- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- 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.
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.