[HN Gopher] NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
___________________________________________________________________
NY energy grid: Real-time dashboard
Author : firstbase
Score : 113 points
Date : 2022-03-11 16:57 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nyiso.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nyiso.com)
| 7thaccount wrote:
| Just an FYI,
|
| All RTO/ISOs in the US have a variety of dashboards to describe
| realtime and historical information, as do the Canadian entities.
| So you can see the same thing for CAISO, ERCOT, SPP, MISO, PJM,
| ISO-NE...etc on their websites.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Check out ElectricityMap.org, they scrape the independent
| dashboards (CAISO, NYISO, ISO-NE, ERCOT) for generation mix
| data, anything else (in the US) is pulled from EIA's balancing
| authority API with a 6-12 hour lag (ElectricityMap uses machine
| learning to provide real time estimates based on historical
| data for data delayed zones, and it is _spooky_ how accurate it
| is [Chile in particular] when the data backfills and "catches
| up").
|
| https://app.electricitymap.org
|
| https://www.eia.gov/electricity/gridmonitor/dashboard/electr...
|
| Edit: (can't reply, HN throttling) @mardifoufs
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/hydro-quebec-could-l...
|
| https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/maine-vote-hydro-quebec-1.6233...
|
| (NIMBYs in Maine sandbagging export of clean hydro to New
| England ISOs)
| mardifoufs wrote:
| Woah Quebec seems to have the lowest (?) Carbon intensity on
| the map. Hydro power is just amazing, and I'm glad we had
| very forward looking PMs back in the 60-70s who pushed for
| massive hydro projects even when the costs were gigantic.
| There's still so much hydro potential in the province that
| isn't being used though.
|
| Makes me wonder if it would be possible to build up our hydro
| capacity specifically for export instead of just exporting
| our surpluses like we do now. Maybe it won't be profitable
| now, but would it be too energy inefficient to transport much
| more electricity from the north of the province to further
| south than New England?
| ceroxylon wrote:
| There is a fair amount of missing / misleading data on that
| map, e.g. Brazil is the 25th largest consumer of coal[0],
| but the map claims 95+% of Brazil's energy consumption is
| renewable and lists their coal percentage as "?"
|
| [0] https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-
| count...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| The data for that link looks like it ends in 2016 for
| Brazil. ElectricityMap is parsing the data directly from
| the grid operator.
|
| https://www.worldometers.info/coal/brazil-coal/#coal-
| consump...
|
| https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=49436
| ("Brazil largely relies on hydropower for electricity
| generation; in 2020, hydropower supplied 66% of its
| electricity demand. Wind and solar generation have grown
| quickly in recent years and had a combined 11% share of
| the country's electricity generation in 2020. Biomass
| accounted for an 8% share. Fossil fuel-fired plants made
| up another 12% of electricity generation, while nuclear
| power accounted for 2%.")
| liketochill wrote:
| And yet everyone is critical of current mega projects that
| are being built now that will benefit future generations.
|
| Site C in BC Muskrat falls in NL/Labrador Keeyask in
| Manitoba.
|
| All while We benefit from paid down mega projects from
| decades ago that our predecessors had the grit to fund and
| build
| finiteseries wrote:
| There is a very nice volunteer made one for ERCOT that popped
| up during the freeze last year, on datadog no less.
|
| https://p.datadoghq.com/sb/5c2fc00be-393be929c9c55c3b80b557d...
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Much nicer than ERCOT's imho.
| pfdietz wrote:
| Ercot's is ok, and tells you things like solar and wind
| production. They're producing nearly 20 GW from wind right
| at this moment.
| trinovantes wrote:
| Ontario also has a dashboard https://www.ieso.ca/power-data
|
| I'm glad most of our energy is from non-carbon sources
| cosmic_quanta wrote:
| I am surprised at how much nuclear power (~50% of the total
| supply) is produced in Ontario!
| johnnyb9 wrote:
| Nice, now I can visualize how much more I'm paying after the
| shutdown of Indian Point nuclear plant in favor of expensive
| fossil fuels.
| thaway2839 wrote:
| Will you be factoring in the cost of an accident (you can
| adjust the rarity of the accident to get your expected value)
| destroying the entire economic engine of the state?
|
| A lot of nuclear closures make no sense. Germany's
| indiscriminate shutting down of all the nuclear power plants in
| the country without waiting for renewable alternatives to be
| online was a bad idea.
|
| However, specific shutdowns do make sense. A nuclear plant
| situation upstream of the biggest city in the US, right by the
| entire city's water supply is very high up in the list of
| existing nuclear shutdowns that make sense.
| johnnyb9 wrote:
| Sure, like Fukushima, which is rare, and had a single death?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| The economic damages of a 30km exclusion zone that close to
| NYC might be significant, even without deaths.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Also the Japanese government is projecting a total of
| somewhere between $200 billion and $600 billion to clean
| up the mess left behind -- amortizing that on the $/MWh
| produced by the power plant would probably lead to
| _slightly_ more expensive power...
