Category: Environment

Post G24-010: Growing ginger in Virginia? This needs a rethink.

 

Ginger and I have had a difficult relationship.

It’s not because I tried to murder her, early on, shown above (Post G24-003, addendum).  We’ve moved past that.

It’s not because her Tinder profile looked so different from her appearance in real life.  I said I’d take her warts and all.

The problem is, she did not disclose that she likes it hot and dirty.  And I’m just not able to deliver that kind of action.  Not in my current situation.

Turns out, ginger thrives at a soil temperature of around 90F, with a minimum acceptable soil temperature of 70F.

Currently (mid-April) the dirt in my garden is around 50F. And there’s no way it’s going to get to 90F.  Heck, it’s not even warm enough in my house to grow it.  Which I think explains why, more than two months after I started down this path, my ginger plants are alive, but only a few inches tall.

This whole “grow ginger in a temperate climate” thing needs a re-think.

In a nutshell, my garden soil just doesn’t get hot enough, here in Zone 7.  So, I’m going to make a planter designed to get the soil as warm as possible.

Maybe.  This post is just Part 1, where I pin down the issue by (finally) looking up the actual data on soil temperature in my region.

Background

This year, on a whim, I decided to grow some ginger.

To be clear, ginger is a tropical plant.  Worse, it’s a tropical plant with a 10-month growing season.

But the internet told me that it’s easy to grow it in a temperate climate.   YouTube told me the same.  Which makes it unanimous.  So it must be true, right?

After toting a couple of trays of scraggly-looking ginger plants into and out of the house over the past month, it has finally dawned on me that, eh, maybe I got some bad advice somewhere along the line.

I now realize that:

1)  Everybody who told me I could grow it in a cool climate actually lives in a warm climate.  Australia, Arizona, and similar places.  A mix of hot desert, tropical, and sub-tropical climates.  So the folks I actually observe growing ginger, and being happy about it, all live where it’s very hot.

2)  They all casually mention that, oh, by the way, ginger does well in pots, in cooler areas.

I finally put two and two together to realize that ginger is never going to grow adequately in a Virginia Zone 7 garden. The soil is just too cool.

Survive, yes.  With enough work, you can get almost any plant to survive.  For example, I have a lime tree that survives in my climate, via moving into and out of the garage all winter long.  But thrive?  In the dirt in my garden?  That’s not looking promising.

Raised beds and garden soil temperature.

And bullshit.

Sometimes I am amazed by the things I’ll take at face value, just because everybody repeats them, and they seem reasonable.

That, rather than getting off my duff and doing the tiniest bit of actual investigation.

We all know that one of the advantages of raised garden beds is that they allow the soil to warm up faster in the spring.  And we all know that because every site on the internet discussing raised garden beds repeats that.

In this case, the “investigation” involved sticking an instant-read thermometer a few inches into the dirt in my garden.   This, from about a week ago:

  1. Lawn adjacent to raised beds:  49F
  2. Raised beds:  …………………..  49F to 50F
  3. Lawn under black plastic for two months:  52F

Maybe very tall raised beds result in markedly earlier warming of the soil.  But short raised beds (around 1′ tall) do squat for spring soil temperature.  Even the surface warming from covering the soil in black plastic was minimal.

Seems like my dirt is going to be the temperature it wants to be, and that’s that.

How did I ever miss the opportunity to obsessively measure the temperature of my garden soil?

But the fact is, I didn’t do that.  So I’m going to have to take some generic soil temperature data and take some reasoned guesses.

This site discussing ground-source heat pumps is probably adequate, with the underlying data ultimately cited to Virginia Tech.

Source:  Builditsolar.com, underlying data are from Virginia Tech.

The year-round average soil temperature where I live (which is also the deep down soil temperature) is around 57F.  As shown above.

Source:  Same as above, but highly simplified from the original diagram.

Near-surface soil temperatures ought to vary about 20F above and 20F below that average, as shown above.  Right now (mid-April), that chart predicts that my near-surface soil temperature should be about 50F.   Which is spot on.  So let me now use the rest of the chart.

Based on the chart above, for my locale:

  • It will be mid-June before the soil is warm enough to plant ginger outside (70F).
  • I will have less than four months of soil temperature of 70F or higher.
  • Soil temperatures will never get anywhere close to 90F.

The bottom line is that if I treat ginger as a houseplant until mid-June, then plant it in my garden, I might get some growth out of it.  But my garden soil is never going hit temperatures at which ginger thrives.

Sure, I can grow ginger in my garden, in my climate.  Just like the internet said.

I just can’t grow it very well.

Funny how nobody ever titled their video “how to expend enormous effort to grow a small amount of ginger in a temperate climate”.  All I got were these subtle little hints, along the lines of “ginger does well in pots in cooler climates”.

How to expend enormous effort to grow a small amount of ginger in a temperate climate.

Now that my eyes have been opened, the obvious and sensible next step is to wish my ginger seedlings the best of luck.

As I toss them on the compost heap.

Instead, I’m going to look at what scraps of materials I have lying around and see if i can come up with a planter designed to overheat the soil.  Which, even as I say that, sounds really stupid.  But actually kind of makes sense, in this context.

