Can You Guess These Surprising Energy Trends?
 

Your electric car is only as clean as its power supply. If we are not supplying all of an EV's power from a home solar array, this ought to be of interest. Here is a clever and informative NYT article on trends in energy production since 2007:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...ol-left-region

I got all three correct and I bet you all will, too.

Well, the questions lead people to the correct answers. I was still off by orders of magnitude even though I was "correct".

While the NYT article still felt obligated to take a jab at conservatives and defend Obama, it was much more restrained than I had anticipated.

At any rate, adopting renewables into the grid is relatively easy and affordable when they amount to only 20% or less of total power. Once you start getting above that amount, it gets significantly more difficult and expensive to stabilize a grid that is increasingly relying on intermittent and variable renewable energy.

Show me a utility with reasonable energy prices that has 40% or more energy coming from wind and/or solar and I'll eat my hat.

As with most issues, both extremes of the political spectrum make errors in reasoning. The extreme right might say there is no AGW, or that renewables aren't feasible at all, and the extreme left might say we're all going to die due to AGW, and that we could easily implement 100% renewable energy sources if Big Oil weren't so powerful.

I'm sure the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. The fact that we're neither 100% renewable, or 100% non-renewable seems to support this middle of the road opinion.

I really don't care as long as my electrical power is cheap.
I only have an associates degree in applied science for wind and solar power generation, also power plant opps so I doubt that someone reporter with an English major (a great indicationthat they couldnot pass a higher math to save their life) is going to tell me something that I am not already intimately well aware of.
Any article you see written by a reporter on renewable power is guaranteed to be at least one third BS.usually they are more like 70% to 90% BS, with the reminder being almost all pipe dream.

The US is now exporting more oil than impoted and natural gas has replaced coals energy market share thanks to hydraulic fracturing and to spite the best efforts of the Obama administration.

The part that makes me sad is the fact that this is often true of technical and scientific journals also. Many authors simply try to push their own agenda and research for economic reasons. Usually these agendas have to do with giant corporations being behind the study and paying off the author to make data fit the company's view of the world. I don't have a problem with someone making a buck as long as they are doing it honestly.

JJ

That's a good point, and might also justify me believing the ICE will remain relevant in a foreseeable future, as long as it can work with different options of alternate fuels integrated instead of singling out just a few.