How did china manage to get hit by power issues :sadness:
It's because they are actively cutting back coal usage to meet climate change emission targets unlike every godforsaken western shithole. This is the cost capitalists are unwilling to face. China is already rationing electricity they'll figure it out.
The entire US is gonna be like Texas last winter, but constantly on and off all over the country, and not always weather related. Sometimes a bird will fry a transformer and shutdown power for a couple million people for 2 days, nbd.
There won't be anything to loot. We have a just in time supply chain, so it's 2 weeks of food and consumables max before we're just done.
Same goes for power and shit, the hundreds/thousands of cities that still rely on coal power will just go dark suddenly if coal flow stops for a few days. When that happens, it reverberates through the entire grid.
America is literally on the verge of complete collapse. Not even necessarily "politically" or whatever. Like physically, the infrastructure necessary for modern society just no longer exists. Everything we're using is running up against the 2x engineering tolerances they were built to, the lifespans are being stretched by a factor of 2 as well. The scariest thing is that a huge amount of our infrastructure was built at the same time, so all that new deal/pre Reagan shit is coming due for changes.
Out where I'm at they've been furiously replacing bridges because they're all at their end of life. Only about half have been replaced so far. The highways that have become necessary for life in most of America are crumbling, there exists no housing or civilization by rail that could be salvaged except some major cities. Here they actually tore up a bunch of rail lately to make room for more kitch breweries and condos in the old industrial area.
I'm legitimately worried about how bad it's going to get...like this is one of those things where it could just snap one day and the cascading failures will be totally uncontrollabe.
I don't think you really are understanding what this means. The rich will be fine, they'll escape to another nation and leave the American workers to starve to death in the waste dump they created. Like the famine that will result from the American grid collapse will make all the fake ones they attributed to communists look like skipping lunch.
duct tape a 50 year old infrastructure for the foreseeable future
nuclear advocates are idealist radlibs who don't know anything about our current engineering system and think "more power" will be simply helpful. The US can't even deal with extra power from solar panels lol
You can't have grid stability exclusively off of wind and solar. That's the dirty little secret, they always end up cheating with natural gas. It's not about "more power". It's about "power is made exactly when it's needed".
What are you talking about? I charge my phone using paperclips and lightning strikes. All natural.
I we have the tech if we had the money. We ajmy aren't willing to put the money into it. Plenty of environmentally friendly battery systems, they just aren't as dense or efficent as lithium but if we thought of not drowning in a boiling sea as an investment we cluld manage it.
It's a lot more complicated than just building a bunch of safe, extremely reliable, zero-carbon nuclear plants. We have the tech to decarbonize the grid. France got it done ffs.
Nuclear is heavily regulated and therefore extremely unprofitable, which is why Greens hate it (they're all neolibs). That's basically it. Wind and Solar require massive amounts of rare earth medals to build a battery system, but that means lots of easy money for Elon Musk level grifters to "disrupt". Can't do that with a EPR
Or pump water uphill, then release that slowly to spin a turbine.
Some other, more gimmicky, options that don't use batteries include giant flywheels or moving a weight up a tower (or down a mineshaft) and dropping it slowly to run a generator.
I've heard the flywheels are pretty okay. It really seems we need some more low-tech solutions to round out how we do energy tbh.
Wait how would this work? I'm a dumbass but it seems to me like you'd need to expend the same amount of energy pumping the water uphill that you would get back from it flowing downhill. Pls explain
Right, and there is probably even some loss from the water potential energy conversion to electricity via the generator.
But it is a great way to store huge amounts of energy, instead of a huge number of lithium batteries. That way it can be used when solar/wind aren't producing energy
Ah ok it's for storage, not generation. Now it makes sense, thank you
Yes, some more mad-scientist shit that tech grifters can get in on vs a mature, safe technology that just happens to be highly regulated and not open for the type of "innovation" America does!
I honesty feel like just brute forcing it with browns gass would end up being easier. You get clean water and enough explody bits to keep us happy.
We would have a coup here in ameriva if they made a bunch of nuclear power plants that you couldn't secretly make bombs at. Just the vibes of doing something efficent would destroy us as a country
I was reading about this before on another article. There is a serious power crunch, but a part of it is the CPC trying to curb coal emissions from their more industrial states. There are multiple factors at play here, but the key is to remember that it appears as if the government is aware of it and continues to respond to those crises. Hopefully it will continue to be watched and not completely privatized to 'solve' the problem.
California, Texas and New York regularly experience rolling blackouts during certain times of the year, which absolutely affects our industrial capacity, it's just Reuters will never actually couch our power supply problems in those terms because we are not a rapidly growing economy.
Because they will be facing a ton of the same problems the rest of the world is facing. And China isn't some superhero country. They'll get stuff wrong.
Hey you know how libs like to get in a panic about "WHAT IF RUSSIA HACKS OUR POWER GRID?!?!"
Okay now imagine it's the US doing the hacking
A lot of these grids are still analog. Unless the CIA is ruining around hitting power lines with hack saws, this appears to just be a crunch in supply relative to ballooning demand.
Given how they sabotaged the DPRK on the ground, I wouldn't put it past them.
I think you're underweighting that Australia - the region's largest coal producer - is on the outs with China while we're experiencing a global shipping crunch that would disrupt the sale of coal-fuel to Chinese plants.
Australia, a nation wherein the CIA effectively did a soft coup in back in like the 70s.
Sure. But that's on China for continuing to do business with them. They've got Russia literally right on the other side of the Amur river, with more natural gas export than it knows what to do. If Merkel's Berlin can figure this shit out, what's Xi's excuse?
Well, someone very deliberately shot up a substation in the U.S. (California?) a few years back, so those type of attacks are far from out of the question.
No guaranteed by any means, just a significant chance of it.
I mean, if there's a substation in China with bullet holes everywhere, please let me know. I remember something about a controlled demolition at a hydro dam in Venezuela in the thick of the "Venezuela Bad!!!" panic of 2018, and that having CIA fingerprints all over it. I believe that was around the same time someone tried to drone-bomb Nicholas Maduro, too.
But the shit between Australia and China isn't looking like sabotage nearly so much as simple souring of relations between Extremely Racist White People and The Yellow Peril.
it's good that this is happening now and not in seventy years when a megahurricane chews up a tenth of the infrastructure in the country all at once
The transition away from fossil fuels will not be easy. What China is doing will have long term benefits and Americans will just have to wait until after Christmas to get their new iPhone which is essentially identical to the last one they got.
China has gigantic coal energy, so if world market suddenly spiked it makes sense they’ll get hit as well :shrug-outta-hecks:
Plus idk, this energy crisis everywhere smells funny, they don’t exactly use same transport mode(pipelines with gas, specific coal ports and ships for coal, not container ships)
naah. this crunch have been an ongoing tussle since like april
https://www.carbonbrief.org/china-briefing-20-may-2021-emissions-growth-fastest-in-a-decade-xinjiang-plant-refutes-forced-labour-claims-regions-urged-to-cut-energy-use
