The renewable energy changes and policy

DIY-HP-LED said:

You should see BYD on the roads of Europe soon, if the EU doesn't tariff them and with their energy squeeze, they seem reluctant to protect European car makers.

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None of my post was a prediction. BYD is not little-known (I realize the paper was Canadian), they are crap. BYD is almost synonymous with failing city buses here, has been a public drama for years. They're so bad, many cities regret buying them instead of something decent like a Volvo or a Mercedes. So bad it made people sick, literally puke after a ride. Geothermics isn't just an experiment here anymore. Tesla is still most popular but it's not associated with quality. Germany will surely win the race for the european car market. BYD will be here to stay but where in the US size matters, here it's all about brand. Roughly it goes from German cars to Volvo to Japanese to French and Italian to chinese crap, which involves anything asian but not Japanese and with actual Chinese stuff being at the bottom. Basically, if you drive a BYD, you're a loser. It's like the most uncool thing you can do. Not cause it's cheap per se, but because it's so cheap you can't even get a bargain deal. A $10K chinese car with no discount or a German EV with $2500 off, anyone here knows the second is the best deal

In october last year, Ursula von der Leyen announced an investigation into subsidised electric cars from China, to determine whether import duties should be imposed. Given Germany's position in the car industry and the position it has in their economy and thus indirectly EU they'll be up for it, but at the earliest that will happen roughly 20 months from now.

Sativied said:

None of my post was a prediction. BYD is not little-known (I realize the paper was Canadian), they are crap. BYD is almost synonymous with failing city buses here, has been a public drama for years. They're so bad, many cities regret buying them instead of something decent like a Volvo or a Mercedes. So bad it made people sick, literally puke after a ride. Geothermics isn't just an experiment here anymore. Tesla is still most popular but it's not associated with quality. Germany will surely win the race for the european car market. BYD will be here to stay but where in the US size matters, here it's all about brand. Roughly it goes from German cars to Volvo to Japanese to French and Italian to chinese crap, which involves anything asian but not Japanese and with actual Chinese stuff being at the bottom. Basically, if you drive a BYD, you're a loser. It's like the most uncool thing you can do. Not cause it's cheap per se, but because it's so cheap you can't even get a bargain deal. A $10K chinese car with no discount or a German EV with $2500 off, anyone here knows the second is the best deal

In october last year, Ursula von der Leyen announced an investigation into subsidised electric cars from China, to determine whether import duties should be imposed. Given Germany's position in the car industry and the position it has in their economy and thus indirectly EU they'll be up for it, but at the earliest that will happen roughly 20 months from now.

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Then the BYDs are to be the "Ladas" of eastern Europe! Hopefully their cars are better than their buses and the EU had better do something, they like the Japanese iteratively improve over the years. We wanted global free trade; well we got it alright.

Sativied said:

None of my post was a prediction. BYD is not little-known (I realize the paper was Canadian), they are crap. BYD is almost synonymous with failing city buses here, has been a public drama for years. They're so bad, many cities regret buying them instead of something decent like a Volvo or a Mercedes. So bad it made people sick, literally puke after a ride. Geothermics isn't just an experiment here anymore. Tesla is still most popular but it's not associated with quality. Germany will surely win the race for the european car market. BYD will be here to stay but where in the US size matters, here it's all about brand. Roughly it goes from German cars to Volvo to Japanese to French and Italian to chinese crap, which involves anything asian but not Japanese and with actual Chinese stuff being at the bottom. Basically, if you drive a BYD, you're a loser. It's like the most uncool thing you can do. Not cause it's cheap per se, but because it's so cheap you can't even get a bargain deal. A $10K chinese car with no discount or a German EV with $2500 off, anyone here knows the second is the best deal

In october last year, Ursula von der Leyen announced an investigation into subsidised electric cars from China, to determine whether import duties should be imposed. Given Germany's position in the car industry and the position it has in their economy and thus indirectly EU they'll be up for it, but at the earliest that will happen roughly 20 months from now.

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I remember when Top Gear (before that fool Clarkson ruined things) reviewed the cheapest car available in Britain at the time. It was Indonesian. They gave it a simply brutal review, then found some daft way to test it to complete destruction.

They also had an episode dedicated to Chinese cars (ten? years ago now), primarily showcasing shameless ripoffs of G7 design. Initial quality was poor. Those Temu buses suggest it will only get worse from there.