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/clearing-the-
| radi...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Will you be factoring in the healthcare costs associated with
| burning more diesel and natural gas? (Not even getting into
| the externalities of climate change.)
|
| ---
|
| I thought Kurzgesagt did a pretty good job of breaking this
| down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jzfpyo-q-RM. Basically,
| no matter how you look at it, nuclear is among the safest
| forms of energy we have, behind _only_ solar, wind, and
| hydropower. Admittedly, deaths [?] costs, but I imagine the
| numbers would be similar.
| cupofpython wrote:
| nuclear is also incredibly hard to build an accurate model
| for because the concern tends to revolve around the risk of
| human stupidity causing major issues.
|
| on top of that, i feel like there is a lot of hand waving
| involved with the waste. if we really industrialized
| nuclear fuel worldwide - we would be creating a lot of
| nuclear waste. theoretically, this isnt a problem.
|
| what id like to see, and may do one day if i run out of
| projects, is at what risk factor does nuclear equal fossil
| fuels. not, look how much better it is, but "this is about
| how dumb we would need to be in our handling of nuclear
| plants to cause about the same damage as our current system
| does"
|
| making it apples to apples like that would make it much
| clearer.. % risk of this or that is tough to internalize
| for a lot of people. but is active sabotage of 1 out of
| every 10 plants necessary to be as bad as current energy?
| or is just 1 plant failing enough to make nuclear worse and
| we are just saying the likelihood of just 1 plant failing
| is astronomically small
| infogulch wrote:
| The past few years have shown that our infrastructure --
| electricity, fuel, shipping, etc -- is more fragile than we
| expected. We're running on very thin margins, which is
| efficient!, but not very durable.
|
| These systems should have a larger buffer for variation than what
| they run at now, and we should regularly exercise their
| flexibility. A chaos monkey for infrastructure perhaps. It will
| be a pain to deal with outages in normal times, but much less of
| a pain than being surprised by their inflexibility in the middle
| of some other crisis.
| primis wrote:
| Interesting that the graph of power is split between "Renewables"
| and "other" which explicitly pulls nuclear out of that equation.
| NY has currently about 36.5% Renewables right now in their power
| mix. If they instead labeled it as "Fossil Fuels" and "Non-Fossil
| Power", the "Non-Fossil" Power production would be 54.3%!
|
| Also, I love how constant that Nuclear line is across the
| generation graph.
| powerbroker wrote:
| Here is the percentage of the combined wind + Solar + Nuclear +
| Hydroelectric on some grids in the East & Midwest, along with
| their direction of growth/decline at 5PM EST on 3/11/2022:
| ERCOT 57.3 Electric Reliability Council of Texas MISO
| 41.9 - Midwest Independent System Operator NYIS 50.6
| New York Independent System Operator SPP 44.4
| SouthWest Power Pool PJM 42.4 / PJM
| Interconnection (PN, NJ, MD, OH, IN, DE & CHicago)
| lprubin wrote:
| Can anyone explain the dip in power usage between 11am and 4pm?
| Why would less energy used between those hours?
| kemiller wrote:
| Warmest part of the day?
| swarnie wrote:
| For those interested the UK have a similar but much cooler
| looking DB (in my opinion)
|
| https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/
| oofbey wrote:
| What units is this? $35 per what? Megawatt-hour?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Yep - LBMP for NYISO is the local based marginal price in
| $/MWh;
|
| https://www.nyiso.com/documents/20142/3625950/mpug.pdf/
| fotta wrote:
| California's ISO has a similar dashboard:
| https://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/default.aspx
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| Every major regional ISO does in North America and most of the
| ones in the equivalent market organizations in Europe do as
| well. The historian data this uses was made easily publishable
| about 8 years or so ago and you can get quite detailed API
| dumps from most of them, although usually at a time-delay to
| meet their requirements for market protection.
