Great, hopefull, article:

[applegrove]

“California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.”

www.newyorker.com/news/annals-...

— Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes.bsky.social) 2025-07-12T10:38:05.906Z

[usonian]

1. Solar is a big contributor.

I don't know the status of battery storage in relation to it. They say that peak demand is a bit after peak production. Where I live, a hot, but not broiling day will drop to 84 degrees outdoor temp around sunset, and I can tolerate up to 84 degrees. So that's the crossover point for active versus "open window" cooling. Around 8 PM just past solstice.

Of course, with regulatory capture, I doubt we'll see any rate help from PG&E.

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Some sort of energy storage is required

Here’s a pretty good explanation of the “Duck Curve” in California:
https://www.caiso.com/documents/flexibleresourceshelprenewables_fastfacts.pdf

[usonian]

6. I am in the Sierra foothills and my energy costs are really minimal

PG&E keeps telling me that I use less energy than “energy efficient homes”

Except in summer. And for better or for worse, that yearly average makes solar not cost-effective.

Kicker is that I am on a ridge and no trees near the home. Great for fire safety but a BIG solar heat load.

I was considering an open-loop system. Ground-racks (you can’t put roof panels on manufactured homes in CA) feeding a grand-room heat pump. The more sun, the more cooling. It’s like an 80% rule.

Energy storage would extend the payback time. But at scale, a great idea.

It might help some in winter. Ground racks should be easier to tilt more vertical (as in once a few months) than roof racks. I knew a guy who was really big into sun-tracking. Sold such units. Haven’t heard, since he left town some years ago.

Just a thought. I may move back nearer the ocean where Mother Nature’s air conditioner works. Not really cost-effective, but quality of life effective and that’s a big deal.

FWIW, I was a fan of solar back in the 60’s and 70’s, when oil companies were buying up solar in order to keep it out of production. (IMNSHO)

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. Actually, during the "Oil Crisis" (some) oil companies were looking to renewables

If you look at the NREL chart for solar cell performance, you’ll see names like ARCO and Mobil. The thinking at that time was that oil would run out soon, and the “oil companies” needed to reinvent themselves as “energy companies.”

The Lithium-ion cell which seemed so revolutionary when SONY started using it for laptops, etc. was invented by “Stan" Whittingham at Esso/Exxon during that period (as “Stan” tells it, oil companies are used to speculating, they drill a bunch of wells and one produces oil, so they were willing to fund his research, hoping that maybe it would pay for itself eventually.)

In any case, my brother lived “off-grid” a couple decades ago, using a combination of, solar panels, (“lead-acid”) batteries, and a small wind turbine. The PV panels work best during the day (obviously) but especially during the Summer. (During the Winter, there’s less sun hitting the ground, that’s why it gets cold.) The wind turbine was not necessary during the Summer, but during the Winter it was the primary source of energy.

There’s a new type of battery coming to market (instead of Lithium-ion batteries) if I was looking to set up a home with battery storage, I might wait to see what happens to it.
https://superdielectrics.com/launch-of-faraday-2/

From a “systems” point of view, I favor “Community Solar” over “Residential Solar.” For society as a whole, it is cheaper to have a team build and maintain “solar farms” rather than having them run from house to house, and, should you choose to move in the near future, you won’t have solar panels on your roof to consider.
https://www.nrel.gov/solar/market-research-analysis/solar-installed-system-cost

Decades ago, homes could have been built with dedicated generators to provide their electricity, but (as a rule) people chose to connect to "the grid" instead. The same logic that applied then applies now.

[usonian]

8. I thought of wind power in winter (those storms!) but again, not cost-effective for a small user like me.

Selling to the grid just fell off a cliff, thanks to PG&’s regulatory capture and propaganda machine. (All of which we slobs paid for).

My alternative to wind power would have been parking an 18-wheeler in font of the house to stop the force of the wind. Thanks to one recent storm, I got new front windows mostly paid by insurance and a little from FEMA. That’s some hell of force at times.

P.S. An 18-wheeler probably couldn’t navigate the bit of road in front of the house, though it would be an interesting mathematical exercise to answer that less the actual truck. A moving van did fit the back side.

A bit off-topic. The home is twice the width of local roads. Manufactured homes are commonly delivered in two halves. This happened before I bought it. The perimeter and block and jack foundation have held nicely. It is, after all, on steel rails. It vibrated a bit when there was an earthquake in Henderson Nevada, some 100 miles away, that shook clean through the backbone of the Sierra Nevada mountains. Rode it out just fine. Nothing fell off the mantle.

[OKIsItJustMe]

9. "Manufactured homes" are a bit like utility-scale solar

You have a (mostly) stationary workforce, producing house after house. They’re shipped to the job site, and quickly tied down and “tied in" by another workforce. They should (as you have found) be relatively solid/stable.

The promised revolution in 3-D printed houses should be solider still.

