What blocks the project from continuing is the local environmental lobby and the national environmental lobby that has pushed for laws like NEPA that the group of projects was exempted from requiring individual approvals for.
Effectively the project required the exemption that allows them to group things together because regulation that some environmentalists lobbied for that is supported by the majority of environmentalists in America is used by some environmentalists to block all projects. Consequently, the cost for the projects is high and the certainty of their completion is low.
These make the projects risky. The federal government revoked this exemption so that the projects have to go through the same environmental review as every other project, because that is what many environmentalists have argued for and the most powerful environmentalists have won.
Therefore many things are simultaneously true:
* the dept of the interior did not cancel the projects
* they returned them to normal conditions
* normal conditions make the projects hard to do
* they de-facto canceled them by making them hard to do
No silly. They just canceled the PERMIT for the project. The developers are welcome to resubmit seven separate applications in the future which will all be processed at snail’s pace and the arbitrarily canceled again.
‘Some’ X are Y, is talking about a subgroup of X, ‘the’ X are Y is talking about all X.
Beyond often it’s people trying to create barriers to something who setup these kinds of reviews not environmentalists. In old cities you’ll see people using historic preservation for similar ends.
Yeah, ultimately they denied that you could group together all these projects under one environmental review as an exception to normal rules. But many of the most influential environmental organizations, and a majority of those shaping modern permitting policy, have supported or defended regulatory structures that make large-scale energy projects extremely difficult to approve while also actively using those regulatory structures to kill major projects. Many prominent environmental groups have, at various times, opposed nuclear, solar, wind, or geothermal projects in the US: sometimes over local impacts, sometimes procedural grounds, and sometimes due to broader philosophical objections. Taken together, the net effect of those positions may have been to slow or block clean energy deployment more than almost any other political force, and therefore they may have been the largest policy contributors to climate change in much of the United States.
There we go. I think you can probably retune every comment you read with an LLM so that there's lots of hedging in it like this and then you can satisfy your own need for sufficient phatic phrases. But this one is from a human, given to you for free. If you don't like my comments, ask dang to ban me.
denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions. Utterances such as hello, how are you? and nice morning, isn't it? are phatic.
One article brought quite a lot of complaints from conservationists over the project which i find ironic. As someone else here said if rules exist they should be applied equally to everyone. In this case the biden administration suspended them in order to help the project and now they are being reinstated.
Conservation and environmentalism are two different things. Preventing a particular population of turtles from being disrupted is conservation, reducing smog in a city is environmentalism. Their goals may overlap, and many people who care about the environment also care about the things that live in those environments, but their goals may at times be at odds. Delaying the implementation of a solar plant, which helps reduce pollution at the expense of consuming a small area of land, is a perfect example.
I don't see why its so ironic. The environment isn't a binary. Its a complex system where the same thing can have both good and bad effects on different parts. Conservationists aren't climate change scientists. They are both going to be focused on the separate parts of the environment they specialize in.
We can evaluate if these projects as a net positive or negative for the enviroment. The enviroment can be divided into local and wider. Which is why i'm suspicious of how good electric cars are for example. If this project will wreak havoc on the local enviroment that is certainly very important and the irony of the situation is that it is getting sidelined in favour of broader enviromental concerns. I don't know what respective weights to attach to them, but the cynic in me says that washington prefers a big project which has better optics, then more local concerns.
Solar is great but the bottleneck is on battery capacity to carry those noon hours into evening for peak usage. Last I checked we had plenty of lithium and are mostly held back on refinement.
You know, this gets brought up every time, and I scratch my head as China and some other countries are just mass implementing any possible energy source. There's no one solution to the problem that will keep being the best solution. You just build, maintain, then build more and more and more and more and more to generate more energy. We shouldn't be debating "what is the most efficient" and only build that, because with that attitude, we just end up building nothing.
I really cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience. I guess because it has something for someone of any political stripe to dislike (fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables and storage - take your pick!) but in a few years when we’re all paying twice the electrical rates we’re paying today, we will probably wish we hadn’t been so doctrinaire.
> cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience
Anger is incredibly viral. In a country on social media, that means cutting opposition spreads faster than support. (Most elements of support, for this reason, scaffold themselves along opposition to something else. Even if that something is a manufactured totem.)
All of the above has a slight advantage, policywise. But it has, by sharing all its components’ weaknesses, a larger cross section than any one alone. Thus you’ll see all-the-above picked apart by the anti-renewable lobby at the same time as the anti-nuke and anti-gas greenies.
