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tygerland · 9 months

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patriciastrike · 11 months

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#look up #power lines #electrical grid #original photography

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boobachu · 4 months

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#Texas #ERCOT #Texas Standard #electrical grid #blizzard #snowmageddon

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kp777 · 7 months

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Powering Up Californians Act Is Signed into Law - CleanTechnica

#california #electrical grid #clean energy #gavin newsom

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wack-ashimself · 9 months

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There's a couple things that could send usa over the edge. An economic collapse due to the federal reserve, wall street, or the dollar collapsing. Could also be caused by brics. They're planning on it. Or could be enough people striking. I mean if truckers, train workers, and dock workers all agreed to strike, the entire United States shut down without even a whimper. And it would be months before we could compensate for the time lost. They're already trying to push a general strike for September 1st. I hope you join in. And the final way this could all fall apart is the worst way. And the closest way we are to falling apart. The electrical grid. People always think air conditioning in the summer could do it, and then forget about Heating in the winter. Our electrical infrastructure is at minimum 40 years outdated. And I'm not even talking about not being updated with new tech (its not. You should see the computers some use...), I'm talking about being reinforced and redone in areas that are required. They say only 19 substations need to go down, when we have over 55,000 I believe, are all that are required for the entire United States to be in darkness for over a year and a half (look it up! They say it's one of our biggest vulnerabilities!) Do you know how many people will die? Seriously, out of all the above ways that the United States can fall, the electrical grid is the number one way to instantly kill the most people. And I think they're going to use some bullshit reasoning like foreigners or a computer hack or aliens has an excuse for when it collapses, even though it's going to collapse naturally just through over usage and being outdated. Just be prepared. Because if you get sideswiped, it's not because I didn't fucking warn you. Fairly I'm not prepared at all. I promise myself years ago to buy a runaway bag with emergency supplies, but they're like 300 to $500 and I didn't seem to have that just lying around. I hope you did. I hope you do. Sincerely. I don't like anybody suffering. Even if they're stupid and deserve it.

#brics #dollar #money #currency #general strike #trucker #truckers #trucking #train #trains #electrical grid #usa

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fuckyeahmarxismleninism · 2 years

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The day before Hurricane Ian hit Cuba, 50,000 people were evacuated and taken to 55 shelters. No private vehicles or public transportation was visible on the streets. Work brigades were mobilized to work on the resumption of electricity supply after the storm had passed. In Artemisa, for instance, the Provincial Defense Council met to discuss how to react to the inevitable flooding. Despite the best efforts made by Cubans, three people died because of the hurricane, and the electrical grid suffered significant damage.

#Cuba #Hurricane Ian #climate crisis #disaster relief #evacuation #socialism #Havana #electrical grid #UnblockCuba #Struggle La Lucha

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rjzimmerman · 2 years

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Excerpt from this story from the LA Times:

Before wind energy took off, there wasn’t much going on in this corner of Wyoming cattle country, says Laine Anderson, director of wind operations at PacifiCorp, the company owned by billionaire investor Warren Buffett that built these turbines.

The American West is on the cusp of immense change. A region long defined by wide-open vistas is in the early stages of a clean energy boom that could fundamentally alter its look and feel. On your next Western road trip, watch for wind turbines in the backcountry. Drive through the desert and prepare for dark seas of shimmering solar panels.

These renewable energy projects are cropping up across the rural West, driven largely by the power demands of distant cities: Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle and more. It’s not the first time those cities have looked far beyond their borders for electricity. They fueled their explosive 20th century growth by propping up coal plants and damming rivers, with little regard for the consequences.

The transition from fossil fuels to clean energy is desperately needed to confront the wildfires, droughts, heat storms and other deadly consequences of the climate crisis. The power-grid transformation will only get faster under a bill signed by President Biden this month, setting aside nearly $370 billion for climate and clean energy projects. But renewable power is also reshaping landscapes, ecosystems and rural economies — and not always for the better.

Solar and wind farms can create jobs and tax revenues, reduce deadly air pollution and slow rising temperatures. But they can also disrupt wildlife habitat and destroy sacred Indigenous sites. Some small-town residents consider them industrial eyesores.

