Common problem in man-made lakes. When you create a lake by damming a river it creates perfect conditions for lamination, deep narrow and filled with agricultural runoff. When they pull the plug on these dams all the de-oxygenated water flows out the bottom, basically just dumping unbreathable water into the river killing off the more sensitive fish, eg trout die catfish live, and smelling like a million firecrackers.
I am not sure if they still plant fish at Crater lake. If you have spent much time fishing you will pretty quickly learn that almost every accessible lake in the US is regularly stocked with fish.
I would say the "native" freshwater fish population is so decimated at this point that if you want to catch something you either seek out inaccessible places that have seen little human contact, or you follow the fish plantings and catch planted fish. The idea of a lake that thousands of humans regularly access having a healthy ecology seems far fetched.
They do not stock the lake anymore, no. The fish currently in it are considered invasive by the park and there are no catch limits.
It's odd the article poses this as a "problem" in an article about Crater Lake, where uniquely among lakes this "problem" is most likely to just fix the other problem.
Kill all the fish in the lake and the lake is better off.
It won't selectively kill fish, it'll kill frogs, turtles, algae, and anything else that lives in the water which isn't a bacteria or archaea capable of living in an anoxic environment. Possibly also the predators of those species which live on land.
> it'll kill frogs, turtles, algae, and anything else that lives in the water which isn't a bacteria or archaea capable of living in an anoxic environment
That's a bit dramatic. Frogs, turtles, salamanders, etc, can breathe air.
The only predators are birds, who can find food at any of the many other lakes in the area.
Crater Lake's geography is essentially unique among lakes that may be having this issue. There is a near-total lack of native fauna that would be affected by an anoxic event.
Does Crater Lake have any visiting ducks? If so, then there were probably fish in the lake at various points as some fish eggs are known to survive the trip through a duck's digestive system.[0]
- Explosives. Drop large explosives deep into the lake periodically. It may kill a lot of life, but if you need to stir up organic matter at the bottom, it’s more efficient than attempting to stir it.
- Migrate life from similar depths at other lakes. If it’s going to die if you don’t, maybe it’s worth the effort.
- Drill. Just drill a deep hole until you get to a water source or heat.
It's impossible to take a bad picture of crater lake, it's still the single most photogenic anything I've ever seen, there may be equals but nothing superior.
I feel like there are lots of places in Central Oregon that are on the same level. Anything near the 3 sisters - McArthur Rim Trail, Highway 242, McKenzie River, Clear Lake, Sparks Lake.
And Newberry Crater - it's like Crater Lake, but without the crowds. You can drive up to the top of East Paulina Peak and you're probably the only person up there. The Great Obsidian Flow is nearby. And there's a trail going all the way around the top of the crater. You can spend 2 hours riding a MTB along that trail, and probably meet 0 other people.
It's an interesting question, here's some napkin math.
There's almost 19 gigaliters of water in Crater Lake. To pump that amount of water in a year would require pumping 52 megaliters of water per day. A small city produces about 200 megaliters of sewage in a day. (LA produces about 2 gigaliters per day.)
So it should be possible but would be very expensive. Maybe on the order of running the drinking water infrastructure for a town. I suspect I'm overestimating though, I think you might only have to pump half of the water to achieve good mixing. (ETA: After a tiny bit of research I think you might be able to do it with much less than half due to entrainment.)
You would also kill a lot of animals and microorganisms in the process. Pumps driven by impellers create cavitation that cracks open microorganisms, and things like peristaltic pumps which avoid this can't handle these volumes. As this material is decomposed by bacteria, they will reproduce and increase the biological oxygen demand in the water, which might end up making the lake anoxic anyway.
That’s overly simplified, and these lakes normally only fully mix every few years. In winter surface water is colder than sub surface water so if you start pumping water to create a cold and more dense column of water in a pipe you can stop the pump and let physics move the through that pipe for months with zero energy expenditure. It’s the same basic reason lakes normally mix in the first place. Decomposing organic mater etc then warm up the deep water over time
Even without that it’s way more efficient to pump water when you have near zero difference in pressure and only need to move a short distance. The column of water outside the pump and the column of water inside the pump are only going to vary by the difference in weight due to differences in temperature. So you’re effectively pumping water up ~10cm even though the column is much longer than that.