|
| Worldwide OSIsoft's PI is the outsized leader in that but there
| are numerous other historians with modernized REST API outputs,
| etc, from Canary Labs and most SCADA systems will at least
| include their own discount version built on top of Postgres or
| something. The more dedicated ones use time-series databases
| versus relational ones but with modern storage and processing
| that isn't as big of a performance issue as it was in the 80s
| and 90s.
|
| OATI is big in that space as well for inter-utility aggregation
| and transfer, as well as some other company I'm blanking on the
| name of out of Illinois that was widely used as least in WECC.
| [deleted]
| londons_explore wrote:
| Right now, the marginal price is $36/MWh.
|
| Over in England, the marginal price is $268/MWh. [1]
|
| When the price of energy is 7x higher, businesses cannot compete.
| Everything takes energy to use or make.
|
| Yet few economists look at the price of energy when deciding
| which nations will rise and which will fall. Perhaps they should.
|
| [1]: https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main
| clappski wrote:
| Something to bare in mind when you're looking at both of those
| is the price is highly dependent on a number of factors;
|
| - Type of generation, looking at the NY data they have a huge
| hydro generation, obviously the UK grid has much less of that
|
| - Time of day, the Elexon graph is showing you the system price
| per 30 minute settlement period. You can see that some of those
| periods weren't anywhere near what you're quoting (there was
| literally a period where the system price was 0PS in the last
| 24h).
| https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=balancing/systemsellbuypri...
| makes the volatility much more obvious.
|
| - The weather, it plays a big part in the system price due to
| price disparity of renewables (commonly wind in the UK grid)
| compared to oil based and gas generation.
|
| - The interconnect, the UK grid has interconnectors to the EU
| grid so there's some price impact from that
| [deleted]
| idiotsecant wrote:
| You should also consider that the whole idea of a network of
| large independent system operators is part of the reason why
| power can be cheap in the US - you can dispatch the most
| economically viable generation source over a wide area. The UK
| is roughly equivalent to a mid-sized US state in terms of
| energy market (roughly half the market of California, for
| example). Having the UK act as it's own electrical balancing
| authority and responsible for it's own power contracts is
| remarkably inefficient. The prices reflect that. In a sane
| world all of Europe would be under a common balancing authority
| that could dispatch power economically based on the generation
| and load across the entire region. The US is moving in this
| direction, we've already got several very large BAs and will
| eventually be under a single authority or a few very large
| regional authorities.
|
| This is one of those many cases where the politics of the
| situation and the physics of the situation go to war and the
| politics wins.
| londons_explore wrote:
| The UK already has power interconnects with lots of Europe,
| and all trading is done in a half-hourly market, so
| effectively a power generator in greece is competing with a
| power generator in scotland on price. Obviously as soon as
| the interconnects are full to capacity, that is no longer the
| case...
| nicoburns wrote:
| > In a sane world all of Europe would be under a common
| balancing authority that could dispatch power economically
| based on the generation and load across the entire region
|
| There are some pretty solid geographical reasons why the UK
| the isn't tied into the European grid (more than by a few
| interconnects).
| woodruffw wrote:
| I assume that the UK is like the US in providing separate
| commercial electricity rates, so I'm not sure that there's a
| meaningful comparison to be made directly here.
| selectodude wrote:
| Those are wholesale rates, literally everybody will be paying
| more than that. Business will be paying less of a premium.
| tialaramex wrote:
| No, consumers will likely be paying the capped price.
|
| (A regulator on behalf of) the British government sets a
| six monthly price cap, based on the actual prices from a
| historical six month period, ordinarily this cap just means
| that people who are too poor or too lazy to "shop around"
| for a better deal pay no more than this amount for their
| electricity, but because the UK uses a _lot_ of natural gas
| to make electricity and European gas prices are very high
| now (even though the UK has its own gas fields and doesn 't
| use very much Russian gas) the cap is actually lower than
| any rational supplier would offer, and so there are no
| "better deals" out there, the alternatives are fixed rates
| _far_ higher than the cap for long periods, essentially a
| bet that prices will go _much_ higher and stay high.
|
| Right now the price cap is 21p per kWh (plus standing
| charges) and in April it rises to 28p per kWh, it is
| already anticipated that in October it will be closer to
| 40p per kWh.
|
| Because metric units are convenient that means right now
| wholesale energy prices above PS210 per MWh mean a loss
| _even before expenses_ to the suppliers, and from April
| until October, wholesale prices above PS280 per MWh are
| likewise a loss. Peak prices of typically PS300-PS400 are
| _literally bankrupting_ the suppliers.