Not far from the Oracle of Omaha’s clean energy kingdom, the reclusive billionaire Phil Anschutz — who owns the Coachella music festival, the Los Angeles Kings hockey team and L.A.'s Crypto.com Arena — is preparing to build the nation’s largest wind farm.

After nearly 15 years of planning, crews are constructing gravel roads. Pads are being cleared for roughly 600 turbines.

Wyoming’s half-million residents don’t need all that energy. California’s 40 million residents do. So Anschutz is getting ready to construct a 732-mile power line across Wyoming, Utah, Colorado and Nevada, to ship electricity to the Golden State.

#electrical grid #electricity transmission grid

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eelhound · 2 years

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"In February 2021, following Winter Storm Uri, Texas devolved into a predictable culture war over what had caused the state’s massive power outages. Conservatives blamed wind and solar for their purported unreliability. Liberals noted that it was natural gas pipelines that froze over. But neither got at the root of the problem.

While it’s true that the crisis in natural gas supply broke the state’s energy system, this failure was caused by a privatized model that puts profit over basic functionality. While many pipelines froze because they had not been properly weatherized, the ones that functioned raked in millions of dollars and the ones that froze were soon back up and running, resulting in a small loss in revenue for a few days.

It wasn’t the stupidity of pipeline owners that made them decide against weatherizing their pipelines, but instead their desire to make a buck. And the consequences were dire: millions of Texans were left without power, and hundreds died. Energy investors, meanwhile, raked in millions.

Despite public anger — millions of Texans faced unpayable electric bills in the wake of the storm — the state’s politicians have little interest in doing much about it. In fact, Governor Greg Abbott has been promoting Bitcoin mining — an environmentally wasteful and socially useless endeavor — as a solution to Texas’s beleaguered grid.

In the absence of political action, what are we left with? Individualism. In wealthy neighborhoods, homeowners are having household batteries and solar installed, almost always by nonunion labor. While no one can blame a person for wanting to ensure their lights don’t go out the next time the state faces an energy crisis, this is exactly the kind of personal solution to a collective problem that excludes poor and working-class people. It’s localized, boutique green power for the rich — and dirty, failing public power for the rest of us.

This model for building green power also relies heavily on tax credits, pulling money out of public coffers and directing them to capitalists...

Texas is offering a glimpse of our future — and it’s a dystopian mess. From entrenched fossil-fuel companies exploiting workers, polluting the planet, and leaving the public with the cleanup bill to a rising green capitalist class whose financial interests are opposed to large-scale publicly controlled power, it’s clear there will be change, but not the change that is needed.

It’s not enough to just 'do something' about climate change. As states like Texas increase their wind and solar capacity, we must ensure these jobs are unionized. We must support large-scale public power and a labor-led transition away from fossil fuels. We must oppose pushes by the wealthy to make powering one’s home an individualistic, market-based operation. And above all, we must target head-on, with a class-based politics, the private power that not only fails us but profits from that failure.

Climate change shouldn’t be a culture war issue. It should be about making sure everyone has the ability to live a safe and dignified life."

- David Griscom, from "Texas Shows the Pitfalls of Liberal Climate Politics." Jacobin, 7 July 2022.

#david griscom #quote #quotations #climate change #climate crisis #american politics #green new deal #renewable energy #labor organizing #democratic socialism #labor unions #texas #fossil fuels #capitalism #liberalism #neoliberalism #electrical grid

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poojagblog-blog · 7 days

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The global Synchronous Condenser Market is projected to grow from USD 661 million in 2022 to USD 811 million by 2030, at a CAGR of 2.6%, according to a new report by MarketsandMarkets™. Synchronous condensers ensure a stable supply to the transmission grid. They can also supply and absorb reactive power and deliver voltage support and dynamic regulation. In addition, many renewable resources are remotely located and feed power into a single radial line. Synchronous condensers can be installed close to the connection point to strengthen the grid with additional short-circuit power. This improves the fault ride-through capability of the power installation itself and provides additional voltage stability. With renewable power generation on the rise, the market for synchronous condensers is expected to witness substantial growth in the coming years. This trend is expected to gain traction in North America and Europe, where renewable energy is gaining momentum, and the conventional power generation infrastructure is aging and converted to synchronous condensers.

