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Orvin posted:I might be missing something, but what is the complaint about this line? They are putting underground cable through the National Forest section. Yes, for a year there will be some destruction of the forest as they install the underground conduit for the cable. But after that, no towers to obstruct the view, and after some number of years, the trees will have grown back. It’s New Hampshire so I assume the complaint is “LIVE FREE OR DIE!!!’”
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Feb 4, 2018 18:05
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Power lines through forests are quaint and rustic in a post Soviet kind of way.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:32
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If they're proposing to bury the line then it seems pretty farcical to object to it, power lines running through forests is the norm when I live, you don't die as a result.
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Feb 4, 2018 18:50
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OwlFancier posted:If they're proposing to bury the line then it seems pretty farcical to object to it, power lines running through forests is the norm when I live, you don't die as a result. A buried line will still need a pathway through the forest clear of trees, as it will need to be accessible for servicing and protected against tree roots growing into the tunnel.
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Feb 4, 2018 20:39
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Yeah but it probably poses less of a hazard than an overhead line. The forest won't collapse for having a werid clearing running through it.
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Feb 4, 2018 20:44
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I don't think there would be need for much forest clearing. The proposed route seems to follow an existing roads, so if they are willing to bury it as close to the road as possible it might be possible to do it with practically no trees cut. On the other hand, it would be less than 20 miles extra to go around the national forest completely, so it could be worth it to avoid the hassle.
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Feb 4, 2018 21:07
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From reading the advocacy sites dedicated to opposing the lines project, the principle objection was that the lines could be seen at all. There was an adorable map where they had outlined the "area of potential visual impact" and it was dotted line in a 15 mile radius from the route. They suggested that the entire project could be buried, not just the sections going through the forest, but the energy company balked because it would have nearly doubled the cost. So while they may have promoted their opposition with pictures of clearcutting and endless transmission towers, complained about "increasing dependence on foreign energy", and talked about "destroying migration routes [and] potential agricultural lands", I think that it was probably largely focused on protecting the "viewshed" as they put it. http://www.notonorthernpass.com/resources/
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Feb 5, 2018 17:48
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Funny how when people get mad about the visual impact on a forest projects get stopped but if you’re worried about crude leaking all over your land, gently caress you.
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Feb 5, 2018 18:07
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evil_bunnY posted:Funny how when people get mad about the visual impact on a forest projects get stopped but if you’re worried about crude leaking all over your land, gently caress you. I mean that's kind of the flip side of it. I might think that the NIMBY's objections are pretty baseless, but on the other hand I don't live there and won't be affected by it. It should be up to infrastructure planners to convince the resident stakeholders that the project is a good idea, and if they don't like it then it's hard to justify ramming it through their community. People should be able to hold a degree of sovereignty over their state. Now this often ends up resulting in little more than public bribery as companies shell out money to the nearby towns, but it still results in something resembling popular support. If a project doesn't have it, then it probably shouldn't go forward.
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Feb 5, 2018 18:17
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Kaal posted:I mean that's kind of the flip side of it. I might think that the NIMBY's objections are pretty baseless, but on the other hand I don't live there and won't be affected by it. It should be up to infrastructure planners to convince the resident stakeholders that the project is a good idea, and if they don't like it then it's hard to justify ramming it through their community. People should be able to hold a degree of sovereignty over their state. Now this often ends up resulting in little more than public bribery as companies shell out money to the nearby towns, but it still results in something resembling popular support. If a project doesn't have it, then it probably shouldn't go forward. Gaining local consent is challenging even at the conceptual level. Ignoring the questions of local consent versus social good (e.g. Owens lake) it is also true that communities can have conflicts between their espoused values and their feelings on a project. Should the fact a community highly values clean air and clean water override their opposition to a specific project that will support those goals? Or is rejecting the project and still demanding the clean solution the correct path for the community? Or is it just ok for them to reject it and the project will fail, pollution be damned—that’s the project planner’s fault for poor planning?
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Feb 5, 2018 18:57
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"I want someone else to get their forest demolished so that I can have better electricity" is a silly objection. Local consent makes no sense in the context of planetwide problems like energy production and pollution.