If we assume we need ultra fast circulation and mixing every year… 19 gigaliter ~= 19 billion kg lifted ~0.1 m is 9.8 * 19 ^9 * 0.1 J / 60 / 24 / 365 = 600 Kw which is a fair bit of energy perhaps 1 MW with losses, definitely expensive for an individual but not much compared to what cities are spending pumping water around. But again you’re likely fine doing less than 1% of that.
I wonder if there are any elegant passive solutions... like a floating sun-exposed surface that conducts heat down to a lower anchored point. Or lake-bottom structures that re-channel water movements from subtle tides or seiches.
I think that's the wrong way round: climate change causes longer summers and shorter winters, so the problem is one of cooling, not heating.
Shade balls[0] could work, but then they'd have to cover part of the lake with that.
EDIT: And of course, that also comes with a reduction in total light reaching the lake, which may have different side effects beyond temperature alone.
Look at the full picture. The cycling is reduced due a reduction in temperature gradient. That reduction in temperature gradient is due to water not cooling down enough in winter and warming up for longer in summer.
Could you increase cycling by creating a temperature gradient by capturing the heat from the sun to warm up the water at the bottom of the lake? Maybe, but that also would imply an even greater increase of average water temperature than the effects of climate change. Which would have all kinds of other ecological side-effects.
Or put another way: global warming increases thermal energy being added to the system, resulting in a change of the dynamics of the lake. Cooling it would counteract that increase. Capturing more heat would add even more thermal energy. Even if they both could affect cycling in the same way, adding even more thermal energy is almost guaranteed to create other ecosystemic imbalances.
Modern society is falling apart over the cost of getting to net zero. I don't think we have the funds to put lakes on artificial life support in the foreseeable future.
Is it the cost of net zero? Or is it the cost of everything else pretending to be relevant to net zero?
Of the interests pushing for net zero, the bulk of them are only doing it insofar as it can be done in a way that basically guarantees them incomes and all of these earmarks are what's driving the non-starter cost while simultaneously souring people on the whole premise. You'd think that people who allege to think on environmental time scales wouldn't need to be told that a movement that looks like branded rent seeking and legalized corruption when viewed through the perspective of anyone who isn't rolling in money isn't gonna last long enough to do its job.
Germany and their out of control energy costs (while still only being at best 1/5 of the way there if you count things like thermal heat), are a good example.
California has a dramatically easier climate, and is similarly struggling - without even taking into account goods shipping/transportation, thermal heat in the less nice climate zones, etc.
California might have a chance of getting to actual net zero without completely breaking the bank. But it’s not obvious it will. Germany is an order of
magnitude harder.
Renewable electricity in Germany is already at over 50% per year and climbing steadily, but heating, mobility, land/resource/artificial fertilizer use, pollution and circular economy are still lagging (esp. accounting for the fact we're externalizing some of those by cross-border trade).
I guess we're trying much harder than most, but it's expensive, as you said, and politicians have become very careful to push things further. That said, I do think it's totally feasible in theory, it's just there's a lot of powerful bad actors out there throwing wrenches in the works.
The challenge is with the remainder, which is actually a much bigger problem.
Thermal heating for example, even using heat pumps, will require more than 5x the existing electrical grids peak energy capacity - just on its own. I’ve done the math several times, it’s staggering.
And it will do it during typically minimal insolation times.
Germany has made good progress, don’t get me wrong, but it highlights just how hard of a problem this really is.
W.r.t. heating did you also consider the effects of increasing local production as well as transferability and variability of load (e.g. requiring larger heat pumps and other "steuerbare Verbrauchseinrichtungen" to be "adjustable", which Germany does)
It’s a straightforward thermodynamic equation - x fuel burnt (and useful heat from that) vs maximum theoretical efficiency for heat pumps for equivalent heat.
