| That the model is useless for anyone actually wanting to do something about carbon emissions (or about anything really). If you told a senior engineer of a power company that you want to reduce carbon emissions by/to some value, they would take out a notebook and pull out real data from power plants and distribution things (power lines, transformers) and tell you how much money and time they need to do it. They would not do hypotheticals or some graphs based on some generalized models of a power grid, but real equations based on real data. Solar does not work the same in Saudi Arabia as it does in Norway as Norway gets less sun. It is similar for wind and all the water powered plants. Some solutions are much more viable for some places (my city is bad for wind and so-so bad for solar (there are maps for bout), but just some 50km away those become somewhat viable options (wind more then solar). There is also the power loss on distribution. For example the loss on power distribution in my country was 15% when i went to school, where it should be 5%. The engineers working at the power company knew exactly why and where the problems are. Funny enough hotter countries have inherently more losses there. Engineers know what must be done to accomplish something, and it is not done by making generalized "models" (water power plants are usually the best solution, after/next to nuklear). (I'l skip over the huge problems with wind and solar power that were probably not solved properly here, as i don't have time now) In the end the real proper solution is to better isolate houses use more efficient electronics. That has been going strong as most "developed" countries subsidize the construction of your house if you use better materials and practices, and there are stricter.. restrictions on what kind of electric devices you can sell (for example you can't sell a vacuum cleaner with power usage over 1.5kW, as many were making high power but inefficient vacuums). TLDR: It doesn't work that way, and engineers already know what to do but don't have the money to do it. It is not a technical problem, but a political one (as almost all bigger problems are). PS Ironically, these interactive web graphs are very power inefficient. EDIT: Just to be clear; if the difference between the amount of power you get from 1m^2 of solar panels in Uganda and the same in Sweden was 5%, and the difference in cost of building a dam on soft soil versus building it on hard soil was 5%, i wouldn't say anything. But the differences are massive, making one way of generating power much more cost effective then another in one specific region (and solar and wind have a big problem of storing power, that is also a bit region specific; IIRC Hawaii has that problem now). |