You’ll have to stay tuned for the actual build.

Summary

Yes, you can grow ginger in a USDA Zone 7 temperate climate.

Nope, you can’t do it well, in the dirt, outdoors.  The soil does not get warm enough for optimal growth.

This will almost certainly grow better in a pot than in the ground, because the soil in a pot will get a lot warmer.  Hence the often-repeated hint that ginger does well in pots.

I’m still pondering what to do next.  One obvious step is just to transplant to some planters, and wait.  One step up from would be to put together a planter that’s designed to overheat the soil.  That’s an interesting if somewhat oddball challenge.

Or maybe just to toss ginger into the compost heap.  Because the basic notion that I can grow this well, in my garden, in my climate, now appears to be dead wrong.

Addendum:  Ginger, meet Darwin

 

I guess the last straw was figuring out that it’s too cold in my house to grow ginger.  I was OK with growing it as a house plant.  But now I realize that I’m going to have to run electric heating pads indoors and/or build a greenhouse outdoors, just to prolong my relationship with ginger through mid-June .  That’s just out of the question.

I considered going all-in for some sort of fancy planter design that would use solar heating to try to boost soil heat.  But when looked up planter designs, it seems that nobody has any thoughts on building a planter designed to overheat the soil.  That strongly suggests it’s a truly dumb idea, if you can’t even find a mention of it on the internet.

For soil warming, the sole option seems to be electric heating cables.  If I’m not willing to run electric heat inside the house, that goes double for running it outside.

The ideal planter for ginger is broad and relatively shallow.  Depending on the source, ginger needs between 8″ and 12″ of soil depth in a planter.  But it needs horizontal room for the rhizome to grow.  The combination of those factors means that an efficient planter for ginger is basically a flat, deep tray.

Given that, it’s more-or-less a fools’ errand to try to keep that heated above ambient temperatures.  Even if I insulated the bottom and sides, the heat losses through the top would, in the long run, mean that the planter is going to match the average air temperature around it, plus or minus.

So I did the best for ginger that I could do.  Above you see some 10″ deep crates, lined, filled with loose, well-draining potting soil, topped with about an inch of my finest kitchen-scrap compost.  These now sit against a southeast-facing wall, and get sun from roughly solar 9 AM to solar 1 PM. The loose clear sheet on the front will eventually be taped up to provide a kind of double-insulated window effect along the sunward-facing edge.

By 5 PM, after a few hours in the shade, the soil in those planters is still around 80F.  So maybe, just by luck, I may finally be giving ginger just what she needs.

I’ve now extended a simple irrigation setup to include these planters.  That’s run off a timer, because I inevitably forget to water my potted plants.  Beyond that, I’m going to put together some “box tops” out of radiant barrier material — simple caps to fit over these trays and reflect the heat back to the tray overnight.  But that’s for tomorrow.

If ginger survives and prospers in that location, then it was meant to be.  If not, I’ll chalk it up as a failed relationship, and move on to the next new thing.

Post #1960: The U.S. is resolving the chaos in the EV charging market. Slowly.

 

This post started off as planning for a road trip from Vienna VA to a town in rural upstate New York.  The catch being that I planned to take my Chevy Bolt EV.

If you look at the map above, it seems like it should be easy.  There appear to be EV charging stations all over my planned route.  But the more I looked at the details, the less I understood.  And the more I realized that most of those chargers pictured above are useless to me. Continue reading Post #1960: The U.S. is resolving the chaos in the EV charging market. Slowly.

Post #1954: LA is a great big freeway. Put a hundred down and buy a car …

 

I just got back from a trip to Los Angeles. A business trip of sorts.

All other aspects aside, LA provided a stark reminder of just how long cars last, and how many miles they can travel, in the right climate.

That was just one of several observations suggesting that our current civilization is doomed by climate change.

Move north and build a bunker, like the rich folks are doing.  That, if you plan on being alive 30 years from now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the only sensible response to global warming that remains.

If nothing else, read this to understand why it makes sense that the Federal government seems to be pushing too hard to change the U.S. auto fleet.  They aren’t aiming for conditions today.  They’re aiming for conditions two decades from now, when half of today’s new cars will still be on the road.   If people today weren’t a little put out by it, the Feds wouldn’t be doing their job.

Like a vegan at a barbecue

I wasn’t prepared for the social aspects of being in a crowd in an airport.  I rarely fly, and I’d forgotten what it was like.  In hindsight, putting it together logically:

  1. airports attract people who like to fly, and
  2. it’s noisy, so everybody talks loudly, and
  3. they tend to talk about all the wonderful trips they’ve taken recently, and
  4. the further the trip, the more noteworthy.

So there I sat, a Prius-driving, EV-purchasing eco-nerd, trapped in the middle of a crowd whose principal pastime was, in effect, bragging about how much they added to global warming for their amusement. I.e., who among us had recently taken the most exotic vacation or series of vacations.  And then giving each other oohs and ahhs for feedback.