DIY-HP-LED said:

and it is useful for making green steel.

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By far the biggest emitter of Co2 in the Netherlands is Tata Steel. A total of 8%. Takes up one of the best locations in Holland too... also cause a higher rate of people with cancer in the area. Needless to say, given all the other efforts and projects, this is a hot issue. Plans is they start using green hydrogen in 2030 and completely switch in 2037. Tata wants 1billion in subsidies to do that. The people say f.u.

Construction already started (national green hydrogen network, connecting all the major industrial areas), Tata center west, largest electrolyzers near the storage (blue) and wind parks. Those two up north are in our formerly active major gasfield and earthquake area. We’re also going to build 2 new nuclear plants. yolo


Expands into Germany and eventually the european hydrogen map which extends to inside Ukraine. Cause we already know this green hydrogen magic will in practice involve creating more gray and pink hydrogen than we otherwise would have needed.


The above is constructed by Gas Unie, owned 100% by the state. Largest electrolyser of Europe, feeding the network is being built near Rotterdam, owned by Shelll. The same Shell that gets billions in subsidies, including for research into hydrogen as car fuel (fcev). And the same Shell that held back a report on climate change decades before it was a thing. Shell who considers BEVs a phase and gets millions in subsidies to research hydrogen based FCEVs, which in practice means they get to build hydrogen filling stations for cars. Knowing the lack of charging stations for EV was initially an obstacle, still is in most place on the planet, they figured let’s build the filling stations first. And… the same Shell that is the largest consumer too (60 chemical factories owned by Shell near Rotterdam too.

So it’s already happening, however, so are the situations in my previous post regarding Africa, the required land and water, the deals with evil nations, the increasing and extended gray hydrogen production and the huge chunk of renewable energy they take from our wind parks.

Real point is that just like any alternative, it comes with less obvious costs and considering the parties involved and their main motive (money) it’s a given somewhere down the line someone’s screwed over.

Sativied said:

By far the biggest emitter of Co2 in the Netherlands is Tata Steel. A total of 8%. Takes up one of the best locations in Holland too... also cause a higher rate of people with cancer in the area. Needless to say, given all the other efforts and projects, this is a hot issue. Plans is they start using green hydrogen in 2030 and completely switch in 2037. Tata wants 1billion in subsidies to do that. The people say f.u.

Construction already started (national green hydrogen network, connecting all the major industrial areas), Tata center west, largest electrolyzers near the storage (blue) and wind parks. Those two up north are in our formerly active major gasfield and earthquake area. We’re also going to build 2 new nuclear plants. yolo
View attachment 5358961

Expands into Germany and eventually the european hydrogen map which extends to inside Ukraine. Cause we already know this green hydrogen magic will in practice involve creating more gray and pink hydrogen than we otherwise would have needed.
View attachment 5358962

The above is constructed by Gas Unie, owned 100% by the state. Largest electrolyser of Europe, feeding the network is being built near Rotterdam, owned by Shelll. The same Shell that gets billions in subsidies, including for research into hydrogen as car fuel (fcev). And the same Shell that held back a report on climate change decades before it was a thing. Shell who considers BEVs a phase and gets millions in subsidies to research hydrogen based FCEVs, which in practice means they get to build hydrogen filling stations for cars. Knowing the lack of charging stations for EV was initially an obstacle, still is in most place on the planet, they figured let’s build the filling stations first. And… the same Shell that is the largest consumer too (60 chemical factories owned by Shell near Rotterdam too.

So it’s already happening, however, so are the situations in my previous post regarding Africa, the required land and water, the deals with evil nations, the increasing and extended gray hydrogen production and the huge chunk of renewable energy they take from our wind parks.

Real point is that just like any alternative, it comes with less obvious costs and considering the parties involved and their main motive (money) it’s a given somewhere down the line someone’s screwed over.

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You made me look it up. The hydrogen rainbow

(I like turquoise hydrogen)

For the hydrogen hopefuls there is now crystal power! Yep, the magic power of crystals.

Making hydrogen directly from sunlight and water would change things, here they do it with formic acid, but you get the idea, it can be done with water too eventually.

Free for now, but I got to it from google. Some sectors like shipping are being affected by the energy transition early, investors need to project ahead a decade for things like ships.