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afrotumble · 27 days

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📷 Will Cohen

#photography #electricity #electrical grid #power #transmission #pylons

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jcmarchi · 1 month

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Most work is new work, long-term study of U.S. census data shows

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/most-work-is-new-work-long-term-study-of-u-s-census-data-shows/

Most work is new work, long-term study of U.S. census data shows

This is part 1 of a two-part MIT News feature examining new job creation in the U.S. since 1940, based on new research from Ford Professor of Economics David Autor. Part 2 is available here.

In 1900, Orville and Wilbur Wright listed their occupations as “Merchant, bicycle” on the U.S. census form. Three years later, they made their famous first airplane flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. So, on the next U.S. census, in 1910, the brothers each called themselves “Inventor, aeroplane.” There weren’t too many of those around at the time, however, and it wasn’t until 1950 that “Airplane designer” became a recognized census category.

Distinctive as their case may be, the story of the Wright brothers tells us something important about employment in the U.S. today. Most work in the U.S. is new work, as U.S. census forms reveal. That is, a majority of jobs are in occupations that have only emerged widely since 1940, according to a major new study of U.S. jobs led by MIT economist David Autor.

“We estimate that about six out of 10 jobs people are doing at present didn’t exist in 1940,” says Autor, co-author of a newly published paper detailing the results. “A lot of the things that we do today, no one was doing at that point. Most contemporary jobs require expertise that didn’t exist back then, and was not relevant at that time.”

This finding, covering the period 1940 to 2018, yields some larger implications. For one thing, many new jobs are created by technology. But not all: Some come from consumer demand, such as health care services jobs for an aging population.

On another front, the research shows a notable divide in recent new-job creation: During the first 40 years of the 1940-2018 period, many new jobs were middle-class manufacturing and clerical jobs, but in the last 40 years, new job creation often involves either highly paid professional work or lower-wage service work.

Finally, the study brings novel data to a tricky question: To what extent does technology create new jobs, and to what extent does it replace jobs?

The paper, “New Frontiers: The Origins and Content of New Work, 1940-2018,” appears in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. The co-authors are Autor, the Ford Professor of Economics at MIT; Caroline Chin, a PhD student in economics at MIT; Anna Salomons, a professor in the School of Economics at Utrecht University; and Bryan Seegmiller SM ’20, PhD ’22, an assistant professor at the Kellogg School of Northwestern University.

“This is the hardest, most in-depth project I’ve ever done in my research career,” Autor adds. “I feel we’ve made progress on things we didn’t know we could make progress on.”

“Technician, fingernail”

To conduct the study, the scholars dug deeply into government data about jobs and patents, using natural language processing techniques that identified related descriptions in patent and census data to link innovations and subsequent job creation. The U.S. Census Bureau tracks the emerging job descriptions that respondents provide — like the ones the Wright brothers wrote down. Each decade’s jobs index lists about 35,000 occupations and 15,000 specialized variants of them.

Many new occupations are straightforwardly the result of new technologies creating new forms of work. For instance, “Engineers of computer applications” was first codified in 1970, “Circuit layout designers” in 1990, and “Solar photovoltaic electrician” made its debut in 2018.

“Many, many forms of expertise are really specific to a technology or a service,” Autor says. “This is quantitatively a big deal.”

He adds: “When we rebuild the electrical grid, we’re going to create new occupations — not just electricians, but the solar equivalent, i.e., solar electricians. Eventually that becomes a specialty. The first objective of our study is to measure [this kind of process]; the second is to show what it responds to and how it occurs; and the third is to show what effect automation has on employment.”

On the second point, however, innovations are not the only way new jobs emerge. The wants and needs of consumers also generate new vocations. As the paper notes, “Tattooers” became a U.S. census job category in 1950, “Hypnotherapists” was codified in 1980, and “Conference planners” in 1990. Also, the date of U.S. Census Bureau codification is not the first time anyone worked in those roles; it is the point at which enough people had those jobs that the bureau recognized the work as a substantial employment category. For instance, “Technician, fingernail” became a category in 2000.

