Here’s the great French scientist Sadi Carnot, writing in 1824:
To take away England’s steam engines to-day would amount to robbing her of her iron and coal, to drying up her sources of wealth, to ruining her means of prosperity and destroying her great power. The destruction of her shipping, commonly regarded as her source of strength, would perhaps be less disastrous for her.
The wealth and power of a country are strongly related to its energy resources, whether those resources take the form of human slaves, steam engines, hydroelectric dams, oil and gas wells, or nuclear reactors. The fact that Russia possesses energy resources on which many other countries depend has been an enormous factor in that country’s ability to invade Ukraine and in Putin’s belief that the world will let him get away with it.
Wealth and power are sought, in one form or another, by most people. Showing James Boswell around the Boulton & Watt steam engine factory in 1776, Matthew Boulton summed up his business one simple phrase:
I sell here, sir, what all the world desires to have–POWER.
Yet the leaders of the West have, with few exceptions, chosen to reduce the relative power of their countries through their opposition to fossil fuel production and use combined with hostility toward further development of nuclear energy—or even the continued operation of existing nuclear plants. There has been little evidence of serious thinking about realistic limitations of intermittent power sources, even as countries have rushed to make themselves dependent on such sources…nor is there much evidence of serious thinking about the critical-mineral dependencies created by a large-scale switch to wind, solar, and batteries.
So what explains the choice of this path? Has mechanical power ceased to be an important factor in political power, in the destinies of nations? Hardly, as the Russia/Ukraine example makes clear. Or do we somehow have a generation of leaders who don’t care about political power? That, clearly, is also not the case…at least as far as the personal political power of those leaders goes.
I think there are several factors at work:
First, there is the widespread scientific and technical ignorance among political leaders and influential media people. I’ve noticed, for example, that American media coverage of energy storage projects almost always refers to kilowatts, megawatts, and gigawatts as if these terms indicate the storage capacity of a battery or other storage system. They do not. (A 100 megawatt storage system may provide 1 hour, 4 hours, or 20 hours worth of 100-megawatt electricity depending on its megawatt-hour rating. Measuring electrical storage capacity in megawatts is like measuring the capacity of your car’s gas tank in horsepower.) More generally, there is a widespread failure to comprehend just how difficult and expensive it is to store large quantities of electricity and an assumption that if we invest enough in wind and solar, the power will be available on winter nights and in the middle of prolonged snowstorms, ‘somehow’.
Second, there has been a general de-emphasis on the physical attributes of the economy under the belief that we are now in a ‘digital’ or ‘virtual’, or ‘post-industrial’ age. Enterprises and people dealing with physical things have lost political power relative to those that deal in words, images, and code. The Western leaders of 1950, or even 1970, would have been a lot more cautious about deliberately creating energy dependency on a likely-hostile power.
Third, many politicians–and many of the academics and other “experts” advising them–simply do not identify closely with their own nations and with the people and culture of those nations. This is also true of a high proportion of influential media figures. There is a strong thread of belief in the U.S. Democratic Party that America is too wealthy, too powerful, too dangerous–that it is country that is “just downright mean,” in the words of a former First Lady. The same is true of much of the Left in other Western countries. And if you think these things about a country and its people, you’re not likely to want to increase–or even sustain–its power.
That’s true especially if you decouple the power of your country from your own personal power and well-being. And I think “progressive” politicians, and many members of academic and even business elites, often do see themselves as inhabiting a transnational space in which their personal well-being is not strongly coupled to that of their countries.
Fourth, in a world in which organized religion has become increasingly marginal, there are a lot of people looking for causes in which to believe. ‘Green energy’ is such a cause, and the specter of Climate Change gives it apocalyptic power. And when people believe they are facing the apocalypse—that the planet is soon going to burn—they’re not likely to look too carefully at those things advertised to avoid the burning.
Fifth, societies across the western world have become much more risk-averse. The question of why this shift has occurred, and of its positive and negative attributes, merits a separate article—but it’s pretty obvious that it has happened. And the consequences for energy development have been very significant, particularly in the case of nuclear energy.
Sixth, there are the personal financial motivations of leaders and other influential people…and even outright corruption. To what degree has Germany’s acceptance of dependence on Russian energy been motivated by the financial interests of powerful and influential individuals…just as a lot of America’s acceptance of critical manufactured product dependence on China has been substantially motivated in a similar way? That factor is surely not a minor one.
Finally and most disturbingly, there is a nontrivial set of people who believe that the general populations of their countries live too well, and that there are too many of them. “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy,” wrote anti-nuclear leader Amory Lovins, “because of what we would do with it.” A Forbes article from 2018 points out that:
Neo-Malthusian conservationists often hid their motivations. When asked in the mid-1990s if he had been worried about nuclear accidents, Sierra Club anti-nuclear activist Martin Litton replied, “No, I really didn’t care because there are too many people anyway … I think that playing dirty if you have a noble end is fine.”
I remember that when a major electrical blackout was going on—in New York City, I think it was—several caller-in to an NPR radio program said things like:
I’m glad when these things happen, it teaches us a lesson
and
We deserve this, because we’re so wasteful
At the extreme, this attitude shades off into outright anti-humanity and nihilism. During the Covid-19 era, there have been memes circulating with messages like “Humans are the real virus” and “The earth is healing in our absence.” There is a meme which shows a “world without bees” as a dry and dismal desert…ok, that may be fair, but some versions of the meme go on to portray a “world without humans” as a beautiful jungle, with noble and happy animals all apparently getting along with each other just fine.
It would be impossible to say how precisely how such attitudes have influenced energy policies, but I’m quite sure the influence is there.
So there have been many factors, from ignorance to greed to nihilism, driving unworkable energy policies. What are the prospects for change?…Is the shock of Ukraine invasion sufficient to lead to a wiser choice of policies? There are at least some grounds for hope. The German government has decided to build two LNG import facilities, and to consider extending the operating life of nuclear plants planned for closure. The EU, even prior to the invasion, has signaled a willingness to consider nuclear as a ‘green’ energy resource—possibly even natural gas under some circumstances.
However, there is pushback. The German nuclear operators have rejected the calls to keep their plants running beyond the existing deadlines: most likely, I would guess, they fear another change in the political climate and just want to get it over with. An article in The Guardian fears that ‘big oil’ will use the invasion to derail the Green Revolution and favors a ‘Marshall Plan” to rapidly expand ‘renewables’ around the world (I didn’t see any mention of the word ’nuclear’ in the article, nor any consideration of critical-minerals problems) And the US ‘climate envoy’, John Kerry, rather pathetically hopes that Putin, in the midst of his assault on Ukraine, will “help us with respect to what we need to do to stay on track with the climate.”
In the US, the Biden administration has shown no serious interest in increasing domestic oil and gas production…the CEO of Devon Energy, for example, expressed surprise that in this situation the administration has not even contacted him about expansion possibilities.
And returning to the subject of nuclear power: will the Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear plant lead to a setback in the growing acceptance of nuclear and a return of the “it’s just too dangerous” viewpoint? (Indeed, it has even been suggested, by Victor Davis Hanson, that Putin’s attack on this facility might have been motivated by a desire to discredit nuclear and hence to preserve the long-term market value of his more important exports)
So, while there are signs of hope, it is by no means guaranteed that the Ukraine events will lead to more rational energy policies throughout the West. And in any case, the fact that we have allowed ourselves to get into this situation at all does not speak well for Western governments and media, nor for the political rationality and maturity of the populace of those countries. We have not been conducting ourselves as serious people and serious nations: we need to begin to do so, before it is too late.
I mentioned the extreme risk-aversion which pervades many of our societies as a factor in energy policy…and I am reminded of a passage from Walter Miller’s great novel A Canticle for Leibowitz:
To minimize suffering and to maximize security were natural and proper ends of . But then they became the only ends, somehow, and the only basis of law—a perversion. Inevitably, then, in seeking only them, we found only their opposites: maximum suffering and minimum security.
It does look less like incompetence and more like enemy action to me…
As to various power sources and their uses I can point to my own example. My car needs what costs $9 a gallon to power at the moment. Its moderately economical but still costs me at least $100 a month, and I don’t drive much.
I will replace that with a car that will cost me about $150 a year to fuel. I can do that for no, or very little money as my car in trade and the nearly $8000 in incentives, we get in Canada, will pay for the car. As well I can build it a small solar array that will be able to keep it charged for about $1000. I do have some of the parts for that as I had one long ago, and I do know how all that works. Certainly it will not continuously produce power but I don’t need it to. Just enough to charge the car.
Tell me how dumb I am. ;)
@David Foster
Good stuff. I’m glad I overcame the tl:dr, it was worth it.
. . . a beautiful jungle, with noble and happy animals all apparently getting along with each other just fine.
A bit like a Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet, except they at least include some people.
It does look less like incompetence and more like enemy action to me…
Why not both?
}}} “It’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of clean, cheap, abundant energy,” wrote anti-nuclear leader Amory Lovins, “because of what we would do with it.”
If I Recall Correctly, he was also the one who proudly stated, “The only physics I ever took was Ex-Lax.”
As though ignorance of science was something to be proud of. >:-(
“As well I can build it a small solar array that will be able to keep it charged for about $1000.”
Quite possible, depending on how often / how far you drive it…but wouldn’t work if you had to go out every day and charge overnight…unless you also invested in significant battery capacity.
As though ignorance of science was something to be proud of. >:-(
I still remember reading a book about the opposition to nuclear power that quoted an activist who described it all as “an overcomplicated way to boil water.”
I got that book from a library circa 1985, and I regret I can’t remember the title.