The global shipping fleet has reached its oldest average age in almost 15 years, despite growing pressure on shipowners to order new, greener vessels and help decarbonise global trade.

Shipbrokers, who advise owners on shipbuilding, said the industry is hesitating to order new vessels that run on greener fuels, amid uncertainty over the availability of these energy resources.

At the same time, shipowners have cashed in on surging demand for second-hand ships from operators of a “shadow fleet” transporting Russian oil that is the subject of sanctions, meaning many vessels that belong on scrap heaps are still sailing.

The average age of the global shipping fleet hit 13.7 years in December, the oldest since 2009, according to data compiled by shipbroker Clarksons and shared with the Financial Times. The data excludes small ships with a volume less than 5,000 gross tonnes.

The container shipping fleet reached 14.3 years late last year, the highest since Clarksons began collecting data in 1993. The average age of tankers, which carry oil and other liquids, hit a two-decade peak of 12.9 years.




Richard Matthews, research director at shipbroker Gibson, said “we have seen hardly any tankers scrapped” since the invasion of Ukraine, which prompted western governments to impose restrictions on trading Russian goods. A shadow fleet of companies with opaque ownership has stepped in to transport Russian oil, buying up older and cheaper tankers, which large oil companies often consider scrapping after 15 years of wear and tear.

The market value of a 15-year-old Aframax tanker, the medium-sized type often used to transport Russian oil, has surged 129 per cent to $40mn since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, according to Gibson data. The market price for selling Aframax ships for scrap, meanwhile, has increased just 40 per cent to $9.2mn.

Shipowners “aren’t scrapping because there’s so much money to be made”, said Matthews. The Ukraine war has also indirectly driven up the cost of shipping oil, as Europe buys its oil imports from more distant producers than Russia and tanker owners are paid more to travel longer distances.

Shipping companies may also be reluctant to order new vessels due to uncertainty over green regulation and alternative fuels, said Stephen Gordon, research director at Clarksons. A range of alternatives to fossil fuels has been proposed, including ammonia and green methanol, although these resources remain scarce.

The shipping fleet is ageing despite increasing pressure from regulators and customers to decarbonise. This summer, diplomats at the UN’s International Maritime Organization set a target for shipping, which delivers about 90 per cent of the world’s traded goods, to achieve net zero emissions “by or around” 2050.

But they are yet to agree on economic measures, such as a carbon levy, that would narrow the current price gap between fossil fuels and more expensive green fuels.

Tristan Smith, a shipping and energy researcher at UCL, said weak environmental regulations risked rewarding investments in older ships and meant that “higher polluting ships stay in the fleet longer”.

Gordon said that the ageing fleet was also the natural result of vessels nearing the end of their life cycle following the last shipbuilding peak in 2010. But the trend is unlikely to reverse imminently. Clarksons estimates that shipbuilding capacity has dropped 35 per cent since 2010, as shipbuilders consolidated in recent years.

“We are seeing a ramp-up in [new builds] for container and LNG [ships], which might moderate the ageing trends. But in bulkers and tankers there are small new-build programmes so the ageing trends will continue,” Gordon said.

Wow, we haven't even seen the impact of all those new battery factories or of the better new batteries headed for commercialization over the next few years. 19% of new auto sales globally are EVs or plug in hybrids already, what will it be like in 5 years? As batteries increase in performance, I would expect the number of hybrids to decrease over time. Looks like the light transport transition is well under way already.

Solar arrays better than trees for climate, study finds

What is better, planting trees or covering the same area of land with solar panels? A group of geoscientists from Israel just looked at this, and they say that solar panels come out way ahead. Let's have a look at what the paper says.

The paper is here https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...

I was thinking about back when I used to have a 2kW indoor grow a few years back and how high my power bills were with separate flowering and veg stages running on LEDs. If I was doing it today, I would have 15kW of solar panels in the back yard on a ground mount (my roof sucks for solar) with net metering to cut my power bill down to nothing. Your power bill might not be too high now, if you don't grow indoors, but there will likely be a heat pump and an EV or two charging at home in your near future. In any case there will likely be a heat pump in my future this summer and perhaps a few solar panels to help run it and my next car, if there is one, will likely be an EV.

If pot is legal and you grow indoors with high power bills, look into if your state or province has net metering and other goodies for going solar and check it out, the more power you use the faster it pays for itself. I think when many people see the impact of an EV or two charging at home on their power bill it will motivate them to go solar, especially if they have net metering, but if you grow pot indoors now then it is worth looking into.