The reality is likely worse for a number of reasons, but even if way better it doesn’t get around that you’d need many multiples of the entire electrical grids peak capacity to come close. And that is assuming there is zero other load on the grid, which isn’t going to happen.
If everyone completely redid all their structures and all their use of heating, and installed all the best heat pumps, AND doubled grid capacity, maaaaybe. But we’re talking massive amounts of Capital. Capital that used to be cheap, but isn’t anymore.
Far more Capital than likely has been spent so far on renewables too, but it’s hard to calculate it because of the sheer distortion that it would cause trying to do something of this scale.
It might be legitimately cheaper to buy Northern Africa and move all Germans there instead (in new construction). That seems pretty unlikely for sócio-political reasons though.
You don’t need to consider any of that, it’s simple arithmetic. Take the amount natural gas burned for heat, convert to kWh (100,000 BTUs or 2.83 cubic feet is 29.3kW), and divide by 3 to approximate the heat pump size you’d need to replace the boiler or furnace.
A 3 million BTU boiler will consume 85 cubic meters of gas in one hour running at max, or about 300kWh of electricity for the same amount of heat from a heat pump over one hour, assuming a COP of 3. It’s 360 amps of current at 480V three-phase (300kW/480/1.732 = 360.8A), or ~400 horsepower. Divide the above units by 30 for a large 100,000 BTU furnace in a home.
Where I live, 85 cubic meters of gas costs about $9 and 300kWh of electricity costs about $45. Natural gas still wins in cost even if your NG heater is only 25% efficient. Even though the heat pump is 3 times more efficient, it costs 5x as much to run vs an HE condensing boiler (at maximum, variable speed compressors will make the COP of the heat pump in practice better than 3 but it will still cost more to operate.)
Anyways, the above is why virtually every building in Minnesota (and similar climates) uses natural gas for heat: cost.
I realize this doesn't really say anything about grid-level/national requirements, but at least in my situation 100% electric heating seems feasible.
Last year we used 7000kWh of natural gas (at 0.14€/kWh). Assuming 90% efficiency of our condensing boiler that's 6300kWh for heating water and air. We heat from ~November to ~February and use hot water all year round (though the cold water will vary by ~6 degC).
We have PV: 7.5kWp, 6kWh storage, electricity 2024: 6.3MWh generation, 2.1MWh usage at 80% autarky (100% from April to August, 90% March, Oktober, avg 50% November to February). 435kWh drawn from grid at 0.36€/kWh, 4.2MWh sent to grid at 0.075€/kWh
We can replace the boiler with a hot water heatpump that would be ~fully powered by our PV from ~March to ~Oktober. And for space heating we can use an air-air heatpump(s). We also have decent insulation and decentral ventilation with enthalpy exchanger.
Now the mystery is how much gas we waste in the non-heating period for hot water, and how little space heating we can get by with (small 60m^2 flat, kitchen, bedroom don't need heating) as well as the actual COP. My guess would be 3-4kWh of heating would be quite adequate plus whatever hot water will use.
We're currently looking for offers for getting rid of gas (and maybe central heating) completely. Wonder what calculation they'll come up with. Note that it doesn't need to be profitable at current prices as gas prices will rise, renewables will get cheaper, and you can still get 30-55% of subsidy.
I also consider getting rid of fossils completely a worthy struggle in itself as it reduces geopolitical dependence and increases resilience. But yeah, it's a multigenerational problem at this scale and scope, esp. considering all the other areas of overuse that need fixing.
In your situation, switching over to heat pumps makes sense, given that you’re sending 66% of the power you generate to the grid. These are the sorts of installations I would expect to go forward since you aren’t spending more money to operate a heat pump.
Note that right now society is subsidizing that - at some point the opposite flow needs to happen (from a basic arithmetic perspective), and that subsidy needs to be a tax or the math doesn’t work society wide.
California had to start killing grid infeed and solar subsidies for instance as it was starting to bankrupt utilities.