We are ruled by people who live in a virtual world. One that does not bother with reality. It is the Harvard faculty club again. Remember when Buckley said he would rather be ruled by the first 100 names in the Cambridge phone book than by the Harvard faculty. He wasn’t kidding. Jennifer Grantholm, who is Energy Secretary( !), doesn’t know anything about energy. We have people who say that “green energy” will replace fossil fuel in our lifetime. This is a delusion. A damned dangerous one that they seem determined to follow as we leave the industrial age and return to horses and buggies.
Even if they were pushing nuclear power, I would have some respect for them. They are idiots.
David
Yes I’d need about twice that to do a full use car, but not really all that hard to do. As you point out to do overnight, needs batteries, but they are not that expensive. You are looking at about 5 grand with all the trimmings. I could do it for maybe $3500 as I have parts and knowledge.
For me and people like me, with low requirements and no need to charge at night, its a good idea. But then taking $15 -$20 a month from hydro is very probably what I will do. ;) You know ‘Maximum Effort” … oh hold it my idol Ryan Reynolds has that copyrighted … so “Minimum Effort” … that’s a better fit anyway. ;)
You mention Canticle. It describes some of our nihilism too.
“… children of Merlin, chasing a gleam. Children, too, of Eve, forever building Edens–and kicking them apart in berserk fury because somehow it isn’t the same. “
Here is a nice example of Grantholm’s brilliance.
Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm publicly called on oil and natural gas producers in the United States to boost output while the country is on a “war footing.”
President Biden’s most senior energy official made the remarks as the administration looks for ways to reduce gas prices, which have skyrocketed even further during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
“We are on a war footing,” the energy secretary told an economic forum in Houston on Wednesday. “We are in an emergency, and we have to responsibly increase short-term supply where we can right now to stabilize the market and minimize harm to American families.”
I wonder if she has seen this chart?
U.S. petroleum inventories are depleting to critically low levels as output fails to keep pace with the rapid rebound in consumption after the pandemic, putting intense upward pressure on oil prices.
Petroleum inventories were depleting at an unsustainable rate even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the disruption of Russia’s petroleum exports in response.
Unleaded at $4.49 today in Tucson.
}}} Tell me how dumb I am. ;)
OK, Penny, as usual, you’re a moron. Clearly, if the ONLY goal is low cost transportation, you should buy a motorcycle and learn how to ride it. Or even better, get a scooter. THOSE things get like 120mpg.
WHAT? You mean you have OTHER things that also apply?
Well, now. This is NOT stupid, but you stupidly failed to grasp these things were hidden from your view by your blind stupidity.
And once you get to THAT, the fact of the matter is, EACH of us has different “side expectations” of what, and how, they use their cars. In other words, your justifications are not THEIR justifications, and neither decision is smarter or dumber than the other, in that context. It IS, however, stupid of you to virtue signal as though it was smarter on your part.
=====================================
Most people vastly overestimate their gasoline costs, anyway. Most of the people looking right now at buying a new, more efficient vehicle will spend more money on the vehicle than they will save on the fuel costs.
Let’s do a calculation:
Suppose you have a 4yo vehicle — estimated life, what, say, 6y before you’d chose to trade it and get a new vehicle, perhaps (when re-doing these calcs for your own specifics, adjust accordingly)
Let’s assume you’ve paid it off (again, adjust the calcs if you have not done so), and will aim for another 4y payoff when you finance the new one.
So, say your current vehicle is getting 15mpg average for typical use, while your “new” vehicle will manage an impressive 30mpg for typical use.
So — the average driver does approximately 12k miles per year. This varies substantially with the job, the driver, etc., but right now, a lot more people are working from home so commute less on average than they did 10y ago — but let’s keep that 12k figure. Adjust as needed if you know you actually, consistently drive more.
So — from this, it’s really a very very simple calc — the average year, your current car will use
12000/15 == 800gal
The new car will clearly use
12000/30 ==400 gal.
At $3 a gallon, your old car will cost 2400/yr to operate, gaswise, the new one will cost 1200/yr to operate, gaswise
At $5 a gallon, your old car will cost 4000 to operate, the new one will cost 2000 to operate.
This is a pretty simple fact of the numbers.
The problem here, is, among other things, whether or not you want to assume the high gas prices will remain high, among other things.
For either case, though — you are basically going with the foolish notion that:
4000/12 == 333/month will be less than 167/month PLUS YOUR NEW CAR PAYMENT.
Now, not sure just what the vehicle you’re going to buy is, but…. betting it’s going to cost you one fuckton more per month than the 167 extra you’re paying as a result of your old car.
Most especially if you have to increase your insurance to match the new car, while you could lower it for your older car, or increase the deductible, etc.
Go ahead, tell me that’s wrong. Using a rational argument, in case that was needed.
Now, if the money isn’t the issue, well, fine. But don’t for a moment think gas at anything short of $7 or $8 a gallon can justify a newer car alone. It’s one thing if you were planning to replace it in a year or a bit more, but for the most part, it’s a poor financial justification.
Gas does not make up as much of a part of the operating costs of any car — even with gas at 2x what it was under Trump.
}}} . You are looking at about 5 grand with all the trimmings. I could do it for maybe $3500 as I have parts and knowledge.
And here we see the fiscal incompetence of people like Penny. That expenditure, alone, would take you a good year to two years of the “savings” on a gas vehicle. Even more on electrics, because if you think there aren’t enough idiots looking at it right now sufficient to put a premium price on Teslas, etc., you’d be sorely mistaken. Fuck, the same idiots are going to drive the price of electricity up. AND those same solar cells and batteries you’re talking about, too.
SMH.
And about the time they actually get it all in and set up, with their premium mortgage payments on it, the price of gas is going to drop back to 2.50 a gallon and make your “savings” virtually nonexistent. LOLZ.
}}} Unleaded at $4.49 today in Tucson.
There is a wonderful light behind this, however.
It’s going to make it very very difficult for the idiot merdia to go, “Hey, look, a pony!!” all the time when every trip to the gas pump reminds them what complete idiots and losers Democrats are.
You appear to be a halfwit, well reading challenged at best.
This rather fine Subaru Solterra will cost me nothing. I will trade my present car, or sell it for about what I paid for it. It is counterintuitive but some of us have lost nothing to depreciation. That with the $7500 my government will give me, for buying a full on EV, will pay for the car. I can trade into a new EV for free, no money, da nada.
At the moment my car uses gas at about $9.15 a gallon. That is not going down soon, or ever perhaps. That works out to well over $100 a month for me if I keep doing this. It would be much more if I drove it a lot.
The Solterra will use around $15 a month worth of electricity. That’s why I did the math to see what I could charge it for, but I doubt I will do that as its so cheap already.
I bought the car I have now, largely because it would retain its value. That worked out far better than I thought it could. The Solterra will be an even better store of value.
So no cost to me, order of magnitude less fuel costs, and I’m the idiot.
Well Penny, if you plant some Pogostemon cablin seeds next to your Cannabis plants,
you could save even more money, as you wouldn’t need to drive into town to buy your
Patchouli oil, you could make your own!
Nothing to disagree with David but a lot to comment on. Maybe tomorrow.
I did want to say thank you for mentioning James watts partner Matthew Boulton. All props to watt for his discoveries of course.
But watt was a scientist, not an entrepreneur. Boulton was. It was he who took the steam engine from a lab curiosity to what I think is the most world changing invention ever.
I am hap that James Watt is remembered daily for the basic unit of power.
I think it is a great wrong that Boulton is not forever memorialized with some fundamental unit named after him. I am always glad to see him recognized at any level. Even just a blog post
Actually you wrote more than “just” a blog post.
Certainly no diminution of the post intended
Al Gore has avoided this particular fustercluck, god love him. I think you meant the Hon. John Kerry.
There was a scifi short story (novel?) that featured a species that had survived the struggle for existence by evolving into frank and utter cowards. Their leaders were “The Hindmost.” If I could remember the author I’d give him or her credit.
Way too much substance for me right now, but a thought or two–the Great Disempowerment may be the way the Modern Age closes, or becomes truly Postmodern (whatever that may mean if anything). Partly a quasi-spiritual renunciation of the world, partly a confession of creative exhaustion common in declining systems, partly selective technophobia, and as already mentioned a whole lotta stupid.
I hope we’re around to see the resolution of the vehicle cost/ben in a few years.
“Second, there has been a general de-emphasis on the physical attributes of the economy …”
Part of that has been the feel-good aspect of environmentalism. Clearly, we are all in favor of clean air, clean water, green landscapes. We are also all in favor of full stomachs and weather-tight homes which are warm in winter and cool in summer. We have tried to have it all — by offshoring the industries which create the products we need. Government officials have boasted that US carbon emissions have been going down — but they ignore that we are cleaning up the US by sending industry (and jobs) overseas to pollute other countries.
The model of importing more than we export is unsustainable. Eventually reality will hit us with a 2 by 4. Then we will have to make the difficult decisions about how “Green” can we really afford to be?
Cousin Eddie…thanks, fixed.
Well Penny, if you plant some Pogostemon cablin seeds next to your Cannabis plants.
You do understand my 4 plants are completely legal here? Its 4 because that’s what my son gave me, otherwise I may break the law, like I have been for well over 50 years.
I also have some squeeze from the store, but mine is better.
Umm Patchouli oil is for people like you. Its just the hippie chicks who actually like that crap. ;)
A very good article, Mr. Foster!
Clarke’s Corollary to Hanlon’s Razor:
Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
Green energy – back when it was still an active blog, USS Clueless had a good explanation about energy density and the futility of the green alternatives.
