4 ms·

Why? We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, so why bother building an even better technology that we als

by fleitz 11y ago

Why? We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, so why bother building an even better technology that we also likely won't build. It's like the dev team that won't refactor but thinks its new design will be perfect and also not need refactoring. The new project invariably needs refactoring which they don't do, leading to another ground up rewrite. I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal.

Lazare 11y ago
> We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, Well, why don't you do it then? The potential profits are absurd; don't you want to be the world's first trillionaire? > I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal. You're suggesting that people will choose to consume expense goods and services over otherwise identical cheaper goods and services? This does not seem to mesh well with observed human behaviour.
- pfisch 11y ago
  I mean I don't really agree with fleitz necessarily, but any power source can be very cheap/free at the consumer/market level when the government is subsidizing all the costs. The government is not really a rational actor in economic markets and is often guided by other factors like popular vote, corruption, etc. It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint, but it is easy to understand how politicians and lobbyists have capitalized on fear mongering to create our current energy markets.
  - nl 11y ago
    It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint It's very easy to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint. See, for example: Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away, according to a February 2011 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nuclear-power-subsidies-report http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nucle... It's something of an anti-pattern on HN to think that nuclear power is somehow this secret source of cheap energy and it is only those damn anti-science greens who conspire to give it a bad name. It's not. Nuclear power is expensive. Some will blame unfair (?) government regulation for that. It is true that regulation adds to the costs, but regulation seems reasonable given the fairly large costs associated with accidents. Some will claim that the dangers associated with Nuclear power are overstated, and that coal kills more people. I agree that coal should be replaced, but not with nuclear. Some will claim that only nuclear power can provide base-load capability without greenhouse gases. I disagree, and point to the range of energy storage capabilities available now, the rapidly dropping costs of batteries, and the increasing decentralization of the power grid.
    - fleitz 11y ago
      85% of my energy is renewable and has been in my area since the 60s, there's no nuclear involved at all.
      - wavefunction 11y ago
        What are the renewable sources?
        fleitz 11y ago
        Hydro, mostly dams some run of river
      - Forbo 11y ago
        What sources are being used? Hydro? Geothermal? Unfortunately, in my area only about 23%-30% of the power generation is composed of renewable sources, primarily hydro.
      - Lazare 11y ago
        In my country (New Zealand), the number is around 75%; we're lucky to have some good geothermal sources, plus a lot of good rivers suitable for hydro, all serving a fairly small population. In our nearest neighbour (Australia), with an extremely similar culture and history, it's about 17%; they don't have any good geothermal sites, and few good hydro sites, combined with a significantly larger population. In the rich world, we've basically tapped every major viable hydro source (and learned a lot about the environmental costs of doing so, and sharply revised our definiton of "viable" too). You claim that there's energy tech we're just not using, but hydro is absolutely not an example of that. The difference between your country and Australia is geography, not technology. If your answer to climate change is "let's all be more like Norway", you may need to rethink your understanding of the problem.
  - newman111 11y ago
    I am not an expert, and so I ask that you read the below comment and let me know how (and where, that's important too) I'm wrong. Honestly, I realize below might be ignorant/controversial/silly, but please help me learn if you know the field/explanation. Admittedly, I'm making numbers up, but I can really only see a gov't skewing by 10-200% before unsustainability. In a free society, lower bound. Higher end, something like Venezuela. That doesn't seem like the kind of range that would be a practical concern. Suppose we solve AGW, we face petroleum shortage in the medium term, it's probably going to require a different scale in change of emissions and petroleum extraction to matter. Governments are inefficient, but those as inefficient as the orders-of-magnitude difference we're talking... those we call revolutions! [/dramatic effect] Apologies for the comedy if that's not your style, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
    - fleitz 11y ago
      I don't see a free market situation in which we'd ever have a shortage of petroleum... I mean we're well past 'peak oil' and we have the cheapest oil in a decade Solving AGW doesn't solve the next ice age...
      - Retric 11y ago
        Depends on what you mean by cheap. Oil costs less than 1/2 as much in 1998, sure it's down from the 9x spike, but it's much higher than inflation adjusted prices from say 1940 -1970, and it seems unlikely to stay even this low for the next 5 years as some producers are flooding the market for political reasons. We are not going to be extracting oil at the current rate for the next 10,000 years or even the next 200. We, could start manufacturing it because from an energy standpoint refining, transport, and extraction cost so much oil is basically just a battery at this point. (See: Canada's oil sands.)
        fleitz 11y ago
        That doesn't mean we'll face shortages... Oil will increase in price until we stop using it.
- fleitz 11y ago
  Barriers to entry, that said if I had the capital to construct power plants I'd probably invest in other more profitable enterprises.
- linker3000 11y ago
  > You're suggesting that people will choose to consume expense goods and services over otherwise identical cheaper goods and services? This does not seem to mesh well with observed human behaviour. Well, there's this company called Apple that produces a range of products...
johncolanduoni 11y ago
The difference is that even if we had the entire world put all production efforts towards building a quantum computer, we don't know what to build. It's not a matter of cost or resources; it's a matter of not even knowing exactly what to construct.

