If only we had the technology to predict solar eclipses!
Or to store electricity in some sort of battery of storage containers.
Burn the witch!
Use the heat to evaporate water and spin a turbine! Wait…
Easier and far more cheaper to just store the engergy in the grid for such a short term outage… batteries are a very expensive short life solution
had to look this idiot up and to the surprise of nobody… he’s a right wing fossil fuel shill.
"…And now they are going after agriculture and of course, denim, which is cotton. Cotton also is deeply rooted in Jim Crow and racism, so that’s another reason to get rid of cotton. But also they want to get rid of cotton in denim because everything causes climate change until they just eliminate people writ large. And then there’ll be no more climate change when we’re all dead, which we may be from the eclipse in a couple of hours. Who knows? When we’re all dead, there’ll be no more climate worries.”
this is the sewerage that seems to flow from his brain.
Yeah, the “PTF” at the end of his username stands for “Power The Future”, the name of his special interest group, which is doublespeak for “do everything possible to avoid acknowledging the climate crisis and the role fossil fuels have played in getting us here.”
Holy shit.
This ISNT SATIRE???
Ffs
if you can actually stand the insane levels of smarm and bullshit
Fox Across America w/ Jimmy Failla - April 8
seek to 1:42:17 for the disgorgement of this priceless nugget. if you skip around his segment you will also find the usual harrasment of Greta Thunberg and all things sane - but I would not wish to inflict listening to this dreck on anyone.
The people saying “we’re destroying our planet and need to stop” want to see all humans go extinct but the people saying “nah oil belongs in the ocean” have our best interest in mind? Well I fully believe him.
The people saying “we’re destroying our planet and need to stop” want to see all humans go extinct
See this is a little bit of a mischaracterization - the Earth will likely recover from climate change. The human race are the sensitive species here.
We need to rethink our rhetoric to make it clear slowing climate change is for the benefit of humans, not “the earth”
You’re right I forget people don’t realize destroying the planet is like burning your own house down but your house will be fine and you’ll die.
Wackadoodle free association.
when we’re all dead, which we may be from the eclipse in a couple of hours
Holy shit, he channeled The Onion: Deadly Super Rainbow Tears Through West Coast.
That should be in an encyclopedia as an example of a strawman argument.
Wooooow.
I guess the sun coming up tomorrow isn’t guaranteed for him since he’s all-in on fossil fuels that will destroy the planet anyway.
I doubt anyone’s paying him to write that sort of nonsense.
also hot take: denim is just a shit product.
It’s the modern era, im sure we can produce MUCH more resilient fabrics and cloth items than denim.
Meaning solar energy produces 30 gigawats per 2 minutes?
Not bad, should build even more.
And that’s just a narrow stretch of the country that received the solar eclipse!
in the path of the eclipse
He may be counting the 1 kW per square metre of sunlight that reaches the ground, not just the fraction we turn to electricity
When there is only 50% totality, photovoltaic also makes 50% less. You just do not notice it when looking around, because your eyes adjust to the changed brightness. So a photovoltaic produces less for a longer time. What I found, for the 2017 eclipse, was that around 16GW were impacted with at most a reduction of 5GW in one moment.
implementation which works 99.99% of the time
Republicans: “It’s broken and bad”
stand for nothing.
Wait until he discovery day and night.
and im sure the US loses even more grid production capacity when it’s flooded due to the inevitable warming of the ocean too huh?
The US used over 3.6 million gigawatts hours of energy in 2020. If you round down, and assume no increase in the last 4 years, that’s over 9800 per day. 30 is a drop in the bucket. We have combined cycle natural gas plants, along with other green options to pick up for dips in production exactly like this.
A better question is how much energy we gain from solar if losing it for a couple hours once a decade or so is such a big deal.
Or how much power was saved because people were outside watching and not inside consuming power.
He didn’t write GWH, he just said GW. For all we know, assuming this number relates to reality at all, that’s just smear across the whole eclipse and no single watt was lost for more than a few minutes.
If we lost “30GW”, I’d bet we lost barely one GWH.
I think a safer assumption is that he made it all up, because truth is dead.
We lost some amount. Did he bother to google how much? Why would he?
If it really was GW, then just multiply the 30 with time the sun was covered, and boom, you have GWH. I don’t think it was even close to an hour.
I was in the penumbra, and around here I would say the entire event took an hour and a half, from “any of the sun at all is covered” to “none of the sun at all is covered.” I’m sure our local solar panels did dip in output, probably to the point of producing no useful power for several minutes as it got noticeably darker.
I see, given the worst case scenario of 1.5h coverage, with the average of 50% coverage, gives about 30*1.5=22.5 GWH.
Perhaps someone should tell this dickhead about all of the land the US will lose due to carbon emissions from coal power. Or maybe mention the continuing increase in business insurance due to the same thing. If we are going to point out the adverse effects of solar we should point out the adverse affects of coal.