(Comprehensive energy policy articles on HN typically have a top-voted commentating the stupidity of a random component.)
Everyone wants to be "right", and prove others "wrong". It feels like building things have gotten very expensive, and margins are not that high, so it would only pay for itself in decades. Everyone is scared for committing to those numbers, and just keep running in circles until some magical thing is invented. Crazy stuff.
Yeah, it is dumb to require battery storage for new solar. We can use gas peaker plants like we always have. China is using coal peaker plants.
We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.
For non-mobile energy storage, I have my hopes on sodium or even saltwater batteries. They are less energy-dense than lithium-based batteries, but they have a longer lifetime, require less maintenance and you avoid the risk of a lithium fire.
Transition clients usage to variable and intermittent energy. Much of our current industrial stack assumes continuous energy. Like smelting. So develop techniques for quick starting and ramping up processes when energy is cheapest.
Time shift usage. Like HVAC pre-cooling buildings, pre-heat water, etc.
One benefit is increased resiliency.
Another is reducing peak usage.
Our current stack (generation, distribution, etc) is over built in order to accommodate the worst case scenario. IIRC, that's < 1% of the time. Adding batteries (strategically) to handle those peaks, instead of peaker gas generators, will be hugely impactful. And open up a lot of our currently built capacity to handle more demand.
I know you know these things. I'm just compelled to reiterate, for our viewing audience.
It's tough to turn that into a scalable, sustainable business. There are so many different types of EV battery packs and you can't just pull one out of an old car and hang it on someone's garage wall. You would typically have to break the old pack down, test the individual cells, and use them to construct a new pack. This is such a labor intensive process that it might not really be cost effective.
Ya, I'm unclear how old EV battery packs are being repurposed, at scale.
Maybe someone's gathering up identical packs, eg a specific generations of Tesla Model 3 packs, and turning just those into power walls or grid storage.
That said, methinks since battery recycling tech has scaled up ahead of demand, it's cheaper and faster to extract the misc minerals and make new, much much better, batteries (for grid storage).
I'm noob, so really wouldn't know. I guess we'll see.
I hope we see this more at the municipal level. Just thinking about dense neighborhoods with sizable lithium storage solutions raises eyebrows. One house fire could spread so quickly.
"Compared to lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries have somewhat lower cost, better safety characteristics (for the aqueous versions), and similar power delivery characteristics, but also a lower energy density (especially the aqueous versions)."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#cite_note-:...
Also, recent CATL PR releases about sodium ion only mention 'future cost savings' rather than anything about a 90% reduction in prices.
Hyperloop was more of an after-the-fact reaction to California's high speed rail project, which started 17yrs ago (2008). Five years before the Hyperloop white paper was published. Hyperloop came out 2013, not long after the 2012 announcement that the rail project's cost would double from $8B to $16B and it was already facing delays. Elon explicitly said he didn't like the project and it inspired him to look into alternatives.
Yes! And more importantly solar/wind are such an eyesore, ruining America's landscape! Coal is big and beautiful. We must have Coal plants in every city and American coal jobs. Solar and Wind are unhealthy! Wonder why the administration didn't outright make it a federal crime to use solar panels. /s
Why can't we just build reactors. Solar requires a ton of physical acreage (sorry, it's just true), plus all the battery storage and transmission and so on. Of course this requires some byzantine "environmental review" (ironic). I just want us to build reactors. We are going to look back on the 20th century anti-nuclear crusade with such disdain, it's really really sad.
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45553487
So did they cancel it or didn't they?
If they deny doing it, what blocks the project from continuing?
What blocks the project from continuing is the local environmental lobby and the national environmental lobby that has pushed for laws like NEPA that the group of projects was exempted from requiring individual approvals for.
Effectively the project required the exemption that allows them to group things together because regulation that some environmentalists lobbied for that is supported by the majority of environmentalists in America is used by some environmentalists to block all projects. Consequently, the cost for the projects is high and the certainty of their completion is low.
These make the projects risky. The federal government revoked this exemption so that the projects have to go through the same environmental review as every other project, because that is what many environmentalists have argued for and the most powerful environmentalists have won.
Therefore many things are simultaneously true:
* the dept of the interior did not cancel the projects
* they returned them to normal conditions
* normal conditions make the projects hard to do
* they de-facto canceled them by making them hard to do
No silly. They just canceled the PERMIT for the project. The developers are welcome to resubmit seven separate applications in the future which will all be processed at snail’s pace and the arbitrarily canceled again.