Algal blooms with limited mixing sounds like a pretty good carbon capture mechanism!
I wonder if there is oil and gas at the bottom of any of these deep lakes? /s
It would be interesting to know the gas balances for these lakes, in particular how reduced mixing affects methanotrophy and methanogenesis. If its talking about climate change, this article really should discuss methane, I think that's a bigger deal.
This is a mechanism by which some oil deposits are thought to have formed, and by which a large quantity of biospheric carbon was sequestered during earlier warm spells, refered to as the Eocene Azolla Event.
Essentially: arctic seas formed fresh-water "lenses" through meltwater, which promoted plant growth (in particular azolla, though likely also algae and plankton). This growth then sank to the sea-floor, depositing as oils (and much ultimately undergoing keroginisation to form petroleum).
Similar mechanisms have been proposed for addressing carbon sequestration goals in the present, e.g., "CO2 sequestration by propagation of the fast-growing Azolla spp. " <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8520330/>.
It could also be the opposite of a carbon capture mechanism is the detritus if those algal blooms are broken down by archaea and turned into methane, which could then return to the atmosphere. Methane is about 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.
Common problem in man-made lakes. When you create a lake by damming a river it creates perfect conditions for lamination, deep narrow and filled with agricultural runoff. When they pull the plug on these dams all the de-oxygenated water flows out the bottom, basically just dumping unbreathable water into the river killing off the more sensitive fish, eg trout die catfish live, and smelling like a million firecrackers.
There weren't even fish in the lake until 1888, it's likely this has occurred more than once in the past.
I am not sure if they still plant fish at Crater lake. If you have spent much time fishing you will pretty quickly learn that almost every accessible lake in the US is regularly stocked with fish.
I would say the "native" freshwater fish population is so decimated at this point that if you want to catch something you either seek out inaccessible places that have seen little human contact, or you follow the fish plantings and catch planted fish. The idea of a lake that thousands of humans regularly access having a healthy ecology seems far fetched.
They do not stock the lake anymore, no. The fish currently in it are considered invasive by the park and there are no catch limits.
It's odd the article poses this as a "problem" in an article about Crater Lake, where uniquely among lakes this "problem" is most likely to just fix the other problem.
Kill all the fish in the lake and the lake is better off.
It won't selectively kill fish, it'll kill frogs, turtles, algae, and anything else that lives in the water which isn't a bacteria or archaea capable of living in an anoxic environment. Possibly also the predators of those species which live on land.
> it'll kill frogs, turtles, algae, and anything else that lives in the water which isn't a bacteria or archaea capable of living in an anoxic environment
That's a bit dramatic. Frogs, turtles, salamanders, etc, can breathe air.
The only predators are birds, who can find food at any of the many other lakes in the area.
Crater Lake's geography is essentially unique among lakes that may be having this issue. There is a near-total lack of native fauna that would be affected by an anoxic event.
The article states this is happening with many lakes, Crater Lake is just the one they framed the story around.
Does Crater Lake have any visiting ducks? If so, then there were probably fish in the lake at various points as some fish eggs are known to survive the trip through a duck's digestive system.[0]
[0]https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/special-delivery-d...
Some more ideas that might work:
- Explosives. Drop large explosives deep into the lake periodically. It may kill a lot of life, but if you need to stir up organic matter at the bottom, it’s more efficient than attempting to stir it.
- Migrate life from similar depths at other lakes. If it’s going to die if you don’t, maybe it’s worth the effort.
- Drill. Just drill a deep hole until you get to a water source or heat.
I know they aren't the point of the article, but the photos are absolutely breathtaking.
It's impossible to take a bad picture of crater lake, it's still the single most photogenic anything I've ever seen, there may be equals but nothing superior.
I feel like there are lots of places in Central Oregon that are on the same level. Anything near the 3 sisters - McArthur Rim Trail, Highway 242, McKenzie River, Clear Lake, Sparks Lake.
