Congressional Hearings on Wind Turbines

[TimS]

3 mins ago, The Fishing Nerd said:

The country's installed power generation capacity rose 7.8% year on year to 2,564.1 GW at end December, the NEA data showed.  Thermal power capacity, which includes both coal and natural gas-fired power plants, rose 2.7% to 1,332.4 GW in the year.  Renewable energy capacity growth was much steeper with hydropower, solar power and wind power rising 5.8%, 28.1% and 11.2% respectively to 413.5 GW, 392.6 GW and 365.4 GW, while nuclear power capacity rose 4.3% to 55.5 GW

So their wind power is at 365GW/year - and their coal power is 1332GW/year - and how many new coal power plants are they planning to add? 

 

Nuclear is literally the ONLY green, renewable energy that is worth a cow fart. Take away trillions in subsidies and wind mills would stop being built tomorrow.

[The Fishing Nerd]

1 min ago, TimS said:

So their wind power is at 365GW/year - and their coal power is 1332GW/year - and how many new coal power plants are they planning to add? 

 

Nuclear is literally the ONLY green, renewable energy that is worth a cow fart. Take away trillions in subsidies and wind mills would stop being built tomorrow.

Take away energy subsidies and take a wild guess what a gallon of gas goes to tomorrow.  The point is China is building out renewables, wind included, faster than coal.

 

Your question - based on those stats, they're adding roughly 35GW of coal and natural gas power combined, while they're building out about 30GW of wind.  Considering you can't just drop a windmill wherever you'd like, the fact that they're basically the same tells you what you need to know - that if they could deploy renewables faster they wouldn't bother with the coal fired plants.  Planned energy deployments for 2023 is shown below.

 

Where we agree is on nuclear - unfortunately, you won't like the answer there.  China can deploy them quicker and easier because they're a communist nation that can dictate that state owned enterprises move quickly and with minimal regard for cost overruns (and hopefully not also regulation).  Here in the US, we're relying on private industry to build out new nuclear capacity.  The bad news is the cost and ROI on plans is so poor that there aren't any planned in the near future.  The good news is there have been advancements in nuclear (particularly in microreactors) that led to the first NRC approved new reactor design in decades just a short while ago, and hopefully that means some new reactors soon.  I'd love to see the government make a push for nuclear that meant subsidies and even more severe - a government backed/funded nuclear utility, but that's never going to happen.

 

 

[Sudsy]

On 3/18/2023 at 0:50 PM, Steve H.C. said:

We are years behind because of the conflict of profit vs reality! As fisherman we are watching species dry up first hand and we still have trouble admitting climate change exists. WTF!

Please explain this:

At the turn of the last century, the fish species most targeting in NJ were Bull Redfish and Sheepshead, fish that in our lifetimes have been considered southern species.

Now they are slowly moving north - not into new ranges but rather back to where they once were.

25 years ago I never heard of a Cow Nosed Ray, never saw, much less targeted, grey triggerfish, had my bait stolen by golden croakers - now that's a very common thing, exactly as it was, right here,100 years ago.

 

Go to the Belmar Fishing Club building on the pier next to Shark River Inlet. In the hall you'll see photos of fine old gentlemen in oilskin jackets and ties holding huge bull reds, not stripers, reds !

Read "The Call of the Surf" by Van Campen Heilner here (free download) https://archive.org/details/callsurf00sticgoog Read about exploring the NJ coast fishing for Reds and Sheephead in the 1910's

 

Remember in the 1970's when we were taught in grammar school that we were coming into a new ice age? That temperatures were dropping (causing fish species to move south). Looks like those temps are shifting back to what was once normal.

 

Keep that in mind while you read the Call of the Surf (great book BTW). When you're done reading you might come to a different conclusion than the people lined up to make huge profits from "climate change" have been conditioning you to believe. 

 

Does this mean that we shouldn't pursue clean energy? Of course not, but it does mean we shouldn't hamstring our economy by forcing things that, either we do not have the tech or the grid to handle. All this while choking off fossil fuels and weakening our country (while China is building 2 new coal power plants a week (just to give you an idea what the Paris Accord was all about)

[The Fishing Nerd]

13 hours ago, Sudsy said:

 

 

Remember in the 1970's when we were taught in grammar school that we were coming into a new ice age? That temperatures were dropping (causing fish species to move south). Looks like those temps are shifting back to what was once normal.