The prize went to the elderly British couple behind me, who lovingly recited their recent adventures.  They had just flown into LA via Hawaii, after a brief trip to New Zealand.  And were now flying across the U.S., prior to flying across the Atlantic, for a brief stay at home, before their next jolly little jaunt.  Footloose and carefree, they were the most eco-heedless, old people with all the time and money in the world. 

After choking down the FOMO that naturally arises from being forced to listen to that, I did something else I rarely do:  I put on headphones and listened to music full-blast, just to drown out the conversations.

That seemed preferable to losing it in a full Jesus-vs-money-changers-at-the-temple scene.  That would have been completely inappropriate.  After all, what is an airport, if not a temple for those who worship the benefits high consumption of fossil fuels.

If nothing else, hunkering down with headphones, rather than causing a scene, maybe gave me a little more sympathy for those with mild autism.  But maybe it’s just condescending to say so.

Sometimes I feel as if I’m not quite as tightly wrapped as I used to be.

Carbon offsets for air travel?  F*ck it.

In my last post, I figured that this quick trip for two would add about 1.2 tons of C02 to my household carbon footprint this year.

I was prepared for that.  Went into it with my eyes open.  Where I’d guess that the average person in that crowd didn’t give it a passing thought.

The issue isn’t the gas mileage of airplanes versus other modes of transport.   Modern jets get somewhere in the range of 80 to 120 passenger-miles per gallon (per the medium-haul table in this Wikipedia article).

The issue is simply the travel distance.  Any way we’d have chosen to travel, we’d have generated quite a bit of C02.  Two people in a Prius would have generated about a ton.  Two people in a small EV, at the U.S. average generating mix, would have generated about 0.4 tons.

Anyway, my plan was to come home, and see if I could identify some sort of carbon offset that offered true additionality.  That is, that would actually reduce global carbon emissions in proportion to the money I paid for it.

Meanwhile, the airline’s attempts at greenwashing got under my skin.  I don’t know how many time we heard about how careful they would be about recycling the trash generated on board.  All the while, I’m trying to do the arithmetic about a couple of ounces of plastic and paper my wife and I plausibly generated, versus the appreciable fraction of a ton of fuel that we burned, getting from A to B and back again.

I’m clearly not their target audience.  I was hamstrung by my ability (and willingness) to do simple arithmetic.  Whereas they were targeting people with a willing suspension of disbelief.  I just couldn’t get with the message that dealing with our used Kleenexes in an environmentally-sensitive fashion turned this whole excursion into a bit of simple harmless fun.

In any case, after marinating in that milieu for a while, pondering my place in the universe, while frying my eardrums with Jimmy Buffet, I came to the conclusion above.

Better to save my money.  Give it to my kids so they can build a better bunker.

Air travel is just the tip of the iceberg

Source:  U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

That’s probably a bad choice of metaphor, given the topic.  But what I mean to convey is that U.S. air travel accounts for less than 4% of U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions.  It’s 10% of transportation emissions, which in turn are just under 40% of total U.S. emissions.

Instead, what got me into a truly dark mood about the future was a few things that really hit home in my brief visit to LA.

Now, in terms of the physical environment and the people, it couldn’t have been a nicer trip.  Mild temperature, beautiful landscaping, and uniformly friendly people.  That’s mostly what I take back from this trip.

But, to get that:

  1. You fly over hundreds of square miles of tightly-packed single-story bungalows.
  2. Everybody drives everywhere.
  3. Most people drive very nice cars.
  4. Almost all those cars were old-fashioned straight-gas vehicles.
  5. There’s an excellent public transportation system …
  6. … that is used exclusively by tourists and the poor.

In that city alone, millions of people have invested their life savings in property that only functions in that car-centric way.

We visited the Getty Villa, a museum situated on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Coast.  As it turned out, the easiest way to get there and back was to take the bus.  (Cell reception is so spotty that it’s all-but-impossible to hail an Uber from that location).  So we did, and we were pleasantly surprised with how nice the buses were, and how nice the bus drivers were, as we asked for directions on what to do next.

And, really, how nice all the drivers were.  Both my wife and I noted that in all the traveling we did in LA, we did not hear a car horn honk, even once.  And that drivers seemed to be quite cautious and courteous around pedestrians.  I can attest that both habits are absent in typical traffic in the DC suburbs.

What really drove it home was driving around with my wife’s cousin.  The idea of driving ten miles to hit up a nice restaurant didn’t phase her a bit.  That’s just business-as-usual there.  She was driving a beautiful nearly-new near-SUV (a “crossover”).  We got to talking, and this thing that appeared to be a nearly-new car had 135K miles on the odometer.  And not a speck of rust or blemish on the car’s finish.  That’s what can happen, in a place that rarely rains.  Cars can last a long time.

But I also noted that the mix of traditional, hybrid, and electric cars on the streets looked absolutely no different from the DC suburbs.  If anything, I noted a lower proportion of hybrids and electrics there than I see around town in Vienna VA.  Which would make sense, if what you’re looking at is generally older, but nice-looking, stock of vehicles.

In the U.S., we look to California to take the lead on all things environmental, at least in so far as they pertain to cars.  That’s why CARB — the California Air Resources Board — has such a nation-wide reach.  Any U.S. region that chronically violates EPA air pollution standards can adopt CARB rules as a way of not having to gin up its own plan to try to get air pollution levels below the health-based EPA standards.