And Newberry Crater - it's like Crater Lake, but without the crowds. You can drive up to the top of East Paulina Peak and you're probably the only person up there. The Great Obsidian Flow is nearby. And there's a trail going all the way around the top of the crater. You can spend 2 hours riding a MTB along that trail, and probably meet 0 other people.
If you feel this way, i recommend you go visit alaska; even just hiking hatcher’s pass on a good day outweighs crater lake in beauty for me.
Why not use pumps to increase mixing?
It's an interesting question, here's some napkin math.
There's almost 19 gigaliters of water in Crater Lake. To pump that amount of water in a year would require pumping 52 megaliters of water per day. A small city produces about 200 megaliters of sewage in a day. (LA produces about 2 gigaliters per day.)
So it should be possible but would be very expensive. Maybe on the order of running the drinking water infrastructure for a town. I suspect I'm overestimating though, I think you might only have to pump half of the water to achieve good mixing. (ETA: After a tiny bit of research I think you might be able to do it with much less than half due to entrainment.)
You would also kill a lot of animals and microorganisms in the process. Pumps driven by impellers create cavitation that cracks open microorganisms, and things like peristaltic pumps which avoid this can't handle these volumes. As this material is decomposed by bacteria, they will reproduce and increase the biological oxygen demand in the water, which might end up making the lake anoxic anyway.
That’s overly simplified, and these lakes normally only fully mix every few years. In winter surface water is colder than sub surface water so if you start pumping water to create a cold and more dense column of water in a pipe you can stop the pump and let physics move the through that pipe for months with zero energy expenditure. It’s the same basic reason lakes normally mix in the first place. Decomposing organic mater etc then warm up the deep water over time
Even without that it’s way more efficient to pump water when you have near zero difference in pressure and only need to move a short distance. The column of water outside the pump and the column of water inside the pump are only going to vary by the difference in weight due to differences in temperature. So you’re effectively pumping water up ~10cm even though the column is much longer than that.
If we assume we need ultra fast circulation and mixing every year… 19 gigaliter ~= 19 billion kg lifted ~0.1 m is 9.8 * 19 ^9 * 0.1 J / 60 / 24 / 365 = 600 Kw which is a fair bit of energy perhaps 1 MW with losses, definitely expensive for an individual but not much compared to what cities are spending pumping water around. But again you’re likely fine doing less than 1% of that.
I wonder if there are any elegant passive solutions... like a floating sun-exposed surface that conducts heat down to a lower anchored point. Or lake-bottom structures that re-channel water movements from subtle tides or seiches.
I think that's the wrong way round: climate change causes longer summers and shorter winters, so the problem is one of cooling, not heating.
Shade balls[0] could work, but then they'd have to cover part of the lake with that.
EDIT: And of course, that also comes with a reduction in total light reaching the lake, which may have different side effects beyond temperature alone.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o
I think what they’re saying is that if you have sufficient heat at the bottom, hotter water rises, so you get cycling.
Look at the full picture. The cycling is reduced due a reduction in temperature gradient. That reduction in temperature gradient is due to water not cooling down enough in winter and warming up for longer in summer.
Could you increase cycling by creating a temperature gradient by capturing the heat from the sun to warm up the water at the bottom of the lake? Maybe, but that also would imply an even greater increase of average water temperature than the effects of climate change. Which would have all kinds of other ecological side-effects.
Or put another way: global warming increases thermal energy being added to the system, resulting in a change of the dynamics of the lake. Cooling it would counteract that increase. Capturing more heat would add even more thermal energy. Even if they both could affect cycling in the same way, adding even more thermal energy is almost guaranteed to create other ecosystemic imbalances.
You could store well sealed nuclear waste in it, and stir by convection. Definitely won’t go wrong, no flaws here.
In addition to that, how many lakes would need to be pumped or would it be a feel-good project for famous lakes?
I wonder whether it’s better to pump air down instead of pumping water up.
Perhaps a large horizontal whisk.
Do fluids appreciate sheer force when it is parallel to gravity?