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Feb 5, 2018 19:04
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OwlFancier posted:"I want someone else to get their forest demolished so that I can have better electricity" is a silly objection. Local consent makes no sense in the context of planetwide problems like energy production and pollution. I think history is replete with examples of why failure to gain local support often dooms projects. At best, it usually leads to the marginalized communities being devastated because a more powerful interest decided they were a small price to pay. Owens lake was my example for a reason. Should we sometimes harm local areas to give drinking water to our cities? Certainly. Did we need to drain Owens lake? Nope. Besides, there is an alternative: integrating the needs of the community into a multi-criteria decision making framework. Our problems are already complex enough we can’t just use a single criteria anymore already, so actually including local engagement as part of a broader decisionmaking framework isn’t an onorous burden considering the advantages when done correctly. The status quo is that powerful local communities have veto while disadvantaged ones do not. The solution is to use existing methods of engaging the community fairly so that local consent can be gained or at least sought, and when the decision to override local consent is made, it is done in a way that weighs the objections of the community and needs of society at large in a consistent way.
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Feb 5, 2018 19:17
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OTOH if solutions aren't put in place promptly there might not be a forest or very many people left in 100 years to complain about cutting a trench through it. If you figure out a way to get everyone to consider that there are other people in the world who have needs as well then you've achieved world peace in your attempt to solve the issue of obstructive localism. Immediate planetwide climate issues are an issue where I'm 100% a jackbooted statist who wants to crush everyone under tonnes of power pylons and wind turbines and nuclear reactors. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:36 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 19:32
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OwlFancier posted:Immediate planetwide climate issues are an issue where I'm 100% a jackbooted statist who wants to crush everyone under tonnes of power pylons and wind turbines and nuclear reactors. Hell same. Provide nuclear desalination to Capetown, ASAP
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Feb 5, 2018 19:42
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Ignoring externalities is how we got into this mess and ignoring externalities will not be the way we get out of this. Everywhere is local and if you collapse enough local ecosystems in the name of the greater good you will still leave the planet in ruin. We cannot foresake social and environment externalities because of the challenges of climate, instead we have to recognize the scale of the task. So called “solutions” that ignore these externalities aren’t solutions at all and are doomed to failure.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:45
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I don't think building a power line through a forest is collapsing the ecosystem.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:46
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OwlFancier posted:I don't think building a power line through a forest is collapsing the ecosystem. Sure and I’m not opposing building that. I’m just saying the idea that we should always ignore local consent is foolish and ineffective. You said local consent makes no sense in the context of climate change and I strongly disagree for both practical and process reasons.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:49
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It doesn't, either the proposal is useful or not, and I have no interest in listening to "but my property values  " as a counterpoint.
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Feb 5, 2018 21:57
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OwlFancier posted:It doesn't, either the proposal is useful or not, and I have no interest in listening to "but my property values That’s the exact same logic used to bulldoze minority communities for freeways and dump toxic waste in marshland. The projects were deemed useful and local complaints about potential impacts were ignored. Ignoring externalities, like the impact on local communities, is the mistake that led to our current climate change disaster. The solution is to integrate those externalities into our decisionmaking not to just change which ones we ignore. It is quite possible to both integrate local consent and local impact into multi-criteria decisionmaking. There is a large body of literature on this and you get better results. If some more powerful communities are abusing the current systems is an argument for reforming how we evaluate the criteria not erasing in from our process. Again, ignoring local consent and local impacts both means your process will achieve flawed results and also those results will be harder and more costly because of the choice to foresake local engagement. Edit: I do agree local consent often plays too big of a role in US powerline siting, but the role should not be zero. Trabisnikof fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Feb 5, 2018 |
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Feb 5, 2018 22:08
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It's a combination of national forestland and state forestland, so it's not the property of people who happen to live nearby and don't want the view temporarily interrupted in the first place.Trabisnikof posted:That’s the exact same logic used to bulldoze minority communities for freeways and dump toxic waste in marshland. And you know who else used written language? Adolf Hitler. Clearly no one should ever write again.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:28
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It's important to take local concerns into account, but also be able to look at those concerns and potentially dismiss them if they are unfounded. Like local opposition to cell phone towers saying it will cause tumors or morgellions or whatever, those sorts of concerns can be dismissed out of hand. If the power line project will only temporarily disrupt a very narrow swath of land already adjacent to a road and no one from the parks department thinks the construction project will result in any long term harm to the local ecosystem, just do it. Locals are very good at couching their purely selfish concerns in fair-sounding language. They might just not want to put up with construction noise, but frame it as a noble defense of nature. I see it all the time at the local level, nimby's don't want "poors" in their neighbourhood but know if they just go to cityhall and rant about how they don't want to mix with other classes they'd be pillorized, so instead they'll frame their opposition being 100% about protecting the root systems of some local trees that they fear the apartment building will harm. Oh they're all for affordable housing, very important, just not when it's going to put these poor trees at risk.