Anyway, what really matters for C02 emissions is housing and transport.  LA — and all the cities like it — are locked into a bunch of long-lived investments (the housing stock) that requires massive amounts of vehicle travel, using a fleet of long-lived vehicles.  Basically, using the vehicles that might have made sense two or three decades ago, but are now just a dead weight as we try to preserve the livability of the planet.

Admittedly, with the generally nice weather, the buildings don’t consume anywhere as much energy per square foot as buildings on the East Coast do.

But the cars?  Cars just keep getting more reliable and longer-lived.  I’m guessing that most of the cars I saw on the road this past week will still be drive-able a decade from now.  And that a quarter of them will still be drive-able two decades from now.

And nothing is going to change that.  There’s no to wean that area off fossil fuels.  At least not over any time span I’m capable of imagining.

To be clear, the DC ‘burbs are largely in the same situation.  But the scale of it here isn’t nearly as obvious as it is in the flat, low-rise terrain of L.A.  Plus, here, cars will eventually rust out, buildings rot, and most of the construction is fairly new.  So while the DC ‘burbs feel ephemeral, to my eye, in L.A., it seem like the shabby post-WWII low-rise buildings that fill the blocks now would likely be there forever.  L.A. is a timeless sprawl, whereas DC feels like this is just a passing phase.

Conclusion

Source:  Ultimately, Dante’s Inferno.  The image is off YouTube.

People who don’t want to adapt to the new reality often point to the fact that most of the truly horrific changes from global warming are predicted to be a half-century or more in the future.  Things like the shutdown of the Gulf Stream, or the dust-bowlification of the interior of the North American continent.

But you lose sight of low long it will take us to change.  If every new car sold in LA were magically made into an EV, given how long cars last, you’d still have a big presence of gas-burning vehicles two decades from now.  And the houses?  Nothing is going to change the fact that L.A. consists of low-density housing as far as the eye can see.  Every house with a natural gas furnace is likely to be burning natural gas for heat for the rest of this century.

That’s set in stone.  Or wood and steel and pavement.  Or, ultimately, by zoning and property rights.  And every year where the majority of new cars are old-fashioned gas powered vehicles is another year where that’s set in stone.

Not to mention that, from the standpoint of a human lifetime, your fossil-fuel emissions today are very close to permanent.  About half the C02 you emit today will still be in the atmosphere warming the climate 200 years from now.  Even out to a time horizon of a millennium, something like a third of the C02 you emit today will still be around, warming the climate.  And that assumes that the current natural “sinks” for C02 — like the oceans, which currently absorb C02 — continue to function.  Which they won’t.  At some point, if we get the planet hot enough, Nature as a whole turns from a C02 sink to its own C02 source.

It’s not clear that it’s even worth trying to explain the disinformation that is spread about how long-lived our C02 emissions are.  But let me just tackle one actual fact that gets misstated all the time. 

You’ll read that, on average, every year, Nature absorbs about half of our annual C02 emissions.  That’s both correct and incorrect.  It’s correct in that every year, we emit about 10 gigatons of atmospheric carbon, and on average, every year, nature absorbs about five.  But those figures are completely unrelated to each other. 

On average, per year, Nature absorbs five gigatons a year out of the ~150 gigatons of excess carbon we’ve built up in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.  It’s that excess amount that (e.g.) drives C02 into solution in the ocean. 

And, completely unrelated, we still manage to emit another 10 gigatons of carbon each year. 

Nature would absorb 5 gigatons if we emitted zero.  Nature would absorb 5 if we emitted 100.  (On average, it varies quite a bit across years.)  And, purely by chance, right now, the amount Nature absorbs each year works out mathematically to be half of what we emit each year.  But there’s no cause-and-effect.  That’s just two unrelated numbers. 

The problem with that sound bite (Nature absorbs half) is that it makes it sound like all we have to do is cut back a bit, and Nature will clean up our mess.  Instead, when you do the detailed modeling — how quickly the various natural sinks are filling up, and so on — if we successfully got onto a path of zero C02 emissions by, say, mid-century — at best, it will take literal millennia for atmospheric C02 to return to the pre-industrial level.

There are other commonly-spread canards in this area, but that’s the only one that even knowledgeable people misstate, in a way that minimizes the problem.  From the standpoint of a human lifetime, our C02 emissions are more-or-less permanent.   It’s not that half of what you emitted, last year, got re-absorbed.  It’s that a few percent of the cumulative total excess emissions got re-absorbed by Nature last year.  That long “tail” of the C02 we emit today is just one of the many reasons why most people who have an accurate grasp of the underlying science tend to be more than a bit freaked out about the problem of global warming.

The lyrics that I borrowed for the title of this post are more than a half-century old (reference).  By all appearances, if you live in L.A., you’re going to live that same 1960s L.A. lifestyle now and for the indefinite future.

For however long this relic of the past lasts.

Even with one foot in the grave, I’m not about to start jet-setting.  It’s just not who I am.  But I think I’m done with trying to go the extra mile with reducing my carbon footprint.