Also the incredibly long supply lines that go to fossil fuel plants. Solar panels aren’t as green as we like to think, but they’re rugged as fuck and require 0 infrastructure to produce power. Most of the maintenance is wiping them with a damp sponge¹, and (these ghouls should love this part) zero non-maintenance labor to operate, no moving parts, and they work best during peak demand times, right? If I were powering my Last Redoubt, solar would be up there on my list of options until the sun dies.
¹i know, hyperbole, but not much of it
Watts are a unit of power, not a unit of energy. The claim is nonsense to the core.
I have no idea about the actual number, but saying the power is decreased by 30 GW does make sense, though… Of course it is not energy, but they might not have meant “solar energy” in the sense of a physical quantity. The sentiment is bullshit of course.
But even then only for a few minutes at each solar energy plant
Sure. It is an effect that has been taken into account by government agencies and grid operators, though: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61743
The good thing is you can predict it extremely accurately, probably much better than cloud cover…
ok so technically, a watt is directly convertable to a joule, which is a unit of energy. So he isn’t wrong. But he is also wrong because he is using name plate production capacity, rather than the total produced capacity, that or he is simply fucking up the numbers. But lets be honest, homie is NOT doing the math.
A watt is a joule per second. It is not “directly convertable” any more than mile is the not a speed just because you can divide it by an hour.
Watts are power, the rate at which you can work. Joules are units of energy, how much work you can do.
He is not fucking up the numbers. He is fucking up the units…and so are you
in this scenario it wouldn’t be speed, though, it would be speed over time. Speed is velocity.
Watts are just joules but arbitrarily defined. Joules are a unit of total energy. A collective amount of work potential. Watts are an in situ measurement of those joules doing work.
If we want to talk about confusing units, W and VA are the units to be talking about.
A watt is a joule per second - they are not directly convertable.
yes, and this twitter post, (or wherever it comes from) is definitely not representative of the original sites layout in any substantial manner.
“Math is science. Science is the work of the devil” - republicunts
A watt is a joule per second. It is not “directly convertable” any more than mile is the not a speed just because you can divide it by an hour.
Watts are power, the rate at which you can work. Joules are units of energy, how much work you can do.
He is not fucking up the numbers. He is fucking up the units…and so are you.
Best part here is that it’s a nonsense statement. Generated electricity is measured in watt hours (be they kilowatt, megawatt, or gigawatt).
Great point! He said “solar energy” which would be watthours. If he said “solar power” he could have used watts.
Probably the least nonsense part of his statement (imo) and not the part worth an argument.
I did some quick math assuming he meant watt-hours and it came out to the us averaging about 11 gigawatt-hours/day in 2022. I feel like we didn’t lose over double our usage during the short amount of time the few solar panels lost the sun, and if we did holy shit what are we doing with anything else.
Also, you can’t lose what you don’t have.
I missed out on about 5kwh. Guess I’ll start pulling the panels off the roof now.
This is unironically the standard corporate response to any temporary slowing of growth.
Why wouldn’t it be? They already took the subsidy and got the green washing. They can switch back to the grid and move it to the expense line on the P&L. And sell the hardware to recoup the difference in cost the subsidy didn’t cover.
You can’t just wait for government funds to come to you. You have to take it before your competition does. And if you exhaust the funds before they or anyone else can take advantage, you look better to the market. Stock price go up.
Wind energy? Hydro energy? Nuclear energy? There’s like more ways to get energy.
I also don’t know if this guy is pointing out that the sun gives us so much energy, so we should use it more or that the sun could be covered sometimes rendering it useless.
Definitely the latter. His bad faith argument is meant to discredit an alternative energy source.
the only solution is that we blow up the moon
Just carve a hole in it so that the sun shines through even during an eclipse. Heck, have fun with it and make it a smiley face so you can see the Man in the Moon better during an eclipse.
With solar powered rockets? We’re doomed!!
Can we tell everyone that Jesus said they need to go to moon first?
Yes, Daniel, a few minutes of eclipse happening every couple years renders solar completely useless. Let’s just keep burning the dead dinosaur juice.
Yeah, if only we could do something about this problem when it reoccurs in 2044…
Don’t you know? We’re going to have eclipses every day now, and that means solar power will be ineffective everywhere for all time over 2 hours of reduced output
every couple years
On average it takes about 375 years for an eclipse to happen again in the same spot so it’ll be a while before the US loses solar energy from an eclipse.
It will be a while until that particular strip of the US loses energy from a Total Solar Eclipse. There’s no shortage of other eclipse events, and from the top of Alaska to the urethra of Florida is a looooong way.
Not that I approve the use of dead dino juice, but in theory we can at least make more of that. Coal is done. Once we use it up, we cannot make more of the stuff, since it’s what happened when the trees didn’t have bacteria that could break them down. They damn near caused a climate crisis with their own corpses.
Sigh… Same energy as the following:
We lost all that sunlight. Add this to the long list of reasons why “farming” food is unreliable.
30GW out of how much Daniel? We need some proper stats from Koch’s mouthpiece.
Yes let’s not invest in green energy because checks notes once every 20 years we will lose a fraction of a percentage of solar energy for about 4 minutes.
Also not for nothing but wind energy actually picks up during that time and generally for a few days before and after too.