- cross-posted to:
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- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
Heat-related deaths and disruptions to daily life are forcing politicians to reckon, in different ways, with a rapidly warming planet.
Unfortunately, adaptation on its on isn’t doable. It takes ending the use of fossil fuels, which are the main cause of the warming, to make adaptation affordable.
Wind/battery with gas backup still allows you to burn much less gas than if you just used gas as a primary power source. Battery doesn’t have to be chemical batteries either if pumped hydro is an option.
Pumped hydro is not an option, pretty flat country plus it would just freeze in the winter when it’s needed the most.
Wind/battery is interesting, but we can’t afford it at a large enough scale unfortunately. Not sure we have enough coastline either, but I haven’t done the math on that.
Norway gets a lot of power from hydro, gets pretty cold in Norway too.
Battery is cheaper than gas at this point and gas is likely to cost more in future.
Do your lakes not freeze in Norway?
Anyway, regular hydro works because it’s rivers, which don’t freeze as easily. We have that here, but it’s not storage, it’s production, and we’ve already dammed what we can. To build pumped hydro, we’d first have to build the “mountains”, you guys already have them naturally.
The batteries also need to come with offshore wind production or something similar. Otherwise we’re just storing energy from burning shale. We don’t really do gas on any real scale, it’s too expensive when we already have the shale, which of course makes even coal look clean.