Wasn’t there a guy who earlier had purchased an electric car and just recently, when he found out what the replacement cost of the batteries would be, just junked the car instead?
“Wasn’t there a guy who earlier had purchased an electric car and just recently, when he found out what the replacement cost of the batteries would be, just junked the car instead?”
A modern EV battery is good for 10 years and after that is usable, but will lose capacity quite fast. The older ones were not as good.
I actually harvested 150 or so 18650s from laptop batteries a friend of mine gave me. They are what was used till just recently, and still are in many EVs. They hold charge and take charge just fine and its been 5 years since I harvested them. They are in a box outside and I use them for flashlights now. They don’t change much over time.
Cousin Eddie: You’re thinking of Pierson’s Puppeteers, from Larry Niven’s Known Space setting, so called because their two head/hands reminded the first contact team of sock puppets.
They are also known to be amoral manipulative bastards.
To Cousin Eddie:
The aliens of whom you are thinking are the Puppeteers, who appear prominently in many of the stories and novels of Larry Niven. Part of his novel Ringworld depicts what they were able to accomplish despite their ostentatiously displayed cowardice.
With the late Jerry Pournelle Niven also wrote a number of novels, not involving the Puppeteers, that Chicago Boyz readers may find interesting.
Boobah posted his reply while I was still composing mine, but as long as we have brought up Niven, perhaps it is worth mentioning his less than cheerful general view of humans, as depicted in such stories as “Cloak of Anarchy” and “The Organleggers”.
If PennyDumb could do any of what he claims, he’d provide links to price quotes. He’d also include the total costs of replacing his battery every 4-5 years because they lose ability to hold charge. And of course, he’d have to address the greater pollution involved in producing what he claims.
PennyDumb is dishonest.
The reason I voted for Johnson instead of Clinton was because she would’ve been the greatest gift to Russia and OPEC ever imagined. Well, before Biden anyway.
Russia campaigning against Hillary Clinton is like Br’er Rabbit begging not to be thrown in the briar patch. To believe Russia preferred Trump over Hillary, that his interests were more conflicted than hers, is incredulous. You have to throw out hundreds of years of history and everything we know about what Russia’s interests are and what we know about how they operate to believe this. Russia’s primary method of influence is class division and class warfare. After that, it’s romantic environmentalism and using that to prevent competition in the energy industry by constraining growth and productivity in foreign energy interests. This has been the case since before the Soviet Union existed. The government is primarily concerned with political power, military, and energy. Its economy is over 20% energy and over 50% of government revenue is from energy, largely oil and natural gas. The HC campaign pledged to stop fracing and curtail natural gas production. At the same time, she told voters she would aggressively push for a massive wind and solar power expansion which would in turn require massive amounts of natural gas to manage variability. Anti-fracking sentiment has already caused problems on the east coast. Despite a glut in natural gas supplies, they have not updated and expanded pipelines to make use of domestic supplies, resulting in actually importing gas from Russia despite sanctions last winter. Hillary basically had the perfect platform, had she been campaigning for US president in Russia.
Whenever people start talking about OPEC, like to point out this Paul Krugman paper from 2001, http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/opec.html. When people say that the US cannot affect the price of oil, I like to point out several things: 1.) That’s a good thing because every bit we produce goes to our GDP. 2.) That’s a good thing because every bit we don’t import adds to our GDP. 3.) That’s a good thing because every bit we don’t import reduces our trade deficit. 4.) That’s a good thing because it means lots of tax revenue (see and 2). 5.) Don’t be so sure about that, a little competition could spur production in lots of other places. Many producers produce inefficiently (and messily) because they believe price rises will keep them wealthy. E.g. Venezuela, Russia in the 1990s… They don’t keep their equipment maintained and they waste/spill a lot.
US hoarding sends a signal to oil producing nations with two implications: 1). Alternative Energy is nowhere near ready, otherwise the US would be extracting its oil before prices fall; the US likely doesn’t expect alternatives to ever be better than fossil fuels (I’d like to get into this, but I’ll save it for another time). 2). Current producers can make money by keeping production low.
If the US told the world it believes alternative energy R&D would pay off within the next 50 it would mean nothing, unless they back it up with extraction for the medium term. I believe that if the US said that there was no future in oil, and backed it up by pumping full- tilt to take advantage of the current high prices, we’d see both alternative research take off as well as exploration, extraction, and productivity throughout the world.
Reagan wasn’t the Great Communicator because of how he talked. Actions speak far louder than words.
If we were properly focused on energy security, greenhouse gas emissions would be a moot point. #AntiFragileEnergy #GreenNUCLEARDeal #HighlyFlexibleNaturalGas #IncineratePlasticPollution #WasteToEnergy
The Northern Hemisphere climate was much more extreme in previous centuries. The past 150 years have been unusually kind. We are not prepared for reversion to the mean.
In case anyone has any doubts about what’s going on, this guy just came out and said it:
https://twitter.com/TheMarieOakes/status/1502301784559210501
Brian Deese, an economic advisor to Biden, recently said:
“The only viable path to energy independence… is to reduce the energy intensity of our economy… to reduce it to zero and get ourselves to a position where we’re no longer reliant on fossil fuels.”
“Energy intensity”–what is that even supposed to mean, if not energy use?–should be “reduced to zero”? These people are psychopaths.
“Energy intensity”
What it means is that the US should import all manufactured goods — and ignore the energy used in manufacturing them. Similarly, the US should shut down all mining operations to “save” the energy used there. Again, the energy will still be used, just somewhere else in the world. That way, as far as the accounting books are concerned, the US is using less energy per unit of GDP. Of course, GDP is also an accounting fiction.
It remains to be seen how long a de-industrialized economy can continue by exporting freshly-printed Bidenbucks to pay for the imports it can no longer make for itself.
PenGun has never been a serious commenter here. Lately he seems to be preening and virtue signaling.
The people now running this country are fools and liars. Biden was a liar before he was senile. Those twerps around him look like Harvard grad students. I wonder what will happen as the recession hits ? Hard !
well blinken was his coffee fetcher, but he listens to his fellow lycee alum, Robert Malley, more leeches are in the forecast
I was watching ‘a funny thing happened on the way to the forum’ for a change of pace, based on plautus,
“If PennyDumb could do any of what he claims, he’d provide links to price quotes.”
You need a certain level of intellect to deal with electricity, so finding your own stuff is a useful filter. ;)
Pengun,
I think you told us that you in British Columbia. Solar insolation there is 3-4 hours per day, not corrected for overcast/weather.
So how many acres of solar panels were you thinking of?
Solar panels produce about 200kw/acre. That’s nominal. It assumes clear skies, at noon, on the equator.
It’s probably closer to 20kw in bc
Allowing 4hrs/day insolation that’s about 80kwh/day/acre.
That’s just off the top of my head. You may have more precise numbers for your application.
The top of your head must be a lonely place. Were I to make a solar power array for my car, I would need about 1000w, so 4 250w panels is about the size of the array.
Finding out what that means is left as an exercise for the reader.
But your car/house doesn’t run on watts, does it?
It runs on watt-hours. To refresh your memory, a watt-hour is a constant output of 1 watt for 1 hour.
When you talk of 250 watt solar panels, I assume you mean what the manufacturer rates them for. Nominal, not actual output.
What are you thinking your actual output will be in BC? A few hundred watt-hours per day?
I really think you are in over your head in this conversation. Unless you wish to provide some actual numbers, I think I’ll just leave it here.
Btw, I’ve been dealing with generating and using industrial scale electricity since the 60s
Something that annoys me with msm coverage of electricity is an apparent lack of knowledge of the difference between a watt and a watt-hour. It is is a useful first pass filter in deciding whether to pay attention to someone.
You seem to lack that understanding as well
You can find a bit of my background and thinking at http://www.darkislandpr.blogspot.com
You all need to show some respect for Kerry and Gore. They stand ready to board a private or government jet at a moments notice to fight the good fight against climate change. They may even be called upon to cut short the time they would otherwise spend on their yachts or 5th home. Surely the rest of us can show support for their selfless sacrifice by walking, biking or spending endless hours on crowded buses every day to get to the menial, mundane jobs we are privileged to hold as long as it serves the purpose of these paragons of virtue, our superiors in every way. Now that we have established these overlords’s authority to determine which jobs are essential, is there any doubt that non-essential people will will next fall under their purview. Surely those not essential to the continued health and comfort of our overlords will feel privileged to take that final injection for the good of the planet
While I admire John Henry’s ambition in trying to educate Pengun in basic engineering principals, I fear that his time would be far better spent doing anything else, like hitting himself in the head with a hammer.
“You all need to show some respect for Kerry and Gore. They stand ready to board a private or government jet at a moments notice to fight the good fight against climate change. They may even be called upon to cut short the time they would otherwise spend on their yachts or 5th home. Surely the rest of us can show support for their selfless sacrifice by walking, biking or spending endless hours on crowded buses every day to get to the menial, mundane jobs we are privileged to hold as long as it serves the purpose of these paragons of virtue, our superiors in every way.”
The sarcasm, it burns! (Very nicely done, BTW.)
I can only repeat my comment on PenGun.
John Henry…”Something that annoys me with msm coverage of electricity is an apparent lack of knowledge of the difference between a watt and a watt-hour.” I have also seen this in the business media as well as the general media…and in press releases from utility companies about their battery storage projects!
“You seem to lack that understanding as well”
The reason I have parts to build a thing like this is because I have built things like this. I ran solar on my trailer for about 10 years. It was more of a technical exercise than anything I really needed, but I could run all my lights at night and my computer for about 2 hours a day off the grid, which I would do once in a while. That is not far from what I need for a car, should feel like doing that.
