The contents below are paid advertisements. Their appearance does not imply an endorsement by The Oil Drum.
“Most people spend more time and energy going around problems than in trying to solve them.”
—Henry Ford
Search The Oil Drum with Google
User login
Contact
- Content: editors at theoildrum dot com
- Tech support: support at theoildrum dot com
Personnel
- Editors: Prof. Goose, Heading Out, Stuart Staniford, Nate Hagens
- DrumBeat Editor: Leanan
- Contributors: ace, Engineer-Poet, Gail the Actuary, jeffvail, JoulesBurn, Khebab, Robert Rapier
- TOD:Local: Glenn
- TOD:Europe: Chris Vernon, Euan Mearns, Francois Cellier, Jerome a Paris, Luís de Sousa, Rembrandt, Rune Likvern, Ugo Bardi
- TOD:Canada: benk, Libelle
- TOD:ANZ: Big Gav, Phil Hart, aeldric
- Technician: Super G
Recently on TOD:World
TOD:Local
- Summer Streets a Success!
- Plan for Hydro-Fracture Drilling for Unconventional Natural Gas in Upstate New York
- Enjoying Life Close to Home: Fun Streets
TOD:Europe
- UK Energy Flow Chart 2007
- Brown pretends to be tough on Russia
- Russian gas and European energy security - a reprise
TOD:Canada
- Compressed Air Energy Storage - How viable is it?
- Oil Megaproject Update (July 2008)
- Weekend Energy Listening: Wind Power with Paul Gipe
TOD:ANZ
Peak Oil Primers
Blogroll
Energy Sites
- The Coming Global Oil Crisis
- Die Off
- Dry Dipstick
- Energy Bulletin
- From the Wilderness
- Life After the Oil Crash
- Peak Oil Crisis
- Peak Oil News and Message Boards
- Powerswitch
- Rigzone
- Matthew Simmons
- Wolf at the Door
Environment & Sustainability Sites
- The Daily Green
- EcoGeek
- Eco Street
- Green Car Congress
- Green Options
- green.alltop.com
- Gristmill
- RealClimate
- Sustainablog
- Treehugger
- WorldChanging
Blogs
- The Big Picture
- Casaubon's Book
- Cleantech Blog
- Clusterf
k Nation (Jim Kunstler) - The Cost of Energy
- Ecological Economics
- David Strahan
- Econbrowser
- The Energy Blog
- Entropy Production
- Environmental Economics
- European Tribune
- GraphOilology
- jeffvail.net
- The Mess That Greenspan Made
- Mish's Global Economic Trend Analysis
- Mobjectivist
- Peak Energy (Australia)
- Peak Energy (USA)
- R-Squared
- Resource Insights
Organizations
License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
GAIA Host Collective
Coal, along with nuclear, is a base-load power supplier. Very little of it is cycled on a daily basis to meet demand. Solar is a peaking power supplier, for it operates best noonish (or later or earlier depending upon the orientation).
To reduce coal usage, base load must come down considerably. Solar first and best replaces natural gas and to some extent the limited remaining oil-fired generators. To eat into coal, we will need more/better electrical storage capability, and even if that is available, the progression will be to replace oil, nat gas first before eating into coal.
We'll get there...it is just a question of how much pain is involved before we do.
Well one step is to redefine baseload, the present status quo utility definition is unacceptable. There's a lot to be gained from redoing our lifestyles based on when the most energy is available etc.
Moving away from fossil fuels isn't just a technological challenge, but also just as much or even more so a cultural one. But the way baseload is thrown around as some a priori fact, is not going to get us far.
"Well one step is to redefine baseload"
Good luck with that.
They have been talking about having computers in homes for years now, if you can have a digital programmable thermostat and irrigation controller why can't you have an electric meter that not only charges more for peak times but displays that somewhere (like on the digital thermostat)-the usage, cost, how much you could save if you turned the dryer off until later...
At this point it has to be right up in people's face to get them to conserve anything (most people, anyway)
re "Good Luck with that"
That's kind of the point of the whole site, isn't it?
I agree wholeheartedly with Brutus' point. We might pout and fuss that 'baseload electricity' is our non-negotiable demand to maintain this lifestyle, but any number of factors might jump in and interrupt the flow.. Uranium, Nat Gas, Coal or Oil supply 'complications', Grid failures, Weather events, Computer Glitches, etc etc.. It seems absolutely crucial that we start to find ways to handle electricity interruptions, and to be able to continue business and other parts of life, even if a grid failure occurs.
Clearly nuclear has some support to continue and try to hold the grid up.. but I don't trust the High-Finance Power Industry, the Poisonous Supply and Waste, and the Complex chain that the system depends on for massive, central power supplies, when gangable diverse technologies are available and structurally safer and more democratic.
Well goinggreen, good luck to us all, but if you really want to change the electricity system, you should challenge utility thinking once in awhile.