“It’s not just technology that creates new work, it’s new demand,” Autor says. An aging population of baby boomers may be creating new roles for personal health care aides that are only now emerging as plausible job categories.

All told, among “professionals,” essentially specialized white-collar workers, about 74 percent of jobs in the area have been created since 1940. In the category of “health services” — the personal service side of health care, including general health aides, occupational therapy aides, and more — about 85 percent of jobs have emerged in the same time. By contrast, in the realm of manufacturing, that figure is just 46 percent.

Differences by degree

The fact that some areas of employment feature relatively more new jobs than others is one of the major features of the U.S. jobs landscape over the last 80 years. And one of the most striking things about that time period, in terms of jobs, is that it consists of two fairly distinct 40-year periods.

In the first 40 years, from 1940 to about 1980, the U.S. became a singular postwar manufacturing powerhouse, production jobs grew, and middle-income clerical and other office jobs grew up around those industries.

But in the last four decades, manufacturing started receding in the U.S., and automation started eliminating clerical work. From 1980 to the present, there have been two major tracks for new jobs: high-end and specialized professional work, and lower-paying service-sector jobs, of many types. As the authors write in the paper, the U.S. has seen an “overall polarization of occupational structure.”

That corresponds with levels of education. The study finds that employees with at least some college experience are about 25 percent more likely to be working in new occupations than those who possess less than a high school diploma.

“The real concern is for whom the new work has been created,” Autor says. “In the first period, from 1940 to 1980, there’s a lot of work being created for people without college degrees, a lot of clerical work and production work, middle-skill work. In the latter period, it’s bifurcated, with new work for college graduates being more and more in the professions, and new work for noncollege graduates being more and more in services.”

Still, Autor adds, “This could change a lot. We’re in a period of potentially consequential technology transition.”

At the moment, it remains unclear how, and to what extent, evolving technologies such as artificial intelligence will affect the workplace. However, this is also a major issue addressed in the current research study: How much does new technology augment employment, by creating new work and viable jobs, and how much does new technology replace existing jobs, through automation? In their paper, Autor and his colleagues have produced new findings on that topic, which are outlined in part 2 of this MIT News series.

Support for the research was provided, in part, by the Carnegie Corporation; Google; Instituut Gak; the MIT Work of the Future Task Force; Schmidt Futures; the Smith Richardson Foundation; and the Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

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patriciastrike · 2 years

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On the grid.

#raven #electrical wires #electrical grid #original photography #photographers on tumblr

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mizelaneus · 1 month

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#decarbonizing #electrical grid

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kp777 · 9 months

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By Alejandro Lazo

CalMatters

July 20, 2023

In Summary: Through bidirectional charging, owners of electric cars can sell energy to the grid or use it to power their homes. But will the technology, which is costly, become widespread?

As a historic 10-day heat wave threatened brownouts across California last summer, a small San Diego County school district did its part to help: It captured excess power from its electric school buses and sent it back to the state’s overwhelmed grid.

The seven school buses provided enough power for 452 homes each day of the heat wave, and the buses were recharged only during off hours when the grid was not strained.

California energy officials have high hopes that this new power source, called bidirectional charging, will boost California’s power supply as it ramps up its ambitious agenda of electrifying its cars, trucks and buses while switching to 100% clean energy.

Gov. Gavin Newsom called two-way charging technology a “game changer,” saying “this is the future” during a speech last September, about a week after the heat wave ended.

This year, a bill already approved by the state Senate in a 29-9 vote would require all new electric cars sold in California to be equipped with bidirectional technology by 2030. In the Assembly, two committees approved the bill earlier this month and it is now under consideration by a third.

This two-way charging has big potential — but also faces big obstacles. By 2035, California expects to have 12.5 million electric cars on the road, but it’s an open question how much California can rely on them to feed the grid. Automakers say the technology would add thousands of dollars to the cost of an electric car, and California’s utilities are still sorting out how to pay ratepayers for selling them the kilowatt hours.