[flagged]
> my guess is that they want to collect bribes (sorry, 'presidential library donations')
Green account, making an off-topic comment about partisan conspiracies… and it’s voted to the top
Green account myself, it's an older code, sir, but it checks out.
Is it a conspiracy if companies are paying it?
Are these specific companies paying for said bribes? Or is it still guesses?
shouldn't you expect that they havent paid the bribe?
It is a conspiracy as long as evidence is not forthcoming.
[flagged]
Environmental regulations are the real reason we have climate change, not polluting for profit. Brilliant!
You make an argument as if all environmentalists were the same entity. It's really very reductionist, maybe this isn't the right forum for you
He literally didn't
> the environmentalists are the ones who
Literally says that. The 2024 Honda Pilots are …
‘Some’ X are Y, is talking about a subgroup of X, ‘the’ X are Y is talking about all X.
Beyond often it’s people trying to create barriers to something who setup these kinds of reviews not environmentalists. In old cities you’ll see people using historic preservation for similar ends.
Language doesn't follow formal logical rules like that.
Words have meaning, it’s not strict logical constructs yet A or B means something different than A and B.
Sure English generally uses an exclusive or rather than a logical or, but as long as approximate meaning is conveyed that’s fine.
Oh wait, I can rewrite this for you. Here you go:
Yeah, ultimately they denied that you could group together all these projects under one environmental review as an exception to normal rules. But many of the most influential environmental organizations, and a majority of those shaping modern permitting policy, have supported or defended regulatory structures that make large-scale energy projects extremely difficult to approve while also actively using those regulatory structures to kill major projects. Many prominent environmental groups have, at various times, opposed nuclear, solar, wind, or geothermal projects in the US: sometimes over local impacts, sometimes procedural grounds, and sometimes due to broader philosophical objections. Taken together, the net effect of those positions may have been to slow or block clean energy deployment more than almost any other political force, and therefore they may have been the largest policy contributors to climate change in much of the United States.
There we go. I think you can probably retune every comment you read with an LLM so that there's lots of hedging in it like this and then you can satisfy your own need for sufficient phatic phrases. But this one is from a human, given to you for free. If you don't like my comments, ask dang to ban me.
I learned a word today! Thank you!
phat·ic
/ˈfadik/
adjective
denoting or relating to language used for general purposes of social interaction, rather than to convey information or ask questions. Utterances such as hello, how are you? and nice morning, isn't it? are phatic.
Origin: GREEK: phatos (spoken)
One article brought quite a lot of complaints from conservationists over the project which i find ironic. As someone else here said if rules exist they should be applied equally to everyone. In this case the biden administration suspended them in order to help the project and now they are being reinstated.
Conservation and environmentalism are two different things. Preventing a particular population of turtles from being disrupted is conservation, reducing smog in a city is environmentalism. Their goals may overlap, and many people who care about the environment also care about the things that live in those environments, but their goals may at times be at odds. Delaying the implementation of a solar plant, which helps reduce pollution at the expense of consuming a small area of land, is a perfect example.
I don't see why its so ironic. The environment isn't a binary. Its a complex system where the same thing can have both good and bad effects on different parts. Conservationists aren't climate change scientists. They are both going to be focused on the separate parts of the environment they specialize in.
We can evaluate if these projects as a net positive or negative for the enviroment. The enviroment can be divided into local and wider. Which is why i'm suspicious of how good electric cars are for example. If this project will wreak havoc on the local enviroment that is certainly very important and the irony of the situation is that it is getting sidelined in favour of broader enviromental concerns. I don't know what respective weights to attach to them, but the cynic in me says that washington prefers a big project which has better optics, then more local concerns.
Solar is great but the bottleneck is on battery capacity to carry those noon hours into evening for peak usage. Last I checked we had plenty of lithium and are mostly held back on refinement.
You know, this gets brought up every time, and I scratch my head as China and some other countries are just mass implementing any possible energy source. There's no one solution to the problem that will keep being the best solution. You just build, maintain, then build more and more and more and more and more to generate more energy. We shouldn't be debating "what is the most efficient" and only build that, because with that attitude, we just end up building nothing.
I really cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience. I guess because it has something for someone of any political stripe to dislike (fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables and storage - take your pick!) but in a few years when we’re all paying twice the electrical rates we’re paying today, we will probably wish we hadn’t been so doctrinaire.
> cannot understand why an “all of the above” approach to energy production has basically no political salience
Anger is incredibly viral. In a country on social media, that means cutting opposition spreads faster than support. (Most elements of support, for this reason, scaffold themselves along opposition to something else. Even if that something is a manufactured totem.)