 

This cartoon is drawn to scale - and shows just how far off this thinking is.  Nothing is shifting back to what was once normal - and the abrupt trajectory that temperatures have taken in the last century is what has scientists concerned.

 

 

 

 

It took 10,000 years for temps to go from where they were to the mid 1900's - less than a full degree Celsius.  The rate of change was very slow - and still enough to cause a collapse of an ice shelf that had a drastic impact on water levels.  And the population of Earth at that time was nothing compared to today, without even considering what technology does to the ecosystem in the past 300 years versus the first 9000 years of human development.

Edited Friday at 12:29 PM by The Fishing Nerd
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[Sandbox]

15 hours ago, The Fishing Nerd said:

I'd love to see the government make a push for nuclear that meant subsidies and even more severe - a government backed/funded nuclear utility, but that's never going to happen

Is storage of spent nuclear fuel still the massive problem it was a while back?  I was involved in that issue back in the 90s but have been out of the loop since.  Seems like nuclear will never be an appealing option unless we can solve the transportation and storage issue, which faces a seemingly insurmountable NIMBY problem no matter where you propose to put it (see Yucca Mountain)..     

[CWitek]

14 hours ago, Sudsy said:

Please explain this:

At the turn of the last century, the fish species most targeting in NJ were Bull Redfish and Sheepshead, fish that in our lifetimes have been considered southern species.

Now they are slowly moving north - not into new ranges but rather back to where they once were.

25 years ago I never heard of a Cow Nosed Ray, never saw, much less targeted, grey triggerfish, had my bait stolen by golden croakers - now that's a very common thing, exactly as it was, right here,100 years ago.

 

Go to the Belmar Fishing Club building on the pier next to Shark River Inlet. In the hall you'll see photos of fine old gentlemen in oilskin jackets and ties holding huge bull reds, not stripers, reds !

Read "The Call of the Surf" by Van Campen Heilner here (free download) https://archive.org/details/callsurf00sticgoog Read about exploring the NJ coast fishing for Reds and Sheephead in the 1910's

 

Remember in the 1970's when we were taught in grammar school that we were coming into a new ice age? That temperatures were dropping (causing fish species to move south). Looks like those temps are shifting back to what was once normal.

 

Keep that in mind while you read the Call of the Surf (great book BTW). When you're done reading you might come to a different conclusion than the people lined up to make huge profits from "climate change" have been conditioning you to believe. 

 

Does this mean that we shouldn't pursue clean energy? Of course not, but it does mean we shouldn't hamstring our economy by forcing things that, either we do not have the tech or the grid to handle. All this while choking off fossil fuels and weakening our country (while China is building 2 new coal power plants a week (just to give you an idea what the Paris Accord was all about)

You can't talk about temperature change vs. fish repopulating parts of their former range withiout also considering fish abundance.

 

As fish populations shrink, the populations tend to collapse on their core ranges.  That's why Maine is the first to feel the effects of a decline in striped bass and bluefish stocks; they're at the northern edge of the range, and so the first to feel the impacts of range contraction.  Similarly, when populations expand, the fish's range expands as welll.

 

Given that, without knowing the comparative population sizes of various fish stocks, such as red drum and sheepshead, in the early 1900s compared to today, you can't separate out the effects of a warming waters from population effects.

 

Having said that, the center of abundance of a number of species, including summer flounder and black sea bass, has been documented as moving north over the years.  Other species, such as northern shrimp (and, perhaps, southern stock winter flounder and perhaps, to the extent it can be separated from the impacts of overfishing) cod, are being forced out of former habitat by warming water.

 

As a purely anecdotal observation, I have seen the mix of offshore fish (Long Island, NY) change over the 40 years that I've been fishing blue water.  Far more dolphin today, to the point that they can be actively targeted on any given day during the summer.  More wahoo.  Chub mackerel are a lot more abundant.  More jacks, both free-swimming and on offshore structure.  More blacktip and spinner sharks, to the point where we're now getting schools of spinners tearing bunker schools apart.  