That’s why I have a Trace 1500w inverter/charger and various other useful bits. If we are stumbling over watts and watt/hours I will leave you to your discussion, maybe someone will learn something, you never know. ;)
The numbers used to tout anything “green” would make Charles Ponzi blush. It would be easier to get the nuclear launch codes than to find out what the actual power output over a reasonable period of time like a year.
Thanks, Sgt. Mom but I really can’t take too much credit. Making fun of those buffoons is a lot like shooting fish in a barrel of pickled herring.
You have to wonder that someone as homely as Kerry managed to snag not one but two heiresses. Must be how he looks in bicycle shorts.
Don’t try to outlogic the green advocates. They know what they know ‘cos some dude in a lab coat told them what to think. They’ve never done the math, themselves, and can’t understand the lies they parrot.
There are precisely zero “green energy” schemes that make sense absent government subsidies. If they made economic sense, they’d be taking over without any subsidies being needed. But, since the crooks can cook the books with tax dollars and utility rate increases mandated by the legislature, they can make anything look workable… Right up until the entire charade collapses under the inherent contradictions. I’ve run the math on these things so many times it’s not even funny–Home solar is my favorite. Unless you’re living off-grid in Arizona, with 320 sunny days every year, you cannot possibly even begin to make back the energy and expense tied up in those panels until just about the time they degrade past usability. The lies are enabled because the subsidies allow the panels to be sold for less than they actually cost, in terms of energy–All the mining, all the refinement, all the transportation and manufacture costs are hidden, invisible to the idiots who fall for the siren song of “free energy”. Those panels are made with Chinese and Australian coal energy inputs, and we’ll never get that back. Long-term efficiency-wise? We’d be better off burning the coal for heat, because the total life-cycle costs are never accounted for. Anywhere in the “green energy” literature…
Go out looking for those original studies on all those massive wind power installations they’re having to bury the blades for, now. Look through them, examine them for their assumptions. Those plants were supposed to be generating power for at least 80% of their twenty-year lifespan. When, exactly, did they get decommissioned? long before the end of their predicted lifespans… Go looking for the costs of disposing of those massive fiberglass blades, and see if you can find that accounted for, anywhere. Try to find out what those plants actually produced, in terms of that 80% availability that was projected. I know for a fact, because friends of ours live under the ones out near Ellensburg, WA, that they rarely see those damn things spinning at all. One of them set up a webcam, and tracked how often the things were actually in operation. Over a two-month period, less than couple of full days of operation, cumulatively.
The actual numbers for what those abortions provide in terms of energy are kept under tighter security than the nuclear codes. You can’t find them, anywhere that I’ve seen. Yet, they keep right on telling us how much “green energy” they’re producing, which is kinda… Weird, considering how much time those blades stay feathered and non-operational.
Green energy is a scam, a massive Ponzi scheme perpetuated by the likes of John Kerry and a whole raft of other scheming con-men. The investors make money, we pay higher rates, and the energy and effort that went into those “green energy” black holes just gets wasted. Solyndra was actually the best-case scenario–Nothing ever actually got manufactured or installed, so no harm done other than wasted imaginary tax dollar money.
Only the truly dumb buy into this crap, and I can’t wait until people are having to spend big money having the overpriced installations they put on their houses torn off because they no longer work. The really laughable part is when they do it themselves, buying cheap Chinese junk solar cells, expecting them to actually be working in five-ten years. It’s like they think they bought the one thing the Chinese aren’t selling as counterfeit crap for high prices–And, they’ll never know until those cells start to fail, or the wiring goes bad and burns their houses down. Seen that twice, already, with these home-brewed solar installations–“Oh, we did it ourselves, for cheaper…”. Oh, did you now? Were your panels legitimately UL rated, tested? Or, did you rely on the counterfeited labels?
It’s even better humor when their insurance companies come back on them and deny coverage because “DIY”. Morons.
Mcs,
Up til mid 2017 the monthly output of all generating sources, including utility plants, all oil, a couple of large (500mw or so) cogeneration /combined cycle plants running on lng, a dozen multi-mw solar farms and 3-4 windfarms was published by the PR Electric Power Authority (PREPA) the govt utility.
This was the amount of power purchased by prepa for the grid.
I took the nominal capacity (megawatts) of each of the wind and dollar plants and multiplied by 8760 to get theoretorical potential annual output.
I then took the power purchased for the year, divided by the theoretical and got capacity factor.
It was in the 20-25% range for the solar and wind. I think the calculations may be in my blog.
A typical gt, diesel, steam, nuclear plant has a capacity factor in the 80-90% range. Even that is a bit misleading because they can generally run for weeks, months, even years at 100% before they need to shut down for maintenance. Even better, that shutdown can be planned. It doesn’t have to happen when there are clouds or no wind.
this is not mere category error, like that american thinker piece about ion pacepa, this is deliberate evil strategy organized by the Soviets since the 80s
The fire hazard is a good point. When my electrical suppliers started promoting special products for solar installation. I wondered why they needed new products to do what had been done safely for years and years. Well, it turns out that in the name of efficiency, they wire the panels in series. This means that some of the wires on a largish installation are 1,000 volts, maybe more. Of course, the people wiring these aren’t the industrial electricians that are used to dealing with voltages like these but some guy that went through a “training” program and only knows what he remembers from a two week course because a, industrial electrician gets $50+ an hour, when you can find one. Nor do they use things like properly secured conduit and big boxes with plenty of internal clearance because that would be too expensive and unsightly on someones roof. So if you have one of these on your roof, you’d better hope they did everything just right and that nothing starts to wear or water doesn’t find it’s way into a high voltage junction box. I foresee lots more fires. And, of course, the company that sold and installed it will belong gone, good luck going after the manufacturer. Chinese courts don’t enforce foreign judgements, not that the manufacturer will be around either.
John Henry,
That 20-25% actually sound good compared to numbers I’ve seen from other places. I believe I’ve seen numbers from England well below 10%. But then Puerto Rico isn’t Northern Europe.
Back when my dad was trying to keep the lights on in Colorado, he would have thought that trying to run a power system with that sort of reliability was insane, not to mention impossible.
We had a little taste of that insanity here in Texas last year and may have come close to a replay this year.
I appreciate Boobah and WDM’s help in identifying the Hindmost writer.
I’ve seen more recent number from US grid operators…wind capacity factors around 30-40% and solar around 15%…highly dependent on location, of course, also seasonal: the numbers are for the whole year.
I’ll try to find and link when I get a chance.
As always, the real question is 30-40% of what? My spidy sense tells me that they have massively de-rated the turbines from the number that was quoted on installation in the media which is usually peak output. With machinery this big, there are many ratings.
I notice this when I see the dumb way they try to compare electric motors in cars to IC engines at so many horsepower and pound feet of torque without any mention of either RPM or duration. Almost all electric motors, unless they have been built specially can produce from 3-5 times the rated continuous horsepower for some period before overheating. Moreover, they develop 3-5 times their continuous rated torque at 0 RPM. Then there’s max RPM, again usually double or better their continuous rating. All of these regimes have various tradeoffs in terms of efficiency and thermal performance.
In other words, there’s a huge space for shenanigans in which to cook these numbers to the point that it’s a dig back through the history of any installation, but I’ll bet the capacity they cite now will be much less than the capacity they announced at the first press conference. Probably by a factor of around three.
Mcs,
Puerto Rico is much nearer the equator than England which makes a huge difference we also, I suspect, have more sunny days.
David,
The 20-40% seems widely accepted so I don’t question its truthiness. But it would still be true if 99% off all windmills were at 20% and 1% at 40.
We would need means and medians to actually know anything useful.
One of the issues I almost never see addressed with solar, in 40+ years is the space requirement.
It takes about 5 acres of solar panels per mw of nominal capacity. Generously assuming 25% capacity, that means about 20 acres/actual mw. Plus access lanes between panels switchgear etc.
When we talk about utility plant replacement we need to talk about gigawatt scale solar. 1gwof solar panels will require more than 20,000 acres of panels. That’s 31 square miles or a patch 5.5 miles on a side.
Some will be rooftops, some will be over parking lots and the like, some will be in deserts. But most will be displacing trees, shrubs, crops, grass and other flora.
There doesn’t seem to be much research addressing these effects.
Another concern is the solar heat striking the panels. Some is converted to electricity, some heats the panels but most is reflected back into the atmosphere. None is absorbed by the earth. What are the climate effects of this?
When solar is small scale as now, we can probably ignore these effects. Probably. Remember that even miniscule effects can have huge impacts. Like the 0.04% co2 in the atmosphere.
AES built a coal fired power plant in guayama pr about 15 years ago. 454 mw
About 10 years ago, on the same site, they built a 20mw nominal/5mw effective solar plant.
The link below is a Google earth image showing both facilities. Note how little actual space is occupied by powerhouse, siloes, ash handling etc.
Note how much space is occupied by the solar panels.
https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-hT2oxxgFm5w/WkPaXzUzP3I/AAAAAAAAACE/COHjjKfB5dcmMCZaAqKHt-96hH15TtUpACPcBGAYYCw/s1600/AES%2BGuayama.png
Mcs,
There is an optimal wind speed for windmills. Too slow or too fast they shut down.
Below the optimized they generate but less electricity. They are nameplate rated for a particular speed eg 1mw at 25mph (or some other speed) so if the wind is 25mph, 100% of the time, capacity factor would be 100%.
It will generate 8,760 mw-hrs per year.
