power company had an agreement with commercial rafting companies to release some water at 10am every day, the amount would depend on time of year and the dam level.

Now the hydro is owned by a company that also has solar so they only release at night. Great use of the resource I suppose but means we only get an early morning paddle until the wet season floods arrive.

[J.P.M.]

Just for fun, electrons don't really flow from one place to another. It's fields and waves, not particles.

Us tree-huggers think that anything you do to conserve and go green affects the force...I mean the field. (Star Wars pun intended.)

Except for drift velocity for short differential time periods and some other smaller things, you are correct. Similar to the idea of wasting electrons on typing stuff to this forum, my reference to flowing electrons was was meant more as colloquial than scientifically accurate,

As for some of the rest of us treehuggers, some of us think anything we do to really conserve resources rather than simply doing little else than offsetting profligate use with alternate generation is what really affects things.

[Ampster]

...........
I'll bet Gerry Browns house has a 50kw diesel backup generator so his air conditioner stayson.
( actually I had a link somewhere to his huge inverter & battery backup system, just can't find it now )

Yes I saw it on this YT video. Lots of expensive SimpliPhi batteries. A big propane generator 24 kW.

https://youtu.be/gGlX-BpAxIs

That guy loves his gutters. Clean install. The irony is his ranch is in Colusa County, which never voted for him in any of his elections.

[bob-n]

J.P.M.,

I think you're saying the there are some "green" things out there that are borderline scams, like cap & trade. Allowing companies to meet their quota by buying green rights doesn't do any good. I agree.

The green quota, however, is real. As we raise the green quota to a significant fraction of our energy use, people are going to have to take green more seriously.

The world is complicated. For example, you can cut down trees to get more solar power. Is that good or bad?

I drive an electric car, yet use a gas lawnmower that probably pollutes worse than a modern car. With all of this heat and dryness, the silver lining is that there isn't much grass to mow. Anyone have experiences with electric mowers?

Another thing you said is that conserving / using less energy is always positive. I'm with you on that one, too.

[SunEagle]

J.P.M.,

I think you're saying the there are some "green" things out there that are borderline scams, like cap & trade. Allowing companies to meet their quota by buying green rights doesn't do any good. I agree.

The green quota, however, is real. As we raise the green quota to a significant fraction of our energy use, people are going to have to take green more seriously.

The world is complicated. For example, you can cut down trees to get more solar power. Is that good or bad?

I drive an electric car, yet use a gas lawnmower that probably pollutes worse than a modern car. With all of this heat and dryness, the silver lining is that there isn't much grass to mow. Anyone have experiences with electric mowers?

Another thing you said is that conserving / using less energy is always positive. I'm with you on that one, too.

Conservation is the best way to go green if you want to keep your lights on when they are needed. Just turn things off that you really don't need. I just wish people would use less and then there shouldn't be those rolling black outs.

I have an electric mower but it is only used for those tight spaces my 52 inch Zero Turn mower can't get to. Unfortunately cutting 2 1/2 acres with an electric mower would require a ton of batteries or a very very long extension cord.

[J.P.M.]

J.P.M.,

I think you're saying the there are some "green" things out there that are borderline scams, like cap & trade. Allowing companies to meet their quota by buying green rights doesn't do any good. I agree.

The green quota, however, is real. As we raise the green quota to a significant fraction of our energy use, people are going to have to take green more seriously.

The world is complicated. For example, you can cut down trees to get more solar power. Is that good or bad?

I drive an electric car, yet use a gas lawnmower that probably pollutes worse than a modern car. With all of this heat and dryness, the silver lining is that there isn't much grass to mow. Anyone have experiences with electric mowers?

Another thing you said is that conserving / using less energy is always positive. I'm with you on that one, too.

Yea, more than a few such things are scams, large and small. Seen them in/around alt. energy/conservation as long as I've been associated with such things. They're no better/different in concept than any other scams and confidence swindles that have been around for millennia. Any time more things/marketing scams/whatever get between a product and it's users - like "buy green power from us", the larger the bureaucracy gets and more it costs to feed the beast. That means not less for the producer as much as it requires more cost/less value to the end user, but people see what they want to see and hear what they want to hear and they feel like they're doing something good. Seems to me most of the good is in their minds and not to the planets benefit. Green scams like that look like little more than white collar welfare to me, but NOMFB. Maybe they're more common just now because we're collectively more intellectually slothful than in the past.

As for what you call a green quota, it can become a more (that is a larger) significant portion of energy use if the denominator of the quotient (energy use) becomes smaller. Using less energy will increase the quotient. It's also the most cost effective way to conserve.

Or, borrowing/recasting something Inetdog wrote recently, the glass, rather than being half empty or half full may be twice a big as it needs to be to meet everyone's real needs.

The world is more complicated by many things. Most of them we can do little about except to realize that many of those things are little more than distractions and wise up. One of those things that's not a distraction is ignorance.

Fortunately, ignorance and its power over us can be reduced by something called critical thinking.
Unfortunately, there seems to be a lot fewer people with those skills around just now than in the past.

To your examples, I had an electric mower. Worked great. Then I got rid of the grass and replaced it with a bunch of edible landscaping (a garden). After the move to so. CA, I now have a yard without grass - just a bunch of appropriate vegetation that doesn't need water or much care at all. The world is full of choices. Took me a while to figure out I could pay my money and take my choice.