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Feb 5, 2018 22:36
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OwlFancier posted:Immediate planetwide climate issues are an issue where I'm 100% a jackbooted statist who wants to crush everyone under tonnes of power pylons and wind turbines and nuclear reactors. I mean if there was a silver bullet capital "s" Solution then sure I'd say we should just do it and drat those who would dissent - the global threat of climate devastation is too urgent. But the reality is that we're going to need to keep picking away at the problem again and again in different ways, and alienating people with inflexible and heavy-handed projects isn't a sustainable method. I'm all for technocratic solutions, but I also recognize that it's important to keep public support on your side. So if Vermont wants to host all that infrastructure rather than New Hampshire, then that seems like a good compromise. Ideally, Vermont will see sufficient benefits from the process that next time an infrastructure plan comes around they'll be willing to adopt that one as well, and the NH folks will start to realize that they're missing out by not getting involved. Meanwhile, next time the project managers involved will have more experience with promoting these sorts of projects and finding community allies that can help advocate.
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Feb 6, 2018 01:53
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On the other hand you'll generally find the same whiny objection to important things anywhere, which is part of why nuclear energy falls so flat, nobody's willing to have anything to do with it if it means it might have to be sited within 500 miles of them. At some point you have to just tell people to gently caress off and deal with it. You can do it with an abundance of other things, might as well do it with something productive.
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Feb 6, 2018 02:13
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Baronjutter posted:It's important to take local concerns into account, but also be able to look at those concerns and potentially dismiss them if they are unfounded. Like local opposition to cell phone towers saying it will cause tumors or morgellions or whatever, those sorts of concerns can be dismissed out of hand. If the power line project will only temporarily disrupt a very narrow swath of land already adjacent to a road and no one from the parks department thinks the construction project will result in any long term harm to the local ecosystem, just do it. I think that ultimately it's important to have fair and coherent systems to deal with this sort of thing, and that are capable of efficiently resolving whether concerns are legitimate or not. The same kind of planning system that bars leaky oil pipelines should also be capable of greenlighting a project even when there's a vocal minority that is up in arms about hypothetically seeing it from 15 miles away. And I certainly recognize that often NIMBYs misrepresent themselves and their concerns, so it's important to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were. But at the same time, I have major qualms about simply forcing projects on a population when there's widespread public loathing for it. If some neighborhood doesn't like an apartment building going in, tough for them, but I do think that the municipality as a whole should be able to say "look we just don't want this". Sometimes that certainly is going to result in suboptimal results, and the US definitely has issues with some communities getting much more access to power than others, but I do think that popular support has to be part of the foundation of these major projects. Perhaps some of these planning committees need to start finding ways of pitting these NIMBYs against each other more. For example, get a community to agree that a certain number of apartment complexes shall be built in the name of affordable housing, and then let the NIMBYs battle it out amongst themselves as to which tree roots are most worthy of protection. Popular support doesn't just have to be seen as an anchor around the neck of technocrats, it also can be a pretty useful tool for getting things done - when it can be harnessed successfully.
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Feb 6, 2018 02:16
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Trabisnikof posted:Sure and I’m not opposing building that. I’m just saying the idea that we should always ignore local consent is foolish and ineffective. You said local consent makes no sense in the context of climate change and I strongly disagree for both practical and process reasons. No one is saying to always ignore local consent. The local objections are basically a load of garbage in this specific case. The landing page for local objections primarily talks about the destruction of migration routes (which is basically false), the loss of tourism dollars (which is overblown), and a potential loss of property value (I don't give one gently caress about this and neither should you).
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Feb 7, 2018 06:56
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The proper response to residents objecting that a project of any kind will mess up their view should always be "gently caress you". Same with "it'll ruin the character of the area".
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Feb 7, 2018 16:49
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Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. Now you can argue in this particular instance their concerns are overblown but as an experiment just imagine your local community is in dire need of an airport and they decide the build one right next door to you. Still have no problem? It's for the greater good of the community after all.
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Feb 7, 2018 19:09
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CFox posted:Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. Horrible.
