Timothy Taylor on transmission capacity; River Page on conflicting goals; Larry Summers on manufacturing; the WSJ on wind power subsidies; Mark Mills on electric vehicles
The trouble is that sometimes, what some people are calling an industrial policy is really just an attempt to mitigate the fallout from the previous round of de-industrial policy.
If you impose costly regulations on a domestic business sector but still allow imports from an unregulated foreign competitor, then all you have done is implement the deindustrial policy of a regulatory arbitrage which transfers production abroad and implodes local employment in those bankrupted sectors while doing nothing to affect levels of consumption or the global aggregate amount of whatever harms the regulations are purported to be trying to prevent.
For example, if California had merely imposed costly requirements on Californian pig farmers, but let in unregulated pork from Iowa, then Californians would still eat the same amount of pork, and the source pigs would still be treated the same way as before, and all that would happen is that Californian pig farms and farmers would go extinct. That's why they also had to ban imports from other states. If they had done this in two steps, perhaps after realizing the dumb error they made in step 1, then the attempt to domestically "reshore" the mistakenly purged industry is, sure, technically "industrial policy" in the sense that every policy affecting an industry is an industrial policy. But it's counter-de-industrial policy.
Came up for the title and subtitle for my first book:
US and EU "Green" Industrial Policy: What happens when an unstoppable force (Government Grift) meets an immovable object (The Laws of Physics and Economic Reality)
A serious question- what are the voltage drops on transmitting very high voltage AC from Arizona/Kansas to New York? The number I see is 7-15% for the normal under 300 mile transmission route, but try googling an answer to my question above. I am guessing I am going to have to dig out a physics book and do the calculations for myself since there seems to be an embargo on anyone posting an answer.
I have a document, EE392J_2_Spring11_AEP_Transmission_Facts.pdf, which I downloaded from somewhere, which has a wealth of information about electric transmission losses. It seems crazy to ship power hundreds of miles from where it is generated, but the losses are lower than I had imagined.
For AC, I already knew the basics- losses are minimized by upping the voltage to lower the current. However, that isn't the only issue- a super high voltage line, AC or DC, isn't going to supply power only at the end-point- it will have to have customers all along the route, or it wouldn't be an actual grid. This drops the voltage the entire path, raising the losses due to resistance. This is the problem have with a lot of the articles I did find discussing the problem obliquely- all of them pretend that transmission lines running a hypothetical 2000 miles only supply power at the end-point- such a thing would be completely impractical.
Yeah, the HVDC descriptions is one of the links I found. Of course, there is the additional issue that no such transmission line would travel from Texas to New York City solely for the purpose of delivering electrical power to New York City- there would be, and would have to be, customers all along the route, dropping the voltage all along the way, and increasing the losses/mile on transmission alone. In short, I find the idea that power generated further than 500-750 miles from consumer to be a pie-in-the-sky proposition absent significantly more efficient conductors, which aren't likely to happen any time soon.
I agree lines sending power from Southwest to Northeast is unlikely. That said, power sometimes goes from Columbia river to SoCal. It's 600 miles from Portland to SF; 950 miles to LA.
Hydro Quebec has its big hydro plants on the LeGrande and frequently sends power into NY. It's 1,000 miles from LeGrande 2 to Burlington, VT. I don't remember the stats on their big HVDC line. You have me curious how long it is.
So I assume Larry Summers would come down on the side of industrial policy initiatives like the "tech hubs" such as the Pensacola one the author describes. I mean, he has been well-ensconced as a "thought leader" during the past couple decades. Does that sort of thing flow from his wisdom, and suddenly numbers aren't important anymore? It's almost like when the number is zero, it's harder to sneer at.
Uuugh. Wind power, how I have come to hate it. I passed through a town in the grassland a few weeks ago. There was a sign on the interstate, one of those "welcome to our town" signs. Because I saw the same sign on the other, outgoing end, being meticulously painted with flowers and animals by somebody who evidently was living there in an RV while doing the work, I knew it had just recently been installed: a huge disused wind turbine blade turned into a canvas. I thought this was cute and snapped a photo.
A couple days later I saw a news story about this selfsame town becoming a vast graveyard for the big blades which apparently don't hold up well although outwardly they look the same as when new.
I saw another story about recycling them. For starters they have to be chopped up, which is tough to deal with. Otherwise, the leading "practical" suggestion was to turn them into shade structures for bus stops.
That's almost the opposite of true. Old blades are easy to deal with (I've seen it in person), and they are not actually 'recycled' at all. Don't buy into GE's BS PR campaign meant to 'greenwash' the extra money they have to spend to comply with both nonsensical regulations and other unwise commitments they made which they believed expedient at the time to secure various subsidies and arithmetically suspect "credits" for effectively imaginary amounts of CO2 emissions "avoided".