So maybe I’ll look around for some carbon offsets that plausibly have true additionality.  But these days, I have to view that as a form of amusement, instead of anything of practical value.  I think most of us are now on the right path, but collectively, it’s going to take us far too long to get there.

Post #1953: Penance for flying?

 

I hate flying.  And yet, my wife and I will soon be taking a flight on a Boeing 737-Max-9, from Virginia to the West Coast and back.

To get in the right mood for the flight, I’m going to calculate just how much this adds to my carbon footprint for the year.   And then start on the path to doing some penance for it.  If that’s even feasible. Continue reading Post #1953: Penance for flying?

Post #1952, addendum 1: How big are Virginia’s batteries going to be?

In the prior post, I finally tracked down and read the Commonwealth of Virginia’s plans for fully de-carbonizing its electrical grid by mid-century. It boils down to replacing the existing natural-gas fired electrical capacity with a combination of wind, solar, and … great big batteries.  You need the batteries because solar and wind are intermittent power sources.

That’s my reading of the law.

Literally, the law calls for the construction of “energy storage” facilities.  While there are ways of storing electrical energy other than batteries, practically speaking, I’m pretty sure that means batteries of some type.

Source:  Wikipedia

For example, Dominion (Virginia’s main electric utility) already owns the largest pumped-storage facility in the world, the Bath County Pumped Storage Station (shown above, per Wikipedia).  That site stores energy by using electricity to pump water uphill from one reservoir to another, and then generates electricity as needed by allowing that water to flow downhill through generating turbines.

Sites suitable for pumped-storage facilities are few and far between.  And other alternatives to batteries tend to be grossly inefficient (e.g., converting electricity to hydrogen, and back again).  So it’s not beyond reason to expect that most of the energy storage that is required to be in the pipeline by 2035 will be battery-based storage of some sort.

The point of this post is to ask whether that seems even remotely feasible and plausible.

And, surprisingly — to me at least — the answer is yes.  Yes, it does seem feasible to produce the required battery-based storage in that timeframe.  Producing and installing (my guess for) the amount of battery capacity required to be in the works by 2035 would be the equivalent of adding grid-connected battery capacity required for manufacturing 400,000 Chevy-Bolt-size electric vehicles.  That much, over the course of more than a decade.  Where Virginia’s current stock of EVs is about 56,000 registered EVs.

Roughly speaking, on a per-year basis, those grid-based batteries will add as much to the demand for batteries as the current manufacture of EVs does.  Given the rapid growth in EVs, and concomitant expansion of world battery manufacturing capacity, filling that amount of demand, in that timeframe, seems completely feasible to me.

That involves some serious guesswork on my part, due to the way the law was written (next section).  But if that’s anywhere in the ballpark, then yeah, then Virginia’s path toward a carbon-free grid isn’t outlandish at all.

Big batteries, and an error in Commonwealth statute?

1. By December 31, 2035, each Phase I Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 400 megawatts of energy storage capacity. ... 

2. By December 31, 2035, each Phase II Utility shall petition the Commission for necessary approvals to construct or acquire 2,700 megawatts of energy storage capacity.

Source:  Commonwealth of Virginia statute, emphasis mine.

Virginia law appears to call for our public utilities to build or buy at least 3,100 megawatts of electrical storage capacity as part of this process.

Those of you who are well-versed on the difference between energy and power will have already spotted the problem.  Megawatts is not a measure of electrical storage capacity.  So the law is written oddly, or possibly incorrectly, no matter how you slice it.

Power is a rate of energy flow per unit of time.  In particular, for electricity, the watt is a unit of power, not an amount of energy.  The electrical unit of energy is the watt-hour.

E.g., the brightness of an old-fashioned incandescent light was determined by its wattage.  But the amount of energy it used was based on its wattage, times the amount of time it was turned on, or total watt-hours used to light it.

When in doubt, just remember that you pay your public utility for the energy you use.  And in Virginia, we pay about 12.5 cents per thousand watt-hours.  (A.k.a. kilowatt-hours.  Or KWH.)

Returning to the Bath County pumped storage facility referenced above, it has a peak power output of 3,000 megawatts, and a total storage of 24,000 megawatt-hours.  Doing the math, if it starts out full, that facility can run at full power for eight hours before all the water has been drained from the upper reservoir.

But if that pumped-storage facility had been built with an upper reservoir ten times that size, or one-tenth that size, it would still produce 3,000 megawatts.  But under those scenarios, the total energy storage could be anything from 1,200 to 120,000 megawatt-hours.

In other word, the section of Virginia statute that specifies the energy storage requirements does not actually specify an amount of energy storage.  It specifies the (instantaneous) amount of power that those facilities must provide (megawatts).

I don’t know whether that’s a mistake, or whether they actually had something in mind.  The nomenclature — megawatts — is what is used to size power plants.  But that makes sense.  Power plants produce electrical power, by transforming something else (coal, gas, sunlight, wind) into electricity.  The assumption with gas and coal-fire plants is that they could produce that power for an indefinitely long period of time.

