Re: The Physics Behind the Spanish Blackout

On 12/06/2025 7:32 pm, David Brown wrote:

On 11/06/2025 17:19, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 11/06/2025 10:58 pm, David Brown wrote:

On 11/06/2025 13:03, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 11/06/2025 5:05 pm, David Brown wrote:

On 10/06/2025 19:01, Bill Sloman wrote:

On 11/06/2025 1:32 am, David Brown wrote:

On 10/06/2025 15:49, Bill Sloman wrote:

...

 

Why would the "fossil carbon extraction industry" even care about this book?  You seem to be imagining some shadowing conspiracy group that is directing a war on electricity and the earth's climate.  That's nonsense - there's just a bunch of companies trying to make a profit from their businesses and investments, and down-playing the risks in order to make a short-term profit.

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It is not nonsense. It has been going on for some twenty years now. George Monbiot in his 2006 book "Heat" devoted a chapter to it.
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https://www.monbiot.com/books/heat/
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In 2010 it was worth writing a whole book about it
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merchants_of_Doubt
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It did point out that the same people who were lying about climate change had originally started their businesses to lie about the health risks of smoking tobacco, which made the story even better.
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People who want to keep on selling gasoline to car drivers don't want their customers to switch to electric cars, and they spread lying propaganda to discourage them.
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It's just normal capitalism, and like any other branch of industry, it is a problem when they are too powerful.  But it doesn't help to be paranoid and imagine a conspiracy that does not exist.

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The "conspiracy" really does exist, and it is well documented. There's nothing paranoid about being realistic about the way consumers are misinformed. Ignoring the manipulation saves you from having to think about it, but that's a false economy.
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Companies that make their living from fossil fuels do not care about some little book written by a journalist.  Why should they?

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Because well-informed customers do read that kind of book, and make choices that cost the fossil fuel companies sales,
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 You are /completely/ disconnected from reality.

I'm sure you like to think that.

How many potential car customers read books like that?  0.01% ?  Maybe 0.001% ?  Of those, how many people choose to buy an electric car rather than a fossil fuel car because they have read such a book?  In total, you could count the cases on the fingers of one hand.

Individual car customers may not read that kind of book, but they read newspapers and get exposed to the prevailing climate of opinion. Tesla's car sales around the world have dropped dramatically in the past six months, apparently because of his US- government activities.

People's thoughts on what is "right" - morally, environmentally, politically, religiously, etc., - are based on what they hear from friends, what they see on TV, Youtube, Tiktok, and the like.  Books are a tiny, tiny proportion of the influence - or rather, an influence on a tiny, tiny proportion of people.

Says somebody who doesn't seem to read enough of them, and is now making excuses for it.

And all these sources of influence can be highly biased, present a distorted view, or be completely wrong. Books are not immune to that, though they are usually be more factually reliable than Tiktok.

It's easier to sue somebody who has published a malicious lie in a book.

Once a potential customer has decided on their idealistic stance - they want to "go green", or they think climate change is all a conspiracy theory from the Chinese - they look at the practicalities and the economics.  And those override the idealism nine times out of ten - idealism typically only matters in the event of a tie.

I don't think that many people adopt any kind of idealistic stance, but they do worry if the people from whom they buy their consumer durables look to be unlikely to stay in business much longer.

Those small proportions do add up, gradually.  If one in ten buyers chooses the environmentally better option, then that will lead to greater availability, better infrastructure, lower prices, and more investment and development in the field - making it a more practical choice for others.
 None of this is, however, affected by books by journalists "revealing" the "truth" about some industry.

It depends on the nature of "the truth" revealed. Ralph Nader had quite a lot of influence.

Very occasionally, some politician might have read the book and ask challenging questions in parliament, or the author will appear on a panel show or debate show and raise awareness.  But that's rare.  Virtually all such books generate a few inches of newspaper column (for those that still read newspapers), then migrate to airport bookshops.  Most copies that are bought are unread - and for most that are read, the reader will think "that's interesting and thought-provoking" - then forget about them.  Again, the tiny levels of influence do add up, slowly, and it is a good thing that these kinds of books are written and published.  But to imagine that they directly affect companies' bottom lines through "informed customers" is ludicrous.

The fossil carbon extraction industry is spending quite a lot money on lying propaganda designed to limit the influence of some of those books.
It would be ludicrous if it didn't work.

I say all this as a person who reads such books (though not those particular ones you happen to have read) - and who tries learn from many sources.

Without much evidence of success.

The people  who read a book like that have no influence of significance. The people that invest in their companies, or buy their products, wouldn't bother with such a book.