Modern society is falling apart over the cost of getting to net zero. I don't think we have the funds to put lakes on artificial life support in the foreseeable future.
Actually it’s already done in some places. https://www.easthamptonct.gov/sites/g/files/vyhlif7556/f/upl...
Is it the cost of net zero? Or is it the cost of everything else pretending to be relevant to net zero?
Of the interests pushing for net zero, the bulk of them are only doing it insofar as it can be done in a way that basically guarantees them incomes and all of these earmarks are what's driving the non-starter cost while simultaneously souring people on the whole premise. You'd think that people who allege to think on environmental time scales wouldn't need to be told that a movement that looks like branded rent seeking and legalized corruption when viewed through the perspective of anyone who isn't rolling in money isn't gonna last long enough to do its job.
"over the cost of getting to net zero"
Really? Where? Sure looks like we've completely given up. Where are these costs? Who is spending any money on Net-Zero.
Germany and their out of control energy costs (while still only being at best 1/5 of the way there if you count things like thermal heat), are a good example.
California has a dramatically easier climate, and is similarly struggling - without even taking into account goods shipping/transportation, thermal heat in the less nice climate zones, etc.
California might have a chance of getting to actual net zero without completely breaking the bank. But it’s not obvious it will. Germany is an order of magnitude harder.
Renewable electricity in Germany is already at over 50% per year and climbing steadily, but heating, mobility, land/resource/artificial fertilizer use, pollution and circular economy are still lagging (esp. accounting for the fact we're externalizing some of those by cross-border trade).
I guess we're trying much harder than most, but it's expensive, as you said, and politicians have become very careful to push things further. That said, I do think it's totally feasible in theory, it's just there's a lot of powerful bad actors out there throwing wrenches in the works.
The challenge is with the remainder, which is actually a much bigger problem.
Thermal heating for example, even using heat pumps, will require more than 5x the existing electrical grids peak energy capacity - just on its own. I’ve done the math several times, it’s staggering.
And it will do it during typically minimal insolation times.
Germany has made good progress, don’t get me wrong, but it highlights just how hard of a problem this really is.
W.r.t. heating did you also consider the effects of increasing local production as well as transferability and variability of load (e.g. requiring larger heat pumps and other "steuerbare Verbrauchseinrichtungen" to be "adjustable", which Germany does)
It’s a straightforward thermodynamic equation - x fuel burnt (and useful heat from that) vs maximum theoretical efficiency for heat pumps for equivalent heat.
The reality is likely worse for a number of reasons, but even if way better it doesn’t get around that you’d need many multiples of the entire electrical grids peak capacity to come close. And that is assuming there is zero other load on the grid, which isn’t going to happen.
If everyone completely redid all their structures and all their use of heating, and installed all the best heat pumps, AND doubled grid capacity, maaaaybe. But we’re talking massive amounts of Capital. Capital that used to be cheap, but isn’t anymore.
Far more Capital than likely has been spent so far on renewables too, but it’s hard to calculate it because of the sheer distortion that it would cause trying to do something of this scale.
It might be legitimately cheaper to buy Northern Africa and move all Germans there instead (in new construction). That seems pretty unlikely for sócio-political reasons though.
You don’t need to consider any of that, it’s simple arithmetic. Take the amount natural gas burned for heat, convert to kWh (100,000 BTUs or 2.83 cubic feet is 29.3kW), and divide by 3 to approximate the heat pump size you’d need to replace the boiler or furnace.
A 3 million BTU boiler will consume 85 cubic meters of gas in one hour running at max, or about 300kWh of electricity for the same amount of heat from a heat pump over one hour, assuming a COP of 3. It’s 360 amps of current at 480V three-phase (300kW/480/1.732 = 360.8A), or ~400 horsepower. Divide the above units by 30 for a large 100,000 BTU furnace in a home.
Where I live, 85 cubic meters of gas costs about $9 and 300kWh of electricity costs about $45. Natural gas still wins in cost even if your NG heater is only 25% efficient. Even though the heat pump is 3 times more efficient, it costs 5x as much to run vs an HE condensing boiler (at maximum, variable speed compressors will make the COP of the heat pump in practice better than 3 but it will still cost more to operate.)
