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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Microgrids And The Indian Power Outage



I think it is first and foremost a demand and supply problem, not a grid problem. Although I think microgrids can help. But the real solution is on the moon.

How Power Outages in India May One Day Be Avoided
Some 600 million people in India have been left without power after parts of the country's massive electricity grid collapsed Tuesday. ..... the simple backup diesel generators that are keeping many essential services in India going right now ...... distributed solar can be cheaper than running diesel generators alone for backup power. "Solar power is very attractive when compared to diesel generators in the daytime" ...... While news reports suggested that there are 600 million people who lost power with this week's outages, that's almost certainly an overestimate—if only because hundreds of millions of people in India didn't have grid power to start with.

It's Climate Change, Stupid


A few years back random fires were getting started all over Greece. The authorities went ahead and arrested the known arsonists.

It was climate change.

This past winter in NYC was unusually warm. That was climate change. This summer in NYC was unusually hot. That was climate change.

This thing is for real.

Is Climate Change to Blame for the Current U.S. Drought?
In large parts of the Midwest, the drought has reached the worst classification possible, a D4 drought that could bring "exceptional and widespread crop and pasture losses" and "water emergencies" due to shortages in reservoirs, streams, and wells ....... the drought will worsen. ..... we're seeing, not only here in the U.S., but across the globe, events that we've never before witnessed in our instrumental record, and it's quite apparent there's a human contribution ..... You actually see more precipitation in the mid and high latitudes like Canada and the northern U.S. border, less precipitation in the southwestern U.S. and along the subtropics. You're seeing a whole shift in the atmospheric circulation system
The time to act was yesterday.