|
| For small suppliers the consequence is they went bankrupt
| last year, in huge numbers once these prices began to bite.
| Some hadn't even been profitable with normal prices, so now
| asked to eat millions of pounds per month of losses they
| just folded. Their customers were handed to the other
| suppliers, on these capped rates, which are of course hurt
| those suppliers too. The biggest will probably survive
| this, if necessary with government money (although none of
| the "suppliers" for consumers actually supply any
| electricity anywhere, they exist on paper to satisfy a pro-
| business agenda for government, obviously if you're
| confident of the principle that capitalism is a good idea
| then more capitalism is a better idea right?)
|
| Anyway, as a result of the cap, essentially all consumers
| are not paying what electricity actually costs. British
| consumers are _angry_ because their bills went up maybe
| 40-50%. But the wholesale prices more than doubled. They,
| as you might say, ain 't seen nothing yet.
|
| I can afford this, lots of people cannot.
| londons_explore wrote:
| Which raises the question... Can I as a consumer put a
| big pump in my back yard to pump water uphill (paying the
| price cap), and then own a company that generates power
| from the water flowing down the hill, and get paid
| wholesale rates, profiting from the difference?
| tqmcb wrote:
| Really interesting data here. I wonder if someone could reverse
| the estimate algorithm to see what impact weather has. I'm
| guessing that's the largest single factor? Might be useful to
| have that information readily available for those using their own
| personal solar panels.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Tangentially related: New York is home to NYPA[1], the largest
| public power utility/authority in the United States. NYPA is
| entirely owned by the public, produces some of the cheapest (and
| greenest) power in the country, and is funded in perpetuity by
| bonds instead of taxes.
|
| Edit: This bond announcement[2] document claims that NYPA
| provides over 25% of NY's electricity and owns over 30% of the
| physical delivery infrastructure in the state.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Power_Authority
|
| [2]: https://www.nypa.gov/-/media/nypa/documents/document-
| library...
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I grew up near this NYPA facility, which is a really
| interesting energy storage idea:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blenheim%E2%80%93Gilboa_Hydroe...
|
| Basically, they built a reservoir on top of a mountain, and
| pump water up there during off peak times. When NYC hits peak
| demand, they let the water flow down. Essentially a giant water
| battery!
| nickt wrote:
| There's a similar facility at Dinorwig in Wales. It's
| important not only to handle the load of all the kettles
| being switched on at half-time (what they refer to as "TV
| pickup", an almost 3GW increase in demand), but it's also a
| "black start" site.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_start
| klenwell wrote:
| I found myself talking randomly to an Enron engineer years
| ago right around the time they were imploding. He described
| working on a similar project. Pump the water up in the dead
| of night. Let it flow down the next day.
|
| Then, well, certain facts came to light and the project got
| halted. At the time we were talking, he was reporting to an
| empty office to search for a new job.
| nsomani wrote:
| Yeah it's actually very common, it's called pumped storage.
| Many power pricing models will treat them identically to
| batteries given they also bid into what's called the
| "ancillary services market," which exists for reliability
| purposes to balance the grid when supply and demand don't
| perfectly match up. You can read about other types of storage
| on the PJM ISO website: https://learn.pjm.com/energy-
| innovations/energy-storage
| boringg wrote:
| Pumped storage - always interesting highly doubt it will be
| realized in any real meaningful way (might be some
| interesting one off projectS). We've stopped building dams
| and its too difficult to site close to markets.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| Whether it's close to markets or not is not particularly
| relevant. I am a engineer at a utility whose power mix is
| primarily hydroelectric and whose customer base is
| primarily _not_ at the top of a mountain in a steep canyon
| river. That 's what transmission lines are for! With the
| increasing role of regional ISO likes the subject of this
| article those transmission networks only get more
| efficient.
| boringg wrote:
| Proximity matters to minimize losses and lower
| transmissions costs for economic viability of the plant.
|
| Obviously Im not talking about the population being at
| the top of the mountain I'm talking about geological
| formations that are viable that are close to the marke in
| order for the value prop of energy storage from pumped
| storage to realized
| pydry wrote:
| China just finished the largest one in the world. It
| produces more power than a nuclear power plant.
|
| UK is building a huge one too.
| boringg wrote:
| How has hydroelectricity worked for china? Three gorges
| was a total cluster.