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The do get bothered when the sales volumes start to shrink. Oil companies used to advertise their products to get the sales volumes up.
That's what you do when you care about what your customers think.

 Of course companies care what their customers think, and what influences them!  That is why they advertise.  But they do not care what books they read, because the influence is totally and completely negligible.

You may want to neglect it. The money spent on lying counter-propaganda suggests that companies involved don't share that view.

So saying "electric car owning households are tending to have both" is nonsense.

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Electric cars are becoming more popular and about 40% of new roof-top solar installation in Australia include a roughly car-sized battery.
It's not nonsense.

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Yes, it is nonsense.
 The reality is that in sunny places, people can get cheap (in amortized costs over time) electricity by putting solar panels on their roofs and such installations might include a battery so that the solar-generated energy is available through the night.  Other installations don't have a battery - they simply sell the solar power back on the grid, for use in industry and other customers during the sunlight hours.

That's what used to happen in Australia, when there wasn't much of it being generated. As roof-top solar became more profitable it got harder to cope with it, and the utilities discouraged people from doing it - first by paying less, then by making it pretty much impossible.
At that point putting in your own battery became a decidedly profitable option. You pretty much stopped having to buy power from the grid - though you still had to pay for the connection. A friend of mine moved house recently, and put the whole package into his new house, and is now pretty much self-sufficient. He's still got an internal combustion engine car. If he ever gets an electric car, that may shift a bit.

 People choose to have solar panels based on the cost - comparing the cost of installing them to the amount of electricity they will generate and the cost (or sale price) of that electricity.  And of course that requires that you own a house and live in a sunny place.

Australia is pretty much all sunny. If you live in a flat, as I do, you don't have the option.

People choose to have a house battery based on the capital cost, the differences between electricity prices during the day and night, their electricity needs, and the reliability and stability of their grid-supplied power.

Around here it is well known that the battery is a profitable option, if you have the capital to pay for it.

People choose to have electric cars because of costs (including tax breaks, subsidies, etc.), where they can use them (such as in low-emission zones in cities, collective traffic lanes, etc.), and personal preference.

Electricity is cheaper than petrol. Fuel cost isn't a big part of the expense of owning a car - depreciation is main expense.

Of course there will be a correlation between these three things.  In particular, if you have solar panels then it is quite likely that you will also have a house battery.
 But the suggestion that "electric car owning households tend to have house batteries" is nonsense.  It is probably fair to say that there is a substantial correlation in Australia, at the moment - but as a general statement, it is flat-out wrong.

If it is correct in Australia, it isn't flat-out wrong. It may or may not generalise to other countries, but as a trend I suspect that it does.

Australia is a rich country with a high proportion of home owners and a high proportion of stand-alone homes (rather than flats).  It is a very sunny country, and has high and volatile electricity prices.  So amongst the richer segment of the population, you will get a lot of solar panels, and a fair proportion of these will have batteries.  It is also amongst those richer people that you will see electric car ownership, probably in addition to fossil fuel cars.  Thus you see a correlation. If and when electric car ownership spreads significantly in Australia, that correlation will disappear as people living in flats, apartments, smaller houses, etc., get electric cars - they will not have solar panels, or house batteries.

Flats and apartments don't have solar panels or batteries at the moment. There a certain amount of agitation to work out ways of making this possible. The building committee that control my apartment block isn't all that interested at the moment - they are still working out how to provide charging points for electric cars parked in our basement parking, but it's going to happen eventually.

When you look at most other countries, the correlation was never there in the first place.  (The exception might be the USA, where electric car ownership is mostly in California which has similarities with Australia.) 

Or sat least that's your guess.

Norway is the country with far and away the highest per-capita electric car ownership - perhaps 50 times that of Australia (though Australia's rate is increasing faster).  Solar power, and house batteries, are very rare here - it is not the sunniest country on earth.

It's not so much lack of sun as being close to the Arctic circle. The sun doesn't far above the horizon in winter, and doesn't stay above it for all that long.

The "environmentally damaging" line seems to come from the usual propaganda sources. Nobody seems to be much fussed about Australia's lithium mines, which is odd because our greenies get excited about most mining operations. Australia has quite a lot of lithium mines with many hard-rock, pegmatite-hosted lithium resources, largely in Western Australia.

 Australia's lithium mining is a noticeably less environmentally damaging source than many other sources of lithium throughout the world.

Which has more to do with our greenies being a noisy bunch, by international standards, than anything fundamental.
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Bill Sloman, Sydney