Blades are almost entirely thin carbon fiber, epoxy, and wood, just like the masts and hulls of tall sailing ships. As such, while you would have to put some muscle into it and obviously it wouldn't be practical, you can literally cut them with a hand saw.
And also, the thing about stuff made out of carbon fiber and wood is that it burns real clean and easy.
Kind of like what they do with wooden shipping pallets when they accumulate in some place or get worn down too much, you can just throw blade pieces in a pit and with a little gasoline to get it started have a nice fun bonfire.
And that's all they mean by """recycling"""! They are just cutting up the pieces to throw them into what amounts to a big wood chipper and then they send the sawdust to factories which -get this- just burn it for heat! "Recycled", lol. Like most recycling, the whole thing is wastefully uneconomical (i.e., unsustainable) at every step, so the money goes the opposite way from normal and flows uphill in the same direction as the stuff to pay people to take it! They don't have to count the carbon emissions from what it takes just to move this stuff around that could have just been burned up on site, so the whole farce and fiasco probably has a net positive impact on emissions.
I'd bet if we looked total kWh produced by a windmill vs how much fossil fuel it would take for the same kWh, the "waste" from the blades would be relatively small though maybe not insignificant.
For decades environmentalists blocked new roads and infrastructure by claiming it would alter the ecosystem for some reptile or bird. Now we have massive wind farms killing thousands of birds and many whales and the environmentalists don't have a complaint.
Green energy is the stupidest ideology ever, most likely because it is the most lucrative grift ever.
Of course they were right about the new roads and infrastructure (and the fires that would flow from them, and have to be fighted because people ...). Maybe shouldn't have marginalized them then. Anyway, as with the ESA, this is one more example of hating on something that was already ever used.
The trouble is that sometimes, what some people are calling an industrial policy is really just an attempt to mitigate the fallout from the previous round of de-industrial policy.
If you impose costly regulations on a domestic business sector but still allow imports from an unregulated foreign competitor, then all you have done is implement the deindustrial policy of a regulatory arbitrage which transfers production abroad and implodes local employment in those bankrupted sectors while doing nothing to affect levels of consumption or the global aggregate amount of whatever harms the regulations are purported to be trying to prevent.
For example, if California had merely imposed costly requirements on Californian pig farmers, but let in unregulated pork from Iowa, then Californians would still eat the same amount of pork, and the source pigs would still be treated the same way as before, and all that would happen is that Californian pig farms and farmers would go extinct. That's why they also had to ban imports from other states. If they had done this in two steps, perhaps after realizing the dumb error they made in step 1, then the attempt to domestically "reshore" the mistakenly purged industry is, sure, technically "industrial policy" in the sense that every policy affecting an industry is an industrial policy. But it's counter-de-industrial policy.
Came up for the title and subtitle for my first book:
US and EU "Green" Industrial Policy: What happens when an unstoppable force (Government Grift) meets an immovable object (The Laws of Physics and Economic Reality)
you are as negative as the eletrons you bad mouth
cheers
A serious question- what are the voltage drops on transmitting very high voltage AC from Arizona/Kansas to New York? The number I see is 7-15% for the normal under 300 mile transmission route, but try googling an answer to my question above. I am guessing I am going to have to dig out a physics book and do the calculations for myself since there seems to be an embargo on anyone posting an answer.
I have a document, EE392J_2_Spring11_AEP_Transmission_Facts.pdf, which I downloaded from somewhere, which has a wealth of information about electric transmission losses. It seems crazy to ship power hundreds of miles from where it is generated, but the losses are lower than I had imagined.
For AC, I already knew the basics- losses are minimized by upping the voltage to lower the current. However, that isn't the only issue- a super high voltage line, AC or DC, isn't going to supply power only at the end-point- it will have to have customers all along the route, or it wouldn't be an actual grid. This drops the voltage the entire path, raising the losses due to resistance. This is the problem have with a lot of the articles I did find discussing the problem obliquely- all of them pretend that transmission lines running a hypothetical 2000 miles only supply power at the end-point- such a thing would be completely impractical.
There are a few long distance DC lines in the west to supply LA. There is one from the Columbia River and another from Montana.
There's another tying the western grid to the middle US grid.
And yet quite a lot of energy used in the NE is renewable. It's just not solar or wind, it's hydro. From Quebec.
You are in the he ballpark.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current#:~:text=Depending%20on%20voltage%20level%20and,lines%20at%20the%20same%20voltage.
