<
https://web.archive.org/web/20240701173142/https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/california-is-showing-how-a-big-state-can-power-itself-without-fossil-fuels>
"Something approaching a miracle has been taking place in California this
spring. Beginning in early March, for some portion of almost every day, a
combination of solar, wind, geothermal, and hydropower has been producing more
than a hundred per cent of the state’s demand for electricity. Some afternoons,
solar panels alone have produced more power than the state uses. And, at night,
large utility-scale batteries that have been installed during the past few
years are often the single largest source of supply to the grid—sending the
excess power stored up during the afternoon back out to consumers across the
state. It’s taken years of construction—and solid political leadership in
Sacramento—to slowly build this wave, but all of a sudden it’s cresting into
view. California has the fifth-largest economy in the world and, in the course
of a few months, the state has proved that it’s possible to run a thriving
modern economy on clean energy.
A good place to view this feat is from Mark Jacobson’s home—a light-filled
two-story modernist house that he shares with his family at the end of a
classic suburban cul-de-sac on the edge of the campus of Stanford University,
where he is a professor of civil and environmental engineering. In part, that’s
because the house is an energy-efficient showpiece; its solar panels produce
more than enough energy to cover what he uses, though it is still tied to the
grid. In the garage, there are two Teslas (including a 2009 Roadster with a
license plate that reads “GHG Free”) and a pair of the company’s Powerwall
batteries. The first place Jacobson shows you on a tour is the mechanical room,
where an air exchanger recovers ninety-seven per cent of the heat from the
stale air that it pushes out of the house. Next up is the kitchen, where an
induction cooktop cuts energy use by sixty per cent compared with gas, even as
it boils water twice as fast. He also showed me an app on his phone that
monitors his usage of the power generated by solar panels on his roof every few
seconds. “Yesterday, seventeen per cent of the generation from my rooftop went
into the batteries in the garage,” he said. “I used eight per cent of it at
home, and I sold seventy-nine per cent to the grid.”
But the real reason to go see Jacobson is that he said this transition could
and would happen. Beginning with an article he co-wrote for
Scientific
American, in 2009, he’s been making the case for a-hundred-per-cent renewable
energy. It’s not been easy—after he won a prize, from the National Academy of
Sciences, for a 2015 paper laying out the vision, twenty-one energy researchers
wrote an analysis for the academy’s magazine that accuses him of modelling
errors and of making “implausible and inadequately supported assumptions.” So
Jacobson can be excused for crowing a bit on social media this spring, if you
define crowing as posting almost daily graphs of the renewable-energy surge."
Via
Fix the News:
<
https://fixthenews.com/good-news-global-emotions-poverty-indonesia-bluefin-tuna/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
