Comments by "Michael RCH" (@michaelrch) on "Steel and coal tariffs a factor in Pennsylvania primaries" video.

  1. YNW Rack It’s actually a lot more interesting than that. The US is huge in terms of its capacity to generate energy from lots of different clean sources across the country. What is on the drawing board of the major power companies are very large, very high power DC grids and very large power storage resources such as hydro and massive deployment of batteries, as well as a diverse range of sources such as hydro, solar, wind and gas. Nuclear is actually fantastically expensive so it’s not very useful. When you have a very large grid then you can get power from where it’s abundant (eg solar in Arizona or wind in Texas) to where it’s needed (eg large cities like Chicago, New York and Houston) even though those cities are a long way away. And when there is excess capacity in the grid then that can be stored on a large scale in things like pump storage hydro plants and a huge array of batteries, deployed in everything from large plants near isolated towns to your car and in-home battery pack (like the Tesla Powerwall). And all this technology is now affordable. It pays for itself in a few years. If you install solar panels with a loan in somewhere like Texas or Florida, you have paid for them in reduced power bills within 5-7 years, after which you are saving every day from then on, plus your house is worth more because it has its own power plant. This is all just a question of smart engineering and people’s economic and political decisions. The cost to switch to green power generation has been shown to now be a rounding error on economic growth over the next couple of decades. In fact, several studies show that it will directly save money. Even if you don’t think climate change is a thing, it’s actually cheaper and much healthier to switch away from fossil fuels, especially coal which is the worst in every single category. It’s not even cheap to extract any more...
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