Anyways, the above is why virtually every building in Minnesota (and similar climates) uses natural gas for heat: cost.
I realize this doesn't really say anything about grid-level/national requirements, but at least in my situation 100% electric heating seems feasible.
Last year we used 7000kWh of natural gas (at 0.14€/kWh). Assuming 90% efficiency of our condensing boiler that's 6300kWh for heating water and air. We heat from ~November to ~February and use hot water all year round (though the cold water will vary by ~6 degC).
We have PV: 7.5kWp, 6kWh storage, electricity 2024: 6.3MWh generation, 2.1MWh usage at 80% autarky (100% from April to August, 90% March, Oktober, avg 50% November to February). 435kWh drawn from grid at 0.36€/kWh, 4.2MWh sent to grid at 0.075€/kWh
We can replace the boiler with a hot water heatpump that would be ~fully powered by our PV from ~March to ~Oktober. And for space heating we can use an air-air heatpump(s). We also have decent insulation and decentral ventilation with enthalpy exchanger.
Now the mystery is how much gas we waste in the non-heating period for hot water, and how little space heating we can get by with (small 60m^2 flat, kitchen, bedroom don't need heating) as well as the actual COP. My guess would be 3-4kWh of heating would be quite adequate plus whatever hot water will use.
We're currently looking for offers for getting rid of gas (and maybe central heating) completely. Wonder what calculation they'll come up with. Note that it doesn't need to be profitable at current prices as gas prices will rise, renewables will get cheaper, and you can still get 30-55% of subsidy.
I also consider getting rid of fossils completely a worthy struggle in itself as it reduces geopolitical dependence and increases resilience. But yeah, it's a multigenerational problem at this scale and scope, esp. considering all the other areas of overuse that need fixing.
In your situation, switching over to heat pumps makes sense, given that you’re sending 66% of the power you generate to the grid. These are the sorts of installations I would expect to go forward since you aren’t spending more money to operate a heat pump.
Note that right now society is subsidizing that - at some point the opposite flow needs to happen (from a basic arithmetic perspective), and that subsidy needs to be a tax or the math doesn’t work society wide.
California had to start killing grid infeed and solar subsidies for instance as it was starting to bankrupt utilities.
The US has flipped. Forget Net-Zero. It's Net-Positive, how can we get more CO2.
Like the movie The Arrival (1996)
How can we burn more coal, more gas.
Yup, it’s like when someone ‘tries to diet’, can’t handle it anymore, and then goes on a crazy binge.
I figure we’ve got at least a year or two before we start puking all over the place. Maybe less though!
Fun times, eh?
Based on nothing, I suspect a giant spoon would be better
Algal blooms with limited mixing sounds like a pretty good carbon capture mechanism!
I wonder if there is oil and gas at the bottom of any of these deep lakes? /s
It would be interesting to know the gas balances for these lakes, in particular how reduced mixing affects methanotrophy and methanogenesis. If its talking about climate change, this article really should discuss methane, I think that's a bigger deal.
This is a mechanism by which some oil deposits are thought to have formed, and by which a large quantity of biospheric carbon was sequestered during earlier warm spells, refered to as the Eocene Azolla Event.
Essentially: arctic seas formed fresh-water "lenses" through meltwater, which promoted plant growth (in particular azolla, though likely also algae and plankton). This growth then sank to the sea-floor, depositing as oils (and much ultimately undergoing keroginisation to form petroleum).
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event>
Similar mechanisms have been proposed for addressing carbon sequestration goals in the present, e.g., "CO2 sequestration by propagation of the fast-growing Azolla spp. " <https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8520330/>.
It could also be the opposite of a carbon capture mechanism is the detritus if those algal blooms are broken down by archaea and turned into methane, which could then return to the atmosphere. Methane is about 30 times more potent a greenhouse gas than CO2.