Now he's getting into "sustainable" energy based on burning those woodchips. Note that this isn't about electricity, it's about delivering heat or steam from a "sustainable" source. From what I gather (through village gossip, admittedly) is that the whole process is, and I know this will piss off some people here when I say this but hear me out, heavily underregulated: nobody checks for whether the wood being burned might have been chemically treated, no need for air filters on the small furnaces being built shockingly close to villages, no problem if the hot steam from the furnace crosses half a km of open field without insulating the pipes, and so on.
And he gets millions in government subsidies of course, because "green" energy.
Doesn't take a expert to see why "we give you freebies if you do this" is an easier political sell than "we punish you if you keep doing that". So much of modern politics is based on risk management to the point of cowardice, including upsetting potential voters.
How on earth can you ever sell burning wood as a environmental sensible thing to do? It's even dirtier then burning brown coal. It seems there is no limit to what people can justify with "spreadsheet-logic".
It was such a scandal it brought down our Government (although some days it feels like a light breeze would bring down our Government...)
I guess The Guardian reporters don't venture far from their flock.
Why are we incentivising electric cars at purchase rather than incentivising the use of green energy to charge them?
(Edited to add "potentially" before "making it worse" given a comment below)
One other thing is that EVs have huge potential for energy storage. Smart energy policy will effectively use EVs as both a source and sink. In the daytime, when solar is dominant, EVs can charge at work. At night, they can discharge and power your home (V2G). There aren’t many EVs that do this currently (there aren’t many EVs at all currently), but many, like the F150 Electric, will.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/mikescott/2020/03/30/yes-electr...
Shouldn't we be incentivising both?
(one of the largest incentives I can see at the moment generation-side is that the levelized-cost-of-energy (LCOE) for solar in particular has become cheaper than most alternatives, and continues to reduce. and that's operational cost, excluding the cost of externalities on nations and their populations)
I will point out, as I usually do when this is trotted out, that this line of thinking is formally called the "long tailpipe" fallacy.
You can find more with that search term.
Yes, it is a fallacy.
The green revolution in personal transportation has two components: emissions-free electrical energy generation and the cars that use that energy. The fact that the former is lagging in many countries cannot be blamed on the latter.
> Why are we incentivising electric cars at purchase rather than incentivising the use of green energy to charge them?
Both need to be incentivised. The energy production will be in the form of disincentives to fossils fuel generation in the form of taxes and cap-and-trade.
Good video to watch on topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzZ1_vH30ko
But then there's the battery manufacturing, not sure how dirty it is compared to manufacturing the car parts they replace.
I saw a lot of people linking articles on them on Reddit.
Even read somebody on hacker news saying baseload is a misleading term.