by fleitz 11y ago

Lazare 11y ago

> We have plenty of better energy technologies than what we have, but we don't implement those, Well, why don't you do it then? The potential profits are absurd; don't you want to be the world's first trillionaire? > I'm pretty sure by the year 2200, we'll have a coffee cup sized zero point energy device but still get our power from coal. You're suggesting that people will choose to consume expense goods and services over otherwise identical cheaper goods and services? This does not seem to mesh well with observed human behaviour.

pfisch 11y ago
I mean I don't really agree with fleitz necessarily, but any power source can be very cheap/free at the consumer/market level when the government is subsidizing all the costs. The government is not really a rational actor in economic markets and is often guided by other factors like popular vote, corruption, etc. It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint, but it is easy to understand how politicians and lobbyists have capitalized on fear mongering to create our current energy markets.
- nl 11y ago
  It is hard to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint It's very easy to explain why we don't use more nuclear power from an economic standpoint. See, for example: Government subsidies to the nuclear power industry over the past fifty years have been so large in proportion to the value of the energy produced that in some cases it would have cost taxpayers less to simply buy kilowatts on the open market and give them away, according to a February 2011 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists. http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nuclear-power-subsidies-report http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power/nucle... It's something of an anti-pattern on HN to think that nuclear power is somehow this secret source of cheap energy and it is only those damn anti-science greens who conspire to give it a bad name. It's not. Nuclear power is expensive. Some will blame unfair (?) government regulation for that. It is true that regulation adds to the costs, but regulation seems reasonable given the fairly large costs associated with accidents. Some will claim that the dangers associated with Nuclear power are overstated, and that coal kills more people. I agree that coal should be replaced, but not with nuclear. Some will claim that only nuclear power can provide base-load capability without greenhouse gases. I disagree, and point to the range of energy storage capabilities available now, the rapidly dropping costs of batteries, and the increasing decentralization of the power grid.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    85% of my energy is renewable and has been in my area since the 60s, there's no nuclear involved at all.
    - wavefunction 11y ago
      What are the renewable sources?
      - fleitz 11y ago
        Hydro, mostly dams some run of river
    - Forbo 11y ago
      What sources are being used? Hydro? Geothermal? Unfortunately, in my area only about 23%-30% of the power generation is composed of renewable sources, primarily hydro.
    - Lazare 11y ago
      In my country (New Zealand), the number is around 75%; we're lucky to have some good geothermal sources, plus a lot of good rivers suitable for hydro, all serving a fairly small population. In our nearest neighbour (Australia), with an extremely similar culture and history, it's about 17%; they don't have any good geothermal sites, and few good hydro sites, combined with a significantly larger population. In the rich world, we've basically tapped every major viable hydro source (and learned a lot about the environmental costs of doing so, and sharply revised our definiton of "viable" too). You claim that there's energy tech we're just not using, but hydro is absolutely not an example of that. The difference between your country and Australia is geography, not technology. If your answer to climate change is "let's all be more like Norway", you may need to rethink your understanding of the problem.
- newman111 11y ago
  I am not an expert, and so I ask that you read the below comment and let me know how (and where, that's important too) I'm wrong. Honestly, I realize below might be ignorant/controversial/silly, but please help me learn if you know the field/explanation. Admittedly, I'm making numbers up, but I can really only see a gov't skewing by 10-200% before unsustainability. In a free society, lower bound. Higher end, something like Venezuela. That doesn't seem like the kind of range that would be a practical concern. Suppose we solve AGW, we face petroleum shortage in the medium term, it's probably going to require a different scale in change of emissions and petroleum extraction to matter. Governments are inefficient, but those as inefficient as the orders-of-magnitude difference we're talking... those we call revolutions! [/dramatic effect] Apologies for the comedy if that's not your style, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts.
  - fleitz 11y ago
    I don't see a free market situation in which we'd ever have a shortage of petroleum... I mean we're well past 'peak oil' and we have the cheapest oil in a decade Solving AGW doesn't solve the next ice age...
    - Retric 11y ago
      Depends on what you mean by cheap. Oil costs less than 1/2 as much in 1998, sure it's down from the 9x spike, but it's much higher than inflation adjusted prices from say 1940 -1970, and it seems unlikely to stay even this low for the next 5 years as some producers are flooding the market for political reasons. We are not going to be extracting oil at the current rate for the next 10,000 years or even the next 200. We, could start manufacturing it because from an energy standpoint refining, transport, and extraction cost so much oil is basically just a battery at this point. (See: Canada's oil sands.)
      - fleitz 11y ago
        That doesn't mean we'll face shortages... Oil will increase in price until we stop using it.
fleitz 11y ago
Barriers to entry, that said if I had the capital to construct power plants I'd probably invest in other more profitable enterprises.
linker3000 11y ago
> You're suggesting that people will choose to consume expense goods and services over otherwise identical cheaper goods and services? This does not seem to mesh well with observed human behaviour. Well, there's this company called Apple that produces a range of products...

johncolanduoni 11y ago

The difference is that even if we had the entire world put all production efforts towards building a quantum computer, we don't know what to build. It's not a matter of cost or resources; it's a matter of not even knowing exactly what to construct.