They work basically unimpaired into zone 4b, which includes all of northern Michigan. This encompasses something like 98% of the entire human population of North America and even the vast majority of Canada.
They will need some support on the coldest days in up to zone 2b, at which point their efficiency drops to a mere 100%.
You're spreading fossil fuel industry-driven FUD. Stop it.
It's undeniably better practice. Better for the land, better for the animals, often even better for the farmers. But meat production will always be an ecologically intensive, extractive process. We will always be better off not doing it at all compared to even the best of the best regenerative practice.
...so no, it's not a climate-friendly solution. If you want climate-friendly meat production, we're probably talking about meal worms or some such, never beef.
I'd like to see all meat producers held to high standards of regenerative ag because it offers a LOT of benefits. It's better land utilization, it's better for drought, it's better for pollution, it's a thumb in the eye of the chemical corpos, and more even than that. And when you hear the stories produced by the regenerative ag advocates for the farmers, they aren't really talking about climate much at all. This is correct. The story of regenerative ag has nothing to do with preventing climate change and anyone claiming otherwise is either deluded or greenwashing.
Yeah, I run into it a lot in my smallish, somewhat historic town -- though I am not a developer. SO many places where all the staff constantly bitch about how they're always popping breakers and all that stuff. Or where they have to go around sharpie-ing faceplates where you must not plug in kitchen equipment.
Line cooks, in my experience, don't really give that much of a shit about the equipment they need to use. It works or doesn't. The comfortability of the space matters most, and as you said, electric's a huge winner for comfortability.
Chefs are sometimes VERY opinionated about the stupidest shit, and egotistical to boot. You can't really argue with the dude who tells you he KNOWS gas is better (but has never actually used electric). Fortunately, these are a dying breed. Even the NYC pizza joints are switching to electric because it's just plain better.
But if there's one universal truth above all others with the restaurant industry, it is that it is entirely allergic to ANY kind of capital investment. Rewiring a kitchen to switch from gas to electric is just a non-starter. Having to pay an extra however many thousands during initial build to get the utility to bring in 3 phase? Good fucking luck. They'd always rather MacGyver a sketchy solution than invest the money now to improve profitability and quality of life in the long-term. The flipside is, that means buying a $150 commercial induction hob is WAY cheaper than trying to add an additional gas burner -- the latter is usually a flat non-starter, the former means a guy can (lol health code) be sent to poach eggs in the break room.
Irrelevant to commercial. A reasonably big restaurant doesn't get enough amps in the panel to replace all their gas equipment with induction, especially in grid-strained California. Not unless it's new construction in an area with quality 3 phase electrical service.
It was a huge, huge, huge mistake that the places that banned new fossil gas installs made it ALL installs instead of just residential.
They made an enemy out of the national restaurant association for no reason and have faced huge setbacks in otherwise-good legislation as a result. It's all just so stupid and shortsighted. Especially since, as the other guy pointed out, commercial gas cooking is not a major contributor. Even just compared to the leaky, awful, terribly, idiotic residential fossil gas network.
We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?
What this "return to office" stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.
You mean Half Life: Full Dive, followed by Half Life: Full Dive 2. The second in a trilogy never to be finished.
Notable that the common european honeybee is an invasive species that tends to preferentially pollinate invasive flora, at least in North America. The likes of bumblebees and carpenter bees are the ones that really matter for conserving and supporting native ecosystems even if they get less love in public media. They're the bees that actually need saving.
It's worth looking up what you can do to support native pollinators -- including native bees -- in your area. Some of the stuff is surprisingly easy -- planting native wildflowers, for example, or setting up an insect hotel.
There's lots of industrial uses for CO2 -- this style of DAC plant can be viewed as a green producer. That said, it's really easy to outpace industrial demands and we can expect any facility like this will need to be sequestering most of their "production". It's hard to overstate how much excess CO2 there is in the atmosphere compared to the sum total of all industrial carbon dioxide needs. Since CO2 is thermodynamicly very stable, splitting it up to get pure carbon would be quite inefficient.
It's part of the business model of every single DAC project pretty much without exception. Any way you can make back a bit of money selling that CO2 rather than sequestering it is an opportunity to offset costs. And no matter what you think of market economics, they're very effective at reducing costs.
One of the most interesting uses is with projects like e.g. CarbonCure, where they dope cement production with CO2 which has known effects to strengthen (or at least not weaken) concrete. They don't produce their own CO2 for their plants and so need to align themselves with renewable CO2 production facilities (which they do Heirloom Carbon).
Big issue is they it's hard to compete with fossil-based CO2 production. So the next step once tech like this is proven is to start regulating/banning fossil-based CO2 production.
The worst part is, one of the "downsides" of renewables like wind and solar is curtailment. A "problem" that needs to be fixed is that they sometimes produce excess energy that you end up having to simply discard if demand isn't there. This is often invoked disingenuously by the allies of apocalypse as some major problem with the tech -- that building enough renewables to basically cover regular power requirements would entail having hugely excess production that gets curtailed, which is somehow wasteful.
DAC and green hydrogen are ways to eat up excess supply and reap benefit from it and should be categorized in similar veins to other forms of energy storage. They are both undeniably necessary technologies to achieve overall goals. Can either solve the problem on their own? God no. But who's saying they can?
They are not worse for the environment than ICE vehicles. This is total FUD nonsense that is significantly fueled by right wing and auto astroturf campaigns. Their lifecycle emissions are vastly lower. It's so mundanely bad a talking point that even low-level sources like factcheck.org publish informers on it. Don't spread misinformation.
EVs aren't good for the environment. They're less bad. Auto-dominant culture remains a non-starter for longterm sustainability, both fiscal and environmental, for most communities around the world.
There are some situations where BEVs are maybe worse overall than ICE counterparts. Rail and busses, for example, where the BEV just makes no sense (put up a pantograph or third rail for a huge LCCA discount and massively lower emissions). Cargo trucking may also fall in this camp; trucks simply cannot be that heavy on modern asphalt design. But for regular passenger vehicles there is no question.
I, for one, could not be made to care one iota about what Jack Dorsey has to say. He's a weird little fuck, and only getting weirder.
Time long past to be a lot more honest about these tech billionaires -- pretty much every one of was just immensely, immensely lucky, and until they can talk honestly about how nearly everything to do with their success compared to any other mid-level software developer was just blind luck, we should assume everything coming out of their mouths is pure grandiose delusion.
Those blades are way, way, way bigger than you think they are. They are moving extremely fast even at normal speeds. That 15ish rpm converts to around 1.5 rads/s. Modern windmill blades are something like 70m long -- so we're talking speeds of 100m/s or north of 350 kph / 220 mph.
Pretty comparable speeds to the windspeeds of the tornadoes in question during routine operation. Of course, there's a lot more intensity with a tornado, but windmills are actually designed to let most of the air pass them unimpeded because it makes them work more efficiently.
Of course, their energy production will be deliberately curtailed under high winds because the generators and infrastructure hooking them up can only handle so much -- they'll brake the blades, or rely on back-emf from the motors, or some combination of those factors to prevent them from over-generating.
Of course, unlike typical wind being harvested by the windmills, the tornado's airflow is far from laminar, meaning that even with their highest intensity, they will be losing a lot of efficiency in driving those blades.
...the tornado, of course, will simply knock them down.