Ignoring maintenance downtime and assuming all other conditions are optimal.
Since the wind doesn’t blow consistently at optimal speed, it will generate less. Let’s sat 3,000mwh/yr.
Capacity factor is 3000/8760 = 34%
Here is a useful analysis of windpower in the real (albeit European) world:
https://www.briefingsforbritain.co.uk/the-costs-offshore-wind-power-blindness-and-insight/
“BEIS’s own figures show that the actual load factor for onshore wind farms has been constant at about 27% over the last decade …”
“The average load factors of offshore wind farms less that five years old in NW Europe mostly fall in the range 40-45%. That is the best they will achieve over their lifetimes and as they age their performance will decline”
Another issue that will become problematic as wind and solar increases is the difference between real AC power, generated by rotating generators and synthetic AC from solar and wind.
Solar and wind both generate DC that us converted to 60hz AC electronically.
A very short explanation is that generators create volt amps reactive (VAR) solar/wind don’t. Integrating them on a utility grid is not rocket science but does add another layer of complexity and cost to the grid.
Look up power factor or var for more info.
There is also a huge flywheel effect from rotational generators that you don’t get with wind and solar. That helps stabilize the grid.
aaron: To believe Russia preferred Trump over Hillary, that his interests were more conflicted than hers, is incredulous.
Except the evidence is that Russia did support Trump in the election, including using an army of internet trolls to interfere in the campaign. They openly celebrated when Trump won. The Russian troll army is now pushing propaganda on social media concerning Ukraine.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/24/social-media-platforms-russia-ukraine-disinformation-00011559
The sort of thing I’m talking about is when a wind park is announced, say they are installing 30, 10 MW “rated” turbines for 300 MW total. 300 MW times 8766 hours in a year comes to 2.6 GWH.
Here, may be more than you wanted to know:
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/15/5/1797/htm
There are layers and layers of flacks to keep the engineering reports as far away from the public as possible, too many facts might harsh the narrative and get in the way of the politicians patting themselves on the back.
If I ever have the chance, I’d like to ask either Gore or Kerry how many Olympic size pools it takes to hold a megawatt just for the look on their face.
Capacity factors: EIA collects data at the plant level and aggregates it in a variety of ways. Here are the capacity factors which I derived by dividing total annual generation by( nameplate capacity times number of hours in a year):
Nuclear 89%
Coal 38%
Hydro 37%
Gas 33% (but this number is tricky…see below)
Wind 32%
Solar 22% (PV)
The surprisingly-low gas number is because it includes both modern combined-cycle plants, running at 56%, and older steam-turbine plants at only 14%.
Hydro also seems low, given that the costs of these plants are just about all capital costs…my guess it that the generation is constrained by water supplies during parts of the year. I know that some plants have added turbines, over and above what the normal water flow can support, so they can sell their electricity for higher prices at peak times…basically, some of the benefits of pumped storage without the pumps!
https://www.eia.gov/electricity/data.php
David — Be careful about those capacity factors in a world in which stupid people are forcing the use of unpredictable wind & solar. There has to be immediately-available reliable 24/7 backup — from sources like gas, coal, hydro. End result is that those plants are spinning spare when the wind blows and put on-line when the wind drops. The economic inefficiency of requiring backup for so-called “renewables” is almost never factored into the real costs of wind & solar.
You will know when “renewables” are truly economic — that will be the day the Political Class starts talking about taxing Big Wind instead of subsidizing it.
Except the evidence is that Russia did support Trump in the election, including using an army of internet trolls to interfere in the campaign.
It just never dies. There is small evidence that Russian troll farms did try to disrupt the election on social media. Nobody thought Trump could win so the effort was directed at disruption, not supporting Trump. The political left still is fixated on this myth although it is getting pretty old.
Mike K: It just never dies.
It just never dies. There is substantial evidence of Russian interference in the U.S. election, along with patent evidence that the Trump campaign welcomed that interference. The Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee documented the evidence in detail and found the following:
• “The Committee found that the Russian government tasked and supported the IRA’ s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.”
• “IRA social media activity was overtly and almost invariably supportive of then-candidate Trump”
• “specific intelligence reporting to support the assessment that Putin and the Russian Government demonstrated a preference for candidate Trump”
• “Manafort’s high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services, particularly Kilimnik, represented a
grave counterintelligence threat.”
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/publications/report-select-committee-intelligence-united-states-senate-russian-active-measures
Why do we have an influx of trolls recently? Is it because of all the instapundit links we’ve been getting?
Gavin…”Be careful about those capacity factors in a world in which stupid people are forcing the use of unpredictable wind & solar. There has to be immediately-available reliable 24/7 backup — from sources like gas, coal, hydro.”
Yeah, I understand that. Any cost calculations based purely on costs & capacity factors only apply by themselves if you don’t care *when* the power is produced, if you view it as something like a commodity that can be stored in a stockpile and sold whenever needed.
What the intermittent sources *can* do, however, is to reduce fuel consumption at the expense of increased capital costs…both high higher cap cost/kw for the wind or solar itself, and also for the cap cost of the fossil fuel plant needed to handle the intermittency. And also, even if you’re not trying to provide enough storage to eliminate the backup fossil plant need, you’re still going to need to provide enough storage to provide for a reasonable ramp-up time for the fossil plant.
Maybe he’s a Russian bot.
thats entirely possible, that senate intelligence committee report, was practically the entire fusion catalog along with crowdstrike, durham seems to examining georgia tech’s part in it,
I apologize for the earlier link. I quickly skimmed the abstract, when I went back to examine it more closely, I realized it is written in some language that only outwardly resembles English. Sorry.
well that’s how i feel when I read most American newspapers, it resembles some semblance of reality but not, its a study made by a Chinese University,
speaking of which
https://www.vox.com/world/2017/6/8/15757876/putin-women-bad-days-russia-domestic-abuse
if they don’t believe in the founding principles, which they have made clear
https://stuinsd.substack.com/p/internal-threats-to-the-american?s=w
David F: “What the intermittent sources *can* do, however, is to reduce fuel consumption at the expense of increased capital costs …”
That is true. My understanding of the backup power from fossil plants is that they have to be kept active all the time (since wind power can die very rapidly), but not feeding power into the grid if the “renewables” happen to be producing power at that moment (which drives the capacity factor down). That means the backup power plant needs to be fully staffed, properly maintained, and have its supply chain in order (supply of gas, coal — where those suppliers also need to have some level of purchase commitment to justify their own investments).
If we were starting from scratch, we would first need to build masses of bird whackers and solar panels to supply the required power — and then build gas, coal, nuclear or hydro power stations of the same capacity as backup. The capital inefficiency of “renewables” is huge.
“And returning to the subject of nuclear power: will the Russian attack on a Ukrainian nuclear plant lead to a setback in the growing acceptance of nuclear and a return of the “it’s just too dangerous” viewpoint? (Indeed, it has even been suggested, by Victor Davis Hanson, that Putin’s attack on this facility might have been motivated by a desire to discredit nuclear and hence to preserve the long-term market value of his more important exports)”
Indeed, the German Greens are using exactly this argument to block attempts to keep the countries reactors online. Inevitably, it will be necessary for Germany to burn more coal to take up the slack, a source of energy that is far more dangerous than nuclear. Estimates of global deaths from coal particulates are typically around 100,000 per year. Coal is even more dangerous than nuclear as a source of radiation. Coal typically contains several parts per million of thorium and uranium. These emit alpha particles, which can’t penetrate your skin. However, if they are carried by particulates and get into your lungs, they will dump their very substantial energy, not into dead skin, but into living lung tissue. This is probably a major reason for the direct connection between lung cancer incidence and proximity to coal plants.
OTH, there may actually be a silver lining to the anti-nuclear fanaticism of our “environmentalists.” Current reactors only use a fraction of the energy that might be extracted from their fuel. The waste they produce contains much uranium 238, which could be converted to plutonium 239 in breeder reactors. This, like U235, is a fissile material, and could be used directly to produce energy. Such reactors would also produce enough neutrons to transmute transuranics and other long-lived radioactive isotopes into much less dangerous materials. As a result, the nuclear waste from running such a reactor for, say, 30 years would potentially have less residual radiation after 300 years than the residual radiation in the ash from operating a coal plant for an equal time. The same is, of course, true of potential future thorium breeders, which would convert that material into fissile U233. The quick and dirty way we burn uranium in current reactors is, as one might expect, the cheapest way to produce nuclear energy at the moment, but it certainly isn’t the wisest. I might add as a caveat that the hardest part of making nuclear weapons is securing special nuclear material – U235, U233 or Pu239. Such material would potentially be easier to secure from breeders than from conventional reactors, a factor that must be taken into account if they are built.
Fusion is the wild card in energy production. If a method is found to produce fusion energy economically, we won’t have to worry about a fuel source any time soon. However, there is little hope that the two “conventional” approaches, inertial and magnetic fusion, will ever be viable sources of energy. The ITER, still mired in an apparently interminable process of construction in France, is a total white elephant. The Achilles heel of such reactors is their requirement for tritium as fuel. Tritium occurs naturally only in trace amounts, so it will have to be bred in the reactors. This may be scientifically possible but is a show stopper from an economical and engineering point of view. We would have been much wiser to invest all the money that has been and will be wasted on that ITER to investigate some of the many alternative approaches to fusion that have been suggested. Most of them will never pan out, but there is always an outside chance that one of them may become the magic bullet we’ve been searching for.
The capital inefficiency of “renewables” is huge.