All of the above has a slight advantage, policywise. But it has, by sharing all its components’ weaknesses, a larger cross section than any one alone. Thus you’ll see all-the-above picked apart by the anti-renewable lobby at the same time as the anti-nuke and anti-gas greenies.
(Comprehensive energy policy articles on HN typically have a top-voted commentating the stupidity of a random component.)
Everyone wants to be "right", and prove others "wrong". It feels like building things have gotten very expensive, and margins are not that high, so it would only pay for itself in decades. Everyone is scared for committing to those numbers, and just keep running in circles until some magical thing is invented. Crazy stuff.
Yeah, it is dumb to require battery storage for new solar. We can use gas peaker plants like we always have. China is using coal peaker plants.
We will need to retire them in future where renewables are everywhere. Maybe wind is good enough to fill the hole at night. Maybe new battery chemistry is cheap. Maybe some other storage tech works out. Maybe they can be converted to hydrogen for long term storage.
Battery capacity is not what this article is about.
For non-mobile energy storage, I have my hopes on sodium or even saltwater batteries. They are less energy-dense than lithium-based batteries, but they have a longer lifetime, require less maintenance and you avoid the risk of a lithium fire.
Yes, both. Sure, build batteries, but also over-provision to avoid dipping into batteries. As a society we’ll find ways to waste excess energy!
Yes and:
Transition clients usage to variable and intermittent energy. Much of our current industrial stack assumes continuous energy. Like smelting. So develop techniques for quick starting and ramping up processes when energy is cheapest.
Time shift usage. Like HVAC pre-cooling buildings, pre-heat water, etc.
One benefit is increased resiliency.
Another is reducing peak usage.
Our current stack (generation, distribution, etc) is over built in order to accommodate the worst case scenario. IIRC, that's < 1% of the time. Adding batteries (strategically) to handle those peaks, instead of peaker gas generators, will be hugely impactful. And open up a lot of our currently built capacity to handle more demand.
I know you know these things. I'm just compelled to reiterate, for our viewing audience.
Discarded EV batteries with 70% life remaining seem like a viable path to energy storage for households.
It's tough to turn that into a scalable, sustainable business. There are so many different types of EV battery packs and you can't just pull one out of an old car and hang it on someone's garage wall. You would typically have to break the old pack down, test the individual cells, and use them to construct a new pack. This is such a labor intensive process that it might not really be cost effective.
Ya, I'm unclear how old EV battery packs are being repurposed, at scale.
Maybe someone's gathering up identical packs, eg a specific generations of Tesla Model 3 packs, and turning just those into power walls or grid storage.
That said, methinks since battery recycling tech has scaled up ahead of demand, it's cheaper and faster to extract the misc minerals and make new, much much better, batteries (for grid storage).
I'm noob, so really wouldn't know. I guess we'll see.
I hope we see this more at the municipal level. Just thinking about dense neighborhoods with sizable lithium storage solutions raises eyebrows. One house fire could spread so quickly.
New sodium battery tech just came out, allegedly 1/10 the price.
"Compared to lithium-ion batteries, sodium-ion batteries have somewhat lower cost, better safety characteristics (for the aqueous versions), and similar power delivery characteristics, but also a lower energy density (especially the aqueous versions)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium-ion_battery#cite_note-:...
Also, recent CATL PR releases about sodium ion only mention 'future cost savings' rather than anything about a 90% reduction in prices.
Battery tech research claims are always outlandish. As usual, the proof is what can be brought to market.
Yeah, let’s wait for that tech to mature just like we waited on building high speed rail because hyperloop was around the corner… \s
Hyperloop was more of an after-the-fact reaction to California's high speed rail project, which started 17yrs ago (2008). Five years before the Hyperloop white paper was published. Hyperloop came out 2013, not long after the 2012 announcement that the rail project's cost would double from $8B to $16B and it was already facing delays. Elon explicitly said he didn't like the project and it inspired him to look into alternatives.
Yes! And more importantly solar/wind are such an eyesore, ruining America's landscape! Coal is big and beautiful. We must have Coal plants in every city and American coal jobs. Solar and Wind are unhealthy! Wonder why the administration didn't outright make it a federal crime to use solar panels. /s
Why can't we just build reactors. Solar requires a ton of physical acreage (sorry, it's just true), plus all the battery storage and transmission and so on. Of course this requires some byzantine "environmental review" (ironic). I just want us to build reactors. We are going to look back on the 20th century anti-nuclear crusade with such disdain, it's really really sad.