Yeah, the HVDC descriptions is one of the links I found. Of course, there is the additional issue that no such transmission line would travel from Texas to New York City solely for the purpose of delivering electrical power to New York City- there would be, and would have to be, customers all along the route, dropping the voltage all along the way, and increasing the losses/mile on transmission alone. In short, I find the idea that power generated further than 500-750 miles from consumer to be a pie-in-the-sky proposition absent significantly more efficient conductors, which aren't likely to happen any time soon.
I agree lines sending power from Southwest to Northeast is unlikely. That said, power sometimes goes from Columbia river to SoCal. It's 600 miles from Portland to SF; 950 miles to LA.
Hydro Quebec has its big hydro plants on the LeGrande and frequently sends power into NY. It's 1,000 miles from LeGrande 2 to Burlington, VT. I don't remember the stats on their big HVDC line. You have me curious how long it is.
To go near that distance, it must be DC. Quebec has DC line(s) from dams far north. Still much shorter and expensive to build.
"Larry Summers said, ..."
But Krugman says Biden's industrial policy is a phenomenal success. ;(
So I assume Larry Summers would come down on the side of industrial policy initiatives like the "tech hubs" such as the Pensacola one the author describes. I mean, he has been well-ensconced as a "thought leader" during the past couple decades. Does that sort of thing flow from his wisdom, and suddenly numbers aren't important anymore? It's almost like when the number is zero, it's harder to sneer at.
Uuugh. Wind power, how I have come to hate it. I passed through a town in the grassland a few weeks ago. There was a sign on the interstate, one of those "welcome to our town" signs. Because I saw the same sign on the other, outgoing end, being meticulously painted with flowers and animals by somebody who evidently was living there in an RV while doing the work, I knew it had just recently been installed: a huge disused wind turbine blade turned into a canvas. I thought this was cute and snapped a photo.
A couple days later I saw a news story about this selfsame town becoming a vast graveyard for the big blades which apparently don't hold up well although outwardly they look the same as when new.
I saw another story about recycling them. For starters they have to be chopped up, which is tough to deal with. Otherwise, the leading "practical" suggestion was to turn them into shade structures for bus stops.
That's almost the opposite of true. Old blades are easy to deal with (I've seen it in person), and they are not actually 'recycled' at all. Don't buy into GE's BS PR campaign meant to 'greenwash' the extra money they have to spend to comply with both nonsensical regulations and other unwise commitments they made which they believed expedient at the time to secure various subsidies and arithmetically suspect "credits" for effectively imaginary amounts of CO2 emissions "avoided".
Blades are almost entirely thin carbon fiber, epoxy, and wood, just like the masts and hulls of tall sailing ships. As such, while you would have to put some muscle into it and obviously it wouldn't be practical, you can literally cut them with a hand saw.
And also, the thing about stuff made out of carbon fiber and wood is that it burns real clean and easy.
Kind of like what they do with wooden shipping pallets when they accumulate in some place or get worn down too much, you can just throw blade pieces in a pit and with a little gasoline to get it started have a nice fun bonfire.
And that's all they mean by """recycling"""! They are just cutting up the pieces to throw them into what amounts to a big wood chipper and then they send the sawdust to factories which -get this- just burn it for heat! "Recycled", lol. Like most recycling, the whole thing is wastefully uneconomical (i.e., unsustainable) at every step, so the money goes the opposite way from normal and flows uphill in the same direction as the stuff to pay people to take it! They don't have to count the carbon emissions from what it takes just to move this stuff around that could have just been burned up on site, so the whole farce and fiasco probably has a net positive impact on emissions.
I'd bet if we looked total kWh produced by a windmill vs how much fossil fuel it would take for the same kWh, the "waste" from the blades would be relatively small though maybe not insignificant.
All I would prefer would be to not see mountains of blades. What you're describing doesn't seem to be happening locally.
My ideas are crude that way. For instance, we could just turn off the lights.
Does anyone know of a good article explaining the cost and process of disposing/recycling of these electric batteries ? I think I've never read one.
For decades environmentalists blocked new roads and infrastructure by claiming it would alter the ecosystem for some reptile or bird. Now we have massive wind farms killing thousands of birds and many whales and the environmentalists don't have a complaint.
Green energy is the stupidest ideology ever, most likely because it is the most lucrative grift ever.
Of course they were right about the new roads and infrastructure (and the fires that would flow from them, and have to be fighted because people ...). Maybe shouldn't have marginalized them then. Anyway, as with the ESA, this is one more example of hating on something that was already ever used.
At least we've been assured there never will be a full stop, that's not how it will go down.