Which is why they need a never ending round of both construction and operating subsidies
The surprisingly-low gas number is because it includes both modern combined-cycle plants, running at 56%, and older steam-turbine plants at only 14%.
The reason for the low capacity factor for gas fired is that the gas fired plants are mostly used as either a swing load or a peak load facility to accommodate rapid changes in the grid. Gas fired plants can be rapidly brought online and can more easily load follow than any other type of generation.
BTW…the few gas fired steam only plants left have an efficiency of about 35% to 40% depending upon the pressure of the steam leaving the boiler. Most of them have been shut down and replaced with much more efficient combined cycle plants.
yes this isn’t about efficiency or price, otherwise other variables would be involved
https://tinyurl.com/2p89r397
that can’t be right?
https://michaelinmi.wordpress.com/2022/03/13/if-only-everyone-bought-electric-vehicles-things-would-be-great-oh-wait/
do they still drill in the north sea
https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2022/03/13/ethical-alternative-boris-may-beg-saudis-boost-oil-supply-despite-mass-beheadings/
Here’s the thing: Until electric cars can match the energy density and convenience factors created by the installed base of ICE liquid petroleum infrastructure, they’re never going to be competitive or even begin to make sense–Never mind the question of where all that new power generation capacity is going to come from.
The actual solution we should have long since begun working on was that of “clean” liquid hydrocarbon technology, beginning with reformatted cleaner-burning gasoline substitutes. Those could go right into the current infrastructure, slipstreamed in with little dislocation.
The sheer idiocy of these people is stunning, when you look at it. With a liquid hydrocarbon, the stuff stays “energetic” for months, even years. You look at what happens with a charged electric battery put into storage for the same length of time, and what you’re going to experience is a whole lot of “Yeah, gotta charge the car before I can drive it again”. Gas engine? Go out, start, drive.
I’ve seen the syndrome with some acquaintances who put their electric cars into storage over the winter months. Charge dissipates, unless you leave it plugged-in, sucking down the ‘lectricity. Batteries degrade more quickly, as well. Whole thing is utterly insane, when you factor out the subsidies and tax breaks.
In terms of “does it work?”, the liquid hydrocarbon ICE setup we have now is a much better choice. Reformat the fuels, so that they’re cleaner, and away we go. There are damn good reasons that ICE beat out the electric car back at the beginning of the 20th Century, and those reasons are still in existence. The real question is, why are the morons running things trying to make electric cars “a thing” again? As opposed, say, to making better and cleaner fuels for ICE?
Anyone driving in rural areas of North America during winter knows precisely why electric is stupid for that application. Especially stupid, when you’re having to go places in the middle of winter storm season…
Before electric even begins to make sense, we’re going to need another exponential improvement in battery technologies. What we’ve got now is only really sensible in terms of edge-case situations that aren’t particularly applicable to most situations in the modern world.
I love how all the projections ignore the actual costs, though… It’s like “OMG, oil is badddddddd… Mmmmmkay?”, while ignoring the very real resource extraction nightmares engendered by electric cars. What’s really funny? Hearing someone describe how their former homesite is now an EPA hazard site due to their electric car catching fire in the garage and burning the place to the ground. Interestingly, insurance ain’t covering the cost of hauling off the contaminated soil and bringing in clean fill, either. See, those burning sparky cars? You use water on them, and the runoff contains all sorts of cool pollutants, the kind of thing you can’t have get into groundwater or soil, if you want to ever, like, live there again. It’s about as bad as a freakin’ meth lab, that way.
Which everyone is ignoring, at the moment. Wait a few years–I wager that once people find out all the issues with this shitty technology, they’re going to be up in arms and demanding that it be banned. The carcinogens generated are really that bad, and once people go looking for them after one o’ them thar’ sparky auuuuuto-mobeeeles sets itself on fire in their home? LOL… Gonna be some very unhappy campers.
See, one of the things they have to start including in the cost for these POS things is the cleanup–I’m already hearing some very unpleasant things about what it actually costs to even scrap one of these wonderful things. You can’t just run it through a crusher with the batteries in it, either–Lots of expensive labor to disassemble those, then a very uncertain set of answers to the question of “What do we do with all these battery cells…?”.
On the whole, if they did honest math? I’m pretty sure that the ICE car and its infrastructure would come out as a whole hell of a lot less trouble than the nascent electric car BS we’re trying to force into life.
Note for anyone listening, out there: If it requires a government mandate or subsidy to succeed on the market? You’re doing it wrong. Introducing artificial incentives into the market-scrum never really works out; you’re just distorting the hell out of it, and the recoil from your distortions will inevitably pop out somewhere else, about like trying to pack a balloon into a space smaller than its volume will.
Kirk…”The actual solution we should have long since begun working on was that of “clean” liquid hydrocarbon technology, beginning with reformatted cleaner-burning gasoline substitutes. Those could go right into the current infrastructure, slipstreamed in with little dislocation.”
Depends what problem one is trying to solve. If you’re trying to solve ‘traditional pollution’…particulates and gases that have a known health impact…then there’s probably a lot that could be done via this approach…although ‘traditional pollution’ has already been reduced so much that hardly anyone talks about it anymore. When people talk about ‘clean’ these days, they’re mostly talking about CO2, absence thereof.
Although the term ‘carbon’ is generally used, and I think that a lot of people, when they talk about ‘carbon pollution’, think the reference is to some kind of black particulate.
The “waste heat” from high temperature gas cooled reactors would be ideal for extracting oil from oil shale, and we have lots of oil shale. If we really want to be green about it, it would be very handy for producing hydrogen as well, not to mention desalinating sea water.
There isn’t going to be some new, magical, pollution free liquid fuel. It’s a matter of the the thermodynamics of combustion in the cylinder. Already, the major pollution concern are nitrogen oxides that are produced from most combustion processes and carbon particulates from diesel engines.
The closest we will come will be natural gas which is quite good and LP gas which is nearly as good from a pollution standpoint. Natural gas suffers from some of the same problems as electric in terms of limited range from low energy density and long fueling times and a somewhat complicated fueling process. LP gas in practice has about half the range per volume as gasoline and the tank must be heavier and the form factor constrained to withstand the necessary pressure but is far less of a challenge than NG. Of course, both have limited fueling infrastructure but LPG is transportable much like gasoline. I’m not sure if anybody that knows, has said what the effects of widespread use of NG would be for that system but I note that there are places with limited pipeline capacity as it is. Right now, an engine will produce around 80% as much power from NG or LPG as from gas, the upside is that it might last 4-5 times as long.
Every way you look at it, hydrogen would be a huge problem. It combines the drawbacks of very poor density, high complexity, zero infrastructure and it is made from natural gas. Oh, for those that say we’ll just switch from natural gas pipelines to hydrogen, the hydrogen content of natural gas is limited to prevent hydrogen embrittlement, you’ll have to replace a lot of pipeline or burn down a lot of houses.
“Gas fired … can more easily load follow than any other type of generation.”
I thought hydro was equally good at load following, is that not correct?
“Every way you look at it, hydrogen would be a huge problem. It combines the drawbacks of very poor density, high complexity, zero infrastructure and it is made from natural gas.”
So what if your car goes up like the Hindenburg in an accident? You’ll die knowing you’ve done your bit to save the planet.
The problem is that for the dirt-worshipping pagans of the green movement nothing discussed above matters. It’s a religious question, not engineering or science. They want pain and suffering, for roughly the same reason some Europeans went around flogging each other during the Black Death- they thought God was punishing them for their faithlessness, and figured suffering would atone for it.
Today the greens believe the West has sinned against Gaia and they seek to punish us. Any talk of solutions to environmental problems simply leaves them awkwardly staring at their birkenstocks.
You can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into. These religious fanatics need to be brushed aside so civilization can continue.
Never forget that one of the founders of Greenpeace left the organization when he found out that he was the only director who opposed a ban on chlorine:
https://www.technocracy.news/former-president-of-greenpeace-scientifically-rips-climate-change-to-shreds/
(The Other) Kirk…hydro is excellent at load-following, it’s just a matter of opening and closing the throttle gates, no thermal problems to worry about…however, given that hydro is so capital-intensive, you want to run it at high utilization.
Hydro is a bit more complicated; you cannot ramp up as quickly or throttle down as quickly, or you’re doing to do grave damage to your equipment. What you get once you’ve done that? See the Russian exploding powerhouse in Siberia a few years back; that was all due to rapid load changes. See:
https://eandt.theiet.org/content/articles/2011/07/fatal-failures-siberias-hydro-disaster/
Everybody thinks things are simpler and easier than they really are, outside their own narrow lane of expertise. Dam operators that I know are never happy when someone starts talking about using them for load-balancing, because that causes issues for them in terms of wear and tear on the equipment. Read that article about what happened at that dam in Siberia, and you begin to get an inkling for why hydro is best used for baseline grid power, not load-balancing.
Today the greens believe the West has sinned against Gaia and they seek to punish us. Any talk of solutions to environmental problems simply leaves them awkwardly staring at their birkenstocks.
You can’t reason someone out of something they weren’t reasoned into. These religious fanatics need to be brushed aside so civilization can continue.
I think we are, for the first time in a century, at real risk of civilization collapsing. The fools running our country right now are doing things (like destroying the oil and gas industry) that will take years to correct. There is no economic sense among those in the Biden regime. They say that spending is not related to inflation. What school did they attend ? Occasional Cortex seems to be a graduate of that school. In “Brave New World” I recall that those who refused to accept the “new” ways were located in the Southwest. I am here in Arizona waiting.