 

But warming waters are definitely having some impact on fish distribution, although sorting out the impact of water temperature from other factors can be difficult, if not impossible, in some cases.

[CWitek]

54 mins ago, Sandbox said:

Is storage of spent nuclear fuel still the massive problem it was a while back?  I was involved in that issue back in the 90s but have been out of the loop since.  Seems like nuclear will never be an appealing option unless we can solve the transportation and storage issue, which faces a seemingly insurmountable NIMBY problem no matter where you propose to put it (see Yucca Mountain)..     

Reprossessing the spent fuel would help, but seems to be anathema here because of fears that it could somehow end up weaponized.  The French have no such concerns, and do it regularly.

[The Fishing Nerd]

34 mins ago, Sandbox said:

Is storage of spent nuclear fuel still the massive problem it was a while back?  I was involved in that issue back in the 90s but have been out of the loop since.  Seems like nuclear will never be an appealing option unless we can solve the transportation and storage issue, which faces a seemingly insurmountable NIMBY problem no matter where you propose to put it (see Yucca Mountain)..     

Yes - it's why they're trying to push smaller reactor solutions like the SMR (small modular reactor) and microreactors.  You still have the same spent materials issue, but on a much smaller scale.  Nuclear engineers have also been examining using different strategies like vitrification to assist with spent material disposal, but the overall mess is still there - it's hard to get people onboard with getting a reactor nearby, and nobody wants anything to do with the spent materials.  And we've got nearly 70 years worth of spent materials backed up in temporary storage and leaking in some places, less than an ideal situation for sure.

[Sudsy]

25 mins ago, CWitek said:

As fish populations shrink, the populations tend to collapse on their core ranges.  That's why Maine is the first to feel the effects of a decline in striped bass and bluefish stocks; they're at the northern edge of the range, and so the first to feel the impacts of range contraction.  Similarly, when populations expand, the fish's range expands as welll.

Where this falls flat is the steady expansion of the striper population in Nova Scotia. It's now a major fishery with no sign of contraction, in fact the opposite. That certainly wasn't the case in the 1980's

[RIRockhound]

11 mins ago, Sudsy said:

Where this falls flat is the steady expansion of the striper population in Nova Scotia. It's now a major fishery with no sign of contraction, in fact the opposite. That certainly wasn't the case in the 1980's

Not if that is a separate breeding population now thriving there because of warming waters...

Edited Friday at 03:26 PM by RIRockhound

[CWitek]

6 mins ago, Sudsy said:

Where this falls flat is the steady expansion of the striper population in Nova Scotia. It's now a major fishery with no sign of contraction, in fact the opposite. That certainly wasn't the case in the 1980's

Those are local fish, spawned in nearby Canadian rivers.  It does not represent a northward movement of bass along the coast, but rather an increase in a local population due to effective fisheries management.

 

There are actually three genetically distinct spawning populations of striped bass endemic to Canadian waters.

[Sudsy]

11 mins ago, RIRockhound said:

Not if that is a separate breeding population now thriving there because of warming waters...

Isn't that basically the same thing though

Is there any data on that population from 1900 through 1930 +/- ?

[Steve H.C.]

My last post here and last time reading this crap!  Some of you guys are anti science or logic.  Like most of us Long Island surf fisherman I fish Montauk.  The light house revettment project is an example of rising water levels, check old pics.   The blue hotel is going to be in the ocean in a year or two.  Have you noticed west coast weather patterns and fires yet.  Stick with your knowledge about fishing and leave the science to the scientists.    OUT!!!!!~!

[Popasilov]

10 hours ago, Steve H.C. said:

Stick with your knowledge about fishing and leave the science to the scientists. 

 

With all due respect and not to make this political debate

 

We all should challenge the science because of the latest "follow the science"event.

 

[pakalolo]

18 hours ago, Steve H.C. said:

My last post here and last time reading this crap!  Some of you guys are anti science or logic.  Like most of us Long Island surf fisherman I fish Montauk.  The light house revettment project is an example of rising water levels, check old pics.   The blue hotel is going to be in the ocean in a year or two.  Have you noticed west coast weather patterns and fires yet.  Stick with your knowledge about fishing and leave the science to the scientists.    OUT!!!!!~!

Good riddance ya tool!