So pot is "legal", but STILL no one is even really even allowed to grow hemp.. not even to experiment with making advancements towards better batteries, etc.. What kind of BS new "green" deal is that? When will it ever be federally legalized? I remember doing a presentation back in high school on how hemp could power the world, and here we still are a few decades later getting screwed by the government as usual. What a scam!

DIY-HP-LED said:

Massive underground reservoir of natural hydrogen in Spain 'could deliver the cheapest H2 in the world' | Recharge

Helios Aragón says it has access to giant resource of naturally occurring hydrogen in northern Spain but the country’s anti-oil rules are standing in its way

www.hydrogeninsight.com

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In 6 years NL and Germany combined will (or plan to) produce more green hydrogen per year than what's in that 'massive reservoir' in Spain. By the time they can extract significant amounts in France the annual results will too be just a fraction of total use and nothing compared to the hydrogen that will be shipped and transported through pipelines. Most optimal estimates it's barely enough for what EU uses in 6 months now, before the network is operational. White hydrogen isn't going to save us, it will make money for some though, especially big oil companies. The reason Macron is marketing it is just that, marketing, hydrogen is - aside from the impact on climate - the new oil.

Sativied said:

In 6 years NL and Germany combined will (or plan to) produce more green hydrogen per year than what's in that 'massive reservoir' in Spain. By the time they can extract significant amounts in France the annual results will too be just a fraction of total use and nothing compared to the hydrogen that will be shipped and transported through pipelines. Most optimal estimates it's barely enough for what EU uses in 6 months now, before the network is operational. White hydrogen isn't going to save us, it will make money for some though, especially big oil companies. The reason Macron is marketing it is just that, marketing, hydrogen is - aside from the impact on climate - the new oil.

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I was just thinking it could help jumpstart green steel production and would probably only start with a fraction of annual steel production. In a few years there should be an abundance of wind and solar power and improved catalytic electrolysis processes for making hydrogen. The Haber Bosch method for producing ammonia could be supplanted by new technology in a few years too, I posted about it on the climate change thread.

Problem with that is the different time frames involved. The self or by law imposed emission reduction targets, the national targets, EU targets, and the required infrastructure for both mining and transportation as well as the conversion of the steel factories, no small feat either. France can make some good money with it but for policies and the need to address climate change asap it’s inconsequential. It’s a way for Macron to attract more investments, and make them (subsidies results in investments).

Same for bold titled youtube vids, that’s not what policies and the resulting billion of dollars costing strategies are based on. Strategies for the next several decades. The electrolysers being built for billions now aren’t going to be replaced in a few years, instead it will take years before they can produce significant amounts and Shell and others get to make their money back first, and then some.

DIY-HP-LED said:

In a few years there should be an abundance of wind and solar power and improved catalytic electrolysis processes for making hydrogen.

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Depends a lot on what you mean with few but the problem is that abundance is then global total. And that’s the crux of the situation. We’re not talking about a few wind parks or solar fields. but massive chunks of land and sea (ours is full), chunks of entire countries (like a quarter of Oman), a chunk of Africa. And parts of repressive regimes like Saudi Arabia, for which they’ll be well paid. It’s why NL jumped on the opportunity to make a deal with Australia (when they started building green hydrogen factory), literally the other side of the world but at least they're the good guys and somewhat stable.

Big oil is betting against that abundance (so they can provide gray or blue hydrogen for the infrastructure we’ll then depend on). It’s also extremely inefficient, at the end of the line only 40-60% of the renewable energy that went in remains for use. They win either way, who do you think builds those electrolysers and hydrogen factories across the globe. That abundance doesn't exist, won't in a few years either. Who owns the gray (and possibly blue) hydrogen factories to make up for the shortage... same companies that pushed it through the largest lobbying attempts Europe has ever seen. Same companies that want us to drive on hydrogen. Same companies already complaining 'make it more profitable'.

While not everything can be electrified, once this is all set up, and we neocolonized Africa (which will have an extra hard time reaching their own targets as a result), that seemingly green but very costly hydrogen isn't going to quench our thirst for more industry and more meat and more fabrication and more destruction of the planet.

i always thought Hydrogen was corrosive.......i could be wrong with that thinking