Back in the day when all utilities worried about was keeping the lights on, no matter what, my dad told me about a small hydro plant west of Bolder CO that was maintained only because the penstock gates could be worked manually. In a total blackout, this would provide enough power to start another small nearby plant and they could in turn be used to restart another, etc.
In any sizeable hydro plant, there are hundreds to thousands of tons of water, under both static and velocity head, directed through tunnels that may be miles long. You don’t change anything quickly. Water hammer is real and water is incompressible.
Any plant that can be throttled quickly and safely will be both fairly small and quite inefficient.
A steam plant on turning gear will be at least 24 hours from producing power. Large gas turbine plants can cut that to hours. Plants that can be started in minutes are pretty small.
I thought hydro was equally good at load following, is that not correct?
No, hydro is not a good load follower as a gas turbine (or a diesel engine) that is warmed up and ready to go. Changing loads on a hydro turbine is somewhat tricky as you have to avoid cavitation on the turbine blades which can lead to catastrophic water hammer in the discharge tunnels. See the big hydro system failure in Siberia a few years ago.
Hydro, like nuke plants, is very capital intensive and is best left as a baseload plant.
my dad told me about a small hydro plant west of Bolder CO that was maintained only because the penstock gates could be worked manually.
I can’t remember right off the top of my head, but there is a nuke plant in the Carolinas that uses a hydro turbine as it’s emergency power source instead of a diesel generator. Almost every plant I have worked at over my 43 year career has had an emergency diesel for station blackout restart. it was sized so as to provide enough power to re-start the smallest unit at the plant.
David,
Very late to the thread, but thanks so much for pulling so many causes for our present counter-productive end. And demonstrating your usual breadth – in both science and culture.
As usual your succinct take gives us much to think about. Sadly, some of the breathtaking here also comes from alarm at how suicidal, destructive, and caste-oriented some of those reasons are.
Henry Adams’ persona can be irritating and elitist (talk about a dynasty – which weighs perhaps too heavily on him). But he seemed to see these tensions as the last century began. He sets up the dynamo and opposes the virgin – their different powers seemed in battle; he forecast the disempowerment of the fecund woman (and his own voice has the despair, the haunting isolation, the nihilism you also see in reactions to power). The reproductive rates of modern society a little over a century later seem a fulfillment – as does the idea of gender as idea rather than fact.
We should rightly celebrate energy, productivity, power of industry, but we should also celebrate that of man. We don’t seem to be honestly facing how mechanical power frees us nor what the purpose of lives so freed should be. Power enables us to live productive lives, and our purpose should be larger than our generation, energy can help us prepare and people the world with another generation – as the last two centuries have shown. Increased life span, healthier bodies arose parallel to the rise in energy through the last two or three centuries.
See the BPA Balancing Authority graph showing how load fluctuations and the power from wind are handled by the wind, hydro, and thermal sources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load-following_power_plant
(about 1/3 of the way down the page)
Ginny, I wish you’d put together some thoughts on the meaning of the Virgin symbol in Adams’ essay. The Dynamo is pretty clear in what it symbolized, the Virgin, not so much, it seems to me…the Virgin Mary, clearly….the importance of art and aesthetics…female fertility (he assigns that to Venus)…collective projects?
But, Jane Fonda and Meryl Streep said nuclear power was bad in the movies they made
Just like the way their estates are watered from deep wells during droughts, they’ll have big diesel generators for when the power goes down.
Jeffrey,
I saw The China Syndrome in 1979 when it came out. In 1982 I had dinner with the VP Business development of a large utilities engineering firm. They were very big on backup systems in nuclear plants and he was pitching his firm for a cogeneration project Alcon was contemplating. I was engineering manager.
At the dinner, he explained the movie to me. The best piece of pro nuke propaganda that could possibly be made. Especially as regarded safety. It may not have been her intention but it was her result. I went and watched the movie again and he was absolutely right.
The plot:
1) Nuclear plant built on an active fault line in California. Several small seismic events to reinforce this point.
2) Power company is in financial straits and cutting corners like crazy
3) Specifically on the piping welds. Falsifying weld x-rays which Jack Lemmon’s character finds out.
4) Lemmon’s character complains to management and gets fired for his efforts.
5) Wilfrid Brimley was in the movie playing Wilfrid Brimley and generally just being cool. Sort of Lemmon’s sidekick.
6) In spite of all the construction problems, the plant is brought online.
7) Lemmon is upset, breaks into the plant control room and takes it over. Trying to shut the plant down. Barricades the door etc.
8) A team of engineers, in an hour or two, manages to bypass all the wiring in the control room and take control of the plant.
9) A SWAT team breaks into the control room, shoots the Hell out of a gazillion dollars worth of controls and kills Lemmon
10) There is a small temblor, welds start cracking, a pump falls off its pedestal and general plant failure.
Then, in spite of all this, they managed to shut the plant down safely. Every possible worst case scenario that could happen, happened.
And nothing happened.
His point was that even in a cartoon, like this movie, nothing happened and it showed how inherently safe the plant was.
I’ve mentioned this to other people familiar with the industry over the years. They all had seen this even before I pointed it out.
Those of us who are pro-nuke should be pushing to have this movie in constant rotation on all channels, with a bit of commentary about what the movie really means.
I wrote the following back on Dec 13, 2017 at darkislandpr.blogspot.com I started this blog after the massive, total, utility failure caused by Hurricane Maria in Sept 2017.
Wednesday, December 13, 2017
Sometimes crying is not enough…
My son and I were riding around today and passed by the generation plant in Mayaguez. These look good and were running. (4 gas turbines totaling 220MW)
So we were talking about electricity and I told him a story I had heard in the early 80s from an engineer whose company had been involved. [NOTE: SAME ENGINEER, SAME DINNER AS ABOVE]
During the great NY Power outage of 1977, at a steam generating plant on Long Island, one of the large steam turbines lost lube oil circulation. The pump depended on utility power to run and when the lights went out, there was no backup. The rotating inertia was such that even though the bearings failed, it continued grinding away for hours. Total damage was multiple millions of dollars and several months of lost capacity. The engineer who told me the story had been involved in designing a backup power system to run auxiliaries. After the failure.
My son told me, “Well, at least a lesson was learned and I’ll bet it doesn’t happen again.” I agreed and said I hoped so.
We got to the hotel and I started reading the damage assessment in the PRERWG report. I ran across this about the San Juan plant: [PR ELECTRIC POWER AUTHORITY OIL FIRED STEAM PLANT. @500MW SUPPLYING THE SAN JUAN METRO AREA]
“Battery chargers are not in service and with a loss of AC power, can result in severe damage to equipment.
One significant issue with the loss of the battery is the failure of the lube oil system to operate and cause damage to the steam turbine bearings.”
I want to cry but I am all cried out.
Not many hydro dams are built purely for electrical power. It is usually more of a byproduct. The TVA system was built to improve navigation and control flooding as much as for hydro. Hoover and the other colorado river dams were built specifically to tame the river and reduce flooding. Ditto most other big dam projects.
Electric is an important byproduct, but it is a byproduct. Water flow is determined by reservoir levels, need for irrigation, required downstream flows and so on. As the water flows through the dam it generates electricity.
China’s 3 Gorges dam generates 20GW or so and is an important power supply. But it’s primary purpose has always been flood control. They Yangtze has killed tens, maybe 100s of millions of chinese over the years. when it floods. In 1933 4 million died because of flooding.
}}} You appear to be a halfwit, well reading challenged at best.
This rather fine Subaru Solterra will cost me nothing. I will trade my present car, or sell it for about what I paid for it. It is counterintuitive but some of us have lost nothing to depreciation. That with the $7500 my government will give me, for buying a full on EV, will pay for the car. I can trade into a new EV for free, no money, da nada.
At the moment my car uses gas at about $9.15 a gallon. That is not going down soon, or ever perhaps. That works out to well over $100 a month for me if I keep doing this. It would be much more if I drove it a lot.
The Solterra will use around $15 a month worth of electricity. That’s why I did the math to see what I could charge it for, but I doubt I will do that as its so cheap already.
OK, so, I’m a halfwit, but YOU are the one generalizing from a very atypical case, using what are nothing but unequivalent numbers (most numbers around here are US$, and if you’re going to use C$ you should note that rather than making it sound as though equivalent, which they are not). Gas in the USA is running ca. $4.50/gallon depending on the venue (Cali is notably higher as they tax the fuck out of it). So CA$9 and more for a gallon is amusing and quite a bit irrelevant to us, here, which is the case being written about.
So first, you actually have a car which, at least assuming your assertions are accurate, has not depreciated significantly, so you are a very atypical case on one level right off the bat, thereby meaning my own analysis is not, and should not, be expected to be applicable to your narrow solitary case.
Second, you are correct, I did not include any money the government is stealing from other Canucks to pay for your car. I don’t tend to think about shit like that, because it offends anyone with a sense of decency.
Thirdly, if you are using all of “$15 a month worth of electricity” for driving with an ELECTRIC GOLF CART then you are yet ANOTHER kind of special case, and aren’t actually driving very much at all, and can debate on how much you actually can justify owning said car at all.
So, special case, special case #2, and bad figures.
The only halfwit is the one making two special cases and deliberately misleading figures to make a case for someone else being wrong.
“Reasoning Comprehension” is def. your challenge.
But we already knew that.
}}} I think it is a great wrong that Boulton is not forever memorialized with some fundamental unit named after him. I am always glad to see him recognized at any level. Even just a blog post
Just like Westinghouse. Without him championing Tesla’s power system, Edison would probably have been adopted, and, while no doubt it would apply at the higher level, all domestic systems might well have been DC, with a converter at some point between the home and the power station. Yet few even get the old refrigerator joke, since GE (IIRC), eventually bought the remnant of Westinghouse after decades of poor management, and not everyone even knows the name.