| woodruffw wrote:
| Pumped storage is an incredible technology. I'm glad that
| chemical battery technology is advancing, but I would love to
| see more construction of this sort!
| chasd00 wrote:
| is there enough difference in price to actually turn a profit
| doing that?
| tialaramex wrote:
| It depends, but in some cases certainly.
|
| https://www.bmreports.com/bmrs/?q=eds/main
|
| That top left graph is showing you the (notional) system
| price for grid electricity in the UK. The x axis is
| settlement periods, which are 30 minutes long, thus period
| 14 on that graph ends 0700 local time, before many people
| are awake, system price was PS0 per MWh. You want it? Have
| it. The evening peak a few hours ago was PS327 per MWh. So
| if you bought 2GWh of electricity this morning and sold
| just 50% of it back this evening (accounting for losses)
| you made over PS300 000 on that transaction.
|
| Now, those sites aren't free, I'm sure you need a dozen or
| more specialist engineers who aren't paid minimum wage to
| run a plant like that, and the spares are doubtless
| expensive, it's not as though everybody has a spare 100MW
| turbine/ pump sat around you could buy. But you can do that
| most days and sometimes twice a day, so it's potentially a
| nice earner. Once upon a time all the ones in the UK were
| owned by the government but today they are owned by for-
| profit corporations.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Admittedly, this is in the UK where electricity is ~10x
| more expensive at peak.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Its not about turning a profit, but running the grid. You
| have to meet demand. The options are basically to build
| pumped storage to smooth out supply and demand, or build
| more peaker plants to meet demand spikes.
| nsomani wrote:
| Yes, but it's also about turning a profit, because you
| have to incentivize power producers to build pumped
| storage / batteries / etc. The ISO markets are
| unregulated in that respect, since the government doesn't
| build or control the power plants.
| tialaramex wrote:
| There are a good few pumped storage sites in the world,
| here's the one most convenient for me to visit (now that
| COVID-19 precautions have eased) in Scotland:
|
| https://www.visitcruachan.co.uk/
|
| It isn't practical to build mountains, so you need to find
| some natural mountains you don't mind cutting a big hole
| into, with a pre-existing lake at the top, at the bottom, or
| ideally both, and then spend a lot of money building the
| storage system, plus hook it up to the grid.
|
| The US does have lots of spare mountains, but they aren't
| exactly in the middle of cities where it would be convenient,
| so the infrastructure cost is very large.
|
| In the UK one rationale for these sites is that they have
| Black Start capability. In the event of a complete network
| failure, there is no grid power, most power stations can't be
| started from this situation, they need the grid first. At
| suitably equipped pumped storage sites a relatively modest
| amount of local electrical power (e.g. from a portable diesel
| generator) is enough to get the site running with no outside
| help, whereupon it can produce, for a few hours, a great deal
| of electrical power for the grid, and other generators on the
| grid can use that power to start themselves up safely. By the
| time the reservoir is empty, lots of other generators are
| back online. Black Start justified paying them money to exist
| even back when they weren't regularly used. Today cheap wind
| power means pumped storage is economic anyway, fill it up at
| night with cheap power (sometimes at _negative_ cost) and
| then generate electricity in the early evening peak with all
| that water.
| idiotsecant wrote:
| The infrastructure cost is not nearly the burden that the
| regulatory process is. Building any kind of hydroelectric
| in the United States is a massive political and
| bureaucratic undertaking. If you plan on building pumped
| storage you better set aside a decade or two of constant
| effort to get through that process. Once you have that part
| done the actual building of it is comparatively simple. I
| am an engineer in hydro and would absolutely love the
| chance to be involved in more pumped storage projects but
| they are quite rare for that reason, despite being a
| perfect match for what our grid currently needs (much more
| storage!)
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| Pumped hydro is cool, but we already have more storage
| than we need, its called "not burning gas". And until we
| run out of opportunities to not burn gas, theres no real
| demand for storage. Hopefully well get there soon, but
| the more people say "we can't build more renewables until
| we have storage", the longer that is going to take.
| replygirl wrote:
| europe came within weeks of consumer energy rationing
| this winter because it almost ran out of natural gas.
|
| in the us, our natural gas infrastructure is such that if
| you build a new building in new york city, you can't get
| a gas hookup.
| s0rce wrote:
| The US already has tons of reservoirs in the mountains. I
| think California does do some pumped hydro energy storage
| at the moment.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helms_Pumped_Storage_Plant
|
| https://www.sdcwa.org/projects/san-vicente-pumping-
| facilitie...