As for “selling to the grid” well, you can think of “the grid” as an alternative to a storage battery. That battery in your home won’t pay you anything for the power you put into it, of course, it also won’t charge you for the power you take out. However, my brother was installing residential solar for people who were scared of “Y2K.” Even then, people found grid-connected solar to be the most convenient (of course, that was before products like the Tesla “Powerwall” but I wouldn’t install one of those in my home.)

[NNadir]

2. Well, this is an interesting line of a bullshit designed to obscure reality. The data is readily available from...

...the California Energy Commission using something other than "percent talk," which, whenever so called "renewable energy" is discussed is used in lieu of real numbers, again, to obscure reality.

The largest source of electrical power generation in California in 2023 was dangerous natural gas, the waste of which is dumped directly into the planetary atmosphere, where it is killing the planet. Its combustion with direct waste dumping into the atmosphere produced 94,192 GWh of electricity. This compares with the solar junk spread all over wilderness areas converted into industrial parks for the "solar will save us" fantasy, which produced 41,344 GWh.

California Energy Commission, 2023 Electricity Sources

In California, as is the case nearly everywhere else, energy demand peaks in the late afternoon and early evening. (I've been following the CAISO charts on demand and supply in California for many years, and often reference it here.)

Today the solar output peaked at 19,667 MW at 11:55 am, whereas energy demand peaked at 33,901 at 19:00 hours (7 pm) PDT. At that time, solar energy's output was 4,791 MW and rapidly falling. At this hour, 9:38 PDT as of this writing, solar energy is producing negative power -12 MW, bleeds into the large number of wires connecting all this crap together.

California, as it needs to link all kinds of unreliable junk together, is laced with powerlines, some of which cause major fires when they spark in heatwaves, whereupon everybody sues PSE&G. Of course, if so many redundant power generators were unnecessary, there would be less wires and presumably less fires caused by them.

The 2023 data, linked above, shows that the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant, on a 12 acre footprint, two relatively small buildings, produced more electricity than all the wind industrial parks in California spread over thousands of square miles of destroyed wilderness. All day long, this plant has been producing 2,267MW +/- 2 MW, reliably and continuously. With 15 such plants, on less than 200 acres, less than one square mile, all of California's electricity demand might be met using very little land area, and without dumping climate gases into the planetary atmosphere.

All of the solar and wind infrastructure in California (and elsewhere) will be landfill before today's newborns finish college (if there is college to finish). Future generations will need to clean all that shit up and replace it somehow, doing so in a world with depleted resources and extreme temperatures. This, as I take it, is a crime against the future.

It is unconscionable to say that less gas is acceptable. Only NO gas is acceptable to me.

The longer we lie to ourselves, the more we act to destroy the future of humanity and indeed, all living things.

Have a nice day tomorrow.

[applegrove]

3. Thanks for your perspective. Much easier to clean up

solar than nuclear waste (that has to be buried for like 70,000 years and how many spent rods will successive nuclear plants need to dump in 70,000 years). Yes no gas is the goal. Good news is cold fushion seems to be closer to reality.

[NNadir]

4. Nonsense. So called "nuclear waste" hasn't killed anyone in this country and the garbage thinking to the contrary....

...that it is "dangerous" is, again, nonsense.

Today, not even counting people killed by extreme weather including but not limited to extreme heat, 19,000 people will die from fossil fuel waste, aka air pollution, as I always point out when people carry on, generally with absolutely no understanding of the contents of valuable used nuclear fuel, about what they call "nuclear waste."

In response to this assertion about so called "nuclear waste" by people who know absolutely nothing about used nuclear fuel, I always link the following text referencing a paper from one of the most prominent medical journals in the world:

It is here: Global burden of 87 risk factors in 204 countries and territories, 1990–2019: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2019 (Lancet Volume 396, Issue 10258, 17–23 October 2020, Pages 1223-1249). This study is a huge undertaking and the list of authors from around the world is rather long. These studies are always open sourced; and I invite people who want to carry on about Fukushima to open it and search the word "radiation." It appears once. Radon, a side product brought to the surface by fracking while we all wait for the grand so called "renewable energy" nirvana that did not come, is not here and won't come, appears however: Household radon, from the decay of natural uranium, which has been cycling through the environment ever since oxygen appeared in the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is what it says about air pollution deaths in the 2019 Global Burden of Disease Survey, if one is too busy to open it oneself because one is too busy carrying on about Fukushima:

The top five risks for attributable deaths for females were high SBP (5·25 million [95% UI 4·49–6·00] deaths, or 20·3% [17·5–22·9] of all female deaths in 2019), dietary risks (3·48 million [2·78–4·37] deaths, or 13·5% [10·8–16·7] of all female deaths in 2019), high FPG (3·09 million [2·40–3·98] deaths, or 11·9% [9·4–15·3] of all female deaths in 2019), air pollution (2·92 million [2·53–3·33] deaths or 11·3% [10·0–12·6] of all female deaths in 2019), and high BMI (2·54 million [1·68–3·56] deaths or 9·8% [6·5–13·7] of all female deaths in 2019). For males, the top five risks differed slightly. In 2019, the leading Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths globally in males was tobacco (smoked, second-hand, and chewing), which accounted for 6·56 million (95% UI 6·02–7·10) deaths (21·4% [20·5–22·3] of all male deaths in 2019), followed by high SBP, which accounted for 5·60 million (4·90–6·29) deaths (18·2% [16·2–20·1] of all male deaths in 2019). The third largest Level 2 risk factor for attributable deaths among males in 2019 was dietary risks (4·47 million [3·65–5·45] deaths, or 14·6% [12·0–17·6] of all male deaths in 2019) followed by air pollution (ambient particulate matter and ambient ozone pollution, accounting for 3·75 million [3·31–4·24] deaths (12·2% [11·0–13·4] of all male deaths in 2019), and then high FPG (3·14 million [2·70–4·34] deaths, or 11·1% [8·9–14·1] of all male deaths in 2019).

After producing this document, which is open sourced, I ask anyone and everyone making this assertion about so called "nuclear waste" to show, that in the entire 70 year history of commercial nuclear power, that the storage of used nuclear fuel has killed as many people as will die in the next eight hours from fossil fuel waste, aka air pollution.

All of the components of used nuclear fuel are valuable, all of them including, as I have argued many times, the fission products and the transuranium actinides.

Unfortunately selective attention, and nonsense about x number of years, which I hear from antinukes all the time 70,000 years, 200,000 years, a million years, a billion years, whatever is an assertion that fear that someone somewhere at some time in the distant might be killed by exposure to radiation is more important that about 800 fossil fuel waste deaths that will take place in the next hour, continuously, constantly without interruption, minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, decade after decade without even a whimper of serious concern.

I note that people carrying on about so called "nuclear waste" seem to have no concern that fossil fuel waste has caused the planet to burst into flames, not 70,000 years from now, but at this very minute.

It can be shown, and I have referenced it elsewhere (828 Underground Nuclear Tests, Plutonium Migration in Nevada, Dunning, Kruger, Strawmen, and Tunnels) that the continuous recycling of used nuclear fuel will actually reduce the radioactivity of the planet, which may or may not be a good thing.

For convenience:

Although anti-nukes are prone to deny it, because they are most often discussing topics about which they know nothing, however, the situation is very different at weapons sites as opposed to commercial nuclear reprocessing sites. The recovery of the transuranium actinides using a wide variety of processes is well understood, and all of them, not just plutonium but also neptunium, americium, and curium are potential nuclear fuels. I therefore always argue that it is just stupid to bury them, as they are vital resources in a time of climate change and massive rising air pollution death rates.

The following figure shows the very different case obtained if one separates the uranium, plutonium and minor actinides (neptunium, americium and curium) and fissions them, whereupon the reduction of radioactivity to a level that is actually below that of the original uranium in a little over 300 years:



The caption:

Fig. 4. – Radiotoxicity (log-scale, unit: Sv/tSM) of 1 t of heavy metal (SM) from a pressurized water reactor (initial enrichment 4.2% U-235, burn-up 50 GWd/t) with regard to ingestion as a function of time (log-scale, unit: years) after discharge. Left-hand frame: contribution of fission products (FP), plutonium (Pu) and minor actinides (MA) to radiotoxicity. Right-hand frame: Modification of radiotoxicity due to separation of U, Pu or U, Pu, MA. The reference value is the radiotoxicity of the amount of natural uranium that was used to produce 1 t of nuclear fuel. Source: [17].

(Hartwig Freiesleben, The European Physical Journal Conferences · June 2013)

Source 17, in German, is this one: Reduzierung der Radiotoxizität abgebrannter Kernbrennstoffe durch Abtrennung und Transmutation von Actiniden: Partitioning. Reducing spent nuclear fuel radiotoxicity by actinide separation and transmutation: partitioning.

It is important to note that simply because a material is radioactive does not imply that it is not useful, perhaps even capable of accomplishing tasks that nothing else can do as well or as sustainably. Given the level of chemical pollution of the air, water and land, in fact, the use of radiation, in particular high energy radiation, gamma rays, x-rays, and ultra UV radiation may prove to be more important than ever, but that's a topic for another time.

Since life on this planet evolved in the presence of radiation, radiation levels that were much higher millions and billions of years ago, reducing the radioactivity of the planet may or may not be a good thing.

Nevertheless, the risk of reducing further the radioactivity of the planet is probably vanishingly small, as is the risk of vastly expanding, on an emergency basis, the use of nuclear energy.

I always say this: Nuclear energy need not be risk free to be vastly superior to everything else. It only needs to be vastly superior to everything else, which it is.

Let me know when you've identified a scheme to store fossil fuel waste on site where its generated, all 37 billion tons of it that will be released this year, for 70,000 years. Until then, consider me grotesquely and supremely unimpressed with the selective attention and "concern."

Have a nice weekend.