Joke:
============
A woman opened up her refrigerator to find a small squirrel, clearly very out of breath in it.
“What are YOU doing there?” she asked.
“This is a Westinghouse, isn’t it?” it replied.
“Yyyyeessss….?” She responded.
“Well,” it answered, “I’m westing.”
}}} The model of importing more than we export is unsustainable. Eventually reality will hit us with a 2 by 4.
Sorry, Gavin, this isn’t right. It’s not even wrong.
We “export” constantly. It’s just not measured in pounds (Hey, we aren’t Britain, right….? :-P )
In fact, as a financial component, the US manufacturing economy alone is the #3 manufacturing economy in the world, behind (obviously) China and Japan.
This is despite it not being the primary factor in our economy.
}}} Clarke’s Corollary to Hanlon’s Razor:
Any sufficiently profound stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.
The tyranny of the well intentioned idiot is worse than tyranny of the malicious entity.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”
― C. S. Lewis
}}} It remains to be seen how long a de-industrialized economy can continue by exporting freshly-printed Bidenbucks to pay for the imports it can no longer make for itself.
Gavin, you are continually locked into the idea of an Industrial Economy. Let it go.
We are not an Industrial Economy and have been steadily moving away from one for more than 65 years, now, and are very much NOT an Industrial economy any more, any more than we are an Agricultural economy. Are you asking how the hell will we eat, since “no one makes food any more”? (it is literally less than 5% of the US Labor force. And we constantly get food from around the world, which is how you have fresh fruits and vegetables in New England in December)
They kinda-sorta grasped this in the mid-60s, when they started talking about a “Post-Industrial Economy”… i.e., post- meaning “what follows next, but we haven’t figured out what it is, yet…”
We have been steadily moving to an IP & Services Economy — the first nation in the world to do it, and uniquely able to handle it due to actual diversity and “melting pot” qualities, despite the endless caterwauling denials of a certain large class of imbeciles. This is self-evidently true because the simple fact is, if it works/sells here, it’ll work/sell almost anywhere.
And the actual fact that we continue to produce as much wealth as we do makes it quite obvious that it is both functional and effective. Most of the wealth generated in the Real World in the last 20-30 odd years has been some variant of IP or Service related value-add.
Manufacturing processes are better, more effective, more efficient, or produce far far better goods not because of improvements by manufacturing entities, but because of IP which adds those things to the manufacturing entities — a value-add process with IP providing the value to be added.
Now, Covid and the shipping debacle have both demonstrated the downside to having all our production on the other side of the world, and there is strong evidence that at least some of that is being resolved here — mind you, with almost completely robotic factories where done here, so the employment will not be improved overmuch, never getting much above 3-5% of the US Labor Force ever again.
OBH: “We have been steadily moving to an IP & Services Economy”
So you keep telling us. Let’s look at the current situation over the highly corrupt Ukraine as a test. On the US side, we have the Financial Economy. On the other side, we have Russia and Brazil, which have massive Real resources, China which is the workshop of the world, and India which is rapidly taking up the lower value manufacturing for which China no longer has sufficient workforce. The guys on the other side are also investing more in real education (not Lesbian Dance Studies) and non-military R&D. Which side will come out on top?
We shall see what we shall see. I think it is tragic that the US has thrown away its once commanding lead. And it is even more tragic that some people in the US refuse to recognize what has happened. But in the end, reality will prevail. Then we can start the multi-generation process of rebuilding what we so foolishly threw away.
OBH…’services’ is a very broad category. It includes everything from fast-food workers to janitors to patent lawyers to programmers-for-hire. Sometimes, services are displaced by products…a lot of household servants were no longer needed once home appliances became available. And sometimes, new products require new services.
Important to note that service are by no means immune to offshoring: see my post Telemigration.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/59860.html
We should try to revive the manufacturing economy for no other reason than we are weak and dependent on hostile regimes for essential products. Antibiotics are obvious. We established the “deep culture” method of making penicillin. We no longer make penicillin. China stole much industrial knowledge by requiring companies like Boeing to share design details when building aircraft in China. Industrial espionage is what made China a manufacturing giant. It is continuing.
For example.
The Department of Justice announced today that the Chair of Harvard University’s Chemistry and Chemical Biology Department and two Chinese nationals have been charged in connection with aiding the People’s Republic of China.
Dr. Charles Lieber, 60, Chair of the Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology at Harvard University, was arrested this morning and charged by criminal complaint with one count of making a materially false, fictitious and fraudulent statement. Lieber will appear this afternoon before Magistrate Judge Marianne B. Bowler in federal court in Boston, Massachusetts.
Not just ethnic Chinese.
US Manufacturing has been doing quite well over the past 60 years. Actually longer but I went back to 1960 and took the index value for 1/1 for 60, 70 and so on. Looks like pretty steady increases to me up to August 2019 with a high of almost 110. Then in September it took a massive dump to 102. All I have is the numbers so no opinion why.
We seem to be doing just fine in terms of manufacturing output in the US. Sure we can always do better but I look at the numbers and spend my days toiling in the manufacturing vinyard, and it looks OK to me.
1/1/1960 25.006
1/1/1970 39.248
1/1/1980 53.707
1/1/1990 63.712
1/1/2000 94.546
1/1/2010 91.685
8/1/2019 109.854
1/1/2020 101.092
The numbers come from the Federal Reserve’s Industrial production index and are described as:
Industrial Production – 100 Year Historical Chart
This interactive chart tracks the Federal Reserve’s Industrial Production Index, which measures real output for all facilities located in the United States manufacturing, mining, and electric, and gas utilities (excluding those in U.S. territories). The current level of industrial production as of January 2022 is 103.47.
https://www.macrotrends.net/2583/industrial-production-historical-chart
The linked page shows a chart but clicking on the download link gives a CSV table for every month back to 1/1/19 (index = 5.059)
Not so much in this group but one of the problems I see all the time in discussions about manufacturing is a conflation of manufacturing output and manufacturing jobs.
When people talk about the loss of manufacturing, they are usually really talking about the loss of manufacturing jobs. And when they talk about manufacturing jobs, they usually mean unskilled/semi-skilled jobs for the most part. Defined as a HS grad can go to work, get some on the job training and be fully productive in a week or two.
Those jobs are gone and are never coming back and we should be thankful. There are still a lot of them but manufacturers are automating them away as fast as they can. So instead of of 5 people putting gallon water bottles in corrugated cases, at 200 bottles per minute, you now have 1 person tending 2-3 automated machines packing 500bpm.
Instead of having 5 people each handling 64 TONS of bottled water per shift, you have 1 person using a forklift to bring cases and glue to the automated machines running 800 tons of bottles/shift. And not needing a lot of physical labor to do it.
That is where all those manufacturing jobs that people talk about have gone.
This is a video I did for a client a few years ago showing a Seagrams whiskey bottling line in about 1970 and comparing it to a modern, automated line.
https://youtu.be/D1jCu8lFEBs
Does anyone in their right mind really want those 1970 jobs back?
One of my favorite examples is the sock industry. As in socks like you wear on your feet.
There are 2 main steps to making knitted socks: Knitting the tube and then sewing the toe closed. The knitting has been automated for 100 years or more. The machines are pretty standard and well understood.
The toe had to be sewn closed manually with a sewing machine.
Fort Payne Alabama used to be the sock capital of the world. Something like 100 factories all making socks. as many as 10,000 or so people employed.
The problem was that having all those people sewing toes was expensive. It was difficult to move overseas because of problems finding people to maintain the knitting machines. Operators could be trained, but mechanics and setup people were thin on the ground.
Honduras (El Salvador?) started a program to train local knitting machine mechanics. Once manufactures found that they could keep their machines running there, the relative cost of toe sewing labor made not moving pretty stupid. In just a few years, the entire sock manufacturing in Fort Payne was gone.
But there is a happy ending!
Someone, probably working in their garage, developed an automated toe sewer. The sock industry has been moving back to the US over the past 20 or so years.
Yippee! Manufacturing jobs! Yeah, no. Skilled manufacturing jobs to build and maintain the machinery, yes. Operator jobs to tend the automated machines, yes.
But hundreds, not thousands, of skilled and semi-skilled jobs. They probably pay better. But there are nowhere near as many.
John H: “… one of the problems I see all the time in discussions about manufacturing is a conflation of manufacturing output and manufacturing jobs.”
That is a fair point. The issue about how to provide meaningful employment for all who want it is a challenge — and it is separate from the issue of generating enough production to support the economy.
In the post-WWII boom years, the conventional wisdom was that we would move to a “leisure society” in which increasing productivity (eg from mechanization) would result in people typically working only 3 days a week or having much longer vacations. Instead, what happened was we had a vast expansion of higher education (disguised unemployment) and government regulation (creating non-productive overhead jobs at the expense of killing genuine productive jobs). Much of the actual production process moved offshore, partly to cut costs but also to avoid those increasing costs of excessive regulation.
Thus we find ourselves in a situation today where — no matter what some bureaucrat says in an Industrial Production index — the US has an unsustainable Trade Deficit. No, manufacturing in the US is not in a healthy position, when we consider output as well as productivity. When we find that most medications in the US are imported directly or indirectly from China, it ought to be a wake-up call.
In the meantime, the US economic situation for non-bureaucrats is slipping. A recent news item noted that wage rates in the US used to be about 24 times those in China; now they are only 4 times. No matter how hard one tries, one cannot put lipstick on this pig.