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Feb 7, 2018 19:41
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CFox posted:Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. Eminent domain is a thing, and it does suck. If an project needs to be built, it needs enough cleared space around it to avoid catastrophically impacting its neighbors. The people next door to a power plant can whine about their property values being killed, and it's possible to make them whole financially. The people 3 miles from a power plant, who can now see it on a clear day... they can eat poo poo. At some point, it's not the public's problem, and individuals need to compromise and accept changes.
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Feb 7, 2018 19:49
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Or that your acres of forest might have a gap in it. Unbearable. E: Look I know that we need to ensure good electrical supply for everybody and in a way that doesn't kill us all due to climate change but on the other hand, I have to, like, look at a building in the distance? And I really don't think that's fair.
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Feb 7, 2018 19:50
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CFox posted:Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. 2) Having powerlines (or renewable power generation) in sight isn't quite the aggravation than a close-by airport is.
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Feb 7, 2018 20:07
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CFox posted:Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. You pay people for their monetary losses in such a case. This is already done in eminent domain cases so I’m not sure what your point is. Also your airport example is bad. Living near an airport isn’t a guaranteed killer of property values and in many cases can increase property value so in that example I would say suck it up and move or live next to an airport. I’ve lived under the approach path for PHX, within 3miles the airport. The sound was livable, the only exception was Air Force jet traffic which was rare.
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Feb 7, 2018 20:10
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CFox posted:Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. It's not a big deal when the supposed loss of property value has no justification (and incidentally, in cases where the value will go down by a large amount, the government can be required to provide compensation for that, just the same as if they'd had to take some of the land). If they built an airport right next door to me I wouldn't particularly care - because when that stuff happens again the government is usually going to buy out people nearby to clear a buffer area.
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Feb 8, 2018 00:03
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Feb 8, 2018 01:14
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CFox posted:Loss of property value isn't a big deal? Like it or not a person's home is most likely the biggest part of their wealth and just telling someone to "suck it up" is really lovely. Their options are either stay and deal with a lower quality of life (however much that may be) or selling their home for less money than it should be worth and moving elsewhere. A) You seem to be arguing that a hypothetical loss in someone's property value should be enough to sink a project, but if that were the case then nothing would ever get built B) You just compared someone having to deal with a potentially major source of traffic and noise to someone complaining that the scenic view from their porch is going to be less than perfect*** C) If my community is in dire need of an airport then by all means, build away. In fact my community is about to build a bunch of low-income housing right down the road from my house and my response was "good, home prices are too high as it is and maybe it'll help bring rent costs down, too". The kind of person who has enough wealth to be able to worry about their property value is already way ahead in the game and won't actually have their quality of life*** impacted by a hypothetical loss of property value *** A huge scenic forest suddenly having a thin bare strip running through it is not impacting anyone's quality of life you idiot
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Feb 8, 2018 06:55
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OwlFancier posted:I mean, price fixing and monopoly are sort of features of the free market. On this topic, something's really been bugging me and I didn't want to bother the Electronics Megathread about it... A PWM (power width modulation) solar charge controller, let's say to charge a 12v battery at 10 amps, costs maybe $5-10 on eBay. A comparable MPPT charge controller (has some circuitry to step-down the voltage from the solar panel while increasing the current) runs about $100 to start. I get that it needs some additional logic ICs and capacitors but... they all seem to be 5-10x the price. That has to be price fixing, right?
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Feb 20, 2018 20:48
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Zero VGS posted:On this topic, something's really been bugging me and I didn't want to bother the Electronics Megathread about it... Are you talking about rooftop high voltage solar MPPT equipment? Or smaller hobby controllers? Either way, MPPT equipment needs heavier gauge conductive wiring and capacitors, since it's main purpose is to reduce voltage drop over PWM. It's more expensive to make UL rated "safe" equipment, and cheap PWM controllers don't have the same quality control. There's a lot of control logic in MPPT, "additional logic ICs" doesn't seem to cover the extra complexity.
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Feb 21, 2018 01:35
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Holy crap, 200 GW!  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-28/saudi-arabia-softbank-ink-deal-on-200-billion-solar-project quote:
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Mar 29, 2018 08:09
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drat. Average energy consumption of the UK is 35GW. Of course that includes at night when a solar array wouldn't be generating, but still.
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Mar 29, 2018 10:11
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Charlz Guybon posted:Holy crap, 200 GW!
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Mar 29, 2018 10:29
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