aniruddh-mohan.bsky.social
Evaluating technologies in electricity systems, carbon removal, and transportation. PhD, Carnegie Mellon. Views deeply personal.
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I think it's mainly because gas is expensive and not a domestic fuel in those countries. If they were focused on pollution they wouldn't be burning record amounts of coal, which they are. Coal is much more polluting than gas, but it's cheap for them
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"staying out of the red zone" as per your figure allows up to 1.8 deg of warming. You know that will mean some low lying island states going underwater. I'd like to see you defend your threshold to people who are going to lose everything. Nothing short of pure callousness.
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Yes, please keep deflecting to avoid admitting that you can't credibly define your vague end state of "climate safety".
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I'm not. Now do you want to finally answer my Q? There's plenty of space below the red zone. Where exactly do you put a threshold and on what basis?
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Useful figure and gets to my Q, at what level is it "safe"? You're suggesting using that word but there's no defined threshold? In the fig. we can see that undetectable impacts (which would be nice) are b/w 0.5-1 deg warming above pre industrial. That's a big range with a lot of uncertainty.
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Asking questions about vague terminology is not considered uncollegial in my department, no. Rather it's encouraged. There is no scientifically defined threshold of "climate safety". Or can you point me to one in the IPCC reports?
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But what's the level of "climate safety"? Zero degrees above pre industrial levels? One degree above pre industrial?
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Isn't this partly what they did in Marbury v Madison ?
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I hope that university deans and department heads recognize this. Let's leave impassioned policy advocacy to lobbyists and think tanks. Science needs to be above the fray, otherwise we shouldn't be calling it such.
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Seeing this happen repeatedly over the past few years has been one of my biggest disappointments with academia. But with the election, I think peak academic influence on energy policy is behind us. The average voter has thrown out any academic delusions about public support for net zero goals.
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It's tempting to blur this line because when people who notionally agree with you are in power, you can have outsized influence. But any sound scientific work would also NOT lend towards emotional attachment for particular policy goals or rules because there is SO much uncertainty involved.
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Yes
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Natural gas steam turbines? Those run at 2% capacity factor on the grid and are only ~30% efficient. I'm guessing they meant to say CCGTs?
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The amount of logical gymnastics in this piece is frankly impressive
www.cfr.org/expert-brief...
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Exactly. There's no reason to think Jevons paradox doesn't apply here. In fact, given 1) the binding constraint on the growth of the sector is energy input, 2) profitability from compute is so high, there's every reason to think Jevons paradox applies more strongly here than anywhere else.
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All public chargers so yeah includes level 2. These are rookie numbers.
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You need financing cost not just overnight cost for the Capex. Also plant lifetime might be 60 or even 80 years but financing will have to be over 20-30 years. All this will nudge the numbers higher. But IMO still a great deal for 80 years of 24x7 carbon free power
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If you have a low temperature process then there are a lot of competitive options on the table worth considering: direct geothermal/nuclear sourced heat or an electrified process with either heat pumps / thermal storage. You don't need oxy combustion of NG if your heat needs are steam at 120C.
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Are you talking about oxy combustion like 1 Point Five or just burning NG unabated? The latter would result in a ~50% premium on your net cost of removal, that simply won't be competitive. DAC is expensive enough without having to eat a 50% reduction in your claimed removals.
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How much of net removals though? The costs will really vary depending on how much you need to discount gross removals by the emissions associated with your energy inputs and there will need to be social legitimacy at the least around the magnitude of your net removals claims
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Yes. As long as you can credibly claim zero emissions for the energy used to power your DAC, which is going to be the major challenge for DAC once we get out of the 100k/year demos to Mt/year stage, where legal claims are attached to those removals.
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Thank you!
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Is there a publicly accessible link for this document?
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Can I get in on this as well as the under on sales of 'superior tech' EVs through 2030? I see a lot of hope of what should happen masquerading as analysis of what will happen.
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Exactly and I don't think it's just DAC or carbon removal companies that are vulnerable. Applies also to LDES, clean fuels, and other sectors given this potential slowdown in govt funding will be following up a broader slowdown in venture funding for climate.
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Could you elaborate further?
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I was positively surprised by this but then I read the article. Duke is also adding a 400MW natural gas CT nearby so it's not a 1:1 replacement with batteries?