By contrast, electrical storage facilities don’t produce power, they simply store and release it.  Telling me the amount of (instantanous) power they can release says nothing about how much energy they can store. It says nothing about how long they can keep up that power flow.  Unlike gas and coal-fired power plants, there’s an expectation that they can only keep up that rate of power release for a relatively short period of time.

Beyond this confusion between units of power and units of energy, something about the energy storage part of the statute still does not quite add up.  Per the U.S. Energy Information Agency, Virginia’s grid has a peak summertime output of about 30,000 megawatts (reference).  So the Commonwealth seems to be requiring that new energy storage facilities have to be able to supply about 10% of peak load.  Which, along with the existing Bath pumped-storage facility, would mean that total storage capacity would be able to supply 20% of peak summertime load. But for no more than eight hours (the amount of time that the existing Bath facility can run flat-out at 3000 megawatts.)

By contrast, the fossil-fuel-fired equipment that must be retired by 2045/2050 accounts for about 65% of current generating capacity, as of 2020.  Acknowledging that nighttime demand is below peak daytime time, it still seems like a breezeless summer night would still result in more electricity demand than the Virginia grid could produce.

So they’re cutting it pretty close, that’s all I’m saying.  Sure, we’re on a multi-state grid.  Sure power can flow in from out-of-state.  But if we’re having still and sultry summer nights, it’s a pretty good bet that all our neighboring states are as well.

I guess I should take the 3,100 as a minimum.  Nothing bars out electric utilities from producing more than that.

Enough batteries to power 400,000 Chevy Bolts?

So let me assume a storage capacity, since the law does not actually specify one.  And let me do that by patterning the new facilities on the characteristics of the existing Bath pumped-storage facility.

Let me then assume that the 3,100 megawatts of “storage” means that the new storage facilities have to match the existing Bath facility, and produce at that rate of power for eight hours.  That would require about 25,000 megawatt-hours’ worth of battery capacity.

My Chevy Bolt, by contrast, has about 60 KWH of battery storage.  Doing the arithmetic, and rounding, that’s enough battery capacity to manufacture  400,000  Chevy Bolts.

Virginia already has about 56,000 EVs registered in-state (reference).  So that would be enough battery capacity to produce a seven-fold increase in EVs on the road, in Virginia, in a more-than-decade timespan.

Absent some huge unforseen bottleneck in the current ramp-up in battery production, that seems completely feasible.  Not cheap.  But clearly feasible.

Conclusion:  This is a good start.

It’s fashionable to say that we aren’t doing anything about global warming. 

While I would agree that we aren’t doing enough, and we aren’t doing it fast enough, the planned conversion of the electrical grid to carbon-free electricity (in just under half the U.S. states) is an example of a material change that is in the works.

Source:  National Conference of State Legislatures.

There’s pretty clearly a red-state/blue-state divide in plans for a carbon-free grid.  And it’s possible that the next time Republicans take power in Virginia, or nationally, they’ll put a stop to grid de-carbonization.  In exactly the same way that they killed the Obama Clean Power Plan.  That was a set of EPA rules that would require all states to have some plan in place for reducing the C02 emissions from their electrical grids.  In effect, it was a national plan for decarbonizing the grid, with states given the freedom to implement those reduction targets as they saw fit.  Republicans did their best to block it, and Republicans eventually successfully killed it once Trump took power (reference).

When you look at the details, the statement that we are unwilling to do anything about global warming is not true.  In the U.S., in terms of Federal and state policies that could matter, Republicans are unwilling to do anything about it.

I have to admit, at first blush, Virginia’s plans for decarbonizing its grid seem kind of nuts.  But when I looked in detail, well, it’s not so nutty after all.  In the grand scheme of things, what’s nutty is all the states — in white and brown above — that have absolutely no plans, whatsoever, to address this issue.

Post #1952: Does Vermont really have a carbon-free electrical grid?

 

And if so, can Virginia copy them?

The short answer is, yes and no.

Yes, they seem to have a carbon-free electrical grid. They are the only state in the U.S. to be able to make that claim.

But not, we can’t copy them.  They are the gateway for hydroelectric power generated in Quebec to enter the U.S.  And they have significant hydroelectric power generated within the state.

They’ve done other things as well.  But hydroelectric power is the backbone of Vermont’s carbon-free grid.  And that’s not going to help Virginia meet its 2045 goal of having its own carbon-free electrical grid.

Instead, weirdly enough, near as I can tell, without explicitly saying so, Virginia has made a big bet on batteries as the backbone of our system.  In 2020, our legislature laid out an explicit path for converting our generation to wind and solar.  But unlike hydroelectric, those are intermittent sources — they require something to store the energy.  Rationally, the same legislation requires construction of specific amounts of  “energy storage facilities” to match.

The legislation doesn’t spell it out, but near as I can tell, with current technology, the only thing on the table with the potential to store that much energy is batteries.  Big batteries, for sure.  At least, at the scale and distribution required for an entire state’s electrical grid.

I guess the takeaway is this:  I thought I was taking a big step by buying an EV.  Running my car off batteries seemed like a real leap forward.  But, as it turns out, twenty years from now, Virginia’s entire electrical grid is going to be running off batteries, half the time.