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Why is power produced by wood (which I assume means _burning_
| wood) listed alongside solar in "other renewables"?
|
| I guess technically trees are renewable? I assume burning them
| releases CO2 though...
| umanwizard wrote:
| Growing them captures CO2. Burning them releases that same CO2.
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| Biosphere carbon is carbon neutral. If you grow a tree, pulp
| the tree, and burn the tree, the amount of overall carbon
| available has not changed as the process of growing new trees
| will reuse the same carbon. Ignoring external energy costs,
| obvs.
|
| It's a little weird to think about but those wood burning
| plants are mostly taking the production waste of lumber
| processing and using it for fuel, similar to wood pellet grills
| but much larger, and it burns surprisingly clean, relatively
| speaking anyway.
|
| What's killing us is pulling billions of tons of carbon that
| was buried deep in the earth and reinjecting that into the
| atmosphere.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| However, while carbon neutral from trees would have been
| great in the past and hopefully will be again in the future,
| _right now_ it's not our saviour because it takes decades to
| rebind the carbon in a new tree and we don't have decades
| anymore.
|
| So it's like natural gas, a marginally better thing than coal
| and oil but still not great.
|
| Same with carbon offsets from planting trees, it might be
| fine to require planting trees for every flight or something
| but it really should not be used to "offset" the emissions
| because it won't.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| That's not true though, because it's not 1:1 -- we don't
| burn one tree, pause, plant a new tree, we burn millions of
| trees while many more millions of other trees are
| simultaneously being grown and are at various stages of
| maturity, only a handful of which (relatively) will be
| burned for fuel like this.
|
| The carbon from the tree burned can be absorbed by all the
| other, currently growing, trees.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If the sawdust and twigs was just going to be dumped to
| rot, then it would give off methane, so similar to food
| composting, burning that output can be GHG negative. Its
| not going to be a primary source of power, because solar
| and wind are so ridiculously cheap and scalable, but every
| little bit helps in the short term. Once fossil fuels are
| elimanted it'll make sense to do other things with them,
| rather than burn them.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Huh! I guess it depends on whether those trees will actually
| end up being repopulated. I'm still not sure I'd put it in
| the same class as solar energy for that reason (not arguing
| against it as a power source), although perhaps solar
| generates so little the distinction is meaningless?
| dahfizz wrote:
| Tree farming is pretty common, both for lumber and biomass
| fuel. NY state has over 300,000 acres of tree farms.
| https://www.nytreefarm.org/about/
| reincarnate0x14 wrote:
| Solar and wind and hydro and nuclear aren't carbon neutral
| though, they're zero carbon (again excluding external costs
| of production, etc). With carbon-neutral the amount of
| biosphere C stays constant, with carbon zero is may
| potentially go back down as natural or artificial carbon
| capture processes happen.
|
| It's not a distinction that is made in public discourse
| commonly but matters if, for example, it's powering a
| carbon capture system or producing methane from atmospheric
| gasses. Doing that via a carbon-neutral system would be a
| net negative energy relatively to carbon usage case,
| whereas using a nuclear reactor or solar plant to do it
| when it's overproducing relative to immediate grid load
| would work out.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _With carbon-neutral the amount of biosphere C stays
| constant, with carbon zero is may potentially go back
| down as natural or artificial carbon capture processes
| happen_
|
| The net effect is the same. A country running on biofuels
| and a country running on solar will have the same net
| production irrespective of carbon capture. One emits and
| absorbs while the other never emits.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Assuming a totally steady-state biosphere, and that zero-
| carbon energy and carbon capture are mutually exclusive,
| which are not a valid assumptions. Almost every first-
| world country's biosphere is limited by human action, so
| a country running on "zero carbon" energy can allow the
| biosphere to capture carbon at effectively the same rate
| as the biofuel country, and _not_ release the carbon back
| into the atmosphere.
| dahfizz wrote:
| Those trees are farmed for burning. So the wood is renewable -
| Every X unit of time, the earth renews that supply of wood.
| Renewable does not mean without carbon dioxide, although this
| is a carbon neutral process (CO2 taken out of the atmosphere
| when the trees grow, and released back as they burn).
| missedthecue wrote:
| Renewable doesn't mean Co2-less, even though most renewable
| energy methods do not emit Co2.
|
| Burning farmed wood is carbon negative, if you attach a carbon
| scrubber to the flue of the power-plant.
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