Or, at least, that’s how I read the plan, as laid out in Commonwealth of Virginia statute, Section 56-585.5. Generation of electricity from renewable and zero carbon sources

Continue reading Post #1952: Does Vermont really have a carbon-free electrical grid?

Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

 

 

This post walks through the process of replacing the “non-replaceable” battery inside a cheap cylindrical dashcam, like the one pictured above.

It’s not hard to do.  I did two identical cameras.  The second one took about 20 minutes.  Both repairs were successful.

You don’t even have to read this post to figure it out.  You can get the gist of the steps by scrolling through the pictures below.

If I learned anything from this, it’s that if I ever buy another dashcam, I’m going to be sure it’s the type that uses a capacitor instead of a battery.

Continue reading Post #1951: Replacing the battery in a cheap cylindrical dashcam.

Post G24-004: Advice on sheltering your bee hotel for the winter.

 

My advice:  Don’t shelter your bee hotel for the winter.  Let it freeze along with everything else.  This post explains why.

Early bee emergence

Last year, for the first time, I hung up a bee hotel.  This is a set of nesting tubes designed to make it easier for solitary/native bees, such as mason bees, to reproduce.  It seemed to be quite successful, per the picture below.  Ultimately I ended up with about 15 nesting tubes filled.

I left that up through the summer and fall, and, per common internet advice, moved it to a sheltered location once winter set in.  In this case, I moved it to the inside of a detached, totally unheated garage.

Moving a bee hotel to a sheltered location, for the winter, is probably not a good idea.  Despite that being widely suggested by seeming experts.  That’s because if your sheltered area is even a little warmer than the outdoors, I think it entices the bees to emerge too early.

That’s what appears to have happened this year.  For my particular Home Depot bee hotel, the nesting tubes that were filled by mason bees last spring …

… are all now empty.

Consistent with that, my wife noticed some bees on her crocuses this morning.  Which was odd enough to stand out.  Because, among other things, not much is blooming right now except crocus and daffodil.  And it’s not all that warm out yet.  The upshot is that it seems a little early to be seeing bees out and about.

I’m betting that those were “my” bees.  And I’m betting that I did them no favors by (inadvertently) waking them up too early, this year.  If I put up a bee hotel again this year, I’m just going to leave it alone.  I’m now of the opinion that  bees ought to overwinter at exactly the temperatures they’ll face out-of-doors.

Like Tinder, but with only 15 people using it.

Experts say that mason bees should emerge when blossoms are open, and daytime temperatures consistently reach 55F (reference).

By those benchmarks — blooms and temperature — my bees are at least three weeks too early. That’s based on these observations.

Blossoms:  Slim pickings.  At present, only the crocuses, daffodils, and maybe a scattered other few species blooming.  There are a few cherry trees here and there, in this area, in blossom.  For reference, the earliest recorded peak bloom date for the national cherry trees is March 15, with April 1 being a typical date (reference March 15 to the National Park Service).  Separately, a harbinger of spring in many areas is forsythia, but our forsythia isn’t even close to blooming yet.

Temperatures:  Still too cold.  We’ve had a couple of days where the high exceeded 55F, but those are still few and far between.  We are not consistently 55F and higher.  But we’re closing in on that.

Source:  Weather underground. 

And based on our historical weather averages, you wouldn’t expect consistent 55F and higher days for another two-three weeks or so.

Source:  Analysis of NOAA weather data for Dulles Airport (Sterling, VA).

All of that, plus my experience last year, tells me that my little batch of bees emerged the better part of a month too early.  Call it three weeks, minimum.

Finally, these bees don’t live very long.  They emerge, eat, mate, and die within a span of a few weeks.  They’re now out of sync with their species in general, and they’re going to be dead before the rest of the local mason bee population emerges.  So, if they all survive, their procreation will be as described in the section title.

Conclusion

I’m not a bee expert, but I’ve spent a lot of time observing the habits of bugs, since I took up gardening during the pandemic.  The one universal rule is that everything in the garden — plants and bugs alike — operates on temperature, and on degree-days.

By keeping this bee hotel in an unheated garage, I kept it warmer than the ambient outdoor temperatures.  I suspect that, one way or the other, this caused my bees to emerge earlier than is optimal, for their species.

If I do this again this year, I’m going to leave the bee hotel outside all winter.  The bee larvae may not much like the cold, but they need to stay in sync with outdoor temperatures, in order to emerge at the right time.

Source;  All the pictures for this post are from Gencraft.com AI, with the prompt of “a bee, wearing a stocking cap and scarf”.

Addendum:  To bee, or not.

Am I going to put up bee hotel this year?  Not sure, but at this point, I’d say, no not.  Probably not going to put up another bee hotel this year.  For the following reasons.

First, these bees don’t pollinate my garden.  They’re out and about early in the year, and they are gone by the time my garden crops or flowers need pollination.  So when you hear about “attracting bees to your garden to get better yields”, they ain’t talking about mason bees.  The earliest-blossoming food I grow is peas, and my recollection is that mason bees do their thing well before (e.g.) the peas blossom.  Apparently they are good for orchards.  Which would make sense, as fruit trees blossom early.  (And mason bees are orchard bees, or orchard bees are mason bees, or something, I’m not entirely sure.  I don’t have an orchard.)

Second, I’m trying to grow the kinds of plants that (the internet tells me) make good natural nesting sites for these bees.  But that whole enterprise is looking a bit sketchy at the moment.  I’ve started down that path, by not mowing my wildflower beds yet.

You’d think, well, that’s got to be dead easy, just grow some plants and leave them. Just don’t mow.

But its not that simple.

Mason bees need medium-sized hollow stalks to nest in.  (Or equivalent.)  That seems right by my experience so far.  Sturdy annuals will sometimes leave behind big, ugly stems.  Looks about the right size.

But that’s the point where anything ceases to be easy.

In a nutshell, you have to keep them for two years, they’re ugly, they get in the way, and you have to defend them from the deer.  I’m not going to go through the details.  I can boil it down to this.

Do I really want to use my time and attention to try to protect some ugly weed stalks from ravenous end-of-winter marauding deer?  For a couple of years, yet (the literal same batch of stalks, I mean.)  And somehow work around them, while prepping the beds for this year’s flowers.  And in the end, really have no clue whether they are effective or not.

I have a lot of sunk cost in this whole bee-hotel thing, not in the sense of buying the Home Depot wooden bee hotel, but mostly in the time and effort gathering and cutting bamboo, in anticipation of annul replacement of the nesting tubes in that hotel.

In addition, rehabbing that Home Depot hotel for re-use could be a fair bit of work.  I should replace the bamboo nesting tubes each year.  This year — with the off-the-shelf unit — that means breaking the existing glued-in tubes out first.

I think I’ll see how hard the rehab is, first, then decide on next steps after that.

But as of right now, I’m not seeing a huge benefit to anybody or anything in being a mason bee hotel keeper for another year.  I should let them find their equilibrium vis-a-vis the local flora.  Might tweak the flora to try to help them out, if I can figure out how to do it.  But I think I’m going to punt on maintaining a manufactured bee hotel.

Post #1945: Microplastic, not sure I much care about it.

 

Let me give you the argument, to see if you buy it.  (Read Post #1941 and Post #1942 to see where I’m coming from on this issue.)

1:  We’ve been using plastic, including artificial fibers, in the U.S., for a long time.  2:  Therefore, best guess, whatever microplastic does to humans, it has already done that to us.  Plus, 3: personally, as it turns out, I live in a microplastic-fiber-rich environment.  I think.

Regarding that last point:  The wall-to-wall carpet that came with my house is polyester fiber.  Not only do I walk around on the cut-off ends of pieces of artificial-fiber yarn whenever I change locations within my home, the fiber is polyester, which typically gets fingered as potentially harmful microplastic.

My guess is that this surely (surely!) generates a microplastic-fiber-fragment-rich living environment.  (But to be clear, there’s only a bit of research to support that, as outlined in this reference.)  And there are a lot of people in the same boat.  A lot of folks who spend a lot of hours in places with synthetic-fiber wall-to-wall carpet.

The upshot is that if microplastic from polyester fibers is a major health hazard, even if that only shows up late in life via a cancer effect, you’d think we’d have noticed it by now.  We’ve had a lot of time and variation in chronic exposure to do so.

Restated:   If there were significant human health effects from typical exposures to microplastic, you’d think we’d have noticed by now.

But how, from this viewpoint, can you explain why we are suddenly seeing and hearing so much about microplastic? How do you explain that, if it has, as you say, been there all along?

My guess?  I guess that we’re now seeing it because we’re now looking for it.

One guess for the uptick is a change in or diffusion of microplastic-detection technology.  The best studies seem to use some fairly exotic equipment, something I take to be a microscopic infrared spectrometer.  Maybe those have gotten cheaper, or maybe it’s just the case that more people have access to the required equipment.  Alternatively, other studies appear to use minimal equipment, but may require significant time.  The publishable standard of measurement is so low (particles per liter) that maybe a lab with the right filter paper (and a microscope and some lab assistants) can quantify microplastic-in-blank to a publishable degree.

(I think that this last point, more than anything else, explains the view that microplastic is an inexhaustible source of clickbait, via finding microplastic in any (e.g.) bodily fluid or organ that you care to examine closely enough.)

A second guess for the uptick is that we now bother to look for microplastics, in both the human and natural environments.

One the one hand, maybe we look more often because “microplastic” is clickbait-du-jour.   An internet-fed fad.  A response to economic rewards for attracting eyes to your article.  After all, every N days, somebody finds microplastic in some new (and yuck-inducing) substance and/or bodily fluid and/or internal organ.  And that makes great clickbait.  Particularly for the closet doomscrollers.

On the other hand, microplastic is part of a legitimate concern about plastic in the environment, overall.  I mean, how many times have we heard this story, only to find out it has an unhappy ending:

There's this stuff?  We use a lot of it.  But it doesn't decompose well.  

So, where does it end up?

But in any case, I’m betting that any human health impacts of microplastic are  pretty subtle.  Not that I’ve done any research on that, but just from a feeling that we’ve been living with plastic for so long, I think we’d have seen something by now.

OTOH, I live in a house with polyester wall-to-wall.  So take this FWIW.